In dystopian Burkistan, actually, we do. Just enough accidental fatalities that the intentional deaths caused by making the thing explode next to your lungs didn't look unusual.
Because it was embedded somewhere in your chest cavity at birth, of course.
But yeah, that's an obvious problem. Stolen ID == the RFID tracker "proves" it was you who was in the administrative office when the petty cash box was looted.
Once each student is equipped with a WiFi tag do theyr really imagine that only the school will have this info. Forget the overzealous parent that wants 24/7 monitoring. What about the creepy stalker who wants to follow the girl of his dreams?
Exactly, and does it even matter if only the "school" has it? Like nobody bad ever worked in a school. So the Creepy Vice Principle can see that this one girl is alone in the bathroom in the middle of a class session. Great.
I saw that episode, but wasn't sure if it was something that had actually been done in a real school before. Of course like all such cop dramas it portrayed such surveillance as though it was completely positive and had no negative implications at all. Oh look, we'll just use the RFID tracker/traffic camera/sattelite photo that tracks everybody all the time to find the guy who we just realized was a bad guy!
Good show, btw. At least, the first season was great and the math was all spot on -- the only critique I have being that there was always a convenient quantitative metric for seemingly subjective things like "quality of sniper location (for cover and escape routes) and difficult of shot". Season two was still good, but I think the show is losing steam and more and more of the math just seems made up.
Heh, same here. Hence I like to claim that I was at all of the original trilogy's theatrical releases. I can only imagine how whatever sound made it through the womb warped my developing brain, making me the... whatever I am... that I am today.
Maybe, but Microsoft said that this was the study they were using as proof that Linux infringed on Microsoft patents and the fact that it is three years old is pretty irrelevent. Of course Microsoft is full of shit and didn't actually check if Linux infringes their patents, that was the whole point, their only "evidence" was a bald-faced lying interpretation of the paper. Either way, I'd appreciate it if you would at least read my post before declaring that it is "-1, Wrong".
What does Nintendo fail to do for third party developers that the PS3 or XBox don't fail to do?
Well, Nintendo themselves has said that they failed to properly court 3rd party developers for the N64, did only a little better with the Gamecube, and were dedicated to fixing the problem with the Wii. I'm not sure exactly what that all entails, but Big N seems to think they failed to do something.
Though these days from most of the complaints I hear, the main thing Nintendo fails to do is ceasing to make good games that 3rd parties have to compete with by making good games themselves.
Wii is getting Geometry Wars?! *Google search confirms* Sweet! I played Geometry Wars on an xbox 360 display unit, and damn did a psychedelic Smash TV almost make me want an xbox...
I forgot that one existed. I remember hearing about it now, in fact it was advertised specifically for Street Fighter, but never got to use it since my friend with the Genesis moved away:)
Dude, I said the study wasn't talking about Microsoft patents -- that was the whole part about how Microsoft is lying about the study -- and this is the study Microsoft used to support their claim, even though the number of patents Microsoft has said are infringing has varied from announcement to announcement.
I can't help but notice how the numbers keep changing. The study says 283 patents, Balmer at one point said 228, and now it's 235. Frankly since they aren't substantiating any of these claims anyway I think MS just makes up a number to keep people confused. Maybe they'll think that further research turned up another 7 patents, even though it's still all based on a completely braindamaged intepretation of someone else's work.
The number 235 didn't come from any Microsoft internal research or MS funded research. It came from an independent research paper that examined patent vulnerability of various software. Microsoft saw the paper and decided to run with it, saying that the paper proved that "Linux violates 235 of Microsoft's patents".
Then the paper's author spoke out, saying that MS was misrepresenting the results. First, it was 235 potential infringements, in part because none of those 235 patents had been tested in court and could be invalid. Second, these were not all Microsoft's patents.
Frankly I think he was far too kind. Microsoft turns "potential" into "actual", and "235 patents" into "235 of our patents". That's not "misrepresenting", that's fucking lying, especially when it comes to implicitly claiming ownership of patents which are not theirs.
Oh yeah, and thirdly the author said that Linux was not atypical compared to closed source software in how many patents it potentially violated. The fact is, and one of the conclusions of the study, was that software patents are such a minefield that pretty much every piece of software potentially violates some.
This was all on/., I think about a week ago. I'll let someone else dig up the link for some karma.
By the way, this probably means that the best source for finding out which patents Linux hypothetically violates would come from the original paper.
It is interesting that Europeans also attempted colonizing Africa, Australia, and Asia. Outside of the Americas, they were really only successful in Australia. The native populations of every place was able to fight back except for the Americas and Australia. There is a reason for that.
