The flood of innovative stuff that's coming out could serve as prior art to upcoming patents surrounding this technology... Perhaps this will lower royalties and increase freedoms if we can figure out all the cool stuff first before it becomes patented.
Why does Microsoft eschew conventional methods of interfacing with MicroSD cards for this piece of hardware? Do they have too many problems with customers using their MicroSD cards for multiple things and then messing up files that are important for the WP7 device? Is there a better solution?
I don't really spend much time crashing cars in GT, usually I restart a race if I fuck up like that. In fact, crashes aside, I just hope they'll have a rewind feature like Forza.
I really wouldn't care if damage modeling weren't even attempted in GT5. For everything that the game offers, I'll be way too busy to think about that issue at all. Rally, F1, Nascar, weather, go cart, track editor, honestly the game has so much, I really won't be one to complain.
Of course people want digital magazines, that's why web sites are so popular. A digital version that strictly adheres to the limitations of its physical counterpart? Not so much. People want to be able to link to specific pages and message their friends about it, you can't do that so much if there's a cost barrier and you can't reference a specific portion with a URL. People also want to cut and paste, modify, change display settings, etc, but if by "digital magazine" you mean a static display that's as interactive as a JPG, you can't do any of that.
Whether or not they include Steam functionality is moot, the stores are selling the games, and people still buy them from said stores. By stopping to sell these games in stores, the retailers are in fact pushing potential buyers to use Steam, accelerating their own irrelevance, and promoting their local competition as well as online retailers such as Amazon. Have they gone mad?
I guess that's true, but I would also rather use Wikipedia than an average web site. Every page is formatted and organized the same, so even after I've gotten to my destination it's a lot easier to absorb the information and also to immediately find relevant info on adjacent topics that is presented in the same way.
I do find Wikipedia a much better starting off point than typical search results, right at the bottom of the article are a bunch of non-crap links to start you off. Maybe Wikipedia is a better search engine because the links at the bottom have to be relevant references to the topic and cannot just be some false search result that leads nowhere...
But then Wikipedia also isn't an unbiased catalog listing resources, you have to qualify it first which raises the barrier of entry, and that can be a bad thing if you don't have a lot of visibility on the web, so obviously we still need search engines. Hmm.
The reason you're going to Wikipedia for actual information is because the site is structured to eliminate anything that isn't factual information. You're just realizing that the web is a bunch of crappy cross-linked blogs and syndicated content behind ads/paywalls. Soon you'll be hitting podcasts for editorial content instead of the ad-laden multi-click regurgitated PR between top 10 lists that make up most sites.
Wow, this has gone even further than I thought... the UK doesn't seek to quash independent thought, it simply believes that independent thought does not even exist!
We knew that we were headed in this direction; Services moving onto the internet, digital delivery, etc. Netflix aren't they only ones, we have YouTube, Hulu, Steam, OnLive!, PSN, Xbox/Windows Live!, every device has some form of app store and streaming video playback. Devices such as the Boxee Box are being built solely for that purpose. If you have any type of clue, you'll know that future applications of internet connectivity will be more bandwidth intensive.
We've been paying our ISPs, phone companies, and cable companies, who, like any other business, is changing to meet new demands and competing to stay relevant. These companies continue to reinvest in their own infrastructure and researching more efficient delivery to meet the demands of consumers. I mean, they're not just sitting around in the middle of this revolution with their thumb up their arse. Right?
Apple, a major promoter of HTML5, has allowed its iOS devices to run Flash videos
No, Google has allowed YouTube to serve the MP4 format to iOS devices, and other sites serving videos have done similar things more recently. Flash isn't involved, and Flash videos could not and still cannot be played on iOS devices. Apple has always had the same stance in regards to iOS and had never made any special exceptions.
you have in fact performed a pavlovian experiment: you've force someone into an unpleasant experience, then associated that unpleasant experience with your brand name
For me, that's pretty much every ad. How long can you stand being treated like a moron? "Yes, every product is a revolution, I believe it." Come on...
Screw the legislation, just build a big red button into Firefox that means "I never want to see this site again" and it blocks it permanently on the user's profile. This does the exact same thing except it protects everyone else from the stupidity of that individual and also stupid legislation. Not only that, but suddenly, Firefox becomes the UK's dominant browser.
A very controversial field
on
CyberForensics
·
· Score: 2, Funny
How do you get fingerprints from someone with a robot hand? Is it ethical to use data from enhanced memory storage devices connected to the brain if the cyborg it belonged to did not explicitly and voluntarily express the data? These questions and many more are asked every day in the field of Cyber Forensics. I appreciate that this book looks into these controversial topics, it helps that we're trying to anticipate these dilemmas in the hopes that we can resolve them before they are commonplace.
