I primarily work in ASP.NET, and have done some work with JSP. Those are nice environments (well... ASP.NET is, anyway) -- but for many, many things, they're overkill. A robust OO model is nice for making programmers feel comfortable, but until recently the web has been an inherently procedural undertaking. ASP.NET and AJAX are putting an end to this, but the underlying technology remains stateless.
PHP is procedurally oriented, works well, and -- most important -- is free. I can't convince my boss to touch it, of course, but if some names get behind it, it might become a much easier sell.
But video games played on a TV or computer monitor don't need that extremity in movement, and the current control paradigms have been improving over the years.
I still disagree. There's nothing that innately makes small movements more suited to a small screen -- witness DDR. It's a question of resolution, not absolute distance. Match the resolution (and solve any kinesthetic or ergonomic problems) and the input methods are interchangeable.
You say these paradigms have been improving, but I only see small, slow, incremental improvements. How much better than the wavebird can a controller become? Perhaps this is just a failure of my imagination, but I think conventional controllers will always, in some ways, be lacking. The Revolution might not be the solution to that problem, but I think it's a step in the right direction.
For one thing, it might just take a slight gesture to indicate a move, keeping you from getting too tired. You could stick with basic directions for movement -- maybe roll the stick one way for blocking. Handle punch and kick through the buttons, and rely on specific hand motions for combos and special moves. It would be very different, but interesting.
I'm not fighting game afficianado, though (aside from smash bros.) -- largely because the button combos (and executing them) are just too daunting. This could get me interested in the genre again, though.
Presumably the point is that it makes for a more intuitive interface. You and I have rewired our brains to make them able to translate our intentions into precise thumb motions on a conventional controller, but for many people this process is too daunting and/or boring to be worth their time.
But everyone is wired to interact with the world by moving their arms precisely. And who knows, maybe you and I can achieve higher levels of competency through this route, too? Either way, it seems likely to offer a more natural way to interface with the machine.
Yes, your arm is less precise than your hand. But your hand has a much more limited range of motion. So your arm is more than likely capable of generating movements with a roughly equivalent equivalent resolution.
For example: if your hand motions have a resolution of 1 mm and your arm motions have a resolution of 1 cm, it's equivalent if your arm can move ten times as far. These numbers are grounded in anything scientific, but hopefully you can see my point.
Anyway, it seems likely that in practice for most games on the Revolution the actual difference will be between thumb and wrist, rather than hand and arm.
ipod: great product developed without a partner industry. made its mark through novel technology: a new hard drive form factor that apple held virtually exclusive access to for an extended period. well-built overall system, too.
ITMS: good product developed in partnership with the music industry. DRM withholds value from the consumer, though, in order to avoid creating a product that takes control out of their hands.
ROKR: uninteresting product developed in partnership with the music industry (ITMS integration) and the cell phone industry. Both are interested in protecting their existing business. The providers don't want to undercut their ringtone business, nor attract high-value subscribers down to pricing that'll be used to market this to the yuppie demographic.
As more subscription industries get their fingers in a product, it gets worse and worse. The article is right in that the ROKR sucks because of a desire to protect revenue streams. But not by Apple: who cares if they sell ipods or ipod phones? They'll price it accordingly and make a bundle. It's the businesses that rely on a subscription model that have an interest in avoiding innovation. They're the ones who've neutered ROKR.
The more months Quake 4 has to grab an audience the better.
Not trying to troll, but I greatly prefer Quake to Halo when it comes to Action/Arcade FPS titles, and I feel like I might have a lot more company (and therefore people to play against, both online and at friends' houses) if people were exposed to more than just the de-facto standard in FPSs.
Many of us feel that Halo is a pretty deeply flawed imitation of the shooters than preceded it, that happened to explode in popularity thanks to being in the right place (consoles) at the right time (arrival of network play and serious 3d on the consoles, and the transition of gaming into the mainstream).
I'm sure Halo 3 will have a huge audience (I'll probably buy it). But more diversity in the FPS marketplace can only be good for all of us. Nobody wants Halo to become the next Madden.
First: the French Quarter is above the level of the lake that is currently flooding the city. This is the oldest part of the city, and was built "high enough".
Can you blame people for building out the city beyond its original boundaries? No. Can you blame them for not having rigorous meteorological science available when the city was founded? No. Can you blame them for not having laser and satellite measuring available to determine that the city is sinking? No. Can you blame people for making decisions about where to live that are based on culture, where they were born, the culture into which they were born, and historical accident? No. You can't.
