The Bell site has been up for a long time. I think they were just having a laugh with that checkbox.
But I was also really disappointed with the results. It doesn't sound much better than the old Apple II setup my chem teacher would wheel into class when his voice went.
I blame cheap sampling over the past decade or so. The ability to record a voice actor's voice and use that has precluded any real advancement on the synthesis front.
People talked about Jar Jar as the first virtual main character (and he wasn't even first) but they seem to forget-- his voice was nothing near virtual.
For better or worse, it seems like it will be a numberof years before we have an artificially generated voice as annoying as Jar Jar's. --
Here's something that you don't here much about on Slashdot: either me and my co-workers (for my last 3 or 4 companies) are way to one side of the slack bellcurve, or there is a *lot* of slacking going on out there.
I've heard someone say here that managers should only expect 4-5 hours of really good high-mind-utilization time from their workers. I think that number goes up when it's crunch time, but can be significantly less than that if the manager lets the techies 'get away with it' and there's not a lot on the burner.
Web access at work is a big culprit. While there are times it's a crucial information gathering resource, there are even more times when it's a tool for procastination enhancement. Possibly in the big picture, the best coders *need* this kind of offtopic stimulus to stay sane and focused and un-burnt-out.
Anyway, it should be lunch *hour*. None of this 37.5 crap. And an expectation to work extra in crunch times should be balanced by leniency at other more relaxed times. --
I was going to karma whore a bit and talk about IGN. They're trying to get a subscription thing going the "IGNsider". $20 or $30 is pretty steep, though, as much or more than some print magazines, and while the coverage is a little faster than magazines, print tends to be easier to browse.
I've been running loveblender.com for a while now. I have some banner exchange ads there just as to try to keep up some new blood incoming traffic. Places like http://www.ezpublishing.com/ and http://www.arrowweb.net/ say they have no bandwidth limits... I don't know how they pull it off. The total cost is less than $200 year. The biggest tradeoff is that both only give you a finite amount of diskspace (50-200meg depending on the plan), you can't just throw in extra disk. But they do take care of all the administrative hassle! --
Of course, spammers claim to be using "opt-in", but they seem to think whatever connection they made with your e-mail counts as an opt-in on your behalf. Post to Usenet? Or someone put your e-mail on the web? Obviously, a silent cry for whatever scheme their peddling this week. I guess a legally mandated 'opt-in' might help, at least until they decide to move offshore and send from there.
And the problems with opt-out are pretty obvious to. Does the official opt-out list keeper give its entire opt-out list to the spammer, (danger will robinson!) or is the spammer required to make requests against the list, processed by the list keeper?
Man, these stupid goons. I gotta look into one of those cooperative blackhole schemes. --
Who cares about digital pictures for TV? I can think of so many thing for pop culture to devote its resources to than this pap (Not PBS: I mean the federal mandate to change everything over.) The networks all want to jam 4 times the # of channels there, thus negating the picture quality advantage.
But why is it in our national interest to make sure we switch to digital? --
Is USB in general in danger? It seems pretty good, and a bit of a current de facto standard for devices, despite Win95 and WinNT not really supporting it. I'm a lot happier now that I'm running a machine with '98 on it, with a USB CD-burner, zip disk, REX pda burner, and joysticks, and maybe soon a graphics tablet. --
evolving hardware *very* sensitive to environment
on
Microchips That Evolve
·
· Score: 2
I remember reading an article about this kind of thing, probably in Discover, a long while back. I think they were trying to breed a minimal gate circuit that would spark when the system heard the sound 'No' or something. Using evolutionary algorithm techniques, they got some phenomenally low gate counts... the trouble was these systems were incredibly sensitive to the environment. It's a general problem with letting circuits breed themselves, they'll end up taking advantage of the oddest things, like RF interferance, or (don't remember the term, the way electricity in one wire is likely to cause a current in a parallel wire) and that once you move the circuit from your evolution/test harness, or even change the temperature or RF shielding, there's a good chance nothing will work. The solution is to build more complex test harnasses and test for how the circut responds to a variety of environments, but that starts to get more and more expensive.
I've heard it said that in the future programming will be more like gardening than building up with legos, but I dunno... --
Uh, thanks.
I know I've asked about good systems to do some multiplayer game development with before. I've done some light game writing ( see http://alienbill.com/abp ) but few systems support multiple joysticks.
