Agreed. for some reason, the human brain has no problem accepting the rules of a 2d game universe. it's bizarre, on the surface doesn't make sense, yet is so natural, it wasn't really questioned by players until 3d came along. further, i would argue that precise control (of the kind Super Mario Bros. or many shooters encouraged) is still only possible in '2d' games.. remember 3d is only a 2d window on virtual 3d space, you have no binocular vision, and controls are still an issue. imho.
i just get a blank page (empty space where presumably article should be) in Opera, and in IE. Do you need Firefox to view this page? No wait, what am i doing. On to the next story!
for anyone interested in what a modern band can do with unusual old electronic tech., i suggest listening to Optiganally Yours - Exclusively Talentmaker (2000), a very good album IMHO.. i mean good music, not just a novelty. Rob Crow is the guy from Heavy Vegetable, Thingy, Pinback and Physics, bands which some of you have hopefully heard of! YMMV whether you think this is good of course. As their name suggests, they use the Optigan, which was mentioned in this article, but also the Chilton Talentmaker and the Vako Orchestron, "slightly varied descendants of the original Optigan" (thanks Allmusic, which i don't know how to link into, JS grr) and Pitchfork review for that info - worth a read!) Just thought this was an opportunity to push a lesser known & pretty creative band i like:) I wouldn't have thought i'd enjoy listening to anything made with such a cheesy looking instrument, it's surprising; hard to describe their sound as it's not really like any other band i know, it's 'alt pop/rock' apparently hmm but if you're interested the songs are (just about) available on P2P networks..
i'm sure they're must be other bands out there doing new stuff with strange old equipment... reply if you know any good ones!
yes, but what are they writing? "frist post" and "teh suxor!" (i don't even know what that means, is that right?):p weeell... unless you want to get into fan fiction and erotic stories. the net has those down.
i love the way you went anonymous to say that. you know,/. is probably the one place you don't need to do that:p. proclaim your love of sci-fi loudly from the rooftops. personally, i hate sci-fi. mostly. well, i've never really given it a chance. does Red Dwarf when i was younger count?:p
to contribute to the topic.. it just occured to me that the only time i really read (other than you know newspapers, mags and TFM*) is when i don't have internet access. i get through several novels a year, on holidays and staying with people w/o net access.. guess i'm pretty sad too huh.
a good novel often sticks in the mind. my web browsing (which there's so much more of) rarely does. hmm, should take a hint from that.
oh, of course there were fps before 3d graphics cards. but cheap consumer 3d has gone hand in hand with mass popularity of fps games, and i stick with my feeling that fps won't ever go away. it'll become much more than point and shoot though... i felt ActionQuake2 was the start of something amazing and still play it - mods show what can be done:)
nice, doesn't seem to work though. says there are no updates, or it couldn't find any, something like that. for both methods you suggested (and for several other plugins i've got insalled). anyone else got firefox's auto-update to work?
god all those replies and no-one's got it right yet. perhaps it's too obvious: 666.666 (recurring, that must be really evil) rounds to 667. the nearest integer, easier for marketing purposes i guess. i.e. it's slightly slower than the rated speed (oh no! we'll have people complaining they're being ripped off now..)
Does anyone have any idea what's next after FPS games?
hmmm, more realistic multiplayer FPS games?:p
Seriously, i don't think anything will replace FPS as a 'genre' (really, it's a wide genre, more akin to "film" or "music" than "drama" or "action" imho). i mean all FPS means is you have a 1st person 3d world view, and usually some kind of pointy object (gun), though even that's not essential. for immersion, for many people, that's where it's best and i can't see it changing much. i mean, it's an approximation of how we see the real world isn't it. also fps games can be very easy to pick up and play in short sessions (so could any other style of game, but sims and rpgs tend not to be afaik). The only thing that stopped us having FPS games since the beginning of time (or computers) was the 3d graphics card circa 1996 - ?
it got modded by mods who also happened to not find it funny. personally, i normally don't find geek humour funny, but some of these i liked. e.g.
