Coriolis effect would happen precisely _because_ it's at the equator and perpendicular to the ground, and precisely _because_ it shares the Earth's rotation. The only places where you wouldn't get that, would be the poles. (But then good luck keeping anything in a geostationary orbit above one of the poles.)
The problem is that you're moving from a smaller radius R1 to a larger radius R2. If you tried keeping the same angular velocity (and precisely because it's perpendicular to the ground, it is getting constant angular velocity), the linear velocity is the radius multiplied by the angular velocity. It's that linear a progression: twice the radius means twice the speed. So in the first place you have a smaller speed v1, and in the second you have a larger speed v2.
To get that, which is the pre-requisite to having it move in a straight line upwards there, you have to apply some extra force (e.g., horizontal thrusters) to increase the speed. If you don't, it will fall behind. That's Coriolis effect in a nutshell: the object's tendency to lag behind as you move away from the centre, or to gain angular velocity as you move towards the centre.
Why it happens on Earth? Because Earth is a sphere. As you go from either pole towards the equator, the radius increases. To move in a straight line from N to S in the northern hemisphere, you move from a small radius to a large radius, at constant angular velocity. (If you stay along the same meridian, you do a full circle in exactly 24 hours at any point along it.)
That means you need to gain speed to stay on that same meridian. While both a city in Canada and one in Mexico have the same angular velocity (both do a full circle in 24 hours), the one in Mexico moves faster horizontally. It moves more feet per second towards the east than the one in Canada.
If you tried launching an ICBM from Canada against Mexico, you couldn't just point it straight to the south. If you did, it would fall behind and fall into the Pacific. You'd have to aim it a bit to the East, so it gains that speed difference by the time it reaches Mexico.
Yet another possible interpretation: God was a game designer.
I can see God sitting there reading the logs and going "gah, this game is turning out boring like crap. Everyone is just baking or laying bricks for that stupid tower. And WTF did I code all those classes and jobs for, if two people out of three are either brick makers or bricklayers? I know, let's give them a bit more combat, to keep things challenging and fun. Better make it PvP too. That's great fun. And, oh, I'm sure they'll love my new language code too."
Some millenia later, picture God watching tens of thousands of Roman legionaires storming Carthage, slaughtering and enslaving the population, and razing the city to the ground, thinking, "Oh, yeah, that's the shit. Great raid there, guys. Didn't think this PvP stuff would be _this_ popular. Damn, that was one great design decision."
"Sounds like what a lot of people around here criticize Microsoft for."
Well, no. Actually MS does have a policy of not shipping with known deffects. (I.e., literally, they won't release until there's no bug report left.)
Now I won't argue whether their software is higher or lower quality than OOo (that's another flame for another time), but just saying that the "hey, let's mis-label betas as releases so unsuspecting people will beta-test them for us" idea is really sinking even lower than MS ever did. MS's QA and testing might be a lot less than perfect, but, you know, they at least _exist_.
I'll have to side with rolfwind on this one. "Let's mis-label it a release, so people will beta-test it for us" is the kind of idea that really disgusts me.
Now I'm not opposed to smaller incremental releases, meaning less features added, and easier to thoroughly test before release. But nevertheless, I expect "stable" to be just that: stable.
You have to understand that while maybe for you "yay, I contributed a bug report to OOo" or "yay, I dug for a week through kernel sources and made my old ISA SCSI board work" may count as fun, for most people it doesn't. In the real world it's more like "fuck, why doesn't this POS print my document right?" Or I can tell you first hand that at work we're not like "yay, it's so cool that we contributed a bug report", but rather "fuck, I'm opening yet another PMR for this POS software. Someone remind me... why are we using this crap anyway?"
What's attractive about OSS to most people is the "because lots of other people have inspected the code and made it better for you" part. It's not the "because you too can spend weeks debugging our code and fixing our bugs, or just beta-testing our unstable stuff and waiting for months for a fix" part. Forcing people to be beta-testers against their will, isn't really going to make your software popular.
I keep hearing about how Windows is bloated and used this huge heap of your resources, but have you actually thought about it? It uses... what resources?
CPU perchance? Well, close any background processes you installed yourself and wouldn't run on a server (e.g., SETI, Folding@home, Steam, WinAmp, etc) hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and look at the CPUI usage. Hmm. It's 0%, isn't it?
Memory? You do realize that we're talking C code, right? All those GUI libraries, if you don't use them, they'll either not even be loaded, or get swapped back to disk within seconds. All that code to draw menus and combo boxes and whatnot, isn't even in memory at all, when Windows is sitting at the login screen and running your server software as a process.
HDD? Well, a HPC cluster could boot off the network, if you don't want to waste local HDD space, so there you go.
So exactly what valuable resources does that GUI use? No, seriously.
All this talk of Windows bloat just reminds me of the "premature optimization is the root of all evil" quote I've put in the subject. You're trying to "optimize" somthing (here: resource usage) without measuring first. How do you even know you have a problem or what's the impact of your optimization, then? How do you know if it's even an optimization at all? How do you know if putting your efforts into something else wouldn't make a bigger difference?
Here's an idea for you: if we're talking HPC, the performance of thread implementation and of that MPI implementation will make a _far_ bigger performance impact than those GUI libraries. Those 0% background services will make just that: 0% difference, but an overhead in passing the messages around can kick performance right in the pants.
The "problem" is that they're not schizophrenic, but that Slashdot and the gang try to squeeze it (and the rest of the world) in some categories that just don't fit. So MS, like pretty much other real world company, just falls somewhere in between. And then we proclaim them schizophrenic, because it beats admitting that our artificial categories are what's wrong.
Some nerds seem to need to see the world as some Star Wars parody, where everyone is either our sworn ally for life or our sworn enemy. Knights in shiny armour versus evil sorcerers. And where everything happens for something that's not just political agenda, but really religious dogma. Super-villains that don't just want to take over the world, but above all to prove once and for all that their own dogma (e.g., the Sith Codex) is better than your dogma (e.g., the Jedi Codex.)
MS isn't schizophrenic, or not any more than any other corporation. It's just not playing by those rules. The real world as a whole isn't.
MS (just like IBM, Apple, Sun, etc) isn't out to make a political point about IP, it's out there to make money. By whatever means they can. Stuff like IP is just a tool, not an end by itself. And dogmas are just stuff you put in a PR release, not something you pour all your corporate resources and go on a crusade to convert the heathens. Again, it's just a tool.
And like any tool, they use a different one when that fits better. The real world doesn't pledge allegiance to a tool, nor divide itself in zealots of the Sacred Hammer vs zealots of the Holy Screwdriver vs zealots of the One True Saw.
MS uses OSS, even GPL'ed software, when it suits its needs. It even published its own sources when that looked like a good idea. (The MFC sources are just about as free or non-free as Sun's Java sources, and were so long before Java or Allegiance.) And it damns OSS when that suits its needs better.
The same applies to any other major company. IBM, Sun, Novell, take your pick. They all flipped between trying to lock you in in some areas, and trying to look like the champions of OSS in others, and various other shades in between, depending on which looked like it would serve their interests betetr. (E.g., if you think IBM really is the champion of OSS and GPL, ask them about the sources to WebSphere or MQSeries some day. See if you can get those under the GPL.) Sun even had several bipolar years of flipping like a yoyo between "we love OSS and Linux dearly" and "Linux is teh suck! Die! Die! Die!" within the same day.
So basically that's all there is to it about MS: it's not that they're schizophrenics about these dogmas, it's that they're really atheists there. They couldn't care less about either dogma, they just go with what makes them money.
MS probably wouldn't even have a problem with GPL as such, if it weren't under attack on that front. It's not just that Linux is a direct competitor, it's that Linux and the GPL have become the battle banner of the anti-MS alliance. So MS fights back with its own press releases and bogus "independent" studies.
Here's some free, complimentary clue: nowhere in the definition of democracy does it say "but vote only on the issues cornface deems important."
The whole _real_ point is to elect the people who best represent _my_ interests, whatever those interests might be. If enough people thought their most important issue is having quicksave in all games, or subsidizing implants for porn stars, that's it. Democracy means they can and in fact should see to it that those issues get heard.
The whole idea in a real democracy is that it's the people who decide for themselves what's important for them, and what's not.
Having one elitist asshole in an ivory tower telling you what should you concerned with, and what you should trust Big Brother with unquestioning, that isn't democracy. That's how democracy breaks. That's how your rights get taken away: by waving around strawmen you should be concerned about, if you were a good upstanding citizen, in stead of the real issues. ("If you were a real patriot and a good citizen you'd concern yourself with combating terrorism/imperialism/drugs/whatever-strawman-of-t he-day and not with trivial matters like our censoring the press and awarding ourselves extra powers.")
Plus, hey, it happens on my tax money anyway. So please don't tell me that you've already decided for me what my money should be used for, and that I shouldn't vote if my opinion doesn't match yours. It's simply not your decision to make. If I decided that I'm ok with my money being used on welfare, but I'm not ok with it being used to censor the media (including movies, games, comics, etc), I should jolly well have a chance to vote just that.
