The first is that the cone density, as per your link, is far from even. In the center of the visual field it is three times as dense as at the ege, so most of those 60 million sensors will in fact be involved in looking at any decently sized picture.
Second, the fact that only 1/20th are for color and almost none are for blue is misleading. The brightness sensors are vastly more sensitive to blue than any other wavelength, which is why there are few blue specific sensors. It's also why bluer papers and fabrics appear whiter and blue LEDs are so blinding.
A red light is sensed as colour with very little brightness activation, which is why it's so good for car signal lights and astronomers use red flashlights.
Even if all 60 million sensors were for brightness rather than color, we'd still want to match most of those 60 million receptor sites with a monochrome pixel. It's not as if resolution doesn't matter in a monochrome picture. Brightness variation enhances the lower resolution color image the eye detects. It means that all the receptors are valid for a question of useful resolution.
Finally, and most critically, the eye is not a camera. It is not a single fixed object on a tripod that has one chance to detect an image and move on. We have two eyes that are not completely aligned. That at least doubles the amount of information we get from a scene. We also take many impressions of an object every second and combine them all into one mental image. As we do this, our body jiggles with the isotonic muscle contractions that stabilize the head. The retina pulses with our heartbeat.
The result of a 60 million sensor image that goes through constant temporal antialiasing, comparison between two sources, and is combined with the logical memory of the visual cortex which can hold certain kinds of information about line structure even when the eye looks away for a moment is an image of unparalleled depth. For this reason a trained eye can easily tell the difference between a 300 dpi image and a 1200 dpi image from a decent distance away.
Those are just the *eye* issues. I haven't even begun to get into issues like moire that show up on a digital camera more often than they do for the eye. When you're looking at someone's hair your eye depends on the precise level of moire to tell you how that hair is constructed and recreate some information that the eye hasn't directly sensed.
There's no question that a trained person could tell the differencee between a 7 megapixel print and a gigapixel print in very little time.
Now the question is, having covered all that, why do the physical limitations of the eye have anything to do with the resolution required for ordinary 4x5 prints? All people are looking for in 4x5 prints is a likeness of reality, not the experience of it. Of coure a standard 3 megapixel camera will give you a very nice 4x5 that reminds you of the time you and she were in Amsterdam. If such a print is indistinguishable from reality for you, if it completely duplicates all the visual information you normally receive, you ought to get to the opthamologist.
One tool does not substitute for another. I know artists who use crow quills. Nobody is so old that using a crow quill is "just what I learned in my childhood, I can't move on."
You use a crow quill if you want a certain line texture. You use a pen, pencil, or tablet for very different results. Art tools are defined by the limitations they place upon the artist.
Charlez Schultz used a certain pen nib for years. When the company making them went out of business he rushed over and bought up all the remaining stock rather than switch to a different nib. Another nib would have been very nearly the same in that it would be a fountain pen nib with the same ink, but he had trouble making his lines with anything else.
Gabe developed those characters on paper. He made a certain process. Drawn entirely on the tablet they probably won't look quite the same, feel quite the same, or act quite the same.
I learned to draw almost entirely on my 12x18 Wacom, so I'm perfectly content to make every piece from digital scratch. I haven't touched my scanner to start a digital piece in over a year.
Several sibling posts are talking about the problems their authors have with a tablet. The hand-eye disconnect or whatever. Those are silly answers to a silly question, though I'm always interested to read how people feel about tablets. If you ask a cellist why she plays the cello instead of the electric guitar you also won't get a sensible answer. It's... bigger? Deeper? Softer?
That isn't a stuck pixel. The Gameboy SP uses a front-lit screen, not a back lit. It's not a common kind of screen.
The result is that if a single bit of fluff gets in under the screen cover during manufacturing it becomes a mirror that reflects that light right back at you.
You only see it when the power is on because it's just a tiny, tiny thing. It wouldn't be apparent on a backlit screen.
I'm not returning it because I expected it be a PDA. I'm returning it because the UI is very bad and the sound quality is poor. There's no way that I should have to reset the machine this often.
Half the functions on the main menu are a trap. If you just want to play a game, you start up in the menu. That takes 2-3 seconds, yes. 40% of the screen real estate on that tiny touchpad is taken up by functions that involve submenus. If you go into *any submenu* by accident, you will have to reboot the machine.
Let me repeat. Exiting any submenu to the main menu reboots the machine. That is NOT the same as any console. On the Gamecube you can access the clock, the memory menu, and the television settings menu without individually power cycling to switch menus. You can then exit those settings menus and select your game. Ditto the X-Box dashboard. The way the DS is set up is archaic and reminds me of my Apple II.
My comment on the PDA was only in relation to the comment to which I was replying. He suggested a PDA cart. I wanted to give him a heads up that it's impossible. I tucked the UI gripes in as an aside.
As for "was that just what I wanted it to be" they did in fact describe a sleep-mode that would wake you up if another DS was nearby in sleep. They said Pictochat could then be used to discuss with the other owner what game to play. The sleep mode is present. It is documented in the manual, so I'm not just spinning in the world of hype. It's just that the implementation is very poor.
