Google won't be killed until someone perfects an AI that you can have a search 'conversation' with, who can understand goddamn context and intelligently narrow down, find relevant articles that don't contain your keywords, etc. Kinda like the librarian from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" novel, but more powerful.
The main reason no one will beat Google until then is that Google is extremely wealthy and can outspend you as it continually perfects information sorting itself, not to mention buy any technology that comes close to threatening it. If you really developed a Google-killer and presented it to the world, do you also have the stones to turn down, say, $100 million? I don't think so, it would take you probably 20-30 years to make that on your own, if you're lucky, with the search field full of competition and Google's mature business-plan in place. Even the days of Alta-Vista were essentially the Cowboy West, unsophisticated and without any proven business plans. Google walked in and owned right away, then discovered how to make money off search when no one else was.
Even then, the founders of Google tried to sell their brilliant search idea not for $100 million dollars, but for $1 million dollars, and there were no takers. They were forced to go it alone. If someone had offered them $500,000 they probably would've taken it and ran.
Although, if you really do develop an AI, there'll be a billion more profit opportunities than search, that's peripheral. An AI can do menial labor far better, faster, stronger than a human. What happens when McDonalds is staffed solely by robots. That would be pretty damn cool actually. They work for the price of electricity, maybe we can get the price of a cheeseburger back down to $0.25:D
Yeah, Nintendo's in a completely different market than Sony/MS./sarcasm Just like the PSP is in a completely different market than the DS, a failing market.
Sony looooves to make this claim. Next thing Sony will be claiming the PS3 is the 'best selling black console on the market':rolleyes:
Kutaragi is famous for his 'spin'. He once said that PS3 would allow users to actually jack into the Matrix:|
Here's another one: Kutaragi on the PS3's initial price of $599: "It's probably too cheap... We want consumers to think to themselves, 'I will work more hours to buy one.'"
If their 2009 LCDs are a great 'value for the money' then Sony has failed and been forced to abandon its previous complete domination of a sector. Remember, Sony was used to charging 10-20% more for the exact same feature set -- because it had the name 'Sony' on the side. The fact that Sony can't do that anymore is a testament to how far their brand has fallen, and how much their competition has increased in stature. If you really want value for the money, I suggest buying Vizio. They are the cheapest on the market, were designed that way using a unique marketing plan, and are a great product. Old-hat producers like Sony won't be able to match because they simple don't have a targeted, focused, one-minded business-plan like Vizio (and perhaps other makers, Samsung, etc).
Sony has been letting profits in one division support the failings in others. That's a dangerous thing to do. As was noted, the PSX and PS2 game sales largely kept the company afloat. Gaming became so important that Kutaragi was in line to become CEO, before the PS3 debacle got him fired. Honestly I would've laughed my head off if Kutaragi had become CEO of Sony, because the way that guy talks can you imagine if he was head of the company and had virtually no accountability? It would've been Kutaragi on steroids, that could've let to some truly funny quotes for a few years before he tanked the company XD
"There's very few good 3rd party games on the Wii as is. There's a considerably higher ratio of shovel ware to good games than the other consoles."
- I actually don't blame Ninty for this problem, it's largely called by the controller. Call it the learning-curve on a new controller paradigm. The Wii revolutionized the market by introducing a control scheme that the public has embraced. There's no going back on that front, and I fully expect to see a Sony and MS version of the Wiimote next gen. This generation has seen the limits of N's original Wii technology which, in retrospect, isn't great. N recently released a gyroscope based add-on which makes the controller a true 1:1 input device (as far as tilt goes, someone will add positional tracking eventually) and will likely be standard in the next console.
I also wouldn't be surprised if a very large number of people whom grew up with the NES and SNES love the Virtual Console and are today buying games on it both for nostalgic value and to share with their own children, which by now are in the newborn to 10 y.o. range.
"That changed a bit after we delivered 90 per cent of the company's profit for a few years."
- Yep, PS2 was the only thing keeping Sony afloat as a company for awhile there. Then they spent some $2 billion making the over-hyped Cell chip for the PS3 and actually thought they didn't need a graphics card, instead one was put in last minute -- what a fiasco. Kutaragi the hyperbolist was later fired for that mistake.
