What if you were able to use a PlayStation2 as the user interface to your Linux/PC box in a really well integrated fashion?
XWindows and really fast rendering with hard-/firm-ware acceleration without having to buy some ridiculously over priced PC card, and it can play some games too.
Think of doing VR without watching the screen update about as quickly as glaciers flow.
C'mon guys there must be a way we can USE this!:-)
The second idea is unrelated but here goes:
How many companies sell Linux distributions? And that's competition your honor...
How many companies sell Windows distributions? And that's a monopoly your honor...
Now lets put that topic to bed, without its supper.
Speaking one of the people in the office who checks out/. at least once a day and as a 46 year-old software professional with twenty five years in the field, I can definitely reassure that this is not a board for fifteen year old Linux afficionadoes.
Great! Another book stating the obvious that nobody will read.
The problem is that nobody will read and apply anything from this book any more than they did when IBM came out with CUA guidelines manual when they created OS/2. (And that one just covered the obvious but it covered a lot of it! Even way back when before Windows 3.0)
Most software is drek because there is no QA done. This is specially true of the UI. Most skins and themes deserve to get their authors a good thrashing behind the wood shed. Finding a gem means that you had to devastate a resource somewhere.
No I didn't write the book, but I wrote the article(s) specially Rovira Diagrams (Computer Language Magazine, Jan 1990, V7N1) which gives some hints about how to think about how you integrate GUI into your apps and how you specify, code and document them...
I'll be glad when I stop looking at crap and the GUI isn't just look&feel by people who think stolen milk crates is an interior decorating "style."
Have you been in touch with Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, et al. about what they've been doing with Smalltalk (now called "Squeak!",) about what can be done to help children and others with active imaginations use computers to their best advantages?
Quality Assurance is a process that makes the difference between M$'s security holes and a secure system.
Quality Assurance is a process that let you pick up a system and shake all the bugs out.
Quality Assurance is a process for building systems st that you maintain a knowledge base to identify ALL components of a system, ALL objects, ALL methods, ALL relationships, ALL functionality and completely cross-reference eveny meme in teh knowledge base.
Quality Assurance lets you deliver a system to your clients and live with it afterwards.
That said, most corporate QA efforts are poorly implemplemented and lacadaisically enforced retrofits. QA at start-ups are lousy and the products can't evolve and don't outlast the creation team.
While there are many other possibilities for "Geek O' the Millenium" the man who I feel truly personified Geekdom and who was supremely unconcerned about it was Richard Feinman.
From the development of Feinman diagrams to the resolution of the Shuttle Explosion debacle with Occam-like wit and precision, his life is an example all self proclaimed Geeks must bow to.
I don't think that Corel would sell, (I lived in Ottawa for a decade and the owner's mansion is familiar on sight, it REALLY stick out in the neighborhood, thank God for spruce trees. They keep their foliage in the snow:-) There's too much ego involved with Corel, but if, IF this can be engineered, how long do you think WordPerfect Suite 8+ would stay closed source?
I LOVE WP's file format. I was able to write stuff in Smalltalk/V (deceased now...) to parse WP files to extract information a long time ago, as opposed to the mess from Redmond which isn't compatible with itself. I'd love to write stuff like that again.
Canada's DCIEM? You must have got to work with some interesting toys.
You're merely describing the schism caused by dichotomy between the somatic sense "I'm sitting in a chair with a mouse in my mand and a hand on a key board" and the cognitive sense "I'm runnning through a corridor with a on my ass.
This is one of the biggest problems with games. It leads to disorientation and nausea. I know a sys admin who wants to use the process hunter-killer interface and he'll do his darndest to implement on the Sun boxes he got at work but he'll hurl the first time he tries to use it.
Doom used to introduce up and down motion to simulate the physical effect of walking and running around. Haven't played in yonks so I'm foggy.
The reason for vehicles in VR is partly what you said and partly to restore credibility (I was lugging fifty rockets at a time in Doom. Like thats ever going to happen. I'd be crushed to death if fifty rockets were dropped on me.)
With Descent you couldn't do it any other way. And getting used to six degrees of freedom was no picknick. (My hat's off to air jocks of every stripe.)
A 2D or 3D mesh (interposed as 'virtuality' between the viewer and the view) would probably work well in a HUD. Rotation tracked to correspond with head rotation and the grid disappearing when it encounters what it estimates is the distance to an object would help further. Ranges to targets, recognized unfriendlies etc. could be displayed as well.
Of course that merely side steps your issue by actually allowing the person(s) to actually move.
The other solution would be a holodeck.
The room has to be large enough that motion is practical. The floor would have to be made of large tiles which can be pivoted and rotated to redirect the individual(s) away from the wall while the scenery projected/displayed on the walls floor and ceiling rotate to accomodate the new direction.
The only remaining obstacle would be a slight dizzyness introduced between the somatic 'inner-ear' and the perceived (sight sound etc.) though changing the direction of an oncoming breeze would be an interesting exercise.
You're still talking about implementing the holodeck from the Voyager.
Maybe when we can grow components (pico technology from HP labs et alia,) and paint them onto the walls celiing and floor tiles...
The concept is called "deep contextual dependency."
It works all right for extracting meaning and for translating documents without nuance or unidiomatically (See National Weather Service of Canada automatic weather advisory translation.)
We can translate WORDS without difficulty. We can parse and deconstruct sometimes surprisingly complex sentences. The problems come when we try to deal with the fact that we don't speak in words.
