That was my first thought too, upon learning about the light and dark beams. I wonder how big the crossover is between Metroid and Ikaruga fans. I'd say being an old-school or hard-core (pick your favourite term) would be a common thread, but the Prime games seem to appeal to a wider audience than the 2D Metroid games of glory days gone by did.
In any case, I doubt there will be much high-score sets-of-three chaining going on with Echoes, but I'll bet the speed-runners of the world are licking their chops!
I don't know about you, but I'd sure as hell never run a small app found on a P2P network. Not that GNU/Linux would know what to do with a Windows app anyway.
Besides, what the RIAA failed to recognize and what a lot of people still fail to see is that peer-to-peer networks ARE advertising, the best and cheapest kind of advertising one can have: word-of-mouth. Except I don't even have to move my lips, and I can tell a hundred people who can each tell a hundred people. The fact is, the best way for a band to get paying fans is through exposure. Top-40 radio and Real World, er, MTV, don't do much for anyone but a few selected mediocre bands. Napster exposed everybody's music to everybody's ears. If your primary goal is selling music, that's good. If your primary goal is iron-fisted control, that's bad. Too bad the execs are blind to the distinction between those concepts. And too bad it led them to do stupid things like destroy the best thing that ever happened to them.
I've been thinking about that too, but if you look at the different-shaped GBA and old-style GBC/GB carts, you'll see that a slot could be made to accept a GBA game but a GBC one physically wouldn't slide in. Nobody who's got their hands on a DS has revealed whether that's the case or not, at least to my knowledge.
I hope the physical limitation isn't there, so that a future DS card with emulation software on it could make classic GB/GBC games playable on the DS, but it wouldn't surprise me greatly if the old carts physically just don't fit. The fact that the DS plays GBA games at all is a little confusing, since it's supposed to be a third platform and not a replacement. I personally think it will serve as a replacement anyway, and in that case, one-generation backwards compatibility is better than none, but that's been one of the really cool things about Game Boy over the years -- all the old stuff would just work with newer sleeker systems.
Anyhow I'm just rambling at this point, but I would advise not to get your hopes up for emulation until you hold a DS in your hands and verify that you can physically stick a GBC game into it.
By nature, a Free Software project has to be more honest about how it works. If it's not legal to include something, the folks who maintain the code are pretty likely to know that, and see to it that the offending material doesn't get put in, or gets taken out if it's there already. That's a large part of why the whole SCO thing is such a joke.
Commercial software vendors probably also know about those legal issues, but it's not like submarine patent owners can go grepping the code for some given algorithm. Plus, in the case of Adobe-type companies, the GIF licensing fee would be a drop in the $600-per-photoshop bucket.
Then there's the rest, regular folks who download stuff and run it for free, legal or not, who don't necessarily know and surely don't care about software patents, as long as they can draw their animated dancing hamster for their webpage, they don't care how it works or who thinks who owns what.
Had GIF compression never been patented, I wonder what might be different today. Maybe the folks who had to rip it out of their projects, the folks who had to deal with new libraries, the people who tried to spread the word about how GIFs shouldn't be used, would have been able to accomplish other things in all those fragments of time. I can't imagine a parallel non-LZW-patented universe being worse off, but I can imagine it being better. The same is true for any given software patent.
I bought a PS2, and to me that means I can use it to play games and DVDs, or I can cut it in pieces and prop up legs of a wobbly table with its remains. It's mine, and if I want to take it apart and solder up an IC that wasn't part of its original circuitry, don't you dare tell me I don't have the right to do so. I didn't rent the thing; I bought it.
The other angle is whether the IC I solder in there itself should be illegal to have. Certain physical things are illegal to own, from specific species of plants to some classes of weapons. Should a chunk of silicon that's capable of altering a PS2's lockout mechanisms be listed among those? That's certainly a step up from telling me I can't tinker with my own stuff. But it still doesn't make sense. A drug or a weapon, that's a physical thing. A partial circuit, that's a physical thing too, but an infinite variety of notably different physical things could be concocted that serve the same purpose. You could probably solder in some leads and wire 'em up to a commodity PC's serial port and have your computer emulate the modchip. (Maybe not a low-bandwidth serial port, but you get the idea) In that case should the PC be illegal too, since it's a physical device that's allowing burned games to run on a PS2?
If a PS2 only locked out burned copies of commercial games, and Sony offered to replace old, beat-up discs for next-to-nothing, this sort of action would have a bit more to stand on, since the non-harmful uses like homebrew games, imports, etc would be features of the system already instead of the modchip. But, it locks out all kinds of stuff, and Sony won't replace Rez on the cheap if I scratch it up, so these modchips have all kinds of legit uses in addition to the non-legit one. Every heavy, blunt, or sharp object I own could be used to commit crimes much worse than copyright infringement, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be allowed to own them.
I'm with you; my DSL costs more than the 15 Mbit service mentioned in the article and has a pathetic upstream cap. It wouldn't bug me quite as much if I didn't know it was a totally artificial and arbitrary limit.
I understand ISPs' arguments that Joe Shmoe users shouldn't run web/ftp/shell/mail servers on their $499 WinXP boxes, but come on! Joe Shmoe ain't gonna pay $60 a month for his internet link either! It used to be an ISP would give you your login credentials and a pile of software for everything from ftp to gopher to telnet to usenet. Now you're given an autorun CD that splatters the ISP's logo onto IE, overwrites your prefs and tells you to think of the internet as a TV you can click on.
Perhaps when another killer P2P app comes along, one that doesn't get crushed and forced into selling out *coughnapster* perhaps demand for real, two-way internet throughput will reach a level ISPs will care about. Something like Squeak perhaps, but with that special-something that makes it a killer app.
I suggest P2P as a possible catalyst for upstream equality, but it could be anything really. For a while I thought blogging might do it, but people don't seem to mind not being in total control of their blogs (hell, I even don't) so I guess I'll keep my fingers crossed as each Next Big Thing® crops up.:^)
I loved F-Zero X's X Cup! I only wish there was the option to save those tracks when the random numbers stumble upon a design that's extra-good.
In Japan, if you didn't mind plunking down some cash on the ill-fated 64DD, you could get an F-Zero expansion disk that included a track editor. I still wish that had been released here in some way; I was disappointed that F-Zero GX had no such extra.
