The very same thing bothered me. I haven't seen the movie yet (but I'm going, 100%) and I'm honestly disappointed that it's all a big solar system. I guess I had pictured a cluster of stars, each with planets. Very important for the show is the notion of the core planets and "farther out" planets. But I did initially picture this on a galactic scale...
I suppose it makes things a little better that these planets have many moons, all of which are terraformed and include artificial gravity (I know, hard to imagine - and all conveniently have the landscape of southern California). But there are laws of physics (maybe math, actually) about how close together planetary orbits may come in a stable solar system. There just can't be many orbits in the habitable zone. (Anything outside of the bands of Venus and Mars would not look like California no matter how good the terraforming is.) So why aren't the outer planets cold?
You're right, many other details are thought out, but Whedon is delinquent on giving us a map of the settled planets, or even a sketch. I imagine he wants to, but can't make it fit with the requirements of the narrative. What the narrative requires is something analogous to an archipelago on the sea - a space that is densely populated with many moons and planets. That's just not gonna happen; the more you say about it, the sillier it would sound, so Whedon just ingnores the subject. If I were him, I'd have been more direct about it up front, bit the bullet on superluminal travel, and made Serenity an interstellar ship. This would explain the huge interstellar migration you mention... The downside is that Serenity seems too crappy to be superluminal... but then again, the Millennium Falcon was also a piece of crap and nobody had problems picturing hyperdrive. But there is something weird about people who can afford an interstellar spaceship but still use revolvers to shoot each other. Yes, a quirk of the show.
So with the solar system thing, I think Whedon is digging himself deeper, and he should have worked out these things when he first conceived the show. Absent that, he just shouldn't address the issue. Anything he says about this will only make matters worse.
Joss Whedon said that he and everyone else all want to do a sequel, and that the only thing that needs to fall into place is money. He even said how much money: Fifty million dollars in US ticket sales, $80mil worldwide. It looks like it will be close. The first weekend earned just over $10mil. I know they will get at least $17 more from me and my gf - who wanted to watch all the episodes from my DVD before going in - but I think most of the movie-goers have been fans of the show, and that's not a big pool to draw from. I think people are skeptical and intimidated by the fact that this movie is episode 14 of some intricate series they never watched.
These 9 minutes are there to reassure people that no, you will get something out of it even if you don't know the show. And I think it's a good idea. I hope it works, because I really think this Firefly thing should go on. Like the Matrix, it might take some time and good word-of-mouth to drive up ticket sales. Of course, the sequels to Serenity, if they come, had better not suck like the Matrix sequels did!
If it were anything else I'd agree with you. In this case though, it's just the outcome of the people working on this movie being 100% dedicated and trying really hard for that reason. I know it *looks* suspect, but what I think you're seeing is just honest effort to 1) get the word out and 2) to sell $50M of tickets, which Whedon said was necessary to justify a sequel (or some other sort of continuation). I think these people really like each other and like the story. It's in character to be an bit unorthodox in order to keep the whole ship flying.
I'm surprised and impressed that Apple don't license FairPlay to companies that make crippled CDs. What most of those CDs do is have portion of CD-ROM-unreadable music tracks that still sort of play in a normal CD player, and then DRM-locked compressed versions of the same songs that you can copy to a hard drive or a music player. But the most common music players, iPods, can't read those files, because the only DRM they know how to read is FairPlay.
If Apple wanted, they could get the crippled CDs out there all using FairPlay to DRM the compressed songs. It's strange they don't. You would think that this would give a further competitive advantage to their iPod line of players, as well as seeing to it that everyone is using iTunes for playback and FairPlay for DRM. Should Apple want to, all of these objectives would be within reach. The strange thing is that they don't seem to want to. Somehow they wait on the sidelines while the music industry seems to default to Windows Media DRM. This is a less useful format for the majority of customers, and with enough of it around, competitors to the iPod get a serious advantage.
