Re:I'd only point out that. . .
on
Tai Chi Robots
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Have you even seen a two-legged robot try to move? All the ones I've seen have fallen, and they can't get up. Makes sense to teach them something old people do to improve their balance...
Your navigation is actually a tree (or a graph if you consider a page to be the same regardless of where you get there from). The conventional "Back" button goes up the tree, which is the simplest operation for going toward the root, and quite useful.
The real problem is that the conventional Back and Forward buttons, between them, don't let you traverse the entire tree, but only the right edge. There needs to be some way of getting to the other pages (for example, I'd like to take another look at the article; I can't navigate there in my history, even though it was on my screen two documents ago, nor can I get there from here without either starting from my bookmarks or losing my comment). They use a button which essentially is an "Undo" for following links.
Their results follow from the ability to access your entire history rather than only the right edge, along with using an operation that is frequently the same as the usual design (if you follow a chain of links down, and then go all the way up); this suggests that an approach which retains the regular Back button and adds an "Undo follow" button to go to the document you were on before. Since Forward is relatively rarely used, it could reverse both of these operations, depending on which you did (i.e., undo history navigation).
No, no, the appliances talk to the computers, not to each other. If I'm on the 3rd floor and my laundry is in the basement, it would be really nice if I could check whether the washer is done yet without walking down three flights of stairs. And it could email me when the dryer is finished, because I always forget about it.
For that matter, it would be nice to be able to take out my Treo at the grocery store and find out how much space is left in the freezer.
You just need to find people who are coding wizards, like the general idea, and don't have particular ideas about the artistic aspects of the result. Nobody ever does the hard parts of any open source project; they do the parts that are relatively easy for them, which may seem to others like the hard parts.
The problem you're probably having is that the people you're looking for are already working on their own game (or game engine). You might have more success looking for an engine that already does enough of what you want that you can tweak it a bit and have something up and running to get people interested.
The "independent game developer" is less and less a programmer, and more and more an artist (author, modeller, composer, etc.), because of exactly what you said: the engine is a great technical feat, but it's the content that makes a great game these days. On the other hand, there are increasingly good tools available to the lone artist, which allows non-programmer artists to get involved in their spare time.
It's much like how computer art started with programmers writing programs that produced single pictures, but then programs like Photoshop got written, and now people who don't know how to write an image file, let alone generate the pictures they want with code, can do computer art.
Of course, on the other side, there are always abstract games like Tetris or (to a certain extent) The Sims, where there is a lot of programming and only a little art.
Independent game developers do well whenever there are few enough hard parts to writing a game that a single person (or a few people) can have all of the necessary skills. Originally, the necessary skills were different, and then there were too many skills needed, but now the necessary skill set is shrinking to the content producers.
Every comparison I've seen lately seems to say that Windows doesn't support a lot of hardware, and it's slow and error-prone getting drivers. Linux distros come with the drivers as modules; it seems to just work.
In the future, I think it will work the other way; you'll recompile your kernel pretty frequently. However, it will be done in a few seconds and entirely automated by the distro's system management program. If you decide you want a new device, you turn it on, which changes your kernel configuration (configuring the kernel is now done with a library that can be linked to by the distro's program) and builds and installs the module. No binary compatibility problems, and it takes a few seconds. For that matter, if you hotplug a USB device that you haven't built support for,/sbin/hotplug could build it.
Customers only *intend* to pay them to make pretty websites. They *actually* pay them to make ugly and unusable websites. How can you tell? These customers are requiring their designers to do things which actual market research by actual professional market researchers says looks bad for actual people and annoys them.
Perhaps there are websites that should have everything twice as big on a monitor with half the DPI. But for almost all websites, this is a major flaw.
That picture makes me want to use the image from the Cosmic Background Imager as my background. Hey, if I run Linux on my microwave, I could have a Cosmic Microwave Background microwave background.
Strafing around corners isn't actually that bad an idea, so you can see if someone is going to run into you. The time to worry is when you run diagonally and never jump, step up more than 6 inches, or try to move objects.
