I've noticed that people have a tendency to start liking a song after hearing it over and over again many times, even if they initially disliked it.
That's what this is all about.
It's not about exposure of a new song to someone who hasn't heard it before -- it's about playing it over and over again so repetitively that they make people start to get used to it, and eventually like it in many cases.
I'm pretty sure they know about this psychological effect -- that's why there's so much over-repetition.
If you liked Elite/Frontier, and are into MMO games, you might enjoy EVE Online -- it's a rather beautiful and complex space trading MMO game from a small company in Iceland.
I've been playing it for about a month, and it is the closest thing i've found to a modern version of Elite/Frontier.
What was great was the times in the early 90's when I would be flipping through the cable TV channels and catch a Guru Meditation error on one of them (usually the TV guide channel or equivalent).
If someone could make one of those magnifying tapers so that it can be compressed like a key, they could insert one into each key and use one large common OLED screen underneath all the keys.
But then that might cost more than just putting a small OLED screen in each key =P
The only "static" thing required in a command/state based system is a static initial state. After that, things can change at will, and only need low bandwidth.
Do you not foresee how much data needs to be sent to make a completely dynamic virtual world function in real time?
Perhaps you're underestimating my use of the word "dynamic", as it is a word used far too often these days for things which are not really completely applicable to the meaning of the word. Also, we are so used to static content in most 3d games that it may be difficult to realize anything substantially different.
In SL, there really is *no* static content. Additionally, very few things (if any) could be synchronized by a random seed, becuase so many things interact with others. If you don't believe me, take a look at SL, or offer me an example of what you think could be made static, and I'll likely explain why it isn't and shouldn't be.
Some examples:
Land - A 2D mesh that can be deformed by any landowner or a "GM" at any time. All clients in range will be updated *as* the land is being modified. Estate owners can apply their own textures to the land, and apply the various altitudes at which they transition, which immediately update to anyone in viewing range.
Object geometry - You can observe another user positioning the object, rotating it, scaling it, applying advanced cuts and bends to it, placing a texture upon it, positioning the texture, rotating the texture, etc. all in real time.
Weather - An estate owner can raise or set the sun at any time. Any user can not only be affected by wind, but also create airflows with sufficient effort. As I understand it, clouds move along a pattern of cellular automata that is also directly influenced by these airflows.
Scripts - Scripts can cause any number of spontaneous behaviors (geometry, colors, textures, land deformations, particles, sounds, videos, motions, etc.). Any changes that are visible are immediately relayed to all clients in viewing range.
Avatars - Nearby users can observe other avatars as they change their outfits, body mesh geometry, skin, eye, and hair colors and textures. Users can upload and perform custom poses and animations.
Note all these observable changes are seen by nearby users as they are made, in small incremental steps, as the person causing these changes to occur makes them.
In addition, anyone can import their own textures, sounds, and animations into the world to be seen, heard, and shared with everyone else.
Yet, if the underlying engines weren't built around BSP trees, you *could* have blasted holes in walls; the command bandwidth wouldn't have changed one iota, and thus it would still work the same over a 33k modem.
If the walls are preloaded, and the explosion pattern is predefined, sure.
But what if it's a random explosion, and each piece of debris has to have it's location accounted for as it's exploding, so a consistent look is dispersed to all clients in range?
Meanwhile, you're synchronizing a couple dozen onlooking avatars, many of whom are spontaneously playing random cheering animations and sounds to applaud the explosion, some rezzing, configuring, and positioning their own weapons to take the next shot. Some are changing their avatars to switch into military-style wardrobe and equipment, requiring new textures, avatar morphs, and attachments to be synced. Someone could be taking in-game snapshots (screenshots that are immediately uploaded as a texture) and sending them to friends nearby to save to remember the event. Meanwhile the weather is still updating and the live music for the event is still streaming.
Now you've got a lot of stuff to stream, and since everyone loves to customize things, you (generously) probably only have about half of it cached. This is just one scenario example of how dynamic SL can be.
If you could do all of this over a 33k modem, you could probably get a very attractive jo
Heh, what do you expect from a company that "regrets" to announce that their quarterly profits are not rising as fast as they did the previous quater.
