I guess it depends on how much TV you watch? I watch probably 1-2 hours of TV per week, so having a single subscription or two to focus on the shows I'm most interested in makes a lot of sense for me, and is a HUGE cost-savings. My "to watch" queue fills faster than my TV watch rate does so I'll be good spending my $10 for "all the TV I care to watch" for the foreseeable future.
I think their branding of "S" as opposed to "2" is pretty important, and is a remarkably honest way to market the device.
Compared to some of the later headsets (Vive Pro, some of the MS-based headsets) it's not much of an improvement (or a small step back). When compared to their current offering, though, it provides a number of quality-of-life benefits which are pretty substantial outside of the in-home market. First is reduction of the SDE, partially due to higher resolution, and also partially due to the change in type of displays. The improved optics are also a welcome improvement. Lack of IPD adjustment is confusing to me, since it's already a problem they've solved before.
Wired means that I can use this in a busy space, and have the full GPU of whatever monster laptop I plug it into. No external sensors makes configuration, maintenance, and organization VASTLY more convenient. These are the main benefits of an MS headset over the Oculus ones for crowded spaces (Game jams, convention shows, demos). If I can do a demo without using those AWFUL Microsoft controllers, I'm a happy man.
Previously, I've only done room-scale setups with my Vive/Vive Pro. This/might/ be able to take on those tasks, but we'll see how room-scale it really gets. Overall, this means there's an Oculus product I can use for more than "Set it up once and leave it alone" type configurations.
They're really nice: The controller base looks and feels very solidly built. The stand-out bits are that it has USB, so you can plug in some existing devices, but more importantly every button and trigger has a 3.5mm plug associated with it, so that you can attach any custom pedal/button/switch/lever/etc for which you can hack in a 3.5mm jack.
This is good for games, but it's also good as the core for other types of customized input arrangements.
Speak for yourself... As a scientist, I'm regularly surprised, especially in the field of Machine Learning. I don't think people understand the incredible number of ways that these things can fail (it borders on the absurd). When the darn thing works, it's by far an exception instead of the rule, and it's very pleasantly surprising.
I work at the laboratory where this spacecraft was designed and built, and I did work on the craft a very little bit. For this mission into the Sun's corona, the outside temperatures will be upwards of 1400C. The heat shield is a 11.5 cm thick carbon composite shield. It is not ablative. The shield is at a distance from much of the craft as to create a large enough umbra to contain all the components. Anything that falls outside the umbra would be cooked to a crisp. The solar arrays retract, so that when the sunlight is 475x times what we get on Earth they can stay nice and cool in the umbra.
For many genres of experiences, teleportation is a very viable way to go. For anything that focuses on locomotion (such as shooters, walking simulators, or non-archery sports games), it's a big problem.
To be honest, I'm not satisfied with any software-only solutions, and I've seen quite a few. Frankly I've been doing this long enough that I'm skeptical a software-only solution could exists. The industry is seeing a lot of growth in the location-based entertainment and industrial sectors, because their solution is "Get a bigger room"... Which is a rather unsatisfying answer for home use. Some of the passive optical sensors (Windows MR headsets) have promise in terms of tracking volume, but homes have lots of obstructions and other dangers (stove tops, stairs) which would need to be designed around.
Even the hardware solutions I've seen are almost all either insanely expensive, or very gimmicky. Omnidirectional treadmills are a technology still in their infancy, but there's a lot of promise there. Things like the Virtuix Omni treadmill (which is NOT a treadmill) aren't enough, it will likely take something akin to the Infinadeck to actually solve the problem.
This isn't competing with Rift or Vive, it's competing with the Meta2 ($1000 tethered) and the HoloLens ($3000 and 3 years old). Expect to see more adoption in the industrial and enterprise markets before you see much in the way of home-based entertainment for this kind of device.
Hi there. I'm a professional VR developer, I teach a VR development course, and I made a fun little game-jam indie game which I sell on Steam. I'll happily talk about this kind of stuff all day. While I don't get motion sickness of any kind (car, boat, desktop gaming), I do occasionally feel ill in VR, especially in a poorly designed experience. If you have to keep a bucket nearby, you're applying the wrong design principles (either by accident or on purpose).
For the vast majority of users, it all comes down to design: If the eyes are seeing movement that the body didn't initiate, then discomfort happens. If the environment does not honor the players' physical body, then discomfort happens.