Meanwhile, Sony is losing its rep as a hardware manufacturer and facing stiff competition in sectors it once dominated such as TV's and now LCDs. Of the three console makers, Sony relied on its console receipts the most in order to keep their company afloat. Even Nintendo survived on owning the portable gaming market through Gameboy and now the DS when its console offering was weak. Microsoft of course had Windows, Office and its other software sales.
Sony was willing to spent billions to make sure the PS3 was number one like its predecessors. It virtually bet the company on it. The market's rejection of that bid has been one of the great business-move blunders in recent memory. Remember, Sony built its own Cell chip-fab (then couldn't produce enough while it cut its teeth on managing the facility). Sony believed the Cell was so awesome that manufacturers would buy it for all sorts of products, such as TVs, DVD players, and... COMPUTERS. That's right, Kutaragi actually thought computer makers would install a Cell chip. I already mentioned that Kutaragi thought the Cell as CPU and GPU alone was better than an added graphics processor.
We all know the story about the Wii taking over the market with a new input scheme, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention this: Johnny Lee's use of a Wiimote to create positional head-tracking creating the illusion of true 3D, you've got to see this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
Hehe, I could answer a few of these questions, but they are the subject of the novel I'm currently writing:) The 2025 estimate isn't mine, it's Ray Kurzweil's, look him up, he's done a lot more research on it than either of us, including two books on the topic. The estimate is based on the number of neurons in the human brain and a projection of Moore's Law to discover how many transistors & ghz would be needed to approximate the processing power equivalent of the human brain. 2025 is actually the later date, he says 2020 - 2025.
Lastly, brain imaging tools have come a very, very, long way. Did you see a recent article which announced the discovery of a way to increase the sensitivity of micro-MRI machines by over 1,000,000 times?
It's hip to be skeptical, and certainly the last 60 years of AI research seem to have gone relatively nowhere, but that was the point of my post: that perception is no longer correct. That ignores the fact, as Kurzweil points out, that progress is not linear but in fact exponential.
As far as modeling the brain, there are researchers which are able to actually trace the circuits in the brain tied to various systems. One example, researchers tied a glowing gene into mice to create glowing brain cells visible in real-time under a microscope. Then they began implanting several different color genes into different parts of the system creating 'rainbow mice' where different parts of the brain glow different colors making it even easier to see all parts of the system:
With such mice they've been picking apart the actual circuitry of the brain and getting it working, including building theoretical models of the observed brain-system. When running the model the result is auditory processing as good as the animal produces.
So, perhaps even you are not quite as up to date on the science as you'd thought.
I'd heard it said recently that things that computers can do in the realm of facial recognition, speech-recognition, and (a little more obviously) optical character recognition have come a damned long way, far further than most realize. That most people's experience with, say, speech-recognition is through some free-ware (crapware actually) and they don't know just how good the state of the art is. Which is: damned good.
Speech-recognition is essentially a solved problem. OCR is easy, obviously, with all the CAPTCHA news going around. Face recognition, sure, sure, this article proves it. So, what's next?
Areas that computers do not excel yet: writing a review of a book or movie, inferred of information, etc. But, it's though that by about 2025 the number of transistors and speed of processors will be such as to rival the brain and after that point all bets are off. It will be an exciting 15 years in AI research.
You might think of a human as a program running in physical memory space. When the power shuts off, we die. But, if we imagine a conscious program we can imagine a being who can 'image' every moment of life (or of their brain), save it, and even rewind backwards, or stop and start states, easily. If you're an AI and you see something you don't want to remember, just rewind a bit and it's gone forever:P If we become: Techumans, that is, human intelligences uploaded into the machine, then life becomes far more interesting going forward on so many fronts...
If they were smart they would have named Vista 'Windows XP II" and focused on hardening it, increasing security, etc.
Although, I do like the direction that Windows 7 is taking the taskbar. I run my taskbar on the left side and often open so many windows that they devolve into single window clusters, just as W-7 arranges them. I also keep a healthy quick launch there, merging them together makes perfect sense.
So here's my question: what is the driving force for the creation of new OS versions?
Is it an attempt to run so far ahead of Linux in terms of features so as to make it impossible to keep up? Let's say they stuck with XP for a decade, improving it, they would still sell a ton of copies, about the same amount really. Or is the problem more systemic: they have a couple thousand programmers they need to keep damned busy otherwise they'd lose 'em?
