How naive do you have to be to be a Microsoft employee that had this brainchild and think that wouldn't get leaked about 5 minutes after video was made available to programmers? The most powerful government in the world leaks shit all the time; I read the whole MS reaction as more of a predictable corperate response for the benifit of shareholder confidance than I do an actual admission of surprise.
Maybe thats even sadder, that this is a good proof of existance of people who hold stock who interpret this kind of leak to be a reflection on the internal controls of corperate communication.
Its an issue of due process. He had to go through paperwork and peer review to do his work. It was legal. Society accepted, or at least tolerated, the pain being inflicted for the mutual benifit of all. (Extra irony; in some-odd years, zoos may plausibly use his research to help monkeys who are born blind. We can already communicate quite well with monkeys via sign language, so as far as I'm concerned, his research is not for the exclusive benifit of humans.) Every social structure deals with this. I hate to bring up the tired cliche, but when animals kill animals of other species so they can propogate or feed, they don't discuss it and create laws about what is acceptable, or have insitutions that attempt to rehabilite people who violate those codes. (We can debate that, because of course there are similar social and communicative structures displayed by other species, but the point stands that we do employ those methods in order to determine what, as a group, we determine to be acceptable.)
If everyone got together and it was discussed on a panel of people who dedicate their lives to stopping medical research on animals, and those people got the A-OK from the proper law enforcement authorities to firebomb the mans house, then I'd be OK with that. Thats due process at work, and if thats what the consensus is after having hashed out the options and differing opinions, I'd light the damn thing myself.
As it stands, I see some people risking the lives of people completely uninvolved with animal research. I see people who are so passionate about what they believe in, they have more in common with fraud artists and murderers than they do humans and monkeys. If they don't trust scientists or engineers, or lawmakers or whoever to rationally come to compromises that enrich lives while attempting to minimize inevitable suffering, then they can move back to the jungle where they don't have to benifit from those who do make difficult decisions and sometimes cause arguably avoidable suffering in the name of science, technology, health, etc. I don't care if they're driving BMWs or riding bikes, using cosmetics or home-made soap, watching television or writing stuff down on parchment they make from their own fully sustainable forest and paper mill factory. Stop using technology if you are uncomfortable with having to cause some level of suffering. I'm not advocating technology as a solution to lifes problems, or ills of society; I'm saying they have a choice. Move to the hills if you're not interested in operating through the channel of the social contract. I respect their opinion, as I respect yours, but I give the kudos to the scientist because he operates in public as opposed to in secrecy.
I think rational discourse and some amount of compromise deals with this kind of subject rather well. Relying on semantics is what gets people into ideological frames of mind to begin with. Your definition of 'animals' is also used by humans to refer to other humans, although with far worse connotations and social baggage. So when you use definitions to put forth a point of debate, you tend to make all the usual mistakes pedantic people make. It'd be like saying, "well, circles and squares are both shapes" in order to argue about whether square pegs fit in round holes. The statement has absolutely no bearing on whether or not square pegs fit in round holes.
As for the actual debate itself, I think that, in general, society has accepted that experiments on animals for purposes of improving products which are not considered 'medical', such as cosmetics, are bad. I don't think too many people argue against this, although of course people do, everyday, continue to buy products without verifying how they were tested. That is the 24h a day principle; there are things that just arn't important enough to people for them to ensure they're not supporting a practice they may ethically disagree with. Experiments designed to furthur medical knowledge, however, if done with plenty of attention given to minimizing suffering by use of anesthisia, may be unfortunate but worthy endevours.
Obviously people will have disagreements on where the balance/tradeoff lies, but it seems to me that if you don't support medical research on animals, then make sure that you nor anybody you care about ever uses pharmaceutical drugs, nor seeks medical treatment such as surgery, etc. The vast majority of these technologies unfortunately would not have been possible without animals being used in the lab.
