Cumbersome? Nope, but definitively brittle. Especially when refactoring and copying code from one indention level to the next its just way to easy to mess things up and ending up with program that is broken in very non-obvious ways, automatic variable declaration and such make the problem even worse.
Programming is reasoning about actions, evaluation and transformation.
Programming is in large part the manipulation of structured data and HTML/CSS can help quite a bit to get the 'structured data' part understood, add Javascript or Python when you want to go into the manipulation part of it. My point is simply that learning how to sort a lists has zero application in everyday life, understanding how pretty webpages you see on the screen are represented as structured data on the other side is quite a important thing, because thats how pretty much all software works and because thats a thing most non-computer people do not understand.
Of course when the students already get those basics right, feel free to move on to hard CS teachings or do some fun project with Python and Pygame or whatever.
They don't teach you the low level details about bits and bytes, they do however teach you the whole thing about structured data, which pretty much what any program today uses in one form or another.
If the job is to teach programming to people who don't care about it, I'd probably start with plain HTML and CSS. Thats of course not exactly real programming, since not Turing complete and all, but it teaches you the basics of how a computer works, that data and presentation are seperate and all those very basic things.
Understanding those basics about how a computer works is much more helpful in the long run then something very abstract like sorting a list, since it applies to almost all daily computer use.
Moving on to Javascript later on would of course always be an option. However one thing i really like about Python is its interactive interpreter, which allows you to get started in no time and gives you clear cut error messages, with Javascripts always a little obscure what exactly went wrong.
I still think that an out of the box solution is implementable
The problem basically boils down to this:
* you have a device that supports a set of events X * you have a game that requires a set of events Y
Since X and Y are not equal, you have to find a way to map the events of X to Y. And thats where the trouble starts, since you don't know which combination of events in X are good to produce the events in Y, you don't even know if its possible at all in a comfortable manner (i.e. you don't want to emulate a mouse with a gamepad, you want a menu system that you can navigate with a stick). But of course thats not all, input devices aren't necessarily clear about their capabilities, so if a device says it has 8 buttons, it might in reality have 4 buttons and a dpad or worse you have something like the WIZ which reports the dpad has 8 buttons, since the diagonals are handled separately. You need a big fat table of information to clean that up. But even if you have it cleared up you are still left with a lot of ambiguity, shall a emulator use the dpad or the analogstick, shall button 5 and 6 get mapped to L/R or to C/Z (gamepad with 6 face buttons), which gamepad shall the emulator use when there are multiple available and so on.
Some of this is fixable, but most is not, unless you actually hack the game. The problem is most obviously demonstrated when you look at PC to console conversions or the other way around, those that end up with a good interface need to basically redesign large part of it, since different input devices have just very different capabilities.
This problem might look simple from far away, but it gets really really tricky when you go into the details and thats mostly because its a damn hard problem and not because lack of API or driver support.
that's three different classes of input "sub"-devices being reported as belonging to that joystick.
Thats already the case, the trouble starts when a game should actually use those. Since then you get into situations where you have a simplistic SNES-like game and somebody wants to have his analog-trigger act as L/R, but the programmer himself used a pad without analog trigger and hasn't bothered to insert the configuration options for the trigger stuff. Or when the programmer used a dpad and thus needed no deadzone, while the gamer wants to use his analogstick and thus needs a deadzone for the thing to function. There are lots of issues that only pop up with this or that gamepad, because they simply are different. When you throw joysticks in the mix it gets even more complicated, since then you stuff like throttle and hats.
If making Linux apps is difficult, it slows down the growth of Linux.
As mentioned before, its not Linux specific, Windows has the exact same problem, many games there don't even bother to support a gamepad at all and force you to keyboard/mouse. Even the PS3 has the problem when you plug in an third-party gamepad into the USB, it sort of works, but most buttons and axis are messed up.
I'm just telling you that it should be easier.
