Actually my impression is that its the other way around, i.e. the old faces often look the best when computer animated for some reason. In Final Fantasy for example I always found Dr. Sid to be by far the best of all of them and some of the older background character also looked pretty good and in something like this video the old guy also feels the most natural while the men looks a little unnatural and the women not even close to realism. Might have something to do with old people not having all that detailed facial animation to begin with, so if something goes wrong its harder to spot or so.
No, the whole problem with motion capture is that its *not* exact. The results can be pretty faulty, especially when it comes to facial animation and when you then apply those faulty animation data to an equally imperfect mesh you lend right deep down in the uncanny area, exactly *because* its motion capture. With hand animation on the other side an artists can fine tune the results till they look perfect, which however never really happens for realistic facial animation since it would just be way to much work.
If the uncanny valley really exist, then please explain realistic paintings that have been around for ages
I think what people mostly call the "uncanny valley" is not the result of a work produced by an artists, but the result up motion captured data applied to a computer model (often generated by 3D scanning). The miss-detection in the data and the incorrect mapping from the animation data to the model result in uncanny results and most often you don't have an artist there to clean things up. When you on the other side have an artists to clean things up, the results most often look quite a fine.
I consider the uncanny valley not something that you drop into the closer you get to realism, but something that you drop into when you screw up the balance between different aspects of a work. A perfectly realistic 3D human will look really uncanny if you just stitch it onto a not so realistic animation, since a lot of vital pieces in facial animation and such would simply be missing. On the other side if you take that same animation and stick it to a simpler human model things look quite fine. Its simply a matter to not move the motion and the graphics so far apart that they won't fit together any more. If you have a super realistic face with every wrinkle modeled perfectly, you better have some animation data to make those wrinkle behave realistically in motion, if you don't you better scale back your detail level, since what looks uncanny is that that is there and looks wrong, not those pieces that are simply missing.
Over the course of the last 20 or so years I have seen a ton of stuff that I would consider uncanny and a ton of stuff that I consider to look quite fine, none of the uncanniness however had much to do with the realism, since even a cartoon creature can look quite uncanny when things are out of balance.
Sugar has a Journal, which is nice for what it does, but doesn't replace a file manager. If you ever tried to exchange data between an XO-1 and a normal computer you will quickly realize that there is a big need for a classic file manager that works the way all other computers work, since the Journal just screws things up big time if you insert a normal USB stick with a normal directory structure on it. This is especially important since Sugar is meant to teach kids how computers work and how to write applications, but you can't do that when the kids have no way to actually ever see a file system, i.e. you currently can't develop Sugar apps in Sugar, you have to launch the Terminal and use non-Sugar applications to create a Sugar application, quite a bummer.
Easy fix, after you run the face replace algorithm, just give it another round with the 'improve attractiveness of faces' one. Then you have your attractive replaced faces in no time.
Give it time, not to long ago flash was quite expensive and also rather slow and small on storage, its only recently that it has come into an area where it is really interesting has a harddrive replacement, it might take some more time till the price is down enough that it is actually interesting for the masses. I don't expect the spinning drives to disappears anytime soon, since they have still quite a leap in terms of storage, but a dual solution with solid state for the OS and a spinning one for the movies and stuff seems to be within reach.
Which might be explained with them getting very low ratings, half the games you mention score in the lower 60-70/100 region and that region happens to be one that most people avoid because the games in there are junk. Not that there aren't exceptions, every now and then there are games that are great and that the press just doesn't get, but a bunch of 60-70 rated games being the better parts of games for a console isn't exactly a good sign.
My point is that lack is not that relevant. Most people don't care. I don't.
I do. $250 for a console that doesn't really do much more then those that I already have is a lot. Might I look over that when the games at least are great, maybe, but then most Wii games still are either PS2 ports, mini-games, crap or games that would have worked on the Gamecube just as well (SmashBros, Galaxy, Zelda,...). The number of Wii games that really make good use of the controls is still very very tiny.
I'll disagree with you there; I think the Gamecube could match anything the PS2 could do, let alone the Wii.