This is why flying around in Google Earth can make you ill, while making things in Google Blocks negatively affects very few people. Comfortable locomotion is still a difficult/unsolved problem, which is why a lot of games have teleportation mechanisms.
The stimuli that make a person feel ill are VERY personal. For example, I have no problem moving up in VR, but I feel a little queasy any time a game moves me down in VR. The precise stimulus and degree of impact is different for every individual.
There are a lot of camera things (such as shaky cam) that have to be avoided outright completely. Even traditional cinematic techniques such as panning over an environment should be done with care (open the scene at speed instead of accelerating/decelerating, provide audio cues such as rushing air before you fade-in to a aerial pan). Flying about in Google Earth is made somewhat more comfortable by reducing the field of view to just the foveated region, which is generally more tolerant of motion than the periphery.
Other forms of discomfort include when objects pass through where the operators' physical body would be, and the use of inverse kinematics which often shows player limbs in orientations that don't match up with the operators' actual position (and thus proprioceptive system). These often "feel weird", but don't generally make people ill. (Interestingly, often the best solution to this is to not include arms or legs at all, and only show hands, like in Job Simulator)
Honor and respect your players' body. They'll thank you.
I just checked some quick examples in JavaScript, and didn't love the syntax it gave back as a result. Meanwhile, the StackOverflow pages in the search results provided much more correct answers. StackOverflow's answers often provide context, which is very important when building software.
I've gotten two or three refunds from Steam. That feature launched in 2015 (Duke Nukem Forever came out well before that, I think). You can ask for a refund if you've owned a game for less than two weeks, and played fewer than two hours. I don't know of any other retailer that lets you return games.
Dude... Do you REMEMBER what PC gaming was like before Steam?
"if you love computing as it has always been" Clearly not. Let's think back, shall we?
You had to have the CD in your computer to play. People started putting in multiple CD-ROM drives so that folks could easily play different games. That's not so bad... The DRM on those CDs was so invasive, some included rootkits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal), back-doors, viruses, or would otherwise slow down / take over your PC (Oops! You can't use your CD-R anymore, too bad!). Sometimes the DRM or other software on the CD would corrupt your OS, so you had to format it and reinstall everything. Lost your CD? Game gone, can't play it ever on anything, have to re-purchase. Bought the game on PC, and changed to a Mac? Have to re-purchase. No sales, everything at full retail all the time. You could never get your money back for a shitty game. Dongles! Some software used to require physical dongles to run as part of their DRM. Are you a small developer? Do you want to sell in more than just your immediate locality? Good luck manufacturing/distributing/selling world-wide.
Steam was (and continues to be) successful, because it turned the adversarial relationship between player and publisher into a much more cooperative one. It's not some grand conspiracy. It took a terrible user experience and turned it into something that was organized, didn't install rootkits, let people have all their games at their fingertips, works across platforms, and has ensured that if I have anything resembling a modern computer, I can play almost anything I've ever purchased. Oh, and there's not monthly fee for anything.
JetBrains started development of the language in 2010 because they were tired of how old-fashioned Java was. Here's a Wired article about it: https://www.wired.com/story/ko...
Go back to that Kotlin Wikipedia page you cited: it first appeared publicly in 2011
And no, it's not ridiculous the the JVM is too slow for what I do. I do machine learning, virtual & augmented reality development, modeling & simulation / game development, and embedded systems. While you can use Java for game development, it's not great at it... And Java is completely unsuitable for those other tasks. I know Java, I don't even mind using Java when it's appropriate (cross-platform back-end), but it's one of many tools in my tool-belt, it is NOT one-size fits all, and Oracle has done the language no favors.
It used to be that Java was THE way to provide interactive content (Remember Applets?), and it used to be that Java was one of the first things I installed on a computer build. Now? I have entire labs where I haven't bothered to put Java on a single machine
"Kotlin and Scala were created long before Oracle bought Sun."
Oracle bought Java in January 27, 2010, Kotlin first appeared in 2011
And while Scala had existed before Oracle bought Java, it was designed precisely to deal with the design issues that Java had, and was barely a blip on the radar until 2014, when Oracle finally included lambda expressions in the JVM (three years after C++, and seven years after.NET)
I'm a developer. I care far more about the language that I'm using, how it's supported, and what it is/is not good at, than anything else. I do have Java experience, but the JVM is far too slow for any of the kind of work that I do these days.
