There is one key issue which will hold this technology back until a point where we are all working from home. Imagine your work environment where everyone around you is constantly talking to their computer. "Cut! Paste! Close window! Go to thaitrannyporn.net!" (Sadly, I think everyone working from home is also unlikely, but that's a topic for another post.)
That being said, I still would like to see more voice integration, if only for use in the home. The key places I would like to see speech integrated into my software:
Word processing. Dictate and hold down modifier keys for commands. For example, mouse over text, hold control, say 'cut,' move mouse, say 'paste.'
Image processing software. I use keyboard commands extensively in these programs, but would like to free myself to simply work with my voice for commands, and my mouse as the tool. (I tried this with PhotoShop a while back. In PhotoShop, all the tools are tied to single keys, and so the software recognized each phonetic element, and rapidly switched between the related tools as I spoke...)
I'm sure there are many other examples, but these are the ones I've found myself wishing for in the past.
I think 'Apple haters' should be more appropriately phrased 'Apple fanboy haters.' I don't really like Apple as a company, but I do respect them.
Apple fanboys, on the other hand, can be rather annoying. I wouldn't go as far as hating them, but I'm not sure I would blame others for doing so.
And no, not everyone hates Windows. Much like Apple, I don't really like them as a company, but I do respect them. In fact, I would go as far as lumping Windows haters in with Apple fanboys. Both are pretty annoying.
In the case of doctors, I'm sure you could go to any doctor and get plenty of anecdotes regarding patients refusing to heed their advice. For example, the doctor says "You have to quit smoking, or you will die." and then watches the patient light up the moment they step out of the office.
With mechanics, I would expect similar stories. "I told him he needed a new oil pump, but he ignored me. Now he needs a new engine." From my experience, mistrust of mechanics is pretty common.
I suspect the real difference in behavior is based on the separation. Much like how people behave differently in online forums than they would in real life, the simple separation of the telephone line makes users more likely to be blunt about their unwillingness to take advice, whereas in face-to-face relations with doctors or mechanics, they simply nod, agree, and then ignore.
Hrm... so if I create something in LittleBigPlanet which infringes on a third party, does that mean Sony is liable for that infringement?
Or are they only claiming responsibility for the positive things I do?
(I'm sure I already know the answer to this question, wherein if I create something infringing on a third party, Sony issues a DMCA takedown or something of that sort for whatever I created. None the less, it seems there must be some means of turning this restriction against them using their own terms...)
I love the way people complain about publishers not publishing more innovative games, as if innovation was something you could just decide on.
"Yeah, we were going to be more innovative, but then we decided it was a lot faster and cheaper to just be a lame copy of something else."
There is some truth to that... it is faster and cheaper to copy something that already exists. At the same time, true innovation is frakking difficult to come up with. What we usually think of as innovation is typically copying many part of several other things in an innovative way.
There's nothing wrong with that. Innovative copying and blending is still innovation, but even that is incredibly difficult.
The fact is, making good games is - forgive me as I repeat myself - frakking hard! Most mainstream games are incredibly complex, which makes them difficult to balance. Add to that the varied tastes of the consumer base, and you'll find creating a fun and playable game is a difficult task.
Take, for example, Blizzard, who enjoy a reputation for producing solid, fun, well-crafted games. Are they innovative? Yes, in small ways. But for the most part, they're copying. Warcraft and Starcraft borrowed from earlier RTS games, Diablo from earlier RPGS, and WoW then borrowed from Warcraft and Diablo. Blizzard's reputation is much more based on their craftsmanship and their attention to detail. They are known for taking their time producing games and paying careful attention to game balance and quality testing.
Innovation is great, but I don't believe it's the major factor in producing quality games. Many times, innovation turns out to be boring or unnecessary. In the end, it's craftsmanship and attention to detail that are more likely to produce quality games.
(And before anyone points out the catastrophe that is the recent WoW pre-WotLK patch, I'd like to note that it stands out because it is the exception to this rule as most of the previous big content patches, while not 100% perfect, have not been nearly as bad as this last one...)
If you have to clarify an ad, you've already lost.
Not at all.
That "HEAD ON: Apply directly to forehead!" ad seems like one of the worst ads ever. Talk about needing to clarify, the Head On ad didn't even say what the product did! However, that ad has been EXTREMELY successful. It has generated a lot of curiosity, name recognition, and sales. After all, you know exactly the ad I'm talking about, right?