Editors are another good way to boost replay value. Random maps have the advantage of surprising the player, but in TimeSplitters 2 for example, I can create my own deathmatch or capture the flag... er, bag... maps to swap or play with my buddies. Since I suck at the single-player game and can't unlock all the built-in maps, that's a pretty attractive feature. Now, if there was some ingenious algorighm for generating a random deathmatch map, that would be the best of both worlds! No more accusations from my buddies that I know where the armor is.;^) Here's hoping some such craziness dons on the developers in time for TimeSplitters 3!
I'm not so sure that a) video games are only a semi-serious art form or that b) they only have the capacity to give serious topics like religion with action-flic level treatment.
It's true many video games have shallow (or absent) stories. There's no creation story or complex morality behind pac-man, it's just pure fun, and is certainly "serious" art; it's called a masterpiece and a classic for good reasons. And while some games are basically interactive movies, some of which do have plenty of religious content (Final Fantasy X comes to mind) even the ones that only touch on religion can sometimes do so in meaningful ways.
In the newer Legend of Zelda games, I'm thinking primarily of Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker here, the stories are of approximately action-flic depth. A few reasonably rounded characters and a slew of flat supporting roles doing their part to help or hinder the hero on his way to get the bad guy. But every now and then, the dialogue mentions folklore and legends that at the very least create an illusion of tapping into a vast resource of Hyrulian (Hyrule is Zelda's game world) culture. We get the creation story with the 3 gods and what they each stand for, and how parts of the world and the inner spirit are to find balance. We get history of why these grand temples were built and the spiritual significance of the artifacts they hold. We even have the king of Hyrule and Gannondorf (the surprisingly non-flat villian) present conflicting interpretations of the actions the Gods have taken. I won't spoil the ending sequence of Wind Waker, but there's some serious game-world religion going on there, in a game that doesn't focus heavily on story.
I mentioned Final Fantasy X before, which does focus on story, and even has the great evil in the game literally named "Sin", and non-believers, and religious pilgrimages, and corruption within the church. It's present in so much of the game's story that I got the same uncomfortable feeling while going through those bits as I do in, say, a Catholic service (no offense anybody!) surrounded by people who will swear to God they believe they're drinking Jesus's blood and eating his body. The medium can and does treat religion pretty seriously if it fits the spirit of the game.
That said, can you imagine if religion were presented "seriously" or "deeply" in a game that wasn't a big long linear interactive movie? Mormons passing out miniature bibles to you on the sidewalks in Vice City... The Mushroom Kingdom factioning into those who worship Lakitu and those who just see him as a spiny-chucking bastard... That kind of stuff is part of why some of us use video games as an escape in the first place!:^)
The "oops, try again in a few seconds"... yeah, that sucks. I chalk it up to Gmail's beta status. I do prefer it to the way Hotmail flakes out, you submit something, the server never answers, and eventually the browser times out and you're left wondering whether to resubmit.
I really dig the group by discussion thing. Matter of taste, I suppose. My guess is by the time it's out of beta, Gmail will have the option to show messages in a more traditional way as well, for folks like you.
Javascript is one of those necessary evils if you want a web app to act as responsive as a client program. In Gmail's case it's used for keyboard shortcuts (yayy!) and preventing the page from going all wonky if the server's acting up or there's a network hiccup. Would lynx support be neat? Of course. And given Google's friendliness with PDAs, cell phones etc (see http://www.google.com/imode ), I wouldn't doubt it will happen eventually. For the record, Hotmail requires javascript too. Yahoo mail, to my surprise, does not.
Fortunately, I've snatched up a beta Gmail account and am finding it to be the bee's knees thus far. I've been fed up with Yahoo for a long time. Had I gone with Hotmail I'd have been even more fed up.
For several years I've had to trim all kinds of stuff out of my email archives due to the claustrophobic 4- and 6-meg limit on Yahoo mail. Then suddenly I log in and there's 100 meg available. Well that sucks, I've deleted maybe half that in stuff I'd rather have kept over the years. And it's still Yahoo; they still puke up obnoxious ads every chanse they get, and at the end of every single outgoing message.
On the other hand, since the dot-bomb, most over-the-web services have gotten crippled or disappeared entirely for non-paying users. It's a breath of fresh air to see some things actually improve, regardless Microsoft's and Yahoo's motives for doing so.
If an all but ad-free environment, a clean interface and the other Google niceties become competitive features that many webmail services mimmick, then great, everybody wins, including those unwilling to switch services. But for my money (or lack of it), I'd rather be signed up with an outfit whose mission statement amounts to "don't be evil" rather than "always be evil except to save face".
Does "cedega" sound like a Final Fantasy spell to anyone else? Stronger than Cede and Ceda...
But anyway, I used to think things like WINE would hinder "true" GNU/Linux game development, and while that may be true, the games are going to be proprietary anyway, so really what's the difference between running a locked-up native binary and a locked-up WINE-translated one? And in the case of WineX, even the program doing the emulation/translation is non-Free. Folks who don't care that PC games aren't open-source shouldn't complain that the closed binary is for the wrong platform.
I actually liked Next Generation (got into it after the first few awkward seasons had already come and gone) but you're right, unflawed characters and literary references do not good Star Trek make.
My favorite episodes involved exactly the kind of stuff you're calling for, leaders making tough decisions and mistakes (Picard is assimilated, Riker orders a kamikazee attack) and real irony beyond "damn that prime directive".
I like the idea of conflicts that echo current world adversaries. Political fragmentation to the point of rebellion within the Federation could be quite interesting too. Sort of a macro extension of allowing character flaws.
I really wanted to like Enterprise, but pretty as it is, it doesn't do it for me. I think the series could be revitalized, without "giving it a rest", if some philosophical changes are made rather than putting a different cast in the same polarity-reversing and particle-du-jour physics scenarios where every Star Trek has gone before.
I bought my PS2 basically as a DVD player that also would play bargain-bin RPGs, e.g. all those PS1 titles I missed out on before. Since then I've bought a few PS2 titles, but most of my playstation library is made up of cheap old PS1 games.
Never having had a PS1, backwards compatibility on the PS2 was a big deal for me, it was like getting two systems in one. I don't have an x-box, and I'm not likely to get the next one of that line either but the ability to play a bargain-bin Panzer Dragoon Orta or Halo certainly would be appealing.
