Even with solar being taken seriously, you'd be using up a lot of land
Not really, to power the world with solar you would need something just the size of Germany and we have more then enough deserts where you could fit that in quite easily.
In Go you just have to confirm to an interface, you don't have to inherit from it. Which removes most cases for which you would need inheritance for in the first place. The rest can be handled by good old composition. You are also able to include an interface in another interface.
No idea how that will work out in practice, but it certainly sounds a lot more clean and simple then what Java and friends are doing.
If its that low, Natal actually has a real chance of making a dent in their user base.
I doubt that price really matters that much. The important part is the software. In terms of price the Wii for example was horrible, but it had software (Wii Sports) that people actually wanted to have, so they didn't care to pay $250 for what was not much more then a Gamecube which you could get for half as much. Same with Wii Fit or GuitarHero/RockBand, neither of which is cheap, but as long as it does something that people really want it doesn't really matter.
What worries me with Natal is that they so far have shown nothing interesting. All they have shown so far was primitive tech demos where its hard to imagine if such stuff would even translate to an actual game.
For the technology, have a look at this demo video, it doesn't show Natal, but technology extremely similar to it. What Natal does is really rather simple, it has a camera that can recognize depth and software that can calculate a very basic skeleton out of that information. Everything after that is basically up to the game.
Natal also has voice recognition, but thats not really Natal specific feature.
Are there any videos of Natal doing something obviously interesting?
No. So far when it comes to actual gameplay only a 3D Breakout variant and Burnout have been shown (not counting Milo as that wasn't really game).
Kind of. The problem however is that nobody else has written a low level system language in a long while and all the low level languages out there kind of suck when it comes to concurrency programming and network stuff. So Go is really doing something that no other language out there is doing and it seems to be doing what it does quite well.
when the guy could just as easily find a 3rd party solution for such issues
One of the points of the lawsuit seems to be that exactly this isn't possible with Sony games. The article explicitly mentions World of Warcraft as an example on how Sony could improve, as World of Warcraft does allow third party plugins to enhance the experince for disabled people.
when he could just as easily use something like a display magnifying glass like that featured in the film version of "1984"?
And what do you do when the anti-cheating detection of the game labels your third party visual enhancement tool as illegal and refuses the game to run?
The system protects users from installing software?
Linux does or at least makes it quite complicated to do so. Its one of the nice side-effects of having a package management system, that is incapable of handling non-root installations and doesn't have real support for third-party software, forcing the average user to pick all their software from the distributions repository instead of random webpages.
If a user manually adds new repositories or goes onto manually./configure && make'ing things, than he is of course no better of then in Windows.
More or less, as far as I remember, you could just do a:
sudo apt-get --purge remove.*pulseaudio.*
and then reboot/logout and have Gnome continue to work fine. With Ubuntu9.10 its the first time that the audio daemon seems to be mandatory for very basic functionality.
At the moment the situation looks a good bit worse in 9.10 then it did in 9.04, as Pulseaudio is no longer optional, but required part for Gnome. If you uninstall Pulseaudio you can no longer access the gnome-volume-control (which has been completly rewritten), volume control buttons on the keyboard no longer work, volume control applet is gone as well.
And with Pulseaudio installed I now have weird "klack" sounds whenever an application starts to use sound and applications like Rhythmbox seem to stall sometimes when they try to start playing sound, neither of the things happened with 9.10.
There are also other issues, such as a new Grub which is extremely slow (40sec(!) just to get to the Grub menu).
As Linux still lacks a proper standardized and userfriendly way to ship software or kernel drivers outside of the distribution we absolute need regular releases, as the alternative would be to be stuck with year old software and drivers which wouldn't support new hardware.
It won't help at all in this case. For instance, nothing stops a spammer from signing up for a GMail account that generates such a header, and sending out spam that your spam filter happily allows through.
Thats trivial to solve, just hold any message whose key is younger then a few days or which isn't trusted enough for moderation.
