Hi. My name is Susan. And I'm going to introduce you to something that may change the way you and your family think about home entertainment. It's called "Wii", and it's from Nintendo. And whether you're an active gamer, or someone who has never played at all, everyone will find a reason to love Wii.
So you're saying that "misinterpreting" my post to mean that it would be unable to find the gravity vector if it exploded... doesn't warrant being a called a moron?... 'Cause... it does.
I assume the firmware is trying to keep it simple so people won't get confused by basic settings.
So, in other words, you weren't able to read allllll the way to the part where I said:
"Sure, I can understand them not *forcing* you to calibrate like that on startup, but to not even bury it under some advanced options?"
Again, to repeat myself unnecessarily, I understand them not making that a basic or a startup option. I don't understand why they wouldn't give you that option *at all* in the OS.
Shooting games (House of the Dead, etc) would no doubt work they way they always have, by reading the pixel colour on the screen. Any motion sensing madness is really just a bonus - and I guess would all help in the calculation and maybe make it more accurate. Its not like you haven't been able to buy gun based games on older systems, like the Dreamcast.
Well, my point was that, if calibrated, the Wiimote could know where you're really pointing, *without* having to read the pixels on the screen. It would just need to see the IR emitters and then apply the transformation based on the screen boundary specifications you gave.
I know you can buy a light gun. But wouldn't it be a lot better if the Wiimote actually applied its capabilities so you didn't have to get one? It could even handle House of the Dead 4, which requires the gun to sense shaking.
Equal in all three *axes*, moron. As in, an acceleration vector of (15,15,15). They don't actually have to be equal, though. They could be (15,-20,-2) or something. Now, how does it infer gravity from those acceleration vectors?
I don't understand. In the second paragraph, it sounds like you're saying the accelerometers can tell which way gravity is, but in the second, you're saying it can't distinguish it from the acceleration due to the motion of the Wiimote.
Did you understand what I was talking about in my previous post? I'm not having "problems". My Wiimote is doing exactly what it's designed to do. The problem has nothing to do with hardware either. The two IR sources suffice to figure out where it's pointing. My complaint was that the Wiimote takes its view of the IR's, and uses a pre-defined formula for placing the crosshairs, when really it should allow you to give it more information about where your screen really is, so it can modify the formula so that the crosshairs are closer to where you're really pointing.
FWIW, Red Steel calibrates your screen size by having you point at objects in the beginning.
The fish thing? That's not really a calibration. That's just telling you to move *its* assumed pointer location onto *its* objects. That has nothing to do with whether *its* assumed pointer location is where you're really pointing.
The Force of Gravity will always register as an (aproximately) 9.81 M/(s^2) acceleration to the acclerometers inside of the Wiimote; this means that you should be able to tell it's orientation in comparison to the ground pretty easily.
Unless, of course, I'm accelerating it such that the vector appears equal in all directions or something.
Why would you want to have to calibrate it for the TV?
Well, that's my point. You *shouldn't* have to. I completely agree with allowing the simple "above or below" quick setup. My complaint was that it doesn't allow you to provide it more information so that it can use a different algorithm, if you desire, that is more accurate for your particular screen. And the "consistency between screens" isn't necessarily good. It means if I have a smaller-than-usual screen (a pitiful 23'', poor me) I have to keep my pointer within a much smaller range to play Red Steel -- which isn't good.
That's true, but that's not what he was talking about. (Well, he was, but not in the part you quoted.) He was talking about how the place where you're really pointing is not the same as where it thinks you're pointing, and you can verify this yourself.
If you stand close to the TV -- not so close that it goes haywire, but close -- you'll see that it thinks it's pointing way off, depending on how you point, and usually in the vertical direction it's the most severe. And unlike the sibling poster said, this has nothing to do with its sensitivity. It has to do with the fact that the ONLY information you are allowed to give it about the sensor bar (in Wii options) is whether it's above or below the screen. WHAT???? It doesn't allow you to give it ANY more information about the real boundaries of your screen, which would allow the OS to have some trivial transformation to make it line up perfectly.
To be sure, this isn't a problem for a lot of applications. For one, as long as you are allowed to see where it THINKS you're pointing, and it's not miles off, it's perfectly functional. Also, for more than about ~8 feet away, the error is very small. But if they want to have a game like, I don't know, Time Crisis or House of the Dead, where you're not supposed to have the luxury of knowing where you're really pointing until you fire, it falls short.
