Not quite. HDR is a very fundamental change because it doesn't just change the resolution, but the range. Currently we store and display images in a range from [0,1], 0 is black, 1 is white. We can store that range in 5bit or in 8bit per color and thus get a higher color resolution, but it will still just be the same range of [0,1]. Photographing a white paper and the sun both gives you a 1.
With HDR on the other side you move beyond that range, you basically switch from integer to float (or just integer with a different range mapping). Instead of [0,1] you get something like [0, 6.55 × 10^4]. Thus you can accurately represent the difference between looking at a white paper and staring into the sun, information that would have otherwise been completely lost.
As our displays will still only have [0,1] range, you have to tone map the HDR images down to that range, but the additional information you have allows a lot of post processing tricks that would otherwise be impossible.
That completly depends on the actual implementation, TrackIR for example seems to be quite popular and allows you to do more in a game then you could with just a keyboard/mouse or gamepad. Similarly I could easily imagine a game where you for example would throw a grenade via a Kinect motion or lurk around a corner by tilting your body or just give hand gestures in multiplayer.
The whole running and jumping, yeah, that won't be of much use other then party games until everybody got an Omni-Directional Treadmill and a VR helmet in their home.
What's with all the talk about this Angry Birds game everywhere?
It is the result of the way the AppStore and basically the whole Internet works. Some stuff gets to the top and then, by being on the top it enters a feedback loop: more people see it, thus more people buy and thus more people report about it, which in turn means more people will see it and buy it. This feedback loop then turns a decent game into such a blockbuster success. All those random flash games out there never entered into such a feedback loop and thus never got that popular.
This is one of those depressing things with modern technology. You have access to basically everything, which should mean more variety, but due to the self enforcing feedback everybody gets exposed to basically the same stuff and the result is less variety.
People have already been killed by robots 30 years ago, so it isn't exactly a new thing that robots can do harm. Also why shouldn't the companies be liable? If you build something that is dangerous enough to do serious harm and sell it to lay persons, you better make sure that it has enough build in safety mechanisms and doesn't just go crazy because some script kiddy came along and wanted to have some fun.
It doesnt matter if someone is the established expert, as long as some weenie is sitting in his mom's basement and has a hard-on about some topic, he wins.
While certainly annoying, one can always use the Talk page to point out where the article is wrong and why. If the claim has any merit, somebody else might pick it up and integrate it into the article sooner or later.
The Encyclopedia Brittanica certainly has it's flaws but they generally seek out expertise, not bar it.
The biggest flaw of an encyclopedia isn't really some lone error here and there, but not covering the topic you are looking up in the first place. Even in Wikipedia I consider lack of information a few bigger problem then the few errors.
Here's an IPv6 address: 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334, the bold bit is the local part. How much bandwidth is your script kiddie going to have to have to find 0000:8a2e:0370:7334 in the range 0-ffffffffffffffff?
In theory, yes. In practice IPv6 addresses aren't quite that randomly distributed and often follow common patterns (DHCP handing out addresses sequentially, etc.). There was a talk about the issue at 27C3. Conclusion basically that you can find 90-95% of the servers with just a bit brute force search. This might of course change in the future when IPv6 gets more used in practice and security issues will be handled more seriously.
Except that would be obviously false. We can and have proven many things in mathematics. They are not necessarily properties about the real world, but they are definitely proofs of something.
Its close enough to 100% for practical purpose, but thats still not some unquestionable philosophical truth. For all we know we could be living in a simulation and every time you look at a math equation somebody flipped the "make him think thats correct" switch.
Instead of forcing everybody on to one social network site they'd all be inter-linked,
If you want to replace Facebook with a bunch of CMS you would need to make sure that those CMS are either all the same or follow some very clear spec, or it would all just be a whole big mess. OpenID is helping you not having to remember dozens of passwords, but it doesn't really help much in turning it into a unified easy to use experience.