This might be a creepy story to impart, but my mother once worked as a biotech in a lab at University of Toronto. They have an 'animal' room there where animals are kept for testing. She was working on a project that tested artificial valves in the heart. Note that these experiments are carried out after enough legwork has been done to at least have a reasonable amount of confidence that the technologies will work. (Otherwise its just a waste of time to conduct the experiments anyhow to conclude that they're safe to test on humans.) I saw a little mouse being operated on; his head was inside a little chamber filled with sleeping gas. He was out cold, but he looked awfully cute. I just take it as fact that life is complicated, and not without certain ethical grey zones. If you want to be a scientist or engineer, this is why earning any degree in the field requires some studies into ethics, society, values and how they relate to technology.
I think firebombing somebodies house is not much a greyzone; I wouldn't do it to a pedophile, much less somebody who did something I disagreed with in his profession. The reason is I have far greater confidence in rational discourge and the general will than I do with vigilante mob mentality immaturity. The same kind of disregard for suffering of anything in nature, from animals to humans to trees, is what causes people to be OK with testing shampoo in the eyes of bunnies. Its a complete lack of empathy for all living things.
Okay, I've been here 8 years. I've never taken a shot at Zonk in my life. I'll get modded down to -infinity, and I'm cool with that.
But one day, I'll know the apocolypse is nigh when I read a Zonk post where the last phrase is,
"Could taking a long piece of sharp metal, through the nostril, straight out the back of your head, be the cure for the common cold?"
Thats Zonks formula for journalistic creativity. Maybe even slashdot at this point. Every post ends with,
"Could having sexual relations with a small creature that inhabits the bottom of the deep sea possibly lead to an increase in social awareness about the plight of amputatee pigeons in New York?"
The answer is no, largly because the question is 99.99% rhetorical, and hopefully in 5 years when no advertising is cost-per-impression, 99.99% unprofitable.
They're all good, they're all useful, and they're all readable (although Perl comes at the bottom of my list.)
But your block-ending comment is inane. You can never know *what* block was ending (ie, what control or condition statement started the block) without scrolling up, indentation-dependant or curly-brace dependant. You must use *really* fancy closing brakets; the kind that actually contain meta-data on the block they're closing or something.
I kinda like Python regarding intendation because nobody can check anything in if it isn't properly indented. C/C++ sources edited by teams of 10+ end up getting pretty messy and unreliable. The amusing thing is that you dont need *any* indentation in C/C++ et al, and yet people still do it because.... drum roll.. it makes the code easier to read.
Spend some time with Python and stop outright dismissing languages. Its got its place in the world of languages. I'm immediately suspicious of programmers who dismiss languages outright. It suggests to me that you havn't worked in a programmer in many different fields where a wide variety of tools are useful, or even better, the kind of job where using a wide variety of tools, if intelligently selected and used, makes development easier to code and easier to maintain.
But picking on indent-dependant or curly-brace dependant.. man, that is so esotaric, thats a programmer who is missing the point. Its a question of preference, not language superiority. Different people prefer different things, but no serious programmer would consider it a reason to tear down a language.
You being a 3D engine programmer, you're not making games, you're making an engine. So surprise surprise, you'd love to work with more powerful hardware. I don't see how that makes Wii a disgrace, since all its guilty of is not costing 600$ to have its design focused on the aspect of the hardware that would let you play with more powerful hardware.
I'm a game programmer. I work in production, and I love making games on current gen systems because its always fun to figure out how to push the hardware to its limits to get the things you want in the game. How to cheat or fake certain things to get the graphics or the gameplay you want, whereas just programming it in the 'true' way would just give you 10 fps.
At any rate, since we both work on games and both are influenced by the flavour of the hardware and how that affects what we get to work with, I don't think we're exactly the most objective people on the matter. And it certainly doesn't make the Wii a 'disgrace', it just shifts the fun around on your team to others who might be dying of boredom by refactoring input APIs for what is essentially the same controller they were working on 6 years ago.
And you can still have fun on the Wii, its still a significant upgrade from all the current-gen systems.
Re:I welcome the exit, if true...
on
The End of E3?
·
· Score: 1
SCMs in the game industry tend to be pretty specialized because they have to deal with graphic assets, integrate with artistic asset production software (maya, 3dmax, etc) and do a whole bunch of things I never thought of before I started working in the game industry.
