From the article, it says at the bottom: ""The Google Images search app helps our customer service team to recognise high profile travellers such as captains of industry who would be using our First class facilities enabling us to give a more personalised service."
I think this is almost certainly something they're aiming at first class passengers only (probably as they approach the lounges at airports). I doubt they care that much about everyone in cattle class...
I'm amazed at how the space combat genre seems to have died a bit of a death in recent years (yeah, I know about the X universe, etc). Surely it's about time someone either rebooted Wing Commander or Tie Fighter, or else made a new game in a similar mould? With modern technology, it could be awesome.
Could this have interesting ramifications when used in an interrogation? Would subvocal speech include bursts of what someone was thinking but did not want to say? Or anything from the subconscious?
But surely the reason for the ban in the first place was so that the jury pool will remain unbiased... it's not as though the testimony is "secret" - journalists have been allowed in. If the prosecution's case collapsed because of this, would it really be something to be proud of?
Straight dope
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This reminds me of a straight dope question/response:
For years those sugarless gum commercials have said, "Sugarless gum is recommended by four out of five dentists for their patients who chew gum." What does the fifth dentist recommend? Gum with sugar? --Elizabeth E., Towson, Maryland
Cecil replies: Oh, sure, Elizabeth, why not? It's like tire dealers scattering tacks on the road. Fact is, the fifth dentist usually recommended no gum at all. Not the kind of advice a chewing-gum company wants to play up real big. The Warner-Lambert Company, makers of Trident sugarless gum, commissioned a market research firm to survey dentists in July 1976.
The research people came up with a list of 1,200 dentists who were supposed to represent a cross-section of their profession. The dentists were asked what they recommended to their gum-chewing patients--sugared gum, sugarless gum, or no gum at all.
Sugarless gum won with 85 percent. Nobody seems to remember exactly how many votes sugared gum got, but I figure there had to be at least one. Cast by the same guy that in a real election always votes for Donald Duck.
I'd love to be able to set my live bookmarks to automatically update at user-defined periods of time; so, for example, I may want my BBC News bookmarks to refresh every 10 minutes, while my slashdot bookmarks can refresh every 30 minutes. At the moment, they only seem to refresh when the browser is first started.
Also - and this is a niggle, but... - the "find" toolbar (accessible by ctrl+F)... they really should move the close button back to the right side of the bar... as far as I can tell, every other part of the UI has the close button in the top-right (or right) corner of the relevant pane, except for that damn find bar!
Hmmm....should the insurance company really have to pay, considering the net result of the impact is that the householders will probably be able to sell it for at least $10,000? Admittedly, I have no idea how much the repairs cost, but.... well... it just seems a bit odd to pay out for an event that will actually monetarily improve the policy-holder....
I think that mobile phones could well become the "killer app" for Grid technology. By "outsourcing" processor intensive tasks to a powerful server owned by the phone company and then seamlessly integrating results returned by that server, each mobile phone could effectively be made just as powerful as a desktop machine (well, in a few years time, anyway).
Of course, you have obvious constraints like screen size, but if you coupled voice technology with the phone (audio being sent to server and processed there, over 3G or 4G link) then you could end up with something not too unlike a Star Trek computer!
USER: Hello Mr. Phone! Can you tell me what the weather is like in Las Vegas, please?
MR. PHONE: Yes! It will be 87 degrees and a little windy! By the way, you're running low on credit - want to top up?
Lest we forget, Oracle are switching their development platform from Sun Solaris to Linux; they didn't use Windows to begin with, as I think a number of people here assume.
The article mentions "The five-year DES hopes to generate about 100 terabytes of data" that will be released to the public at regular intervals....
This kit is probably one example of why the world needs more 92 Tbs routers; sharing the data generated by this baby will probably be a task not unlike that faced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
You're going to have to have a really nice architecture and set of protocols to be able to efficiently pass around these images - possibly this is where Grid Technology comes in to play....
Of course, then you'll need something to actually process the images on! I guess Intel and AMD still have a rosy future ahead of them...
