That assumes that I pay for the T3 solely for the purpose of downloading MP3s. If I have the T3 for work, or some other purpose, then it doesn't become a cost factor when comparing the cost of downloading versus ripping my own mp3s.
You can use the juke-cd-... for other things, as a backup system, or whatever.
Do you even know what Napster is? Hint: It's not a website..
Got me. I'm not an english native speaker, and for some reason i can't come with a word or phrase that fits, and i've been thinkin one for at least 20 seconds! Sorry. Now discuss my arguments, not my mental quality(which isn't at it's best, you know...)
Many of us download mp3s AND buy the cd. This seems to be supported by the Jupiter study. This will probably become much more prevalent if we could get the damn record companies out of the way. Then we could more directly support the artists we like.
Granted. But i was talking about the record companies, and i don't think they will find that "getting out of the way" is an acceptble market strategy.
I think people fail to realize sometimes that downloading music from Napster is not illegal if you own the music already. Why would you download the music than? Well, it's simple... you want to listen to it on your computer or perhaps you want to watch it with cool WinAmp plug-ins.:o)
Then why don't simply rip the tracks from the CD and compress them? that's much faster than downloading them(and if you have a T3 or something, it's still faster, because you can have a multi-cdrw-dvd-jukebox-60x-whatever cheaper than the cost of the T3).
I don't mean that napster doesn't have legal uses. When i'm told of a new CD or group, i usually download a song or two to see if the cd is worth it(which, due to murphy's law, end being the only one or two worthwhile songs of the CD, but i disgress...). Of course, if at some point it would be easier to me downloading all the cd rather than buying it, i wouldn't mind twice(let's see when i get DSL...), and nothing that the music industry does would stop that, so suing around would not help them, because if they close napster, a dozen similar sites will appear, and even if they don't there's still ftp irc etc... so if they really want to stop it, they would have to shut down the whole net, something out of their grasp(i hope). Instead, they should try to make the buying thing easier, and give it added value(maybe you buy mp3 on the net and get some merchandising?), so people will still prefer buying it than pirating it.
Music industry is wrong, because they see napster as the problem, but it's only it's symptoms, and if they don't change their busuness model, they will be left behind......life's a bitch, i almost feel sorry for them(not!)...
Heh, iirc the actual number is closer to 6 hours/week on average. Of course, no laptops, no dsl, no car, and no assurance on getting food the next day...
But the best life, of course, is the life of the no-studying student. an average of 30 hours/year (it may go up a bit if you count all the talking and all the tricks you have to pull to keep yourself in that priviledged but fragile state:P )!
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. While it's true that Lincoln was born in a log cabin, that was in Ostia, and besides, he was abducted at the age of 12 by aliens, who implanted him a brain controller chip, and used him as a puppet to carry on the war. And, the war was'nt against the sourthern states, that was only a diversion move while the real war was being fought in nepal, because the world's biggest mines of trollitium are there. About the naming, in light of the real facts, i think it would be best called "Mars attacks".
Having a defense system would piss china and russia, but throwing enough nukes to blow another country across the globe wouldn't?
Last thing; With as few as 10 medium sized a-bombs, you could make all the West coast inhabitable, and that would be worse(from the economical point of wiew) than destroying it completely, because you would have to relocate millions of people
Genes regulating fundamentals of our biochemistry are probably very, very similar if not identical BUT genes that determine our physical characteristics obviously are different from person to person.
There is no such thing as a "phisical gene", the genes only describe how to sintesize a given peptid, and usually changing the gene affects many things. You can change a gene and change skin color and give the subject some tendency to have short fingers, you can change another and make him process less efficiently fat acids, and you can change BOTH and have him grow a new nose in the armpit, and if you change a third one, that one would inhibit the former changes. Not to mention that many genes overlap between them, so you can't change one without changing the other. Genome isn't a structured language, it has evolved from random changes, and thus it gives a whole new meaning to "spaghetti code".
