Actually, proving or disproving that statement is pretty much the crux of this whole debate. Can you prove or disprove that everything that exists must have evidence of it's existence, without falling into the circular logic of simply saying that the evidence is what demonstrates existence?
The whole deal with the supernatural is that the scientific method falls down, because the believer can always either 1) claim the force at work is only detectable by "sensitive readers", not giving off any normal measureable forces, 2) claim the results of the tests were manipulated by the forces at work, or 3) claim the force at work was aware of being measured and, for whatever reason, refused to show. This is what the GP and others are trying to point out; stating that there has never been evidence for a phenomena isn't, strictly speaking, evidence against it. Whether that's because we're looking in the wrong place, looking in the wrong way, the tests are being subverted by the thing being searched for or the thing we're looking for isn't there is, again, the crux of this debate.
For what it's worth, I'm a skeptic, and think ghosts are about as likely to exist as the good old flying spaghetti monster. But lets try to distinguish between what we believe, what is likely, and what is scientifically provable/disprovable. So put aside the fact that the idea of ghosts is a bit silly, and move to the more interesting topic of how we can prove/disprove them, or if indeed it's even possible to do so.
But doing a bad job does not mean your are a bad worker.
Isn't that pretty much the definition of a bad worker?
Maybe you were sick that day. Maybe you were told the wrong size for the door. Maybe you laid the bricks correctly, but the frame wasn't strong enough to support the weight and it sagged.
At the danger of arguing the metaphor, those would all be things a bad worker would do. If I was too sick to competently do the job, I wouldn't do it until I was well; I'd delay or hand off. If I was told the wrong size, they while I might again have to delay and charge extra, I wouldn't just shove in the wrong one and call it a day. If the frame I built wasn't strong enough to support the door I was putting in, and I didn't realise that, then hey; my bad.
And to leave the metaphor alone and get back to the point, the argument "you can only comment when you're at least as good as the person doing the work" let's everyone off for any reason. Maybe that worker did a shitty job of putting on the door because he turned up drunk with the wrong kind of wood but, hey, you're not a builder so for all you know he's *meant* to turn up with a traffic cone on his head and glue a load of pencils together for the panels, right? I mean, who's the expert here? I've seen comedy sketches based around taking that idea to it's conclusion.
No, screw that. I paid for a fitted door, I got the damned measurements you told me to get, the way you told me to get them. You screwed it up, and I want it sorted.
(And I'd *love* to hear your excuses for the Cake Wrecks stuff;) )
Note that in the linked Brittanica / Wikipedia chart, Britannica appears higher due to smoothing being set as it is. Set it to a lower value, which gives a less pretty, more accurate chart, and Wikipedia is much higher by the present day.
Except that as far as I can tell, there's no game called "Starsiege Lore". More likely it was just a typo, and should've read "Even though it had no single player..."
"Over here, we have this crazy idea that PEOPLE run the government, not the other way around, and that they can CHOOSE not to have their government provide a certain service if they don't want their tax dollars being spent on it."
From my perspective, I don't care. I want the people around me to be safe from big-life changing (or ending) problems that might arise in or out of their control, and fire is pretty high on that list. I don't care if that is something decided by national government or local, and I don't care if that decision is made with or without input by the people. In most cases, the opinion of the people is routed through so many local officials and lobbyists, shaped through media and pressure groups, and interpreted by national officials and groups such that by the end, the actual will of the people is, if nothing else, impossible to accurately verify.
"Fought a war over that one. Forgot who won. Do you remember?"
I assume you mean the American civil war, and yes, America won. I'm rather sketchy on what that has to do with this topic though?
"By the way, that $75 as a tax would mean that failure to pay would result in loss of household in about three years anyway. As a voluntary fee, failure to pay might result in loss of household IF there is a fire. You choose you r poison, you takes your chances."
IF you can afford it. It's a big if for more people than you might think. Again, as I said above, I don't care about how a particular person gets help when they need it, and if they aren't paying the tax I don't care if it's because they're cheap, stupid, needy, ill, or unlucky. I don't want to worry that someone I know is going to get into a spiral of problems where their income drops, they aren't able to keep up with payments for things I'd consider basic or essential, and then the universe bites them in the ass. I just want to know they are safe. If you consider that opinion to be flamebait, so be it.
As a Brit, yes, I pay taxes, and if my house was on fire, a fire engine would come to put it out. And if the house of my friend who has a part-time job and pays less taxes was on fire, a fire engine would come to put it out. And if the house of my other friend who is on benefits (which you'd call "welfare") because this wretched economy means they can't get an interview much less a job, and as such doesn't pay taxes in any meaningful sense was on fire, a fire engine would come and put it out. And if the house of my other other friend, who has a debilitating illness which means she couldn't work if she wanted to and gets just enough money from the government to pay for the food, rent and carers she needs was on fire, a fire engine would come and put it out.
