You know that scene in the movie Minority Report where Tom Cruise just had his eyes replaced and has that bandage over his eyes that his doctor told him not to remove to soon or he'd go permanently blind and then those spider bots come in and he hides in a bathtub full of ice water but they find him and pull the bandage up and shine a bright light directly into his eyes but he strangely isn't injured at all except having to turn his rigamortis grin into a rigamortis grimace for a couple seconds?
To two different articles. The word "more" came from the second link, which was to New Scientist, which according to the helpful link provided by brian0918, is wrong. It was in fact a 60% rate of picking the picture of the ovulating woman. Anyway, that's where the confusion came from.
Where the word 'more' came from, other than slashdot summary, I don't know.
It came from the New Scientist article which was linked from the summary at the end of the sentence: "The observers chose the "high fertility" subject nearly 60% more of the time than would be expected by chance, according to the NewScientist.com writeup."
So like I was saying, it isn't the slashdot summary, it's Daily Mall and New Scientist which are contradicting each other.
Thank goodness for the real study, though, which makes it clear that it is New Scientist which is incorrect.
No, the slashdot summary is quoting New Scientist, which is also refered to by the Daily Mall article. Sounds to me like Daily Mall may be misquoting New Scientist, but of course the full New Scientist article isn't available online.
Three Mile Island is an example of how the system actually works to protect.
Fun Three Mile Island fact: The TMI reactor suffered a form of worst-case failure -- a runaway reaction when all of the control rods were removed and could not be reinserted -- and as a result released less radiation into the atmosphere than a coal plant does in a single day of normal operation.
Reactor designs have only improved since then.
There are political forces at work against nuclear power, and they have galvanized a large portion of the populace with fear of the nuclear boogeyman. There is no rational reason to fear nuclear power any more. If we can work on that issue, then maybe we can start to work on the political issues. With people still screaming in terror at the thought of nuclear power, we can never build the momentum to take on the special interests.
If we actually put the stuff to good use, we wouldn't have to bury, sink, or launch much of anything. Instead, we sit around and worry that terrorists are going to steal plutonium to make a very complicated implosion bomb rather than stealing the supposedly "safer" Uranium we currently use. Nevermind that the Uranium could be used to make a super-simple gun-type nuclear bomb that could be constructed without massive computational resources, dozens of nuclear scientists, and actual test sites that would show up on a seismograph. No, it's much better to worry about Plutonium.
If I'm not mistaken, the uranium used in normal reactors does not contain enough U-235 to make a gun-type bomb. So our hypothetical uranium-snatching terrorists would at least need centrifuges or some other enrichment process. Breeder reactors, however, generate weapons grade plutonium, which is why they are considered more of a proliferation risk.
However I still think it's a ridiculous concern. We're seriously counting on terrorists who could rob our reactors and assemble a nuclear bomb to not also be able to do enrichment? They may not even need to do that, really. While North Korea's test may be considered a dud for a nation-state that wants to enable MAD-style politics, for a terrorist group a sub-kiloton explosion from only partially enriched uranium would be just peachy so long as the headlines juxtapose the words "nucular" and "kaboom".
And in the meantime we're throwing away a vast amount of energy potential in the form of hazardous and hard to handle waste when we could just re-use it until it is both less plentiful and shorter lived. It's silly. Sorry Jimmy Carter, love ya man, but I'm against you on this one.
* This factoid has convinced me that a complicated issue is in reality terribly simple and already "proven". * On the other hand, I have no idea what I'm talking about.
You can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, and you can't make super mutants with laser vision without cracking some radioactive material storage facilities. Let's take a balanced look at this.
Yes, we'd all like more super heros like Captain Laser Eyes. Personally though I'm not sure it's worth the increase in the number of not-so-super heroes, like Skin Sloughing Off Man, Riddled With Tumors Woman, and that sad excuse for a hero Admiral Impotent.
Dude, Carmack is hot stuff. He makes hardware do things it was never intended to do, something which any console programmer should have the utmost respect for. A game developer not having respect for Carmack is like an inventor not having respect for da Vinci. Basically either jealousy or idiocy and in neither case healthy.
