But before that, in high school, he would memorize D&D books, and sit in front of anime all the time.
But he still got the high marks needed for a full scholarship to engineering school, right? So it wasn't a 'problem'.
Non-chemical addiction is often a personal problem, not a problem with the entertainment they spend all their time with.
But it wasn't until everquest that it affected his ability to get the other stuff done; until EQ he still showed up for school and exams.
And it didn't just affect him, it affected a statistically significant number of people like that. And there were real elements of the game that encouraged it. Timed spawns, contested camps, persistent world that continued when you logged out... for a lot of people this was the game changer. If they stayed on another x-minutes they could get a shot at y. If they logged out, they'd miss the chance.
D&D wasn't like that. Anime wasn't like that. Other video games weren't like that.
I played EQ at launch and off an on over the years. It really was like crack for a lot of people. They just couldn't let go, couldn't log out until they couldn't keep their eyes open.
In that case, your security problem is with the HOST, not the windows 7 VM. Right?
Absolutely.
And it should be obvious that if the host is compromised remotely, than the VMs are totally and completely vulnerable, as if the attacker had physical access to the VMs.
This should be pretty obvious really if you think about it... I'm just connecting the dots for the people that haven't.
You cannot disconnect a drive or even insert a USB key (during boot) with RDP. It's not the same at all.
You are thinking at the wrong level. You can't do that from inside the -guest-. But you CAN do it from the -host-. And you -can- potentially access the -host- remotely. After all, vmware server 2's administration for example is web based...
So if you hire some company to allocate you a VM and you run Windows 7 on it. And I can get remote control of the HOST, I now effectively have physical access to YOUR Windows 7 VM. Including 'inserting a disk' (by mapping your CDrom to an iso image) as it boots, inorder to use this physical-access exploit.
If you do it based on a clean-room reimplementation of the database's communication protocol rather than, e.g., relying on the vendor's client libraries
Who wants to do THAT.
as GP's post ("as long as you know the protocol...") suggest,
No. His comment was trying say that the client app is separate from the server app. That you communicate with the server, but that your client app ultimately stands separate. So you can sell your client app without worrying about the license on the server. Which is true. In precisely the same way that I can write and sell a browser ('client app') that talks to IIS7 without worrying about the license for IIS7. Because I'm not selling / distributing IIS7.
However, in reality, a RDBMS client app is worthless without the RDBMS it talks to; and in the majority of cases, when you sell an rdbms client app, the customer requires their own server. And they generally expect you provide them with it... and at that point the rdbms license becomes a big issue.
I have to either license the RDBMS for resale so I can bundle / integrate it with my software, or instruct customers that they have to provide an rdbms server that meets my specifications.
For REALLY BIG enterprisey stuff, people expect the latter.
But for smaller stuff... like a point of sale system for a small/med business, or the software to run your medical practice, or your brake and muffler shop... or handle the accounting for your 22 location chain of restaurants... people want to just 'buy a system' and install it. And there are a lot of systems like this.
With a GPL rdbms, I can't distribute it -with- my proprietary application, which means the former option is closed to me, and I have to distribute mysql separately from my app or have them obtain it themselves... either is a hassle.
The main reason people bought mysql licenses was so that they could sell complete turnkey solutions based on mysql and distrubte mysql WITH their solution, install it all from one CD, one wizard, etc.
This is a very interesting threat from a virtual infrastructure security standpoint.
Not really. *ANY* physical-attack type threat is altered in the same way by virtualization.
To obtain illicit 'physical' access to the virtual machine they have to compromise the host machine. If the host machine can't be hacked remotely, then the 'physical' virtual machine is essentially safe.
And if the host machine CAN be compromised remotely, then the guests are hosed no matter what.
This also isn't a windows-specific vulnerability: any OS which does not checksum memory contents each time they're read is vulnerable.
Even that wouldn't matter, because the first thing I'd in-memory patch is the checksum algorithm to always return 'ok'.
The only real way to resolve this would be a-la console style 'trusted computing, and digital signatures through the whole bios and bootstrap process'. Of course, even this could be 'hacked' or 'modchipped' but at least it wouldn't be as simple as just putting in a disk.
There is no security if they have enough physical access.
if you know the protocol, you can interface with oracle, mySQL, sybase, whatever without touching oracle's code, which means oracle's license is irrelevant if all you want is to build a client app.