"My personal view of the PSP hasn't changed at all. It's not what I'm looking for in a portable system. Seriously, who actually wants to watch a movie on a tiny screen? The DS genuinely has more options for innovation when it comes to unique software"
Then it goes on to basically accuse the PSP of being just hype, causing developpers to stop writing innovative stuff (as if writing software for another resolution automatically turns a genius designer into a me-too cloner, or viceversa), and so on.
There's a difference between posting information, and posting such inflamatory crap as above. If it was a regular post, it would get modded troll. See the post which said the DS is just a gimmick, and how fast that got moderated down.
So, no, you get a clue already. Noone's saying there shouldn't be Nintendo-related news, but FFS, keep it news, not lame fanboy trolling. It's called "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." I'm sure some fanboy's foaming at the mouth against Sony is _not_ news, and it's sure as hell _not_ "stuff that matters."
And let's RTFA while we're at it. It's news... how? Exactly what's the information there? It has no sales numbers, no feedback from actual developpers, no market survey, etc. It's just a bunch of letters to the editor, so to speak, no better and no worse than your average Slashdot posts. It's just a bunch of readers posting out of the ass.
So this whole "story" is what? A link to a bunch of fanboy posts (from both camps), and he chooses the most inflamatory anti-PSP troll from an Anonymous Coward post. (Ok, so on Gamasutra it's called just "Anonymous", without the "Coward" past.)
I could see a point if someone from EA or Ubisoft or whatever told me that it's harder to develop for the PSP or whatever, or what keeps them from being innovative on a PSP. Or if it was some actual market survey about how many people want to watch movies on the road. You know, something that actually has _some_ information in it.
But an AC bashing a console, and pulling wild generalizations like "who wants to watch movies on a tiny screen" out of the ass? (I know people who bought PDAs for that, and a lot of companies are selling portable DVD players. So at least _some_ people must want that. Go figure.) Geesh. Exactly since when the heck does an AC troll count as news? Are we going to get links to the most inflamatory AC posts on Slashdot next, or what?
That's the problem. It's not that it's a Nintendo "story", it's not that it's biased, it's that it's just worthless content-free AC trolling. If anyone published this kind of mindless fanboy crap against the DS, I wouldn't think it deserves a its own Slashdot story either. Much less being quoted right in the summary as "news".
"The parent post is why the internet sucks. No matter what the discussion, someone inevitably comes in with a knee jerk reaction, doesn't think about the things he's saying, and acts like an ass-hat. Way to be that guy, buddy."
You mean like this knee-jerk "must defend Nintendo against the infidels" post of yours? Heh.:P
"Cause that's the way archers in real life do it, right?"
Because real life has _any_ relevance on what is good gameplay, or what's good controls? Because what you liked in Nintendo games, like, say, Mario 64 or Mario Kart or the Zelda games, was the complete realism?
Oh, wait, you didn't. If you wanted to simulate Real Life, Mario or Link would be out of breath after 2-3 jumps. Jumping is a very unnatural thing for humans. It doesn't matter if you're a nerd or an athlete. Try bouncing around for hours like Mario and you may discover it's not that easy.
Basically usually RL is that-a-way, good gameplay is that other way. Virtually all the games today, be it CounterStrike or Zelda, are fun precisely _because_ they avoid being too realistic. Abstractions like hit points and whatnot are there precisely because the way it works IRL, e.g., that you'd likely just bleed and die after the first hit, just isn't fun.
So I'll wait and see if it's fun to _play_, realism be damned.
"A lot of the rest of your post was just Nintendo bashing drivel. I'm continually amazed that people are so against innovation by gaming companies. People like you seem to be very comfortable in your fps world where the greater the number of frags apparently increases the size of your penis"
You don't even know what games I play, fanboy. I've mentioned playing story-driven RPGs right in the post you're answering, for example. So try thinking instead of reaching out for the standard insults for a change, ok?
And, no, I'm not against innovation, I just don't like this gimmick controller. That's all. I know it's hard to comprehend, but the real world has more shades of grey between "OMG, it's Nintendo, so it must be automatically perfect" and "grr! must attack Nintendo and stiffle innovation at all cost." Some of us just judge a product as it is. And I just don't like this one. That's all.
"Think of playing ping-pong or tennis with this thing. The controller becomes the handle of the racket/paddle. Spin, direction, and force could all be controlled with this and I would imagine the effect would be much more gratifying and *gasp* fun than pressing buttons on a controller. You could probably even outfit these things with an add-on paddle for even more realism."
Well, _why_ is it more gratifying? Sorry, I don't do axioms. Explain.
Realism? Have you actually played either IRL? Because you're trying to tell me that it's realistic to swing your wrist somewhere else than the ball you're tracking with your eyes is. Nope, having played the real thing, I can tell you that it's not.
Plus, again, I'll take good gameplay over realism any day.
"Golf. Again, far more control (and more realistic control) could be had with this device than with a traditional setup."
Far less control, as you lack the actual feedback, both inertial and visual.
"Arcade-style shooters would be super fun with this type of device. And if the accruacy is as good as the review implies, this would be an improvement over the systems available in most arcades."
Again, I don't just swallow axioms pulled out of the hat. Exactly how would this more fun than existing lightguns? It's not more realistic (unless the shooter is themed around Blake's 7, with their curling-iron style weapons), it's _not_ more accurate, so exactly _what_ is the huge advantage and fun factor?
You haven't seen many product launches before, right? Everyone and their grandma shows up and shakes hands. This, however, doesn't mean jack squat about them actually shipping a product for it.
Reminds me of some of AMD's product launches, where CEOs and representatives from all sorts of companies went up on stage to pledge undying love... and then went back to promoting their Intel-based products instead.
They're just trying to squeeze in their own self-advertising, piggybacked on this. Whether they'll actually ship a game or not, they got a free chance to basically advertise "Buy our games! We're all innovative and original!" (THQ) or "Buy our sports games! And did you know we have a full portfolio of other games across all genres too?" (EA.)
Also rest assured that noone actually asked the _developpers_ for such an event. It's a bunch of C*Os reciting canned texts that came straight from the PR department, maybe with a short detour to the legal dept for a quick check.
Basically, oh, I'm sure they'll port some stuff, if it's easy to do. E.g., via some quick-hack abstraction layer that makes the motion sensor look like a mouse or like a thumbstick to the software.
But if you think they'll actually go make some exclusive titles just because the programmers jumped up and down with joy at the idea of a new controller... you don't know some of these companies. We're talking for example EA who occasionally openly admits its "meh, we're not into making art, we're into making money" attitude.
_If_ they'll make some exclusive title, it won't be because some programmer liked the controller, but because an accountant made a business plan that said "we estimate we'll make x million dollars out of it." This either means being just given the money (MS style) or having a _hell_ of a market to buy those games. Basically until the Revolution has already gained a bunch of market share, I wouldn't hold my breath.
"As for the FPS thing... it may be hard to keep pointing at the screen, but I can't see it being worse than trying to play an FPS with a thumb-stick."
The FPS-on-consoles world doesn't begin and end with thumbsticks, you know.
E.g., on the PS2 you can just take any existing USB keyboard and mouse and plug them into the console. There you go: you can play your FPS with keyboard and mouse, like on the PC.
E.g., I had a Sega keyboard and mouse for the Dreamcast, and while I got them mostly to chat online in PSO, I can assure you first-hand that they worked perfectly in FPS too.
So basically "it can't be worse than a thumb-stick" is good and fine, but I'm more interested in whether it works better than keyboard and mouse. That's where FPS gaming is at.
"Though, of course, if that's what floats your boat, you can still do it. And that is awesome."
Did they include USB ports for the keyboard and mouse? No? Well, then it's not so awesome, after all.
So they solved... umm... what? A problem that only Nintendo had to start with? Heh.
"yup, if people dont keep trying their 'stupid ideas' then technology will stagnate."
That would be the case if those ideas were actually _new_. Rehashing the exact same failed stuff over and over again has yet to result in any actual progress.
It's sorta like seeing someone come up every year with "I know, let's make a perpetuum mobile where the water coming down powers a pump that pushes it back up." Just coming up with it one more time won't make it work better this time, or result in much progress.
"sure your arms could get tired waving them around all the time, but not as tired as they'd get if you really were using a gun or a sword."
That's like saying that getting kicked in the head is less bad than being kicked in the balls, so it must be a good thing. Well, I'd rather not have either, if I have a choice. Sometimes "less bad" is still nevertheless just "bad".
"People will get more excercise at least ^___^"
Or I'll just buy another console instead. One which doesn't put me through a useless exercise that I don't need or want. (If I wanted to exercise only one hand, I'd be on a porn site instead.)
"and even if it's easier to play with a joypad/mouse"
Then, see above, I'll go buy a console which lets me do just that.
"then it'll be more immersive and realistic to have to control your feeble geeky limbs:D"
There are two very separate issues there which I would contest:
1. The same quip again about "getting some exercise" and "feeble geeky limbs".
I may have mentioned before that I like to experiment on getting people, especially non-gamers, to play various stuff that they normally wouldn't. Just to get an idea about the usability of it for a new player. You can get some fascinating insight that way.
