Really? I was unaware that a study was conducted on the PS2 and Wii
If you find an endless number of videos, photos, blog and forums posts and what not for Xbox360 disc scratch issues and zero for other consoles, then I think it is safe to assume that its a bigger issue on Xbox360 then on any other consoles, especially considering that PS2 and Wii have sold a lot more units then Xbox360.
has anyone ever tried rotating a ps1/ps2/saturn/dreamcast/gamecube/xbox in the same way?
The early generation PlayStation1 had an overheating issue with the GPU, the "recommend" workaround was turning the whole console upside down. Yet I never heard of a scratching issue on that machine. For the Playstation3 one can find this video, no scratching and the console is handled pretty brutally. And there is also this video showing a Xbox360 with rubber pads installed, no scratching after the mod.
The simple fact is that you can find dozens of videos of Xbox360 destroying discs on Youtube, but finding videos of other consoles doing the same turns out to be pretty damn hard, so far I haven't even seen a single one.
If you lift a console up whilst a disc is spinning inside it then no-one is at fault other than the person who lifted it.
Name another console that scratches discs . If its so common sense and totally to be expected that discs get scratched that shouldn't be to hard, right?
No discs are getting scratched from people bumping their console slightly either.
And your argument is based on what data? Some earlier Xbox360 models scratched discs even when the console was not moved at all, so I wouldn't exactly trust that a disc-scratching Slim would not scratch discs on minor bumps.
I suspect to get disc scratching you have to go through some quite speciifc motions, which seems to be what happens in this video- a quick abrupt shake:
I suspect it is simply is the direction in which you move it. One way will tilt your disc away from what scratch it, the other will move it right into it.
I doubt it. The Xbox360 Slim was on sale just days later. It would be pretty retard to use a prototype instead of finished hardware for presentation when the final hardware is ready.
b) It's a bad idea to move anything that has a spinning disc in it, from harddisks, to dvd-players, whatever.
Yeah, so what. Fact remains the Xbox360 is the only console in history that is famous for destroying discs. It was never an issue with any other console, not even with the Xbox1. And Microsoft has known this for the last five years, yet refuses to do anything about it (no, warning sticker doesn't count).
c) Why would you need to move your console while it's running anyway?
It is not about need, it is about stuff that happens in real life use. Cats might bump into it, people might trip over cables or maybe you just bump the console a little while you try to insert a USB connector. Just see the destructoid video, guy wants to get a closer look, lifts it up, Alan Wake goes bye-bye. He shouldn't have done it, but neither should the Xbox360 destroyed the disc.
However not everything has improved, the Xbox360 Slim still scratches DVD just like the old one. I guess installing a few rubber pads would have been to complicated.
On the positive side there are rumors that the Dpad on the controller has been improved, however thats still a rumor and so far I haven't found photos of a disassembly of the controller.
See, it's true that "the market is small," as other posters will point out, but porting is a pretty low-overhead proposition.
One problem however is that ports aren't all that attractive these days. Why pay $50 for a port, when I can run the $10 original in Wine or dual boot? Unless a port comes out very close to the original, there just isn't all that much interest for it, as its either not worth it or you played it on another platform in the meantime. The only exception are the small indie games, their prices don't fall as fast as those from the big commercial titles and thus you don't end up paying extra premium for the port, even if it might come out a few month later.
If you know you're compiling a product that will be used on the Linux environment and don't want to be locked on a specific library version/etc, static compilations are perfect.
Wrong. When you compiling statically you are locked to a specific library, if you link dynamically on the other side you can upgrade, fix and replace the libraries later on as you like. The important part however is including all the dynamic libraries with your app, not hopeing that the Linux distribution will provide them for you.
Microsoft is actually the least oppressive console maker this generation.