This *is* Slashdot, so I suppose you should be forgiven for thinking that old cities were founded and build like a game of Simcity. But of course they weren't.
We're all Americans, and we're all in this together. I don't live in a storm-prone area, but I'm quite confident that losing all your material posessions is a sufficient economic disincentive to make the point to those affected. Besides, insurance underwriters already figure location into their premiums. We don't need to make these people pay for being rescued off their rooftops.
If you're so upset about this wealth transfer, I invite you to take advantage of this great opportunity and move to a disaster-prone area. Nobody's stopping you -- you can cash in today! You might not add much to the immense cultural and historical contributions of cities like New Orleans or San Francisco, but I'm sure they'd be glad to have you anyway.
There's basically no documentation or mention of what the prereqs are. They don't even tell you how to get a blacklist! Users are referred to their forums, but there's no link to a forum on the page or their homepage. And you've got to have iptables installed, which I didn't. It became obvious pretty quickly that I'd have to figure out how to set up iptables to get PG working, and if that's the case, why do I need PG?
Maybe it's alright for Windows. But I'm a casual linux user who keeps a FC4 box up for file serving and running azureus. For me, PG is basically useless. I'll stick with I2P and Tor to keep me un-sued, thanks.
I agree that plasma isn't a long-term solution, but you're greatly overstating the case for OLEDs. They're used in phones because a) it's small but also because b) phones tend to be replaced every few years. Higher-energy OLEDs (e.g. blue ones) tend to burn out pretty quickly at the moment. Perhaps this problem will eventually be solved, but I have no idea when that might be.
It's not media center XP that will be required, it the XP media connector. It's just a free download, not a whole OS. I'm not sure if it'll work with win2k -- that'll be the sticking point for me.
It's all a shot in the dark right now, but I'm guessing it'll just stream WMV. I'm no expert on encrypted video, but hopefully someone can pluck whatever keys are necessary (if any) out of the binary and hack up a modified version of VLC.
Obviously it'd require the use of the proprietary XDK, and for the user to have the PAK files, but (assuming some terrible person uses the XDK without permission), would this allow a version of Q3 to be compiled for the Xbox? I have to admit I don't know enough about the platform to know whether getting OpenGL apps to run on it is practical, or whether it's DirectX or nothing (in which case I imagine a port would be impractical).
Yes, the controller sucks compared to a mouse, but I'm awash in old video cards, laptops and PC's with LCDs -- Halo 2 is the only FPS I've got available, and let's face it: compared to Q3A, it sucks pretty hard.
Are you using the telerik radeditor MCMS placeholder? It's free, and has capabilities that let you automatically strip out word formatting. In my experience it only sort of works... but it's better than nothing.
You can also add an event handler for the updating event that does some regex tidying. Replacing the regex "]*>" will go a long way (better double-check that). You should be able to come up with a similar one for all the smarttag nonsense that gets inserted, too.
Still, Word formatting remains a major bane to my existence. Good luck.
Speakeasy fills an important niche, but by and large opening the DSL networks has done very little for the consumer. If you don't own the infrastructure you can only compete on customer service, and generally this means you'll be offering a premium service.
It's nice to have this as an option, but it really doesn't encourage innovation in the way that free markets are intended to. Having a lot of resellers working off the same network has not made upgrades to that network happen any faster, and may in fact have retarded them. There's also no decent excuse for why cable gets to keep a monopoly on their network and the telcos don't.
But removing competition doesn't seem likely to improve the situation, either. Really, the right answer here is to make our networks public or semi-public infrastructure, like roads or powerlines (respectively). But that won't happen overnight.
I agree with everything you wrote -- but really, the confusion over this (which leads to the headlines) is generated because until recently, teens have been at the technological forefront. Only recently have non-geek, technologically literate adults become easy to find. Viewed through that lens, folks assume that if the kids are doing it, soon we all will be. This is still true for many things, but not in this case.
To wit: I was part of this transition. In college I still used email, but 90% of communication with my peers was through IM. Now, several years out, I still use IM, but 90% of my communication with my peers is via email.
Well, okay, yes. But you won't die from smoking two cigarettes, or from eating two. It's all about the route of administration. For example, nutmeg is a hallucinogenic poison, but you unless you're taking it by syringe, you can eat pumpkin pie without worry.