Well, I know someone who's actually a body-builder. Unless you're one yourself, chances are this guy's arms are thicker than your _leg_. Guess what? He can't, for example, hold his arm pointed forward with a lightgun for hours at a time, either.
Some stuff is just uncomfortable no matter if you're geeky or not. It might be ok and fun for a quick distraction to play for half an hour or an hour, but it's not something I'd want for my main controller.
2. I fail to see why bad controls make anything more immersive. If anything, getting a muscle cramp is a distracting factor from _outside_ the game's universe. It can break suspension of disbelief in a jiffy.
And generally, immersion has to do with internal consistency and the quality of storytelling, not with such gimmicks. If a game was uninteresting or inconsistent enough to not keep you immersed with a mouse or gamepad, chances are it still won't keep you immersed after adding some gimmick controls. And viceversa. If it was a good game with some gimmick unwieldy controls, chances are it would keep you just as immersed with a gamepad or mouse.
"Let's start off with the most obvious implementation: FPS. A genre that drives the PS2 and XBox (and dominates computers) will thrive on the Gamecube. Gone is the fiddling with the joystick. A quick flip of the controller, and you've completely turned around. Aiming is no longer tense; your hand eye coordination will allow you to better attack your enemies using a 3d mouse than with a regular controller (think about how many people are about FPS on the computer.)"
Yep, that's why you get owned in FPS by people using a presentation remote control instead of a mouse. Oh, wait, except you don't.
Trust me, this is one use that's been tried to _death_ before. If there actually were some inherent advantage in it, we'd have known it already. (We've had no problem switching from keyboard to joystick, or then from joystick to mouse when it actually offered better tracking. These things just don't.)
If Nintendo wanted to do something that actually works in FPS, they could have just replaced the right stick on a normal controller with a trackball. That actually works.
"Want to control how tense your bow string is? Pull out the bow and arrow, go into first person mode, and extend your arm. Press a button to lock the start position, and pull back as far as you want."
Actually, I don't. I just want to point and click, and have the arrow go that-a-way. If I want it to go farther or closer, I'll vary the angle I shoot it at, thank you very much. So that's one gimmick I can live without quite easily.
"Don't like FPS? Let's ignore that and move to a love of the Nintendo community: Zelda. Want to see Link do more than just two directions with his sword? No problem, since you will be controlling his sword. When you swing your arm, Link swings his. When you jab, so does he."
Actually, if we're talking Zelda-type games, that's the least of my concerns. A story that's not for pre-schoolers would be right at the top, on the other hand.
Not meant as an offense or anything, but that's really why I'm playing my story-driven RPGs on the PS2, PC or XBox. Not because of the controller, but because of the "story-driven" part. Adding more kinds of ways to swing a sword is just about irrelevant there.
"And the accessories for the controller; you can be sure that these will be fairly inexpensive, meaning that companies can throw in their own little controller to add more depth to the game. How about hooking up the headphone set to talk to your buddies in online games to the controller instead of having to have an entire other attachment to the Revolution?"
Accessories always tended to be the part where you pay three times what it's worth. And if we're talking Nintendo, we're talking the company that made you pay extra to get a lightbulb for the original GBA's dark screen, or various other such gimmics. So, umm, I'll wait and see there. I wouldn't take it for granted.
"Now imagine that you hold the controller vertically. You're playing Star Fox. You move the controller, just like in a real jet fighter, and the plane moves with you."
Except in that case I'd rather use a good self-centering force-feedback joystick than wave a wand around. Because that's what you're really pretending to do there: pretending that a silly wand without all that is a substitute for the real thing.
The advantage of Nintendo's controller over that is...? I'm drawing blanks here.
" Your arm swing is its arm swing."
So it can get uncomfortable real fast?
"Your aim is its aim."
And a piss-poor one, compared to using a mouse with your fingers.
I've just got out of the 18-34 demographic, I still play games lots, in fact more than ever, but Nintendo's games do nothing for _me_. (Well, actually I lie. Last time I tried one, it got me bored out of my skull.)
Simplifying it as, basically, "bah all Sony and MS games are yet another Madden or WW2 shooter each year" is so over-simplified, it's not even funny. I'm pretty sure I've played lots of games that weren't FPS, sports or MMO. In fact, on my PS2, I don't even own any games that fall into either of those three categories.
I'm also very sure most of them could be played with friends, co-workers, etc. E.g., virtually all PSP games can be played in multi-player over wireless. I've actually tried it. And it's portable too, so yes you _can_ take it around your school, work, family, etc.
So, basically, please... If you like Nintendo's games, good for you. But reading yet another variant of the same old "Nintendo is for people who want to have FUN, MS and Sony are for people who want to get bored in a 5 hour WoW raid" wisecrack is getting boring already.
We _all_ play games to have fun. Just for some of us that involves different games. That's all.
It was definitely a _lot_ earlier than 2003 when it was first shown at an expo. I didn't know it eventually actually got released with a game, so I wouldn't know if it's the same one. I'd guess it probably is the same, though. But it's just a guess.
It's such a "radical" departure, that Sony tried it already, and it already failed. There were all sorts of cool-sounding gizmos being hyped when the PS2 launched, quite a few being, yes, motion controlled. E.g., a sword that you could swing around and see your character do the same move. Yet we're stuck using the same old DualShock controllers, because that's what actually works better.
It's not like it's a new idea by any means. It's just yet another incarnation of the same tired power-glove idea. It _has_ already been tried by Nintendo, Sega, Sony and on the PC.
It's one of those idiotic ideas which sound all great and revolutionary (again) until you actually try it. No, seriously.
RPGs? Try swinging your arm around like with a sword for hours, because that's what you'd have to do in an action-RPG. See how quickly it gets uncomfortable and then outright _painful_.
FPS? It's been done already, and done better with lightguns. And skipping over the lower accuracy that's already been mentioned, again, the problem is that you just can't keep your arm pointing at the screen for hours. Those are games played for half an hour, maybe an hour at a time, and by then you're already desperately trying to find ways to "cheat" by resting your arm on something. It really gets that uncomfortable.
And let me get back to the "again" part. It's not even a new idea. The PS2 at launch also demonstrated cool-sounding gizmos, like swords you can swing around and see your character do the same swing. Guess why it never actually took off? And it goes even farther back in time, with gizmos like the power glove that was already mentioned.
Idiotic ideas are like vampires in this industry. You just can't ever really kill them. Just when you think one failed spectacularly and miserably, that you've seen it crumble into a pile of ash once and for all... someone drops a drop of blood there and it springs right back to life.
Or more accurately, some ignorant designer comes along and thinks he's soo utterly original for repeating the same mistake again. "I know! It'll be soo original to have permanent death!" (Well, no, every third idiot MUD coder gets the _exact_ same idea. It's not original, it just keeps failing and getting off the radar.) Or in this case, "I know! It'll be soo original to make people swing the controller around!" Or whatever.
*sigh* I know by now I can't expect people to learn from history, as in what happened in the 1600's at the court of some obscure HRE "kingdom". But, eh, the launch of the PS2 isn't _that_ far back in time. You'd think someone at Nintendo would get their head out of their ass long enough to remember that the exact same thing was hyped back then.
"Blah, blah, blah... Am I the only one that is sick and tired of hearing about the "age of the universe", "big bang", and "cosmic expansion"? Cosmology and Astronomy are so far from true science as to be almost laughable. I declare that there are x number of galaxies in the universe! Who is going to prove me wrong?"
No, rest assured that you're not the only one. There's a majority of dumb and uneducated people who need to mock science they never understood (or learned), and generally try to drag everyone back into the muck of mediocrity.
I assume that belittling everyone else's achievement makes them feel better about being dumb failures themselves.
And the dumber and less educated they are, the less they actually understand from that science, the more rabid they'll be in attacking it. The farther someone will be to the left of that IQ or education Gauss curve, the more they'll rant and rave about how everyone to the right is a quack and a witch-doctor spouting nonsense.
Either way, rest assured that you're not alone. You fit in that dumb and uneducated majority perfectly.
At the time, it couldn't have been more than 1.4 billion years away from where earth would have been back then, had the Earth and Sun existed. (They didn't yet.) The whole universe had a 0.7 billion year radius, yeah, so no points could have been more than 2*R apart.
But the universe has been expanding very quickly, and Earth point was basically running away from that beam of light trying to reach it. So it reached us after a whole 13 billion years.
Basically that 13 billion light-years away is measured from where the Earth is _now_, not from where Earth would have been back then. (Again, if Sol or Earth had existed at the time, which they didn't yet.)
It's sorta like this. Let's say I'm a shoplifter running away and you're the security guard trying to catch me. Let's say you start only 10m behind me, but are running only a little faster than I am. So you get to chase me a good 130m before you catch me. You started your chase only 10m from the point I was in the beginning, but 130m behind the point you actually caught up with me.
It's the same starting point in both cases, but the distance is measured from two very different points: (A) from where I was in the beginning, and (B) from where I am at the end of the chase.
If you replace me with the Earth and you with the gamma ray pulse, you get a very rough visual metaphor of what happened there. It's 13 billion years from where we are _now_. It is indeed larger than the R=0.7 billion light-years bubble that the observable universe was back then, because in the meantime the bubble has expanded and Sol and Earth have moved that far outside that space. If you were to plot the way back to where the Earth would have been back then, yeah, it would be a lot closer.