We have this crazy idea over here that a person's right to emergency services shouldn't be based on how much money they're making, and shouldn't be removed through poor luck or illness. And yeah, a few lazy people abuse it; frankly, I'll accept that knowing that if anyone I care about is in need, no matter whether due to malice, bad luck or their own stupidity, they'll be helped, without needing to sign up for a series of different plans years beforehand.
Software piracy has been around since at least the early 80's. You would be hard-pressed to find a Spectrum or Commodore owner that didn't copy games for their friends and family, and since those days piracy has only gotten easier, and hence more widespread.
So, with this in mind, why haven't we already seen this widespread change of mindset amongst the consumers? Despite how much they moan about lost sales, the movie, and gaming industries are at worst maintaining a slow upward trend, and at best are positively booming; how are they seeing revenue continue to rise for the most part if increased piracy means less people are willing to buy even when they're able?
Of course you can't tell the difference; your monitor resolution means that the video is being rendered down to only a few percent over 1080p anyway, and the same will be the case for almost everyone. Support for this will cater to a niche audience for the moment, whilst also allowing for wider adoption of higher-resolution cameras, monitors and graphics cards. This is how it always is in the world of tech; we settle into a certain pattern of what we can expect our hardware to achieve, and then someone releases software (or a service, or something) that requires hardware currently on the upper bounds, slowly encouraging people to purchase it, manufacturers to lower the costs, and R&D to start working on the next high-end until eventually the cutting-edge hardware it required is mainstream.
Remember that once upon a time, 640k of RAM *really was* enough for pretty much anyone.
The Kinetic stuff looks is not only looks as un-fun as any gaming thing possibly could be, it is also getting torn apart by people closely watching the demos and seeing the horrendous lag and inaccuracy.
What does this mean? Translator please.
I'd try to help, but I really have no idea what it is you don't understand about that post; they're saying Kinetik doesn't look very fun, and if you looked closely at the demonstrations, it appears to suffer from lag and be rather inaccurate. What do you need translating?
what? He specifically stated birds. Not Animals, or inanimate objects.
What if I tell it that a 747 is a bird?
...
Now, I can mess with the AI's mind by feeding it false information, instead of messing with my child's mind.
Wait... so your problem with this is that, if you give it the wrong information, it'll give you the wrong answer? Doesn't that go for, you know, *any* informational process? I mean, error checking and redundancy is one thing, but I don't know of any programme imaginable that, if you accidentally typed "What is 5 x 5?", would know you meant "What is 2 x 2?" and answer accordingly.
I understand completely the behind-the-scenes mechanics at work here... There's not much to say that you haven't already on why the different choices exist, so I won't try. But that's not really my point.
The use of regenerative health in settings where it makes no sense may aid in controlling player behavior, but can also kill player immersion. It's also a bit of a double-edged sword... Regenerative health is (I would argue) a more easily-abusable system than either of the others described, because there's no long-term cumulative effect of short-term abuse. (In the health-pack example, full health would let you go toe-to-toe with larger groups of enemies than you should... But if you did that, you start the next encounter low on health, or having used health items you could have saved. There are long-term repercussions to your actions).
Essentially, what I'm saying is that health regen can be fine if you can justify it within the settings. In the present day though, health regen is in nigh-every FPS being released, and that's frankly ridiculous.
There are, presumably, other methods of handling player health than the three you mentioned above, or other ways of presenting the existing methods to the player. I don't doubt for a second that many, and perhaps even the majority, haven't even been conceived (or at least used) yet. I guess all I'm saying is; let's mix things up a bit.
Slightly offtopic (on Slashdot?!?), but my own choice for worst innovation in modern gaming is regenerative healing in FPS games.
Its not always bad or wrong... It made sense in Halo to have regenerative shielding due to the setting (and didn't make sense in The Getaway, which I KNOW isn't an FPS but I have to mention it before someone pipes up to mention Halo isn't technically the innovator of the concept), and a lot of Sci-Fi games benefit from it for similar reasons. I also quite liked how FarCry 2 handled it... Tiny wounds get shrugged off with time, if they accumulate you're stuck with them, and magic healing syringes are plentiful to carry, but not easy to find in the field.
But I'll be damned if I can find a single excuse for current-era or WW2-era FPS games having regenerative healing. What is that? A WW2 soldier takes a rocket to the face, but hey, all he has to do is hide around the corner for a few seconds and, BAM, fit as a fiddle? Really?
And OK, I know the old stalwort of FPS games, the Health Pack, doesn't make *much* more sense ("It's OK, we'll reconstruct your landmine-kicking leg using bandages! All done!") But at least it feels slightly more sensible thematically.
