How big was Final Fantasy VI? 32Mbits = 4 MB if I recall correctly. How big was Mario 64, one of the most impressive 3D worlds at the time? 16MB? A playable game, if designed correctly (and on the right hardware), can be significantly smaller than 50MB.
That being said, remember that a run-of-the mill 16/10/40 CD-Recorder records at up to 140MB/s
Funny, I have access to a 16x cdr and it takes me quite a bit longer than 5 seconds to burn a 700MB cd. Additionally I have had my cd software return a perfect burn report only to find the cd horribly mangled the next time I actually start to pull something off it, so a run-of-the-mill CDR is probably not the way to go. Unless of course you intend to make X copies of each disk for redundancy's sake or fashion some kind of parity check on incoming data and the finished cdr (RAID cd-recording?).
They have red blood now. In The Undiscovered Country, it was green and blue (or something close, I'm colorblind). Plus there's the time taken to get anywhere at a mere 30,000,000 KM/s... Eh, the depth charges were cool.
In response to the concerns over not being able to change your demon/armageddon/Republican "contact" numbers once enough spammers and other jerks get a hold of them, I thought of this solution: Everyone might still have the normal area code+7 digit phone #, same freedom of email addys, etc., however, these would all relay to the afformentioned super contact number. Some degree of anonymity/flexibility is maintained, and you still have the mark of the beas, er, the convienience of only really needing one number to access all that data. Now this doesn't mean that the companies (Hotmail, Buy.com, et al) that you give the relaying uber-# to won't leak it....
Actually I was under the impression that FFX (and presumably FFXI) were being re-written for the PC, no direct porting. Imagine actually being able to TYPE in your character names.....
Now as long as the PC port is on a DVD like the PS2 version, I'll be happy. Disc swapping be damned.
Under Win98SE, tabbing from text box to box to enter my/. password crashes Mozilla 0.9.1. Looks nice though, and yes, I reported the bug. Now what I want to know is....
Who's the bastard at/. that pissed off the Mozilla developers? These crashes don't just happen by themselves. In the words of a great captain:
"When I get back, I want some answers!"
Copyright was created was created with the intent to protect artists' as well as academians' works. The problem now is that the big companies that "represent" these artists are in control of the copyrights, and they are using that ownership to squash anything they see as a threat to their way of life. This includes blurring if not obliterating the concepts of fair use (I can't tell you how many cds I only have back-ups of due to accidents...) and, IMHO limiting competition, in the form of music and file sharing services which CAN introduce people to new, non-mainstream media creators.
Now, does that mean get rid of the copyright laws that are being abused? Ask the NRA a similar question and you'll get the "cold, dead hands" answer. But there is a point there. I, like 4,000,000,000 other people have dreams of one day selling a script to hollywood, getting fabulously wealthy and dying of a drug overdose. However, the only thing that binds a production company to actually PAY me for my work is the copyright I have on it. In your guerilla-distribution scenario, my script would no doubt see the screen without me seeing a dime. It's THAT good.
Reform, not obliteration. Protest, not sabotage. And keep your hands off my copyrighted works!
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm downloading 23 mp3s on gnutella..... Ah, maybe there is no hope.
Does anyone wonder if Yahoo's selling their own porn will affect how they link to other porn-for-pay sites? Just seems to be they wouldn't really have any reason not to....
Ah well, Yahoo sucks for finding free porn I say. May my cable usenet access never die! Precious porn. Precious, precious, precioussssss.......
I wonder what Sony, Creative, et al will think about this once they realize it will pretty much put a nail in the coffin of their Mini-disc players, portable MP3 players, etc.
Heck, several companies make products that do nothing BUT copy cds.
And what about the new Mac ads (with Lil' Kim, hubba hubba) lauding the ability to rip and burn mix cds? So much for that feature...
Just send everyone five dozen 1.44MB diskettes with your new, zippy IM software on it.
Sad that you can make a file available on the web for free, yet no one will download it. Give them a hard copy via junk mail, and they actually give it a shot.
The problem is we WANT to use AOL protocols so that we can talk to our friends/co-workers/selves who are using the offical AOL IM clients. (Assuming some cross-protocol isn't available.)