A game could calibrate this, but I only know one that does -- Zelda -- and that's only horizontal, not vertical, which is the bigger problem.
BEFORE YOU MOD TROLL, let me just say that I love playing the Wii, but it bothers me to no end that they didn't put in a very trivial step that would vastly increase functionaly. Sure, I can understand them not *forcing* you to calibrate like that on startup, but to not even bury it under some advanced options?
The accelerometer returns acceleration along 3 directions, with relation to the remote. This allows it to detect tilt by figuring out which way gravity is, giving it 3 rotational axises.
How can you infer gravity's direction purely from the local linear accelerations? If your acceleration vector is , okay, you know which way gravity is. But what if your acceleration vector is ? Which component is due to me moving the WIimote and which component is gravity?
Also:
The POINTER system can determine... c) The rotation of the remote with respect to the sensor bar.
Yes, it *can*, but if you'll notice, the Wiimote knows your tilt, even when not pointed at the screen. I suspect there is a separate tilt sensor, similar to what they have on planes.
Oh, and anyone know why there isn't yet a game that tries to find your wiimote's absolute location at all times by integrating accelerations from the last known data from the sensor bar? Or one that allows you to calibrate to your screen size? (No, Zelda doesn't count, that's just horizontal.)
Without patents, patent-heavy fields like pharmaceutical research fall into cutthroat, razor-thin-margin price wars - but that is not a bad thing.
Well, cutthroat razor-thin margins generally aren't bad, but it's hard to imagine how it would be profitable to sink billions of dollars and 20 years into developing a drug, when someone can compete with you when they're already billions of dollars and 20 years ahead, merely by using your published formula.
The article's point was not that "patents" are bad, but that allowing an additional patent for an incremental upgrade is bad.
In fact, it's not too different than desktop computers, where we've seen manufacturers keep up with Moore's law for a remarkable amount of time, even while having to struggle to break even on almost every product.
Well, yes and no. It's the same in that the driving force behind Moore's law, the processors, are patented (rendering your example moot). It's different in that, even if you could legally copy the processor design, you'd have to put up a huge amount of capital (though you wouldn't need to do the research, that's a much smaller fraction of costs of bringing to market).
Again, patents do not exist to provide peace of mind to investors; they exist only to promote progress. If ending them, and forcing pharmaceuticals to (*gasp*) innovate to stay in business (and even having a few go out of business when they fail to!) is the best way to promote progress, than that is exactly what we should do.
Pharmas do innovate! And they do fail sometimes, even with patents. You seem to think that just because they don't have to struggle as much once they have a patent, they're not competing. That ignores the research competition they have to go through to find patentable medicines. Whenever someone tells me that a pharma is earning monopoly profits for doing nothing because they have a patent, I almost have to ask what they think of veterans drawing a pension. "Oh, okay, great, big deal, you fought some war a while back. What are you doing for us *now*? Why should we pay you this pension *now*?"
Just to be clear, I don't want to come across as a pro-patent extremist. My point is that the issue is a lot more complicated than people on either side give it credit for.
Good point here. If you're allowing a company to snoop your email for spam/viruses then you're already negating the privacy issue.
The Post Office checks for dangerous characteristics of packages (smell, leading, powdery residue, someone pounding on inside demanding that you let him out) without opening them. The ISP checks for dangerous characteristics without any human actually reading the content.
I wouldn't call that stupid. I'd call it careless. "Stupid" would be if you inferred from those events that Nintendo is to blame and took legal action on that basis.
Slashdot Mirror
If that's the problem, here's a crazy idea:
Market PC's with Linux already installed and ready to start.
Hire a real marketing team. Put it where the masses will see it.
Oh, you mean that take real money and business expertise? Ah, dammit, so *that's* why they charge for software! I *knew* there was a reason behind it!
Hi. My name is Susan. And I'm going to introduce you to something that may change the way you and your family think about home entertainment. It's called "Wii", and it's from Nintendo. And whether you're an active gamer, or someone who has never played at all, everyone will find a reason to love Wii.
It is impossible for you to waive/sign away your constitutionally-protected rights.
Oh, like how it's impossible to testify at your own trial? Or to talk to police after you're arrested?
LOL!!!!! You act like he actually knows what a futures market is.
The elderly are more likely to forget vital pet care (feeding, vet, etc.). That's why it's important to automate the pet.