I studied advertising photography in school and we covered a lot of general advertising topics. It turns out that, when adjusted for scale, cheap, low-budget "CRAZY PRICES! EVERYTHING MUST GO! BUY NOW NOW NOW!" ads are much more effective than big-budget ads for the major players - when adjusted for scale. Dollar for dollar, they are more effective at grabbing eyes and creating recognition.
It's kind of crude, but I think there's a lot of truth to to the saying "Show me a beautiful woman, and I'll show you a guy who's tired of f*cking her"
Maybe it's the warcraft widow's fault for not giving her boyfriend a good reason to log off the game. Maybe it's the boyfriend's fault for not being able to see what he's doing to her. Maybe she's a b*tch or a nag, or he's a hopeless addict or a selfish bastard...
My guess is that it's a little of everything. I rarely find personal relations can be simplified via Occam's Razor. When it comes to interpersonal relations, it's always a combination of a thousand factors...
Chad encourages you to refrain from learning vendor-specific technologies that can disappear with the vendor, and then calls you to action by suggesting you write a small project in a technology that competes with the technology you are used to using.
The action items at the end of the section suggests practicing "Code Katas" katas similar to martial artists, but instead in code and in different languages.
Maybe I'm just reading into it, but it does sound like the reviewer is contradicting himself when comparing the quotes I just posted to the 'refrain from learning vendor-specific technologies' one the parent included.
Considering that the author worked as a programmer and also hired programmers, I give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume the reviewer phrased things poorly. I suspect that instead of the 'refraining from learning vendor specific technologies' the author advocates 'refraining from specializing in vendor specific technologies. After all, it's hard to code in competing technologies if you don't learn them. And, if you do work on these small projects on your own, you will be able to honestly tell a potential employer 'Yes I have worked with ______ technology' and then offer a sample.
Maybe the author is indeed the one contradicting himself, but I do agree the overall (and I consider obvious) premise of improving yourself to increase your value to your employer. While I'm sure I could find think of plenty of ways to increase my skills on my own, or find advice for free online, I'm still intrigued enough that I added the book to my Amazon wishlist.
Wrong. It also requires a reasonable amount of space. Not a TON of space, but often enough to require re-arrangement of furniture, as younger folks usually have limited space.
Do you drink beer in your version of beer pong? If so, how do you make it to the final round?
I'm not sure how it works in tournament, but in everyday beer pong, the better you play, the less you drink. The goal is to get the ping-pong ball in your opponents cup, which they then have to drink. If your opponent sucks, or if you are good enough that they never have a chance to shoot, you might not have to drink at all. Your opponent, on the other hand...
As a note, I was referring to understanding both sides of the 'old enough to fight but not old enough to drink argument.'
The 'Beer Pong' video game hoopla is just idiotic. It is counter to freedom of expression, and, as has been noted, counter-productive. Prohibition will only increase the appeal.
Would you rather attend a Beer Pong tournament, or an illegal underground Beer Pong tournament?
Part of the "Not old enough to drink, but old enough to kill" argument is indeed invalidated by the fact that "When in non-forward-deployed, non-CONUS locations, the legal drinking age is 18."
However, this is only part of the point. At 18, you are legally able to make the decision to put your own life in harm's way and possibly end the lives of others. However, you are not legally able to make the decision to drink alcohol, no matter how responsible you may be in your actions.
I do feel there is a contradiction there.
However, it is an extremely complex issue. There are many caveats - for example, I believe certain drinking, such as having a glass of wine at dinner with the family consenting and present is permitted, at least in some areas.
To the best of my understanding, the discrepancy between the age of majority and the drinking age is due to statistics. Consider your driving insurance - rates are lower for females than males, lower after certain ages, and so on, all due to studies and the resulting statistics. To the best of my knowledge, studies show(ed) that incidents of drunk driving fell significantly after the age of twenty-one, and so that became the legal drinking age.
As much as I hated waiting to hit twenty-one, and putting myself at risk when I drank before the age of twenty-one, I can understand the logic behind both sides of the argument.
It's not my field, but I would assume that adjusting graphics to display over a hexagonal array would be much more complex than a rectangular array. I imagine straight line rasters really simplify a lot of the calculations involved in basic graphics, compression, filtering, and so on...
(Please forgive me if some of my terminology is incorrect, I hope my point is still clear.)
True, but the issue is that this is exactly how bad data gets started. A slight misquote, and you have a false statistic that means something completely different from the actual data.
Nope, this never works. Until it does, at which point everyone will ask why no one did it before.
History is full of people saying the next cool thing will never work. Most of them are right. None of them are helpful.