Not quite. The Sony PS3 allows you to install a custom harddrive, has allowed USB sticks right from the very start, not just five years later, support normal USB cameras, keyboards, mice, Blutooth headsets and even USB gamepads. And they had the whole OtherOS stuff that they recently fucked up. Microsoft only really has XNA going for it and that costs you $99 a year if you want to develop for it, everything else was or still is completly closed. Even something simple as developing a third party control for the Xbox360 will cost you, as its all proprietary and locked up with encryption, on the PS3 its standard USB or Blutooth.
I will feel sorry for the people on the other side of the planet just as soon as they start hunting down and killing the people on their side of the planet that are sending people to this side,
It might be news for you, but Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 911. Zero, Nada, Zilch.
I also find it a bit hypocritical to complain about a few missing minutes (in which likely nothing of interest happened), when the military is censoring the whole fucking war. We are not taking about minutes of footage here, but months or even years of footage then ended up on the cutting floor or never being released in the first place.
These are nice features that can make the experience more "authentic", but how far do you go?
A nice intermediate step would be when emulators would include functional 3D models of the original hardware, so that you would at least get a decent impression of how that stuff looked in reality. Clicking around on a 3D model to insert a disk or module would of course still not give the same impression as the real thing, but it would at least be a hell of a lot closer then just loading a disk image.
There are of course also advertising, game manuals and gimmicks that might have shipped with a game that would need preservation.
Doom is the ultimate example of JUST how to preserve a virtual world.
Releasing source code is a very good way to keep the game accessible, but its not the best way to archive it for historical purpose, as for those you want to preserve it in a form that comes as close as possible to the original experience and a port with improved features doesn't accomplish that. Emulation is a much better choice, but still runs into issues when it comes to emulating hardware features. For example transparency in the old days was often accomplished by quickly turning a sprite on and off, thanks to a bit of delay in the display, that lead to something close to transparency, on modern LCD that stuff just looks like flickering. Input devices are also something that isn't easy to replicate, especially as they easily wear out.
And the further problem is that if you want another presentation, you probably need another set of divs than what you have right now.
To a certain extend, yes, as you can't reorder div's with CSS, you have to arrange them in your HTML to fit your planed CSS layout. But that is really not the fault of the web designer, as CSS just doesn't offer any tools to do a better job. Considering what HTML/CSS allow, many webpages do as good as a job of separating presentation and content that is possible.
That does not mean content and presentation are separated.
If it renders properly in Basic Page Style or in Lynx they certainly have done something right.
Those pages will still contain a ton of divs that are there only to support the presentation.
A few more <div>'s aren't really that big of a deal, when you not use them in the CSS, they are simply invisible. Also in pre-HTML5 there is just no proper way to markup some structures, HTML5 fixes that a bit with its <nav>, <article>, <aside>, etc. tags. But most lists these days I encounter really are proper <ul>s, not just some <div>s with decoration. The webpages that are just build out of <div>s are really shrinking quite rapidly.
The basic problem however is simply a different one, just look at http://www.csszengarden.com/, its clean HTML, allows complete restyling in CSS and completly fails when you browse with 200% text size. As a normal user you gain almost nothing from clean markup, as it doesn't result in a flexible page layout, in fact it makes things worse, old table style layouts where far more robust then CSS. But as CSS doesn't offer a way construct logical relationships between elements (this div is below that div, this one is left from that one), people have to resort to things like absolute positioning and such that just can't deal with changes in font size.
Actually the separation of presentation and content is pretty good on most of the bigger sites, i.e. you can switch to "View/Page Style/Basic Page Style" in Firefox and things will look just "fine", they have all their <ul>'s and <h2>'s marked up properly.
The much bigger problem is that the presentation information itself isn't very flexible, instead it consists of ugly hacks and expectation of pixel-perfect exact rendering on every browser. If you change little details like the font-size almost all webpages will completly fail. Some will fail mildly (on Slashdot the Reply button will fall apart) while others will fail catastrophically (overlapping and thus unreadable text). CSS is simply extremely crappy when it comes to creating robust layout, as soon as some small parameter changes, it might result in an unusable webpage, which is why the user is left with the choice between no style at all and pixel perfect rendering as intended by the author, while most of the time you really would want something in between.