I'm returning my DS this morning. It has some major flaws.
I really wanted to like this machine. I *ached* to like it, because I want to see draw/chat becoming a daily thing.
I can sum it all up very neatly. It says that it has an "alarm." You would think that you set this alarm and the machine beeps at the time you've set, whatever you happen to be doing.
No such luck. The "alarm" is a special mode you put it in. While the "alarm" is active, you can't do anything else with the machine. It just displays the current time and the time the "alarm" will go off.
It's the same with every part of the DS software.
Want to PictoChat? The chatting's nice, but if you want to exit to the main menu you have to reset the machine. If you then want to check the time and date you have to reset the machine. If you change any of the user settings, like which screen GBA games will show up on when you run them, you have to reset the machine. If you're in Pictochat and you want to change your background color you'll end up resetting the machine twice!
Every time you reset it displays a several second startup screen and a health warning you have to click through.
What they had described was a multitasking system that would keep an eye out for other players, do the alarm stuff, and sleep when you weren't using it. What they gave us was a system with many modes, but no reasonable integration between them. It's a collection of kludges.
The game functionality is very nice if you just want to pop in a GBA or a DS game and play, but the bells and whistles are refugees from a 1994 handheld PC. So no, I really don't think a PDA card would work. A PDA requires an uninterrupted background OS of some sort to be watching out for your appointments. The DS just can't do that.
Oh, while I'm griping, the sound's got so much interference from two processors and two screens that in a good set of headphones the buzzing is nearly unbearable.
It's a pity you think that's misogyny. You do women a disservice.
Grandparent is saying that specific people are just selling their bodies, rather than selling music. He/she suggests rhetorically that if the music industry weren't available, those people would still sell their bodies elsewhere.
It says nothing about women as a whole. The fact that they're women isn't particularly relevant... imagine the same post rewritten around a boy band or some latin music stud. The post would then talk about how they'd be working as gigolos or some such. It would remain essentially intact.
A dislike of objectification and of prostitution is nothing like a hatred of women.
Reality television and the rest of the dreck suddenly makes a lot more sense if we're surveying people who are willing to spend the time writing down everything they watch for $5 a week.
I thought they used special boxes... I guess that only worked when the television landscape was more uniform.
Your wife buys you a crappy controller with 76 nintendo games on it that are freely available online via P2P. She spends $60 on it and it's a surprise for you.
Do you a) tell your wife she bought a stupid thing that's completely worthless, but you appreciate the thought or b) point out that it's a con and say "you know, there are some things I'll pirate online, but we probably shouldn't support the industry."
In the first case she chose a bad thing for you through ignorance. It's like you're disappointed in her. In the second, she was conned. She can feel righteously angry at the vendor. They're equally true.
B is much kinder, and there's really nothing wrong with it. It's the spin I'd use, and it's *certainly* what I'd use when lambasting the clerk for a return.
They might reply that way but they'd be selling the game short. The reason the graphics don't matter in Animal Crossing is that they create a consistent, believable universe. Yes, in the universe everything is cartoony. There are other games which have cartoony graphics... say, Quest 64, that look like shit.
It's all about the art, not the graphics power used to render it. I'm looking at some daikatana screenshots right now. The character models are wretched. In trying to push way too much detail in for the systems of the time, the artists made spindly, blotchy creatures with strange faces.
Consider the uproar over cel-shading in zelda... everyone preferred the older "realistic' Zelda at first. But then, that realistic Zelda had been almost perfeclty realized on the N64. The model in OOT had implied the existence of a shiny, uber-realistic anime world. So when we saw the original Spaceworld demo we said "Yes, that's what OOT looked like in my head."
Half-life, Goldeneye, the original Unreal... all very old games that leave a realistic impression in our heads in spite of their graphics.
So the delay and the dating of the graphics really weren't the biggest problem with daikatana. It was the poorly made art assets. I think they were so badly made because as the programming of the game slipped, the artists kept aiming their textures and models for a slightly higher level of hardware sophistication. This made the level of detail uneven.
Late-cycle Nintendo console games always have incredible graphics, despite five year old hardware, because the artists know what they're doing. People often ascribe this to knowing better "programming tricks" but it's just as much knowing the feel and character of the graphics that system displays.
You can buy $500 worth of oils or you can use a marker. Either way you need to know what you're doing.
Anyway, main point.... I like Animal Crossing. I just don't think it's a choice between a cartoony game and a game that uses all the graphics power available, even when released to compete with games that do.
First, a nice colour screen. Second, they brought the battery life UP to 15 hours.
It's already won. The displaying of photos is nice... I'll probably use it to carry my portfolio with me. "Oh, you're an artist? What kind of work do you do?"
But I'd buy it as my replacement iPod anyway. The photo bit is clever marketing of something that's *free* for them with the new screen.
There are video players, sure, that will do this, but like everything else about the iPod this is elegant.
The Griffin is fine but pretty limited. Turn right, turn left, click right, click left, click, long click. All the click commands tend to stick together so it's mainly useful on only the one axis.
