I totally agree with your statement on cost versus value. Sure it'll cost a lot to build fiber and gigabit+ speed Internet to every home and business in the US but the economic benefits would be huge and the cost of not doing this will hurt badly as we'll slip further behind in education and our companies will not be equipped to keep up with companies in countries such as Japan and Korea. Do we want to lose our technological lead? Having universal gigabit Internet access is required if we want to stay a world power.
Will magnetic induction hurt a penny or set of keys? I would assume they have taken into account things like disk drives being placed near the device since they mention laptops. Just being metal wouldn't necessarily mean it'd be detected as needing power.
I'd be more interested if someone was actually going to try rolling out a nation-wide fiber to the home initiative that could get us all gigabit or better speeds at a reasonable price ( $100/mo). I don't give a damn about some stupid VR project but I would like to have decent Internet access.
The biggest shortcomings in VR are in the user-interface. If you can't provide a decent experience with all the information sitting on the local machine then you can't expect to do it over the network.
Locating the captcha in the rendered page can't take more than a couple seconds. You'd have to change it a lot to change that. It's a blocky, colorful, bit of screen near a form submit button. Even if you change it there are only so many ways you can change it without making it confusing to users. If a user can find it then I can write a script to find it.
It's a useful tool to slow down script kiddies but it won't stop anyone that could actually write the code to grab the characters in the image in the first place.
Sadly, the three Rs are not enough to create a strong workforce. Computers are the most flexible and therefore most important tool we have and therefore it is important to learn. It also gives incredible access to a huge library of information and powerful communication tools. I'd say learning to read, do basic math, and use a computer should be the basics of education. As for writing I guess it's a cute historical footnote but not overly important. I'd teach basic block letters and of course grammar and spelling but wouldn't waste time on learning cursive.
I think PRey is probably the most interesting game of the year. The game itself was so-so but the capabilities of the engine are really cool. I love the gravity and portal effects. It seems like the perfect engine to build multiplayer games in.
Of course I had to wait ten years to actually see this game so no matter what it turned out to be I was bound to be a little let down.
I think even shooting some sort of robotic crew to the moon or Mars to start preparing them for human occupants would get people interested again. People don't care about discovering interesting space dust. Think big and act big and the public will be interested and support you. Talk about moon and Mars colonies within the next twenty years and get it done. When I see projections of this stuff talking about next century I just feel like NASA is suddenly full of wusses who won't even risk saying something exciting besides actually trying to do it.
Even if it costs a lot of money and lives I think we should push ahead as fast as possible at colonization. It's safer for humanity not to be bunched on one rock, we could elarn a lot and develop a lot of awesome new technology, and it'll catch the public imagination which will mean NASA will get more funding. Make it about colonizing before the Chinese, Russians, or French do.
Most consumer electronics lack any sort of vision. Like certain bloatware software we're all familiar with they tend to add lots of features most people won't use while ignoring simple ease of use issues. I can't even count up the number of people I've had to help add a new DVD player or game console to their entertainment center because it was to confussing for them to get right. Quite a few I had to help configure their devices too because they didn't work out of the box and have a lot of complex technical options (which are all reset when there is a power outage!).
I shouldn't be all that hard to define a new power and data over one cable standard. I don't even care if internally it's two (or more) wires shielded from each other. It seems to me all the details of interconnections should be handled by the power strip / network switch. All devices should be able to sense each other and figure out who wants, and can get, access to the others. So the screen is a pure output device, the PinkDisc SHD-DVD, PS4, Woo, and XBox 666 are pure input devices, the DVR can capture the outputs of other devices as input and also output to other interested devices, etc. It could even be as simple as giving each device it's own output channel to broadcast on and letting the devices tune to the channels they are interested in.
I'd just use some souped up version of PoE and keep as much of the rest of the ethernet spec as possible intact. Then drop in a simple communications protocol and you're set.
