Do you have any idea how many shots you'd need to take to recoup costs? Dont forget all the 300 GB hard drives you're going to need to store onto. And those will last 10 years. Of course by then, we'll have 5 TB storage capacities.
On the other hand, medium print negatives are good for what? couple hundred years if stored in a decent binder?
This guys wrong. Image stabilization, camcorder crap, thats here already. Anyone can predict yesterday.
How about better form factors? Casio S500 is 0.65 inches thikc. Thats tiny, tiny in the way that counts, fits great in your pocket, no bulge. Dad's got a really tiny minolta, but its still too thick to be really comfortable in pocket. Sony's got a nice touchscreen (with a hideous ugly bevel around it). Drop in a massively telescoping lense, a bigger higher sensitivity lower noise CCD... oh fantastic. Reduce shutter lag to nothing, add in better shot bracketing and rapid firing. Others?
The other big advancement would be when someone thermally insulates the CCD and adds in a thermocoupler. Cool down that CCD and drop the noise, yesh, yesh! That'd be damned good sensitivity. Figuring out how to work the power consumption would be tough.
On the other hand, the escallating megapixel war does partially negate the need for better optical zoom. I figure a 18 megapixel sensor is to my old 2 megapixel Olympus C-720 as a 15x optical would be to a 3x optical; the same dpi, same resolution.
How about better form factors? Casio S500 is 0.65 inches thikc. Thats tiny, tiny in the way that counts, fits great in your pocket, no bulge. Dad's got a really tiny minolta, but its still too thick to be really comfortable in pocket. Sony's got a nice touchscreen (with a hideous ugly bevel around it). Drop in a massively telescoping lense, a bigger higher sensitivity lower noise CCD... oh fantastic. Reduce shutter lag to nothing, add in better shot bracketing and rapid firing. Others?
The other big advancement would be when someone thermally insulates the CCD and adds in a thermocoupler. Cool down that CCD and drop the noise, yesh, yesh! That'd be damned good sensitivity. Figuring out how to work the power consumption would be tough.
On the other hand, the escallating megapixel war does partially negate the need for better optical zoom. I figure a 18 megapixel sensor is to my old 2 megapixel Olympus C-720 as a 15x optical would be to a 3x optical; the same dpi, same resolution.
Um, that was really the point I was trying to make. If you need to buy proprietary custom crafted gizmo's, you've lost. If you want a bose sound dock, get a $50 VFD display unit, $50 a USB griffin air remote, a pair of USB speakers ($100) and a USB hub ($10).
Its a knob and a button. Supplemented with a basic knowledge of morse code, thats a complete one handed interface.
I've gotetn all mine for $35. Thats still only half way to the $25 it shold cost, but it is exceedingly well made, and I'm not entirely unhappy to pay th price.
Or instead of nephariously trying to create a tiered controller internet, they might be trying to have some muscle to back against the current internet-pipe-giants who keep spinning their mouths off about doing just such. That might fit with Google's recent press & hubub about telling the we-want-to-rape-your-netizen-rights companies to shove off, ya think?
Perhaps google might use all this dark fiber its been buying (because its almost literally too cheap not to after all the crap we put in) to create indeed a private internet, but a private internet immune to the bullshit of the dumb-ass know-nothing dirt-eating baby-killing devil-worshipping feces-tossing telco's. If anyone, google as a company understands the value of the network as a dumb pipe. If anyone, Page&Brin have the wherewithal to go crusading for that. Its not a bad place in the history books. "I formed a massive fucking company" v. "I singlehandedly protected an entirely new form of of democratic adhocracy and free exchange from being anally raped by big buisness!"
Look, I loved beating down on Google when Google Chat wasnt federating. Nice big technical slipup. But the google bashing has gone a little far. They got the bad press for BushCo's wiretapping, when they were one of the two to deny the information. They're getting this bad press for the China incident, but its the chinese. You cant tell them no, we're not going to censor information. They're a totalitarian state, I dont care how much fiber google owns, they shoot people for that over there.
Give em a chance, Google is still immensely young. Think before you criticize.
Not only do they make royalty for your car's head unit w/ iPod integration, they insure that one in every three will most certainly get an iPod if they dont already have one.
Its just an enormous network externality.
But really, if we're talking about network externalities... why not just add the network? There seems to have been a certain je ne sais pas ce qui when we introduced intercommunication to the pc. Would I be a total heretic to suggest we try exposing network interfaces to our mp3 players? Ian Murdock (debian creator) was lamenting the lack of good remoting interfaces. Well, he was wrong. The problem is just that no one's implemented it.