"Ooooh, but it aids the flow of the game! It's all about the flow!" Don't give me that. With autosaves and checkpoints being ever denser, it doesn't really matter if I lose 15 seconds from having to replay a small section of level or from hiding in an out-of-the-way corner waiting for my health to come back. Or hey, here's an idea, why not come up with some innovative new approach that doesn't rely on instant healing packs OR regenerative healing?
Now hey, it's not my job to come up with that new approach... It wouldn't be innovation if you got it from some random Slashdot poster... But I do have a couple of ideas, if you want to hire this gorgeous little brain of mine.
Put simply, because the return on investment is higher, quicker.
A gamer can pick up a new Guitar Hero/Rock Band/etc game having not played any before, pick up the basics, and be playing songs within the hour. Within an hour of picking up a real guitar, the same gamer *might* be able to pick out a chord or two, following along to some guide they found online or, if they're lucky or have money to burn, with someone teaching them. Mastering Guitar Hero can take months, at which point you're "playing along" with dozens of your favourite bands and feeling a sense of some accomplishment. Mastering a guitar can take years (well, *really* mastering a guitar can take decades), and at the end of it it's still you and your guitar, nothing more. Maybe one guitar player in dozens will wind up actually out there in a band worth a damn, and maybe one in ten thousand will wind up hitting the big time. The number who wind up playing with all their favourites... too small a number to quantify.
To put it another way one is a game, and the other is an art form, and the two are very very different. Why would I want to practice an art form when I just want to play a fun game? I have utmost respect for anyone who can learn an instrument, even tried it myself for a while, but it's not the same thing.
You know that whole "the eyes only work at xxfps!" is an urban myth, right? Yes, I daresay 10,000fps is overkill, but the eyes don't see in discrete frames, they perceive a constant input.
Devices such as monitors and TVs which use discrete frames have to display those frames fast enough that the eye can't tell the difference, or it becomes noticeable and annoying. In TV and films they can be shot taking this into account, ensuring that objects move around relatively smoothly, but in games the camera is usually player controlled, and often swings round much faster, so framerates have be higher to compensate.
If you play those types of games, having a system that can achieve a high FPS is important. More important is having a system which can achieve a consistent FPS. And if nothing else, having a system which is overkill for the current high end games just means you have that much more time until the inevitable upgrade to keep up. Comparable hardware may be available for cheaper in a couple of years, but in a couple of years the games need more and the hardware is no longer, pound-for-pound, comparable.
"With Windows having some 80-90% of the Desktop PC OS market, what would be the point in writing a Linux virus?"
I've heard that argument so many times that *I'm* tempted to write a linux virus, just to get people to stop parroting the same response whenever the subject is brought up. What's that phrase that used to be all the rage on here a year or two ago about how "security through obscurity" is a bad thing? Besides, what percentage of the server market runs Linux?
Colin McRae Rally is probably the series they're most known for in recent times, and most old-schoolers will probably think of the Dizzy games first, and Micro Machines second. Personally, I remember them for things like Jet Bike Ski Simulator on the Spectrum. Came complete with classic incomprehensible speech synthesis, but at least you didn't need an add-in speech cartridge.
I can't find it now, but I saw an excellent example on Amazon once; a +£200 ($400) HDMI cable.
The ludicrously high price was bad enough, justified by the usual techno-babble that's always used with these kind of things. But the best was where it mentioned it could carry a 1080i signal to up to 7.5 metres.
It was a 15 metre cable. I can only presume your signal would get halfway, and then just sorta stay there.
I did just stumble across an even more moronic example here; a HDMI-HDMI cable, prices start at £179.95 for a 1m cable, up to £720 (well over $1,000) for 20m. Seriously, I don't care how good the cable is; for the extra £500, just move the AV source closer to the output.
While I don't doubt the idea has been around long before, this reminds me of the "autoremotes" from the Elite novella "The Dark Wheel";
"Blinking through its solitary monitor, it hovered over his face like a squat, legless dachsund hound and pumped adrenalin, oxygen and glucose into his bloodstream. Alex opened his eyes and panicked slightly. The autoremote calmed him down with a quick pumpsurge of tetval.
The robot's voice whispered in his ears, 'Brandy? Scotch? Vodka? I am equipped with a full range of miniature stimulants to make the waiting easier.'
'What . . . happened . . . ship? . . . Avalonia . ..' he gasped through the tight face mask.
The autoremote blinked at him sympathetically, 'Brandy, then,' and hit Alex with two shots of
Qutirian SynCognac."
There's nothing in particular wrong with the concept, but I can't help thinking a cheery voice would be the last thing I'd want if I had various limbs crushed under several tonnes of rubble.
Physical media : You could burn the game files to a disc for backup, but that'll still cost that extra $1 or $2 for the blank media.