We USE words, sometimes the wrong ones though Malapropisms are less of a problem nowadays with the spread of mass media spreading too few languages like manure. There is pretty good concensual agreement on the meaning of any word.
But, unless we're really anal-retentive or WASP, but I repeat myself, we usually back up or demonstrate our meaning with gestural cues.
We SPEAK in sentence fragments and often, like cats purring, we aren't really communicating a damn thing, except "Hello I'm here. Don't kill me." Most of what passes for communication is just interpersonal noise.
The problems of automatic translation arise because we don't speak or even think in words. We think in sentence fragments.
To complicate things, the words we use in constructing those fragments are often not words that bear any relationship with the thought being expressed by the sentence fragment.
"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" is a great example of a consensually determined, historically derived idiomatic fragment sequence used to express a single thought. It is directly untranslatable.
Don't know what it means? Not not sure of what it means? Then you don't come from a Judao-Christian, AngloSaxon family that at least paid lip-service to the church and to Shakespear. There IS a concept and a context expressed with the phrase but most of us would dance around trying to express it to a foreigner (or a computer.)
To understand it, you need to be a part of the consensus that was the socio-cultural caldrom that cooked up the expression in the first place. (Did you spot the idiomatic expession in that last sentence?)
Not to disagree with Suzanne Vega, but Language IS liguid. It may not be able to rush in but it is constantly deforming to fill the ill-defined vessels that speak it.
Machine translation will require that our machines not only become more like us but join us in constructing language
the mind reels with potential Shakespearean references, here. I wonder if the next generation will be called the "Oberon"? Or if they will just cut the crap and show us their "Bottom"
Or will they market this turkey with a "DS9" flair as a Ferengi invention and expect people to bid on 'em with bars of Latanum.
I'm getting a G4 chip based box and I'll have gigaflop rather than a marketing-flop.
Reverse engineering is not a problem, in an open-source community. But sometimes you just want to make sure your backers get a return for their investment. (We'll get back to the open-source model in a minute.)
I work for a company which invested hundred's of millions of dollars, that nine integers worth of dough, in a row folks, and fifteen years in the doing, developping a complex monster of a financial data model. This thing is REALLY complete.
Now you may just think that anything less than a billion is pocket change for Bill G. But we're not Bill G. Neither were our investors and some of us sweated blood to evolve this beast.
How would you feel if YOU and a couple of hundred of your friends had worked for years on something only to see your potential for break-even vanish to null, zip, nada, nothing, by somebody swiping a copy of your database, publishing the data dictionary and reverse-engineering the software you worked fifteen years on to build interfaces to all the data tables.
I'd venture to offer: "Very broke and broken hearted." Not to mention angry enough to sick a law firm full of angry paperwork at the perpetrators to get them to "cease and decist."
No, Reverse engineering is not a problem in an open-source community. Because it shouldn't happen. The development should have been collaborative from the get go.
Open-source is a great concept, if a project was started as open-source and everybody chips in to improve the product and its place in the market and doesn't rip-off the concept or the source code depriving the originators of revenue by contributing nothing and reaping the rewards.
Also the project has to come first and be acknowledged as THE project. Its no good if we have another Apache project competing for web services or another Samba competing for intersystem operability. You have to contribute to Apache and Samba and not just grab the code and, uh, fork off.
That's what the corporate world, the backers and users of the fruits of our labors are really worried about. The technical issues don't bother them. Like everybody else, they don't understand them.
I'm still a little leary of all these Linux distributions. I'm not the only one. Luckily, GNU/Linux, Apache, Samba, (Mozilla some day, I hope,) and a host of other products were well controlled and evolved in a collaborative yet well-controlled atmosphere.
That's rare and I'm going to OpenSource / OpenScience 99 at Brookhaven labs tomorrow to see what is being done to spread the faith.
Because its the the competitive aspects of the development process for all of the other 'stuff' that's a real worry.
That's why there's a hundred lousy accounting packages out there rather than just ONE great one... That's why there's a hundred lousy payroll packages out there rather than ONE great one. We haven't yet learned to share and play nice with the other children.
Say we learn to spread the wealth, that begs the question "How do you spread the cost?"
So far, lets face it GNU/Linux, Samba, Apache and a whole lot of other software out there is at the beginning of the cost curve. We're not talking millions of dollars here. The development has to date been very Mom-and-Pop and devoted hobbyist.
Will the development slow to a crawl when its not something that's universally needed, like an OS or a Web server, but gets into niches, like financial models or if something get really expensive to build.
Can an open-source approach work in the alleys off of the Bazzar? That's THE question and we have to come up with a right answer, a complete answer.
Because if we're to reach farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, let's make sure the giants are not heading in separate directions and leaving us, the development community (not just the hackers) hovering precariously over a growing chasm.
Hello, I went to the link offered on the page: http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/columns/gillmo r/docs/dg092499.htm .
Its got nothing to do with face recognition.
Too bad, I'm a firm believer in letting our computers and other systems which require authentication recognize us for who we are (biometrics) rather than what we know (passwords and PINs) because it requires nothing from us but being ourselves and makes it MUCH harder for somebody else to pretend to be us. This applies far beyond just cracking computer systems.
My wife and I have been victims of forgery and criminal impersonation because some ethically challenged old family "friend" found (stole really,) some blank checks and an SS# and ran up thousands of dollars in forged cheques, a phony credit card application and thousands in fraudulent credit card charges. (she 'copped a plea' in one case but the other has not yet come to trial so I'm not going to post her image with a large red warning on it.)