Game Boy has been the best example of backwards compatibility; the fanciest GBA SP of today and even the dual-screened Gameboy of the future will still play the original circa-1988 games. Granted, the Game Boy evolved in small increments, but apart from HDTV resolution and more megahertz, what's the next x-box going to do that the current one doesn't?
Even for folks that don't actually take advantage of a system's backwards compatibility, it's a strong selling point. The device seems more universal. AMD's x86-64 is cool for some of the same reasons. It's the new hotness, but the old and busted stuff still works on it.
It's not as though either of those things can't easily be added. I would bet that anybody who knows and cares what PAM is (i.e. you) wouldn't install a distro's defaults and be done with it anyway. I use Slackware, but do all kinds of system tweaking myself, compiling new sendmail's and apache's from source when there's a bugfix or new feature I care about. If I also cared about PAM, I'd install that too. There's nothing about a Slackware box that makes it any harder to set up PAM than anything else, unless you're looking to have it installed and enabled by default, which is a security risk especially for the install-and-forget-about-it types.
I'm personally a little disappointed 2.6 isn't going to be the default Slack 10 kernel, but in all honesty, I haven't run an out-of-the-box kernel for years. If the modutils and everything are ready for it, as looks to be the case, I don't see how it's any different than doing an install and then building a fresh kernel.org kernel.
Say you got the latest Red Hat, Fedora I guess it's called now, would you keep the default kernel, or keep the security systems set up according to their defaults? Given the fact that you can even discuss PAM and that you consider 2.4 stone-age, I'm guessing no.:^)
I guess what set me off is that you'd only use Slack for "smaller, simpler tasks", which is sort of a silly thing to say based on its default selection of packages. I like its traditional system layout, simple package handling, its old-fashioned/etc/rc.d/... stuff like that should determine what you use a distro for, not whether or not it defaults to using the new kernel or the almost-secure-now-we-hope authentication system of choice.
Hmm, were there maybe some not-quite-original ones that didn't have two slots? 'Cause I took them apart hoping to make one 64-meg machine and there was nowhere for more memory to go.
Anyway my point was, I want to run Linux on a 32 meg PowerPC. There's no technical reason why I can't do that, but to my knowledge, no distribution exists that is packaged in a way that will let it happen.
Metal Gear Solid(TS, 2, 3): non-shiny, "realistic" facial models, but there's something not quite right with the animation.
007-Everything or Nothing: face models and textures taken from actual human actors, still don't animate quite right or look "alive".
Final Fantasy XII: granted, there are only screenshots/movies to go on so far, but again, real-looking faces that don't move quite right.
Going off on a tangent, I've thought every Final Fantasy game that tried to look "real" (VIII, X, X-2, XI) came off as creepy, while the more abstract/toony ones (VI, VII, IX, Crystal Chronicles) were fantastic, in part due to being better able to relate to these abstract characters than not-quite-perfect ones, as the article mentions.
On the vanilla, x86 side of things I use pretty minimal stuff, slackware/home-brewed system setup, compile my own kernels, run blackbox/fluxbox, etc.
But a while back I inherited a couple of iMacs, the very original blue beachball-shaped ones. They had the standard 32 megs of ram (no expansion slots, of course) which wasn't even enough to run the OS8.5 or whatever they came with. So I thought I'd stick yellow dog on it (might have tried something else too, can't remember) but the install CD crashed because the installer itself (even in text mode!) required more ram than 32 megs.
My first experience with Linux was on an 486 with 8 megs of ram. Now, I didn't want to do anything fancy with these iMacs, maybe just a dumb-terminal type framebuffer x-server to remotely run web browsers from one of my servers or something. Or even just to have it run text-mode ssh/pine/lynx. But due to a bloated installer, I couldn't even do that.
I don't much care that mainstream distros have beefy requirements, but it would be nice if there were viable options for old pathetic hardware too. It's easy to dig up such stuff on the x86 side, but I failed miserably at finding something that would: + run on an original iMac + burn to a bootable CD (no floppy drive!) + be happy with 32 megs of memory If anybody knows of such a beast, let me know! I've got a pair of big translucent paperweights just itching to play some ascii quake over ssh!:^)
My flavor is Blackbox and/or Fluxbox, but you're spot-on about "my computer is a tool" thinking versus "my computer is a toy" thinking.
I wonder if it would be possible to do a lot of the "toy" stuff so many people like (or use by default) without the high memory/cpu requirements? If it's just a matter of having the stuff to explore and play with, you'd think something like xfce or enlightenment would take off. But the toy concept seems to go hand-in-hand with eye candy, so we need to load the alpha blending code, the anti-aliasing font libraries, the scalable vector graphics rendering engine, the bitmap skins, all that junk into core, then we need the cpu to juggle the fading in and out of tooltips, animated menus, and big chunky kparts modules, parsing xml for every little thing, all on top of the work the user's actually trying to do.
A lot of the information this process would be interested in (what parts of the frame are moving, what direction/speed, and relative to what other areas) is already used in MPEG-style compression (which I mean mpeg1/videoCD, mpeg2/DVD, mpeg4/divx...) in order to save space by copy & pasting sligtly diff'd image chunks along paths rather than storing every little piece of every frame.
I wonder if this technique uses and/or depends on those MPEG motion cues, or if it does all its own image/motion analysis? It would mean the difference between being a specific- or general-purpose movie 3d-ifying tool.
At first, motion pictures themselves were a novelty. Synchronized sound, color, wider viewing area, hell, even cut perspective changes and camera motion -- all these were novelties. They added another dimension (sorry, sorry!) to film, enhancing the experience and growing to lose their novelty status. Rather than films that served only to show "look, you hear my voice while you see my lips move!" or "look, bright colors everywhere!" those things just became standard filmmaking tools.
Time will tell whether 3D movies are viewer-friendly and/or affordable enough to really catch on. The special-glasses approaches have been too gimmicky or glitchy, perhaps this kind of display will get it right.