Because, your declaration that it's "lame" notwithstanding, there are a limited number of available channels in a given market. Given that, it's not unreasonable to insist that channel owners refrain from committing a fraud against their audience. They exist to serve the public; not the other way around.
Put it another way: we don't allow people to sell placebos as headache remedies. Ending up with a headache isn't the worst thing in the world, although it might distract someone from buying aspirin. And folks could probably figure out for themselves that the product isn't very good, if they could find enough time to critically evaluate it. But despite this, there just isn't a very compelling reason for allowing such quacks and con-men to continue preying upon people.
I think you need to consider why we utilize the free market. It isn't some sort of pagan deity to be satisfied as an end unto itself; it's a means to an end.
The nicotine found in tobacco is perfectly natural: the plant makes it as an insecticide
Of course, it isn't the nicotine in cigarettes that kills you. Yes, it is a poison, but in the amounts present in tobacco, not all that dangerous. Also, it's been shown to have a protective effect against parkinson's!
And, on another related note, smokers metabolize caffeine about twice as fast as the rest of us, for reasons that are still not clearly understood. Hence the coffee & cigarettes cliche -- smokers need more of the stuff to get the same effect.
- the amount of salable intellectual property generated by your employees remains constant regardless of compensation. Just make sure you lock it up in their contracts!
I know businesses exist to make money, but when I was last interviewing I viewed lots of in-office perks as a big strike against prospective employers. It's great if there's a foosball table in the break room, but not if the payments on it come out of my salary.
Even worse is the likelihood that companies who pay a lot of lipservice to maximizing employee creativity aren't looking for innovations within their area of business expertise, but rather new revenue streams. All too frequently contracts at these places give the firm rights to all of your projects and ideas, even if they're not developed at the job.
but I don't own a PS2, and at the point when the original came out, there wasn't much reason to buy one (it was so late in this console cycle that buying any machine prior to the inevitably price-drops is questionable; and particularly the PS2, which was pretty obviously eclipsed by that point).
I'm keeping my fingers crossed for an Xbox 360 release, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I primarily work in ASP.NET, and have done some work with JSP. Those are nice environments (well... ASP.NET is, anyway) -- but for many, many things, they're overkill. A robust OO model is nice for making programmers feel comfortable, but until recently the web has been an inherently procedural undertaking. ASP.NET and AJAX are putting an end to this, but the underlying technology remains stateless.
PHP is procedurally oriented, works well, and -- most important -- is free. I can't convince my boss to touch it, of course, but if some names get behind it, it might become a much easier sell.
But video games played on a TV or computer monitor don't need that extremity in movement, and the current control paradigms have been improving over the years.
I still disagree. There's nothing that innately makes small movements more suited to a small screen -- witness DDR. It's a question of resolution, not absolute distance. Match the resolution (and solve any kinesthetic or ergonomic problems) and the input methods are interchangeable.
You say these paradigms have been improving, but I only see small, slow, incremental improvements. How much better than the wavebird can a controller become? Perhaps this is just a failure of my imagination, but I think conventional controllers will always, in some ways, be lacking. The Revolution might not be the solution to that problem, but I think it's a step in the right direction.
For one thing, it might just take a slight gesture to indicate a move, keeping you from getting too tired. You could stick with basic directions for movement -- maybe roll the stick one way for blocking. Handle punch and kick through the buttons, and rely on specific hand motions for combos and special moves. It would be very different, but interesting.
I'm not fighting game afficianado, though (aside from smash bros.) -- largely because the button combos (and executing them) are just too daunting. This could get me interested in the genre again, though.
Presumably the point is that it makes for a more intuitive interface. You and I have rewired our brains to make them able to translate our intentions into precise thumb motions on a conventional controller, but for many people this process is too daunting and/or boring to be worth their time.
But everyone is wired to interact with the world by moving their arms precisely. And who knows, maybe you and I can achieve higher levels of competency through this route, too? Either way, it seems likely to offer a more natural way to interface with the machine.
Yes, your arm is less precise than your hand. But your hand has a much more limited range of motion. So your arm is more than likely capable of generating movements with a roughly equivalent equivalent resolution.
For example: if your hand motions have a resolution of 1 mm and your arm motions have a resolution of 1 cm, it's equivalent if your arm can move ten times as far. These numbers are grounded in anything scientific, but hopefully you can see my point.
