Second, Java's GUI toolkits are fairly heavy weight
This is probably why SWT came about (in part thanks to IBM).
The first application to use SWT, Eclipse, doesn't feel like a java application because it's using native widgets, which gives the GUI a very snappy response.
If the only strong reason you have avoided programming applications in Java is because of their slow GUI response, I suggest looking into SWT. =)
This is an interesting concept. I never heard this term before today, but it roughly resembles the path I've been headed down lately.
Ever since I broke up with my last g/f two years ago, I've buried myself in online games and virtual worlds, cutting off nearly everyone who I couldn't contact through those environments.
I still have to leave home occasionally to work to pay my share of the bills, but I spend nearly the whole day thinking about getting back to my seclusion, and back in-world and away from the real world.
Did anyone else go to that Cyberkinetics site and get a weird creepy feeling like you couldn't tell if it was a fake website used for viral marketing a sci-fi movie, or if it was real?
How long do you think it'll be before they OCR your license plate using cameras spread around town, track where you go, where you park, and then advertise to you based on your shopping habits?
They wouldn't even need to necessarily know your name or anything, but your license plate would make for a nice unique identifier, like a browser cookie holding a UUID.
When you're driving down the highway these dynamic billboards can then adjust the advertisment to fit whatever "average" ad best fits the group of cars who have the billboard in view.
With enough cameras installed around a city, and a little fancy tag recognition + OCR technology, I don't see what's to stop them from being able to do this now.
I hope they take into consideration some of the plans that are being put into place for DirectX 10 (aka Directx Next). According to this article, it looks like there are going to be a lot of fundamental changes to the underlying architecture in DirectX 10.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to be an advocate of either DirectX or OpenGL, but it would seem like some really *neat* stuff should be possible with the changes mentioned in that article.
There are plenty of places that I can point to where speed limits are entirely too low. Agreed. There is a six-lane highway near where I live where the speed limit was dropped from 55 to 45 because some maniac going 85-90 got into an accident and killed a car full of teenagers.
Now how is it rational to lower the speed limit from 55 to 45 because some maniac was going a ludicrous speed? What does this solve?
Though it makes a great speed trap now. And of course anyone who tries to speak up to raise the limit back to 55 will probably be persecuted as thoughtless about the lives of the kids who were killed.
Exactly. These features will only encourage people to be more wreckless.
Someone who's right on the threshold of falling asleep at the wheel will rationalize in their completely irrational fatigued-mind state that they can "let go" and drift off for a moment because the car will stay on the road and come to a nice safe stop.
Most games should support places like the Gaming Open Market. The website lets the buyers and sellers set their prices, or accept an existing posted transaction, much like a commodity market.
The problem I see with all the games that don't support a place like GOM is that keeping currency exchange against the rules, just makes it so that the cheaters win, while those who stick to the rules lose.
I spend most of my time in Second Life these days, and basically GOM makes it so that you can get paid RL money for your creations. If you keep coming up with creative new builds, you can sell them for virtual currency which you can then exchange for real currency. Of course people who need more virtual currency can do the opposite.
There has been a lot of debate in SL over the ability to make real money from your efforts in-world. Some people claim that now many are motivated to build for money instead of just for the "pure" need to be creative. I generally shrug at this concept because whether or not this is true, it doesn't seem to matter becuase even if you make it against the rules to trade the currency, people will do it anyway. Best thing to do is to find a way to embrace it and channel it in the right direction to do the most good.
Funny they don't list this as one of the strongest probable reasons for the decline.
I quit listening to mainstream music a few years ago. I don't P2P. I don't even listen to music on the radio anymore. I occasionally tune into a live365 station run by friends, but that's about it.
What's going to happen when people start walking around with "personal memory augmenters" that record everything they see and hear for their own personal data mining later on?
Are they going to make such a device illegal because you might wear it to a concert / movie / theme park and then get to play back your experience again later?
What happens when the technology advances so far that it becomes a sort of implant?
When we begin to become practically symbiotic with such a device such that our competitiveness and our daliy lives begin to depend on it more and more, will we still be told by large media organizations what we can and can't re-experience?
When our human memories become fully meshed with technology (which I expect will happen within the next 100 years), where will we draw the line between our rights to re-experience something from memory and the content producer's right to get compensated for repeated experiences?
Heh, I used to be really bad at FPS games. I've spent the last few months in a non-shooting 3d world where you mostly build and script stuff. Even though there was not really any intense shooting action going on, it seemed to help because I'm doing a lot better at FPS games now.
I think hand-eye coordination is definitely an important part, but also conditioning your brain to intuitively perceptualize the 3d-on-2d screen accurately is one aspect that is overlooked.
It helps that the keyboard layouts are mostly standard these days too =D
You have to buy a whole package, which is 90% crap, just to experience the one little piece you really want.
