There's a bit of a cyclic model at play here: Games will have emotional power once they are taken seriously, and they'll be taken seriously once they have emotional power. Because games aren't widely respected as an art form, lots of people have difficulty engaging with them in a way that would foster an emotional experience. Even if the game is the same story as a movie, the fact that it's a game is a stigma.
I also think few games have managed to capture a feeling beyond toying with our survival instincts. I think that the two sides will slowly slide together, however. Games will improve their emotional content bit by bit, and people who would previously have been turned off by a video game will warm up to them slowly.
It would be interesting to take a look at the social history of movies. They, too, were once shallow and flashy, something no respectable adult would pay to see.
I used to be the QA department coordinator for a small software company that made 3D modeling/rendering software. Every once in a while I'd be asked to take some tech support calls. The same week the final candidate build of a program was going through the ringers, one of the tech support guys left early. I wasn't too happy about having to take the calls, considering how much I had to do. After a couple of fairly painless calls, a SCREAMINGLY ANGRY USER phoned in. After a tirade about how bad the software was, how everyone involved was incompetent, et cetera, he finally told me what was wrong:
Him: I've got this goddamn dialog that keeps coming up saying 'the current frame couldn't be written to disk because the disk is full!' What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Me: Well, off the top of my head, I'd say it means that the current frame couldn't be written to disk because the disk is full.
I didn't think it was possible, but the caller got louder and more angry. Admittedly, I was irritable and my response was snarky. The tech support manager took the call from there, so I never found out what he didn't understand. Maybe he was checking the disk space on a different drive, or maybe he didn't know the difference between B, KB and MB.
Another call (before that one; after that I wasn't asked to take many calls) had me step through a process that involved copying files to and from the Desktop. About a half-dozen steps into it, the guy paused to ask what the desktop was. I think that was a language barrier issue, but I would have thought he'd have stopped me at Step #1 when I first mentioned it.
Perhaps I'm just being nit-picky about hyperbole, but evolution/Natural Selection doesn't produce optimal results; it produces things that just barely satisfy the requirements for survival/reproduction. Evolution doesn't make plans in advance.
It's frustrating to me that these companies chose to buy off a pointless suit like this, rather than see the patent nullified.
Why would they nullify it when it could work against their competitors? I can't imagine that it would cost less to engage in the legal fight to nullify the patent, anyway.
wxPython has long run under OS X. It's a little flaky -- occasional redraw problems with some widgets, and a couple of widgets just don't work. It's frustrating, but I'm still optimistic about future releases.
There's also a library for driving scriptable applications (of which there are a lot, paricularly all of the Apple applications) from Python. I've only looked at it a little, just because I can't get my brain around the almost-English-but-not-quite style of AppleScript.
I did EEG biofeedback for ADD about 14 years ago, back when it was still semi-experimental. After a couple weeks of work, I was able to have some negligable conscious effect on some on-screen graphs. I'm dubious, however, if it really did anything to improve my focus.
Assuming the current process is still the same as when I did it, it boils down to attention being a ratio of beta/theta activity less than one. The goal of the EEG biofeedback was to conscious control over that ratio. I'm not certain, however, that the beta/theta ratio itself is attention; it could be only a symptom of other workings. EEG feedback could be like seeing that trees wiggle when the wind blows and then concluding that wiggling a tree will create the wind.
Ultimately, however, it all depends on the individual's psychology and chemistry -- unlike some other posters, I won't assume my own experiences are going to be exactly what other people will get. Biofeedback may work better in your case. Personally, Adderall works for me.
This looks like a reduced-scale version of 80/20, an industrial product typically used for building custom workbenches, robot chassis and the like. I wonder how the prices compare. The 80/20 web site is here:
http://www.8020.net/
I'll admit up front that I haven't more than skimmed the linked article, but this sort of question comes up fairly often and in more general terms: which is the cause and which is the symptom? Did more tech make the techies less social and more isolated, or did those with antisocial tendencies gravitate toward the more technical jobs? It stikes me as similar to the argument that violent movies and video games make children violent, as opposed to already violent children happening to especially like violent games and movies.
One underappreciated feature of PNG that I really like is the support of 16b grayscale. While video hardware (at least the hardware I have) won't display more than 256 levels of gray, having the extra data is good for displacement mapping and such in 3D.
(Before anyone says that their 24b video card displays more than 256 grays, consider: grayscale is R = G = B. If you have 8 bits per channel and all three channels need to be equal to form grayscale, that's only 256.)
I say sure, refute the nuts, although I think it should be done for other reasons.
It seems that the root of most crackpot theories is confusion borne from misunderstanding and misinterpretation of NASA press releases and publications. Looking at bizarre theories provides insight into points that are unclear to the layperson.