The fact that IE is falling below 50% means that competition is healthy and the antitrust ruling has had a positive effect. It should not be read as a failure on MS's part because no browser should have a 50% market share, especially with four or five healthy competitors (IE, FF, Chrome, Safari, Opera), not to mention that many devices other than Windows-based PCs are browsing the web, such as iPhones, Blackberries, netbooks, and more.
If things were done legally and above-board in the first place in regards to the practices that led to IE having the position it did, it never would have had it in the first place. MS may or may not be dying as a consumer brand, but the browser share should not be a metric used to determine that.
I was very interested in the 3DS when it was announced, but I'm not going to pay the early adopter tax on this one. Sure I might pick up a few interesting games if they look like they won't last long on store shelves (Konami's notorious for limiting Castlevania runs for example), but I won't pick up the system until it's in the $150 - $180 range. The cost of the screen will go down after the first year and that alone will drive the system price down. I'm not paying PS3/360 prices for this system, sorry Nintendo.
The page says so itself: "For optimal display purposes and due to the large size of the file, we're presenting scaled down versions of the images here."
The images are all scaled down so the appearance of macro blocking and other distortions is not as apparent. They're comparing files that are almost a megabyte in size, nobody will use these on the web unless it's deviantart, photobucket, flickr, or whatever. There is also a clear loss of color information, just look at the football player's head. On the other hand it seems to do a better job of preserving small details in #6 even at that scale.
Anyhow it will probably be suitable for typical web usage which is what they are going for, just not for featured images or archival purposes.
TV commercials are also notorious for using sounds of alarm clocks, notifications from common electronic gadgets (phones, microwave beep, common PC "important dialog" noises, "door ajar" noises, fire alarm sounds, etc) to get you to pay attention. It's not only annoying but unnerving. What purpose does it serve anyway, do they want you to associate anxiety with their product?
Aggregator sites like Metacritic and Gamerankings don't really work unless you just use them to find reviews to look at (you mention reading the reviews which is great, but many don't). These sites misinterpret scores, they have the task of taking all of the different scoring methods and getting the average score, but not every site uses the same ranking method. For example, at 1up they use a letter grade, from A to F, with C being "Good", B being "Great", and A being "Excellent". Metacritic however thinks that a C is 50%, would you say a "Good" game should be given a 50% score? Also, the sites listed on Metacritic and Gamerankings are more likely to receive bribes, as pointed out by others in the comments. Many developers and publishers hand out bonuses based on metacritics scores so there is an incentive to get these artificially inflated, and public representatives for publishers and developers often try to coax higher scores out of reviews listed by aggregators because a PR rep's job is often at stake in this case.
And that's only half the ones I listen to:( If you still need more:
Giant Bombcast, GameSpy Debriefings, CO-OP (video podcast, now defunct but still worth watching old eps), Downloadable Content (Penny Arcade podcast), EA Podcast (w/Jeff Green), Evil Avatar Shotgun, Podcast Beyond, Three Red Lights, Nintendo Voice Chat, The Kojima Productions Report, Pixel Revolt, Played, Shackcast, Re-Play Radio, At 1up, 1up Whiteboard, Active Time Babble, In This Thread, Retronauts Bonus Stage, and The Sound Test
If you want some great podcasts that are no longer made but are probably better than any of the new ones out there, I would highly recommend torrenting old episodes of: 1up FM, The 1up Show, 1up Yours, Legendary Thread, and GFW Radio. These are the classics. It's also worth checking out old episodes of On The Spot video podcast and The Hotspot audio podcast with Rich Gallup, they were fun and it's interesting to go back and see impressions from early on in the PS2 generation, and you also see some older PC games.
But what is the rest of the coverage besides recycled PR anyway? Personally I just try and get a sense of a game I'm interested in and then stop looking at coverage on it. I just want to see the basic idea of the game and what mechanics it uses, as soon as I'm interested then I cut off coverage because I don't want anything spoiled, not even the introduction. In other media I also avoid trailers because of how much they will spoil the actual movie for example. The way a game starts is meant to draw you in and intrigue you, and if you hear a lot about it beforehand, it doesn't have the same impact when you actually play the game.
There have been situations with games such as Super Smash Bros Brawl where they drip feed you with information, every day you see a new character, or a new move, or a new item you will be using in the game. By the time the game comes out I'm sick of it already and I don't even want to see it anymore. Or sometimes development time will drag on and paying attention to a game's coverage is like torturing yourself, such as with Dragon Quest IX or Duke Nukem Forever. In that case, coverage will often turn me off of a game, and if I already know I want to play it, what's the point? I've got better things to do.
