This is the first time I've been back here in a while. I decided to try it when I realized reddit's downtime is probably going to be a while. I still feel a reverence for this place. It sort of reminds me of going back and visiting my university.
They must have really jacked up the price in the past two years. In 2006, parking was $15-$20 within the radius of a 5 minute walk to the convention center. Our group even arrived late in the morning on most days and still had parking available.
It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly. If your mail passes through the USA, this is unavoidable.
The fiber optic infrastructure you paid for was never delivered.
Starting in the early 1990's, with a push from the Clinton-Gore Administration's "Information Superhighway", every Bell company - SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest - made commitments to rewire America, state by state. Fiber optic wires would replace the 100-year old copper wiring. The push caused techno-frenzy of major proportions. By 2006, 86 million households should have had a service capable of 45 Mbps in both directions, (to and from the customer) could handle over 500 channels of high quality video and be deployed in rural, urban and suburban areas equally. And these networks were open to ALL competition.
In order to pay for these upgrades, in state after state, the public service commissions and state legislatures acquiesced to the Bells' promises by removing the constraints on the Bells' profits as well as gave other financial perks. They were able to print money - billions of dollars per state - all collected in the form of higher phone rates and tax perks. (Note: each state is different.)
* ADSL is not what was promised and paid for. It goes over the old copper wiring, can't achieve the speed, has problems in rural areas and is mostly one-way.
* The public subsidies for infrastructure were pocketed. The phone companies collected over $200 billion in higher phone rates and tax perks, about $2000 per household.
* The World is Laughing at US. Korea and Japan have 100 Mbps services as standard, and America could have been Number One had the phone companies actually delivered. Instead, we are 16th in broadband and falling in technology dominance.
* Harm to the economy. Five trillion dollars was lost because new technologies and services that America would have developed, happened in Korea. Municipalities around America are waking up to the fact that the phone companies failed to deliver and are now doing Wifi and fiber-based work-arounds.
* The promised networks couldn't be built in 1993 and state laws were changed based on "deceptive speech". The technology today still has problems delivering 500 channels.
* The phone companies pulled a bait and switch. In order to offer DSL over copper, it was not necessary to have state regulation changed. Their plan was to get rid of regulations and enter long distance.
* The Bell mergers resulted in the death of the state plans for fiber optic broadband. Over 26 states had fiber optic projects closed when the mergers of SBC and Verizon were completed. That affected almost 80% of all phone customers in the US.
What I'm wondering is with these supercapacitors and super-batteries we're making, how long until we start reading news reports about people stealing joules from unsecured outdoor power outlets? =)
Even today, fashion (clothing, accessories, etc) is not copyrightable, and yet it's one of the fastest-moving industries. We also see new costumes, recipes, and perfumes/colognes as well, and those are not patentable or copyrightable.
One might be able to argue that a lack of a copyright monopoly would spur *more* competition and innovation -- to stay ahead of the counterfeiters.
I'm also in PBC. The power flickered for a second making my UPSes beep, but that was about it. My A/C (and probably water heater) were offline for a few hours though, due to load management installed in all the apartments in my apartment complex.
Not only that, but if your job is a source of your depression, you can't change jobs because you will risk losing your insurance. So people just stick to the job and treat the symptoms.
Perhaps reasonable annual renewal fee would be ((y - 20)^4) * x, rounded up to an even dollar, where: y = copyright age in years x = value of 1/1000th of an ounce of gold
At the current price of gold (1oz. = $910), some example fees would be:
y+21: $1
y+22: $15 (sum: $16)
y+23: $74 (sum: $90)
y+24: $233 (sum: $323)
y+25: $569 (sum: $892)
y+30: $9,100 (sum: $23,056)
y+35: $46,069 (sum: $162,269)
y+40: $145,600 (sum: $657,634)
y+50: $737,100 (sum: $4,799,351)
y+60: $2,329,600 (sum: $19,821,029)
y+75: $8,327,069 (sum: $95,811,777)
y+100: $37,273,600 (sum: $615,169,736)
The reason for basing it on gold is that we should use something with a stable value which will not be affected by currency inflation, otherwise these fees would effectively become less expensive as years pass. (Note: It doesn't have to be gold, just something with a fairly stable value).
Since most DS game ROMs are 16-128MB and the DS only has 4MB of RAM, it would not be possible to sell normal full DS games through such a download system without some kind of memory expansion. It would still be neat to be able to download demos and maybe even buy minigames that are persisted on the Wii though =)
You hit on a good point here. Most people in SL are amaeturs. They don't know how to, or are unwilling to expend the effort to optimize. These people don't have the same skill as a team of professional game designers, who tweak every polygon for maximum speed.