If he decides on his own to enhance or nullify a law, we would label it judicial activism.
if he decides on his own to enahance or nullify a law _in the courtroom_ its a problem.
If he decides on his own to work to enhance or nullify a law by participating in a lobby group, that's ok... even if I disagree with him.
That said, judges generally have sentencing leeway, and a biased judge will probably issue lighter or harsher sentences based on that, and that is distasteful.
In other words, bidding at the last minute gives you a final chance to change your mind.
No. Bidding at the last minute DENIES anyone else a chance to change THEIR minds and increase THEIR maximum bids.
If $92 was too much to pay when you had time to think about it, it's not suddenly going to become a reasonable price just before the auction ends.
Well, DUH!. But we're talking about optimal bidding strategies for the other guy to beat people like "me" AND get the lowest price. I specifically said:
"For the sake of argument, lets assume I'm one of those twits who raises maximums." Hint: I'm not that person,
You said before that bidding early is a formula for losing.
Bidding early is a formula for losing AND/OR paying more.
If you want to get things at a reasonable price, you'll actually end up losing most auctions.
If "your maximum bid" == "reasonable price", then you will lose less often and get more things at a reasonable price by bidding your maximum bid at the last second.
Especially on eBay, where most of the users seem to be like you, in it solely for the buzz of winning.
Why did you give up at $92? Unless you're a compulsive bidder, it's because that's the most you're willing to pay. So that's the maximum you're going to bid for the thing, regardless of what the other guy does.
Right. But -until- he bid, "I" had entered a max bid of $80. After he bid I reconsidered and decided my true max was 92.
However, if he had bid at at the last second, I never would have reconsidered my max bid and it would have still been $80 five seconds before the auction ended, when he bids. By doing this I don't have a chance to consider enter my true maximum.
By bidding $100 immediately before the auction bid he is able to get the item for $85, well LESS than my maximum bid, which is to his advantage.
The outcome, by him bidding at the last second, was different AND in his favor.
IPv6 is only relevant on the internet as a whole, and has a chicken/egg problem. There's no real benefit to itself for a single business switching to ipv6, and the ISPs don't need it if their customers and peers aren't switching.
Businesses do however derive benefit from upgrading the speed of their LANs and therefore are motivated to do so, individually. Hell, I'd buy a 10GB lan for my home office if the price dropped. I upgraded to gigabit a few years ago already. Just for moving VM images around on my LAN, doing backups, etc, it was worth it.
Personally I would avoid such an auction (unless it was the only way to get a rare item) because I would know that irrational twits would most likely win
They should win. Its an auction where the person willing to pay the most wins the item. That's the point. Why on earth would any seller ever want to sell anything below the maximum they could get for it?
While I don't particularlly like the current ebay format I think an indeterminate end time would piss off a lot of buyers
Perhaps, but the current system pisses off a lot of buyers, and turns them away. I don't buy much on ebay because I hate the system. And the majority of my 'wins' are 'buy it now'.
Another idea for fixing ebay is to switch to a looser and slightly random end time. Instead of '5 minutes left...', '1 minute left'... '10 seconds left'.
Simply say the auction ends on Friday, May 3. And leave it at that. On May 3, say the auction ends: 'Today', until suddenly its done. Bidders will have a pre-determined time it will be over... they KNOW it will be over by May 4 no matter what happens, they just don't know what time it ends on May 3.
The upshot is there is no way to effectively snipe since you don't know what time the auction ends. The best you can do is bid midnight May 2nd, and hope the auction ends really early May 3rd.
On a serious note, I hate last-minute eBay bidders.
Me too, but its the optimal bidding strategy.
The people you're bidding against don't know what your maximum bid is, so it doesn't matter if you enter your maximum as soon as you decide on it or at the last minute.
It does matter. See my explanation elsewhere in the thread here:
Of course your comment assumes the concept of "maximum bid" does not exist. If you have to bid more than your maximum bid to win, then it wasn't your maximum bid--it doesn't matter whether the other party is rational or not. You seem to be implying that the only way to win against an irrational counter bid is with a larger, also irrational bid.
Not quite.
