So, to rephrase your suggestion: "If Microsoft would just add a small piece of hardware to every computer running their OS, they could reduce the number of menu options by 1!"
Yeah... it's not that people are having a hard time thinking of things that could add up to $700 (I assume), it's more the fact that EB isn't telling what you're paying $700 for that makes it interesting.
The poster says that GameTap's business model is bad. Well, what can I say. It seems to be working well for them, so it can't be all THAT bad.
To be fair to him, he clarifies that it's not necessarily a bad business model, that is, it may well be good for GameTap. He just thinks it's bad for everyone else. His reasoning involves repeating some sort of bizarre metaphor about making gravy from spoiled fruit. Is that, like, vegan gravy or something? It doesn't sound very appetizing, anyway.
As far as I can tell, he believes that GameTap's "bad" business model is going to cause some sort of vegan gravy apocolypse.
However, this all assumes the controller works well. I haven't played one yet, nor have many people that aren't developers, so few people really know if it works as advertised.
If it helps, lots of people HAVE used mousing products from Gyration, which use the exact same technology (minus the sensor strip). I've got one, and it's very nice. Using it in the air is somewhat less precise than a standard optical mouse, but much more precise than a thumbstick.
This is misinformation. IGN has a video from Leipzig of an IGN staffer playing several games, and he barely has to move his arms to do all game functions on a variety of games.
To be fair to the other side of this debate... that video showed him playing one game (Battalion Wars, or something like that?) that appeared to have a pretty awkward control scheme. It looked like one of those "we have to use controller motion" situations, like some of the dumber uses of the DS touch screen. If my choices for steering a tank were "thumbstick" or "strange wrist contortions," I'd prefer a thumbstick.
I'm really excited about the Wii (why is nobody taking preorders yet?), but I'm also trying to be realistic about it. Motion sensitive controllers are really cool, but you must realize that some developers are going to do some really stupid things with them. I expect the Wii to be fun right away, but I don't expect to be really impressed until the "second round" of games comes out.
They actually got pretty upset about that, too, back in the day. It's just that in the end, they lost that battle in court, so they let us keep our video recorders and moved on.
I got that. It just seems kind of odd to me that they're trying to convince people to measure speed in magic AMD numbers instead of GHz, and now apparently power consumption in some different magic AMD numbers instead of Watts. It's good to get people thinking, but after a while it just seems like you're trying to fudge things to make yourself look better.
AMD also plans to push a sort of "performance number" into the market to redefine how consumers should think about power, they said.
Doesn't AMD already label their processors with a relatively meaningless number designed to... say... redefine how consumers think about processor speed?
Was that a highly effective marketing technique? I mean, I guess it did get people to think about speed, and it helped convince many people that GHz isn't the be-all and end-all of processor comparison. But at some point won't people just be annoyed by the mess of pretend numbers AMD is throwing around to "make us think?"
A kid who's too lazy to rotate his or her magazine 45 degrees is too lazy to have picked up the magazine in the first place. "What? You have to turn the pages yourself? There isn't, like, a button for that?"
If you're back on a hoary hedgehog build, you'll have to update to Breezy Badger before updating to Dapper Drake. Both are reasonably straightforward operations, but my undestanding is that it works best if you upgrade one version at a time.
If you don't have much invested in your current install, though, it might be worthwhile to download a Dapper install disc and start from scratch. The upgrade path "shouldn't" cause any problems, but a clean install is just a touch more likely to go smoothly.
As for the broadcom wireless... I don't have first-hand experience, but I hear good things about Dapper's wireless support. I know some people have, in fact, been able to get wireless working quickly under Dapper. Someone else may be able to give you more details about support for broadcom adapters, specifically.
My understanding is that Gyration uses the same gyroscopes as the Wiimote. However, their mouse lacks the positional awareness. It has the same 2 axes as a normal mouse, you can just get them by rotating it in the air rather than sliding it on a surface.
I love mine, but it's not revolutionary or anything. I think the main thing it needs is slightly more versatile drivers, that would better support some of the features the GP described.
the comparatively low resolution (480p) is going to make it look like a jaggy mess - and there's not exactly much power to spare for fancy AA.
To be fair, if you never hook it up to an HDTV (which, I believe, is what they're hoping for), you don't really need AA. Nintendo has been using the "natural AA" of fuzzy TV pixels to great advantage since the SNES. Check out Donkey Kong Country on an old TV, and then on a high-resolution computer monitor using an emulator -- they actually made the fuzziness work for them.
