I agree that XBL and content download are great additions to console gaming (and Ghost Recon is great fun), but I don't see consoles ever approaching the community content level of PCs - the manufacturers won't allow it, because a poorly made game map that crashes an Xbox, say, is going to shatter the no-maintenance, plug-and-play appeal that consoles are founded on. The two main options, as I see them, are to impose a QA regime on released levels and maps, which will be a major bottleneck, or restrict the level building capacity as in the Timesplitters series, which greatly restricts the kind of content users can create. In addition to that, console manufacturers rely on software sales and licences for profit, so they won't want you getting two years of extended modded play out of Unreal Tournament (say) for free; more likely they'll throw out the occasional free map to keep your interest up, and then start releasing commercial expansions; I understand a few companies are sizing up paid downloads via Xbox Live, for example. Nothing wrong with that per se - if the quality's good enough, I'll gladly pay. But the level of community contribution regularly seen on the PC would stifle such a scheme pretty quickly, IMO. It's a shame... but, as you say, we do get cheat-free, consistent level playing fields, which is great... swings and roundabouts...
Well, of the games you mention, I've only played Civ3 (which is wonderful). No reason that couldn't be ported to, say, Xbox - with some control tweaks. The biggest burden for the console user there, I'd say, would be display resolution. But it could surely be done - the original Civ made it onto the Snes, so the GBA is feasible, with the same display caveat. I'd rather play it on a PC, of course - no argument there.
But, of course, these titles don't appear on consoles, primarily - I assume - because they just wouldn't sell, which in the game industry is probably the most dominant factor of all.
With controllers, yes, there are some nice options for the PC - including console pad adapters - but the difference is that console controllers are standardised. When you know that everyone playing your game is going to have a Dual Shock (or equivalent), you can approach the control system with more confidence, and tie it more effectively to the gameplay. Not that everyone does, by a long shot, but when it works - as in Halo, Sons of Liberty, or Mario Sunshine - it works beautifully. You know every player will have analogue face buttons, so you can make button sensitivity a core part of the game - something I can't imagine you could ever do on a PC. I guess a good example - albeit a niche title - is Shake It Bravoes / Mad Maestro on PS2, where button sensitivity accounts for half the gameplay dynamic. On the other hand, there are clearly times when the knowledge that every play has a full keyboard and a mouse is similarly liberating...
In the end, I suppose, it's all good. We should really just be thankful we have the choices we do...
> Are there any flight-sims on consoles? How about > strategy-games? FPS with controls that match > keyboard/mouse-combo? No?
Yes! Well, granted you're not going to get a really in-depth flight-sim on a console without some kind of dedicated controller (the Steel Batallion one for the Xbox could probably be reused in a flight-sim quite effectively) or a radical rethink of the control system... but then how much does a qwerty keyboard resemble the controls of a flight deck? Anyhow, Pikmin has demonstrated that RTS games can be converted to home consoles (some refining remains, to be sure) and if you're after turn-based strategy, the GBA is the way to go at the moment. FPS controls that match keyboard/mouse... well, that's a matter of design, largely. You lose pinpoint accuracy and high speed, but you gain analogue controls for view AND movement, and analogue face-buttons. The gameplay changes, certainly, but not necessarily for the worse.
The things I do miss about PC gaming are the mod scene and access to in-depth level builders, and I'm considering getting a new Windows machine so I can get back into all that. It was nice to see a level builder in the Timesplitters games, for example, but you're not going to get the from-scrath limitless possibilities that something like UnrealEd offers. And since it's been a couple of years since I was active in that area, I dare say today's processors will go like the proverbial rockets compared to my last experience...
Certainly was, but that's no reason to stop doing things - we have a bunch of Toshiba machines in our library that have precisely this problem. Student finishes off a chapter, pushes the keyboard back a little as they sit back to read it, and bink! How they laugh! Granted, these Toshibas aren't exactly new, but they're a lot newer than the PoweMac 601 (I believe they're P3s). The reset button is on a hair-trigger and it isn't recessed into the case, so it's quite a piece of work. To round off the package, it's located just beneath the sleep button, presumably to punish the fat-thumbed.
> Imagine if you started a company, 20 years ago, > called it Microsoft, and started selling Music. > Do you think that would go over well with > Microsoft, the software manufacturer?