Anyway, it seems likely that in practice for most games on the Revolution the actual difference will be between thumb and wrist, rather than hand and arm.
ipod: great product developed without a partner industry. made its mark through novel technology: a new hard drive form factor that apple held virtually exclusive access to for an extended period. well-built overall system, too.
ITMS: good product developed in partnership with the music industry. DRM withholds value from the consumer, though, in order to avoid creating a product that takes control out of their hands.
ROKR: uninteresting product developed in partnership with the music industry (ITMS integration) and the cell phone industry. Both are interested in protecting their existing business. The providers don't want to undercut their ringtone business, nor attract high-value subscribers down to pricing that'll be used to market this to the yuppie demographic.
As more subscription industries get their fingers in a product, it gets worse and worse. The article is right in that the ROKR sucks because of a desire to protect revenue streams. But not by Apple: who cares if they sell ipods or ipod phones? They'll price it accordingly and make a bundle. It's the businesses that rely on a subscription model that have an interest in avoiding innovation. They're the ones who've neutered ROKR.
The more months Quake 4 has to grab an audience the better.
Not trying to troll, but I greatly prefer Quake to Halo when it comes to Action/Arcade FPS titles, and I feel like I might have a lot more company (and therefore people to play against, both online and at friends' houses) if people were exposed to more than just the de-facto standard in FPSs.
Many of us feel that Halo is a pretty deeply flawed imitation of the shooters than preceded it, that happened to explode in popularity thanks to being in the right place (consoles) at the right time (arrival of network play and serious 3d on the consoles, and the transition of gaming into the mainstream).
I'm sure Halo 3 will have a huge audience (I'll probably buy it). But more diversity in the FPS marketplace can only be good for all of us. Nobody wants Halo to become the next Madden.
First: the French Quarter is above the level of the lake that is currently flooding the city. This is the oldest part of the city, and was built "high enough".
Can you blame people for building out the city beyond its original boundaries? No. Can you blame them for not having rigorous meteorological science available when the city was founded? No. Can you blame them for not having laser and satellite measuring available to determine that the city is sinking? No. Can you blame people for making decisions about where to live that are based on culture, where they were born, the culture into which they were born, and historical accident? No. You can't.
This *is* Slashdot, so I suppose you should be forgiven for thinking that old cities were founded and build like a game of Simcity. But of course they weren't.
We're all Americans, and we're all in this together. I don't live in a storm-prone area, but I'm quite confident that losing all your material posessions is a sufficient economic disincentive to make the point to those affected. Besides, insurance underwriters already figure location into their premiums. We don't need to make these people pay for being rescued off their rooftops.
If you're so upset about this wealth transfer, I invite you to take advantage of this great opportunity and move to a disaster-prone area. Nobody's stopping you -- you can cash in today! You might not add much to the immense cultural and historical contributions of cities like New Orleans or San Francisco, but I'm sure they'd be glad to have you anyway.
There's basically no documentation or mention of what the prereqs are. They don't even tell you how to get a blacklist! Users are referred to their forums, but there's no link to a forum on the page or their homepage. And you've got to have iptables installed, which I didn't. It became obvious pretty quickly that I'd have to figure out how to set up iptables to get PG working, and if that's the case, why do I need PG?
Maybe it's alright for Windows. But I'm a casual linux user who keeps a FC4 box up for file serving and running azureus. For me, PG is basically useless. I'll stick with I2P and Tor to keep me un-sued, thanks.
I agree that plasma isn't a long-term solution, but you're greatly overstating the case for OLEDs. They're used in phones because a) it's small but also because b) phones tend to be replaced every few years. Higher-energy OLEDs (e.g. blue ones) tend to burn out pretty quickly at the moment. Perhaps this problem will eventually be solved, but I have no idea when that might be.
Personally, I'd put my money on SEDs.
It's not media center XP that will be required, it the XP media connector. It's just a free download, not a whole OS. I'm not sure if it'll work with win2k -- that'll be the sticking point for me.
It's all a shot in the dark right now, but I'm guessing it'll just stream WMV. I'm no expert on encrypted video, but hopefully someone can pluck whatever keys are necessary (if any) out of the binary and hack up a modified version of VLC.
Oh, I donno. I had it on the dreamcast; it wasn't THAT bad. admittedly, I wouldn't want to play it against people who were using a kb/mouse combo...
Obviously it'd require the use of the proprietary XDK, and for the user to have the PAK files, but (assuming some terrible person uses the XDK without permission), would this allow a version of Q3 to be compiled for the Xbox? I have to admit I don't know enough about the platform to know whether getting OpenGL apps to run on it is practical, or whether it's DirectX or nothing (in which case I imagine a port would be impractical).