I actually blame Intel and the Set-Top-Box people for not pushing Universal Plug and Play. It should've been pushed into more embedded devices, just the control specs for it, skip the whole streaming media over IP till basic networked devices get off the ground. Instead we're back where we were 20 years ago, fucking Apple(iPod)Talk 2.0, only this ones' even stupider than the last. That and serial interfaces, la-di-friggin-da. How many USBSerial adapters do I need to run my home theater? Gimme a break.
Or just start on the right foot and buy a mp3 player from the company that made the first hard drive mp3 player, the company that has patents on the integrated FM tuner, the company that's got integrated USB and SDIO expandability, the company built around open source, Neuros! Do what you will with it! Use standard devices with it, again, not that you need to given the builtin FM tuner.
The 442v2 is going to be so god damned fscking sweet. I cannot wait. I nearly bought a GP2x; whoops! That would've been a mistake. The neuros is going to rock steady.
Griffin is actually the reason I've gone from mildly ignoring the iPod to active revulsion over the accursed device. I can accept the inexplicable bumper crop of white colored single-purpose peripherials, the profusion of morons thinking iPod was is and will be the first and only hard drive mp3 player, but watching what was formerly one of the greatest human computer interface companies in the world reduce their entire r&d to these white shiny peripherials... well... enough is enough. You've got your false god Jobs, thats fine, I respect your beliefs even if I disagree with them, but please leave your pagan devil worshipping their, stop oppressing my own religion; stop trying to convert our Saints to your blasphemy.
Look, just give us back Griffin and I'll suceed that iPod is the master device. Anything, just give em back!
One word; PowerMate. Big. Shiny. Knob. Best. Interface. Evar.
I only got hassled by the cops once. And I blame it solely on the fact that my cantenna fell apart. I was sitting in an empty drive way across the street, but the neighbors thought itw as overly suspicious.
It'd been like a week since I'd bothered connecting up; it usually is when you've got only a moderately good wifi card with no real antenna. I was probably there way way too long.
With a good cantenna (Whooo Pepperidge Farm canisters!!) I could've been where I normally am; sitting in my car or at a park, far far away.
OTOH, Cingular does offer an unlimited data rate plan for a grand $20/mo. Sure there's no teathering allowed by policy, but there is a nearly dejure unenforcement. As it should be! Its like the Europeans; the laws are only there to pester those who offend, not to crack over the skulls of basically benign citizens. I know quite a few people who are on Cingular for this reason alone. Thats why I got Cingular, and I know quite a few techies and non-techies alike in the same boat.
i wish i could remember, but warcraft and warcraft 2 were either the bee's knee's for mode switching or they were some undiscovered layer that Mr. Dante missed.
There's a couple games out there that you can just keep smashing alt-enter on and the game barely hickups; its simply stunning. Resolution change and everything. Most games take ages to switch.
Look, even if we're not teaching our kids chemistry, games could do a lot more to broaden our perspectives. Sometimes a good RPG plot will do that, but I really think the future is in simulation.
SimCity is wonderful, a great example, but its constrained by basically modelling existing systems; city dynamics. There was a middle school project we entered where we built scale model city in conjunction with a simcity city, some competition (our team never really got in gear, I dont think we even submitted), which kind of played off this effect; its a tool for bringing kids closer to reality while also creating a sense of play in the world. Although the SimXYZ genre really emphasized its groundings in the real world, some sort of psuedo-applicable nature, I think the real value is in the sense of play.
I think an Imaginary Foundation class open world system would really be one of the best gifts we could grant. Create some kind of open world filled with dynamic potentials. Games are all so finite, scoped to such limited domains for silly reasons like "play balance". I think if the goal were more to create a world than to make a viable game, given a little nudge, the players could do an amazing job of crafting their own games. Rather than playing a game, the player is in a slightly more exestential state of play, interacting with and shaping a reality around them.
The thing I still picture the most is what Halo was originally going to be. You've crashlanded on an alien planet. Now go, bring the war to these vicious alien skum, go kick ass lone deranger.
It might not people think about brainy things like chemistry, but creating a more authentic virtual world where players can really enguage... that's exciting. Players will do a far better job of creating purpose than some storyline, if you give them the world to do so.
From a DeLanda perspective, the anti-market forces have basically made it their god given mission to stop hobbyists. There is no probe head exploring what hobbyist friendly electronics would or could do anymore. The big companies have rightfully realized that they would be safest in a world where hobbyists cant come up and invent drastically disruptive & innovative toys on demand; that threatens the companies. Hence why they are called anti-market, because they actively exercise power to prevent hobbyists from participating in the market, in the free exchange. Even if it ends up being a selling point, its awful odds on ROI; how much effort is required to let a dozen guys hack some extra software.