Again, maybe some one deeper into console games can enlighten me...but my piece of the public perception is that the Xbox is still all about shooting and driving.
There are a handful of exceptions, like Tomb Raider Underworld or Prince of Persia, whose main focus is on exploration not killing enemies or games like Bayonetta or Assassins Creed, but as far as the rest goes you are pretty much spot on. Games these days are focused way to much around on shooting and while Resident Evil 4 and then Gears of War moved much of the genre from first person to third person, nothing much else has changed. Its still a game of "shoot that other guy in the face" and even worse is that the game mechanics get more and more unified. It is kind of shocking when you can take a handful of games from different companies and they all basically boil down to the same cover based shooting mechanic, the setting might vary and how good the game is executed, but strip the window dressing aside and they are essentially the same game.
In the end I think this is also the main reason why we have that whole casual/hardcore split in the first place. Back on the Amiga or SNES nobody cared about if a game was some hardcore RPG thing or just a variant of Tetris, both of those where just two of a very large and widespread number of genres. Today on the other side you have the causal stuff on one side and the hardcore stuff on the other, with very little in between. The casual stuff is must often devoid of any kind of story or difficulty, while the hardcore stuff is just about shooting people. Games like Mario Galaxy which manage to be casual and hardcore at the same time are simply missing on other platforms.
It's amusing to see all the hard core gamers posting various rationalizations for and glorifications of what is basically a complex digital version of "hit the ball with the stick".
I don't think that is quite correct. While games, just as everything else in life, are just a waste of time, hardcore games at least try to tell a more or less memorable story while doing so. Casual games on the other side often do not, they don't even try. So while casual games end up being said "hit the ball with the stick", hardcore games are more like your average Hollywood movie with a little bit of "hit the ball with the stick" build in. Thats quite a significant difference.
Geeks often dismiss new technologies. Such as 3D TVs. 3D is here to stay and you will eventually be using it.
The thing to realize is that 3D is old, extremely old. It started somewhere back in 1838 when we believe Wikipedia. Thats not only pre-TV era, thats pre-lightbulb era. In all those decades 3D was tried again and again and again and again and basically always failed. It is a neat gimmick for a while, but if you actually want something you use on a day to day basis, you go back to 2D, as 3D still has to many unsolved problems. Now will 3D TV be here to stay? Likely, as there really isn't any harm in rendering high framerates, but I seriously doubt that everybody will sit with 3D glasses in front of the TV all day long. That stuff didn't take of back when it was tried on PCs and as nothing really has changed in the tech, there is not much reason to think it will now.
The one thing I find a little surprising however is that with all the focus on 3D these days, there is still basically nothing new when it comes to VR googles. VR googles with headtracking would improve the immersion into a game far beyond what a small little 3D TV could do, yet the market doesn't seem to care much about it at this point.
The same goes to the Kinect. The Kinect is truly revolutionary and many otherwise informed people are dismissing it as a Wii clone.
It is a Wii clone. Just look at it. Microsoft cloned Miis, then they cloned Wii Sports, now they are even cloning Nintendogs. Its just a big long "doing what Nintendo does". It is based around different technology, but almost everything else is a more or less straight copy.
It surprises me how many people here on slashdot are poor at predicting what technologies will become commonplace the future.
There is a slight difference between what the Slashdot people consider good and what is mass marketable. See the Wii, its a huge success in the mass market, but has it actually produced any games a gamer would care about? Not really. The few really good Wii games, like Mario Galaxy or SSBM, make little to no use of the whole motion sensing business. So from a gamers point of view, the Wii is still more like a little technological experiment then something that actually produced valuable gameplay.
Will Natal/Kinect be different? I doubt it. It seems to work really well for some games (the dancing game looked interesting), but pointless in others (racing games) and basically hopeless for any classic gamer game, which doesn't come as much surprise given the complete lack of actual buttons on the thing.
After 4 years of motion controls with the wii, I still have yet to see anything worthwhile being done with it.
