I'll grant that the engine may wait for a person to finish a sentance before writing it out.
It'll do more than that. It'll have to give you a *hold button* for the people around you. And they won't even know they're on hold. Because we're using technology to make something BETTER THAN reality, not just duping it.
If it doesn't have that kind of capability, lots of people aren't going to use it. When you add new technology to replace text, DO try and make it actually better than text.
In sims where hearing a persons voice is a part of the fantasy (you do watch movies, right? You don't entirely read books, no?) we'll synth a voice.
Right now, due to the technology, it's almost entirely in the "sending messages in a bottle."
Now, if you believe people are inattentive and have some sort of mindset that says people need to concentrate, meditate, reflect more, not talk live, live slow, etc., etc., - whatever's going on in your personal life or that you observe going on in the social world, fine, fine, fine. I'm not going to bother arguing or talking with you about it right now.
Basically, without your "this is a problem" spin and your mischaracterization of me as some kind of luddite, yes, this is what I believe. I believe that the ability of technology to provide ways to manage attention and serialise distracting inputs is a good thing.
As evidence of demand for this stuff, I point you to all the bulletin board systems that tell you who else is online right now.
They do that because it's easy to do. People add features to enable instant messaging to applications because they can, and then... people don't use it. I have yet to recieve a single message from anyone through one of these interfaces.
Sure, you can see who's on. But people still post through the serialised interface.
Second Life can be humbling, and when I look ahead into the future, I realize just how archaic our web experience is right now, and how unsustainable the technical platform is.
Since Second Life went "free", and since I have a hand-me-down graphics card (from my son... I get gamer tech handed down from my kids) that's capable of running it, I've been having a look at it. And Second Life provides all the tools to serialise input and defer responses that anything else does. The instant message and chat systems aren't real-time, they're all buffered and deferred just like EVERY such system has been since we gave up making them interruptable in the early '80s. There's no shared whiteboard unless you *write* a shared whiteboard application... and I have no idea how you'd do it in LSL... next to Javascript LSL is a clumsy hippo.
If you're looking for better real-time interaction than the Web and IRC, you're not going to find it in Second Life.
If you're in the "slow down" "stop making technology" crowd, we can't have a conversation.
No, I'm in the speed up, use technology crowd who sees the attempt to copy problems from the real world into the virtual world as misguided.
the problem is organizing communications, not the amount of communication
Well, yes, of course. That's the problem... the more concurrency you have to deal with, the harder it is to organize. Serialise communication, avoid real-time interrupts and delays while you busy-wait on someone's attention. Computers are infinitely better at doing that than humans are... so why obsessively drag humans into the loop?
We do shared meeting notes collection in gobby and IRC, and we ain't ''never'' going back.
I don't know what gobby is, but IRC serialises and buffers the conversation stream and eliminates the whole issue of "when you're in a room you know when to interrupt". That degree of immediacy is not a feature of face-to-face interaction, it's a drawback to face-to-face interaction.
Basically, it comes down to this: If I'm in this "real time" thing with you, and I need to go look something up in google to answer you, if taking a minute out of the discussion means I've *lost* a minute's worth of discussion or whiteboard updates, then I don't want this software to exist. Because if it exists some idiot manager is going to demand I use it, and that's going to suck.
Except, only one person's done it so far. You have to actually write software. It's not enough to say, "It can be done."
Well, you have to write software, and you have to want it to be done. If you're not interested saying "you can do it in Javascript, you don't need a new browser" is a perfectly reasonable response.
You're in IRC, and you want to have a shared whiteboarding session? Oh, now we have to spend 5 minutes starting up programs, negotiating a channel, telling how to download if someone doesn't have it, etc., etc.,.
Well, if I wanted to do that, and if (as you say you have) I'd already written it, I'd just past the URL for the shared whiteboarding page into the chat session.
I don't give a damn it's already been done. I've already seen it. I've even written one myself.
Then use it.
What suxors right now is that you can't do real-time visibility stuff when you want it.
I thought you said you'd already written it?
The web is just text, text, text, deferred text.
