All this pinging back and forth over gesture-based interfaces vs. keyboards and mice... is wasted on me. I just want a nice wireless subvocal interface between me and my devices. When I use it I can speak aloud and the device won't take action because it knows I am, well, vocal. I guess the only danger of subvocal would be found in meetings at work where I find myself muttering profanities under my breath after the idiotic comments people make;p
As far as the actual subvocal transfer to my device... I am honestly hoping someone can come up with an implant that is fairly small which goes near the vocal chords or attach to a nerve which drives them (a little scary) that could be powered by my body and reliably transmit the information of a distance up to the length of my arm, where it could then interface with something more powerful to transmit over larger distances if needed (but generally not needed).
All of this of course just being a stop-gap solution to when we have true brain/nervous system level interfaces.
Re:Benefits of computers
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 1
On Demand cable TV allows you to watch back episodes of your favorite shows for the current season. If you really want to watch last years reruns though, I guess you'd have to pop in a DVD, so in that regard the internet will win.
As far as news... hello? There's a bunch of news channels that give you up to the minute news 24x7.
TV that can pause... Hi, my TV can pause. It's called a DVR, and most cable boxes these days can do it.
Personally, my house is setup so that I can cook and watch TV at the same time (because my kitchen/den area is an open layout).
And as for the airplane-portable TV...Obviously TVs aren't very portable, but then you're getting away from the real point of my first post about their convenience in the home.
As the 'good' content becomes available only over the Internet, you think we won't still have to endure commercials?
I mean, I agree that it's nice to be able to watch your show 'when you want' over Hulu. But hell, I can do that right now with my On Demand cable. And I don't need a computer to do it.
Also, I don't think you're giving enough credit to 'regularly scheduled' programs. Millions of people watch prime time television because that's when they are home and can do so. That's why it's prime time. So they aren't forced to watch whatever is playing on the channel at any given moment. They know *exactly* what is going to be on the channel before they even turn it on. There's a pretty large difference between the two.
You've got a point here. I was attempting to come to grips with the stupidity of the "Facebook killed TV." statement. I felt that the whoever made the statement was trying to imply a connection which wasn't there (in my opinion) and I responded, separately, to what I perceived was both sides in the connection.
In reality, I feel like it's only a matter of time before television as we know it is primarily delivered over the Internet. There's going to be a period of adjustment where those setups that do what I described, and you might have right now, become more commonplace, but that period is merely a transition and in the grand scheme of things it will be a very short period indeed.
Recently research has shown that "induced pluripotent stem cells", AKA adult stem cells, do not have the same capability to differentiate into all types of tissue found in the body. Nobody is sure why not.
Therefore embryonic stem cells still offer the largest known possibility for finding cures to degenerative diseases and for regrowth of organs and limbs which the body will not reject.
And while there has been no ban, per se, on the research itself, the lack of federal funding has had an adverse impact on the research. Some of the best research this country has ever done was federally funded, and I expect stem cells could fall into that category as well.
Personally, I don't consider it immoral to harvest the stem cells of an embryo that would have never become a human being. If you do, perhaps you should tap on your moral compass a bit and maybe it will reset to true North, because right now, I think it's confused.
Oh my! How clever and powerful, three words that explain the death of TV! BRILLIANT!/sarcasm Well I have three words in return: "You are wrong."
I'll agree with this when I can only get my favorite shows through Facebook, and when if I want to sit down and casually surf the channels I have to do more than press a single button.
Nothing compares to being able to flop onto the couch, press the "On" button on a television remote, and immediately have my regularly scheduled prime time show on the screen.
Show me any computer setup that can have my show on the screen in the time it takes for me to get home tired from work, toss my shoes off, plop on the couch and just press "on" one time to be where I want to be.
Some of you resourceful nerds out there probably have such a setup, but I will offer two things preemptively to respond to that:
1) You are not nearly the norm, most people don't want the hassle of setting something like that up, and, 2) Even if they did, what does this have to do with Facebook again?
Please excuse my french, but seriously, the statement "Facebook killed TV" is just fucking stupid.
"loot" is not just an item in your inventory, or cargo bay, or satchel. It can be anything the player controls which they did not control before an encounter.