Random chat would be interesting on a p2p IM network, as it would be a good model of the "6 degrees of separation" theory. See who your friends know, who they know, etc....
Not that I have any expertise in this area at all, but would a p2p IM client, let's say based on AOL's protocols, be beyond legal reach, at least in the same scope of *tella or any other p2p software?
As long as the client doesn't have ads, its an improvement. AOL is already ruining ICQ with the damn things.
From reading the article it seems more like the sterile moths have some kind of infancidal tendancies built-in:
...a biotech version, called the "Terminator" by farmers, that is sterile, but sexually active; it is designed to mate with wild relatives and eliminate their offspring.
I'm not sure how this is supposed to work, as in the insect world most breeding is fire-and-forget, sorry ladies, and the offspring usually just get deposited some random place. I wonder if the sterile moths somehow damage the reproductive organs of their mate? Ewww.
Also, does it seem like they intend to make nothing but sterile males?
Heh, wow. Sorry, I've had Snow Crash on the brain for a few days, I'm sorry about that.
It's been a while since I read it, too, but another good note about the Diamond Age is that the people living in the super-ad-saturated world didn't seem to mind or notice the ads that much. Guess their filters are even better than ours.
There's a problem with the idea a lot of people seem to have: that if there was a sudden technological "rewind", the people that died from not being able to adapt to the new (old?) lifestyle would be the "useless" population, (someone mentioned cleaning up the currant gene pool?) and that technology would be able to zap back into gear in a few years thanks to loads of newly-bored IT workers eager to bring humanity back up to speed.
Take your average IT worker, nay, take your average American and your average uneducated, never-seen-an-electronic-device third-worlder, make all technology involving IC chips (and magnetic media, and optical, and etc.) unavailable to them. Who will survive past the first month?
Now maybe you enjoyed Cast Away, but that doesn't mean it was all that realistic. The average person accustomed to the magic, I mean come on, the IC is a pretty amazing thing, of the Information Age (TM) doesn't know SQUAT about wilderness survival.
And that's what the world would be. A wilderness. No lights, no heat, no cars, no credit cards, no cash registers, no police dispatches, no fire trucks, no 911. We had a 7-day blackout in my town (Syracuse, NY) a few years back, and there were some notable lootings, including a gun store. Stores emptyed or were sometimes looted if they didn't stay open. There was still food, there were still functional automobiles, etc, and people still seemed to think that it was a good idea to prepare for the end of the world. A complete electronic wipe, especially on a worldwide scale, would no doubt have disasterous social consequences.
Remember Arthur Dent in Mostly Harmless? He figured he was from a pretty high-tech place (the Earth, R.I.P.), so he assumed he could get a job doing something. Through when it came down to it, all he really knew how to create were sandwiches. Sure you can write a friggin amazing graphics engine, Mr. Carmack, but can you catch rabbits using a snare?
So if there was an infocalypse, the population that would probably die off first would be the people that wouldn't have any applicable skills in that new environment. The annoying red-neck who cuts you off with a deer strapped to his hood might do just fine.
Sorry if the above is confusing, I'm a lousy self-proof-reader.
Of course, it won't be long before every appliance has built in advertising. You'll have a flat LCD screen attached to your fridge that runs ads 24/7...ugh.
It could possibly, and very likely go beyond that. As I'm sure many (if not all) of you have read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which describes not only the above scenario, but also, due to the fabulous science of nanotechnology, multimedia ads on food packaging, chopsticks, and yes, toilet paper.
So perhaps one day we will see reports of the Nanotechnology Advertising Bureau trying to get decibel-restrictions taken off gum-wrapper ads.
Wow, I envy that school. At my old high school there were perhaps three Macintosh Performas (~60Mhz I believe) "distributed" throughout the classrooms and a cluster of twenty 286s, I kid you not, for research in the library. The only thing those were good for was MUDding when the librarian wasn't looking.
Later on we got an Imac cluster, but kids weren't allowed to use any of them indivivualy due to lack of available supervision, and teachers couldn't bring a class in unless they took a training course in computer admin.
They were some darn pretty paperweights though.
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How big was Final Fantasy VI? 32Mbits = 4 MB if I recall correctly. How big was Mario 64, one of the most impressive 3D worlds at the time? 16MB? A playable game, if designed correctly (and on the right hardware), can be significantly smaller than 50MB.