It seems a really odd press release.....I mean, it says:
"We've built a profitable business in the Seattle test market and to go national requires additional capital," Hellebust said. The company was unable to obtain the capital necessary for this expansion, and will wind down operations
If the business was profitable in the Seattle test market....why close it down? Why not just let reserves build up gradually and then expand organically instead of in a couple of giant leaps?
Methinks that it wasn't quite as profitable as they still claim...
This is quite timely, considering the reports of UFO's coming from Mexico as well as reported in Iran, although for me, one of the most intriguing cases happened in Belgium, over a decade ago.
Slightly more on topic, I think that something he doesn't really touch upon here is what happens when two cultures of vastly differing technology meet; in nearly all (if not all) cases in history of such a collision, it is always the weaker culture that either perishes (is absorbed) or is greatly affected by the sudden influx of ideas and technoloy.
If aliens do visit us, then their technology is obviously greatly superior to our own, and I can see similar things happening (we would begin to adopt their technology, which in addition to contact, would lead to massive culture change). Of course, some people would hate the aliens and vow to eradicate them, whilst others would look to them as gods themselves.....well, it's all conjecture, but it's interesting stuff!
I think that's a really dodgy view of Grid computing. Grid computing is essentially resource/service sharing across heterogeneous nodes (i.e. different types of machines - macs/pcs/microscopes/etc). To do that, the Global Grid Forum are developing a load of standard protocols and methods for getting everything to inter-communicate.
As far as I'm aware, there is currently no standard way of purchasing CPU cycles or similar, although there are a number of working groups whose remit probably covers this.
The beauty of the Grid is more in being able to seamlessly connect to pretty much any hardware resource you want - I suspect that in reality, the actual economics will be dictated more by existing commercial agreements more than anything else.
Nevermind the noise from the actual PC - that's bareable! It's my CD drive that drives me insane! It's like there's some kind of acid-fuelled lawnmower-driving madman in my machine, whenever I so much as access F:!!!
A while ago, I'm sure I read a review for a "quiet" CD drive, but I haven't found it since.... Old quad-speed drives were never like that!
This debate will always be subjective and multi-faceted, and no one will ever agree completely on what gives a game that special "something"....
Personally, I think the best kind of story for a computer game is definitely a sense of mystery; of the unknown. Games like Gabriel Knight do it wonderfully; your knowledge of who you are and what you're up against slowly but surely expands the more you play.Torment was also an exceptional computer game; you played it to find out who you were and what your relationship with those around you was.
A sense of magic is another good facet; games like Little Big Adventure, Syberia, and ever The Secret of Monkey Island all had that "something" to them that many games just can't capture, although I couldn't tell you precisely what that something is.....
But anyway. I've only played the original Max Payne, not the sequel, but I couldn't get over the shallow, pretentious sixth-form poetry that seemed to litter it; it was trying too hard.....
I think the most interesting part of the article was:
Japanese players do not like being thrown into an arena in which they are given very little instruction," said Hideo Kojima, creator of the popular "Metal Gear Solid" games.
"You can head in any direction, 360 degrees. They say, 'What am I supposed to do? Give me hints. Provide me service instead of just throwing me into this arena
I guess that in Japan, society is a lot more regimented and order-driven than in the west, and so they'll seek games that are similar..... If only they'd start buying more of my favourite genre (point'n'click adventure games!) - more might be released then! (although I guess instead of games like Syberia and Syberia II, we'd end up with stuff like "Puzzle puzzle cow fan 3400"...but at least it'd be a start!
Openness is the first casualty of going public?!
on
How does Google do it?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If truth is the first casualty of war, openness is the first casualty of going public
OK - I can (perhaps) see this as being the case prior to an IPO, but that statement can't be true after it has happened...
I mean....surely once they've gone public, they'll be obliged to detail and list the sort of information that the article postulates about? The shareholders would be entitled to know how many servers google has, what their specifications are, and what their current commercial strategy is.....surely?!