Q269916: Office Assistant Makes Sudden Loud Noise
Q261186: Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music
Q264642: Scenery Shudders Violently When You Fly the Concorde
Q284895: Text Is Typed by Office Assistant Sounds When Microphone Is Turned off or Unplugged (actually super annoying when it happens i bet)
sure it's not deep lasting humour but it's ok for a quick laugh.
others are just lame (Cookies Lost After Upgrading to Windows XP, whatever could that mean, or Q323927: How to Resurrect a Dead Character, yes i bet it's not a game), or like Q174630: Windows Restarts Continuously with Blue Screen, just not funny. at least for anyone who's had to deal with windows computers.
this is also a much more serious problem, because it's funding organised crime, with all the nasty that infers. but we're going OT, though presumably a similar thing applies to pirate DVDs over there?
i think what you're missing is that there's many kinds of intelligence that people can have. i think when women say they want an intelligent guy, it usually means witty, observant, sensitive and things like this. *not* a walking encyclopedia, or even someone who is any good at academic work at all. being good with your hands (no double entendre intended) is one example, being practical and so on. if you think about it (to get deep), evolution has favoured women who went for these sort of things. oog oog ape man. console yourself with the thought that being a mathematician is such a recent idea that women haven't had a chance to catch up;). i am not an expert on sexual attraction.
ah, but if buying said MS product causes the MS corp. to lose money.. (or to put it another way, MS is paying for part of your media centre!) - is it morally ok for a/. geek to buy ?;)
great read. i haven't anything to add, since i've never worked for a parcel company, but i have seen the beginning of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (anyone?):) GO PACKAGE PEOPLE!
Ace Ventura: I have a package for you, sir.
Man: Sounds broken.
Ace Ventura: Most likely; I bet it was something nice, though.
but yeah er, thanks for confirming my worst fears about package delivery firms..:/ astounding. anyone managed to get a hidden camera on that? hmm new TV series idea: "America's Worst Package Deliveries". wouldn't be worse than most of what's on...
There's porn, and then there's porn... I'm worried about... I'd come home and find them sucking off the family pet or something.
rotfl. funny. can anyone post any links to studies showing a correlation between childhood exposure to extreme porn and (criminal) sexual deviancy or problems in adulthood? (not a rhetorical question, i'm curious). guess what i'm really asking is, do we have to think of the children? or is this like a (true) story my mum told, when she was young her dad gave her a cigarette and it was so disgusting it put her off for life. i'm not advocating showing horse porn to children, i'm just wondering how dangerous some of this stuff really is... kids are tougher than most people seem to think. they deal with fucked up things in many parts of the world that are way beyond what most lucky brits/americans will see in their lives.
no you won't, by the time these games appear there'll be a single card with more power than these. that's how it usually goes anyway. i've been bitten by "2 of anything" (CPUs, video cards) bad value before.
no 'cos the 400W supply isn't all for the card. it's not "hey my computer has a 250W PSU, now i want to add a GF-whatever, now i need a 650W PSU" is it? but yeah, you have a point, the power requirement is probably silly. i wouldn't run this even if i was given the cards for free, not worth it. except to run some demos for a minute:)
isn't this article conveniently erasing a very important part of (video format) history - the laserdisc! that large analogue video disc that was, ahem, very popular with 'videophiles'. hello? the DiscoVision? the Selectavision? never heard of them! but the LD was a succesful format in the mid 90s.
The relevant paragraph:
"Putting movies on a disc wasn't Lieberfarb's idea. The glitch-prone DiscoVision from MCA and Selectavision from RCA came and went in the early 1980s. The pricey album-size laser discs appealed mostly to videophiles. At Warner, Lieberfarb collaborated on disc projects with Philips in the late 1980s. Little came of it, though. By the early 1990s, his gut was telling him that if movie discs were the size of CDs, were priced right and offered a better picture and sound than video, people would collect movies like books. The key was to make the discs cheaply, based on a universal standard."
Now rewrite that with laserdisc in there and we're making sense. not to mention getting our milestones and perspective right. Sorry i stopped reading after that 'cos the article is... long but i did check & there's no mention of it. wtf.
"allowing skinflint fans to see... without coughing up the price of a ticket."
i couldn't leave this quote alone.
right, so they're 'skinflint', which means in this context that they have no money to spend on films, and the film industry is losing all that money, that doesn't exist, that they aren't spending on films. funnily enough. now either this article is bollocks, or the law is bollocks, or i'm talking bollocks. i think it's just another crap article.
the truth is obviously either:
(a)the 'fans' aren't skinflint, they think the movie isn't worth paying for or want to find out if it is
(b)or they couldn't afford the movie tickets anyway. but neither is as easy to read, or as bad for the movie industry.
why let the signals in? why not just put an aerial on the roof (which i already have, and most people in the UK have - made for TV and work fine for FM radio aswell. even when people switch to satellite they usually still have it). unless you want to take mobile phone calls in your house, i guess, but that's a different range anyway?