Lets suppose his rational absolute maximum bid is $100, and he is immune from the excitement psychology that compels people to start increasing their maximum as the counter runs out.
For the sake of argument lets say I am one of those irrational twits who bids things up at the end beyond my maximum price to win. (I'm not.)
Lets also say I'm the current high bidder at $60.00, with a maximum of $80, with 1hour to go.
His rational and optimal bidding strategy is to bid his maximum of $100 in the final seconds of the auction.
Here's why: If he waits and bids in the final seconds, his $100 will exceed my $80, and he'll become the top bidder at $82.00 and then the auction ends. And he wins at $85.
If he bids immediately, with an hour to go; his $100 will exceed my $80, and he'll become the top bidder at $85, I'll get notified that I've been outbid, and then log in to ebay... I'll see it sitting there at $85, and the pschychological need to win takes hold... so I up my maximum.
I bid $92, but that's not enough, and he still has high bid at $97. And I give up. He still wins, but he's paying $97 instead of $85. Bidding early cost him $12.
Or... I don't give up, and raise my max another $12.. $102. Now I'm back on top at $102. And he loses. Bidding early cost him the auction.
This is why I hate ebay. Its *designed* in such a way that the *optimal* bidding strategy is to try and snipe the auction at the last second. Its just stupid. And it costs the sellers because they aren't getting the best prices (and therefore it even costs ebay fees). Sellers should have the option of creating a 'rolling auction' where each time a bid is placed the auction close is reset a day into the future or maybe 8 hours... I dunno whatever. Then sniping becomes a much weaker strategy because even if you bid at the last second everyone else has a reasonable period of time to re-consider their bids.
There's still too many things that can't be measured with just a wiimote. Wrist angle is the most important, as the wiimote would have no way to verify the wrist was absolutely straight. Body lean, distance between the elbow and body, and foot position are also very important.
I'm the poster you responded to, and you are right; the Wii couldn't possibly be the primary teacher.
But I wasn't really thinking it could replace joining a club / taking lessons. I was more thinking of it as a teaching aid... where once you know the forms it could help with practice and make it fun, and provide useful feedback that could help you correct some (but clearly not all) mistakes. For example, it could take you through exercises and monitor your point control (e.g. whether you are dropping the point to low or high during parries, whether your point moves straight through a lunge or whether its bouncing up and down (e.g. to help catch the way beginners often lunge 'up' and then come back down instead of lunging straight across)
That said, something like that would probably be of pretty limited mass market appeal.
the Wii is generally (if not always?) targeted at whole-family orientated stuff,
no. Not always.
Manhunt 2 House of the Dead: Overkill Tenchu: Shadow Assassins Alone in the Dark Brothers in Arms: Double Time Madworld Resident Evil 4 Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles No More Heroes Mortoal Kombat: Armageddon Driver: Parallel Lines Escape from Bug Island Call of Duty: World at War Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent The Godfather: Blackhand Edition Target Terror...
There's lots of blood&gore and more coming to the Wii. Some of its good... some of its shit.
The Xbox/PS3 gets most of these too though and their versions are usually the stronger titles. This is partly because the xbox/ps3 is the stronger platform in terms of hardware, and partly because the people looking for blood&guts gravitate towards the xbox/ps3 (and a large portion of them are -only- interested in a title if it has an "M" rating -- actually favoring blood&guts over having a game worth playing (but I digress...)
All that said, a title like Resident Evil 4 or the new Metroid Prime in my opinion show the Wii to be an EXCELLENT platform for FPS and hard core games. The control scheme when done well is infinitely superior to the xbox/ps3 analog stick controllers.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but I'm pretty sure that the wiimote isn't even close to being balanced like any real sword
So stick the wii remote into an attachment that is correctly balanced.
You could probably set something up for most swords where the wii remotes is just in front hand/gaurd, and then add weight appropriately. As a fencer, I'm confident you could get the balance right for a foil, epee, and sabre. And these are all much lighter and more delicate than a japanese sword (e.g. Katana) so it should be even easier to create something with the correct balance for those.
I'm not sure how well sword fighting itself would work, because of course their is no resistance. However, I think you could still effectively teach or at least practice the forms. And you could probably put together a sword fighting game, that while not entirely realistic, would at least be fun. A little vibration as you execute a beat attack lets you know you've knocked the blade out of line and you extend fully... a double vibration means you've beat and he has counter beat and you need to execute a parry riposte or be touched... it would have to be lenient on which parry... it would have to be simplified... but it could still be fun.