On New Years Day this year, my house got burgled. They didn't take much, at least in terms of size; just some packages of meat from the fridge (for some reason), and a 320-disc carry-case of mine containing the majority of my films, CDs, and PC games. Any game in that case that I didn't have installed at the time, I lost. The majority that I did have installed either were unplayable due to requiring the disc to be in the drive at the time, or will be gone at some point in the future either due to uninstalling them to make room for newer games, or if a PC problem/upgrade necessitates a wipe.
The games bought on Steam, however, were all safe. There was no disc to steal. If my computer gets upgraded, wiped, damaged, destroyed or sucked into a hole in space time, no matter; I download Steam onto the replacement system, sign in, and all my games are there to download again. I don't even need to have kept a list of CD keys.
There's a feeling of safety that people get from having the physical media, and I understand that... but from personal experience, it's really not all it's cracked up to be. (Oh, and speaking of cracking up, this is without counting the 2 occasions, 2 PCs, 4 years and 15 miles apart, when a game disc shattered inside the DVD drive, destroying the disc AND the drive. Half Life 1 and Battlefield 2, for reference.)
Funny that; as an Englishman, pretty much everyone I've ever met says "Maths". The concept of calling it "Math" only appeared when dealing with American media. You might find it's more accurate to say that only native American (you know what I mean) speakers say "Math".
"If they didn't ask for it, and you still blast it out to a bunch of people, it's still unsolicited bulk email -- in other words, it's still spam."
I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here, for the sake of discussion.
The argument above loses some of it's strength when you consider the people involved don't ask because they can't ask; this isn't like you or I not wanting information on mortgages or Viagra or whatever the spam of the month is. So 99% of recipients aren't looking for mortgage information... but what if the other 1% literally couldn't find out any other way? We're talking about e-mail as a person-to-person communication channel that shouldn't be used any other way; what if we drop that basic premise and rethink it for cases where where communications have to be sent TO you because there's no way for you to go to the information? Or should we lump in PSA's on TV for subjects that don't relate to you, road signs for locations you never drive, and any other methods where information is made present to us, whether we want it or not, and whether it directly applies to us? Should these pieces of information be directed also? What's the difference?
A lot of the statements in this thread are based around the content and context of the spam being irrelevant to whether it's right or wrong to send it, and I'm not sure that's true. Many of the statements are also based on the concept that if many of the individuals wouldn't want the information that it shouldn't be sent, and I'm not sure that's true either; we can all think of situations in which governments, organisations and individuals have made decisions which are were seen as right (objectively or subjectively) for the populace at the expense of groups of individuals, rightly and wrongly.
We don't like spam. Hey, it's Slashdot, of course we don't. I think the question is whether there are shades of gray where perhaps spamming would be acceptable... or, perhaps, situations where unsolicited mass-mailing isn't spam at all. In this case, it's worth considering that spam is spam because it's not information we chose to get, and which we could do ourselves if wanted... but when that choice is not given freely, and someone else, this fundementally changes it's nature. The Chinese government has chosen to restrict that access... the question is whether that choice should be over-ridden, and whether it should be left to the governments to do so by pressure, or the worldwide public to do so by subversion.
Given that Red Steel was designed specifically for the Wii, they couldn't have gotten it more wrong.
The main control problem with the game is that there is a huge "dead zone" taking most of the screen, where you can point anywhere without turning... Which is fine as long as you just want to stand in one place and shoot at people in front of you. Making small turns, in combat, is nigh impossible, as the distance between "starting to turn" and "turning full speed" is too small. Worse, it's hard to tell where this area starts... meaning that often you'll atempt to shoot an enemy close to the edge of your vision, and find yourself flung about in another direction. Moving in combat is nigh impossible.
It is a great example of horrid pointing, but it's not a great example of the WiiMote's abilities.
Funnily enough Call Of Duty 3, despite being a port, got the controls about right. The dead zone was gone... the further you aim away from the center the faster you turn, but close to the center is slight enough not be be off-putting, and it works great. The gimmicky bits (like driving) are done well enough to be more fun than their X-Box/PS alternatives. And the important controls are placed well enough that they become practically transparent; when I took it to my friends, I didn't need to explain the controls, as everything is where it should be. If you want to look at how the pointing can be done, you could certainly find worse examples than this.
But regardless, this is all 1st gen stuff. As with the DS, it takes time for people to understand how a system can be used when it's away from the norm, but developers will learn. It's what they're paid for, after all.
Reading through the GP and GPPs posts, I believe the GP was referring to a work where the original work is NOT copyrighted, and whether this change would or would not let the new work be covered by copyright.
So in a work where the original was NOT copyrighted (I think I'm using the wrong word there, forgive me if this is the case), would a format shift constitute a copyrightable work? What about colour correction?
Because, of course, amongst the things teachers should be teaching children from an early age is that violence is the solution to difficult situations. But then, in a country where murder is punished by murder, I can see why the idea could be seen to have merit.
Slashdot Mirror
Things that exist have EVIDENCE.