I suggest using a gamepad and Joystick 2 Mouse 3.
I'm using a PS2 controller now, which gives me two analog sticks (four axes) and 16 or however many buttons. Moreover Joystick 2 Mouse supports a shift key system, so 15 buttons can be set to have two commands.
There's essentially nothing in the UI I can't control with it. I have it to the side of my keyboard and can use it without picking it up.
What's *really* great is that I have it mapped to control things like brush opacity in Corel Painter and take care of all the major shortcuts. With my Intuos 2 in one hand and the left half of the PS2 pad in my other, I don't need to touch the keyboard at all when painting. It reminds me of Data playing that strategy game with the cups on his fingers.
Wacom recently clued in to the importance of extra controls, but their Intuos 3 fingertrack system is currently more limited than the gamepad approach. Once the image software supports the tracks in a more creative way that may change.
PS2 controller for $20, adapter for $10, Joystick 2 Mouse 3 is free... $30. Most people already have a gamepad of some sort, too.
It won't bring down the price of games at all. Nothing ever does. Everyone on all the forums will whine about that.
What it will do is the same thing that cheaper production has done all along the line. It will *keep* the price at $50-$60 per title despite inflation. That's more or less what the price was eighteen years ago. Inflation has changed the value of $50 a lot since then, so games really are much cheaper than they were.
I'm going to sell you this elephant charm. It will protect you from wild elephants, and you can be sure it works! Do you see any elephants around here?
Zelda (a videogame starring a young Hylian boy (a videogame is a recreational electronic program (a program is a set of computer instructions(...))(a Hylian is something that looks like an Elf (an Elf was once a form of pixie but was redefined by J.R.R. Tolkein(...))))) will see a new version soon.
I wish I could have posted this in the better way, but of course the filters are trouble.
That's actually something Kerry was doing at the beginning. Didn't work so well... the explanations were far too long and complex to work on TV. Many of them simply couldn't be explained to an ordinary voter at all.
I'm no supporter of the "philosopher king" model of protecting "stupid" voters, but many voters do not want to wade through the intricacies of federal legislation. They want someone they can trust to do that for them. Bush seems like such a man to many... he won't bother you with the details. He'll take care of it. Don't worry.
The problem is that they are basing that trust on a flawed metric of voting consistency. Far better to see what the candidate has himself done... has he stolen or put others lives at risk through his partying? Has he put corporate interests above those of the common good when not a politician? Did he turn on his comrades when let out of the army by denouncing them as rapists and murderers? (A little against both sides.:)
The mud-slinging everyone denounces isn't really that bad. It may be a cheap and vicious way to get at a candidate, but it's at least arguing about the merits of a man that an ordinary person can understand.
Quotes from house discussions of bills are also pretty good. They may be out of context, but are not so hideously malformed as a voting record.
An awful lot of house vote trading is done after everyone is sure which way a bill's going to go anyway... if your representative sees that a very good bill is going to pass no matter what, it may be worth voting against that bill as a favour to some group so you can get a quid pro quo on something else that's important.
Only a stupid representative would vote entirely on the merits of the main point of any bill everytime. The smarter the representative is, the more effective he is, the more likely his record is to be speckled. It's the representatives who've sold out you can rely on... there's no higher bidder competing with the tobacco lobby, there'll be no switching horses in midstream on something like that.
These subtleties are hard to explain to someone who isn't an avid political amateur, but this part is easy: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." You have to be willing to adjust to circumstances.
It's just the stylus. Really, modern controllers *are* left-handed.
In the old days you had to hit the buttons really fast and the D-Pad was suited for the less coordinated task of just leaning back and forth. Or whatever. I think it could have gone either way.
Now we have the subtle and touchy anaolg stick under the thumb of the left hand. The less intense camera view stick is under the thumb of the right. Then again in an FPS the intensity is reversed again...
The result is that if you play a game like Super Monkey Ball which requires extraordinary precision you really notice how clumsy your non-dominant hand is. In the end when playing it, I just held the controller funny in my right hand alone. No buttons are involved.
The DS stylus must be located in the dominant hand, so they've designed to deal with handedness, but there's really no reason to complain on a normal console pad. In some games the control is right-handed-ish and in some left-ish. Either way you're using a whole set of learning that isn't really hand based.
After all, what handedness has a keyboard?:)
This is why any talk of John Kerry flip-flopping is nonsense. Regardless of which candidate you support, you should be aware that voting for or against a bill on a certain subject, say taxes, does not mean what it would seem.
A senator or congressman may vote to raise taxes because the tax raise is minor and one of the riders is really important. He may vote against gun control because the bill has a loathesome rider.
Any representative who was honestly and intelligently representing his consituents *would* flip-flop, rather than voting on the hot button name of the bill. The result is a voting record that's speckled and looks inconsistent.
The hypothetical disaster is a strange thing. It's a lot like the hypothetical terrorist attack.
Exactly what kind of natural disaster appears out of nowhere, complete disrupts all communications, and is dangerous in such a way that you only have ten minutes for your TV or radio to tell you what to do?