And it would be trivial for a spammer to spoof a legitimate user's signature.
Unless they hack into a users account it will be pretty much impossible to fake a signature.
The only way that'll happen is if people stop buying products advertised that way.
Good luck with that. Sending spam is virtually free and making a free thing unprofitable ain't gonna work.
The only way to solve the spam problem is to add accountability into the system and PGP signatures would be one way to do it.
"aptitude install " (or the pointy-clicky equivalent) works for me.
That only works for stuff you distribution provides, for third party stuff its already problematic and for stuff that should work across multiple distributions its completly useless.
The "try before you buy" excuse that people give as a reason to pirate (very popular here at Slashdot) has always been a steaming pile of bullshit,
"Try before you buy" doesn't mean that they buy it afterwards, it includes the option to not buy it when its not considered worth the money and for by far most stuff that will be the case.
Another thing worth to consider is that "going pirate" is a one-way trip with many locked down devices. As once you hacked the firmware you are locked out of the official online store. Can't say if thats the case with the iPhone, but it is for most part the case with Xbox360, Playstation3, PSP and Wii.
Mercedes had build joystick control for cars some years ago and if I remember correctly they had some software to filter out accidental joystick movements. And of course those things never hit mass market.
For a brilliant anything, you need a brilliant creator.
While a brilliant creator certainly helps, I don't think that is the core of the problem. After all its not that they try and fail at interactive narration, the issue is that they don't even try. All the lack of interaction with other characters in Half Life or similar games is there by design, not by accident. I think the issue is more that having an interactive narration requires more of a commitment from the player. When a game has lots of interactible characters and dialog the player has to memorize things, think about decisions, choices and all that stuff, you can't just put the game in and blast away some enemies. The lack of interaction streamlines things to the point where you can basically sleepwalk through those games, just follow the corridor or even the blinking arrow and you will be fine, thoughts about tactics and unaggressive behavior aren't needed. Games become much more accessible that way, but it also removes a lot of the fun you could have with them.
Nonsense. Doom wasn't supposed to be story-driven game, it was an action game.
Doom1 wasn't the problem. That game came out when adventure games where still alive and well and simply did its own thing, nothing wrong with that. The trouble with storytelling in games only started when games like Half Life and friends tried to reinvent storytelling for the FPS, while completly ignoring what was learned in adventure games over the years. The trouble with the Half Life kind of story telling is that its narrative is completly uninteractive, you run through a series of nicely textured corridors and are pushed from one scripted event to the next, which looks all fine and good, except that you have no way to actually interact with the people in the world other then shooting them. Why isn't there a talk-button? Even a game like Bioshock, praised for its "story", completly falls flat in that area, even worse it uses it for a cheap story-twist gimmick at the end.
Games like DeusEx have shown that you actually can combine a FPS with a good interactive narrative, but after DeusEx there just hasn't been all that much new in that area and most games follow the Half Life kind of dragging the player through the narrative by force.
For this generation the most likely thing is that most games will completely ignore the motion sensing stuff, as it doesn't make much sense to invest large amount of money into an add-on that only a fraction of people will own.
On top of that its questionable if motion sensing would even work for regular hardcore games. Especially Microsofts Natal just seems unfit, with no buttons at all you are extremely limited in how you could use the controller in a game (how do you fire a gun?).
Sonys solution looks more promising as it actually has buttons, so it might be useful as a lightgun like tool that could enhance aiming in some games. But how to apply it to gaming in general is still pretty much an unsolved problem and it remains to be seen how many buttons it really has (Is it a full PS3 controller replacement?).
Even on the Wii after all those years people are still struggling to do anything useful with the motion controller in regular games. And more often then not the results are rather uneven.
I think in the end we will end up with a bunch of party & mini-games, some experimental use in regular games and then only see actual real use of motion sensing in the next generation after all that experimentation is over and some new gameplay mechanics have been established.