And this latest step, analyzing motion cues and faking a 3D movie out of a 2D one, well even if it sort-of works, it's a pretty cool idea. If 3D displays become standard/expected equipment, we'll still be able to play our old movies without having them look completely outdated. Hopefully the "original format" option will still be there, for us anti-colorization, anti-pan&scan folks.:^)
Not to fan the flames, but get real. I run a homebrew GNU/Linux box (still a 2.4 kernel, I'm lazy) at home, and XP at work. At work I can get almost a week out of a boot before Windows chokes on itself and needs to restart. At home, the local power grid and my lack of a UPS determines how often I restart.
Sure, Win2000 and XP are more stable than 95/98 or the travesty that was ME. So it has "come a long way". But let's not be silly and try to call it as stable as GNU/Linux. One crash a week, hell, even if it were once every six months, still seems pretty unstable to me. If that's an "out of touch" point of view, so be it. An OS shouldn't just decide it's had enough and flake out; I don't care how long it's been running.
Anywho, clustering something even the tiniest bit unstable just seems like a funny idea to me. We've all seen Windows behavior when too much stuff is open or a flaky driver has impaired its ability to operate, things gradually failing, the cursor suddenly trapped in just a portion of the screen, swap thrashing as though it were a sign of the apocolypse... The mental picture of racks and racks full of convulsing, imploding Windows boxen when somebody fires up the wrong version of Quicktime is just priceless.
You're right, it's complete nonsense to "own an idea". It's like claiming to own math, or own musical notes.
Unfortunately, those in power in the aforementioned "western" countries today can be pried away from common-sense, grounded-in-reality thinking by fancy doublespeak coming from the same sources as their campaign funding, and from lobbyists hired by corporations who would like to do something as ridiculous as own ideas and math.
Patents, copyrights, all the stuff that folks try to lump under the term "intellectual property", were created in the first place to keep inventors inventing, to give positive feedback to those who came up with innovative ideas. One way to provide such positive feedback would be a short-term monopoly on the new idea.
Unfortunately, even creative people can be greedy and/or lazy. Or sell-outs. Copyright life was lengthened many times. Patents were granted for all kinds of ridiculous and obvious concepts. Laws against infringement became more strict. Politicians heard plenty from lobbyists and campaign-funding corporations about how valuable such things are and how greatly they need protection in order for there to be any progress. It was bullshit, but the politicians heard very little to the contrary.
It got pretty ridiculous before I even became aware of these matters, and I think the same goes for a lot of people, given the amount of it-just-hit-me type alarm being expressed over these subjects. We're now on the defensive, with organizations like the EFF scrambling to get enough people to contact their senators and representatives in opposition to further "intellectual property" laws being bolstered. It's all we can do to create a little resistance, let alone propose disassembling some of the damaging legislation that's already in place.
I agree, and one of the things I like so much about Nintendo's hardware and software is that they act as though there aren't other big players out there, they come up with stuff they think will be fun and interesting.
One of my favorite "games" ever is Mario Paint on the SNES. I can only imagine how cool a modern, portable, touch-screen-enabled version of that would be.
Plenty of developers might not "get it", as has been discussed here, but I think those who do will start putting out really creative and fun stuff. Truly new ideas are, I think, sorely lacking right now in a game industry that's been MTV-ized by Sony and Microsoft.
Sure, I'm pumped about seeing a portable Goldeneye- or Zelda-type game in 3D, with a full screen to play on and another full touch screen for picking weapons/items and viewing maps/radars. That's innovation enough for me to want one of these. But what really interests me is that this opens up some new dimensions to gaming that haven't ever been explored.
Drawing clouds under a falling baby Mario to help him slow down is a simple idea, but it's a fresh and clever idea. Maybe spells get cast by mouse-gesture-like movements on the touch screen. Maybe a future WarioWare game mischieviously swaps screens on you, just to mess with your head. Maybe Monkey Ball DS uses the touch screen to give you more accurate tilt control than even the Gamecube's analog stick. Maybe you can draw on your buddy's point of view to guide him in a co-op game.
There are all kinds of ways to make a second, touch-sensitive screen an integral part of a game's experience. Even if it doesn't catch on and make it big, I just know there will be some real gems of gaming created for this thing.
For better or worse, precision-wise and fingerprint-wise, I'm thinking the touch screen will be finger/thumb-touched instead of (or in addition to?) pen-touched. Juggling a stylus then putting your thumbs back on the buttons wouldn't be very natural, and if there's one thing Nintendo knows it's intuitive, comfortable controls.
I don't see any stylus clip on the unit, though I suppose it could be buried in the dark black area or inside the hinges. Plus it would be terribly easy to lose a tiny little pen. Nintendo might be doing their best to start appealing to an older crowd, but they're not going to also start ignoring pokemon-aged kids!
I'm right-handed, but could easily use either hand to point at stuff. I started out really skeptical about this thing, but warm up to it a little more with each tidbit of news.
...But I fear you're not. You'd think businesses and schools would be the last stronghold, but those have been "infected" too. Microsoft makes schools and businesses alike offers they can't refuse. Even if those groups resisted with all their might, there is something bigger at work here.
These aren't some random chunks of bad news suddenly coming together and giving us these nightmares; this stuff has been a long time coming. Getting folks to think that software and music and television all come from magic far-away places floating somewhere above everyday life, that was important. That's why music and television programming are so streamlined, overproduced and bottom-line optimized. Meanwhile, if you buy a computer the way a normal person does, it has Windows on it. Period. Windows has traditionally been a saddle that's comfortable enough that most people don't mind the bundled blinders.
Well before the whole AOL/Time Warner thing, Microsoft, AOL, Compuserve, you name it, they were all about getting computing to work more like "big media", so that similar profits could be reaped and similar big-dollar deals made. At the same time, "big media" were seeing something on the horizon that scared them. Consumers could perfectly recreate media, be it their own or anyone else's material. If they could get their hooks into computing and somehow stop this, they too could sit tight and enjoy the same profit-reaping and deal-making that they were used to.
That so many companies are behind this from day one just shows how badly this is wanted by those at the top of those industries. And when it comes time to try and legally require all this nonsense (notice how both software companies and big media have been getting more aggressive legally? Also no accident), multitudes of deep-pocketed corporations have rather a lot more lobbying and political funding clout than do "business and academia", let alone the odd free-thinking individual who's interested in _doing_ as opposed to consuming.
I don't want to believe it either, but this is one nightmare that only gets worse when we wake up each morning.