One thing that really annoys me is that most televisions, DVD players, VCRs, game consoles, etc lose their data and have to have some level of reconfiguration on start-up if you hard kill their power. I'd love to be able to put all that crap on a power strip that I could flip everything on, or off, at once on and save some power when I don't need them. It doesn't cost all that much more (a couple dollars) to build such items to retain such information when cut off from power - most companies just don't bother. As far as I know there isn't even any label for the consumer to look for to know which items would retain such information.
For that matter why does every device in my house require configuration? IMO I don't even need a real tv anymore - cut out the tuner and pretty much all options and just make it work as a monitor for whatever devices are plugged into it. If everything needs to know the time then why don't we design them all to use the atomic time as broadcast or design homes to broadcast their own time signal. Why do I need to configure everything to know what everything else is? Have the tv and devices attached to it auto-sense each other and auto-configure properly. (And off-topic, but related, why do we need so many cords? Can't we figure out how to send power and data on the same single cord so I don't need twenty cables behind my damn tv?)
If the crack turns out to be real and workable on all titles then this will be good enough for me to be able to buy BlueRay movies. I probably won't, for a while, because I still don't feel a need for any form of HD movies.
I totally agree that it'd be great if we could force these companies not to use DRM but to be realistic that isn't going to happen until a competitor that doesn't use DRM starts whooping their ass. So the first step would be to start releasing DRM-free HD movies which probably means either producing your own movies or convincing someone high up in some movie company that DRM is hurting them.
That too. With everyone's dirty little secrets exposed it no longer has any shock value and quickly becomes boring. In the end, most people won't care and a few people will be interested and a few more will be critical. Most of us just aren't very interested and most of us are to lazy to spend a lot of time worrying about what other people are doing.
This is why, while I'm against spy cameras placed in public (for business owners and the government use only), I don't care if there are public spy cameras in public places. Let everyone peek at their favorite cameras and see what people are doing so long as they are usable by everyone and clearly identified. It's really pretty boring and still helps to control crime and avoids a lot of concerns over abuse by the government and others in power.
Then for those people let them stick with their toy OS of choice. I'm okay with that. If anything, I think that they need simpler user-interfaces for such people. There is no reason we need a single user-interface that applys for everyone. I'd disagree as to the number of people who wouldn't want to do more complex tasks though - of it could be made easy to do them. It's not very easy to do complex tasks on any desktop environment I've ever seen. The closest I've seen to actually making this possible is the much loved web browser you mentioned.
Expose is not really a task switcher. It is nice for seeing what windows you have open but it is not a good system for quickly switching between windows or with breaking windows down into groups by task. It does nothing to organize your workflow.
I think the reason why people throw away their privacy so easily is bcause privacy is a stupid concept anyway. What do you really gain from privacy? People can do what they want without other people knowing? Oh that's a good one - so instead of openly admitting and discussing things we allow silly tabboos to fester while we scurry around trying to hide our sins. We allow true crimes to stay hidden. We hide from ourselves and each other. Hell yes, gimme some of that.
Stop hiding in the shadows. Step into the digital sunlight and shout your secrets to the world. You'll find some criticism but with it you'll also find a lot of people with similar interests, problems, and lives. You'll find friends and lovers. You may even find a good job.
You don't have much choice anyway. We're quickly moving into a society where it's possible that you're being seen, heard, and tracked anywhere, at anytime, by anybody. That is both a curse and a blessing but it's just the way things are going to be. We'll all be better off if we let the skeletons out of our own closet, on our own terms, than if we try to fight and let someone else expose us.
I had a Linux system about the time I was 14 and I could use it very well. I'll take argument with the notion that UI is inconsistant and hard to use in Unix. Sitting down at a bash command line and most basic XWindow apps is the same on any system - even before KDE and Gnome made them more colorful. Of course the interface used in Jurrasic Park is retarded.. wasn't it some sort of experimental file explorer by SGI?
There are quite a number of books that I like that can no longer be found at all. I'd love to be able to just have this machine print me out copies instead of just waiting for the off chance of finding one some where.
You can. The image I downloaded needed some hand tweaking to make it fast enough to use and to enable all basic hardware though (network, video, sound). I found the image downloadable with BT and there were a few sites that had information on getting everything working right although I ended up piecing things together based on directions from several sites.
