Not really. I know dozens of people with GPS enabled cell phones and swear by their GPS navigation systems still. They're faster and have greater ease of use then cell phones. The large screen and large type work as well. Single function devices still have a huge place in the market. Navigation systems also don't require a locked in contract and $100 / month bill. Also, phones use assisted GPS.
Most people won't replace their GPS with their phone. It's silly. The same goes for cameras. Phones have had them for a decade now, longer than GPS, and still the new camera models are selling every quarter. Also, phones have been playing mp3's for a decade also, yet no one cares and still buys dedicated music players. Weeeird huh?
Robots can do all of that as well. Hell, they ARE the cars, and machinery. They don't need to walk.
Software can interpret tones in speech, body language, facial expressions, etc.. almost on par with some humans.
The idea that people don't think for themselves, is rather true. They won't form an opinion and won't make choices until someone advises them on what to do. Haven't you ever had that little sister or gf who won't ever decide for herself? It really is a common problem. Many people get in life, solely by following instructions of those around them. The only thought of their own is "who can I get to decide for me?" and even that was probably implanted by somebody.
This is what Milo is doing. A programmer has instilled in him directions on what to do given known circumstances. The only difference is Humans can be told what to do much easier than Milo can be.
Then all your family will ask how they can like stuff on the page and have it show up on facebook. This is like suggesting your family should use linux. It sounds good in writing, but then you get to the delivery and no one is as enthusiastic as you about it.
The difference between ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, etc.. and Facebook is the success I had finding old friends. I would've had to do this myself with any other network. Facebook succeeded in facilitating it though.
I used all of the above and Facebook crushed all of their capabilities, even before it had the chat window function.
So long as the operator isn't some tool. You can't always rely on the human on the other end to assume danger in the absence of a voice. Consider how many pocket dialed calls any one 911 dispatch station may get in any given period.
At least they're improving the 911 issue. HTC phones can dial it now.
He's not blaming tethering. What he's saying is it seems that Android developers care more about whistles and bells than actually making the phone work as it should. They race the development in order to have the feature the other guy doesn't have out yet. Maybe they should slow it down a little and make sure their phone software actually makes calls, or calls 911 while gps on, etc..
HTC's track record is really crapping it up. I was thinking of getting an incredible if they came to Canada but now I am completely sold on the iPhone 4. I consistently see incredible problems from the company.
Even crappy phones still have attennas. I've had call issues with many different phones, not just smart phones. And many times the issues were solved with... you guessed it, holding the phone different. Sometimes I even had to use a case!
Suddenly when 'Another Company'(tm) with a track record of releasing models with horrible problems does it, no one cares.
Why would innocent students who aren't cheating, worry about tighter observation towards cheating. My take from the article is they're not doing some automatic screening that can create a false positive, but rather are making observation and available resources much more controlled.
If you're suggesting that students who aren't caring enough to study will kill themselves more because it's harder to cheat, then I suggest this is a great case of evolution in action.
Hooray Evolution!
I imagine the community team protesting as best as they could before this went through. Then after explaining the possible situation to the suits (that ended up happening), and the suits saying "thats only a possibility. lets see what happens".. there was an epic sigh and a solemn "okay, lets do it and see what happens then"
Tonight the community team is getting drunk and celebrating an epic win. This is at least what I hope happened.
I doubt that was it. Blizzard is in no shortage of hits and banner ad's are not a major source of income for them. Time and time again I see this call to boycott sounding. It's always a minor effort. L4D2 is the most recent example I can think of.
It's a band wagon
Most font's are vectors. An equation representing a line. They would be rendered just as smooth, if not smoother. The rendering algorithm would be changed to graph the line across a hexagonal grid. I imagine that sub pixel rendering would still be used as well.
As a graphic artist, I recognize that bitmap/pixel fonts are niche use formats and serve a limited need. They are a supplemental format that are only beneficial in a few circumstances. 99% of the fonts you see are vector paths.
I think what Kirsch is trying to do is create a file format which can store a better approximation of what's going on in any 1 grid coordinate. Using this new form of digitally recording an image, you can render it more accurately on different forms of displays.
This is an improvement in recording visual information so that it is separate from the display technology it will end up on. I think.
There are plenty of screens in consumer devices this very day that only give an effective pixel measurement. Many times they are actually made up of tiny dots or rectangles layered offset from each other. A cluster of 3 or 4 different colored dots could be considered 1 pixel. The commonly used method of sub pixel rendering for font smoothing uses this sub structure of a pixel to produce a better edge.