And it works both ways, too. Disease is the reason why Europeans were able to colonize the Americas and Australia, and disease was the reason why they were not able to colonize Africa and Asia. The only succesful colonies in Africa were on the coasts, because as soon as the Europeans went inland they were struck down by malaria and other tropical diseases which they had no resistance to.
I completely agree, although I don't have big hands or anything; those giant original XBox controllers felt very comfortable to me. I like having my left thumb going straight up, as opposed to the Dual Shock that has both thumbs going towards the middle
Although I agree that the xbox controller made the right decision to put the analog control where it is, and the dual shock sucks for having the stick in such an awkward position based on it's original PSX controller legacy, I really have to call the original xbox controller the worst ever for a simple reason:
It was physically impossible for me to reach the analog stick with my thumb. Yes, my hands are small. No, I've never been unable to even reach a control before on any controller ever. That controller was just plain to fucking big. The Dreamcast controller made my hands and wrists ache within minutes, but at least I could operate it.
He just lost his cool, and said what I'm sure every other CM thinks.
He's said basically as much before. In fact, other CMs have said it before, but they were ones who had engaged with the community successfully enough before that it was seen as a harmless venting of steam, as opposed to being their basic opinion of the entire community.
The need to be constructive goes both ways. Sadly, you can never get a large audience of random posters to be completely constructive.
I think Tseric's problem was that he seemed to seek out the non-constructive posters. Constructive posts would get a couple sentences of dismissal, insulting trolls get a big screed. The result is that it appeared he responded to trolls and ignore the productive, which obviously started skewing things towards the trolls. If he had just been able to ignore the trolls, and engage with the constructive members of the community more, not only would he have probably been happier and thus less prone to outbursts, he also would have been liked better by the community and gotten more support.
The majority of victims were political opponents, and anyone fitting that description risked death. The distinction is just that Jews, homosexuals, and Gypsies were being eliminated not just because they were considered enemies of Nazi Germany, but because they were seen as a class of sub-human people. It doesn't make any of the other murders any less evil, they just weren't part of the ethnic cleansing plan that Nazism is so famous for.
Then his purpose for preventing people kids from playing Doom will become clear as his armies rampage unhindered and he begins his thousand year reign over all the nations of the earth!
Bah, he's too late! A whole generation grew up on Doom. We'll be there standing at the gate, BFG 9000s at the ready. "IDDQD IDKFA, demon bitches!"
He might have stopped some kids from playing Doom 3, but they would have only known how to fight one demon at a time in a dark closet.
Tseric was an ass, it's just sometimes the person he was talking to was as big or bigger an ass than he was. That he only compares favorably to the biggest forum trolls exemplifies why he was a crap CM -- a CM should lift up the quality of discussion, not happily sink to its level. Even when someone was being polite and trying to be constructive, Tseric's response would be condescending, ill-informed, and basically a blow off meant to say that he was right and everyone else was wrong.
The fact that other CMs have walked in his shoes, dealt with the exact same community, and yet are not hated because they managed to not be as big a dick as the forum trolls they were dealing with just proves that it is not in fact the job, it was a problem with Tseric.
Seriously. Goldeneye had you aiming with the stick, and moving with the "C-pad" as they called it. Would it have been that hard to flip it around?
You could flip it around. But frankly your preference for analog movement and digital aiming is probably backwards from what most people would want. Using the analog to aim was sweetness. I would demonstrate this to my friends who used your scheme by rocking their socks in multiplayer until they switched and quickly got better.
Well that's what I mean, if there's some reason they can't do it in the system software (firmware, whatever, that distinction is dead to me when it includes a gui and automatic downloaded updates) they should have done it in the SDK. I don't know, maybe they worried each game would have it's own calibration needs. Either way it seems the ball has been dropped.
This is one thing the Nintendorks software writers need to fix for the next Wii software update: include a goddamn calibration routine.
I have no idea why the decided not to include a system-wide calibration utility. But whatever their reason may be, they should absolutely have include calibration software as part of their SDK to make it as simple for game developers to include it as possible.
The Dual Shock is overall a fine controller, and while no I don't find it as comfortable as the GC controller (it's tapered handles make it hard to hold compared to more bulb-shaped handles), I'd still give it a place in esteemed game controller history.
It does suffer from what I consider to be a huge design flaw: The favored position of the left thumb is occupied by the d-pad, and the left analog stick is placed downward where it is harder to reach and the flexing of the thumb means it's painful to use after long periods. And when my thumb starts to ache, my pain turns to hate because this painfull situation only exists because Sony was too conservative to design the controller right to begin with, and too conservative to break from the "tradition" and fix the controller when they had a chance.
