The analog sticks are clickable, providing an extra button-worth of input each, but they're analog sticks, not buttons. You know, "call the tail a leg" and all that...
I mean, let's suppose Mr. Jass did want to register on the board listing the address of his vacation home on Fake Street instead of his actual residence on Streetname Avenue. If he gives my mother's e-mail address as his contact e-mail, he won't get his confirmation e-mail and therefore won't be able to complete registration! And home.com is in Japanese - as we all know, the Japanese are all honorable, respectful people and would never hack a server in their own homeland in order to get access to someone else's email - and no one from another country would be able to hack in Japanese.
...is the PS3. Yes, this will have TWICE the delays with its new marketing and rumor engine. Capable of thousands of speculations a second!
Sources have verified that the controllers will have ten buttons, two analog sticks, and a D-pad. Some have doubted the validity of this claim in the past but it is now quite certain that it's true.
They're crap to use. I mean, they're *useless* for any serious amount of data input, have you ever tried writing a letter on one?
No, but I used to draft short papers on my Palm III in college. At the time I had no laptop but wanted to be able to be somewhere other than my room and still get work done. The Palm was nice for that, especially as I got really good at Graffiti - plus it was easier to input accent marks and tildes (needed for those annoying Spanish assignments) on the Palm than on my PC.
I say PDAs are hard to sell because they're a new kind of device. To sell a PDA you need to explain to people why they need a PDA. Selling phones is easy. People have used those for over a hundred years. People grew up with phones. So selling a phone that's battery-powered and mobile is easy to do - it's a familiar device, enhanced. But to sell the PDA, you've got to explain to people why they need this thing they didn't need before.
To me, the advantages of having organizer functions in digital form, and of having a general-purpose computer that I really can have with me all the time are worth it. But smartphones are gradually taking over all that.
Most people NEVER needed a PDA anyway - a calendar and addressbook in a mobile is enough for most people.
Plus many modern PDAs cost almost as much as a small / low budget laptop. Why bother buying an expensive gizmo if you can (get) the real thing for a bit more?
A laptop is not "better" than a PDA. More precisely, it does not replace a PDA any more than a PDA replaces a laptop. I can have my PDA with me any time, jot down something that's on my mind, and it's stored. It's quick and simple.
A small enough laptop with tablet functionality or a micro-keyboard could provide that functionality, but when you put a full PC in a package that small it starts to not be so useful for the things you would want a full PC for. And for that kind of usage scenario (always around, use when I need it, quickly, and usually briefly, possibly in less than optimal conditions) software written for a PC isn't too suitable anyway. For a portable device you need software designed for a small (physically and in terms of resolution) screen. For a mobile device you need software that's well suited to that usage scenario, minimal effort required to perform the most common actions.
Mobile phones are bound to take over PDA stuff, of course - as time goes on we'll eventually reach the point where the mobile phone as a whole (subscription and all) is cheap enough and small enough and efficient enough that it simply wouldn't be worth not including one in a smart device (meaning, if you had a PDA-ish thing, it having wireless connectivity and a data plan would be a given. And if you have the connectivity and data plan, adding a mic and speaker is trivial...) - and in the mean time, for all those people who want a phone, creating smart phones is the best way to sell them digital organizer functions which they either don't need, or don't know they need.
According to him, going online with Amazon was a desparation move to gain some profitability back from Walmart - managed by Toys R Us execs who had not a clue about managing an online store.
Yeah, seriously... Anybody else remember the year before TRU partnered with Amazon? Their massive failure to do their promised holiday shipping was a well-publicized disaster.
And the whole point of the statement "correlation does not imply causality" is that people are taking demonstration of an observed correlation as proof of a cause-effect relationship which (we would contend) isn't adequately demonstrated. It's complicated by the fact that there are certain interests at work here - people who want to change things not because of the results of a study, but for some other reason, and are more than happy to (mis)use whatever study they can get in any way that helps their cause. When the results of a study are taken out of context and selectively re-worded the effect changes.