Also, the details that conspiracy theorists point out as evidence of forgery actually have interesting stories behind them. Often, these seem to be the product of "common sense" not applying to how things behave in microgravity or vacuum. These could be worked into engaging educational materials, surprising and entertaining schoolchildren.
To say we "let" it happen implies we really have any say. Our last presidential election was a farce; despite lacking the majority vote, Bush was elected. If the right to select the President can be taken from the American people, the pruning of smaller and less obvious civil liberties is a trivial undertaking.
A friend of a former co-worker wrote a top-notch PDP-11 emulator for the PC. I think he originally did it for the fun; the same guy apparently installed drop-panel flooring in his garage in order to house and operate a collection of mainframes and minicomputers. Anyway, this emulator was really good, even supporting various pieces of ISA hardware by emulating DEC's old, propietary bus. The first computer I hacked around on extensively was a PDP-11/44 back in middle school, so I'd love to have a copy of his emulator. But I digress...
Anyway, some sort of manufacturing company contacted this guy and wanted to buy his emulator. They had a PDP-11 driving some sort of milling machine that was crucial to their operation. This PDP-11 was on its last legs and neither spare parts nor service were available any longer. So, the guy went in and put together a '486 with the needed I/O hardware and his emulator to replace it. The new virtual PDP-11 worked perfectly... if they used dumb terminals to connect to it, it would be completely indisguinguishable from the original, especially by the critical milling machine or whatever was plugged into the other end.
The moral of the story: Old machines are being replaced, but not always in the most obvious way.
In a bizzare accident, two famous scientists attempting to create "new" life died today in their homes. The cause is unknown at this point, but the CDC/FBI/CIA have quaranteed the research lab, their houses, the coworkers, their family and dozens of other people.
In a follow-up bulletin, the coroner has announced that the apparent cause of death was repeated application of torchfire and rustic peasant pitchfork.
Roger Penrose Jr. wrote a book titled The Emperor's New Mind, which argues that sapience is some sort of mystical quantum effect or the like. He's clearly a brilliant guy and did a lot of research, but I found the book verging on wishful thinking.
As for his credentials, I believe Penrose is a mathematician. His father, the better known Roger Penrose, was also a mathematician. The elder Penrose produced a set of wooden blocks that, when shaken, linked into patterned chains -- a little demonstration of order arising from chaos. Living under his materialist father's shadow, it's not surprising that Penrose the Younger rebelled a little.
Amiga or not, this is a GoodThing(tm)
on
PPC Amigas Go On Sale
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Personally, I've never used an Amiga, other than playing with a Video Toaster setup at a NewTek party. I do see this as a very good thing, however, for a number of reasons:
It's another OS with a GUI. Maybe they'll eventually break away from some of the paradigms and other bad habits of existing UI design. I'm not holding my breath, though.
It's another machine using a PowerPC. It's a good processor -- smaller die size and a fraction of the heat of a Pentium or its kin, et cetera -- but is currently way too expensive. More demand could drive down the prices.
More is better. I have my personal doubts about the effectiveness of the "free market," but in this case the competition is clearly beneficial. Neither Apple nor Microsoft would have advanced as far as they have without having each other to compete with/copy from/whatnot. Another player could push everyone even further. Even if this incarnation of the Amiga fails, maybe they'll put forth some good ideas to which the others will have to answer.
I'm a 3D animator by trade, and I worked for a 3D software company for years before that. From what I've seen, there are two big things I'd do:
1) Base the whole design around plug-ins. That way, you can build as you go and replace parts that become outdated. Make every object, light, and renderer a plug-in.
2) Implement a scripting language early on. Go with an existing OO scripting language and extend it to your application. A lot of the application's UI can be implemented in the scripting language. Later versions of 3DSMax use MAXscript for a lot of the UI, and Maya uses MEL all over the place.
It is just about making money. Epson and HP don't make Mac drivers for the sake of fairness; they do it to sell printers to the Mac market. Apple would sell more iPods if they offered PC support, true, but having the iPod be Mac only (at least officially) is a selling point for their computers. The iPod is a nice piece of hardware, but it is more importantly a major marketing tool for Apple.
Frightening possibilities...
on
Modular Robots
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Consider first that the CPU in these machines is of the same family as a Power Macintosh. Then consider the jointed arm that the latest iMac employs to support the screen. I can see a future model of Mac that not only smiles at you when you boot it up, but tries to hug you as well.