I absolutely agree, getting a gamepad to work currently can be hard. However I just don't see a way to make it work easily and out of the box. Beside xboxdrv I also have inputdrv, which is sort of a universal input event rerouter, if I ever finish that up, it should be able to make games work with pretty much any pad, it however won't be an out of the box. The way its supposed to work is that you have the hardware driver talk to a userspace driver which then transforms the events into something that can be handled by a specific game, so you are basically building up a virtual gamepad for the game to use, instead of letting the game access your gamepad directly.
In the end, while the input system on Linux has a few problems, especially in the upper layers (Xorg, SDL,...), the lower layer (/dev/input/eventX) are actually quite pretty and simple and Linux also allows you to write user space input driver with which you can fix up basically any game if you really need to.
Would be nice to see it included by default then in either HAL or come with Xorg, or the problem fixed in Xorg perhaps would be a better solution instead of a "patchier" solution, if it is.
The problem with that fix is that you need a database of all the possible joystick names, which isn't practical and undermines the whole benefit of USB-HID (i.e. any input device 'just works'). However a more permanent fix seems to be available, haven't checked it myself.
Xorg is ignoring/overriding the driver?
No, the Xorg problem is just that Xorgs thinks your joystick is a mouse, once that is fixed Xorg is completly out of the way, since games access the joystick/event interface directly. The whole problem with games not recognizing the dpad is a completly different beast and in large part simply caused by gamepads having a wide variety of different configurations (some have one digital stick and two digital buttons, other have two analog sticks, a digital dpad and a dozen of buttons, some buttons are analog, some digital,...) and games simply are not able to handle all of them, because hardly anybody has all those input devices floating around to test all those things. I don't think that problem will go away anytime soon, since there just doesn't seem to be a clear solution. Microsofts solution was to basically say "fuck you, buy our gamepad instead", which of course isn't a pretty solution. The other solution is that games just tries to handle all the possible cases and allows users configuration, which many try to do, but which many fail, since there is always a weird edge case that they haven't thought of (analog-trigger for example often fail to be recognized as buttons). The cleanest solution at the moment seems to be to just to allow to remap things at the driver level so that the game gets to see an input device which it can handle, which my xboxdrv app does, but that of course means that you have to configure each game individually, but at least it works after that.
It's sad really that those joypads have been out for so long and don't work out of the box, when the PS2 and PS3 ones do.
The problem is that Xorg added automatic configuration while not implementing any proper way to override it from the Xorg side. So its not the joypads drivers faults, its Xorg that is the guilty one, it will happily grab all the devices it can find and turn them into a mouse (aka making them unusable), a little HAL config file however can easily fix that permanently.
This is either due to a lack of Linux input standards,
/dev/input/eventX works perfectly fine, the trouble is that dpad comes in a numerous different variants of events, some gamepad have it as first and second axis, in some other it comes much later and thus in not recognized by the games since they only check first and second. Other gamepads report the dpad as buttons, which again doesn't work when the game is looking for an axis. And of course there is SDL, which will report the dpad sometimes as Hat, so even if you have config options for buttons and axis it will not work. If you use some PS2-to-USB adapter things can even more funny, since then two gamepads might end up registering as a single device. And then there is of course the whole deadzone issue, which will screw up some games as well. It happens almost never that a game properly handles all of these cases. This however really isn't a Linux-only problem, gamepads are totally fucked up on Windows as well (to properly use the Xbox360 pad on Windows you have to throw the official driver away and use a homebrew one and the chatpad isn't even support at all). In the end I think the only short time fix is to have an input driver that is actually configurable enough to handle all those situations, which is why I wrote one, its however right know limited to Firestorm pad and Xbox360 gamepads.
it's a lack of an update to the emulators to make them work with the Xinput standards if it actually is a standard.
I don't know any game that actually uses Xinput, most use either the old/dev/input/jsX directly, the new/dev/input/eventX or just a wrapper library like SDL. And just to add a bit of naming confusion, there are actually two Xinput, one is the Xorg input system and the other one is Microsoft new input system mainly used for Xbox360 controller I think, both however are completly unrelated.
You can't necessarily make a good movie with a handful of guys and some talent.