That person was not very good at running scams and she got caught for both offenses, but the crimes shouldn't have happened in the first place. They wouldn't have if the systems were vigilant and had proper recognition mechanisms. Computers are 'patient' and 'vigilant' but they are still too 'gullible' for our collective good.
Credit cards and other fiscal instruments which are tagged with biometric data constitute an excellent line of defense for financial institutions and us, their customers.
My wife and I are out a grand or so and the time and expense to go back to somewhere we don't live anymore to swear out criminal complaints. Its more than just a nuisance. But imagine if we had moved somewhere really far away, she'd have got away with being a parasite and she'd still be out there preying on others, perhaps you!
Yes there are aspects of '1984' and 'Big Brother' which are worrisome but we already live under constant surveillance. Except for certain bulk items, (fasteners, drugs, shotgun shells, boxers, biefs, lipstick and the like, which are are tracable by lot number,) every single thing we buy is given a serial number and is tracable from the manufacturing plant all the way to you.
Everything in your possession of any worth has "provenance," has a serial number or a lot number and can be traced all from you, through all others who might have owned it all the way back to the manufacturer or artisan that created it. And I do mean everything: (With apologies to "Sting":-) every fib you lie, every fake-tear you cry, every knife you buy, every scam you try, someone's recorded you.
Right now, most retrieval's a time consuming pain, (and someone's pain is someone else's profit center, crminals as well as honest companies are getting rich off of the fact that verification is still a slow process) but things like the automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS)make it much easier to retrieve information based on biometrics and that's the only difference. The information's ALREADY in there!
Personally, I'm looking forward to Mac OS9 when I can just walk up to my Macs, say "Honey I'm Home!" and they'll actually let me touch the keyboard without shutting down.
The only safegard we need to put on the systems, both machine and human, already in place is that they remain passive observers or arbitrers of access and that they aren't used in predatory fashion.
Microsoft may no longer have "a dogmatic commitment to the PC platform" but the PC platform has a dogmatic commitment to Microsoft. And that platform is going the way of all flesh.
Intel ain't gonna make no more. They've got a whole bunch of new toys they want us to buy and if we're not paying a tithe to Redmond, it means we can afford to spend more on those toys. Intel wants to change partner and is dancing with a Penguin on its new 64 bit ballroom. Motorola's happy with that too.
I suspect we'll see MS go the way DRI did when the Z80 and 8-bit machines got supplanted by the 8086, 68000 and the 16 bit machines...
The war for 16 bits on the desktop was won by Intel and Microsoft Windows against Motorola and the Apple GUI based on their existing pre-eminence in the business market (No manager ever got fired for recommending IBM and then for saving some corporate bucks by recommending IBM compatible.)
The 32-bit skirmishes are now coming to a close with Intel and MS hanging on but with Motorola and Apple still very much in fighting trim.
But now that the x86 architecture is hitting the wall and the PPC chips are crawling up the evolutionary ladder with gigaflop machines with 128-bit wide AltiVec straight out of the Apple boxes.... Expect a change...
Intel doesn't want to put a hundred more billion dollars in anybody else's pocket but their own. Neither does Motorola.
Result? Look for the Free Software Foundation to get some major funding "slid under the door" until it starts to look like a P.A.C.
I find the idea of getting a microchip implanted for the purposes to which it was used a case of blaming the victim.
What we need to do is give our equipment better sensory hardware and the reflexes to use it. I'd like to walk up to a machine and have it recognize ME not something I had implanted for its convenience.
There are only a very few ways our brain to detect anything: * Sight, through organs that sense energy directly, our eyes. **Hearing and touch, through cells that convert pressure into a signal for our brains, (sound is just pressure varied over time.) **Taste and smell, through cells that detect the presence and structure of molecules impinging on receptors. (taste is extremely primitive and limited. You don't so much taste as smell your food by detecting various aromatic compounds.)
We already know how to build and interface with direct energy receptors, pressure sensors and even chemical sensors. You can buy these, off the shelf, to construct devices of incredible sensitivity.
Why don't we work on increasing the machine's ability to sense us rather then relying on some artifice to make up for the lack of engineering.
There was no feedback button where I could have asked if *I* could innovate. Without that possibility, its just BS wrapped up in a flag.
Microsoft is acting like a PAC (politician action committee) or worse like politicians. Well, they should suffer the fate of politicians. There are at least TWO parties in any democracy. They share in the general apathy of the populace and their fortunes are as variable as the last election.
Also their leadership is forced to roll-over.
Would YOU like to be King'O Redmond for a term? What Catbert-ish damage I could inflict!:-)
We're living breathing mobile bags of bio-metric data.
Who is the idiot who figured that we needed tatoos? Anybody could get any tatoo and get it lased off or altered. That's a really, really stupid proposal. Patent offices are no longer the place to nurture budding Einsteins I guess.
I'm me. Really. Like my wife says sometimes, "Its you allright. I just have to scratch and sniff.":-)
It is a clever script and as a bilingual person, I can appreciate the humor. Open source is a wonderful thing in that we can all share how he accomplished it. It also unfortunately exposed some insight into the less plesant side of the coder's personality that I'd rather not know about. To whit: " if (param('phrase')) { $phrase = param('phrase'); $phrase =~ s/^\s*//; $phrase =~ s/\s*$//; $phrase =~ s/\s+//g; $phrase =~ s/\cM//gs; #Macintosh sux D00D my $lang = param('lang') || 'fr'; print "Your Results:\n"; do_results($phrase, $lang . '_en', 'en_' . $lang); print "\n";" As a multiple Mac owner, and Mac OS and MkLinux user, I think you should keep your opinions to yourself. The enemy lives in Redmond, "D00D," and he's sitting on a hundred billion dollars handed over by people who write stupid messages that would never get past peer-review.