I have that book. It's very interesting. To bad more about Tesla isn't properly recorded as he was so obviously one of the leading genuises of the previous couple centuries. He is the closest I have to a geek hero. His plan to wirelessly transmit power, for free, to people is just awesome and he planned a wireless world-wide communications network almost 100 years before the Internet.
I'm glad, at least, that some scientists are finally remembering Tesla and working towards making wireless power transmission a reality. This time, I hope greedy business men don't interfere.
I like being able to run OS X in VMWare. Thank gawd for hacked copies since Apple refuses to sell OS X for this use and you have to jump through hoops to make it work. Makes it handy to test out programs and web sites you're developing.
VMWare is supposed to be working on 3D drivers for use inside the VM. I hope they get it working as it'd be nice to be able to run games in VMWare w/ Win2k instead of having to dual-boot. It probably doesn't matter to me though as I'm refussing to ever use Vista and I imagine most new PC games will soon be for Vista.
I think the XBox 360 will lead for the next year or so and then as games that fully take advantage of the PS3 come out and the PS3 gets cheap enough for more casual gamers to buy the PS3 will take the lead as the console of choice. In the end it's power and BlueRay will make it the champion.
Meanwhile I see the Wii as the runner up behind the PS3 largely due to it's low price point and classic Nintendo style. I see the XBox 360 becoming another Dreamcast. Like the Dreamcast, I'd consider buying a 360 but not until it's price drops down to almost nothing.
I can see both Sony and Microsoft finding ways to clone the Wiimote and add it's functionality to their games. Nintendo's best bet could be to prove the technology and then to license it to Sony and Microsoft. They could get a slice of the profits from all three consoles.
As to the power of the PS3 I think the real interesting stuff will not be the graphics, although those are nice, but improved AI and physics and other stuff that you can't see in a screenshot. Interactivity is as much in what you can do with the processing power available as it is in the interface.
The only real benefit of the XBox 360 is that it was out first and was a little cheaper than the PS3. If theyw ant to come out as the best selling console of this generation I think they need to really work on putting out some awesome titles and bringing their price down quickly. Adding some optional controller similar to the Wiimote, with enough good games that can support it, could help too. They should attack the Wii in the area of performance and the PS3 in the area of price.
Being easy to do nothing and being easy to do something are quite a bit different. Aqua is fine for doing a couple simple tasks in such as looking at the web or email but it quickly begins to fall apart as you try to do more, more complex, tasks. Not that most users know the difference since they just take it for granted that those limitations are just the way working with a computer has to be.
The research companies like Apple does are based more on making things easier for newbies, and easier to sell to newbies, and not for experts. Apple doesn't even use a consistant interface between it's different applications. So much for all their research into user interfaces. Can't make up their mind can they? Most people spend a very short part of their entire life of using a product as a newbie and quite a bit of time as a progressingly advanced user. Making it difficult for advanced users to use the system any more effectively than a newbie isn't very smart. That would be a large part as to why companies find that moving their workplace to be more computerized doesn't greatly benefit employee effeciency and that effeciency doesn't greatly improve with time.
I'm not to cool to use an Aqua interface and in fact I use it quite often - I just have to much work to get done to leave myself trapped in Mac OS. Keep your cutsie toy interface that doesn't even make it easy to get to more than a few applications let alone files. Nor does it make it easy to manage more than a few windows. It's like trying to work with your hands tied behind your back. Aqua is a horrible interface for working and when the shit really hits the fan you can't even fix your problems without dropping to the good old command-line. So much for making everything easy enough that even an idiot can do it.
The one thing Apple has right is that simplicity is a good thing. The major thing that they have wrong is that they try to simplify tasks to such a degree that you can often no longer do the task without figuring out how to jump through hoops. Sure a 10-key phone pad is a simpler interface for entering data than a full-sized keyboard - but it isn't an easier interface except for very targeted uses. If you send very many text messages from your phone you'll understand what I mean. An interface should neither be complicated or simple - it should be elegant. An elegant interface is one that keeps things as simple as possible but no simpler. It needs to be reasonably easy to get started in and easy to figure out how to do more complex tasks in. It needs to adapt neatly so that as tasks grow more complex they don't grow exponentially harder to do.
