Since we're having a correction party here, may I point out that both you and your parent got "never mind" wrong. "Nevermind" is a fine Nirvana album though - maybe you were referencing it?
The trouble is that Nintendo produces few enough games as it is. I'm all in favour of them polishing them, but time spent fixing up Zelda if time they're not spending on the awesome stuff they could be doing like producing DS games (even ports... Pikmin and Donkey Konga on DS would be pretty cool), ensuring the Revolution has a decent line up, getting Mario Kart GP out for the cube (it's a japan-only arcade at the moment), and a million other things.
I'd be happy if every time they delayed a game they hired another programming team or bought another studio to pick up the slack.
Blu-ray? Nah. USB hard drives (or ipods), laptops or good old LAN parties... though optical discs are good for posting (I guess you'd call that stampnet?).
And how do you decided what games to spend your limited time evaluating without taking other people's opinions into account*? It's that or the box art.
*Attempting to compensate for their biases and your tastes, naturally...
Well, I don't own one yet. An 8 gig flash player might just convince me, so long as it's cheap and they doesn't leave the screen off. So, roll on the new models until they've convinced everyone to buy, I say.
"how to put tera-upon-tera bytes of audio/visual information onto a type of media"
Easy, just increase the diameter of your DVD. Back of imaginary envelope calculations suggest a 1 metre radius dual-layer DVD would hold about 10 terabytes. Spinning it fast enough to get a decent read speed could be tricky though.
You're wrong. MOND is a subject of current research in the scientific community, and that throws Newton out of the window (which takes Einsteinian gravity with it).
You might have met some bad scientists (or they might just have been trying to shut you up... the famous ones apparently get a lot of crackpots writing to them and I imagine that would eat up your patience).
"Read more carefully"... I said your eyes create the effect in every post so far. We agree on that.
Wave something in front of your face and it will blur, yes. Load up UT2004 or BF2. Look straight up. Have someone fly a plane fast, directly over your head. It will blur, assuming you are getting a decent framerate.
You don't need to add any extra blur to computer games because your eyes already do it.
It's because of your eyes, not because real objects actually blur when they move fast. You watch a computer screen with those same eyes. Real objects don't motion blur, so computer graphics don't need to either.
Games and displays should just push the framerate higher - any "motion blur" will then be due to your eyes not keeping up. The real world does not have motion blur. Movies do, because they're shot at a crappy 25 fps, and because each frame is exposed for a significant number of milliseconds - game graphics can be a lot better than the movies in this respect, although realtime rendering will never be as detailed as prerendering.
With the margins on CDs being what they are (see some of the posts above_, I suspect the record industry has a lot more cash floating around than Philips - a company whose products actually compete on a level field (i.e. labels are granted monopoly on artists they sign, dvd players are all equivalent but bands are not).
Your point is good though - I'd love a conglomorate of ISPs and electronics companies (and governments?) to simply purchase all the worlds music/video and make it public domain...
This is a great article! I wish there were more like it on slashdot. It's scientific instead of an opinion piece, it has references, it's repeatable. It's also short and very readable, unlike a lot of science papers.
OK, it is yet another Google piece, but it's not "some junior analyst predicts Google will buy Apple and release OSX86box 720".
1: Q3A had a linux port pretty quickly (maybe not at release, I don't remember)
2: That doesn't apply so much to games, the distributed development model is less effective since you need a coherent structure. Also budding game developers tend to mod on commercial engines (e.g. Counter-Strike on Half-Life), for the installed base and because they can re-use game assets.
3: For the amazing stuff people have done with the Quake 2 engine Nexuiz, which has ~quake 3 model/level quality and ~doom 3 effects (and system requirements, sadly). It's entirely "viable", as in I've joined servers full of people and had fun playing. I don't think it's popular compared to the big commercial games - but it's had zero media exposure and isn't sold in game stores, and still had 250000 downloads! I wouldn't say it puts Quake 3 to shame, but it's worthy competition.
Yeah, they might be unarmed and cowering for mercy, but killing and eating them heals you as much as eating a marine (when you play as an alien). The game encourages you to eat them, which I don't have a problem with since they're potentially just as morally bankrupt as the guards - maybe more so.
If the game had some kind of heads-up display like:
"receptionist - has never experimented on a sentient being, vegetarian..." "senior technician - responsible for implanting eggs in criminals, tells sexist jokes..."
Then maybe you could make the requisite ethical judgements. But ethics are at least partially subjective - and when you're playing as an alien you should be acting in character!