So my question is this: Why is Apple holding out on the licensing of FairPlay? Is it simply that they think crippled CDs are evil and they don't want to dirty their hands with it? Strange.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I agree with you that we have artificial scarcity today. In some cases it's really ugly and people die. And this will almost inevitably grow. Right now, the people who suffer most from the artificiality of certain scarcities are the starving, that is, people who don't have the power to affect any government.
I started writing a list of all the things that I expect to be added to the list after production is automatized: Housing, medical treatments, luxury goods, etc. - and then I realized that these are all artificially scarce already, to some degree. But as time goes on, more and more of the people of the world will be on the ugly side of this artificial scarcity.
I think that it will become harder and harder to keep the newly unemployed from taking control of the means of production that could eliminate scarcity, if only the system in place didn't rely on scarcity.
So what I think we need to consider seriously is that the scarcity-based system we have today might be subverted by a revolution. Hopefully it will be peaceful and democratic. Marx didn't think it would be peaceful, but he might have been wrong. Anyway, that might be a little reason to be optimistic.
Sorry, I find Kruzweil's futurism shallow and boring. I mean, he's kind enough to try to illustrate for the mathophobic how exponential growth works. Since most of us here already understand this, what more is there, really, in all this futurism? He appropriated the idea of the singularity, but there already is a singularity institute, which put out an excellent and serious book, and made it available for free.
I don't have this latest book by Kruzweil, but I've found him to be especially naive when it comes to politics. He seems to think that the present system of distributive justice will more or less survive intact into the post-singularity age o' plenty. There will still be money, "companies", etc. Surely, the companies themselves will strive to maintain this arrangement, creating artificial scarcity where there is no actual scarcity (and as AI engines take over most manufacturing, agriculture and much of engineering, natural scarcities will be hard to find). It seems pretty clear that this system of artificial scarcity will not be stable long after the first murmors of the singularity transition. That will have profound consequences Krutzweil is too scared or shallow to deal with. The entire system of capitalism and all the institutions connected with it (like money) require scarcity in order to operate. But the world won't long put up with artificially-induced scarcity. For one thing, it's clearly immoral.
The result will be a profound social change, an end of a "goods" market (and of most services too, like cooking, cleaning, etc.), and this will look eerily like the revolution predicted by Marx. Whether the outcome will be a stateless anarchy like Marx expectedf is hard to guess. Somehow I doubt it, though I do expect that the decline of the importance of nationhood will continue, exponentially. (Communities of interest, sometimes ugly interests, will probably replace them.)
It's good for Kruzweil to think about how people with malicious intentions will interact with the new system, and what the rest of us will be prepared to do in response. These thoughts are a bit chilling. Because he fails to factor in the huge and inevitable political changes, I can imagine his speculations on this will not be terribly useful.
Very good point about the MS "extended" PDF's. I don't think Microsoft was people to standardize on PDF. If they create some FUD regarding the format and introduce little incompatibilities, most lay will think that PDF is not worth bothering with.
Folding tinfoil hats? Gah, I though everybody knew you just tear off a strip of tinfoil slightly longer than the circumference of your head, wrap it around, and smush it down into a sleek (though crinckly) helmet-like shape. Smush, I said. Not fold. Why in the world would you say "fold"? Ah, unless you're FROM THE GOVERNMENT, trying to subtly undermine the effectiveness of our improvised protection systems!
Best non-spoiler review so far
on
Serenity Opens Today
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· Score: 2, Informative
Here is a very insightful review from an unlikely source:
Thanks for the advice. I wasn't exaggerating when I said the cpu heatsink was cold, and it is the stock AMD heatsink (which comes with a rather fast fan). The thing is, my CPU temps only reach into the lower 40's when the system is under load. I'm not overclocking that 3000+, I know a lot of people like to. I think it's just a very energy efficient chip, and I regret buying such a big, hot power supply for a system that draws so little juice.
Is the PS now the biggest heat producer in an PC?
on
Silent 500W Power Supply
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I had just built a new computer with a 90nm Athlon64 and a 500W power supply. This is mainly for work, so no hot/fancy GPU. The CPU heatsink is absolutely cold to the touch. The air blown from inside the case feels exactly the same temperature as background. But, the air that comes out of the power supply is noticably warm. It really seems like the power supply is the only thing that is actually producing any heat. Is this typical of modern systems? How much more difficult is it to make efficient power supplies? Somehow I feel even worse about all the power I waste on power supply inefficiency than the power I waste with my CPU.
