Joysticks were always a niche peripheral really - keyboard/mouse is much better for FPS, and though fighting games use joysticks in the arcade, it's a lot easier to combo with a digital pad (dammit Melty Blood, I pushed down three times, why isn't your dead zone large enough to notice?). I think what the decline in joysticks really shows is the decline in first-person flight sim-esque games - remember when X-Wing/TIE fighter/etc. was the big thing to play? What happened to those days? The last decent game of that sort I remember was Star Trek Bridge Commander, and I'll bet many people played through the whole campaign without even noticing the ability to control the Enterprise flight-sim style. It's a shame, because it seems like one of the genres that would really benefit a lot from modern graphics. So, what happened to it?
My experience disagrees with you; if groups of people get drunk with nothing to do, they get bored, and fall out with each other due to not having an outlet for aggression. It's a lot better to have at least a pack of cards, or a movie - ok, not a games console per se, but something of the sort.
Show me someone who can actually hear a problem with CD. The article you link has bad mathematics, a usage of "weedy" that suggests he has no idea what he's talking about, and the problems he mentions with a particular album are more than likely due to someone doing dynamic range compression to make it sound louder than any real problems with the CD format.
(Interesting story: the DVDA of REM's best of album is just the CD upsampled; this was only noticed when someone ran an audio editor on it).
If you have recorded something known to be indistinguishable by human hearing from the original, as we can easily do now, why do you care about getting any more?
I cannot quite see how this would apply for example to a h.264 decoder.
You might want to combine it with something else, to make e.g. a hardware transcoder, for which you might want to include an ac3 encoder based off an existing software one rather than writing one from scratch, and last I knew the only decent open-source one around was GPLed. Just as an example
On the very low hardware level, yes, the memory will be base 4. However, on anything but that very low level there's no reason for anything to care - it's trivial to convert between base 2 and 4, and it's a lot easier and more sensible to program a computer that works in base 2 than to make your opcodes do something sensible on 4-state things.
I hear this from lisp zealots all the time, but I really don't see it. Statements are useful because they make the distinction between things which need to occur sequentially and things which could be calculated at any time - which is an important one in the real world, something that pure-functional languages tend to be very bad at, and is only going to become more important with the rise of multicore machines.
Making print a function is a sensible thing, I think, but it reveals a deeper flaw in python: a bare "function argument" ought to call the function with the argument, without needing brackets.
As long as there are people using it support will continue, since a certain fraction of them will patch things. And writing modules yourself is quite straightforward, really (though why would you need to if this is old working code that you just want to keep working?)
This is what I love about slashdot. Every biotech article gets tagged "whatcouldpossiblygowrong", yet every article which mentions religious people saying the same, it's all "religion is all lies".
Taggers are a tiny, unrepresentative minority. Compare like with like - how many comments like the pope's do you see in biotech discussions? And how are they moderated?
Newsflash: if there exist invisible super-beings, then there's no way to tell! If you get all holier-than-thou because you are so certain that unprovability is equal to nonexistance, you really need to read up on Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
Right back at you; maybe you should read the actual theorem yourself. Because currently you're just making yourself look like an idiot who read the name in a book somewhere.
Seriously, in a corp that big, your machines need to be as secure as if they were on the internet anyway. You can't and won't secure that much cable, building and personnel.
I think LANs will continue to exist out of sheer practicality though. What's easier, wiring up every computer in the building to the internet, or wiring the building computers together and then getting internet to one of them?
Re:I thought those things were already broken
on
Yahoo CAPTCHA Hacked
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· Score: 1
Many hosts will charge more for porn. Or not allow it at all.
I do not see the positive correlation between graphical enhancements and gameplay. In fact, one could say that back then video game developers had to focus on gameplay because graphics alone could not attract gamers.
You seem to be defining gameplay to not include graphics, in which case of course they won't be correlated. The *right* question to ask is: do better graphics make a game more fun? And I would say that, all other things being equal, of course they do.
Either way, I don't know why some people can't admit the style of video games made on the SNES is more appealing to some gamers.
Sure, but those games could often be made better on more modern hardware - even if they aren't, there's no reason why you couldn't. And often when people do do that, it leads to some of the very best games.
I can live with it, and more than that, I wish games would go back to pre-rendered cutscenes - doing it with the game engine just doesn't quite cut it, not yet. Look at e.g. Red Alert 2, with actual movie-grade production, and tell me that wasn't a great leap forward for actual/storytelling/ in games.
Since we haven't had a proper naval engagement since WWII, all we're operating under is a bunch of theory that has not been put to the test in a very long time.
There were some serious naval engagements in the Falklands. Of course, the British didn't have any cruisers there, so that doesn't help us find out whether they're usefull.
A Megajoule class railgun is powered by a Compulsator, a type of modified alternator ( compensated for low inductance to provide enormous current pulses )...the rotor is spun up by a large engine, and the rotational energy in the rotor is turned into multiple high current pulses.
Sure, but how is that functionally different from a large capacitor bank? It still needs to be spun up, with energy that has to come from somewhere, taking a while to charge. And sure, you can overengineer it so it's capable of firing more than one shot per charge - but at the end of the day, you're going to need to take time to charge it every so often. Simple conservation of energy.
Uh, just what free license is there that allows you to revoke it? I don't think that's even possible - if someone else can revoke my right to redistribute a given piece of software at any time, how can that piece of software be free?
Some case where a nation committed to a war, with substantial interests at stake, eschewed methods of war because some lawyer somewhere said they were "illegal?"
Howabout the non-use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam?