Well, this is only a very very rough visual analogy, and not particularly correct either, but it will hopefully do.
Admittedly, the isolation isn't as perfect as you describe for the Etymotic, but it's very noticeable and the fidelity being nothing short of amazing is a bonus too. I also like the closed can design more than in-ear plugs. (But that's just personal preference.)
And yep, you're absolutely right, it's nice to be able to listen to music at a more sane volume. And since the sound dampening works both ways, it also means my co-workers don't all get to listen to my music.
All in all, yep, I can only recommend that more people buy such headphones.
There are massive cultural differences between Europe, USA and Japan, but viewing it all as a competion scale is so over-simplified it's not even funny.
There is plenty of competition and competitive people in Europe. The difference is _how_ we view that competition. (And even that is just one aspect of the cultural difference, and not _the_ one criterion that explains it all.)
The difference in a nutshell is just that willingness to view violence, all the way up to rape and murder, as just normal competition. That's a USA-specific cultural quirk.
If we're talking games, the cult of the free enterprise is, if anything, stronger here. Economic games routinely outsell FPS in Germany. (Well, maybe not ID and Epic games, but they outsell a lot of others.)
E.g., I remember "Die Gilde" (called "Europa 1400: The Guild" in the USA) selling more than 100,000 copies within the first week in Germany. If you put that into perspective of the population size, it's comparable to a PC game selling anywhere between 300,000 and 400,000 copies in the USA. We're talking a _major_ success for a game that's mostly about hiring apprentices, buying raw materials, having those apprentices hammer them into goods, and selling them on the free market.
So there you go: the "Compete to win. Free enterprise. Yeah!" message is very alive and kicking in games down here.
Japan too has a lot of competitive games, but again, just in a very different way from the USA. The focus there is on winning through hard work and functioning within society, rather than the USA message that you're cool if you're a gangsta and bust a cap in the ass of everyone in your way.
I remember one particular truck driving game, the name escapes me now, which illustrated that very difference. The USA version gave you extra points for breaking traffic laws, smashing property, and generally being a homicidal psycho at the wheel. The original Japan version got you fired and finished your game for the exact same things. In the Japan version you got ahead by driving responsibly, obeying the laws, and carfully avoiding the obstacles instead of smashing into everything.
Or take japanese RPGs for example. It's not that those don't have violence or challenges to overcome. But _the_ message is the emphasis on the message that you only won because of your friends, and the help of all those people you've helped too. I think about half the japanese RPGs I've played even felt a need to literally tell you that, at some point.
As you say it yourself, "Violence is a degenerate form of competition." I took the liberty of emphasizing that, because that's the keyword for the rest of the world. In other parts of the world, e.g., Japan, the competitiveness scale is between 0 = lazy, and 10 = total workaholic, not a scale where 10 = murder and rape.
The difference isn't competitiveness, it's that the USA culture values being a psychopath, in the medical sense of the world. Either the ultra-violent serial-killer kind, or the corporate kind climbing his's way to the top over dead bodies and broken lives, or whatever. It's not just wanting to win, it's the "Society be damned" part. Sometimes not even for an actual "win" in a "competition", but just as just personal entertainment at the expense of others.
Now it's not that other countries don't have their own psychopaths. About 1% of people everywhere are psychopaths, and that's that. But they're not viewed as _the_ role-model and ideal member of society.
Ah, the traditional redneck talking out of the ass about other countries he has _zero_ clue about. How refreshing.
Parties being silenced? Well when was the last USA election that involved more than Democrats and Republicans? (Both of which currently have the same ideology and catter to the same corporate sponsors.) How often have you been told that voting anything else is throwing your vote away?
By comparison virtually any European contry's elections are won by a fragile alliance of several parties. A small party here can and routinely does get seats in the parliament.
And here's a much more fun effect: since neither party has a majority by itself, it can't proceed to whore itself to the highest corporate bidder with impunity for the next X years. Alliances can be formed the other way around within days, and a former majority leader can find itself being _the_ opposition real quick if it did something unpopular.
Other parties being silenced? You don't know what you're talking about. The common complaint here is that those small parties have disproportionately too much power. A coalition's ideology usually reflects more of those small parties ideology than that of the dominant party in the coalition. Because those small parties are what makes it be a majority coalition, and could go form a majority coalition around someone else at any time.
Want some real suppression of a party and an ideology? How about the McCarthy witch-hunt for communists in the USA? Yeah, that sooo makes your point about parties not being allowed to suppress their competition there. Not.
European government slots being filled with the most violent bastards? Geeze, care to support that accusation with any actual case where a minister was even accused of any violence after WW2?
So basically, I won't even try to be diplomatic: go get some real education before you spew such idiocies. And no, Hollywood movies don't count as an education.
Whenever politicians rant and rave about how games are aimed at turning kid into killers, we all rally around the battle cry of "well, duh, some games are not for kids. See that 'M' or '18+' rating on the box? It already says it's not for kids."
So now there's a law saying just that. Why is that a bad thing?
Sure, resourceful kids will always find ways around restrictions, and parents still have to pay some attention to what Junior is playing. And talk to Junior, so he/she doesn't get all the education from games and TV.
But still, the law basically doesn't say anything that we were't already saying: well, duh, some games are not for kids.
Will it bankrupt anyone? I can tell you first hand that it won't.
Here in Germany for example GTA games had an 18+ rating all along for violence. (Which is basically what it's just been re-classified as in the USA too: from 17+ to 18+. If for a different reason.)
Did it stop shops from selling it? Well, no. You can go to Saturn or Media Markt or whatever and pick it off the aisle just the same.
Did it involve some major effort or burden on those shops? No. I'll tell you how Saturn does it, for example. They put these games in a sort of a big red (transparent) plastic box each, that the cashier has to open for you. It takes exactly 1 extra second to open that box, and it's something that's (A) big and obvious even for the most retarded cashier, and (B) obvious to any kid that they're not gonna just pack that between Barbie Fashion Designer and The Sims: Another Expansion and sneak it past the cashier.
I don't see huge queues where an army of cashiers have to ask everyone for ID. Most of the time the Saturn I go to has one cashier at a time, and frankly they couldn't go any lower than that anyway.
Did it make those stores utterly uncompetitive with e-commerce sites? Not more than they already were. At any rate, I didn't see Saturn or Media Markt packing their bags and vacating the premises yet.
So the huge problem is?
As I've said, yes, it's not perfect and there _will_ be some black market, but then again it won't bankrupt anyone either.
Whatever problems the USA has with the 18+ rating are utterly artifficial, and due to some hypocrites' (e.g., WalMart) taking a "nooo, we can't sell 18+ games 'cause they're, like, pornography" stance for purely PR corporate-image reasons. The rest of the world has managed to function just fine with 18+ rated games, and with not selling them to minors.
Well, on the whole I can see you're in the science camp too, and on the whole I'll aggree with what you've said. At least theoretically, in a wishful thinking kinda way. In practice I'm not sure they're feasible.
1. I'm not convinced that peer review is _that_ horribly flawed as it is. Or let me explain better. Sure, there is a lot of bias, and the anonymous submission idea does have real merit. But in the end good science does get recognized (e.g., Einstein's relativity did get recognized, in spite of at least one major authority figure denouncing it as bolshevism) and pseudo-science tends to remain in the realm of lobby groups, marketting departments and tabloids.
And honestly, I don't know how you'd stop them from waving the banner of pseudo-science. Getting their bogus hypotheses rejected after anonymous submitting, still wouldn't stop them from claiming that only polytical/academic/whatever conspiracies are blocking them. For every single "they're only rejecting my miracle cure because they're personally against _me_" conspiracy theory lost, you'd gain a "they're only rejecting my miracle cure because they're paid by some pharma/political/academic/whatever world-conspiracy to hide the truth! They're only against it because it would expose their lies that keep them in business!" It's not like we don't have enough of those already.
2. Well, the problem with payment is that basically there is no mass market for those, so you have to charge a lot even just to recoup the costs. (As in, even to have someone there to manage the archives, make a copy now and then and mail it.) It would be nice to have them somehow available for free to anyone, but I'm not entirely sure how. If the author had to pay for the privilege, it would just mean even less independent stuff published, and more stuff subsidized by the various lobbies. I'm not entirely sure it would be an improvement, to be honest.
3. I'm not sure a president should be replaced over his choice of science. Personally I'd vote we just keep politicians out of it completely. Let's face it, their job is to run the economy, not to have the expertise needed to decide which hypothesis is right. Between a president who can balance the economy and mend the diplomatic relations, and a president who's a world-reknowned expert in several hard sciences, eh, much as I'm a nerd myself, I'd choose the former any time.
Then again, this is _the_ one that's guaranteed to remain just wishful thinking. There are just too many interests and too much political capital in it. It's like asking that Bill Gates gives up Windows and starts a Linux distribution, or Larry Ellison decides that Oracle sucks and starts advertising MySQL. I'm not even discussing if either product is good and bad, but just that noone just gives up on their cash-cow.