I don't think the scores they give are THAT unjustified. Consider that the 0% point of the scale is some unfinished crappy Flash game on a 12-year-old's website. They only review stuff which gets actually published, games that people expect you to pay money for: of course they'll be better than the average game out there. Of course, a few commercial games do completely suck, and deserve 50% scores (e.g. Rogue Squadron 3, although no doubt some people won't agree).
Convenience is not the point. For someone living in the US, buying cheap goods from down the street is more convenient than flying to Japan and buying the same CD for 50% more. The price difference is what they're complaining about (and the fact that the price difference is being carried forward into the borderless, distanceless internet).
"no universal license that anyone could afford could support any significant number of artists."
If we all paid what we currently spend on music into a universal licence it would support the exact same number of musicians, since it's the same amount of money. Distributing it fairly (and preventing fraud) would be tricky... but if we wanted to maximise our gains at the expense of pure capitalism we could actually get MORE full-time musicians out of it by capping salaries - a few millionaire rock stars could go a long way.
FTFA The fuel used by these engines is super-cold liquid hydrogen, kept at a temperature of -253 degrees Celsius, which Nasa reports is "the second coldest liquid on Earth".
The NASA engineer went on to say:
"The coldest being, of course, the blood pumping through my ex-girlfriend's heart."
(Although I think he's wrong and it's actually liquid Helium.)
Go and fire up Google Maps, zoom out a nice long way. See how much of the Earth is empty of humans. We could pave the deserts with solar panels, cover the wilderness areas and inefficient animal farms with protein vats (the stuff that the Quorn mycoprotein meat substitute comes from - it's quite nice). Live in apartment blocks, and make more use of the huge amount of space below our feet. Desalinate the oceans for drinking water.
With a little technology and organisation we could probably support 10* times our current population, with a standard of living comparable to the current middle class. We'd fuck over the wildlife, and we'd have to be careful with what we did to the ecosystem, but we could do it - and a hell of a lot more easily than colonising Mars.
*I made up this number, but you don't have any solid ones either...
Slashdot Mirror
Since we're having a correction party here, may I point out that both you and your parent got "never mind" wrong. "Nevermind" is a fine Nirvana album though - maybe you were referencing it?
The trouble is that Nintendo produces few enough games as it is. I'm all in favour of them polishing them, but time spent fixing up Zelda if time they're not spending on the awesome stuff they could be doing like producing DS games (even ports... Pikmin and Donkey Konga on DS would be pretty cool), ensuring the Revolution has a decent line up, getting Mario Kart GP out for the cube (it's a japan-only arcade at the moment), and a million other things.
I'd be happy if every time they delayed a game they hired another programming team or bought another studio to pick up the slack.
Blu-ray? Nah. USB hard drives (or ipods), laptops or good old LAN parties... though optical discs are good for posting (I guess you'd call that stampnet?).
And how do you decided what games to spend your limited time evaluating without taking other people's opinions into account*?
It's that or the box art.
*Attempting to compensate for their biases and your tastes, naturally...
Well, I don't own one yet. An 8 gig flash player might just convince me, so long as it's cheap and they doesn't leave the screen off.
So, roll on the new models until they've convinced everyone to buy, I say.
IIRC, MS edit was pretty damn WYSIWYG on the dot-matrix printers of the day.
"how to put tera-upon-tera bytes of audio/visual information onto a type of media"
Easy, just increase the diameter of your DVD. Back of imaginary envelope calculations suggest a 1 metre radius dual-layer DVD would hold about 10 terabytes. Spinning it fast enough to get a decent read speed could be tricky though.
Yeah, that was good until I got my hair in the custard I was eating...
nt.
You're wrong. MOND is a subject of current research in the scientific community, and that throws Newton out of the window (which takes Einsteinian gravity with it).
You might have met some bad scientists (or they might just have been trying to shut you up... the famous ones apparently get a lot of crackpots writing to them and I imagine that would eat up your patience).
Whoever wins a game of Go kills the other player. :)
"Read more carefully"... I said your eyes create the effect in every post so far. We agree on that.
Wave something in front of your face and it will blur, yes. Load up UT2004 or BF2. Look straight up. Have someone fly a plane fast, directly over your head. It will blur, assuming you are getting a decent framerate.
You don't need to add any extra blur to computer games because your eyes already do it.
It's because of your eyes, not because real objects actually blur when they move fast. You watch a computer screen with those same eyes.