Seems some things should be easy. There's a certain minimum amount of time that it takes a human to tab from one field to another as they fill in data, even if they're pasting info in. Even just slowing down bots to the speed that a human could reasonably do a task would put a dent in the problem =\
Let's just view it like attacking a castle. We clearly, then, need ramparts at the tops of ships behind which can be placed Elven archers. Any ladders or ropes fly up, they just cut the ropes and push off the ladders while dumping flaming pots of oil down on their attackers, conveniently obtained from the oil-tanker's hold, and voila, no more pirates XD
(Voiceover): It's Channel 5 News at 11, and now, our top story:
Cristy: Noted anti-video-game crusader Jack Thompson's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied today. Thompson was disbarred by the Florida Supreme court earlier this year and was seeking to be vindicated and have his license reinstated...
John: In related news, a D.C. prostitute just around the corner from the bar nearest the Supreme Court turned down Jack Thompson's last $20 in his bid for a blowjob. The madame is quoted as saying to Thompson, "No way, you creepy ass mother-fucker, get a life, Jesus." Thompson's office could not be reached for comment. Cristy?
Cristy: Well, looks like that's another 'happy-ending' Thompson won't be getting today.
"Can we just skip straight to gamma rays so I don't have to keep re-buying the same movies?"
XD Lol, nice one. But I think that could only happen once the copyrights expire on a significant number of movies... You could probably fit every movie ever made on a gamma-ray reading drive O_O
A callous can be formed, as I recall, from either stretching of the skin in a location or from abrasion/pressure. This is different from simply an area of thickened skin caused by the skin in that area being killed off by an event. That sort of callous is thick, but it's just dead skin and it sloughs away or peels off in time. A real callous is a live portion which, I'd guess, probably is fortified with a great deal more fibrin in the skin, fibrin being the protein that regulates how stretchy your skin is, helps toughen it up.
I have a few permanent callouses on my hands from working with hand tools from a young age. It's been probably a decade since I've regularly done harsh work with my hands, but they're still there, little buggers. Now I have typing callouses from resting my wrists on a keyboard, on that little pivot bone on the corner of the hand--a memento from writing my first novel years ago:P
Once I was in my backyard wearing above-military-grade steel-toed boots with a metal anti-shrapnel lining through the bottom of the sole designed to help your foot survive if you stepped on a land-mine (complete with a Goretex liner). This is my favorite pair of work boots (still). But, my backyard is filled with scrap wood from the portions of the house that were torn down previously, some of which have long 16 penny nails in them. Long-story short: I jumped over an obstacle and landed on a 2x4 with a nail through it... The nail went straight through my boot like it wasn't there, the sole of my boot was flush with the 2x4.
I fell rather than landed, crumpled to the ground in pain and pulled the board off my foot and then the boot. There was a nice red dot on the top of my foot where the nail had nearly penetrated. This was actually the 2nd time I'd stepped on a nail like this, virtually in the same spot, but the only time I had a heavy-duty boot on:P I'm just glad that it landed towards the front of the foot and was able to pass through the fingerlike bones of the foot and didn't hit the heel, can you imagine a nail passing through, hitting the heel, and then bending and wrenching inside the flesh, man, makes me cringe just thinking about it.
To this day, if I see a board with a nail protruding, don't care where it is, I bend it over so no one else may share my pain:)
Wouldn't it be just as easy to present an animated.gif of a rotating 3D representation of an object (rather than use actual mouse-manipulation ability for a virtual object)? I would think a computer program would have a far, far, far harder time interpreting a constantly changing image, especially trying to infer its pattern of changes lines and tones as a 3D image being rotated--a task that is trivial for the human brain and vision system, than a human would.
That's a very good point, that people with unusual eye challenges, especially those challenges which affect each eye differently, may have a very difficult time seeing a stereogram. With that in mind I can dispense with the previous idea that people who couldn't see stereograms were somehow less than capable >_>
Seriously though, some of them can be challenging to line-up, and some are extremely easy. As a rule, the random dot ones are going to be easier to line-up than the photographic ones simply because you don't have to cross your eyes as much. If you can make the two dots turn into three dots, then you've done it. All that's left is to stabilize your eyes at that depth by pausing for a few moments and holding those three dots and then trying to notice what's below, and if you lose it you go back up to the dots. It's like riding a bike, the dots are training wheels. Eventually you don't even need them.