Actually, proving or disproving that statement is pretty much the crux of this whole debate. Can you prove or disprove that everything that exists must have evidence of it's existence, without falling into the circular logic of simply saying that the evidence is what demonstrates existence?
The whole deal with the supernatural is that the scientific method falls down, because the believer can always either 1) claim the force at work is only detectable by "sensitive readers", not giving off any normal measureable forces, 2) claim the results of the tests were manipulated by the forces at work, or 3) claim the force at work was aware of being measured and, for whatever reason, refused to show. This is what the GP and others are trying to point out; stating that there has never been evidence for a phenomena isn't, strictly speaking, evidence against it. Whether that's because we're looking in the wrong place, looking in the wrong way, the tests are being subverted by the thing being searched for or the thing we're looking for isn't there is, again, the crux of this debate.
For what it's worth, I'm a skeptic, and think ghosts are about as likely to exist as the good old flying spaghetti monster. But lets try to distinguish between what we believe, what is likely, and what is scientifically provable/disprovable. So put aside the fact that the idea of ghosts is a bit silly, and move to the more interesting topic of how we can prove/disprove them, or if indeed it's even possible to do so.
But doing a bad job does not mean your are a bad worker.
Isn't that pretty much the definition of a bad worker?
Maybe you were sick that day. Maybe you were told the wrong size for the door. Maybe you laid the bricks correctly, but the frame wasn't strong enough to support the weight and it sagged.
At the danger of arguing the metaphor, those would all be things a bad worker would do. If I was too sick to competently do the job, I wouldn't do it until I was well; I'd delay or hand off. If I was told the wrong size, they while I might again have to delay and charge extra, I wouldn't just shove in the wrong one and call it a day. If the frame I built wasn't strong enough to support the door I was putting in, and I didn't realise that, then hey; my bad.
And to leave the metaphor alone and get back to the point, the argument "you can only comment when you're at least as good as the person doing the work" let's everyone off for any reason. Maybe that worker did a shitty job of putting on the door because he turned up drunk with the wrong kind of wood but, hey, you're not a builder so for all you know he's *meant* to turn up with a traffic cone on his head and glue a load of pencils together for the panels, right? I mean, who's the expert here? I've seen comedy sketches based around taking that idea to it's conclusion.
No, screw that. I paid for a fitted door, I got the damned measurements you told me to get, the way you told me to get them. You screwed it up, and I want it sorted.
(And I'd *love* to hear your excuses for the Cake Wrecks stuff ;) )
Note that in the linked Brittanica / Wikipedia chart, Britannica appears higher due to smoothing being set as it is. Set it to a lower value, which gives a less pretty, more accurate chart, and Wikipedia is much higher by the present day.
Except that as far as I can tell, there's no game called "Starsiege Lore". More likely it was just a typo, and should've read "Even though it had no single player..."
OK, I'll bite.
"Over here, we have this crazy idea that PEOPLE run the government, not the other way around, and that they can CHOOSE not to have their government provide a certain service if they don't want their tax dollars being spent on it."
From my perspective, I don't care. I want the people around me to be safe from big-life changing (or ending) problems that might arise in or out of their control, and fire is pretty high on that list. I don't care if that is something decided by national government or local, and I don't care if that decision is made with or without input by the people. In most cases, the opinion of the people is routed through so many local officials and lobbyists, shaped through media and pressure groups, and interpreted by national officials and groups such that by the end, the actual will of the people is, if nothing else, impossible to accurately verify.
"Fought a war over that one. Forgot who won. Do you remember?"
I assume you mean the American civil war, and yes, America won. I'm rather sketchy on what that has to do with this topic though?
"By the way, that $75 as a tax would mean that failure to pay would result in loss of household in about three years anyway. As a voluntary fee, failure to pay might result in loss of household IF there is a fire. You choose you r poison, you takes your chances."
IF you can afford it. It's a big if for more people than you might think. Again, as I said above, I don't care about how a particular person gets help when they need it, and if they aren't paying the tax I don't care if it's because they're cheap, stupid, needy, ill, or unlucky. I don't want to worry that someone I know is going to get into a spiral of problems where their income drops, they aren't able to keep up with payments for things I'd consider basic or essential, and then the universe bites them in the ass. I just want to know they are safe. If you consider that opinion to be flamebait, so be it.
As a Brit, yes, I pay taxes, and if my house was on fire, a fire engine would come to put it out. And if the house of my friend who has a part-time job and pays less taxes was on fire, a fire engine would come to put it out. And if the house of my other friend who is on benefits (which you'd call "welfare") because this wretched economy means they can't get an interview much less a job, and as such doesn't pay taxes in any meaningful sense was on fire, a fire engine would come and put it out. And if the house of my other other friend, who has a debilitating illness which means she couldn't work if she wanted to and gets just enough money from the government to pay for the food, rent and carers she needs was on fire, a fire engine would come and put it out.
