Actually, the Christmas gift-giving tradition is relatively new as well (according to some Western Studies class I more or less slept through). It only dates back about 150-200 years (not far, in the scope of religion), and originally kids made gifts for their parents while their parents gave them things like candy. Giving gifts to kids wasn't very widespread in the US until the early 1900's, when toy companies decided that this would be a great way to boost profits.
But anyway, it's pretty mute, as the winter Christmas holiday as we know it was stolen from the "pagans" by the Roman Catholic Church as an attempt to convert them. For all of you evangelical Christans out there, read the bible again. Christ was born in the spring, as evidenced by descriptions of annual Roman events that were taking place when the Magi traveled to Bethlehem.
Well, that's not all. It wouldn't explain the extreme shortage of both new and used consoles, just the shortage of those games. I think we can also pin it on the consoles being priced lower than ever, and that they all have games that would compel a person to buy a system. (Don't flame me over this... I'm saying that all three have good points and large audiences, I'm not saying you have to like all three.)
I don't know what the connection is, but when the guy at GameStop told me "No, we're out of PS2's. In fact, the only console new or used we have left is a new X-Box. Do you wanna buy an X-Box?" I laughed wholeheartedly in his face. Also, I knew that sales were up this year.
So I'm curious. If this is a new engine, then I guess that would explain why it ran so poorly - but it wouldn't explain why the graphics looked so vanilla.
Well, here's the catch-22. If it's a new engine, yes, that'll stress your computer and make the framerate drop as it will most certainly have all sorts of added graphical stuff (things like depth of field or glow, which can be added afterward with no need for new textures or anything). The reason why it looks so vanilla, though, is that the characters, environments, and textures were all designed for an engine from a few years back. They're always going to look just as vanilla, no matter how much the engine improves. (Think of Tenebare, except in a much less extreme case.)
The benchmark isn't meant to gague how powerful your system is, but how well your system can run FFXI. They give a list of scores on the page and tell you what kind of in-game experience you can expect. This is mainly the result of a console developer trying to cope with a multi-configuration platform (i.e. you can't complain so much if the game doesn't work on your system, as you could've tried the demo first for free).
Last time I checked, Xbox had way better specs than the PS2.
Owing totally to the fact that it's newer, and that Microsoft loses a ton of money every time they sell one. Not only that, but the X-Box doesn't have nearly the polygon draw rate nor the pixel fill rate that they report. Even if the graphics card were capible of such a thing (and it's not), the system bus doesn't have the bandwidth to transmit that much vertex data to it.
Programming on the PS2 is a complicated mess because of their vector processors.
Well, it was when it first came out. Now they have real development kits and there are people in the industry you can turn to for support. There's a real reason that newer PS2 games look better than first-gen ones, and a lot of it has to do with improved dev kits.
PS2 is flooded with a an incredible amount of "uncreative games" - that is how they achieved market dominance in the first place.
While not totally off-base, it's not like anyone's running to the X-Box for all of the wildly imaginitive stuff they have. The X-Box is crtuching its success on sports games and the Halo series. Now that's a lack of originality.
I don't think we'll see any PS2 games in the near future that use normal mapping.
Sure you will. Normal mapping is completely do-able on the PS2, but you have to use a multi-pass algorithm to do it right. You'll definitely see it in the future (Capcom has stated that they intend to port RE4 to the PS2), but if you look around you'll find a few out there that already use it.
Tell me again how high a concept memory cards are for save game storage (and in play use)?
I can take my save game to a friend's house. I can't with an X-Box.
The PS2 is actually a work of hardware art. It stands up very well to the X-Box (especially when you look at games like MGS3 and the Silent Hill series) considering that it's both older hardware and much cheaper to manufacture. There were a lot of blunders with making the hardware a bit overcomplicated, but it's still nothing compared to the Saturn (which had so much crap in it, they had to split the motherboard in half and layer it inside the case). The vector units were very complicated at first, but now that Sony has actually released development tools that help you use them, developers are getting a lot out of them.
Those devices [wacom.com] are really amazing. I wonder why he doesn't just get rid of the pencil and paper altogether.
Speaking as a webcomic artist and a tablet user, you simply can't beat a pencil and paper when trying to sketch something out of nothing. The slick plastic-on-plastic surface of a tablet makes such things feel awkward, and the ability to move the paper around as you draw is a big plus. It's not like you can't do everything purely digital, but the resolution on the tablet and the monitor is simply not enough to make it work. (When you zoom out far enough to get a feel for the whole image, you simply don't have enough resolution left to make a decent sketch. If you zoom in enough to have the resolution, then you lose the feel for the entirety of the image.)
