"Gamify" is such an ugly neologism, even in the situations it was coined to cover (ie. the ones where a non-game task is dressed up in game-style features by some means), that it really should be taken out and shot. In this case, they aren't even 'gamifying'. They're just experimenting with COTS gear as a, presumably cheaper, presentation system for the stitched-together output of the exterior cameras. That doesn't make the situation somehow more game-like.
Is it too late to take out an insurance policy on some Oklahoma property?
Sure, no problem. Your first month's premium will be the expected damages to your property in the event of a magnitude 5.0 or greater earthquake, plus our cut; but you are welcome to buy!
Out of curiosity, is the current key-based system actually such a thing, or is it effectively a mechanically troublesome button that feels like it actually clicks in to something important; but is no more in direct control than some horrible capacitive touch-area without even the slightest nod to tactile response?
If it is, is it dependent on the key in some way that couldn't be replicated by a different sort of switch. If not, when was the last time that it was?
They were never fast; but they were pretty much the only game in town if you wanted x86 within tight thermal constraints, for a time after they launched. VIA was similarly tepid and a bit hotter and Intel was pretending that a "Pentium 4 Mobile" was something other than a contradiction in terms.
Now, once Intel stopped pretending that Netburst was something other than a failure, and put some actual effort into lower power designs, it was Game Over; but they didn't do that overnight.
He doesn't just misunderstand bitcoin: Guy wants something 'tangible' so he picks stock... And stock in retailers? Those things that basically live and die by 'consumer confidence', which moves around according to some mixture of actual economic conditions and pure animal spirits.
Have you looked at the prices of a tape? In the last 10 years tape is on par on price with disks, and that is exluding the price of a tape deck.
Oh, I was delighted when the stodgy traditionalists finally bowed to the inevitable and let me move all the nearline and less-demanding-I/O to HDD. Tape still seems to be a bit more reliable if you want to just put something on the shelf and then spin it up in 5 years, HDDs can be a bit touchy about that.
Since this was the first question that came to my mind: apparently HDD platter densities (in similar 'we have demonstrated the technology but don't look for it at Best Buy just yet' stage) are ~ 1 terabit/square inch.
Obviously, the cost of packaging a given number of square inches of HDD platter is markedly higher, so the tape is likely to offer better value(if you are using enough to spread the, generally alarming, cost of the drive(s) and possibly robotic library around a bit); but it's hard to beat the density of a very tightly controlled rigid medium that never leaves a controlled environment during its entire life.
It would be extra tricky because you'd need a system that is not only current and active (which, as you say, is easier said than done on a continuing basis); but you'd need a system that can tell somebody standing right there, who probably doesn't have a specialist interest something they don't already know; but would want to.
If I'm sitting at municipal maintenance HQ, a map/information system that can tell me where all the streetlights are, whether their bulbs are fine, dead, or in predicted-failure, when they were last changed, and what lamp type they require, that's very useful: I can't be everywhere at once, and when I send out the guys with the bucket truck, I want them to have the right lamp the first time, and ideally I want them to arrive shortly before a lamp failure; but not waste money on excessively frequent precautionary swaps.
If I'm a pedestrian, standing next to street lamp #53583, even if your 'smart' agent has access to all those data, what can it tell me that I don't already know and do care about? Am I a lightbulb fancier who just wants to know the FRU number for that particular fixture? Am I standing there at noon, fretting about whether this particular lamp will be functional when it gets dark?
When you are doing infrastructure work, having good data about the state of the world is invaluable in trying to stay on top of constant demands with limited resources while minimizing downtime and waste. That much, I couldn't agree more. If that isn't your problem, though, it's substantially harder to think of cases where such records, even in very good shape, would be of interest to more than a few eccentric hobbyists.
Proposing the use of smartphones and maintenance ID stickers is either proposing a system that would be trivial to implement; but actively less than useless, or patting yourself on the back for having solved what is overwhelmingly the easiest problem in building a (nightmarish, dystopian; but at least genuinely powerful) 'smart city'.