Slashdot Mirror
Coriolis effect would happen precisely _because_ it's at the equator and perpendicular to the ground, and precisely _because_ it shares the Earth's rotation. The only places where you wouldn't get that, would be the poles. (But then good luck keeping anything in a geostationary orbit above one of the poles.)
The problem is that you're moving from a smaller radius R1 to a larger radius R2. If you tried keeping the same angular velocity (and precisely because it's perpendicular to the ground, it is getting constant angular velocity), the linear velocity is the radius multiplied by the angular velocity. It's that linear a progression: twice the radius means twice the speed. So in the first place you have a smaller speed v1, and in the second you have a larger speed v2.
To get that, which is the pre-requisite to having it move in a straight line upwards there, you have to apply some extra force (e.g., horizontal thrusters) to increase the speed. If you don't, it will fall behind. That's Coriolis effect in a nutshell: the object's tendency to lag behind as you move away from the centre, or to gain angular velocity as you move towards the centre.
Why it happens on Earth? Because Earth is a sphere. As you go from either pole towards the equator, the radius increases. To move in a straight line from N to S in the northern hemisphere, you move from a small radius to a large radius, at constant angular velocity. (If you stay along the same meridian, you do a full circle in exactly 24 hours at any point along it.)
That means you need to gain speed to stay on that same meridian. While both a city in Canada and one in Mexico have the same angular velocity (both do a full circle in 24 hours), the one in Mexico moves faster horizontally. It moves more feet per second towards the east than the one in Canada.
If you tried launching an ICBM from Canada against Mexico, you couldn't just point it straight to the south. If you did, it would fall behind and fall into the Pacific. You'd have to aim it a bit to the East, so it gains that speed difference by the time it reaches Mexico.
That's Coriolis effect in a nutshell.
Yet another possible interpretation: God was a game designer.
I can see God sitting there reading the logs and going "gah, this game is turning out boring like crap. Everyone is just baking or laying bricks for that stupid tower. And WTF did I code all those classes and jobs for, if two people out of three are either brick makers or bricklayers? I know, let's give them a bit more combat, to keep things challenging and fun. Better make it PvP too. That's great fun. And, oh, I'm sure they'll love my new language code too."
Some millenia later, picture God watching tens of thousands of Roman legionaires storming Carthage, slaughtering and enslaving the population, and razing the city to the ground, thinking, "Oh, yeah, that's the shit. Great raid there, guys. Didn't think this PvP stuff would be _this_ popular. Damn, that was one great design decision."
"Sounds like what a lot of people around here criticize Microsoft for."
Well, no. Actually MS does have a policy of not shipping with known deffects. (I.e., literally, they won't release until there's no bug report left.)
Now I won't argue whether their software is higher or lower quality than OOo (that's another flame for another time), but just saying that the "hey, let's mis-label betas as releases so unsuspecting people will beta-test them for us" idea is really sinking even lower than MS ever did. MS's QA and testing might be a lot less than perfect, but, you know, they at least _exist_.
I'll have to side with rolfwind on this one. "Let's mis-label it a release, so people will beta-test it for us" is the kind of idea that really disgusts me.
Now I'm not opposed to smaller incremental releases, meaning less features added, and easier to thoroughly test before release. But nevertheless, I expect "stable" to be just that: stable.
You have to understand that while maybe for you "yay, I contributed a bug report to OOo" or "yay, I dug for a week through kernel sources and made my old ISA SCSI board work" may count as fun, for most people it doesn't. In the real world it's more like "fuck, why doesn't this POS print my document right?" Or I can tell you first hand that at work we're not like "yay, it's so cool that we contributed a bug report", but rather "fuck, I'm opening yet another PMR for this POS software. Someone remind me... why are we using this crap anyway?"
What's attractive about OSS to most people is the "because lots of other people have inspected the code and made it better for you" part. It's not the "because you too can spend weeks debugging our code and fixing our bugs, or just beta-testing our unstable stuff and waiting for months for a fix" part. Forcing people to be beta-testers against their will, isn't really going to make your software popular.
... will they be tentacled aliens? You know, it being Japan and all ;)
I keep hearing about how Windows is bloated and used this huge heap of your resources, but have you actually thought about it? It uses... what resources?
CPU perchance? Well, close any background processes you installed yourself and wouldn't run on a server (e.g., SETI, Folding@home, Steam, WinAmp, etc) hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and look at the CPUI usage. Hmm. It's 0%, isn't it?
Memory? You do realize that we're talking C code, right? All those GUI libraries, if you don't use them, they'll either not even be loaded, or get swapped back to disk within seconds. All that code to draw menus and combo boxes and whatnot, isn't even in memory at all, when Windows is sitting at the login screen and running your server software as a process.
HDD? Well, a HPC cluster could boot off the network, if you don't want to waste local HDD space, so there you go.
So exactly what valuable resources does that GUI use? No, seriously.
All this talk of Windows bloat just reminds me of the "premature optimization is the root of all evil" quote I've put in the subject. You're trying to "optimize" somthing (here: resource usage) without measuring first. How do you even know you have a problem or what's the impact of your optimization, then? How do you know if it's even an optimization at all? How do you know if putting your efforts into something else wouldn't make a bigger difference?
Here's an idea for you: if we're talking HPC, the performance of thread implementation and of that MPI implementation will make a _far_ bigger performance impact than those GUI libraries. Those 0% background services will make just that: 0% difference, but an overhead in passing the messages around can kick performance right in the pants.
The "problem" is that they're not schizophrenic, but that Slashdot and the gang try to squeeze it (and the rest of the world) in some categories that just don't fit. So MS, like pretty much other real world company, just falls somewhere in between. And then we proclaim them schizophrenic, because it beats admitting that our artificial categories are what's wrong.
Some nerds seem to need to see the world as some Star Wars parody, where everyone is either our sworn ally for life or our sworn enemy. Knights in shiny armour versus evil sorcerers. And where everything happens for something that's not just political agenda, but really religious dogma. Super-villains that don't just want to take over the world, but above all to prove once and for all that their own dogma (e.g., the Sith Codex) is better than your dogma (e.g., the Jedi Codex.)
MS isn't schizophrenic, or not any more than any other corporation. It's just not playing by those rules. The real world as a whole isn't.
MS (just like IBM, Apple, Sun, etc) isn't out to make a political point about IP, it's out there to make money. By whatever means they can. Stuff like IP is just a tool, not an end by itself. And dogmas are just stuff you put in a PR release, not something you pour all your corporate resources and go on a crusade to convert the heathens. Again, it's just a tool.
And like any tool, they use a different one when that fits better. The real world doesn't pledge allegiance to a tool, nor divide itself in zealots of the Sacred Hammer vs zealots of the Holy Screwdriver vs zealots of the One True Saw.
MS uses OSS, even GPL'ed software, when it suits its needs. It even published its own sources when that looked like a good idea. (The MFC sources are just about as free or non-free as Sun's Java sources, and were so long before Java or Allegiance.) And it damns OSS when that suits its needs better.
The same applies to any other major company. IBM, Sun, Novell, take your pick. They all flipped between trying to lock you in in some areas, and trying to look like the champions of OSS in others, and various other shades in between, depending on which looked like it would serve their interests betetr. (E.g., if you think IBM really is the champion of OSS and GPL, ask them about the sources to WebSphere or MQSeries some day. See if you can get those under the GPL.) Sun even had several bipolar years of flipping like a yoyo between "we love OSS and Linux dearly" and "Linux is teh suck! Die! Die! Die!" within the same day.
So basically that's all there is to it about MS: it's not that they're schizophrenics about these dogmas, it's that they're really atheists there. They couldn't care less about either dogma, they just go with what makes them money.
MS probably wouldn't even have a problem with GPL as such, if it weren't under attack on that front. It's not just that Linux is a direct competitor, it's that Linux and the GPL have become the battle banner of the anti-MS alliance. So MS fights back with its own press releases and bogus "independent" studies.
Here's some free, complimentary clue: nowhere in the definition of democracy does it say "but vote only on the issues cornface deems important."
t he-day and not with trivial matters like our censoring the press and awarding ourselves extra powers.")
The whole _real_ point is to elect the people who best represent _my_ interests, whatever those interests might be. If enough people thought their most important issue is having quicksave in all games, or subsidizing implants for porn stars, that's it. Democracy means they can and in fact should see to it that those issues get heard.
The whole idea in a real democracy is that it's the people who decide for themselves what's important for them, and what's not.
Having one elitist asshole in an ivory tower telling you what should you concerned with, and what you should trust Big Brother with unquestioning, that isn't democracy. That's how democracy breaks. That's how your rights get taken away: by waving around strawmen you should be concerned about, if you were a good upstanding citizen, in stead of the real issues. ("If you were a real patriot and a good citizen you'd concern yourself with combating terrorism/imperialism/drugs/whatever-strawman-of-
Plus, hey, it happens on my tax money anyway. So please don't tell me that you've already decided for me what my money should be used for, and that I shouldn't vote if my opinion doesn't match yours. It's simply not your decision to make. If I decided that I'm ok with my money being used on welfare, but I'm not ok with it being used to censor the media (including movies, games, comics, etc), I should jolly well have a chance to vote just that.