I think it's possible that violent gaming could encourage violent behavior. But I'm not convinced that this has been adequately demonstrated, and as a side note I fail to see why games are being selectively targeted.
Clever? Outside-of-the-box? I thought it was the obvious solution! The rules even seem to encourage such approaches, saying (in the "standard rules") that the vehicle which gets the egg down slowest wins (I rather like the other version - fastest descent time wins. Seems much more interesting challenge), and the vehicle which is the lightest wins in a tie. The only bit that seems like it could make things difficult for the use of parachutes is the requirement that it wind up in the landing zone, where a parachute might drift off course.
The nature of the problem is such that a parachute is a good choice. The structure of the rules and judging guidelines is such that a parachute is a good choice. And it's an obvious choice, it being a thing that was invented for the specific purpose of limiting the falling speed of objects in the atmosphere.
So yeah, I don't really get why using a parachute to solve that problem is bad. It solves the problem as stated, within the rules as stated, and has a very good chance of scoring very well using the scoring criteria as stated. If the organizers specifically want complicated solutions they need to set up the rules to favor that.
Damn those information-gathering devices, they're nothing but trouble! Sure, you pitch a couple out there to see what information they can send back, and then a few hundred years later they return, hell-bent on destroying everything in their path. Damn the inquisitive explorer spirit, it leads to nothing but trouble!
Please explain to me, then, why every VCR you can buy in stores has a Macrovision circuit, which causes the video signal to become intentionally degraded if you use a Macrovision signal (like a rental VHS tape played on another VCR, or a DVD player) on the line input - and not necessarily only if you happen to be recording that signal on the VCR. This is the same as DRM and it's worked its way into just about all the consumer-level VCRs out there, and it's been around for ages.
It might be nice: but the notion that the will of the majority is always the right thing is flawed. For instance, if minority rights are determined by majority rule, the minorities in question get hosed.
Without something standing in the way of people using P2P downloads to get all their favorite copyrighted works, without something saying "this is illegitimate" or making some vague (or not) threat toward those who do it, the system of charging money for that stuff will collapse. That doesn't mean that entertainment will cease to be, but big-budget entertainment will cease to be viable.
Sometimes I like to think that it'd be nice if movies were cheaper - cheaper to go and see, lower budgets - if movies weren't so expensive people would see more of them. If there weren't millions of dollars riding on every release, the people who make them would have more creative freedom. But then the result would basically be what we have on TV, perhaps. With TV on hand, it's hard to justify the existence of movie theaters unless they're big-budget shows.
Rather late to add this, but I wonder how much of this is cause vs. effect?
That is, it's a correlation between level of education and Alzheimer's progression. I wonder if it's the education itself, or the degree of disposition toward becoming educated which is the factor responsible for the correlation. Meaning, does becoming more educated excercise the brain, or reorganize it, such that this effect occurs in Alzheimers-succeptible people, or does it come from the mental talents the people had even before they memorized facts and learned processes to accumulate all that knowledge?
Yeah, seriously, people, it's not just "knowledge going away" - though there is that. It's a grown man barricading a door at night, thinking his 6-year old niece might be a serious threat to him. It's these weird bipolar shifts in attitudes and perceptions. Somebody can be their best friend one day, and an unscrupulous traitor the next.
I think I could deal with my dad becoming forgetful, losing capability to work with computers and electronics, and so on - though that's sad, too, since he taught me a lot of that stuff when I was a kid - but knowing where these other issues are headed just sucks.
I did enjoy BeatNES, and I know just a bit about the other stuff that's in the game - but it's still largely an unknown to me. If you'd like to elaborate on other features in the game I'd be interested in hearing about it.
For a very simplistic way of saving your compositions to your computer, get a male-male 1/8" audio cable ($3-$4 at your local electronics store). Plug one end into the DS headphone jack and the other into your PC's mic input. Then use a program such as Sound Recorder to capture the audio.
If you connect your headphone jack (stereo) to your mic input (mono, most likely) you'll short out one of your sound channels and possibly blow the DS's audio amplifier. Plus the mic. input is attenuated for microphones, not line-level input, so it'll sound like crap. What you want is the line-in.