Agreed, this was on my mind as well. Civ in 2D is just as playable and prettier than any given view of 3D, or so it seems to me.
A different AI question: AI moddability
on
Ask The Civ IV Dev Team
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· Score: 5, Interesting
My question is AI related as well. Since the parent is a good question, I'd like to tack this on:
Will the code for the AI routines be user-editable, easy to mod and documented?
Rationalle: As an fan AI-coder for CRPG's (I worked with David Gaider on AI in the Ascention mod of Baldur's Gate 2), it's my experience that with no deadlines and lot of playing experience (very important), a community of modders are willing and able to write a much smarter AI than any game engineer. Nothing would more increase my willingness to replay the game than the promise that this time, a newly modded AI really will give me a run for my money. In my experience, it only took several solid weeks of playing and a few weeks of coding before I could make a computer-controlled magic-user in BG2 who could regularly kick the ass of an identically-able human controlled magic user, without cheating.
For Civ-specific AI issues, here are the features of what I take to be the holy grail of AI:
1. No omniscience: The input information available to each country's AI would be the same as what would be available to a player if she controlled that country. (No "seeing past your range of view".)
2. The AI is completely blind as to which rivals are human and which are AI.
3. There are several very good AI's that each favor different strategies, and a meta-AI that determines which strategy is the best fit for the situation.
4. Exactly the same rules apply to the AI civs as to the human-controlled civs (regarding science, production, trade, etc.).
Yes it may be that a team of scientists might get more done that 100 robotic rovers, but getting them there and back alive would be a whole lot more expensive than a fleet of 100 rovers. (And, the robotic mission could be done sooner, and you don't need to worry about them going crazy en route, or getting cancer, etc.) They don't all have to be little things like the Pathfinder, either. We could easily build deep drilling robots, unmanned laboratories for serious chemical analysis, maybe (this would be cool) an automated nuclear powerplant.
Yeah, and once all that stuff is in place and the robots built a powerplant and a little biosphere, then I'd say we're ready for the people to visit.
A manned mission done too soon will inevitably go like this:
1. Grand, ambitious, inspiring plans, maybe even a plausible rationale
2. Huge federal budget
3. Budget overruns, due to unexpected problems doing something this big.
4. Scale back grand the plans in 1. to save money.
5-8. Repeat step 4.
9. Run the crippled expensive monstrosity
10. Try to put a good spin on the fact that a trillion+ dollars bought us nothing but the right to say "been there" and some snapshots, of worse quality than what robots could take. One line that will be tried sooner or later: "Well, at least no one died."
Because of the last part, I consider this the optimistic scenario. Oh and two more steps:
I don't know why I even look at these sorts of "rankings" stories - the author may as well be posting a definitive ranking the "50 greatest ice cream flavors of the 20th century" - but I detect a weird, incomprehensible trend: there are people who find the new Battlestar Galactica to be a watchable show. Now I've tried it. Thanks to some of these people, I've watched MANY episodes of it, and I understand it less each time. How can even average-smart people put up with such terrible writing? Such stupid plots and stupider plot holes? Such transparent and flacid attempts to be edgy and gritty? Such... lack of immagination?
I admit that I might be spoiled by Firefly, which actually did well all those things BSG tries but miserably fails at, minus that mystical crap about fulfilled prophecies, which just couldn't work and wasn't worth trying. But I've got to think that even without Firefly, I would see BSG for the vacuous soap opera that it is.
Anyway, if they didn't want me flaming on slashdot, they shouldn't have baited me by giving that vomit the second ranking in all-time sci-fi.
I certainly agree that for my purposes, Office 2003 or even XP are good enough. (This may be the only MS software that I'm prepared to praise.) This leads me to think that the evolution of office suite useablity has slowed to a crawl - for simple tasks, Office 12 (with its annoying "guessing what you need" interface) might be a step backwards.