A meteorite strike? A major atomic attack? You can see hurricanes coming, earthquakes don't give warning but your TV can't help you much with them, you can see raining that may lead to floods...
I don't know much about tornado response.
Emergency broadcasts are *not* to give you information to which you must respond within ten minutes or else die. They are to keep the populace in order, give the city an awareness of which evacuation routes to take, this kind of thing.
This information will get transmitted to almost anybody who doesn't have a TV by the normal processes... "Gee, there's a blackout. I guess I'll go outside for a bit. Hey, Frank, what's up?"
All that said, if your area is prone to some disaster I haven't thought of, a disaster that will kill you if you haven't heard the broadcast, then you deserve to die for not buying a five dollar radio as much as anyone deserves to die for not buying a one dollar condom. Is that a reasonable definition of deserves? *shrug*
From another reply to this post I gather that you meant the "voice chat mode". There isn't one yet.
The only announced chat mode is PictoChat, which is great for drawing and such. Here's the best part:
"And a Nintendo DS in sleep mode will spring to life if it senses another DS in transmitting range, alerting users to each other's presence and setting the stage for an impromptu conversation or game session."
I haven't seen this emphasized elsewhere in the discussion. You're on the bus, some kid turns on his DS, and yours alerts you that you can whip his ass in the bundled Metroid FPS if you feel like it.
For this, wireless chat is brilliant. You can holler at your kids, but will you holler at strangers in the mall? "DOES ANYONE HAVE A DS AND WANT TO PLAY A GAME?"
It creates a whole secret DS club you can join... a nerd's secret handshake. I'm for that!
"My main problem concerning buddy icons and avatars and such is that the selections are simply too limited."
You're right, this is where it falls down. I collect a bunch of emotes, then I find I want to express wry exaperation. None of them are quite right... so I find myself wishing I had one, searching for it forever, not using it ever again.
What I've discovered is that if you install a Messenger Plus Handwriting plugin, everything changes. If I want a different expresison I just draw it. If I'm trying to show how I set something up, I draw it.
Admittedly I'm an illustrator... I spend more time drawing every day than I do talking. You don't have to be professionally trained to draw cute smiling faces. Most people have trained for hours in boring meetings.
I think this is where microsoft is really missing the boat on their Tablet PC system. My MSN plugin is error-prone because it's not supported by the OS. I have a wacom tablet, but I can't buy the Tablet OS because Microsoft invented a fictional market of brilliant young businesspeople rushing about and jotting cocktail napkin ideas worth a million dollars to each other. They locked the OS to licensed tablets and pitched to that market, so I'm stuck.
As usual, a marketing concept has crushed a real possibility. Writing isn't a very good way to conduct business, but drawing is a great way to get a feeling across to someone who isn't there. My friends have picked up on it and draw back to me... they're not all artists, but they do alright. Many people spend their time on PaintChat for this reason, but only the ones who can wander through the labyrinth of the various incomplete English translations and bizarre server rules.
The graphical experience is definitely missing from chat. 3-D is just a silly way to go about it.
It's very frustrating that the slashdot crowd won't let you make *just one point*. You also have to address everything that might be similar to what you said, but isn't.
I'm not attacking solar cells as they stand. I'm defending the usefulness of research into these new cells.
Solar cells are very toxic to produceon a per-weight basis. This toxicity is manageable and less dangerous than NiCad. It pays for itself in lower conventional pollution and similar devices are being made heedless of the toxicity. Sure.
I'd question the "locked away for 20-30 years" bit, in this context. If you were to put solar cells in more consumer electronics as the article suggests, you'd have the same issue with throwing them away to be melted down.
Nonetheless, solar cells are manageable. The toxicity of nuclear power can also be well managed to provide some of the cleanest energy around. That doesn't mean solar cells, wind-power, and hydro aren't worthwhile to avoid dealing with the political hot potato that is nuclear waste.
Like it or not, solar cell toxicity is an issue in the real world. It may be silly to worry about it, but the way solar cells chart is causing problems for them. Therefore, a less-toxic solar cell is a useful thing to develop, competitive in value with directly addressing homelessness. *This* is the point I was addressing, and what I said in defence of it is not a serious distortion of the facts.
If you'd prefer to protest conventional CPU chips to make the whole thing fair, go for it. I'm going to A) not protest CPUs, considering the overall worth more than the cost, B) not protest current solar cells, and C) trumpet the arrival of cleaner methods of doing pretty much anything. Agreed?
It's possible to make *any* achievement sound trivial by choosing the right words. You call this "using Spinach to power your cell phone" because you're just reading the summary.
Consider that conventional solar cells are among the most toxic devices now made and you've got a new way to avoid dumping horrible chemicals into the environment, a sustainable way to have solar power, and spin-offs of the knowledge to more efficiently reclamate CO2 pollutiona t the production site. How does "the survival of humans on earth" stack up to "ending homelessness"?
Of course, the ways to end homelessness in the long run are drug treatment, education, and job creation. New kinds of cell-phones, and hence more jobs, are the main place you'd use engineers and organic chemists to fix homelessness.
Slashdot Mirror
There are three important factors involved here.