Even if the DNA samples for different chromosomes are from separate source, the final result of the project still "describes" an individual with very specific characteristics
The map doesn't describe a particular gene set, but rather it describes the locus(positions) of the different genes(there's a difference between the position, which is invariable on the same species, and the genes that occupy it, which can be many on any given species).
Let's drag it a bit further... after all by now we must be the only ones reading this...:P
You need to see numbers though. You know exactly how big 100 megs is. You don't know how big a sphere is thats 2" big is. Your not going to be seeing companies do their revenue accounting with circles and squares any time soon.
Simply move the cursor over the ball and a nice tooltip will give you the data... And talking about companies... i always see nifty bar graphs showing how big is the gap between the company and it's closest competition, but when i look the actual numbers(very small) i only see differences about.5%...
Alot of these things acctually seem like things that are dumbing down the user. Your going to be showing people that lag is represented by how far away a webpage is, and then when someone mentions ping their going to have no idea what their talking about.
The user will be as dumb as the system lets him, but i believe that power users can benefit of 3D GUIs by having more information density on their screens, rather than having an "easier" GUI. I know people that although know what is "ping", they don't know anything about why and how it works, they only know that the higher it is, the worse. For these people, it doesn't matter if you talk them about "ping" or "distance", they won't ever get a clue. As for the rest, if they know what's under it, no cute graphics will take that knowledge from their heads.
Well i think i haven't anything else to say(as if this thread was too short!) Have a nice day (that's you, piku, the only one who will read this:) )
I'm sure it even could reach 100% if they dump the charged batteries on the river.
Seriously, imagine this: you have something gas station-alike(power station?), you go there, park remove the used batteries of you car(a heavy pair of cylinders) give them to the guy in the station, he gives you a new pair, and you pay him. He has some 10 of these cylinders in a backroom, so when a user comes, he simply gives him one of these, and puts the used one on a recharging machine(he has a very big electrical conection, so it takes 5 min to fill it). This way, the batteries would only be charged and idle a a few hours, so they won't discharge.
I beg pardon? As i understand it, electrochemical processes take energy from differences of entalpy AND from differences of entropy, thus have a very high efficiency ratio(85% or more, iirc), gas or coal power plants and car motors only use the entalpy drop to take energy(the temperature drop), and thus have a very low efficiency. That's why some people are talking about fuel-cell motors. They work on gas, too, but they use it on a redos process that uses the entropy drop.
My point:
Electric cars are FAR more efficient than actual combustion cars. Their batteries are, too
While many power plants are only big combustion engines, they can also be made in an ecological way, and even the combustion ones are more efficient at it than ca motor car can possibly be
You didn't proof your affirmations(links, links). Ok i also haven't, but you can ask any chemistry student you have around and he'll confrim.
of course if you come up with some kind of proof, i'll believe you(no really, i'll move my lazy ass and search for a counter-proof)
The point on this is to use our capabilities in a 3d world to enhace how much information we can aprehend easily. In a 3d environment you can make things have sizes according to it's disk size, or whatever, and then you can easily compare two of these things. Simply showing you the numbers is not as intuitive as it could be. Btw i haven't used ie to read mail, but im pretty sure that you can't select a huge list of archives using wildcards, join them on a big file and attach them to a mail. Distances in a GUI can be used to represent logical distance or difficulty of acces(eg. a network resource would be very far if the network is slow/has lag), it's not about making the user do virtual footing; Putting something far away is enough to tell the user something about it(bad connection/whatever), but making the user walk all the way to it is completely unnecesary. YEah, most of these things are eye candy. Most of them help to increase the volume of comprehensible information to be fitted in a 17" screen. Most of it can be done tweaking the actual GUIs because i thought them to work in the actual infrastructure. No need of radical changes, only a 3d card THe sky thing is actually a description of an X background program i'm trying to do, based on lavatop(you can find lavatop in sourceforge), and is the perfect example of what i meant. THere you can have a good general vision of what's going on on your computer, you don't see the exact numbers, also you don't need it to have a "feel" of it(of course, there's an option to see exact numbers. I believe the GUI is there to help have contact with the underlying machine, not to obfuscate it). I do not mean that what i wrote is THE way to do it, it's only an example, but i tried to ilustrate that a 3D GUI can at least be as good as a 2D one, and from there, it can do things that the latter can't.