Even if you assume that everybody has the time and money to install and maintain a personal CMS, it just doesn't work, as each of your friends would end up having his own CMS and you would need accounts on each and every one of those CMSs. So instead of login in on a single webpage with a unified interface, you would need to cross communicate over a dozen webpages. Not very practical to say the least.
Blogspot only has a very tiny fraction of the features Facebook has. Yes, if you want to have a public blog, its the right place to go, for communicating with your friends, not so much.
You can't just put together any old PC and then expect it to run ALL older software,
Yes, and thats exactly the problem. I can do that with a console. If I have a SNES I can say exactly what will work and what will not. With a PC it is a whole lot of "maybe" and suboptimal experiences (slow framerates, crashes, etc.). Also if I upgrade from SNES to N64. I still have my SNES around. If I upgrade from XP to Windows7, I no longer have a Windows XP PC around.
If you consider emulation then it's even less sensible. Today you emulate DOS with DOSBox, and decades from now you'll be able to emulate Windows XP/Vista/7,
The problem is that there are quite a few games released past-DOS but pre-XP. Yes, in 10 years that won't be an issue and can be solved with emulation, today on the other side it can be really hard or even impossible to get some old PC games working properly. Also its not just about games, there are a lot of drivers that break in the progress of OS updates, a lot of the old Sidewinder joystick/gamepads for example are either useless or very limited in modern Windows.
Anyway, all that said, as problematic as PC upgrades can be, I wouldn't go all the way and start buying Wii games for exactly that reason. It takes some years for PC stuff to run into major compatibility issues and half the time there are decent workarounds. And if all else fails, one can always get an old PC, not as easy as dragging a SNES out of the closet, but not all that impossible either.
If you really want to guarantee the availability of your old software, why don't you simply use an old computer, the exact same deal you are taking on with the Wii?
It is far harder to keep an old PCs in working conditions then a Wii or any other console for that matter, as with the Wii you have one single technology on which all games released for it will work, with PCs on the other side you have a ton of different and constantly changing technologies, OSs, soundcards, graphic cards, input devices, etc.
Have the PC of the right time for a game, but lack a 3Dfx card? Your favorite game might not run at all. Have an old PC, but miss a driver? Good look finding that. There are simply far more variables and no clear boundaries that tell you if a game will run or not. Its certainly not impossible to get an old PC running some old games, I did that and have a nice Win98 machine here, but I ran into plenty of games that caused issues as some component was to young, old or otherwise not quite what the game wanted. I mean, heck half the games where troublesome to get running properly back when that stuff was brand new, trying to recover all the necessary information to get something more obscure running in perfect working order can be really tricky, not impossible for sure, but far harder then just inserting a module in an old console.
Ironically, 30 years from now you'll probably have some trouble finding a working Wii, but it will be emulated on PC.
Yeah, but so will you do with todays PCs. When I want to play an old DOS game I use DOSBox, not a real installation of DOS.
I paid 10,000$ for my first postscript Laserprinter.
The issue isn't so much total cost, but the "is it worth to have such a thing around" part. 3D printers might very well drop below the $1000 mark, maybe even a lot below it, but then that will be a very basic printer with limited materials, limited size of the printable object and plenty of other limitations. Why bother with that when you can just order the part you need to printed with the most high quality printers on the market? You will have a better printout, larger choice of materials and not have a bulky printer in your home.
As said, just look at photo printing, sure ink jets are easily affordable, but I can order a professorial printout of better quality for less per image then it would cost me to print it on my own printer.
Now that of course doesn't mean that 3D printers won't be popular with hobbyists, but I seriously doubt that we will ever see 3D printers in as widespread distribution as we have seen 2D printers in the past, there is just to little use of them and its to easy to just order the parts online.
We all know these can be used for printing complex objects like product prototypes.
Yes, but there is quite a differences between a simple prototype and a fully functional flute. 3D printing has traditionally been used to print pretty things to look at, not so much to build real products that you can actually use. So while it might not be a mind blowing revolution, its certainly an interesting next step.