When I'm offered the ability to choose exactly what I want to watch, and I pay for the programming instead of advertisers, then I might come back.
At least then they'll have a direct incentive to make good continuious shows instead of shows which slice up just right for optimal advertising exposure.
Television is like a stench. Once you step away from it for a while, if you try to come back, you realize just how awful it really is.
You forget how blatantly dumb, loud and exploitive commercials are when you're constantly exposed to them. But when you come back after a haitus, you realize just how awful they really are, and how the people who make them deserve to burn in hell.
I've seen how bad television has gotten lately: annoying ads in the corner or bottom of the screen during the program, incessant laugh tracks for people who are too dumb to know what's funny, and advertisments that sound 20db louder than the programme.
There's NO chance I'm coming back. When they start delivering syndicated programming on demand without commercials for a reasonable price, I'll check back in to see if there's still any creativity left. For the meantime, I'm enjoying interactive entertainment.
So, I have to wait to probably download a way to pretend to download the ability to use a virtual representation of a virtual representation of more than just 3 standard game guns?
This is why I can never go back to a traditional MMORPG. The online world I now spend most of my time in lets you make anything you want. When I say "make" I mean build it from primitive shapes, link it together, and write one or more programs to model the behavior for the object.
I love how some MMORPGs claim that they have a free market where you can "craft" objects and sell them to other players.
Their definition of "crafting" is: "run on the levelling treadmill until you earn enough XP to gain permission to instantiate limited copies of objects that we already modeled, textured, and programmed".
Uh, I think I'll stay where I am and build and sell my own objects unimpeded, thank you very much...
Slashdot Mirror
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't all CD-Rs taxed in Canada to compensate copyright holders?
The fact that they named one of their products "Clik" after the whole Click of Death fiasco should tell you that they aren't playing with a full deck.
This is actually fascinating on a geeky level. How do photon-simulated images compare to raytraced images?
:: raytracing : texture mapping?
Would the following be a fair statement?
photon simulation : raytracing
Second, Java's GUI toolkits are fairly heavy weight
This is probably why SWT came about (in part thanks to IBM).
The first application to use SWT, Eclipse, doesn't feel like a java application because it's using native widgets, which gives the GUI a very snappy response.
If the only strong reason you have avoided programming applications in Java is because of their slow GUI response, I suggest looking into SWT. =)
Go outside and look up at a bright star.
I suppose a disclaimer should be made for our sun being an exception. =P
Someday hopefully we will learn everything.
Honestly though, wouldn't that be boring?
This is an interesting concept. I never heard this term before today, but it roughly resembles the path I've been headed down lately.
Ever since I broke up with my last g/f two years ago, I've buried myself in online games and virtual worlds, cutting off nearly everyone who I couldn't contact through those environments.
I still have to leave home occasionally to work to pay my share of the bills, but I spend nearly the whole day thinking about getting back to my seclusion, and back in-world and away from the real world.
Did anyone else go to that Cyberkinetics site and get a weird creepy feeling like you couldn't tell if it was a fake website used for viral marketing a sci-fi movie, or if it was real?
How long do you think it'll be before they OCR your license plate using cameras spread around town, track where you go, where you park, and then advertise to you based on your shopping habits?
They wouldn't even need to necessarily know your name or anything, but your license plate would make for a nice unique identifier, like a browser cookie holding a UUID.
When you're driving down the highway these dynamic billboards can then adjust the advertisment to fit whatever "average" ad best fits the group of cars who have the billboard in view.
With enough cameras installed around a city, and a little fancy tag recognition + OCR technology, I don't see what's to stop them from being able to do this now.
You know, somewhere, someone is taking bets on this...
While Intel may be saving this functionality for their high-end chips, this could backfire on them.
Already your post makes an example of how Intel's chip will be seen as "less secure" than AMD's right from the start.
How long before AMD's marketing people pick up on this and run with it?
I hope they take into consideration some of the plans that are being put into place for DirectX 10 (aka Directx Next). According to this article, it looks like there are going to be a lot of fundamental changes to the underlying architecture in DirectX 10.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to be an advocate of either DirectX or OpenGL, but it would seem like some really *neat* stuff should be possible with the changes mentioned in that article.
There are plenty of places that I can point to where speed limits are entirely too low.
Agreed. There is a six-lane highway near where I live where the speed limit was dropped from 55 to 45 because some maniac going 85-90 got into an accident and killed a car full of teenagers.
Now how is it rational to lower the speed limit from 55 to 45 because some maniac was going a ludicrous speed? What does this solve?
Though it makes a great speed trap now. And of course anyone who tries to speak up to raise the limit back to 55 will probably be persecuted as thoughtless about the lives of the kids who were killed.