The original PSX controller was digital only. After the N64's release heralded the rise of the analog stick, Sony wanted to make an analog controller for the PSX -- with two analog sticks, for some evolutionary innovation. However because all the existing games used the d-pad, and because Sony wasn't sure that the analog stick would really take off and get used by developers, they put it in it's awkward, second-class position relative to the d-pad. At the time this was probably prudent for them.
By the time the PSX generation was coming to a close, it was clear that the analog controller was a hit and the d-pad was a relic that, while still useful, would not be the primary input for the majority of games in the future. Yet for the PS2 they decided to keep the exact same layout with the d-pad in the primary position, for no reason I can fathom other than that they were scared to mess with what had worked before. It had become a "tradition" of sorts to have a controller based around 2d gaming with 3d bolted on. A sacred tradition of uncomfortable controllers, yay.
They wouldn't even mess with this tradition for the PS3. Even when they decided to get "creative" with the banana controller, it still had exactly the same layout as the dual shock, only now with a shape that makes my hands hurt just looking at it. Everyone hated this controller, not because it was something different, but because it was so similar the changes they did make seemed pointless and stupid. If you want to be different, but are too scared to actually do something different, then it's a good bet that you should do nothing at all.
And thus we have the current situation of 3 generations of essentially identical controllers from Sony, all with the exact same horrible design flaw. The initial burst of innovation in the dual shock has never been repeated. This is why it's the Xbox360 that gets recognized for having an excellent controller which actually improves over the decade-old dual-analog design.
I always preferred the Sega Saturn controller to the SNES
I can buy that. In particular for Street Fighter it's great but just slightly sub-optimal compared to the 6-face-button setup.
Genesis directional pad was a bit soft or I'd also put it above the SNES controller.
Okay, now you're on crack. 3 face buttons, no shoulder buttons. The SNES was sub-optimal for SF and MK, but playing those games on the Genesis was a joke because of the controller.
Slashdot Mirror
we wouldn't want any "accidents" now would we?
In dystopian Burkistan, actually, we do. Just enough accidental fatalities that the intentional deaths caused by making the thing explode next to your lungs didn't look unusual.
Because it was embedded somewhere in your chest cavity at birth, of course.
But yeah, that's an obvious problem. Stolen ID == the RFID tracker "proves" it was you who was in the administrative office when the petty cash box was looted.
Once each student is equipped with a WiFi tag do theyr really imagine that only the school will have this info. Forget the overzealous parent that wants 24/7 monitoring. What about the creepy stalker who wants to follow the girl of his dreams?
Exactly, and does it even matter if only the "school" has it? Like nobody bad ever worked in a school. So the Creepy Vice Principle can see that this one girl is alone in the bathroom in the middle of a class session. Great.
I saw that episode, but wasn't sure if it was something that had actually been done in a real school before. Of course like all such cop dramas it portrayed such surveillance as though it was completely positive and had no negative implications at all. Oh look, we'll just use the RFID tracker/traffic camera/sattelite photo that tracks everybody all the time to find the guy who we just realized was a bad guy!
Good show, btw. At least, the first season was great and the math was all spot on -- the only critique I have being that there was always a convenient quantitative metric for seemingly subjective things like "quality of sniper location (for cover and escape routes) and difficult of shot". Season two was still good, but I think the show is losing steam and more and more of the math just seems made up.
That's rather off-topic though.
Heh, same here. Hence I like to claim that I was at all of the original trilogy's theatrical releases. I can only imagine how whatever sound made it through the womb warped my developing brain, making me the... whatever I am... that I am today.
Maybe, but Microsoft said that this was the study they were using as proof that Linux infringed on Microsoft patents and the fact that it is three years old is pretty irrelevent. Of course Microsoft is full of shit and didn't actually check if Linux infringes their patents, that was the whole point, their only "evidence" was a bald-faced lying interpretation of the paper. Either way, I'd appreciate it if you would at least read my post before declaring that it is "-1, Wrong".
What does Nintendo fail to do for third party developers that the PS3 or XBox don't fail to do?
Well, Nintendo themselves has said that they failed to properly court 3rd party developers for the N64, did only a little better with the Gamecube, and were dedicated to fixing the problem with the Wii. I'm not sure exactly what that all entails, but Big N seems to think they failed to do something.
Though these days from most of the complaints I hear, the main thing Nintendo fails to do is ceasing to make good games that 3rd parties have to compete with by making good games themselves.