If this guy's format of storing color information takes off, we could use the data within his files to create a better image across the substructure of a screen. I don't see what the problem is. With the proper software, photographs could be rendered better on almost any modern LCD by using the substructure of a screen pixel combined with his variably shaped pixel format.
The improvement may not be all that great, but new screen technologies are using effective pixel measurements more and more. We could see benefits on todays technology and lay the software ground work for display manufacturers to stop cramming their technology into some square box which can only ever be an effective measurement.
Most of your xbox 360 games are rendered at something between 400p-700p and sampled up. The games that are released as full high def usually don't have many objects on screen at once or sacrifice something else like textures, which makes it so the game shows no incredible increase in detail from 480p anyways.
The plants of course are the subjects of the experiment. Since we assume they do not have any conscious bias (there's really no way to know because we're not a plant), we can assume that any test with plants as subjects is at least a blind test. Given that the subject is unaware of the test, we're half way there. To properly double blind the test, we still have to remove the researcher's bias. But wait, there's more! The plants are bias towards some conditions. Some plants enjoy cages for instance. It gives them a lattice on which to grow. Perhaps the geraniums inside the faraday cage simply grew more because of the structure they were provided. In order to remove this possible bias of a plants preferred place to grow, we would create 2 cages that appear alike, 1 being non conductive. These cages would be used over 3 plants. 2 covered and 1 left alone for control.
Human opinion isn't the only way for bias to form and sentience isn't required to be capable of observing local conditions. The first thing any researcher should be doing is considering how we can eliminate any kind of exterior influence from the test. A controlled environment so to speak. Claiming that only sentient humans can have bias shows a complete lack of understanding for the scientific method. I may not be the most enriched scientific thinker here, but I think it is you who should become more scientifically literate. Bringing emotion and petty name calling to critical thinking is rarely a good approach (but when it is, it sure is fun!)
True this. If you're income is meager but you are still spending precious time on watching tv, then you've got a major priority problem. I've got the same one unfortunately. TV is awesome.
When it's a medical study, it's accounting for a patient's bias.
Scientists can have bias as well, this is why researchers use the double blind method to eliminate their personal bias from the results.
Personally, I think the shielding worked more as a cozy for the plant and gave it a more stable immediate environment upon which to grow. Perhaps even the faraday cage was diminishing the light around the geraniums, so they spent more energy growing their leaves bigger to compensate. Given my personal bias, I wouldn't of published yet since I know there couldn't be a correlation. There are any number of reasons why a bias of opinion might be involved and there is any number of reasons why plants in a cage could grow better than plants not. I doubt she had the soil, in which the roots were, wrapped with a faraday cage either.
Crysis runs on many laptops I've seen. I actually use it as a personal metric on how good a machine is. If it won't run crysis in native resolution on at least medium settings smoothly then I won't recommend it.
Desktops may be taking a smaller portion of the sales pie compared to laptops these days, but I will point out that there is probably a greater installed base of desktops that are more graphically capable then the ps3, then there are of all the consoles combined.
There has been no loss in popularity. It's growing. The console markets simply have a lower barrier to entry and a brand upon which to market their services. The PC being an open ecosystem of software and hardware, is more leading edge. History can show us that those of us leading the way have always been the smaller group. We can also imply the 80/20 rule in this case; Which states something to the effect of, "20 percent of the effort will effect 80% of the results. " I'll flip the point about death onto it's head, with my thesis in the next sentence. PC gaming is thriving and providing much needed foundations for which consoles can market to the masses.
When you're saying consoles succeed in networking games, I say they fail. Harshly. My roommate bought a live card last week in order to play his favorite online mech game, Chrome Hounds. He discovered that the servers were shut down years ago though. He had to go buy a new game on top of the subscription that the limited audience of live was currently engaged in, just so his subscription wasn't a total waste of money.
Consoles do not sustain. You're paying for an experience that is volatile and will not stand against time. Servers are shut down all the time on consoles. You mention Counterstrike but fail to mention that it still has a healthy ecosystem of players and servers, even 1.7. Game servers can disappear for any number of reasons, but only on consoles are they guaranteed to not last forever. This is a huge selling point for me as I still load up classic games such as StarCraft BW. While we're talking about network capabilities, we should also mention that WoW is the most played multiplayer game on any platform. This will continue for a few more years at least. With consoles though, almost every game loses half it's player base whenever a newer game launches. So before a server is even shut down, the player base dramatically reduces itself regularly. This happens on the pc as well, but there is at least a chance for a community favorite to sustain themselves with community controlled dedicated servers.