BTW, my damn keyboard makes me type caps by pairs...
I have to agree with you. In meatspace we try very hard to make distances shorter, by means of planes, faster cars, etc... then, we go to our computer and set a 3d gui were we have to take a walk all around if we want to do something. Also, there is no point in 3d if it simply serves to have things so far we can't see what they are. However, i think these problems could be overcome simply not using a realworld 3d methaphore. We can make traveling between 2 points instantaneous, and making no text, only showing a tooltip(or simmilar) when focusing attention into it. also, objects don't have to be static, we should be able to recall them in some way. An example of using it:
I want to go to the mailbox
Look around (clicking left mouse button i can make the world rotate "a la" quake) to locate network object(should be recognisable and visible from anywhere in the virtual world)
Click on it
have a.5 sec fly to it
click on mailbox object, it is attached to the surface of network object, or inside, if the network thing is transparent(the network object rotates automatically to face me, so i have easy access to it, and don't have to spin it)
the mail object detaches from network object and opens up(fast) showing up various transparent globes
I look for one globe that has a connection to the network object, and click on it
the link between network object and it blinks lightly to show its downloading. If you put the mouse over it, it shows what operations is performing(HELO, PWD, RETR bla...)
as it downoads, the globe starts getting filled with opaque balloons, each textured differently, according to the autor.
the balloons align in a 3d matrix that in one dimension shows date of arrival, in the other shows thread, and in the depth dimension shows priority, although using a key combination, you can make the top ones almost invisible, so you can easily see what's behind them
You click on the first one, and a plain window opens in a place where the gui has determined is the least quantity of data shown(that's no icons or relevant/close objects)
The window has a white semitransparent background and black letters, it lets you see trough it while it's still easy to read the text.
it's from a friend askin you to send him some files, so you press a key to instruct the mail object to follow you, then turn to the FS object, click on it, and have a fast fly to it
you park the mouse over it, and start typing bash-style the route to a directory; While you do it, in a transparent tooltip box appears what you're typing, and the tree opens gradually to show in what point are you. At some point, you try to acces a NFS directory stub, and when the GUI heuristics detect that you are trying to go further, it decides to mount it, so you see a small agent that jumps almost instantaneously to the network object, creating a red bright line linking the directory to some part of the network object. If you move the mouse over it, you can see again what operations are going on. when the NFS volume is mounted, the agent comes back and melds into the directory, but leaves the link(now blue, showing a established conection), and now the directory is full of files, so you continue typing until you reach the directory you want
using classical wildcards, you type what files you want, and they become selected. Now you have done all this looking trough the transparent mail program, that is closer to you. you click on the files and drag them forward(using the wheel in your mouse for the depth dimension) to a new mail you have created, but sudenly realize that it would be good to gather all the files into one before sending it, so without stopping the drag, you turn around to look for a far bubble, that contains all executable programs(actually, if you select one, it shows a link to the real executable file, in the FS object, and using a special program on it, you also see links to what files it does use when running
You don't feel like traveling there, so simply drag your bubble of selected files over it, when over it, type simply cat(these files are assumed to be text) and then drag again from there to a previously opened new mail, and drop it.
These are some 250MB spread on some 10,000 files(did i mention it was a BIG bubble?) so you stand back while you see the pipe lines blinking nicely, telling you that they are doing something.
You look at the sky, it has been showing seemingly random patterns of brightness all the time, and now it's showing a mildly bright, soft,high chaotic patterns all over it, moving around very fast, almost all of it has now a soft blue hue. That means some things:
The brightness shows the processors load, not so much
The chaotic patterns show the HD Load is very high. When it's low, the patterns get very geometrical
The sky movements shows memory is being used a lot, when no memory use, the sky is almost still
the blue hue is the color assigned to the user, it shows how much system resources is using the program. Slight variations of hue and saturation account for different programs of the same user.