I am not so sure an that point myself. What Shadow of the Colossus did with fur, pseudo-HDR, particles, view distance and worldsize was highly impressive and I haven't really seen anything quite a like on any of the last gen consoles or even current gen consoles. Maybe its just all down to art style and could be replicated on a technical level on another console if people would just try, but lets just say, I believe it when I see it and that hasn't happened yet on the Wii.
I have a hunch that a lot of the 360's and PS3 are owned by the same people, who will probably not be buying a copy for both.
And a bunch of Wiis are either collecting dust or only used for Wii Sports and nothing else, so I don't think that changes much. The lower development cost is certainly a valid point, but I think some publishers really want to spend big money on one game, instead of trying to split the money across more lower cost games. Trying to do the next big AAA title seems to be a thing they try to do and they don't seem to see the Wii as a valid target for such a title. It might be stupid and foolish, but then thats kind of the way things seems to be at the moment.
My problem with the Wii isn't so much that it has developed in a different direction, but that it hasn't developed enough. Motion control is still more a theoretical cool sounding concept then something that is implemented well in games. And with that lack of hardware power, a little bit of motion control just isn't enough. We have to wait and see, maybe Motion Plus will fix in the new games many of the responsiveness and detection issue that plague many todays Wii games. But on the other side as long as most Wii games are still mini-games collection instead of something with a bit more substance, even if technically possible, I have some doubt that it will actually happen.
In terms of point&click there is Zack&Wiki, Strong Bad and Sam'n Max is supposed to be coming soon too, there are also games like Nancy Drew. In terms of lightgun shooter there is Ghost Squad, House of Dead and quite a few other ones. So there really isn't a total lack of the later kind.
However overall I have to agree, while the Wiimote does have its weaks points, it also does some things quite well and while porting old mouse/lightgun driven stuff over is a nice thing, the Wiimote could be used for more. There is still quite a lack of non-minigames that are build from ground of for the Wii and especially the genre of first-person-adventures could benefit from that a lot, especially since that is a genre which hasn't really been used much often. A modernized Snachters remake for the Wii could certainly be very cool.
I think developers are still learning how to work with the Wii.
I have some doubt about that, because there really is not that much to be learned. The Wiimote is pretty limited and not really that complicated and much of the reason why you don't really see anything exciting being done with it, is because it just can't do it.
If you need further proof look no further then Nintendo itself, who will release MotionPlus, another little sensor to stick into your Wiimote that will bring it a little closer to what people expected from it in its original form already.
There certainly is still a lot to be learned about motion sensing, but a lot of that has to be learned on the controller design and sensory side before the third parties can even start to think about going really serious about motion sensing and elevating it to something truely good instead of just variations of stick waggling.
Remember, the Wii is substantially more powerful than any last generation console (PS2, Gamecube, X-Box),
Completely wrong, I guess that myth will never die. Its pretty much equally powerful then the stuff from the last generation, its hardware can't even run some effects that the Xbox1 could do, due to the lack of shader, so you won't see a game like Riddick on the Wii ever. Keep in mind that the normal generation jump in computing power is around 10 times or more, the Wii is stuck somewhere between 1.5x-2.0x times more powerful then the Gamecube and quite a bit of that additional power is already eaten up by 16:9/480p output vs 4:3/480i output that the Gamecube did.
it's certainly less powerful than the PS3 and 360, but the difference is mainly in HD graphic detail
The difference is *FAR* bigger then just HD. For one very important thing there is anti-aliasing, which the Wii doesn't do and causes all Wii games look pretty sucky on a big screen. But more importantly there is texture and object count. One of the fundamental difference between this gen and last gen is that in a PS3 or a Xbox360 game you have the screen full of stuff, crisp textures and a ton of objects, while on a PS2/Wii/Xbox1 game you always have plenty of empty space that is only filled with a blurry texture. Stuff like that gets *very* clear when you compare a MarioGalaxy vs a Ratched&Clank side by side in 480p, those games are really a generation apart.
