When you say it's the oil company's fault, you're leaving out quite a bit.
The corn industry, for example, is trying to improve profits by this whole "live green go yellow" BS, when it's questionable as to whether or not using corn to make ethanol is actually better for the environment. Sugar Cane is MUCH better, something like 6 times better last I read.
The meat and fast food industries, for example, use up such a large portion of the available agricultural land for growing food for animals and for grazing. If that space was used to grow cereals, fruits and vegitables, we could feed more people with less land, leaving plenty open to grow alternative fuels. I certainly wouldn't mind paying a premium for beef, pork and chicken if supply were cut way below demand. It might encourage me to eat it less.
The government is to blame as well, since they've kept the hemp industry down (probably on behalf of the corn, paper, cotton and oil industries). Hemp grows like crazy, and each part of the plant can be used for different things.
I'd think that the only reason why that was the case was that Intel had an essentially legal monopoly in the processor business, and by making other peripherals (presumably to be sold cheaper than the competition, or that would work better with intel chips) they would be using their monopoly position to hurt competition.
Neither AMD nor ATI have that issue. I believe they are both beat by Intel and nVidia in their respective busiensses, atleast in terms of marketshare.
Seems like this was meant for the failed 64DD network. While it's tough to say whether or not they will apply it to the Wii (the 64DD was going to offer NES games for download). Current rumblings from Nintendo seem to indicate the Wii online service will be more like the DS's, per game friend codes and no unified system. On the other hand, they have registered a bunch of Wii domains that could be the basis for some sort of online community.
I've read that they've already got a good solution for this, and you're right, it is just a voltage regulator of some sort. The only thing keeping them from using capacitors right now is their small capacity. My memory of this sort of thing is a little fuzzy, but here's how I figure it:
Q = CV (where Q = charge, C = capacitance and V = voltage).
There's absolutely no problem regulating the voltage as it comes off of the capacitor, the biggest problem is getting the maximum Q high enough to supply more than a few minutes of constant voltage. It's not hard to get a high Q by increasing the total voltage across the capacitor, but that's extremely dangerous. If you accidentally discharge it, you can do some serious damage to yourself and anything the capacitor is hooked to. Presumably, this technology is being used to increase the Capacitance of the capacitor, which is roughly proportional to the surface area of each of the plates. The end result would be a MUCH higher Q at a much lower V, allowing for hours of sustained use and near instantanious recharge.
This could make electric motors for cars more fesible, as well as replace batteries in electric appliances like laptops.
Considering that TFS says that the balls only lasted 1/2 a second (something a lot of my fellow/.ers are probably familiar with), a live video wouldn't be very interesting. 6 seconds of nothing, then a brief flash, then 6 more seconds of nothing.
There's no reason why just the core stuff the operating system needs to function couldn't be loaded into the flash portion, and the rest could overflow onto the HDD proper. I suppose that might require some changes to the OS.
On the other hand, open up task manager some time when you're about to go into hibernation. I think it's pretty unlikely that you've got more than a few hundred MB used when you're idling. I suppose if the whole reason why you're hibernating is so you don't have to reopen all of your web browsers and excel spreadsheets and visual studio IDEs, then you might be using a bit more. But I thought most people just used hibernation to shorten shutdown and start up times.
I've been thinking about this a lot over the past year (probably since I took an AI class a year or so ago). Ideal science seems like it should be very well suited to computer manipulation. The goal of science is to craft theories that are completely unambiguous, highly detailed step-by-step instructions for reproducing the supporting evidence, and every logical conclusion should be traceable back to either an observation statement, or a very small set of basic assumptions about the world around us, and our capacity to understand/manipulate that world.
The only downside I can see, though, is a reduction in "hunch" training. If computers are nailing all of the "obvious" connections between different theories/experiments to determine new hypotheses, then people may not get the experience they need to make the more dramatic leaps that can, on occasion, turn a field on it's head (Einstein's watching a baseball roll around on a sheet, or whatever it is that led him to general relativity, for example).
My hope is that they will provide the full three episodes at retail for 40-50 bucks after the third one comes out. It sounds cool (I'm thinking about picking up HL2 now, since I haven't played that yet), but I'm not gonna drop 20 bucks per episode for something like that.