The reason that these numbers on consoles always look bigger and are breaking records is because it's a single service. The PC is an open ecosystem. You can't effectively count how many people are playing computer games because 1 entity doesn't control the access. How do you even begin to express the quantity of mods and communities that arise from this openness? Because M$ has control over their numbers, marketing drivel is concocted to make it seem like there are more people playing games on consoles then on PC's, when this is completely false. Notice next time how these press releases specifically avoid making this claim.
As for your comment about teenagers and how they only know about facebook games; I laugh at it. Going back 10 years when counterstrike was the champ, people were all about archmage and earth 2025. Great games and very comparable. These casual games have been around for ever and have always supplemented people's gaming experiences. Should we also talk about zynga's most recent claim that 11 million unique people farm on facebook everyday? This rivals live's population easily.
To tie up my points, I want to reiterate about ecosystems. It's not the numbers of players playing that dictates quality, it's the quality of the players playing that does. In my personal experience, almost every game I play on the PC has a more mature and enthusiastic gaming community then the comparable counterpart on the console. LFD2 being the most obvious case. The console crowd for this game is simply not nearly as enjoyable to play with. I lend this to the fact that the community controls the servers and a community can shape itself far better than a corporate team can. Console gaming is a parasite upon the PC gaming ecosystem. Without the host to feed it the nutrients it needs to live, then console gaming would not be in the state it is today.
considering very few of the homebrew games are even playable, and few would consider them fun, Nintendo is right to not worry about the tiny blip that homebrew is on their horizon. Homebrew is a minor casualty in the update wars. They update for a number of reasons. Better system performance for instance. In order to make sure that the update is done in a way which doesn't brick it, a system clean is done first. Closing the banner bomb was probably a minor item on their todo list, just to create significant enough hurdles to keep widespread piracy being the popular choice.
I think it's a very responsible move to clean the system before proceeding with the update.
Actually when you first boot your wii from the factory, it provides you an opportunity to accept the EULA.
You must've gotten your's used but even then, there are laws about first sale and how they're responsible for any notification of licenses.
I see this as a means to prevent console damage.
Modified unofficial software on system meets official update. We've seen how time and time again this can brick your system.
Nintendo is a hero here for recognizing there are machines out there that are modified, and proactively make sure that those who want the update, do not brick their Wii in the process. When the homebrew guys eventually come around, it'll be that much easier to install from a base configuration instead of user created configuration.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. I know dozens of people with GPS enabled cell phones and swear by their GPS navigation systems still. They're faster and have greater ease of use then cell phones. The large screen and large type work as well. Single function devices still have a huge place in the market. Navigation systems also don't require a locked in contract and $100 / month bill. Also, phones use assisted GPS.
Most people won't replace their GPS with their phone. It's silly. The same goes for cameras. Phones have had them for a decade now, longer than GPS, and still the new camera models are selling every quarter. Also, phones have been playing mp3's for a decade also, yet no one cares and still buys dedicated music players. Weeeird huh?
Robots can do all of that as well. Hell, they ARE the cars, and machinery. They don't need to walk.
Software can interpret tones in speech, body language, facial expressions, etc.. almost on par with some humans.
The idea that people don't think for themselves, is rather true. They won't form an opinion and won't make choices until someone advises them on what to do. Haven't you ever had that little sister or gf who won't ever decide for herself? It really is a common problem. Many people get in life, solely by following instructions of those around them. The only thought of their own is "who can I get to decide for me?" and even that was probably implanted by somebody.
This is what Milo is doing. A programmer has instilled in him directions on what to do given known circumstances. The only difference is Humans can be told what to do much easier than Milo can be.
Not at all. This is the exact video that was released last year. Nothing new.
Then all your family will ask how they can like stuff on the page and have it show up on facebook. This is like suggesting your family should use linux. It sounds good in writing, but then you get to the delivery and no one is as enthusiastic as you about it.
The difference between ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, etc.. and Facebook is the success I had finding old friends. I would've had to do this myself with any other network. Facebook succeeded in facilitating it though.
I used all of the above and Facebook crushed all of their capabilities, even before it had the chat window function.
So long as the operator isn't some tool. You can't always rely on the human on the other end to assume danger in the absence of a voice. Consider how many pocket dialed calls any one 911 dispatch station may get in any given period.
At least they're improving the 911 issue. HTC phones can dial it now.
He's not blaming tethering. What he's saying is it seems that Android developers care more about whistles and bells than actually making the phone work as it should. They race the development in order to have the feature the other guy doesn't have out yet. Maybe they should slow it down a little and make sure their phone software actually makes calls, or calls 911 while gps on, etc..
