Don't be silly. If people have to think beyond empty platitudes like "all lawyers are evil", who the hell knows what will happen. Perhaps they'll start wondering if the phrase "all politicians lie" is a bit of a simplification; and maybe it isn't such a good thing to throw that out to avoid actually thinking about the issues.
In Civ4 going from (0,0) to (1,1) was possible through a diagonal move. In your conversion, this becomes impossible. This can have real importance in the game. A diagonal waterway in Civ4 will appear as non practicable in Civ5.
Going from a 8 neighborhood to a 6 neighborhood bears implications that are interesting but make conversion non ideal in most cases. If what you want is a nice map of Italy that looks about the same in Civ5, this is fine. But in the random map you loved so much in Civ4, some straits will disappear, some part of the sea will become lakes and just don't count on roads to be correctly converted.
Yes, it'll doubtless need some tweaking and it won't be exactly the same. But versus not converting it at all, it would presumably be easier than starting from scratch again.
Sheeze, just because it's not perfect, doesn't mean it's worthless. If you really want to play the old maps, stick to Civ IV.
I can't be bothered with the rest of your post but:
Actually I could imagine some (e.g. vanillin, melting point 80C and a VERY important aroma chemical) could clog the heads.
That is rather interesting. In the non-synthesised world is this carried to the nose as a solid, and then dissolved in mucus? Or is it dissolved in moisture in the air?
I believe it sublimes (slowly) at room temperature.
Couple that with the fact that aroma chemicals are, by necessity, volatile (otherwise you couldn't smell them) and you have a real problem with shelf-life too. If you had an olfactometer with a few hundred chemicals for producing smells, you would be forever having to replace the chemicals because they have evaporated away.
do you hint at material selection or seal problems. Reading through your post, the implication is that volatility isn't a problem that had to be overcome with printers.
I say nothing about printers in the part you quote. Volatility is one of many challenges, material compatibility, dispensing, sealing, chemical stability (one I haven't mentioned yet - some aroma chemicals will oxidize) are other challenges. Just because I didn't feel the need to enumerate all the problems in my first post I seem to have deeply offended you. Odd.
I gave one example of a reason why it's hard. You countered with an example of how that problem has been tackled in another application. I gave some other challenges that exist.
As for different viscosities; you could mix them with additives to reduce volatility and viscosity.
And those additives have to be compatible with the wide range of aroma chemicals and add no aroma of their own. It's not a simple problem.
One of the main problems with ink jets was clogging, because the ink has suspended solids in it, so as it dried it left gunge on the head. You would not have this problem with scents as they will evaporate completely.
Actually I could imagine some (e.g. vanillin, melting point 80C and a VERY important aroma chemical) could clog the heads.
Also they do not need to be fired accurately only a piece of paper, they just need to be allowed to escape.
Not just escape, but escape cleanly leaving absolutely no carry over that will contaminate the next aroma. Not an easy task.
Something like an aerosol can is a good example of how volatility and viscosity wouldn't be much of an issue. You can have extremely volatile and low viscosity chemicals (for example propanone) contained within a canister, under pressure (making the whole thing even harder!), yet it can all be effectively held back with a simple, cheap valve.
And a lot of work goes into ensuring that perfumes for aerosols are compatible with that method of delivery.
The point is not that it's impossible. The point is that it's a very difficult (more difficult than ink jet printing) and multi-faceted problem. [For what it's worth, I don't think ink jet technology would be the way to go either]. That is why there are no successful commercial products out there and why you don't see Sony or other large CE companies working in this space.
And that's not even touching on the difficulty of coming up with a viable business plan for such a device. How much are you willing to pay to be able to smell somebody's BO during a movie?
The solvent in printer ink is volatile, not the ink itself.
Incorrect. Inks are liquids with suspended pigments/dyes in them. Once the solvent (water in most cases) evaporates it leaves the pigment/dye. At that point it is no longer ink. Therefore, it is correct to say that the ink is volatile, but not the pigments within them.
You're splitting hairs.
I can see that you would need to choose the material you manufactured your cartridge out of carefully, but I think something like polyethylene would be suitable.
And you'd be wrong. PE is not universally compatible with all the common aroma chemicals you might use.
However that is not the problem you implied in this quote:
Couple that with the fact that aroma chemicals are, by necessity, volatile (otherwise you couldn't smell them) and you have a real problem with shelf-life too. If you had an olfactometer with a few hundred chemicals for producing smells, you would be forever having to replace the chemicals because they have evaporated away.