You talk of encoding. Many of the world's best encoding solutions were not created by Macromedia, not by Apple, not by MS, not by the MPEG people, but by a bunch of hackers. How many of these companies still charge for the encoder? In those cases, hobbyists _cant_ make content. And they certainly cant do stuff like encode multiple audio streams with video; the formats werent built for it.
I know percisely eight people with PSP's. Six of em went out and bought themselves a handful of games this past weekend. Because they know the 2.60 firmware will be toast, becasue they know they'll be able to play SNES on their PSP's again. They'd rather have a couple old games and a hackable SNES playing PSP than something running new games that they cant hack. Every game console is like this. PS2 linux, Dreamcast Linux, gamecube linux, DS linux.... just look at itplaysdoom.com... clearly people want to spend effort doing hacking.
These hobbyists, the true technical pursuit hobbyists, they're miles ahead of the curve. No company is going to give a shit about ten guys that just want to make the crappy low budget poorly designed consumer gear they buy work better, no company is going to go out of their way to make docs and toolchains for a dozen hobbyists. The interesting hobbyists are perpetually so far ahead of the market there's no way they can be tailored to, thought of in something built in a world of margins.
Look, as far as I know, there is exactly one company making hobbyist grade consumer electronics; Neuros. They're the only ones! [and the Neuros 442v2 is looking awsome btw] Compare that against Hack-a-Day. Clearly there are interested hackers, clearly our society will sieze whatever potential its thrown; yet something is wrong with this picture if none of the corps are tailoring to this. It really looks like our society WANTS to sit and stagnate and rot. Or maybe there's something wrong with the current market and antimarket system we've got....
I was ranting about this a couple weeks ago for the guy who wanted to stream all sound off his windows computer. There used to be a fake sound card drive which would pipe to esound, but it was for WinNT4, back when DDK was free, or at least included with Visual Studios.
1997 is calling. they want their news back assholes. and i want my fucking mod points you didnt give me the first time around for this story.
FPS has largely devolved into a frag fest game of reflexes, but I find that there's a real art which has gone missing. This misses the point.
Games are all about play. Zero sum shoot or be shot is fun and all, but its an exclusive club. Its zero sum, you kill or you loose. Not everyone can escallate in such a harsh environment.
I really want to see ET:Quake Wars. Involved multiplayer is where its at. I'm hoping its like U2XMP, it was a little bit slower, all the weapons had really good purpose and you didnt have to be a frag god to do really well.
On the other hand, rocket arena always was a damned good time.
You're right and you're wrong. I myself started with T-cards and 36gig cheetahs. It was amazing after a life of cheap low performant IDE (college student at the time). But shit kept breaking, the hacks kept getting worse and worse, the duct tape bill started getting too big and I just got tired of it. Drives would go offline and there was no hotswap support... kiss your uptime goodbye.
So I exactly that, went on ebay and bought a pair of photons. Only 5100's, but 28 drives was pretty nice.
I was pretty undewhelmed. They were a steal when I got them (well, a "good" price when you factor shipping), but the performance was never there even with really good 10k6 cheetah's. RAID never helped, no matter how it was configured. It just didnt seem that useful.
Plus the A5200's weigh 125lbs and hauling them between dorm rooms proved less than fun.
And even locked my basement closet I could hear the roar of two A5100's. I'd been "meaning" to get rid of them for a while, but now that I'm changing states... it was finally time. I sold em on craigslist for $280 for both. Same I bought em for, and taht includes shipping.
I dunno, If I were anyone with a brain, I'd wait another year for SAS go to ape-shit on everyone. The enclosure-hostcontroller system is a smart breakdown that'll really help beat away the single-vendor-solution... the reason everyone can charge so much for hw now is that everything is one unit, the enclosures, the controller, its a big package with a nice margin. when XYZ company can come along and sell you a 24 drive enclosure for pennies that you can plug in to a retail SAS controller... its a game changer. Just watch the rediculous margins drop.
If you need something now, just get SATA raid. Intel's new IO processor is amazing, it'll give you really nice performance. But otherwise, I'd say wait for SAS. I suppose its still more expensive than a pair of A5100's, but I'd wager the performance will be better.