Have a look at the recent Half Life short movie or movies like The Man from Earth or Primer, you very definitvly can make a good movie with a tiny budget. The only real disadvantage that a movie seems to have is that you need to have all the crew in the same place at the same time, while a game can be developed by people connected via the internet and can recycle lots of content from the parent game. But of course, a tiny movie budget won't give you the next Star Wars any more then a tiny game budget will give you the next Half Life, that however doesn't mean they can't be good in their own way.
including paying or compensating actors.
That's like saying you can't make a game without compensating the programmers and artists, but you very definitively can, because there are plenty people who do it for the fun of it, not the money.
Yes, isn't it dreadful how Steam makes it so easy to buy games?
I can order a game from Amazon.de (Germany), have it at my doorstep the next day and pay 5-10EUR less then buying it on Steam and of course I get a printed manual and a box too. With that given digital distribution doesn't look so great any more.
Same over here in Germany, games are almost always overpriced on Steam, Orange Box from Amazon.de costs 24EUR from steam 30EUR, Bioshock 10EUR vs 20EUR, eets is 5EUR vs 10EUR, Empire: Total War is 45EUR vs 50EUR, Fear2 is 43EUR vs 50EUR, TR:A 10EUR vs 20EUR and so on.
Down side? We'll probably have to wait another 10-20 years before it all gets worked out...:(
The annoying part is that games where already there or at least going in that direction, a good 20 years ago. Elite had a huge universe to explore back in 1984, then in 1993 there was XCom:UFO where you had to fight war against alien on a dynamic playing field, all with a meta-game where you researched stuff, build your base and so on, in EF2000 in 1995 you had a complete war that was simulated dynamically, so you didn't just flew your missions, you also saw friend and enemy fly their missions, planes and runways could get destroyed, captured and so on over the progress of the war, you could also design your own missions.
Since then a lot of stuff has been forgotten or dumped down, so you average FPS today is even more linear then Doom. In the end I think the problem with 'open' games is that they simply are to inaccessible for the masses. While they are extremely fun when you got into them, they can take quite a while to get into, which means the instant gratification crowed is easily scared off.
Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy does that, the story is told from the viewpoint of three characters and you switch between them every now and then on predefined points. It works pretty well. Dreamfall also does that, even featuring a dialog between the two of the characters where you switch characters in the mid of discussion, which was pretty cool moment. The interesting part is that this is really nothing new, Maniac Mansion had that back in 1987, along with cutscenes that show you what other non-player characters in the house where doing.
I think a big problem with video games these days is that they try to follow Half Life model of 'cinematic storytelling', which means a single view point that is always attached to the main character, it never ever gives you a clear idea of the bigger picture and limits the story to things the main character experiences, which makes things both implausible and very limiting.
Buffy not only ended pretty well, it also could have ended after Season 1, 3, 4 and 5 perfectly fine without feeling unfinished. The arcs in that series where for most part very confined to a given season. There where of course also plenty of storylines going on that went across seasons, but they always where in the background and never the focal point to base a cliffhanger on.
in 30 years, it will all be vocal with no buttons.
I hope that in 30 years we will have finally gotten rid of money printed on paper.
Sure, they need to learn to use a computer well enough to serve their interests, but why any more?
Sure you don't have to know every little detail of how a computer works, but a little basic knowledge can help quite a bit, since it turns all those scary messages that the computer shouts at you into something meaningful.
ATMs suck. People get confused. People who don't know computers intimately are afraid of them.
I think that has a lot to do with the fact that one doesn't use ATMs very often and that one can't use them in private for practice. A lot of the confusion with technical devices goes away when one just plays a bit around with them, but that isn't so easy when it has to happen in public and with your money at risk. With voting machines it of course can be even worse, since you use them just once every few years.
True, but that isn't really that different from normal paper (i.e. posters get rolled and not folded and books and magazines have a pre-created fold in the middle). I think the flexibility is much more important for durability then it is for folding, since dropping a thing that can bent is pretty much a non-issue, while dropping a solid objects pretty much always kills it due to the much higher G-forces involved. And of course you could always add pre-created bends to an e-paper device as well if you need them.
how hard is it to hack a piece of paper and a pen?