It seemed to me strange that you would bring up that problem when it had already been solved by the product you were making a comparison with (a printer).
You are making the erroneous assumption that because this problem is solved fairly successfully in printers, which have odorless (or nearly odorless) solvents (so a slow leak isn't too much of a problem), a very limited set of chemicals (making selecting compatible materials easier) and that all will work with the same dispensing system (because they all have very similar physical properties, such as viscosity). This is not the case with a large palette of aroma chemicals. Some will work very well in an ink jet printer type cartridge. Others won't. Some will be too viscous to dispense through an ink jet nozzle, some will be not viscous enough (i.e. low surface tension) and will leak out an ink jet nozzle making it uncontrollable. Some will be so volatile that they will escape through any tiny gaps in the ink jet cartridge and will smell so intensely that they will contaminate the entire instrument.
I would mention that early ink jets were largely shit. They gave crappy print quality, they leaked and they tended to splodge ink over the paper. It took years of development to reach the point we are at now to have systems that can accurately dispense inks relatively cleanly. And that's with the engineering challenge of only a very limited number of inks and the ability to reformulate the inks as needed (there are lots of ways to make a black ink, there are less ways to make a strawberry aroma). An olfactometer using something similar to ink jet technology would be a large engineering challenge which is why so many companies pop up with the idea that they are going to do something along those lines and then disappear again after a couple of years (see iSmell, Trisenx, etc).
You are missing the point. They are using the SAME aroma (different for different stores) all the time. It's basically a big can of air-freshener. They are not generating arbitrary aromas on-demand or on-the-fly. This would be similar to having them pipe the same song out their speakers all the time because their stereo is only capable of producing Justin Bieder.
As for your nonsense about chemicals, what do you think are the "actual components for smells"? Here's a hint, they are chemicals. Everything you smell is a chemical. In the case of leather I'd even argue you're better of with a reproduced leather smell that the real thing. Do you have any idea of the shit they use for tanning?
The solvent in printer ink is volatile, not the ink itself. However, I didn't say it would be an impossible problem, but it is non-trivial. Especially when you consider that you are dealing with a wide range of chemicals with different material compatibilities, it is unlikely that you could design a single cartridge that could hold all of them. For example, terpenes can be very aggressive on some plastics.
Producing a single smell (like steak) or a small number of smells is easy. Generating a system that would be flexible enough to cover a wide range of the "aroma space" is much more difficult. That aside, your point about lingering is also very true. It's pretty hard to suck the aroma back out of a space and there are problems with contamination as well (example, I was grilling over the weekend and the clothes I wore that day still smell like smoke).
You can't electronically reproduce a smell in a way analogous to a speaker. Olfaction is a chemical sense (along with taste) and requires chemicals to be present in order to be smelt. In other words, any device for producing aromas has to have a reservoir of aroma chemicals already present, in the same way a printer must have a reservoir of ink. Unfortunately, unlike a printer where you can produce a good range of colors from 3 primary colored inks, the same doesn't happen with smell. There is no such thing (as far as anybody has been able to identify) as a primary smell. You can't reproduce the smell of benzaldehyde by mixing other chemicals in any simple straightforward way.
That's not to say you can produce a range of aromas by mixing chemicals, of course you can, it's what perfumers and flavorist do all day; but the palette of chemicals they use for, say, producing steak aromas is both large and quite different than the palette they'd use to produce, say, strawberry aromas. If you wanted a palette that could reasonably cover the entire range of aromas you might smell in everyday life (from steak and strawberries to gasoline and dog shit) it would easily run into several hundred chemicals.
Smell-o-whatever -> several hundred different aroma compounds
That's your problem. There is, as far as anybody's been able to demonstrate, such a thing as a primary odor. You have somewhere in the region of 1000 different odor receptors in your nose but they are mostly non-specific and have overlapping sensitivities that make it next to impossible to reproduce all possible aromas from a small subset of chemicals. Couple that with the fact that aroma chemicals are, by necessity, volatile (otherwise you couldn't smell them) and you have a real problem with shelf-life too. If you had an olfactometer with a few hundred chemicals for producing smells, you would be forever having to replace the chemicals because they have evaporated away.