I'm not suggesting that the Wii will actually produce graphics anywhere near the quality of a 360 hooked up to an HDTV. That'd be crazy-talk. I do, however, think that its graphical capabilities will be more than sufficient for what it is.
I'm not saying that 15% is necessarily accurate, but you're making faulty assumptions in the other direction. Not everyone who's killed Nefarion has been on all the learning runs. Once a big guild gets good at BWL, some of the regulars start slacking off, and they start taking new 60s in the guild, or friends of the guild, or whatnot. I've never been in a BWL-capable guild, but there were people in my old guild who would sometimes run it with a bigger guild when they needed a fill-in.
Basically, what I'm saying is, there are probably a lot of people who have killed Nefarion who haven't spent months in BWL.
According to TFA, "Blizzard would very much like to release Burning Crusade some time in 2006." Given that they're saying they'd "like" to have it done this year, rather than they "expect" to have it done this year, I suspect it'll be in 2007 sometime.
Nintendogs has various "scores" (trainer points, competetion scores, and money), and various things that might be considered win conditions, although the designer's real goal was to get the gamer playing in perpetuity.
Animal crossing, similarly, has a few different score-like things, as well as different win-conditions depending on user preference. A "perfect town," a full catalog at Nook's, museum collections, HRA scores, etc. Depending on your goals, it's entirely possible to "win" at Animal Crossing.
You're right in a sense, in that in these games, users select their own goals. There isn't a clear "you've beaten the game!" scenario. But that's true of a lot of games these days, as many developers take the "open ended" approach. There are still all sorts of intermediate scores and achievable goals. It's a reasonable question to ask about Spore, too.
to steer or control an airplane, and that's about it.
To be fair to Sony, the DualShake is probably better than the Wiimote for these two things. I mean, I'm not going to run out and buy one just for this... but it's not like they just threw some crap together and came up with a bunch of stupid. If TFA is accurate, and the DualShake is accurate and responsive, then this will be a nice feature in certain types of games.
The NYT server seems to be choking at the moment, but I'm told that the article says that the Draenei are related to the Eredor. And some of them look like it. The ones we've seen so far (prior to the E3 video) are all disfigured for some reason.
So... there's an explanation out there, anyway, odd though it may be.
I'm sorry, sometimes I'm a little too subtle in my humour. It was a joke. I was suggesting that since programmers like automating repetitive actions, and sex involves a certain amount of repetitive motion, that a script of some sort would be ideal. Just to beat the whole thing completely to death: the comedy was in the absurdity of automating an act with intimate emotional significance. I utilized the common slashdot comedic form of "self-deprecating computer geek," though I failed to do so with sufficient clarity.
In other words, I was not disagreeing with you, and your further explanation on the subject was likely unnecessary.;) It seems doubtful that anyone actually thinks that a fully-automated, repetitive, text-based sex system will be particularly successful.
I love JMS too, and I understand your desire to mention his work whenever you can. In this case, though, you're reaching pretty far. In an industry whose main subject is superheroes, "government attempting to control superheroes" isn't a plot, it's a category of plots. If the Marvel Civil War is a ripoff of Rising Stars, then Rising Stars must be a ripoff of the way the police were always after Spider-Man back in the 70's, right? Rising Stars wasn't even about government controls; the government control of the super-kids was just a plot device in a different story.
You have to read the whole post, and not just go all nuts about one little part of it while ignoring the rest. Was the Beagle Boys analogy not clear enough for you?
You're just lucky there are less ducks, or some of them would be coming to kick your ass right now.
That's because Jack Bauer advertises for no man... except Jack Bauer.
What? Do you even watch 24?
[Bauer, concealed in the rafters, whips out his Treo and takes some pictures with it] Bauer: I'm sending you some pictures of the terrorists now. They should be clear enough for you to make a positive ID.
There was an episode a few seasons ago that aired commercial-free. It was payed for by Ford, because Jack Bauer was driving an Expedition at the time.
Then there was that Cisco thing last year... that wasn't Jack, but it was a particularly widely-commented-on instance of product placement.
And, of course, they've got the typical Dell and Apple computers, and other more subtle examples. Jack Bauer is one of the biggest advertising whores ever.
Yeah. In the Spanish translation, two of Gulliver's destinations were "Lilliput" and "Lilliput." I understand it's very confusing for Spanish schoolchildren.
Actually, I broke with tradition and RTFA... it sounds like people wouldn't learn anything at all about brackets or braces. It looks like you talk in almost pseudo-code, and it translates that into valid Python.