Its easy to hack it, but its nearly impossible to do it on a large scale without getting caught, thanks to the whole process being completly transparent, understandable by everybody and most importantly verifiable by the voter himself. Your average non-paper-trail electronic voting machine fails on all three of them. With a voting machine with paper trail things look much better then without, but then whats the point of buying expensive machines, when you need to hand count anyway to be sure of the results?
This controller is nothing new, the Classic Controller has existed since day one, this one just changes the form a bit, but doesn't add any extra stuff. It can be used in Virtual Console games and a few Wii games such as SmashBros, just as the original Classic Controller, its not meant to replace the Wiimote and most Wii games will continue to use the Wiimote, just as they have in the past two years.
And I wonder if you called the dpad, analog stick, etc., "gimick controls".
Dpad and analogstick have well over a decade of gaming history to show that they work quite well, the Wiimote so far has none of that. Even after two years most games don't manage to produce more then a half functional waggle control and thats not because everybody is lazy, but simply because the device just doesn't have enough sensors to make a decent motion sensing device. Even Nintendo seems to have realized that and now brings us MotionPlus, which should at least reduce the problem a lot and allow developers to make a half decent sword fighting game, which was impossible before.
Everything in my house plays a fucking DVD.
That just makes it even more obvious that the Wii is missing something very basic. TVs have a limited amount of component connectors and many people would surely prefer if they could just have one box next to their TV instead of two. There are plenty good reasons why DVD in the Wii would be a useful feature for many people, but alas Nintendo doesn't offer that option.
HDMI is a terrible connector interface, the worst I've ever seen, with so many licensing issues,
Yeah, but so what? Its not that there are plenty of digital alternatives to chose from.
You're the same pricks who bought PS2s back when the Gamecube was the only console putting out 480p over component,
Only console? Xbox can do 480p and higher and the PS2 can even do 1080i. Now in terms of power per dollar, the Gamecube was probably the greatest console ever build, but in absolute terms the Xbox still has a lead, Gamecube gets close, but nothing more.
That electric car is going to need some way to store electricity. Back to square one!
Yeah, its called a battery. Thing is, a fuel cell doesn't run on electricity, it runs on hydrogen and hydrogen isn't coming out of the power outlet, so you have to either generate it by different means (electrolysis) or ship it around, neither of which sounds more efficient then just using a good old battery.
My power outlet works just fine without a hydrogen tank in my house. Now with solar panels, windmills and whatever it might be different, but thats not where most of our power comes from for a long while to come. The big problem I see with hydrogen is that I just don't see how it would be more effective building a completly new infrastructure to ship hydrogen around, when we already have a perfectly fine infrastructure to move electricity around. Hydrogen also doesn't seem to be more efficient then latest battery technology. So where exactly is the big advantage in hydrogen? A electric car that I can just plug into the power outlet seems a lot more convenient to me then one into which I have to inject hydrogen.
I don't really know much about the topic, so I could be completly wrong, but a little of google, didn't really brought up all that many good arguments for hydrogen, but quite a few one for the opposite.
New first party controllers happen only once every few years, so this is quite unexpected news. On the other side its of course just a classic controller with hand grips bolted on, so not all that exciting.
I doubt that regulation could stop the data from accumulating, after all many people want to have their data out there, twitter, facebook, blogs, youtube and all that stuff works by users publishing stuff on their own, not by evil companies collecting things behind your back, and those things will only grow when storage and bandwidth become less of an issue. I think what could need regulation is how that data is handled, just as you can't discriminate people due to their skin color, maybe one shouldn't be able to discriminate somebody because they posted something a decade ago on facebook. It might also be a good idea if there would be a stronger emphasis on anonymous communication, that might not need regulation by itself, but at least it should be made sure that it doesn't get outlawed someday due to some "stop the terrorist/crimilals/pirates/whatever".
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Am I the only one who finds Python cumbersome?