I don't really know much about Asian sword fighting, but what I've seen of Kendo is that like Sabre its mostly strike-hit. Occasionally strike-block/counterattack-hit. Very occasionally strick-block/counterattack-counterblock-strike-hit. And rarely does it go further than that. So if a game even just gave you one opportunity to block/counterblock it would be fairly realistic in that sense.
And in fencing at least blocks aren't 'feats of strength vs your opponent where you stand there blades crossed for 10 seconds grunting at each other'. They are generally brief deflections of the blade that require little strength, and simply knock the incoming blade off 'line', and the moment your opponent is off line, you riposte so its not like you are sitting their holding his blade... its just a quick 'tick' and then your counterattack.
The former feat of strength couldn't really be captured by a bit of audio and vibration feedback, but the latter probably could be, and reality (of fencing) is most the latter.
Now, I respect the rest of your post...[snip]...but the above statement is pure fanboy flamebait.
Fair enough, but you've got to put it in context. I (the GP) said "Using a Zen or Sansa is crippling yourself." to echo the GGP who said (to paraphrase) "Using an ipod is crippling yourself." I was just echoing his words to sarcastically make my point.
So... to summarize... you feel the ipods are "crippled by design" because they didn't cope with a corrupted hard drive/crash the way you expected it to, and you didn't make or have a proper backup, and you had to use a 3rd party tool to do data recovery...and it worked out? Seriously? that's your complaint?
iTunes was designed on purpose to make the music sync from the PC to the device. Granted full 2-way sync would be nice, but its one of Apple's concessions to the labels its dealing with so it can sell content. Otherwise, when ever your friends came over they'd pop in their ipod and give you their entire 16 or 30 or 160GB library...
Of course, you can still do it, but Apple didn't build it right into the software. Its hardly a 'crippling' blow.
nd with both WMP11 and the monkey it really isn't hard to cook up playlists like "Songs I haven't heard in a month" or "songs I like on weekends".
Is that "songs I haven't heard in a month on my pc"? Does it sync back meta data from the device? After all, songs I haven't heard in a month on my PC, but listened to 10 minutes ago on my mp3 player should not be in a "Songs I haven't heard in a month" playlist.
This is why I've defended the proprietary ipod 'database' system. It tracks and syncs all the meta data on the -device- back to the PC, so when you say "how many times have I listened to this song", it incorporates the times you listened to it on the device instead of just the PC. To me that is useful because, for me, 90% of the time I'm listening from -the device-. So if the media management programs play count, skip count, last played date, etc, etc, isn't pulling the information from the device then its worthless to me.
Winamp generates my playlists based on listening habits,
Based on your listening habits on your PC. itunes incorporates your listening habits ON YOUR IPOD.
automatically syncs new content to my zen every time its connected(via a usb mini cable you can obtain anywhere for a few dollars instead of a proprietary POS connector, I might add).
You can buy a 3rd party dock-usb cable for a few bucks all over the place.
As for whether the dock connector is justified... hard to say. It was introduced at a time when ipods supported both firewire and usb, when a pure usb solution wasn't an option, so it was justified a few years ago for sure. But even today, it has a higher insertion rating than mini-usb, so it'll last longer. It locks better and supports the ipods weight, which is handy for docks, clock radios, etc.
However, being non-standard -is- a minor hassle. Although, to be fair, the odds of a person having a mini-usb cable handy where-ever I go isn't much better. Full size usb, sure... but not mini usb or micro usb.
Another feature Zen's have over the competition is recording from FM radio.
Different strokes and all that. I listen to FM radio in my car when I forget my ipod. It helps motivate me not to ever forget my ipod. On the flip-side my sister bought a sony precisely because it had an fm tuner. I grok that people want different things.
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But before that, in high school, he would memorize D&D books, and sit in front of anime all the time.
But he still got the high marks needed for a full scholarship to engineering school, right? So it wasn't a 'problem'.
Non-chemical addiction is often a personal problem, not a problem with the entertainment they spend all their time with.
But it wasn't until everquest that it affected his ability to get the other stuff done; until EQ he still showed up for school and exams.