THe web is text and graphics, deferred and immediate. It sounds to me like Javascript and SVG would pretty much DTRT for you.
If I buy a legitimate CD in Russia, it's not illegal to bring the CD home...even though the CD will cost a lot less there than it would in the US.
But you're not buying a CD in Russia, you're buying it in the US from a Russian company.
There are many reasons unrelated to music that I would like some kind of "neutral servers carry neutral goods" doctrine to exist, but that's DEFINITELY not settled law.
People are becoming accustomed to the idea that there's protection on songs, that they don't own their music, only license it... but they see that as harmless, because it's easy to bypass.
There is that danger, but the converse is that people are getting accustomed to the idea that even though Apple says they're only licensing the songs, Apple's also telling them to back them up in a form they can keep. So they should be getting used to having the right to remove the DRM.
Alas, people are stupid, so you get people ragging on Apple when their system crashes and they run out of authorizations. So you're probably more right than I want to admit to myself.
People are going to use this to collaborate on texts together.
Popular wikipedia pages will be perpetually live. In place of "saves," there will be "checkpoints" in the live stream.
Errr.
1. There must have been hundreds of collaborative tools that did things like this over the past 25 years, and the edit/save/checking method has proven infinitely superior. Even when people are standing in the same room with a whiteboard, you get *one person* doing a bunch of work on it, then talking about it, then stepping back to let someone else do it. I won't say there' are NO people who can pay attention to more than one thing at once, but it's rare.
2. If you wanted to do this, you could do it right now with Javascript.
If you go in a room, you know whether to interrupt or not, based on being able to see what the person is doing. You can't do that on the web right now.
One of the big advantages of the near-but-not-quite real-time nature of computer communication is that it defers interruptions. You don't need to know when to interrupt someone, because you can't interrupt someone... you can *queue* a request for their attention, and they don't have to feel rushed, and you don't have to pay the computer attention waiting for them to be ready.
It's like applying a layer of anti-ADD to relationships. Stripping that away again is just annoying.
Another example is that back in the early days of the net, when men were men and women were women and small furry creatures from alpha centauri were... worng story.
Back in teh old days, one of the things that the early talk/chat system authors spent a lot of time doing was dealing with immediate feedback. You typed, and what you were writing showed up on the other guy's screen, character by character. One version did it word by word, and that was seen as really cool. A big coup was having it use cursor movement, so if you started typing the other guy's typing moved up and you could type under it...
This all got backed out pretty quickly. People LIKED being able to edit stuff before they showed it to other people. They liked not having all their erase and correct on display. What made word-by-word cool is precisely that it smoothed out sme of that, and line-by-line really DID work better. VR chat systems, where you're burning bandwidth transmitting changes in posture and position, people STILL do things line by line and they STILL have the chat-window buffer to keep from having to re-direct your train of thought more than necessary.
Even the "..." in IM systems when someone's typing is distracting, an interruption, just plain impolite... I turn it off.
No, I don't see more immediacy and the ability to interrupt as anything but the possibility of another cycle of the same mistake.
Good luck trying to enforce that against thousands of spam zombies across the Internet!
Why would you do that? You'd follow the money... see who's benefitting from the spam and file your claim against THEM in small-claims court. If every spam against cellular gateways was followed up by hundreds of chickenfeed lawsuits against the advertiser, nobody would pay spammers to do it.
Well, I once saw a software license that said that by using their software you were deeding them an option on your immortal soul, and if you pirated it they'd forfeit it to the first sulfur-scented apparition with horns and hooves that turned up with evidence. And you didn't even have to sign in blood...
You can email a text message to someone's phone, and for some carriers it is an automatic $0.10 or more a message received and the reciever can't not recieve it......and all over the world, spammers rub their hands in glee.
I'd love to see some spammers do this.
Because for sure they'd hit some cellphones that are on the do-not-call list.
Which, unlike the spammer-promoted "don't spam me" lists, are real and enforcable.
I had assumed that the text message system was insanely overpriced, because with any sane design that sending or receiving a text message should use less airtime and bandwidth than a fraction of a second of scratchy hold music.