Cumbersome? Nope, but definitively brittle. Especially when refactoring and copying code from one indention level to the next its just way to easy to mess things up and ending up with program that is broken in very non-obvious ways, automatic variable declaration and such make the problem even worse.
Programming is reasoning about actions, evaluation and transformation.
Programming is in large part the manipulation of structured data and HTML/CSS can help quite a bit to get the 'structured data' part understood, add Javascript or Python when you want to go into the manipulation part of it. My point is simply that learning how to sort a lists has zero application in everyday life, understanding how pretty webpages you see on the screen are represented as structured data on the other side is quite a important thing, because thats how pretty much all software works and because thats a thing most non-computer people do not understand.
Of course when the students already get those basics right, feel free to move on to hard CS teachings or do some fun project with Python and Pygame or whatever.
They don't teach you the low level details about bits and bytes, they do however teach you the whole thing about structured data, which pretty much what any program today uses in one form or another.
If the job is to teach programming to people who don't care about it, I'd probably start with plain HTML and CSS. Thats of course not exactly real programming, since not Turing complete and all, but it teaches you the basics of how a computer works, that data and presentation are seperate and all those very basic things.
Understanding those basics about how a computer works is much more helpful in the long run then something very abstract like sorting a list, since it applies to almost all daily computer use.
Moving on to Javascript later on would of course always be an option. However one thing i really like about Python is its interactive interpreter, which allows you to get started in no time and gives you clear cut error messages, with Javascripts always a little obscure what exactly went wrong.
You don't even have to leave the house, ordering from Amazon.de is generally 5-10EUR cheaper then Steam.
I still think that an out of the box solution is implementable
The problem basically boils down to this:
* you have a device that supports a set of events X
* you have a game that requires a set of events Y
Since X and Y are not equal, you have to find a way to map the events of X to Y. And thats where the trouble starts, since you don't know which combination of events in X are good to produce the events in Y, you don't even know if its possible at all in a comfortable manner (i.e. you don't want to emulate a mouse with a gamepad, you want a menu system that you can navigate with a stick). But of course thats not all, input devices aren't necessarily clear about their capabilities, so if a device says it has 8 buttons, it might in reality have 4 buttons and a dpad or worse you have something like the WIZ which reports the dpad has 8 buttons, since the diagonals are handled separately. You need a big fat table of information to clean that up. But even if you have it cleared up you are still left with a lot of ambiguity, shall a emulator use the dpad or the analogstick, shall button 5 and 6 get mapped to L/R or to C/Z (gamepad with 6 face buttons), which gamepad shall the emulator use when there are multiple available and so on.
Some of this is fixable, but most is not, unless you actually hack the game. The problem is most obviously demonstrated when you look at PC to console conversions or the other way around, those that end up with a good interface need to basically redesign large part of it, since different input devices have just very different capabilities.
This problem might look simple from far away, but it gets really really tricky when you go into the details and thats mostly because its a damn hard problem and not because lack of API or driver support.
that's three different classes of input "sub"-devices being reported as belonging to that joystick.
Thats already the case, the trouble starts when a game should actually use those. Since then you get into situations where you have a simplistic SNES-like game and somebody wants to have his analog-trigger act as L/R, but the programmer himself used a pad without analog trigger and hasn't bothered to insert the configuration options for the trigger stuff. Or when the programmer used a dpad and thus needed no deadzone, while the gamer wants to use his analogstick and thus needs a deadzone for the thing to function. There are lots of issues that only pop up with this or that gamepad, because they simply are different. When you throw joysticks in the mix it gets even more complicated, since then you stuff like throttle and hats.
If making Linux apps is difficult, it slows down the growth of Linux.
As mentioned before, its not Linux specific, Windows has the exact same problem, many games there don't even bother to support a gamepad at all and force you to keyboard/mouse. Even the PS3 has the problem when you plug in an third-party gamepad into the USB, it sort of works, but most buttons and axis are messed up.
I'm just telling you that it should be easier.