I'm sure I'm very condescending - people who give other people credit for being intelligent are often considered that way. As opposed to people that think everyone else is stupid and therefore need to be protected from thinking or being able to get work done.
You assume that we want to sell Linux to the masses. I'm content to let the masses of idiots use Windows so long as my computer works the way I need it to work. If people want something consistant, that doesn't work very well or offer any choices, them let them use Windows or Mac OS. What do I gain by dumbing down my OS/DE to the same level of the competition? Then I have to go and create yet another OS/DE so that I can have something that actually works. Just buy an etch-s-sketch for each of the people that want their computer to be a toy instead of a tool - it'll serve them better.
For companies that want to spend their own money dumbing things down I guess it's fine but I'd rather not see all their stupidity forced on the rest of us. If their customers really want their dumbed down product then they'll have no trouble selling it. If they can't then maybe they need to figure out that their market niche isn't significant enough.
Windows and Mac OS have created a curse in computing. Instead of actually making it easier to do complex work, interfaces are now designed so that complete idiots with no experience can sit down and play Minesweeper and look at porn. It's all about eye candy and not about usability or managing complex workflow and processes. It's incredibly stupid to emphasis keeping users trapped at a newbie level.
If anything, Linux needs a complete new direction in the desktop - one that doesn't copy every stupid idea from Windows and Mac OS but instead places the emphasis on making experienced users more productive. Why is it that experienced users still need to drop to the command-line to do real work? Because nobody has innovated in accomplishing complex tasks in a graphical enviroment since the creation of the stupid desktop metaphor. Instead of spending time cloning other environments I'd suggest spending more time on the parts of Linux that can be really annoying - make devices and services work better. These are usually better than their Windows counterparts already but they are still the most frustrating aspect of using the computer.
If you build something different but better THEN you have a killer app people will switch to Linux for. You think people are dumb but in my experience this is a lie people have been convinced of by Microsoft and Apple. I know many people that easily used DOS or even older, and harder systems, like punch cards or typing in cryptic commands on their C64. These people are now confussed by their desktop and no longer think they can manage to use their computer for anything more than the web, email, and games. They could use their computer just fine except they've been convinced otherwise and everything has been dumbed down so much that none of it has any meaning. Stop being so condescending - most people are smart enough to use a real computer.
When I was researching AI still I always embedded emotions into my programs so I don't think it's true that nobody has done it. I guess you can argue if they are real emotions or psuedo-emotions but IMO if they behave like emotions then they are emotions and I don't need to do any further navel lint inspection before I can go on with my work.
I define two basic axioms the machine can respond to, call them pain and pleasure if you like, and create certain conditions which can cause either of those. Then I create a few more axioms that are interconnected to these axioms - fear, happiness, etc. Any axiom can be increased or decreased by any other and how they form these connections control most of how the program will respond. Then on top of that what you would call logical axioms can be layered so that for example the program can detect food and know that if it is hungry that consuming that food will create pleasure and reduce pain and also know that even if it isn't hungry now that consuming the food will reduce the fear of future pain.
Being a better number cruncher isn't intelligence IMO. All your examples just use brute force and human collected data sets to emulate intelligence. Faking intelligence is easy for specific domains but you get very little flexibility which IMO is the hallmark of intelligence. Knowing facts is education - being able to do stuff that hasn't been explicitly taught is intelligence. If you don't understand what you know you can't do much with it because you have no connections between the small amount of data provided and other data which would allow you to think about it. The word apple represents certain things in your mind. I could assign number 423743 to mean an apple too but if you don't understand that this is an apple, or have any of those data connections that give the word apple meaning, then you don't understand it and will have a lot of trouble thinking about that data. Likewise a computer processing the word apple has no context in which to give the word meaning except that which we've hard coded into it.