Now one could of course argue that most of that is just fluff, unimportant to gameplay, and I even agree with that, I certainly had much more fun with Galaxy then Ratched, but claiming that there isn't a *huge* technological leap between Wii and a Xbox360/PS3 is ridiculous. There certainly is one, but well, I have to admin, that the brain is pretty damn good at filling those empty spots with stuff from imagination, so a last-gen game never feels as empty as it really is.
Think of it this way: The Wii is theoretically powerful enough to do a better game than anything ever made for the PS2.
Seriously, that is *eight* years after the Playstation2 was released, really not exactly much. But even still I have some doubt of even that, while the Wii is powerful in some areas, I am not sure if it could do a Shadow of the Colossus type of game. The PS2 isn't the most powerful console around, but at the end of its lifecycle some extremely impressive stuff has been done of it, thanks to its vector processor I guess, that I haven't seen anywhere else.
Also, the Wii does offer something else besides the motion controls... a market substantially larger than either of the other two consoles.
Yeah, but also a market smaller then both of those consoles combined, i.e. a cross platform game for Xbox360 and PS3 still has a larger market then a Wii-only title.
The sad truth is that the Wii doesn't need those games. It is selling like crazy, even now well over a year after its release and so far I haven't seen numbers that this trend is going to change, even things like the much more powerful Xbox360 selling for 50EUR less then the Wii in europe hasn't put a dent in the sales. The Wiis whole concept simply isn't build around classical games, instead it seems to be build around accessories, Wiimote, Balance Board, Zapper, Wii Wheel and so on. Accessories seem to give people something that they can instantly understand, which you can't have with classical game, which is also why you always see happy people jumping around in front of a TV in Wii commercials and never really much of the actual game.
When it comes to 'normal' games I have given up all hope for the Wii and never really had it much to begin with. Nintendo is doing something completly different with the Wii and simply doesn't care about the market segments of Xbox360 and PS3, when some third party still manages to sneak such a title on the Wii, fine, but there are always exceptions to the rule.
The interesting part is what will happen five years down the road? Will people still swing their controller as tennis rack and golf club or will they be tired of it and move on to the next trendy thing? I don't really know, but for the moment Nintendo seems to be doing more then fine with what they do.
Seriously, do you really think sites like GCW et al exist because people have huge personal issues with DRM
Ever tried to run a game in Wine? A visit to GCW is often the first step in getting it running, since copy protection is the one thing Wine doesn't properly emulate. Now that is certainly not the only or the major reason why people use GCW, but its one of many quite legitimate uses. Also never underestimate the convenience to not being forced to have the DVD in the drive to play the game.
Some people have tons of time and are low on money. And there is also the case of people piracting 'because they can', not because you actually want to use the item, i.e. when you find a tarball with a ton of games in it, you download the whole thing, instead of cherry picking the things that you actually care about. When things are free, people tend to just grab what they can, instead of thinking about what they need first.
If one country is beating the other up just for the hell of it, I'd say that stopping that from happening is justifiable,
Might be, that is what we have the UN for to decide.
All I am saying is that when you want to start something that will kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian you better have a damn good reason for doing so. And none of the reasons for going into Iraq came even close.
Are you seriously saying that anyone who goes to war, ever, should end up before a war crimes tribunal?
Not everybody that goes to war should, but everybody that starts a war should. Nothing wrong with defending your country, but plenty is wrong when you "defend" your country thousands of miles from home with an "enemy" that never had the intention or the ability to attack your country. If you start a war, then hell yes, you should be held accountable for each and every person that dies in it.
You don't have to actively target them to kill hundreds of thousands of them. Thats something that the chaos of war will ensure quite automatically and that is also something that was well known before the US attacked Iraq. In a better world the organizers of such wars would end up on a war crime tribunal, but alas, here they get voted to be President of the USA, again.
Ideas may be a dime in a dozen, but good ideas are very rare, especially in the video game industry where every title tries to copy whatever was successful in the last year. And that of course makes even the best ideas worthless in terms of money, since publishers are only interested in ideas that are already out there and have been tried and succeeded, they don't want new and risky stuff. They often don't even want games that have already been proven to be successful in another market.