That's because the original Wiimote couldn't do anything that even got near 1:1 mapping, it could detect waggle and on a good day it might tell apart horizontal waggle from vertical waggle, but that's basically it. With Motion Plus it, thanks to rotational sensing, it can now do dead reckoning and give you at least a good guess what move you performed, it however still has no idea where your controller is in 3D space and there is plenty of annoying calibration involved. With Sonys Move on the other side they have shown that they can lay 3D objects into the video stream at the exact point of the controller, that is real 1:1 mapping and something that goes well beyond what MotionPlus can do.
After 4 years of motion controls with the wii, I still have yet to see anything worthwhile being done with it.
That's because it simply sucked so far. Without 1:1 mapping all you can do is use predefined gestures to trigger predefined actions, basically using motion as a plain button replacement. With 1:1 mapping on the other side you can directly map your actions into the game, there is no longer a need to have canned animations.
That said, I still consider Sonys Move a failure. Instead of adding an analog stick to Move and going with two Move controllers, they added the stupid Subcontroller. Thus you will have to either have two Move controller in a game and live without any analogstick (how do you walk then?) or you will be using a Sub and a Move thus lacking a second analogstick for camera control and motion detection in your other hand. This limits the gameplay possibilities quite a bit and requires you to have four controllers for the full singleplayer experience (Dualshock, Sub, 2x Move) instead of just two.
In the end I consider motion control in this generation just one big experiment and we will probably have to wait for the next generation till the controllers are capable enough and the game design advanced enough to make good use of them. When it comes to "core games" there is still basically nothing that uses motion control for actually enhancing the game, maybe that will change with Move, but its probably more likely that all the "core games" will continue to focus on dual analog controls instead spending millions of dollars on a Move game, which then only a fraction of their buyers will be able to play.
How is it impossible to build a voting machine again?
The voting process has to be verifiable by the average citizen, when a voting machine is involved it almost certainly isn't. You could of course build a voting machine that prints out paper and make the process transparent that way, but then why would one want to go to all that trouble and buy a voting machine for thousands of dollars when a one dollar pen could make the cross just as easily.
Whats to stop them from inserting malicious code, compiling and packaging it up and seeding it to anyone that `aptitude install`s it?
In a perfect world the key would need to have some minimum level of trust assigned to it to let it pass through automatic verification. And trust would be gained by both time and other people. Somebody who has registered a month ago on launchpad and was active over all that time is more trustworthy then somebody who created his account yesterday. Also people in the open source world could give trust to each other (i.e. when you want to upload something to Debian, you do it first via a mentor, not by yourself).
Of course none of that would stop somebody from doing constructive work for a while and then running amok and uploading a backdoored version, but it would lower the likely hood a good bit and would make the clean up much easier, as everything the person uploaded could automatically be tracked and blacklisted.
If all of that fails, which it might be due to the complications with manual trust assignment (hardly anybody understands it so nobody uses it, those that understand it require impractical high levels before they assign trust, i.e. person meeting) and alternative approach might be the way of a CA or what ebay is doing for verification. Each developer would give his real world address to Ubuntu, Sourceforge or another company and they would send a postcard with a code for verification. The developer would input that code and thus verify his real world address and thus gain trust from that company for his key. He could then go upload stuff with his key and would automatically be trusted on installation. It again wouldn't stop backdoor writers, but one might hesitate a good bit to upload a backdoored version when you have your real world address attached to it (not publically visible), as that kind of behaviour is a crime in quite a few countries.
Someone needs to start thinking seriously about this.
The best approach so far is the SSH one, give a short warning when connecting to a new host, but let the user connect, but give a big fat warning when the host key changes later on.
The important part when it comes to signing of downloads isn't that you can guarantee that it comes from a trusted good source, but simply that it comes from the same source as the last few downloads.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? I was unaware that a study was conducted on the PS2 and Wii
If you find an endless number of videos, photos, blog and forums posts and what not for Xbox360 disc scratch issues and zero for other consoles, then I think it is safe to assume that its a bigger issue on Xbox360 then on any other consoles, especially considering that PS2 and Wii have sold a lot more units then Xbox360.
has anyone ever tried rotating a ps1/ps2/saturn/dreamcast/gamecube/xbox in the same way?