I've been checking and re-checking this site since it was up. I'm pretty damned excited about the glove for 3D modeling (just being able to reach around something I'm working on would be great, if only 3D Studio MAX had depth cueing) but particularly for motion capture purposes. I can imagine animating a 3D creature like a sock puppet, doing Kermit the Frog style lip synch and head motion. It'd be a lot easier and more intuitive than using a joystick or MIDI controllers for simple mocap (I've used both), and hell, it'd be fun.
There is a serious problem with data gloves, though: think about how much effort it will be to use one for a long period of time. People (myself included) have all kinds of problems related to using mice for hours on end... imagine if you had to keep your hand held up for similar lengths of time. Test it out now: pick up your hand and hold it in front of you, as if you were waiting to make a toast with a glass of beer. Even after a minute of this, you can tell that this could be really painful if done for prolonged periods.
This year, I was given a cool birthday present: a TINI board from Dallas Semiconductor. It's a 72 pin SIMM-sized computer with serial, ethernet, CANbus, i2c, 1-Wire and a bunch of bit-addressable I/O lines. It comes in 512K and 1024K and runs a little Java VM. It' even comes with a little shell you can telnet to, and cute little httpd and ftpd equivilants. I haven't had as much time to play with it as I'd like, but it's fun. Cost competitive with BASIC stamps and a lot more powerful.
There's also PICbots... basically the same thing as Robocode and the like, except you're programming in real PIC assembly. I thought it was pretty cool, except for the fact that I loathe assembly. Can't say for sure what impact this has had on my manliness, though.
I've got an idea... let's hybridize a postfix language like Forth and natural language processing. We can call the new programming language "Yoda." Here's some sample code:
Variable x to 10 be setting.
1 to x you add.
This times 10 you be repeating.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a bit of a cyclic model at play here: Games will have emotional power once they are taken seriously, and they'll be taken seriously once they have emotional power. Because games aren't widely respected as an art form, lots of people have difficulty engaging with them in a way that would foster an emotional experience. Even if the game is the same story as a movie, the fact that it's a game is a stigma.
I also think few games have managed to capture a feeling beyond toying with our survival instincts. I think that the two sides will slowly slide together, however. Games will improve their emotional content bit by bit, and people who would previously have been turned off by a video game will warm up to them slowly.
It would be interesting to take a look at the social history of movies. They, too, were once shallow and flashy, something no respectable adult would pay to see.
I used to be the QA department coordinator for a small software company that made 3D modeling/rendering software. Every once in a while I'd be asked to take some tech support calls. The same week the final candidate build of a program was going through the ringers, one of the tech support guys left early. I wasn't too happy about having to take the calls, considering how much I had to do. After a couple of fairly painless calls, a SCREAMINGLY ANGRY USER phoned in. After a tirade about how bad the software was, how everyone involved was incompetent, et cetera, he finally told me what was wrong:
Him: I've got this goddamn dialog that keeps coming up saying 'the current frame couldn't be written to disk because the disk is full!' What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Me: Well, off the top of my head, I'd say it means that the current frame couldn't be written to disk because the disk is full.
I didn't think it was possible, but the caller got louder and more angry. Admittedly, I was irritable and my response was snarky. The tech support manager took the call from there, so I never found out what he didn't understand. Maybe he was checking the disk space on a different drive, or maybe he didn't know the difference between B, KB and MB.
Another call (before that one; after that I wasn't asked to take many calls) had me step through a process that involved copying files to and from the Desktop. About a half-dozen steps into it, the guy paused to ask what the desktop was. I think that was a language barrier issue, but I would have thought he'd have stopped me at Step #1 when I first mentioned it.
Perhaps I'm just being nit-picky about hyperbole, but evolution/Natural Selection doesn't produce optimal results; it produces things that just barely satisfy the requirements for survival/reproduction. Evolution doesn't make plans in advance.
Why would they nullify it when it could work against their competitors? I can't imagine that it would cost less to engage in the legal fight to nullify the patent, anyway.
wxPython has long run under OS X. It's a little flaky -- occasional redraw problems with some widgets, and a couple of widgets just don't work. It's frustrating, but I'm still optimistic about future releases.
There's also a library for driving scriptable applications (of which there are a lot, paricularly all of the Apple applications) from Python. I've only looked at it a little, just because I can't get my brain around the almost-English-but-not-quite style of AppleScript.
Assuming the current process is still the same as when I did it, it boils down to attention being a ratio of beta/theta activity less than one. The goal of the EEG biofeedback was to conscious control over that ratio. I'm not certain, however, that the beta/theta ratio itself is attention; it could be only a symptom of other workings. EEG feedback could be like seeing that trees wiggle when the wind blows and then concluding that wiggling a tree will create the wind.
Ultimately, however, it all depends on the individual's psychology and chemistry -- unlike some other posters, I won't assume my own experiences are going to be exactly what other people will get. Biofeedback may work better in your case. Personally, Adderall works for me.