You want to give random inanimate objects grating artificial personalities that suitably masochistic people can access over the internet? Ok. We've been poking at chatbots since the mid 1950s, and some of the ones available now are vaguely convincing. If you want to assign a differently configured one to every class of object, or every object, you could have that spun up in relatively short order and for not much money. It's just that it would be totally pointless. You might as well assign the bots to any collection of numbers that happen to be handy, it'd be as useful.
To begin to approach utility, you'd need to solve the (conceptually simple; but there is no hell like the integration of two or more data storage systems that weren't designed to play nicely with one another from the ground up, even if the city in question already has a very, very, nice municipal mapping and infrastructure issue-tracking system to pull from) problem of connecting the bot to (ideally non-obvious) information that somebody might be interested in, serving as a pointlessly inefficient interface to municipal maintenance records or the like.
To actually qualify as 'smart', the sky is the limit on the amount of mesh networking, interconnected sensors, and who knows what else you'd have to throw at the problem.
In what possible sense is taking a bunch of chatbots with different apparent personalities and assigning them to the object codes in a city a 'smart city'? Would using your GPS coordinates as seed values for customizing your chatbot give you a 'smart planet'?
I'd like to present some sort of cogent refutation; but the sheer magnitude of the 'what? I don't even... why?' leaves nothing to argue with...
I get the impression that, once you get into the realm of molecules that can easily be thousands to tens of thousands of atoms in size (and, just for extra fun, 'graphene oxide nanoparticle' isn't even a specific molecule, just a gigantic class of various differently shaped and sized hunks of graphene with assorted oxidizers grafted on here and there. There might actually be no two alike in a modestly sized sample...) 'systematic naming' becomes a bit of a joke. Assuming your pet molecule doesn't break some hitherto trusted rule it can probably be named; but you aren't going to want to read the result.
It's still arguably sloppy, there just aren't terribly good options.
Only if you really oxidize it, good and hard. Carbon's ability to bond fairly strongly with itself, and graphite's mixture of strong bonds within layers and weak bonds between them allow for a variety of vexingly complex oxidized forms that definitely have a lot more oxygen grafted on than the non-oxide form; but still retain much of their graphite layer structure.
We like exotic nanostructures because they have cool properties that their bulk counterparts don't. Unfortunately, this ends up meaning that a knowledge of the toxicology of the bulk material is of only limited use for inferring what the cool nanostructure will do. Carbon shows signs of potentially being rather nastier in its fancy forms than it is in more familiar flavors; but other nanomaterials might go the other way.
It doesn't seem like a huge surprise that this space is currently a howling wasteland:
Most people who actually want such a service can just tap 'mute' or their platform equivalent when the dump their phone in the beverage holder and start up the car. They aren't going to be terribly good customers, unless you do something really clever, and people who do really clever things are probably focused on sexier, or at least more lucrative, segments.
The people who really don't want such a service aren't good customers; but their worried parents might be; but any software sold for that purpose is likely to be folded into some relatively expensive, subscription based, offspring-command-and-control suite, and thus notably hostile and overengineered for an individual just trying to automate muting his own phone.
It likely doesn't help that laws regulating what you can do in your car aren't all that popular, so there isn't much incentive for carriers or platform vendors to roll out nannyware voluntarily; but, if there were a shift in the wind, they would be overwhelmingly better placed than 3rd-party vendors to take advantage of their deep control of the platform and full access to all sensor data and crush the entire market, such as it is, with a single OS update. Game over man, game over.
The xbox360 had a not-wildly-successful external HD-DVD option at one point; but the internal drive was always a standard DVD drive, and no games or xbox-specific disks were ever released as anything other than DVDs.
This hardly decreased the space crunch on xbox games, since DVD9s are even smaller than either successor format; but the xbox never really crossed paths with HD-DVD, other than Microsoft's one relatively lukewarm accessory offering.