This makes me think there is plenty of opportunity for non-MS office suites to take market share - all they have to achieve is the "good enough" state of Office 97, plus the ability to read and write all the various MS-Office formats (StarOffice is making headway on the latter). What's sad is that there is not a free office suite which works as well as Microsoft's decade old software. If it did, you can bet people would use it, Office is stupid-expensive.
This seems to me to be a critical time. People will soon be faced with a choice: Do I teach myself the new Office12 interface or do I teach myself to use some worthy competitor with a more faminiar interface. How this is decided will depend on how worthy is the competitor. At this point, I'm rather pessimistic about the competitors. (I hope I'm wrong because I'm rooting for them.) I do have a strong feeling that OOo and Star Office are unfixable and that OSS is giving up the long-term game to Microsoft if we keep all our eggs in that basket. We all have our preferences for alternatives - I happen to like both Abiword/Gnumeric and Koffice, and the latter seems particulartly easy to develop. I can't code well enough to be of help, but I would hope that long term strategic thinking would wake people up to the importance of quickly improving software like Koffice (which right now only has a couple of guys doing development, a tiny fraction compared to the StarOffice developers).
honestly, what can anyone do in todays MS office that couldnt be done in Office 2000?
Yeah, I would have been happy to stick with Office 2000, but I would have been even happier if OOO worked as smoothly and predictably now as Office did in 2000. I'm no fan of Microsoft software, but Office is one thing they make that comes out well.
I don't think that OOo will ever be good. It might get new features, but its bloat and ugliness are unfixable. I will always be embarassed showing people Linux when I have to open OOo, it makes them think Linux makes things run stupidly slow. Of course it doesn't, Koffice is incredibly responsive... and with OOo's 100 developers, it would get into shape very quickly (I think it has less than 10 people working on it now and is making great strides all the same.)
Maybe somewhere inside OOo there is code which is worth saving, but the whole framework is rotten. If there is no hope for a Firefox-style rebirth, maybe the developer effort should move on to something with a future.
I know I would also much rather run OSX (or OSXI) on AMD64, there are many people who would. Will Apple on Intel be able to beat comparably nice AMD64 boxes on price/performance? Maybe, but for that Intel would really have to start cranking, what they're making now is pretty weak.
But I think one big headache for Apple if they stay with Intel-only is that many of the people who demand OSX on AMD will just use a hacked version of OSX. These people will be Apple software converts and not give one penny to Apple, because Apple isn't giving them the hardware options they want. This will be an especially visible group if AMD stays as far ahead of Intel as they are now (unlikely, but their engineers are quite good).
I'd love to see the contract Intel and Apple hammered out. I wonder if Intel made certain delivery promises and what would be the remedy if those promises are broken. Super-cheap EE Pentiums for Apple? That might keep people from grumbling too much about the lack of AMD options, but still, it will be a little demoralizing when Apple pirates will gloat on Slashdot about how they can blow away every OSX benchmark on their overclocked AthlonFX and still spend less than they would for an Apple machine.
Pasty kids with super-thumbs is something we're used to, but now it looks like you'll need to master fine movements that involve an entire arm. Yes, it's not exactly sport, but it's a hell of a lot closer than it used to be.
Seriously, Nintendo-fencing is going to involve some serious skill and dexterity, expecially against online opponents. Bravo!
Aah, I see how this works. Microsoft first plants some moles into Trolltech, and soon, it will be a company that anyone with a fat wallet can buy out. Yes, one of the dangers of going public is that you never know who your new owner will turn out to be. Manchester United, probably the most famous sports team in the world, went public and the next thing you know, some Yankee tycoon bought all their stock. Huge protests from the fans did nothing. These are the perils of going public - so seeing this done by a company that codes and maintains such an important componenet of Linux distributions makes me a little nervous.
Hi, I still haven't played much with VOIP. The biggest pain with standard Skype is that you have to use headphones and a mic instead of a normal handset.
I have a few old voice modems lying around and I was wondering whether it would be technically feasible to write software that would route the call through the modem so that I plug into it a standard telephone and talk. Maybe it could even make the phone ring? If such a thing wouldn't work, why not? I don't know enough about modems.
