All games will be free to play. Developers will make money through in-game purchases, subcriptions, unlocks, etc, like TF2 and League of Legends. This is all on the Kickstarter page.
Incidentally, a lot of keyboards can't handle a large number of simultaneous keys being pressed due to what's called "ghosting". Try typing "THE QUICK RED FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG" with both shift keys held down. You'll be disappointed. (This is one of the reasons gaming keyboards cost so much.)
...also, I meant optimized against typewriter jamming, I guess. Still, there are lots of bad adjacent key pairs, like GH and ED, that should still cause typewriter jamming. The process used was not exactly perfect.
For ten-fingered input, the maximum gains in typing performance brought on by a new keyboard layout are minimal; one or two percent at best. As long as your hands can reach the whole keyboard, the difference in time it takes for any given keystroke is negligible. The real benefit that comes from, for example, Dvorak vs. QWERTY, is a reduction in stress on the hands, and hence RSI. Saying that QWERTY "optimized" typewriter jamming would be overly generous; the improvement over the traditional alphabetical key ordering was only performed to a modest extent, and the typists of the day were not proficient touch-typists as we are now.
In the case of thumb-typing, however, great improvement is possible. The Metropolis keyboard, for example, was generated stochastically by optimising an energy function based on letter pair frequency, and provides a 40% typing speed increase over QWERTY.
1. Demographics. The information can be used to determine if the employees are being treated properly. Tracking a person's ethnicity can be used the same way.
2. Inflection and pronouns. Most European languages get extremely awkward when you can't use a person's gender in writing. With a variable-length gender string you can at least provide your own.:)
3. Gender doesn't just mean 'pants or bedrooms.' (And 'pants' is more 'sex', anyway.) It also determines how we act toward each other on a regular basis. The traditional four gender interactions (how women treat women, how men treat men, how women treat men, how men treat women) are intricately-developed dances that distribute different responsibilities and conventions to each gender. Without these interactions on a regular basis, part of what makes up a gender ceases to exist. Unlike ethnicity or class, gender is actually harmed when you try to avoid it. (The next logical retort, that everyone should be taught the nature of gender, act completely ungendered in public, and reserve gender roles for private interactions, is a pretty neat idea, but not one that anyone will probably widely implement any time soon, outside of the occasional co-op.)
IE7 is down to 1.4% according to StatCounter; check the dropdown at the bottom. Presumably even IE6 is down even further. There are now more Opera users than IE7 users.
Global Statistics from StatCounter is more holistic. 32.76% for Chrome this month, vs. IE's 32.31%. Not shabby, but hardly the landslide w3schools is reporting.
By the time you get to the "T" in "LGBT", you're pretty much too open-minded for that to be a concern. Or are you saying "I want employee registration forms where the gender field is a variable-length string instead of a one-bit value"?
Balderdash! I have evidence that god evolved from a larger pool of predecessor gods through a process of natural selection! What institute issued your degree in applied psychotheology?!
And look how far they've come! Now we can shoot eyes out with them and discover weird properties of other things of obscure utility! Never wake me up from this world of theoretical bliss.
Or better still—how do we know some of these students haven't already taken an equivalent AI course and are just messing with the statistics? Outliers come in all shapes and sizes!
There are various calculations on the Internet for how much paper you can get from a tree. They vary in their conclusions from about 8,000 sheets up to 100,000, mostly because they use different trees to start with. Given that some areas of the Amazon have 30,000 trees per square kilometre, or at least 240,000,000 pages, this court case used less than half a square kilometre of rainforest. I propose we start measuring large proceedings in square kilometres of northern Amazon, just to emphasize how drastic they are.
We can then derive other fanciful metrics, like how many species are being destroyed in the process (as many Amazonian plants and animals have extremely small habitats.)