I quote, from the summary:
"My personal view of the PSP hasn't changed at all. It's not what I'm looking for in a portable system. Seriously, who actually wants to watch a movie on a tiny screen? The DS genuinely has more options for innovation when it comes to unique software"
Then it goes on to basically accuse the PSP of being just hype, causing developpers to stop writing innovative stuff (as if writing software for another resolution automatically turns a genius designer into a me-too cloner, or viceversa), and so on.
There's a difference between posting information, and posting such inflamatory crap as above. If it was a regular post, it would get modded troll. See the post which said the DS is just a gimmick, and how fast that got moderated down.
So, no, you get a clue already. Noone's saying there shouldn't be Nintendo-related news, but FFS, keep it news, not lame fanboy trolling. It's called "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." I'm sure some fanboy's foaming at the mouth against Sony is _not_ news, and it's sure as hell _not_ "stuff that matters."
And let's RTFA while we're at it. It's news... how? Exactly what's the information there? It has no sales numbers, no feedback from actual developpers, no market survey, etc. It's just a bunch of letters to the editor, so to speak, no better and no worse than your average Slashdot posts. It's just a bunch of readers posting out of the ass.
So this whole "story" is what? A link to a bunch of fanboy posts (from both camps), and he chooses the most inflamatory anti-PSP troll from an Anonymous Coward post. (Ok, so on Gamasutra it's called just "Anonymous", without the "Coward" past.)
I could see a point if someone from EA or Ubisoft or whatever told me that it's harder to develop for the PSP or whatever, or what keeps them from being innovative on a PSP. Or if it was some actual market survey about how many people want to watch movies on the road. You know, something that actually has _some_ information in it.
But an AC bashing a console, and pulling wild generalizations like "who wants to watch movies on a tiny screen" out of the ass? (I know people who bought PDAs for that, and a lot of companies are selling portable DVD players. So at least _some_ people must want that. Go figure.) Geesh. Exactly since when the heck does an AC troll count as news? Are we going to get links to the most inflamatory AC posts on Slashdot next, or what?
That's the problem. It's not that it's a Nintendo "story", it's not that it's biased, it's that it's just worthless content-free AC trolling. If anyone published this kind of mindless fanboy crap against the DS, I wouldn't think it deserves a its own Slashdot story either. Much less being quoted right in the summary as "news".
"The parent post is why the internet sucks. No matter what the discussion, someone inevitably comes in with a knee jerk reaction, doesn't think about the things he's saying, and acts like an ass-hat. Way to be that guy, buddy."
:P
You mean like this knee-jerk "must defend Nintendo against the infidels" post of yours? Heh.
"Cause that's the way archers in real life do it, right?"
Because real life has _any_ relevance on what is good gameplay, or what's good controls? Because what you liked in Nintendo games, like, say, Mario 64 or Mario Kart or the Zelda games, was the complete realism?
Oh, wait, you didn't. If you wanted to simulate Real Life, Mario or Link would be out of breath after 2-3 jumps. Jumping is a very unnatural thing for humans. It doesn't matter if you're a nerd or an athlete. Try bouncing around for hours like Mario and you may discover it's not that easy.
Basically usually RL is that-a-way, good gameplay is that other way. Virtually all the games today, be it CounterStrike or Zelda, are fun precisely _because_ they avoid being too realistic. Abstractions like hit points and whatnot are there precisely because the way it works IRL, e.g., that you'd likely just bleed and die after the first hit, just isn't fun.
So I'll wait and see if it's fun to _play_, realism be damned.
"A lot of the rest of your post was just Nintendo bashing drivel. I'm continually amazed that people are so against innovation by gaming companies. People like you seem to be very comfortable in your fps world where the greater the number of frags apparently increases the size of your penis"
You don't even know what games I play, fanboy. I've mentioned playing story-driven RPGs right in the post you're answering, for example. So try thinking instead of reaching out for the standard insults for a change, ok?
And, no, I'm not against innovation, I just don't like this gimmick controller. That's all. I know it's hard to comprehend, but the real world has more shades of grey between "OMG, it's Nintendo, so it must be automatically perfect" and "grr! must attack Nintendo and stiffle innovation at all cost." Some of us just judge a product as it is. And I just don't like this one. That's all.
"Think of playing ping-pong or tennis with this thing. The controller becomes the handle of the racket/paddle. Spin, direction, and force could all be controlled with this and I would imagine the effect would be much more gratifying and *gasp* fun than pressing buttons on a controller. You could probably even outfit these things with an add-on paddle for even more realism."
Well, _why_ is it more gratifying? Sorry, I don't do axioms. Explain.
Realism? Have you actually played either IRL? Because you're trying to tell me that it's realistic to swing your wrist somewhere else than the ball you're tracking with your eyes is. Nope, having played the real thing, I can tell you that it's not.
Plus, again, I'll take good gameplay over realism any day.
"Golf. Again, far more control (and more realistic control) could be had with this device than with a traditional setup."
Far less control, as you lack the actual feedback, both inertial and visual.
"Arcade-style shooters would be super fun with this type of device. And if the accruacy is as good as the review implies, this would be an improvement over the systems available in most arcades."
Again, I don't just swallow axioms pulled out of the hat. Exactly how would this more fun than existing lightguns? It's not more realistic (unless the shooter is themed around Blake's 7, with their curling-iron style weapons), it's _not_ more accurate, so exactly _what_ is the huge advantage and fun factor?
You haven't seen many product launches before, right? Everyone and their grandma shows up and shakes hands. This, however, doesn't mean jack squat about them actually shipping a product for it.
Reminds me of some of AMD's product launches, where CEOs and representatives from all sorts of companies went up on stage to pledge undying love... and then went back to promoting their Intel-based products instead.
They're just trying to squeeze in their own self-advertising, piggybacked on this. Whether they'll actually ship a game or not, they got a free chance to basically advertise "Buy our games! We're all innovative and original!" (THQ) or "Buy our sports games! And did you know we have a full portfolio of other games across all genres too?" (EA.)
Also rest assured that noone actually asked the _developpers_ for such an event. It's a bunch of C*Os reciting canned texts that came straight from the PR department, maybe with a short detour to the legal dept for a quick check.
Basically, oh, I'm sure they'll port some stuff, if it's easy to do. E.g., via some quick-hack abstraction layer that makes the motion sensor look like a mouse or like a thumbstick to the software.
But if you think they'll actually go make some exclusive titles just because the programmers jumped up and down with joy at the idea of a new controller... you don't know some of these companies. We're talking for example EA who occasionally openly admits its "meh, we're not into making art, we're into making money" attitude.
_If_ they'll make some exclusive title, it won't be because some programmer liked the controller, but because an accountant made a business plan that said "we estimate we'll make x million dollars out of it." This either means being just given the money (MS style) or having a _hell_ of a market to buy those games. Basically until the Revolution has already gained a bunch of market share, I wouldn't hold my breath.
"As for the FPS thing... it may be hard to keep pointing at the screen, but I can't see it being worse than trying to play an FPS with a thumb-stick."
The FPS-on-consoles world doesn't begin and end with thumbsticks, you know.
E.g., on the PS2 you can just take any existing USB keyboard and mouse and plug them into the console. There you go: you can play your FPS with keyboard and mouse, like on the PC.
E.g., I had a Sega keyboard and mouse for the Dreamcast, and while I got them mostly to chat online in PSO, I can assure you first-hand that they worked perfectly in FPS too.
So basically "it can't be worse than a thumb-stick" is good and fine, but I'm more interested in whether it works better than keyboard and mouse. That's where FPS gaming is at.
"Though, of course, if that's what floats your boat, you can still do it. And that is awesome."
Did they include USB ports for the keyboard and mouse? No? Well, then it's not so awesome, after all.
So they solved... umm... what? A problem that only Nintendo had to start with? Heh.
"yup, if people dont keep trying their 'stupid ideas' then technology will stagnate."
:D"
That would be the case if those ideas were actually _new_. Rehashing the exact same failed stuff over and over again has yet to result in any actual progress.
It's sorta like seeing someone come up every year with "I know, let's make a perpetuum mobile where the water coming down powers a pump that pushes it back up." Just coming up with it one more time won't make it work better this time, or result in much progress.
"sure your arms could get tired waving them around all the time, but not as tired as they'd get if you really were using a gun or a sword."
That's like saying that getting kicked in the head is less bad than being kicked in the balls, so it must be a good thing. Well, I'd rather not have either, if I have a choice. Sometimes "less bad" is still nevertheless just "bad".
"People will get more excercise at least ^___^"
Or I'll just buy another console instead. One which doesn't put me through a useless exercise that I don't need or want. (If I wanted to exercise only one hand, I'd be on a porn site instead.)
"and even if it's easier to play with a joypad/mouse"
Then, see above, I'll go buy a console which lets me do just that.
"then it'll be more immersive and realistic to have to control your feeble geeky limbs
There are two very separate issues there which I would contest:
1. The same quip again about "getting some exercise" and "feeble geeky limbs".
I may have mentioned before that I like to experiment on getting people, especially non-gamers, to play various stuff that they normally wouldn't. Just to get an idea about the usability of it for a new player. You can get some fascinating insight that way.