Star Trek isn't really sloppy, it is simply episode based and like in all episode based shows there is very little that carries over. That has it good and bad sides of course. You don't ever get much of a story arc in Star Trek, but being episode based gives them a lot more freedom on the concepts that they can explore. A lot of what happened in Star Trek just wouldn't work if you couldn't hit the reset button at the end of an episode.
Star Trek episodes are philosophical parables, like most good science fiction. Suppose the world has this property. Then how would we behave under those circumstances?
Absolutely spot on. Complaining about the technobabble in StarTrek is really missing the point. The show was all about exploring interesting ideas and asking "What if?" questions, the technology was just a way to get to interesting places where those questions could be asked. Aside from Outer Limits and Twilight Zone there really haven't been all that much other TV shows that did that.
Shows like Battlestar or Firefly are much lower on the philosophical aspects and basically just drama in space. They did throw a bit of plausible technology in the mix every now and then, but those where much more decoration then the core of the show.
Depends on the kind of game. In MarioKart multiplayer, sure, a few or even a lot options couldn't hurt, as you will quickly get familiar with them. But in a more story driven single player experience that you may play through only once I find to many options horribly distracting, as its impossible to judge the effects of them when you play the game for the first time. I'd much prefer letting the developer spend some time on good balance then letting the player do the fine tuning. That said, there is nothing wrong with a simple easy, normal, hard difficulty select, as long as that selection is available at all time from the option menu. Nothing sucks more then a game that only allows selection at the very start, thus making you stuck with a to hard or to easy difficulty when you select the wrong option.
Slashdot Mirror
Even with solar being taken seriously, you'd be using up a lot of land
Not really, to power the world with solar you would need something just the size of Germany and we have more then enough deserts where you could fit that in quite easily.
In Go you just have to confirm to an interface, you don't have to inherit from it. Which removes most cases for which you would need inheritance for in the first place. The rest can be handled by good old composition. You are also able to include an interface in another interface.
No idea how that will work out in practice, but it certainly sounds a lot more clean and simple then what Java and friends are doing.
If its that low, Natal actually has a real chance of making a dent in their user base.
I doubt that price really matters that much. The important part is the software. In terms of price the Wii for example was horrible, but it had software (Wii Sports) that people actually wanted to have, so they didn't care to pay $250 for what was not much more then a Gamecube which you could get for half as much. Same with Wii Fit or GuitarHero/RockBand, neither of which is cheap, but as long as it does something that people really want it doesn't really matter.
What worries me with Natal is that they so far have shown nothing interesting. All they have shown so far was primitive tech demos where its hard to imagine if such stuff would even translate to an actual game.
For the technology, have a look at this demo video, it doesn't show Natal, but technology extremely similar to it. What Natal does is really rather simple, it has a camera that can recognize depth and software that can calculate a very basic skeleton out of that information. Everything after that is basically up to the game.
Natal also has voice recognition, but thats not really Natal specific feature.
Are there any videos of Natal doing something obviously interesting?
No. So far when it comes to actual gameplay only a 3D Breakout variant and Burnout have been shown (not counting Milo as that wasn't really game).
Kind of. The problem however is that nobody else has written a low level system language in a long while and all the low level languages out there kind of suck when it comes to concurrency programming and network stuff. So Go is really doing something that no other language out there is doing and it seems to be doing what it does quite well.
when the guy could just as easily find a 3rd party solution for such issues
One of the points of the lawsuit seems to be that exactly this isn't possible with Sony games. The article explicitly mentions World of Warcraft as an example on how Sony could improve, as World of Warcraft does allow third party plugins to enhance the experince for disabled people.
when he could just as easily use something like a display magnifying glass like that featured in the film version of "1984"?
And what do you do when the anti-cheating detection of the game labels your third party visual enhancement tool as illegal and refuses the game to run?
Did I miss something or does the thing lack both a touchscreen and a tablet/ebook mode?
The system protects users from installing software?