Even those in SL with some skill are limited by the tools that they are given.
Professionally-designed games take into account the maximum number of movable objects that the physics engine will have to deal with, and they probabaly design for a maximum number of polygons that might ever appear on the screen at once. SL doesn't specifically try to limit its users in these ways (other than some really minor inconsequential things like 31 primitives per solid physical object), nor does LL (the company that runs SL) provide guidelines or suggestions on improving efficiency in these regards.
Because of the very high overhead of script processing, the pipe dream of player-created "mini MMOs" has never materialized
The main limitations I encountered in this area were:
Scripts are limited to 16 kilobytes of memory in a very high level language which is not very memory efficient
Communications between objects is very crude and unreliable
Communications to the outside world are very unstable, and bandwidth-limited, preventing you from developing a reliable "core" server which controls the global aspects of the game.
Geography is very expensive in SL. A 256x256 meter region will cost you over a thousand dollars up front, and $300 per month in maintenance.
Regions are practically limited to about 30-40 users before performace becomes unusuable, especially in a game environment.
Timing-dependent actions are often thwarted by latency from several of the above issues.
One significant shackle to Second Life is the fact of player-created content: when SL releases a feature, players build around that feature's abilities AND limitations.
A very good example of this is a "transparency" hack that people took advantage of long ago to make parts of their avatar invisible by masking them with a special texture that caused an alpha bug in the graphics engine at the time.
Now that so much content has been made to rely on this, the developers have to explicitly code around this and implement it in future versions using an extra rendering pass. If this capability had been written explicitly into the graphics engine when people started to demonstrate a demand for it, it could be adapted far more elegantly as the engine evolved.
Another example is the 256x256 meter region design. Many scripts (and presumably server code) have been written now which expect this as a constant, making it impractical/unpopular to expand the region size (e.g., to 512x512 or even 65536x65536).
There are many other SL-style "sandbox"/microtransaction games currently in development on the premise of "great idea but Linden Labs is running it poorly enough that there is opportunity for others in the same product type".
Unfortunately most or perhaps all of these seem to be designed around the idea of creating your own turnkey MMO instead of a generic realtime dyanamic platform like SL. I do look forward to the day that another competing service opens up though, as I have abandoned hope for SL ever opening a second system that is completely redesigned based on lessons that they learned the first time around.
Generally, each 256x256 meter region of SL runs on it's own core (it used to be one region per CPU prior to multicore hardware). This limits each region to about 40 or so users, but the entire grid of regions is theoretically able to scale indefinitely. In reality though, there are grid-wide services that need to work too (e.g., the asset server), and those have some serious problems scaling with a growing population.
Unfortunately, SL was developed in a very "duct tape and bailing wire style" early on, so they have some long-term legacy issues that they have been struggling with for quite some time. At this point, I don't think refactoring can fix their problems; a complete re-write using a much more elegant design may be in order. I personally think that the developers are too set in their ways to make this happen though, so I look forward to a new company to come along some day to evolve the virtual reality platform.
More likely is that one or more US States will secede from the union and either petition to join Canada or be independent rather than stay in JebusLand.
Reading this excited me momentarily until I realized how unlikely it is. =/
Slashdot Mirror
The article is 404'd and I'm not seeing any other news of this. Did someone jump the gun? The w3c page still says "proposed recommendation".
This is the first time I've been back here in a while. I decided to try it when I realized reddit's downtime is probably going to be a while. I still feel a reverence for this place. It sort of reminds me of going back and visiting my university.
Digg can rot in hell.
They must have really jacked up the price in the past two years. In 2006, parking was $15-$20 within the radius of a 5 minute walk to the convention center. Our group even arrived late in the morning on most days and still had parking available.
I love how a candidate who supports the suspension of habeas corpus is now considered a "moderate".
America is lost.
The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal
Here's a summary of the relevant points:
Wouldn't you like your $2000 back?
What I'm wondering is with these supercapacitors and super-batteries we're making, how long until we start reading news reports about people stealing joules from unsecured outdoor power outlets? =)
Maybe Smug-Block could be an add-on for StupidFilter. =)
The Paradox of the Heap
Even today, fashion (clothing, accessories, etc) is not copyrightable, and yet it's one of the fastest-moving industries. We also see new costumes, recipes, and perfumes/colognes as well, and those are not patentable or copyrightable.
One might be able to argue that a lack of a copyright monopoly would spur *more* competition and innovation -- to stay ahead of the counterfeiters.
I'm also in PBC. The power flickered for a second making my UPSes beep, but that was about it. My A/C (and probably water heater) were offline for a few hours though, due to load management installed in all the apartments in my apartment complex.