Don't get me wrong, in theory, it should be easy. When you're working 50 hours a week just to stay on scheduale, preparing an E3 build while attempting to fix bugs both in the E3-bound build and in the main trunk, with more than 30 non-technical artists also contributing to the 'codebase' (because thats what it is.. they contribute to revisions of model/animation/texture assets that contibute or solve bugs in the game), its not quite the same as working with a bunch of programmers on a well organized tree.
Mind you, AlienBrain *is* a piece of shit, but once you've worked in the game industry, you earn a little more appreciation for the combination of being over-worked and having to work with SCM software that must be usable by non-technical folks.
Its always a lot simpler when you're looking from the outside in, and its been this way no matter which industry I've worked in.
One last tidbit, conference builds include different features and different code paths that can make forking a tree signifincantly more complicated. It gets to the point, near the final conference build where you really have to do some investigation to figure out if a bug in the E3 build, or the main build, affects the other branch. The disperate builds really can differ that much, and as I noted above, when you're working so much overtime you stop looking for the 'correct' fix and start looking for an ugly line or two of code in the specific branch the bug was reported in that will let you go home that night. To give you an idea of how bad it is with alien-brain, you need to purchase a seperate diff client from a 3rd party to handle merges in a reasonable feasible fashion. Its enough to make me cry for joy when I come across the text ">>" online. Those were the days.
Limited search capabilities, lack of a decent command line client.. I miss CVS, and even its severe limitations would be preferable to what game companies use. Still, its a fun job, massive overtime be damned.
You grow a set, and ask her to reciprocate all the time and effort in an area of her expertise. If she can't, offer her a reasonable rate to fix her computer. If she declines, tell her shes on her own. Tell her you suck at fixing computers, as evidenced by 'your track record'.
Probably not for key mappings. Remember that the console will have WAY more flash memory to store those kinds of things. 6KB is a tiny tiny tiny amount, so I doubt its really all that significant with respect to the featureset of the controller.
Well, as a camera, no purpose, because the folks at IGN are, as usual, being paid to be highly speculative fanboys. I say this as:
a) a game developer b) who has access to the wii-mote and has read the dev documentation c) somebody who likes IGN, although my like of them dies by the day
Trust me, it can never be used as a camera. It translates position into co-ordinates because, holy fuck batman, thats what a pointer does.
The difference with a joystick or analog stick is that you map the 'force' of the joystick (ie, pointed up down, left right) into some kind of velocity and acceleration and determine where on the screen the pointer should be.. the "co-ordinates" you end up with are a result of your game logic that deals with the input values of the console controllers' analog stick. With the wii-mote, the idea is that it is pointing somewhere, therefore, the hardware can tell you where.
I read the article a few days ago on IGN, and for the most part, its correct. You have to distinguish between real input, and glare from windows or lights, and another interesting matter is that the controller is so sensitive that in order to deal with the input from the accelerometer you cant take what you get EVERY frame and go from that.. you should average it out over some small delta, maybe.2 seconds.
But the 'maybe it can be used a camera' part is just like.. man why am I working 50 hours a week to create something mediocre when I could be paid to work 40 hours a week, some of that playing videogames to write wild wet-dream conjecture?!
So you're looking down your nose at a strawman you think is looking down its nose at you.
Gotcha.
Lighten up. =) It is true that some people can eek out a deeper meaning in more abstract forms of communication; some people come out of a play going, "Okay, Tom ran away from his home, then screwed Lily underneath a tree in a park, then his brother came and got him, and they both went home." Some people (note I'm not saying better people, or more sophisticated, or more intelligent people) come away from some plays with the suspicion or hypothesis that the playright was making snide social commentary on social disenfranchisement brought on by the increased population growth of the suburbs. Anybody who looks down on anybody else for not interpreting art or theatre at the level the artist is intending to communicate is really no different than people who suspect everybody that likes 'arthouse' art is a snobby elitist.. you're both missing the point. Live and let live.
That said, I saw the movie, and I didn't think it was even meant to be particularly deep. I was annoyed by the dialog, but in its defence it was clearly translated, and not very successfully it would appear.