And it didn't just affect him, it affected a statistically significant number of people like that. And there were real elements of the game that encouraged it. Timed spawns, contested camps, persistent world that continued when you logged out... for a lot of people this was the game changer. If they stayed on another x-minutes they could get a shot at y. If they logged out, they'd miss the chance.
D&D wasn't like that. Anime wasn't like that. Other video games weren't like that.
I played EQ at launch and off an on over the years. It really was like crack for a lot of people. They just couldn't let go, couldn't log out until they couldn't keep their eyes open.
In that case, your security problem is with the HOST, not the windows 7 VM. Right?
Absolutely.
And it should be obvious that if the host is compromised remotely, than the VMs are totally and completely vulnerable, as if the attacker had physical access to the VMs.
This should be pretty obvious really if you think about it... I'm just connecting the dots for the people that haven't.
that's still meat-presence.
How so?
I interpret 'mere aggregation' as permission to put a copy of mysql and its installer on a CD of software, including some which might be non-GPL.
But as a key part of a complete system? Does that still qualify for 'mere aggregation'?
You cannot disconnect a drive or even insert a USB key (during boot) with RDP. It's not the same at all.
You are thinking at the wrong level. You can't do that from inside the -guest-. But you CAN do it from the -host-. And you -can- potentially access the -host- remotely. After all, vmware server 2's administration for example is web based...
So if you hire some company to allocate you a VM and you run Windows 7 on it. And I can get remote control of the HOST, I now effectively have physical access to YOUR Windows 7 VM. Including 'inserting a disk' (by mapping your CDrom to an iso image) as it boots, inorder to use this physical-access exploit.
If you do it based on a clean-room reimplementation of the database's communication protocol rather than, e.g., relying on the vendor's client libraries
Who wants to do THAT.
as GP's post ("as long as you know the protocol...") suggest,
No. His comment was trying say that the client app is separate from the server app. That you communicate with the server, but that your client app ultimately stands separate. So you can sell your client app without worrying about the license on the server. Which is true. In precisely the same way that I can write and sell a browser ('client app') that talks to IIS7 without worrying about the license for IIS7. Because I'm not selling / distributing IIS7.
However, in reality, a RDBMS client app is worthless without the RDBMS it talks to; and in the majority of cases, when you sell an rdbms client app, the customer requires their own server. And they generally expect you provide them with it... and at that point the rdbms license becomes a big issue.
I have to either license the RDBMS for resale so I can bundle / integrate it with my software, or instruct customers that they have to provide an rdbms server that meets my specifications.
For REALLY BIG enterprisey stuff, people expect the latter.
But for smaller stuff... like a point of sale system for a small/med business, or the software to run your medical practice, or your brake and muffler shop... or handle the accounting for your 22 location chain of restaurants... people want to just 'buy a system' and install it. And there are a lot of systems like this.
With a GPL rdbms, I can't distribute it -with- my proprietary application, which means the former option is closed to me, and I have to distribute mysql separately from my app or have them obtain it themselves... either is a hassle.
The main reason people bought mysql licenses was so that they could sell complete turnkey solutions based on mysql and distrubte mysql WITH their solution, install it all from one CD, one wizard, etc.
This is a very interesting threat from a virtual infrastructure security standpoint.
Not really. *ANY* physical-attack type threat is altered in the same way by virtualization.
To obtain illicit 'physical' access to the virtual machine they have to compromise the host machine. If the host machine can't be hacked remotely, then the 'physical' virtual machine is essentially safe.
And if the host machine CAN be compromised remotely, then the guests are hosed no matter what.
This also isn't a windows-specific vulnerability: any OS which does not checksum memory contents each time they're read is vulnerable.
Even that wouldn't matter, because the first thing I'd in-memory patch is the checksum algorithm to always return 'ok'.
The only real way to resolve this would be a-la console style 'trusted computing, and digital signatures through the whole bios and bootstrap process'. Of course, even this could be 'hacked' or 'modchipped' but at least it wouldn't be as simple as just putting in a disk.
There is no security if they have enough physical access.
if you know the protocol, you can interface with oracle, mySQL, sybase, whatever without touching oracle's code, which means oracle's license is irrelevant if all you want is to build a client app.
Until you want to sell the client app.