That being said, remember that a run-of-the mill 16/10/40 CD-Recorder records at up to 140MB/s
Funny, I have access to a 16x cdr and it takes me quite a bit longer than 5 seconds to burn a 700MB cd. Additionally I have had my cd software return a perfect burn report only to find the cd horribly mangled the next time I actually start to pull something off it, so a run-of-the-mill CDR is probably not the way to go. Unless of course you intend to make X copies of each disk for redundancy's sake or fashion some kind of parity check on incoming data and the finished cdr (RAID cd-recording?).
They have red blood now. In The Undiscovered Country, it was green and blue (or something close, I'm colorblind). Plus there's the time taken to get anywhere at a mere 30,000,000 KM/s...
Eh, the depth charges were cool.
That's it! Just distribute the music in a form that can't be heard! Total copy protection.
Classic Quake + Software Mode + 4.4GHz = How many hundred fps?
In response to the concerns over not being able to change your demon/armageddon/Republican "contact" numbers once enough spammers and other jerks get a hold of them, I thought of this solution:
Everyone might still have the normal area code+7 digit phone #, same freedom of email addys, etc., however, these would all relay to the afformentioned super contact number.
Some degree of anonymity/flexibility is maintained, and you still have the mark of the beas, er, the convienience of only really needing one number to access all that data. Now this doesn't mean that the companies (Hotmail, Buy.com, et al) that you give the relaying uber-# to won't leak it....
Actually I was under the impression that FFX (and presumably FFXI) were being re-written for the PC, no direct porting. Imagine actually being able to TYPE in your character names.....
Now as long as the PC port is on a DVD like the PS2 version, I'll be happy. Disc swapping be damned.
Under Win98SE, tabbing from text box to box to enter my /. password crashes Mozilla 0.9.1. Looks nice though, and yes, I reported the bug. Now what I want to know is....
/. that pissed off the Mozilla developers? These crashes don't just happen by themselves. In the words of a great captain:
Who's the bastard at
"When I get back, I want some answers!"
Copyright was created was created with the intent to protect artists' as well as academians' works. The problem now is that the big companies that "represent" these artists are in control of the copyrights, and they are using that ownership to squash anything they see as a threat to their way of life. This includes blurring if not obliterating the concepts of fair use (I can't tell you how many cds I only have back-ups of due to accidents...) and, IMHO limiting competition, in the form of music and file sharing services which CAN introduce people to new, non-mainstream media creators.
Now, does that mean get rid of the copyright laws that are being abused? Ask the NRA a similar question and you'll get the "cold, dead hands" answer. But there is a point there. I, like 4,000,000,000 other people have dreams of one day selling a script to hollywood, getting fabulously wealthy and dying of a drug overdose. However, the only thing that binds a production company to actually PAY me for my work is the copyright I have on it. In your guerilla-distribution scenario, my script would no doubt see the screen without me seeing a dime. It's THAT good.
Reform, not obliteration. Protest, not sabotage. And keep your hands off my copyrighted works!
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm downloading 23 mp3s on gnutella..... Ah, maybe there is no hope.
Does anyone wonder if Yahoo's selling their own porn will affect how they link to other porn-for-pay sites? Just seems to be they wouldn't really have any reason not to....
Ah well, Yahoo sucks for finding free porn I say. May my cable usenet access never die! Precious porn. Precious, precious, precioussssss.......
Your nosy other half no longer knows your buying porn unless she discovers the stash under the desk at the office.
You keep your porn at work? I think I'd be more worried about your co-workers discovering your stash than your spouse.
I wonder what Sony, Creative, et al will think about this once they realize it will pretty much put a nail in the coffin of their Mini-disc players, portable MP3 players, etc.
Heck, several companies make products that do nothing BUT copy cds.
And what about the new Mac ads (with Lil' Kim, hubba hubba) lauding the ability to rip and burn mix cds? So much for that feature...
Just send everyone five dozen 1.44MB diskettes with your new, zippy IM software on it.
Sad that you can make a file available on the web for free, yet no one will download it. Give them a hard copy via junk mail, and they actually give it a shot.