If you are going to target a relatively obscure sysem to avoid the big, bad, GPL why not skip the BSDs entirely and help ReactOS chase binary compatibility with Windows drivers? Then you wouldn't even need a second set of drivers.
I think basically, he's proposing pay per pixel. If you have a phone-sized screen, you have lower resolution, and they aren't sending you as many pixels.
Except that, as it happens, phones and tablets frequently have rather more pixels than everything but early-adopter 4k TVs and relatively expensive computers.
My understanding is that you do lose some to thermal cracking, internal steam in improperly dried tablets, and that sort of thing; but that is basically the reason why we have a (comparatively) massive canon of fertile crescent cuneiform, despite its creators being among the oldest in the known history of written language, and living in a pretty rough neighborhood where getting sacked and burned was a common occurrence. I'm not even sure that we have enough subject matter experts to read them all.
It's just disgusting how many people use their cell phones while driving.
It is quite vexing; but I suspect that 'people looking down in surprise when their signal suddenly cuts out' are even less useful for driving than are people chattering like idiots.
flash is equally bad on all platforms web guys please stop using it.
Will nothing please you whiners? The Adobe Exploit Runtime offers simultaneous support across Windows, OSX, and Linux for a cutting edge vulnerability, and do we hear even a whisper of credit?
Fighting with the old drives probably isn't a pleasant business; but I wonder how difficult DIY-ing really antique floppy disks would be?
We still manufacturer magnetic thin films on flexible media, for the last few 3.5 inch floppies and other purposes, and I'd imagine that you could get away with putting a very low resolution magnetic pattern on film capable of a much finer one (though not the reverse), so if you could convince a maker of magnetic medium for floppy or tape storage to sell you some film in whatever larger size the finished product is cut down from, you might need little more than the ability to cut in a neat circle and then fold together the outer case.
I wouldn't depend on it for archival purposes; but it wouldn't surprise me if it would work.
10 years from now there won't be watches without some sort of connectivity except for specialty pieces designed from the outset to satisfy luddites.
I wouldn't be entirely sanguine about the future of watches in the 'just a basic quartz oscillator; but dressed up to the 50-100 range' sector; but why would the $2 expendables and the $$$ pointlessly-mechanical-man-jewelry sector worry? The former will always be cheaper than watches with additional parts, and the latter 'should' have been wiped out by superior quartz oscillator technology; but obviously wasn't.
Arguably, there might be situations in which internal inconsistency works (and might even work better than the alternative), it's not as though literature has had nothing but total failure with stories where narrator unreliability, assorted magical-realist or supernatural elements, imperfect information, and so on make deriving an internally consistent ruleset for the story's setting effectively impossible.) There are even stories that do just fine despite explicitly denying the possibility of internally consistent understandings, sometimes downright rubbing the characters' faces in it and watching them suffer, and they are none the worse for it.(HP Lovecraft is quite arguably not high art; but it's good fun, definitely the sort of thing that could make a game plot, and it revels in a universe where only the smallest and best-lit corners are within the reach of human understanding and to go beyond that is to enter a nightmare realm of eldrich madness that is beyond human grasp, permanently.) Something like the (overtly 4th-wall-breaking) effects of low 'sanity' in "Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem", are arguably similar in a gaming context. Does it make any internally consistent sense that your avatar suffering sanity damage would cause the player to be confronted with 'hallucination' effects that include (simulated) technical glitches with their gamecube and TV? Not really. Is it a perfectly workable mechanic? Definitely.
What doesn't go over well are the instances of internal inconsistency that suggest that the continuity people were just asleep on the job, or where the game is 'on rails' such that the mechanics of the world vary wildly according to the needs of the Guiding Hand Of Plot: Does game X have destructible environments? Except for the plot-specific doors that are invulnerable, unhackable, and can only be opened with the magic keycard? Fuck that.