Unfortunately, most video games are produced just to give the user a previous story with some limited involvement in it. Look at how many Lord of the Rings video games there are out there. Look at how many games are spurred from a successful book or movie. Is this really necessary? Do game makers lack so much imagination that they are relying upon movies or books for their storylines? If this is the case, then gaming is doomed to be a mere wanna-be art medium.
How many movies were produced from books? How many books were produced from plays? How many plays were acting out ancient oral myths/stories?
There's plenty of originality out there, it just might not be as popular. But isn't that how it is in every medium? People go with what they are most comfortable/familiar with, so the original stuff quickly gets pushed to the side until the latest fad is over and done.
It's good, and all, that the rating system is being revamped, but it lumps together artistic games like Killer 7 with mindless shooting like the GTA series, and (according to TFA) does not include games with fantasy or historical violence.
Killer 7 probably deserves the Z rating (it's awfully violent, even though the player never attacks another human being throughout the game.), but man... it'd be a shame if Capcom didn't release a game like that just because of a ratings system.
My organic professor had a roadmap question (which is like a giant interconnecting series of reactions that all go towards one product, and some of the reagents/conditions/intermediates are missing and you have to fill them in) on one of his exams for producing meth, and some of the starting ingredients were things like that antihistimene they recently took off the shelves.
Sony and Microsoft compete over the berries, which are pretty easy to get but are in short supply. Nintendo's going after the bugs, of which there are many, but they are hard to get.
Last I checked, there were more non-gamers than gamers, and non-gamers don't tend to like to game (and therefore, are much harder to please).
If you look at the promotional materials he's talking about, it's not exactly like they picked super models. Sure, they didn't pick a bunch of overweight, greasy, nasty people either, but some of them look awfully goofy.
The majority of imports come from the fact that the system usually comes out so much earlier in other markets. You'd probably pay more in shipping and customs to get one from the US than the difference would be to just go out and buy one from the store. I seriously doubt that there will be that big of an import craze.
Anoop's blog over at IGN had a post that included a rumor about how Nintendo was set to announce their launch price of 199.99 USD and 25000yen, but decided to reconsider after seeing Sony's price. I think it's pretty much a given that it'll sell for 199.99 USD in the US, and given the track record of charging the same numerical value in Euros as they do in USD, it'll probably cost 200 Euros as well.
It's a good thing.
Actually, the Sattalaview system was comparable to what the new games on the virtual console will probably be like. They fell into a few categories:
1 - Reusing existing game modes to create episodic content (There were three or four extremely short Fire Emblem campaigns, and BS Zelda had new dungeons and special events added each week or month or something).
2 - Reusing existing game modes to create new multiplayer experiences (Mario 3 and Excitebike both had pretty compelling multiplayer modes).
3 - Simple, but addicting, brand new titles. "Suck and Blow" (I forget the japanese title, I think it's something Sutte Hauken, but it's been awhile) was a great puzzle game where you were one of those glass dunking birds, and you had to navigate mazes collecting shards while sucking up and spitting out objects and dyes (which bestowed different effects to various objects).
The big difference here is that you paid a single price for the hardware, and a recurring monthly cost to access the service. After that, everything was free (to the best of my knowledge). My guess is that the VC will be free to access and require no new hardware, but content will cost money.
I have my doubts about the sensor bar being used for triangulation. It seems like the best you could do is 2d triangulation (since there's only two reference points) and even still, it seems like the reference points are awfully close together for that to work.
I can't wait until someone rips one of these apart to figure out how it works.
Direct Pointing Device. It's Nintendo's name for whatever technology they are using to make the wiimote function like a super sophisticated light-gun (think about how aiming weapons in Zelda and Metroid works. You point and shoot, it's not like the controller just acts as a mouse in free-look mode).
It's my understanding, and I could certainly be wrong, that the sensor bar is only used for DPD functionality. Everything else is just accelerometers in the wiimote and nunchaku.
I still haven't given much thought to how this works. My previous ideas, inspired by the Ars Technica article, are probably bunk. But I have heard that some games don't require the sensor bar, and that's enough to make me think that it's only needed for the DPD.