It should also be noted that there's two ways to cross your eyes, inward and outward. Most stereograms use outward crossing (as in looking further into the distance than the image you're looking at). The extremely challenging stereograms require much more crossing than outward crossing will allow (unless you back away from the image quite a bit), and so use inward crossing (as in trying to look at your nose). But, this creates focus problems. Your eye has a much harder time focussing far away on something that the angle of your eyes tells your brain should be really close to you. Outward crossing doesn't have this problem as much, except in cases where the stereogram uses extreme depth levels, but most do not.
When I first saw stereograms years ago I sent away for a computer program that would allow me to make them. I think it was $15, and with it you could manipulate something like 15 'levels' of depth. There wasn't yet invented the smooth depth blending, or at leas that program wasn't capable of it. You know what, it would be cool if there was a Photoshop filter that could take a B&W depth-map and create a sterogram out of it, that would be really neat.
And, chances are, if you have any depth perception at all you can see a stereogram. A touch of practice to get the hang o' it and it's second nature.
Do you think that we could use sterograms as a new form of Captcha? A sterogram uses the deep structures of the brain in a way completely different from mere character recognition in order to derive depth from an image. How hard would it be for a computer program to derive 3D information from a stereogram and make sense out of it? Wouldn't spammers essentially have to solve a much-harder vision problem, that of depth perception, than CAPTCHAs OCR solution?
I'd imagine this has something to do with an attempt to crack down on the drug running cartels that threaten to grow so powerful as to destabilize the government. A threatened government is a dangerous thing.
It actually is quite deep in its quality of gameplay. The gameplay gimmick isn't simply 'rewinding time', as some have dismissed it. The game begins adding layers to the onion quite quickly as each level introduces a newly added concept to the stable of gameplay. -The first level is, simply, time rewinding. But unlike Prince of Persia the amount of rewinding is infinite, and if you rewind too far, simply fast forward to the spot you missed. - The second level introduces items which aren't affected by time reversal, leading to significantly increased puzzle-platforming. - The third introduces the idea of, how would one describe it, shadow-gameplay? Where what you do is mimic'd by your shadow after you do it, allowing you to accomplish two things at once, effectively. - The next gimmick is to tie your lateral movement to the movement of time. So if you're moving to the right, time advances, but if you're moving left time rewinds for all characters and items onscreen. - Later you're given a ring that is capable of slowing the local passage of time to a near stand-still. You can drop this ring wherever you want and do things like massively slow the number of cannonballs fired from a cannon in a minute, or cause enemies to bunch up in place. Almost like a miniature black-hole, because the time dilation radiates outward and then get faster and faster the further away you are. One puzzle that was really crazy, near the end, had you manipulating a series of three piranha plants (there are more than a few similar nods to Mario) using time reversal in order to allow a series of time-immune enemies to walk past these plants, and the tough thing was that you needed two of them in a row to do the move. - The last gimmick had time running in the backwards entirely. So, enemies would fly up onto the screen where they were shown to have just been scorched by a fire-bed and then would be quickly sucked into a cannon where it came from, and using this feature you could interfere with that process and neat things would happen, it was fairly crazy.
The boss battles were especially creative and enjoyable without being overwhelming. The end of the show was also extremely well thought out, and I will not give-away the end for anyone:) I will say that the books detailing the 'story' along the way are exercises in deliberate confuzzlement, they don't particularly make sense, I think they tried a bit to hard to be profound and then just ended up like so much gibberish, and the end acknowledges this fact at least. The final prognosis is that Braid is the latest in a series of well-thought out and perfectly executed 'short games', much like a short-story that began with, arguably, 'World of Goo' and have dramatically upped the ante for originality in platforming and the question of 'what is a game?' and what makes one fun. Another recent win is 'And Yet It Moves' which moves the world around the player in order to accomplish platforming goals and tiny integrated minigames. We may be entering a new golden age of gaming where a single producer finally has enough technological leverage to create wonderful titles like these and come out on top. This is the avant-garde of the game industry. Braid's great, try it and buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
Google won't be killed until someone perfects an AI that you can have a search 'conversation' with, who can understand goddamn context and intelligently narrow down, find relevant articles that don't contain your keywords, etc. Kinda like the librarian from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" novel, but more powerful.