It is true that this incarnation of the idea does sound pretty poorly thought out. The 'shoving together and hoping' is vastly inferior to the 'build on existing models, plan ahead, and then start hoping' method.
None the less, I think even the poorly thought out efforts give the thinkers and planners more to work with, and I am fully in support of trying to mix, mangle, and push the boundaries.
You are correct in that you pay a fixed fee for time in China. However, not being much of a TV watcher, I usually ended up easily spending more than $15 per month. I like the pay-as-you play concept, but now that I am back in the States I went with automatic monthly billing.
Being nearly illiterate in Chinese, I was unable to buy more time online. My Chinese girlfriend also did not have much luck with online billing, so it may not have even been possible. I had to go across the street to buy time at the internet cafe. For various reasons, I would be unable to purchase more time on about half of my trips the cafe. (The guy who knew how to buy time was not there, the site was down, the cafe had sold it's time for the month, and so on)
On a side note, I think I learned more Chinese from playing WoW than I did from real life. In life, I learned the basics - the food I wanted, beer, cigarettes, taxi, subway. In WoW, I was always learning new words, a surprising number of which turned out to be useful in life.
The sound quality point is pretty moot in my mind. More power to the people who are concerned about the higher reaches of sound quality, but I like that I can carry a vast portion of my music collection - all of it if I invested in a larger memory stick - in my phone/camera/mp3 player. This beats a 12 lb. binder of CDs or a pickup full of vinyl. In addition, I have had much less problem with corrupted mp3s than I ever had with scratched CDs and vinyl.
Sound quality is great. I would love better sound quality in mp3s. But in my life, the convenience of the mp3 format so greatly outweighs any sound quality issues that I would listen to lower bps recordings on old mp3 codecs before going back to CDs.
Slashdot Mirror
There is one key issue which will hold this technology back until a point where we are all working from home. Imagine your work environment where everyone around you is constantly talking to their computer. "Cut! Paste! Close window! Go to thaitrannyporn.net!" (Sadly, I think everyone working from home is also unlikely, but that's a topic for another post.)
That being said, I still would like to see more voice integration, if only for use in the home. The key places I would like to see speech integrated into my software:
Word processing. Dictate and hold down modifier keys for commands. For example, mouse over text, hold control, say 'cut,' move mouse, say 'paste.'
Image processing software. I use keyboard commands extensively in these programs, but would like to free myself to simply work with my voice for commands, and my mouse as the tool. (I tried this with PhotoShop a while back. In PhotoShop, all the tools are tied to single keys, and so the software recognized each phonetic element, and rapidly switched between the related tools as I spoke...)
I'm sure there are many other examples, but these are the ones I've found myself wishing for in the past.
I think 'Apple haters' should be more appropriately phrased 'Apple fanboy haters.' I don't really like Apple as a company, but I do respect them.
Apple fanboys, on the other hand, can be rather annoying. I wouldn't go as far as hating them, but I'm not sure I would blame others for doing so.
And no, not everyone hates Windows. Much like Apple, I don't really like them as a company, but I do respect them. In fact, I would go as far as lumping Windows haters in with Apple fanboys. Both are pretty annoying.
I would have to disagree.
In the case of doctors, I'm sure you could go to any doctor and get plenty of anecdotes regarding patients refusing to heed their advice. For example, the doctor says "You have to quit smoking, or you will die." and then watches the patient light up the moment they step out of the office.
With mechanics, I would expect similar stories. "I told him he needed a new oil pump, but he ignored me. Now he needs a new engine." From my experience, mistrust of mechanics is pretty common.
I suspect the real difference in behavior is based on the separation. Much like how people behave differently in online forums than they would in real life, the simple separation of the telephone line makes users more likely to be blunt about their unwillingness to take advice, whereas in face-to-face relations with doctors or mechanics, they simply nod, agree, and then ignore.
Hrm... so if I create something in LittleBigPlanet which infringes on a third party, does that mean Sony is liable for that infringement?
Or are they only claiming responsibility for the positive things I do?
(I'm sure I already know the answer to this question, wherein if I create something infringing on a third party, Sony issues a DMCA takedown or something of that sort for whatever I created. None the less, it seems there must be some means of turning this restriction against them using their own terms...)
I love the way people complain about publishers not publishing more innovative games, as if innovation was something you could just decide on.
"Yeah, we were going to be more innovative, but then we decided it was a lot faster and cheaper to just be a lame copy of something else."