I absolutely agree, getting a gamepad to work currently can be hard. However I just don't see a way to make it work easily and out of the box. Beside xboxdrv I also have inputdrv, which is sort of a universal input event rerouter, if I ever finish that up, it should be able to make games work with pretty much any pad, it however won't be an out of the box. The way its supposed to work is that you have the hardware driver talk to a userspace driver which then transforms the events into something that can be handled by a specific game, so you are basically building up a virtual gamepad for the game to use, instead of letting the game access your gamepad directly.
In the end, while the input system on Linux has a few problems, especially in the upper layers (Xorg, SDL, ...), the lower layer (/dev/input/eventX) are actually quite pretty and simple and Linux also allows you to write user space input driver with which you can fix up basically any game if you really need to.
Would be nice to see it included by default then in either HAL or come with Xorg, or the problem fixed in Xorg perhaps would be a better solution instead of a "patchier" solution, if it is.
The problem with that fix is that you need a database of all the possible joystick names, which isn't practical and undermines the whole benefit of USB-HID (i.e. any input device 'just works'). However a more permanent fix seems to be available, haven't checked it myself.
Xorg is ignoring/overriding the driver?
No, the Xorg problem is just that Xorgs thinks your joystick is a mouse, once that is fixed Xorg is completly out of the way, since games access the joystick/event interface directly. The whole problem with games not recognizing the dpad is a completly different beast and in large part simply caused by gamepads having a wide variety of different configurations (some have one digital stick and two digital buttons, other have two analog sticks, a digital dpad and a dozen of buttons, some buttons are analog, some digital, ...) and games simply are not able to handle all of them, because hardly anybody has all those input devices floating around to test all those things. I don't think that problem will go away anytime soon, since there just doesn't seem to be a clear solution. Microsofts solution was to basically say "fuck you, buy our gamepad instead", which of course isn't a pretty solution. The other solution is that games just tries to handle all the possible cases and allows users configuration, which many try to do, but which many fail, since there is always a weird edge case that they haven't thought of (analog-trigger for example often fail to be recognized as buttons). The cleanest solution at the moment seems to be to just to allow to remap things at the driver level so that the game gets to see an input device which it can handle, which my xboxdrv app does, but that of course means that you have to configure each game individually, but at least it works after that.
It's sad really that those joypads have been out for so long and don't work out of the box, when the PS2 and PS3 ones do.
The problem is that Xorg added automatic configuration while not implementing any proper way to override it from the Xorg side. So its not the joypads drivers faults, its Xorg that is the guilty one, it will happily grab all the devices it can find and turn them into a mouse (aka making them unusable), a little HAL config file however can easily fix that permanently.
This is either due to a lack of Linux input standards,
/dev/input/eventX works perfectly fine, the trouble is that dpad comes in a numerous different variants of events, some gamepad have it as first and second axis, in some other it comes much later and thus in not recognized by the games since they only check first and second. Other gamepads report the dpad as buttons, which again doesn't work when the game is looking for an axis. And of course there is SDL, which will report the dpad sometimes as Hat, so even if you have config options for buttons and axis it will not work. If you use some PS2-to-USB adapter things can even more funny, since then two gamepads might end up registering as a single device. And then there is of course the whole deadzone issue, which will screw up some games as well. It happens almost never that a game properly handles all of these cases. This however really isn't a Linux-only problem, gamepads are totally fucked up on Windows as well (to properly use the Xbox360 pad on Windows you have to throw the official driver away and use a homebrew one and the chatpad isn't even support at all). In the end I think the only short time fix is to have an input driver that is actually configurable enough to handle all those situations, which is why I wrote one, its however right know limited to Firestorm pad and Xbox360 gamepads.
it's a lack of an update to the emulators to make them work with the Xinput standards if it actually is a standard.
I don't know any game that actually uses Xinput, most use either the old /dev/input/jsX directly, the new /dev/input/eventX or just a wrapper library like SDL. And just to add a bit of naming confusion, there are actually two Xinput, one is the Xorg input system and the other one is Microsoft new input system mainly used for Xbox360 controller I think, both however are completly unrelated.
You can't necessarily make a good movie with a handful of guys and some talent.