If it's not compiled in a Java compiler, then it's not Java. Languages like Kotlin and Scala exist PRECISELY because of Oracle's mistreatment/neglect of Java.
You can call me a troll all you want, but Java has been in decline for a very long time. I'm sure there are areas where it will continue to be viable for the foreseeable future, but to pretend that it's as strong as it was back in it's heyday is just deluding yourself.
This is precisely the kind of product that benefits greatly from corporation / open-source collaboration. A community-centric tool that benefits with having both close ties to the official codebase, and also has a broad population of interested persons providing input, feedback, bugfixes, etc.
Oracle has bungled, and continues to bungle, both open-source in general, and Java in particular. Despite a 2016 bubble, the long-term decline in popularity of the platform is significant.
1) It's a charitable act. Charity. As in, you do it for free, because it's the right thing to do. 2) They're not talking about IT systems. They're talking about hacking together solutions for those under-served by the general populace.
... after being lazy and wasteful of other peoples' resources (time, bandwidth, storage space).
I've made game demos before. It's not exactly rocket science. Heck, many entry-level game engines (Unity) have, as part of the build process, a way for you to select what levels you want for a given build so that it creates output with the appropriate size & content (and nothing more).
... I set up a separate low-balance checking account just for less secure transactions. It can only get hit so hard, acting as a buffer to my household finances. I can transfer money in/out at my financial institution, but my household funds never get exposed to the world.
... especially in an at-will state, it's always legally in your best interest to not state a reason for the termination. For an at-will state, you are often not required to provide a reason, and if you do provide one it can come back to bite you in a lawsuit if they can show evidence otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Because that's how you get zombies.
I guess it depends on how much TV you watch? I watch probably 1-2 hours of TV per week, so having a single subscription or two to focus on the shows I'm most interested in makes a lot of sense for me, and is a HUGE cost-savings. My "to watch" queue fills faster than my TV watch rate does so I'll be good spending my $10 for "all the TV I care to watch" for the foreseeable future.
I think their branding of "S" as opposed to "2" is pretty important, and is a remarkably honest way to market the device.
Compared to some of the later headsets (Vive Pro, some of the MS-based headsets) it's not much of an improvement (or a small step back). When compared to their current offering, though, it provides a number of quality-of-life benefits which are pretty substantial outside of the in-home market. First is reduction of the SDE, partially due to higher resolution, and also partially due to the change in type of displays. The improved optics are also a welcome improvement. Lack of IPD adjustment is confusing to me, since it's already a problem they've solved before.
Wired means that I can use this in a busy space, and have the full GPU of whatever monster laptop I plug it into. No external sensors makes configuration, maintenance, and organization VASTLY more convenient. These are the main benefits of an MS headset over the Oculus ones for crowded spaces (Game jams, convention shows, demos). If I can do a demo without using those AWFUL Microsoft controllers, I'm a happy man.
Previously, I've only done room-scale setups with my Vive/Vive Pro. This /might/ be able to take on those tasks, but we'll see how room-scale it really gets. Overall, this means there's an Oculus product I can use for more than "Set it up once and leave it alone" type configurations.
They're really nice: The controller base looks and feels very solidly built. The stand-out bits are that it has USB, so you can plug in some existing devices, but more importantly every button and trigger has a 3.5mm plug associated with it, so that you can attach any custom pedal/button/switch/lever/etc for which you can hack in a 3.5mm jack.
This is good for games, but it's also good as the core for other types of customized input arrangements.
~D
Speak for yourself... As a scientist, I'm regularly surprised, especially in the field of Machine Learning. I don't think people understand the incredible number of ways that these things can fail (it borders on the absurd). When the darn thing works, it's by far an exception instead of the rule, and it's very pleasantly surprising.
~D
I work at the laboratory where this spacecraft was designed and built, and I did work on the craft a very little bit. For this mission into the Sun's corona, the outside temperatures will be upwards of 1400C. The heat shield is a 11.5 cm thick carbon composite shield. It is not ablative. The shield is at a distance from much of the craft as to create a large enough umbra to contain all the components. Anything that falls outside the umbra would be cooked to a crisp. The solar arrays retract, so that when the sunlight is 475x times what we get on Earth they can stay nice and cool in the umbra.