True, however that was many years ago, when Carmack still had some ambition and imagination. I'm not saying Doom III was bad, but...... but you're still going to imply that Carmack is a luddite who can't adopt to new technology. What-fucking-ever, he is still what he's always been -- a pusher of new technology, and a great determiner of what technology actually works in practice and what is theoretical pie-in-the-sky wishfull thinking. Just because he is no longer the only man on earth who is serious about pushing the envelope on 3D technology doesn't mean he has lost his ambition or imagination.
The problem is people viewing it as a hurdle rather than an opportunity.
It's a hurdle and an opportunity. Practical people see this, theorists don't. Hell, even IBM admitted that it was a hurdle for programmers in an architecture talk about Cell that I attended at UT.
It's a safe bet that the XBox 1080 (or whatever) will have multi cores, and of course the PC industry is full-steam ahead on that front.
Are you mental? The 360 is already multi-processor, and multi-core is just a performance optimization to reduce communication overhead between processors (while making DRAM access more expensive). It already requires multi-processor programming which Carmack is an early adopter of. You think he doesn't know how to write a multi-threaded application? Please. His point, and a very good one at that, is that it is harder to write multi-threaded code when some of your processors have drastically different capabilities than others. Like I said even IBM, the creator of Cell, agrees with this assesment, so it is nothing but bald-faced denial of reality to pretend otherwise.
Once you start thinking parallel you actually see that it is easier than not as it allows better division of code and work.
It's not just thinking in parallel, Cell requires that you think in terms of what the SPEs are good at, which is streaming data processing with no branches. The transition to parallel thinking is much easier with the Xbox360 because you can parallelize along any task boundary since each processor is the same and capable of the same general processor functions.
As a Software Engineer I grow more an more disgusted with the x86, and to a lesser extent Power, architecture every day.
Which has fuck-all to do with parallel programming. x86 actually has a memory consistency model that is friendlier to parallel programming than many other modern ISAs. If you aren't writing assembly I can't fathom why a software engineer would be bothered by x86.
Also, you forgot Elebits and Trauma Center(Neither is everyone's cup of tea, but their quite good). And Red Steel is actually pretty fun, despite being extremely mediocre. Hopefully they release a solid title with the sequel, the potential is definately there, and that's what makes the actual game so very, very sad.
Naw, I didn't forget either, I was focusing on Ubi who is an allegedly major backer of the Wii but didn't exactly come through as such at launch. Trauma Center is, along with Raving Rabbids and of course Zelda, a game that I am definitely buying at the same time I buy my Wii. Elebits sounds fun, but I think I might want to rent it before I buy. That mostly depends on how giddy I am on that magical day that I can actually walk into a store and buy a Wii.
You do have a good point on launch lineups generally being poor, though. As far as Nintendo console 3rd party launch lineups go, this is easily the best since the SNES.
I suspect that this is an error, and that the real value lies in the expertise and ability of the lone inventor or small company to create the technology in question. It's really interesting how business shies away from valuing people and expertise over some sort of even very nebulous, intangible and somewhat imaginary asset. I think there are some powerful blinders in operation somewhere.
Actually a lot of businesses do value people with expertise over just about all else. A lot of startups -- I mean real startups that were producing actual products, not business plans based on selling advertisements to goldfish -- were bought out not because their patent/product portfolio was really all that impressive or valuable on their own, but because the engineers that designed those products were impressive. Brainpower is a powerful asset, and successfull businesses recognize it and try to aquire/cultivate it. Of course then the accountants come in with the quarterly reports and then the axe starts swinging, but so it goes.
People need to keep in mind the Wii costs less than half of the PS3's hefty price tag. Of course more people are going to buy Wiis right now, it's cheaper.
It's funny, because it was Sony fanboys who were trying to say the price wasn't an issue before the launch -- scarily enough this seemed to have included Sony management. Of course that's ridiculous, and regardless of anything else Wii's price is a big advantage.