Exactly. These features will only encourage people to be more wreckless.
Someone who's right on the threshold of falling asleep at the wheel will rationalize in their completely irrational fatigued-mind state that they can "let go" and drift off for a moment because the car will stay on the road and come to a nice safe stop.
Most games should support places like the Gaming Open Market. The website lets the buyers and sellers set their prices, or accept an existing posted transaction, much like a commodity market.
The problem I see with all the games that don't support a place like GOM is that keeping currency exchange against the rules, just makes it so that the cheaters win, while those who stick to the rules lose.
I spend most of my time in Second Life these days, and basically GOM makes it so that you can get paid RL money for your creations. If you keep coming up with creative new builds, you can sell them for virtual currency which you can then exchange for real currency. Of course people who need more virtual currency can do the opposite.
There has been a lot of debate in SL over the ability to make real money from your efforts in-world. Some people claim that now many are motivated to build for money instead of just for the "pure" need to be creative. I generally shrug at this concept because whether or not this is true, it doesn't seem to matter becuase even if you make it against the rules to trade the currency, people will do it anyway. Best thing to do is to find a way to embrace it and channel it in the right direction to do the most good.
Funny they don't list this as one of the strongest probable reasons for the decline.
I quit listening to mainstream music a few years ago. I don't P2P. I don't even listen to music on the radio anymore. I occasionally tune into a live365 station run by friends, but that's about it.
What's going to happen when people start walking around with "personal memory augmenters" that record everything they see and hear for their own personal data mining later on?
Are they going to make such a device illegal because you might wear it to a concert / movie / theme park and then get to play back your experience again later?
What happens when the technology advances so far that it becomes a sort of implant?
When we begin to become practically symbiotic with such a device such that our competitiveness and our daliy lives begin to depend on it more and more, will we still be told by large media organizations what we can and can't re-experience?
When our human memories become fully meshed with technology (which I expect will happen within the next 100 years), where will we draw the line between our rights to re-experience something from memory and the content producer's right to get compensated for repeated experiences?
BTW, if you're interested in what software some of these organizations use to datamine, take a look at http://www.convera.com/
Agreed. Lindows is a good move towards consumer-based Linux use. They need to keep their priorities in check and focus on the goal.
They've got enough press over this that whatever new name they pick should stick in enough people's minds to ensure their brand has a strong market.
I'd be happy if they'd just port the original 8-bit Legend of Zelda to the GBA.
Heh, I used to be really bad at FPS games. I've spent the last few months in a non-shooting 3d world where you mostly build and script stuff. Even though there was not really any intense shooting action going on, it seemed to help because I'm doing a lot better at FPS games now.
I think hand-eye coordination is definitely an important part, but also conditioning your brain to intuitively perceptualize the 3d-on-2d screen accurately is one aspect that is overlooked.
It helps that the keyboard layouts are mostly standard these days too =D
Television and Music CDs have a lot in common.
You have to buy a whole package, which is 90% crap, just to experience the one little piece you really want.
When I'm offered the ability to choose exactly what I want to watch, and I pay for the programming instead of advertisers, then I might come back.
At least then they'll have a direct incentive to make good continuious shows instead of shows which slice up just right for optimal advertising exposure.
I quit watching TV about 2-3 years ago.
Here's what I realized:
Television is like a stench. Once you step away from it for a while, if you try to come back, you realize just how awful it really is.
You forget how blatantly dumb, loud and exploitive commercials are when you're constantly exposed to them. But when you come back after a haitus, you realize just how awful they really are, and how the people who make them deserve to burn in hell.
I've seen how bad television has gotten lately: annoying ads in the corner or bottom of the screen during the program, incessant laugh tracks for people who are too dumb to know what's funny, and advertisments that sound 20db louder than the programme.
There's NO chance I'm coming back. When they start delivering syndicated programming on demand without commercials for a reasonable price, I'll check back in to see if there's still any creativity left. For the meantime, I'm enjoying interactive entertainment.
Shoutcast + VNC
Sure, it's not the most elegant solution, but it's worked for me for the past 2+ years just fine =)
So, I have to wait to probably download a way to pretend to download the ability to use a virtual representation of a virtual representation of more than just 3 standard game guns?
This is why I can never go back to a traditional MMORPG. The online world I now spend most of my time in lets you make anything you want. When I say "make" I mean build it from primitive shapes, link it together, and write one or more programs to model the behavior for the object.
I love how some MMORPGs claim that they have a free market where you can "craft" objects and sell them to other players.
Their definition of "crafting" is: "run on the levelling treadmill until you earn enough XP to gain permission to instantiate limited copies of objects that we already modeled, textured, and programmed".
Uh, I think I'll stay where I am and build and sell my own objects unimpeded, thank you very much...