When will these 3D printers become affordable for the home user and easy to use? In other words, when will it become cheaper than printer ink?
Affordable for home users? Basically never. Even ink jet printers aren't really cost effective anymore. But that is not really an issue, as instead of owning the printer, you simply order the part you want to have printed, just as you today can order a bunch of photos instead of printing them out yourself. Shapeways and a few other companies are offering that service right now already. All you need to do is model the thing you want to have printed and send it to them, you can chose from quite a few materials while doing so.
Yeah, but you also gain a lot (as other have mentioned, no monthly fee):
* no more installing games, just click and run * games become portable, play on every computer even potentially iPhone and iPad * the console costs only $99 * savegames automatically carry over * potential for gaming on Linux * no DRM software that installs on your computer * perfect piracy protection * future potential to run regular PC apps everywhere * free 30min demos of the full game
Yeah, you do lose ownership of the games, but with DRM and DLC all over the place you kind of do so with regular games too. Its not that you can sell a game you registered on Steam.
Of course OnLive is still young and nobody knows if it will catch on or if it will fail, but I am pretty sure that a service like OnLine will become rather important in the not so distant future.
Better yet, a multitude of decisions from the first game return to either help or haunt you if you import your original Shepard save file.
That feature is kind of overrated a lot. Yes, quite a bit of stuff caries over, but all that means is that you get an mail every now and then or an extra line of dialog. It basically doesn't change anything important in the game, as all the the big decisions you made in the first game are written out of the story in the second one (doesn't matter if council is alive or dead if it has no screen time in the second game).
That is the root of the problem, not the lack of a stable ABI.
If the driver is OSS and yet still fails with older kernels you can't really blame Intel, they have done their work in actually providing the source, its the shitty underlying OSS infrastructure that fails in actually doing something with that code.
If having code is so superior to a binary only driver it should work better then a closed one, but yet I have never heard a Windows person complain about any of these issues, there stuff "just works" (most of the time anyway).
I'd say its the other way around. SMB2J was a lame level pack, had no involvement of Miyamoto and was crazy hard. It just felt amateurish.
SMB2US on the other side was simply a great game, designed by Miyamoto, introduced a lot of fresh ideas and new enemies that actually got reused by later games. This is quite unlike SMB2J, everything that that game introduced has been basically completly forgotten and ignored.
I'd say Nintendo did absolutely the right thing in going the sprite-swap route.
I can't remember Thief3 being all that well received that I would put it into the "Good Sequel" category. Also Mass Effect 2 is pretty troublesome, they fixed a lot of things, sure, but they also removed a ton of stuff (Mako, large scale levels, RPG elements), also the main plot of Mass Effect 2 just plain out sucked, completly boring and uninteresting compared to the first one.
Assassins Creed 2 seems a better candidate. Original showed a lot of promise, but was mostly received lukewarm, the second on the other side fixed a lot of issues and was received much butter.
That would've been introduced into law this year, but the Bundesrat (more or less our upper house) didn't let it through.
Not quite, the regulation that didn't pass would have introduced additional measurements, basically introducing the "age 0", "age 6", "age 12", "age 16", "age 18" ratings that Germany has for movies, TV and games to the web. However that regulation is independed from the restrictions that apply hardcore porn and indexed media, both of which already where and still are outlawed unless you build some age verification into your webpage.
In germany there is porn on TV (basically any TV station).
That depends on the porn. There is zero hardcore porn on German TV and even if you get a pay TV subscription you have to to input a mandatory non-optional PIN before you are allowed to view it, every time.
When it comes to simple nudity, yes, thats all over the place and you might also find softcore on regular TV after 22:00 o'clock or so, but hardcore is handled very different and making it available to minors is strictly forbidden (i.e. basically the same way as violent stuff that gets placed on the index).
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Not quite. HDR is a very fundamental change because it doesn't just change the resolution, but the range. Currently we store and display images in a range from [0,1], 0 is black, 1 is white. We can store that range in 5bit or in 8bit per color and thus get a higher color resolution, but it will still just be the same range of [0,1]. Photographing a white paper and the sun both gives you a 1.