Not to say that the Wii's awesomeness isn't playing a big role, but keep in mind that Nintendo's biggest problem is finding 3rd party developers who make worthwhile games. The gamecube was a great system, but they had very few must-have games that were not from Nintendo. No matter how good the Wii is, good third party dev support is what wins console wars.
Yep, and Nintendo has stated clearly that they understand this problem and were doing their best to fix it for Wii. I thought they looked like they did have it knocked, with Ubisoft declaring steadfast support for the Wii... but all that's gotten them so far is the hyped up Red Steel which isn't doing so well in reviews, and craptacular shovelware in the form of Far Cry Vengenge and GT Pro.
Third party support still looks like the major vulnerability for Wii in the long term. This is part of why the initial marketshare numbers are so important, if large enough they may be able to sway studios to devote more effort to the Wii in time to make a difference. One problem that other consoles don't have though is that Nintendo is always Developer Numero Uno, and anyone making an adventure game has to compete with Zelda/Metroid, platformers with Mario, racing games with Mario Kart, etc. So it will take a very large user base that buys lots of games beyond those offered by Big N to convince 3rd parties that Wii is a good investment.
LG is coming out with a dual-mode player, which means that given the choice, the consumer can be easily swayed towards Blu-ray simply by flooding (true) advertisements about the media's technical superiority.
I thought Sony was still preventing those players from being made? Or does that only apply in certain jurisdictions? Anyway, a dual-mode player is the only hope as far as I can tell for either format, since both have enough momentum to prevent an early and decisive winner (right now HDDVD has more marketshare and cheaper players, but the unknown PS3 effect could easily sway things the other way). I believe a split market means both will fail. Hopefully Sony wakes up and allows dual format players.
I know one who got really angry when I explained him what an axis is and that SIXAXIS is just false advertising.
Oh come on, I hate sony as much as the next guy but that's just pedantry. Take it to mean "six degrees of freedom of movement" and it's perfectly valid. I have a flightstick with three degrees of freedom -- two translational and one rotation -- even though the rotational axis is geometrically just translation in the other two axes. Now in this case the axes are distinct physically, the rotation axis is a separate mechanism from the other two, while SIXAXIS probably uses the same accelerometers for detecting rotation and translation, but that's picking nits.
It was called the NES Advantage and it was for cheaters. God, I loved that thing and its delicate little turbo button.
Yeah, it was very much for cheating. It even had knobs that allowed you to change the fire rate of the turbo, so games that had optimal patterns (like Track and Field) could be tuned for maximum cheating.
Just curious, have you used the xbox controller and do you consider it a big improvement? I've only ever used it at kiosks in stores, and though it didn't feel bad, it also didn't feel any better to me.
The original Xbox controller was the worst I've ever used, because it was physically impossible for me to reach the left analog properly, I could only push it from the side up and to the right. Yes, I have very small hands, and yes the xbox controller was too damn big.
The S version though is a very nice controller, and I found it to be very comfortable.
I'm not stuck on symmetry as a general concept, but when playing shooters it seems like a natural arrangement. If I wanted one of them up high, it would just seem natural to put the other up high as well on. Do you know of any controllers that do this, and if so, what did you think of them?
Nope, never used one. Most controllers are based on the concept of making whatever you use the most be the most natural thing to touch. For most games that's the control stick for the left, and the face buttons with the right, so both are in the normal "straight thumb" position. Shooters are an exception because you are constantly using the right analog to use the more PC-like movement/aiming setup, and the trigger buttons are the main buttons you use. A controller designed for console FPS that had both sticks in the raised position would probably work very well. Dual shock is the opposite -- it just makes both your hands have to hold an awkward position.
Slashdot Mirror
You know that scene in the movie Minority Report where Tom Cruise just had his eyes replaced and has that bandage over his eyes that his doctor told him not to remove to soon or he'd go permanently blind and then those spider bots come in and he hides in a bathtub full of ice water but they find him and pull the bandage up and shine a bright light directly into his eyes but he strangely isn't injured at all except having to turn his rigamortis grin into a rigamortis grimace for a couple seconds?
This is just like that.