We have this crazy idea over here that a person's right to emergency services shouldn't be based on how much money they're making, and shouldn't be removed through poor luck or illness. And yeah, a few lazy people abuse it; frankly, I'll accept that knowing that if anyone I care about is in need, no matter whether due to malice, bad luck or their own stupidity, they'll be helped, without needing to sign up for a series of different plans years beforehand.
Software piracy has been around since at least the early 80's. You would be hard-pressed to find a Spectrum or Commodore owner that didn't copy games for their friends and family, and since those days piracy has only gotten easier, and hence more widespread.
So, with this in mind, why haven't we already seen this widespread change of mindset amongst the consumers? Despite how much they moan about lost sales, the movie, and gaming industries are at worst maintaining a slow upward trend, and at best are positively booming; how are they seeing revenue continue to rise for the most part if increased piracy means less people are willing to buy even when they're able?
Sources: Video game industry revenue, Movie industry revenue (look under chart for sales figures).
Of course you can't tell the difference; your monitor resolution means that the video is being rendered down to only a few percent over 1080p anyway, and the same will be the case for almost everyone. Support for this will cater to a niche audience for the moment, whilst also allowing for wider adoption of higher-resolution cameras, monitors and graphics cards. This is how it always is in the world of tech; we settle into a certain pattern of what we can expect our hardware to achieve, and then someone releases software (or a service, or something) that requires hardware currently on the upper bounds, slowly encouraging people to purchase it, manufacturers to lower the costs, and R&D to start working on the next high-end until eventually the cutting-edge hardware it required is mainstream.
Remember that once upon a time, 640k of RAM *really was* enough for pretty much anyone.
I agree; you don't get it.
The Kinetic stuff looks is not only looks as un-fun as any gaming thing possibly could be, it is also getting torn apart by people closely watching the demos and seeing the horrendous lag and inaccuracy.
What does this mean? Translator please.
I'd try to help, but I really have no idea what it is you don't understand about that post; they're saying Kinetik doesn't look very fun, and if you looked closely at the demonstrations, it appears to suffer from lag and be rather inaccurate. What do you need translating?
what? He specifically stated birds. Not Animals, or inanimate objects.
What if I tell it that a 747 is a bird?
Now, I can mess with the AI's mind by feeding it false information, instead of messing with my child's mind.
Wait... so your problem with this is that, if you give it the wrong information, it'll give you the wrong answer? Doesn't that go for, you know, *any* informational process? I mean, error checking and redundancy is one thing, but I don't know of any programme imaginable that, if you accidentally typed "What is 5 x 5?", would know you meant "What is 2 x 2?" and answer accordingly.
I understand completely the behind-the-scenes mechanics at work here... There's not much to say that you haven't already on why the different choices exist, so I won't try. But that's not really my point.
The use of regenerative health in settings where it makes no sense may aid in controlling player behavior, but can also kill player immersion. It's also a bit of a double-edged sword... Regenerative health is (I would argue) a more easily-abusable system than either of the others described, because there's no long-term cumulative effect of short-term abuse. (In the health-pack example, full health would let you go toe-to-toe with larger groups of enemies than you should... But if you did that, you start the next encounter low on health, or having used health items you could have saved. There are long-term repercussions to your actions).
Essentially, what I'm saying is that health regen can be fine if you can justify it within the settings. In the present day though, health regen is in nigh-every FPS being released, and that's frankly ridiculous.
There are, presumably, other methods of handling player health than the three you mentioned above, or other ways of presenting the existing methods to the player. I don't doubt for a second that many, and perhaps even the majority, haven't even been conceived (or at least used) yet. I guess all I'm saying is; let's mix things up a bit.
Slightly offtopic (on Slashdot?!?), but my own choice for worst innovation in modern gaming is regenerative healing in FPS games.
Its not always bad or wrong... It made sense in Halo to have regenerative shielding due to the setting (and didn't make sense in The Getaway, which I KNOW isn't an FPS but I have to mention it before someone pipes up to mention Halo isn't technically the innovator of the concept), and a lot of Sci-Fi games benefit from it for similar reasons. I also quite liked how FarCry 2 handled it... Tiny wounds get shrugged off with time, if they accumulate you're stuck with them, and magic healing syringes are plentiful to carry, but not easy to find in the field.
But I'll be damned if I can find a single excuse for current-era or WW2-era FPS games having regenerative healing. What is that? A WW2 soldier takes a rocket to the face, but hey, all he has to do is hide around the corner for a few seconds and, BAM, fit as a fiddle? Really?
And OK, I know the old stalwort of FPS games, the Health Pack, doesn't make *much* more sense ("It's OK, we'll reconstruct your landmine-kicking leg using bandages! All done!") But at least it feels slightly more sensible thematically.