With HDR on the other side you move beyond that range, you basically switch from integer to float (or just integer with a different range mapping). Instead of [0,1] you get something like [0, 6.55 × 10^4]. Thus you can accurately represent the difference between looking at a white paper and staring into the sun, information that would have otherwise been completely lost.
As our displays will still only have [0,1] range, you have to tone map the HDR images down to that range, but the additional information you have allows a lot of post processing tricks that would otherwise be impossible.
Discs don't scratch themselves. You have to be pretty careless to scratch a disc to a point where the disc can no longer be read.
That completly depends on the actual implementation, TrackIR for example seems to be quite popular and allows you to do more in a game then you could with just a keyboard/mouse or gamepad. Similarly I could easily imagine a game where you for example would throw a grenade via a Kinect motion or lurk around a corner by tilting your body or just give hand gestures in multiplayer.
The whole running and jumping, yeah, that won't be of much use other then party games until everybody got an Omni-Directional Treadmill and a VR helmet in their home.
What's with all the talk about this Angry Birds game everywhere?
It is the result of the way the AppStore and basically the whole Internet works. Some stuff gets to the top and then, by being on the top it enters a feedback loop: more people see it, thus more people buy and thus more people report about it, which in turn means more people will see it and buy it. This feedback loop then turns a decent game into such a blockbuster success. All those random flash games out there never entered into such a feedback loop and thus never got that popular.
This is one of those depressing things with modern technology. You have access to basically everything, which should mean more variety, but due to the self enforcing feedback everybody gets exposed to basically the same stuff and the result is less variety.
People have already been killed by robots 30 years ago, so it isn't exactly a new thing that robots can do harm. Also why shouldn't the companies be liable? If you build something that is dangerous enough to do serious harm and sell it to lay persons, you better make sure that it has enough build in safety mechanisms and doesn't just go crazy because some script kiddy came along and wanted to have some fun.
It doesnt matter if someone is the established expert, as long as some weenie is sitting in his mom's basement and has a hard-on about some topic, he wins.
While certainly annoying, one can always use the Talk page to point out where the article is wrong and why. If the claim has any merit, somebody else might pick it up and integrate it into the article sooner or later.
The Encyclopedia Brittanica certainly has it's flaws but they generally seek out expertise, not bar it.
The biggest flaw of an encyclopedia isn't really some lone error here and there, but not covering the topic you are looking up in the first place. Even in Wikipedia I consider lack of information a few bigger problem then the few errors.
Here's an IPv6 address: 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334, the bold bit is the local part. How much bandwidth is your script kiddie going to have to have to find 0000:8a2e:0370:7334 in the range 0-ffffffffffffffff?
In theory, yes. In practice IPv6 addresses aren't quite that randomly distributed and often follow common patterns (DHCP handing out addresses sequentially, etc.). There was a talk about the issue at 27C3. Conclusion basically that you can find 90-95% of the servers with just a bit brute force search. This might of course change in the future when IPv6 gets more used in practice and security issues will be handled more seriously.
And if you flip all those switches perfectly, every time all the time, then the world really does work that way doesn't it?
Yeah, but somebody could stop flipping switches any time and thus turning that "absolute truth" into something that is clearly false.
Except that would be obviously false. We can and have proven many things in mathematics. They are not necessarily properties about the real world, but they are definitely proofs of something.
Its close enough to 100% for practical purpose, but thats still not some unquestionable philosophical truth. For all we know we could be living in a simulation and every time you look at a math equation somebody flipped the "make him think thats correct" switch.
Instead of forcing everybody on to one social network site they'd all be inter-linked,
If you want to replace Facebook with a bunch of CMS you would need to make sure that those CMS are either all the same or follow some very clear spec, or it would all just be a whole big mess. OpenID is helping you not having to remember dozens of passwords, but it doesn't really help much in turning it into a unified easy to use experience.