In other words: 1- They are making a profit 2- The profit is greater than last quater 3- The profit is still rising 4- But it's not rising as fast as it was before
Many companies would be more than happy with just #1.
you're not paying for the data, you're paying for the content of the data.
For an SL subscription, you're not paying for the data, you're paying for the service to HOST the data. Each region in SL requires about 500-1000 USD in server hardware in order for the environment to be sufficiently responsive to provide real time performance to the people who are interacting with that region.
For this game though, what are you paying for?
Hosting. It's just like web hosting, except it's a 3d space instead of scrolling pages of text and pictures.
By the way, what are you paying for when you pay your TV bill?
things have value because they are desirable and scarce. Virtual real estate is neither.
This is not quite correct, especially in the situation SL operates under.
Each region in SL is supported by a server. For realistic performance, a dual opteron server is used to to run two regions. A region in SL is defined as 65536 square meters, and can support about 15,000 3D primitives before performace becomes uncomfortably slow.
Therefore, virtual real estate is limited by server resources. Sure, they could expand the "space" and/or the "prims" but the ability to enjoy the experience will be lost due to poor performance.
Saying virtual real estate is not scarce is ignoring that it takes hardware to run all this stuff, just as with web hosts.
Latency and bandwidth were non-issues. Why? Because the game didn't try to stream graphics or objects; it streamed actions and state changes. Clients had their own local copies of the entire "region" (a map), and their computers ran it, relying only on the action/state change information from the server.
Congratulations, you just described a static, precompiled world, which is what most 3D games are.
SL is not this. In SL, anything can change at any time. This includes the geometry, the sky, the land, textures, colors, particles, sounds, videos, avatars, motions, gestures, etc. There are no precomplied maps in SL. There aren't even any BSP trees to make ultra high frame rates possible. If someone rezzes a 1000-primitive object, it has to stream that geometry to everyone within viewing range as quickly as possible, and then download and apply all of the textures if they aren't already cached.
LL has some *very* bright, technically brilliant people. Don't assume they haven't already tackled the problems you think you can solve so flippantly. In fact, if you really think you are up for the challenge, they are hiring.
Most have probably seen this already, but if you haven't it's worth a browse. The stories on here seem to resemble the Simpsons' Comic Book Guy, only with video games instead.
Maybe a "clean" design wouldn't necessarily be faster; but less cruft, means less silicon, means more yield, so the chips would almost certianly be less expensive.
There seems to be something about biological material which brings consciousness
The absence of consciousness in any non-biologicals discovered so far does not prove it's impossible for non-biological entities to be conscious. In fact, I'd suggest that the co-relation between consciousness and matter probably comes from highly structured complexity, not necessarily biological material alone.
if we consider a machine to be conscious, where do we draw the line
Just because a potential situation presents a difficult challenge to us does not mean we should ignore the possibility that it could exist. We face many challenges where it is difficult to "draw the line", but that does not mean we should ignore them.
So do we treat all things as our conscious equals?
Why not? Many Asian and Native American beliefs do to some degree. Maybe it would be healthy for our long term existance for humanity to humble itself a bit and realize that maybe we aren't so unique.
That road leads to humanity's extinction.
Howso?
treating machines made of minerals as if they were conscious, while disregarding the possiblity of conscious beaches and soil, is not a reasonable approach.
I think you're assuming consciousness is only an on-or-off boolean state. =)
except when people go outta control and put 20 automatically running Hillary Duff music videos inside the same piece of land
You can't have more than one video stream going at a time, since video streams are one per land parcel, and your avatar can only be in one land parcel at a time. The streams for neighboring parcels can only play when you step into their land.
Besides, you can turn off streaming video in your preferences if it's a problem.
So I get to PAY to make content for them? Well SIGN ME UP!
Do you PAY a web hosting company to host content for the web?
SL's subscription model is much like the web. You pay a monthly fee if you want to persistently host content on a space that you fully own.
Alternatively, you can pay a one-time $10 for Basic membership and be able to do everything except own land outright. However, even a Basic member can still make friends with a landowner who will host something for them, or rent land from other landowners who pay for it at a bulk discount.