Oh, I remember. Word 6.0, Win 95, floppy drive. You write a document, save to floppy. Write another document. save to hard disk. Close all documents. Eject floppy. Windows crashes because you ejected the floppy without first closing Word, even though you weren't currently using any files on the floppy.
I always thought that the disk drives themselves should have buttons on them, like the PC ones do, but have them be software buttons. When the Mac OS detects the button press, it does the normal Eject operation (i.e. as though you dragged that disk to the trash). disclaimer: don't yell at me too harshly if it does already. The only macs I've used where there were buttons on the drives were where they were on the zip drives, and the deficiency may be iomega's fault for all I know.)
A system for determining if two operands point to different locations in memory, the system comprising: a compiler for receiving source code and generating executable code from the source code, the source code comprising an expression comprising an operator associated with a first operand and a second operand, the expression evaluating to true when the first operand and the second operand point to different memory locations.
So, in summary, it must:
be part of a compiler
have an expression in the form of (operand)(operator)(operand)
evaluate "true" when the operands point to differnet addresses
Are they joking, that they're trying to do this in 2004? How about this:
a != b
Considering how long C++ has been around, I don't think we'll have to worry much.
How 'bout some prior art? They're patenting the use of a single operator to compare two objects and tell you if they're different. Something tells me that "!=" predates "IsNot". (Yes, "!=" is a single operator. It's not the combination of "!" and "=", otherwise it'd have to be "!==".)
So they require an online activation? Whoopty-hoo.
And please don't bitch about online activation if you're posting on slashdot (unless you mail in all your posts to the editors).
There are other problems with online activation, just as strong for real users as pirates. (a) What happens X years from now when Valve goes out of business? (b) What if I re-install it? Will the authentication bitch about the same copy being registered twice? (c) What if my firewall prevents it from working correctly? (I've heard that the Steam verrification only works through one level of NAT maximum, which is bad for people on college networks, but that's just unconfirmed rumor.)
Also, people are kind of annoyed right now because they went out and plunked down real money to get a real disc that contains a game, and now they can't play it until Vivendi says "allright, go ahead." I'm sure if Valve was able to authorize the early purchases, many fewer people would be angry about it.
P.S. I agree that the distribution method is freaking sweet. I would love to see more games made available this way. I have a feeling that, if it catches on, it'll help developers gain more leverage over distributors. Then we won't have this whole "activation denied" fiasco that happened this weekend.
Great Advice and absolutely true, HOWEVER, for the "DIY" types, i would add:
1. AVOID THE HIGH-LEARNING CURVE TOOSLS, SUCH AS:
A. Photoshop
B. Dreamweaver
C. Flash
D. ALL THE 3D Products; Lightwave, Maya, 3dFX
Speaking as a graphic designer and a programmer, this is some of the worst advise I've ever heard. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right, and you have to have the right tools. If you're in web development (and given the product list, I'll guess that's what we're going for), you'll need Photoshop and Dreamweaver simply because everything else outputs either absolutely horrid images or completely malformed HTML. For making Flash animations, you really should use Flash, if for nothing else than to ensure compatability and that your successor will be able to update it. And for 3D content creation, there's no easy way to do it at all. Anything simple (like buttons) can be easily accomplished in Photoshop with minimal effort, but anything complicated will take time and devotion. You simply have to learn the tools and use them.
And whatever you do... if you're in web design, never use Paint Shop Pro or Fireworks. Paint Shop Pro will never give you the power to create the graphics you need, and Fireworks renders things so completely wrong that it's jarring and detracts from your site.
If I could get EA CEO Larry Probst on the phone, there are a few things I would ask him. "What's your salary?" would be merely a point of curiosity. The main thing I want to know is, Larry: you do realize what you're doing to your people, right? And you do realize that they ARE people, with physical limits, emotional lives, and families, right?
It dawns on me that Probst probably doesn't know exactly how hard his programmers have it, and it's probably very intentional. The actual operations are obscured to him purposefully so that either (a) the people who put the labor policies in place doesn't face reprimand, or (b) to maintain plausable deniability in the case that the labor policies create a major shit-storm in the media or in the courts. Probst, if you know about this, you must fix it. And if you didn't you have to fix it, and then fire the guy who didn't inform you. You should have no tolerance for people who can't conform to standards of ethical treatment of employees and who purposefully hide a liability from you in the hopes of perpetuating it.
