1) Large movements of the whole arm are a horrible idea. It's hard to keep your arm rested on a stable surface if you have to move it around a lot. Not being able to rest your arm on a surface is going to kill your precision. Ever aim a rifle in real life? It's really hard --- after a just a little bit, your arm is moving all over the place because its gotten tired. Snipers are trained to compensate for this sort of thing --- your average gamer isn't. If large arm movements are required, its going to be killer on long gaming sessions. The reviewer referred to in TFA even said as much.
2) Gyro mice didn't have those sensors, but that's not the reason nobody uses them. Gyros are pretty damn accurate as they are. The problem is that gyro mice are phenomenally awkward and cumbersom to use.
3) Gun games are quite a niche. They're okay for arcades, but during extended gaming sessions, your arms want to fall off. And flying with a wheel or joystick is fine, but this thing isn't a wheel or joystick. One of the key aspects of a wheel or joystick is that its affixed to a firm, heavy base. On top of that, if you've ever read a wheel controller review, every single one goes on about the best such controllers having just the right amount of resistance to turning motion. This controller can't have that.
4) If I wanted to swing a bat or racquet, I'd go outside. Gaming is virtual reality. Making it more like actual reality isn't necessarily a good thing. Most people don't have the coordination to be a pro ball player or professional sniper. That's why they play games!
To back up my previous point about the mouse: there is a reason CAD folks use hockey-pucks or giant trackballs for detail work. Moving those with your fingers is a lot more precise than moving a mouse with your wrist.
Your thumb is extremely precise within its range of motion, as are all your fingers. Try writing your name by gripping your pencil like a knife. See what kind of precision you get out of your wrist. There is a reason humans write (or solder, etc), with their thumb and index finger.
Also, I don't know anybody who moves their arm while mousing. I generally use my fingers for small movements, and my wrist for larger ones. The fleshy part of the base of my hand stays quite affixed to my desk.
The question, though, is whether it helps your precision. An analog pad or joystick helps your precision in two ways. First, pushing against a slight resistance allows for more precision through free space. Second, the predictably changing resistance of the stick as it moves gives you some feedback about where the stick is relative to its center detent and its limits. I don't know if vibrating the cartridge would accomplish the same thing. Indeed, I'd think that vibrating the cartridge would worsen your accuracy.
Actually, there are several of these controllers in the PC space. Microsoft had one in the Sidewinder, and there was a two-fisted one for Quake. They've got gyro mice too. Nobody uses them, because after the initial "whoo" effect wears off, all you notice are your aching wrists.
Um, your thumb is pretty much the most coordinated and precise appendage you have. It's one of the evolutionary leaps that made us the dominant species on the planet...
This controller is completely retarded. They've had these gyro gizmos in PC controllers for awhile. They never caught on. Know why? Because they hurt! Current controllers are almost ideal from an ergonomic point of view. There is no motion required of the wrist, only small pressing movements required of the eight fingers, and thumb motion limited entirely to its natural range of movement. This controller gets rid of that nice setup, and requires wrist motion on multiple axes. Not only that, but unlike an analog stick or D-Pad, there is no tactile feedback to the wrist motion, which means that your precision in directional control is going to be a lot lower.
This is hardly innovation. This is more "different for the sake of being different."
Here is the setup I use, I like it a lot, maybe you an get some ideas.
Computer: Custom-built Athlon X2 4800+. The dual-core CPU is awesome --- big compiles don't bog down the UI, while it doesn't require the hassle and expense of your average dual-CPU machine. Other than the CPU, the two parts useful for coding are the 2GB of RAM (no reason to get less at today's prices), and the Antec P180 case. The nice thing about the case is that it makes for a very quiet computer, which is important to me since I'm pretty noise-sensitive.
Monitor: Dell 2405FPW. It's a 24" widescreen flat panel that's been getting a lot of attention on various forums. It's got excellent contrast, which is good for extended reading of text. The size and format also make it easy to have a ton of stuff on-screen at the same time. It's entirely possible to keep two source files open side-by-side, along with a reference manual or something next to them.
Keyboard: Cherry CyMotion. Keyboards are important. I'm personally not a big fan of the curved ergo keyboards, but its a matter of taste. If you like traditional straight keyboards, any of the Cherry line is a good bet. The use Cherry's keyswitches, which means they have excellent tactile feedback and a good amount of key travel. They CyMotion line also has tons of extra function keys (real keys, not those silly hard-plastic buttons), which is useful for custom keyboard shortcuts.