If only 165 messages a second is enough to overwhelm a cell that can run dozens of high-quality voice channels, let alone use more then a couple of packets on the equivalent of a BRI's "D" channel... what kind of overhead do the damn things HAVE?
For example, we can envision a world where you can watch people writing blog posts as they write them.
And for real thrills, you can watch paint dry.... "he's started a new paragraph..."... "woot, is he talking about Microsoft yet?"... "nah, it's something about his kid."... "screw this, I'm gonna see what Dvorak's up to."
Because the things that were contributed back DID NOT include the improvements.
Setting aside the whole "have you actually looked at all the stuff in Darwin that isn't actually dependent on Darwin to run" debate (though we can do that one if you really insist, there's a lot of complete packages there people really need to consider), let's drop back a bit and look at what my message and the one I was replying to said...
If they had used Linux as the base, how much more of Mac OS X would they have been legally required to contribute back by the GPL? I suspect that the answer is "nothing". Cocoa, Aqua, Quartz, these all run as separate libraries, utilities, and applications and would have been no more considered "part of Linux" than Oracle or VMware or Metro-X.
So despite them using a non-GPLed base, they have gone ahead and released everything the GPL would have required... and more. If it's not enough for you, well, you'd still have to come up with something more constraining than the GPL to churlishly force them to cough up the rest.
I'm sorry to inform you that you have failed the Turing Test. Please turn your activation key at the nearest upgrade station and prepare for upgrading. Have a nice day.
-Go to the mayor -Go to the healer -Go to the blacksmith -Leave
What about:
-Go to the mayor -Go to the healer -Go to the blacksmith -Go to the pub -Go to the library -Go to the fairground -Go to the monastery -Go to the cathedral -Go to the carpenter -Go to the stews -Go to the alchemist -Go to the recruiting hall -Go to the clockmaker
It is entirely possible to go wading through thousands of enemies annihilating all in your path as it is to fight only when absolutely necessary (which is really rare).
That's a tactical-level choice, yes, but what if I want to opt out of the whole "combat" thing and have my character be an armorer or a research alchemist? I know Everquest has schemes where you can pretend to be a shopkeeper and sit at your computer typing buy and sell commands all day (or have a script do it for you), but that's seems to be something they added to discourage people from avoiding the combat option. After all, if you were to role-play the life of a fighter at that mind-numbing level of reality you'd spend most of your time working out, drilling, or sitting around recovering from your wounds (or dying from them, but that'd REALLY turn off the punters).
In essence, it is what a lot of DMs want to see in a Roleplaying game.
I dunno. I had my best time ever in a RPG when one of the players misunderstood one of the clues I'd dropped and the whole party went haring off along the coast to the other side of the inland sea. I hadn't laid out that part of the world in any kind of detail and I had to ad-lib like the devil for the rest of the session and do a lot of redesign before the next weekend. But a fine time was had by all!
this is a computer game, last I checked everything on a computer at this time has at least some restrictions.
I know, you can't really do a computer RPG without Turing-level AI. That's why I wish they'd call these things unit/individual level combat games than "role playing" games.
Re:am I the only one who does not get it?
on
Video iPod Oct 12?
·
· Score: 1
Can you play music files ripped from you CD collection on an iPod?
Heh. Most of the music files I play on my iPod Shuffle are ripped from my CD collection or recorded from tapes. Don't you remember Apple's "Rip-Mix-Burn" ad campaign?
Planescape: Torment and the Baldur's Gate sagas are some of the finest gaming experiences RPG fans can cite.
I haven't played all that many of these games, because I became disenchanted with the whole genre long ago, but I have to ask... do any of these games actually provide any opportunities for role playing? That is, do you as a player have any control over your character's actions beyond those of a "choose your own adventure" book? Oh, sure, you can choose to go on or not go on side-quests, but beyond that the only results of your actions are whether you make it through to the ending, or at the most get one of a couple of different variations to the end.