The media feeding frenzy that results whenever anything happens to anyone who has become note worthy is an over-reaction but its of little consequence except that other stuff not as "news worthy" loses out in the competition for ad space filler, uh, media coverage.
Is Linus Torvald worthy of our attention but JFK Jr. or Bill Gates are not? It depends on how interested you are (a situation that never lasts very long anyway.)
Ignore the hype and save some dough like I did. I avoided the entire Monica Lewinski debacle so totally that I wouldn't recodnize her in an elevator hawking her new "'Oval Office' brand" knee-pads and dress stain remover. (Okay, I didn't buy a news paper or watch TV news for almost a year to avoid the "star-f*cker".)
You only pay attention if you care and look else where if you don't. The ubiquity of the coverage may become a tad annoying but that's as much a reflection of your interest, or more precisely, lack there-of, as it is a reflection of the media's need for something to fill their pages with (regardless of the sentiments and level of interest of the producer's and editor's of the media pieces.)
Its too bad that the Kennedy/Bessettes crashed and sank but its not as important to me as it would be if *I* crashed and sank. Sad but there it is.
Propaganda isn't what it was when Lenie Rifenstal created "Triumph of the Will" because the media are no longer what it was back then: a tightly controlled mouth-piece for the powers that were or are. Media are now degenerate (I don't mean that in a pejorative way, just a factual one,) trivialized and specialized.
Don't perpetuate topics you don't care about by lamenting them.
Do Palm Pilots make you more productive? In and of themselves" No. Not anymore than a dictionary makes you a better writer. (But at leest u cun spel.:-)
Productivity is a hard one to measure anyway. Kust ask Alan Greenspan and the Fed. who are just beginning to realize that wealth is not only measured by the number of cars and refrigirators you own and the health of the economy is not measured by how many cars and refrigirators you make.
The benefits of productivity don't begin until you use your Palm Pilot to save yourself some time with looking up data or to eliminate re-entering data.
Then they save you something priceless. Something wich even Bill Gates can't afford to buy. They save you time.
They may be great toys but their usefulness begins with, uh, their utility.
If you can talk anybody into delivering an SMP box with 128x1.GHz Merceds with 16 GB of RAM in it for a reasonable amount of dough, I'll hock my car:-)
Wow, that would make for some absolute killer 'Point-n-Shoot' games. Cyber-cannon-fodder with some real AI, man!
with apologies to Matt Groenig, but High school is Hell. Mine sure was!
To make matters worse I was going from French school to English school, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and even as a puny, four-foot tall kid, I got into way too many fights, until some kind soul took me aside and taught me how to swear properly in English. (Oh, and I grew a foot, put on sixty pounds of muscle and stopped pulling my punches...)
Kids are cruel, conformist, slaves-to-fashion and God help anyone who doesn't fit the mold. And you're never told what the mold-of-the-week is either. High school was a hemorhoid and I often dreamed of making the evening news: ANGRY YOUTH SLAYS 330+ NO SURVIVORS!
The diference is that in Canada, guns are a real pain-in-the-ass to get a hold of so I'm not currently doing a whole bunch of consecutive life terms. (Legalized murder, sorry capital punishment, not being de rigeur there either.)
Too many guns, too many hormones, to many stupid students who fake being too bright and you end up with shools with too many dead students.
Its sad, its sick and the Weapons Manufacturers clearly share in the blame. Weapons without concience have caused multiple tens of millions of deaths in this century. Until we learn how to make them not to act without cause, we'll keep the worms fed.
-Charles-A.
Oh, I got initiative, but a life and a wife :-)
on
Linuxnewbie.org
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· Score: 1
Hello all,
well, I'm a *real* Linux newbie and I'm starting to believe that a site like that (one with a REALLY well indexed set of pages,) is really necessary. Specially if, like me, you're standing outside the pool watching everybody swim.
Previously I'd only installed RedHat 5.1 on a Pentium PC and didn't understand what I was really doing. I know it never crashed but I never really used it enough to crash it It was dual-boot and I crashed Windoze, uh, quite a bit more...:-)
As far as I can see, its only an OS. Its a GREAT OS but its only an OS. Once you've set up the accounts, then what?
Just to make things more complicated, the PC is history and I'm running on three Macs now (7200/75, G3/300 and an iMac/233.)
I want to use the 7200/75 as a firewall/comm server shoving/taking packets at/from the other two but I have no idea what to set up or how.
I am not even sure what version of Linux would work...MkLinux, LinuxPPC, YellowDog?
I can tell that I've got some decisions to make but I have no info on which to base 'em.
This site is NOT a great resource, by the way. Its a great place to watch the Linux world flow-by but I am not picking up much uselful info.
And, by the way, I don't want to spend three months learning Sys Admin stuff that I can only hope I'll never need to know again before I can use it, because I want to do some stuff that I consider real work.
Slashdot Mirror
I just had two ideas.
:-)
What if you were able to use a PlayStation2 as the user interface to your Linux/PC box in a really well integrated fashion?