Slashdot Mirror
"Gamify" is such an ugly neologism, even in the situations it was coined to cover (ie. the ones where a non-game task is dressed up in game-style features by some means), that it really should be taken out and shot. In this case, they aren't even 'gamifying'. They're just experimenting with COTS gear as a, presumably cheaper, presentation system for the stitched-together output of the exterior cameras. That doesn't make the situation somehow more game-like.
Is it too late to take out an insurance policy on some Oklahoma property?
Sure, no problem. Your first month's premium will be the expected damages to your property in the event of a magnitude 5.0 or greater earthquake, plus our cut; but you are welcome to buy!
Out of curiosity, is the current key-based system actually such a thing, or is it effectively a mechanically troublesome button that feels like it actually clicks in to something important; but is no more in direct control than some horrible capacitive touch-area without even the slightest nod to tactile response?
If it is, is it dependent on the key in some way that couldn't be replicated by a different sort of switch. If not, when was the last time that it was?
They were never fast; but they were pretty much the only game in town if you wanted x86 within tight thermal constraints, for a time after they launched. VIA was similarly tepid and a bit hotter and Intel was pretending that a "Pentium 4 Mobile" was something other than a contradiction in terms.
Now, once Intel stopped pretending that Netburst was something other than a failure, and put some actual effort into lower power designs, it was Game Over; but they didn't do that overnight.
He doesn't just misunderstand bitcoin: Guy wants something 'tangible' so he picks stock... And stock in retailers? Those things that basically live and die by 'consumer confidence', which moves around according to some mixture of actual economic conditions and pure animal spirits.
Have you looked at the prices of a tape? In the last 10 years tape is on par on price with disks, and that is exluding the price of a tape deck.
Oh, I was delighted when the stodgy traditionalists finally bowed to the inevitable and let me move all the nearline and less-demanding-I/O to HDD. Tape still seems to be a bit more reliable if you want to just put something on the shelf and then spin it up in 5 years, HDDs can be a bit touchy about that.
Since this was the first question that came to my mind: apparently HDD platter densities (in similar 'we have demonstrated the technology but don't look for it at Best Buy just yet' stage) are ~ 1 terabit/square inch.
Obviously, the cost of packaging a given number of square inches of HDD platter is markedly higher, so the tape is likely to offer better value(if you are using enough to spread the, generally alarming, cost of the drive(s) and possibly robotic library around a bit); but it's hard to beat the density of a very tightly controlled rigid medium that never leaves a controlled environment during its entire life.
It would be extra tricky because you'd need a system that is not only current and active (which, as you say, is easier said than done on a continuing basis); but you'd need a system that can tell somebody standing right there, who probably doesn't have a specialist interest something they don't already know; but would want to.
If I'm sitting at municipal maintenance HQ, a map/information system that can tell me where all the streetlights are, whether their bulbs are fine, dead, or in predicted-failure, when they were last changed, and what lamp type they require, that's very useful: I can't be everywhere at once, and when I send out the guys with the bucket truck, I want them to have the right lamp the first time, and ideally I want them to arrive shortly before a lamp failure; but not waste money on excessively frequent precautionary swaps.
If I'm a pedestrian, standing next to street lamp #53583, even if your 'smart' agent has access to all those data, what can it tell me that I don't already know and do care about? Am I a lightbulb fancier who just wants to know the FRU number for that particular fixture? Am I standing there at noon, fretting about whether this particular lamp will be functional when it gets dark?
When you are doing infrastructure work, having good data about the state of the world is invaluable in trying to stay on top of constant demands with limited resources while minimizing downtime and waste. That much, I couldn't agree more. If that isn't your problem, though, it's substantially harder to think of cases where such records, even in very good shape, would be of interest to more than a few eccentric hobbyists.
Proposing the use of smartphones and maintenance ID stickers is either proposing a system that would be trivial to implement; but actively less than useless, or patting yourself on the back for having solved what is overwhelmingly the easiest problem in building a (nightmarish, dystopian; but at least genuinely powerful) 'smart city'.