"Ooooh, but it aids the flow of the game! It's all about the flow!" Don't give me that. With autosaves and checkpoints being ever denser, it doesn't really matter if I lose 15 seconds from having to replay a small section of level or from hiding in an out-of-the-way corner waiting for my health to come back. Or hey, here's an idea, why not come up with some innovative new approach that doesn't rely on instant healing packs OR regenerative healing?
Now hey, it's not my job to come up with that new approach... It wouldn't be innovation if you got it from some random Slashdot poster... But I do have a couple of ideas, if you want to hire this gorgeous little brain of mine.
Put simply, because the return on investment is higher, quicker.
A gamer can pick up a new Guitar Hero/Rock Band/etc game having not played any before, pick up the basics, and be playing songs within the hour. Within an hour of picking up a real guitar, the same gamer *might* be able to pick out a chord or two, following along to some guide they found online or, if they're lucky or have money to burn, with someone teaching them. Mastering Guitar Hero can take months, at which point you're "playing along" with dozens of your favourite bands and feeling a sense of some accomplishment. Mastering a guitar can take years (well, *really* mastering a guitar can take decades), and at the end of it it's still you and your guitar, nothing more. Maybe one guitar player in dozens will wind up actually out there in a band worth a damn, and maybe one in ten thousand will wind up hitting the big time. The number who wind up playing with all their favourites... too small a number to quantify.
To put it another way one is a game, and the other is an art form, and the two are very very different. Why would I want to practice an art form when I just want to play a fun game? I have utmost respect for anyone who can learn an instrument, even tried it myself for a while, but it's not the same thing.
You know that whole "the eyes only work at xxfps!" is an urban myth, right? Yes, I daresay 10,000fps is overkill, but the eyes don't see in discrete frames, they perceive a constant input.
Devices such as monitors and TVs which use discrete frames have to display those frames fast enough that the eye can't tell the difference, or it becomes noticeable and annoying. In TV and films they can be shot taking this into account, ensuring that objects move around relatively smoothly, but in games the camera is usually player controlled, and often swings round much faster, so framerates have be higher to compensate.
If you play those types of games, having a system that can achieve a high FPS is important. More important is having a system which can achieve a consistent FPS. And if nothing else, having a system which is overkill for the current high end games just means you have that much more time until the inevitable upgrade to keep up. Comparable hardware may be available for cheaper in a couple of years, but in a couple of years the games need more and the hardware is no longer, pound-for-pound, comparable.
"With Windows having some 80-90% of the Desktop PC OS market, what would be the point in writing a Linux virus?"
I've heard that argument so many times that *I'm* tempted to write a linux virus, just to get people to stop parroting the same response whenever the subject is brought up. What's that phrase that used to be all the rage on here a year or two ago about how "security through obscurity" is a bad thing? Besides, what percentage of the server market runs Linux?
Colin McRae Rally is probably the series they're most known for in recent times, and most old-schoolers will probably think of the Dizzy games first, and Micro Machines second. Personally, I remember them for things like Jet Bike Ski Simulator on the Spectrum. Came complete with classic incomprehensible speech synthesis, but at least you didn't need an add-in speech cartridge.
I can't find it now, but I saw an excellent example on Amazon once; a +£200 ($400) HDMI cable.
The ludicrously high price was bad enough, justified by the usual techno-babble that's always used with these kind of things. But the best was where it mentioned it could carry a 1080i signal to up to 7.5 metres.
It was a 15 metre cable. I can only presume your signal would get halfway, and then just sorta stay there.
I did just stumble across an even more moronic example here; a HDMI-HDMI cable, prices start at £179.95 for a 1m cable, up to £720 (well over $1,000) for 20m. Seriously, I don't care how good the cable is; for the extra £500, just move the AV source closer to the output.
While I don't doubt the idea has been around long before, this reminds me of the "autoremotes" from the Elite novella "The Dark Wheel";
"Blinking through its solitary monitor, it hovered over his face like a squat, legless dachsund hound and pumped adrenalin, oxygen and glucose into his bloodstream. Alex opened his eyes and panicked slightly. The autoremote calmed him down with a quick pumpsurge of tetval.
The robot's voice whispered in his ears, 'Brandy? Scotch? Vodka? I am equipped with a full range of miniature stimulants to make the waiting easier.'
'What . . . happened . . . ship? . . . Avalonia . . .' he gasped through the tight face mask.
The autoremote blinked at him sympathetically, 'Brandy, then,' and hit Alex with two shots of Qutirian SynCognac."
There's nothing in particular wrong with the concept, but I can't help thinking a cheery voice would be the last thing I'd want if I had various limbs crushed under several tonnes of rubble.