XWindows and really fast rendering with hard-/firm-ware acceleration without having to buy some ridiculously over priced PC card, and it can play some games too.
Think of doing VR without watching the screen update about as quickly as glaciers flow.
C'mon guys there must be a way we can USE this!
The second idea is unrelated but here goes:
How many companies sell Linux distributions?
And that's competition your honor...
How many companies sell Windows distributions?
And that's a monopoly your honor...
Now lets put that topic to bed, without its supper.
Speaking one of the people in the office who checks out /. at least once a day and as a 46 year-old software professional with twenty five years in the field, I can definitely reassure that this is not a board for fifteen year old Linux afficionadoes.
Great! Another book stating the obvious that nobody will read.
The problem is that nobody will read and apply anything from this book any more than they did when IBM came out with CUA guidelines manual when they created OS/2. (And that one just covered the obvious but it covered a lot of it! Even way back when before Windows 3.0)
Most software is drek because there is no QA done. This is specially true of the UI. Most skins and themes deserve to get their authors a good thrashing behind the wood shed. Finding a gem means that you had to devastate a resource somewhere.
No I didn't write the book, but I wrote the article(s) specially Rovira Diagrams (Computer Language Magazine, Jan 1990, V7N1) which gives some hints about how to think about how you integrate GUI into your apps and how you specify, code and document them...
I'll be glad when I stop looking at crap and the GUI isn't just look&feel by people who think stolen milk crates is an interior decorating "style."
Have you been in touch with Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, et al. about what they've been doing with Smalltalk (now called "Squeak!",) about what can be done to help children and others with active imaginations use computers to their best advantages?
Quality Assurance is a process that makes the difference between M$'s security holes and a secure system.
Quality Assurance is a process that let you pick up a system and shake all the bugs out.
Quality Assurance is a process for building systems st that you maintain a knowledge base to identify ALL components of a system, ALL objects, ALL methods, ALL relationships, ALL functionality and completely cross-reference eveny meme in teh knowledge base.
Quality Assurance lets you deliver a system to your clients and live with it afterwards.
That said, most corporate QA efforts are poorly implemplemented and lacadaisically enforced retrofits. QA at start-ups are lousy and the products can't evolve and don't outlast the creation team.
While there are many other possibilities for "Geek O' the Millenium" the man who I feel truly personified Geekdom and who was supremely unconcerned about it was Richard Feinman.
From the development of Feinman diagrams to the resolution of the Shuttle Explosion debacle with Occam-like wit and precision, his life is an example all self proclaimed Geeks must bow to.
-Charles-A.
I don't think that Corel would sell, (I lived in Ottawa for a decade and the owner's mansion is familiar on sight, it REALLY stick out in the neighborhood, thank God for spruce trees. They keep their foliage in the snow :-) There's too much ego involved with Corel, but if, IF this can be engineered, how long do you think WordPerfect Suite 8+ would stay closed source?
I LOVE WP's file format. I was able to write stuff in Smalltalk/V (deceased now...) to parse WP files to extract information a long time ago, as opposed to the mess from Redmond which isn't compatible with itself. I'd love to write stuff like that again.
-Charles-A.
Canada's DCIEM? You must have got to work with some interesting toys.
You're merely describing the schism caused by dichotomy between the somatic sense "I'm sitting in a chair with a mouse in my mand and a hand on a key board" and the cognitive sense "I'm runnning through a corridor with a on my ass.
This is one of the biggest problems with games. It leads to disorientation and nausea. I know a sys admin who wants to use the process hunter-killer interface and he'll do his darndest to implement on the Sun boxes he got at work but he'll hurl the first time he tries to use it.
Doom used to introduce up and down motion to simulate the physical effect of walking and running around. Haven't played in yonks so I'm foggy.
The reason for vehicles in VR is partly what you said and partly to restore credibility (I was lugging fifty rockets at a time in Doom. Like thats ever going to happen. I'd be crushed to death if fifty rockets were dropped on me.)
With Descent you couldn't do it any other way. And getting used to six degrees of freedom was no picknick. (My hat's off to air jocks of every stripe.)
A 2D or 3D mesh (interposed as 'virtuality' between the viewer and the view) would probably work well in a HUD. Rotation tracked to correspond with head rotation and the grid disappearing when it encounters what it estimates is the distance to an object would help further. Ranges to targets, recognized unfriendlies etc. could be displayed as well.
Of course that merely side steps your issue by actually allowing the person(s) to actually move.
The other solution would be a holodeck.
The room has to be large enough that motion is practical. The floor would have to be made of large tiles which can be pivoted and rotated to redirect the individual(s) away from the wall while the scenery projected/displayed on the walls floor and ceiling rotate to accomodate the new direction.
The only remaining obstacle would be a slight dizzyness introduced between the somatic 'inner-ear' and the perceived (sight sound etc.) though changing the direction of an oncoming breeze would be an interesting exercise.
You're still talking about implementing the holodeck from the Voyager.
Maybe when we can grow components (pico technology from HP labs et alia,) and paint them onto the walls celiing and floor tiles...
The concept is called "deep contextual dependency."
It works all right for extracting meaning and for translating documents without nuance or unidiomatically (See National Weather Service of Canada automatic weather advisory translation.)
We can translate WORDS without difficulty. We can parse and deconstruct sometimes surprisingly complex sentences. The problems come when we try to deal with the fact that we don't speak in words.