I know VOIP companies sell special hardware for using conventional phones, but it seems to me that a modem+software might work as well, and everybody has one already.
Yes, the point about the investment value of dark fiber purchases is a good one. It's a funny picture as well. Everybody is rubbing their chins raw trying to figure out what devious data Google plan to transmit down that dark fiber. I'm sure contingency plans are frantically being worked on by the major ISPs and Google's other competitors. Others start buying dark fiber out of fear of Google, creating scarcity and driving up the price... and Google says: "Psyche!... anyone wanna buy some expensive fiber from us?" That would be hillarious.
If you start sucking and you deliberately compromise the user's interests to make some money or crush some company, do those users have to bend over and take it, or do they have elsewhere to go?
I think in Google's case, it's pretty obvious they have somewhere else to go. Google doesn't have anyone locked in, not with Search, not with Maps, and definitely not with Gmail. If they turned evil, that would definitely compromise their quality of service, and there are many people including MS eagerly lining up to serve Google emigrees who only came to Google in the first place because Google's lack of evil made for a good user experience.
I think it's incredibly immature to equate the size and power, or even the ambition of a company, with evil. I guess there are some people who can't distinguish legitimate moral objections from mere sour grapes and envy. Remember that what makes Microsoft bad is the fact they deliberately screw their users (just because they can) and try to undermine open standards and install their own proprietary ones. This behavior should be condemned whether it's done by a big or a small company (remember Rambus?). And Google, big as they are, are not doing this. They are the sort of company we should cheer - a pro-user company with a bit of power. The alernative is that only the evil companies have the power, and I wouldn't like that.
I know for a fact that many of my vegetarian friends would love to eat this sort of meat. What bothers them is not the texture and taste of meat, it's the sickening cruelty that goes into producing. it. Also, some of my friends object to the environmental effects of livestock farming, but these appear to be solved as well.
Yes, there are also people who just don't like the taste of meat (so their vegetarianism has nothing to do with ethics/health concerns), but I imagine this makes up about 5% of vegetarians in industrialized countries.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose it makes things a little better that these planets have many moons, all of which are terraformed and include artificial gravity (I know, hard to imagine - and all conveniently have the landscape of southern California). But there are laws of physics (maybe math, actually) about how close together planetary orbits may come in a stable solar system. There just can't be many orbits in the habitable zone. (Anything outside of the bands of Venus and Mars would not look like California no matter how good the terraforming is.) So why aren't the outer planets cold?
You're right, many other details are thought out, but Whedon is delinquent on giving us a map of the settled planets, or even a sketch. I imagine he wants to, but can't make it fit with the requirements of the narrative. What the narrative requires is something analogous to an archipelago on the sea - a space that is densely populated with many moons and planets. That's just not gonna happen; the more you say about it, the sillier it would sound, so Whedon just ingnores the subject. If I were him, I'd have been more direct about it up front, bit the bullet on superluminal travel, and made Serenity an interstellar ship. This would explain the huge interstellar migration you mention... The downside is that Serenity seems too crappy to be superluminal... but then again, the Millennium Falcon was also a piece of crap and nobody had problems picturing hyperdrive. But there is something weird about people who can afford an interstellar spaceship but still use revolvers to shoot each other. Yes, a quirk of the show.
So with the solar system thing, I think Whedon is digging himself deeper, and he should have worked out these things when he first conceived the show. Absent that, he just shouldn't address the issue. Anything he says about this will only make matters worse.
These 9 minutes are there to reassure people that no, you will get something out of it even if you don't know the show. And I think it's a good idea. I hope it works, because I really think this Firefly thing should go on. Like the Matrix, it might take some time and good word-of-mouth to drive up ticket sales. Of course, the sequels to Serenity, if they come, had better not suck like the Matrix sequels did!