Prometheus the Apple 1 is not. There were only 200, after all; the TRS-80 Model I sold ten thousand units in its first month and a half of sales. The Apple ][, sure, but if you consider not shipping with a keyboard to be a critical threshold in a microcomputer's ability to support the masses, then surely the absence of a significant user base is more important than coming out first.
Ugh. That's a bad header. Okay, so the TRS-80 and PET were a year later; I blame the weird formatting on that page. Still—the Altair was already out. That deserves way more respect than the Apple I.
The TRS-80, the SOL-20, and the PET 2001 were also officially introduced in 1976. (In fact, the SOL-20 dates to '75... as does the freaking Altair 8800.) I'm pretty sure the TRS-80 was more popular than the Apple I and hence had more direct impact. Ars, you sadden me this day for ignoring these other systems.
Ah, I'm afraid it's really more spot-on than you realise. The vast, vast majority of pharmacologists and pharmaceutical companies aren't so evil; they're invisible and you never hear about them in the news. It's only the exceptional cases—the psychopathic executives whose crap would be invisible in any other industry (e.g. bribing doctors), a neglected interaction between two common chemicals, the group that just invested "too much" into a product to let it fail—that actually get media attention. About thirty drugs are approved by the FDA per year (down from forty-ish in the late nineties), and while drug development companies do get hauled over the legal coals frequently, the leading reason is over-generalization in marketing material.
Drug mechanisms, however, are not generally voodoo. Mind-altering substances frequently have inexplicable consequences further down the line, but the mechanism of their immediate effect (e.g. how they influence neurotransmitters) is rarely debated; drug designs have to be very specific to be discovered in the first place. It's unreasonable to ask a drug company to explain why one psychoactive drug creates a different high from another, however, beyond the simple questions of "what does it target," "where does it target it," and "how long does it remain in the body," because no one knows how any of that stuff works. We don't know how the mind works beyond these very basic levels—so would you rather have a bit of uncertainty in the down-stream effects, or no drugs at all?
Posner's position comes from the simple fact that a drug's components are much less interchangeable than a phone's or an operating system's. A successful drug performs one very specific task, like blocking a serotonin receptor, and must do so in a manner that protects it from the body's desire to get rid of it, as well as making sure it gets to the point in the body where it should act in the first place. Holistically, the drug must function in a very specific way. A drug patent covers the whole molecule. Electronics, by contrast, are essentially modular, and their patents only cover small portions: a phone would still be a phone if you took out the camera, or removed the multiple-source search function (which was what Apple sued Samsung over regarding the Galaxy Nexus), or re-did the layout of the home screen.
Here's a specific tech-pharma comparison that equates: imagine that Apple was suing Samsung not for making a product that superficially resembled theirs, but was identical to the iPhone or the iPad. In the pharmaceutical world, all that you have to do to get past this constraint (and create a so-called "me too" drug) is modify one of the side-chain groups: imagine replacing the camera with a lousier one or adding a hole on the side so you could stick a wristband through it. That would be sufficient to let you produce Apple's product at a very low price and completely decimate them in the market. This is why pharmaceutical companies spend most of their budgets on marketing, followed by R&D.
The vast majority of software and design patents refer to developments that take very little time to think up; not years. This is why software patent trolls are a viable business model. Apple got an injunction against Samsung in Europe because the shape of the Galaxy Tab was too similar to the iPad. They got an injunction against Samsung in the US because the search box on the home screen in Android 4.1 can browse the local file system as well as search the web. The pharmaceutical equivalent would drastically affect very integral parts of a wide range of drugs in many cases.
Slashdot Mirror
98% percent* of people have taken caffeine at least once in their lifetimes. Clearly, it is the true gateway drug.
(* statistic made up for illustrative purposes.)
All games will be free to play. Developers will make money through in-game purchases, subcriptions, unlocks, etc, like TF2 and League of Legends. This is all on the Kickstarter page.