The early generation PlayStation1 had an overheating issue with the GPU, the "recommend" workaround was turning the whole console upside down. Yet I never heard of a scratching issue on that machine. For the Playstation3 one can find this video, no scratching and the console is handled pretty brutally. And there is also this video showing a Xbox360 with rubber pads installed, no scratching after the mod.
The simple fact is that you can find dozens of videos of Xbox360 destroying discs on Youtube, but finding videos of other consoles doing the same turns out to be pretty damn hard, so far I haven't even seen a single one.
If you lift a console up whilst a disc is spinning inside it then no-one is at fault other than the person who lifted it.
Name another console that scratches discs . If its so common sense and totally to be expected that discs get scratched that shouldn't be to hard, right?
No discs are getting scratched from people bumping their console slightly either.
And your argument is based on what data? Some earlier Xbox360 models scratched discs even when the console was not moved at all, so I wouldn't exactly trust that a disc-scratching Slim would not scratch discs on minor bumps.
I suspect to get disc scratching you have to go through some quite speciifc motions, which seems to be what happens in this video- a quick abrupt shake:
I suspect it is simply is the direction in which you move it. One way will tilt your disc away from what scratch it, the other will move it right into it.
a) That was a demo model, not a production model.
I doubt it. The Xbox360 Slim was on sale just days later. It would be pretty retard to use a prototype instead of finished hardware for presentation when the final hardware is ready.
b) It's a bad idea to move anything that has a spinning disc in it, from harddisks, to dvd-players, whatever.
Yeah, so what. Fact remains the Xbox360 is the only console in history that is famous for destroying discs. It was never an issue with any other console, not even with the Xbox1. And Microsoft has known this for the last five years, yet refuses to do anything about it (no, warning sticker doesn't count).
c) Why would you need to move your console while it's running anyway?
It is not about need, it is about stuff that happens in real life use. Cats might bump into it, people might trip over cables or maybe you just bump the console a little while you try to insert a USB connector. Just see the destructoid video, guy wants to get a closer look, lifts it up, Alan Wake goes bye-bye. He shouldn't have done it, but neither should the Xbox360 destroyed the disc.
Just because people have lowered their standards and accept such defects doesn't make them any better.
However not everything has improved, the Xbox360 Slim still scratches DVD just like the old one. I guess installing a few rubber pads would have been to complicated.
On the positive side there are rumors that the Dpad on the controller has been improved, however thats still a rumor and so far I haven't found photos of a disassembly of the controller.
See, it's true that "the market is small," as other posters will point out, but porting is a pretty low-overhead proposition.
One problem however is that ports aren't all that attractive these days. Why pay $50 for a port, when I can run the $10 original in Wine or dual boot? Unless a port comes out very close to the original, there just isn't all that much interest for it, as its either not worth it or you played it on another platform in the meantime. The only exception are the small indie games, their prices don't fall as fast as those from the big commercial titles and thus you don't end up paying extra premium for the port, even if it might come out a few month later.
If you know you're compiling a product that will be used on the Linux environment and don't want to be locked on a specific library version/etc, static compilations are perfect.
Wrong. When you compiling statically you are locked to a specific library, if you link dynamically on the other side you can upgrade, fix and replace the libraries later on as you like. The important part however is including all the dynamic libraries with your app, not hopeing that the Linux distribution will provide them for you.
XML abuses aside, XHTML is superior to HTML5.
HTML can be loaded incrementally, XHTML can't, as you can only validate the document when you have all of it.
Microsoft is actually the least oppressive console maker this generation.