Besides which, this method of "saving" compositions doesn't allow things a true save feature would, like re-editing later.
I've only played the WMB download demo of Electroplankton (Beatnes) so I don't know if the full game is also like this - but in that demo any music you input only gets looped like 3-4 times, then it stops. So to create a continuous, full tune you pretty much have to keep inputting more notes. This goes beyond "no save function"/"no later editing" into the realm of the experience being completely momentary.
Here I was all excited becuase I thought traditional vector-style laser projectors were somehow being made cheaper and more compact. Laser projectors are just about the only piece of new hardware you could buy to provide a vector display for Asteroids. (It's slow and doesn't have the phosphor effect, but at least it's still a vector display... Plus you could play the game hugely.)
"Within just five seconds of turning on the system, the Nintendo DS is already fully operational. This makes it the ideal device to enable people to swiftly obtain the latest information from the internet, wherever they are,"
Ideal? I kind of doubt it... Of course, people misuse the word "ideal" all the time, but still..
First, how about that "five seconds" figure? I get similar times from my Palm if I reset it. If it's just in its normal "off" state, power-on is nearly instantaneous. And I don't have to tap-through any obnoxious "health and safety" screen.
Then there's the limitations of the DS: in terms of form factor it's a lot bigger than the typical handheld (though the Lite version improves the situation somewhat). In terms of storage space it's pretty weak: 4MB RAM total, and the program has to be loaded into that RAM. So unless their game card has some writable storage, their browser has no cache. In terms of screen resolution, across the two screens it's marginally better than QVGA. Palm's Tungsten C and the Treo 650 both have slightly better resolution (102,000 pixels vs. 98,000 pixels split between two screens). Contemporary devices like the Tungsten T5, Lifedrive, or modern WinCE devices have even higher resolution.
Having a web browser on the DS is a good thing, of course - it's one more piece of capability I'll have access to when I have my DS with me for gaming and happen upon a wi-fi spot. But there are certainly devices out there better suited to the job.
Does anyone else here get the irony of/.-ers spending virtual lifetimes bashing 'Doze, hating every byte of M$ kruftware, and yearning for an environmental catastrophe in Redmond, then getting all excited about the potential of running XP on a new MacBook?
Am I alone here when I utter a collossal WTF?
Believe it or not, there are different kinds of people on Slashdot! Whoa!
Some people don't like Microsoft. They probably still don't.
Some people do like Microsoft, and take exception to the fact that they've decided to come to a place where a lot of people don't. They'll post all about how persecuted they are and engage in passive-agressive discussion of the moderation system like "You are going to mod me down for this, I know it! Go ahead and prove me wrong unless you really are a bunch of elitist jerks." They will probably like to boot whatever they like on the Mac(Power)Book.
Some people don't care. They just want to run what they want to run on their hardware of choice. They'd like to know that Windows will run so that they can run whatever they want to run. After all, if Windows will run on it then most likely anything else will.
I know you all are going to mod me down for this, go ahead and prove me wrong unless you really are a bunch of moderators who think that this post doesn't merit a high score based on the quality of its content! Ha! So there.
Games have evolved. Games have diversified. Are they suddenly not games as a result?
I guess some things, like The Sims I might consider "toys" instead of "games" in that they're a little more open-ended by design... But still... if we make the wrong associations when we hear the word "game" that's a fault in us, not in our terminology.
The real issue is the jerks who choose to be jerks. Not the people who forget to turn off their ringers, but the people who just don't give a shit. Load up the most obnoxious ringtone possible (it gets so hard to calculate that, since they're all obnoxious), head on down to the movies and take a few calls. Oh, is this bothering you? "Somebody Else's Problem" effect.
Perhaps movie theaters could be retrofitted with Faraday cages...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, not a handbasket, but a Subaru Brat.
The analog sticks are clickable, providing an extra button-worth of input each, but they're analog sticks, not buttons. You know, "call the tail a leg" and all that...