[sarcasm] yeah, it should say "install something to stop you copying this disc? Y/N" [/sarcasm].
no wait.. it actually should say that, because that's all it is. i haven't seen the exact message, but if it's not clear & honest these companies should be taken to court for lying to people. this is the kind of thing that really gets on my tits. there has to be a law that covers this in most 1st world countries?!
well, if i was going to pay for it, i'd take the Copy-Protected Optical Media and bypass the copy protection - half price with free postage from any of the nice websites i know. it's lossless music i can do what i want with and a physical product that lasts and has $ value. no i'm not trolling, but i don't think that was +4 insightful. not for me and i'm sure plenty of others anyway.
right.. for anyone not clear on the "joke" status of this story, here's a few choice quotes:
"With a four port ethernet card in the E450 it would be simple to connect four Sun Ray 150 terminals and allow both general control of the system and also support each child choosing a video stored in the RAID array."
"The E450 still has casters at the moment...the machine would be much more stable if they were removed"
"excellent support for Solaris 10, so that I can test bug-fixes, etc. while on the road if necessary"
at first i didn't see this as funny, i was angry, but now a few people point it out.. i get it. i just hope the author is in on the joke, otherwise i'd be worried.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. for some reason, the human brain has no problem accepting the rules of a 2d game universe. it's bizarre, on the surface doesn't make sense, yet is so natural, it wasn't really questioned by players until 3d came along. further, i would argue that precise control (of the kind Super Mario Bros. or many shooters encouraged) is still only possible in '2d' games.. remember 3d is only a 2d window on virtual 3d space, you have no binocular vision, and controls are still an issue. imho.
i just get a blank page (empty space where presumably article should be) in Opera, and in IE. Do you need Firefox to view this page? No wait, what am i doing. On to the next story!
i'm sure they're must be other bands out there doing new stuff with strange old equipment... reply if you know any good ones!
. hehe. . .
i've heard.
i love the way you went anonymous to say that. you know, /. is probably the one place you don't need to do that :p. proclaim your love of sci-fi loudly from the rooftops. personally, i hate sci-fi. mostly. well, i've never really given it a chance. does Red Dwarf when i was younger count? :p
to contribute to the topic.. it just occured to me that the only time i really read (other than you know newspapers, mags and TFM*) is when i don't have internet access. i get through several novels a year, on holidays and staying with people w/o net access.. guess i'm pretty sad too huh.
a good novel often sticks in the mind. my web browsing (which there's so much more of) rarely does. hmm, should take a hint from that.
*instructions for tech-toys
oh, of course there were fps before 3d graphics cards. but cheap consumer 3d has gone hand in hand with mass popularity of fps games, and i stick with my feeling that fps won't ever go away. it'll become much more than point and shoot though... i felt ActionQuake2 was the start of something amazing and still play it - mods show what can be done :)
nice, doesn't seem to work though. says there are no updates, or it couldn't find any, something like that. for both methods you suggested (and for several other plugins i've got insalled). anyone else got firefox's auto-update to work?
god all those replies and no-one's got it right yet. perhaps it's too obvious: 666.666 (recurring, that must be really evil) rounds to 667. the nearest integer, easier for marketing purposes i guess. i.e. it's slightly slower than the rated speed (oh no! we'll have people complaining they're being ripped off now..)
hmmm, more realistic multiplayer FPS games? :p
Seriously, i don't think anything will replace FPS as a 'genre' (really, it's a wide genre, more akin to "film" or "music" than "drama" or "action" imho). i mean all FPS means is you have a 1st person 3d world view, and usually some kind of pointy object (gun), though even that's not essential. for immersion, for many people, that's where it's best and i can't see it changing much. i mean, it's an approximation of how we see the real world isn't it. also fps games can be very easy to pick up and play in short sessions (so could any other style of game, but sims and rpgs tend not to be afaik). The only thing that stopped us having FPS games since the beginning of time (or computers) was the 3d graphics card circa 1996 - ?
sure it's not deep lasting humour but it's ok for a quick laugh.
others are just lame (Cookies Lost After Upgrading to Windows XP, whatever could that mean, or Q323927: How to Resurrect a Dead Character, yes i bet it's not a game), or like Q174630: Windows Restarts Continuously with Blue Screen, just not funny. at least for anyone who's had to deal with windows computers.