The first is that the cone density, as per your link, is far from even. In the center of the visual field it is three times as dense as at the ege, so most of those 60 million sensors will in fact be involved in looking at any decently sized picture.
Second, the fact that only 1/20th are for color and almost none are for blue is misleading. The brightness sensors are vastly more sensitive to blue than any other wavelength, which is why there are few blue specific sensors. It's also why bluer papers and fabrics appear whiter and blue LEDs are so blinding.
A red light is sensed as colour with very little brightness activation, which is why it's so good for car signal lights and astronomers use red flashlights.
Even if all 60 million sensors were for brightness rather than color, we'd still want to match most of those 60 million receptor sites with a monochrome pixel. It's not as if resolution doesn't matter in a monochrome picture. Brightness variation enhances the lower resolution color image the eye detects. It means that all the receptors are valid for a question of useful resolution.
Finally, and most critically, the eye is not a camera. It is not a single fixed object on a tripod that has one chance to detect an image and move on. We have two eyes that are not completely aligned. That at least doubles the amount of information we get from a scene. We also take many impressions of an object every second and combine them all into one mental image. As we do this, our body jiggles with the isotonic muscle contractions that stabilize the head. The retina pulses with our heartbeat.
The result of a 60 million sensor image that goes through constant temporal antialiasing, comparison between two sources, and is combined with the logical memory of the visual cortex which can hold certain kinds of information about line structure even when the eye looks away for a moment is an image of unparalleled depth. For this reason a trained eye can easily tell the difference between a 300 dpi image and a 1200 dpi image from a decent distance away.
Those are just the *eye* issues. I haven't even begun to get into issues like moire that show up on a digital camera more often than they do for the eye. When you're looking at someone's hair your eye depends on the precise level of moire to tell you how that hair is constructed and recreate some information that the eye hasn't directly sensed.
There's no question that a trained person could tell the differencee between a 7 megapixel print and a gigapixel print in very little time.
Now the question is, having covered all that, why do the physical limitations of the eye have anything to do with the resolution required for ordinary 4x5 prints? All people are looking for in 4x5 prints is a likeness of reality, not the experience of it. Of coure a standard 3 megapixel camera will give you a very nice 4x5 that reminds you of the time you and she were in Amsterdam. If such a print is indistinguishable from reality for you, if it completely duplicates all the visual information you normally receive, you ought to get to the opthamologist.
One tool does not substitute for another. I know artists who use crow quills. Nobody is so old that using a crow quill is "just what I learned in my childhood, I can't move on."
You use a crow quill if you want a certain line texture. You use a pen, pencil, or tablet for very different results. Art tools are defined by the limitations they place upon the artist.
Charlez Schultz used a certain pen nib for years. When the company making them went out of business he rushed over and bought up all the remaining stock rather than switch to a different nib. Another nib would have been very nearly the same in that it would be a fountain pen nib with the same ink, but he had trouble making his lines with anything else.
Gabe developed those characters on paper. He made a certain process. Drawn entirely on the tablet they probably won't look quite the same, feel quite the same, or act quite the same.
I learned to draw almost entirely on my 12x18 Wacom, so I'm perfectly content to make every piece from digital scratch. I haven't touched my scanner to start a digital piece in over a year.
Several sibling posts are talking about the problems their authors have with a tablet. The hand-eye disconnect or whatever. Those are silly answers to a silly question, though I'm always interested to read how people feel about tablets. If you ask a cellist why she plays the cello instead of the electric guitar you also won't get a sensible answer. It's... bigger? Deeper? Softer?
It's a different instrument.
That isn't a stuck pixel. The Gameboy SP uses a front-lit screen, not a back lit. It's not a common kind of screen.
The result is that if a single bit of fluff gets in under the screen cover during manufacturing it becomes a mirror that reflects that light right back at you.
You only see it when the power is on because it's just a tiny, tiny thing. It wouldn't be apparent on a backlit screen.
White speck policy at Nintendo
I'm not returning it because I expected it be a PDA. I'm returning it because the UI is very bad and the sound quality is poor. There's no way that I should have to reset the machine this often.
Half the functions on the main menu are a trap. If you just want to play a game, you start up in the menu. That takes 2-3 seconds, yes. 40% of the screen real estate on that tiny touchpad is taken up by functions that involve submenus. If you go into *any submenu* by accident, you will have to reboot the machine.
Let me repeat. Exiting any submenu to the main menu reboots the machine. That is NOT the same as any console. On the Gamecube you can access the clock, the memory menu, and the television settings menu without individually power cycling to switch menus. You can then exit those settings menus and select your game. Ditto the X-Box dashboard. The way the DS is set up is archaic and reminds me of my Apple II.
My comment on the PDA was only in relation to the comment to which I was replying. He suggested a PDA cart. I wanted to give him a heads up that it's impossible. I tucked the UI gripes in as an aside.
As for "was that just what I wanted it to be" they did in fact describe a sleep-mode that would wake you up if another DS was nearby in sleep. They said Pictochat could then be used to discuss with the other owner what game to play. The sleep mode is present. It is documented in the manual, so I'm not just spinning in the world of hype. It's just that the implementation is very poor.