If he decides on his own to enhance or nullify a law, we would label it judicial activism.
if he decides on his own to enahance or nullify a law _in the courtroom_ its a problem.
If he decides on his own to work to enhance or nullify a law by participating in a lobby group, that's ok... even if I disagree with him.
That said, judges generally have sentencing leeway, and a biased judge will probably issue lighter or harsher sentences based on that, and that is distasteful.
"You already paid for it." != "free" in any sense of the word.
If you've already paid for it, and you are now choosing between multiple tools, the ones you have ALREADY PAID for are as good as free ones.
In other words, bidding at the last minute gives you a final chance to change your mind.
No. Bidding at the last minute DENIES anyone else a chance to change THEIR minds and increase THEIR maximum bids.
If $92 was too much to pay when you had time to think about it, it's not suddenly going to become a reasonable price just before the auction ends.
Well, DUH!. But we're talking about optimal bidding strategies for the other guy to beat people like "me" AND get the lowest price. I specifically said:
"For the sake of argument, lets assume I'm one of those twits who raises maximums." Hint: I'm not that person,
You said before that bidding early is a formula for losing.
Bidding early is a formula for losing AND/OR paying more.
If you want to get things at a reasonable price, you'll actually end up losing most auctions.
If "your maximum bid" == "reasonable price", then you will lose less often and get more things at a reasonable price by bidding your maximum bid at the last second.
Especially on eBay, where most of the users seem to be like you, in it solely for the buzz of winning.
No. Not like me.
Of course, I doubt it's open source/free software, so it wouldn't be on this list anyway.
Well, its effectively 'free' in the sense that any one who has the operating system that runs it already owns a copy.
Why did you give up at $92? Unless you're a compulsive bidder, it's because that's the most you're willing to pay. So that's the maximum you're going to bid for the thing, regardless of what the other guy does.
Right. But -until- he bid, "I" had entered a max bid of $80. After he bid I reconsidered and decided my true max was 92.
However, if he had bid at at the last second, I never would have reconsidered my max bid and it would have still been $80 five seconds before the auction ended, when he bids. By doing this I don't have a chance to consider enter my true maximum.
By bidding $100 immediately before the auction bid he is able to get the item for $85, well LESS than my maximum bid, which is to his advantage.
The outcome, by him bidding at the last second, was different AND in his favor.
And consider this: IPv6 is a change in software.
IPv6 is only relevant on the internet as a whole, and has a chicken/egg problem. There's no real benefit to itself for a single business switching to ipv6, and the ISPs don't need it if their customers and peers aren't switching.
Businesses do however derive benefit from upgrading the speed of their LANs and therefore are motivated to do so, individually. Hell, I'd buy a 10GB lan for my home office if the price dropped. I upgraded to gigabit a few years ago already. Just for moving VM images around on my LAN, doing backups, etc, it was worth it.
Personally I would avoid such an auction (unless it was the only way to get a rare item) because I would know that irrational twits would most likely win
They should win. Its an auction where the person willing to pay the most wins the item. That's the point. Why on earth would any seller ever want to sell anything below the maximum they could get for it?
While I don't particularlly like the current ebay format I think an indeterminate end time would piss off a lot of buyers
Perhaps, but the current system pisses off a lot of buyers, and turns them away. I don't buy much on ebay because I hate the system. And the majority of my 'wins' are 'buy it now'.
Another idea for fixing ebay is to switch to a looser and slightly random end time. Instead of '5 minutes left...', '1 minute left'... '10 seconds left'.
Simply say the auction ends on Friday, May 3. And leave it at that. On May 3, say the auction ends: 'Today', until suddenly its done. Bidders will have a pre-determined time it will be over... they KNOW it will be over by May 4 no matter what happens, they just don't know what time it ends on May 3.
The upshot is there is no way to effectively snipe since you don't know what time the auction ends. The best you can do is bid midnight May 2nd, and hope the auction ends really early May 3rd.
On a serious note, I hate last-minute eBay bidders.
Me too, but its the optimal bidding strategy.
The people you're bidding against don't know what your maximum bid is, so it doesn't matter if you enter your maximum as soon as you decide on it or at the last minute.