Does the endgame of Eve consist of many players getting together to achieve a common goal, with rewards commensurate with those achievements?
Does a large degree of that endgame activity involve the environment of the game and not just other players' ships? (If players in Eve Online only had each other's ships to attack, how successful do you suspect the game would be?)
If the answer to both is yes (...and it is, these were rhetorical questions), then your disagreement with my statement is faulty.
You mean that wise-ass won't have to subject themselves to the artificial devices of game designers who worked under limitations, but that they no longer work under and yet are still designing into the new games, with the new tech, as if they didn't have the new tech at all?
There was no real endgame. A game without serious, multi-tiered, Player vs. Environment raiding, with many very tough encounters which reward players with exceptional loot is going to FAIL. MMOs are about progression and customization, and loot is the best way to provide that, period. Whether it's "Epic PurpZ" in WoW or Skill Enhancers etc in CoH, if the loot a game offers (including crafting) is weak, the game WILL fail. Glorified chat rooms are not going to survive.
This is why TR failed. Crafting was absolutely horrible, and the endgame pve was equally as bad. It's simply not enough that you can dye your armor. That would be like trying to charge a monthly fee for Guild Wars. That, my friend, is a laughable concept.
Despite everything you said, TR was a good game and would've succeeded if it had been released as a finished product instead of an abortion. It did NOT try to ignore all that was known about game design -- that statement of yours is false. The name of the game was a product of the storyline. If you'd paid any attention to the opening cinematic you'd understand that. Any attempt to make it sound like a revolutionary new game design, which 'ignored' all previous knowledge on game design was nothing more than PR spin.
I don't blame Lord British at all really. He had a vision and he was only allowed to see part of it through to completion before the stupid publisher forced the release and doomed the game, as has happened so many times in the past. Was he taking longer than anticipated to finish the game? Yes. But to release it early was an even bigger mistake.
As you may have realized, this is not really a problem Blizzard had with WoW. When WoW was released there was significant endgame PvE content in the form of several 5 player dungeons, a 10 player raid, and two 40 player raids. In other words, enough to hold over hardcore players until Blizzard could publish the next tier of content.
When an MMO is being developed, and subsequently before its release, if the studio is able to show the true depth of the endgame, and show that it is complex and rewarding, then the game will have a chance. If not, it will fail. Example: Age of Conan.
The age of shallow MMOs is over. The bar has been raised, and rightly so.
What is the shortest possible signal that would almost have to be from a sentient being? I mean, speaking from the perspective of information, what would it take? Something like sending a sequence of repeating primes?
Well, whatever it is.. we need to send it now, not tomorrow.
We need the opposite of SETI. Instead of looking for them, we need to send out the strongest signal we ever have. So strong that it will need to originate from the other side of the moon just to protect people on Earth from the source.
I could paste a sticker on my ass that says "bowling pin capable", and though that may be technically true, it would still hurt pretty bad.
Did you install Ubuntu 64?
Did you clean format before your Vista 64 upgrade?
Does Ubuntu run all of the software that Vista runs, once installed properly?
What's the point of having a 64bit address space if most of your applications are 32bit and you probably don't have enough RAM to even hit the 32bit ceiling anyway?
Yesterday I installed Vista (Business x64) on my new laptop (Toshiba A300). The original Vista (Home Premium x86) kind of worked - but I did not manage to remove all the crap software that come with it.
So, let's start off blaming Vista for all of the crap software that 'come with it'. Wait, who is to blame for this, Microsoft? Wow, that's conveniently fitting for his *nix biased worldview (even though none of that is required by Microsoft and is entirely Toshiba's fault).
It sounds to me like the OP didn't even perform a clean format, he just tried to upgrade to x64 on top of a previous install. This is always a bad idea.
Furthermore, did the OP state he/she installed Ubuntu 32 or 64? No. That curious detail was left missing.
I have no doubt that Ubuntu is faster to install. What I do doubt is that out of the box Ubuntu supports nearly as much hardware as Vista. Probably not even close.
My statement in no way condemned curiosity or experimentation. That you think it did is evidence that you are logically challenged.
What I was getting at with the statement about society was that there seems to be a percentage of people who are immune to cognitive dissonance: they hold two conflicting ideas before the light of their mind and for whatever reason cannot understand that when they combine these ideas Bad Things will probably happen.