No, but then there's a *world* of difference between the word "Microsoft" and the word "Apple". Now I can't speak for your mom, but mine would certainly be able to distinguish between the two Apples in this case. She wouldn't think "Oh, the Beatles are selling online music", she'd think "This online music store has the same name as the Beatles' label" - though really, she wouldn't stop to give it any thought at all, because she's neither an idiot or a lawyer.
But Microsoft is different; it's not a 'real' word, it's a portmanteau word that has no application outside the context of that company. Because of this, there IS a real danger that consumers would be confused by a company called Microsoft that sold, say, vacuum cleaners. Returning to my sainted mother, the only context she has for the name Microsoft is the work of the sotware giant. When her MS vacuum breaks down, she might well kick Bill Gates in the leg. But when her Apple audio files turn out to be too lossy, she's not going to go after Paul McCartney. Which is kind of a shame, come to think of it...
As ever, this is neither good or bad; it can't be anchored to either extreme. It's good in as much as the more kids get access to technology, the better. If it has to be MS tech, then even the most cynical can take comfort in the possibility that the kids will be desperate to get away from Windows by the time they're freed. But there's no competition between a kid with access to a PC and a kid without; the kid with a PC is undoubtedly better off.
But this is also bad in that branded education is arguably undesirable. One of the dangers, for example, is that the school won't be free to teach students about Microsoft's less desirable traits and tactics, or about the problem with monopolies in general. As the article notes, MS is pursuing this as a case study - it may decide it wants to market this service far and wide in the future. A Microsoft school is obviously going to reflect Microsoft's interests. You may not think this a problem today, but how might this develop in the future, as MS' strategies develop and the schools they created are bound to follow? Now, I'm not proposing GNU-sponsored schools here, but at least such schools would have guaranteed freedom and flexibility in terms of their IT setup and how they choose to use it.
The big difference is, of course, that MS is able to do this here and now, and potentially make great improvements to kids' educations. So for once, this isn't a theoretical debate. Which, you know, makes the whole thing ten times more difficult.
The iTunes approach is similar to Evolution's, as far as I can tell (I've used the former but not the latter): in iTunes, you can create 'smart' playlists, which use ruls such as "include every song with 'Twist' in the title". The playlists then take care of themselves. For example, I have a 'short songs' playlist of 60s tracks I can use to pad out audio CDs or use as backing tracks to short movies, and I don't have to worry about organising anything. I understand Panther is using an iTunes approach for Finder, but I don't know if that includes smart folders. The concern here is probably metadata - at the moment, CDDB provides the information that iTunes uses, so I don't have to manually enter genres and song lengths. Emails are similarly easy to filter and sort. But images and documents require some user input to help categorise them efficiently, and, of course, we are the weak point...
Why not just buy the DVDs? The maker of 'Curb your Enthusiasm' are clearly making something that you value.
Yes, they are, and I would buy them like a shot if they were available. Similarly, I wouldn't need to watch them on my PC if they were shown in the UK, but over here we've only had the first season, shown at a time that was hardly likely to attract much attention and support for subsequent airings. I may or may not be stealing, depending on your viewpoint, but I'm definitely not out to deprive the makers of any revenue; I'll pay for the overpriced Special Edition 3-disc DVD set any time they like. In the meantime, if it helps, try to consider my actions as a compliment to the makers; I'll risk my very liberty to view their work!
For OS X, I spent an age trying to get various codecs working in Quicktime to view variously encoded episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm which probably won't be aired in the UK before 2005. The recent Mac DivX codecs solved a lot of these, but I didn't like the fact that they came in an installer package - I try to stick to drag-installs on the Mac so I know what's where. Then I gave VLC (http://www.videolan.org/) a try, and in OS X at least, it works like a charm. I haven't found anything it won't run yet, it plays DVDs without any region checking (provided your firmware is fixed), and it handles VCDs to boot. It really does do everything I need it to in a proper one-app drag install, and it's GPL. Definitly worth a look for Apple users - which isn't to say Mplayer isn't worthy, too.
Of course, once porn vendors latch onto this (they seem to have been onto the "index of" part for a while), going through the results will take long enough to invalidate the technique. Unless you add something like "-blowjob", I guess. Ah, Google wins again. Don't forger you can specify the above search strings as "intitle:" phrases to focus the results a little more.