There is some truth to that... it is faster and cheaper to copy something that already exists. At the same time, true innovation is frakking difficult to come up with. What we usually think of as innovation is typically copying many part of several other things in an innovative way.
There's nothing wrong with that. Innovative copying and blending is still innovation, but even that is incredibly difficult.
The fact is, making good games is - forgive me as I repeat myself - frakking hard! Most mainstream games are incredibly complex, which makes them difficult to balance. Add to that the varied tastes of the consumer base, and you'll find creating a fun and playable game is a difficult task.
Take, for example, Blizzard, who enjoy a reputation for producing solid, fun, well-crafted games. Are they innovative? Yes, in small ways. But for the most part, they're copying. Warcraft and Starcraft borrowed from earlier RTS games, Diablo from earlier RPGS, and WoW then borrowed from Warcraft and Diablo. Blizzard's reputation is much more based on their craftsmanship and their attention to detail. They are known for taking their time producing games and paying careful attention to game balance and quality testing.
Innovation is great, but I don't believe it's the major factor in producing quality games. Many times, innovation turns out to be boring or unnecessary. In the end, it's craftsmanship and attention to detail that are more likely to produce quality games.
(And before anyone points out the catastrophe that is the recent WoW pre-WotLK patch, I'd like to note that it stands out because it is the exception to this rule as most of the previous big content patches, while not 100% perfect, have not been nearly as bad as this last one...)
It worked for Pepsi with the 'Blind Taste Test." You think you think Coke tastes better than Pepsi. We just proved you wrong. Buy Pepsi.
If you have to clarify an ad, you've already lost.
Not at all.
That "HEAD ON: Apply directly to forehead!" ad seems like one of the worst ads ever. Talk about needing to clarify, the Head On ad didn't even say what the product did! However, that ad has been EXTREMELY successful. It has generated a lot of curiosity, name recognition, and sales. After all, you know exactly the ad I'm talking about, right?
I studied advertising photography in school and we covered a lot of general advertising topics. It turns out that, when adjusted for scale, cheap, low-budget "CRAZY PRICES! EVERYTHING MUST GO! BUY NOW NOW NOW!" ads are much more effective than big-budget ads for the major players - when adjusted for scale. Dollar for dollar, they are more effective at grabbing eyes and creating recognition.
Just because you do it using Google doesn't mean that it's new, cool, innovative or news worthy.
No, it means that a lot of people who are unaware of more esoteric sources will now know about it, which makes it newsworthy.
It's kind of crude, but I think there's a lot of truth to to the saying "Show me a beautiful woman, and I'll show you a guy who's tired of f*cking her"
Maybe it's the warcraft widow's fault for not giving her boyfriend a good reason to log off the game. Maybe it's the boyfriend's fault for not being able to see what he's doing to her. Maybe she's a b*tch or a nag, or he's a hopeless addict or a selfish bastard...
My guess is that it's a little of everything. I rarely find personal relations can be simplified via Occam's Razor. When it comes to interpersonal relations, it's always a combination of a thousand factors...
Is Stoddart a danger or a menace? Or just clueless?
Is 'An anonymous reader' Hitler or Stalin? Or just a pedophile?
Chad encourages you to refrain from learning vendor-specific technologies that can disappear with the vendor, and then calls you to action by suggesting you write a small project in a technology that competes with the technology you are used to using.
The action items at the end of the section suggests practicing "Code Katas" katas similar to martial artists, but instead in code and in different languages.
Maybe I'm just reading into it, but it does sound like the reviewer is contradicting himself when comparing the quotes I just posted to the 'refrain from learning vendor-specific technologies' one the parent included.
Considering that the author worked as a programmer and also hired programmers, I give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume the reviewer phrased things poorly. I suspect that instead of the 'refraining from learning vendor specific technologies' the author advocates 'refraining from specializing in vendor specific technologies. After all, it's hard to code in competing technologies if you don't learn them. And, if you do work on these small projects on your own, you will be able to honestly tell a potential employer 'Yes I have worked with ______ technology' and then offer a sample.
Maybe the author is indeed the one contradicting himself, but I do agree the overall (and I consider obvious) premise of improving yourself to increase your value to your employer. While I'm sure I could find think of plenty of ways to increase my skills on my own, or find advice for free online, I'm still intrigued enough that I added the book to my Amazon wishlist.
Seriously, if death by snoo-snoo is the punishment... well, I've never used the word 'feminazi' before, but I may have to start.
Do we get to select our own executioner? Anything else would be inhumane!