I mean, let's suppose Mr. Jass did want to register on the board listing the address of his vacation home on Fake Street instead of his actual residence on Streetname Avenue. If he gives my mother's e-mail address as his contact e-mail, he won't get his confirmation e-mail and therefore won't be able to complete registration! And home.com is in Japanese - as we all know, the Japanese are all honorable, respectful people and would never hack a server in their own homeland in order to get access to someone else's email - and no one from another country would be able to hack in Japanese.
...is the PS3. Yes, this will have TWICE the delays with its new marketing and rumor engine. Capable of thousands of speculations a second!
Sources have verified that the controllers will have ten buttons, two analog sticks, and a D-pad. Some have doubted the validity of this claim in the past but it is now quite certain that it's true.
They're crap to use. I mean, they're *useless* for any serious amount of data input, have you ever tried writing a letter on one?
No, but I used to draft short papers on my Palm III in college. At the time I had no laptop but wanted to be able to be somewhere other than my room and still get work done. The Palm was nice for that, especially as I got really good at Graffiti - plus it was easier to input accent marks and tildes (needed for those annoying Spanish assignments) on the Palm than on my PC.
I say PDAs are hard to sell because they're a new kind of device. To sell a PDA you need to explain to people why they need a PDA. Selling phones is easy. People have used those for over a hundred years. People grew up with phones. So selling a phone that's battery-powered and mobile is easy to do - it's a familiar device, enhanced. But to sell the PDA, you've got to explain to people why they need this thing they didn't need before.
To me, the advantages of having organizer functions in digital form, and of having a general-purpose computer that I really can have with me all the time are worth it. But smartphones are gradually taking over all that.
Most people NEVER needed a PDA anyway - a calendar and addressbook in a mobile is enough for most people.
Plus many modern PDAs cost almost as much as a small / low budget laptop. Why bother buying an expensive gizmo if you can (get) the real thing for a bit more?
A laptop is not "better" than a PDA. More precisely, it does not replace a PDA any more than a PDA replaces a laptop. I can have my PDA with me any time, jot down something that's on my mind, and it's stored. It's quick and simple.
A small enough laptop with tablet functionality or a micro-keyboard could provide that functionality, but when you put a full PC in a package that small it starts to not be so useful for the things you would want a full PC for. And for that kind of usage scenario (always around, use when I need it, quickly, and usually briefly, possibly in less than optimal conditions) software written for a PC isn't too suitable anyway. For a portable device you need software designed for a small (physically and in terms of resolution) screen. For a mobile device you need software that's well suited to that usage scenario, minimal effort required to perform the most common actions.
Mobile phones are bound to take over PDA stuff, of course - as time goes on we'll eventually reach the point where the mobile phone as a whole (subscription and all) is cheap enough and small enough and efficient enough that it simply wouldn't be worth not including one in a smart device (meaning, if you had a PDA-ish thing, it having wireless connectivity and a data plan would be a given. And if you have the connectivity and data plan, adding a mic and speaker is trivial...) - and in the mean time, for all those people who want a phone, creating smart phones is the best way to sell them digital organizer functions which they either don't need, or don't know they need.
According to him, going online with Amazon was a desparation move to gain some profitability back from Walmart - managed by Toys R Us execs who had not a clue about managing an online store.
Yeah, seriously... Anybody else remember the year before TRU partnered with Amazon? Their massive failure to do their promised holiday shipping was a well-publicized disaster.
Without a doubt they'll do better now.
And the whole point of the statement "correlation does not imply causality" is that people are taking demonstration of an observed correlation as proof of a cause-effect relationship which (we would contend) isn't adequately demonstrated. It's complicated by the fact that there are certain interests at work here - people who want to change things not because of the results of a study, but for some other reason, and are more than happy to (mis)use whatever study they can get in any way that helps their cause. When the results of a study are taken out of context and selectively re-worded the effect changes.
I think it's possible that violent gaming could encourage violent behavior. But I'm not convinced that this has been adequately demonstrated, and as a side note I fail to see why games are being selectively targeted.
Right on! Gimme more o' that Blasted Vulcan Logic any day! Live long and prosper, man!