This looks like a reduced-scale version of 80/20, an industrial product typically used for building custom workbenches, robot chassis and the like. I wonder how the prices compare. The 80/20 web site is here: http://www.8020.net/
I'll admit up front that I haven't more than skimmed the linked article, but this sort of question comes up fairly often and in more general terms: which is the cause and which is the symptom? Did more tech make the techies less social and more isolated, or did those with antisocial tendencies gravitate toward the more technical jobs? It stikes me as similar to the argument that violent movies and video games make children violent, as opposed to already violent children happening to especially like violent games and movies.
(Before anyone says that their 24b video card displays more than 256 grays, consider: grayscale is R = G = B. If you have 8 bits per channel and all three channels need to be equal to form grayscale, that's only 256.)
It seems that the root of most crackpot theories is confusion borne from misunderstanding and misinterpretation of NASA press releases and publications. Looking at bizarre theories provides insight into points that are unclear to the layperson.
Also, the details that conspiracy theorists point out as evidence of forgery actually have interesting stories behind them. Often, these seem to be the product of "common sense" not applying to how things behave in microgravity or vacuum. These could be worked into engaging educational materials, surprising and entertaining schoolchildren.
To say we "let" it happen implies we really have any say. Our last presidential election was a farce; despite lacking the majority vote, Bush was elected. If the right to select the President can be taken from the American people, the pruning of smaller and less obvious civil liberties is a trivial undertaking.
Anyway, some sort of manufacturing company contacted this guy and wanted to buy his emulator. They had a PDP-11 driving some sort of milling machine that was crucial to their operation. This PDP-11 was on its last legs and neither spare parts nor service were available any longer. So, the guy went in and put together a '486 with the needed I/O hardware and his emulator to replace it. The new virtual PDP-11 worked perfectly... if they used dumb terminals to connect to it, it would be completely indisguinguishable from the original, especially by the critical milling machine or whatever was plugged into the other end.
The moral of the story: Old machines are being replaced, but not always in the most obvious way.
In a follow-up bulletin, the coroner has announced that the apparent cause of death was repeated application of torchfire and rustic peasant pitchfork.
As for his credentials, I believe Penrose is a mathematician. His father, the better known Roger Penrose, was also a mathematician. The elder Penrose produced a set of wooden blocks that, when shaken, linked into patterned chains -- a little demonstration of order arising from chaos. Living under his materialist father's shadow, it's not surprising that Penrose the Younger rebelled a little.
I'm a 3D animator by trade, and I worked for a 3D software company for years before that. From what I've seen, there are two big things I'd do:
1) Base the whole design around plug-ins. That way, you can build as you go and replace parts that become outdated. Make every object, light, and renderer a plug-in.
2) Implement a scripting language early on. Go with an existing OO scripting language and extend it to your application. A lot of the application's UI can be implemented in the scripting language. Later versions of 3DSMax use MAXscript for a lot of the UI, and Maya uses MEL all over the place.
Spammer -> My Inbox -> Trash
It is just about making money. Epson and HP don't make Mac drivers for the sake of fairness; they do it to sell printers to the Mac market. Apple would sell more iPods if they offered PC support, true, but having the iPod be Mac only (at least officially) is a selling point for their computers. The iPod is a nice piece of hardware, but it is more importantly a major marketing tool for Apple.
Consider first that the CPU in these machines is of the same family as a Power Macintosh. Then consider the jointed arm that the latest iMac employs to support the screen. I can see a future model of Mac that not only smiles at you when you boot it up, but tries to hug you as well.
There is a serious problem with data gloves, though: think about how much effort it will be to use one for a long period of time. People (myself included) have all kinds of problems related to using mice for hours on end... imagine if you had to keep your hand held up for similar lengths of time. Test it out now: pick up your hand and hold it in front of you, as if you were waiting to make a toast with a glass of beer. Even after a minute of this, you can tell that this could be really painful if done for prolonged periods.
You can find it at http://www.ibutton.com/.
There's also PICbots... basically the same thing as Robocode and the like, except you're programming in real PIC assembly. I thought it was pretty cool, except for the fact that I loathe assembly. Can't say for sure what impact this has had on my manliness, though.
I've got an idea... let's hybridize a postfix language like Forth and natural language processing. We can call the new programming language "Yoda." Here's some sample code:
Variable x to 10 be setting.
1 to x you add.
This times 10 you be repeating.
Environmental activism will seem a lot more appealing to both frat boys and high school kids.
Question #4 is easy to answer. Macintosh Common LISP (MCL) is, IMHO, one of the best LISP implementations out there.