Incidentally, a lot of keyboards can't handle a large number of simultaneous keys being pressed due to what's called "ghosting". Try typing "THE QUICK RED FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG" with both shift keys held down. You'll be disappointed. (This is one of the reasons gaming keyboards cost so much.)
...also, I meant optimized against typewriter jamming, I guess. Still, there are lots of bad adjacent key pairs, like GH and ED, that should still cause typewriter jamming. The process used was not exactly perfect.
For ten-fingered input, the maximum gains in typing performance brought on by a new keyboard layout are minimal; one or two percent at best. As long as your hands can reach the whole keyboard, the difference in time it takes for any given keystroke is negligible. The real benefit that comes from, for example, Dvorak vs. QWERTY, is a reduction in stress on the hands, and hence RSI. Saying that QWERTY "optimized" typewriter jamming would be overly generous; the improvement over the traditional alphabetical key ordering was only performed to a modest extent, and the typists of the day were not proficient touch-typists as we are now.
In the case of thumb-typing, however, great improvement is possible. The Metropolis keyboard, for example, was generated stochastically by optimising an energy function based on letter pair frequency, and provides a 40% typing speed increase over QWERTY.
As an evolutionary biologist, I cannot help but agree with you. With double or possibly triple sarcasm.
And to make matters worse, for all intensive purposes, most people could care less!
Tried to cover that here already. There are fairly good reasons, at least unless/until culture changes dramatically.
1. Demographics. The information can be used to determine if the employees are being treated properly. Tracking a person's ethnicity can be used the same way. :)
2. Inflection and pronouns. Most European languages get extremely awkward when you can't use a person's gender in writing. With a variable-length gender string you can at least provide your own.
3. Gender doesn't just mean 'pants or bedrooms.' (And 'pants' is more 'sex', anyway.) It also determines how we act toward each other on a regular basis. The traditional four gender interactions (how women treat women, how men treat men, how women treat men, how men treat women) are intricately-developed dances that distribute different responsibilities and conventions to each gender. Without these interactions on a regular basis, part of what makes up a gender ceases to exist. Unlike ethnicity or class, gender is actually harmed when you try to avoid it. (The next logical retort, that everyone should be taught the nature of gender, act completely ungendered in public, and reserve gender roles for private interactions, is a pretty neat idea, but not one that anyone will probably widely implement any time soon, outside of the occasional co-op.)
IE7 is down to 1.4% according to StatCounter; check the dropdown at the bottom. Presumably even IE6 is down even further. There are now more Opera users than IE7 users.
Global Statistics from StatCounter is more holistic. 32.76% for Chrome this month, vs. IE's 32.31%. Not shabby, but hardly the landslide w3schools is reporting.
By the time you get to the "T" in "LGBT", you're pretty much too open-minded for that to be a concern. Or are you saying "I want employee registration forms where the gender field is a variable-length string instead of a one-bit value"?
Balderdash! I have evidence that god evolved from a larger pool of predecessor gods through a process of natural selection! What institute issued your degree in applied psychotheology?!
Due to a recent restructuring of modern epistemology, cat entertainment, seeing things, and Belgium are all considered forms of shooting eyes out.
You're still missing one: lasers can be used to calibrate sarcasm detectors to sub-micron accuracy.
And look how far they've come! Now we can shoot eyes out with them and discover weird properties of other things of obscure utility! Never wake me up from this world of theoretical bliss.
Not sure why it was so important to mod this off-topic—there's a typo in the submission title!
Or better still—how do we know some of these students haven't already taken an equivalent AI course and are just messing with the statistics? Outliers come in all shapes and sizes!
One, like some of the silly people responding to the first comment. But it gives us a baseline!
No one whines when you raze Libraries of Congress!
There are various calculations on the Internet for how much paper you can get from a tree. They vary in their conclusions from about 8,000 sheets up to 100,000, mostly because they use different trees to start with. Given that some areas of the Amazon have 30,000 trees per square kilometre, or at least 240,000,000 pages, this court case used less than half a square kilometre of rainforest. I propose we start measuring large proceedings in square kilometres of northern Amazon, just to emphasize how drastic they are.