So, for example, you say "if x is less than y then" and it prints "if (x y)" without you saying anything about the...uh... parentheses? The round brackets. You know what I mean.;)
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So, to rephrase your suggestion: "If Microsoft would just add a small piece of hardware to every computer running their OS, they could reduce the number of menu options by 1!"
Yeah... it's not that people are having a hard time thinking of things that could add up to $700 (I assume), it's more the fact that EB isn't telling what you're paying $700 for that makes it interesting.
To be fair to him, he clarifies that it's not necessarily a bad business model, that is, it may well be good for GameTap. He just thinks it's bad for everyone else. His reasoning involves repeating some sort of bizarre metaphor about making gravy from spoiled fruit. Is that, like, vegan gravy or something? It doesn't sound very appetizing, anyway.
As far as I can tell, he believes that GameTap's "bad" business model is going to cause some sort of vegan gravy apocolypse.
Yes, this is very clever marketing. I mean, talk about making lemonade -- Sony is marketing to the "people who hate Sony" demographic!
If it helps, lots of people HAVE used mousing products from Gyration, which use the exact same technology (minus the sensor strip). I've got one, and it's very nice. Using it in the air is somewhat less precise than a standard optical mouse, but much more precise than a thumbstick.
To be fair to the other side of this debate... that video showed him playing one game (Battalion Wars, or something like that?) that appeared to have a pretty awkward control scheme. It looked like one of those "we have to use controller motion" situations, like some of the dumber uses of the DS touch screen. If my choices for steering a tank were "thumbstick" or "strange wrist contortions," I'd prefer a thumbstick.
I'm really excited about the Wii (why is nobody taking preorders yet?), but I'm also trying to be realistic about it. Motion sensitive controllers are really cool, but you must realize that some developers are going to do some really stupid things with them. I expect the Wii to be fun right away, but I don't expect to be really impressed until the "second round" of games comes out.
They actually got pretty upset about that, too, back in the day. It's just that in the end, they lost that battle in court, so they let us keep our video recorders and moved on.
I got that. It just seems kind of odd to me that they're trying to convince people to measure speed in magic AMD numbers instead of GHz, and now apparently power consumption in some different magic AMD numbers instead of Watts. It's good to get people thinking, but after a while it just seems like you're trying to fudge things to make yourself look better.
Doesn't AMD already label their processors with a relatively meaningless number designed to... say... redefine how consumers think about processor speed?
Was that a highly effective marketing technique? I mean, I guess it did get people to think about speed, and it helped convince many people that GHz isn't the be-all and end-all of processor comparison. But at some point won't people just be annoyed by the mess of pretend numbers AMD is throwing around to "make us think?"
A kid who's too lazy to rotate his or her magazine 45 degrees is too lazy to have picked up the magazine in the first place. "What? You have to turn the pages yourself? There isn't, like, a button for that?"
You'd rather have a human maid than a collection of robots?
Did you somehow stumble onto the wrong website here?
If you're back on a hoary hedgehog build, you'll have to update to Breezy Badger before updating to Dapper Drake. Both are reasonably straightforward operations, but my undestanding is that it works best if you upgrade one version at a time.
If you don't have much invested in your current install, though, it might be worthwhile to download a Dapper install disc and start from scratch. The upgrade path "shouldn't" cause any problems, but a clean install is just a touch more likely to go smoothly.
As for the broadcom wireless... I don't have first-hand experience, but I hear good things about Dapper's wireless support. I know some people have, in fact, been able to get wireless working quickly under Dapper. Someone else may be able to give you more details about support for broadcom adapters, specifically.
My understanding is that Gyration uses the same gyroscopes as the Wiimote. However, their mouse lacks the positional awareness. It has the same 2 axes as a normal mouse, you can just get them by rotating it in the air rather than sliding it on a surface.
I love mine, but it's not revolutionary or anything. I think the main thing it needs is slightly more versatile drivers, that would better support some of the features the GP described.
To be fair, if you never hook it up to an HDTV (which, I believe, is what they're hoping for), you don't really need AA. Nintendo has been using the "natural AA" of fuzzy TV pixels to great advantage since the SNES. Check out Donkey Kong Country on an old TV, and then on a high-resolution computer monitor using an emulator -- they actually made the fuzziness work for them.
I'm not suggesting that the Wii will actually produce graphics anywhere near the quality of a 360 hooked up to an HDTV. That'd be crazy-talk. I do, however, think that its graphical capabilities will be more than sufficient for what it is.