The soft lines show that the given program does not have a high priority. time critical programs show very sharp edges
then, suddenly the link lines cut, and the cat program, who popped out of the executables object, pops in again, and the pipes dissapear.
You click on the selected files bubble, and press a key to dismiss it. It pops nicely
Then you look back to your mail document, it has a sphere close to it showing a gray link(passive)
when you move your mouse over the sphere, you see that it has no name. you name it "bigfile" When you finish, you click on a minimize button on the message, it involutes into a sphere.
You drag it to the network object, and the message splits in two, one to the network and the other to the sent mail sphere.
you minimize the mail program
you look into the file tree for another file, and you drag it to the executables object, in the tooltip box where you'd type the program, the GUI has detected that it is a C^*#@ source file, and it's already written the default program to open it(an IDE)
you work for some time on it, then, a bright light shines all over the objects
you promptly turn to face the source of the light, it is the mail program.
when you park the cursor over it, the light fades out, and appears a text box saying that the messages have been sent.
You close the program and go back to the coding thing
Well, i don't know why i typed this way too long nonsense...
What happens when Linus writes a kernel that runs natively on the VLIW Crusoe instruction set?
That would be VERY wrong, if you make a program go trough the code-morphing layer and run natively, you couldn't use the ability to swap chips seamlessly, and if the chip had some bug, the morph layer couldnt make a workaround. However, i'm expecting that transmeta releases, along the x86 translator software, some software that translates from a especially designed instruction set, that would be designed to be easy and fast to translate, a la Java bytecode, that way you would minimize the translating overhead(it may even be native VLIW instructions, and the morph layer would only check them for any important problem and pass them to the processor), while keeping the benefits from the morph layer. Extrapolating that, Transmeta could design interpreted bytecodes optimized for specific tasks, as multimedia, databases, or whatever. Of course, would the opensource the damn thing, you could have translators for everything you want, but in case of bugs in the chipset, getting a workaround would be a bit more difficult, if your particular translator wasn't supported by transmeta.
yeah, sure, but i can still type "rm/wi[tab]wi[tab]te[tab]*" faster than i can say "remove all the files in the root, windows, windows, temp directory" I think voice recognition can play a good role in improving the interface, but there are things that voice recognition alone has a hard time to do. Voice is very good for introducing secuential data, as in a text procesor, but when you need to give multidimensional data, it's worth nothing(try playing quake telling the computer "jump!, run! fire! turn left" no, not that much! now fire! lower your aim..." i think you can get the picture. I think that an interface composed by mouse/keyboard/voice would work best using the mouse when you give discrete inconnex orders, using the keyboard to do parallel input, and voice to feed long streams of connected data, eg: in word processing using voice to feed the text while with the mouse you give instructions on text placement, and using combinations of keyboard presses and mouse-clicks to set the layout of the page and fonts, font-styles, font colors, etc... this way you could format a page while you're talking it out without stop. Of course it would need a bit of training and concentration, more than playing Q3... but when you got used to it it would be simple(if someone had told me when i was with wolf3d that i would play a game of that kind with keyb and mouse at the same time...).
Where i live(Spain), there is something called "Carnet Jove"(Young card) that is issued to people between 14 and 27?(not sure of the latter), by various organizations, to have discounts at some places, and where i got mine, it also works as a VISA debit card...
A usual joke between my friends is that we don't use IRC because if we want to talk to brainless things, we already have eliza. In fact, i only use IRC when i have something to do there(Playing RPGs online, or having a meeting). I never used ICQ, but i'll have to, simply to see the apparent oxymoron of somebody(or something) whose intelectual capabilities compare unfavorably with the IRC average idiot.
Note: I'm not exactly making fun of you, this is pure astonishment about something i've never dreamed. Heck, even the typical slashdotter compares favorably with the typical IRCer!