If it were anything else I'd agree with you. In this case though, it's just the outcome of the people working on this movie being 100% dedicated and trying really hard for that reason. I know it *looks* suspect, but what I think you're seeing is just honest effort to 1) get the word out and 2) to sell $50M of tickets, which Whedon said was necessary to justify a sequel (or some other sort of continuation). I think these people really like each other and like the story. It's in character to be an bit unorthodox in order to keep the whole ship flying.
If Apple wanted, they could get the crippled CDs out there all using FairPlay to DRM the compressed songs. It's strange they don't. You would think that this would give a further competitive advantage to their iPod line of players, as well as seeing to it that everyone is using iTunes for playback and FairPlay for DRM. Should Apple want to, all of these objectives would be within reach. The strange thing is that they don't seem to want to. Somehow they wait on the sidelines while the music industry seems to default to Windows Media DRM. This is a less useful format for the majority of customers, and with enough of it around, competitors to the iPod get a serious advantage.
So my question is this: Why is Apple holding out on the licensing of FairPlay? Is it simply that they think crippled CDs are evil and they don't want to dirty their hands with it? Strange.
I started writing a list of all the things that I expect to be added to the list after production is automatized: Housing, medical treatments, luxury goods, etc. - and then I realized that these are all artificially scarce already, to some degree. But as time goes on, more and more of the people of the world will be on the ugly side of this artificial scarcity.
I think that it will become harder and harder to keep the newly unemployed from taking control of the means of production that could eliminate scarcity, if only the system in place didn't rely on scarcity.
So what I think we need to consider seriously is that the scarcity-based system we have today might be subverted by a revolution. Hopefully it will be peaceful and democratic. Marx didn't think it would be peaceful, but he might have been wrong. Anyway, that might be a little reason to be optimistic.
I don't have this latest book by Kruzweil, but I've found him to be especially naive when it comes to politics. He seems to think that the present system of distributive justice will more or less survive intact into the post-singularity age o' plenty. There will still be money, "companies", etc. Surely, the companies themselves will strive to maintain this arrangement, creating artificial scarcity where there is no actual scarcity (and as AI engines take over most manufacturing, agriculture and much of engineering, natural scarcities will be hard to find). It seems pretty clear that this system of artificial scarcity will not be stable long after the first murmors of the singularity transition. That will have profound consequences Krutzweil is too scared or shallow to deal with. The entire system of capitalism and all the institutions connected with it (like money) require scarcity in order to operate. But the world won't long put up with artificially-induced scarcity. For one thing, it's clearly immoral.
The result will be a profound social change, an end of a "goods" market (and of most services too, like cooking, cleaning, etc.), and this will look eerily like the revolution predicted by Marx. Whether the outcome will be a stateless anarchy like Marx expectedf is hard to guess. Somehow I doubt it, though I do expect that the decline of the importance of nationhood will continue, exponentially. (Communities of interest, sometimes ugly interests, will probably replace them.)
It's good for Kruzweil to think about how people with malicious intentions will interact with the new system, and what the rest of us will be prepared to do in response. These thoughts are a bit chilling. Because he fails to factor in the huge and inevitable political changes, I can imagine his speculations on this will not be terribly useful.
Very good point about the MS "extended" PDF's. I don't think Microsoft was people to standardize on PDF. If they create some FUD regarding the format and introduce little incompatibilities, most lay will think that PDF is not worth bothering with.
Folding tinfoil hats? Gah, I though everybody knew you just tear off a strip of tinfoil slightly longer than the circumference of your head, wrap it around, and smush it down into a sleek (though crinckly) helmet-like shape. Smush, I said. Not fold. Why in the world would you say "fold"? Ah, unless you're FROM THE GOVERNMENT, trying to subtly undermine the effectiveness of our improvised protection systems!
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/25438/
Thanks for the advice. I wasn't exaggerating when I said the cpu heatsink was cold, and it is the stock AMD heatsink (which comes with a rather fast fan). The thing is, my CPU temps only reach into the lower 40's when the system is under load. I'm not overclocking that 3000+, I know a lot of people like to. I think it's just a very energy efficient chip, and I regret buying such a big, hot power supply for a system that draws so little juice.
