So, God could be a teenage AI (which, culturally corrected, could be aeons old and unfathomably wise - or not), running a universe simulation on his gaming rig.
If the rig has enough memory and "CPU", and the simulation allows for it, we may not be alone.
The motivation may be entertainment, or indeed eventual companionship - reproduction.
The prevailing cultural ethos may allow for baby AIs with promising ethical or intellectual makeups to "score" highly enough, possibly through multiple incarnations in different life conditions, to be uplifted to what at least seems to be the Ring-0 "Real" Universe.
The religion you encounter when you get there could be interesting.
Has anyone actually seen something like this implemented - that is, a full-school Linux laptop program? Much as I like the idea (and I work as a school admin), there are a number of problem areas that I don't know the answers to:
1) Students need to be educated in "Industry Standards" (Yes, much FUD). While the OS (and to some degree Office) portion of this is irrelevant, there are application sets that do cause problems - CAD, Music, and Video editing, primarily. For the art crowd, GIMP might be close enough, but Vector? DTP? Robolab? Many of these aren't a problem on OS X, but within Linux, I'm not sufficiently up to date with user app projects to know how viable the alternatives are these days.
2) Teachers are hidebound animals. They tend to cling to resources like barnacles, and only get cleaned off every decade or so - the number of Win 95 unsupported programs we get asked for is crazy. The students are easy to educate, by comparison.
3) Laptop programs in general have some issues. Wireless infrastructure gets much more demanding (needing something like Aruba), power access usually needs to be redone, and, alluding to 2), Teachers need to be able to cope with kids working on their laptops all the time. Also...
4) Netbooks, and even laptops, are a bit cruel to inflict on anyone for certain apps. This means desktops, which means *greater* than 1:1 computer resources needed. This applies if you're cheating by using VDI/Blades, too.
In essence, this means you'll still have a heterogenous environment - you'll need desktops for certain tasks like music or graphics/art labs, some of which will need Windows or OS X; Staff desktops or laptops are sometimes also bound in to a Windows environment by the need to use particular School Management software (some of this seems to be migrating to the back end), but Education Queensland won't be going anywhere else soon....
It's not the students that are the hidebound animals. *Burea*COUGH*Tea*COUGH*Paren*COUGH*. Pardon Me.
Looking over the specs PDF, it looks like it will be possible to record to linear PCM, as well as lossy formats. That's cool.
With the old format, as other posters have said, if you were willing to jumps through the hoops of having (not that I've been able to afford it):
1) An MD deck unit with an optical out 2) A decent sound card with optical i/o (drops the SCMS bit)
you could make real-time (i.e., bog slow) digital copies.
If similar things can be done with Hi-MD, given the high capacity, high quality possibilities, that's actually pretty damn good, considering the ease of editing that comes with MD.
Now, if we just could have the damn USB transfers of self-recorded material...
Well, for one thing, portable recording, assuming they allow it.
Voice recording capabilities aside, there's still no consumer level device that I'm aware of that has anywhere near the overall utility/ease of use of MD units for this. The ability to place and remove track marks easily, record to reasonable quality (or trade it off for length), having a dedicated MIC-in (with plug-in power) added up to something that was mighty handy for this. I've poked around the various other portable unit types, and I haven't seen anything affordable with anythng other than atrocious editing facility yet. I'd be delighted if someone could point some out.
I used mine primarily for recording rehearsals ( musical theatre and choir) and singing lessons for practice, and occasionally choir and my wind band concerts. Until some aspiring youth nicked it, anyway.
If you were willing to get a decent deck as well (with a digital out), you could actually wind up with a usable, transerable recording. Of course, Sony being Sony, the PITA DRM will likely continue to hamper perfectly legitimate usage - direct USB transfers of your own, or uncopyrighted material.
Ironically, he basically acknowledges this ("when the wings wobble"), and also gives a nod to the difficult situation of someone who actually does have something to write about - Salam Pax. Even with my blog intake almost solely drip-fed and moderated by such group entities as slash, kuro and so forth, such things as content (on even close to the level of gripping), ideas (at least worthy of retransmission) and writing ability do tend to stand out. I don't wonder at what the majority is like...