This leads to them complaining about said Bad Things ex post facto, which is not only annoying for those of us who saw it coming, but it's probably even dangerous in some way(s).
First, Toshiba does not support x64 version of Vista.
Stopped reading after this. People who cause themselves mental anguish, despite knowing that it's coming, and then complain about it later represent all that is wrong with society.
What I find amusing about this whole debacle is the incredible uselessness of the effort that is being spent to stop Glider from existing. I mean, OK... in the short term Blizzard *might* eek out more profit because they stopped Glider from existing, but in the long term, can you really expect them to be able to stop botting?
What is it that detects if someone is botting? Well, so far it has been processes that are running that Warden looks at and says "these are controlling this character, not a human".
But what happens when the bot is smart enough that the inputs themselves (i.e. the usb ports) are fed from the bot? Think of it like this:
You have a "bot box" that just feeds the typical (read: exact) signals that a USB keyboard and mouse feed to the game. This box also reads the video output of the graphics card to determine what is happening on screen. Then some random pseudo-A.I. is thrown in to mimic the playing ability of a 9 year old kid (guess what, tons of em in WoW) and boom, undetectable and unstoppable bot.
So Blizz goes after other approaches, like checking to see if the IP address has been playing any number of different accounts for too many hours in a 24hr period and flags that address.. Then they find out that it's an internet cafe who runs WoW and they just banned the IP of the cafe... oops, guess that won't work, either.
The only thing I can think of that might have the potential to defeat botting is by running a live CAPTCHA test using real people as the testers. They've been doing this already, but it has a natural wall where if they do it too much they start to annoy their legitimate players... I know that if I'm raiding and a Blizz CAPTCHA-Cop comes to ask me if I'm real, and distracts me from my enjoyment, I'm going to think about going to another game.
And seriously, is all of this worth the supposedly bad effects it has on the economy? I'm not crying over botters or gold spammers. My fun in the game is in playing the game, not comparing myself to some guy who has a million gold... especially in a game like WoW where gold is basically useless anyway.
I honestly doubt Blizzard has done an adequate cost vs. benefit analysis on the money they are spending to stop this perceived issue that really nobody could give a fuck about.
Oh and one other thing: gold farming and spamming wouldn't exist if PEOPLE WEREN'T BUYING THE GOLD.
You are all reading way too into what I am saying. My point is only that there are probably some pieces of software which began as open source and the government has since made modifications to them, and that these modifications are classified.
So, it's a one way road for Open Source *in this situation* only.
If that's the case, then please send me all the source code to every Open Source program the "Intelligence Community" uses. I mean, it's truly Open, right?
Or does transmitting at 10 Mbps when everyone else is using 54 Mbps (for their 3 Mbps DSL pipes!) give you a true advantage?"
...Yes, because all people ever do is transfer data to their '3Mbps DSL pipes!'... never between two computers on the same network. I mean, that's just ludicrous./sarcasm
I have a, uhh, friend, who would have to pay around $150/mo just on World of Warcraft under this model.
Yeah, so obviously this is not an all or nothing model, but more of an option.
Some people have the habit of staying logged in, but afk.. I suppose that would come to an end at least.
I know people with over 100 days/played on a single character. Do the math. If they were playing under the $1.25/hr model, they would've paid $3,000 to play WoW....
The human response to an object is based on something. It exists, so it pretty much has to be, right? But *what* is it based on? Where do the "values" come from when we see an object? Are they the result of a conscious decision, based on a series of choices, derived from the ability to think and choose and also based on memories of the past? Or are these values simply "embedded" into us as we experience things, and experienced again in their triggering upon the sight of such objects?
To put it a different way, does the result of this experiment imply that things which we value are determined, or does it imply that we determine the things that we value? Can you say either way?
Yes but I believe you forgot the CDx5 aphysical dipole bacterium, usually called "Bull" for its similarity to same, which is so small that it actually lives *within* molecules. These new scanners are able to detect levels of the excretions of these Bull, and plot them against known levels during infections of certain diseases. Scientists are still trying to figure out a name for these excretions, but suffice it to say the obvious choice was not picked for obvious reasons.