The main reason no one will beat Google until then is that Google is extremely wealthy and can outspend you as it continually perfects information sorting itself, not to mention buy any technology that comes close to threatening it. If you really developed a Google-killer and presented it to the world, do you also have the stones to turn down, say, $100 million? I don't think so, it would take you probably 20-30 years to make that on your own, if you're lucky, with the search field full of competition and Google's mature business-plan in place. Even the days of Alta-Vista were essentially the Cowboy West, unsophisticated and without any proven business plans. Google walked in and owned right away, then discovered how to make money off search when no one else was.
Even then, the founders of Google tried to sell their brilliant search idea not for $100 million dollars, but for $1 million dollars, and there were no takers. They were forced to go it alone. If someone had offered them $500,000 they probably would've taken it and ran.
Although, if you really do develop an AI, there'll be a billion more profit opportunities than search, that's peripheral. An AI can do menial labor far better, faster, stronger than a human. What happens when McDonalds is staffed solely by robots. That would be pretty damn cool actually. They work for the price of electricity, maybe we can get the price of a cheeseburger back down to $0.25 :D
Yeah, Nintendo's in a completely different market than Sony/MS. /sarcasm
Just like the PSP is in a completely different market than the DS, a failing market.
Sony looooves to make this claim. Next thing Sony will be claiming the PS3 is the 'best selling black console on the market' :rolleyes:
Kutaragi is famous for his 'spin'. He once said that PS3 would allow users to actually jack into the Matrix :|
Here's another one: Kutaragi on the PS3's initial price of $599:
"It's probably too cheap... We want consumers to think to themselves, 'I will work more hours to buy one.'"
Kutaragi at his finest :P
If their 2009 LCDs are a great 'value for the money' then Sony has failed and been forced to abandon its previous complete domination of a sector. Remember, Sony was used to charging 10-20% more for the exact same feature set -- because it had the name 'Sony' on the side. The fact that Sony can't do that anymore is a testament to how far their brand has fallen, and how much their competition has increased in stature. If you really want value for the money, I suggest buying Vizio. They are the cheapest on the market, were designed that way using a unique marketing plan, and are a great product. Old-hat producers like Sony won't be able to match because they simple don't have a targeted, focused, one-minded business-plan like Vizio (and perhaps other makers, Samsung, etc).
Sony has been letting profits in one division support the failings in others. That's a dangerous thing to do. As was noted, the PSX and PS2 game sales largely kept the company afloat. Gaming became so important that Kutaragi was in line to become CEO, before the PS3 debacle got him fired. Honestly I would've laughed my head off if Kutaragi had become CEO of Sony, because the way that guy talks can you imagine if he was head of the company and had virtually no accountability? It would've been Kutaragi on steroids, that could've let to some truly funny quotes for a few years before he tanked the company XD
"There's very few good 3rd party games on the Wii as is. There's a considerably higher ratio of shovel ware to good games than the other consoles."
- I actually don't blame Ninty for this problem, it's largely called by the controller. Call it the learning-curve on a new controller paradigm. The Wii revolutionized the market by introducing a control scheme that the public has embraced. There's no going back on that front, and I fully expect to see a Sony and MS version of the Wiimote next gen. This generation has seen the limits of N's original Wii technology which, in retrospect, isn't great. N recently released a gyroscope based add-on which makes the controller a true 1:1 input device (as far as tilt goes, someone will add positional tracking eventually) and will likely be standard in the next console.
I also wouldn't be surprised if a very large number of people whom grew up with the NES and SNES love the Virtual Console and are today buying games on it both for nostalgic value and to share with their own children, which by now are in the newborn to 10 y.o. range.
"That changed a bit after we delivered 90 per cent of the company's profit for a few years."
- Yep, PS2 was the only thing keeping Sony afloat as a company for awhile there. Then they spent some $2 billion making the over-hyped Cell chip for the PS3 and actually thought they didn't need a graphics card, instead one was put in last minute -- what a fiasco. Kutaragi the hyperbolist was later fired for that mistake.
Meanwhile, Sony is losing its rep as a hardware manufacturer and facing stiff competition in sectors it once dominated such as TV's and now LCDs. Of the three console makers, Sony relied on its console receipts the most in order to keep their company afloat. Even Nintendo survived on owning the portable gaming market through Gameboy and now the DS when its console offering was weak. Microsoft of course had Windows, Office and its other software sales.