I had just built a new computer with a 90nm Athlon64 and a 500W power supply. This is mainly for work, so no hot/fancy GPU. The CPU heatsink is absolutely cold to the touch. The air blown from inside the case feels exactly the same temperature as background. But, the air that comes out of the power supply is noticably warm. It really seems like the power supply is the only thing that is actually producing any heat. Is this typical of modern systems? How much more difficult is it to make efficient power supplies? Somehow I feel even worse about all the power I waste on power supply inefficiency than the power I waste with my CPU.
Agreed, this was on my mind as well. Civ in 2D is just as playable and prettier than any given view of 3D, or so it seems to me.
Rationalle: As an fan AI-coder for CRPG's (I worked with David Gaider on AI in the Ascention mod of Baldur's Gate 2), it's my experience that with no deadlines and lot of playing experience (very important), a community of modders are willing and able to write a much smarter AI than any game engineer. Nothing would more increase my willingness to replay the game than the promise that this time, a newly modded AI really will give me a run for my money. In my experience, it only took several solid weeks of playing and a few weeks of coding before I could make a computer-controlled magic-user in BG2 who could regularly kick the ass of an identically-able human controlled magic user, without cheating.
For Civ-specific AI issues, here are the features of what I take to be the holy grail of AI:
1. No omniscience: The input information available to each country's AI would be the same as what would be available to a player if she controlled that country. (No "seeing past your range of view".) 2. The AI is completely blind as to which rivals are human and which are AI. 3. There are several very good AI's that each favor different strategies, and a meta-AI that determines which strategy is the best fit for the situation. 4. Exactly the same rules apply to the AI civs as to the human-controlled civs (regarding science, production, trade, etc.).Yeah, and once all that stuff is in place and the robots built a powerplant and a little biosphere, then I'd say we're ready for the people to visit.
A manned mission done too soon will inevitably go like this:
1. Grand, ambitious, inspiring plans, maybe even a plausible rationale
2. Huge federal budget
3. Budget overruns, due to unexpected problems doing something this big.
4. Scale back grand the plans in 1. to save money.
5-8. Repeat step 4.
9. Run the crippled expensive monstrosity
10. Try to put a good spin on the fact that a trillion+ dollars bought us nothing but the right to say "been there" and some snapshots, of worse quality than what robots could take. One line that will be tried sooner or later: "Well, at least no one died."
Because of the last part, I consider this the optimistic scenario. Oh and two more steps:
11. ????
12. Profit!
I admit that I might be spoiled by Firefly, which actually did well all those things BSG tries but miserably fails at, minus that mystical crap about fulfilled prophecies, which just couldn't work and wasn't worth trying. But I've got to think that even without Firefly, I would see BSG for the vacuous soap opera that it is.
Anyway, if they didn't want me flaming on slashdot, they shouldn't have baited me by giving that vomit the second ranking in all-time sci-fi.
This makes me think there is plenty of opportunity for non-MS office suites to take market share - all they have to achieve is the "good enough" state of Office 97, plus the ability to read and write all the various MS-Office formats (StarOffice is making headway on the latter). What's sad is that there is not a free office suite which works as well as Microsoft's decade old software. If it did, you can bet people would use it, Office is stupid-expensive.
This seems to me to be a critical time. People will soon be faced with a choice: Do I teach myself the new Office12 interface or do I teach myself to use some worthy competitor with a more faminiar interface. How this is decided will depend on how worthy is the competitor. At this point, I'm rather pessimistic about the competitors. (I hope I'm wrong because I'm rooting for them.) I do have a strong feeling that OOo and Star Office are unfixable and that OSS is giving up the long-term game to Microsoft if we keep all our eggs in that basket. We all have our preferences for alternatives - I happen to like both Abiword/Gnumeric and Koffice, and the latter seems particulartly easy to develop. I can't code well enough to be of help, but I would hope that long term strategic thinking would wake people up to the importance of quickly improving software like Koffice (which right now only has a couple of guys doing development, a tiny fraction compared to the StarOffice developers).
