But I cannot find any citation that Wiimote can measure its position in space.
The problem was that there where tons of sources for that. Mainstream press took the Nintendo press release (which was correct, just not exactly detailed to be useful), added imagination and ended up with wrong technical information, but since everybody was printing it, it of course is fine with Wikipedia. The trouble is that a valid source for Wikipedia is anything that is printed on paper and well, homebrew groups and stuff happen to do their work in the Internet, not on paper so they get automatically disqualified. And the only real technical documentation that exist is of course only available under NDA for official Nintendo developers, so not exactly a source you might get your hands on either.
Textured Quads are used for leaves because of polygon count.
The whole point of realtime ray tracing is that it scales with O(log(n)) instead of O(n) when it comes to polygons. Which means that you can and should model each leaf as fully polygon. That is actually done in quite a few other examples, such as the sunflower scene or that Boeing model, where every last screw is modeled and yes, ray tracing can handle those just fine.
Now there is of course a cavet, this scalability only works for static scenes and things become quite a bit more problematic when stuff is animated, but never the less the whole point of 'going ray tracing' is because presumably polygon counts are slowly get high enough that ray tracing just outruns rasterization.
Yet another ray tracing article and yet again all the same problems as before. Doing yesterday games in ray tracing is all nifty, but also kind of pointless. For one we already played them, but more importantly, it doesn't actually use the strength of ray tracing. Rendering a tree build out of texture quads is a nice accomplishment, but wasn't the whole point of ray tracing that one can have a million polygons and no longer need such hacks? So show me a realistic tree instead of trying to replicate the limitations of rasterization.
I am still waiting for a game/demo that actually is build from the ground up with ray tracing in mind and by that I mean one that actually looks good, just a few shiny spheres might have been impressive back on the Amiga some 20 years ago, not any more.
I completly disagree. Actually I think the disclaimers are by far the best part of Wikipedia. What other source ever admits that it might be wrong? Basically none, even so many are far less accurate then Wikipedia. Its great that Wikipedia has the courage to admit that it isn't perfect. I think the real problem is exactly what you are proposing: Without those boxes the article has to be correct. So instead of a box you get people reverting edits because they aren't perfect and instead of people fixing edits and adding citations you just get edit wars. And well, that is already the case. I had quite a few of my (not many) edits reverted by people that didn't liked it, when the correct approach would have just been to flag them with a 'needs more citation' mark.
What do you mean? Please name a specific third-party source or type of source that Wikipedia has rejected, and show us that it has "a reputation for fact-checking".
First one I had an issue with was correcting some incorrect information of what the Wiimote is capable of. The article stated that it could measure position in space, while reality was that it had only an 3-axis accelerometer and a camera-sensor for the pointer. So I corrected, got reverted, cited one of the Wii homebrew wiki's, was reverted again, argued a bit and finally managed to reword the thing without actually quoting the homebrew wiki. Kind of stupid to only accept something without quoting a good source. The whole problem is ridicules because everybody with a Bluetooth adapter can verify the homebrew wiki, its not rocket science. The incorrect information appeared in the first place because everybody was using official Nintendo press releases mixing in with a little to much imagination, but that is apparently more worth then somebody that actually looked at the bits and bytes that come out of the Wiimote.
Next one was PSP homebrew, the old article was full of detail, whole history of homebrew firmwares released and stuff. Now true, it wasn't a great article, but it was a useful one. Few month later they 'fixed' it by removing all the useful information and replacing it with generic blabla that doesn't tell you anything, it doesn't even mention Pandora battery. One of the reasons: No realiable sources. Well, duh, mainstream media prefers to not report about homebrew because they like their advertising money from Sony. All the useful sources of the homebrew community are ignored, most of which can easily be verified by people actually using the software. Now one actually might be able to update the current article with some more useful information, but since I came there myself to look for information, I can't really do much about it, I don't use PSP homebrew.
Next in line were Free Software games. Almost every article about a Free Software game was at one point either removed or threatened to be removed. Because, guess what, mainstream gaming press doesn't really talk much about those games. Now given the community around those games might not be the biggest and the games might not be up to snuff compared to commercial ones, but there is a community around those and some of them have been their for years and quite a fan base. But of course citing community pages, blogs and stuff isn't worth a thing. It has to be CNN mentioning a game in some 'new linux software' section or whatever to be good enough for Wikipedia, and well, most of them have, so after being deleted and blocked, most of them returned after a few month. Ironically, the quality of some of them is now more awful then ever, guess to many editors have been scared away from Wikipedia.