Many reviewers just refuse them and don't let it influence their decision. There aren't just tchotchkes knick-knacks and gewgaws, but actual games given in order to review them, and some places keep them, but many don't. At Joystiq for example, they pay for trips on their own dime to attend previews, demos and conferences. They also give away reviewed games in contests, and refuse any extras. At 1up.com:
"We do not accept any gifts--such as video iPods, World Series tickets, cash (in the form of contest prizes)...all of which were actually offered to us at one point. But we are allowed to keep cheap, promotional items, so you'll see game posters or XXXXXXXL T-shirts around our offices. We also keep the games that the companies send us, but EGM's rule is to put one away for the office library copy, and the rest get evenly distributed to staffers who will actually play them (absolutely no trading them in or eBaying them for profit or gain of any sort)."
The rules are different at different outlets but you'll find most try to think about this subject and let their audience know how it affects or doesn't affect them. Giant Bomb are headed up by people who left after a related incident at their previous employer. One of the founders fought to defend their review against a publisher and editor who wanted them to give it a more glowing review, and their previous job was terminated for doing so, certain people quit in disgust and joined together to form a new site.
'The harsh reality,' warns Wadhwa, is that for every Zuckerberg, there are a thousand who drop out of college and fail,'
That's because the harsh reality is that those students don't go to college for the right reasons and enter generic programs that they feel lead them nowhere and since after a while they don't see the point, they drop out. Since they haven't figured out their aim, having a false goal doesn't really help and probably only serves to discourage them further. Schools are set up in a way where if you already have enough experience to know what you want to do it's pretty easy to follow through, but that doesn't work for everyone.
Why can't they be both? I'm sure people are fully capable of understanding tactics as well as programming. The designers of games such as Metal Gear Solid 2 undertook SWAT training to create more realistic AI, and the designers of America's Army clearly had to understand military training and combat situations.
If there's a security bug or privacy hole in Facebook, all you can do is play with your profile options and pray it helps, or start a petition. Here, we have a chance to define the way we want to use such a system. It doesn't start out perfect, but Facebook as-is isn't perfect either after years of work. This project has started out with a foot forward in a much better direction.
Slashdot Mirror
The flood of innovative stuff that's coming out could serve as prior art to upcoming patents surrounding this technology... Perhaps this will lower royalties and increase freedoms if we can figure out all the cool stuff first before it becomes patented.
Why does Microsoft eschew conventional methods of interfacing with MicroSD cards for this piece of hardware? Do they have too many problems with customers using their MicroSD cards for multiple things and then messing up files that are important for the WP7 device? Is there a better solution?
I don't really spend much time crashing cars in GT, usually I restart a race if I fuck up like that. In fact, crashes aside, I just hope they'll have a rewind feature like Forza.
I really wouldn't care if damage modeling weren't even attempted in GT5. For everything that the game offers, I'll be way too busy to think about that issue at all. Rally, F1, Nascar, weather, go cart, track editor, honestly the game has so much, I really won't be one to complain.
Of course people want digital magazines, that's why web sites are so popular. A digital version that strictly adheres to the limitations of its physical counterpart? Not so much. People want to be able to link to specific pages and message their friends about it, you can't do that so much if there's a cost barrier and you can't reference a specific portion with a URL. People also want to cut and paste, modify, change display settings, etc, but if by "digital magazine" you mean a static display that's as interactive as a JPG, you can't do any of that.
Whether or not they include Steam functionality is moot, the stores are selling the games, and people still buy them from said stores. By stopping to sell these games in stores, the retailers are in fact pushing potential buyers to use Steam, accelerating their own irrelevance, and promoting their local competition as well as online retailers such as Amazon. Have they gone mad?
I guess that's true, but I would also rather use Wikipedia than an average web site. Every page is formatted and organized the same, so even after I've gotten to my destination it's a lot easier to absorb the information and also to immediately find relevant info on adjacent topics that is presented in the same way.
I do find Wikipedia a much better starting off point than typical search results, right at the bottom of the article are a bunch of non-crap links to start you off. Maybe Wikipedia is a better search engine because the links at the bottom have to be relevant references to the topic and cannot just be some false search result that leads nowhere...
But then Wikipedia also isn't an unbiased catalog listing resources, you have to qualify it first which raises the barrier of entry, and that can be a bad thing if you don't have a lot of visibility on the web, so obviously we still need search engines. Hmm.