Chair: Nice full-back office chair. This one is really a matter of personal preference, so I recommend you experiment. I find a waterfall seat and good lumber support to be indispensible.
Software: Ubuntu Linux, gvim. The editor choice is massively a matter of preference. It has occurred to me that what editor you choose is less important than how well you learn to use your chosen editor.
I don't know if Be was a particularly good example to use. Be released a free BeOS when they were already near death. Free demos can get interested customers to buy your product, but that wasn't the situation here. With Be, there were no interested customers...
That's kind of retarded, if you ask me. If your goal, as a capitalist, is to make as much money as possible (and its an admirable goal, as far as I'm concerned), then why the hell would you diminish your profit by not offering free demos? Companies don't just do that out of the goodness of their hearts, you know. They do it because they make more money that way than they could without the demo.
I did Verrazano (AKA Fetter). Lisp bindings generator for C++. You can track it at http://www.common-lisp.net/project/fetter. It's still pretty rough, but Kenny Tilton just did some OpenAL bindings with them, so they're getting there:)
First, by including a "why", it is automatically a "personalized e-mail"! In any case, Google, by and large, didn't know why people were rejected, only why people were accepted. They had the mentoring organizations rank proposals before they ever looked at them. They mostly just took the top N proposals from each organization, did a final review, and sent out acceptance and rejection letters. Whether individual mentoring organizations gave applicants more feedback was their business (I know some did).
Hmm, that last statement was perhaps a bit unclear. The company didn't miss the deadline (that would have lost us the project). DARPA missed their own deadlines.
- What philosophy? Again, I agree that if you needed the startup money as, well, startup money, that would be a problem, but other than that, I don't see the problem here.
- For Google, the SoC isn't a serious business, its a tangential project. In any case, we didn't pay Google for services, it was the other way around. Since they are the ones cutting the checks, they can miss whatever deadlines they want. I'm not being facetious about this. In the real world, missed deadlines happen all the time, especially on the customer's end. In previous summers, I worked with a company bidding on a DARPA project, and they once missed a major deadline by a month and a half. And you know what? That was okay, because they were the ones writing the checks!
Hmm. Let's see. 9000 applications, and average of 3 pages apiece, that's almost 30,000 pages of proposals to go through. So that's what they did most of June, read those proposals. Now, sending out personalied replies? Assuming it takes 2 minutes to write a reply (with some actual content referring to "why"), that's 18,000 man-minutes, and assuming 5 people working full time on the program (about how many they had), that's 60 hours of non-stop work per person. That'd be a full tech-workweek, doing nothing but sending out personalized replies!
I can understand being pissed off if you needed the $500 to cover incidentials, but other than that, I think Chris and crew did a good job given their circumstances. It's not easy to organize something like this (the ITIN stuff alone must've caused at least a couple of ulcers), and it's their first time doing it. Not to mention the fact that they have regular jobs to attend to as well.
IMHO, a lot of the SoC participants came off as overly demanding and self-righteous, kinda like you. The mailing lists were full of complete drivel (to the point where I just unsubscribed and just used dejanews to find the occasional bit of info). If I had to read those to pick out the 0.1% of info that actually consisted of pertinent questions, well, that'd make me reconsider my line of work...
I think the flexibility that came with the SoC counts for a lot. Numerically, the SoC was a fairly significant pay-cut for me. I would have made almost 3x as much if I had taken my regular summer job (60 hour work-weeks add up quite quickly...). On the other hand, with the SoC, I had a lot of flexibility in my schedule, and more importantly, I was able to choose my own project. That in and of itself is worth the difference, at least for one summer. Let's face it --- it's very hard to get paid working on Lisp:) While I do like my regular job, as well as my major, I doubt I'm the only one who has tangential interests that they would love to persue, but often cannot due to lack of time or money. The SoC, while it might not pay like my regular job, made persuing such projects much more palatable.
I suspect it has a lot to do with what kind of games you like. I originally got a Gamecube a couple of years ago, since my roommate's already had a PS2. It kinda gathered dust for a year or so, at which point I sent it back home, where it's still gathering dust. Why? There aren't any good games for it, at least, from my point of view. I don't like "fun" games. My reflexes kind of suck, and I find it very hard to focus on "simple" things. I like games with stories, atmosphere, or a tactical element. There are precious few of these games on the GC. There are few RPGs (and almost no good ones), few FPSs, few 2D or 3D fighters, etc.