Thats of course not all, the page for the German version of the Pirate Party was either threatened to be removed or actually removed. Why? Because the party wasn't actually an official party at the point the article was written and some crackpots interpreted the guidelines in such a way that you aren't allowed to write an article about a political party that isn't an official party that you can actually vote for. Completely ignoring that the party was soon becoming an official party and that the whole Pirate Party thing has generated quite a bit of buzz.
Now of course there is more, German version of Simspon Episode guide was removed, because it wasn't pretty enough. Duh, guess what, Wikipedia is there to allow people to fix it up, but somehow that was to much for admins to understand. So instead of a imperfect article, you ended up with no article. Whats the point of that? Since when has it ever been a criteria for Wikipedia that an article has to be perfect on edit number 1. Especially in the German Wikipedia the admins are extremely crazy at interpreting the Wikipedia rules word by word (in very weird ways) instead of considering them as guidlines and direction.
They've been taking the "magic" path ever since Einstein and relativity came along and said reality is unintuitive
The fun part with relativity is that its not half as magical as it looks on the first view, it follows naturally when you accept that the speed of light is constant. Similarly a lot of quantum mechanics follows naturally when you accept that energy is quantized, which isn't all that far fetched to begin with, since matter is too. The annoying problem with quantum mechanics is that its pretty hard for a lay person to find any information on it that stays to the experimental facts instead of drifting away into magical interpretations.
Little video I ran across while googling for Beel's Theorem. Can't say I understand much of it, but at the end it started talking about boxes and balls as well...
* you generate two entangled quantum things * you move them apart * you look at one of them and figure out its state, by that you knock it out of the superposition * magic happens and the (inverse of that) state is transported to the other thing * you look at the other thing an confirm that the state is as expected
Since the stuff is in superposition you shouldn't be able to tell its state beforehand, but due to looking at the other thing an teleportation you can. The other thing has the inverse state thing since they must obey conservation of angular momentum (i.e. one spins up, then the other spins down).
Now what I don't get is why this involves any 'teleportation' or quantum weirdness at all. Analog experiment:
* you have two boxes * you put into one of those boxes a ball at random * you move them apart * you look into your box and can now tell if a ball is in the other box or not * no magic necessary, no teleportation happens, since the state of both boxes is fixed from the start
I don't get why this teleportation thing is anything special, since as far as I understand it, its completly normal and matches exactly what you would expect.
IPv6 wouldn't help here. Registration attempts could come from botnets and IPv6, when properly used, gives you *a lot* of IP addresses to chose from, so a spammer could just switch to a new one whenever he wants. The only way to fix this in the long run would be a web-of-trust kind of thing where your authenticity isn't based on a single test, but on reputation you build up in the past.
When it comes to handling crashes Pitstop on my C64 looked better then GT5. In terms of still pictures GT5 is pretty awesome, in terms realistic physics (destructible tracks, cars, etc.) and AI it still has a long long way to go.
In the very very early days of ReiserFS, it had the tendency to trash files and it happened to me a couple of times, but it got fixed at some point and I didn't had any problem with that after that and have used ReiserFS3 happily for years.
Then on a new system (Ubuntu8.10) I tried XFS just for a change and I had file loss on day one, followed by continual file loss after each and every crash of the system (buggy Nvidia driver). The recommend solution to this was switching of hard drive cache, which however didn't change anything at all for me. I have replaced XFS with ext3 after that, since XFS seems to be completly unable to not lose files on crashes, and so far with ext3 I haven't lost a single file.
With all that talk about file system performance and stuff, it would be really nice to get a bit more information on what really matters: How good is a filesystem at keeping your files safe. All information on that seems anecdotal at best.
ReiserFS isn't actively maintained. In addition to that ext3 and now ext4 have learned quite a few new tricks since ReiserFS first appeared, you can now online resize an ext3 filesystem, it supports hashed b-trees, which should speed up directory handling, it is getting an online defrag tool and a bunch of other goodies. So many of the benefits that ReiserFS originally brought to the table can now be have with ext3 or ext4.
Fully ACK, the weird tilt is kind of driving me nuts because it so obviously just doesn't make any sense and would be easy to fix. Even the ergonomic split keyboards don't fix it.
The really annoying part for me is that my 'perfect' keyboard was already build, detachable numpad, trackball in the middle, matrix layout, split layout... all the good stuff I miss on my current keyboard. Sadly its just a prototype that never entered production.
Thats a myth, QWERTY was not there to slow the typist down, but to speed them up. Letters that would jam where places further apart, so less jamming and more speed as the result. As a result QWERTY is simply the solution to a problem that no longer exist.