That seems to be a common analogy for pipelining, and is actually quite useful, since it extends to cases where you have two washers and a big dryer, or one washer and two slow dryers, or you're in a dorm and have a dozen of each, but you have to run the dryers several times each to get stuff dry (and then you go to work at Intel).
Am I the only person who therefore uses the word "clock" for what you do when a step has finished?
You mean like one of those rides that spins you around really fast in an enclosed space so that you're pressed against the wall with several G so that it feels like you're lying on your back rather than standing? If they adjust your spin and angle to get the desired forces, you won't be able to tell by forces that your position and velocity are totally different; with fans you can't tell that you're not moving right relative to the air, and video is relatively easy.
What would actually be really cool is if they had a ball on an elastic hanging between the seats so you could see what forces the people were under.
Buffer overflows are pretty easy to avoid, if you care. Many of the brightest programmers care more about other things, however. It's a bit easier to write code which could overflow than code which can't, and writing readable code which can't overflow requires a bit of non-standard library support.
Furthermore, fundamental parts of the OS design make any bug security critical, which means that what would be a minor flaw on other OSes (browser crashes, have to restart it) are major security holes on Windows. This reflects a bit of bad planning a long time ago (and the fact that the design started out on systems which were not affected by anything but physical access) and an unwillingness to change fundamental user-visible design.
That's why you want a wireless dongle. The user wears the device or has it in their pocket all the time. Most users aren't in the habit of leaving their wallet and keys by the sticky note, and they don't do that with their non-security-related watches. Of course, the wireless device has to be active, because passive ones are trivial to clone, which is why this is a watch and not a card.
I personally think that most people play GTA for the fast cars and reckless driving, not the violence. Sure, the story involves a lot of violence, but the really fun missions are the ones where you have to do something complicated in some vehicle with people trying to mess with you. The violence is there for marketting and because it's more fun when crashing into things causes damage. Unlike most games, it actually makes it fun to get from place to place.
Re:solution for one of the problems..
on
The New IT Crisis
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· Score: 2
It's not necessary to go entirely to thin clients. The right design is to move to the central server everything that needs to be changed by IT, as well as storage that people care about. The clients can still benefit from, for instance, running the applications locally.
The trend has been to increase the processor power of desktop machines and the features of the programs that run there. The common secretary needs a full-powered PC because her word processor is redoing the layout of her document every time she presses a key. It's the servers these days that don't need to be big machines, because they're doing essentially the same amount of work that they've been doing for years. Furthermore, swapping out a modern PC isn't any harder than swapping out a thin client, and PCs don't break that often either.
On the other hand, having the software, the data, and the default configuration managed centrally makes a lot of sense, and means that people can work at other desks, if desired.
It would be good, though, if they'd release as much of the source as they could. Particularly if they could make it so all of their memory access is visible. Just have some comments that say, "secret algorithm here", with documentation on what the effects of that section are. Since the bulk of the code is almost certainly not other people's IP, people would be able to debug many more problems than they can now. I suspect "OpenGL stops initializing properly" isn't part of a trade secret algorithm.
It is not illegal to *use* your eBook reader to make fair use of a work. If you do so, however, you must *have* an eBook reader, and making or selling one *is* illegal, even if you don't do anything at all with it.
Similarly, it is illegal (in some places, without a license) to own lockpicks, although it is not illegal to use them to pick your own locks. The fact that they're your own locks, however, doesn't change the fact that you have lockpicks and know how to use them.
Did you know that most people who might be prosecuted under the DMCA do not have the legal education necessary to properly understand it, and therefore either have to go to law school or read interpretations by actual lawyers?