The problem is we WANT to use AOL protocols so that we can talk to our friends/co-workers/selves who are using the offical AOL IM clients. (Assuming some cross-protocol isn't available.)
Random chat would be interesting on a p2p IM network, as it would be a good model of the "6 degrees of separation" theory. See who your friends know, who they know, etc....
Not that I have any expertise in this area at all, but would a p2p IM client, let's say based on AOL's protocols, be beyond legal reach, at least in the same scope of *tella or any other p2p software?
As long as the client doesn't have ads, its an improvement. AOL is already ruining ICQ with the damn things.
From reading the article it seems more like the sterile moths have some kind of infancidal tendancies built-in:
...a biotech version, called the "Terminator" by farmers, that is sterile, but sexually active; it is designed to mate with wild relatives and eliminate their offspring.
I'm not sure how this is supposed to work, as in the insect world most breeding is fire-and-forget, sorry ladies, and the offspring usually just get deposited some random place. I wonder if the sterile moths somehow damage the reproductive organs of their mate? Ewww.
Also, does it seem like they intend to make nothing but sterile males?
Heh, wow. Sorry, I've had Snow Crash on the brain for a few days, I'm sorry about that. It's been a while since I read it, too, but another good note about the Diamond Age is that the people living in the super-ad-saturated world didn't seem to mind or notice the ads that much. Guess their filters are even better than ours.
There's a problem with the idea a lot of people seem to have: that if there was a sudden technological "rewind", the people that died from not being able to adapt to the new (old?) lifestyle would be the "useless" population, (someone mentioned cleaning up the currant gene pool?) and that technology would be able to zap back into gear in a few years thanks to loads of newly-bored IT workers eager to bring humanity back up to speed.
Take your average IT worker, nay, take your average American and your average uneducated, never-seen-an-electronic-device third-worlder, make all technology involving IC chips (and magnetic media, and optical, and etc.) unavailable to them. Who will survive past the first month?
Now maybe you enjoyed Cast Away, but that doesn't mean it was all that realistic. The average person accustomed to the magic, I mean come on, the IC is a pretty amazing thing, of the Information Age (TM) doesn't know SQUAT about wilderness survival.
And that's what the world would be. A wilderness. No lights, no heat, no cars, no credit cards, no cash registers, no police dispatches, no fire trucks, no 911. We had a 7-day blackout in my town (Syracuse, NY) a few years back, and there were some notable lootings, including a gun store. Stores emptyed or were sometimes looted if they didn't stay open. There was still food, there were still functional automobiles, etc, and people still seemed to think that it was a good idea to prepare for the end of the world. A complete electronic wipe, especially on a worldwide scale, would no doubt have disasterous social consequences.
Remember Arthur Dent in Mostly Harmless? He figured he was from a pretty high-tech place (the Earth, R.I.P.), so he assumed he could get a job doing something. Through when it came down to it, all he really knew how to create were sandwiches. Sure you can write a friggin amazing graphics engine, Mr. Carmack, but can you catch rabbits using a snare?
So if there was an infocalypse, the population that would probably die off first would be the people that wouldn't have any applicable skills in that new environment. The annoying red-neck who cuts you off with a deer strapped to his hood might do just fine.
Sorry if the above is confusing, I'm a lousy self-proof-reader.
Of course, it won't be long before every appliance has built in advertising. You'll have a flat LCD screen attached to your fridge that runs ads 24/7...ugh.
It could possibly, and very likely go beyond that. As I'm sure many (if not all) of you have read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which describes not only the above scenario, but also, due to the fabulous science of nanotechnology, multimedia ads on food packaging, chopsticks, and yes, toilet paper.
So perhaps one day we will see reports of the Nanotechnology Advertising Bureau trying to get decibel-restrictions taken off gum-wrapper ads.
Who says technology is a good thing?
Wow, I envy that school. At my old high school there were perhaps three Macintosh Performas (~60Mhz I believe) "distributed" throughout the classrooms and a cluster of twenty 286s, I kid you not, for research in the library. The only thing those were good for was MUDding when the librarian wasn't looking. Later on we got an Imac cluster, but kids weren't allowed to use any of them indivivualy due to lack of available supervision, and teachers couldn't bring a class in unless they took a training course in computer admin. They were some darn pretty paperweights though.