Linux does or at least makes it quite complicated to do so. Its one of the nice side-effects of having a package management system, that is incapable of handling non-root installations and doesn't have real support for third-party software, forcing the average user to pick all their software from the distributions repository instead of random webpages.
If a user manually adds new repositories or goes onto manually ./configure && make'ing things, than he is of course no better of then in Windows.
Pulseaudio is optional in 9.04?
More or less, as far as I remember, you could just do a:
sudo apt-get --purge remove .*pulseaudio.*
and then reboot/logout and have Gnome continue to work fine. With Ubuntu9.10 its the first time that the audio daemon seems to be mandatory for very basic functionality.
At the moment the situation looks a good bit worse in 9.10 then it did in 9.04, as Pulseaudio is no longer optional, but required part for Gnome. If you uninstall Pulseaudio you can no longer access the gnome-volume-control (which has been completly rewritten), volume control buttons on the keyboard no longer work, volume control applet is gone as well.
And with Pulseaudio installed I now have weird "klack" sounds whenever an application starts to use sound and applications like Rhythmbox seem to stall sometimes when they try to start playing sound, neither of the things happened with 9.10.
There are also other issues, such as a new Grub which is extremely slow (40sec(!) just to get to the Grub menu).
So far the release is rather disappointing.
As Linux still lacks a proper standardized and userfriendly way to ship software or kernel drivers outside of the distribution we absolute need regular releases, as the alternative would be to be stuck with year old software and drivers which wouldn't support new hardware.
It won't help at all in this case. For instance, nothing stops a spammer from signing up for a GMail account that generates such a header, and sending out spam that your spam filter happily allows through.
Thats trivial to solve, just hold any message whose key is younger then a few days or which isn't trusted enough for moderation.
And it would be trivial for a spammer to spoof a legitimate user's signature.
Unless they hack into a users account it will be pretty much impossible to fake a signature.
The only way that'll happen is if people stop buying products advertised that way.
Good luck with that. Sending spam is virtually free and making a free thing unprofitable ain't gonna work.
The only way to solve the spam problem is to add accountability into the system and PGP signatures would be one way to do it.
"aptitude install " (or the pointy-clicky equivalent) works for me.
That only works for stuff you distribution provides, for third party stuff its already problematic and for stuff that should work across multiple distributions its completly useless.
The "try before you buy" excuse that people give as a reason to pirate (very popular here at Slashdot) has always been a steaming pile of bullshit,
"Try before you buy" doesn't mean that they buy it afterwards, it includes the option to not buy it when its not considered worth the money and for by far most stuff that will be the case.
Another thing worth to consider is that "going pirate" is a one-way trip with many locked down devices. As once you hacked the firmware you are locked out of the official online store. Can't say if thats the case with the iPhone, but it is for most part the case with Xbox360, Playstation3, PSP and Wii.
Mercedes had build joystick control for cars some years ago and if I remember correctly they had some software to filter out accidental joystick movements. And of course those things never hit mass market.
For a brilliant anything, you need a brilliant creator.
While a brilliant creator certainly helps, I don't think that is the core of the problem. After all its not that they try and fail at interactive narration, the issue is that they don't even try. All the lack of interaction with other characters in Half Life or similar games is there by design, not by accident. I think the issue is more that having an interactive narration requires more of a commitment from the player. When a game has lots of interactible characters and dialog the player has to memorize things, think about decisions, choices and all that stuff, you can't just put the game in and blast away some enemies. The lack of interaction streamlines things to the point where you can basically sleepwalk through those games, just follow the corridor or even the blinking arrow and you will be fine, thoughts about tactics and unaggressive behavior aren't needed. Games become much more accessible that way, but it also removes a lot of the fun you could have with them.
Sorry but i can't agree, my pc costs less than a ps3
Where can I buy that sub-$300 gaming PC?