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I totally agree with your statement on cost versus value. Sure it'll cost a lot to build fiber and gigabit+ speed Internet to every home and business in the US but the economic benefits would be huge and the cost of not doing this will hurt badly as we'll slip further behind in education and our companies will not be equipped to keep up with companies in countries such as Japan and Korea. Do we want to lose our technological lead? Having universal gigabit Internet access is required if we want to stay a world power.
Will magnetic induction hurt a penny or set of keys? I would assume they have taken into account things like disk drives being placed near the device since they mention laptops. Just being metal wouldn't necessarily mean it'd be detected as needing power.
I'd be more interested if someone was actually going to try rolling out a nation-wide fiber to the home initiative that could get us all gigabit or better speeds at a reasonable price ( $100/mo). I don't give a damn about some stupid VR project but I would like to have decent Internet access.
The biggest shortcomings in VR are in the user-interface. If you can't provide a decent experience with all the information sitting on the local machine then you can't expect to do it over the network.
Locating the captcha in the rendered page can't take more than a couple seconds. You'd have to change it a lot to change that. It's a blocky, colorful, bit of screen near a form submit button. Even if you change it there are only so many ways you can change it without making it confusing to users. If a user can find it then I can write a script to find it.
It's a useful tool to slow down script kiddies but it won't stop anyone that could actually write the code to grab the characters in the image in the first place.
Sadly, the three Rs are not enough to create a strong workforce. Computers are the most flexible and therefore most important tool we have and therefore it is important to learn. It also gives incredible access to a huge library of information and powerful communication tools. I'd say learning to read, do basic math, and use a computer should be the basics of education. As for writing I guess it's a cute historical footnote but not overly important. I'd teach basic block letters and of course grammar and spelling but wouldn't waste time on learning cursive.
I think PRey is probably the most interesting game of the year. The game itself was so-so but the capabilities of the engine are really cool. I love the gravity and portal effects. It seems like the perfect engine to build multiplayer games in.
Of course I had to wait ten years to actually see this game so no matter what it turned out to be I was bound to be a little let down.
I think even shooting some sort of robotic crew to the moon or Mars to start preparing them for human occupants would get people interested again. People don't care about discovering interesting space dust. Think big and act big and the public will be interested and support you. Talk about moon and Mars colonies within the next twenty years and get it done. When I see projections of this stuff talking about next century I just feel like NASA is suddenly full of wusses who won't even risk saying something exciting besides actually trying to do it.
Even if it costs a lot of money and lives I think we should push ahead as fast as possible at colonization. It's safer for humanity not to be bunched on one rock, we could elarn a lot and develop a lot of awesome new technology, and it'll catch the public imagination which will mean NASA will get more funding. Make it about colonizing before the Chinese, Russians, or French do.
Most consumer electronics lack any sort of vision. Like certain bloatware software we're all familiar with they tend to add lots of features most people won't use while ignoring simple ease of use issues. I can't even count up the number of people I've had to help add a new DVD player or game console to their entertainment center because it was to confussing for them to get right. Quite a few I had to help configure their devices too because they didn't work out of the box and have a lot of complex technical options (which are all reset when there is a power outage!).
I shouldn't be all that hard to define a new power and data over one cable standard. I don't even care if internally it's two (or more) wires shielded from each other. It seems to me all the details of interconnections should be handled by the power strip / network switch. All devices should be able to sense each other and figure out who wants, and can get, access to the others. So the screen is a pure output device, the PinkDisc SHD-DVD, PS4, Woo, and XBox 666 are pure input devices, the DVR can capture the outputs of other devices as input and also output to other interested devices, etc. It could even be as simple as giving each device it's own output channel to broadcast on and letting the devices tune to the channels they are interested in.
I'd just use some souped up version of PoE and keep as much of the rest of the ethernet spec as possible intact. Then drop in a simple communications protocol and you're set.
One thing that really annoys me is that most televisions, DVD players, VCRs, game consoles, etc lose their data and have to have some level of reconfiguration on start-up if you hard kill their power. I'd love to be able to put all that crap on a power strip that I could flip everything on, or off, at once on and save some power when I don't need them. It doesn't cost all that much more (a couple dollars) to build such items to retain such information when cut off from power - most companies just don't bother. As far as I know there isn't even any label for the consumer to look for to know which items would retain such information.