Did you know that 1201(a)(2) doesn't use the word "sole" or any similar one, instead using "primarily" and "limited other"? Did you know that 1201(a)(1)(B) doesn't talk at all about fair use, but essentially lets the LoC exempt classes of works from the protections? (My explanation above is based on 1201(c)(1), which states that making fair use of a work is unaffected by this section)
Sure, if you're doing something simple. If you're, say, trying to recognize people's names which you haven't trained the system on, it'll rarely be right. It's never going to do better at matching spoken names and spelled names than a telemarketer. And having 8% of your phone calls going to the wrong person from your list would get tiresome anyway.
For that matter, geeks frequently don't need much computing power on all of their machines. There are a lot of applications (firewall, mail/web/name server, music machine, etc.) for which you would like an extra machine that doesn't need much power. And some geeks don't have enough extra computers lying around to use.
Actually, it will be quickly subverted on a per-identity basis, so your family, friends, and co-workers will be able to instantly see where you want them to think you are. Most people will get text messages as soon as they're willing to get messages, but be able to pretend that they didn't get them for hours if desired.
Re:Washing machine, quit making long distance call
on
5 Predictions for 2012
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· Score: 2
Actually, your washing machine will negotiate will your day planner when the guy can come out to fix it. Then you'll renegotiate around all the things you don't want your day planner to know about. The your washing machine will email Sears, and the guy still won't show up that day.
Complete speech recognition will be killed in user testing, where it will turn out that people do much better with a shorthand than with complete sentences. You'll probably press a button to get it to listen to you, because buttons are much more accurate. You'll probably say "map", have it repeat it back (so you know it's understood which system you want to use), and then say "nearest gas station", and it will give directions.
Speech recognition will be used in combination with a couple of buttons, because it will never get better than 87% accuracy on novel requests, so you'll press a button to start, speak, listen to what it now intends to do, and press a button to have it do it. 5% of the time, you'll just dial the phone yourself.
The networks ideally want time allotted to shows in proportion to the size of the demographics; that optimizes for viewers. The problem is that they seem to buy but not keep shows this way. So, for a minority demographic, they'll buy a show, cancel it (because only a minority watches it), find they don't have a show for that demographic, and buy a new one.
The problem, of course, is that this is the minority of people who like to follow long complicated plot arcs, and the networks give them the first year of a new show every year.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you even seen a two-legged robot try to move? All the ones I've seen have fallen, and they can't get up. Makes sense to teach them something old people do to improve their balance...
Your navigation is actually a tree (or a graph if you consider a page to be the same regardless of where you get there from). The conventional "Back" button goes up the tree, which is the simplest operation for going toward the root, and quite useful.
The real problem is that the conventional Back and Forward buttons, between them, don't let you traverse the entire tree, but only the right edge. There needs to be some way of getting to the other pages (for example, I'd like to take another look at the article; I can't navigate there in my history, even though it was on my screen two documents ago, nor can I get there from here without either starting from my bookmarks or losing my comment). They use a button which essentially is an "Undo" for following links.
Their results follow from the ability to access your entire history rather than only the right edge, along with using an operation that is frequently the same as the usual design (if you follow a chain of links down, and then go all the way up); this suggests that an approach which retains the regular Back button and adds an "Undo follow" button to go to the document you were on before. Since Forward is relatively rarely used, it could reverse both of these operations, depending on which you did (i.e., undo history navigation).
No, no, the appliances talk to the computers, not to each other. If I'm on the 3rd floor and my laundry is in the basement, it would be really nice if I could check whether the washer is done yet without walking down three flights of stairs. And it could email me when the dryer is finished, because I always forget about it.
For that matter, it would be nice to be able to take out my Treo at the grocery store and find out how much space is left in the freezer.
You just need to find people who are coding wizards, like the general idea, and don't have particular ideas about the artistic aspects of the result. Nobody ever does the hard parts of any open source project; they do the parts that are relatively easy for them, which may seem to others like the hard parts.
The problem you're probably having is that the people you're looking for are already working on their own game (or game engine). You might have more success looking for an engine that already does enough of what you want that you can tweak it a bit and have something up and running to get people interested.