Slashdot Mirror
That was my first thought too, upon learning about the light and dark beams. I wonder how big the crossover is between Metroid and Ikaruga fans. I'd say being an old-school or hard-core (pick your favourite term) would be a common thread, but the Prime games seem to appeal to a wider audience than the 2D Metroid games of glory days gone by did.
In any case, I doubt there will be much high-score sets-of-three chaining going on with Echoes, but I'll bet the speed-runners of the world are licking their chops!
I don't know about you, but I'd sure as hell never run a small app found on a P2P network. Not that GNU/Linux would know what to do with a Windows app anyway.
Besides, what the RIAA failed to recognize and what a lot of people still fail to see is that peer-to-peer networks ARE advertising, the best and cheapest kind of advertising one can have: word-of-mouth. Except I don't even have to move my lips, and I can tell a hundred people who can each tell a hundred people. The fact is, the best way for a band to get paying fans is through exposure. Top-40 radio and Real World, er, MTV, don't do much for anyone but a few selected mediocre bands. Napster exposed everybody's music to everybody's ears. If your primary goal is selling music, that's good. If your primary goal is iron-fisted control, that's bad. Too bad the execs are blind to the distinction between those concepts. And too bad it led them to do stupid things like destroy the best thing that ever happened to them.
I've been thinking about that too, but if you look at the different-shaped GBA and old-style GBC/GB carts, you'll see that a slot could be made to accept a GBA game but a GBC one physically wouldn't slide in. Nobody who's got their hands on a DS has revealed whether that's the case or not, at least to my knowledge.
I hope the physical limitation isn't there, so that a future DS card with emulation software on it could make classic GB/GBC games playable on the DS, but it wouldn't surprise me greatly if the old carts physically just don't fit. The fact that the DS plays GBA games at all is a little confusing, since it's supposed to be a third platform and not a replacement. I personally think it will serve as a replacement anyway, and in that case, one-generation backwards compatibility is better than none, but that's been one of the really cool things about Game Boy over the years -- all the old stuff would just work with newer sleeker systems.
Anyhow I'm just rambling at this point, but I would advise not to get your hopes up for emulation until you hold a DS in your hands and verify that you can physically stick a GBC game into it.
By nature, a Free Software project has to be more honest about how it works. If it's not legal to include something, the folks who maintain the code are pretty likely to know that, and see to it that the offending material doesn't get put in, or gets taken out if it's there already. That's a large part of why the whole SCO thing is such a joke.
Commercial software vendors probably also know about those legal issues, but it's not like submarine patent owners can go grepping the code for some given algorithm. Plus, in the case of Adobe-type companies, the GIF licensing fee would be a drop in the $600-per-photoshop bucket.
Then there's the rest, regular folks who download stuff and run it for free, legal or not, who don't necessarily know and surely don't care about software patents, as long as they can draw their animated dancing hamster for their webpage, they don't care how it works or who thinks who owns what.
Had GIF compression never been patented, I wonder what might be different today. Maybe the folks who had to rip it out of their projects, the folks who had to deal with new libraries, the people who tried to spread the word about how GIFs shouldn't be used, would have been able to accomplish other things in all those fragments of time. I can't imagine a parallel non-LZW-patented universe being worse off, but I can imagine it being better. The same is true for any given software patent.
I bought a PS2, and to me that means I can use it to play games and DVDs, or I can cut it in pieces and prop up legs of a wobbly table with its remains. It's mine, and if I want to take it apart and solder up an IC that wasn't part of its original circuitry, don't you dare tell me I don't have the right to do so. I didn't rent the thing; I bought it.
The other angle is whether the IC I solder in there itself should be illegal to have. Certain physical things are illegal to own, from specific species of plants to some classes of weapons. Should a chunk of silicon that's capable of altering a PS2's lockout mechanisms be listed among those? That's certainly a step up from telling me I can't tinker with my own stuff. But it still doesn't make sense. A drug or a weapon, that's a physical thing. A partial circuit, that's a physical thing too, but an infinite variety of notably different physical things could be concocted that serve the same purpose. You could probably solder in some leads and wire 'em up to a commodity PC's serial port and have your computer emulate the modchip. (Maybe not a low-bandwidth serial port, but you get the idea) In that case should the PC be illegal too, since it's a physical device that's allowing burned games to run on a PS2?
If a PS2 only locked out burned copies of commercial games, and Sony offered to replace old, beat-up discs for next-to-nothing, this sort of action would have a bit more to stand on, since the non-harmful uses like homebrew games, imports, etc would be features of the system already instead of the modchip. But, it locks out all kinds of stuff, and Sony won't replace Rez on the cheap if I scratch it up, so these modchips have all kinds of legit uses in addition to the non-legit one. Every heavy, blunt, or sharp object I own could be used to commit crimes much worse than copyright infringement, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be allowed to own them.
I'm with you; my DSL costs more than the 15 Mbit service mentioned in the article and has a pathetic upstream cap. It wouldn't bug me quite as much if I didn't know it was a totally artificial and arbitrary limit.
:^)
I understand ISPs' arguments that Joe Shmoe users shouldn't run web/ftp/shell/mail servers on their $499 WinXP boxes, but come on! Joe Shmoe ain't gonna pay $60 a month for his internet link either! It used to be an ISP would give you your login credentials and a pile of software for everything from ftp to gopher to telnet to usenet. Now you're given an autorun CD that splatters the ISP's logo onto IE, overwrites your prefs and tells you to think of the internet as a TV you can click on.
Perhaps when another killer P2P app comes along, one that doesn't get crushed and forced into selling out *coughnapster* perhaps demand for real, two-way internet throughput will reach a level ISPs will care about. Something like Squeak perhaps, but with that special-something that makes it a killer app.
I suggest P2P as a possible catalyst for upstream equality, but it could be anything really. For a while I thought blogging might do it, but people don't seem to mind not being in total control of their blogs (hell, I even don't) so I guess I'll keep my fingers crossed as each Next Big Thing® crops up.
I loved F-Zero X's X Cup! I only wish there was the option to save those tracks when the random numbers stumble upon a design that's extra-good.
;^) Here's hoping some such craziness dons on the developers in time for TimeSplitters 3!