We USE words, sometimes the wrong ones though Malapropisms are less of a problem nowadays with the spread of mass media spreading too few languages like manure. There is pretty good concensual agreement on the meaning of any word.
But, unless we're really anal-retentive or WASP, but I repeat myself, we usually back up or demonstrate our meaning with gestural cues.
We SPEAK in sentence fragments and often, like cats purring, we aren't really communicating a damn thing, except "Hello I'm here. Don't kill me." Most of what passes for communication is just interpersonal noise.
The problems of automatic translation arise because we don't speak or even think in words. We think in sentence fragments.
To complicate things, the words we use in constructing those fragments are often not words that bear any relationship with the thought being expressed by the sentence fragment.
"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" is a great example of a consensually determined, historically derived idiomatic fragment sequence used to express a single thought. It is directly untranslatable.
Don't know what it means? Not not sure of what it means? Then you don't come from a Judao-Christian, AngloSaxon family that at least paid lip-service to the church and to Shakespear. There IS a concept and a context expressed with the phrase but most of us would dance around trying to express it to a foreigner (or a computer.)
To understand it, you need to be a part of the consensus that was the socio-cultural caldrom that cooked up the expression in the first place. (Did you spot the idiomatic expession in that last sentence?)
Not to disagree with Suzanne Vega, but Language IS liguid. It may not be able to rush in but it is constantly deforming to fill the ill-defined vessels that speak it.
Machine translation will require that our machines not only become more like us but join us in constructing language
Ooh Boy,
the mind reels with potential Shakespearean references, here. I wonder if the next generation will be called the "Oberon"? Or if they will just cut the crap and show us their "Bottom"
Or will they market this turkey with a "DS9" flair as a Ferengi invention and expect people to bid on 'em with bars of Latanum.
I'm getting a G4 chip based box and I'll have gigaflop rather than a marketing-flop.
Reverse engineering is not a problem, in an open-source community. But sometimes you just want to make sure your backers get a return for their investment. (We'll get back to the open-source model in a minute.)
I work for a company which invested hundred's of millions of dollars, that nine integers worth of dough, in a row folks, and fifteen years in the doing, developping a complex monster of a financial data model. This thing is REALLY complete.
Now you may just think that anything less than a billion is pocket change for Bill G. But we're not Bill G. Neither were our investors and some of us sweated blood to evolve this beast.
How would you feel if YOU and a couple of hundred of your friends had worked for years on something only to see your potential for break-even vanish to null, zip, nada, nothing, by somebody swiping a copy of your database, publishing the data dictionary and reverse-engineering the software you worked fifteen years on to build interfaces to all the data tables.
I'd venture to offer: "Very broke and broken hearted." Not to mention angry enough to sick a law firm full of angry paperwork at the perpetrators to get them to "cease and decist."
No, Reverse engineering is not a problem in an open-source community. Because it shouldn't happen. The development should have been collaborative from the get go.
Open-source is a great concept, if a project was started as open-source and everybody chips in to improve the product and its place in the market and doesn't rip-off the concept or the source code depriving the originators of revenue by contributing nothing and reaping the rewards.
Also the project has to come first and be acknowledged as THE project. Its no good if we have another Apache project competing for web services or another Samba competing for intersystem operability. You have to contribute to Apache and Samba and not just grab the code and, uh, fork off.
That's what the corporate world, the backers and users of the fruits of our labors are really worried about. The technical issues don't bother them. Like everybody else, they don't understand them.
I'm still a little leary of all these Linux distributions. I'm not the only one. Luckily, GNU/Linux, Apache, Samba, (Mozilla some day, I hope,) and a host of other products were well controlled and evolved in a collaborative yet well-controlled atmosphere.
That's rare and I'm going to OpenSource / OpenScience 99 at Brookhaven labs tomorrow to see what is being done to spread the faith.
Because its the the competitive aspects of the development process for all of the other 'stuff' that's a real worry.
That's why there's a hundred lousy accounting packages out there rather than just ONE great one... That's why there's a hundred lousy payroll packages out there rather than ONE great one. We haven't yet learned to share and play nice with the other children.
Say we learn to spread the wealth, that begs the question "How do you spread the cost?"
So far, lets face it GNU/Linux, Samba, Apache and a whole lot of other software out there is at the beginning of the cost curve. We're not talking millions of dollars here. The development has to date been very Mom-and-Pop and devoted hobbyist.
Will the development slow to a crawl when its not something that's universally needed, like an OS or a Web server, but gets into niches, like financial models or if something get really expensive to build.
Can an open-source approach work in the alleys off of the Bazzar? That's THE question and we have to come up with a right answer, a complete answer.
Because if we're to reach farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, let's make sure the giants are not heading in separate directions and leaving us, the development community (not just the hackers) hovering precariously over a growing chasm.
Hello, I went to the link offered on the page:o r/docs/dg092499.htm .
:-) every fib you lie, every fake-tear you cry, every knife you buy, every scam you try, someone's recorded you.
http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/columns/gillm
Its got nothing to do with face recognition.
Too bad, I'm a firm believer in letting our computers and other systems which require authentication recognize us for who we are (biometrics) rather than what we know (passwords and PINs) because it requires nothing from us but being ourselves and makes it MUCH harder for somebody else to pretend to be us. This applies far beyond just cracking computer systems.
My wife and I have been victims of forgery and criminal impersonation because some ethically challenged old family "friend" found (stole really,) some blank checks and an SS# and ran up thousands of dollars in forged cheques, a phony credit card application and thousands in fraudulent credit card charges. (she 'copped a plea' in one case but the other has not yet come to trial so I'm not going to post her image with a large red warning on it.)