For that matter why does every device in my house require configuration? IMO I don't even need a real tv anymore - cut out the tuner and pretty much all options and just make it work as a monitor for whatever devices are plugged into it. If everything needs to know the time then why don't we design them all to use the atomic time as broadcast or design homes to broadcast their own time signal. Why do I need to configure everything to know what everything else is? Have the tv and devices attached to it auto-sense each other and auto-configure properly. (And off-topic, but related, why do we need so many cords? Can't we figure out how to send power and data on the same single cord so I don't need twenty cables behind my damn tv?)
If the crack turns out to be real and workable on all titles then this will be good enough for me to be able to buy BlueRay movies. I probably won't, for a while, because I still don't feel a need for any form of HD movies.
I totally agree that it'd be great if we could force these companies not to use DRM but to be realistic that isn't going to happen until a competitor that doesn't use DRM starts whooping their ass. So the first step would be to start releasing DRM-free HD movies which probably means either producing your own movies or convincing someone high up in some movie company that DRM is hurting them.
That too. With everyone's dirty little secrets exposed it no longer has any shock value and quickly becomes boring. In the end, most people won't care and a few people will be interested and a few more will be critical. Most of us just aren't very interested and most of us are to lazy to spend a lot of time worrying about what other people are doing.
This is why, while I'm against spy cameras placed in public (for business owners and the government use only), I don't care if there are public spy cameras in public places. Let everyone peek at their favorite cameras and see what people are doing so long as they are usable by everyone and clearly identified. It's really pretty boring and still helps to control crime and avoids a lot of concerns over abuse by the government and others in power.
Then for those people let them stick with their toy OS of choice. I'm okay with that. If anything, I think that they need simpler user-interfaces for such people. There is no reason we need a single user-interface that applys for everyone. I'd disagree as to the number of people who wouldn't want to do more complex tasks though - of it could be made easy to do them. It's not very easy to do complex tasks on any desktop environment I've ever seen. The closest I've seen to actually making this possible is the much loved web browser you mentioned.
Expose is not really a task switcher. It is nice for seeing what windows you have open but it is not a good system for quickly switching between windows or with breaking windows down into groups by task. It does nothing to organize your workflow.
I think the reason why people throw away their privacy so easily is bcause privacy is a stupid concept anyway. What do you really gain from privacy? People can do what they want without other people knowing? Oh that's a good one - so instead of openly admitting and discussing things we allow silly tabboos to fester while we scurry around trying to hide our sins. We allow true crimes to stay hidden. We hide from ourselves and each other. Hell yes, gimme some of that.
Stop hiding in the shadows. Step into the digital sunlight and shout your secrets to the world. You'll find some criticism but with it you'll also find a lot of people with similar interests, problems, and lives. You'll find friends and lovers. You may even find a good job.
You don't have much choice anyway. We're quickly moving into a society where it's possible that you're being seen, heard, and tracked anywhere, at anytime, by anybody. That is both a curse and a blessing but it's just the way things are going to be. We'll all be better off if we let the skeletons out of our own closet, on our own terms, than if we try to fight and let someone else expose us.
Ready or not, you're no longer alone - ever.
I had a Linux system about the time I was 14 and I could use it very well. I'll take argument with the notion that UI is inconsistant and hard to use in Unix. Sitting down at a bash command line and most basic XWindow apps is the same on any system - even before KDE and Gnome made them more colorful. Of course the interface used in Jurrasic Park is retarded.. wasn't it some sort of experimental file explorer by SGI?
I can play 2D games in VMWare and thye seem to work fine.
There are quite a number of books that I like that can no longer be found at all. I'd love to be able to just have this machine print me out copies instead of just waiting for the off chance of finding one some where.
You can. The image I downloaded needed some hand tweaking to make it fast enough to use and to enable all basic hardware though (network, video, sound). I found the image downloadable with BT and there were a few sites that had information on getting everything working right although I ended up piecing things together based on directions from several sites.
http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3368775 looks like it has a link you can download it from.