I think one thing that doesn't get mentioned about SL very often is that it isn't run by the company's sales & marketing department, like most games are.
The people at Linden Lab (the place responsible for developing SL) are geeks. They like Linux, they share opinions about languages, database, file formats, and protocols, they play the same games we play. They laugh at obscure geek jokes that we do.
And unlike any other MMOG, you *can* catch the designers, developers, administrators, and occasionally even the CEO in-world and have a reasonable conversation with them.
That's what impressed me the most about SL on my first day. In the "Welcome Area", I spent a few minutes talking to one of the lead developers, and I got reasonably technical answers to my inquiries, and was not treated like one unit of a herd of cattle like most game companies do.
Yes, SL doesn't have all the fancy flashy new graphics features you see in the latest games, but it's still a technically fascinating concept as it stands -- a completely dynamic, 3D, multiuser world that streams all updates (caused by users, their scripts, or the environment) in real time.
Maybe. But that scares the heck out of me. I know of high level managers and engineers that were fired for this sort of stuff. It would have been better for all if effective censorship existed. This is a stupid a reading a politically controversial magazine during a department meeting. But I guess you are right that the politically controversial site really doesn't care. Still, who looks are politically controversial content while on an employer's LAN, that is career suicide.
Maybe. But that scares the heck out of me. I know of high level managers and engineers that were fired for this sort of stuff. It would have been better for all if effective censorship existed. This is a stupid a reading a reverse engineering magazine during a department meeting. But I guess you are right that the reverse engineering site really doesn't care. Still, who looks are reverse engineering content while on an employer's LAN, that is career suicide.
Maybe. But that scares the heck out of me. I know of high level managers and engineers that were fired for this sort of stuff. It would have been better for all if effective censorship existed. This is a stupid a reading a unpatriotic magazine during a department meeting. But I guess you are right that the unpatriotic site really doesn't care. Still, who looks are unpatriotic content while on an employer's LAN, that is career suicide.
But, they could require all companies existing in the USA to do so, thereby pressuring them to move outside the USA to continue their business in a completely uncensored environment.
Even if that is all that happens, the fundamentalists will have won a small victory becuase they will have forced the porn industry outside the USA.
I predict that within a few years, United States law will require that all mature content hosted within the USA must be accessible only by way of addresses resolving to an.xxx TLD.
There are too many conservatives/puritans in this country who will scream "Won't somebody think of the children" for this NOT to happen.
After those requirements are in place, don't be surprised if ISPs, homeowner's associations, etc require.xxx to be blocked.
Seriously, you should give Firefox a try (or another try, as appropriate).
Good advice.
I was one of those "I'll just continue to use IE because it works on all websites" type of people. I used to assume that the people who used Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera were just the usual group of discordians using this as some silly way of striking out against Microsoft. After several debates on the issue with friends who had switched to FF, I finally decided to give FireFox a try.
At first I thought I'd use it alongside IE, but after a couple weeks I find that I am using FF exclusively -- now I only open IE when I need to confirm that my DHTML webapps work properly in IE as well as FF.
In fact, I've discovered that FF has much more useful debugging capabilities for JavaScript than IE, and QuirksMode makes it easy to write JS that works in both.
The tabs are nice, but what I really like most is the FlashBlock extension. It's a perfect way to manage those unstoppable Flash ads that are often so distracting it makes it impossible for me to read the text on the same page. And when I want to see a Flash element, I just click it, and it starts.
FF rocks. If you last tried it before 1.0, give it another go; you'll probably be pleasantly surprised. It renders most everything just fine now and it works perfectly with the secure websites I use (bank, brokerage, etc). Get the FlashBlock extension and enjoy the web again =)
Slashdot Mirror
As it is, they can't even fill a whole CD without padding it with crappy filler material.
I've noticed that people have a tendency to start liking a song after hearing it over and over again many times, even if they initially disliked it.
That's what this is all about.
It's not about exposure of a new song to someone who hasn't heard it before -- it's about playing it over and over again so repetitively that they make people start to get used to it, and eventually like it in many cases.
I'm pretty sure they know about this psychological effect -- that's why there's so much over-repetition.