Even if you assume that everybody has the time and money to install and maintain a personal CMS, it just doesn't work, as each of your friends would end up having his own CMS and you would need accounts on each and every one of those CMSs. So instead of login in on a single webpage with a unified interface, you would need to cross communicate over a dozen webpages. Not very practical to say the least.
Blogspot only has a very tiny fraction of the features Facebook has. Yes, if you want to have a public blog, its the right place to go, for communicating with your friends, not so much.
You can't just put together any old PC and then expect it to run ALL older software,
Yes, and thats exactly the problem. I can do that with a console. If I have a SNES I can say exactly what will work and what will not. With a PC it is a whole lot of "maybe" and suboptimal experiences (slow framerates, crashes, etc.). Also if I upgrade from SNES to N64. I still have my SNES around. If I upgrade from XP to Windows7, I no longer have a Windows XP PC around.
If you consider emulation then it's even less sensible. Today you emulate DOS with DOSBox, and decades from now you'll be able to emulate Windows XP/Vista/7,
The problem is that there are quite a few games released past-DOS but pre-XP. Yes, in 10 years that won't be an issue and can be solved with emulation, today on the other side it can be really hard or even impossible to get some old PC games working properly. Also its not just about games, there are a lot of drivers that break in the progress of OS updates, a lot of the old Sidewinder joystick/gamepads for example are either useless or very limited in modern Windows.
Anyway, all that said, as problematic as PC upgrades can be, I wouldn't go all the way and start buying Wii games for exactly that reason. It takes some years for PC stuff to run into major compatibility issues and half the time there are decent workarounds. And if all else fails, one can always get an old PC, not as easy as dragging a SNES out of the closet, but not all that impossible either.
If you really want to guarantee the availability of your old software, why don't you simply use an old computer, the exact same deal you are taking on with the Wii?
It is far harder to keep an old PCs in working conditions then a Wii or any other console for that matter, as with the Wii you have one single technology on which all games released for it will work, with PCs on the other side you have a ton of different and constantly changing technologies, OSs, soundcards, graphic cards, input devices, etc.
Have the PC of the right time for a game, but lack a 3Dfx card? Your favorite game might not run at all. Have an old PC, but miss a driver? Good look finding that. There are simply far more variables and no clear boundaries that tell you if a game will run or not. Its certainly not impossible to get an old PC running some old games, I did that and have a nice Win98 machine here, but I ran into plenty of games that caused issues as some component was to young, old or otherwise not quite what the game wanted. I mean, heck half the games where troublesome to get running properly back when that stuff was brand new, trying to recover all the necessary information to get something more obscure running in perfect working order can be really tricky, not impossible for sure, but far harder then just inserting a module in an old console.
Ironically, 30 years from now you'll probably have some trouble finding a working Wii, but it will be emulated on PC.
Yeah, but so will you do with todays PCs. When I want to play an old DOS game I use DOSBox, not a real installation of DOS.
I paid 10,000$ for my first postscript Laserprinter.
The issue isn't so much total cost, but the "is it worth to have such a thing around" part. 3D printers might very well drop below the $1000 mark, maybe even a lot below it, but then that will be a very basic printer with limited materials, limited size of the printable object and plenty of other limitations. Why bother with that when you can just order the part you need to printed with the most high quality printers on the market? You will have a better printout, larger choice of materials and not have a bulky printer in your home.
As said, just look at photo printing, sure ink jets are easily affordable, but I can order a professorial printout of better quality for less per image then it would cost me to print it on my own printer.
Now that of course doesn't mean that 3D printers won't be popular with hobbyists, but I seriously doubt that we will ever see 3D printers in as widespread distribution as we have seen 2D printers in the past, there is just to little use of them and its to easy to just order the parts online.
We all know these can be used for printing complex objects like product prototypes.
Yes, but there is quite a differences between a simple prototype and a fully functional flute. 3D printing has traditionally been used to print pretty things to look at, not so much to build real products that you can actually use. So while it might not be a mind blowing revolution, its certainly an interesting next step.