See, I would almost be swayed by the whole "PSP is a portable media player" argument, except that it doesn't support any standard media type. Sure, I could buy all my movies and music over again, but something tells me that that even real PSP enthusiasts will really be looking for it for playing games.
See, I tend to think that the idea of having an all 10's review would automatically discredit the review. They're pretty much saying that the game is perfect... but we all know it isn't. There will be some complaint eventually, and there are always more things to add to a game. It can't be perfect, it's an FPS that uses joysticks instead of a keyboard and mouse, and it definitely doesn't have the graphical bang of Doom 3. Not that I'm saying it's terrible,... but seriously, perfect?
My roommate was talking to some guy at Game Informer recently and he brought up that they were completely off the mark with a few games, as were the rest of the gaming mags. He explained it like this: they never put what they actually think about the game personally. They put what they think you'll think about the game. Maybe a lot of these Halo 2 scores are actually reviewers saying "wow, I'm sure everybody will love this, no need to add my opinion."
You'd be surprised how little time 2 hours can be when you're on a long trip. You can easily burn through that when you're on a plane or stuck waiting in line somewhere. It's also nice to have a long battery time when you forget to recharge.
It'll be corrected in a later version because as the cost of the lcd and other internals goes down, they'll be able to afford a better built-in battery. For now, though, I'm sure early adopters will be happy with a shitty battery and probably a battery extender that plugs in to the dc power port.
Unfortunately, the GCN uses a disc format that's more proprietary than just disc size. Burning to a 3" DVD or a ground down 5" DVD won't work on the system because of it. I'm sure, though, that in time this will be hacked, even if it means using a boot-loader from the network to read from the DVD drive.
(a) no modding involved, so in that respect it's really easy to get up and running.
(b) Well, since they have mplayer running, you could use it as a network media player. I think if someone developed a front end specifically for gclinux that would let you specify a samba/windows file share in a.conf file somewhere, displayed the files in some user-friendly way, and then spawned mplayer when you clicked on one,... well that'd be nice.... sadly, I don't know how to program squat on linux or I'd be all over that.
Both groups tend to have a dislike of the mainstream subculture - they may well have both suffered through high school.
It used to be a really tight coupling of geeks and goths, both sharing the same "fringe" properties. Now "goth" is pretty much just another part of mainstream, which pisses off a lot of the real goths who don't like the "posers" in their group. Now, thanks to Hot Topic and similar stores, geek culture and video games are starting to become mainstream, which is annoying people like me. I'm especially pissed seeing people I knew as popular jerks in high-school several years ago try to do geeky shop-talk. Advice for them: The case and all the components in it is called the "computer," not the CPU, the tower, the hard drive, or the drive. assholes
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Actually, the Christmas gift-giving tradition is relatively new as well (according to some Western Studies class I more or less slept through). It only dates back about 150-200 years (not far, in the scope of religion), and originally kids made gifts for their parents while their parents gave them things like candy. Giving gifts to kids wasn't very widespread in the US until the early 1900's, when toy companies decided that this would be a great way to boost profits.
But anyway, it's pretty mute, as the winter Christmas holiday as we know it was stolen from the "pagans" by the Roman Catholic Church as an attempt to convert them. For all of you evangelical Christans out there, read the bible again. Christ was born in the spring, as evidenced by descriptions of annual Roman events that were taking place when the Magi traveled to Bethlehem.
I bought my girlfriend games for Hannukah. I bought my roomate a game for Christmas. It's just quicker to say "holiday."
Well, that's not all. It wouldn't explain the extreme shortage of both new and used consoles, just the shortage of those games. I think we can also pin it on the consoles being priced lower than ever, and that they all have games that would compel a person to buy a system. (Don't flame me over this... I'm saying that all three have good points and large audiences, I'm not saying you have to like all three.)
I don't know what the connection is, but when the guy at GameStop told me "No, we're out of PS2's. In fact, the only console new or used we have left is a new X-Box. Do you wanna buy an X-Box?" I laughed wholeheartedly in his face. Also, I knew that sales were up this year.
The benchmark isn't meant to gague how powerful your system is, but how well your system can run FFXI. They give a list of scores on the page and tell you what kind of in-game experience you can expect. This is mainly the result of a console developer trying to cope with a multi-configuration platform (i.e. you can't complain so much if the game doesn't work on your system, as you could've tried the demo first for free).
I don't know... have you ever watched a trailer from an XBN disc? Perhaps FMV playback is a harder proposition for MS than previously imagined.