Well, I know someone who's actually a body-builder. Unless you're one yourself, chances are this guy's arms are thicker than your _leg_. Guess what? He can't, for example, hold his arm pointed forward with a lightgun for hours at a time, either.
Some stuff is just uncomfortable no matter if you're geeky or not. It might be ok and fun for a quick distraction to play for half an hour or an hour, but it's not something I'd want for my main controller.
2. I fail to see why bad controls make anything more immersive. If anything, getting a muscle cramp is a distracting factor from _outside_ the game's universe. It can break suspension of disbelief in a jiffy.
And generally, immersion has to do with internal consistency and the quality of storytelling, not with such gimmicks. If a game was uninteresting or inconsistent enough to not keep you immersed with a mouse or gamepad, chances are it still won't keep you immersed after adding some gimmick controls. And viceversa. If it was a good game with some gimmick unwieldy controls, chances are it would keep you just as immersed with a gamepad or mouse.
"Let's start off with the most obvious implementation: FPS. A genre that drives the PS2 and XBox (and dominates computers) will thrive on the Gamecube. Gone is the fiddling with the joystick. A quick flip of the controller, and you've completely turned around. Aiming is no longer tense; your hand eye coordination will allow you to better attack your enemies using a 3d mouse than with a regular controller (think about how many people are about FPS on the computer.)"
Yep, that's why you get owned in FPS by people using a presentation remote control instead of a mouse. Oh, wait, except you don't.
Trust me, this is one use that's been tried to _death_ before. If there actually were some inherent advantage in it, we'd have known it already. (We've had no problem switching from keyboard to joystick, or then from joystick to mouse when it actually offered better tracking. These things just don't.)
If Nintendo wanted to do something that actually works in FPS, they could have just replaced the right stick on a normal controller with a trackball. That actually works.
"Want to control how tense your bow string is? Pull out the bow and arrow, go into first person mode, and extend your arm. Press a button to lock the start position, and pull back as far as you want."
Actually, I don't. I just want to point and click, and have the arrow go that-a-way. If I want it to go farther or closer, I'll vary the angle I shoot it at, thank you very much. So that's one gimmick I can live without quite easily.
"Don't like FPS? Let's ignore that and move to a love of the Nintendo community: Zelda. Want to see Link do more than just two directions with his sword? No problem, since you will be controlling his sword. When you swing your arm, Link swings his. When you jab, so does he."
Actually, if we're talking Zelda-type games, that's the least of my concerns. A story that's not for pre-schoolers would be right at the top, on the other hand.
Not meant as an offense or anything, but that's really why I'm playing my story-driven RPGs on the PS2, PC or XBox. Not because of the controller, but because of the "story-driven" part. Adding more kinds of ways to swing a sword is just about irrelevant there.
"And the accessories for the controller; you can be sure that these will be fairly inexpensive, meaning that companies can throw in their own little controller to add more depth to the game. How about hooking up the headphone set to talk to your buddies in online games to the controller instead of having to have an entire other attachment to the Revolution?"
Accessories always tended to be the part where you pay three times what it's worth. And if we're talking Nintendo, we're talking the company that made you pay extra to get a lightbulb for the original GBA's dark screen, or various other such gimmics. So, umm, I'll wait and see there. I wouldn't take it for granted.
"Now imagine that you hold the controller vertically. You're playing Star Fox. You move the controller, just like in a real jet fighter, and the plane moves with you."
Except in that case I'd rather use a good self-centering force-feedback joystick than wave a wand around. Because that's what you're really pretending to do there: pretending that a silly wand without all that is a substitute for the real thing.
The advantage of Nintendo's controller over that is...? I'm drawing blanks here.
" Your arm swing is its arm swing."
So it can get uncomfortable real fast?
"Your aim is its aim."
And a piss-poor one, compared to using a mouse with your fingers.
I've just got out of the 18-34 demographic, I still play games lots, in fact more than ever, but Nintendo's games do nothing for _me_. (Well, actually I lie. Last time I tried one, it got me bored out of my skull.)
Simplifying it as, basically, "bah all Sony and MS games are yet another Madden or WW2 shooter each year" is so over-simplified, it's not even funny. I'm pretty sure I've played lots of games that weren't FPS, sports or MMO. In fact, on my PS2, I don't even own any games that fall into either of those three categories.
I'm also very sure most of them could be played with friends, co-workers, etc. E.g., virtually all PSP games can be played in multi-player over wireless. I've actually tried it. And it's portable too, so yes you _can_ take it around your school, work, family, etc.
So, basically, please... If you like Nintendo's games, good for you. But reading yet another variant of the same old "Nintendo is for people who want to have FUN, MS and Sony are for people who want to get bored in a 5 hour WoW raid" wisecrack is getting boring already.
We _all_ play games to have fun. Just for some of us that involves different games. That's all.
It was definitely a _lot_ earlier than 2003 when it was first shown at an expo. I didn't know it eventually actually got released with a game, so I wouldn't know if it's the same one. I'd guess it probably is the same, though. But it's just a guess.
It's such a "radical" departure, that Sony tried it already, and it already failed. There were all sorts of cool-sounding gizmos being hyped when the PS2 launched, quite a few being, yes, motion controlled. E.g., a sword that you could swing around and see your character do the same move. Yet we're stuck using the same old DualShock controllers, because that's what actually works better.
It's not like it's a new idea by any means. It's just yet another incarnation of the same tired power-glove idea. It _has_ already been tried by Nintendo, Sega, Sony and on the PC.
It's one of those idiotic ideas which sound all great and revolutionary (again) until you actually try it. No, seriously.
RPGs? Try swinging your arm around like with a sword for hours, because that's what you'd have to do in an action-RPG. See how quickly it gets uncomfortable and then outright _painful_.
FPS? It's been done already, and done better with lightguns. And skipping over the lower accuracy that's already been mentioned, again, the problem is that you just can't keep your arm pointing at the screen for hours. Those are games played for half an hour, maybe an hour at a time, and by then you're already desperately trying to find ways to "cheat" by resting your arm on something. It really gets that uncomfortable.
And let me get back to the "again" part. It's not even a new idea. The PS2 at launch also demonstrated cool-sounding gizmos, like swords you can swing around and see your character do the same swing. Guess why it never actually took off? And it goes even farther back in time, with gizmos like the power glove that was already mentioned.
Idiotic ideas are like vampires in this industry. You just can't ever really kill them. Just when you think one failed spectacularly and miserably, that you've seen it crumble into a pile of ash once and for all... someone drops a drop of blood there and it springs right back to life.
Or more accurately, some ignorant designer comes along and thinks he's soo utterly original for repeating the same mistake again. "I know! It'll be soo original to have permanent death!" (Well, no, every third idiot MUD coder gets the _exact_ same idea. It's not original, it just keeps failing and getting off the radar.) Or in this case, "I know! It'll be soo original to make people swing the controller around!" Or whatever.
*sigh* I know by now I can't expect people to learn from history, as in what happened in the 1600's at the court of some obscure HRE "kingdom". But, eh, the launch of the PS2 isn't _that_ far back in time. You'd think someone at Nintendo would get their head out of their ass long enough to remember that the exact same thing was hyped back then.
"Blah, blah, blah... Am I the only one that is sick and tired of hearing about the "age of the universe", "big bang", and "cosmic expansion"? Cosmology and Astronomy are so far from true science as to be almost laughable. I declare that there are x number of galaxies in the universe! Who is going to prove me wrong?"
No, rest assured that you're not the only one. There's a majority of dumb and uneducated people who need to mock science they never understood (or learned), and generally try to drag everyone back into the muck of mediocrity.
I assume that belittling everyone else's achievement makes them feel better about being dumb failures themselves.
And the dumber and less educated they are, the less they actually understand from that science, the more rabid they'll be in attacking it. The farther someone will be to the left of that IQ or education Gauss curve, the more they'll rant and rave about how everyone to the right is a quack and a witch-doctor spouting nonsense.
Either way, rest assured that you're not alone. You fit in that dumb and uneducated majority perfectly.
At the time, it couldn't have been more than 1.4 billion years away from where earth would have been back then, had the Earth and Sun existed. (They didn't yet.) The whole universe had a 0.7 billion year radius, yeah, so no points could have been more than 2*R apart.
But the universe has been expanding very quickly, and Earth point was basically running away from that beam of light trying to reach it. So it reached us after a whole 13 billion years.
Basically that 13 billion light-years away is measured from where the Earth is _now_, not from where Earth would have been back then. (Again, if Sol or Earth had existed at the time, which they didn't yet.)
It's sorta like this. Let's say I'm a shoplifter running away and you're the security guard trying to catch me. Let's say you start only 10m behind me, but are running only a little faster than I am. So you get to chase me a good 130m before you catch me. You started your chase only 10m from the point I was in the beginning, but 130m behind the point you actually caught up with me.
It's the same starting point in both cases, but the distance is measured from two very different points: (A) from where I was in the beginning, and (B) from where I am at the end of the chase.
If you replace me with the Earth and you with the gamma ray pulse, you get a very rough visual metaphor of what happened there. It's 13 billion years from where we are _now_. It is indeed larger than the R=0.7 billion light-years bubble that the observable universe was back then, because in the meantime the bubble has expanded and Sol and Earth have moved that far outside that space. If you were to plot the way back to where the Earth would have been back then, yeah, it would be a lot closer.