Geometry Wars: Galaxies
Wii is getting Geometry Wars?! *Google search confirms* Sweet! I played Geometry Wars on an xbox 360 display unit, and damn did a psychedelic Smash TV almost make me want an xbox...
I forgot that one existed. I remember hearing about it now, in fact it was advertised specifically for Street Fighter, but never got to use it since my friend with the Genesis moved away :)
Dude, I said the study wasn't talking about Microsoft patents -- that was the whole part about how Microsoft is lying about the study -- and this is the study Microsoft used to support their claim, even though the number of patents Microsoft has said are infringing has varied from announcement to announcement.
Whatever, here are links: The slashdot article, and the first post in it links to this article covering the paper author's rebuttle..
I can't help but notice how the numbers keep changing. The study says 283 patents, Balmer at one point said 228, and now it's 235. Frankly since they aren't substantiating any of these claims anyway I think MS just makes up a number to keep people confused. Maybe they'll think that further research turned up another 7 patents, even though it's still all based on a completely braindamaged intepretation of someone else's work.
The number 235 didn't come from any Microsoft internal research or MS funded research. It came from an independent research paper that examined patent vulnerability of various software. Microsoft saw the paper and decided to run with it, saying that the paper proved that "Linux violates 235 of Microsoft's patents".
/., I think about a week ago. I'll let someone else dig up the link for some karma.
Then the paper's author spoke out, saying that MS was misrepresenting the results. First, it was 235 potential infringements, in part because none of those 235 patents had been tested in court and could be invalid. Second, these were not all Microsoft's patents.
Frankly I think he was far too kind. Microsoft turns "potential" into "actual", and "235 patents" into "235 of our patents". That's not "misrepresenting", that's fucking lying, especially when it comes to implicitly claiming ownership of patents which are not theirs.
Oh yeah, and thirdly the author said that Linux was not atypical compared to closed source software in how many patents it potentially violated. The fact is, and one of the conclusions of the study, was that software patents are such a minefield that pretty much every piece of software potentially violates some.
This was all on
By the way, this probably means that the best source for finding out which patents Linux hypothetically violates would come from the original paper.
It is interesting that Europeans also attempted colonizing Africa, Australia, and Asia. Outside of the Americas, they were really only successful in Australia. The native populations of every place was able to fight back except for the Americas and Australia. There is a reason for that.
And it works both ways, too. Disease is the reason why Europeans were able to colonize the Americas and Australia, and disease was the reason why they were not able to colonize Africa and Asia. The only succesful colonies in Africa were on the coasts, because as soon as the Europeans went inland they were struck down by malaria and other tropical diseases which they had no resistance to.
I completely agree, although I don't have big hands or anything; those giant original XBox controllers felt very comfortable to me. I like having my left thumb going straight up, as opposed to the Dual Shock that has both thumbs going towards the middle
Although I agree that the xbox controller made the right decision to put the analog control where it is, and the dual shock sucks for having the stick in such an awkward position based on it's original PSX controller legacy, I really have to call the original xbox controller the worst ever for a simple reason:
It was physically impossible for me to reach the analog stick with my thumb. Yes, my hands are small. No, I've never been unable to even reach a control before on any controller ever. That controller was just plain to fucking big. The Dreamcast controller made my hands and wrists ache within minutes, but at least I could operate it.
The S controller, though, was pretty damn good.
He just lost his cool, and said what I'm sure every other CM thinks.
He's said basically as much before. In fact, other CMs have said it before, but they were ones who had engaged with the community successfully enough before that it was seen as a harmless venting of steam, as opposed to being their basic opinion of the entire community.
The need to be constructive goes both ways. Sadly, you can never get a large audience of random posters to be completely constructive.
I think Tseric's problem was that he seemed to seek out the non-constructive posters. Constructive posts would get a couple sentences of dismissal, insulting trolls get a big screed. The result is that it appeared he responded to trolls and ignore the productive, which obviously started skewing things towards the trolls. If he had just been able to ignore the trolls, and engage with the constructive members of the community more, not only would he have probably been happier and thus less prone to outbursts, he also would have been liked better by the community and gotten more support.
The majority of victims were political opponents, and anyone fitting that description risked death. The distinction is just that Jews, homosexuals, and Gypsies were being eliminated not just because they were considered enemies of Nazi Germany, but because they were seen as a class of sub-human people. It doesn't make any of the other murders any less evil, they just weren't part of the ethnic cleansing plan that Nazism is so famous for.
Then his purpose for preventing people kids from playing Doom will become clear as his armies rampage unhindered and he begins his thousand year reign over all the nations of the earth!