That doesn't mean that good ideas are worthless, but they simply have the problem that there is no market for them and likely won't be anytime soon. If you want to see an idea get turned into reality, you simply has to do it yourself. And while doing so one has of course to avoid a ton of other pitfalls, since even the best idea is only as good as the game that makes use of it.
The trouble starts with Gimp not having one animation system, but two. One is simply layer based with one layer for each frame, which works fine for really simple stuff, but starts to cause trouble with more complex stuff (transparent layers can't be properly previewed, changing fps for preview isn't easily possible, only one layer per frame, etc.). The other system is GAP, which works by having one.xcf file per frame, which fixes a few shortcomings of the other, but adds plenty of its own. For one thing you have to save your image under a special name before you can start animating, which is not only awkward, but also causes plenty of other problems. Gimp doesn't have proper access to all frames, but only to the current one, the GAP plug-in swaps the images more or less behind Gimps back. This not only causes performance issues, but also the loss of undo across frames as well as the loss of many other operations that should work across frame borders. Onionskins for example are awkward to setup and then appear as normal layers in your images, instead of being invisible or somehow special.
However, none of this come as a surprise or is the fault of GAP itself, since it is all the natural consequence of Gimps layer system not being all that flexible and GAP then just being a hack around all that. A proper way to fix the issue would involve to first make Gimps layer system more flexible, adding cloning, special layers, groups, etc. and then adding a new animation system on top of that, so that a frame can be handled as proper layer group. With GEGL getting closer that might happen one day, but it still might take a while.
A lot of free software comes about because of the need, or the personal interest.
And that is often why it is good. Complains about usability in Free Software slowly get old. Not only has Free Software improved quite a lot over the years, commercial software also got rather horrible. Its mindbogglingly how many pointless dialogs and licenses one has to click away in Windows Vista just to make something simple work, yet on Linux you have none of those problems. Its also a little ridiculous how a mouse driver can take 70MB to download on Windows, while it just works by default on Linux.
Now of course none of that means that Linux doesn't have problems, but they aren't really half as big an issue as some people claim.
I think the real issue is much simpler: Cleaning things up requires work, not necessarily the most interesting kind of work. You really don't need a usability guru to see or fix many of the issues you find in free software, you however have to take the time to look into the issue and figure out a solution and that most often simply never happens.
I wouldn't go so far to say that a critique is useless, but there is truth in his statement. A lot of usability problems are not just where you place the buttons, but they are much more deeply down in the code structure. Take Gimp for example, one of my issues with it is its lackluster animation support, you of course can try to polish the GUI a bit, but the real problem are much deeper down into the code and need to be fixed there first before you can even start to think about a proper GUI, same is true for a lot of other issues.
Usability in the free software world is simply not just an issue of GUI, but goes down through all layers of the code, since after all, they have to be usable too, both by developers and users. Tackling the GUI is all nice and good, but it really is only a small part of the whole picture.
Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding.
Yeah, well, duh. Science is mainly there to explain and predict observations, as long as our predictions and observations match, science is quite happy. It doesn't mean that science is giving you truth, it simply means that it gets it "close enough". If we can make new observations that can't be explained, then the theories get extended and fixed up, but they don't go just 'poof' and are proven all wrong, they are simply replaced by theories that work better at those new edge cases. For the non-edge cases the old theories an the other side continue to work perfectly fine.
The video is rather lame, since it only states in rather verbose terms that the CELL isn't a x86 CPU and that you don't have access to the GPU, which we already knew anyway. It would be much more interesting to know what the PS3 Linux actually can do instead of knowing what it can't do (i.e. does mplayer work, is CELL any good for video encoding right know, how fast is the framebuffer when watching video, how fast is Dosbox or other emulation, etc.).