Well, this is only a very very rough visual analogy, and not particularly correct either, but it will hopefully do.
Admittedly, the isolation isn't as perfect as you describe for the Etymotic, but it's very noticeable and the fidelity being nothing short of amazing is a bonus too. I also like the closed can design more than in-ear plugs. (But that's just personal preference.)
And yep, you're absolutely right, it's nice to be able to listen to music at a more sane volume. And since the sound dampening works both ways, it also means my co-workers don't all get to listen to my music.
All in all, yep, I can only recommend that more people buy such headphones.
There are massive cultural differences between Europe, USA and Japan, but viewing it all as a competion scale is so over-simplified it's not even funny.
There is plenty of competition and competitive people in Europe. The difference is _how_ we view that competition. (And even that is just one aspect of the cultural difference, and not _the_ one criterion that explains it all.)
The difference in a nutshell is just that willingness to view violence, all the way up to rape and murder, as just normal competition. That's a USA-specific cultural quirk.
If we're talking games, the cult of the free enterprise is, if anything, stronger here. Economic games routinely outsell FPS in Germany. (Well, maybe not ID and Epic games, but they outsell a lot of others.)
E.g., I remember "Die Gilde" (called "Europa 1400: The Guild" in the USA) selling more than 100,000 copies within the first week in Germany. If you put that into perspective of the population size, it's comparable to a PC game selling anywhere between 300,000 and 400,000 copies in the USA. We're talking a _major_ success for a game that's mostly about hiring apprentices, buying raw materials, having those apprentices hammer them into goods, and selling them on the free market.
So there you go: the "Compete to win. Free enterprise. Yeah!" message is very alive and kicking in games down here.
Japan too has a lot of competitive games, but again, just in a very different way from the USA. The focus there is on winning through hard work and functioning within society, rather than the USA message that you're cool if you're a gangsta and bust a cap in the ass of everyone in your way.
I remember one particular truck driving game, the name escapes me now, which illustrated that very difference. The USA version gave you extra points for breaking traffic laws, smashing property, and generally being a homicidal psycho at the wheel. The original Japan version got you fired and finished your game for the exact same things. In the Japan version you got ahead by driving responsibly, obeying the laws, and carfully avoiding the obstacles instead of smashing into everything.
Or take japanese RPGs for example. It's not that those don't have violence or challenges to overcome. But _the_ message is the emphasis on the message that you only won because of your friends, and the help of all those people you've helped too. I think about half the japanese RPGs I've played even felt a need to literally tell you that, at some point.
As you say it yourself, "Violence is a degenerate form of competition." I took the liberty of emphasizing that, because that's the keyword for the rest of the world. In other parts of the world, e.g., Japan, the competitiveness scale is between 0 = lazy, and 10 = total workaholic, not a scale where 10 = murder and rape.
The difference isn't competitiveness, it's that the USA culture values being a psychopath, in the medical sense of the world. Either the ultra-violent serial-killer kind, or the corporate kind climbing his's way to the top over dead bodies and broken lives, or whatever. It's not just wanting to win, it's the "Society be damned" part. Sometimes not even for an actual "win" in a "competition", but just as just personal entertainment at the expense of others.
Now it's not that other countries don't have their own psychopaths. About 1% of people everywhere are psychopaths, and that's that. But they're not viewed as _the_ role-model and ideal member of society.
Ah, the traditional redneck talking out of the ass about other countries he has _zero_ clue about. How refreshing.
Parties being silenced? Well when was the last USA election that involved more than Democrats and Republicans? (Both of which currently have the same ideology and catter to the same corporate sponsors.) How often have you been told that voting anything else is throwing your vote away?
By comparison virtually any European contry's elections are won by a fragile alliance of several parties. A small party here can and routinely does get seats in the parliament.
And here's a much more fun effect: since neither party has a majority by itself, it can't proceed to whore itself to the highest corporate bidder with impunity for the next X years. Alliances can be formed the other way around within days, and a former majority leader can find itself being _the_ opposition real quick if it did something unpopular.
Other parties being silenced? You don't know what you're talking about. The common complaint here is that those small parties have disproportionately too much power. A coalition's ideology usually reflects more of those small parties ideology than that of the dominant party in the coalition. Because those small parties are what makes it be a majority coalition, and could go form a majority coalition around someone else at any time.
Want some real suppression of a party and an ideology? How about the McCarthy witch-hunt for communists in the USA? Yeah, that sooo makes your point about parties not being allowed to suppress their competition there. Not.
European government slots being filled with the most violent bastards? Geeze, care to support that accusation with any actual case where a minister was even accused of any violence after WW2?
So basically, I won't even try to be diplomatic: go get some real education before you spew such idiocies. And no, Hollywood movies don't count as an education.
Whenever politicians rant and rave about how games are aimed at turning kid into killers, we all rally around the battle cry of "well, duh, some games are not for kids. See that 'M' or '18+' rating on the box? It already says it's not for kids."
So now there's a law saying just that. Why is that a bad thing?
Sure, resourceful kids will always find ways around restrictions, and parents still have to pay some attention to what Junior is playing. And talk to Junior, so he/she doesn't get all the education from games and TV.
But still, the law basically doesn't say anything that we were't already saying: well, duh, some games are not for kids.
Will it bankrupt anyone? I can tell you first hand that it won't.
Here in Germany for example GTA games had an 18+ rating all along for violence. (Which is basically what it's just been re-classified as in the USA too: from 17+ to 18+. If for a different reason.)
Did it stop shops from selling it? Well, no. You can go to Saturn or Media Markt or whatever and pick it off the aisle just the same.
Did it involve some major effort or burden on those shops? No. I'll tell you how Saturn does it, for example. They put these games in a sort of a big red (transparent) plastic box each, that the cashier has to open for you. It takes exactly 1 extra second to open that box, and it's something that's (A) big and obvious even for the most retarded cashier, and (B) obvious to any kid that they're not gonna just pack that between Barbie Fashion Designer and The Sims: Another Expansion and sneak it past the cashier.
I don't see huge queues where an army of cashiers have to ask everyone for ID. Most of the time the Saturn I go to has one cashier at a time, and frankly they couldn't go any lower than that anyway.
Did it make those stores utterly uncompetitive with e-commerce sites? Not more than they already were. At any rate, I didn't see Saturn or Media Markt packing their bags and vacating the premises yet.
So the huge problem is?
As I've said, yes, it's not perfect and there _will_ be some black market, but then again it won't bankrupt anyone either.
Whatever problems the USA has with the 18+ rating are utterly artifficial, and due to some hypocrites' (e.g., WalMart) taking a "nooo, we can't sell 18+ games 'cause they're, like, pornography" stance for purely PR corporate-image reasons. The rest of the world has managed to function just fine with 18+ rated games, and with not selling them to minors.
Well, on the whole I can see you're in the science camp too, and on the whole I'll aggree with what you've said. At least theoretically, in a wishful thinking kinda way. In practice I'm not sure they're feasible.
1. I'm not convinced that peer review is _that_ horribly flawed as it is. Or let me explain better. Sure, there is a lot of bias, and the anonymous submission idea does have real merit. But in the end good science does get recognized (e.g., Einstein's relativity did get recognized, in spite of at least one major authority figure denouncing it as bolshevism) and pseudo-science tends to remain in the realm of lobby groups, marketting departments and tabloids.
And honestly, I don't know how you'd stop them from waving the banner of pseudo-science. Getting their bogus hypotheses rejected after anonymous submitting, still wouldn't stop them from claiming that only polytical/academic/whatever conspiracies are blocking them. For every single "they're only rejecting my miracle cure because they're personally against _me_" conspiracy theory lost, you'd gain a "they're only rejecting my miracle cure because they're paid by some pharma/political/academic/whatever world-conspiracy to hide the truth! They're only against it because it would expose their lies that keep them in business!" It's not like we don't have enough of those already.
2. Well, the problem with payment is that basically there is no mass market for those, so you have to charge a lot even just to recoup the costs. (As in, even to have someone there to manage the archives, make a copy now and then and mail it.) It would be nice to have them somehow available for free to anyone, but I'm not entirely sure how. If the author had to pay for the privilege, it would just mean even less independent stuff published, and more stuff subsidized by the various lobbies. I'm not entirely sure it would be an improvement, to be honest.
3. I'm not sure a president should be replaced over his choice of science. Personally I'd vote we just keep politicians out of it completely. Let's face it, their job is to run the economy, not to have the expertise needed to decide which hypothesis is right. Between a president who can balance the economy and mend the diplomatic relations, and a president who's a world-reknowned expert in several hard sciences, eh, much as I'm a nerd myself, I'd choose the former any time.
Then again, this is _the_ one that's guaranteed to remain just wishful thinking. There are just too many interests and too much political capital in it. It's like asking that Bill Gates gives up Windows and starts a Linux distribution, or Larry Ellison decides that Oracle sucks and starts advertising MySQL. I'm not even discussing if either product is good and bad, but just that noone just gives up on their cash-cow.