Funny comic, but coming from an arts background and knowing the scene pretty well, these 'art snobs' I hear so much are pretty damn rare (and I've never ever EVER seen one in a beret, lol.) It does seem to be a stereotype that lots of people can agree to hate tho.. it brings us together.:)
I agree you with, and grandparent, except with one caveat; learning advertising helped me in my previous job of writing advertising delivery and reporting software. (No, it wasn't straight spamming, it was legit.)
I'm still left wondering if that was worth it because I feel so dirty to be able to make marketing employees and managers drool when I 'talk the talk'. Probably an easier croud to please than most, but I do agree with you; learning what customers were looking for when they ran campaigns and contracts with us was really valuable to my career when you're called to talk to the client on the phone to explain 'technical' things.
I'm working in the games industry now, and recently we had a client who was upset that our game didn't run on some integrated videocards they really wanted to support. One of the newer programmers in the room told the client, basically, that those videocards were shitty and underpowered. Which was true, but thats not what the client wants to hear. Thats the lesson you learn from 'knowing' the industry you work in; you don't talk to a client like you'd talk to your boss.
Of couse, because its massively popular, and its also the worlds most gruesome 24/7 car crash. A substantial portion of that traffic has to be from the 'how bad can it get' voyeristic traffic.
That said, there are a number of top folks in lots of musical/artistic/etc displinines who realize that its a decent way to provide a forum for their fans. (For me, its the number of top flight DMC DJs and Ninja Tunes artists who offer free videos and music across the site.) I wonder if that will stop if it becomes too popular and too noise-to-signal.
Slashdot Mirror
How naive do you have to be to be a Microsoft employee that had this brainchild and think that wouldn't get leaked about 5 minutes after video was made available to programmers? The most powerful government in the world leaks shit all the time; I read the whole MS reaction as more of a predictable corperate response for the benifit of shareholder confidance than I do an actual admission of surprise.
Maybe thats even sadder, that this is a good proof of existance of people who hold stock who interpret this kind of leak to be a reflection on the internal controls of corperate communication.
Its an issue of due process. He had to go through paperwork and peer review to do his work. It was legal. Society accepted, or at least tolerated, the pain being inflicted for the mutual benifit of all. (Extra irony; in some-odd years, zoos may plausibly use his research to help monkeys who are born blind. We can already communicate quite well with monkeys via sign language, so as far as I'm concerned, his research is not for the exclusive benifit of humans.) Every social structure deals with this. I hate to bring up the tired cliche, but when animals kill animals of other species so they can propogate or feed, they don't discuss it and create laws about what is acceptable, or have insitutions that attempt to rehabilite people who violate those codes. (We can debate that, because of course there are similar social and communicative structures displayed by other species, but the point stands that we do employ those methods in order to determine what, as a group, we determine to be acceptable.)
If everyone got together and it was discussed on a panel of people who dedicate their lives to stopping medical research on animals, and those people got the A-OK from the proper law enforcement authorities to firebomb the mans house, then I'd be OK with that. Thats due process at work, and if thats what the consensus is after having hashed out the options and differing opinions, I'd light the damn thing myself.
As it stands, I see some people risking the lives of people completely uninvolved with animal research. I see people who are so passionate about what they believe in, they have more in common with fraud artists and murderers than they do humans and monkeys. If they don't trust scientists or engineers, or lawmakers or whoever to rationally come to compromises that enrich lives while attempting to minimize inevitable suffering, then they can move back to the jungle where they don't have to benifit from those who do make difficult decisions and sometimes cause arguably avoidable suffering in the name of science, technology, health, etc. I don't care if they're driving BMWs or riding bikes, using cosmetics or home-made soap, watching television or writing stuff down on parchment they make from their own fully sustainable forest and paper mill factory. Stop using technology if you are uncomfortable with having to cause some level of suffering. I'm not advocating technology as a solution to lifes problems, or ills of society; I'm saying they have a choice. Move to the hills if you're not interested in operating through the channel of the social contract. I respect their opinion, as I respect yours, but I give the kudos to the scientist because he operates in public as opposed to in secrecy.