The "independent game developer" is less and less a programmer, and more and more an artist (author, modeller, composer, etc.), because of exactly what you said: the engine is a great technical feat, but it's the content that makes a great game these days. On the other hand, there are increasingly good tools available to the lone artist, which allows non-programmer artists to get involved in their spare time.
It's much like how computer art started with programmers writing programs that produced single pictures, but then programs like Photoshop got written, and now people who don't know how to write an image file, let alone generate the pictures they want with code, can do computer art.
Of course, on the other side, there are always abstract games like Tetris or (to a certain extent) The Sims, where there is a lot of programming and only a little art.
Independent game developers do well whenever there are few enough hard parts to writing a game that a single person (or a few people) can have all of the necessary skills. Originally, the necessary skills were different, and then there were too many skills needed, but now the necessary skill set is shrinking to the content producers.
Every comparison I've seen lately seems to say that Windows doesn't support a lot of hardware, and it's slow and error-prone getting drivers. Linux distros come with the drivers as modules; it seems to just work.
/sbin/hotplug could build it.
In the future, I think it will work the other way; you'll recompile your kernel pretty frequently. However, it will be done in a few seconds and entirely automated by the distro's system management program. If you decide you want a new device, you turn it on, which changes your kernel configuration (configuring the kernel is now done with a library that can be linked to by the distro's program) and builds and installs the module. No binary compatibility problems, and it takes a few seconds. For that matter, if you hotplug a USB device that you haven't built support for,
Customers only *intend* to pay them to make pretty websites. They *actually* pay them to make ugly and unusable websites. How can you tell? These customers are requiring their designers to do things which actual market research by actual professional market researchers says looks bad for actual people and annoys them.
Perhaps there are websites that should have everything twice as big on a monitor with half the DPI. But for almost all websites, this is a major flaw.
That picture makes me want to use the image from the Cosmic Background Imager as my background. Hey, if I run Linux on my microwave, I could have a Cosmic Microwave Background microwave background.
Strafing around corners isn't actually that bad an idea, so you can see if someone is going to run into you. The time to worry is when you run diagonally and never jump, step up more than 6 inches, or try to move objects.
That seems to be a common analogy for pipelining, and is actually quite useful, since it extends to cases where you have two washers and a big dryer, or one washer and two slow dryers, or you're in a dorm and have a dozen of each, but you have to run the dryers several times each to get stuff dry (and then you go to work at Intel).
Am I the only person who therefore uses the word "clock" for what you do when a step has finished?
You mean like one of those rides that spins you around really fast in an enclosed space so that you're pressed against the wall with several G so that it feels like you're lying on your back rather than standing? If they adjust your spin and angle to get the desired forces, you won't be able to tell by forces that your position and velocity are totally different; with fans you can't tell that you're not moving right relative to the air, and video is relatively easy.
What would actually be really cool is if they had a ball on an elastic hanging between the seats so you could see what forces the people were under.
Buffer overflows are pretty easy to avoid, if you care. Many of the brightest programmers care more about other things, however. It's a bit easier to write code which could overflow than code which can't, and writing readable code which can't overflow requires a bit of non-standard library support.
Furthermore, fundamental parts of the OS design make any bug security critical, which means that what would be a minor flaw on other OSes (browser crashes, have to restart it) are major security holes on Windows. This reflects a bit of bad planning a long time ago (and the fact that the design started out on systems which were not affected by anything but physical access) and an unwillingness to change fundamental user-visible design.
That's why you want a wireless dongle. The user wears the device or has it in their pocket all the time. Most users aren't in the habit of leaving their wallet and keys by the sticky note, and they don't do that with their non-security-related watches. Of course, the wireless device has to be active, because passive ones are trivial to clone, which is why this is a watch and not a card.
I personally think that most people play GTA for the fast cars and reckless driving, not the violence. Sure, the story involves a lot of violence, but the really fun missions are the ones where you have to do something complicated in some vehicle with people trying to mess with you. The violence is there for marketting and because it's more fun when crashing into things causes damage. Unlike most games, it actually makes it fun to get from place to place.