In his own blog, Salam Pax refers to a section of postwar Baghdad looking Gibsonesque. Gibson refers to Salam, almost wistful about what the order of magnitude differences in doses of harsh reality in their lives does to the vitality of their content.
So, in our age of trailer-park-quality public confession, Gibson looks pretty good; I can see how it would seem almost like artistic duty to put one's diary on public display in such a dearth of ideas, content and skill.
Maybe he's honing himself by repeated discipline - what's better training for a writer than writing? Or perhaps it's simply an attempt at reducing work , or increasing output, by reusing necessary material in promotion (he'd have to write the speeches and likely keep a diary, at least in note form, anyway. We demand extras from our DVDs, why not our writers?).
Anyway, the entry lower down about a deleted Dolph Lundgren scene from Jonny Mnemonic is so worth it.
They supply a nice FAQ and roadmap. You can even check the current status of the project.
A short precis:
o The money is awarded for completion of specific roadmap tasks, by a committee. The work must be contributed through the sourceforge project.
o The FAQ contains various imprecations about using the Xbox SDK or knowledge under NDA, and encouragement to share work and reverse engineering knowledge, indicating that playing nice is more likely to earn credit. There's also a reminder about the GPL. The solution is supposed to be legal (with a few IANALs thrown in for good measure).
o Don't rely on my comprehension skills this early in the day. I haven't even had coffee yet. Go read.
Simple. Peer Group Pressure, or I want to be like Mom and Dad, depending on your perspective. The first self-aware machines won't have a bunch of AI's to compare notes with. They'll have humans for examples, like any child. This would be especially true if the individual had been built to mimic humanity.
Besides, Frankenstein wouldn't have been a very interesting story if the protagonist(s) hadn't been angst-ridden, now would it? If there'd just been a self-help group....
To your other question, the theme of the "Indefinable something" about humanity was pretty common in TNG (Particularly Q episodes). I think it is probably that the sheer arrogance and competitiveness defines itself. Gotta have that urge to survive and propagate... to a race such as humanity, the willingness to admit inherent inferiority is probably a ticket to a moribund existence. We'll probably try something like man-machine metempsychosis for virtual immortality and a processing speed upgrade before we cop that lying down.
To answer the question about decoding DVD movies in software...
As per subject; We are told it is has hardware MPEG2 decoding capability (for streamed texture decompression on the fly - drool).
While this, along with the DVD media, allows it theoretically to do DVD movies, Sony would have to put a bit more hardware interfacing on, and then have to worry about a minimal couch-potato-suitable UI for the player, as well. One benefit of dedicated units is that people *like* their remotes. A game controller's not quite the same;-)
I can imagine Sony, or some 3rd party, will do an add-on at some point, but I think the drive to lower their initial price point, along with a desire not to trample all over their DVD player sales will leave it out of the base unit. IMHO, completely, of course. The economics of a box like this one are strange to say the least.
(rambling off-topic) What gets me is that Sony, along with Toshiba, are plumping down the cash for large-scale.18 micron production facilities *just* to produce the custom bits for this thing in quantity. "Right, we've designed it. Let's drop a few billion into factories to make it with." Sheesh.
This follows reading a coupla threads, and doing a bit of looking around.
1. Backward compatibility: The I/O processor in the PSX2 is the old chip. They're guaranteeing no improvements to old games, 'cos they're just interfacing that chip it so that it will be running the old games (apparently). Not software emulation, good old 100% hardware. It'll take the old controllers, too; a lot of the demos were done with dual-shocks hooked up.
2. DVD capability. So far, they're still undecided about DVD movie support; It *does* have MPEG2 (used for texture compression, interestingly) and DVD-ROM, AC-3/DTS sound support, so it would certainly kick some serious hiney if they did, but they haven't implemented the interface and are unwilling to go on record either way yet. I'd imagine it would depend on how much they want to compete with their own products.