Well, it's not like I'd read either article before making my original post. ;)
To two different articles. The word "more" came from the second link, which was to New Scientist, which according to the helpful link provided by brian0918, is wrong. It was in fact a 60% rate of picking the picture of the ovulating woman. Anyway, that's where the confusion came from.
Where the word 'more' came from, other than slashdot summary, I don't know.
It came from the New Scientist article which was linked from the summary at the end of the sentence: "The observers chose the "high fertility" subject nearly 60% more of the time than would be expected by chance, according to the NewScientist.com writeup."
So like I was saying, it isn't the slashdot summary, it's Daily Mall and New Scientist which are contradicting each other.
Thank goodness for the real study, though, which makes it clear that it is New Scientist which is incorrect.
No, the slashdot summary is quoting New Scientist, which is also refered to by the Daily Mall article. Sounds to me like Daily Mall may be misquoting New Scientist, but of course the full New Scientist article isn't available online.
Not 60% of the time, but 60% more than expected if it were chance alone. So more likely 1.6 * (30*.5) = 24/30, not 18/30.
But of course the actual number isn't in the article.
Oops, thanks. And hey, what's a factor of 365 outside of NASA missions, right?
Oh, I get it, and you're I-Make-Jokes-But-Can't-Detect-Them-Myself Man.
Lighten up and bask in teh funny.
Three Mile Island is an example of how the system actually works to protect.
Fun Three Mile Island fact: The TMI reactor suffered a form of worst-case failure -- a runaway reaction when all of the control rods were removed and could not be reinserted -- and as a result released less radiation into the atmosphere than a coal plant does in a single day of normal operation.
Reactor designs have only improved since then.
There are political forces at work against nuclear power, and they have galvanized a large portion of the populace with fear of the nuclear boogeyman. There is no rational reason to fear nuclear power any more. If we can work on that issue, then maybe we can start to work on the political issues. With people still screaming in terror at the thought of nuclear power, we can never build the momentum to take on the special interests.
If we actually put the stuff to good use, we wouldn't have to bury, sink, or launch much of anything. Instead, we sit around and worry that terrorists are going to steal plutonium to make a very complicated implosion bomb rather than stealing the supposedly "safer" Uranium we currently use. Nevermind that the Uranium could be used to make a super-simple gun-type nuclear bomb that could be constructed without massive computational resources, dozens of nuclear scientists, and actual test sites that would show up on a seismograph. No, it's much better to worry about Plutonium.
If I'm not mistaken, the uranium used in normal reactors does not contain enough U-235 to make a gun-type bomb. So our hypothetical uranium-snatching terrorists would at least need centrifuges or some other enrichment process. Breeder reactors, however, generate weapons grade plutonium, which is why they are considered more of a proliferation risk.
However I still think it's a ridiculous concern. We're seriously counting on terrorists who could rob our reactors and assemble a nuclear bomb to not also be able to do enrichment? They may not even need to do that, really. While North Korea's test may be considered a dud for a nation-state that wants to enable MAD-style politics, for a terrorist group a sub-kiloton explosion from only partially enriched uranium would be just peachy so long as the headlines juxtapose the words "nucular" and "kaboom".
And in the meantime we're throwing away a vast amount of energy potential in the form of hazardous and hard to handle waste when we could just re-use it until it is both less plentiful and shorter lived. It's silly. Sorry Jimmy Carter, love ya man, but I'm against you on this one.
* This factoid has convinced me that a complicated issue is in reality terribly simple and already "proven".
* On the other hand, I have no idea what I'm talking about.
I know that wasn't nice, but I laughed anyway.
You can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, and you can't make super mutants with laser vision without cracking some radioactive material storage facilities. Let's take a balanced look at this.
Yes, we'd all like more super heros like Captain Laser Eyes. Personally though I'm not sure it's worth the increase in the number of not-so-super heroes, like Skin Sloughing Off Man, Riddled With Tumors Woman, and that sad excuse for a hero Admiral Impotent.
Dude, Carmack is hot stuff. He makes hardware do things it was never intended to do, something which any console programmer should have the utmost respect for. A game developer not having respect for Carmack is like an inventor not having respect for da Vinci. Basically either jealousy or idiocy and in neither case healthy.