Theres no point! If you had to calibrate each time you sat down, the console would be a horrid failure.
Really? You have to tell it whether the sensor bar is above or below, each time you play?
No, it's stored in the OS. Like the calibration settings would be!
Most people can't calibrate gun games correctly.
They can't expand a rectangle to their screen boundaries?
So you're saying that "misinterpreting" my post to mean that it would be unable to find the gravity vector if it exploded ... doesn't warrant being a called a moron? ... 'Cause ... it does.
I assume the firmware is trying to keep it simple so people won't get confused by basic settings.
So, in other words, you weren't able to read allllll the way to the part where I said:
"Sure, I can understand them not *forcing* you to calibrate like that on startup, but to not even bury it under some advanced options?"
Again, to repeat myself unnecessarily, I understand them not making that a basic or a startup option. I don't understand why they wouldn't give you that option *at all* in the OS.
See sig.
I meant "money" as a slang adjective ("money" = "good").
Now go watch Swingers.
Earplugs are good at muffling excessively loud sounds, particularly keeping them from damaging your ears. But you can still hear them.
Also, earplugs introduce the new annoyance of intimately hearing your own breathing process.
Shooting games (House of the Dead, etc) would no doubt work they way they always have, by reading the pixel colour on the screen. Any motion sensing madness is really just a bonus - and I guess would all help in the calculation and maybe make it more accurate. Its not like you haven't been able to buy gun based games on older systems, like the Dreamcast.
Well, my point was that, if calibrated, the Wiimote could know where you're really pointing, *without* having to read the pixels on the screen. It would just need to see the IR emitters and then apply the transformation based on the screen boundary specifications you gave.
I know you can buy a light gun. But wouldn't it be a lot better if the Wiimote actually applied its capabilities so you didn't have to get one? It could even handle House of the Dead 4, which requires the gun to sense shaking.
Equal in all three *axes*, moron. As in, an acceleration vector of (15,15,15). They don't actually have to be equal, though. They could be (15,-20,-2) or something. Now, how does it infer gravity from those acceleration vectors?
Me? I thought they named you!
I don't understand. In the second paragraph, it sounds like you're saying the accelerometers can tell which way gravity is, but in the second, you're saying it can't distinguish it from the acceleration due to the motion of the Wiimote.
I'd M2 that unfair.
Time is very dumbed down, and uses slang my middle school English teacher wouldn't allow. That's for non-technical articles.
The NY Times article doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know.
Did you understand what I was talking about in my previous post? I'm not having "problems". My Wiimote is doing exactly what it's designed to do. The problem has nothing to do with hardware either. The two IR sources suffice to figure out where it's pointing. My complaint was that the Wiimote takes its view of the IR's, and uses a pre-defined formula for placing the crosshairs, when really it should allow you to give it more information about where your screen really is, so it can modify the formula so that the crosshairs are closer to where you're really pointing.
FWIW, Red Steel calibrates your screen size by having you point at objects in the beginning.
The fish thing? That's not really a calibration. That's just telling you to move *its* assumed pointer location onto *its* objects. That has nothing to do with whether *its* assumed pointer location is where you're really pointing.
The Force of Gravity will always register as an (aproximately) 9.81 M/(s^2) acceleration to the acclerometers inside of the Wiimote; this means that you should be able to tell it's orientation in comparison to the ground pretty easily.
Unless, of course, I'm accelerating it such that the vector appears equal in all directions or something.
Why would you want to have to calibrate it for the TV?
Well, that's my point. You *shouldn't* have to. I completely agree with allowing the simple "above or below" quick setup. My complaint was that it doesn't allow you to provide it more information so that it can use a different algorithm, if you desire, that is more accurate for your particular screen. And the "consistency between screens" isn't necessarily good. It means if I have a smaller-than-usual screen (a pitiful 23'', poor me) I have to keep my pointer within a much smaller range to play Red Steel -- which isn't good.
That's true, but that's not what he was talking about. (Well, he was, but not in the part you quoted.) He was talking about how the place where you're really pointing is not the same as where it thinks you're pointing, and you can verify this yourself.