I'm returning my DS this morning. It has some major flaws.
I really wanted to like this machine. I *ached* to like it, because I want to see draw/chat becoming a daily thing.
I can sum it all up very neatly. It says that it has an "alarm." You would think that you set this alarm and the machine beeps at the time you've set, whatever you happen to be doing.
No such luck. The "alarm" is a special mode you put it in. While the "alarm" is active, you can't do anything else with the machine. It just displays the current time and the time the "alarm" will go off.
It's the same with every part of the DS software.
Want to PictoChat? The chatting's nice, but if you want to exit to the main menu you have to reset the machine. If you then want to check the time and date you have to reset the machine. If you change any of the user settings, like which screen GBA games will show up on when you run them, you have to reset the machine. If you're in Pictochat and you want to change your background color you'll end up resetting the machine twice!
Every time you reset it displays a several second startup screen and a health warning you have to click through.
What they had described was a multitasking system that would keep an eye out for other players, do the alarm stuff, and sleep when you weren't using it. What they gave us was a system with many modes, but no reasonable integration between them. It's a collection of kludges.
The game functionality is very nice if you just want to pop in a GBA or a DS game and play, but the bells and whistles are refugees from a 1994 handheld PC. So no, I really don't think a PDA card would work. A PDA requires an uninterrupted background OS of some sort to be watching out for your appointments. The DS just can't do that.
Oh, while I'm griping, the sound's got so much interference from two processors and two screens that in a good set of headphones the buzzing is nearly unbearable.
It's a pity you think that's misogyny. You do women a disservice.
Grandparent is saying that specific people are just selling their bodies, rather than selling music. He/she suggests rhetorically that if the music industry weren't available, those people would still sell their bodies elsewhere.
It says nothing about women as a whole. The fact that they're women isn't particularly relevant... imagine the same post rewritten around a boy band or some latin music stud. The post would then talk about how they'd be working as gigolos or some such. It would remain essentially intact.
A dislike of objectification and of prostitution is nothing like a hatred of women.
Reality television and the rest of the dreck suddenly makes a lot more sense if we're surveying people who are willing to spend the time writing down everything they watch for $5 a week.
I thought they used special boxes... I guess that only worked when the television landscape was more uniform.
Your wife buys you a crappy controller with 76 nintendo games on it that are freely available online via P2P. She spends $60 on it and it's a surprise for you.
Do you a) tell your wife she bought a stupid thing that's completely worthless, but you appreciate the thought or b) point out that it's a con and say "you know, there are some things I'll pirate online, but we probably shouldn't support the industry."
In the first case she chose a bad thing for you through ignorance. It's like you're disappointed in her. In the second, she was conned. She can feel righteously angry at the vendor. They're equally true.
B is much kinder, and there's really nothing wrong with it. It's the spin I'd use, and it's *certainly* what I'd use when lambasting the clerk for a return.
They might reply that way but they'd be selling the game short. The reason the graphics don't matter in Animal Crossing is that they create a consistent, believable universe. Yes, in the universe everything is cartoony. There are other games which have cartoony graphics... say, Quest 64, that look like shit.
It's all about the art, not the graphics power used to render it. I'm looking at some daikatana screenshots right now. The character models are wretched. In trying to push way too much detail in for the systems of the time, the artists made spindly, blotchy creatures with strange faces.
Consider the uproar over cel-shading in zelda... everyone preferred the older "realistic' Zelda at first. But then, that realistic Zelda had been almost perfeclty realized on the N64. The model in OOT had implied the existence of a shiny, uber-realistic anime world. So when we saw the original Spaceworld demo we said "Yes, that's what OOT looked like in my head."
Half-life, Goldeneye, the original Unreal... all very old games that leave a realistic impression in our heads in spite of their graphics.
So the delay and the dating of the graphics really weren't the biggest problem with daikatana. It was the poorly made art assets. I think they were so badly made because as the programming of the game slipped, the artists kept aiming their textures and models for a slightly higher level of hardware sophistication. This made the level of detail uneven.
Late-cycle Nintendo console games always have incredible graphics, despite five year old hardware, because the artists know what they're doing. People often ascribe this to knowing better "programming tricks" but it's just as much knowing the feel and character of the graphics that system displays.
You can buy $500 worth of oils or you can use a marker. Either way you need to know what you're doing.
Anyway, main point.... I like Animal Crossing. I just don't think it's a choice between a cartoony game and a game that uses all the graphics power available, even when released to compete with games that do.
Like Animal Crossing!
Oh.
If it's all red, it's always solved... until your girlfriend points out it's six different shades of red. Oy.
First, a nice colour screen. Second, they brought the battery life UP to 15 hours.
It's already won. The displaying of photos is nice... I'll probably use it to carry my portfolio with me. "Oh, you're an artist? What kind of work do you do?"
But I'd buy it as my replacement iPod anyway. The photo bit is clever marketing of something that's *free* for them with the new screen.
There are video players, sure, that will do this, but like everything else about the iPod this is elegant.