Have a look at the recent Half Life short movie or movies like The Man from Earth or Primer, you very definitvly can make a good movie with a tiny budget. The only real disadvantage that a movie seems to have is that you need to have all the crew in the same place at the same time, while a game can be developed by people connected via the internet and can recycle lots of content from the parent game. But of course, a tiny movie budget won't give you the next Star Wars any more then a tiny game budget will give you the next Half Life, that however doesn't mean they can't be good in their own way.
including paying or compensating actors.
That's like saying you can't make a game without compensating the programmers and artists, but you very definitively can, because there are plenty people who do it for the fun of it, not the money.
Yes, isn't it dreadful how Steam makes it so easy to buy games?
I can order a game from Amazon.de (Germany), have it at my doorstep the next day and pay 5-10EUR less then buying it on Steam and of course I get a printed manual and a box too. With that given digital distribution doesn't look so great any more.
Same over here in Germany, games are almost always overpriced on Steam, Orange Box from Amazon.de costs 24EUR from steam 30EUR, Bioshock 10EUR vs 20EUR, eets is 5EUR vs 10EUR, Empire: Total War is 45EUR vs 50EUR, Fear2 is 43EUR vs 50EUR, TR:A 10EUR vs 20EUR and so on.
Down side? We'll probably have to wait another 10-20 years before it all gets worked out... :(
The annoying part is that games where already there or at least going in that direction, a good 20 years ago. Elite had a huge universe to explore back in 1984, then in 1993 there was XCom:UFO where you had to fight war against alien on a dynamic playing field, all with a meta-game where you researched stuff, build your base and so on, in EF2000 in 1995 you had a complete war that was simulated dynamically, so you didn't just flew your missions, you also saw friend and enemy fly their missions, planes and runways could get destroyed, captured and so on over the progress of the war, you could also design your own missions.
Since then a lot of stuff has been forgotten or dumped down, so you average FPS today is even more linear then Doom. In the end I think the problem with 'open' games is that they simply are to inaccessible for the masses. While they are extremely fun when you got into them, they can take quite a while to get into, which means the instant gratification crowed is easily scared off.
Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy does that, the story is told from the viewpoint of three characters and you switch between them every now and then on predefined points. It works pretty well. Dreamfall also does that, even featuring a dialog between the two of the characters where you switch characters in the mid of discussion, which was pretty cool moment. The interesting part is that this is really nothing new, Maniac Mansion had that back in 1987, along with cutscenes that show you what other non-player characters in the house where doing.
I think a big problem with video games these days is that they try to follow Half Life model of 'cinematic storytelling', which means a single view point that is always attached to the main character, it never ever gives you a clear idea of the bigger picture and limits the story to things the main character experiences, which makes things both implausible and very limiting.
Buffy not only ended pretty well, it also could have ended after Season 1, 3, 4 and 5 perfectly fine without feeling unfinished. The arcs in that series where for most part very confined to a given season. There where of course also plenty of storylines going on that went across seasons, but they always where in the background and never the focal point to base a cliffhanger on.
in 30 years, it will all be vocal with no buttons.
I hope that in 30 years we will have finally gotten rid of money printed on paper.
Sure, they need to learn to use a computer well enough to serve their interests, but why any more?
Sure you don't have to know every little detail of how a computer works, but a little basic knowledge can help quite a bit, since it turns all those scary messages that the computer shouts at you into something meaningful.
ATMs suck. People get confused. People who don't know computers intimately are afraid of them.
I think that has a lot to do with the fact that one doesn't use ATMs very often and that one can't use them in private for practice. A lot of the confusion with technical devices goes away when one just plays a bit around with them, but that isn't so easy when it has to happen in public and with your money at risk. With voting machines it of course can be even worse, since you use them just once every few years.
True, but that isn't really that different from normal paper (i.e. posters get rolled and not folded and books and magazines have a pre-created fold in the middle). I think the flexibility is much more important for durability then it is for folding, since dropping a thing that can bent is pretty much a non-issue, while dropping a solid objects pretty much always kills it due to the much higher G-forces involved. And of course you could always add pre-created bends to an e-paper device as well if you need them.
how hard is it to hack a piece of paper and a pen?