For a canned game, where the only person involved is yourself, this kind of interactive fiction approach is probably the best you can manage... but even the "massively multiplayer" games seem to give you awfully limited opportunities for developing your own character with his or her own motivations and goals. And, after all, that's what distinguishes the role-playing campaign from the canned dungeon crawl whete the DM may as well BE a computer...
It is ILLEGAL to use allofmp3.com from the United States
Could you cite the statute that says this?
I wouldn't use allofmp3.com because while iTunes only kicks back 6c (or whatever) to the artist, allofmp3.com kicks back zero cents. At that rate you might as well just rip it off yourself and save the money you're sending to Russia.
Yeh. I have a similar problem with bad shadows and reflections, and "infinitely thin" transparent surfaces that don't implement refraction. Mostly, I can ignore them, but sometimes they're really glaring and while a developer can write special-case code to deal with individual problems (raycasting shadows, for example) it's not automatic and they inevitably forget about some of the places where there should be shadows, reflections, caustics, or other optical effects that just fall out automatically in raytracing.
Now... I was doing raytracing on an Amiga 1000 (7.14 Mhz 68000) in the late '80s, and while a full scene took insanely long you could render a patch for testing in a few seconds and farm patches out to other computers without worrying about edge effects. That's because pure raytracing is an "embarassingly parallelizable algorithm": for static scenes, you get linear speedup in raytracing for every CPU you add. The problem is getting dynamically updated scenes out to the individual raytracers fast enough...
I'm waiting for someone to come up with a massively parallel raytracer in a video card. If they can solve the memory fan-out problem so that they can give each 16x16 (or smaller) pixel patch its own dedicated raytracer with access to the whole scene's collection of bounding boxes... so they only need to go off-chip *after* they've discovered a potential intersect on a secondary ray... it should be possible to get optically correct photorealistic rendering in real time.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone is doing business in the US, they have assets in the US.
If they're NOT doing business in the US, they're being ripped off by the spammer.
I'll grant that the engine may wait for a person to finish a sentance before writing it out.
It'll do more than that. It'll have to give you a *hold button* for the people around you. And they won't even know they're on hold. Because we're using technology to make something BETTER THAN reality, not just duping it.
If it doesn't have that kind of capability, lots of people aren't going to use it. When you add new technology to replace text, DO try and make it actually better than text.
In sims where hearing a persons voice is a part of the fantasy (you do watch movies, right? You don't entirely read books, no?) we'll synth a voice.
I prefer my anime subbed, not dubbed, thanks.
Right now, due to the technology, it's almost entirely in the "sending messages in a bottle."
Now, if you believe people are inattentive and have some sort of mindset that says people need to concentrate, meditate, reflect more, not talk live, live slow, etc., etc., - whatever's going on in your personal life or that you observe going on in the social world, fine, fine, fine. I'm not going to bother arguing or talking with you about it right now.
Basically, without your "this is a problem" spin and your mischaracterization of me as some kind of luddite, yes, this is what I believe. I believe that the ability of technology to provide ways to manage attention and serialise distracting inputs is a good thing.
As evidence of demand for this stuff, I point you to all the bulletin board systems that tell you who else is online right now.
They do that because it's easy to do. People add features to enable instant messaging to applications because they can, and then... people don't use it. I have yet to recieve a single message from anyone through one of these interfaces.
Sure, you can see who's on. But people still post through the serialised interface.
Second Life can be humbling, and when I look ahead into the future, I realize just how archaic our web experience is right now, and how unsustainable the technical platform is.
Since Second Life went "free", and since I have a hand-me-down graphics card (from my son... I get gamer tech handed down from my kids) that's capable of running it, I've been having a look at it. And Second Life provides all the tools to serialise input and defer responses that anything else does. The instant message and chat systems aren't real-time, they're all buffered and deferred just like EVERY such system has been since we gave up making them interruptable in the early '80s. There's no shared whiteboard unless you *write* a shared whiteboard application... and I have no idea how you'd do it in LSL... next to Javascript LSL is a clumsy hippo.
If you're looking for better real-time interaction than the Web and IRC, you're not going to find it in Second Life.
If you're in the "slow down" "stop making technology" crowd, we can't have a conversation.