I only got two paragraphs into that before I realized it was BS.
It claims that someone has claimed that TDP will turn metals into oil, which is downright false. The claim is that if you put metals into the TDP process, they are converted into safe, easy to transport metal oxides.
I simply can't take anyone seriously who can't tell the difference between that sort of thing. It's like if someone saw that an air purifier is advertising that it can purify gasses other than oxygen, and ends up getting all huffy because the gasses that come out can't support respiration. It's alarming how many people don't have basic reading comprehension skills.
Technically, the product would be diesel, no biodiesel. My understanding of biodiesel is that it's composed of fatty acids that have had their hydroxide group replaced by a methoxide or ethoxide group, which allows it to burn in diesel engines. My guess is that the conversion to biodiesel just makes the molecules volitile enough to be used in a combustion engine.
TDP's diesel, on the other hand, is the same as what you'd get from oils extracted from the ground. Long, straight hydrocarbons.
Errr, I was wrong. It's actually more like 100,000 barrels per year. Not great.
If only they hadn't partnered with Conagra, and instead have partnered with a waste processing plant (like a sewage company, for example). Then they'd be doing much better.
TDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerizat ion produces light crude, not biodiesel. It'd work just fine on sewage, in addition to pretty much anything else that contains any lipids, plastics, gums, rubbers, etc. Long carbon chains, basically.
I keep my eye on the company and technology, and am extremely disapointed that the only commercial plant up and running so far is only pumping out approximately 800,000 gallons per year from waste (turkey offal) that's not actually waste because the US government hasn't outlawed using animal products as animal feed.
I feel compelled to mention that the X360 and PS3 both feature archetectures that aren't particularily friendly to game code (particularily things like AI and Physics) while the GCN is a tried and true format that devs are already familiar with. Add to that the recent announcement about the Havok engine, and I really don't think the lack of power is going to hurt Nintendo at all when it comes to AI and physics.
Slashdot Mirror
When you say it's the oil company's fault, you're leaving out quite a bit.
The corn industry, for example, is trying to improve profits by this whole "live green go yellow" BS, when it's questionable as to whether or not using corn to make ethanol is actually better for the environment. Sugar Cane is MUCH better, something like 6 times better last I read.
The meat and fast food industries, for example, use up such a large portion of the available agricultural land for growing food for animals and for grazing. If that space was used to grow cereals, fruits and vegitables, we could feed more people with less land, leaving plenty open to grow alternative fuels. I certainly wouldn't mind paying a premium for beef, pork and chicken if supply were cut way below demand. It might encourage me to eat it less.
The government is to blame as well, since they've kept the hemp industry down (probably on behalf of the corn, paper, cotton and oil industries). Hemp grows like crazy, and each part of the plant can be used for different things.
Man, I sound like such a hippie.
I'd think that the only reason why that was the case was that Intel had an essentially legal monopoly in the processor business, and by making other peripherals (presumably to be sold cheaper than the competition, or that would work better with intel chips) they would be using their monopoly position to hurt competition.
Neither AMD nor ATI have that issue. I believe they are both beat by Intel and nVidia in their respective busiensses, atleast in terms of marketshare.
Seems like this was meant for the failed 64DD network. While it's tough to say whether or not they will apply it to the Wii (the 64DD was going to offer NES games for download). Current rumblings from Nintendo seem to indicate the Wii online service will be more like the DS's, per game friend codes and no unified system. On the other hand, they have registered a bunch of Wii domains that could be the basis for some sort of online community.
I've read that they've already got a good solution for this, and you're right, it is just a voltage regulator of some sort. The only thing keeping them from using capacitors right now is their small capacity. My memory of this sort of thing is a little fuzzy, but here's how I figure it:
Q = CV (where Q = charge, C = capacitance and V = voltage).