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All this pinging back and forth over gesture-based interfaces vs. keyboards and mice... is wasted on me. I just want a nice wireless subvocal interface between me and my devices. When I use it I can speak aloud and the device won't take action because it knows I am, well, vocal. I guess the only danger of subvocal would be found in meetings at work where I find myself muttering profanities under my breath after the idiotic comments people make ;p
As far as the actual subvocal transfer to my device... I am honestly hoping someone can come up with an implant that is fairly small which goes near the vocal chords or attach to a nerve which drives them (a little scary) that could be powered by my body and reliably transmit the information of a distance up to the length of my arm, where it could then interface with something more powerful to transmit over larger distances if needed (but generally not needed).
All of this of course just being a stop-gap solution to when we have true brain/nervous system level interfaces.
On Demand cable TV allows you to watch back episodes of your favorite shows for the current season. If you really want to watch last years reruns though, I guess you'd have to pop in a DVD, so in that regard the internet will win.
As far as news... hello? There's a bunch of news channels that give you up to the minute news 24x7.
TV that can pause... Hi, my TV can pause. It's called a DVR, and most cable boxes these days can do it.
Personally, my house is setup so that I can cook and watch TV at the same time (because my kitchen/den area is an open layout).
And as for the airplane-portable TV...Obviously TVs aren't very portable, but then you're getting away from the real point of my first post about their convenience in the home.
As the 'good' content becomes available only over the Internet, you think we won't still have to endure commercials?
I mean, I agree that it's nice to be able to watch your show 'when you want' over Hulu. But hell, I can do that right now with my On Demand cable. And I don't need a computer to do it.
Also, I don't think you're giving enough credit to 'regularly scheduled' programs. Millions of people watch prime time television because that's when they are home and can do so. That's why it's prime time. So they aren't forced to watch whatever is playing on the channel at any given moment. They know *exactly* what is going to be on the channel before they even turn it on. There's a pretty large difference between the two.
You've got a point here. I was attempting to come to grips with the stupidity of the "Facebook killed TV." statement. I felt that the whoever made the statement was trying to imply a connection which wasn't there (in my opinion) and I responded, separately, to what I perceived was both sides in the connection.
In reality, I feel like it's only a matter of time before television as we know it is primarily delivered over the Internet. There's going to be a period of adjustment where those setups that do what I described, and you might have right now, become more commonplace, but that period is merely a transition and in the grand scheme of things it will be a very short period indeed.
Recently research has shown that "induced pluripotent stem cells", AKA adult stem cells, do not have the same capability to differentiate into all types of tissue found in the body. Nobody is sure why not.
Therefore embryonic stem cells still offer the largest known possibility for finding cures to degenerative diseases and for regrowth of organs and limbs which the body will not reject.
And while there has been no ban, per se, on the research itself, the lack of federal funding has had an adverse impact on the research. Some of the best research this country has ever done was federally funded, and I expect stem cells could fall into that category as well.
Personally, I don't consider it immoral to harvest the stem cells of an embryo that would have never become a human being. If you do, perhaps you should tap on your moral compass a bit and maybe it will reset to true North, because right now, I think it's confused.
Oh my! How clever and powerful, three words that explain the death of TV! BRILLIANT! /sarcasm Well I have three words in return: "You are wrong."
I'll agree with this when I can only get my favorite shows through Facebook, and when if I want to sit down and casually surf the channels I have to do more than press a single button.
Nothing compares to being able to flop onto the couch, press the "On" button on a television remote, and immediately have my regularly scheduled prime time show on the screen.
Show me any computer setup that can have my show on the screen in the time it takes for me to get home tired from work, toss my shoes off, plop on the couch and just press "on" one time to be where I want to be.
Some of you resourceful nerds out there probably have such a setup, but I will offer two things preemptively to respond to that:
1) You are not nearly the norm, most people don't want the hassle of setting something like that up, and,
2) Even if they did, what does this have to do with Facebook again?
Please excuse my french, but seriously, the statement "Facebook killed TV" is just fucking stupid.
"loot" is not just an item in your inventory, or cargo bay, or satchel. It can be anything the player controls which they did not control before an encounter.