Sony was willing to spent billions to make sure the PS3 was number one like its predecessors. It virtually bet the company on it. The market's rejection of that bid has been one of the great business-move blunders in recent memory. Remember, Sony built its own Cell chip-fab (then couldn't produce enough while it cut its teeth on managing the facility). Sony believed the Cell was so awesome that manufacturers would buy it for all sorts of products, such as TVs, DVD players, and... COMPUTERS. That's right, Kutaragi actually thought computer makers would install a Cell chip. I already mentioned that Kutaragi thought the Cell as CPU and GPU alone was better than an added graphics processor.
We all know the story about the Wii taking over the market with a new input scheme, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention this: Johnny Lee's use of a Wiimote to create positional head-tracking creating the illusion of true 3D, you've got to see this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
Hehe, I could answer a few of these questions, but they are the subject of the novel I'm currently writing :)
The 2025 estimate isn't mine, it's Ray Kurzweil's, look him up, he's done a lot more research on it than either of us, including two books on the topic. The estimate is based on the number of neurons in the human brain and a projection of Moore's Law to discover how many transistors & ghz would be needed to approximate the processing power equivalent of the human brain. 2025 is actually the later date, he says 2020 - 2025.
Lastly, brain imaging tools have come a very, very, long way. Did you see a recent article which announced the discovery of a way to increase the sensitivity of micro-MRI machines by over 1,000,000 times?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10141097-76.html
It's hip to be skeptical, and certainly the last 60 years of AI research seem to have gone relatively nowhere, but that was the point of my post: that perception is no longer correct. That ignores the fact, as Kurzweil points out, that progress is not linear but in fact exponential.
As far as modeling the brain, there are researchers which are able to actually trace the circuits in the brain tied to various systems. One example, researchers tied a glowing gene into mice to create glowing brain cells visible in real-time under a microscope. Then they began implanting several different color genes into different parts of the system creating 'rainbow mice' where different parts of the brain glow different colors making it even easier to see all parts of the system:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/300/5616/78
With such mice they've been picking apart the actual circuitry of the brain and getting it working, including building theoretical models of the observed brain-system. When running the model the result is auditory processing as good as the animal produces.
So, perhaps even you are not quite as up to date on the science as you'd thought.
I'd heard it said recently that things that computers can do in the realm of facial recognition, speech-recognition, and (a little more obviously) optical character recognition have come a damned long way, far further than most realize. That most people's experience with, say, speech-recognition is through some free-ware (crapware actually) and they don't know just how good the state of the art is. Which is: damned good.
Speech-recognition is essentially a solved problem. OCR is easy, obviously, with all the CAPTCHA news going around. Face recognition, sure, sure, this article proves it. So, what's next?
Areas that computers do not excel yet: writing a review of a book or movie, inferred of information, etc. But, it's though that by about 2025 the number of transistors and speed of processors will be such as to rival the brain and after that point all bets are off. It will be an exciting 15 years in AI research.
You might think of a human as a program running in physical memory space. When the power shuts off, we die. But, if we imagine a conscious program we can imagine a being who can 'image' every moment of life (or of their brain), save it, and even rewind backwards, or stop and start states, easily. If you're an AI and you see something you don't want to remember, just rewind a bit and it's gone forever :P If we become: Techumans, that is, human intelligences uploaded into the machine, then life becomes far more interesting going forward on so many fronts...
Damn, it's about time.
640kb should be enough for anyone, eh?
If they were smart they would have named Vista 'Windows XP II" and focused on hardening it, increasing security, etc.
Although, I do like the direction that Windows 7 is taking the taskbar. I run my taskbar on the left side and often open so many windows that they devolve into single window clusters, just as W-7 arranges them. I also keep a healthy quick launch there, merging them together makes perfect sense.
So here's my question: what is the driving force for the creation of new OS versions?
Is it an attempt to run so far ahead of Linux in terms of features so as to make it impossible to keep up? Let's say they stuck with XP for a decade, improving it, they would still sell a ton of copies, about the same amount really. Or is the problem more systemic: they have a couple thousand programmers they need to keep damned busy otherwise they'd lose 'em?
Seems some things should be easy. There's a certain minimum amount of time that it takes a human to tab from one field to another as they fill in data, even if they're pasting info in. Even just slowing down bots to the speed that a human could reasonably do a task would put a dent in the problem =\
Let's just view it like attacking a castle. We clearly, then, need ramparts at the tops of ships behind which can be placed Elven archers. Any ladders or ropes fly up, they just cut the ropes and push off the ladders while dumping flaming pots of oil down on their attackers, conveniently obtained from the oil-tanker's hold, and voila, no more pirates XD
Hey, sweet, they have fickin' laser beams for eyes ^_^
(Voiceover): It's Channel 5 News at 11, and now, our top story:
Cristy: Noted anti-video-game crusader Jack Thompson's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied today. Thompson was disbarred by the Florida Supreme court earlier this year and was seeking to be vindicated and have his license reinstated...