For many genres of experiences, teleportation is a very viable way to go. For anything that focuses on locomotion (such as shooters, walking simulators, or non-archery sports games), it's a big problem.
To be honest, I'm not satisfied with any software-only solutions, and I've seen quite a few. Frankly I've been doing this long enough that I'm skeptical a software-only solution could exists. The industry is seeing a lot of growth in the location-based entertainment and industrial sectors, because their solution is "Get a bigger room"... Which is a rather unsatisfying answer for home use. Some of the passive optical sensors (Windows MR headsets) have promise in terms of tracking volume, but homes have lots of obstructions and other dangers (stove tops, stairs) which would need to be designed around.
Even the hardware solutions I've seen are almost all either insanely expensive, or very gimmicky. Omnidirectional treadmills are a technology still in their infancy, but there's a lot of promise there. Things like the Virtuix Omni treadmill (which is NOT a treadmill) aren't enough, it will likely take something akin to the Infinadeck to actually solve the problem.
This isn't competing with Rift or Vive, it's competing with the Meta2 ($1000 tethered) and the HoloLens ($3000 and 3 years old). Expect to see more adoption in the industrial and enterprise markets before you see much in the way of home-based entertainment for this kind of device.
Hi there. I'm a professional VR developer, I teach a VR development course, and I made a fun little game-jam indie game which I sell on Steam. I'll happily talk about this kind of stuff all day. While I don't get motion sickness of any kind (car, boat, desktop gaming), I do occasionally feel ill in VR, especially in a poorly designed experience. If you have to keep a bucket nearby, you're applying the wrong design principles (either by accident or on purpose).
For the vast majority of users, it all comes down to design:
If the eyes are seeing movement that the body didn't initiate, then discomfort happens.
If the environment does not honor the players' physical body, then discomfort happens.
This is why flying around in Google Earth can make you ill, while making things in Google Blocks negatively affects very few people. Comfortable locomotion is still a difficult/unsolved problem, which is why a lot of games have teleportation mechanisms.
The stimuli that make a person feel ill are VERY personal. For example, I have no problem moving up in VR, but I feel a little queasy any time a game moves me down in VR. The precise stimulus and degree of impact is different for every individual.
There are a lot of camera things (such as shaky cam) that have to be avoided outright completely. Even traditional cinematic techniques such as panning over an environment should be done with care (open the scene at speed instead of accelerating/decelerating, provide audio cues such as rushing air before you fade-in to a aerial pan). Flying about in Google Earth is made somewhat more comfortable by reducing the field of view to just the foveated region, which is generally more tolerant of motion than the periphery.
Other forms of discomfort include when objects pass through where the operators' physical body would be, and the use of inverse kinematics which often shows player limbs in orientations that don't match up with the operators' actual position (and thus proprioceptive system). These often "feel weird", but don't generally make people ill. (Interestingly, often the best solution to this is to not include arms or legs at all, and only show hands, like in Job Simulator)
Honor and respect your players' body. They'll thank you.
I just checked some quick examples in JavaScript, and didn't love the syntax it gave back as a result. Meanwhile, the StackOverflow pages in the search results provided much more correct answers. StackOverflow's answers often provide context, which is very important when building software.
I've gotten two or three refunds from Steam. That feature launched in 2015 (Duke Nukem Forever came out well before that, I think). You can ask for a refund if you've owned a game for less than two weeks, and played fewer than two hours. I don't know of any other retailer that lets you return games.
Dude... Do you REMEMBER what PC gaming was like before Steam?
"if you love computing as it has always been"
Clearly not. Let's think back, shall we?
You had to have the CD in your computer to play. People started putting in multiple CD-ROM drives so that folks could easily play different games. That's not so bad...
The DRM on those CDs was so invasive, some included rootkits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal), back-doors, viruses, or would otherwise slow down / take over your PC (Oops! You can't use your CD-R anymore, too bad!).
Sometimes the DRM or other software on the CD would corrupt your OS, so you had to format it and reinstall everything.
Lost your CD? Game gone, can't play it ever on anything, have to re-purchase.
Bought the game on PC, and changed to a Mac? Have to re-purchase.
No sales, everything at full retail all the time.
You could never get your money back for a shitty game.