HTC's track record is really crapping it up. I was thinking of getting an incredible if they came to Canada but now I am completely sold on the iPhone 4. I consistently see incredible problems from the company.
Even crappy phones still have attennas. I've had call issues with many different phones, not just smart phones. And many times the issues were solved with... you guessed it, holding the phone different. Sometimes I even had to use a case!
Suddenly when 'Another Company'(tm) with a track record of releasing models with horrible problems does it, no one cares.
Why would innocent students who aren't cheating, worry about tighter observation towards cheating. My take from the article is they're not doing some automatic screening that can create a false positive, but rather are making observation and available resources much more controlled.
If you're suggesting that students who aren't caring enough to study will kill themselves more because it's harder to cheat, then I suggest this is a great case of evolution in action.
Hooray Evolution!
I imagine the community team protesting as best as they could before this went through. Then after explaining the possible situation to the suits (that ended up happening), and the suits saying "thats only a possibility. lets see what happens".. there was an epic sigh and a solemn "okay, lets do it and see what happens then"
Tonight the community team is getting drunk and celebrating an epic win. This is at least what I hope happened.
I doubt that was it. Blizzard is in no shortage of hits and banner ad's are not a major source of income for them. Time and time again I see this call to boycott sounding. It's always a minor effort. L4D2 is the most recent example I can think of.
It's a band wagon
Most font's are vectors. An equation representing a line. They would be rendered just as smooth, if not smoother. The rendering algorithm would be changed to graph the line across a hexagonal grid. I imagine that sub pixel rendering would still be used as well.
As a graphic artist, I recognize that bitmap/pixel fonts are niche use formats and serve a limited need. They are a supplemental format that are only beneficial in a few circumstances. 99% of the fonts you see are vector paths.
I think what Kirsch is trying to do is create a file format which can store a better approximation of what's going on in any 1 grid coordinate. Using this new form of digitally recording an image, you can render it more accurately on different forms of displays. This is an improvement in recording visual information so that it is separate from the display technology it will end up on. I think.
There are plenty of screens in consumer devices this very day that only give an effective pixel measurement. Many times they are actually made up of tiny dots or rectangles layered offset from each other. A cluster of 3 or 4 different colored dots could be considered 1 pixel. The commonly used method of sub pixel rendering for font smoothing uses this sub structure of a pixel to produce a better edge.
If this guy's format of storing color information takes off, we could use the data within his files to create a better image across the substructure of a screen. I don't see what the problem is. With the proper software, photographs could be rendered better on almost any modern LCD by using the substructure of a screen pixel combined with his variably shaped pixel format.
The improvement may not be all that great, but new screen technologies are using effective pixel measurements more and more. We could see benefits on todays technology and lay the software ground work for display manufacturers to stop cramming their technology into some square box which can only ever be an effective measurement.
I would love to have a 2560x1600 monitor =(
But wait, there's more! The plants are bias towards some conditions. Some plants enjoy cages for instance. It gives them a lattice on which to grow. Perhaps the geraniums inside the faraday cage simply grew more because of the structure they were provided. In order to remove this possible bias of a plants preferred place to grow, we would create 2 cages that appear alike, 1 being non conductive. These cages would be used over 3 plants. 2 covered and 1 left alone for control.
Human opinion isn't the only way for bias to form and sentience isn't required to be capable of observing local conditions. The first thing any researcher should be doing is considering how we can eliminate any kind of exterior influence from the test. A controlled environment so to speak. Claiming that only sentient humans can have bias shows a complete lack of understanding for the scientific method. I may not be the most enriched scientific thinker here, but I think it is you who should become more scientifically literate. Bringing emotion and petty name calling to critical thinking is rarely a good approach (but when it is, it sure is fun!)
True this. If you're income is meager but you are still spending precious time on watching tv, then you've got a major priority problem. I've got the same one unfortunately. TV is awesome.
Scientists can have bias as well, this is why researchers use the double blind method to eliminate their personal bias from the results.
Personally, I think the shielding worked more as a cozy for the plant and gave it a more stable immediate environment upon which to grow. Perhaps even the faraday cage was diminishing the light around the geraniums, so they spent more energy growing their leaves bigger to compensate. Given my personal bias, I wouldn't of published yet since I know there couldn't be a correlation. There are any number of reasons why a bias of opinion might be involved and there is any number of reasons why plants in a cage could grow better than plants not. I doubt she had the soil, in which the roots were, wrapped with a faraday cage either.