John: In related news, a D.C. prostitute just around the corner from the bar nearest the Supreme Court turned down Jack Thompson's last $20 in his bid for a blowjob. The madame is quoted as saying to Thompson, "No way, you creepy ass mother-fucker, get a life, Jesus." Thompson's office could not be reached for comment. Cristy?
Cristy: Well, looks like that's another 'happy-ending' Thompson won't be getting today.
All: Ahahaha.
"Can we just skip straight to gamma rays so I don't have to keep re-buying the same movies?"
XD Lol, nice one. But I think that could only happen once the copyrights expire on a significant number of movies... You could probably fit every movie ever made on a gamma-ray reading drive O_O
How long until Sony announces their new 'Exray' drive, the successor to Bluray--capable of holding 60 petabytes on a single disk? :P
A callous can be formed, as I recall, from either stretching of the skin in a location or from abrasion/pressure. This is different from simply an area of thickened skin caused by the skin in that area being killed off by an event. That sort of callous is thick, but it's just dead skin and it sloughs away or peels off in time. A real callous is a live portion which, I'd guess, probably is fortified with a great deal more fibrin in the skin, fibrin being the protein that regulates how stretchy your skin is, helps toughen it up.
I have a few permanent callouses on my hands from working with hand tools from a young age. It's been probably a decade since I've regularly done harsh work with my hands, but they're still there, little buggers. Now I have typing callouses from resting my wrists on a keyboard, on that little pivot bone on the corner of the hand--a memento from writing my first novel years ago :P
Once I was in my backyard wearing above-military-grade steel-toed boots with a metal anti-shrapnel lining through the bottom of the sole designed to help your foot survive if you stepped on a land-mine (complete with a Goretex liner). This is my favorite pair of work boots (still). But, my backyard is filled with scrap wood from the portions of the house that were torn down previously, some of which have long 16 penny nails in them. Long-story short: I jumped over an obstacle and landed on a 2x4 with a nail through it... The nail went straight through my boot like it wasn't there, the sole of my boot was flush with the 2x4.
I fell rather than landed, crumpled to the ground in pain and pulled the board off my foot and then the boot. There was a nice red dot on the top of my foot where the nail had nearly penetrated. This was actually the 2nd time I'd stepped on a nail like this, virtually in the same spot, but the only time I had a heavy-duty boot on :P I'm just glad that it landed towards the front of the foot and was able to pass through the fingerlike bones of the foot and didn't hit the heel, can you imagine a nail passing through, hitting the heel, and then bending and wrenching inside the flesh, man, makes me cringe just thinking about it.
To this day, if I see a board with a nail protruding, don't care where it is, I bend it over so no one else may share my pain :)
If anyone's interested I found a Stereogram Movie:
This is of the antics of a snowman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArWY-Ck-CPc
Watch it in HQ and not at full-screen >_>
There's a whole bunch of these on Youtube, including many done with natural video (requiring the inside crossing method): http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=stereogram+movie&aq=f
Wouldn't it be just as easy to present an animated .gif of a rotating 3D representation of an object (rather than use actual mouse-manipulation ability for a virtual object)? I would think a computer program would have a far, far, far harder time interpreting a constantly changing image, especially trying to infer its pattern of changes lines and tones as a 3D image being rotated--a task that is trivial for the human brain and vision system, than a human would.
That's a very good point, that people with unusual eye challenges, especially those challenges which affect each eye differently, may have a very difficult time seeing a stereogram. With that in mind I can dispense with the previous idea that people who couldn't see stereograms were somehow less than capable >_>
Seriously though, some of them can be challenging to line-up, and some are extremely easy. As a rule, the random dot ones are going to be easier to line-up than the photographic ones simply because you don't have to cross your eyes as much. If you can make the two dots turn into three dots, then you've done it. All that's left is to stabilize your eyes at that depth by pausing for a few moments and holding those three dots and then trying to notice what's below, and if you lose it you go back up to the dots. It's like riding a bike, the dots are training wheels. Eventually you don't even need them.