Not only that, but if your job is a source of your depression, you can't change jobs because you will risk losing your insurance. So people just stick to the job and treat the symptoms.
y = copyright age in years
x = value of 1/1000th of an ounce of gold
At the current price of gold (1oz. = $910), some example fees would be:
- y+21: $1
- y+22: $15 (sum: $16)
- y+23: $74 (sum: $90)
- y+24: $233 (sum: $323)
- y+25: $569 (sum: $892)
- y+30: $9,100 (sum: $23,056)
- y+35: $46,069 (sum: $162,269)
- y+40: $145,600 (sum: $657,634)
- y+50: $737,100 (sum: $4,799,351)
- y+60: $2,329,600 (sum: $19,821,029)
- y+75: $8,327,069 (sum: $95,811,777)
- y+100: $37,273,600 (sum: $615,169,736)
The reason for basing it on gold is that we should use something with a stable value which will not be affected by currency inflation, otherwise these fees would effectively become less expensive as years pass. (Note: It doesn't have to be gold, just something with a fairly stable value).For reference, here are the top 10 grossing movies from 1987:
Top 20 songs:
I'd say these have all pretty much had their run by now.
I found this quite interesting:
pi is close to sqrt(g), where g = gravitational acceleration on the surface of Earth in m/(s^2).
Apparently, this is not a coincidence.
What piss me off is people disbelieving in God's existence just because they can't scientifically prove it.
Why do you have to be "pissed off"? Why not just let people believe what they want and go on with your life?
Since most DS game ROMs are 16-128MB and the DS only has 4MB of RAM, it would not be possible to sell normal full DS games through such a download system without some kind of memory expansion. It would still be neat to be able to download demos and maybe even buy minigames that are persisted on the Wii though =)
This company sells ultracap modules in 5, 15, 16.2, 48.6, and 75 volts.
What is the name of the space that contains Universes?
The multiverse?
If there are an infinite number of parallel universes for each possible quantum outcome, why do we only experience -this- one?
One possible explanation: you are the sum of your experiences.
You hit on a good point here. Most people in SL are amaeturs. They don't know how to, or are unwilling to expend the effort to optimize. These people don't have the same skill as a team of professional game designers, who tweak every polygon for maximum speed.
Even those in SL with some skill are limited by the tools that they are given.
Professionally-designed games take into account the maximum number of movable objects that the physics engine will have to deal with, and they probabaly design for a maximum number of polygons that might ever appear on the screen at once. SL doesn't specifically try to limit its users in these ways (other than some really minor inconsequential things like 31 primitives per solid physical object), nor does LL (the company that runs SL) provide guidelines or suggestions on improving efficiency in these regards.
The main limitations I encountered in this area were:
One significant shackle to Second Life is the fact of player-created content: when SL releases a feature, players build around that feature's abilities AND limitations.
A very good example of this is a "transparency" hack that people took advantage of long ago to make parts of their avatar invisible by masking them with a special texture that caused an alpha bug in the graphics engine at the time.
Now that so much content has been made to rely on this, the developers have to explicitly code around this and implement it in future versions using an extra rendering pass. If this capability had been written explicitly into the graphics engine when people started to demonstrate a demand for it, it could be adapted far more elegantly as the engine evolved.
Another example is the 256x256 meter region design. Many scripts (and presumably server code) have been written now which expect this as a constant, making it impractical/unpopular to expand the region size (e.g., to 512x512 or even 65536x65536).
There are many other SL-style "sandbox"/microtransaction games currently in development on the premise of "great idea but Linden Labs is running it poorly enough that there is opportunity for others in the same product type".
Unfortunately most or perhaps all of these seem to be designed around the idea of creating your own turnkey MMO instead of a generic realtime dyanamic platform like SL. I do look forward to the day that another competing service opens up though, as I have abandoned hope for SL ever opening a second system that is completely redesigned based on lessons that they learned the first time around.
Generally, each 256x256 meter region of SL runs on it's own core (it used to be one region per CPU prior to multicore hardware). This limits each region to about 40 or so users, but the entire grid of regions is theoretically able to scale indefinitely. In reality though, there are grid-wide services that need to work too (e.g., the asset server), and those have some serious problems scaling with a growing population.
Unfortunately, SL was developed in a very "duct tape and bailing wire style" early on, so they have some long-term legacy issues that they have been struggling with for quite some time. At this point, I don't think refactoring can fix their problems; a complete re-write using a much more elegant design may be in order. I personally think that the developers are too set in their ways to make this happen though, so I look forward to a new company to come along some day to evolve the virtual reality platform.
More likely is that one or more US States will secede from the union and either petition to join Canada or be independent rather than stay in JebusLand.
Reading this excited me momentarily until I realized how unlikely it is. =/