I thought that the plot of Mafia would make a brilliant film, even though it might be quite derivative from films like "The Godfather"....
Another game that could *easily* be made into a film is any of the Gabriel Knight trilogy by Jane Jensen - she's already written two books on the first two games, and they'd make a great and intelligent series of films if handled properly... Of course, "Blood of the Sacred - Blood of the Damned" would probably be considered too heretical to ever make it to mainstream release...
It's great that it can store data in a three dimensional way, but the article doesn't seem to mention how robust such a material would be - will the dyes last for a long period of time, and if not, will some dyes fade before others?
Also, I would've liked to see some metrics to give an idea of the capacity such a material has in comparison with some of the recent stuff developed by, for example, IBM. Although I appreciate that it's early days at the moment.
Finally, making a reader for the material is one thing, but I imagine making a writer is an altogether trickier process....how do add and remove all these dye-polymer shells, or is the whole point to have a static, WORM-style data store?
The "learning edition" of MSVC++ prohibited you from commercially distributing binaries made with it (or perhaps even just distributing the binaries, I can't remember just now). It also displayed a pop-up window whenever you executed your code, reminding you of this.
However, considering it cost virtually nothing to get the thing, I don't think this was particularly unfair.
This sounds similar to what some people (such as Entropia) are attempting on "The Grid" (see The Globus Project for more wiffly utopian detail on that).
Of course, it also leads to problems. Like security - how much can you trust an autonomous node to return correct data?
To what extent is there scope for malicious nodes deliberately returning incorrect results? And given the autonomous nature of the nodes, they can turn on and off (crash, be turned off) at any time and their performance will fluctuate depending on what other load (that you can't control) is placed on them, so you may want checkpointing and/or redundancy going on.
Which leads to the question of how to co-ordinate it all to maintain consistancy should you wish to roll back. All very app-specific, to be sure, but it's the detail that prevents stuff like this from being used by more people.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article, it says at the bottom: ""The Google Images search app helps our customer service team to recognise high profile travellers such as captains of industry who would be using our First class facilities enabling us to give a more personalised service."
I think this is almost certainly something they're aiming at first class passengers only (probably as they approach the lounges at airports). I doubt they care that much about everyone in cattle class...
I'm amazed at how the space combat genre seems to have died a bit of a death in recent years (yeah, I know about the X universe, etc). Surely it's about time someone either rebooted Wing Commander or Tie Fighter, or else made a new game in a similar mould? With modern technology, it could be awesome.
So one of the major thinsg to expect in FF5 is "UI animation"?
For some reason, this makes me feel kind of sad....
I suspect that this BBC article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4816848.stm
was made based on the same meeting....
Could this have interesting ramifications when used in an interrogation? Would subvocal speech include bursts of what someone was thinking but did not want to say? Or anything from the subconscious?
But surely the reason for the ban in the first place was so that the jury pool will remain unbiased... it's not as though the testimony is "secret" - journalists have been allowed in. If the prosecution's case collapsed because of this, would it really be something to be proud of?
This reminds me of a straight dope question/response:
For years those sugarless gum commercials have said, "Sugarless gum is recommended by four out of five dentists for their patients who chew gum." What does the fifth dentist recommend? Gum with sugar? --Elizabeth E., Towson, Maryland
Cecil replies:
Oh, sure, Elizabeth, why not? It's like tire dealers scattering tacks on the road. Fact is, the fifth dentist usually recommended no gum at all. Not the kind of advice a chewing-gum company wants to play up real big. The Warner-Lambert Company, makers of Trident sugarless gum, commissioned a market research firm to survey dentists in July 1976. The research people came up with a list of 1,200 dentists who were supposed to represent a cross-section of their profession. The dentists were asked what they recommended to their gum-chewing patients--sugared gum, sugarless gum, or no gum at all. Sugarless gum won with 85 percent. Nobody seems to remember exactly how many votes sugared gum got, but I figure there had to be at least one. Cast by the same guy that in a real election always votes for Donald Duck.