It should also be noted that there's two ways to cross your eyes, inward and outward. Most stereograms use outward crossing (as in looking further into the distance than the image you're looking at). The extremely challenging stereograms require much more crossing than outward crossing will allow (unless you back away from the image quite a bit), and so use inward crossing (as in trying to look at your nose). But, this creates focus problems. Your eye has a much harder time focussing far away on something that the angle of your eyes tells your brain should be really close to you. Outward crossing doesn't have this problem as much, except in cases where the stereogram uses extreme depth levels, but most do not.
When I first saw stereograms years ago I sent away for a computer program that would allow me to make them. I think it was $15, and with it you could manipulate something like 15 'levels' of depth. There wasn't yet invented the smooth depth blending, or at leas that program wasn't capable of it. You know what, it would be cool if there was a Photoshop filter that could take a B&W depth-map and create a sterogram out of it, that would be really neat.
And, chances are, if you have any depth perception at all you can see a stereogram. A touch of practice to get the hang o' it and it's second nature.
Maybe your brain doesn't even process depth and you don't even realize it, poor sap :P
Do you think that we could use sterograms as a new form of Captcha? A sterogram uses the deep structures of the brain in a way completely different from mere character recognition in order to derive depth from an image. How hard would it be for a computer program to derive 3D information from a stereogram and make sense out of it? Wouldn't spammers essentially have to solve a much-harder vision problem, that of depth perception, than CAPTCHAs OCR solution?
For the uninitiated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereogram
For a sample stereogram along with a picture of what you will see when done correctly (as shown by a B&W heightmap): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stereogram_Tut_Random_Dot_Shark.png
I'd imagine this has something to do with an attempt to crack down on the drug running cartels that threaten to grow so powerful as to destabilize the government. A threatened government is a dangerous thing.
It actually is quite deep in its quality of gameplay. The gameplay gimmick isn't simply 'rewinding time', as some have dismissed it. The game begins adding layers to the onion quite quickly as each level introduces a newly added concept to the stable of gameplay.
-The first level is, simply, time rewinding. But unlike Prince of Persia the amount of rewinding is infinite, and if you rewind too far, simply fast forward to the spot you missed.
- The second level introduces items which aren't affected by time reversal, leading to significantly increased puzzle-platforming.
- The third introduces the idea of, how would one describe it, shadow-gameplay? Where what you do is mimic'd by your shadow after you do it, allowing you to accomplish two things at once, effectively.
- The next gimmick is to tie your lateral movement to the movement of time. So if you're moving to the right, time advances, but if you're moving left time rewinds for all characters and items onscreen.
- Later you're given a ring that is capable of slowing the local passage of time to a near stand-still. You can drop this ring wherever you want and do things like massively slow the number of cannonballs fired from a cannon in a minute, or cause enemies to bunch up in place. Almost like a miniature black-hole, because the time dilation radiates outward and then get faster and faster the further away you are. One puzzle that was really crazy, near the end, had you manipulating a series of three piranha plants (there are more than a few similar nods to Mario) using time reversal in order to allow a series of time-immune enemies to walk past these plants, and the tough thing was that you needed two of them in a row to do the move.
- The last gimmick had time running in the backwards entirely. So, enemies would fly up onto the screen where they were shown to have just been scorched by a fire-bed and then would be quickly sucked into a cannon where it came from, and using this feature you could interfere with that process and neat things would happen, it was fairly crazy.
The boss battles were especially creative and enjoyable without being overwhelming. The end of the show was also extremely well thought out, and I will not give-away the end for anyone :) I will say that the books detailing the 'story' along the way are exercises in deliberate confuzzlement, they don't particularly make sense, I think they tried a bit to hard to be profound and then just ended up like so much gibberish, and the end acknowledges this fact at least. The final prognosis is that Braid is the latest in a series of well-thought out and perfectly executed 'short games', much like a short-story that began with, arguably, 'World of Goo' and have dramatically upped the ante for originality in platforming and the question of 'what is a game?' and what makes one fun. Another recent win is 'And Yet It Moves' which moves the world around the player in order to accomplish platforming goals and tiny integrated minigames. We may be entering a new golden age of gaming where a single producer finally has enough technological leverage to create wonderful titles like these and come out on top. This is the avant-garde of the game industry. Braid's great, try it and buy it.