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Actually my impression is that its the other way around, i.e. the old faces often look the best when computer animated for some reason. In Final Fantasy for example I always found Dr. Sid to be by far the best of all of them and some of the older background character also looked pretty good and in something like this video the old guy also feels the most natural while the men looks a little unnatural and the women not even close to realism. Might have something to do with old people not having all that detailed facial animation to begin with, so if something goes wrong its harder to spot or so.
No, the whole problem with motion capture is that its *not* exact. The results can be pretty faulty, especially when it comes to facial animation and when you then apply those faulty animation data to an equally imperfect mesh you lend right deep down in the uncanny area, exactly *because* its motion capture. With hand animation on the other side an artists can fine tune the results till they look perfect, which however never really happens for realistic facial animation since it would just be way to much work.
If the uncanny valley really exist, then please explain realistic paintings that have been around for ages
I think what people mostly call the "uncanny valley" is not the result of a work produced by an artists, but the result up motion captured data applied to a computer model (often generated by 3D scanning). The miss-detection in the data and the incorrect mapping from the animation data to the model result in uncanny results and most often you don't have an artist there to clean things up. When you on the other side have an artists to clean things up, the results most often look quite a fine.
I consider the uncanny valley not something that you drop into the closer you get to realism, but something that you drop into when you screw up the balance between different aspects of a work. A perfectly realistic 3D human will look really uncanny if you just stitch it onto a not so realistic animation, since a lot of vital pieces in facial animation and such would simply be missing. On the other side if you take that same animation and stick it to a simpler human model things look quite fine. Its simply a matter to not move the motion and the graphics so far apart that they won't fit together any more. If you have a super realistic face with every wrinkle modeled perfectly, you better have some animation data to make those wrinkle behave realistically in motion, if you don't you better scale back your detail level, since what looks uncanny is that that is there and looks wrong, not those pieces that are simply missing.
Over the course of the last 20 or so years I have seen a ton of stuff that I would consider uncanny and a ton of stuff that I consider to look quite fine, none of the uncanniness however had much to do with the realism, since even a cartoon creature can look quite uncanny when things are out of balance.
Sugar already has a file manager
Sugar has a Journal, which is nice for what it does, but doesn't replace a file manager. If you ever tried to exchange data between an XO-1 and a normal computer you will quickly realize that there is a big need for a classic file manager that works the way all other computers work, since the Journal just screws things up big time if you insert a normal USB stick with a normal directory structure on it. This is especially important since Sugar is meant to teach kids how computers work and how to write applications, but you can't do that when the kids have no way to actually ever see a file system, i.e. you currently can't develop Sugar apps in Sugar, you have to launch the Terminal and use non-Sugar applications to create a Sugar application, quite a bummer.
Easy fix, after you run the face replace algorithm, just give it another round with the 'improve attractiveness of faces' one. Then you have your attractive replaced faces in no time.
Give it time, not to long ago flash was quite expensive and also rather slow and small on storage, its only recently that it has come into an area where it is really interesting has a harddrive replacement, it might take some more time till the price is down enough that it is actually interesting for the masses. I don't expect the spinning drives to disappears anytime soon, since they have still quite a leap in terms of storage, but a dual solution with solid state for the OS and a spinning one for the movies and stuff seems to be within reach.
They just don't get a lot of attention.
Which might be explained with them getting very low ratings, half the games you mention score in the lower 60-70/100 region and that region happens to be one that most people avoid because the games in there are junk. Not that there aren't exceptions, every now and then there are games that are great and that the press just doesn't get, but a bunch of 60-70 rated games being the better parts of games for a console isn't exactly a good sign.
My point is that lack is not that relevant. Most people don't care. I don't.
I do. $250 for a console that doesn't really do much more then those that I already have is a lot. Might I look over that when the games at least are great, maybe, but then most Wii games still are either PS2 ports, mini-games, crap or games that would have worked on the Gamecube just as well (SmashBros, Galaxy, Zelda, ...). The number of Wii games that really make good use of the controls is still very very tiny.
I'll disagree with you there; I think the Gamecube could match anything the PS2 could do, let alone the Wii.