You are not alone. I will be very surprised if my company moves from XP any time soon. We only upgraded to Office 2003 about 18 months ago, and yes, we are still stuck on IE 6. We're also using Lotus Notes 6.5 (latest version is 8.5 according to Wikipedia).
It just so happens that we're apparently civilised now, and no longer foist our religion upon others. Give the Middle East a few more hundred years and they'll expand, stagnate, and be destroyed like the rest were. Then they can start with a civil civilisation. God knows where the Western world will be then, though.
By then, the western world will be a hot-bed of radical fundamentalist Scientologists hijacking planes and blowing shit up.
Of course, Pirates of the Caribbean was a theme park ride before it became a blockbuster movie. So you'd think if you can take a source with absolutely nothing in terms of story (a theme park ride) and turn it into a successful movie, then you ought to be able to take something like Doom and make something decent.
Maybe the difference is that only a handful of people ever rode the Pirates of the Caribbean ride so for the vast majority of people the film had no baggage. As far as I know there might be avid riders of the PotC ride that complained that the film wasn't faithful to the source material.
I agree with Divine Divinity. I recently purchased it from GOG.com and it's well worth playing. I've been waiting for a good sale on Sacred Gold, but it's been on my to buy list for a long time.
Well, my local power company is now into selling broadband over power lines. They use the same technology to connect my power meter back to the power company so they don't need to send out meter readers and they can monitor outages.
And since you can't get Joe Lieberman's name right, it seems that you know as much about politics as he does about the internet. I mean he was only the Democrat's VP candidate in 2000.
Brilliant! All they need to do is force you to register when you want to view the digital content with your photo of the relevant page and include a unique part to the code in the book (so it can't be registered again by a different person) and they've stamped out resales of printed text books too.
Uh, good point. I love Seth Green's work on Family Guy (as Chris) and Robot Chicken, and even the work in Mass Effect was almost tolerable, but he has made some truly awful movies.
Slashdot Mirror
Answer: we could pay them a lot less.
Congratulations on completely proving my point.
Don't be silly. If people have to think beyond empty platitudes like "all lawyers are evil", who the hell knows what will happen. Perhaps they'll start wondering if the phrase "all politicians lie" is a bit of a simplification; and maybe it isn't such a good thing to throw that out to avoid actually thinking about the issues.
In Civ4 going from (0,0) to (1,1) was possible through a diagonal move. In your conversion, this becomes impossible. This can have real importance in the game. A diagonal waterway in Civ4 will appear as non practicable in Civ5. Going from a 8 neighborhood to a 6 neighborhood bears implications that are interesting but make conversion non ideal in most cases. If what you want is a nice map of Italy that looks about the same in Civ5, this is fine. But in the random map you loved so much in Civ4, some straits will disappear, some part of the sea will become lakes and just don't count on roads to be correctly converted.
Yes, it'll doubtless need some tweaking and it won't be exactly the same. But versus not converting it at all, it would presumably be easier than starting from scratch again.
Sheeze, just because it's not perfect, doesn't mean it's worthless. If you really want to play the old maps, stick to Civ IV.
I can't be bothered with the rest of your post but:
Actually I could imagine some (e.g. vanillin, melting point 80C and a VERY important aroma chemical) could clog the heads.
That is rather interesting. In the non-synthesised world is this carried to the nose as a solid, and then dissolved in mucus? Or is it dissolved in moisture in the air?
I believe it sublimes (slowly) at room temperature.
Couple that with the fact that aroma chemicals are, by necessity, volatile (otherwise you couldn't smell them) and you have a real problem with shelf-life too. If you had an olfactometer with a few hundred chemicals for producing smells, you would be forever having to replace the chemicals because they have evaporated away.
do you hint at material selection or seal problems. Reading through your post, the implication is that volatility isn't a problem that had to be overcome with printers.
I say nothing about printers in the part you quote. Volatility is one of many challenges, material compatibility, dispensing, sealing, chemical stability (one I haven't mentioned yet - some aroma chemicals will oxidize) are other challenges. Just because I didn't feel the need to enumerate all the problems in my first post I seem to have deeply offended you. Odd.
I gave one example of a reason why it's hard. You countered with an example of how that problem has been tackled in another application. I gave some other challenges that exist.
As for different viscosities; you could mix them with additives to reduce volatility and viscosity.
And those additives have to be compatible with the wide range of aroma chemicals and add no aroma of their own. It's not a simple problem.