Not quite. The Sony PS3 allows you to install a custom harddrive, has allowed USB sticks right from the very start, not just five years later, support normal USB cameras, keyboards, mice, Blutooth headsets and even USB gamepads. And they had the whole OtherOS stuff that they recently fucked up. Microsoft only really has XNA going for it and that costs you $99 a year if you want to develop for it, everything else was or still is completly closed. Even something simple as developing a third party control for the Xbox360 will cost you, as its all proprietary and locked up with encryption, on the PS3 its standard USB or Blutooth.
I will feel sorry for the people on the other side of the planet just as soon as they start hunting down and killing the people on their side of the planet that are sending people to this side,
It might be news for you, but Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 911. Zero, Nada, Zilch.
I also find it a bit hypocritical to complain about a few missing minutes (in which likely nothing of interest happened), when the military is censoring the whole fucking war. We are not taking about minutes of footage here, but months or even years of footage then ended up on the cutting floor or never being released in the first place.
These are nice features that can make the experience more "authentic", but how far do you go?
A nice intermediate step would be when emulators would include functional 3D models of the original hardware, so that you would at least get a decent impression of how that stuff looked in reality. Clicking around on a 3D model to insert a disk or module would of course still not give the same impression as the real thing, but it would at least be a hell of a lot closer then just loading a disk image.
There are of course also advertising, game manuals and gimmicks that might have shipped with a game that would need preservation.
Doom is the ultimate example of JUST how to preserve a virtual world.
Releasing source code is a very good way to keep the game accessible, but its not the best way to archive it for historical purpose, as for those you want to preserve it in a form that comes as close as possible to the original experience and a port with improved features doesn't accomplish that. Emulation is a much better choice, but still runs into issues when it comes to emulating hardware features. For example transparency in the old days was often accomplished by quickly turning a sprite on and off, thanks to a bit of delay in the display, that lead to something close to transparency, on modern LCD that stuff just looks like flickering. Input devices are also something that isn't easy to replicate, especially as they easily wear out.
And the further problem is that if you want another presentation, you probably need another set of divs than what you have right now.
To a certain extend, yes, as you can't reorder div's with CSS, you have to arrange them in your HTML to fit your planed CSS layout. But that is really not the fault of the web designer, as CSS just doesn't offer any tools to do a better job. Considering what HTML/CSS allow, many webpages do as good as a job of separating presentation and content that is possible.
That does not mean content and presentation are separated.
If it renders properly in Basic Page Style or in Lynx they certainly have done something right.
Those pages will still contain a ton of divs that are there only to support the presentation.
A few more <div>'s aren't really that big of a deal, when you not use them in the CSS, they are simply invisible. Also in pre-HTML5 there is just no proper way to markup some structures, HTML5 fixes that a bit with its <nav>, <article>, <aside>, etc. tags. But most lists these days I encounter really are proper <ul>s, not just some <div>s with decoration. The webpages that are just build out of <div>s are really shrinking quite rapidly.
The basic problem however is simply a different one, just look at http://www.csszengarden.com/, its clean HTML, allows complete restyling in CSS and completly fails when you browse with 200% text size. As a normal user you gain almost nothing from clean markup, as it doesn't result in a flexible page layout, in fact it makes things worse, old table style layouts where far more robust then CSS. But as CSS doesn't offer a way construct logical relationships between elements (this div is below that div, this one is left from that one), people have to resort to things like absolute positioning and such that just can't deal with changes in font size.
Actually the separation of presentation and content is pretty good on most of the bigger sites, i.e. you can switch to "View/Page Style/Basic Page Style" in Firefox and things will look just "fine", they have all their <ul>'s and <h2>'s marked up properly.
The much bigger problem is that the presentation information itself isn't very flexible, instead it consists of ugly hacks and expectation of pixel-perfect exact rendering on every browser. If you change little details like the font-size almost all webpages will completly fail. Some will fail mildly (on Slashdot the Reply button will fall apart) while others will fail catastrophically (overlapping and thus unreadable text). CSS is simply extremely crappy when it comes to creating robust layout, as soon as some small parameter changes, it might result in an unusable webpage, which is why the user is left with the choice between no style at all and pixel perfect rendering as intended by the author, while most of the time you really would want something in between.