There's absolutely no problem regulating the voltage as it comes off of the capacitor, the biggest problem is getting the maximum Q high enough to supply more than a few minutes of constant voltage. It's not hard to get a high Q by increasing the total voltage across the capacitor, but that's extremely dangerous. If you accidentally discharge it, you can do some serious damage to yourself and anything the capacitor is hooked to. Presumably, this technology is being used to increase the Capacitance of the capacitor, which is roughly proportional to the surface area of each of the plates. The end result would be a MUCH higher Q at a much lower V, allowing for hours of sustained use and near instantanious recharge.
This could make electric motors for cars more fesible, as well as replace batteries in electric appliances like laptops.
Considering that TFS says that the balls only lasted 1/2 a second (something a lot of my fellow /.ers are probably familiar with), a live video wouldn't be very interesting. 6 seconds of nothing, then a brief flash, then 6 more seconds of nothing.
There's no reason why just the core stuff the operating system needs to function couldn't be loaded into the flash portion, and the rest could overflow onto the HDD proper. I suppose that might require some changes to the OS.
On the other hand, open up task manager some time when you're about to go into hibernation. I think it's pretty unlikely that you've got more than a few hundred MB used when you're idling. I suppose if the whole reason why you're hibernating is so you don't have to reopen all of your web browsers and excel spreadsheets and visual studio IDEs, then you might be using a bit more. But I thought most people just used hibernation to shorten shutdown and start up times.
I've been thinking about this a lot over the past year (probably since I took an AI class a year or so ago). Ideal science seems like it should be very well suited to computer manipulation. The goal of science is to craft theories that are completely unambiguous, highly detailed step-by-step instructions for reproducing the supporting evidence, and every logical conclusion should be traceable back to either an observation statement, or a very small set of basic assumptions about the world around us, and our capacity to understand/manipulate that world.
The only downside I can see, though, is a reduction in "hunch" training. If computers are nailing all of the "obvious" connections between different theories/experiments to determine new hypotheses, then people may not get the experience they need to make the more dramatic leaps that can, on occasion, turn a field on it's head (Einstein's watching a baseball roll around on a sheet, or whatever it is that led him to general relativity, for example).
My hope is that they will provide the full three episodes at retail for 40-50 bucks after the third one comes out. It sounds cool (I'm thinking about picking up HL2 now, since I haven't played that yet), but I'm not gonna drop 20 bucks per episode for something like that.
Unfortunately, most video games are produced just to give the user a previous story with some limited involvement in it. Look at how many Lord of the Rings video games there are out there. Look at how many games are spurred from a successful book or movie. Is this really necessary? Do game makers lack so much imagination that they are relying upon movies or books for their storylines? If this is the case, then gaming is doomed to be a mere wanna-be art medium.
How many movies were produced from books? How many books were produced from plays? How many plays were acting out ancient oral myths/stories?
There's plenty of originality out there, it just might not be as popular. But isn't that how it is in every medium? People go with what they are most comfortable/familiar with, so the original stuff quickly gets pushed to the side until the latest fad is over and done.
It's good, and all, that the rating system is being revamped, but it lumps together artistic games like Killer 7 with mindless shooting like the GTA series, and (according to TFA) does not include games with fantasy or historical violence. Killer 7 probably deserves the Z rating (it's awfully violent, even though the player never attacks another human being throughout the game.), but man... it'd be a shame if Capcom didn't release a game like that just because of a ratings system.
My organic professor had a roadmap question (which is like a giant interconnecting series of reactions that all go towards one product, and some of the reagents/conditions/intermediates are missing and you have to fill them in) on one of his exams for producing meth, and some of the starting ingredients were things like that antihistimene they recently took off the shelves.
I think the analogy would be more like this:
Sony and Microsoft compete over the berries, which are pretty easy to get but are in short supply. Nintendo's going after the bugs, of which there are many, but they are hard to get.
Last I checked, there were more non-gamers than gamers, and non-gamers don't tend to like to game (and therefore, are much harder to please).
If you look at the promotional materials he's talking about, it's not exactly like they picked super models. Sure, they didn't pick a bunch of overweight, greasy, nasty people either, but some of them look awfully goofy.
It hasn't really happened before, has it?
The majority of imports come from the fact that the system usually comes out so much earlier in other markets. You'd probably pay more in shipping and customs to get one from the US than the difference would be to just go out and buy one from the store. I seriously doubt that there will be that big of an import craze.