What is required is a catalyst which turns CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen. Unfortunately outside of plants and trees we don't have one.
What is this newfangled "plants and trees" technology of which you speak? If these things do what you claim, why don't we just make more of them?
(sorry, just being silly) =P
If you liked Elite/Frontier, and are into MMO games, you might enjoy EVE Online -- it's a rather beautiful and complex space trading MMO game from a small company in Iceland.
I've been playing it for about a month, and it is the closest thing i've found to a modern version of Elite/Frontier.
What was great was the times in the early 90's when I would be flipping through the cable TV channels and catch a Guru Meditation error on one of them (usually the TV guide channel or equivalent).
If someone could make one of those magnifying tapers so that it can be compressed like a key, they could insert one into each key and use one large common OLED screen underneath all the keys.
But then that might cost more than just putting a small OLED screen in each key =P
The only "static" thing required in a command/state based system is a static initial state. After that, things can change at will, and only need low bandwidth.
Do you not foresee how much data needs to be sent to make a completely dynamic virtual world function in real time?
Perhaps you're underestimating my use of the word "dynamic", as it is a word used far too often these days for things which are not really completely applicable to the meaning of the word. Also, we are so used to static content in most 3d games that it may be difficult to realize anything substantially different.
In SL, there really is *no* static content. Additionally, very few things (if any) could be synchronized by a random seed, becuase so many things interact with others. If you don't believe me, take a look at SL, or offer me an example of what you think could be made static, and I'll likely explain why it isn't and shouldn't be.
Some examples:
Land - A 2D mesh that can be deformed by any landowner or a "GM" at any time. All clients in range will be updated *as* the land is being modified. Estate owners can apply their own textures to the land, and apply the various altitudes at which they transition, which immediately update to anyone in viewing range.
Object geometry - You can observe another user positioning the object, rotating it, scaling it, applying advanced cuts and bends to it, placing a texture upon it, positioning the texture, rotating the texture, etc. all in real time.
Weather - An estate owner can raise or set the sun at any time. Any user can not only be affected by wind, but also create airflows with sufficient effort. As I understand it, clouds move along a pattern of cellular automata that is also directly influenced by these airflows.
Scripts - Scripts can cause any number of spontaneous behaviors (geometry, colors, textures, land deformations, particles, sounds, videos, motions, etc.). Any changes that are visible are immediately relayed to all clients in viewing range.
Avatars - Nearby users can observe other avatars as they change their outfits, body mesh geometry, skin, eye, and hair colors and textures. Users can upload and perform custom poses and animations.
Note all these observable changes are seen by nearby users as they are made, in small incremental steps, as the person causing these changes to occur makes them.
In addition, anyone can import their own textures, sounds, and animations into the world to be seen, heard, and shared with everyone else.
Yet, if the underlying engines weren't built around BSP trees, you *could* have blasted holes in walls; the command bandwidth wouldn't have changed one iota, and thus it would still work the same over a 33k modem.
If the walls are preloaded, and the explosion pattern is predefined, sure.
But what if it's a random explosion, and each piece of debris has to have it's location accounted for as it's exploding, so a consistent look is dispersed to all clients in range?
Meanwhile, you're synchronizing a couple dozen onlooking avatars, many of whom are spontaneously playing random cheering animations and sounds to applaud the explosion, some rezzing, configuring, and positioning their own weapons to take the next shot. Some are changing their avatars to switch into military-style wardrobe and equipment, requiring new textures, avatar morphs, and attachments to be synced. Someone could be taking in-game snapshots (screenshots that are immediately uploaded as a texture) and sending them to friends nearby to save to remember the event. Meanwhile the weather is still updating and the live music for the event is still streaming.
Now you've got a lot of stuff to stream, and since everyone loves to customize things, you (generously) probably only have about half of it cached. This is just one scenario example of how dynamic SL can be.
If you could do all of this over a 33k modem, you could probably get a very attractive jo
D'oh... I really can spell the word 'quarter' if I try. I have quaternions stuck in my head for some reason. =P
Heh, what do you expect from a company that "regrets" to announce that their quarterly profits are not rising as fast as they did the previous quater.