So I guess the key question here is: were most of the porn sites you visit frequently Dutch porn sites?
If so, I think we have you answer.
All it takes is cups and ping pong balls!
Wrong. It also requires a reasonable amount of space. Not a TON of space, but often enough to require re-arrangement of furniture, as younger folks usually have limited space.
Do you drink beer in your version of beer pong? If so, how do you make it to the final round?
I'm not sure how it works in tournament, but in everyday beer pong, the better you play, the less you drink. The goal is to get the ping-pong ball in your opponents cup, which they then have to drink. If your opponent sucks, or if you are good enough that they never have a chance to shoot, you might not have to drink at all. Your opponent, on the other hand...
As a note, I was referring to understanding both sides of the 'old enough to fight but not old enough to drink argument.'
The 'Beer Pong' video game hoopla is just idiotic. It is counter to freedom of expression, and, as has been noted, counter-productive. Prohibition will only increase the appeal.
Would you rather attend a Beer Pong tournament, or an illegal underground Beer Pong tournament?
Part of the "Not old enough to drink, but old enough to kill" argument is indeed invalidated by the fact that "When in non-forward-deployed, non-CONUS locations, the legal drinking age is 18."
However, this is only part of the point. At 18, you are legally able to make the decision to put your own life in harm's way and possibly end the lives of others. However, you are not legally able to make the decision to drink alcohol, no matter how responsible you may be in your actions.
I do feel there is a contradiction there.
However, it is an extremely complex issue. There are many caveats - for example, I believe certain drinking, such as having a glass of wine at dinner with the family consenting and present is permitted, at least in some areas.
To the best of my understanding, the discrepancy between the age of majority and the drinking age is due to statistics. Consider your driving insurance - rates are lower for females than males, lower after certain ages, and so on, all due to studies and the resulting statistics. To the best of my knowledge, studies show(ed) that incidents of drunk driving fell significantly after the age of twenty-one, and so that became the legal drinking age.
As much as I hated waiting to hit twenty-one, and putting myself at risk when I drank before the age of twenty-one, I can understand the logic behind both sides of the argument.
It's not my field, but I would assume that adjusting graphics to display over a hexagonal array would be much more complex than a rectangular array. I imagine straight line rasters really simplify a lot of the calculations involved in basic graphics, compression, filtering, and so on...
(Please forgive me if some of my terminology is incorrect, I hope my point is still clear.)
True, but the issue is that this is exactly how bad data gets started. A slight misquote, and you have a false statistic that means something completely different from the actual data.
"Damned Lies and Statistics" is an excellent book on the topic, with some amusing examples.
Nope, this never works. Until it does, at which point everyone will ask why no one did it before.
History is full of people saying the next cool thing will never work. Most of them are right. None of them are helpful.
It is true that this incarnation of the idea does sound pretty poorly thought out. The 'shoving together and hoping' is vastly inferior to the 'build on existing models, plan ahead, and then start hoping' method.
None the less, I think even the poorly thought out efforts give the thinkers and planners more to work with, and I am fully in support of trying to mix, mangle, and push the boundaries.
You are correct in that you pay a fixed fee for time in China. However, not being much of a TV watcher, I usually ended up easily spending more than $15 per month. I like the pay-as-you play concept, but now that I am back in the States I went with automatic monthly billing.
Being nearly illiterate in Chinese, I was unable to buy more time online. My Chinese girlfriend also did not have much luck with online billing, so it may not have even been possible. I had to go across the street to buy time at the internet cafe. For various reasons, I would be unable to purchase more time on about half of my trips the cafe. (The guy who knew how to buy time was not there, the site was down, the cafe had sold it's time for the month, and so on)
On a side note, I think I learned more Chinese from playing WoW than I did from real life. In life, I learned the basics - the food I wanted, beer, cigarettes, taxi, subway. In WoW, I was always learning new words, a surprising number of which turned out to be useful in life.
The sound quality point is pretty moot in my mind. More power to the people who are concerned about the higher reaches of sound quality, but I like that I can carry a vast portion of my music collection - all of it if I invested in a larger memory stick - in my phone/camera/mp3 player. This beats a 12 lb. binder of CDs or a pickup full of vinyl. In addition, I have had much less problem with corrupted mp3s than I ever had with scratched CDs and vinyl. Sound quality is great. I would love better sound quality in mp3s. But in my life, the convenience of the mp3 format so greatly outweighs any sound quality issues that I would listen to lower bps recordings on old mp3 codecs before going back to CDs.