In Japan, if you didn't mind plunking down some cash on the ill-fated 64DD, you could get an F-Zero expansion disk that included a track editor. I still wish that had been released here in some way; I was disappointed that F-Zero GX had no such extra. Editors are another good way to boost replay value. Random maps have the advantage of surprising the player, but in TimeSplitters 2 for example, I can create my own deathmatch or capture the flag... er, bag... maps to swap or play with my buddies. Since I suck at the single-player game and can't unlock all the built-in maps, that's a pretty attractive feature. Now, if there was some ingenious algorighm for generating a random deathmatch map, that would be the best of both worlds! No more accusations from my buddies that I know where the armor is.
I'm not so sure that a) video games are only a semi-serious art form or that b) they only have the capacity to give serious topics like religion with action-flic level treatment.
:^)
It's true many video games have shallow (or absent) stories. There's no creation story or complex morality behind pac-man, it's just pure fun, and is certainly "serious" art; it's called a masterpiece and a classic for good reasons. And while some games are basically interactive movies, some of which do have plenty of religious content (Final Fantasy X comes to mind) even the ones that only touch on religion can sometimes do so in meaningful ways.
In the newer Legend of Zelda games, I'm thinking primarily of Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker here, the stories are of approximately action-flic depth. A few reasonably rounded characters and a slew of flat supporting roles doing their part to help or hinder the hero on his way to get the bad guy. But every now and then, the dialogue mentions folklore and legends that at the very least create an illusion of tapping into a vast resource of Hyrulian (Hyrule is Zelda's game world) culture. We get the creation story with the 3 gods and what they each stand for, and how parts of the world and the inner spirit are to find balance. We get history of why these grand temples were built and the spiritual significance of the artifacts they hold. We even have the king of Hyrule and Gannondorf (the surprisingly non-flat villian) present conflicting interpretations of the actions the Gods have taken. I won't spoil the ending sequence of Wind Waker, but there's some serious game-world religion going on there, in a game that doesn't focus heavily on story.
I mentioned Final Fantasy X before, which does focus on story, and even has the great evil in the game literally named "Sin", and non-believers, and religious pilgrimages, and corruption within the church. It's present in so much of the game's story that I got the same uncomfortable feeling while going through those bits as I do in, say, a Catholic service (no offense anybody!) surrounded by people who will swear to God they believe they're drinking Jesus's blood and eating his body. The medium can and does treat religion pretty seriously if it fits the spirit of the game.
That said, can you imagine if religion were presented "seriously" or "deeply" in a game that wasn't a big long linear interactive movie? Mormons passing out miniature bibles to you on the sidewalks in Vice City... The Mushroom Kingdom factioning into those who worship Lakitu and those who just see him as a spiny-chucking bastard... That kind of stuff is part of why some of us use video games as an escape in the first place!
The "oops, try again in a few seconds"... yeah, that sucks. I chalk it up to Gmail's beta status. I do prefer it to the way Hotmail flakes out, you submit something, the server never answers, and eventually the browser times out and you're left wondering whether to resubmit.
I really dig the group by discussion thing. Matter of taste, I suppose. My guess is by the time it's out of beta, Gmail will have the option to show messages in a more traditional way as well, for folks like you.
Javascript is one of those necessary evils if you want a web app to act as responsive as a client program. In Gmail's case it's used for keyboard shortcuts (yayy!) and preventing the page from going all wonky if the server's acting up or there's a network hiccup. Would lynx support be neat? Of course. And given Google's friendliness with PDAs, cell phones etc (see http://www.google.com/imode ), I wouldn't doubt it will happen eventually. For the record, Hotmail requires javascript too. Yahoo mail, to my surprise, does not.
Fortunately, I've snatched up a beta Gmail account and am finding it to be the bee's knees thus far. I've been fed up with Yahoo for a long time. Had I gone with Hotmail I'd have been even more fed up.
For several years I've had to trim all kinds of stuff out of my email archives due to the claustrophobic 4- and 6-meg limit on Yahoo mail. Then suddenly I log in and there's 100 meg available. Well that sucks, I've deleted maybe half that in stuff I'd rather have kept over the years. And it's still Yahoo; they still puke up obnoxious ads every chanse they get, and at the end of every single outgoing message.
On the other hand, since the dot-bomb, most over-the-web services have gotten crippled or disappeared entirely for non-paying users. It's a breath of fresh air to see some things actually improve, regardless Microsoft's and Yahoo's motives for doing so.
If an all but ad-free environment, a clean interface and the other Google niceties become competitive features that many webmail services mimmick, then great, everybody wins, including those unwilling to switch services. But for my money (or lack of it), I'd rather be signed up with an outfit whose mission statement amounts to "don't be evil" rather than "always be evil except to save face".
Does "cedega" sound like a Final Fantasy spell to anyone else? Stronger than Cede and Ceda...
But anyway, I used to think things like WINE would hinder "true" GNU/Linux game development, and while that may be true, the games are going to be proprietary anyway, so really what's the difference between running a locked-up native binary and a locked-up WINE-translated one? And in the case of WineX, even the program doing the emulation/translation is non-Free. Folks who don't care that PC games aren't open-source shouldn't complain that the closed binary is for the wrong platform.
I actually liked Next Generation (got into it after the first few awkward seasons had already come and gone) but you're right, unflawed characters and literary references do not good Star Trek make.
My favorite episodes involved exactly the kind of stuff you're calling for, leaders making tough decisions and mistakes (Picard is assimilated, Riker orders a kamikazee attack) and real irony beyond "damn that prime directive".
I like the idea of conflicts that echo current world adversaries. Political fragmentation to the point of rebellion within the Federation could be quite interesting too. Sort of a macro extension of allowing character flaws.
I really wanted to like Enterprise, but pretty as it is, it doesn't do it for me. I think the series could be revitalized, without "giving it a rest", if some philosophical changes are made rather than putting a different cast in the same polarity-reversing and particle-du-jour physics scenarios where every Star Trek has gone before.
I bought my PS2 basically as a DVD player that also would play bargain-bin RPGs, e.g. all those PS1 titles I missed out on before. Since then I've bought a few PS2 titles, but most of my playstation library is made up of cheap old PS1 games.
Never having had a PS1, backwards compatibility on the PS2 was a big deal for me, it was like getting two systems in one. I don't have an x-box, and I'm not likely to get the next one of that line either but the ability to play a bargain-bin Panzer Dragoon Orta or Halo certainly would be appealing.