We can then derive other fanciful metrics, like how many species are being destroyed in the process (as many Amazonian plants and animals have extremely small habitats.)
Prometheus the Apple 1 is not. There were only 200, after all; the TRS-80 Model I sold ten thousand units in its first month and a half of sales. The Apple ][, sure, but if you consider not shipping with a keyboard to be a critical threshold in a microcomputer's ability to support the masses, then surely the absence of a significant user base is more important than coming out first.
Ugh. That's a bad header. Okay, so the TRS-80 and PET were a year later; I blame the weird formatting on that page. Still—the Altair was already out. That deserves way more respect than the Apple I.
I bring you an image with a relevant sentiment attached.
The TRS-80, the SOL-20, and the PET 2001 were also officially introduced in 1976. (In fact, the SOL-20 dates to '75... as does the freaking Altair 8800.) I'm pretty sure the TRS-80 was more popular than the Apple I and hence had more direct impact. Ars, you sadden me this day for ignoring these other systems.
Ah, I'm afraid it's really more spot-on than you realise. The vast, vast majority of pharmacologists and pharmaceutical companies aren't so evil; they're invisible and you never hear about them in the news. It's only the exceptional cases—the psychopathic executives whose crap would be invisible in any other industry (e.g. bribing doctors), a neglected interaction between two common chemicals, the group that just invested "too much" into a product to let it fail—that actually get media attention. About thirty drugs are approved by the FDA per year (down from forty-ish in the late nineties), and while drug development companies do get hauled over the legal coals frequently, the leading reason is over-generalization in marketing material.
Drug mechanisms, however, are not generally voodoo. Mind-altering substances frequently have inexplicable consequences further down the line, but the mechanism of their immediate effect (e.g. how they influence neurotransmitters) is rarely debated; drug designs have to be very specific to be discovered in the first place. It's unreasonable to ask a drug company to explain why one psychoactive drug creates a different high from another, however, beyond the simple questions of "what does it target," "where does it target it," and "how long does it remain in the body," because no one knows how any of that stuff works. We don't know how the mind works beyond these very basic levels—so would you rather have a bit of uncertainty in the down-stream effects, or no drugs at all?
Posner's position comes from the simple fact that a drug's components are much less interchangeable than a phone's or an operating system's. A successful drug performs one very specific task, like blocking a serotonin receptor, and must do so in a manner that protects it from the body's desire to get rid of it, as well as making sure it gets to the point in the body where it should act in the first place. Holistically, the drug must function in a very specific way. A drug patent covers the whole molecule. Electronics, by contrast, are essentially modular, and their patents only cover small portions: a phone would still be a phone if you took out the camera, or removed the multiple-source search function (which was what Apple sued Samsung over regarding the Galaxy Nexus), or re-did the layout of the home screen.
Here's a specific tech-pharma comparison that equates: imagine that Apple was suing Samsung not for making a product that superficially resembled theirs, but was identical to the iPhone or the iPad. In the pharmaceutical world, all that you have to do to get past this constraint (and create a so-called "me too" drug) is modify one of the side-chain groups: imagine replacing the camera with a lousier one or adding a hole on the side so you could stick a wristband through it. That would be sufficient to let you produce Apple's product at a very low price and completely decimate them in the market. This is why pharmaceutical companies spend most of their budgets on marketing, followed by R&D.
The vast majority of software and design patents refer to developments that take very little time to think up; not years. This is why software patent trolls are a viable business model. Apple got an injunction against Samsung in Europe because the shape of the Galaxy Tab was too similar to the iPad. They got an injunction against Samsung in the US because the search box on the home screen in Android 4.1 can browse the local file system as well as search the web. The pharmaceutical equivalent would drastically affect very integral parts of a wide range of drugs in many cases.