I wonder, someone knows what is the practical resolution of an average human eye? If these things work, they are going to improve a lot, just think of the posibilities of discerning things, say, 50 times smaller of what you can actually see... you could spot bacteries!
Actually, in my games of CP2020, i made up a "spider" eyes implant that puts eyes around your head, and in your hands, with a computer that integrates the images and feeds them to your brain. Now you can see 360 and if you put your hands around something, you can see it from eveery side at the same time. It's even possible use with that nifty eyeball that you can leave somewhere... why go on surveillance patrol when you can see everything from bed!?
Well, now that's really offtopic, but i had a sudden urge...
Mmmhh you could ask for a subvention from the government.
Don't laugh, I'm serious, communism was killed by the bureaucracy (and by Stalin), now with computers and nets, and some brains, it could work.
Really! You Americans have a lot of fear/hate against your government(not unjustified, i have to say), and tend to think that all govs are evil by nature, but that's not always true(though in most cases...).
That's not true, the fact is that any human breeded plants(and animals, fungus, etc... for that case) are less succesful in a non human-controlled environment, sure you can make a plant that is resistant to some pesticide, and if you keep showering the crop in it, that plant will reign in there(although some bugs and wild plants are getting increasingly resistant to some pesticides, you know, nature is smart), but as soon you stop with the pesticide, and leave it to the fittest law, the wild crops will take over the engineered ones, because they won't have to keep with the overhead of being immunized against a pesticide that has disappeared from the local environment. That has happened with every domesticated species, when the qualities that humans like most of them are improved(size, taste, although it seems that the guys that make the last "innovation" hybrids have had some surgery to remove their tasting ability), that specie can no longer be succesful against his wild type counterparts. Genetic engineering only makes that worse, the plants with pesticide resistant genes will die VERY fast at the hands of the wild crops without pesticides(with all those pesticides, humans should be engineered too to be resistant to them). There have been cases on wild species introduced by man on another location, that caused inmense devastation to the ecosystem(i.e. rabbits in Australia), but those were because they had no natural predators, but the species that are being engineered are already widely spread around the world, and so are its predators(and the ecological price has already been paid, so nothing to worry:P ).
Now think on this: Some big company(Monsanto) starts selling that sterile weed, they are cheap, they are resistant, and with them, monsanto gets a lot of the market share, displacing it's competence. An asteroid hits the monsanto's production plant(well, think yourself on a more probable disgrace) Lots of people can't get weed to plant the next crop, there's a big famine in most of the world(3rd world, should I say, they always get all the hits), and that means LOTS of people die, revolutions(not that they are bad, but...), etc, more people die. Sure it is a fast solution to the demographic problems on earth.
You could think that's a far fetched issue, but I remember when IBM's manufacturing plant of RAM's,it was the world's principal source of RAM, and it got very difficult to get some of it, only 2nd hand RAM, and at very high prices. Of course, eventually they made another plant, or whatever, and RAM got back to normal prices, but while I can live without my computer(I swear I can, I'm not addicted, well...), I'm addicted to food(a very nasty drug, indeed, parents all around the world should be ashamed to hook their kids to such a drug when they are so small...), and I can NOT live without it, and I don't think I will find someone to sell me theirs for a lot of money so he can starve surrounded by it(well, at least I won't find many...).
Slashdot Mirror
Then why don't simply rip the tracks from the CD and compress them? that's much faster than downloading them(and if you have a T3 or something, it's still faster, because you can have a multi-cdrw-dvd-jukebox-60x-whatever cheaper than the cost of the T3).
I don't mean that napster doesn't have legal uses. When i'm told of a new CD or group, i usually download a song or two to see if the cd is worth it(which, due to murphy's law, end being the only one or two worthwhile songs of the CD, but i disgress...). Of course, if at some point it would be easier to me downloading all the cd rather than buying it, i wouldn't mind twice(let's see when i get DSL...), and nothing that the music industry does would stop that, so suing around would not help them, because if they close napster, a dozen similar sites will appear, and even if they don't there's still ftp irc etc... so if they really want to stop it, they would have to shut down the whole net, something out of their grasp(i hope). Instead, they should try to make the buying thing easier, and give it added value(maybe you buy mp3 on the net and get some merchandising?), so people will still prefer buying it than pirating it.