True, however that was many years ago, when Carmack still had some ambition and imagination. I'm not saying Doom III was bad, but... ... but you're still going to imply that Carmack is a luddite who can't adopt to new technology. What-fucking-ever, he is still what he's always been -- a pusher of new technology, and a great determiner of what technology actually works in practice and what is theoretical pie-in-the-sky wishfull thinking. Just because he is no longer the only man on earth who is serious about pushing the envelope on 3D technology doesn't mean he has lost his ambition or imagination.
The problem is people viewing it as a hurdle rather than an opportunity.
It's a hurdle and an opportunity. Practical people see this, theorists don't. Hell, even IBM admitted that it was a hurdle for programmers in an architecture talk about Cell that I attended at UT.
It's a safe bet that the XBox 1080 (or whatever) will have multi cores, and of course the PC industry is full-steam ahead on that front.
Are you mental? The 360 is already multi-processor, and multi-core is just a performance optimization to reduce communication overhead between processors (while making DRAM access more expensive). It already requires multi-processor programming which Carmack is an early adopter of. You think he doesn't know how to write a multi-threaded application? Please. His point, and a very good one at that, is that it is harder to write multi-threaded code when some of your processors have drastically different capabilities than others. Like I said even IBM, the creator of Cell, agrees with this assesment, so it is nothing but bald-faced denial of reality to pretend otherwise.
Once you start thinking parallel you actually see that it is easier than not as it allows better division of code and work.
It's not just thinking in parallel, Cell requires that you think in terms of what the SPEs are good at, which is streaming data processing with no branches. The transition to parallel thinking is much easier with the Xbox360 because you can parallelize along any task boundary since each processor is the same and capable of the same general processor functions.
As a Software Engineer I grow more an more disgusted with the x86, and to a lesser extent Power, architecture every day.
Which has fuck-all to do with parallel programming. x86 actually has a memory consistency model that is friendlier to parallel programming than many other modern ISAs. If you aren't writing assembly I can't fathom why a software engineer would be bothered by x86.
oremor nhoj em llik tsum uoy emag eht niw ot
Also, you forgot Elebits and Trauma Center(Neither is everyone's cup of tea, but their quite good). And Red Steel is actually pretty fun, despite being extremely mediocre. Hopefully they release a solid title with the sequel, the potential is definately there, and that's what makes the actual game so very, very sad.
Naw, I didn't forget either, I was focusing on Ubi who is an allegedly major backer of the Wii but didn't exactly come through as such at launch. Trauma Center is, along with Raving Rabbids and of course Zelda, a game that I am definitely buying at the same time I buy my Wii. Elebits sounds fun, but I think I might want to rent it before I buy. That mostly depends on how giddy I am on that magical day that I can actually walk into a store and buy a Wii.
You do have a good point on launch lineups generally being poor, though. As far as Nintendo console 3rd party launch lineups go, this is easily the best since the SNES.
I suspect that this is an error, and that the real value lies in the expertise and ability of the lone inventor or small company to create the technology in question. It's really interesting how business shies away from valuing people and expertise over some sort of even very nebulous, intangible and somewhat imaginary asset. I think there are some powerful blinders in operation somewhere.
Actually a lot of businesses do value people with expertise over just about all else. A lot of startups -- I mean real startups that were producing actual products, not business plans based on selling advertisements to goldfish -- were bought out not because their patent/product portfolio was really all that impressive or valuable on their own, but because the engineers that designed those products were impressive. Brainpower is a powerful asset, and successfull businesses recognize it and try to aquire/cultivate it. Of course then the accountants come in with the quarterly reports and then the axe starts swinging, but so it goes.
Heh, I forgot about that one, which is pretty stupid because it's one of the games I'm definitely getting when I finally aquire a Wii.
Okay, so one solid entry, though it is a minigame collection. Maybe that's an indication of the future of 3rd party Wii support, though...
Somebody mod this post Teh Funny!