So thanks, dickwad. --
Would this have support for > 2 joysticks? Right now it seems that the best bet for getting multiplayer on PCs (ala N64, not network) is with USB joysticks, which some versions of Windows support. Would I have access to them through this system? --
The security brief seems a little unclear... it seems like the vulnerability is e-mail related, but you can get it browsing websites? Is it IE using outlook, or outlook using ie that's the source of the problem? --
Re:the thing about the console wars...
on
XBox Tidbits
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· Score: 1
Carts was not that bad of a decision. Two words: Load Times. N64 just doesn't have them. I have Blitz 2000 for both N64 and Dreamcast. The N64 gets played because we don't have to wait. I hope the gamecube does better than many dreamcast games in that regard.
Certain genres have suffered, but overall the N64 has been and is a great system. Kudos to Nintendo for bringing back 4 controllers on one system (without a multitap) and the analog stick.
I think there's a chance that if solid state memory ever has a dramatic decrease in price, carts might return. Admittedly, DVD type storage will always be cheaper per megabyte/gigabyte, but the bandwidth to read the info off the disk will become more and more of an issue. --
According to Gleick's Faster, Attention is the new currency. Over the past few years we thought that meant that bannerads will pay for your work, by the economic value of eyeballs. That's not true cash and attention aren't freely convertible.
On the other hand, people will work for attention.
Although this kind of begs the question, the ad/micropayment shakeout might mean that hobbyist sites become more prominent. It's only a couple hundred dollars, if that, a year to grab a domain and make a site. People will do it bevause they love the subject matter or they love the attention. (Egoboo is the 'currency' of getting your egoboosted by making something popular in an online forum) Making it pay for itself will become the exception. In some ways, this is probably bad for content in general, but I think it will be an important trend to watch.
--
One thing Nintendo understands that Sony doesn't: Multiplayer Gaming. (Which ties directly into some of the best games not needing the best graphics, though having to do 4 3D viewpoints can be a bit taxing) Sure, a big part of the future of gaming is going to be network play, but there really is something for the social aspect of having a few friends over and wailing the hail out of each other in Mario Kart, Smash Brothers, or Mario Tennis.
Another minor point, Nintendo really has been making some great games. Any game that uses its stable of mascot characters is almost guaranteed to be worthwhile. That doesn't totally make up for the N64's lack of 3rd party support, but it goes a long way. (And people need to learn that just because the mascot games are cute and cartoony doesn't mean they're for kids. Some of those can be the hardest damn games... I'm a better player than most kids I know (ok, my cousins) and sometimes I can barely make it through even with a FAQ or walkthrough.) --
One thing about PalmOS though, its historical regular use is tied in pretty closely with graffiti. While it represents a good compromise of teach the human / teach the machine, it is indeed a compromise, and hardly the pinnacle of intuitive use that everyone here seems to think it is. --
Not to be one of the bitchers but...
on
Freshmeat II
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· Score: 1
...no qualms with the aesthetic qualities of the design, but on my IE 5.5, the main content section is a fixed width, wider than my wide open browser window, meaning I have to scroll left and right to read any given line. --
I didn't like playing the board games like Mechwarrior and Aerotech and all that (a little numbers heavy for me) but I loved reading the source book material... I have this one book from "Renegade Legion", just all these very well thought backstories for a variety of Tanks, and it's fun to page through.
That said, didn't the original flaship MechWarrior blatantly rip off the designs of the Mech from Japanese sources? Was that legal or not, did they ever get in trouble? And the generations of mech design that came after, the Clans, most of it looked pretty lame and contrived next to the originals. --
Eh, it's not so bad. I just got the IIIc, reasonably priced color, and with the 8megs I've started moving away from doing everything in memopad and putting it in thinkDB instead. And I'm using AvantGo to get HTML snapshots of my online journal.
It can't do everything (most of the streetmap apps are pretty slow) but most of what it can't do is more hardware related than anything else. --
I was reading this short story by Niven (I think it was in N-Space, can't remember the title) that suggested maybe aliens would try to communicate using gravity waves... ('course that's assuming there is a possible way of controlling gravity, like the Tufts Gravity Stone thinks there is.) The story suggested Gravity's proogation would be less limited than light, radio, or other Electromagnetic principles.
And by the way... we're listening, but are we transmitting? Is our usual EMF noise enough to clue an alien race in? --
Anyone who took comp sci at Tufts University and got serious about it during college probably owes it to Professor Alva Couch. The guy was an amazing font of enthusiasm, giggling and jumping at the front of the class... probably a typical friendly old school geek/hacker in that regard. (He also had more than his fair share of non-computer related hobbies, photography, tandem-bicycling, I think some low woodwind or other...)