Yeah, I would have been happy to stick with Office 2000, but I would have been even happier if OOO worked as smoothly and predictably now as Office did in 2000. I'm no fan of Microsoft software, but Office is one thing they make that comes out well.
I don't think that OOo will ever be good. It might get new features, but its bloat and ugliness are unfixable. I will always be embarassed showing people Linux when I have to open OOo, it makes them think Linux makes things run stupidly slow. Of course it doesn't, Koffice is incredibly responsive... and with OOo's 100 developers, it would get into shape very quickly (I think it has less than 10 people working on it now and is making great strides all the same.)
Maybe somewhere inside OOo there is code which is worth saving, but the whole framework is rotten. If there is no hope for a Firefox-style rebirth, maybe the developer effort should move on to something with a future.
But I think one big headache for Apple if they stay with Intel-only is that many of the people who demand OSX on AMD will just use a hacked version of OSX. These people will be Apple software converts and not give one penny to Apple, because Apple isn't giving them the hardware options they want. This will be an especially visible group if AMD stays as far ahead of Intel as they are now (unlikely, but their engineers are quite good).
I'd love to see the contract Intel and Apple hammered out. I wonder if Intel made certain delivery promises and what would be the remedy if those promises are broken. Super-cheap EE Pentiums for Apple? That might keep people from grumbling too much about the lack of AMD options, but still, it will be a little demoralizing when Apple pirates will gloat on Slashdot about how they can blow away every OSX benchmark on their overclocked AthlonFX and still spend less than they would for an Apple machine.
Seriously, Nintendo-fencing is going to involve some serious skill and dexterity, expecially against online opponents. Bravo!
http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/comm ents/538/
Aah, I see how this works. Microsoft first plants some moles into Trolltech, and soon, it will be a company that anyone with a fat wallet can buy out. Yes, one of the dangers of going public is that you never know who your new owner will turn out to be. Manchester United, probably the most famous sports team in the world, went public and the next thing you know, some Yankee tycoon bought all their stock. Huge protests from the fans did nothing. These are the perils of going public - so seeing this done by a company that codes and maintains such an important componenet of Linux distributions makes me a little nervous.
I have a few old voice modems lying around and I was wondering whether it would be technically feasible to write software that would route the call through the modem so that I plug into it a standard telephone and talk. Maybe it could even make the phone ring? If such a thing wouldn't work, why not? I don't know enough about modems.
I know VOIP companies sell special hardware for using conventional phones, but it seems to me that a modem+software might work as well, and everybody has one already.
Yes, the point about the investment value of dark fiber purchases is a good one. It's a funny picture as well. Everybody is rubbing their chins raw trying to figure out what devious data Google plan to transmit down that dark fiber. I'm sure contingency plans are frantically being worked on by the major ISPs and Google's other competitors. Others start buying dark fiber out of fear of Google, creating scarcity and driving up the price... and Google says: "Psyche!... anyone wanna buy some expensive fiber from us?" That would be hillarious.
If you start sucking and you deliberately compromise the user's interests to make some money or crush some company, do those users have to bend over and take it, or do they have elsewhere to go?
I think in Google's case, it's pretty obvious they have somewhere else to go. Google doesn't have anyone locked in, not with Search, not with Maps, and definitely not with Gmail. If they turned evil, that would definitely compromise their quality of service, and there are many people including MS eagerly lining up to serve Google emigrees who only came to Google in the first place because Google's lack of evil made for a good user experience.
I think it's incredibly immature to equate the size and power, or even the ambition of a company, with evil. I guess there are some people who can't distinguish legitimate moral objections from mere sour grapes and envy. Remember that what makes Microsoft bad is the fact they deliberately screw their users (just because they can) and try to undermine open standards and install their own proprietary ones. This behavior should be condemned whether it's done by a big or a small company (remember Rambus?). And Google, big as they are, are not doing this. They are the sort of company we should cheer - a pro-user company with a bit of power. The alernative is that only the evil companies have the power, and I wouldn't like that.
Yes, there are also people who just don't like the taste of meat (so their vegetarianism has nothing to do with ethics/health concerns), but I imagine this makes up about 5% of vegetarians in industrialized countries.