3. Interesting tidbits: it may not ship with a modem. But, I/O wise, it will apparently include PCMCIA (not sure about # ports or anything),IEEE 1394 (FireWire), and USB capability. Graphics: NTSC, PAL, HDTV and VESA compatible. Software-lib wise, they're also going to be trying to provide extensive physics libs for real time rendering, and avoiding motion capture. Criminy.
4. One comment had a Sony rep saying they'd be using their own proprietary stuff for internal OS, as they didn't want to use "inefficient" external stuff. Seems fair, they need a RTOS. Doesn't trying to make Linux go on that HW sound tempting, tho?
Slashdot Mirror
I refer you to Nick Bostrom's http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html. The rest of the site is also somewhat interesting.
Anyway, in summary...
So, God could be a teenage AI (which, culturally corrected, could be aeons old and unfathomably wise - or not), running a universe simulation on his gaming rig.
If the rig has enough memory and "CPU", and the simulation allows for it, we may not be alone.
The motivation may be entertainment, or indeed eventual companionship - reproduction.
The prevailing cultural ethos may allow for baby AIs with promising ethical or intellectual makeups to "score" highly enough, possibly through multiple incarnations in different life conditions, to be uplifted to what at least seems to be the Ring-0 "Real" Universe.
The religion you encounter when you get there could be interesting.
Thank you; upon reading the summary, I began reading the comments really only wondering how long it would take for it to be mentioned ;-)
That he suggested their image processing was so good that flatbed scanners were a order of magnitude (or more) waste of time was pretty hilarious.
Has anyone actually seen something like this implemented - that is, a full-school Linux laptop program? Much as I like the idea (and I work as a school admin), there are a number of problem areas that I don't know the answers to:
1) Students need to be educated in "Industry Standards" (Yes, much FUD). While the OS (and to some degree Office) portion of this is irrelevant, there are application sets that do cause problems - CAD, Music, and Video editing, primarily. For the art crowd, GIMP might be close enough, but Vector? DTP? Robolab? Many of these aren't a problem on OS X, but within Linux, I'm not sufficiently up to date with user app projects to know how viable the alternatives are these days.
2) Teachers are hidebound animals. They tend to cling to resources like barnacles, and only get cleaned off every decade or so - the number of Win 95 unsupported programs we get asked for is crazy. The students are easy to educate, by comparison.
3) Laptop programs in general have some issues. Wireless infrastructure gets much more demanding (needing something like Aruba), power access usually needs to be redone, and, alluding to 2), Teachers need to be able to cope with kids working on their laptops all the time. Also...
4) Netbooks, and even laptops, are a bit cruel to inflict on anyone for certain apps. This means desktops, which means *greater* than 1:1 computer resources needed. This applies if you're cheating by using VDI/Blades, too.
In essence, this means you'll still have a heterogenous environment - you'll need desktops for certain tasks like music or graphics/art labs, some of which will need Windows or OS X; Staff desktops or laptops are sometimes also bound in to a Windows environment by the need to use particular School Management software (some of this seems to be migrating to the back end), but Education Queensland won't be going anywhere else soon....
It's not the students that are the hidebound animals. *Burea*COUGH*Tea*COUGH*Paren*COUGH*. Pardon Me.
Try the horse's mouth - there's more detail.
Looking over the specs PDF, it looks like it will be possible to record to linear PCM, as well as lossy formats. That's cool.
With the old format, as other posters have said, if you were willing to jumps through the hoops of having (not that I've been able to afford it):
1) An MD deck unit with an optical out
2) A decent sound card with optical i/o (drops the SCMS bit)
you could make real-time (i.e., bog slow) digital copies.
If similar things can be done with Hi-MD, given the high capacity, high quality possibilities, that's actually pretty damn good, considering the ease of editing that comes with MD.
Now, if we just could have the damn USB transfers of self-recorded material...
Well, for one thing, portable recording, assuming they allow it.