As a side note, I sometimes wonder whether the fibre cabling i bought was bad. I really couldnt sustain more than 40 MB/s even doing XFS linear copies, even with 14 drives dedicated to the task. I'm not sure if bad cabling would've given me some kind of overt error, or might have just quietly degraded my performance.
as somone going on a long road trip soon, i am highly disappointed. I have 25 amp X10 gear. I can turn my @#$@#$ oven on and off, Some good tahts gonna do me in Peoria.
patents are only useful if they can be leveraged without the use of someone elses patent. in this case, scansoft owns the entire book of speech patents... IBM already even sold them their last couple chapters.
so even if someone does build the complete natural-linguistic speech recognition, it'd be worthless since scansoft (they've chagned names a # of times now) owns a couple of the stages in the stack. you can try to sell it to them or try to buy the rights, but you're just some schmoe with cool technology and they're the guys enjoying selling multi-thousand dollar software packages to enterprises with no alternative....
scansoft, as true capitalists, needs only do everything it can to keep anyone else from innovating. all so they can keep selling rediculously overpriced software to big buisness.
innovation is un-capitalistic; why invest resources and cause disruption when you're making more money selling stuff you can make for free?
the company keeps changing, but what was once scansoft (dragon dictate) had a bunch of really big patents. its my understanding taht they did what any true capitalist should do once they gain complete monolopy over something; they sat on it and milked the big fat tit they'd engineered themselves. and thats what they're doing today. just think of the god damned margins on something like that...
and tahts why speech recognition 2006 is the exact same as speech recognition 1997.
For starters, it tends to take people a certain amount of time to get to sleep, which changes depending on time of day and overall sleep debt that has been built up. This wastes precious minutes. the whole point of polyphasic sleep is to get to a point where your body can instantly go to sleep. the first week is the problem because you arent trained for that yet, it takes forever to go to sleep after you slept four hours ago. the trick with polyphasic sleep, the way to learn how to do it is, you only put your head down on the pillow for the alloted time. sleep or no. by the end of day three a 15 minute nap is instant and divine. there is no "wasted minutes", only ever growing debt and madness which payoff latter by sending you instantly to sleep.
As well as this, there have been quite a few studies that have examined what happens to people who try polyphasic sleep. The results tend to involve an ever-increasing sleep debt. You could try looking for the '90 minute day' - most participants who come out of those experiments will afterwards sleep for quite a while. That's pretty strong evidence that they've built up quite a bit of sleep debt. like most things in nature, growth is bounded. if you dont sleep for four days straight, you dont need 24 hours of consecutive sleep. polyphasic sleep simply finds that upper bound of sleep debt very quickly and forces your body to adjust to recieving and maximizing the short duration payments it recieves. That restlessness before sleep you spoke of, the inability to get to sleep... the point of polyphasic is to overcome that.
REM sleep is not the only goal of sleep indeed, some people naturally have no REM at all. on the other hand, it does signify a very deep state of slumber. if you can get to rem directly, you're skipping many of "entering sleep" stages most people go through.
"If you are stupid enough to try polyphasic sleep, you might want to make sure that during your wake periods, you're exposed to quite strong light and during your sleep periods, you don't get any." As for light cycles, most people sleep through some part of daylight. 15 minute and one hour naps throughout the day is not seriously going to injure your daylight exposure. Sitting in cublices all day will. ---
In summation; You list a number of barriers to starting polyphasic sleep; trying to get to sleep in the middle of the day, trying to sleep during the light, &c &c. Its true taht these all can be barriers to entry but the point of the exercise is to overcome these barriers, to adjust your system, maximize sleep value and reap enormous temporal rewards. the question is "can we go to the moon?" and you start talking about how gravity's keeping us down... well great, the question wasnt "is it easy", the question is, is it possible.
Polyphasic sleep isn't an effective long-term way to decrease your overall sleep time. Yes and no. Polyphasic sleep is an exceedingly effective way to get the magic 26 hour day. Yes, it really is. It works great, you feel fine (after you get adjusted & break through the problems establishing the cycle) and you're sleeping one third the time.
What makes your statement right is the terms "long-term": Actually living a polyphasic sleep cycle, once you've started it, is extremely difficult. The cycle continues itself fine, without problems, but it is extremely inflexible to the callings of real normal life. It is an unstable equilibrium, waiting for the first moment of deviation to go spiralling out of control. Accidentally oversleeping can have devestating effects, missing a regular rest interval will crush you. When its working, it works fine, there are really no self evident mental defects, no externally discernable oddities (besides the disappearing every four hours)... but keeping it up is exceedingly hard to manage in a relatively busy world. Thats the biggest problem with polyphasic sleep, with normal sleep you can skip nights here&there,
There are some really good crypto-voting schemes, but the one thing I just dont see is how you can stop what is fundamentally a proprietary system from confirming each individual vote fine while tabulating the votes incorrectly.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. There used to be some really nice 1600 ISO and B&W 3200 ISO films out there. And you could always underexpose and just adjust the development.
No dice with the digital's.
Your 38MP back costs $50,000.
Do you have any idea how many shots you'd need to take to recoup costs? Dont forget all the 300 GB hard drives you're going to need to store onto. And those will last 10 years. Of course by then, we'll have 5 TB storage capacities.
On the other hand, medium print negatives are good for what? couple hundred years if stored in a decent binder?