I think rational discourse and some amount of compromise deals with this kind of subject rather well. Relying on semantics is what gets people into ideological frames of mind to begin with. Your definition of 'animals' is also used by humans to refer to other humans, although with far worse connotations and social baggage. So when you use definitions to put forth a point of debate, you tend to make all the usual mistakes pedantic people make. It'd be like saying, "well, circles and squares are both shapes" in order to argue about whether square pegs fit in round holes. The statement has absolutely no bearing on whether or not square pegs fit in round holes.
As for the actual debate itself, I think that, in general, society has accepted that experiments on animals for purposes of improving products which are not considered 'medical', such as cosmetics, are bad. I don't think too many people argue against this, although of course people do, everyday, continue to buy products without verifying how they were tested. That is the 24h a day principle; there are things that just arn't important enough to people for them to ensure they're not supporting a practice they may ethically disagree with. Experiments designed to furthur medical knowledge, however, if done with plenty of attention given to minimizing suffering by use of anesthisia, may be unfortunate but worthy endevours.
Obviously people will have disagreements on where the balance/tradeoff lies, but it seems to me that if you don't support medical research on animals, then make sure that you nor anybody you care about ever uses pharmaceutical drugs, nor seeks medical treatment such as surgery, etc. The vast majority of these technologies unfortunately would not have been possible without animals being used in the lab.
This might be a creepy story to impart, but my mother once worked as a biotech in a lab at University of Toronto. They have an 'animal' room there where animals are kept for testing. She was working on a project that tested artificial valves in the heart. Note that these experiments are carried out after enough legwork has been done to at least have a reasonable amount of confidence that the technologies will work. (Otherwise its just a waste of time to conduct the experiments anyhow to conclude that they're safe to test on humans.) I saw a little mouse being operated on; his head was inside a little chamber filled with sleeping gas. He was out cold, but he looked awfully cute. I just take it as fact that life is complicated, and not without certain ethical grey zones. If you want to be a scientist or engineer, this is why earning any degree in the field requires some studies into ethics, society, values and how they relate to technology.
I think firebombing somebodies house is not much a greyzone; I wouldn't do it to a pedophile, much less somebody who did something I disagreed with in his profession. The reason is I have far greater confidence in rational discourge and the general will than I do with vigilante mob mentality immaturity. The same kind of disregard for suffering of anything in nature, from animals to humans to trees, is what causes people to be OK with testing shampoo in the eyes of bunnies. Its a complete lack of empathy for all living things.
Shit dude, you should move to Burma. I hear people kill other people all the time in defence of their personal property. It'd be your wet dream!
I used to use ROT13 to protect my files until I found out how unsecure it is. Now I ROT13 twice, just to make sure.
there's no decent Saturn emulation yet
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Okay, I've been here 8 years. I've never taken a shot at Zonk in my life. I'll get modded down to -infinity, and I'm cool with that.
But one day, I'll know the apocolypse is nigh when I read a Zonk post where the last phrase is,
"Could taking a long piece of sharp metal, through the nostril, straight out the back of your head, be the cure for the common cold?"
Thats Zonks formula for journalistic creativity. Maybe even slashdot at this point. Every post ends with,
"Could having sexual relations with a small creature that inhabits the bottom of the deep sea possibly lead to an increase in social awareness about the plight of amputatee pigeons in New York?"
The answer is no, largly because the question is 99.99% rhetorical, and hopefully in 5 years when no advertising is cost-per-impression, 99.99% unprofitable.
Zing! Hahaha, you'd get a funny by me if I didnt run out of mod points on friday.
You lost me when you said that it takes the "fun" out of programming.
Cmon lets be fair. Its because MS employs so many programmers, they can't all fit into a small, modest sandbox. So they made the sandbox REALLY HUGE.
C/C++/Python/Perl/PHP/Javascript/ServersideJS/Java
.... drum roll .. it makes the code easier to read.
.. man, that is so esotaric, thats a programmer who is missing the point. Its a question of preference, not language superiority. Different people prefer different things, but no serious programmer would consider it a reason to tear down a language.