The thing that pisses me off about this is that Nintendo didn't used to be this way. Back in the SNES days, they had tons of games with tons of variety. Sure, there were lots of crappy games, but it was easier to find good games in genres you actually cared about. On the GC, there are just fewer games in all, and the good ones tend to be heavily concentrated in a few particular genres.
Also, the thousands of dollars of new equipment thing isn't really sensical. I've got a 24' 1920x1200 LCD. It cost me $900 new, and its down to around $750 these days. That's hardly a lot for a screen of that size. I know lots of people who paid around that much for a good 20-21" CRT back in the day. Heck, for $400 you can buy a damn good 20" widescreen LCD at 1600x1080. Even on those screens, regular DVDs just don't look good enough.
seriously, who is dissatisfied by the visual quality of DVDs?
Most people I know? They're far too low res to look good on today's high-res video devices. They look like crap on my 2405FPW, they look like crap on our HDTV, they look marginal on my 15" laptop LCD (about 3 years old now!).
The argument of whether or not its worth it is irrelevent. The picture quality of the DVD format is the bottleneck in modern TV setups. HD-DVD and BluRay are trying to address that bottleneck.
OpenGL doesn't have any scalable font support because there is no need for it to have any. Scalable fonts are always pre-rendered to bitmaps, and OpenGL (via pixel shaders), does have the capability to composite those bitmaps to the screen in a way that preserves sub-pixel anti-aliasing.
OS X, yes. Longhorn? Not --- it's not a shipping product any more than Xgl is, and even the much bemoaned "1 year from release" still puts Xgl at a release around the time of longhorn.
I don't understand. You say $50 is "a lot", now you say its "decently priced". I'm curious, did you buy games back in 1995? Were they "decently priced" back then? They're not making the things any more expensive, in absolute terms. They're simply bringing the price to the same level as they were in 1995, when the $50 price was set.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Large movements of the whole arm are a horrible idea. It's hard to keep your arm rested on a stable surface if you have to move it around a lot. Not being able to rest your arm on a surface is going to kill your precision. Ever aim a rifle in real life? It's really hard --- after a just a little bit, your arm is moving all over the place because its gotten tired. Snipers are trained to compensate for this sort of thing --- your average gamer isn't. If large arm movements are required, its going to be killer on long gaming sessions. The reviewer referred to in TFA even said as much.
2) Gyro mice didn't have those sensors, but that's not the reason nobody uses them. Gyros are pretty damn accurate as they are. The problem is that gyro mice are phenomenally awkward and cumbersom to use.
3) Gun games are quite a niche. They're okay for arcades, but during extended gaming sessions, your arms want to fall off. And flying with a wheel or joystick is fine, but this thing isn't a wheel or joystick. One of the key aspects of a wheel or joystick is that its affixed to a firm, heavy base. On top of that, if you've ever read a wheel controller review, every single one goes on about the best such controllers having just the right amount of resistance to turning motion. This controller can't have that.
4) If I wanted to swing a bat or racquet, I'd go outside. Gaming is virtual reality. Making it more like actual reality isn't necessarily a good thing. Most people don't have the coordination to be a pro ball player or professional sniper. That's why they play games!
To back up my previous point about the mouse: there is a reason CAD folks use hockey-pucks or giant trackballs for detail work. Moving those with your fingers is a lot more precise than moving a mouse with your wrist.
Your thumb is extremely precise within its range of motion, as are all your fingers. Try writing your name by gripping your pencil like a knife. See what kind of precision you get out of your wrist. There is a reason humans write (or solder, etc), with their thumb and index finger.
Also, I don't know anybody who moves their arm while mousing. I generally use my fingers for small movements, and my wrist for larger ones. The fleshy part of the base of my hand stays quite affixed to my desk.
The question, though, is whether it helps your precision. An analog pad or joystick helps your precision in two ways. First, pushing against a slight resistance allows for more precision through free space. Second, the predictably changing resistance of the stick as it moves gives you some feedback about where the stick is relative to its center detent and its limits. I don't know if vibrating the cartridge would accomplish the same thing. Indeed, I'd think that vibrating the cartridge would worsen your accuracy.