I'd love to be able to set my live bookmarks to automatically update at user-defined periods of time; so, for example, I may want my BBC News bookmarks to refresh every 10 minutes, while my slashdot bookmarks can refresh every 30 minutes. At the moment, they only seem to refresh when the browser is first started.
Also - and this is a niggle, but... - the "find" toolbar (accessible by ctrl+F)... they really should move the close button back to the right side of the bar... as far as I can tell, every other part of the UI has the close button in the top-right (or right) corner of the relevant pane, except for that damn find bar!
*ahem*
Hmmm....should the insurance company really have to pay, considering the net result of the impact is that the householders will probably be able to sell it for at least $10,000? Admittedly, I have no idea how much the repairs cost, but.... well... it just seems a bit odd to pay out for an event that will actually monetarily improve the policy-holder....
I think that mobile phones could well become the "killer app" for Grid technology. By "outsourcing" processor intensive tasks to a powerful server owned by the phone company and then seamlessly integrating results returned by that server, each mobile phone could effectively be made just as powerful as a desktop machine (well, in a few years time, anyway).
Of course, you have obvious constraints like screen size, but if you coupled voice technology with the phone (audio being sent to server and processed there, over 3G or 4G link) then you could end up with something not too unlike a Star Trek computer!
USER: Hello Mr. Phone! Can you tell me what the weather is like in Las Vegas, please?
MR. PHONE: Yes! It will be 87 degrees and a little windy! By the way, you're running low on credit - want to top up?
Lest we forget, Oracle are switching their development platform from Sun Solaris to Linux; they didn't use Windows to begin with, as I think a number of people here assume.
The article mentions "The five-year DES hopes to generate about 100 terabytes of data" that will be released to the public at regular intervals....
This kit is probably one example of why the world needs more 92 Tbs routers; sharing the data generated by this baby will probably be a task not unlike that faced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. You're going to have to have a really nice architecture and set of protocols to be able to efficiently pass around these images - possibly this is where Grid Technology comes in to play....
Of course, then you'll need something to actually process the images on! I guess Intel and AMD still have a rosy future ahead of them...
....Slashdot readers have known about Darl McBride for a while now....
It seems a really odd press release.....I mean, it says:
"We've built a profitable business in the Seattle test market and to go national requires additional capital," Hellebust said. The company was unable to obtain the capital necessary for this expansion, and will wind down operations
If the business was profitable in the Seattle test market....why close it down? Why not just let reserves build up gradually and then expand organically instead of in a couple of giant leaps?
Methinks that it wasn't quite as profitable as they still claim...
This is quite timely, considering the reports of UFO's coming from Mexico as well as reported in Iran, although for me, one of the most intriguing cases happened in Belgium, over a decade ago. Slightly more on topic, I think that something he doesn't really touch upon here is what happens when two cultures of vastly differing technology meet; in nearly all (if not all) cases in history of such a collision, it is always the weaker culture that either perishes (is absorbed) or is greatly affected by the sudden influx of ideas and technoloy. If aliens do visit us, then their technology is obviously greatly superior to our own, and I can see similar things happening (we would begin to adopt their technology, which in addition to contact, would lead to massive culture change). Of course, some people would hate the aliens and vow to eradicate them, whilst others would look to them as gods themselves.....well, it's all conjecture, but it's interesting stuff!
I think that's a really dodgy view of Grid computing. Grid computing is essentially resource/service sharing across heterogeneous nodes (i.e. different types of machines - macs/pcs/microscopes/etc). To do that, the Global Grid Forum are developing a load of standard protocols and methods for getting everything to inter-communicate.
As far as I'm aware, there is currently no standard way of purchasing CPU cycles or similar, although there are a number of working groups whose remit probably covers this.
The beauty of the Grid is more in being able to seamlessly connect to pretty much any hardware resource you want - I suspect that in reality, the actual economics will be dictated more by existing commercial agreements more than anything else.
Nevermind the noise from the actual PC - that's bareable! It's my CD drive that drives me insane! It's like there's some kind of acid-fuelled lawnmower-driving madman in my machine, whenever I so much as access F:!!!