Stupid for Apple - I'd buy it from them if they'd support VMWare.
I have that book. It's very interesting. To bad more about Tesla isn't properly recorded as he was so obviously one of the leading genuises of the previous couple centuries. He is the closest I have to a geek hero. His plan to wirelessly transmit power, for free, to people is just awesome and he planned a wireless world-wide communications network almost 100 years before the Internet.
I'm glad, at least, that some scientists are finally remembering Tesla and working towards making wireless power transmission a reality. This time, I hope greedy business men don't interfere.
I like being able to run OS X in VMWare. Thank gawd for hacked copies since Apple refuses to sell OS X for this use and you have to jump through hoops to make it work. Makes it handy to test out programs and web sites you're developing.
VMWare is supposed to be working on 3D drivers for use inside the VM. I hope they get it working as it'd be nice to be able to run games in VMWare w/ Win2k instead of having to dual-boot. It probably doesn't matter to me though as I'm refussing to ever use Vista and I imagine most new PC games will soon be for Vista.
I think the XBox 360 will lead for the next year or so and then as games that fully take advantage of the PS3 come out and the PS3 gets cheap enough for more casual gamers to buy the PS3 will take the lead as the console of choice. In the end it's power and BlueRay will make it the champion.
Meanwhile I see the Wii as the runner up behind the PS3 largely due to it's low price point and classic Nintendo style. I see the XBox 360 becoming another Dreamcast. Like the Dreamcast, I'd consider buying a 360 but not until it's price drops down to almost nothing.
I can see both Sony and Microsoft finding ways to clone the Wiimote and add it's functionality to their games. Nintendo's best bet could be to prove the technology and then to license it to Sony and Microsoft. They could get a slice of the profits from all three consoles.
As to the power of the PS3 I think the real interesting stuff will not be the graphics, although those are nice, but improved AI and physics and other stuff that you can't see in a screenshot. Interactivity is as much in what you can do with the processing power available as it is in the interface.
The only real benefit of the XBox 360 is that it was out first and was a little cheaper than the PS3. If theyw ant to come out as the best selling console of this generation I think they need to really work on putting out some awesome titles and bringing their price down quickly. Adding some optional controller similar to the Wiimote, with enough good games that can support it, could help too. They should attack the Wii in the area of performance and the PS3 in the area of price.
Being easy to do nothing and being easy to do something are quite a bit different. Aqua is fine for doing a couple simple tasks in such as looking at the web or email but it quickly begins to fall apart as you try to do more, more complex, tasks. Not that most users know the difference since they just take it for granted that those limitations are just the way working with a computer has to be.
The research companies like Apple does are based more on making things easier for newbies, and easier to sell to newbies, and not for experts. Apple doesn't even use a consistant interface between it's different applications. So much for all their research into user interfaces. Can't make up their mind can they? Most people spend a very short part of their entire life of using a product as a newbie and quite a bit of time as a progressingly advanced user. Making it difficult for advanced users to use the system any more effectively than a newbie isn't very smart. That would be a large part as to why companies find that moving their workplace to be more computerized doesn't greatly benefit employee effeciency and that effeciency doesn't greatly improve with time.
I'm not to cool to use an Aqua interface and in fact I use it quite often - I just have to much work to get done to leave myself trapped in Mac OS. Keep your cutsie toy interface that doesn't even make it easy to get to more than a few applications let alone files. Nor does it make it easy to manage more than a few windows. It's like trying to work with your hands tied behind your back. Aqua is a horrible interface for working and when the shit really hits the fan you can't even fix your problems without dropping to the good old command-line. So much for making everything easy enough that even an idiot can do it.
The one thing Apple has right is that simplicity is a good thing. The major thing that they have wrong is that they try to simplify tasks to such a degree that you can often no longer do the task without figuring out how to jump through hoops. Sure a 10-key phone pad is a simpler interface for entering data than a full-sized keyboard - but it isn't an easier interface except for very targeted uses. If you send very many text messages from your phone you'll understand what I mean. An interface should neither be complicated or simple - it should be elegant. An elegant interface is one that keeps things as simple as possible but no simpler. It needs to be reasonably easy to get started in and easy to figure out how to do more complex tasks in. It needs to adapt neatly so that as tasks grow more complex they don't grow exponentially harder to do.