that page needs cutting down.
this is also a much more serious problem, because it's funding organised crime, with all the nasty that infers. but we're going OT, though presumably a similar thing applies to pirate DVDs over there?
just in case anyone's not clear, wikipedia is your friend:
Hot Grits
and Natalie Portman
Now how they ever got combined.. you'll have to ask slashdot for that.
i think what you're missing is that there's many kinds of intelligence that people can have. i think when women say they want an intelligent guy, it usually means witty, observant, sensitive and things like this. *not* a walking encyclopedia, or even someone who is any good at academic work at all. being good with your hands (no double entendre intended) is one example, being practical and so on. if you think about it (to get deep), evolution has favoured women who went for these sort of things. oog oog ape man. console yourself with the thought that being a mathematician is such a recent idea that women haven't had a chance to catch up ;). i am not an expert on sexual attraction.
ah, but if buying said MS product causes the MS corp. to lose money.. (or to put it another way, MS is paying for part of your media centre!) - is it morally ok for a /. geek to buy ? ;)
but yeah er, thanks for confirming my worst fears about package delivery firms.. :/ astounding. anyone managed to get a hidden camera on that? hmm new TV series idea: "America's Worst Package Deliveries". wouldn't be worse than most of what's on...
rotfl. funny. can anyone post any links to studies showing a correlation between childhood exposure to extreme porn and (criminal) sexual deviancy or problems in adulthood? (not a rhetorical question, i'm curious). guess what i'm really asking is, do we have to think of the children? or is this like a (true) story my mum told, when she was young her dad gave her a cigarette and it was so disgusting it put her off for life. i'm not advocating showing horse porn to children, i'm just wondering how dangerous some of this stuff really is... kids are tougher than most people seem to think. they deal with fucked up things in many parts of the world that are way beyond what most lucky brits/americans will see in their lives.
no you won't, by the time these games appear there'll be a single card with more power than these. that's how it usually goes anyway. i've been bitten by "2 of anything" (CPUs, video cards) bad value before.
no 'cos the 400W supply isn't all for the card. it's not "hey my computer has a 250W PSU, now i want to add a GF-whatever, now i need a 650W PSU" is it? but yeah, you have a point, the power requirement is probably silly. i wouldn't run this even if i was given the cards for free, not worth it. except to run some demos for a minute :)
i'm tired and missed the mention right in the middle of that paragraph. woops. sorry. mod down.
The relevant paragraph:
Now rewrite that with laserdisc in there and we're making sense. not to mention getting our milestones and perspective right. Sorry i stopped reading after that 'cos the article is... long but i did check & there's no mention of it. wtf.
i couldn't leave this quote alone.
right, so they're 'skinflint', which means in this context that they have no money to spend on films, and the film industry is losing all that money, that doesn't exist, that they aren't spending on films. funnily enough. now either this article is bollocks, or the law is bollocks, or i'm talking bollocks. i think it's just another crap article.
the truth is obviously either: (a)the 'fans' aren't skinflint, they think the movie isn't worth paying for or want to find out if it is
(b)or they couldn't afford the movie tickets anyway.
but neither is as easy to read, or as bad for the movie industry.
why let the signals in? why not just put an aerial on the roof (which i already have, and most people in the UK have - made for TV and work fine for FM radio aswell. even when people switch to satellite they usually still have it). unless you want to take mobile phone calls in your house, i guess, but that's a different range anyway?
no wait.. it actually should say that, because that's all it is. i haven't seen the exact message, but if it's not clear & honest these companies should be taken to court for lying to people. this is the kind of thing that really gets on my tits. there has to be a law that covers this in most 1st world countries?!
well, if i was going to pay for it, i'd take the Copy-Protected Optical Media and bypass the copy protection - half price with free postage from any of the nice websites i know. it's lossless music i can do what i want with and a physical product that lasts and has $ value. no i'm not trolling, but i don't think that was +4 insightful. not for me and i'm sure plenty of others anyway.
"With a four port ethernet card in the E450 it would be simple to connect four Sun Ray 150 terminals and allow both general control of the system and also support each child choosing a video stored in the RAID array."
"The E450 still has casters at the moment...the machine would be much more stable if they were removed"
"excellent support for Solaris 10, so that I can test bug-fixes, etc. while on the road if necessary"
at first i didn't see this as funny, i was angry, but now a few people point it out.. i get it. i just hope the author is in on the joke, otherwise i'd be worried.