You clearly don't have enough experience with dogs. They can tell. Eventually, they can even figure out the word "bath" if we spell it instead of saying it. They understand the difference between "do you want to go outside" and "youy're not going outside", and "come get a treat" and "come get a cookie"
If that were truly understanding language, they'd be able to do all that for any person speaking English, even with their owners not present - and it's usually (always?) the case that they can't.
Slashdot Mirror
Joysticks were always a niche peripheral really - keyboard/mouse is much better for FPS, and though fighting games use joysticks in the arcade, it's a lot easier to combo with a digital pad (dammit Melty Blood, I pushed down three times, why isn't your dead zone large enough to notice?). I think what the decline in joysticks really shows is the decline in first-person flight sim-esque games - remember when X-Wing/TIE fighter/etc. was the big thing to play? What happened to those days? The last decent game of that sort I remember was Star Trek Bridge Commander, and I'll bet many people played through the whole campaign without even noticing the ability to control the Enterprise flight-sim style. It's a shame, because it seems like one of the genres that would really benefit a lot from modern graphics. So, what happened to it?
Linux has managed to grow a fair bit without binary compatibility with the alternatives.
My experience disagrees with you; if groups of people get drunk with nothing to do, they get bored, and fall out with each other due to not having an outlet for aggression. It's a lot better to have at least a pack of cards, or a movie - ok, not a games console per se, but something of the sort.
That would defeat the entire purpose of a general-purpose computer. If that's what you really want out of a system, enjoy your WebTV
(Interesting story: the DVDA of REM's best of album is just the CD upsampled; this was only noticed when someone ran an audio editor on it).
If you have recorded something known to be indistinguishable by human hearing from the original, as we can easily do now, why do you care about getting any more?
You might want to combine it with something else, to make e.g. a hardware transcoder, for which you might want to include an ac3 encoder based off an existing software one rather than writing one from scratch, and last I knew the only decent open-source one around was GPLed. Just as an example
On the very low hardware level, yes, the memory will be base 4. However, on anything but that very low level there's no reason for anything to care - it's trivial to convert between base 2 and 4, and it's a lot easier and more sensible to program a computer that works in base 2 than to make your opcodes do something sensible on 4-state things.
Making print a function is a sensible thing, I think, but it reveals a deeper flaw in python: a bare "function argument" ought to call the function with the argument, without needing brackets.
As long as there are people using it support will continue, since a certain fraction of them will patch things. And writing modules yourself is quite straightforward, really (though why would you need to if this is old working code that you just want to keep working?)
Taggers are a tiny, unrepresentative minority. Compare like with like - how many comments like the pope's do you see in biotech discussions? And how are they moderated?
Newsflash: if there exist invisible super-beings, then there's no way to tell! If you get all holier-than-thou because you are so certain that unprovability is equal to nonexistance, you really need to read up on Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
Right back at you; maybe you should read the actual theorem yourself. Because currently you're just making yourself look like an idiot who read the name in a book somewhere.
Dying
UNIX
Dying
the mouse
Hardly following the same specs it was originally
the QWERTY keyboard
Damn well should be dying.
RS-232
Are you claiming this *isn't* dead?
SMTP
Not the same standard it was back then, and showing signs of trouble.
Seriously, in a corp that big, your machines need to be as secure as if they were on the internet anyway. You can't and won't secure that much cable, building and personnel.
I think LANs will continue to exist out of sheer practicality though. What's easier, wiring up every computer in the building to the internet, or wiring the building computers together and then getting internet to one of them?
Many hosts will charge more for porn. Or not allow it at all.
Straight down to -1 I'm sure, but if they're going to be that silly and discriminatory, let their culture rot.
You seem to be defining gameplay to not include graphics, in which case of course they won't be correlated. The *right* question to ask is: do better graphics make a game more fun? And I would say that, all other things being equal, of course they do.
Either way, I don't know why some people can't admit the style of video games made on the SNES is more appealing to some gamers.
Sure, but those games could often be made better on more modern hardware - even if they aren't, there's no reason why you couldn't. And often when people do do that, it leads to some of the very best games.
I can live with it, and more than that, I wish games would go back to pre-rendered cutscenes - doing it with the game engine just doesn't quite cut it, not yet. Look at e.g. Red Alert 2, with actual movie-grade production, and tell me that wasn't a great leap forward for actual /storytelling/ in games.
There were some serious naval engagements in the Falklands. Of course, the British didn't have any cruisers there, so that doesn't help us find out whether they're usefull.
Sure, but how is that functionally different from a large capacitor bank? It still needs to be spun up, with energy that has to come from somewhere, taking a while to charge. And sure, you can overengineer it so it's capable of firing more than one shot per charge - but at the end of the day, you're going to need to take time to charge it every so often. Simple conservation of energy.
We hate HD DVD because they started a format war it should have been obvious from the start they were going to lose.
Uh, just what free license is there that allows you to revoke it? I don't think that's even possible - if someone else can revoke my right to redistribute a given piece of software at any time, how can that piece of software be free?
Howabout the non-use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam?
Seriously, compare the quality of e.g. TV news with even the low end of internet journalism. Can you honestly say the web is less intelligent?
"I'm too intelligent for radio!" I have to troll boards and poll my friends to find the latest music.
No need for that when e.g. last.fm works better.
"I'm too intelligent for books/magazines!"
Well, no. But seriously, nothing on TV these days can hold a candle to a decent book. Am I wrong?
The problem is, "I'm not intelligent enough." To get my butt away from the computer.
No, you're wrong. There are intelligent things one can do without a computer, but TV really isn't one of them.
"Without MS DRM, BlueRay playback would be impossible due to the idiot movie studios. Go grouse at them."
If that were truly understanding language, they'd be able to do all that for any person speaking English, even with their owners not present - and it's usually (always?) the case that they can't.