I have no real problem typing on another keyboard in QWERTY, however typing on my primary keyboard in QWERTY is kind of troublesome after years of Dvorak, since its quite a bit more confusing to make the switch when everything stays the same and just the keyboard layout switches. It of course helps that my primary keyboard is a split-keyboard, while most others are classical rectangular layouts.
I don't know how the web has gotten so centralized.
Its pretty obvious why it got centralized. End users never had the necessary upstream bandwidth, often weren't even allowed to run their own servers, didn't have machines up 24/7, didn't have the knowledge to build their own webpages, didn't want to spend money to rent their own servers, etc. Add to that, that centralized content specific servers provide much better search and user interface then a random collection of pages on the web and it becomes pretty obvious why the web is the way it is today.
The difference is that the PS2 also got tons of awesome games too, the Wii on the other side not so much. With the DS situation looks quite a bit better, but not exactly all roses either.
While at the topic of game sales, whats up with PS3 game prices in the UK? LittleBigPlanet, MirrorsEdge, Resistence2, Fallout3 and a whole bunch of other pretty new games sell for less then half the regular price on Amazon.co.uk.
I would say that a big reason why LittleBigPlanet underperformed is the stupid censor policy they run, deleting levels without explanation, deleting everything that might be a copyright violation, even so it would be valid fair use, deleting stuff on their own without waiting for a DMCA takedown notice from the copyright holder, etc. When news about how cool and creative people are with the game is followed by news how all the cool stuff from last week got deleted, its not much of a surprise that some people prefer to not buy it or at least not at full price.
You can watch youtube on those systems, but its not exactly a perfectly smooth experience. On the Wii half the time I tried it videos would either just stop in the middle randomly, continue to play in the background when switching to fullscreen and a ton of other annoyances. So a little compatibility testing and a more streamlined interface would be more then welcome.
Slashdot Mirror
But I cannot find any citation that Wiimote can measure its position in space.
The problem was that there where tons of sources for that. Mainstream press took the Nintendo press release (which was correct, just not exactly detailed to be useful), added imagination and ended up with wrong technical information, but since everybody was printing it, it of course is fine with Wikipedia. The trouble is that a valid source for Wikipedia is anything that is printed on paper and well, homebrew groups and stuff happen to do their work in the Internet, not on paper so they get automatically disqualified. And the only real technical documentation that exist is of course only available under NDA for official Nintendo developers, so not exactly a source you might get your hands on either.
Textured Quads are used for leaves because of polygon count.
The whole point of realtime ray tracing is that it scales with O(log(n)) instead of O(n) when it comes to polygons. Which means that you can and should model each leaf as fully polygon. That is actually done in quite a few other examples, such as the sunflower scene or that Boeing model, where every last screw is modeled and yes, ray tracing can handle those just fine.
Now there is of course a cavet, this scalability only works for static scenes and things become quite a bit more problematic when stuff is animated, but never the less the whole point of 'going ray tracing' is because presumably polygon counts are slowly get high enough that ray tracing just outruns rasterization.
Yet another ray tracing article and yet again all the same problems as before. Doing yesterday games in ray tracing is all nifty, but also kind of pointless. For one we already played them, but more importantly, it doesn't actually use the strength of ray tracing. Rendering a tree build out of texture quads is a nice accomplishment, but wasn't the whole point of ray tracing that one can have a million polygons and no longer need such hacks? So show me a realistic tree instead of trying to replicate the limitations of rasterization.
I am still waiting for a game/demo that actually is build from the ground up with ray tracing in mind and by that I mean one that actually looks good, just a few shiny spheres might have been impressive back on the Amiga some 20 years ago, not any more.
I tried linking to Wikis with information on homebrew twice, got reverted both times. Wikis are not an accepted source for Wikipedia.
It already does. I have seen more interesting articles get deleted by admins then crippled by vandals.
We dont need the damn disclaimer
I completly disagree. Actually I think the disclaimers are by far the best part of Wikipedia. What other source ever admits that it might be wrong? Basically none, even so many are far less accurate then Wikipedia. Its great that Wikipedia has the courage to admit that it isn't perfect. I think the real problem is exactly what you are proposing: Without those boxes the article has to be correct. So instead of a box you get people reverting edits because they aren't perfect and instead of people fixing edits and adding citations you just get edit wars. And well, that is already the case. I had quite a few of my (not many) edits reverted by people that didn't liked it, when the correct approach would have just been to flag them with a 'needs more citation' mark.