Game Boy has been the best example of backwards compatibility; the fanciest GBA SP of today and even the dual-screened Gameboy of the future will still play the original circa-1988 games. Granted, the Game Boy evolved in small increments, but apart from HDTV resolution and more megahertz, what's the next x-box going to do that the current one doesn't?
Even for folks that don't actually take advantage of a system's backwards compatibility, it's a strong selling point. The device seems more universal. AMD's x86-64 is cool for some of the same reasons. It's the new hotness, but the old and busted stuff still works on it.
It's not as though either of those things can't easily be added. I would bet that anybody who knows and cares what PAM is (i.e. you) wouldn't install a distro's defaults and be done with it anyway. I use Slackware, but do all kinds of system tweaking myself, compiling new sendmail's and apache's from source when there's a bugfix or new feature I care about. If I also cared about PAM, I'd install that too. There's nothing about a Slackware box that makes it any harder to set up PAM than anything else, unless you're looking to have it installed and enabled by default, which is a security risk especially for the install-and-forget-about-it types.
:^)
/etc/rc.d/... stuff like that should determine what you use a distro for, not whether or not it defaults to using the new kernel or the almost-secure-now-we-hope authentication system of choice.
I'm personally a little disappointed 2.6 isn't going to be the default Slack 10 kernel, but in all honesty, I haven't run an out-of-the-box kernel for years. If the modutils and everything are ready for it, as looks to be the case, I don't see how it's any different than doing an install and then building a fresh kernel.org kernel.
Say you got the latest Red Hat, Fedora I guess it's called now, would you keep the default kernel, or keep the security systems set up according to their defaults? Given the fact that you can even discuss PAM and that you consider 2.4 stone-age, I'm guessing no.
I guess what set me off is that you'd only use Slack for "smaller, simpler tasks", which is sort of a silly thing to say based on its default selection of packages. I like its traditional system layout, simple package handling, its old-fashioned
Hmm, were there maybe some not-quite-original ones that didn't have two slots? 'Cause I took them apart hoping to make one 64-meg machine and there was nowhere for more memory to go.
Anyway my point was, I want to run Linux on a 32 meg PowerPC. There's no technical reason why I can't do that, but to my knowledge, no distribution exists that is packaged in a way that will let it happen.
Metal Gear Solid(TS, 2, 3): non-shiny, "realistic" facial models, but there's something not quite right with the animation.
007-Everything or Nothing: face models and textures taken from actual human actors, still don't animate quite right or look "alive".
Final Fantasy XII: granted, there are only screenshots/movies to go on so far, but again, real-looking faces that don't move quite right.
Going off on a tangent, I've thought every Final Fantasy game that tried to look "real" (VIII, X, X-2, XI) came off as creepy, while the more abstract/toony ones (VI, VII, IX, Crystal Chronicles) were fantastic, in part due to being better able to relate to these abstract characters than not-quite-perfect ones, as the article mentions.
On the vanilla, x86 side of things I use pretty minimal stuff, slackware/home-brewed system setup, compile my own kernels, run blackbox/fluxbox, etc.
:^)
But a while back I inherited a couple of iMacs, the very original blue beachball-shaped ones. They had the standard 32 megs of ram (no expansion slots, of course) which wasn't even enough to run the OS8.5 or whatever they came with. So I thought I'd stick yellow dog on it (might have tried something else too, can't remember) but the install CD crashed because the installer itself (even in text mode!) required more ram than 32 megs.
My first experience with Linux was on an 486 with 8 megs of ram. Now, I didn't want to do anything fancy with these iMacs, maybe just a dumb-terminal type framebuffer x-server to remotely run web browsers from one of my servers or something. Or even just to have it run text-mode ssh/pine/lynx. But due to a bloated installer, I couldn't even do that.
I don't much care that mainstream distros have beefy requirements, but it would be nice if there were viable options for old pathetic hardware too. It's easy to dig up such stuff on the x86 side, but I failed miserably at finding something that would:
+ run on an original iMac
+ burn to a bootable CD (no floppy drive!)
+ be happy with 32 megs of memory
If anybody knows of such a beast, let me know! I've got a pair of big translucent paperweights just itching to play some ascii quake over ssh!
My flavor is Blackbox and/or Fluxbox, but you're spot-on about "my computer is a tool" thinking versus "my computer is a toy" thinking.
I wonder if it would be possible to do a lot of the "toy" stuff so many people like (or use by default) without the high memory/cpu requirements? If it's just a matter of having the stuff to explore and play with, you'd think something like xfce or enlightenment would take off. But the toy concept seems to go hand-in-hand with eye candy, so we need to load the alpha blending code, the anti-aliasing font libraries, the scalable vector graphics rendering engine, the bitmap skins, all that junk into core, then we need the cpu to juggle the fading in and out of tooltips, animated menus, and big chunky kparts modules, parsing xml for every little thing, all on top of the work the user's actually trying to do.
A lot of the information this process would be interested in (what parts of the frame are moving, what direction/speed, and relative to what other areas) is already used in MPEG-style compression (which I mean mpeg1/videoCD, mpeg2/DVD, mpeg4/divx...) in order to save space by copy & pasting sligtly diff'd image chunks along paths rather than storing every little piece of every frame.
I wonder if this technique uses and/or depends on those MPEG motion cues, or if it does all its own image/motion analysis? It would mean the difference between being a specific- or general-purpose movie 3d-ifying tool.
At first, motion pictures themselves were a novelty. Synchronized sound, color, wider viewing area, hell, even cut perspective changes and camera motion -- all these were novelties. They added another dimension (sorry, sorry!) to film, enhancing the experience and growing to lose their novelty status. Rather than films that served only to show "look, you hear my voice while you see my lips move!" or "look, bright colors everywhere!" those things just became standard filmmaking tools.
:^)
Time will tell whether 3D movies are viewer-friendly and/or affordable enough to really catch on. The special-glasses approaches have been too gimmicky or glitchy, perhaps this kind of display will get it right.
And this latest step, analyzing motion cues and faking a 3D movie out of a 2D one, well even if it sort-of works, it's a pretty cool idea. If 3D displays become standard/expected equipment, we'll still be able to play our old movies without having them look completely outdated. Hopefully the "original format" option will still be there, for us anti-colorization, anti-pan&scan folks.