The reason you're going to Wikipedia for actual information is because the site is structured to eliminate anything that isn't factual information. You're just realizing that the web is a bunch of crappy cross-linked blogs and syndicated content behind ads/paywalls. Soon you'll be hitting podcasts for editorial content instead of the ad-laden multi-click regurgitated PR between top 10 lists that make up most sites.
Wow, this has gone even further than I thought... the UK doesn't seek to quash independent thought, it simply believes that independent thought does not even exist!
We knew that we were headed in this direction; Services moving onto the internet, digital delivery, etc. Netflix aren't they only ones, we have YouTube, Hulu, Steam, OnLive!, PSN, Xbox/Windows Live!, every device has some form of app store and streaming video playback. Devices such as the Boxee Box are being built solely for that purpose. If you have any type of clue, you'll know that future applications of internet connectivity will be more bandwidth intensive.
We've been paying our ISPs, phone companies, and cable companies, who, like any other business, is changing to meet new demands and competing to stay relevant. These companies continue to reinvest in their own infrastructure and researching more efficient delivery to meet the demands of consumers. I mean, they're not just sitting around in the middle of this revolution with their thumb up their arse. Right?
We don't really talk about it publicly because the focus is on testing of apps to make sure they're okay
How does information about this topic relate to (or even prevent) people from testing apps?
Apple, a major promoter of HTML5, has allowed its iOS devices to run Flash videos
No, Google has allowed YouTube to serve the MP4 format to iOS devices, and other sites serving videos have done similar things more recently. Flash isn't involved, and Flash videos could not and still cannot be played on iOS devices. Apple has always had the same stance in regards to iOS and had never made any special exceptions.
you have in fact performed a pavlovian experiment: you've force someone into an unpleasant experience, then associated that unpleasant experience with your brand name
For me, that's pretty much every ad. How long can you stand being treated like a moron? "Yes, every product is a revolution, I believe it." Come on...
Screw the legislation, just build a big red button into Firefox that means "I never want to see this site again" and it blocks it permanently on the user's profile. This does the exact same thing except it protects everyone else from the stupidity of that individual and also stupid legislation. Not only that, but suddenly, Firefox becomes the UK's dominant browser.
How do you get fingerprints from someone with a robot hand? Is it ethical to use data from enhanced memory storage devices connected to the brain if the cyborg it belonged to did not explicitly and voluntarily express the data? These questions and many more are asked every day in the field of Cyber Forensics. I appreciate that this book looks into these controversial topics, it helps that we're trying to anticipate these dilemmas in the hopes that we can resolve them before they are commonplace.
The fact that IE is falling below 50% means that competition is healthy and the antitrust ruling has had a positive effect. It should not be read as a failure on MS's part because no browser should have a 50% market share, especially with four or five healthy competitors (IE, FF, Chrome, Safari, Opera), not to mention that many devices other than Windows-based PCs are browsing the web, such as iPhones, Blackberries, netbooks, and more.
If things were done legally and above-board in the first place in regards to the practices that led to IE having the position it did, it never would have had it in the first place. MS may or may not be dying as a consumer brand, but the browser share should not be a metric used to determine that.
Anecdotally, among my peers most use Macbooks
I was very interested in the 3DS when it was announced, but I'm not going to pay the early adopter tax on this one. Sure I might pick up a few interesting games if they look like they won't last long on store shelves (Konami's notorious for limiting Castlevania runs for example), but I won't pick up the system until it's in the $150 - $180 range. The cost of the screen will go down after the first year and that alone will drive the system price down. I'm not paying PS3/360 prices for this system, sorry Nintendo.
The page says so itself: "For optimal display purposes and due to the large size of the file, we're presenting scaled down versions of the images here."
The images are all scaled down so the appearance of macro blocking and other distortions is not as apparent. They're comparing files that are almost a megabyte in size, nobody will use these on the web unless it's deviantart, photobucket, flickr, or whatever. There is also a clear loss of color information, just look at the football player's head. On the other hand it seems to do a better job of preserving small details in #6 even at that scale.
Anyhow it will probably be suitable for typical web usage which is what they are going for, just not for featured images or archival purposes.
TV commercials are also notorious for using sounds of alarm clocks, notifications from common electronic gadgets (phones, microwave beep, common PC "important dialog" noises, "door ajar" noises, fire alarm sounds, etc) to get you to pay attention. It's not only annoying but unnerving. What purpose does it serve anyway, do they want you to associate anxiety with their product?