You want to give random inanimate objects grating artificial personalities that suitably masochistic people can access over the internet? Ok. We've been poking at chatbots since the mid 1950s, and some of the ones available now are vaguely convincing. If you want to assign a differently configured one to every class of object, or every object, you could have that spun up in relatively short order and for not much money. It's just that it would be totally pointless. You might as well assign the bots to any collection of numbers that happen to be handy, it'd be as useful.
To begin to approach utility, you'd need to solve the (conceptually simple; but there is no hell like the integration of two or more data storage systems that weren't designed to play nicely with one another from the ground up, even if the city in question already has a very, very, nice municipal mapping and infrastructure issue-tracking system to pull from) problem of connecting the bot to (ideally non-obvious) information that somebody might be interested in, serving as a pointlessly inefficient interface to municipal maintenance records or the like.
To actually qualify as 'smart', the sky is the limit on the amount of mesh networking, interconnected sensors, and who knows what else you'd have to throw at the problem.
In what possible sense is taking a bunch of chatbots with different apparent personalities and assigning them to the object codes in a city a 'smart city'? Would using your GPS coordinates as seed values for customizing your chatbot give you a 'smart planet'?
I'd like to present some sort of cogent refutation; but the sheer magnitude of the 'what? I don't even... why?' leaves nothing to argue with...
I get the impression that, once you get into the realm of molecules that can easily be thousands to tens of thousands of atoms in size (and, just for extra fun, 'graphene oxide nanoparticle' isn't even a specific molecule, just a gigantic class of various differently shaped and sized hunks of graphene with assorted oxidizers grafted on here and there. There might actually be no two alike in a modestly sized sample...) 'systematic naming' becomes a bit of a joke. Assuming your pet molecule doesn't break some hitherto trusted rule it can probably be named; but you aren't going to want to read the result.
It's still arguably sloppy, there just aren't terribly good options.
Only if you really oxidize it, good and hard. Carbon's ability to bond fairly strongly with itself, and graphite's mixture of strong bonds within layers and weak bonds between them allow for a variety of vexingly complex oxidized forms that definitely have a lot more oxygen grafted on than the non-oxide form; but still retain much of their graphite layer structure.
We like exotic nanostructures because they have cool properties that their bulk counterparts don't. Unfortunately, this ends up meaning that a knowledge of the toxicology of the bulk material is of only limited use for inferring what the cool nanostructure will do. Carbon shows signs of potentially being rather nastier in its fancy forms than it is in more familiar flavors; but other nanomaterials might go the other way.
It doesn't seem like a huge surprise that this space is currently a howling wasteland:
Most people who actually want such a service can just tap 'mute' or their platform equivalent when the dump their phone in the beverage holder and start up the car. They aren't going to be terribly good customers, unless you do something really clever, and people who do really clever things are probably focused on sexier, or at least more lucrative, segments.
The people who really don't want such a service aren't good customers; but their worried parents might be; but any software sold for that purpose is likely to be folded into some relatively expensive, subscription based, offspring-command-and-control suite, and thus notably hostile and overengineered for an individual just trying to automate muting his own phone.
It likely doesn't help that laws regulating what you can do in your car aren't all that popular, so there isn't much incentive for carriers or platform vendors to roll out nannyware voluntarily; but, if there were a shift in the wind, they would be overwhelmingly better placed than 3rd-party vendors to take advantage of their deep control of the platform and full access to all sensor data and crush the entire market, such as it is, with a single OS update. Game over man, game over.
Under those circumstances, why even bother?
The xbox360 had a not-wildly-successful external HD-DVD option at one point; but the internal drive was always a standard DVD drive, and no games or xbox-specific disks were ever released as anything other than DVDs.
This hardly decreased the space crunch on xbox games, since DVD9s are even smaller than either successor format; but the xbox never really crossed paths with HD-DVD, other than Microsoft's one relatively lukewarm accessory offering.
If you are going to target a relatively obscure sysem to avoid the big, bad, GPL why not skip the BSDs entirely and help ReactOS chase binary compatibility with Windows drivers? Then you wouldn't even need a second set of drivers.