Music industry is wrong, because they see napster as the problem, but it's only it's symptoms, and if they don't change their busuness model, they will be left behind... ...life's a bitch, i almost feel sorry for them(not!)...
Hey! That's really funny! Long time since i had a laugh with something posted on /.
Of course, no laptops, no dsl, no car, and no assurance on getting food the next day...
But the best life, of course, is the life of the no-studying student. an average of 30 hours/year (it may go up a bit if you count all the talking and all the tricks you have to pull to keep yourself in that priviledged but fragile state :P )!
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. While it's true that Lincoln was born in a log cabin, that was in Ostia, and besides, he was abducted at the age of 12 by aliens, who implanted him a brain controller chip, and used him as a puppet to carry on the war.
And, the war was'nt against the sourthern states, that was only a diversion move while the real war was being fought in nepal, because the world's biggest mines of trollitium are there. About the naming, in light of the real facts, i think it would be best called "Mars attacks".
Last thing; With as few as 10 medium sized a-bombs, you could make all the West coast inhabitable, and that would be worse(from the economical point of wiew) than destroying it completely, because you would have to relocate millions of people
Your point is, is preferable to have a big hole in your country and a completely obliterated enemy, than having no holes at all in home??
There is no such thing as a "phisical gene", the genes only describe how to sintesize a given peptid, and usually changing the gene affects many things. You can change a gene and change skin color and give the subject some tendency to have short fingers, you can change another and make him process less efficiently fat acids, and you can change BOTH and have him grow a new nose in the armpit, and if you change a third one, that one would inhibit the former changes. Not to mention that many genes overlap between them, so you can't change one without changing the other.
Genome isn't a structured language, it has evolved from random changes, and thus it gives a whole new meaning to "spaghetti code".
The map doesn't describe a particular gene set, but rather it describes the locus(positions) of the different genes(there's a difference between the position, which is invariable on the same species, and the genes that occupy it, which can be many on any given species).
Note: Don't think that if i receive a "Cease and desist" letter from Him, i'm going to stop using my genes....
Simply move the cursor over the ball and a nice tooltip will give you the data... .5% ...
And talking about companies... i always see nifty bar graphs showing how big is the gap between the company and it's closest competition, but when i look the actual numbers(very small) i only see differences about
The user will be as dumb as the system lets him, but i believe that power users can benefit of 3D GUIs by having more information density on their screens, rather than having an "easier" GUI.
I know people that although know what is "ping", they don't know anything about why and how it works, they only know that the higher it is, the worse. For these people, it doesn't matter if you talk them about "ping" or "distance", they won't ever get a clue. As for the rest, if they know what's under it, no cute graphics will take that knowledge from their heads.
Well i think i haven't anything else to say(as if this thread was too short!) Have a nice day (that's you, piku, the only one who will read this :) )
I'm sure it even could reach 100% if they dump the charged batteries on the river.
Seriously, imagine this: you have something gas station-alike(power station?), you go there, park remove the used batteries of you car(a heavy pair of cylinders) give them to the guy in the station, he gives you a new pair, and you pay him.
He has some 10 of these cylinders in a backroom, so when a user comes, he simply gives him one of these, and puts the used one on a recharging machine(he has a very big electrical conection, so it takes 5 min to fill it). This way, the batteries would only be charged and idle a a few hours, so they won't discharge.
That's why some people are talking about fuel-cell motors. They work on gas, too, but they use it on a redos process that uses the entropy drop.
My point:
- Electric cars are FAR more efficient than actual combustion cars. Their batteries are, too
- While many power plants are only big combustion engines, they can also be made in an ecological way, and even the combustion ones are more efficient at it than ca motor car can possibly be
- You didn't proof your affirmations(links, links). Ok i also haven't, but you can ask any chemistry student you have around and he'll confrim.