I am not so sure an that point myself. What Shadow of the Colossus did with fur, pseudo-HDR, particles, view distance and worldsize was highly impressive and I haven't really seen anything quite a like on any of the last gen consoles or even current gen consoles. Maybe its just all down to art style and could be replicated on a technical level on another console if people would just try, but lets just say, I believe it when I see it and that hasn't happened yet on the Wii.
I have a hunch that a lot of the 360's and PS3 are owned by the same people, who will probably not be buying a copy for both.
And a bunch of Wiis are either collecting dust or only used for Wii Sports and nothing else, so I don't think that changes much. The lower development cost is certainly a valid point, but I think some publishers really want to spend big money on one game, instead of trying to split the money across more lower cost games. Trying to do the next big AAA title seems to be a thing they try to do and they don't seem to see the Wii as a valid target for such a title. It might be stupid and foolish, but then thats kind of the way things seems to be at the moment.
My problem with the Wii isn't so much that it has developed in a different direction, but that it hasn't developed enough. Motion control is still more a theoretical cool sounding concept then something that is implemented well in games. And with that lack of hardware power, a little bit of motion control just isn't enough. We have to wait and see, maybe Motion Plus will fix in the new games many of the responsiveness and detection issue that plague many todays Wii games. But on the other side as long as most Wii games are still mini-games collection instead of something with a bit more substance, even if technically possible, I have some doubt that it will actually happen.
In terms of point&click there is Zack&Wiki, Strong Bad and Sam'n Max is supposed to be coming soon too, there are also games like Nancy Drew. In terms of lightgun shooter there is Ghost Squad, House of Dead and quite a few other ones. So there really isn't a total lack of the later kind.
However overall I have to agree, while the Wiimote does have its weaks points, it also does some things quite well and while porting old mouse/lightgun driven stuff over is a nice thing, the Wiimote could be used for more. There is still quite a lack of non-minigames that are build from ground of for the Wii and especially the genre of first-person-adventures could benefit from that a lot, especially since that is a genre which hasn't really been used much often. A modernized Snachters remake for the Wii could certainly be very cool.
I think developers are still learning how to work with the Wii.
I have some doubt about that, because there really is not that much to be learned. The Wiimote is pretty limited and not really that complicated and much of the reason why you don't really see anything exciting being done with it, is because it just can't do it.
If you need further proof look no further then Nintendo itself, who will release MotionPlus, another little sensor to stick into your Wiimote that will bring it a little closer to what people expected from it in its original form already.
There certainly is still a lot to be learned about motion sensing, but a lot of that has to be learned on the controller design and sensory side before the third parties can even start to think about going really serious about motion sensing and elevating it to something truely good instead of just variations of stick waggling.
Remember, the Wii is substantially more powerful than any last generation console (PS2, Gamecube, X-Box),
Completely wrong, I guess that myth will never die. Its pretty much equally powerful then the stuff from the last generation, its hardware can't even run some effects that the Xbox1 could do, due to the lack of shader, so you won't see a game like Riddick on the Wii ever.
Keep in mind that the normal generation jump in computing power is around 10 times or more, the Wii is stuck somewhere between 1.5x-2.0x times more powerful then the Gamecube and quite a bit of that additional power is already eaten up by 16:9/480p output vs 4:3/480i output that the Gamecube did.
it's certainly less powerful than the PS3 and 360, but the difference is mainly in HD graphic detail
The difference is *FAR* bigger then just HD. For one very important thing there is anti-aliasing, which the Wii doesn't do and causes all Wii games look pretty sucky on a big screen. But more importantly there is texture and object count. One of the fundamental difference between this gen and last gen is that in a PS3 or a Xbox360 game you have the screen full of stuff, crisp textures and a ton of objects, while on a PS2/Wii/Xbox1 game you always have plenty of empty space that is only filled with a blurry texture. Stuff like that gets *very* clear when you compare a MarioGalaxy vs a Ratched&Clank side by side in 480p, those games are really a generation apart.