What do you mean? Please name a specific third-party source or type of source that Wikipedia has rejected, and show us that it has "a reputation for fact-checking".
First one I had an issue with was correcting some incorrect information of what the Wiimote is capable of. The article stated that it could measure position in space, while reality was that it had only an 3-axis accelerometer and a camera-sensor for the pointer. So I corrected, got reverted, cited one of the Wii homebrew wiki's, was reverted again, argued a bit and finally managed to reword the thing without actually quoting the homebrew wiki. Kind of stupid to only accept something without quoting a good source. The whole problem is ridicules because everybody with a Bluetooth adapter can verify the homebrew wiki, its not rocket science. The incorrect information appeared in the first place because everybody was using official Nintendo press releases mixing in with a little to much imagination, but that is apparently more worth then somebody that actually looked at the bits and bytes that come out of the Wiimote.
Next one was PSP homebrew, the old article was full of detail, whole history of homebrew firmwares released and stuff. Now true, it wasn't a great article, but it was a useful one. Few month later they 'fixed' it by removing all the useful information and replacing it with generic blabla that doesn't tell you anything, it doesn't even mention Pandora battery. One of the reasons: No realiable sources. Well, duh, mainstream media prefers to not report about homebrew because they like their advertising money from Sony. All the useful sources of the homebrew community are ignored, most of which can easily be verified by people actually using the software. Now one actually might be able to update the current article with some more useful information, but since I came there myself to look for information, I can't really do much about it, I don't use PSP homebrew.
Next in line were Free Software games. Almost every article about a Free Software game was at one point either removed or threatened to be removed. Because, guess what, mainstream gaming press doesn't really talk much about those games. Now given the community around those games might not be the biggest and the games might not be up to snuff compared to commercial ones, but there is a community around those and some of them have been their for years and quite a fan base. But of course citing community pages, blogs and stuff isn't worth a thing. It has to be CNN mentioning a game in some 'new linux software' section or whatever to be good enough for Wikipedia, and well, most of them have, so after being deleted and blocked, most of them returned after a few month. Ironically, the quality of some of them is now more awful then ever, guess to many editors have been scared away from Wikipedia.
Thats of course not all, the page for the German version of the Pirate Party was either threatened to be removed or actually removed. Why? Because the party wasn't actually an official party at the point the article was written and some crackpots interpreted the guidelines in such a way that you aren't allowed to write an article about a political party that isn't an official party that you can actually vote for. Completely ignoring that the party was soon becoming an official party and that the whole Pirate Party thing has generated quite a bit of buzz.
Now of course there is more, German version of Simspon Episode guide was removed, because it wasn't pretty enough. Duh, guess what, Wikipedia is there to allow people to fix it up, but somehow that was to much for admins to understand. So instead of a imperfect article, you ended up with no article. Whats the point of that? Since when has it ever been a criteria for Wikipedia that an article has to be perfect on edit number 1. Especially in the German Wikipedia the admins are extremely crazy at interpreting the Wikipedia rules word by word (in very weird ways) instead of considering them as guidlines and direction.
That was true for Gnome2.0 back in the day and a huge annoyances, it however is not true for Gnome2.24 and hasn't been for quite a while.
They've been taking the "magic" path ever since Einstein and relativity came along and said reality is unintuitive
The fun part with relativity is that its not half as magical as it looks on the first view, it follows naturally when you accept that the speed of light is constant. Similarly a lot of quantum mechanics follows naturally when you accept that energy is quantized, which isn't all that far fetched to begin with, since matter is too. The annoying problem with quantum mechanics is that its pretty hard for a lay person to find any information on it that stays to the experimental facts instead of drifting away into magical interpretations.
Little video I ran across while googling for Beel's Theorem. Can't say I understand much of it, but at the end it started talking about boxes and balls as well...
I assume you could, but then wouldn't it be the same as just taking a disk with one-time pads with you?
The way I understand it:
* you generate two entangled quantum things
* you move them apart
* you look at one of them and figure out its state, by that you knock it out of the superposition
* magic happens and the (inverse of that) state is transported to the other thing
* you look at the other thing an confirm that the state is as expected
Since the stuff is in superposition you shouldn't be able to tell its state beforehand, but due to looking at the other thing an teleportation you can. The other thing has the inverse state thing since they must obey conservation of angular momentum (i.e. one spins up, then the other spins down).