Not to fan the flames, but get real. I run a homebrew GNU/Linux box (still a 2.4 kernel, I'm lazy) at home, and XP at work. At work I can get almost a week out of a boot before Windows chokes on itself and needs to restart. At home, the local power grid and my lack of a UPS determines how often I restart.
Sure, Win2000 and XP are more stable than 95/98 or the travesty that was ME. So it has "come a long way". But let's not be silly and try to call it as stable as GNU/Linux. One crash a week, hell, even if it were once every six months, still seems pretty unstable to me. If that's an "out of touch" point of view, so be it. An OS shouldn't just decide it's had enough and flake out; I don't care how long it's been running.
Anywho, clustering something even the tiniest bit unstable just seems like a funny idea to me. We've all seen Windows behavior when too much stuff is open or a flaky driver has impaired its ability to operate, things gradually failing, the cursor suddenly trapped in just a portion of the screen, swap thrashing as though it were a sign of the apocolypse... The mental picture of racks and racks full of convulsing, imploding Windows boxen when somebody fires up the wrong version of Quicktime is just priceless.
You're right, it's complete nonsense to "own an idea". It's like claiming to own math, or own musical notes.
Unfortunately, those in power in the aforementioned "western" countries today can be pried away from common-sense, grounded-in-reality thinking by fancy doublespeak coming from the same sources as their campaign funding, and from lobbyists hired by corporations who would like to do something as ridiculous as own ideas and math.
Patents, copyrights, all the stuff that folks try to lump under the term "intellectual property", were created in the first place to keep inventors inventing, to give positive feedback to those who came up with innovative ideas. One way to provide such positive feedback would be a short-term monopoly on the new idea.
Unfortunately, even creative people can be greedy and/or lazy. Or sell-outs. Copyright life was lengthened many times. Patents were granted for all kinds of ridiculous and obvious concepts. Laws against infringement became more strict. Politicians heard plenty from lobbyists and campaign-funding corporations about how valuable such things are and how greatly they need protection in order for there to be any progress. It was bullshit, but the politicians heard very little to the contrary.
It got pretty ridiculous before I even became aware of these matters, and I think the same goes for a lot of people, given the amount of it-just-hit-me type alarm being expressed over these subjects. We're now on the defensive, with organizations like the EFF scrambling to get enough people to contact their senators and representatives in opposition to further "intellectual property" laws being bolstered. It's all we can do to create a little resistance, let alone propose disassembling some of the damaging legislation that's already in place.
I agree, and one of the things I like so much about Nintendo's hardware and software is that they act as though there aren't other big players out there, they come up with stuff they think will be fun and interesting.
One of my favorite "games" ever is Mario Paint on the SNES. I can only imagine how cool a modern, portable, touch-screen-enabled version of that would be.
Plenty of developers might not "get it", as has been discussed here, but I think those who do will start putting out really creative and fun stuff. Truly new ideas are, I think, sorely lacking right now in a game industry that's been MTV-ized by Sony and Microsoft.
Sure, I'm pumped about seeing a portable Goldeneye- or Zelda-type game in 3D, with a full screen to play on and another full touch screen for picking weapons/items and viewing maps/radars. That's innovation enough for me to want one of these. But what really interests me is that this opens up some new dimensions to gaming that haven't ever been explored.
Drawing clouds under a falling baby Mario to help him slow down is a simple idea, but it's a fresh and clever idea. Maybe spells get cast by mouse-gesture-like movements on the touch screen. Maybe a future WarioWare game mischieviously swaps screens on you, just to mess with your head. Maybe Monkey Ball DS uses the touch screen to give you more accurate tilt control than even the Gamecube's analog stick. Maybe you can draw on your buddy's point of view to guide him in a co-op game.
There are all kinds of ways to make a second, touch-sensitive screen an integral part of a game's experience. Even if it doesn't catch on and make it big, I just know there will be some real gems of gaming created for this thing.
For better or worse, precision-wise and fingerprint-wise, I'm thinking the touch screen will be finger/thumb-touched instead of (or in addition to?) pen-touched. Juggling a stylus then putting your thumbs back on the buttons wouldn't be very natural, and if there's one thing Nintendo knows it's intuitive, comfortable controls.
I don't see any stylus clip on the unit, though I suppose it could be buried in the dark black area or inside the hinges. Plus it would be terribly easy to lose a tiny little pen. Nintendo might be doing their best to start appealing to an older crowd, but they're not going to also start ignoring pokemon-aged kids!
I'm right-handed, but could easily use either hand to point at stuff. I started out really skeptical about this thing, but warm up to it a little more with each tidbit of news.
...But I fear you're not. You'd think businesses and schools would be the last stronghold, but those have been "infected" too. Microsoft makes schools and businesses alike offers they can't refuse. Even if those groups resisted with all their might, there is something bigger at work here.
These aren't some random chunks of bad news suddenly coming together and giving us these nightmares; this stuff has been a long time coming. Getting folks to think that software and music and television all come from magic far-away places floating somewhere above everyday life, that was important. That's why music and television programming are so streamlined, overproduced and bottom-line optimized. Meanwhile, if you buy a computer the way a normal person does, it has Windows on it. Period. Windows has traditionally been a saddle that's comfortable enough that most people don't mind the bundled blinders.
Well before the whole AOL/Time Warner thing, Microsoft, AOL, Compuserve, you name it, they were all about getting computing to work more like "big media", so that similar profits could be reaped and similar big-dollar deals made. At the same time, "big media" were seeing something on the horizon that scared them. Consumers could perfectly recreate media, be it their own or anyone else's material. If they could get their hooks into computing and somehow stop this, they too could sit tight and enjoy the same profit-reaping and deal-making that they were used to.
That so many companies are behind this from day one just shows how badly this is wanted by those at the top of those industries. And when it comes time to try and legally require all this nonsense (notice how both software companies and big media have been getting more aggressive legally? Also no accident), multitudes of deep-pocketed corporations have rather a lot more lobbying and political funding clout than do "business and academia", let alone the odd free-thinking individual who's interested in _doing_ as opposed to consuming.
I don't want to believe it either, but this is one nightmare that only gets worse when we wake up each morning.