Now one could of course argue that most of that is just fluff, unimportant to gameplay, and I even agree with that, I certainly had much more fun with Galaxy then Ratched, but claiming that there isn't a *huge* technological leap between Wii and a Xbox360/PS3 is ridiculous. There certainly is one, but well, I have to admin, that the brain is pretty damn good at filling those empty spots with stuff from imagination, so a last-gen game never feels as empty as it really is.
Think of it this way: The Wii is theoretically powerful enough to do a better game than anything ever made for the PS2.
Seriously, that is *eight* years after the Playstation2 was released, really not exactly much. But even still I have some doubt of even that, while the Wii is powerful in some areas, I am not sure if it could do a Shadow of the Colossus type of game. The PS2 isn't the most powerful console around, but at the end of its lifecycle some extremely impressive stuff has been done of it, thanks to its vector processor I guess, that I haven't seen anywhere else.
Also, the Wii does offer something else besides the motion controls... a market substantially larger than either of the other two consoles.
Yeah, but also a market smaller then both of those consoles combined, i.e. a cross platform game for Xbox360 and PS3 still has a larger market then a Wii-only title.
but the wii NEEDS to have those games.
The sad truth is that the Wii doesn't need those games. It is selling like crazy, even now well over a year after its release and so far I haven't seen numbers that this trend is going to change, even things like the much more powerful Xbox360 selling for 50EUR less then the Wii in europe hasn't put a dent in the sales. The Wiis whole concept simply isn't build around classical games, instead it seems to be build around accessories, Wiimote, Balance Board, Zapper, Wii Wheel and so on. Accessories seem to give people something that they can instantly understand, which you can't have with classical game, which is also why you always see happy people jumping around in front of a TV in Wii commercials and never really much of the actual game.
When it comes to 'normal' games I have given up all hope for the Wii and never really had it much to begin with. Nintendo is doing something completly different with the Wii and simply doesn't care about the market segments of Xbox360 and PS3, when some third party still manages to sneak such a title on the Wii, fine, but there are always exceptions to the rule.
The interesting part is what will happen five years down the road? Will people still swing their controller as tennis rack and golf club or will they be tired of it and move on to the next trendy thing? I don't really know, but for the moment Nintendo seems to be doing more then fine with what they do.
Which of course doesn't really solve the issue, since Wine's Direct3D is based on OpenGL.
Seriously, do you really think sites like GCW et al exist because people have huge personal issues with DRM
Ever tried to run a game in Wine? A visit to GCW is often the first step in getting it running, since copy protection is the one thing Wine doesn't properly emulate. Now that is certainly not the only or the major reason why people use GCW, but its one of many quite legitimate uses. Also never underestimate the convenience to not being forced to have the DVD in the drive to play the game.
Some people have tons of time and are low on money. And there is also the case of people piracting 'because they can', not because you actually want to use the item, i.e. when you find a tarball with a ton of games in it, you download the whole thing, instead of cherry picking the things that you actually care about. When things are free, people tend to just grab what they can, instead of thinking about what they need first.
If one country is beating the other up just for the hell of it, I'd say that stopping that from happening is justifiable,
Might be, that is what we have the UN for to decide.
All I am saying is that when you want to start something that will kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian you better have a damn good reason for doing so. And none of the reasons for going into Iraq came even close.
Are you seriously saying that anyone who goes to war, ever, should end up before a war crimes tribunal?
Not everybody that goes to war should, but everybody that starts a war should. Nothing wrong with defending your country, but plenty is wrong when you "defend" your country thousands of miles from home with an "enemy" that never had the intention or the ability to attack your country. If you start a war, then hell yes, you should be held accountable for each and every person that dies in it.
US does not target the innocent
You don't have to actively target them to kill hundreds of thousands of them. Thats something that the chaos of war will ensure quite automatically and that is also something that was well known before the US attacked Iraq. In a better world the organizers of such wars would end up on a war crime tribunal, but alas, here they get voted to be President of the USA, again.
Really ideas are a dime a dozen.