It does matter. See my explanation elsewhere in the thread here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1206487&cid=27666381
Of course your comment assumes the concept of "maximum bid" does not exist. If you have to bid more than your maximum bid to win, then it wasn't your maximum bid--it doesn't matter whether the other party is rational or not. You seem to be implying that the only way to win against an irrational counter bid is with a larger, also irrational bid.
Not quite.
Lets suppose his rational absolute maximum bid is $100, and he is immune from the excitement psychology that compels people to start increasing their maximum as the counter runs out.
For the sake of argument lets say I am one of those irrational twits who bids things up at the end beyond my maximum price to win. (I'm not.)
Lets also say I'm the current high bidder at $60.00, with a maximum of $80, with 1hour to go.
His rational and optimal bidding strategy is to bid his maximum of $100 in the final seconds of the auction.
Here's why:
If he waits and bids in the final seconds, his $100 will exceed my $80, and he'll become the top bidder at $82.00 and then the auction ends. And he wins at $85.
If he bids immediately, with an hour to go; his $100 will exceed my $80, and he'll become the top bidder at $85, I'll get notified that I've been outbid, and then log in to ebay... I'll see it sitting there at $85, and the pschychological need to win takes hold... so I up my maximum.
I bid $92, but that's not enough, and he still has high bid at $97. And I give up. He still wins, but he's paying $97 instead of $85. Bidding early cost him $12.
Or... I don't give up, and raise my max another $12.. $102. Now I'm back on top at $102. And he loses. Bidding early cost him the auction.
This is why I hate ebay. Its *designed* in such a way that the *optimal* bidding strategy is to try and snipe the auction at the last second. Its just stupid. And it costs the sellers because they aren't getting the best prices (and therefore it even costs ebay fees). Sellers should have the option of creating a 'rolling auction' where each time a bid is placed the auction close is reset a day into the future or maybe 8 hours ... I dunno whatever. Then sniping becomes a much weaker strategy because even if you bid at the last second everyone else has a reasonable period of time to re-consider their bids.
There's still too many things that can't be measured with just a wiimote. Wrist angle is the most important, as the wiimote would have no way to verify the wrist was absolutely straight. Body lean, distance between the elbow and body, and foot position are also very important.
I'm the poster you responded to, and you are right; the Wii couldn't possibly be the primary teacher.
But I wasn't really thinking it could replace joining a club / taking lessons. I was more thinking of it as a teaching aid... where once you know the forms it could help with practice and make it fun, and provide useful feedback that could help you correct some (but clearly not all) mistakes. For example, it could take you through exercises and monitor your point control (e.g. whether you are dropping the point to low or high during parries, whether your point moves straight through a lunge or whether its bouncing up and down (e.g. to help catch the way beginners often lunge 'up' and then come back down instead of lunging straight across)
That said, something like that would probably be of pretty limited mass market appeal.
the Wii is generally (if not always?) targeted at whole-family orientated stuff,
no. Not always.
Manhunt 2 ...
House of the Dead: Overkill
Tenchu: Shadow Assassins
Alone in the Dark
Brothers in Arms: Double Time
Madworld
Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles
No More Heroes
Mortoal Kombat: Armageddon
Driver: Parallel Lines
Escape from Bug Island
Call of Duty: World at War
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent
The Godfather: Blackhand Edition
Target Terror
There's lots of blood&gore and more coming to the Wii. Some of its good... some of its shit.
The Xbox/PS3 gets most of these too though and their versions are usually the stronger titles. This is partly because the xbox/ps3 is the stronger platform in terms of hardware, and partly because the people looking for blood&guts gravitate towards the xbox/ps3 (and a large portion of them are -only- interested in a title if it has an "M" rating -- actually favoring blood&guts over having a game worth playing (but I digress...)
All that said, a title like Resident Evil 4 or the new Metroid Prime in my opinion show the Wii to be an EXCELLENT platform for FPS and hard core games. The control scheme when done well is infinitely superior to the xbox/ps3 analog stick controllers.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but I'm pretty sure that the wiimote isn't even close to being balanced like any real sword
So stick the wii remote into an attachment that is correctly balanced.
You could probably set something up for most swords where the wii remotes is just in front hand/gaurd, and then add weight appropriately. As a fencer, I'm confident you could get the balance right for a foil, epee, and sabre. And these are all much lighter and more delicate than a japanese sword (e.g. Katana) so it should be even easier to create something with the correct balance for those.