Its easy to hack it, but its nearly impossible to do it on a large scale without getting caught, thanks to the whole process being completly transparent, understandable by everybody and most importantly verifiable by the voter himself. Your average non-paper-trail electronic voting machine fails on all three of them. With a voting machine with paper trail things look much better then without, but then whats the point of buying expensive machines, when you need to hand count anyway to be sure of the results?
This controller is nothing new, the Classic Controller has existed since day one, this one just changes the form a bit, but doesn't add any extra stuff. It can be used in Virtual Console games and a few Wii games such as SmashBros, just as the original Classic Controller, its not meant to replace the Wiimote and most Wii games will continue to use the Wiimote, just as they have in the past two years.
And I wonder if you called the dpad, analog stick, etc., "gimick controls".
Dpad and analogstick have well over a decade of gaming history to show that they work quite well, the Wiimote so far has none of that. Even after two years most games don't manage to produce more then a half functional waggle control and thats not because everybody is lazy, but simply because the device just doesn't have enough sensors to make a decent motion sensing device. Even Nintendo seems to have realized that and now brings us MotionPlus, which should at least reduce the problem a lot and allow developers to make a half decent sword fighting game, which was impossible before.
Everything in my house plays a fucking DVD.
That just makes it even more obvious that the Wii is missing something very basic. TVs have a limited amount of component connectors and many people would surely prefer if they could just have one box next to their TV instead of two. There are plenty good reasons why DVD in the Wii would be a useful feature for many people, but alas Nintendo doesn't offer that option.
HDMI is a terrible connector interface, the worst I've ever seen, with so many licensing issues,
Yeah, but so what? Its not that there are plenty of digital alternatives to chose from.
You're the same pricks who bought PS2s back when the Gamecube was the only console putting out 480p over component,
Only console? Xbox can do 480p and higher and the PS2 can even do 1080i. Now in terms of power per dollar, the Gamecube was probably the greatest console ever build, but in absolute terms the Xbox still has a lead, Gamecube gets close, but nothing more.
That electric car is going to need some way to store electricity. Back to square one!
Yeah, its called a battery. Thing is, a fuel cell doesn't run on electricity, it runs on hydrogen and hydrogen isn't coming out of the power outlet, so you have to either generate it by different means (electrolysis) or ship it around, neither of which sounds more efficient then just using a good old battery.
Electricity needs a storage medium.
My power outlet works just fine without a hydrogen tank in my house. Now with solar panels, windmills and whatever it might be different, but thats not where most of our power comes from for a long while to come. The big problem I see with hydrogen is that I just don't see how it would be more effective building a completly new infrastructure to ship hydrogen around, when we already have a perfectly fine infrastructure to move electricity around. Hydrogen also doesn't seem to be more efficient then latest battery technology. So where exactly is the big advantage in hydrogen? A electric car that I can just plug into the power outlet seems a lot more convenient to me then one into which I have to inject hydrogen.
I don't really know much about the topic, so I could be completly wrong, but a little of google, didn't really brought up all that many good arguments for hydrogen, but quite a few one for the opposite.
That 'stick' is called money and Nintendo has more then enough of it at the moment.
New first party controllers happen only once every few years, so this is quite unexpected news. On the other side its of course just a classic controller with hand grips bolted on, so not all that exciting.
I doubt that regulation could stop the data from accumulating, after all many people want to have their data out there, twitter, facebook, blogs, youtube and all that stuff works by users publishing stuff on their own, not by evil companies collecting things behind your back, and those things will only grow when storage and bandwidth become less of an issue. I think what could need regulation is how that data is handled, just as you can't discriminate people due to their skin color, maybe one shouldn't be able to discriminate somebody because they posted something a decade ago on facebook. It might also be a good idea if there would be a stronger emphasis on anonymous communication, that might not need regulation by itself, but at least it should be made sure that it doesn't get outlawed someday due to some "stop the terrorist/crimilals/pirates/whatever".