Clever? Outside-of-the-box? I thought it was the obvious solution! The rules even seem to encourage such approaches, saying (in the "standard rules") that the vehicle which gets the egg down slowest wins (I rather like the other version - fastest descent time wins. Seems much more interesting challenge), and the vehicle which is the lightest wins in a tie. The only bit that seems like it could make things difficult for the use of parachutes is the requirement that it wind up in the landing zone, where a parachute might drift off course.
The nature of the problem is such that a parachute is a good choice. The structure of the rules and judging guidelines is such that a parachute is a good choice. And it's an obvious choice, it being a thing that was invented for the specific purpose of limiting the falling speed of objects in the atmosphere.
So yeah, I don't really get why using a parachute to solve that problem is bad. It solves the problem as stated, within the rules as stated, and has a very good chance of scoring very well using the scoring criteria as stated. If the organizers specifically want complicated solutions they need to set up the rules to favor that.
That sounds like V'Ger!
Damn those information-gathering devices, they're nothing but trouble! Sure, you pitch a couple out there to see what information they can send back, and then a few hundred years later they return, hell-bent on destroying everything in their path. Damn the inquisitive explorer spirit, it leads to nothing but trouble!
Please explain to me, then, why every VCR you can buy in stores has a Macrovision circuit, which causes the video signal to become intentionally degraded if you use a Macrovision signal (like a rental VHS tape played on another VCR, or a DVD player) on the line input - and not necessarily only if you happen to be recording that signal on the VCR. This is the same as DRM and it's worked its way into just about all the consumer-level VCRs out there, and it's been around for ages.
It might be nice: but the notion that the will of the majority is always the right thing is flawed. For instance, if minority rights are determined by majority rule, the minorities in question get hosed.
Without something standing in the way of people using P2P downloads to get all their favorite copyrighted works, without something saying "this is illegitimate" or making some vague (or not) threat toward those who do it, the system of charging money for that stuff will collapse. That doesn't mean that entertainment will cease to be, but big-budget entertainment will cease to be viable.
Sometimes I like to think that it'd be nice if movies were cheaper - cheaper to go and see, lower budgets - if movies weren't so expensive people would see more of them. If there weren't millions of dollars riding on every release, the people who make them would have more creative freedom. But then the result would basically be what we have on TV, perhaps. With TV on hand, it's hard to justify the existence of movie theaters unless they're big-budget shows.
Rather late to add this, but I wonder how much of this is cause vs. effect?
That is, it's a correlation between level of education and Alzheimer's progression. I wonder if it's the education itself, or the degree of disposition toward becoming educated which is the factor responsible for the correlation. Meaning, does becoming more educated excercise the brain, or reorganize it, such that this effect occurs in Alzheimers-succeptible people, or does it come from the mental talents the people had even before they memorized facts and learned processes to accumulate all that knowledge?
I don't want Fop, goddamn it! I'm a Dapper Dan man!
I'm sorry to say I have.
Yeah, seriously, people, it's not just "knowledge going away" - though there is that. It's a grown man barricading a door at night, thinking his 6-year old niece might be a serious threat to him. It's these weird bipolar shifts in attitudes and perceptions. Somebody can be their best friend one day, and an unscrupulous traitor the next.
I think I could deal with my dad becoming forgetful, losing capability to work with computers and electronics, and so on - though that's sad, too, since he taught me a lot of that stuff when I was a kid - but knowing where these other issues are headed just sucks.
Yeah, but the show was cancelled.
Knock yourself out.
I did enjoy BeatNES, and I know just a bit about the other stuff that's in the game - but it's still largely an unknown to me. If you'd like to elaborate on other features in the game I'd be interested in hearing about it.
For a very simplistic way of saving your compositions to your computer, get a male-male 1/8" audio cable ($3-$4 at your local electronics store). Plug one end into the DS headphone jack and the other into your PC's mic input. Then use a program such as Sound Recorder to capture the audio.