In other words:
1- They are making a profit
2- The profit is greater than last quater
3- The profit is still rising
4- But it's not rising as fast as it was before
Many companies would be more than happy with just #1.
you're not paying for the data, you're paying for the content of the data.
For an SL subscription, you're not paying for the data, you're paying for the service to HOST the data. Each region in SL requires about 500-1000 USD in server hardware in order for the environment to be sufficiently responsive to provide real time performance to the people who are interacting with that region.
For this game though, what are you paying for?
Hosting. It's just like web hosting, except it's a 3d space instead of scrolling pages of text and pictures.
By the way, what are you paying for when you pay your TV bill?
things have value because they are desirable and scarce. Virtual real estate is neither.
This is not quite correct, especially in the situation SL operates under.
Each region in SL is supported by a server. For realistic performance, a dual opteron server is used to to run two regions. A region in SL is defined as 65536 square meters, and can support about 15,000 3D primitives before performace becomes uncomfortably slow.
Therefore, virtual real estate is limited by server resources. Sure, they could expand the "space" and/or the "prims" but the ability to enjoy the experience will be lost due to poor performance.
Saying virtual real estate is not scarce is ignoring that it takes hardware to run all this stuff, just as with web hosts.
Latency and bandwidth were non-issues. Why? Because the game didn't try to stream graphics or objects; it streamed actions and state changes. Clients had their own local copies of the entire "region" (a map), and their computers ran it, relying only on the action/state change information from the server.
Congratulations, you just described a static, precompiled world, which is what most 3D games are.
SL is not this. In SL, anything can change at any time. This includes the geometry, the sky, the land, textures, colors, particles, sounds, videos, avatars, motions, gestures, etc. There are no precomplied maps in SL. There aren't even any BSP trees to make ultra high frame rates possible. If someone rezzes a 1000-primitive object, it has to stream that geometry to everyone within viewing range as quickly as possible, and then download and apply all of the textures if they aren't already cached.
LL has some *very* bright, technically brilliant people. Don't assume they haven't already tackled the problems you think you can solve so flippantly. In fact, if you really think you are up for the challenge, they are hiring.
Most have probably seen this already, but if you haven't it's worth a browse. The stories on here seem to resemble the Simpsons' Comic Book Guy, only with video games instead.
http://www.actsofgord.com/
Maybe a "clean" design wouldn't necessarily be faster; but less cruft, means less silicon, means more yield, so the chips would almost certianly be less expensive.
There seems to be something about biological material which brings consciousness
The absence of consciousness in any non-biologicals discovered so far does not prove it's impossible for non-biological entities to be conscious. In fact, I'd suggest that the co-relation between consciousness and matter probably comes from highly structured complexity, not necessarily biological material alone.
if we consider a machine to be conscious, where do we draw the line
Just because a potential situation presents a difficult challenge to us does not mean we should ignore the possibility that it could exist. We face many challenges where it is difficult to "draw the line", but that does not mean we should ignore them.
So do we treat all things as our conscious equals?
Why not? Many Asian and Native American beliefs do to some degree. Maybe it would be healthy for our long term existance for humanity to humble itself a bit and realize that maybe we aren't so unique.
That road leads to humanity's extinction.
Howso?
treating machines made of minerals as if they were conscious, while disregarding the possiblity of conscious beaches and soil, is not a reasonable approach.
I think you're assuming consciousness is only an on-or-off boolean state. =)
I doubt we can create conscious machines
How would you know anyway? Can you prove to me that you are conscious, and not just some simulation?
If you can't tell for sure, then should not the ethics remain in place?
except when people go outta control and put 20 automatically running Hillary Duff music videos inside the same piece of land
You can't have more than one video stream going at a time, since video streams are one per land parcel, and your avatar can only be in one land parcel at a time. The streams for neighboring parcels can only play when you step into their land.
Besides, you can turn off streaming video in your preferences if it's a problem.
So I get to PAY to make content for them? Well SIGN ME UP!
Do you PAY a web hosting company to host content for the web?
SL's subscription model is much like the web. You pay a monthly fee if you want to persistently host content on a space that you fully own.