Does the endgame of Eve consist of many players getting together to achieve a common goal, with rewards commensurate with those achievements?
Does a large degree of that endgame activity involve the environment of the game and not just other players' ships? (If players in Eve Online only had each other's ships to attack, how successful do you suspect the game would be?)
If the answer to both is yes (...and it is, these were rhetorical questions), then your disagreement with my statement is faulty.
You mean that wise-ass won't have to subject themselves to the artificial devices of game designers who worked under limitations, but that they no longer work under and yet are still designing into the new games, with the new tech, as if they didn't have the new tech at all?
Those the wise-asses you're talking about? ;p
This is what happens when you read about wireless devices in a periodical called WIRED...
It's pretty simple for me why TR failed...
There was no real endgame. A game without serious, multi-tiered, Player vs. Environment raiding, with many very tough encounters which reward players with exceptional loot is going to FAIL. MMOs are about progression and customization, and loot is the best way to provide that, period. Whether it's "Epic PurpZ" in WoW or Skill Enhancers etc in CoH, if the loot a game offers (including crafting) is weak, the game WILL fail. Glorified chat rooms are not going to survive.
This is why TR failed. Crafting was absolutely horrible, and the endgame pve was equally as bad. It's simply not enough that you can dye your armor. That would be like trying to charge a monthly fee for Guild Wars. That, my friend, is a laughable concept.
Despite everything you said, TR was a good game and would've succeeded if it had been released as a finished product instead of an abortion. It did NOT try to ignore all that was known about game design -- that statement of yours is false. The name of the game was a product of the storyline. If you'd paid any attention to the opening cinematic you'd understand that. Any attempt to make it sound like a revolutionary new game design, which 'ignored' all previous knowledge on game design was nothing more than PR spin.
I don't blame Lord British at all really. He had a vision and he was only allowed to see part of it through to completion before the stupid publisher forced the release and doomed the game, as has happened so many times in the past. Was he taking longer than anticipated to finish the game? Yes. But to release it early was an even bigger mistake.
As you may have realized, this is not really a problem Blizzard had with WoW. When WoW was released there was significant endgame PvE content in the form of several 5 player dungeons, a 10 player raid, and two 40 player raids. In other words, enough to hold over hardcore players until Blizzard could publish the next tier of content.
When an MMO is being developed, and subsequently before its release, if the studio is able to show the true depth of the endgame, and show that it is complex and rewarding, then the game will have a chance. If not, it will fail. Example: Age of Conan.
The age of shallow MMOs is over. The bar has been raised, and rightly so.
What is the shortest possible signal that would almost have to be from a sentient being? I mean, speaking from the perspective of information, what would it take? Something like sending a sequence of repeating primes?
Well, whatever it is.. we need to send it now, not tomorrow.
We need the opposite of SETI. Instead of looking for them, we need to send out the strongest signal we ever have. So strong that it will need to originate from the other side of the moon just to protect people on Earth from the source.
I could paste a sticker on my ass that says "bowling pin capable", and though that may be technically true, it would still hurt pretty bad.
Did you install Ubuntu 64?
Did you clean format before your Vista 64 upgrade?
Does Ubuntu run all of the software that Vista runs, once installed properly?
What's the point of having a 64bit address space if most of your applications are 32bit and you probably don't have enough RAM to even hit the 32bit ceiling anyway?
Hi, Mr. Strawman, how are you?
First of all, let's examine the OP's statements.
So, let's start off blaming Vista for all of the crap software that 'come with it'. Wait, who is to blame for this, Microsoft? Wow, that's conveniently fitting for his *nix biased worldview (even though none of that is required by Microsoft and is entirely Toshiba's fault).
It sounds to me like the OP didn't even perform a clean format, he just tried to upgrade to x64 on top of a previous install. This is always a bad idea.
Furthermore, did the OP state he/she installed Ubuntu 32 or 64? No. That curious detail was left missing.
I have no doubt that Ubuntu is faster to install. What I do doubt is that out of the box Ubuntu supports nearly as much hardware as Vista. Probably not even close.
My statement in no way condemned curiosity or experimentation. That you think it did is evidence that you are logically challenged.