No, I'm in the speed up, use technology crowd who sees the attempt to copy problems from the real world into the virtual world as misguided.
the problem is organizing communications, not the amount of communication
Well, yes, of course. That's the problem... the more concurrency you have to deal with, the harder it is to organize. Serialise communication, avoid real-time interrupts and delays while you busy-wait on someone's attention. Computers are infinitely better at doing that than humans are... so why obsessively drag humans into the loop?
We do shared meeting notes collection in gobby and IRC, and we ain't ''never'' going back.
I don't know what gobby is, but IRC serialises and buffers the conversation stream and eliminates the whole issue of "when you're in a room you know when to interrupt". That degree of immediacy is not a feature of face-to-face interaction, it's a drawback to face-to-face interaction.
Basically, it comes down to this: If I'm in this "real time" thing with you, and I need to go look something up in google to answer you, if taking a minute out of the discussion means I've *lost* a minute's worth of discussion or whiteboard updates, then I don't want this software to exist. Because if it exists some idiot manager is going to demand I use it, and that's going to suck.
Except, only one person's done it so far. You have to actually write software. It's not enough to say, "It can be done."
Well, you have to write software, and you have to want it to be done. If you're not interested saying "you can do it in Javascript, you don't need a new browser" is a perfectly reasonable response.
You're in IRC, and you want to have a shared whiteboarding session? Oh, now we have to spend 5 minutes starting up programs, negotiating a channel, telling how to download if someone doesn't have it, etc., etc.,.
Well, if I wanted to do that, and if (as you say you have) I'd already written it, I'd just past the URL for the shared whiteboarding page into the chat session.
I don't give a damn it's already been done. I've already seen it. I've even written one myself.
Then use it.
What suxors right now is that you can't do real-time visibility stuff when you want it.
I thought you said you'd already written it?
The web is just text, text, text, deferred text.
THe web is text and graphics, deferred and immediate. It sounds to me like Javascript and SVG would pretty much DTRT for you.
If I buy a legitimate CD in Russia, it's not illegal to bring the CD home...even though the CD will cost a lot less there than it would in the US.
But you're not buying a CD in Russia, you're buying it in the US from a Russian company.
There are many reasons unrelated to music that I would like some kind of "neutral servers carry neutral goods" doctrine to exist, but that's DEFINITELY not settled law.
People are becoming accustomed to the idea that there's protection on songs, that they don't own their music, only license it... but they see that as harmless, because it's easy to bypass.
There is that danger, but the converse is that people are getting accustomed to the idea that even though Apple says they're only licensing the songs, Apple's also telling them to back them up in a form they can keep. So they should be getting used to having the right to remove the DRM.
Alas, people are stupid, so you get people ragging on Apple when their system crashes and they run out of authorizations. So you're probably more right than I want to admit to myself.
The reason they have "overhead" is that they use the (limited) control (signaling) channel.
Oh. Ouch. Idiots.
People are going to use this to collaborate on texts together.
Popular wikipedia pages will be perpetually live. In place of "saves," there will be "checkpoints" in the live stream.
Errr.
1. There must have been hundreds of collaborative tools that did things like this over the past 25 years, and the edit/save/checking method has proven infinitely superior. Even when people are standing in the same room with a whiteboard, you get *one person* doing a bunch of work on it, then talking about it, then stepping back to let someone else do it. I won't say there' are NO people who can pay attention to more than one thing at once, but it's rare.
2. If you wanted to do this, you could do it right now with Javascript.
If you go in a room, you know whether to interrupt or not, based on being able to see what the person is doing. You can't do that on the web right now.
One of the big advantages of the near-but-not-quite real-time nature of computer communication is that it defers interruptions. You don't need to know when to interrupt someone, because you can't interrupt someone... you can *queue* a request for their attention, and they don't have to feel rushed, and you don't have to pay the computer attention waiting for them to be ready.
It's like applying a layer of anti-ADD to relationships. Stripping that away again is just annoying.
Another example is that back in the early days of the net, when men were men and women were women and small furry creatures from alpha centauri were... worng story.