Again, maybe some one deeper into console games can enlighten me...but my piece of the public perception is that the Xbox is still all about shooting and driving.
There are a handful of exceptions, like Tomb Raider Underworld or Prince of Persia, whose main focus is on exploration not killing enemies or games like Bayonetta or Assassins Creed, but as far as the rest goes you are pretty much spot on. Games these days are focused way to much around on shooting and while Resident Evil 4 and then Gears of War moved much of the genre from first person to third person, nothing much else has changed. Its still a game of "shoot that other guy in the face" and even worse is that the game mechanics get more and more unified. It is kind of shocking when you can take a handful of games from different companies and they all basically boil down to the same cover based shooting mechanic, the setting might vary and how good the game is executed, but strip the window dressing aside and they are essentially the same game.
In the end I think this is also the main reason why we have that whole casual/hardcore split in the first place. Back on the Amiga or SNES nobody cared about if a game was some hardcore RPG thing or just a variant of Tetris, both of those where just two of a very large and widespread number of genres. Today on the other side you have the causal stuff on one side and the hardcore stuff on the other, with very little in between. The casual stuff is must often devoid of any kind of story or difficulty, while the hardcore stuff is just about shooting people. Games like Mario Galaxy which manage to be casual and hardcore at the same time are simply missing on other platforms.
It's amusing to see all the hard core gamers posting various rationalizations for and glorifications of what is basically a complex digital version of "hit the ball with the stick".
I don't think that is quite correct. While games, just as everything else in life, are just a waste of time, hardcore games at least try to tell a more or less memorable story while doing so. Casual games on the other side often do not, they don't even try. So while casual games end up being said "hit the ball with the stick", hardcore games are more like your average Hollywood movie with a little bit of "hit the ball with the stick" build in. Thats quite a significant difference.
Geeks often dismiss new technologies. Such as 3D TVs. 3D is here to stay and you will eventually be using it.
The thing to realize is that 3D is old, extremely old. It started somewhere back in 1838 when we believe Wikipedia. Thats not only pre-TV era, thats pre-lightbulb era. In all those decades 3D was tried again and again and again and again and basically always failed. It is a neat gimmick for a while, but if you actually want something you use on a day to day basis, you go back to 2D, as 3D still has to many unsolved problems. Now will 3D TV be here to stay? Likely, as there really isn't any harm in rendering high framerates, but I seriously doubt that everybody will sit with 3D glasses in front of the TV all day long. That stuff didn't take of back when it was tried on PCs and as nothing really has changed in the tech, there is not much reason to think it will now.
The one thing I find a little surprising however is that with all the focus on 3D these days, there is still basically nothing new when it comes to VR googles. VR googles with headtracking would improve the immersion into a game far beyond what a small little 3D TV could do, yet the market doesn't seem to care much about it at this point.
The same goes to the Kinect. The Kinect is truly revolutionary and many otherwise informed people are dismissing it as a Wii clone.
It is a Wii clone. Just look at it. Microsoft cloned Miis, then they cloned Wii Sports, now they are even cloning Nintendogs. Its just a big long "doing what Nintendo does". It is based around different technology, but almost everything else is a more or less straight copy.
It surprises me how many people here on slashdot are poor at predicting what technologies will become commonplace the future.
There is a slight difference between what the Slashdot people consider good and what is mass marketable. See the Wii, its a huge success in the mass market, but has it actually produced any games a gamer would care about? Not really. The few really good Wii games, like Mario Galaxy or SSBM, make little to no use of the whole motion sensing business. So from a gamers point of view, the Wii is still more like a little technological experiment then something that actually produced valuable gameplay.
Will Natal/Kinect be different? I doubt it. It seems to work really well for some games (the dancing game looked interesting), but pointless in others (racing games) and basically hopeless for any classic gamer game, which doesn't come as much surprise given the complete lack of actual buttons on the thing.
After 4 years of motion controls with the wii, I still have yet to see anything worthwhile being done with it.