That person was not very good at running scams and she got caught for both offenses, but the crimes shouldn't have happened in the first place. They wouldn't have if the systems were vigilant and had proper recognition mechanisms. Computers are 'patient' and 'vigilant' but they are still too 'gullible' for our collective good.
Credit cards and other fiscal instruments which are tagged with biometric data constitute an excellent line of defense for financial institutions and us, their customers.
My wife and I are out a grand or so and the time and expense to go back to somewhere we don't live anymore to swear out criminal complaints. Its more than just a nuisance. But imagine if we had moved somewhere really far away, she'd have got away with being a parasite and she'd still be out there preying on others, perhaps you!
Yes there are aspects of '1984' and 'Big Brother' which are worrisome but we already live under constant surveillance. Except for certain bulk items, (fasteners, drugs, shotgun shells, boxers, biefs, lipstick and the like, which are are tracable by lot number,) every single thing we buy is given a serial number and is tracable from the manufacturing plant all the way to you.
Everything in your possession of any worth has "provenance," has a serial number or a lot number and can be traced all from you, through all others who might have owned it all the way back to the manufacturer or artisan that created it. And I do mean everything: (With apologies to "Sting"
Right now, most retrieval's a time consuming pain, (and someone's pain is someone else's profit center, crminals as well as honest companies are getting rich off of the fact that verification is still a slow process) but things like the automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS)make it much easier to retrieve information based on biometrics and that's the only difference. The information's ALREADY in there!
Personally, I'm looking forward to Mac OS9 when I can just walk up to my Macs, say "Honey I'm Home!" and they'll actually let me touch the keyboard without shutting down.
The only safegard we need to put on the systems, both machine and human, already in place is that they remain passive observers or arbitrers of access and that they aren't used in predatory fashion.
Microsoft may no longer have "a dogmatic commitment to the PC platform" but the PC platform has a dogmatic commitment to Microsoft. And that platform is going the way of all flesh.
... Expect a change ...
:-)
Intel ain't gonna make no more. They've got a whole bunch of new toys they want us to buy and if we're not paying a tithe to Redmond, it means we can afford to spend more on those toys. Intel wants to change partner and is dancing with a Penguin on its new 64 bit ballroom. Motorola's happy with that too.
I suspect we'll see MS go the way DRI did when the Z80 and 8-bit machines got supplanted by the 8086, 68000 and the 16 bit machines...
The war for 16 bits on the desktop was won by Intel and Microsoft Windows against Motorola and the Apple GUI based on their existing pre-eminence in the business market (No manager ever got fired for recommending IBM and then for saving some corporate bucks by recommending IBM compatible.)
The 32-bit skirmishes are now coming to a close with Intel and MS hanging on but with Motorola and Apple still very much in fighting trim.
But now that the x86 architecture is hitting the wall and the PPC chips are crawling up the evolutionary ladder with gigaflop machines with 128-bit wide AltiVec straight out of the Apple boxes.
Intel doesn't want to put a hundred more billion dollars in anybody else's pocket but their own. Neither does Motorola.
Result? Look for the Free Software Foundation to get some major funding "slid under the door" until it starts to look like a P.A.C.
(You heard the prognostication here first!
I find the idea of getting a microchip implanted for the purposes to which it was used a case of blaming the victim.
What we need to do is give our equipment better sensory hardware and the reflexes to use it. I'd like to walk up to a machine and have it recognize ME not something I had implanted for its convenience.
There are only a very few ways our brain to detect anything:
* Sight, through organs that sense energy
directly, our eyes.
**Hearing and touch, through cells that convert
pressure into a signal for our brains,
(sound is just pressure varied over time.)
**Taste and smell, through cells that detect the
presence and structure of molecules impinging
on receptors. (taste is extremely primitive and
limited. You don't so much taste as smell your
food by detecting various aromatic compounds.)
We already know how to build and interface with direct energy receptors, pressure sensors and even chemical sensors. You can buy these, off the shelf, to construct devices of incredible sensitivity.
Why don't we work on increasing the machine's ability to sense us rather then relying on some artifice to make up for the lack of engineering.
-Charles-A.
I went, I saw and I was not conquered.
:-)
There was no feedback button where I could have asked if *I* could innovate. Without that possibility, its just BS wrapped up in a flag.
Microsoft is acting like a PAC (politician action committee) or worse like politicians. Well, they should suffer the fate of politicians. There are at least TWO parties in any democracy. They share in the general apathy of the populace and their fortunes are as variable as the last election.
Also their leadership is forced to roll-over.
Would YOU like to be King'O Redmond for a term? What Catbert-ish damage I could inflict!
-Charles-A.
We're living breathing mobile bags of bio-metric data.
:-)
Who is the idiot who figured that we needed tatoos? Anybody could get any tatoo and get it lased off or altered. That's a really, really stupid proposal. Patent offices are no longer the place to nurture budding Einsteins I guess.
I'm me. Really. Like my wife says sometimes, "Its you allright. I just have to scratch and sniff."
-Charles-A.