Back in teh old days, one of the things that the early talk/chat system authors spent a lot of time doing was dealing with immediate feedback. You typed, and what you were writing showed up on the other guy's screen, character by character. One version did it word by word, and that was seen as really cool. A big coup was having it use cursor movement, so if you started typing the other guy's typing moved up and you could type under it...
This all got backed out pretty quickly. People LIKED being able to edit stuff before they showed it to other people. They liked not having all their erase and correct on display. What made word-by-word cool is precisely that it smoothed out sme of that, and line-by-line really DID work better. VR chat systems, where you're burning bandwidth transmitting changes in posture and position, people STILL do things line by line and they STILL have the chat-window buffer to keep from having to re-direct your train of thought more than necessary.
Even the "..." in IM systems when someone's typing is distracting, an interruption, just plain impolite... I turn it off.
No, I don't see more immediacy and the ability to interrupt as anything but the possibility of another cycle of the same mistake.
Good luck trying to enforce that against thousands of spam zombies across the Internet!
Why would you do that? You'd follow the money... see who's benefitting from the spam and file your claim against THEM in small-claims court. If every spam against cellular gateways was followed up by hundreds of chickenfeed lawsuits against the advertiser, nobody would pay spammers to do it.
*snort*
:)
I'd mod you +1 Funny but I can't mod in stories I've posted to.
For kicks they can require that you give blood ...
Well, I once saw a software license that said that by using their software you were deeding them an option on your immortal soul, and if you pirated it they'd forfeit it to the first sulfur-scented apparition with horns and hooves that turned up with evidence. And you didn't even have to sign in blood...
You can email a text message to someone's phone, and for some carriers it is an automatic $0.10 or more a message received and the reciever can't not recieve it... ...and all over the world, spammers rub their hands in glee.
I'd love to see some spammers do this.
Because for sure they'd hit some cellphones that are on the do-not-call list.
Which, unlike the spammer-promoted "don't spam me" lists, are real and enforcable.
I had assumed that the text message system was insanely overpriced, because with any sane design that sending or receiving a text message should use less airtime and bandwidth than a fraction of a second of scratchy hold music.
If only 165 messages a second is enough to overwhelm a cell that can run dozens of high-quality voice channels, let alone use more then a couple of packets on the equivalent of a BRI's "D" channel... what kind of overhead do the damn things HAVE?
For example, we can envision a world where you can watch people writing blog posts as they write them.
... "he's started a new paragraph..." ... "woot, is he talking about Microsoft yet?" ... "nah, it's something about his kid." ... "screw this, I'm gonna see what Dvorak's up to."
And for real thrills, you can watch paint dry.
If they'd done this 15 years ago, when Linus Torvalds was in Finland, would Linux even exist?
Because the things that were contributed back DID NOT include the improvements.
Setting aside the whole "have you actually looked at all the stuff in Darwin that isn't actually dependent on Darwin to run" debate (though we can do that one if you really insist, there's a lot of complete packages there people really need to consider), let's drop back a bit and look at what my message and the one I was replying to said...
If they had used Linux as the base, how much more of Mac OS X would they have been legally required to contribute back by the GPL? I suspect that the answer is "nothing". Cocoa, Aqua, Quartz, these all run as separate libraries, utilities, and applications and would have been no more considered "part of Linux" than Oracle or VMware or Metro-X.
So despite them using a non-GPLed base, they have gone ahead and released everything the GPL would have required... and more. If it's not enough for you, well, you'd still have to come up with something more constraining than the GPL to churlishly force them to cough up the rest.
You're missing the point.
6 cents or 60 cents, it's still infinitely many times what allofmp3.com pays.
I'm sorry to inform you that you have failed the Turing Test. Please turn your activation key at the nearest upgrade station and prepare for upgrading. Have a nice day.