He had an interesting way of running the class known as the "weedout" class for comp sci at Tufts, as well as some of the other less theoretical higher level classes. There were 4 or 5 big programming per semester. He'd pass out the assignment. 9/10 of the class would blow it off because it wasn't due for another few weeks but 2 or 3 of the hardcore students would tear right into it. Those students got personal attention, and really ended up collaborating with him to find good solutions... the problems were setup so usually he didn't have preconceived notions of what the best solution was going to look like. He would then disseminate the techniques discovered with those students to the rest of the class... nothing was more irritating than some punk getting equal results to you starting two days before the assignment was due, just by implementing the technique you invented, so the elites had to press on to even better independent tweaks and methods.
It's kind of odd that he makes Big Companies the boogieman here. The point of the web is that it allows anyone to publish and reach a potentially huge audience without a huge expenditure, big companies can buy their own media outlets.
I don't even want to think of the Orwellian nightmare his ideas would produce if put into action. Hell, I'm not even comfortable with what I hear about libel laws in the UK.
As always, the solution to bad speech is more speech. Let the ideas fight it out in the open marketplace - a marketplace made more open by the structure of the web and digital information.
rotated text of the print version...
on
Gifts For Geeks
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· Score: 1
Man, just when I thought Wired might be learning to rein in the typographic madness of issues past with a sense of what's actually readable, they do something like that gift guide, with every description rotated 90 degrees from the pictures. Did some designer think it was cool? Too dumb to figure out how to get it to fit otherwise? Trying to make people reading it look like they were browsing a Playboy centerfold? (An idea with poetic justice, actually, but they could've rotated the pictures as well and still kept most of the effect.)
Wired: reading is not supposed to be a physical challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, the toothpaste manufacturer wants its domain back "we make holes in teeth-- take AIM against cavities..."
--
But I was also really disappointed with the results. It doesn't sound much better than the old Apple II setup my chem teacher would wheel into class when his voice went.
I blame cheap sampling over the past decade or so. The ability to record a voice actor's voice and use that has precluded any real advancement on the synthesis front.
People talked about Jar Jar as the first virtual main character (and he wasn't even first) but they seem to forget-- his voice was nothing near virtual.
For better or worse, it seems like it will be a numberof years before we have an artificially generated voice as annoying as Jar Jar's.
--
I've heard someone say here that managers should only expect 4-5 hours of really good high-mind-utilization time from their workers. I think that number goes up when it's crunch time, but can be significantly less than that if the manager lets the techies 'get away with it' and there's not a lot on the burner.
Web access at work is a big culprit. While there are times it's a crucial information gathering resource, there are even more times when it's a tool for procastination enhancement. Possibly in the big picture, the best coders *need* this kind of offtopic stimulus to stay sane and focused and un-burnt-out.
Anyway, it should be lunch *hour*. None of this 37.5 crap. And an expectation to work extra in crunch times should be balanced by leniency at other more relaxed times.
--
Their subscription servlet is busted.
--
I've been running loveblender.com for a while now. I have some banner exchange ads there just as to try to keep up some new blood incoming traffic. Places like http://www.ezpublishing.com/ and http://www.arrowweb.net/ say they have no bandwidth limits... I don't know how they pull it off. The total cost is less than $200 year. The biggest tradeoff is that both only give you a finite amount of diskspace (50-200meg depending on the plan), you can't just throw in extra disk. But they do take care of all the administrative hassle!
--
And the problems with opt-out are pretty obvious to. Does the official opt-out list keeper give its entire opt-out list to the spammer, (danger will robinson!) or is the spammer required to make requests against the list, processed by the list keeper?
Man, these stupid goons. I gotta look into one of those cooperative blackhole schemes.
--
But why is it in our national interest to make sure we switch to digital?
--
Kieran! What's your e-mail address, you anon coward you? Mine's posted here or at http://kisrael.com
--
I can't find the server-- DNS problem? Could someone post the IP address?
--
Is USB in general in danger? It seems pretty good, and a bit of a current de facto standard for devices, despite Win95 and WinNT not really supporting it. I'm a lot happier now that I'm running a machine with '98 on it, with a USB CD-burner, zip disk, REX pda burner, and joysticks, and maybe soon a graphics tablet.