Crysis runs on many laptops I've seen. I actually use it as a personal metric on how good a machine is. If it won't run crysis in native resolution on at least medium settings smoothly then I won't recommend it. Desktops may be taking a smaller portion of the sales pie compared to laptops these days, but I will point out that there is probably a greater installed base of desktops that are more graphically capable then the ps3, then there are of all the consoles combined.
Unfortunately the advent of HDTV has also stagnated computer monitor resolutions.
There has been no loss in popularity. It's growing. The console markets simply have a lower barrier to entry and a brand upon which to market their services. The PC being an open ecosystem of software and hardware, is more leading edge. History can show us that those of us leading the way have always been the smaller group. We can also imply the 80/20 rule in this case; Which states something to the effect of, "20 percent of the effort will effect 80% of the results. " I'll flip the point about death onto it's head, with my thesis in the next sentence. PC gaming is thriving and providing much needed foundations for which consoles can market to the masses.
When you're saying consoles succeed in networking games, I say they fail. Harshly. My roommate bought a live card last week in order to play his favorite online mech game, Chrome Hounds. He discovered that the servers were shut down years ago though. He had to go buy a new game on top of the subscription that the limited audience of live was currently engaged in, just so his subscription wasn't a total waste of money.
Consoles do not sustain. You're paying for an experience that is volatile and will not stand against time. Servers are shut down all the time on consoles. You mention Counterstrike but fail to mention that it still has a healthy ecosystem of players and servers, even 1.7. Game servers can disappear for any number of reasons, but only on consoles are they guaranteed to not last forever. This is a huge selling point for me as I still load up classic games such as StarCraft BW. While we're talking about network capabilities, we should also mention that WoW is the most played multiplayer game on any platform. This will continue for a few more years at least. With consoles though, almost every game loses half it's player base whenever a newer game launches. So before a server is even shut down, the player base dramatically reduces itself regularly. This happens on the pc as well, but there is at least a chance for a community favorite to sustain themselves with community controlled dedicated servers.
The reason that these numbers on consoles always look bigger and are breaking records is because it's a single service. The PC is an open ecosystem. You can't effectively count how many people are playing computer games because 1 entity doesn't control the access. How do you even begin to express the quantity of mods and communities that arise from this openness? Because M$ has control over their numbers, marketing drivel is concocted to make it seem like there are more people playing games on consoles then on PC's, when this is completely false. Notice next time how these press releases specifically avoid making this claim.
As for your comment about teenagers and how they only know about facebook games; I laugh at it. Going back 10 years when counterstrike was the champ, people were all about archmage and earth 2025. Great games and very comparable. These casual games have been around for ever and have always supplemented people's gaming experiences. Should we also talk about zynga's most recent claim that 11 million unique people farm on facebook everyday? This rivals live's population easily.
To tie up my points, I want to reiterate about ecosystems. It's not the numbers of players playing that dictates quality, it's the quality of the players playing that does. In my personal experience, almost every game I play on the PC has a more mature and enthusiastic gaming community then the comparable counterpart on the console. LFD2 being the most obvious case. The console crowd for this game is simply not nearly as enjoyable to play with. I lend this to the fact that the community controls the servers and a community can shape itself far better than a corporate team can. Console gaming is a parasite upon the PC gaming ecosystem. Without the host to feed it the nutrients it needs to live, then console gaming would not be in the state it is today.
considering very few of the homebrew games are even playable, and few would consider them fun, Nintendo is right to not worry about the tiny blip that homebrew is on their horizon. Homebrew is a minor casualty in the update wars. They update for a number of reasons. Better system performance for instance. In order to make sure that the update is done in a way which doesn't brick it, a system clean is done first. Closing the banner bomb was probably a minor item on their todo list, just to create significant enough hurdles to keep widespread piracy being the popular choice.
I think it's a very responsible move to clean the system before proceeding with the update.
Actually when you first boot your wii from the factory, it provides you an opportunity to accept the EULA. You must've gotten your's used but even then, there are laws about first sale and how they're responsible for any notification of licenses.
I see this as a means to prevent console damage. Modified unofficial software on system meets official update. We've seen how time and time again this can brick your system. Nintendo is a hero here for recognizing there are machines out there that are modified, and proactively make sure that those who want the update, do not brick their Wii in the process. When the homebrew guys eventually come around, it'll be that much easier to install from a base configuration instead of user created configuration.
Having a mac doesn't mean you have no viruses. You can still have malware installed. False security blanket is false.