If you stand close to the TV -- not so close that it goes haywire, but close -- you'll see that it thinks it's pointing way off, depending on how you point, and usually in the vertical direction it's the most severe. And unlike the sibling poster said, this has nothing to do with its sensitivity. It has to do with the fact that the ONLY information you are allowed to give it about the sensor bar (in Wii options) is whether it's above or below the screen. WHAT???? It doesn't allow you to give it ANY more information about the real boundaries of your screen, which would allow the OS to have some trivial transformation to make it line up perfectly.
To be sure, this isn't a problem for a lot of applications. For one, as long as you are allowed to see where it THINKS you're pointing, and it's not miles off, it's perfectly functional. Also, for more than about ~8 feet away, the error is very small. But if they want to have a game like, I don't know, Time Crisis or House of the Dead, where you're not supposed to have the luxury of knowing where you're really pointing until you fire, it falls short.
A game could calibrate this, but I only know one that does -- Zelda -- and that's only horizontal, not vertical, which is the bigger problem.
BEFORE YOU MOD TROLL, let me just say that I love playing the Wii, but it bothers me to no end that they didn't put in a very trivial step that would vastly increase functionaly. Sure, I can understand them not *forcing* you to calibrate like that on startup, but to not even bury it under some advanced options?
In my last post, I missed that the vectors were hidden because I used the tag containers.
The first should be [0,0,-9.8] and the second should be [15,15,15].
That doesn't sound right.
... c) The rotation of the remote with respect to the sensor bar.
The accelerometer returns acceleration along 3 directions, with relation to the remote. This allows it to detect tilt by figuring out which way gravity is, giving it 3 rotational axises.
How can you infer gravity's direction purely from the local linear accelerations? If your acceleration vector is , okay, you know which way gravity is. But what if your acceleration vector is ? Which component is due to me moving the WIimote and which component is gravity?
Also:
The POINTER system can determine
Yes, it *can*, but if you'll notice, the Wiimote knows your tilt, even when not pointed at the screen. I suspect there is a separate tilt sensor, similar to what they have on planes.
Oh, and anyone know why there isn't yet a game that tries to find your wiimote's absolute location at all times by integrating accelerations from the last known data from the sensor bar? Or one that allows you to calibrate to your screen size? (No, Zelda doesn't count, that's just horizontal.)
Without patents, patent-heavy fields like pharmaceutical research fall into cutthroat, razor-thin-margin price wars - but that is not a bad thing.
Well, cutthroat razor-thin margins generally aren't bad, but it's hard to imagine how it would be profitable to sink billions of dollars and 20 years into developing a drug, when someone can compete with you when they're already billions of dollars and 20 years ahead, merely by using your published formula.
The article's point was not that "patents" are bad, but that allowing an additional patent for an incremental upgrade is bad.
In fact, it's not too different than desktop computers, where we've seen manufacturers keep up with Moore's law for a remarkable amount of time, even while having to struggle to break even on almost every product.
Well, yes and no. It's the same in that the driving force behind Moore's law, the processors, are patented (rendering your example moot). It's different in that, even if you could legally copy the processor design, you'd have to put up a huge amount of capital (though you wouldn't need to do the research, that's a much smaller fraction of costs of bringing to market).
Again, patents do not exist to provide peace of mind to investors; they exist only to promote progress. If ending them, and forcing pharmaceuticals to (*gasp*) innovate to stay in business (and even having a few go out of business when they fail to!) is the best way to promote progress, than that is exactly what we should do.
Pharmas do innovate! And they do fail sometimes, even with patents. You seem to think that just because they don't have to struggle as much once they have a patent, they're not competing. That ignores the research competition they have to go through to find patentable medicines. Whenever someone tells me that a pharma is earning monopoly profits for doing nothing because they have a patent, I almost have to ask what they think of veterans drawing a pension. "Oh, okay, great, big deal, you fought some war a while back. What are you doing for us *now*? Why should we pay you this pension *now*?"
Just to be clear, I don't want to come across as a pro-patent extremist. My point is that the issue is a lot more complicated than people on either side give it credit for.
I don't know how bad this analogy is, but ...
Good point here. If you're allowing a company to snoop your email for spam/viruses then you're already negating the privacy issue.
The Post Office checks for dangerous characteristics of packages (smell, leading, powdery residue, someone pounding on inside demanding that you let him out) without opening them. The ISP checks for dangerous characteristics without any human actually reading the content.
I wouldn't call that stupid. I'd call it careless. "Stupid" would be if you inferred from those events that Nintendo is to blame and took legal action on that basis.
You're money.