Eero Ahonen wrote:
> Power button? I was actually wondering this, but I though Apple would 
> make it "hip" to lack one :p.

I thought it has a power button on top and a "home" button on the front.

It has a nice UI tho, I will say. That isn't what's stopping me from 
buying one, tho. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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> I had a go at playing something called "call of duty 4" on my sister's 
> PS3. [Yes, I know. I still find it hard to believe a real person somewhere 
> actually owns one.]

"Europe PS3 sales 'overtake 360'"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7386879.stm

I got mine because it was the cheapest blu-ray player out there.  I also use 
it a lot to stream music and videos from my PC wirelessly into the living 
room.  Oh and show off some POV animations on the big TV at 1920x1080 
resolution :-) And I sometimes play a couple of games on it too (the 
graphics from GT5 are awesome).

http://www.greatwallofgaming.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/gt5-prologue-5.jpg

The focal blur is a bit too optimised for speed and sometimes doesn't look 
realistic, but while playing you hardly notice.  But the HDR rendering and 
tonemapping are great, and the detail of the car models both inside and out 
are staggering.

> It seemed rather impressive on a vast 29-inch LCD TV.

And I suspect that on a 29" TV you weren't even playing it at the highest 
resolution (I don't think (m)any 29" TVs support 1920x1080 resolution).

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> As for the Wii... Apart from the obviously ridiculous name, I think it's 
> an "interesting" concept. But when I tried to play with my sister's 
> boyfriend's Wii [do NOT say this out loud in public!] it just made my arm 
> hurt [do NOT include this part in public either!!]
>
> Seriously - the centrifugal forces just make the veins in my hand 
> overpressure. And my wrist hurt.
>
> I wonder... surely there have been some pretty serious injuries / property 
> damage due to the Wii, no?

We broke a light, dented a door and I had to stay home from work one day due 
to pulling a muscle in my back!

When we got our Wii we played the Wii sports games almost every day for like 
2 or 3 months, we are a bit bored of it now, actually I don't remember the 
last time we played.  Definitely don't regret playing it though, we spent so 
long on the tennis and bowling games.

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>> I've heard of TV casualties from the wrist band snapping. LCDs and 
>> Plasmas.
>> The glass on a CRT is usually strong enough to survive,

Yup, whereas the glass in an LCD is usually under 1mm thick - the polarisers 
stop it shattering, but it still cracks easily and then it's useless.

>> I have to wonder what kind of force is necessary to get it to snap. It
>> seemed pretty secure the few times I've played.

Ditto.

> The strap on the earlier models was weaker than the current one. When the 
> damage reports started trickling in, they redesigned it.

I really don't understand how they did not test such an obvious part before 
starting production.  I mean surely, when designing it, they *must* have 
asked themselves "ok, how strong does it need to be".  They could have 
easily got some strong dude to swing something around extremely violently, 
the multiplied the required strength by 2 or 3.  And even then, if something 
went wrong when they started making the sample parts, you think it would 
have shown up in their testing that they were snapping earlier than 
expected.

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> You now have fingerprints all over your viewing area. Good luck cleaning 
> skin oil off a plastic display. ;-)
>
> You get no tactile feedback from the "keyboard".

Previously Nokia and still today many car manufacturers rejected the 
touchscreen keyboard approach for those very two reasons.

> As a matter of fact, my sat nav device uses a similar on-screen keyboard. 
> While it's a little slow to operate, it's not *too* bad... The key [pun!] 
> is to make the keys big enough to hit reliably. Not all products manage 
> this.

It's not just getting the tactile feedback of having pressed a button, but 
getting the tactile feedback that you are over a button before you press. 
Try pressing those buttons on your satnav screen while driving fast on the 
motorway - then try controlling your radio while driving using real 
buttons - which is easier/safer?

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scott wrote:
>> I had a go at playing something called "call of duty 4" on my sister's 
>> PS3. [Yes, I know. I still find it hard to believe a real person 
>> somewhere actually owns one.]
> 
> "Europe PS3 sales 'overtake 360'"

Yeah. Obviously *somebody* must buy these things. It just seems weird 
meeting somebody who actually owns one. In real life.

> http://www.greatwallofgaming.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/gt5-prologue-5.jpg 

Now that's a little more like it. That actually looks good.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say this is the first scanline-rendered 
image I've seen that manages to make crude polygon tesselations and 
deceptive illumination trickery look like real curves.

I see what you mean about the blur though...

[Unrelated, but... TF2 somehow manages to achieve motion blur. On a 
standard 3D card. I'm not really sure how that's physically possible...]

>> It seemed rather impressive on a vast 29-inch LCD TV.
> 
> And I suspect that on a 29" TV you weren't even playing it at the 
> highest resolution (I don't think (m)any 29" TVs support 1920x1080 
> resolution).



-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> http://www.greatwallofgaming.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/gt5-prologue-5.jpg
>
> Now that's a little more like it. That actually looks good.
>
> In fact, I'd go as far as to say this is the first scanline-rendered image 
> I've seen that manages to make crude polygon tesselations and deceptive 
> illumination trickery look like real curves.

Looking at it closer, the while line painted on the edge of the road is not 
very curvey.

> [Unrelated, but... TF2 somehow manages to achieve motion blur. On a 
> standard 3D card. I'm not really sure how that's physically possible...]

Why not?  Motion blur is not impossible to do on a 3D card - there's even a 
demo sample in the DirectX SDK showing you how to do it.



Where were you looking?  I typed "hdmi cable" into amazon and this one is 
only 51p!!!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fisual-Install-GOLD-Plated-Cable/dp/B0014WH8EY

There are lots around 10 pounds if you want to spend a bit more.

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>> [Unrelated, but... TF2 somehow manages to achieve motion blur. On a 
>> standard 3D card. I'm not really sure how that's physically possible...]
> 
> Why not?  Motion blur is not impossible to do on a 3D card - there's 
> even a demo sample in the DirectX SDK showing you how to do it.

The only way I can think of doing this is to just rerender the entire 
frame multiple times - which would obviously not work in realtime. So 
I'm not sure what clever trick they've found to make it fast enough...


> 
> Where were you looking?

PC World, Curries, Dixons... hey wait, those are all the same shop! o_O

> I typed "hdmi cable" into amazon and this one is only 51p!!!
> 
> There are lots around 10 pounds if you want to spend a bit more.

...so it's a tax on stupidity then?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> The only way I can think of doing this is to just rerender the entire 
> frame multiple times - which would obviously not work in realtime. So

That's one way of doing it, and it works ok if your scene is simple enough, 
or if you only want to motion blur certain parts of it (eg a fast moving 
missile).

> I'm not sure what clever trick they've found to make it fast enough...

Another way is to render the scene to a texture, and at the same time render 
the velocity information of each pixel to another texture.  Then a final bit 
of code (running on the GPU naturally) creates the final image each frame 
using that data.  This method maybe slows down rendering by 5-10% on a 
complex scene, but allows full screen motion blur, all you need to do is 
make sure you add some velocity data to each mesh you render.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> You now have fingerprints all over your viewing area. Good luck cleaning 
> skin oil off a plastic display. ;-)

I think it's glass actually. It's designed to be easily wiped down, at 
any rate.

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