The Griffin is fine but pretty limited. Turn right, turn left, click right, click left, click, long click. All the click commands tend to stick together so it's mainly useful on only the one axis.
I suggest using a gamepad and Joystick 2 Mouse 3.
I'm using a PS2 controller now, which gives me two analog sticks (four axes) and 16 or however many buttons. Moreover Joystick 2 Mouse supports a shift key system, so 15 buttons can be set to have two commands.
There's essentially nothing in the UI I can't control with it. I have it to the side of my keyboard and can use it without picking it up.
What's *really* great is that I have it mapped to control things like brush opacity in Corel Painter and take care of all the major shortcuts. With my Intuos 2 in one hand and the left half of the PS2 pad in my other, I don't need to touch the keyboard at all when painting. It reminds me of Data playing that strategy game with the cups on his fingers.
Wacom recently clued in to the importance of extra controls, but their Intuos 3 fingertrack system is currently more limited than the gamepad approach. Once the image software supports the tracks in a more creative way that may change.
PS2 controller for $20, adapter for $10, Joystick 2 Mouse 3 is free... $30. Most people already have a gamepad of some sort, too.
Aniseed has been used to throw off tracking dogs for hundreds of years. It's sometimes called dog pepper.
It won't bring down the price of games at all. Nothing ever does. Everyone on all the forums will whine about that.
What it will do is the same thing that cheaper production has done all along the line. It will *keep* the price at $50-$60 per title despite inflation. That's more or less what the price was eighteen years ago. Inflation has changed the value of $50 a lot since then, so games really are much cheaper than they were.
I'm going to sell you this elephant charm. It will protect you from wild elephants, and you can be sure it works! Do you see any elephants around here?
Zelda (a videogame starring a young Hylian boy (a videogame is a recreational electronic program (a program is a set of computer instructions(...))(a Hylian is something that looks like an Elf (an Elf was once a form of pixie but was redefined by J.R.R. Tolkein(...))))) will see a new version soon.
I wish I could have posted this in the better way, but of course the filters are trouble.
That's actually something Kerry was doing at the beginning. Didn't work so well... the explanations were far too long and complex to work on TV. Many of them simply couldn't be explained to an ordinary voter at all.
:)
I'm no supporter of the "philosopher king" model of protecting "stupid" voters, but many voters do not want to wade through the intricacies of federal legislation. They want someone they can trust to do that for them. Bush seems like such a man to many... he won't bother you with the details. He'll take care of it. Don't worry.
The problem is that they are basing that trust on a flawed metric of voting consistency. Far better to see what the candidate has himself done... has he stolen or put others lives at risk through his partying? Has he put corporate interests above those of the common good when not a politician? Did he turn on his comrades when let out of the army by denouncing them as rapists and murderers? (A little against both sides.
The mud-slinging everyone denounces isn't really that bad. It may be a cheap and vicious way to get at a candidate, but it's at least arguing about the merits of a man that an ordinary person can understand.
Quotes from house discussions of bills are also pretty good. They may be out of context, but are not so hideously malformed as a voting record.
An awful lot of house vote trading is done after everyone is sure which way a bill's going to go anyway... if your representative sees that a very good bill is going to pass no matter what, it may be worth voting against that bill as a favour to some group so you can get a quid pro quo on something else that's important.
Only a stupid representative would vote entirely on the merits of the main point of any bill everytime. The smarter the representative is, the more effective he is, the more likely his record is to be speckled. It's the representatives who've sold out you can rely on... there's no higher bidder competing with the tobacco lobby, there'll be no switching horses in midstream on something like that.
These subtleties are hard to explain to someone who isn't an avid political amateur, but this part is easy: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." You have to be willing to adjust to circumstances.
It's just the stylus. Really, modern controllers *are* left-handed. In the old days you had to hit the buttons really fast and the D-Pad was suited for the less coordinated task of just leaning back and forth. Or whatever. I think it could have gone either way. Now we have the subtle and touchy anaolg stick under the thumb of the left hand. The less intense camera view stick is under the thumb of the right. Then again in an FPS the intensity is reversed again... The result is that if you play a game like Super Monkey Ball which requires extraordinary precision you really notice how clumsy your non-dominant hand is. In the end when playing it, I just held the controller funny in my right hand alone. No buttons are involved. The DS stylus must be located in the dominant hand, so they've designed to deal with handedness, but there's really no reason to complain on a normal console pad. In some games the control is right-handed-ish and in some left-ish. Either way you're using a whole set of learning that isn't really hand based. After all, what handedness has a keyboard? :)
This is why any talk of John Kerry flip-flopping is nonsense. Regardless of which candidate you support, you should be aware that voting for or against a bill on a certain subject, say taxes, does not mean what it would seem.
A senator or congressman may vote to raise taxes because the tax raise is minor and one of the riders is really important. He may vote against gun control because the bill has a loathesome rider.
Any representative who was honestly and intelligently representing his consituents *would* flip-flop, rather than voting on the hot button name of the bill. The result is a voting record that's speckled and looks inconsistent.