What I was getting at with the statement about society was that there seems to be a percentage of people who are immune to cognitive dissonance: they hold two conflicting ideas before the light of their mind and for whatever reason cannot understand that when they combine these ideas Bad Things will probably happen.
This leads to them complaining about said Bad Things ex post facto, which is not only annoying for those of us who saw it coming, but it's probably even dangerous in some way(s).
Anyway, welcome to the concept of exaggeration.
Stopped reading after this. People who cause themselves mental anguish, despite knowing that it's coming, and then complain about it later represent all that is wrong with society.
What I find amusing about this whole debacle is the incredible uselessness of the effort that is being spent to stop Glider from existing. I mean, OK... in the short term Blizzard *might* eek out more profit because they stopped Glider from existing, but in the long term, can you really expect them to be able to stop botting?
What is it that detects if someone is botting? Well, so far it has been processes that are running that Warden looks at and says "these are controlling this character, not a human".
But what happens when the bot is smart enough that the inputs themselves (i.e. the usb ports) are fed from the bot? Think of it like this:
You have a "bot box" that just feeds the typical (read: exact) signals that a USB keyboard and mouse feed to the game. This box also reads the video output of the graphics card to determine what is happening on screen. Then some random pseudo-A.I. is thrown in to mimic the playing ability of a 9 year old kid (guess what, tons of em in WoW) and boom, undetectable and unstoppable bot.
So Blizz goes after other approaches, like checking to see if the IP address has been playing any number of different accounts for too many hours in a 24hr period and flags that address.. Then they find out that it's an internet cafe who runs WoW and they just banned the IP of the cafe... oops, guess that won't work, either.
The only thing I can think of that might have the potential to defeat botting is by running a live CAPTCHA test using real people as the testers. They've been doing this already, but it has a natural wall where if they do it too much they start to annoy their legitimate players... I know that if I'm raiding and a Blizz CAPTCHA-Cop comes to ask me if I'm real, and distracts me from my enjoyment, I'm going to think about going to another game.
And seriously, is all of this worth the supposedly bad effects it has on the economy? I'm not crying over botters or gold spammers. My fun in the game is in playing the game, not comparing myself to some guy who has a million gold... especially in a game like WoW where gold is basically useless anyway.
I honestly doubt Blizzard has done an adequate cost vs. benefit analysis on the money they are spending to stop this perceived issue that really nobody could give a fuck about.
Oh and one other thing: gold farming and spamming wouldn't exist if PEOPLE WEREN'T BUYING THE GOLD.
But they are Blizz, so get over it.
What...the...FUCK?
You are all reading way too into what I am saying. My point is only that there are probably some pieces of software which began as open source and the government has since made modifications to them, and that these modifications are classified.
So, it's a one way road for Open Source *in this situation* only.
If that's the case, then please send me all the source code to every Open Source program the "Intelligence Community" uses. I mean, it's truly Open, right?
I wonder if you could lessen the air friction problem with either a directed airflow around the wheel, or putting the wheel in a vaccuum...
I have a, uhh, friend, who would have to pay around $150/mo just on World of Warcraft under this model.
Yeah, so obviously this is not an all or nothing model, but more of an option.
Some people have the habit of staying logged in, but afk.. I suppose that would come to an end at least.
I know people with over 100 days /played on a single character. Do the math. If they were playing under the $1.25/hr model, they would've paid $3,000 to play WoW....
The human response to an object is based on something. It exists, so it pretty much has to be, right? But *what* is it based on? Where do the "values" come from when we see an object? Are they the result of a conscious decision, based on a series of choices, derived from the ability to think and choose and also based on memories of the past? Or are these values simply "embedded" into us as we experience things, and experienced again in their triggering upon the sight of such objects?
To put it a different way, does the result of this experiment imply that things which we value are determined, or does it imply that we determine the things that we value? Can you say either way?
Yes but I believe you forgot the CDx5 aphysical dipole bacterium, usually called "Bull" for its similarity to same, which is so small that it actually lives *within* molecules. These new scanners are able to detect levels of the excretions of these Bull, and plot them against known levels during infections of certain diseases. Scientists are still trying to figure out a name for these excretions, but suffice it to say the obvious choice was not picked for obvious reasons.
Now my next gen iPhone will be able to tell me *precisely* when it causes my brain cancer.