I'm sure I'm very condescending - people who give other people credit for being intelligent are often considered that way. As opposed to people that think everyone else is stupid and therefore need to be protected from thinking or being able to get work done.
You assume that we want to sell Linux to the masses. I'm content to let the masses of idiots use Windows so long as my computer works the way I need it to work. If people want something consistant, that doesn't work very well or offer any choices, them let them use Windows or Mac OS. What do I gain by dumbing down my OS/DE to the same level of the competition? Then I have to go and create yet another OS/DE so that I can have something that actually works. Just buy an etch-s-sketch for each of the people that want their computer to be a toy instead of a tool - it'll serve them better.
For companies that want to spend their own money dumbing things down I guess it's fine but I'd rather not see all their stupidity forced on the rest of us. If their customers really want their dumbed down product then they'll have no trouble selling it. If they can't then maybe they need to figure out that their market niche isn't significant enough.
Windows and Mac OS have created a curse in computing. Instead of actually making it easier to do complex work, interfaces are now designed so that complete idiots with no experience can sit down and play Minesweeper and look at porn. It's all about eye candy and not about usability or managing complex workflow and processes. It's incredibly stupid to emphasis keeping users trapped at a newbie level.
If anything, Linux needs a complete new direction in the desktop - one that doesn't copy every stupid idea from Windows and Mac OS but instead places the emphasis on making experienced users more productive. Why is it that experienced users still need to drop to the command-line to do real work? Because nobody has innovated in accomplishing complex tasks in a graphical enviroment since the creation of the stupid desktop metaphor. Instead of spending time cloning other environments I'd suggest spending more time on the parts of Linux that can be really annoying - make devices and services work better. These are usually better than their Windows counterparts already but they are still the most frustrating aspect of using the computer.
If you build something different but better THEN you have a killer app people will switch to Linux for. You think people are dumb but in my experience this is a lie people have been convinced of by Microsoft and Apple. I know many people that easily used DOS or even older, and harder systems, like punch cards or typing in cryptic commands on their C64. These people are now confussed by their desktop and no longer think they can manage to use their computer for anything more than the web, email, and games. They could use their computer just fine except they've been convinced otherwise and everything has been dumbed down so much that none of it has any meaning. Stop being so condescending - most people are smart enough to use a real computer.
When I was researching AI still I always embedded emotions into my programs so I don't think it's true that nobody has done it. I guess you can argue if they are real emotions or psuedo-emotions but IMO if they behave like emotions then they are emotions and I don't need to do any further navel lint inspection before I can go on with my work.
I define two basic axioms the machine can respond to, call them pain and pleasure if you like, and create certain conditions which can cause either of those. Then I create a few more axioms that are interconnected to these axioms - fear, happiness, etc. Any axiom can be increased or decreased by any other and how they form these connections control most of how the program will respond. Then on top of that what you would call logical axioms can be layered so that for example the program can detect food and know that if it is hungry that consuming that food will create pleasure and reduce pain and also know that even if it isn't hungry now that consuming the food will reduce the fear of future pain.
Being a better number cruncher isn't intelligence IMO. All your examples just use brute force and human collected data sets to emulate intelligence. Faking intelligence is easy for specific domains but you get very little flexibility which IMO is the hallmark of intelligence. Knowing facts is education - being able to do stuff that hasn't been explicitly taught is intelligence. If you don't understand what you know you can't do much with it because you have no connections between the small amount of data provided and other data which would allow you to think about it. The word apple represents certain things in your mind. I could assign number 423743 to mean an apple too but if you don't understand that this is an apple, or have any of those data connections that give the word apple meaning, then you don't understand it and will have a lot of trouble thinking about that data. Likewise a computer processing the word apple has no context in which to give the word meaning except that which we've hard coded into it.