Legislation doesn't tabulate that way.
Exactly what kind of natural disaster appears out of nowhere, complete disrupts all communications, and is dangerous in such a way that you only have ten minutes for your TV or radio to tell you what to do?
A meteorite strike? A major atomic attack? You can see hurricanes coming, earthquakes don't give warning but your TV can't help you much with them, you can see raining that may lead to floods...
I don't know much about tornado response.
Emergency broadcasts are *not* to give you information to which you must respond within ten minutes or else die. They are to keep the populace in order, give the city an awareness of which evacuation routes to take, this kind of thing.
This information will get transmitted to almost anybody who doesn't have a TV by the normal processes... "Gee, there's a blackout. I guess I'll go outside for a bit. Hey, Frank, what's up?"
All that said, if your area is prone to some disaster I haven't thought of, a disaster that will kill you if you haven't heard the broadcast, then you deserve to die for not buying a five dollar radio as much as anyone deserves to die for not buying a one dollar condom. Is that a reasonable definition of deserves? *shrug*
From another reply to this post I gather that you meant the "voice chat mode". There isn't one yet.
The only announced chat mode is PictoChat, which is great for drawing and such. Here's the best part:
"And a Nintendo DS in sleep mode will spring to life if it senses another DS in transmitting range, alerting users to each other's presence and setting the stage for an impromptu conversation or game session."
I haven't seen this emphasized elsewhere in the discussion. You're on the bus, some kid turns on his DS, and yours alerts you that you can whip his ass in the bundled Metroid FPS if you feel like it.
For this, wireless chat is brilliant. You can holler at your kids, but will you holler at strangers in the mall? "DOES ANYONE HAVE A DS AND WANT TO PLAY A GAME?"
It creates a whole secret DS club you can join... a nerd's secret handshake. I'm for that!
You're right, this is where it falls down. I collect a bunch of emotes, then I find I want to express wry exaperation. None of them are quite right... so I find myself wishing I had one, searching for it forever, not using it ever again.
What I've discovered is that if you install a Messenger Plus Handwriting plugin, everything changes. If I want a different expresison I just draw it. If I'm trying to show how I set something up, I draw it.
Admittedly I'm an illustrator... I spend more time drawing every day than I do talking. You don't have to be professionally trained to draw cute smiling faces. Most people have trained for hours in boring meetings.
I think this is where microsoft is really missing the boat on their Tablet PC system. My MSN plugin is error-prone because it's not supported by the OS. I have a wacom tablet, but I can't buy the Tablet OS because Microsoft invented a fictional market of brilliant young businesspeople rushing about and jotting cocktail napkin ideas worth a million dollars to each other. They locked the OS to licensed tablets and pitched to that market, so I'm stuck.
As usual, a marketing concept has crushed a real possibility. Writing isn't a very good way to conduct business, but drawing is a great way to get a feeling across to someone who isn't there. My friends have picked up on it and draw back to me... they're not all artists, but they do alright. Many people spend their time on PaintChat for this reason, but only the ones who can wander through the labyrinth of the various incomplete English translations and bizarre server rules.
The graphical experience is definitely missing from chat. 3-D is just a silly way to go about it.
I'm not attacking solar cells as they stand. I'm defending the usefulness of research into these new cells.
Solar cells are very toxic to produceon a per-weight basis. This toxicity is manageable and less dangerous than NiCad. It pays for itself in lower conventional pollution and similar devices are being made heedless of the toxicity. Sure.
I'd question the "locked away for 20-30 years" bit, in this context. If you were to put solar cells in more consumer electronics as the article suggests, you'd have the same issue with throwing them away to be melted down.
Nonetheless, solar cells are manageable. The toxicity of nuclear power can also be well managed to provide some of the cleanest energy around. That doesn't mean solar cells, wind-power, and hydro aren't worthwhile to avoid dealing with the political hot potato that is nuclear waste.
Like it or not, solar cell toxicity is an issue in the real world. It may be silly to worry about it, but the way solar cells chart is causing problems for them. Therefore, a less-toxic solar cell is a useful thing to develop, competitive in value with directly addressing homelessness. *This* is the point I was addressing, and what I said in defence of it is not a serious distortion of the facts.
If you'd prefer to protest conventional CPU chips to make the whole thing fair, go for it. I'm going to A) not protest CPUs, considering the overall worth more than the cost, B) not protest current solar cells, and C) trumpet the arrival of cleaner methods of doing pretty much anything. Agreed?
It's possible to make *any* achievement sound trivial by choosing the right words. You call this "using Spinach to power your cell phone" because you're just reading the summary.
Consider that conventional solar cells are among the most toxic devices now made and you've got a new way to avoid dumping horrible chemicals into the environment, a sustainable way to have solar power, and spin-offs of the knowledge to more efficiently reclamate CO2 pollutiona t the production site. How does "the survival of humans on earth" stack up to "ending homelessness"?
Of course, the ways to end homelessness in the long run are drug treatment, education, and job creation. New kinds of cell-phones, and hence more jobs, are the main place you'd use engineers and organic chemists to fix homelessness.