Myren
My old Olympus C720 was 2.1 mp's. It also had a 10x optical zoom. An 8mp with a 3x optical zoom can get the same resolution with croppping.
Also, if you want to print anything out, you really do need at least 4mp's. 6+ is recommended for 8x11.
Just saying, there are really good reasons for having high MP's.
This guys wrong. Image stabilization, camcorder crap, thats here already. Anyone can predict yesterday.
How about better form factors? Casio S500 is 0.65 inches thikc. Thats tiny, tiny in the way that counts, fits great in your pocket, no bulge. Dad's got a really tiny minolta, but its still too thick to be really comfortable in pocket. Sony's got a nice touchscreen (with a hideous ugly bevel around it). Drop in a massively telescoping lense, a bigger higher sensitivity lower noise CCD... oh fantastic. Reduce shutter lag to nothing, add in better shot bracketing and rapid firing. Others?
The other big advancement would be when someone thermally insulates the CCD and adds in a thermocoupler. Cool down that CCD and drop the noise, yesh, yesh! That'd be damned good sensitivity. Figuring out how to work the power consumption would be tough.
On the other hand, the escallating megapixel war does partially negate the need for better optical zoom. I figure a 18 megapixel sensor is to my old 2 megapixel Olympus C-720 as a 15x optical would be to a 3x optical; the same dpi, same resolution.
How about better form factors? Casio S500 is 0.65 inches thikc. Thats tiny, tiny in the way that counts, fits great in your pocket, no bulge. Dad's got a really tiny minolta, but its still too thick to be really comfortable in pocket. Sony's got a nice touchscreen (with a hideous ugly bevel around it). Drop in a massively telescoping lense, a bigger higher sensitivity lower noise CCD... oh fantastic. Reduce shutter lag to nothing, add in better shot bracketing and rapid firing. Others?
The other big advancement would be when someone thermally insulates the CCD and adds in a thermocoupler. Cool down that CCD and drop the noise, yesh, yesh! That'd be damned good sensitivity. Figuring out how to work the power consumption would be tough.
On the other hand, the escallating megapixel war does partially negate the need for better optical zoom. I figure a 18 megapixel sensor is to my old 2 megapixel Olympus C-720 as a 15x optical would be to a 3x optical; the same dpi, same resolution.
Um, that was really the point I was trying to make. If you need to buy proprietary custom crafted gizmo's, you've lost. If you want a bose sound dock, get a $50 VFD display unit, $50 a USB griffin air remote, a pair of USB speakers ($100) and a USB hub ($10).
Its a knob and a button. Supplemented with a basic knowledge of morse code, thats a complete one handed interface.
I've gotetn all mine for $35. Thats still only half way to the $25 it shold cost, but it is exceedingly well made, and I'm not entirely unhappy to pay th price.
Or instead of nephariously trying to create a tiered controller internet, they might be trying to have some muscle to back against the current internet-pipe-giants who keep spinning their mouths off about doing just such. That might fit with Google's recent press & hubub about telling the we-want-to-rape-your-netizen-rights companies to shove off, ya think?
Perhaps google might use all this dark fiber its been buying (because its almost literally too cheap not to after all the crap we put in) to create indeed a private internet, but a private internet immune to the bullshit of the dumb-ass know-nothing dirt-eating baby-killing devil-worshipping feces-tossing telco's. If anyone, google as a company understands the value of the network as a dumb pipe. If anyone, Page&Brin have the wherewithal to go crusading for that. Its not a bad place in the history books. "I formed a massive fucking company" v. "I singlehandedly protected an entirely new form of of democratic adhocracy and free exchange from being anally raped by big buisness!"
Look, I loved beating down on Google when Google Chat wasnt federating. Nice big technical slipup. But the google bashing has gone a little far. They got the bad press for BushCo's wiretapping, when they were one of the two to deny the information. They're getting this bad press for the China incident, but its the chinese. You cant tell them no, we're not going to censor information. They're a totalitarian state, I dont care how much fiber google owns, they shoot people for that over there.
Give em a chance, Google is still immensely young. Think before you criticize.
Myren
Not only do they make royalty for your car's head unit w/ iPod integration, they insure that one in every three will most certainly get an iPod if they dont already have one.
Its just an enormous network externality.
But really, if we're talking about network externalities... why not just add the network? There seems to have been a certain je ne sais pas ce qui when we introduced intercommunication to the pc. Would I be a total heretic to suggest we try exposing network interfaces to our mp3 players?
Ian Murdock (debian creator) was lamenting the lack of good remoting interfaces. Well, he was wrong. The problem is just that no one's implemented it.