I'm not sure how well sword fighting itself would work, because of course their is no resistance. However, I think you could still effectively teach or at least practice the forms. And you could probably put together a sword fighting game, that while not entirely realistic, would at least be fun. A little vibration as you execute a beat attack lets you know you've knocked the blade out of line and you extend fully... a double vibration means you've beat and he has counter beat and you need to execute a parry riposte or be touched... it would have to be lenient on which parry... it would have to be simplified... but it could still be fun.
I don't really know much about Asian sword fighting, but what I've seen of Kendo is that like Sabre its mostly strike-hit. Occasionally strike-block/counterattack-hit. Very occasionally strick-block/counterattack-counterblock-strike-hit. And rarely does it go further than that. So if a game even just gave you one opportunity to block/counterblock it would be fairly realistic in that sense.
And in fencing at least blocks aren't 'feats of strength vs your opponent where you stand there blades crossed for 10 seconds grunting at each other'. They are generally brief deflections of the blade that require little strength, and simply knock the incoming blade off 'line', and the moment your opponent is off line, you riposte so its not like you are sitting their holding his blade... its just a quick 'tick' and then your counterattack.
The former feat of strength couldn't really be captured by a bit of audio and vibration feedback, but the latter probably could be, and reality (of fencing) is most the latter.
Now, I respect the rest of your post...[snip]...but the above statement is pure fanboy flamebait.
Fair enough, but you've got to put it in context. I (the GP) said "Using a Zen or Sansa is crippling yourself." to echo the GGP who said (to paraphrase) "Using an ipod is crippling yourself." I was just echoing his words to sarcastically make my point.
So... to summarize... you feel the ipods are "crippled by design" because they didn't cope with a corrupted hard drive/crash the way you expected it to, and you didn't make or have a proper backup, and you had to use a 3rd party tool to do data recovery...and it worked out? Seriously? that's your complaint?
iTunes was designed on purpose to make the music sync from the PC to the device. Granted full 2-way sync would be nice, but its one of Apple's concessions to the labels its dealing with so it can sell content. Otherwise, when ever your friends came over they'd pop in their ipod and give you their entire 16 or 30 or 160GB library...
Of course, you can still do it, but Apple didn't build it right into the software. Its hardly a 'crippling' blow.
nd with both WMP11 and the monkey it really isn't hard to cook up playlists like "Songs I haven't heard in a month" or "songs I like on weekends".
Is that "songs I haven't heard in a month on my pc"? Does it sync back meta data from the device? After all, songs I haven't heard in a month on my PC, but listened to 10 minutes ago on my mp3 player should not be in a "Songs I haven't heard in a month" playlist.
This is why I've defended the proprietary ipod 'database' system. It tracks and syncs all the meta data on the -device- back to the PC, so when you say "how many times have I listened to this song", it incorporates the times you listened to it on the device instead of just the PC. To me that is useful because, for me, 90% of the time I'm listening from -the device-. So if the media management programs play count, skip count, last played date, etc, etc, isn't pulling the information from the device then its worthless to me.
Winamp generates my playlists based on listening habits,
Based on your listening habits on your PC. itunes incorporates your listening habits ON YOUR IPOD.
automatically syncs new content to my zen every time its connected(via a usb mini cable you can obtain anywhere for a few dollars instead of a proprietary POS connector, I might add).
You can buy a 3rd party dock-usb cable for a few bucks all over the place.
As for whether the dock connector is justified... hard to say. It was introduced at a time when ipods supported both firewire and usb, when a pure usb solution wasn't an option, so it was justified a few years ago for sure. But even today, it has a higher insertion rating than mini-usb, so it'll last longer. It locks better and supports the ipods weight, which is handy for docks, clock radios, etc.
However, being non-standard -is- a minor hassle. Although, to be fair, the odds of a person having a mini-usb cable handy where-ever I go isn't much better. Full size usb, sure... but not mini usb or micro usb.
Another feature Zen's have over the competition is recording from FM radio.
Different strokes and all that. I listen to FM radio in my car when I forget my ipod. It helps motivate me not to ever forget my ipod. On the flip-side my sister bought a sony precisely because it had an fm tuner. I grok that people want different things.