When will these 3D printers become affordable for the home user and easy to use? In other words, when will it become cheaper than printer ink?
Affordable for home users? Basically never. Even ink jet printers aren't really cost effective anymore. But that is not really an issue, as instead of owning the printer, you simply order the part you want to have printed, just as you today can order a bunch of photos instead of printing them out yourself. Shapeways and a few other companies are offering that service right now already. All you need to do is model the thing you want to have printed and send it to them, you can chose from quite a few materials while doing so.
Yeah, but you also gain a lot (as other have mentioned, no monthly fee):
* no more installing games, just click and run
* games become portable, play on every computer even potentially iPhone and iPad
* the console costs only $99
* savegames automatically carry over
* potential for gaming on Linux
* no DRM software that installs on your computer
* perfect piracy protection
* future potential to run regular PC apps everywhere
* free 30min demos of the full game
Yeah, you do lose ownership of the games, but with DRM and DLC all over the place you kind of do so with regular games too. Its not that you can sell a game you registered on Steam.
Of course OnLive is still young and nobody knows if it will catch on or if it will fail, but I am pretty sure that a service like OnLine will become rather important in the not so distant future.
Better yet, a multitude of decisions from the first game return to either help or haunt you if you import your original Shepard save file.
That feature is kind of overrated a lot. Yes, quite a bit of stuff caries over, but all that means is that you get an mail every now and then or an extra line of dialog. It basically doesn't change anything important in the game, as all the the big decisions you made in the first game are written out of the story in the second one (doesn't matter if council is alive or dead if it has no screen time in the second game).
That is the root of the problem, not the lack of a stable ABI.
If the driver is OSS and yet still fails with older kernels you can't really blame Intel, they have done their work in actually providing the source, its the shitty underlying OSS infrastructure that fails in actually doing something with that code.
If having code is so superior to a binary only driver it should work better then a closed one, but yet I have never heard a Windows person complain about any of these issues, there stuff "just works" (most of the time anyway).
I'd say its the other way around. SMB2J was a lame level pack, had no involvement of Miyamoto and was crazy hard. It just felt amateurish.
SMB2US on the other side was simply a great game, designed by Miyamoto, introduced a lot of fresh ideas and new enemies that actually got reused by later games. This is quite unlike SMB2J, everything that that game introduced has been basically completly forgotten and ignored.
I'd say Nintendo did absolutely the right thing in going the sprite-swap route.
I can't remember Thief3 being all that well received that I would put it into the "Good Sequel" category. Also Mass Effect 2 is pretty troublesome, they fixed a lot of things, sure, but they also removed a ton of stuff (Mako, large scale levels, RPG elements), also the main plot of Mass Effect 2 just plain out sucked, completly boring and uninteresting compared to the first one.
Assassins Creed 2 seems a better candidate. Original showed a lot of promise, but was mostly received lukewarm, the second on the other side fixed a lot of issues and was received much butter.
That would've been introduced into law this year, but the Bundesrat (more or less our upper house) didn't let it through.
Not quite, the regulation that didn't pass would have introduced additional measurements, basically introducing the "age 0", "age 6", "age 12", "age 16", "age 18" ratings that Germany has for movies, TV and games to the web. However that regulation is independed from the restrictions that apply hardcore porn and indexed media, both of which already where and still are outlawed unless you build some age verification into your webpage.
There is also Max Hardcore currently sitting in prison in the USA for producing porn that was considered obscene.
In germany there is porn on TV (basically any TV station).
That depends on the porn. There is zero hardcore porn on German TV and even if you get a pay TV subscription you have to to input a mandatory non-optional PIN before you are allowed to view it, every time.
When it comes to simple nudity, yes, thats all over the place and you might also find softcore on regular TV after 22:00 o'clock or so, but hardcore is handled very different and making it available to minors is strictly forbidden (i.e. basically the same way as violent stuff that gets placed on the index).