That's certainly an excellent start (though valid XHTML would be far preferable), but not by any means a full solution. If I post an image that contains relevant information (a graph, say), all I need to provide is a simple ALT tag ("Usage graph for 2002"), and a HTML validator will let it pass. But that tag is of no use to someone who can't see it, but needs the information in conveys. That's why we need more comprehensive standards to ensure that, as the first WCAG checkpoint says, content is perceivable by any user.
It can be hard work. I'm still trying to get the commercial designers of our main site to apply standard formatting to all links, instead of underlining some and not others, and having different mouseover behaviours on the same page (and in the same paragraph...). Again, their HTML is most likely valid, but the resulting page is not accessible.
For my part, I do follow your advice - I aim for valid XHTML, and believe that it will result in an accessible and usable page. I think it works, but it's not automatic - you still have to think about the information you're presenting and how best to present it - there's an infinite number of ways to present your information in valid XHTML, but some will be (far) more accessible than others.
The fun(ny) part is watching the RIAA, etc try to convince the world that file sharing is really malum in se.
I think that's the scary part, and that's what this story is really about - the fact that the BBC, a major news source, has put out a story that paints a picture of heroic cyber 'cops' fighting file-sharing 'bad guys', along with tales of their 'hi-tech' tracking tools and great success rate. It's easy to laugh at if you know something about the subject, but it's also bringing the issue to the general public in a pretty alarmist fashion, instead of presenting a balanced view - protection of copyright vs. corporate legal power vs. suitable punishment vs. privacy vs. throwing the baby out with the bathwater... and so on.
I don't think any sane person 'in the street' would suggest putting a music swapper in jail right now, but another year of this kind of propaganda (no other word for this article, given the language used) and... 'The more things stay, the more they change the sane.'
Apple's 'technologies' delete the bought-and-paid-for files with no refund and no replacement when & if you leave the U.S
This is irresponsible reporting par exellence. One fool gets confused and sends an email out. It gets spotted, the misunderstanding is perpetuated, and it's submitted to Slashdot. Slashdot puts the submission up with the alarmist tone (see above) intact. A few rational people explain what's really going on. A lot more irrational people start freaking out. Overall, this article just does harm to the iTMS when it simply doesn't deserve it. And how is this going to be redressed? Through another main-page post that REALLY explains the situation? I doubt it, but mud sticks - whether it deserved to be thrown or not.
I'm a big fan of Audio Hijack - the first piece of shareware I ever found irreplacable enough to purchase - so I thought I'd expand a little on the 'more capablities' comment for anyone mildly interested (but not to the point of clicking the link). AH lets you record any source with the usual encoding options, and offers you a timer utility so you can set yr Mac to kick off at 4am or 1pm or whenever you happen to be in bed, and snag that shipping forecast / radio soap / opera/ whatever. Good feature, but I've never used it, because the killer IMO is the VST / AudioUnit support - you can plought the signal through any number of plugin effects before it hits the hard drive. Pack in a free VST grain delay, pitch shifter, bitcrusher and reverb and you can turn any sound source into a live glitch-up session and get some turly incredible results for the price. Or just hijack a DVD sountrack while you watch and use AH to bump the pitch up an octave. Paid for itself the first time I did that, easily.
The heyday of the movie game IMO was the 8-bit era, bleeding slightly into 16-bit. The Spectrum/Timex and C64 saw some great tie-ins (for the time):
Short Circuit - where you had to use hacked CCTV cameras to plan your route; a proto-stealth title.
Cobra - the Stallone movie. A simple side-on shooter, very hard without being unfair.
Alien / Aliens - the first was a fairly abstract team-based game using a top-down plan on the Nostromo - like seeing the tracking system used when the captain gets killed in the vents. Motion tracker, flamethrower, the cat - they were all in there. Tension was way high, death was way swift. Don't think I ever finished it, but I kept going back. Aliens was an 8-bit FPS which derived most of its tension from having to slowly turn around and check each room. Single colour graphics on the Spectrum helped no end.
Robocop - a great side-on shooter with multi-angle shooting (forcing you to keep an eye on windows and doors all over the screen), ED-209 showdowns and baby food power-ups.