- of course if you come up with some kind of proof, i'll believe you(no really, i'll move my lazy ass and search for a counter-proof)
HANDBtw i haven't used ie to read mail, but im pretty sure that you can't select a huge list of archives using wildcards, join them on a big file and attach them to a mail.
Distances in a GUI can be used to represent logical distance or difficulty of acces(eg. a network resource would be very far if the network is slow/has lag), it's not about making the user do virtual footing; Putting something far away is enough to tell the user something about it(bad connection/whatever), but making the user walk all the way to it is completely unnecesary.
YEah, most of these things are eye candy. Most of them help to increase the volume of comprehensible information to be fitted in a 17" screen. Most of it can be done tweaking the actual GUIs because i thought them to work in the actual infrastructure. No need of radical changes, only a 3d card
THe sky thing is actually a description of an X background program i'm trying to do, based on lavatop(you can find lavatop in sourceforge), and is the perfect example of what i meant. THere you can have a good general vision of what's going on on your computer, you don't see the exact numbers, also you don't need it to have a "feel" of it(of course, there's an option to see exact numbers. I believe the GUI is there to help have contact with the underlying machine, not to obfuscate it).
I do not mean that what i wrote is THE way to do it, it's only an example, but i tried to ilustrate that a 3D GUI can at least be as good as a 2D one, and from there, it can do things that the latter can't.
BTW, my damn keyboard makes me type caps by pairs...
However, i think these problems could be overcome simply not using a realworld 3d methaphore. We can make traveling between 2 points instantaneous, and making no text, only showing a tooltip(or simmilar) when focusing attention into it. also, objects don't have to be static, we should be able to recall them in some way.
An example of using it:
Well, i don't know why i typed this way too long nonsense...
That would be VERY wrong, if you make a program go trough the code-morphing layer and run natively, you couldn't use the ability to swap chips seamlessly, and if the chip had some bug, the morph layer couldnt make a workaround.
However, i'm expecting that transmeta releases, along the x86 translator software, some software that translates from a especially designed instruction set, that would be designed to be easy and fast to translate, a la Java bytecode, that way you would minimize the translating overhead(it may even be native VLIW instructions, and the morph layer would only check them for any important problem and pass them to the processor), while keeping the benefits from the morph layer. Extrapolating that, Transmeta could design interpreted bytecodes optimized for specific tasks, as multimedia, databases, or whatever. Of course, would the opensource the damn thing, you could have translators for everything you want, but in case of bugs in the chipset, getting a workaround would be a bit more difficult, if your particular translator wasn't supported by transmeta.
Thanks for the(very good) link!
yeah, sure, but i can still type "rm /wi[tab]wi[tab]te[tab]*" faster than i can say "remove all the files in the root, windows, windows, temp directory"
.02 of visionary crap. :)
I think voice recognition can play a good role in improving the interface, but there are things that voice recognition alone has a hard time to do. Voice is very good for introducing secuential data, as in a text procesor, but when you need to give multidimensional data, it's worth nothing(try playing quake telling the computer "jump!, run! fire! turn left" no, not that much! now fire! lower your aim..." i think you can get the picture.
I think that an interface composed by mouse/keyboard/voice would work best using the mouse when you give discrete inconnex orders, using the keyboard to do parallel input, and voice to feed long streams of connected data, eg: in word processing using voice to feed the text while with the mouse you give instructions on text placement, and using combinations of keyboard presses and mouse-clicks to set the layout of the page and fonts, font-styles, font colors, etc... this way you could format a page while you're talking it out without stop. Of course it would need a bit of training and concentration, more than playing Q3... but when you got used to it it would be simple(if someone had told me when i was with wolf3d that i would play a game of that kind with keyb and mouse at the same time...).
Well that's my
Herpetologists?
Where i live(Spain), there is something called "Carnet Jove"(Young card) that is issued to people between 14 and 27?(not sure of the latter), by various organizations, to have discounts at some places, and where i got mine, it also works as a VISA debit card...