That's because the original Wiimote couldn't do anything that even got near 1:1 mapping, it could detect waggle and on a good day it might tell apart horizontal waggle from vertical waggle, but that's basically it. With Motion Plus it, thanks to rotational sensing, it can now do dead reckoning and give you at least a good guess what move you performed, it however still has no idea where your controller is in 3D space and there is plenty of annoying calibration involved. With Sonys Move on the other side they have shown that they can lay 3D objects into the video stream at the exact point of the controller, that is real 1:1 mapping and something that goes well beyond what MotionPlus can do.
After 4 years of motion controls with the wii, I still have yet to see anything worthwhile being done with it.
That's because it simply sucked so far. Without 1:1 mapping all you can do is use predefined gestures to trigger predefined actions, basically using motion as a plain button replacement. With 1:1 mapping on the other side you can directly map your actions into the game, there is no longer a need to have canned animations.
That said, I still consider Sonys Move a failure. Instead of adding an analog stick to Move and going with two Move controllers, they added the stupid Subcontroller. Thus you will have to either have two Move controller in a game and live without any analogstick (how do you walk then?) or you will be using a Sub and a Move thus lacking a second analogstick for camera control and motion detection in your other hand. This limits the gameplay possibilities quite a bit and requires you to have four controllers for the full singleplayer experience (Dualshock, Sub, 2x Move) instead of just two.
In the end I consider motion control in this generation just one big experiment and we will probably have to wait for the next generation till the controllers are capable enough and the game design advanced enough to make good use of them. When it comes to "core games" there is still basically nothing that uses motion control for actually enhancing the game, maybe that will change with Move, but its probably more likely that all the "core games" will continue to focus on dual analog controls instead spending millions of dollars on a Move game, which then only a fraction of their buyers will be able to play.
You won't have any hanging chads
A mechanical voting machine is still a voting machine and should thus be avoided.
any impartially filled circles that will allow people to throw your vote out as unclear.
I think most people are confident enough in using a pen that that is hardly a real issue.
How is it impossible to build a voting machine again?
The voting process has to be verifiable by the average citizen, when a voting machine is involved it almost certainly isn't. You could of course build a voting machine that prints out paper and make the process transparent that way, but then why would one want to go to all that trouble and buy a voting machine for thousands of dollars when a one dollar pen could make the cross just as easily.
Whats to stop them from inserting malicious code, compiling and packaging it up and seeding it to anyone that `aptitude install`s it?
In a perfect world the key would need to have some minimum level of trust assigned to it to let it pass through automatic verification. And trust would be gained by both time and other people. Somebody who has registered a month ago on launchpad and was active over all that time is more trustworthy then somebody who created his account yesterday. Also people in the open source world could give trust to each other (i.e. when you want to upload something to Debian, you do it first via a mentor, not by yourself).
Of course none of that would stop somebody from doing constructive work for a while and then running amok and uploading a backdoored version, but it would lower the likely hood a good bit and would make the clean up much easier, as everything the person uploaded could automatically be tracked and blacklisted.
If all of that fails, which it might be due to the complications with manual trust assignment (hardly anybody understands it so nobody uses it, those that understand it require impractical high levels before they assign trust, i.e. person meeting) and alternative approach might be the way of a CA or what ebay is doing for verification. Each developer would give his real world address to Ubuntu, Sourceforge or another company and they would send a postcard with a code for verification. The developer would input that code and thus verify his real world address and thus gain trust from that company for his key. He could then go upload stuff with his key and would automatically be trusted on installation. It again wouldn't stop backdoor writers, but one might hesitate a good bit to upload a backdoored version when you have your real world address attached to it (not publically visible), as that kind of behaviour is a crime in quite a few countries.
Someone needs to start thinking seriously about this.
The best approach so far is the SSH one, give a short warning when connecting to a new host, but let the user connect, but give a big fat warning when the host key changes later on.
The important part when it comes to signing of downloads isn't that you can guarantee that it comes from a trusted good source, but simply that it comes from the same source as the last few downloads.