I think basically, he's proposing pay per pixel. If you have a phone-sized screen, you have lower resolution, and they aren't sending you as many pixels.
Except that, as it happens, phones and tablets frequently have rather more pixels than everything but early-adopter 4k TVs and relatively expensive computers.
My understanding is that you do lose some to thermal cracking, internal steam in improperly dried tablets, and that sort of thing; but that is basically the reason why we have a (comparatively) massive canon of fertile crescent cuneiform, despite its creators being among the oldest in the known history of written language, and living in a pretty rough neighborhood where getting sacked and burned was a common occurrence. I'm not even sure that we have enough subject matter experts to read them all.
It's just disgusting how many people use their cell phones while driving.
It is quite vexing; but I suspect that 'people looking down in surprise when their signal suddenly cuts out' are even less useful for driving than are people chattering like idiots.
True, though if you were trying to load a program onto the nuclear-control-widget, you might be able to get away with a read-only disk.
flash is equally bad on all platforms web guys please stop using it.
Will nothing please you whiners? The Adobe Exploit Runtime offers simultaneous support across Windows, OSX, and Linux for a cutting edge vulnerability, and do we hear even a whisper of credit?
At least they are no longer using a clay tablet reader.
I'll say one thing for clay tablets: few other formats just shrug when somebody burns your civilization to the ground...
Fighting with the old drives probably isn't a pleasant business; but I wonder how difficult DIY-ing really antique floppy disks would be?
We still manufacturer magnetic thin films on flexible media, for the last few 3.5 inch floppies and other purposes, and I'd imagine that you could get away with putting a very low resolution magnetic pattern on film capable of a much finer one (though not the reverse), so if you could convince a maker of magnetic medium for floppy or tape storage to sell you some film in whatever larger size the finished product is cut down from, you might need little more than the ability to cut in a neat circle and then fold together the outer case.
I wouldn't depend on it for archival purposes; but it wouldn't surprise me if it would work.
...how that attitude worked out for them.
10 years from now there won't be watches without some sort of connectivity except for specialty pieces designed from the outset to satisfy luddites.
I wouldn't be entirely sanguine about the future of watches in the 'just a basic quartz oscillator; but dressed up to the 50-100 range' sector; but why would the $2 expendables and the $$$ pointlessly-mechanical-man-jewelry sector worry? The former will always be cheaper than watches with additional parts, and the latter 'should' have been wiped out by superior quartz oscillator technology; but obviously wasn't.
Arguably, there might be situations in which internal inconsistency works (and might even work better than the alternative), it's not as though literature has had nothing but total failure with stories where narrator unreliability, assorted magical-realist or supernatural elements, imperfect information, and so on make deriving an internally consistent ruleset for the story's setting effectively impossible.) There are even stories that do just fine despite explicitly denying the possibility of internally consistent understandings, sometimes downright rubbing the characters' faces in it and watching them suffer, and they are none the worse for it.(HP Lovecraft is quite arguably not high art; but it's good fun, definitely the sort of thing that could make a game plot, and it revels in a universe where only the smallest and best-lit corners are within the reach of human understanding and to go beyond that is to enter a nightmare realm of eldrich madness that is beyond human grasp, permanently.) Something like the (overtly 4th-wall-breaking) effects of low 'sanity' in "Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem", are arguably similar in a gaming context. Does it make any internally consistent sense that your avatar suffering sanity damage would cause the player to be confronted with 'hallucination' effects that include (simulated) technical glitches with their gamecube and TV? Not really. Is it a perfectly workable mechanic? Definitely.
What doesn't go over well are the instances of internal inconsistency that suggest that the continuity people were just asleep on the job, or where the game is 'on rails' such that the mechanics of the world vary wildly according to the needs of the Guiding Hand Of Plot: Does game X have destructible environments? Except for the plot-specific doors that are invulnerable, unhackable, and can only be opened with the magic keycard? Fuck that.