Goonies - a turly wonderful single-screen puzzle-solving game, like a computerised Mousetrap in some ways - requiring wacky physics-based solutions - or else depending on clever team co-ordination....and many more efforts from Ocean and the likes. Wasn't there a Home Alone game on the NES/SNES? I don't see how that could have failed, either.
These goons (the DoubleClick advertisors) deliberately designed their items to trick people.
Yeah, this is the really obnoxious factor and why I hope they get demolished. My dad is not a stupid man, but he's not an experience computer user. He's got the sense to know that an unfamiliar "you have a new message" window or a "you've won!" announcement are going to be scams. But he's probably naive enough to think that a "Close" or "Cancel" button that looks exactly like the ones he uses on a daily basis is going to get rid of the unwanted window, not launch a full-screen page or an.exe file. Similarly, if an ad has a "click here to install" button clearly marked out, he might well imagine that clicking anywhere else in the window - to bring it to the front, perhaps - wouldn't lead to an install, but he'd probably be wrong. People who design this kind of stuff ARE bloody diabolical. I don't care that it's just a stupid small pop-up ad - it's the aggregation of little annoyances like this that's the problem. It gets me all Georged up - "we're trying to have a civilization here!".
The real time time stretching, pitch modification, key changes, tc, etc, REQUIRE the AltiVec unit. It's just not possible to do that level of real time sound morphing without a G4
It definitely is; Reaktor performs all those tasks, and a hell of a lot more, on my G3 iBook just fine - as long as I don't go overboard and start piling on the pressure. True, a G4 would perform far better, but for now I have a G3 and I find Reaktor 4 perfectly usable. Similarly, Steinberg Remix and its big brother, Ableton Live, run fine on a G3 and offer a similar experience. Perhaps the G4 requirement has more to do with the Quicktime / video integration?
At any rate, while I'm sure Soundtrack is great at what it does, it does seem geared toward AV use. I'd encourage anyone looking for an Acid / Fruitloops replacement on OSX to consider Live 2. It's amazing at realtime manipulation, but also has great composition features. The scaled-down Steinberg Remix offers a good introduction to Live and should cost around $50, I'd guess - it's around £35 in the UK.
As the article states, the plan is to recieve the search query, bring up the most suitable pages, compress them, and mail them back. I'd assume that in general a graphicaly heavy or plugin-dependent page wouldn't be deemed 'suitable', so they'd just be receiving a zip of text pages - hardly a great burden on the line and, at the end of the day, a real improvement for, say, schools. This is technological development at the opposite end of the scale from pop-under web ads; great work, and good work.
The part that scares me is that he (and I bet millions of other brainwashed Nintendo'ers) think that this is actually a cool way of doing this.
It's a brilliant way of doing it, which helped massively with Animal Crossing's success. With private community networked swapping, outsiders would be completely unaware of what was going on in Animal Crossing. But when a public forum needs to have a new folder added purely for AC item swaps, people notice that and get curious about the game and why so many people are engrossed in it. Nintendo simply used the most powerful and effective existing channels of communication instead of reinventing the wheel.
One of the many GC magazines currently out in the UK this month features a free, scaled-down version of the Freeloader disc on the cover, which will only run Animal Crossing. So as long as your TV will display the output and you have access to an import supplier, you can play the game; bad luck if you can't read English, I guess, but better than Nintendo's efforts to date; i.e. better than nothing.
If you love Nights, and you've got an Xbox, I suggest trying Project Gotham Racing. The arcade challenge mode in PGR is quite similar to Nights in a lot of ways - you're driving around a circuit, trying to fit between a series of cones, taking corners with long slides, and trying to maintain the longest score combo you can. Going from cones to powerslide to jump to cones to keep a combo on the go is a lot like keeping a Nights combo running, and you can get into the same 'zone'. Worth a go - I'm a huge Nights fan, and that's the closest gameplay I've found so far.
I never understood the Marvel vs. Capcom anyways. They are entirely unrelated. One is a video game maker the other is a comic book maker. DC vs. Marvel makes total sense though.