I actually blame Intel and the Set-Top-Box people for not pushing Universal Plug and Play. It should've been pushed into more embedded devices, just the control specs for it, skip the whole streaming media over IP till basic networked devices get off the ground. Instead we're back where we were 20 years ago, fucking Apple(iPod)Talk 2.0, only this ones' even stupider than the last. That and serial interfaces, la-di-friggin-da. How many USBSerial adapters do I need to run my home theater? Gimme a break.
Myren
Myren
Or just start on the right foot and buy a mp3 player from the company that made the first hard drive mp3 player, the company that has patents on the integrated FM tuner, the company that's got integrated USB and SDIO expandability, the company built around open source, Neuros! Do what you will with it! Use standard devices with it, again, not that you need to given the builtin FM tuner.
The 442v2 is going to be so god damned fscking sweet. I cannot wait. I nearly bought a GP2x; whoops! That would've been a mistake. The neuros is going to rock steady.
Myren
Griffin is actually the reason I've gone from mildly ignoring the iPod to active revulsion over the accursed device. I can accept the inexplicable bumper crop of white colored single-purpose peripherials, the profusion of morons thinking iPod was is and will be the first and only hard drive mp3 player, but watching what was formerly one of the greatest human computer interface companies in the world reduce their entire r&d to these white shiny peripherials... well... enough is enough. You've got your false god Jobs, thats fine, I respect your beliefs even if I disagree with them, but please leave your pagan devil worshipping their, stop oppressing my own religion; stop trying to convert our Saints to your blasphemy.
Look, just give us back Griffin and I'll suceed that iPod is the master device. Anything, just give em back!
One word; PowerMate.
Big. Shiny. Knob.
Best. Interface. Evar.
Love and kisses,
Myren
Ok, even if Belkin was, say, 99.999999% of all iPod acessories sold, I'm sure their margins would still be greater on the printer cables.
I only got hassled by the cops once. And I blame it solely on the fact that my cantenna fell apart. I was sitting in an empty drive way across the street, but the neighbors thought itw as overly suspicious.
It'd been like a week since I'd bothered connecting up; it usually is when you've got only a moderately good wifi card with no real antenna. I was probably there way way too long.
With a good cantenna (Whooo Pepperidge Farm canisters!!) I could've been where I normally am; sitting in my car or at a park, far far away.
OTOH, Cingular does offer an unlimited data rate plan for a grand $20/mo. Sure there's no teathering allowed by policy, but there is a nearly dejure unenforcement. As it should be! Its like the Europeans; the laws are only there to pester those who offend, not to crack over the skulls of basically benign citizens. I know quite a few people who are on Cingular for this reason alone. Thats why I got Cingular, and I know quite a few techies and non-techies alike in the same boat.
i wish i could remember, but warcraft and warcraft 2 were either the bee's knee's for mode switching or they were some undiscovered layer that Mr. Dante missed.
There's a couple games out there that you can just keep smashing alt-enter on and the game barely hickups; its simply stunning. Resolution change and everything. Most games take ages to switch.
Ah, yes, I remember now, the "worth a frontpage but not worht a mod point" routine.
Look, even if we're not teaching our kids chemistry, games could do a lot more to broaden our perspectives. Sometimes a good RPG plot will do that, but I really think the future is in simulation.
SimCity is wonderful, a great example, but its constrained by basically modelling existing systems; city dynamics. There was a middle school project we entered where we built scale model city in conjunction with a simcity city, some competition (our team never really got in gear, I dont think we even submitted), which kind of played off this effect; its a tool for bringing kids closer to reality while also creating a sense of play in the world. Although the SimXYZ genre really emphasized its groundings in the real world, some sort of psuedo-applicable nature, I think the real value is in the sense of play.
I think an Imaginary Foundation class open world system would really be one of the best gifts we could grant. Create some kind of open world filled with dynamic potentials. Games are all so finite, scoped to such limited domains for silly reasons like "play balance". I think if the goal were more to create a world than to make a viable game, given a little nudge, the players could do an amazing job of crafting their own games. Rather than playing a game, the player is in a slightly more exestential state of play, interacting with and shaping a reality around them.
The thing I still picture the most is what Halo was originally going to be. You've crashlanded on an alien planet. Now go, bring the war to these vicious alien skum, go kick ass lone deranger.
It might not people think about brainy things like chemistry, but creating a more authentic virtual world where players can really enguage... that's exciting. Players will do a far better job of creating purpose than some storyline, if you give them the world to do so.
Myren
I dont know where to start on this one.
From a DeLanda perspective, the anti-market forces have basically made it their god given mission to stop hobbyists. There is no probe head exploring what hobbyist friendly electronics would or could do anymore. The big companies have rightfully realized that they would be safest in a world where hobbyists cant come up and invent drastically disruptive & innovative toys on demand; that threatens the companies. Hence why they are called anti-market, because they actively exercise power to prevent hobbyists from participating in the market, in the free exchange. Even if it ends up being a selling point, its awful odds on ROI; how much effort is required to let a dozen guys hack some extra software.