They're all good, they're all useful, and they're all readable (although Perl comes at the bottom of my list.)
But your block-ending comment is inane. You can never know *what* block was ending (ie, what control or condition statement started the block) without scrolling up, indentation-dependant or curly-brace dependant. You must use *really* fancy closing brakets; the kind that actually contain meta-data on the block they're closing or something.
I kinda like Python regarding intendation because nobody can check anything in if it isn't properly indented. C/C++ sources edited by teams of 10+ end up getting pretty messy and unreliable. The amusing thing is that you dont need *any* indentation in C/C++ et al, and yet people still do it because
Spend some time with Python and stop outright dismissing languages. Its got its place in the world of languages. I'm immediately suspicious of programmers who dismiss languages outright. It suggests to me that you havn't worked in a programmer in many different fields where a wide variety of tools are useful, or even better, the kind of job where using a wide variety of tools, if intelligently selected and used, makes development easier to code and easier to maintain.
But picking on indent-dependant or curly-brace dependant
Much appreciated, that one ALWAYS nets a bunch of replies.
You being a 3D engine programmer, you're not making games, you're making an engine. So surprise surprise, you'd love to work with more powerful hardware. I don't see how that makes Wii a disgrace, since all its guilty of is not costing 600$ to have its design focused on the aspect of the hardware that would let you play with more powerful hardware.
I'm a game programmer. I work in production, and I love making games on current gen systems because its always fun to figure out how to push the hardware to its limits to get the things you want in the game. How to cheat or fake certain things to get the graphics or the gameplay you want, whereas just programming it in the 'true' way would just give you 10 fps.
At any rate, since we both work on games and both are influenced by the flavour of the hardware and how that affects what we get to work with, I don't think we're exactly the most objective people on the matter. And it certainly doesn't make the Wii a 'disgrace', it just shifts the fun around on your team to others who might be dying of boredom by refactoring input APIs for what is essentially the same controller they were working on 6 years ago.
And you can still have fun on the Wii, its still a significant upgrade from all the current-gen systems.
SCMs in the game industry tend to be pretty specialized because they have to deal with graphic assets, integrate with artistic asset production software (maya, 3dmax, etc) and do a whole bunch of things I never thought of before I started working in the game industry.
.. they contribute to revisions of model/animation/texture assets that contibute or solve bugs in the game), its not quite the same as working with a bunch of programmers on a well organized tree.
.. I miss CVS, and even its severe limitations would be preferable to what game companies use. Still, its a fun job, massive overtime be damned.
Don't get me wrong, in theory, it should be easy. When you're working 50 hours a week just to stay on scheduale, preparing an E3 build while attempting to fix bugs both in the E3-bound build and in the main trunk, with more than 30 non-technical artists also contributing to the 'codebase' (because thats what it is
Mind you, AlienBrain *is* a piece of shit, but once you've worked in the game industry, you earn a little more appreciation for the combination of being over-worked and having to work with SCM software that must be usable by non-technical folks.
Its always a lot simpler when you're looking from the outside in, and its been this way no matter which industry I've worked in.
One last tidbit, conference builds include different features and different code paths that can make forking a tree signifincantly more complicated. It gets to the point, near the final conference build where you really have to do some investigation to figure out if a bug in the E3 build, or the main build, affects the other branch. The disperate builds really can differ that much, and as I noted above, when you're working so much overtime you stop looking for the 'correct' fix and start looking for an ugly line or two of code in the specific branch the bug was reported in that will let you go home that night. To give you an idea of how bad it is with alien-brain, you need to purchase a seperate diff client from a 3rd party to handle merges in a reasonable feasible fashion. Its enough to make me cry for joy when I come across the text ">>" online. Those were the days.
Limited search capabilities, lack of a decent command line client
You grow a set, and ask her to reciprocate all the time and effort in an area of her expertise. If she can't, offer her a reasonable rate to fix her computer. If she declines, tell her shes on her own. Tell her you suck at fixing computers, as evidenced by 'your track record'.
Why?
As an umcircumcised male, I say, you go girl!
... =)
I dont get circumcision
The parent comment has been posted, more or less verbatim, to just about every Wii-related article on /.