Yeah, but... as a freakin' video game? [head explodes]
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that XBL and content download are great additions to console gaming (and Ghost Recon is great fun), but I don't see consoles ever approaching the community content level of PCs - the manufacturers won't allow it, because a poorly made game map that crashes an Xbox, say, is going to shatter the no-maintenance, plug-and-play appeal that consoles are founded on. The two main options, as I see them, are to impose a QA regime on released levels and maps, which will be a major bottleneck, or restrict the level building capacity as in the Timesplitters series, which greatly restricts the kind of content users can create. In addition to that, console manufacturers rely on software sales and licences for profit, so they won't want you getting two years of extended modded play out of Unreal Tournament (say) for free; more likely they'll throw out the occasional free map to keep your interest up, and then start releasing commercial expansions; I understand a few companies are sizing up paid downloads via Xbox Live, for example. Nothing wrong with that per se - if the quality's good enough, I'll gladly pay. But the level of community contribution regularly seen on the PC would stifle such a scheme pretty quickly, IMO. It's a shame... but, as you say, we do get cheat-free, consistent level playing fields, which is great... swings and roundabouts...
Well, of the games you mention, I've only played Civ3 (which is wonderful). No reason that couldn't be ported to, say, Xbox - with some control tweaks. The biggest burden for the console user there, I'd say, would be display resolution. But it could surely be done - the original Civ made it onto the Snes, so the GBA is feasible, with the same display caveat. I'd rather play it on a PC, of course - no argument there.
But, of course, these titles don't appear on consoles, primarily - I assume - because they just wouldn't sell, which in the game industry is probably the most dominant factor of all.
With controllers, yes, there are some nice options for the PC - including console pad adapters - but the difference is that console controllers are standardised. When you know that everyone playing your game is going to have a Dual Shock (or equivalent), you can approach the control system with more confidence, and tie it more effectively to the gameplay. Not that everyone does, by a long shot, but when it works - as in Halo, Sons of Liberty, or Mario Sunshine - it works beautifully. You know every player will have analogue face buttons, so you can make button sensitivity a core part of the game - something I can't imagine you could ever do on a PC. I guess a good example - albeit a niche title - is Shake It Bravoes / Mad Maestro on PS2, where button sensitivity accounts for half the gameplay dynamic. On the other hand, there are clearly times when the knowledge that every play has a full keyboard and a mouse is similarly liberating...
In the end, I suppose, it's all good. We should really just be thankful we have the choices we do...
> Are there any flight-sims on consoles? How about
> strategy-games? FPS with controls that match
> keyboard/mouse-combo? No?
Yes! Well, granted you're not going to get a really in-depth flight-sim on a console without some kind of dedicated controller (the Steel Batallion one for the Xbox could probably be reused in a flight-sim quite effectively) or a radical rethink of the control system... but then how much does a qwerty keyboard resemble the controls of a flight deck? Anyhow, Pikmin has demonstrated that RTS games can be converted to home consoles (some refining remains, to be sure) and if you're after turn-based strategy, the GBA is the way to go at the moment. FPS controls that match keyboard/mouse... well, that's a matter of design, largely. You lose pinpoint accuracy and high speed, but you gain analogue controls for view AND movement, and analogue face-buttons. The gameplay changes, certainly, but not necessarily for the worse.
The things I do miss about PC gaming are the mod scene and access to in-depth level builders, and I'm considering getting a new Windows machine so I can get back into all that. It was nice to see a level builder in the Timesplitters games, for example, but you're not going to get the from-scrath limitless possibilities that something like UnrealEd offers. And since it's been a couple of years since I was active in that area, I dare say today's processors will go like the proverbial rockets compared to my last experience...
Outright stupid it was.
Certainly was, but that's no reason to stop doing things - we have a bunch of Toshiba machines in our library that have precisely this problem. Student finishes off a chapter, pushes the keyboard back a little as they sit back to read it, and bink! How they laugh! Granted, these Toshibas aren't exactly new, but they're a lot newer than the PoweMac 601 (I believe they're P3s). The reset button is on a hair-trigger and it isn't recessed into the case, so it's quite a piece of work. To round off the package, it's located just beneath the sleep button, presumably to punish the fat-thumbed.
It's taken a rather long time for Married With Children to come out on DVD, and who knows when it'll all be available?
;)
October 28th for the first season in the US. Go check Amazon... hope that puts a smile on your face
> Imagine if you started a company, 20 years ago,
> called it Microsoft, and started selling Music.
> Do you think that would go over well with
> Microsoft, the software manufacturer?