Wow.
A usual joke between my friends is that we don't use IRC because if we want to talk to brainless things, we already have eliza. In fact, i only use IRC when i have something to do there(Playing RPGs online, or having a meeting). I never used ICQ, but i'll have to, simply to see the apparent oxymoron of somebody(or something) whose intelectual capabilities compare unfavorably with the IRC average idiot.
Note: I'm not exactly making fun of you, this is pure astonishment about something i've never dreamed. Heck, even the typical slashdotter compares favorably with the typical IRCer!
I wonder, someone knows what is the practical resolution of an average human eye?
If these things work, they are going to improve a lot, just think of the posibilities of discerning things, say, 50 times smaller of what you can actually see... you could spot bacteries!
But you can use an X-ray gun as a lamp, and then you could have fun looking at transparent people and the like...
Actually, in my games of CP2020, i made up a "spider" eyes implant that puts eyes around your head, and in your hands, with a computer that integrates the images and feeds them to your brain. Now you can see 360 and if you put your hands around something, you can see it from eveery side at the same time.
It's even possible use with that nifty eyeball that you can leave somewhere... why go on surveillance patrol when you can see everything from bed!?
Well, now that's really offtopic, but i had a sudden urge...
Mmmhh you could ask for a subvention from the government.
Don't laugh, I'm serious, communism was killed by the bureaucracy (and by Stalin), now with computers and nets, and some brains, it could work.
Really! You Americans have a lot of fear/hate against your government(not unjustified, i have to say), and tend to think that all govs are evil by nature, but that's not always true(though in most cases...).
That's not true, the fact is that any human breeded plants(and animals, fungus, etc... for that case) are less succesful in a non human-controlled environment, sure you can make a plant that is resistant to some pesticide, and if you keep showering the crop in it, that plant will reign in there(although some bugs and wild plants are getting increasingly resistant to some pesticides, you know, nature is smart), but as soon you stop with the pesticide, and leave it to the fittest law, the wild crops will take over the engineered ones, because they won't have to keep with the overhead of being immunized against a pesticide that has disappeared from the local environment. :P ).
That has happened with every domesticated species, when the qualities that humans like most of them are improved(size, taste, although it seems that the guys that make the last "innovation" hybrids have had some surgery to remove their tasting ability), that specie can no longer be succesful against his wild type counterparts. Genetic engineering only makes that worse, the plants with pesticide resistant genes will die VERY fast at the hands of the wild crops without pesticides(with all those pesticides, humans should be engineered too to be resistant to them). There have been cases on wild species introduced by man on another location, that caused inmense devastation to the ecosystem(i.e. rabbits in Australia), but those were because they had no natural predators, but the species that are being engineered are already widely spread around the world, and so are its predators(and the ecological price has already been paid, so nothing to worry
Now think on this:
Some big company(Monsanto) starts selling that sterile weed, they are cheap, they are resistant, and with them, monsanto gets a lot of the market share, displacing it's competence.
An asteroid hits the monsanto's production plant(well, think yourself on a more probable disgrace)
Lots of people can't get weed to plant the next crop, there's a big famine in most of the world(3rd world, should I say, they always get all the hits), and that means LOTS of people die, revolutions(not that they are bad, but...), etc, more people die. Sure it is a fast solution to the demographic problems on earth.
You could think that's a far fetched issue, but I remember when IBM's manufacturing plant of RAM's,it was the world's principal source of RAM, and it got very difficult to get some of it, only 2nd hand RAM, and at very high prices.
Of course, eventually they made another plant, or whatever, and RAM got back to normal prices, but while I can live without my computer(I swear I can, I'm not addicted, well...), I'm addicted to food(a very nasty drug, indeed, parents all around the world should be ashamed to hook their kids to such a drug when they are so small...), and I can NOT live without it, and I don't think I will find someone to sell me theirs for a lot of money so he can starve surrounded by it(well, at least I won't find many...).
I hope I have exposed my point clearly.