Actually, there are several of these controllers in the PC space. Microsoft had one in the Sidewinder, and there was a two-fisted one for Quake. They've got gyro mice too. Nobody uses them, because after the initial "whoo" effect wears off, all you notice are your aching wrists.
Um, your thumb is pretty much the most coordinated and precise appendage you have. It's one of the evolutionary leaps that made us the dominant species on the planet...
This controller is completely retarded. They've had these gyro gizmos in PC controllers for awhile. They never caught on. Know why? Because they hurt! Current controllers are almost ideal from an ergonomic point of view. There is no motion required of the wrist, only small pressing movements required of the eight fingers, and thumb motion limited entirely to its natural range of movement. This controller gets rid of that nice setup, and requires wrist motion on multiple axes. Not only that, but unlike an analog stick or D-Pad, there is no tactile feedback to the wrist motion, which means that your precision in directional control is going to be a lot lower.
This is hardly innovation. This is more "different for the sake of being different."
Here is the setup I use, I like it a lot, maybe you an get some ideas.
Computer: Custom-built Athlon X2 4800+. The dual-core CPU is awesome --- big compiles don't bog down the UI, while it doesn't require the hassle and expense of your average dual-CPU machine. Other than the CPU, the two parts useful for coding are the 2GB of RAM (no reason to get less at today's prices), and the Antec P180 case. The nice thing about the case is that it makes for a very quiet computer, which is important to me since I'm pretty noise-sensitive.
Monitor: Dell 2405FPW. It's a 24" widescreen flat panel that's been getting a lot of attention on various forums. It's got excellent contrast, which is good for extended reading of text. The size and format also make it easy to have a ton of stuff on-screen at the same time. It's entirely possible to keep two source files open side-by-side, along with a reference manual or something next to them.
Keyboard: Cherry CyMotion. Keyboards are important. I'm personally not a big fan of the curved ergo keyboards, but its a matter of taste. If you like traditional straight keyboards, any of the Cherry line is a good bet. The use Cherry's keyswitches, which means they have excellent tactile feedback and a good amount of key travel. They CyMotion line also has tons of extra function keys (real keys, not those silly hard-plastic buttons), which is useful for custom keyboard shortcuts.
Chair: Nice full-back office chair. This one is really a matter of personal preference, so I recommend you experiment. I find a waterfall seat and good lumber support to be indispensible.
Software: Ubuntu Linux, gvim. The editor choice is massively a matter of preference. It has occurred to me that what editor you choose is less important than how well you learn to use your chosen editor.
I don't know if Be was a particularly good example to use. Be released a free BeOS when they were already near death. Free demos can get interested customers to buy your product, but that wasn't the situation here. With Be, there were no interested customers...
That's kind of retarded, if you ask me. If your goal, as a capitalist, is to make as much money as possible (and its an admirable goal, as far as I'm concerned), then why the hell would you diminish your profit by not offering free demos? Companies don't just do that out of the goodness of their hearts, you know. They do it because they make more money that way than they could without the demo.
I did Verrazano (AKA Fetter). Lisp bindings generator for C++. You can track it at http://www.common-lisp.net/project/fetter. :)
It's still pretty rough, but Kenny Tilton just did some OpenAL bindings with them, so they're getting there
First, by including a "why", it is automatically a "personalized e-mail"! In any case, Google, by and large, didn't know why people were rejected, only why people were accepted. They had the mentoring organizations rank proposals before they ever looked at them. They mostly just took the top N proposals from each organization, did a final review, and sent out acceptance and rejection letters. Whether individual mentoring organizations gave applicants more feedback was their business (I know some did).
Hmm, that last statement was perhaps a bit unclear. The company didn't miss the deadline (that would have lost us the project). DARPA missed their own deadlines.
- What philosophy? Again, I agree that if you needed the startup money as, well, startup money, that would be a problem, but other than that, I don't see the problem here.
- For Google, the SoC isn't a serious business, its a tangential project. In any case, we didn't pay Google for services, it was the other way around. Since they are the ones cutting the checks, they can miss whatever deadlines they want. I'm not being facetious about this. In the real world, missed deadlines happen all the time, especially on the customer's end. In previous summers, I worked with a company bidding on a DARPA project, and they once missed a major deadline by a month and a half. And you know what? That was okay, because they were the ones writing the checks!