No, but then there's a *world* of difference between the word "Microsoft" and the word "Apple". Now I can't speak for your mom, but mine would certainly be able to distinguish between the two Apples in this case. She wouldn't think "Oh, the Beatles are selling online music", she'd think "This online music store has the same name as the Beatles' label" - though really, she wouldn't stop to give it any thought at all, because she's neither an idiot or a lawyer.
But Microsoft is different; it's not a 'real' word, it's a portmanteau word that has no application outside the context of that company. Because of this, there IS a real danger that consumers would be confused by a company called Microsoft that sold, say, vacuum cleaners. Returning to my sainted mother, the only context she has for the name Microsoft is the work of the sotware giant. When her MS vacuum breaks down, she might well kick Bill Gates in the leg. But when her Apple audio files turn out to be too lossy, she's not going to go after Paul McCartney. Which is kind of a shame, come to think of it...
As ever, this is neither good or bad; it can't be anchored to either extreme. It's good in as much as the more kids get access to technology, the better. If it has to be MS tech, then even the most cynical can take comfort in the possibility that the kids will be desperate to get away from Windows by the time they're freed. But there's no competition between a kid with access to a PC and a kid without; the kid with a PC is undoubtedly better off.
But this is also bad in that branded education is arguably undesirable. One of the dangers, for example, is that the school won't be free to teach students about Microsoft's less desirable traits and tactics, or about the problem with monopolies in general. As the article notes, MS is pursuing this as a case study - it may decide it wants to market this service far and wide in the future. A Microsoft school is obviously going to reflect Microsoft's interests. You may not think this a problem today, but how might this develop in the future, as MS' strategies develop and the schools they created are bound to follow? Now, I'm not proposing GNU-sponsored schools here, but at least such schools would have guaranteed freedom and flexibility in terms of their IT setup and how they choose to use it.
The big difference is, of course, that MS is able to do this here and now, and potentially make great improvements to kids' educations. So for once, this isn't a theoretical debate. Which, you know, makes the whole thing ten times more difficult.
The iTunes approach is similar to Evolution's, as far as I can tell (I've used the former but not the latter): in iTunes, you can create 'smart' playlists, which use ruls such as "include every song with 'Twist' in the title". The playlists then take care of themselves. For example, I have a 'short songs' playlist of 60s tracks I can use to pad out audio CDs or use as backing tracks to short movies, and I don't have to worry about organising anything. I understand Panther is using an iTunes approach for Finder, but I don't know if that includes smart folders. The concern here is probably metadata - at the moment, CDDB provides the information that iTunes uses, so I don't have to manually enter genres and song lengths. Emails are similarly easy to filter and sort. But images and documents require some user input to help categorise them efficiently, and, of course, we are the weak point...
Why not just buy the DVDs? The maker of 'Curb your Enthusiasm' are clearly making something that you value.
Yes, they are, and I would buy them like a shot if they were available. Similarly, I wouldn't need to watch them on my PC if they were shown in the UK, but over here we've only had the first season, shown at a time that was hardly likely to attract much attention and support for subsequent airings. I may or may not be stealing, depending on your viewpoint, but I'm definitely not out to deprive the makers of any revenue; I'll pay for the overpriced Special Edition 3-disc DVD set any time they like. In the meantime, if it helps, try to consider my actions as a compliment to the makers; I'll risk my very liberty to view their work!
For OS X, I spent an age trying to get various codecs working in Quicktime to view variously encoded episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm which probably won't be aired in the UK before 2005. The recent Mac DivX codecs solved a lot of these, but I didn't like the fact that they came in an installer package - I try to stick to drag-installs on the Mac so I know what's where. Then I gave VLC (http://www.videolan.org/) a try, and in OS X at least, it works like a charm. I haven't found anything it won't run yet, it plays DVDs without any region checking (provided your firmware is fixed), and it handles VCDs to boot. It really does do everything I need it to in a proper one-app drag install, and it's GPL. Definitly worth a look for Apple users - which isn't to say Mplayer isn't worthy, too.
Of course, once porn vendors latch onto this (they seem to have been onto the "index of" part for a while), going through the results will take long enough to invalidate the technique. Unless you add something like "-blowjob", I guess. Ah, Google wins again. Don't forger you can specify the above search strings as "intitle:" phrases to focus the results a little more.