It is a clever script and as a bilingual person, I can appreciate the humor. Open source is a wonderful thing in that we can all share how he accomplished it. It also unfortunately exposed some insight into the less plesant side of the coder's personality that I'd rather not know about. To whit: " if (param('phrase')) { $phrase = param('phrase'); $phrase =~ s/^\s*//; $phrase =~ s/\s*$//; $phrase =~ s/\s+/ /g; $phrase =~ s/\cM//gs; #Macintosh sux D00D my $lang = param('lang') || 'fr'; print "Your Results:\n"; do_results($phrase, $lang . '_en', 'en_' . $lang); print "\n";" As a multiple Mac owner, and Mac OS and MkLinux user, I think you should keep your opinions to yourself. The enemy lives in Redmond, "D00D," and he's sitting on a hundred billion dollars handed over by people who write stupid messages that would never get past peer-review.
The media feeding frenzy that results whenever anything happens to anyone who has become note worthy is an over-reaction but its of little consequence except that other stuff not as "news worthy" loses out in the competition for ad space filler, uh, media coverage.
Is Linus Torvald worthy of our attention but JFK Jr. or Bill Gates are not? It depends on how interested you are (a situation that never lasts very long anyway.)
Ignore the hype and save some dough like I did. I avoided the entire Monica Lewinski debacle so totally that I wouldn't recodnize her in an elevator hawking her new "'Oval Office' brand" knee-pads and dress stain remover. (Okay, I didn't buy a news paper or watch TV news for almost a year to avoid the "star-f*cker".)
You only pay attention if you care and look else where if you don't. The ubiquity of the coverage may become a tad annoying but that's as much a reflection of your interest, or more precisely, lack there-of, as it is a reflection of the media's need for something to fill their pages with (regardless of the sentiments and level of interest of the producer's and editor's of the media pieces.)
Its too bad that the Kennedy/Bessettes crashed and sank but its not as important to me as it would be if *I* crashed and sank. Sad but there it is.
Propaganda isn't what it was when Lenie Rifenstal created "Triumph of the Will" because the media are no longer what it was back then: a tightly controlled mouth-piece for the powers that were or are. Media are now degenerate (I don't mean that in a pejorative way, just a factual one,) trivialized and specialized.
Don't perpetuate topics you don't care about by lamenting them.
-Charles-A.
Do Palm Pilots make you more productive? In and of themselves" No. Not anymore than a dictionary makes you a better writer. (But at leest u cun spel. :-)
Productivity is a hard one to measure anyway. Kust ask Alan Greenspan and the Fed. who are just beginning to realize that wealth is not only measured by the number of cars and refrigirators you own and the health of the economy is not measured by how many cars and refrigirators you make.
The benefits of productivity don't begin until you use your Palm Pilot to save yourself some time with looking up data or to eliminate re-entering data.
Then they save you something priceless. Something wich even Bill Gates can't afford to buy. They save you time.
They may be great toys but their usefulness begins with, uh, their utility.
-Charles-A.
Way Cool indeed.
:-)
If you can talk anybody into delivering an SMP box with 128x1.GHz Merceds with 16 GB of RAM in it for a reasonable amount of dough, I'll hock my car
Wow, that would make for some absolute killer 'Point-n-Shoot' games. Cyber-cannon-fodder with some real AI, man!
-Charles
Hi,
with apologies to Matt Groenig, but High school is Hell. Mine sure was!
To make matters worse I was going from French school to English school, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and even as a puny, four-foot tall kid, I got into way too many fights, until some kind soul took me aside and taught me how to swear properly in English. (Oh, and I grew a foot, put on sixty pounds of muscle and stopped pulling my punches...)
Kids are cruel, conformist, slaves-to-fashion and God help anyone who doesn't fit the mold. And you're never told what the mold-of-the-week is either. High school was a hemorhoid and I often dreamed of making the evening news: ANGRY YOUTH SLAYS 330+ NO SURVIVORS!
The diference is that in Canada, guns are a real pain-in-the-ass to get a hold of so I'm not currently doing a whole bunch of consecutive life terms. (Legalized murder, sorry capital punishment, not being de rigeur there either.)
Too many guns, too many hormones, to many stupid students who fake being too bright and you end up with shools with too many dead students.
Its sad, its sick and the Weapons Manufacturers clearly share in the blame. Weapons without concience have caused multiple tens of millions of deaths in this century. Until we learn how to make them not to act without cause, we'll keep the worms fed.
-Charles-A.
Hello all,
:-)
well, I'm a *real* Linux newbie and I'm starting to believe that a site like that (one with a REALLY well indexed set of pages,) is really necessary. Specially if, like me, you're standing outside the pool watching everybody swim.
Previously I'd only installed RedHat 5.1 on a Pentium PC and didn't understand what I was really doing. I know it never crashed but I never really used it enough to crash it It was dual-boot and I crashed Windoze, uh, quite a bit more...
As far as I can see, its only an OS. Its a GREAT OS but its only an OS. Once you've set up the accounts, then what?
Just to make things more complicated, the PC is history and I'm running on three Macs now (7200/75, G3/300 and an iMac/233.)
I want to use the 7200/75 as a firewall/comm server shoving/taking packets at/from the other two but I have no idea what to set up or how.
I am not even sure what version of Linux would work...MkLinux, LinuxPPC, YellowDog?
I can tell that I've got some decisions to make but I have no info on which to base 'em.
This site is NOT a great resource, by the way. Its a great place to watch the Linux world flow-by but I am not picking up much uselful info.
And, by the way, I don't want to spend three months learning Sys Admin stuff that I can only hope I'll never need to know again before I can use it, because I want to do some stuff that I consider real work.
-Charles-A.