People need to keep in mind the Wii costs less than half of the PS3's hefty price tag. Of course more people are going to buy Wiis right now, it's cheaper.
It's funny, because it was Sony fanboys who were trying to say the price wasn't an issue before the launch -- scarily enough this seemed to have included Sony management. Of course that's ridiculous, and regardless of anything else Wii's price is a big advantage.
Not to say that the Wii's awesomeness isn't playing a big role, but keep in mind that Nintendo's biggest problem is finding 3rd party developers who make worthwhile games. The gamecube was a great system, but they had very few must-have games that were not from Nintendo. No matter how good the Wii is, good third party dev support is what wins console wars.
Yep, and Nintendo has stated clearly that they understand this problem and were doing their best to fix it for Wii. I thought they looked like they did have it knocked, with Ubisoft declaring steadfast support for the Wii... but all that's gotten them so far is the hyped up Red Steel which isn't doing so well in reviews, and craptacular shovelware in the form of Far Cry Vengenge and GT Pro.
Third party support still looks like the major vulnerability for Wii in the long term. This is part of why the initial marketshare numbers are so important, if large enough they may be able to sway studios to devote more effort to the Wii in time to make a difference. One problem that other consoles don't have though is that Nintendo is always Developer Numero Uno, and anyone making an adventure game has to compete with Zelda/Metroid, platformers with Mario, racing games with Mario Kart, etc. So it will take a very large user base that buys lots of games beyond those offered by Big N to convince 3rd parties that Wii is a good investment.
LG is coming out with a dual-mode player, which means that given the choice, the consumer can be easily swayed towards Blu-ray simply by flooding (true) advertisements about the media's technical superiority.
I thought Sony was still preventing those players from being made? Or does that only apply in certain jurisdictions? Anyway, a dual-mode player is the only hope as far as I can tell for either format, since both have enough momentum to prevent an early and decisive winner (right now HDDVD has more marketshare and cheaper players, but the unknown PS3 effect could easily sway things the other way). I believe a split market means both will fail. Hopefully Sony wakes up and allows dual format players.
I know one who got really angry when I explained him what an axis is and that SIXAXIS is just false advertising.
Oh come on, I hate sony as much as the next guy but that's just pedantry. Take it to mean "six degrees of freedom of movement" and it's perfectly valid. I have a flightstick with three degrees of freedom -- two translational and one rotation -- even though the rotational axis is geometrically just translation in the other two axes. Now in this case the axes are distinct physically, the rotation axis is a separate mechanism from the other two, while SIXAXIS probably uses the same accelerometers for detecting rotation and translation, but that's picking nits.
What does Technoogical Impact of Video Game Controllers mean?
:)
It means what happens when your Wii remote hits your 40" plasma screen.
It was called the NES Advantage and it was for cheaters. God, I loved that thing and its delicate little turbo button.
Yeah, it was very much for cheating. It even had knobs that allowed you to change the fire rate of the turbo, so games that had optimal patterns (like Track and Field) could be tuned for maximum cheating.
Just curious, have you used the xbox controller and do you consider it a big improvement? I've only ever used it at kiosks in stores, and though it didn't feel bad, it also didn't feel any better to me.
The original Xbox controller was the worst I've ever used, because it was physically impossible for me to reach the left analog properly, I could only push it from the side up and to the right. Yes, I have very small hands, and yes the xbox controller was too damn big.
The S version though is a very nice controller, and I found it to be very comfortable.
I'm not stuck on symmetry as a general concept, but when playing shooters it seems like a natural arrangement. If I wanted one of them up high, it would just seem natural to put the other up high as well on. Do you know of any controllers that do this, and if so, what did you think of them?
Nope, never used one. Most controllers are based on the concept of making whatever you use the most be the most natural thing to touch. For most games that's the control stick for the left, and the face buttons with the right, so both are in the normal "straight thumb" position. Shooters are an exception because you are constantly using the right analog to use the more PC-like movement/aiming setup, and the trigger buttons are the main buttons you use. A controller designed for console FPS that had both sticks in the raised position would probably work very well. Dual shock is the opposite -- it just makes both your hands have to hold an awkward position.