Real objects don't motion blur, so computer graphics don't need to either.
Games and displays should just push the framerate higher - any "motion blur" will then be due to your eyes not keeping up. The real world does not have motion blur. Movies do, because they're shot at a crappy 25 fps, and because each frame is exposed for a significant number of milliseconds - game graphics can be a lot better than the movies in this respect, although realtime rendering will never be as detailed as prerendering.
With the margins on CDs being what they are (see some of the posts above_, I suspect the record industry has a lot more cash floating around than Philips - a company whose products actually compete on a level field (i.e. labels are granted monopoly on artists they sign, dvd players are all equivalent but bands are not).
Your point is good though - I'd love a conglomorate of ISPs and electronics companies (and governments?) to simply purchase all the worlds music/video and make it public domain...
This is a great article! I wish there were more like it on slashdot. It's scientific instead of an opinion piece, it has references, it's repeatable. It's also short and very readable, unlike a lot of science papers.
OK, it is yet another Google piece, but it's not "some junior analyst predicts Google will buy Apple and release OSX86box 720".
1: Q3A had a linux port pretty quickly (maybe not at release, I don't remember)
2: That doesn't apply so much to games, the distributed development model is less effective since you need a coherent structure. Also budding game developers tend to mod on commercial engines (e.g. Counter-Strike on Half-Life), for the installed base and because they can re-use game assets.
3: For the amazing stuff people have done with the Quake 2 engine Nexuiz, which has ~quake 3 model/level quality and ~doom 3 effects (and system requirements, sadly). It's entirely "viable", as in I've joined servers full of people and had fun playing. I don't think it's popular compared to the big commercial games - but it's had zero media exposure and isn't sold in game stores, and still had 250000 downloads! I wouldn't say it puts Quake 3 to shame, but it's worthy competition.
writing the macros!
Yeah, they might be unarmed and cowering for mercy, but killing and eating them heals you as much as eating a marine (when you play as an alien). The game encourages you to eat them, which I don't have a problem with since they're potentially just as morally bankrupt as the guards - maybe more so.
If the game had some kind of heads-up display like:
"receptionist - has never experimented on a sentient being, vegetarian..."
"senior technician - responsible for implanting eggs in criminals, tells sexist jokes..."
Then maybe you could make the requisite ethical judgements. But ethics are at least partially subjective - and when you're playing as an alien you should be acting in character!
I don't think the scores they give are THAT unjustified. Consider that the 0% point of the scale is some unfinished crappy Flash game on a 12-year-old's website.
They only review stuff which gets actually published, games that people expect you to pay money for: of course they'll be better than the average game out there. Of course, a few commercial games do completely suck, and deserve 50% scores (e.g. Rogue Squadron 3, although no doubt some people won't agree).
Convenience is not the point. For someone living in the US, buying cheap goods from down the street is more convenient than flying to Japan and buying the same CD for 50% more. The price difference is what they're complaining about (and the fact that the price difference is being carried forward into the borderless, distanceless internet).
Shot Online, a golf MMO, is the first I've heard of.
"no universal license that anyone could afford could support any significant number of artists."
If we all paid what we currently spend on music into a universal licence it would support the exact same number of musicians, since it's the same amount of money. Distributing it fairly (and preventing fraud) would be tricky... but if we wanted to maximise our gains at the expense of pure capitalism we could actually get MORE full-time musicians out of it by capping salaries - a few millionaire rock stars could go a long way.
FTFA The fuel used by these engines is super-cold liquid hydrogen, kept at a temperature of -253 degrees Celsius, which Nasa reports is "the second coldest liquid on Earth".
The NASA engineer went on to say:
"The coldest being, of course, the blood pumping through my ex-girlfriend's heart."
(Although I think he's wrong and it's actually liquid Helium.)
Go and fire up Google Maps, zoom out a nice long way.
See how much of the Earth is empty of humans. We could pave the deserts with solar panels, cover the wilderness areas and inefficient animal farms with protein vats (the stuff that the Quorn mycoprotein meat substitute comes from - it's quite nice). Live in apartment blocks, and make more use of the huge amount of space below our feet. Desalinate the oceans for drinking water.
With a little technology and organisation we could probably support 10* times our current population, with a standard of living comparable to the current middle class. We'd fuck over the wildlife, and we'd have to be careful with what we did to the ecosystem, but we could do it - and a hell of a lot more easily than colonising Mars.
*I made up this number, but you don't have any solid ones either...