Now what I don't get is why this involves any 'teleportation' or quantum weirdness at all. Analog experiment:
* you have two boxes
* you put into one of those boxes a ball at random
* you move them apart
* you look into your box and can now tell if a ball is in the other box or not
* no magic necessary, no teleportation happens, since the state of both boxes is fixed from the start
I don't get why this teleportation thing is anything special, since as far as I understand it, its completly normal and matches exactly what you would expect.
IPv6 wouldn't help here. Registration attempts could come from botnets and IPv6, when properly used, gives you *a lot* of IP addresses to chose from, so a spammer could just switch to a new one whenever he wants. The only way to fix this in the long run would be a web-of-trust kind of thing where your authenticity isn't based on a single test, but on reputation you build up in the past.
When it comes to handling crashes Pitstop on my C64 looked better then GT5. In terms of still pictures GT5 is pretty awesome, in terms realistic physics (destructible tracks, cars, etc.) and AI it still has a long long way to go.
In the very very early days of ReiserFS, it had the tendency to trash files and it happened to me a couple of times, but it got fixed at some point and I didn't had any problem with that after that and have used ReiserFS3 happily for years.
Then on a new system (Ubuntu8.10) I tried XFS just for a change and I had file loss on day one, followed by continual file loss after each and every crash of the system (buggy Nvidia driver). The recommend solution to this was switching of hard drive cache, which however didn't change anything at all for me. I have replaced XFS with ext3 after that, since XFS seems to be completly unable to not lose files on crashes, and so far with ext3 I haven't lost a single file.
With all that talk about file system performance and stuff, it would be really nice to get a bit more information on what really matters: How good is a filesystem at keeping your files safe. All information on that seems anecdotal at best.
ReiserFS isn't actively maintained. In addition to that ext3 and now ext4 have learned quite a few new tricks since ReiserFS first appeared, you can now online resize an ext3 filesystem, it supports hashed b-trees, which should speed up directory handling, it is getting an online defrag tool and a bunch of other goodies. So many of the benefits that ReiserFS originally brought to the table can now be have with ext3 or ext4.
Fully ACK, the weird tilt is kind of driving me nuts because it so obviously just doesn't make any sense and would be easy to fix. Even the ergonomic split keyboards don't fix it.
The really annoying part for me is that my 'perfect' keyboard was already build, detachable numpad, trackball in the middle, matrix layout, split layout... all the good stuff I miss on my current keyboard. Sadly its just a prototype that never entered production.
Thats a myth, QWERTY was not there to slow the typist down, but to speed them up. Letters that would jam where places further apart, so less jamming and more speed as the result. As a result QWERTY is simply the solution to a problem that no longer exist.
I have no real problem typing on another keyboard in QWERTY, however typing on my primary keyboard in QWERTY is kind of troublesome after years of Dvorak, since its quite a bit more confusing to make the switch when everything stays the same and just the keyboard layout switches. It of course helps that my primary keyboard is a split-keyboard, while most others are classical rectangular layouts.
I don't know how the web has gotten so centralized.
Its pretty obvious why it got centralized. End users never had the necessary upstream bandwidth, often weren't even allowed to run their own servers, didn't have machines up 24/7, didn't have the knowledge to build their own webpages, didn't want to spend money to rent their own servers, etc. Add to that, that centralized content specific servers provide much better search and user interface then a random collection of pages on the web and it becomes pretty obvious why the web is the way it is today.
Telltale is running their whole business on adventure games and so far they seem to be doing quite fine.
The difference is that the PS2 also got tons of awesome games too, the Wii on the other side not so much. With the DS situation looks quite a bit better, but not exactly all roses either.
While at the topic of game sales, whats up with PS3 game prices in the UK? LittleBigPlanet, MirrorsEdge, Resistence2, Fallout3 and a whole bunch of other pretty new games sell for less then half the regular price on Amazon.co.uk.
LittleBigPlanet = great demo!
Which demo? Where can I get that? Unless I am not completly mistaken that game never had a demo, but just a closed beta test.
I would say that a big reason why LittleBigPlanet underperformed is the stupid censor policy they run, deleting levels without explanation, deleting everything that might be a copyright violation, even so it would be valid fair use, deleting stuff on their own without waiting for a DMCA takedown notice from the copyright holder, etc. When news about how cool and creative people are with the game is followed by news how all the cool stuff from last week got deleted, its not much of a surprise that some people prefer to not buy it or at least not at full price.
You can watch youtube on those systems, but its not exactly a perfectly smooth experience. On the Wii half the time I tried it videos would either just stop in the middle randomly, continue to play in the background when switching to fullscreen and a ton of other annoyances. So a little compatibility testing and a more streamlined interface would be more then welcome.