Anoop's blog over at IGN had a post that included a rumor about how Nintendo was set to announce their launch price of 199.99 USD and 25000yen, but decided to reconsider after seeing Sony's price. I think it's pretty much a given that it'll sell for 199.99 USD in the US, and given the track record of charging the same numerical value in Euros as they do in USD, it'll probably cost 200 Euros as well. It's a good thing.
Actually, the Sattalaview system was comparable to what the new games on the virtual console will probably be like. They fell into a few categories: 1 - Reusing existing game modes to create episodic content (There were three or four extremely short Fire Emblem campaigns, and BS Zelda had new dungeons and special events added each week or month or something). 2 - Reusing existing game modes to create new multiplayer experiences (Mario 3 and Excitebike both had pretty compelling multiplayer modes). 3 - Simple, but addicting, brand new titles. "Suck and Blow" (I forget the japanese title, I think it's something Sutte Hauken, but it's been awhile) was a great puzzle game where you were one of those glass dunking birds, and you had to navigate mazes collecting shards while sucking up and spitting out objects and dyes (which bestowed different effects to various objects). The big difference here is that you paid a single price for the hardware, and a recurring monthly cost to access the service. After that, everything was free (to the best of my knowledge). My guess is that the VC will be free to access and require no new hardware, but content will cost money.
I have my doubts about the sensor bar being used for triangulation. It seems like the best you could do is 2d triangulation (since there's only two reference points) and even still, it seems like the reference points are awfully close together for that to work. I can't wait until someone rips one of these apart to figure out how it works.
Direct Pointing Device. It's Nintendo's name for whatever technology they are using to make the wiimote function like a super sophisticated light-gun (think about how aiming weapons in Zelda and Metroid works. You point and shoot, it's not like the controller just acts as a mouse in free-look mode).
It's my understanding, and I could certainly be wrong, that the sensor bar is only used for DPD functionality. Everything else is just accelerometers in the wiimote and nunchaku. I still haven't given much thought to how this works. My previous ideas, inspired by the Ars Technica article, are probably bunk. But I have heard that some games don't require the sensor bar, and that's enough to make me think that it's only needed for the DPD.
I only got two paragraphs into that before I realized it was BS. It claims that someone has claimed that TDP will turn metals into oil, which is downright false. The claim is that if you put metals into the TDP process, they are converted into safe, easy to transport metal oxides. I simply can't take anyone seriously who can't tell the difference between that sort of thing. It's like if someone saw that an air purifier is advertising that it can purify gasses other than oxygen, and ends up getting all huffy because the gasses that come out can't support respiration. It's alarming how many people don't have basic reading comprehension skills.
I'd be interested in reading about that. Do you have a link?
Technically, the product would be diesel, no biodiesel. My understanding of biodiesel is that it's composed of fatty acids that have had their hydroxide group replaced by a methoxide or ethoxide group, which allows it to burn in diesel engines. My guess is that the conversion to biodiesel just makes the molecules volitile enough to be used in a combustion engine.
TDP's diesel, on the other hand, is the same as what you'd get from oils extracted from the ground. Long, straight hydrocarbons.
Errr, I was wrong. It's actually more like 100,000 barrels per year. Not great. If only they hadn't partnered with Conagra, and instead have partnered with a waste processing plant (like a sewage company, for example). Then they'd be doing much better.
TDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerizat ion produces light crude, not biodiesel. It'd work just fine on sewage, in addition to pretty much anything else that contains any lipids, plastics, gums, rubbers, etc. Long carbon chains, basically.
I keep my eye on the company and technology, and am extremely disapointed that the only commercial plant up and running so far is only pumping out approximately 800,000 gallons per year from waste (turkey offal) that's not actually waste because the US government hasn't outlawed using animal products as animal feed.
I feel compelled to mention that the X360 and PS3 both feature archetectures that aren't particularily friendly to game code (particularily things like AI and Physics) while the GCN is a tried and true format that devs are already familiar with. Add to that the recent announcement about the Havok engine, and I really don't think the lack of power is going to hurt Nintendo at all when it comes to AI and physics.