--
I remember reading an article about this kind of thing, probably in Discover, a long while back. I think they were trying to breed a minimal gate circuit that would spark when the system heard the sound 'No' or something. Using evolutionary algorithm techniques, they got some phenomenally low gate counts... the trouble was these systems were incredibly sensitive to the environment. It's a general problem with letting circuits breed themselves, they'll end up taking advantage of the oddest things, like RF interferance, or (don't remember the term, the way electricity in one wire is likely to cause a current in a parallel wire) and that once you move the circuit from your evolution/test harness, or even change the temperature or RF shielding, there's a good chance nothing will work. The solution is to build more complex test harnasses and test for how the circut responds to a variety of environments, but that starts to get more and more expensive.
I've heard it said that in the future programming will be more like gardening than building up with legos, but I dunno...
--
Uh, thanks. I know I've asked about good systems to do some multiplayer game development with before. I've done some light game writing ( see http://alienbill.com/abp ) but few systems support multiple joysticks. So thanks, dickwad.
--
Would this have support for > 2 joysticks? Right now it seems that the best bet for getting multiplayer on PCs (ala N64, not network) is with USB joysticks, which some versions of Windows support. Would I have access to them through this system?
--
The security brief seems a little unclear... it seems like the vulnerability is e-mail related, but you can get it browsing websites? Is it IE using outlook, or outlook using ie that's the source of the problem?
--
Carts was not that bad of a decision. Two words: Load Times. N64 just doesn't have them. I have Blitz 2000 for both N64 and Dreamcast. The N64 gets played because we don't have to wait. I hope the gamecube does better than many dreamcast games in that regard. Certain genres have suffered, but overall the N64 has been and is a great system. Kudos to Nintendo for bringing back 4 controllers on one system (without a multitap) and the analog stick. I think there's a chance that if solid state memory ever has a dramatic decrease in price, carts might return. Admittedly, DVD type storage will always be cheaper per megabyte/gigabyte, but the bandwidth to read the info off the disk will become more and more of an issue.
--
Although this kind of begs the question, the ad/micropayment shakeout might mean that hobbyist sites become more prominent. It's only a couple hundred dollars, if that, a year to grab a domain and make a site. People will do it bevause they love the subject matter or they love the attention. (Egoboo is the 'currency' of getting your egoboosted by making something popular in an online forum) Making it pay for itself will become the exception. In some ways, this is probably bad for content in general, but I think it will be an important trend to watch.
--
Another minor point, Nintendo really has been making some great games. Any game that uses its stable of mascot characters is almost guaranteed to be worthwhile. That doesn't totally make up for the N64's lack of 3rd party support, but it goes a long way. (And people need to learn that just because the mascot games are cute and cartoony doesn't mean they're for kids. Some of those can be the hardest damn games... I'm a better player than most kids I know (ok, my cousins) and sometimes I can barely make it through even with a FAQ or walkthrough.)
--
One thing about PalmOS though, its historical regular use is tied in pretty closely with graffiti. While it represents a good compromise of teach the human / teach the machine, it is indeed a compromise, and hardly the pinnacle of intuitive use that everyone here seems to think it is.
--
...no qualms with the aesthetic qualities of the design, but on my IE 5.5, the main content section is a fixed width, wider than my wide open browser window, meaning I have to scroll left and right to read any given line.
--
That said, didn't the original flaship MechWarrior blatantly rip off the designs of the Mech from Japanese sources? Was that legal or not, did they ever get in trouble? And the generations of mech design that came after, the Clans, most of it looked pretty lame and contrived next to the originals.
--
It can't do everything (most of the streetmap apps are pretty slow) but most of what it can't do is more hardware related than anything else.
--
And by the way... we're listening, but are we transmitting? Is our usual EMF noise enough to clue an alien race in?
--
He had an interesting way of running the class known as the "weedout" class for comp sci at Tufts, as well as some of the other less theoretical higher level classes. There were 4 or 5 big programming per semester. He'd pass out the assignment. 9/10 of the class would blow it off because it wasn't due for another few weeks but 2 or 3 of the hardcore students would tear right into it. Those students got personal attention, and really ended up collaborating with him to find good solutions... the problems were setup so usually he didn't have preconceived notions of what the best solution was going to look like. He would then disseminate the techniques discovered with those students to the rest of the class... nothing was more irritating than some punk getting equal results to you starting two days before the assignment was due, just by implementing the technique you invented, so the elites had to press on to even better independent tweaks and methods.
You can see his old-school homepage here
--
I don't even want to think of the Orwellian nightmare his ideas would produce if put into action. Hell, I'm not even comfortable with what I hear about libel laws in the UK.
As always, the solution to bad speech is more speech. Let the ideas fight it out in the open marketplace - a marketplace made more open by the structure of the web and digital information.
Wired: reading is not supposed to be a physical challenge.