I'm not saying that 15% is necessarily accurate, but you're making faulty assumptions in the other direction. Not everyone who's killed Nefarion has been on all the learning runs. Once a big guild gets good at BWL, some of the regulars start slacking off, and they start taking new 60s in the guild, or friends of the guild, or whatnot. I've never been in a BWL-capable guild, but there were people in my old guild who would sometimes run it with a bigger guild when they needed a fill-in.
Basically, what I'm saying is, there are probably a lot of people who have killed Nefarion who haven't spent months in BWL.
According to TFA, "Blizzard would very much like to release Burning Crusade some time in 2006." Given that they're saying they'd "like" to have it done this year, rather than they "expect" to have it done this year, I suspect it'll be in 2007 sometime.
Nintendogs has various "scores" (trainer points, competetion scores, and money), and various things that might be considered win conditions, although the designer's real goal was to get the gamer playing in perpetuity.
Animal crossing, similarly, has a few different score-like things, as well as different win-conditions depending on user preference. A "perfect town," a full catalog at Nook's, museum collections, HRA scores, etc. Depending on your goals, it's entirely possible to "win" at Animal Crossing.
You're right in a sense, in that in these games, users select their own goals. There isn't a clear "you've beaten the game!" scenario. But that's true of a lot of games these days, as many developers take the "open ended" approach. There are still all sorts of intermediate scores and achievable goals. It's a reasonable question to ask about Spore, too.
To be fair to Sony, the DualShake is probably better than the Wiimote for these two things. I mean, I'm not going to run out and buy one just for this... but it's not like they just threw some crap together and came up with a bunch of stupid. If TFA is accurate, and the DualShake is accurate and responsive, then this will be a nice feature in certain types of games.
The NYT server seems to be choking at the moment, but I'm told that the article says that the Draenei are related to the Eredor. And some of them look like it. The ones we've seen so far (prior to the E3 video) are all disfigured for some reason.
So... there's an explanation out there, anyway, odd though it may be.
I'm sorry, sometimes I'm a little too subtle in my humour. It was a joke. I was suggesting that since programmers like automating repetitive actions, and sex involves a certain amount of repetitive motion, that a script of some sort would be ideal. Just to beat the whole thing completely to death: the comedy was in the absurdity of automating an act with intimate emotional significance. I utilized the common slashdot comedic form of "self-deprecating computer geek," though I failed to do so with sufficient clarity.
;) It seems doubtful that anyone actually thinks that a fully-automated, repetitive, text-based sex system will be particularly successful.
In other words, I was not disagreeing with you, and your further explanation on the subject was likely unnecessary.
As a programmer, I find the idea of replacing any repetitive action with a macro very appealing.
I love JMS too, and I understand your desire to mention his work whenever you can. In this case, though, you're reaching pretty far. In an industry whose main subject is superheroes, "government attempting to control superheroes" isn't a plot, it's a category of plots. If the Marvel Civil War is a ripoff of Rising Stars, then Rising Stars must be a ripoff of the way the police were always after Spider-Man back in the 70's, right? Rising Stars wasn't even about government controls; the government control of the super-kids was just a plot device in a different story.
You have to read the whole post, and not just go all nuts about one little part of it while ignoring the rest. Was the Beagle Boys analogy not clear enough for you?
You're just lucky there are less ducks, or some of them would be coming to kick your ass right now.
What? Do you even watch 24?
[Bauer, concealed in the rafters, whips out his Treo and takes some pictures with it]
Bauer: I'm sending you some pictures of the terrorists now. They should be clear enough for you to make a positive ID.
There was an episode a few seasons ago that aired commercial-free. It was payed for by Ford, because Jack Bauer was driving an Expedition at the time.
Then there was that Cisco thing last year... that wasn't Jack, but it was a particularly widely-commented-on instance of product placement.
And, of course, they've got the typical Dell and Apple computers, and other more subtle examples. Jack Bauer is one of the biggest advertising whores ever.
Yeah. In the Spanish translation, two of Gulliver's destinations were "Lilliput" and "Lilliput." I understand it's very confusing for Spanish schoolchildren.
Actually, I broke with tradition and RTFA... it sounds like people wouldn't learn anything at all about brackets or braces. It looks like you talk in almost pseudo-code, and it translates that into valid Python.
;)
So, for example, you say "if x is less than y then" and it prints "if (x y)" without you saying anything about the...uh... parentheses? The round brackets. You know what I mean.