I much prefer:
-Go to the mayor
-Go to the healer
-Go to the blacksmith
-Leave
What about:
-Go to the mayor
-Go to the healer
-Go to the blacksmith
-Go to the pub
-Go to the library
-Go to the fairground
-Go to the monastery
-Go to the cathedral
-Go to the carpenter
-Go to the stews
-Go to the alchemist
-Go to the recruiting hall
-Go to the clockmaker
It is entirely possible to go wading through thousands of enemies annihilating all in your path as it is to fight only when absolutely necessary (which is really rare).
That's a tactical-level choice, yes, but what if I want to opt out of the whole "combat" thing and have my character be an armorer or a research alchemist? I know Everquest has schemes where you can pretend to be a shopkeeper and sit at your computer typing buy and sell commands all day (or have a script do it for you), but that's seems to be something they added to discourage people from avoiding the combat option. After all, if you were to role-play the life of a fighter at that mind-numbing level of reality you'd spend most of your time working out, drilling, or sitting around recovering from your wounds (or dying from them, but that'd REALLY turn off the punters).
In essence, it is what a lot of DMs want to see in a Roleplaying game.
I dunno. I had my best time ever in a RPG when one of the players misunderstood one of the clues I'd dropped and the whole party went haring off along the coast to the other side of the inland sea. I hadn't laid out that part of the world in any kind of detail and I had to ad-lib like the devil for the rest of the session and do a lot of redesign before the next weekend. But a fine time was had by all!
this is a computer game, last I checked everything on a computer at this time has at least some restrictions.
I know, you can't really do a computer RPG without Turing-level AI. That's why I wish they'd call these things unit/individual level combat games than "role playing" games.
Can you play music files ripped from you CD collection on an iPod?
Heh. Most of the music files I play on my iPod Shuffle are ripped from my CD collection or recorded from tapes. Don't you remember Apple's "Rip-Mix-Burn" ad campaign?
Planescape: Torment and the Baldur's Gate sagas are some of the finest gaming experiences RPG fans can cite.
I haven't played all that many of these games, because I became disenchanted with the whole genre long ago, but I have to ask... do any of these games actually provide any opportunities for role playing? That is, do you as a player have any control over your character's actions beyond those of a "choose your own adventure" book? Oh, sure, you can choose to go on or not go on side-quests, but beyond that the only results of your actions are whether you make it through to the ending, or at the most get one of a couple of different variations to the end.
For a canned game, where the only person involved is yourself, this kind of interactive fiction approach is probably the best you can manage... but even the "massively multiplayer" games seem to give you awfully limited opportunities for developing your own character with his or her own motivations and goals. And, after all, that's what distinguishes the role-playing campaign from the canned dungeon crawl whete the DM may as well BE a computer...
It is ILLEGAL to use allofmp3.com from the United States
Could you cite the statute that says this?
I wouldn't use allofmp3.com because while iTunes only kicks back 6c (or whatever) to the artist, allofmp3.com kicks back zero cents. At that rate you might as well just rip it off yourself and save the money you're sending to Russia.
Don't forget the open-source instruction set and WCS.
Yeh. I have a similar problem with bad shadows and reflections, and "infinitely thin" transparent surfaces that don't implement refraction. Mostly, I can ignore them, but sometimes they're really glaring and while a developer can write special-case code to deal with individual problems (raycasting shadows, for example) it's not automatic and they inevitably forget about some of the places where there should be shadows, reflections, caustics, or other optical effects that just fall out automatically in raytracing.
Now... I was doing raytracing on an Amiga 1000 (7.14 Mhz 68000) in the late '80s, and while a full scene took insanely long you could render a patch for testing in a few seconds and farm patches out to other computers without worrying about edge effects. That's because pure raytracing is an "embarassingly parallelizable algorithm": for static scenes, you get linear speedup in raytracing for every CPU you add. The problem is getting dynamically updated scenes out to the individual raytracers fast enough...
I'm waiting for someone to come up with a massively parallel raytracer in a video card. If they can solve the memory fan-out problem so that they can give each 16x16 (or smaller) pixel patch its own dedicated raytracer with access to the whole scene's collection of bounding boxes... so they only need to go off-chip *after* they've discovered a potential intersect on a secondary ray... it should be possible to get optically correct photorealistic rendering in real time.