Hmm. Let's see. 9000 applications, and average of 3 pages apiece, that's almost 30,000 pages of proposals to go through. So that's what they did most of June, read those proposals. Now, sending out personalied replies? Assuming it takes 2 minutes to write a reply (with some actual content referring to "why"), that's 18,000 man-minutes, and assuming 5 people working full time on the program (about how many they had), that's 60 hours of non-stop work per person. That'd be a full tech-workweek, doing nothing but sending out personalized replies!
I can understand being pissed off if you needed the $500 to cover incidentials, but other than that, I think Chris and crew did a good job given their circumstances. It's not easy to organize something like this (the ITIN stuff alone must've caused at least a couple of ulcers), and it's their first time doing it. Not to mention the fact that they have regular jobs to attend to as well.
IMHO, a lot of the SoC participants came off as overly demanding and self-righteous, kinda like you. The mailing lists were full of complete drivel (to the point where I just unsubscribed and just used dejanews to find the occasional bit of info). If I had to read those to pick out the 0.1% of info that actually consisted of pertinent questions, well, that'd make me reconsider my line of work...
I think the flexibility that came with the SoC counts for a lot. Numerically, the SoC was a fairly significant pay-cut for me. I would have made almost 3x as much if I had taken my regular summer job (60 hour work-weeks add up quite quickly...). On the other hand, with the SoC, I had a lot of flexibility in my schedule, and more importantly, I was able to choose my own project. That in and of itself is worth the difference, at least for one summer. Let's face it --- it's very hard to get paid working on Lisp :) While I do like my regular job, as well as my major, I doubt I'm the only one who has tangential interests that they would love to persue, but often cannot due to lack of time or money. The SoC, while it might not pay like my regular job, made persuing such projects much more palatable.
I suspect it has a lot to do with what kind of games you like. I originally got a Gamecube a couple of years ago, since my roommate's already had a PS2. It kinda gathered dust for a year or so, at which point I sent it back home, where it's still gathering dust. Why? There aren't any good games for it, at least, from my point of view. I don't like "fun" games. My reflexes kind of suck, and I find it very hard to focus on "simple" things. I like games with stories, atmosphere, or a tactical element. There are precious few of these games on the GC. There are few RPGs (and almost no good ones), few FPSs, few 2D or 3D fighters, etc.
The thing that pisses me off about this is that Nintendo didn't used to be this way. Back in the SNES days, they had tons of games with tons of variety. Sure, there were lots of crappy games, but it was easier to find good games in genres you actually cared about. On the GC, there are just fewer games in all, and the good ones tend to be heavily concentrated in a few particular genres.
Also, the thousands of dollars of new equipment thing isn't really sensical. I've got a 24' 1920x1200 LCD. It cost me $900 new, and its down to around $750 these days. That's hardly a lot for a screen of that size. I know lots of people who paid around that much for a good 20-21" CRT back in the day. Heck, for $400 you can buy a damn good 20" widescreen LCD at 1600x1080. Even on those screens, regular DVDs just don't look good enough.
seriously, who is dissatisfied by the visual quality of DVDs?
Most people I know? They're far too low res to look good on today's high-res video devices. They look like crap on my 2405FPW, they look like crap on our HDTV, they look marginal on my 15" laptop LCD (about 3 years old now!).
The argument of whether or not its worth it is irrelevent. The picture quality of the DVD format is the bottleneck in modern TV setups. HD-DVD and BluRay are trying to address that bottleneck.
They have never tried selling revisions of their hardware... Even when they did...
Yep, Nintendo fan...
OpenGL doesn't have any scalable font support because there is no need for it to have any. Scalable fonts are always pre-rendered to bitmaps, and OpenGL (via pixel shaders), does have the capability to composite those bitmaps to the screen in a way that preserves sub-pixel anti-aliasing.
OS X, yes. Longhorn? Not --- it's not a shipping product any more than Xgl is, and even the much bemoaned "1 year from release" still puts Xgl at a release around the time of longhorn.
Great book. We used it in our intro astrodynamics class. Absolutely attrocious typesetting, though.
I don't understand. You say $50 is "a lot", now you say its "decently priced". I'm curious, did you buy games back in 1995? Were they "decently priced" back then? They're not making the things any more expensive, in absolute terms. They're simply bringing the price to the same level as they were in 1995, when the $50 price was set.