All that should be a concern is using valid HTML
That's certainly an excellent start (though valid XHTML would be far preferable), but not by any means a full solution. If I post an image that contains relevant information (a graph, say), all I need to provide is a simple ALT tag ("Usage graph for 2002"), and a HTML validator will let it pass. But that tag is of no use to someone who can't see it, but needs the information in conveys. That's why we need more comprehensive standards to ensure that, as the first WCAG checkpoint says, content is perceivable by any user.
It can be hard work. I'm still trying to get the commercial designers of our main site to apply standard formatting to all links, instead of underlining some and not others, and having different mouseover behaviours on the same page (and in the same paragraph...). Again, their HTML is most likely valid, but the resulting page is not accessible.
For my part, I do follow your advice - I aim for valid XHTML, and believe that it will result in an accessible and usable page. I think it works, but it's not automatic - you still have to think about the information you're presenting and how best to present it - there's an infinite number of ways to present your information in valid XHTML, but some will be (far) more accessible than others.
The fun(ny) part is watching the RIAA, etc try to convince the world that file sharing is really malum in se.
I think that's the scary part, and that's what this story is really about - the fact that the BBC, a major news source, has put out a story that paints a picture of heroic cyber 'cops' fighting file-sharing 'bad guys', along with tales of their 'hi-tech' tracking tools and great success rate. It's easy to laugh at if you know something about the subject, but it's also bringing the issue to the general public in a pretty alarmist fashion, instead of presenting a balanced view - protection of copyright vs. corporate legal power vs. suitable punishment vs. privacy vs. throwing the baby out with the bathwater... and so on.
I don't think any sane person 'in the street' would suggest putting a music swapper in jail right now, but another year of this kind of propaganda (no other word for this article, given the language used) and... 'The more things stay, the more they change the sane.'
Apple's 'technologies' delete the bought-and-paid-for files with no refund and no replacement when & if you leave the U.S
This is irresponsible reporting par exellence. One fool gets confused and sends an email out. It gets spotted, the misunderstanding is perpetuated, and it's submitted to Slashdot. Slashdot puts the submission up with the alarmist tone (see above) intact. A few rational people explain what's really going on. A lot more irrational people start freaking out. Overall, this article just does harm to the iTMS when it simply doesn't deserve it. And how is this going to be redressed? Through another main-page post that REALLY explains the situation? I doubt it, but mud sticks - whether it deserved to be thrown or not.
I'm a big fan of Audio Hijack - the first piece of shareware I ever found irreplacable enough to purchase - so I thought I'd expand a little on the 'more capablities' comment for anyone mildly interested (but not to the point of clicking the link). AH lets you record any source with the usual encoding options, and offers you a timer utility so you can set yr Mac to kick off at 4am or 1pm or whenever you happen to be in bed, and snag that shipping forecast / radio soap / opera/ whatever. Good feature, but I've never used it, because the killer IMO is the VST / AudioUnit support - you can plought the signal through any number of plugin effects before it hits the hard drive. Pack in a free VST grain delay, pitch shifter, bitcrusher and reverb and you can turn any sound source into a live glitch-up session and get some turly incredible results for the price. Or just hijack a DVD sountrack while you watch and use AH to bump the pitch up an octave. Paid for itself the first time I did that, easily.
The heyday of the movie game IMO was the 8-bit era, bleeding slightly into 16-bit. The Spectrum/Timex and C64 saw some great tie-ins (for the time):
...and many more efforts from Ocean and the likes. Wasn't there a Home Alone game on the NES/SNES? I don't see how that could have failed, either.
Short Circuit - where you had to use hacked CCTV cameras to plan your route; a proto-stealth title.
Cobra - the Stallone movie. A simple side-on shooter, very hard without being unfair.
Alien / Aliens - the first was a fairly abstract team-based game using a top-down plan on the Nostromo - like seeing the tracking system used when the captain gets killed in the vents. Motion tracker, flamethrower, the cat - they were all in there. Tension was way high, death was way swift. Don't think I ever finished it, but I kept going back. Aliens was an 8-bit FPS which derived most of its tension from having to slowly turn around and check each room. Single colour graphics on the Spectrum helped no end.
Robocop - a great side-on shooter with multi-angle shooting (forcing you to keep an eye on windows and doors all over the screen), ED-209 showdowns and baby food power-ups.