You talk of encoding. Many of the world's best encoding solutions were not created by Macromedia, not by Apple, not by MS, not by the MPEG people, but by a bunch of hackers. How many of these companies still charge for the encoder? In those cases, hobbyists _cant_ make content. And they certainly cant do stuff like encode multiple audio streams with video; the formats werent built for it.
I know percisely eight people with PSP's. Six of em went out and bought themselves a handful of games this past weekend. Because they know the 2.60 firmware will be toast, becasue they know they'll be able to play SNES on their PSP's again. They'd rather have a couple old games and a hackable SNES playing PSP than something running new games that they cant hack. Every game console is like this. PS2 linux, Dreamcast Linux, gamecube linux, DS linux.... just look at itplaysdoom.com... clearly people want to spend effort doing hacking.
These hobbyists, the true technical pursuit hobbyists, they're miles ahead of the curve. No company is going to give a shit about ten guys that just want to make the crappy low budget poorly designed consumer gear they buy work better, no company is going to go out of their way to make docs and toolchains for a dozen hobbyists. The interesting hobbyists are perpetually so far ahead of the market there's no way they can be tailored to, thought of in something built in a world of margins.
Look, as far as I know, there is exactly one company making hobbyist grade consumer electronics; Neuros. They're the only ones! [and the Neuros 442v2 is looking awsome btw] Compare that against Hack-a-Day. Clearly there are interested hackers, clearly our society will sieze whatever potential its thrown; yet something is wrong with this picture if none of the corps are tailoring to this. It really looks like our society WANTS to sit and stagnate and rot. Or maybe there's something wrong with the current market and antimarket system we've got....
Myren
I was ranting about this a couple weeks ago for the guy who wanted to stream all sound off his windows computer. There used to be a fake sound card drive which would pipe to esound, but it was for WinNT4, back when DDK was free, or at least included with Visual Studios.
1997 is calling. they want their news back assholes. and i want my fucking mod points you didnt give me the first time around for this story.
FPS has largely devolved into a frag fest game of reflexes, but I find that there's a real art which has gone missing. This misses the point.
Games are all about play.
Zero sum shoot or be shot is fun and all, but its an exclusive club. Its zero sum, you kill or you loose. Not everyone can escallate in such a harsh environment.
I really want to see ET:Quake Wars. Involved multiplayer is where its at. I'm hoping its like U2XMP, it was a little bit slower, all the weapons had really good purpose and you didnt have to be a frag god to do really well.
On the other hand, rocket arena always was a damned good time.
You're right and you're wrong. I myself started with T-cards and 36gig cheetahs. It was amazing after a life of cheap low performant IDE (college student at the time). But shit kept breaking, the hacks kept getting worse and worse, the duct tape bill started getting too big and I just got tired of it. Drives would go offline and there was no hotswap support... kiss your uptime goodbye.
So I exactly that, went on ebay and bought a pair of photons. Only 5100's, but 28 drives was pretty nice.
I was pretty undewhelmed. They were a steal when I got them (well, a "good" price when you factor shipping), but the performance was never there even with really good 10k6 cheetah's. RAID never helped, no matter how it was configured. It just didnt seem that useful.
Plus the A5200's weigh 125lbs and hauling them between dorm rooms proved less than fun.
And even locked my basement closet I could hear the roar of two A5100's. I'd been "meaning" to get rid of them for a while, but now that I'm changing states... it was finally time. I sold em on craigslist for $280 for both. Same I bought em for, and taht includes shipping.
I dunno, If I were anyone with a brain, I'd wait another year for SAS go to ape-shit on everyone. The enclosure-hostcontroller system is a smart breakdown that'll really help beat away the single-vendor-solution... the reason everyone can charge so much for hw now is that everything is one unit, the enclosures, the controller, its a big package with a nice margin. when XYZ company can come along and sell you a 24 drive enclosure for pennies that you can plug in to a retail SAS controller... its a game changer. Just watch the rediculous margins drop.
If you need something now, just get SATA raid. Intel's new IO processor is amazing, it'll give you really nice performance. But otherwise, I'd say wait for SAS. I suppose its still more expensive than a pair of A5100's, but I'd wager the performance will be better.
As a side note, I sometimes wonder whether the fibre cabling i bought was bad. I really couldnt sustain more than 40 MB/s even doing XFS linear copies, even with 14 drives dedicated to the task. I'm not sure if bad cabling would've given me some kind of overt error, or might have just quietly degraded my performance.