Ideas may be a dime in a dozen, but good ideas are very rare, especially in the video game industry where every title tries to copy whatever was successful in the last year. And that of course makes even the best ideas worthless in terms of money, since publishers are only interested in ideas that are already out there and have been tried and succeeded, they don't want new and risky stuff. They often don't even want games that have already been proven to be successful in another market.
That doesn't mean that good ideas are worthless, but they simply have the problem that there is no market for them and likely won't be anytime soon. If you want to see an idea get turned into reality, you simply has to do it yourself. And while doing so one has of course to avoid a ton of other pitfalls, since even the best idea is only as good as the game that makes use of it.
The trouble starts with Gimp not having one animation system, but two. One is simply layer based with one layer for each frame, which works fine for really simple stuff, but starts to cause trouble with more complex stuff (transparent layers can't be properly previewed, changing fps for preview isn't easily possible, only one layer per frame, etc.). The other system is GAP, which works by having one .xcf file per frame, which fixes a few shortcomings of the other, but adds plenty of its own. For one thing you have to save your image under a special name before you can start animating, which is not only awkward, but also causes plenty of other problems. Gimp doesn't have proper access to all frames, but only to the current one, the GAP plug-in swaps the images more or less behind Gimps back. This not only causes performance issues, but also the loss of undo across frames as well as the loss of many other operations that should work across frame borders. Onionskins for example are awkward to setup and then appear as normal layers in your images, instead of being invisible or somehow special.
However, none of this come as a surprise or is the fault of GAP itself, since it is all the natural consequence of Gimps layer system not being all that flexible and GAP then just being a hack around all that. A proper way to fix the issue would involve to first make Gimps layer system more flexible, adding cloning, special layers, groups, etc. and then adding a new animation system on top of that, so that a frame can be handled as proper layer group. With GEGL getting closer that might happen one day, but it still might take a while.
A lot of free software comes about because of the need, or the personal interest.
And that is often why it is good. Complains about usability in Free Software slowly get old. Not only has Free Software improved quite a lot over the years, commercial software also got rather horrible. Its mindbogglingly how many pointless dialogs and licenses one has to click away in Windows Vista just to make something simple work, yet on Linux you have none of those problems. Its also a little ridiculous how a mouse driver can take 70MB to download on Windows, while it just works by default on Linux.
Now of course none of that means that Linux doesn't have problems, but they aren't really half as big an issue as some people claim.
I think the real issue is much simpler: Cleaning things up requires work, not necessarily the most interesting kind of work. You really don't need a usability guru to see or fix many of the issues you find in free software, you however have to take the time to look into the issue and figure out a solution and that most often simply never happens.
I wouldn't go so far to say that a critique is useless, but there is truth in his statement. A lot of usability problems are not just where you place the buttons, but they are much more deeply down in the code structure. Take Gimp for example, one of my issues with it is its lackluster animation support, you of course can try to polish the GUI a bit, but the real problem are much deeper down into the code and need to be fixed there first before you can even start to think about a proper GUI, same is true for a lot of other issues.
Usability in the free software world is simply not just an issue of GUI, but goes down through all layers of the code, since after all, they have to be usable too, both by developers and users. Tackling the GUI is all nice and good, but it really is only a small part of the whole picture.
Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding.
Yeah, well, duh. Science is mainly there to explain and predict observations, as long as our predictions and observations match, science is quite happy. It doesn't mean that science is giving you truth, it simply means that it gets it "close enough". If we can make new observations that can't be explained, then the theories get extended and fixed up, but they don't go just 'poof' and are proven all wrong, they are simply replaced by theories that work better at those new edge cases. For the non-edge cases the old theories an the other side continue to work perfectly fine.
The video is rather lame, since it only states in rather verbose terms that the CELL isn't a x86 CPU and that you don't have access to the GPU, which we already knew anyway. It would be much more interesting to know what the PS3 Linux actually can do instead of knowing what it can't do (i.e. does mplayer work, is CELL any good for video encoding right know, how fast is the framebuffer when watching video, how fast is Dosbox or other emulation, etc.).