A quick google turned up this:
US PC Game Software Sales
1998 - $1.8 billion
1999 - $1.9 billion
2000 - $1.78 billion (84.9 million units)
2001 - $1.75 billion (83.6 million units)
2002 - $1.4 billion (61.5 million units)
2003 - $1.2 billion (52.8 million units)
2004 - $1.1 billion (47 million units)
2005 - $953 million (38 million units)
2006 - $970 million
Nonsense. Doom wasn't supposed to be story-driven game, it was an action game.
Doom1 wasn't the problem. That game came out when adventure games where still alive and well and simply did its own thing, nothing wrong with that. The trouble with storytelling in games only started when games like Half Life and friends tried to reinvent storytelling for the FPS, while completly ignoring what was learned in adventure games over the years. The trouble with the Half Life kind of story telling is that its narrative is completly uninteractive, you run through a series of nicely textured corridors and are pushed from one scripted event to the next, which looks all fine and good, except that you have no way to actually interact with the people in the world other then shooting them. Why isn't there a talk-button? Even a game like Bioshock, praised for its "story", completly falls flat in that area, even worse it uses it for a cheap story-twist gimmick at the end.
Games like DeusEx have shown that you actually can combine a FPS with a good interactive narrative, but after DeusEx there just hasn't been all that much new in that area and most games follow the Half Life kind of dragging the player through the narrative by force.
For this generation the most likely thing is that most games will completely ignore the motion sensing stuff, as it doesn't make much sense to invest large amount of money into an add-on that only a fraction of people will own.
On top of that its questionable if motion sensing would even work for regular hardcore games. Especially Microsofts Natal just seems unfit, with no buttons at all you are extremely limited in how you could use the controller in a game (how do you fire a gun?).
Sonys solution looks more promising as it actually has buttons, so it might be useful as a lightgun like tool that could enhance aiming in some games. But how to apply it to gaming in general is still pretty much an unsolved problem and it remains to be seen how many buttons it really has (Is it a full PS3 controller replacement?).
Even on the Wii after all those years people are still struggling to do anything useful with the motion controller in regular games. And more often then not the results are rather uneven.
I think in the end we will end up with a bunch of party & mini-games, some experimental use in regular games and then only see actual real use of motion sensing in the next generation after all that experimentation is over and some new gameplay mechanics have been established.
Star Trek isn't really sloppy, it is simply episode based and like in all episode based shows there is very little that carries over. That has it good and bad sides of course. You don't ever get much of a story arc in Star Trek, but being episode based gives them a lot more freedom on the concepts that they can explore. A lot of what happened in Star Trek just wouldn't work if you couldn't hit the reset button at the end of an episode.
They reintroduced them in one of the Voyager episode and it was kind of painful to watch.
Star Trek episodes are philosophical parables, like most good science fiction. Suppose the world has this property. Then how would we behave under those circumstances?
Absolutely spot on. Complaining about the technobabble in StarTrek is really missing the point. The show was all about exploring interesting ideas and asking "What if?" questions, the technology was just a way to get to interesting places where those questions could be asked. Aside from Outer Limits and Twilight Zone there really haven't been all that much other TV shows that did that.
Shows like Battlestar or Firefly are much lower on the philosophical aspects and basically just drama in space. They did throw a bit of plausible technology in the mix every now and then, but those where much more decoration then the core of the show.
Can MaraDNS handle IPv6 now? Last time I used it I had to ditch it in end as IPv6 support was lacking.
I'd like to see it configurable.
Depends on the kind of game. In MarioKart multiplayer, sure, a few or even a lot options couldn't hurt, as you will quickly get familiar with them. But in a more story driven single player experience that you may play through only once I find to many options horribly distracting, as its impossible to judge the effects of them when you play the game for the first time. I'd much prefer letting the developer spend some time on good balance then letting the player do the fine tuning. That said, there is nothing wrong with a simple easy, normal, hard difficulty select, as long as that selection is available at all time from the option menu. Nothing sucks more then a game that only allows selection at the very start, thus making you stuck with a to hard or to easy difficulty when you select the wrong option.