A while ago, I'm sure I read a review for a "quiet" CD drive, but I haven't found it since.... Old quad-speed drives were never like that!
This debate will always be subjective and multi-faceted, and no one will ever agree completely on what gives a game that special "something"....
Personally, I think the best kind of story for a computer game is definitely a sense of mystery; of the unknown. Games like Gabriel Knight do it wonderfully; your knowledge of who you are and what you're up against slowly but surely expands the more you play.Torment was also an exceptional computer game; you played it to find out who you were and what your relationship with those around you was.
A sense of magic is another good facet; games like Little Big Adventure, Syberia, and ever The Secret of Monkey Island all had that "something" to them that many games just can't capture, although I couldn't tell you precisely what that something is.....
But anyway. I've only played the original Max Payne, not the sequel, but I couldn't get over the shallow, pretentious sixth-form poetry that seemed to litter it; it was trying too hard.....
I think the most interesting part of the article was:
Japanese players do not like being thrown into an arena in which they are given very little instruction," said Hideo Kojima, creator of the popular "Metal Gear Solid" games.
"You can head in any direction, 360 degrees. They say, 'What am I supposed to do? Give me hints. Provide me service instead of just throwing me into this arena
I guess that in Japan, society is a lot more regimented and order-driven than in the west, and so they'll seek games that are similar..... If only they'd start buying more of my favourite genre (point'n'click adventure games!) - more might be released then! (although I guess instead of games like Syberia and Syberia II, we'd end up with stuff like "Puzzle puzzle cow fan 3400"...but at least it'd be a start!
If truth is the first casualty of war, openness is the first casualty of going public
OK - I can (perhaps) see this as being the case prior to an IPO, but that statement can't be true after it has happened...
I mean....surely once they've gone public, they'll be obliged to detail and list the sort of information that the article postulates about? The shareholders would be entitled to know how many servers google has, what their specifications are, and what their current commercial strategy is.....surely?!
I thought that the plot of Mafia would make a brilliant film, even though it might be quite derivative from films like "The Godfather"....
Another game that could *easily* be made into a film is any of the Gabriel Knight trilogy by Jane Jensen - she's already written two books on the first two games, and they'd make a great and intelligent series of films if handled properly... Of course, "Blood of the Sacred - Blood of the Damned" would probably be considered too heretical to ever make it to mainstream release...
It's great that it can store data in a three dimensional way, but the article doesn't seem to mention how robust such a material would be - will the dyes last for a long period of time, and if not, will some dyes fade before others?
Also, I would've liked to see some metrics to give an idea of the capacity such a material has in comparison with some of the recent stuff developed by, for example, IBM. Although I appreciate that it's early days at the moment.
Finally, making a reader for the material is one thing, but I imagine making a writer is an altogether trickier process....how do add and remove all these dye-polymer shells, or is the whole point to have a static, WORM-style data store?
The "learning edition" of MSVC++ prohibited you from commercially distributing binaries made with it (or perhaps even just distributing the binaries, I can't remember just now). It also displayed a pop-up window whenever you executed your code, reminding you of this.
However, considering it cost virtually nothing to get the thing, I don't think this was particularly unfair.
This sounds similar to what some people (such as Entropia) are attempting on "The Grid" (see The Globus Project for more wiffly utopian detail on that).
Of course, it also leads to problems. Like security - how much can you trust an autonomous node to return correct data?
To what extent is there scope for malicious nodes deliberately returning incorrect results? And given the autonomous nature of the nodes, they can turn on and off (crash, be turned off) at any time and their performance will fluctuate depending on what other load (that you can't control) is placed on them, so you may want checkpointing and/or redundancy going on.
Which leads to the question of how to co-ordinate it all to maintain consistancy should you wish to roll back. All very app-specific, to be sure, but it's the detail that prevents stuff like this from being used by more people.
Blah!
Oh no! Another 160 days of cover-ups and conspiracies! Well...perhaps, anyway! :-)