One of the main problems with ink jets was clogging, because the ink has suspended solids in it, so as it dried it left gunge on the head. You would not have this problem with scents as they will evaporate completely.
Actually I could imagine some (e.g. vanillin, melting point 80C and a VERY important aroma chemical) could clog the heads.
Also they do not need to be fired accurately only a piece of paper, they just need to be allowed to escape.
Not just escape, but escape cleanly leaving absolutely no carry over that will contaminate the next aroma. Not an easy task.
Something like an aerosol can is a good example of how volatility and viscosity wouldn't be much of an issue. You can have extremely volatile and low viscosity chemicals (for example propanone) contained within a canister, under pressure (making the whole thing even harder!), yet it can all be effectively held back with a simple, cheap valve.
And a lot of work goes into ensuring that perfumes for aerosols are compatible with that method of delivery.
The point is not that it's impossible. The point is that it's a very difficult (more difficult than ink jet printing) and multi-faceted problem. [For what it's worth, I don't think ink jet technology would be the way to go either]. That is why there are no successful commercial products out there and why you don't see Sony or other large CE companies working in this space.
And that's not even touching on the difficulty of coming up with a viable business plan for such a device. How much are you willing to pay to be able to smell somebody's BO during a movie?
The solvent in printer ink is volatile, not the ink itself.
Incorrect. Inks are liquids with suspended pigments/dyes in them. Once the solvent (water in most cases) evaporates it leaves the pigment/dye. At that point it is no longer ink. Therefore, it is correct to say that the ink is volatile, but not the pigments within them.
You're splitting hairs.
I can see that you would need to choose the material you manufactured your cartridge out of carefully, but I think something like polyethylene would be suitable.
And you'd be wrong. PE is not universally compatible with all the common aroma chemicals you might use.
However that is not the problem you implied in this quote:
Couple that with the fact that aroma chemicals are, by necessity, volatile (otherwise you couldn't smell them) and you have a real problem with shelf-life too. If you had an olfactometer with a few hundred chemicals for producing smells, you would be forever having to replace the chemicals because they have evaporated away.
It seemed to me strange that you would bring up that problem when it had already been solved by the product you were making a comparison with (a printer).
You are making the erroneous assumption that because this problem is solved fairly successfully in printers, which have odorless (or nearly odorless) solvents (so a slow leak isn't too much of a problem), a very limited set of chemicals (making selecting compatible materials easier) and that all will work with the same dispensing system (because they all have very similar physical properties, such as viscosity). This is not the case with a large palette of aroma chemicals. Some will work very well in an ink jet printer type cartridge. Others won't. Some will be too viscous to dispense through an ink jet nozzle, some will be not viscous enough (i.e. low surface tension) and will leak out an ink jet nozzle making it uncontrollable. Some will be so volatile that they will escape through any tiny gaps in the ink jet cartridge and will smell so intensely that they will contaminate the entire instrument.
I would mention that early ink jets were largely shit. They gave crappy print quality, they leaked and they tended to splodge ink over the paper. It took years of development to reach the point we are at now to have systems that can accurately dispense inks relatively cleanly. And that's with the engineering challenge of only a very limited number of inks and the ability to reformulate the inks as needed (there are lots of ways to make a black ink, there are less ways to make a strawberry aroma). An olfactometer using something similar to ink jet technology would be a large engineering challenge which is why so many companies pop up with the idea that they are going to do something along those lines and then disappear again after a couple of years (see iSmell, Trisenx, etc).
You are missing the point. They are using the SAME aroma (different for different stores) all the time. It's basically a big can of air-freshener. They are not generating arbitrary aromas on-demand or on-the-fly. This would be similar to having them pipe the same song out their speakers all the time because their stereo is only capable of producing Justin Bieder.
As for your nonsense about chemicals, what do you think are the "actual components for smells"? Here's a hint, they are chemicals. Everything you smell is a chemical. In the case of leather I'd even argue you're better of with a reproduced leather smell that the real thing. Do you have any idea of the shit they use for tanning?
Actually Sony have a patent on doing something similar (minus the implants).
The solvent in printer ink is volatile, not the ink itself. However, I didn't say it would be an impossible problem, but it is non-trivial. Especially when you consider that you are dealing with a wide range of chemicals with different material compatibilities, it is unlikely that you could design a single cartridge that could hold all of them. For example, terpenes can be very aggressive on some plastics.