Myren
as somone going on a long road trip soon, i am highly disappointed.
I have 25 amp X10 gear. I can turn my @#$@#$ oven on and off,
Some good tahts gonna do me in Peoria.
patents are only useful if they can be leveraged without the use of someone elses patent. in this case, scansoft owns the entire book of speech patents... IBM already even sold them their last couple chapters.
so even if someone does build the complete natural-linguistic speech recognition, it'd be worthless since scansoft (they've chagned names a # of times now) owns a couple of the stages in the stack. you can try to sell it to them or try to buy the rights, but you're just some schmoe with cool technology and they're the guys enjoying selling multi-thousand dollar software packages to enterprises with no alternative....
scansoft, as true capitalists, needs only do everything it can to keep anyone else from innovating. all so they can keep selling rediculously overpriced software to big buisness.
innovation is un-capitalistic; why invest resources and cause disruption when you're making more money selling stuff you can make for free?
the company keeps changing, but what was once scansoft (dragon dictate) had a bunch of really big patents. its my understanding taht they did what any true capitalist should do once they gain complete monolopy over something; they sat on it and milked the big fat tit they'd engineered themselves. and thats what they're doing today. just think of the god damned margins on something like that...
and tahts why speech recognition 2006 is the exact same as speech recognition 1997.
FUCK YOU CAPITALISM. FUCK YOU.
For starters, it tends to take people a certain amount of time to get to sleep, which changes depending on time of day and overall sleep debt that has been built up. This wastes precious minutes.
the whole point of polyphasic sleep is to get to a point where your body can instantly go to sleep. the first week is the problem because you arent trained for that yet, it takes forever to go to sleep after you slept four hours ago. the trick with polyphasic sleep, the way to learn how to do it is, you only put your head down on the pillow for the alloted time. sleep or no. by the end of day three a 15 minute nap is instant and divine. there is no "wasted minutes", only ever growing debt and madness which payoff latter by sending you instantly to sleep.
As well as this, there have been quite a few studies that have examined what happens to people who try polyphasic sleep. The results tend to involve an ever-increasing sleep debt. You could try looking for the '90 minute day' - most participants who come out of those experiments will afterwards sleep for quite a while. That's pretty strong evidence that they've built up quite a bit of sleep debt.
like most things in nature, growth is bounded. if you dont sleep for four days straight, you dont need 24 hours of consecutive sleep. polyphasic sleep simply finds that upper bound of sleep debt very quickly and forces your body to adjust to recieving and maximizing the short duration payments it recieves. That restlessness before sleep you spoke of, the inability to get to sleep... the point of polyphasic is to overcome that.
REM sleep is not the only goal of sleep
indeed, some people naturally have no REM at all. on the other hand, it does signify a very deep state of slumber. if you can get to rem directly, you're skipping many of "entering sleep" stages most people go through.
"If you are stupid enough to try polyphasic sleep, you might want to make sure that during your wake periods, you're exposed to quite strong light and during your sleep periods, you don't get any."
As for light cycles, most people sleep through some part of daylight. 15 minute and one hour naps throughout the day is not seriously going to injure your daylight exposure. Sitting in cublices all day will.
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In summation;
You list a number of barriers to starting polyphasic sleep; trying to get to sleep in the middle of the day, trying to sleep during the light, &c &c. Its true taht these all can be barriers to entry but the point of the exercise is to overcome these barriers, to adjust your system, maximize sleep value and reap enormous temporal rewards. the question is "can we go to the moon?" and you start talking about how gravity's keeping us down... well great, the question wasnt "is it easy", the question is, is it possible.
Polyphasic sleep isn't an effective long-term way to decrease your overall sleep time.
Yes and no. Polyphasic sleep is an exceedingly effective way to get the magic 26 hour day. Yes, it really is. It works great, you feel fine (after you get adjusted & break through the problems establishing the cycle) and you're sleeping one third the time.
What makes your statement right is the terms "long-term":
Actually living a polyphasic sleep cycle, once you've started it, is extremely difficult. The cycle continues itself fine, without problems, but it is extremely inflexible to the callings of real normal life. It is an unstable equilibrium, waiting for the first moment of deviation to go spiralling out of control. Accidentally oversleeping can have devestating effects, missing a regular rest interval will crush you. When its working, it works fine, there are really no self evident mental defects, no externally discernable oddities (besides the disappearing every four hours)... but keeping it up is exceedingly hard to manage in a relatively busy world. Thats the biggest problem with polyphasic sleep, with normal sleep you can skip nights here&there,
There are some really good crypto-voting schemes, but the one thing I just dont see is how you can stop what is fundamentally a proprietary system from confirming each individual vote fine while tabulating the votes incorrectly.