Yes, the controller sucks compared to a mouse, but I'm awash in old video cards, laptops and PC's with LCDs -- Halo 2 is the only FPS I've got available, and let's face it: compared to Q3A, it sucks pretty hard.
there are still servers for DC quake?
Are you using the telerik radeditor MCMS placeholder? It's free, and has capabilities that let you automatically strip out word formatting. In my experience it only sort of works... but it's better than nothing.
You can also add an event handler for the updating event that does some regex tidying. Replacing the regex "]*>" will go a long way (better double-check that). You should be able to come up with a similar one for all the smarttag nonsense that gets inserted, too.
Still, Word formatting remains a major bane to my existence. Good luck.
It's nice to have this as an option, but it really doesn't encourage innovation in the way that free markets are intended to. Having a lot of resellers working off the same network has not made upgrades to that network happen any faster, and may in fact have retarded them. There's also no decent excuse for why cable gets to keep a monopoly on their network and the telcos don't.
But removing competition doesn't seem likely to improve the situation, either. Really, the right answer here is to make our networks public or semi-public infrastructure, like roads or powerlines (respectively). But that won't happen overnight.
I agree with everything you wrote -- but really, the confusion over this (which leads to the headlines) is generated because until recently, teens have been at the technological forefront. Only recently have non-geek, technologically literate adults become easy to find. Viewed through that lens, folks assume that if the kids are doing it, soon we all will be. This is still true for many things, but not in this case.
To wit: I was part of this transition. In college I still used email, but 90% of communication with my peers was through IM. Now, several years out, I still use IM, but 90% of my communication with my peers is via email.
Well, okay, yes. But you won't die from smoking two cigarettes, or from eating two. It's all about the route of administration. For example, nutmeg is a hallucinogenic poison, but you unless you're taking it by syringe, you can eat pumpkin pie without worry.
Why exactly should this be illegal?
Because, your declaration that it's "lame" notwithstanding, there are a limited number of available channels in a given market. Given that, it's not unreasonable to insist that channel owners refrain from committing a fraud against their audience. They exist to serve the public; not the other way around.
Put it another way: we don't allow people to sell placebos as headache remedies. Ending up with a headache isn't the worst thing in the world, although it might distract someone from buying aspirin. And folks could probably figure out for themselves that the product isn't very good, if they could find enough time to critically evaluate it. But despite this, there just isn't a very compelling reason for allowing such quacks and con-men to continue preying upon people.
I think you need to consider why we utilize the free market. It isn't some sort of pagan deity to be satisfied as an end unto itself; it's a means to an end.
The nicotine found in tobacco is perfectly natural: the plant makes it as an insecticide
Of course, it isn't the nicotine in cigarettes that kills you. Yes, it is a poison, but in the amounts present in tobacco, not all that dangerous. Also, it's been shown to have a protective effect against parkinson's!
And, on another related note, smokers metabolize caffeine about twice as fast as the rest of us, for reasons that are still not clearly understood. Hence the coffee & cigarettes cliche -- smokers need more of the stuff to get the same effect.
Exactly. He knows, but without the cable channel, how will he let us know?
Shorter version:
- pensions cost most than an on-site masseuse
- the amount of salable intellectual property generated by your employees remains constant regardless of compensation. Just make sure you lock it up in their contracts!
I know businesses exist to make money, but when I was last interviewing I viewed lots of in-office perks as a big strike against prospective employers. It's great if there's a foosball table in the break room, but not if the payments on it come out of my salary.
Even worse is the likelihood that companies who pay a lot of lipservice to maximizing employee creativity aren't looking for innovations within their area of business expertise, but rather new revenue streams. All too frequently contracts at these places give the firm rights to all of your projects and ideas, even if they're not developed at the job.
Excellent point. Scientology is more concerned with ruining lives than ruining movies (Battlefield Earth notwithstanding).
but I don't own a PS2, and at the point when the original came out, there wasn't much reason to buy one (it was so late in this console cycle that buying any machine prior to the inevitably price-drops is questionable; and particularly the PS2, which was pretty obviously eclipsed by that point).
I'm keeping my fingers crossed for an Xbox 360 release, though.
I agree completely. "Whilst" is usually a pretty good signifier that whatever you're reading was written by a pretentious ass.