On New Years Day this year, my house got burgled. They didn't take much, at least in terms of size; just some packages of meat from the fridge (for some reason), and a 320-disc carry-case of mine containing the majority of my films, CDs, and PC games. Any game in that case that I didn't have installed at the time, I lost. The majority that I did have installed either were unplayable due to requiring the disc to be in the drive at the time, or will be gone at some point in the future either due to uninstalling them to make room for newer games, or if a PC problem/upgrade necessitates a wipe.
The games bought on Steam, however, were all safe. There was no disc to steal. If my computer gets upgraded, wiped, damaged, destroyed or sucked into a hole in space time, no matter; I download Steam onto the replacement system, sign in, and all my games are there to download again. I don't even need to have kept a list of CD keys.
There's a feeling of safety that people get from having the physical media, and I understand that... but from personal experience, it's really not all it's cracked up to be. (Oh, and speaking of cracking up, this is without counting the 2 occasions, 2 PCs, 4 years and 15 miles apart, when a game disc shattered inside the DVD drive, destroying the disc AND the drive. Half Life 1 and Battlefield 2, for reference.)
Funny that; as an Englishman, pretty much everyone I've ever met says "Maths". The concept of calling it "Math" only appeared when dealing with American media. You might find it's more accurate to say that only native American (you know what I mean) speakers say "Math".
"If they didn't ask for it, and you still blast it out to a bunch of people, it's still unsolicited bulk email -- in other words, it's still spam." I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here, for the sake of discussion. The argument above loses some of it's strength when you consider the people involved don't ask because they can't ask; this isn't like you or I not wanting information on mortgages or Viagra or whatever the spam of the month is. So 99% of recipients aren't looking for mortgage information... but what if the other 1% literally couldn't find out any other way? We're talking about e-mail as a person-to-person communication channel that shouldn't be used any other way; what if we drop that basic premise and rethink it for cases where where communications have to be sent TO you because there's no way for you to go to the information? Or should we lump in PSA's on TV for subjects that don't relate to you, road signs for locations you never drive, and any other methods where information is made present to us, whether we want it or not, and whether it directly applies to us? Should these pieces of information be directed also? What's the difference? A lot of the statements in this thread are based around the content and context of the spam being irrelevant to whether it's right or wrong to send it, and I'm not sure that's true. Many of the statements are also based on the concept that if many of the individuals wouldn't want the information that it shouldn't be sent, and I'm not sure that's true either; we can all think of situations in which governments, organisations and individuals have made decisions which are were seen as right (objectively or subjectively) for the populace at the expense of groups of individuals, rightly and wrongly. We don't like spam. Hey, it's Slashdot, of course we don't. I think the question is whether there are shades of gray where perhaps spamming would be acceptable... or, perhaps, situations where unsolicited mass-mailing isn't spam at all. In this case, it's worth considering that spam is spam because it's not information we chose to get, and which we could do ourselves if wanted... but when that choice is not given freely, and someone else, this fundementally changes it's nature. The Chinese government has chosen to restrict that access... the question is whether that choice should be over-ridden, and whether it should be left to the governments to do so by pressure, or the worldwide public to do so by subversion.
Given that Red Steel was designed specifically for the Wii, they couldn't have gotten it more wrong.
The main control problem with the game is that there is a huge "dead zone" taking most of the screen, where you can point anywhere without turning... Which is fine as long as you just want to stand in one place and shoot at people in front of you. Making small turns, in combat, is nigh impossible, as the distance between "starting to turn" and "turning full speed" is too small. Worse, it's hard to tell where this area starts... meaning that often you'll atempt to shoot an enemy close to the edge of your vision, and find yourself flung about in another direction. Moving in combat is nigh impossible.
It is a great example of horrid pointing, but it's not a great example of the WiiMote's abilities.
Funnily enough Call Of Duty 3, despite being a port, got the controls about right. The dead zone was gone... the further you aim away from the center the faster you turn, but close to the center is slight enough not be be off-putting, and it works great. The gimmicky bits (like driving) are done well enough to be more fun than their X-Box/PS alternatives. And the important controls are placed well enough that they become practically transparent; when I took it to my friends, I didn't need to explain the controls, as everything is where it should be. If you want to look at how the pointing can be done, you could certainly find worse examples than this.
But regardless, this is all 1st gen stuff. As with the DS, it takes time for people to understand how a system can be used when it's away from the norm, but developers will learn. It's what they're paid for, after all.
Reading through the GP and GPPs posts, I believe the GP was referring to a work where the original work is NOT copyrighted, and whether this change would or would not let the new work be covered by copyright.
So in a work where the original was NOT copyrighted (I think I'm using the wrong word there, forgive me if this is the case), would a format shift constitute a copyrightable work? What about colour correction?
Because, of course, amongst the things teachers should be teaching children from an early age is that violence is the solution to difficult situations. But then, in a country where murder is punished by murder, I can see why the idea could be seen to have merit.