The PS2 is actually a work of hardware art. It stands up very well to the X-Box (especially when you look at games like MGS3 and the Silent Hill series) considering that it's both older hardware and much cheaper to manufacture. There were a lot of blunders with making the hardware a bit overcomplicated, but it's still nothing compared to the Saturn (which had so much crap in it, they had to split the motherboard in half and layer it inside the case). The vector units were very complicated at first, but now that Sony has actually released development tools that help you use them, developers are getting a lot out of them.
Oh, I remember. Word 6.0, Win 95, floppy drive. You write a document, save to floppy. Write another document. save to hard disk. Close all documents. Eject floppy. Windows crashes because you ejected the floppy without first closing Word, even though you weren't currently using any files on the floppy.
I always thought that the disk drives themselves should have buttons on them, like the PC ones do, but have them be software buttons. When the Mac OS detects the button press, it does the normal Eject operation (i.e. as though you dragged that disk to the trash). disclaimer: don't yell at me too harshly if it does already. The only macs I've used where there were buttons on the drives were where they were on the zip drives, and the deficiency may be iomega's fault for all I know.)
Photo. Shop. Document.
I'd love to see the "Preparing to save" status bar every couple of seconds. That'd be great.
So, in summary, it must:
- be part of a compiler
- have an expression in the form of (operand)(operator)(operand)
- evaluate "true" when the operands point to differnet addresses
Are they joking, that they're trying to do this in 2004? How about this:Considering how long C++ has been around, I don't think we'll have to worry much.
How 'bout some prior art? They're patenting the use of a single operator to compare two objects and tell you if they're different. Something tells me that "!=" predates "IsNot". (Yes, "!=" is a single operator. It's not the combination of "!" and "=", otherwise it'd have to be "!==".)
Also, people are kind of annoyed right now because they went out and plunked down real money to get a real disc that contains a game, and now they can't play it until Vivendi says "allright, go ahead." I'm sure if Valve was able to authorize the early purchases, many fewer people would be angry about it.
P.S. I agree that the distribution method is freaking sweet. I would love to see more games made available this way. I have a feeling that, if it catches on, it'll help developers gain more leverage over distributors. Then we won't have this whole "activation denied" fiasco that happened this weekend.
And whatever you do... if you're in web design, never use Paint Shop Pro or Fireworks. Paint Shop Pro will never give you the power to create the graphics you need, and Fireworks renders things so completely wrong that it's jarring and detracts from your site.
See, I would almost be swayed by the whole "PSP is a portable media player" argument, except that it doesn't support any standard media type. Sure, I could buy all my movies and music over again, but something tells me that that even real PSP enthusiasts will really be looking for it for playing games.
See, I tend to think that the idea of having an all 10's review would automatically discredit the review. They're pretty much saying that the game is perfect... but we all know it isn't. There will be some complaint eventually, and there are always more things to add to a game. It can't be perfect, it's an FPS that uses joysticks instead of a keyboard and mouse, and it definitely doesn't have the graphical bang of Doom 3. Not that I'm saying it's terrible,... but seriously, perfect?
My roommate was talking to some guy at Game Informer recently and he brought up that they were completely off the mark with a few games, as were the rest of the gaming mags. He explained it like this: they never put what they actually think about the game personally. They put what they think you'll think about the game. Maybe a lot of these Halo 2 scores are actually reviewers saying "wow, I'm sure everybody will love this, no need to add my opinion."
Do you have a link to an artilce about this case? I don't doubt you one bit, but being a curious person, I'd like to read up on it more.
You'd be surprised how little time 2 hours can be when you're on a long trip. You can easily burn through that when you're on a plane or stuck waiting in line somewhere. It's also nice to have a long battery time when you forget to recharge.
It'll be corrected in a later version because as the cost of the lcd and other internals goes down, they'll be able to afford a better built-in battery. For now, though, I'm sure early adopters will be happy with a shitty battery and probably a battery extender that plugs in to the dc power port.
Unfortunately, the GCN uses a disc format that's more proprietary than just disc size. Burning to a 3" DVD or a ground down 5" DVD won't work on the system because of it. I'm sure, though, that in time this will be hacked, even if it means using a boot-loader from the network to read from the DVD drive.
(a) no modding involved, so in that respect it's really easy to get up and running. (b) Well, since they have mplayer running, you could use it as a network media player. I think if someone developed a front end specifically for gclinux that would let you specify a samba/windows file share in a .conf file somewhere, displayed the files in some user-friendly way, and then spawned mplayer when you clicked on one,... well that'd be nice. ... sadly, I don't know how to program squat on linux or I'd be all over that.