Aggregator sites like Metacritic and Gamerankings don't really work unless you just use them to find reviews to look at (you mention reading the reviews which is great, but many don't). These sites misinterpret scores, they have the task of taking all of the different scoring methods and getting the average score, but not every site uses the same ranking method. For example, at 1up they use a letter grade, from A to F, with C being "Good", B being "Great", and A being "Excellent". Metacritic however thinks that a C is 50%, would you say a "Good" game should be given a 50% score? Also, the sites listed on Metacritic and Gamerankings are more likely to receive bribes, as pointed out by others in the comments. Many developers and publishers hand out bonuses based on metacritics scores so there is an incentive to get these artificially inflated, and public representatives for publishers and developers often try to coax higher scores out of reviews listed by aggregators because a PR rep's job is often at stake in this case.
And that's only half the ones I listen to :( If you still need more:
Giant Bombcast, GameSpy Debriefings, CO-OP (video podcast, now defunct but still worth watching old eps), Downloadable Content (Penny Arcade podcast), EA Podcast (w/Jeff Green), Evil Avatar Shotgun, Podcast Beyond, Three Red Lights, Nintendo Voice Chat, The Kojima Productions Report, Pixel Revolt, Played, Shackcast, Re-Play Radio, At 1up, 1up Whiteboard, Active Time Babble, In This Thread, Retronauts Bonus Stage, and The Sound Test
If you want some great podcasts that are no longer made but are probably better than any of the new ones out there, I would highly recommend torrenting old episodes of: 1up FM, The 1up Show, 1up Yours, Legendary Thread, and GFW Radio. These are the classics. It's also worth checking out old episodes of On The Spot video podcast and The Hotspot audio podcast with Rich Gallup, they were fun and it's interesting to go back and see impressions from early on in the PS2 generation, and you also see some older PC games.
But what is the rest of the coverage besides recycled PR anyway? Personally I just try and get a sense of a game I'm interested in and then stop looking at coverage on it. I just want to see the basic idea of the game and what mechanics it uses, as soon as I'm interested then I cut off coverage because I don't want anything spoiled, not even the introduction. In other media I also avoid trailers because of how much they will spoil the actual movie for example. The way a game starts is meant to draw you in and intrigue you, and if you hear a lot about it beforehand, it doesn't have the same impact when you actually play the game.
There have been situations with games such as Super Smash Bros Brawl where they drip feed you with information, every day you see a new character, or a new move, or a new item you will be using in the game. By the time the game comes out I'm sick of it already and I don't even want to see it anymore. Or sometimes development time will drag on and paying attention to a game's coverage is like torturing yourself, such as with Dragon Quest IX or Duke Nukem Forever. In that case, coverage will often turn me off of a game, and if I already know I want to play it, what's the point? I've got better things to do.
Nowadays I just listen to a few podcasts where people don't talk so formally about their experiences and they often talk game theory which is much more interesting to me compared to regurgitated PR. I would recommend A Life Well Wasted, The Brainy Gamer, Gamasutra Podcast, In-Game Chat, Irrational Behavior, Mobcast, and Retronauts. If you also like those, you might like Geekbox, RebelFM, 1up Oddcast, Weekend Confirmed, Player One Podcast, Joystiq Podcast, Gamers with Jobs, Drunken Gamers Radio, IGN GameScoop and CAGCast. Hey, it makes work and commutes go by fast.
The rules are different at different outlets but you'll find most try to think about this subject and let their audience know how it affects or doesn't affect them. Giant Bomb are headed up by people who left after a related incident at their previous employer. One of the founders fought to defend their review against a publisher and editor who wanted them to give it a more glowing review, and their previous job was terminated for doing so, certain people quit in disgust and joined together to form a new site.
'The harsh reality,' warns Wadhwa, is that for every Zuckerberg, there are a thousand who drop out of college and fail,'
That's because the harsh reality is that those students don't go to college for the right reasons and enter generic programs that they feel lead them nowhere and since after a while they don't see the point, they drop out. Since they haven't figured out their aim, having a false goal doesn't really help and probably only serves to discourage them further. Schools are set up in a way where if you already have enough experience to know what you want to do it's pretty easy to follow through, but that doesn't work for everyone.
Why can't they be both? I'm sure people are fully capable of understanding tactics as well as programming. The designers of games such as Metal Gear Solid 2 undertook SWAT training to create more realistic AI, and the designers of America's Army clearly had to understand military training and combat situations.
If there's a security bug or privacy hole in Facebook, all you can do is play with your profile options and pray it helps, or start a petition. Here, we have a chance to define the way we want to use such a system. It doesn't start out perfect, but Facebook as-is isn't perfect either after years of work. This project has started out with a foot forward in a much better direction.