Please moderate accrodingly.
Probably not for key mappings. Remember that the console will have WAY more flash memory to store those kinds of things. 6KB is a tiny tiny tiny amount, so I doubt its really all that significant with respect to the featureset of the controller.
Well, hey waitaminute, you never said you lived in New York. I take it all back. ;)
Well, as a camera, no purpose, because the folks at IGN are, as usual, being paid to be highly speculative fanboys. I say this as:
.. the "co-ordinates" you end up with are a result of your game logic that deals with the input values of the console controllers' analog stick. With the wii-mote, the idea is that it is pointing somewhere, therefore, the hardware can tell you where.
.. you should average it out over some small delta, maybe .2 seconds.
.. man why am I working 50 hours a week to create something mediocre when I could be paid to work 40 hours a week, some of that playing videogames to write wild wet-dream conjecture?!
a) a game developer
b) who has access to the wii-mote and has read the dev documentation
c) somebody who likes IGN, although my like of them dies by the day
Trust me, it can never be used as a camera. It translates position into co-ordinates because, holy fuck batman, thats what a pointer does.
The difference with a joystick or analog stick is that you map the 'force' of the joystick (ie, pointed up down, left right) into some kind of velocity and acceleration and determine where on the screen the pointer should be
I read the article a few days ago on IGN, and for the most part, its correct. You have to distinguish between real input, and glare from windows or lights, and another interesting matter is that the controller is so sensitive that in order to deal with the input from the accelerometer you cant take what you get EVERY frame and go from that
But the 'maybe it can be used a camera' part is just like
So you're looking down your nose at a strawman you think is looking down its nose at you.
.. you're both missing the point. Live and let live.
.. it brings us together. :)
Gotcha.
Lighten up. =) It is true that some people can eek out a deeper meaning in more abstract forms of communication; some people come out of a play going, "Okay, Tom ran away from his home, then screwed Lily underneath a tree in a park, then his brother came and got him, and they both went home." Some people (note I'm not saying better people, or more sophisticated, or more intelligent people) come away from some plays with the suspicion or hypothesis that the playright was making snide social commentary on social disenfranchisement brought on by the increased population growth of the suburbs. Anybody who looks down on anybody else for not interpreting art or theatre at the level the artist is intending to communicate is really no different than people who suspect everybody that likes 'arthouse' art is a snobby elitist
That said, I saw the movie, and I didn't think it was even meant to be particularly deep. I was annoyed by the dialog, but in its defence it was clearly translated, and not very successfully it would appear.
Funny comic, but coming from an arts background and knowing the scene pretty well, these 'art snobs' I hear so much are pretty damn rare (and I've never ever EVER seen one in a beret, lol.) It does seem to be a stereotype that lots of people can agree to hate tho
I agree you with, and grandparent, except with one caveat; learning advertising helped me in my previous job of writing advertising delivery and reporting software. (No, it wasn't straight spamming, it was legit.)
I'm still left wondering if that was worth it because I feel so dirty to be able to make marketing employees and managers drool when I 'talk the talk'. Probably an easier croud to please than most, but I do agree with you; learning what customers were looking for when they ran campaigns and contracts with us was really valuable to my career when you're called to talk to the client on the phone to explain 'technical' things.
I'm working in the games industry now, and recently we had a client who was upset that our game didn't run on some integrated videocards they really wanted to support. One of the newer programmers in the room told the client, basically, that those videocards were shitty and underpowered. Which was true, but thats not what the client wants to hear. Thats the lesson you learn from 'knowing' the industry you work in; you don't talk to a client like you'd talk to your boss.
Of couse, because its massively popular, and its also the worlds most gruesome 24/7 car crash. A substantial portion of that traffic has to be from the 'how bad can it get' voyeristic traffic.
That said, there are a number of top folks in lots of musical/artistic/etc displinines who realize that its a decent way to provide a forum for their fans. (For me, its the number of top flight DMC DJs and Ninja Tunes artists who offer free videos and music across the site.) I wonder if that will stop if it becomes too popular and too noise-to-signal.
Billy West's Speak and Spell.