It's not necessary to go entirely to thin clients. The right design is to move to the central server everything that needs to be changed by IT, as well as storage that people care about. The clients can still benefit from, for instance, running the applications locally.
The trend has been to increase the processor power of desktop machines and the features of the programs that run there. The common secretary needs a full-powered PC because her word processor is redoing the layout of her document every time she presses a key. It's the servers these days that don't need to be big machines, because they're doing essentially the same amount of work that they've been doing for years. Furthermore, swapping out a modern PC isn't any harder than swapping out a thin client, and PCs don't break that often either.
On the other hand, having the software, the data, and the default configuration managed centrally makes a lot of sense, and means that people can work at other desks, if desired.
It would be good, though, if they'd release as much of the source as they could. Particularly if they could make it so all of their memory access is visible. Just have some comments that say, "secret algorithm here", with documentation on what the effects of that section are. Since the bulk of the code is almost certainly not other people's IP, people would be able to debug many more problems than they can now. I suspect "OpenGL stops initializing properly" isn't part of a trade secret algorithm.
It is not illegal to *use* your eBook reader to make fair use of a work. If you do so, however, you must *have* an eBook reader, and making or selling one *is* illegal, even if you don't do anything at all with it.
Similarly, it is illegal (in some places, without a license) to own lockpicks, although it is not illegal to use them to pick your own locks. The fact that they're your own locks, however, doesn't change the fact that you have lockpicks and know how to use them.
Did you know that most people who might be prosecuted under the DMCA do not have the legal education necessary to properly understand it, and therefore either have to go to law school or read interpretations by actual lawyers?
Did you know that 1201(a)(2) doesn't use the word "sole" or any similar one, instead using "primarily" and "limited other"? Did you know that 1201(a)(1)(B) doesn't talk at all about fair use, but essentially lets the LoC exempt classes of works from the protections? (My explanation above is based on 1201(c)(1), which states that making fair use of a work is unaffected by this section)
If md5sum doesn't work when you disable the network, be very very suspicious...
Sure, if you're doing something simple. If you're, say, trying to recognize people's names which you haven't trained the system on, it'll rarely be right. It's never going to do better at matching spoken names and spelled names than a telemarketer. And having 8% of your phone calls going to the wrong person from your list would get tiresome anyway.
For that matter, geeks frequently don't need much computing power on all of their machines. There are a lot of applications (firewall, mail/web/name server, music machine, etc.) for which you would like an extra machine that doesn't need much power. And some geeks don't have enough extra computers lying around to use.
Ideally, all software should be written in iambic pentameter, to permit code reuse. (#include "dawn.h")
Actually, it will be quickly subverted on a per-identity basis, so your family, friends, and co-workers will be able to instantly see where you want them to think you are. Most people will get text messages as soon as they're willing to get messages, but be able to pretend that they didn't get them for hours if desired.
Actually, your washing machine will negotiate will your day planner when the guy can come out to fix it. Then you'll renegotiate around all the things you don't want your day planner to know about. The your washing machine will email Sears, and the guy still won't show up that day.
Complete speech recognition will be killed in user testing, where it will turn out that people do much better with a shorthand than with complete sentences. You'll probably press a button to get it to listen to you, because buttons are much more accurate. You'll probably say "map", have it repeat it back (so you know it's understood which system you want to use), and then say "nearest gas station", and it will give directions.
Speech recognition will be used in combination with a couple of buttons, because it will never get better than 87% accuracy on novel requests, so you'll press a button to start, speak, listen to what it now intends to do, and press a button to have it do it. 5% of the time, you'll just dial the phone yourself.
The networks ideally want time allotted to shows in proportion to the size of the demographics; that optimizes for viewers. The problem is that they seem to buy but not keep shows this way. So, for a minority demographic, they'll buy a show, cancel it (because only a minority watches it), find they don't have a show for that demographic, and buy a new one.
The problem, of course, is that this is the minority of people who like to follow long complicated plot arcs, and the networks give them the first year of a new show every year.