Bah, he's too late! A whole generation grew up on Doom. We'll be there standing at the gate, BFG 9000s at the ready. "IDDQD IDKFA, demon bitches!"
He might have stopped some kids from playing Doom 3, but they would have only known how to fight one demon at a time in a dark closet.
Tseric was an ass, it's just sometimes the person he was talking to was as big or bigger an ass than he was. That he only compares favorably to the biggest forum trolls exemplifies why he was a crap CM -- a CM should lift up the quality of discussion, not happily sink to its level. Even when someone was being polite and trying to be constructive, Tseric's response would be condescending, ill-informed, and basically a blow off meant to say that he was right and everyone else was wrong.
The fact that other CMs have walked in his shoes, dealt with the exact same community, and yet are not hated because they managed to not be as big a dick as the forum trolls they were dealing with just proves that it is not in fact the job, it was a problem with Tseric.
Seriously. Goldeneye had you aiming with the stick, and moving with the "C-pad" as they called it. Would it have been that hard to flip it around?
You could flip it around. But frankly your preference for analog movement and digital aiming is probably backwards from what most people would want. Using the analog to aim was sweetness. I would demonstrate this to my friends who used your scheme by rocking their socks in multiplayer until they switched and quickly got better.
Well that's what I mean, if there's some reason they can't do it in the system software (firmware, whatever, that distinction is dead to me when it includes a gui and automatic downloaded updates) they should have done it in the SDK. I don't know, maybe they worried each game would have it's own calibration needs. Either way it seems the ball has been dropped.
This is one thing the Nintendorks software writers need to fix for the next Wii software update: include a goddamn calibration routine.
I have no idea why the decided not to include a system-wide calibration utility. But whatever their reason may be, they should absolutely have include calibration software as part of their SDK to make it as simple for game developers to include it as possible.
The Dual Shock is overall a fine controller, and while no I don't find it as comfortable as the GC controller (it's tapered handles make it hard to hold compared to more bulb-shaped handles), I'd still give it a place in esteemed game controller history.
It does suffer from what I consider to be a huge design flaw: The favored position of the left thumb is occupied by the d-pad, and the left analog stick is placed downward where it is harder to reach and the flexing of the thumb means it's painful to use after long periods. And when my thumb starts to ache, my pain turns to hate because this painfull situation only exists because Sony was too conservative to design the controller right to begin with, and too conservative to break from the "tradition" and fix the controller when they had a chance.
The original PSX controller was digital only. After the N64's release heralded the rise of the analog stick, Sony wanted to make an analog controller for the PSX -- with two analog sticks, for some evolutionary innovation. However because all the existing games used the d-pad, and because Sony wasn't sure that the analog stick would really take off and get used by developers, they put it in it's awkward, second-class position relative to the d-pad. At the time this was probably prudent for them.
By the time the PSX generation was coming to a close, it was clear that the analog controller was a hit and the d-pad was a relic that, while still useful, would not be the primary input for the majority of games in the future. Yet for the PS2 they decided to keep the exact same layout with the d-pad in the primary position, for no reason I can fathom other than that they were scared to mess with what had worked before. It had become a "tradition" of sorts to have a controller based around 2d gaming with 3d bolted on. A sacred tradition of uncomfortable controllers, yay.
They wouldn't even mess with this tradition for the PS3. Even when they decided to get "creative" with the banana controller, it still had exactly the same layout as the dual shock, only now with a shape that makes my hands hurt just looking at it. Everyone hated this controller, not because it was something different, but because it was so similar the changes they did make seemed pointless and stupid. If you want to be different, but are too scared to actually do something different, then it's a good bet that you should do nothing at all.
And thus we have the current situation of 3 generations of essentially identical controllers from Sony, all with the exact same horrible design flaw. The initial burst of innovation in the dual shock has never been repeated. This is why it's the Xbox360 that gets recognized for having an excellent controller which actually improves over the decade-old dual-analog design.
I always preferred the Sega Saturn controller to the SNES
I can buy that. In particular for Street Fighter it's great but just slightly sub-optimal compared to the 6-face-button setup.
Genesis directional pad was a bit soft or I'd also put it above the SNES controller.
Okay, now you're on crack. 3 face buttons, no shoulder buttons. The SNES was sub-optimal for SF and MK, but playing those games on the Genesis was a joke because of the controller.
Yeah, it probably works better that way, especially with the wording where your aunt is accused of being a Duchess. :)
As far as I know, the only groups that the Nazis determined to systematically exterminate were the Jews and the homosexuals.
Gypsies were also the target of systematic extermination.