Alternatively, you can pay a one-time $10 for Basic membership and be able to do everything except own land outright. However, even a Basic member can still make friends with a landowner who will host something for them, or rent land from other landowners who pay for it at a bulk discount.
or read the scripting language wiki
The scripting capability is what hooked my interest in trying SL, so I thought I'd link to the LSL Wiki here for others who might be curious. =)
I think one thing that doesn't get mentioned about SL very often is that it isn't run by the company's sales & marketing department, like most games are.
The people at Linden Lab (the place responsible for developing SL) are geeks. They like Linux, they share opinions about languages, database, file formats, and protocols, they play the same games we play. They laugh at obscure geek jokes that we do.
And unlike any other MMOG, you *can* catch the designers, developers, administrators, and occasionally even the CEO in-world and have a reasonable conversation with them.
That's what impressed me the most about SL on my first day. In the "Welcome Area", I spent a few minutes talking to one of the lead developers, and I got reasonably technical answers to my inquiries, and was not treated like one unit of a herd of cattle like most game companies do.
Yes, SL doesn't have all the fancy flashy new graphics features you see in the latest games, but it's still a technically fascinating concept as it stands -- a completely dynamic, 3D, multiuser world that streams all updates (caused by users, their scripts, or the environment) in real time.
Nevermind they could only legislate American sites...
Yes, but it would still be a small victory for the fundies to chase all the "smut vendors" from "God's Land".
Let's try a few variations here...
Maybe. But that scares the heck out of me. I know of high level managers and engineers that were fired for this sort of stuff. It would have been better for all if effective censorship existed. This is a stupid a reading a politically controversial magazine during a department meeting. But I guess you are right that the politically controversial site really doesn't care. Still, who looks are politically controversial content while on an employer's LAN, that is career suicide.
Maybe. But that scares the heck out of me. I know of high level managers and engineers that were fired for this sort of stuff. It would have been better for all if effective censorship existed. This is a stupid a reading a reverse engineering magazine during a department meeting. But I guess you are right that the reverse engineering site really doesn't care. Still, who looks are reverse engineering content while on an employer's LAN, that is career suicide.
Maybe. But that scares the heck out of me. I know of high level managers and engineers that were fired for this sort of stuff. It would have been better for all if effective censorship existed. This is a stupid a reading a unpatriotic magazine during a department meeting. But I guess you are right that the unpatriotic site really doesn't care. Still, who looks are unpatriotic content while on an employer's LAN, that is career suicide.
Censorship tends to snowball.
But, they could require all companies existing in the USA to do so, thereby pressuring them to move outside the USA to continue their business in a completely uncensored environment.
Even if that is all that happens, the fundamentalists will have won a small victory becuase they will have forced the porn industry outside the USA.
You make it sound like this would be voluntary.
.xxx TLD.
.xxx to be blocked.
I predict that within a few years, United States law will require that all mature content hosted within the USA must be accessible only by way of addresses resolving to an
There are too many conservatives/puritans in this country who will scream "Won't somebody think of the children" for this NOT to happen.
After those requirements are in place, don't be surprised if ISPs, homeowner's associations, etc require
Seriously, you should give Firefox a try (or another try, as appropriate).
Good advice.
I was one of those "I'll just continue to use IE because it works on all websites" type of people. I used to assume that the people who used Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera were just the usual group of discordians using this as some silly way of striking out against Microsoft. After several debates on the issue with friends who had switched to FF, I finally decided to give FireFox a try.
At first I thought I'd use it alongside IE, but after a couple weeks I find that I am using FF exclusively -- now I only open IE when I need to confirm that my DHTML webapps work properly in IE as well as FF.
In fact, I've discovered that FF has much more useful debugging capabilities for JavaScript than IE, and QuirksMode makes it easy to write JS that works in both.
The tabs are nice, but what I really like most is the FlashBlock extension. It's a perfect way to manage those unstoppable Flash ads that are often so distracting it makes it impossible for me to read the text on the same page. And when I want to see a Flash element, I just click it, and it starts.
FF rocks. If you last tried it before 1.0, give it another go; you'll probably be pleasantly surprised. It renders most everything just fine now and it works perfectly with the secure websites I use (bank, brokerage, etc). Get the FlashBlock extension and enjoy the web again =)