If you connect your headphone jack (stereo) to your mic input (mono, most likely) you'll short out one of your sound channels and possibly blow the DS's audio amplifier. Plus the mic. input is attenuated for microphones, not line-level input, so it'll sound like crap. What you want is the line-in.
Besides which, this method of "saving" compositions doesn't allow things a true save feature would, like re-editing later.
I've only played the WMB download demo of Electroplankton (Beatnes) so I don't know if the full game is also like this - but in that demo any music you input only gets looped like 3-4 times, then it stops. So to create a continuous, full tune you pretty much have to keep inputting more notes. This goes beyond "no save function"/"no later editing" into the realm of the experience being completely momentary.
Ah, so that's it...
Here I was all excited becuase I thought traditional vector-style laser projectors were somehow being made cheaper and more compact. Laser projectors are just about the only piece of new hardware you could buy to provide a vector display for Asteroids. (It's slow and doesn't have the phosphor effect, but at least it's still a vector display... Plus you could play the game hugely.)
"Within just five seconds of turning on the system, the Nintendo DS is already fully operational. This makes it the ideal device to enable people to swiftly obtain the latest information from the internet, wherever they are,"
Ideal? I kind of doubt it... Of course, people misuse the word "ideal" all the time, but still..
First, how about that "five seconds" figure? I get similar times from my Palm if I reset it. If it's just in its normal "off" state, power-on is nearly instantaneous. And I don't have to tap-through any obnoxious "health and safety" screen.
Then there's the limitations of the DS: in terms of form factor it's a lot bigger than the typical handheld (though the Lite version improves the situation somewhat). In terms of storage space it's pretty weak: 4MB RAM total, and the program has to be loaded into that RAM. So unless their game card has some writable storage, their browser has no cache. In terms of screen resolution, across the two screens it's marginally better than QVGA. Palm's Tungsten C and the Treo 650 both have slightly better resolution (102,000 pixels vs. 98,000 pixels split between two screens). Contemporary devices like the Tungsten T5, Lifedrive, or modern WinCE devices have even higher resolution.
Having a web browser on the DS is a good thing, of course - it's one more piece of capability I'll have access to when I have my DS with me for gaming and happen upon a wi-fi spot. But there are certainly devices out there better suited to the job.
Does anyone else here get the irony of /.-ers spending virtual lifetimes bashing 'Doze, hating every byte of M$ kruftware, and yearning for an environmental catastrophe in Redmond, then getting all excited about the potential of running XP on a new MacBook?
Am I alone here when I utter a collossal WTF?
Believe it or not, there are different kinds of people on Slashdot! Whoa!
Some people don't like Microsoft. They probably still don't.
Some people do like Microsoft, and take exception to the fact that they've decided to come to a place where a lot of people don't. They'll post all about how persecuted they are and engage in passive-agressive discussion of the moderation system like "You are going to mod me down for this, I know it! Go ahead and prove me wrong unless you really are a bunch of elitist jerks." They will probably like to boot whatever they like on the Mac(Power)Book.
Some people don't care. They just want to run what they want to run on their hardware of choice. They'd like to know that Windows will run so that they can run whatever they want to run. After all, if Windows will run on it then most likely anything else will.
I know you all are going to mod me down for this, go ahead and prove me wrong unless you really are a bunch of moderators who think that this post doesn't merit a high score based on the quality of its content! Ha! So there.
Games have evolved. Games have diversified. Are they suddenly not games as a result?
I guess some things, like The Sims I might consider "toys" instead of "games" in that they're a little more open-ended by design... But still... if we make the wrong associations when we hear the word "game" that's a fault in us, not in our terminology.
Definitely the pancreas. That thing never did anybody a bit of good.
Then again, I may be vastly underestimating the importance of the pancreas.
The real issue is the jerks who choose to be jerks. Not the people who forget to turn off their ringers, but the people who just don't give a shit. Load up the most obnoxious ringtone possible (it gets so hard to calculate that, since they're all obnoxious), head on down to the movies and take a few calls. Oh, is this bothering you? "Somebody Else's Problem" effect.
Perhaps movie theaters could be retrofitted with Faraday cages...