Producing a single smell (like steak) or a small number of smells is easy. Generating a system that would be flexible enough to cover a wide range of the "aroma space" is much more difficult. That aside, your point about lingering is also very true. It's pretty hard to suck the aroma back out of a space and there are problems with contamination as well (example, I was grilling over the weekend and the clothes I wore that day still smell like smoke).
You can't electronically reproduce a smell in a way analogous to a speaker. Olfaction is a chemical sense (along with taste) and requires chemicals to be present in order to be smelt. In other words, any device for producing aromas has to have a reservoir of aroma chemicals already present, in the same way a printer must have a reservoir of ink. Unfortunately, unlike a printer where you can produce a good range of colors from 3 primary colored inks, the same doesn't happen with smell. There is no such thing (as far as anybody has been able to identify) as a primary smell. You can't reproduce the smell of benzaldehyde by mixing other chemicals in any simple straightforward way.
That's not to say you can produce a range of aromas by mixing chemicals, of course you can, it's what perfumers and flavorist do all day; but the palette of chemicals they use for, say, producing steak aromas is both large and quite different than the palette they'd use to produce, say, strawberry aromas. If you wanted a palette that could reasonably cover the entire range of aromas you might smell in everyday life (from steak and strawberries to gasoline and dog shit) it would easily run into several hundred chemicals.
Printer -> 4 colors (3 primaries plus black)
Smell-o-whatever -> several hundred different aroma compounds
That's your problem. There is, as far as anybody's been able to demonstrate, such a thing as a primary odor. You have somewhere in the region of 1000 different odor receptors in your nose but they are mostly non-specific and have overlapping sensitivities that make it next to impossible to reproduce all possible aromas from a small subset of chemicals. Couple that with the fact that aroma chemicals are, by necessity, volatile (otherwise you couldn't smell them) and you have a real problem with shelf-life too. If you had an olfactometer with a few hundred chemicals for producing smells, you would be forever having to replace the chemicals because they have evaporated away.
You are not alone. I will be very surprised if my company moves from XP any time soon. We only upgraded to Office 2003 about 18 months ago, and yes, we are still stuck on IE 6. We're also using Lotus Notes 6.5 (latest version is 8.5 according to Wikipedia).
It just so happens that we're apparently civilised now, and no longer foist our religion upon others. Give the Middle East a few more hundred years and they'll expand, stagnate, and be destroyed like the rest were. Then they can start with a civil civilisation. God knows where the Western world will be then, though.
By then, the western world will be a hot-bed of radical fundamentalist Scientologists hijacking planes and blowing shit up.
Of course, Pirates of the Caribbean was a theme park ride before it became a blockbuster movie. So you'd think if you can take a source with absolutely nothing in terms of story (a theme park ride) and turn it into a successful movie, then you ought to be able to take something like Doom and make something decent.
Maybe the difference is that only a handful of people ever rode the Pirates of the Caribbean ride so for the vast majority of people the film had no baggage. As far as I know there might be avid riders of the PotC ride that complained that the film wasn't faithful to the source material.
Never played DS 2, but I got seriously bored with DS 1 after not very long. It's very linear, very repetitive and very dull. I wouldn't recommend it.
I agree with Divine Divinity. I recently purchased it from GOG.com and it's well worth playing. I've been waiting for a good sale on Sacred Gold, but it's been on my to buy list for a long time.
Well, my local power company is now into selling broadband over power lines. They use the same technology to connect my power meter back to the power company so they don't need to send out meter readers and they can monitor outages.
Wow! That's really original. Or it least it was the first time I heard it, about 15 years ago.
I didn't say he wasn't, stop trying to read more into what I say than what I actually say. You get over it.
And since you can't get Joe Lieberman's name right, it seems that you know as much about politics as he does about the internet. I mean he was only the Democrat's VP candidate in 2000.
Brilliant! All they need to do is force you to register when you want to view the digital content with your photo of the relevant page and include a unique part to the code in the book (so it can't be registered again by a different person) and they've stamped out resales of printed text books too.
It appears that both will easily hit speeds in excess of 4GHz with air cooling.
Nigel Tufnel: These go to eleven.
Uh, good point. I love Seth Green's work on Family Guy (as Chris) and Robot Chicken, and even the work in Mass Effect was almost tolerable, but he has made some truly awful movies.