Dongles! Some software used to require physical dongles to run as part of their DRM.
Are you a small developer? Do you want to sell in more than just your immediate locality? Good luck manufacturing/distributing/selling world-wide.
Steam was (and continues to be) successful, because it turned the adversarial relationship between player and publisher into a much more cooperative one. It's not some grand conspiracy. It took a terrible user experience and turned it into something that was organized, didn't install rootkits, let people have all their games at their fingertips, works across platforms, and has ensured that if I have anything resembling a modern computer, I can play almost anything I've ever purchased. Oh, and there's not monthly fee for anything.
JetBrains started development of the language in 2010 because they were tired of how old-fashioned Java was. Here's a Wired article about it:
https://www.wired.com/story/ko...
Go back to that Kotlin Wikipedia page you cited: it first appeared publicly in 2011
And no, it's not ridiculous the the JVM is too slow for what I do. I do machine learning, virtual & augmented reality development, modeling & simulation / game development, and embedded systems. While you can use Java for game development, it's not great at it... And Java is completely unsuitable for those other tasks. I know Java, I don't even mind using Java when it's appropriate (cross-platform back-end), but it's one of many tools in my tool-belt, it is NOT one-size fits all, and Oracle has done the language no favors.
It used to be that Java was THE way to provide interactive content (Remember Applets?), and it used to be that Java was one of the first things I installed on a computer build. Now? I have entire labs where I haven't bothered to put Java on a single machine
"Kotlin and Scala were created long before Oracle bought Sun."
Oracle bought Java in January 27, 2010, Kotlin first appeared in 2011
And while Scala had existed before Oracle bought Java, it was designed precisely to deal with the design issues that Java had, and was barely a blip on the radar until 2014, when Oracle finally included lambda expressions in the JVM (three years after C++, and seven years after .NET)
I'm a developer. I care far more about the language that I'm using, how it's supported, and what it is/is not good at, than anything else. I do have Java experience, but the JVM is far too slow for any of the kind of work that I do these days.
If it's not compiled in a Java compiler, then it's not Java. Languages like Kotlin and Scala exist PRECISELY because of Oracle's mistreatment/neglect of Java.
You asked for a source, I showed you a source that showed Java popularity at about half of what it once was.
I don't have enterprise-specific numbers, but in 2018, the Java job demand is down about 9%
https://www.codingdojo.com/blo...
Fewer people are looking for tutorials and information as compared to a year ago
http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.htm...
Between 2013 and 2017 Java has seen a 4% decline in popularity
https://insights.stackoverflow...
You can call me a troll all you want, but Java has been in decline for a very long time. I'm sure there are areas where it will continue to be viable for the foreseeable future, but to pretend that it's as strong as it was back in it's heyday is just deluding yourself.
The overall Java decline since at least 2002, aside from the 2015/2016 bubble
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-in...
This is precisely the kind of product that benefits greatly from corporation / open-source collaboration. A community-centric tool that benefits with having both close ties to the official codebase, and also has a broad population of interested persons providing input, feedback, bugfixes, etc.
Oracle has bungled, and continues to bungle, both open-source in general, and Java in particular. Despite a 2016 bubble, the long-term decline in popularity of the platform is significant.
Just because she can't put out a dumpster fire doesn't mean everything she touches is a dumpster fire. Just another CxO moving around.
1) It's a charitable act. Charity. As in, you do it for free, because it's the right thing to do.
2) They're not talking about IT systems. They're talking about hacking together solutions for those under-served by the general populace.
... after being lazy and wasteful of other peoples' resources (time, bandwidth, storage space).
I've made game demos before. It's not exactly rocket science. Heck, many entry-level game engines (Unity) have, as part of the build process, a way for you to select what levels you want for a given build so that it creates output with the appropriate size & content (and nothing more).
... I set up a separate low-balance checking account just for less secure transactions. It can only get hit so hard, acting as a buffer to my household finances. I can transfer money in/out at my financial institution, but my household funds never get exposed to the world.
I wish I could mod you above 5.
... especially in an at-will state, it's always legally in your best interest to not state a reason for the termination. For an at-will state, you are often not required to provide a reason, and if you do provide one it can come back to bite you in a lawsuit if they can show evidence otherwise.
Maybe you shouldn't buy it then?
For some folks it has some attractive features.