Goonies - a turly wonderful single-screen puzzle-solving game, like a computerised Mousetrap in some ways - requiring wacky physics-based solutions - or else depending on clever team co-ordination.
These goons (the DoubleClick advertisors) deliberately designed their items to trick people.
Yeah, this is the really obnoxious factor and why I hope they get demolished. My dad is not a stupid man, but he's not an experience computer user. He's got the sense to know that an unfamiliar "you have a new message" window or a "you've won!" announcement are going to be scams. But he's probably naive enough to think that a "Close" or "Cancel" button that looks exactly like the ones he uses on a daily basis is going to get rid of the unwanted window, not launch a full-screen page or an .exe file. Similarly, if an ad has a "click here to install" button clearly marked out, he might well imagine that clicking anywhere else in the window - to bring it to the front, perhaps - wouldn't lead to an install, but he'd probably be wrong. People who design this kind of stuff ARE bloody diabolical. I don't care that it's just a stupid small pop-up ad - it's the aggregation of little annoyances like this that's the problem. It gets me all Georged up - "we're trying to have a civilization here!".
The real time time stretching, pitch modification, key changes, tc, etc, REQUIRE the AltiVec unit. It's just not possible to do that level of real time sound morphing without a G4
It definitely is; Reaktor performs all those tasks, and a hell of a lot more, on my G3 iBook just fine - as long as I don't go overboard and start piling on the pressure. True, a G4 would perform far better, but for now I have a G3 and I find Reaktor 4 perfectly usable. Similarly, Steinberg Remix and its big brother, Ableton Live, run fine on a G3 and offer a similar experience. Perhaps the G4 requirement has more to do with the Quicktime / video integration?
At any rate, while I'm sure Soundtrack is great at what it does, it does seem geared toward AV use. I'd encourage anyone looking for an Acid / Fruitloops replacement on OSX to consider Live 2. It's amazing at realtime manipulation, but also has great composition features. The scaled-down Steinberg Remix offers a good introduction to Live and should cost around $50, I'd guess - it's around £35 in the UK.
As the article states, the plan is to recieve the search query, bring up the most suitable pages, compress them, and mail them back. I'd assume that in general a graphicaly heavy or plugin-dependent page wouldn't be deemed 'suitable', so they'd just be receiving a zip of text pages - hardly a great burden on the line and, at the end of the day, a real improvement for, say, schools. This is technological development at the opposite end of the scale from pop-under web ads; great work, and good work.
The part that scares me is that he (and I bet millions of other brainwashed Nintendo'ers) think that this is actually a cool way of doing this.
It's a brilliant way of doing it, which helped massively with Animal Crossing's success. With private community networked swapping, outsiders would be completely unaware of what was going on in Animal Crossing. But when a public forum needs to have a new folder added purely for AC item swaps, people notice that and get curious about the game and why so many people are engrossed in it. Nintendo simply used the most powerful and effective existing channels of communication instead of reinventing the wheel.
shift click reload
but what if you don't have two hands free while browsing for pr0^H^H^H stuff?
Well, that's a job for sticky keys, which is presumably what you'll have.
So don't be surprised if you're in Japan early next year and see people running holding their cellphone/PDA like a gun."
Just to clarify, though, you should always be alarmed if you see someone holding their gun like a cellphone.
One of the many GC magazines currently out in the UK this month features a free, scaled-down version of the Freeloader disc on the cover, which will only run Animal Crossing. So as long as your TV will display the output and you have access to an import supplier, you can play the game; bad luck if you can't read English, I guess, but better than Nintendo's efforts to date; i.e. better than nothing.
If you love Nights, and you've got an Xbox, I suggest trying Project Gotham Racing. The arcade challenge mode in PGR is quite similar to Nights in a lot of ways - you're driving around a circuit, trying to fit between a series of cones, taking corners with long slides, and trying to maintain the longest score combo you can. Going from cones to powerslide to jump to cones to keep a combo on the go is a lot like keeping a Nights combo running, and you can get into the same 'zone'. Worth a go - I'm a huge Nights fan, and that's the closest gameplay I've found so far.
I never understood the Marvel vs. Capcom anyways. They are entirely unrelated. One is a video game maker the other is a comic book maker. DC vs. Marvel makes total sense though. Yeah, but... as a freakin' video game? [head explodes]