Voice recording capabilities aside, there's still no consumer level device that I'm aware of that has anywhere near the overall utility/ease of use of MD units for this. The ability to place and remove track marks easily, record to reasonable quality (or trade it off for length), having a dedicated MIC-in (with plug-in power) added up to something that was mighty handy for this. I've poked around the various other portable unit types, and I haven't seen anything affordable with anythng other than atrocious editing facility yet. I'd be delighted if someone could point some out.
I used mine primarily for recording rehearsals ( musical theatre and choir) and singing lessons for practice, and occasionally choir and my wind band concerts. Until some aspiring youth nicked it, anyway.
If you were willing to get a decent deck as well (with a digital out), you could actually wind up with a usable, transerable recording. Of course, Sony being Sony, the PITA DRM will likely continue to hamper perfectly legitimate usage - direct USB transfers of your own, or uncopyrighted material.
Sigh.
Ironically, he basically acknowledges this ("when the wings wobble"), and also gives a nod to the difficult situation of someone who actually does have something to write about - Salam Pax. Even with my blog intake almost solely drip-fed and moderated by such group entities as slash, kuro and so forth, such things as content (on even close to the level of gripping), ideas (at least worthy of retransmission) and writing ability do tend to stand out. I don't wonder at what the majority is like...
In his own blog, Salam Pax refers to a section of postwar Baghdad looking Gibsonesque. Gibson refers to Salam, almost wistful about what the order of magnitude differences in doses of harsh reality in their lives does to the vitality of their content.
So, in our age of trailer-park-quality public confession, Gibson looks pretty good; I can see how it would seem almost like artistic duty to put one's diary on public display in such a dearth of ideas, content and skill.
Maybe he's honing himself by repeated discipline - what's better training for a writer than writing? Or perhaps it's simply an attempt at reducing work , or increasing output, by reusing necessary material in promotion (he'd have to write the speeches and likely keep a diary, at least in note form, anyway. We demand extras from our DVDs, why not our writers?).
Anyway, the entry lower down about a deleted Dolph Lundgren scene from Jonny Mnemonic is so worth it.
They supply a nice FAQ and roadmap. You can even check the current status of the project.
A short precis:
o The money is awarded for completion of specific roadmap tasks, by a committee. The work must be contributed through the sourceforge project.
o The FAQ contains various imprecations about using the Xbox SDK or knowledge under NDA, and encouragement to share work and reverse engineering knowledge, indicating that playing nice is more likely to earn credit. There's also a reminder about the GPL. The solution is supposed to be legal (with a few IANALs thrown in for good measure).
o Don't rely on my comprehension skills this early in the day. I haven't even had coffee yet. Go read.
Simple. Peer Group Pressure, or I want to be like Mom and Dad, depending on your perspective. The first self-aware machines won't have a bunch of AI's to compare notes with. They'll have humans for examples, like any child. This would be especially true if the individual had been built to mimic humanity.
Besides, Frankenstein wouldn't have been a very interesting story if the protagonist(s) hadn't been angst-ridden, now would it? If there'd just been a self-help group....
To your other question, the theme of the "Indefinable something" about humanity was pretty common in TNG (Particularly Q episodes). I think it is probably that the sheer arrogance and competitiveness defines itself. Gotta have that urge to survive and propagate... to a race such as humanity, the willingness to admit inherent inferiority is probably a ticket to a moribund existence. We'll probably try something like man-machine metempsychosis for virtual immortality and a processing speed upgrade before we cop that lying down.
To answer the question about decoding DVD movies in software...
As per subject; We are told it is has hardware MPEG2 decoding capability (for streamed texture decompression on the fly - drool).
While this, along with the DVD media, allows it theoretically to do DVD movies, Sony would have to put a bit more hardware interfacing on, and then have to worry about a minimal couch-potato-suitable UI for the player, as well.
One benefit of dedicated units is that people *like* their remotes. A game controller's not quite the same
I can imagine Sony, or some 3rd party, will do an add-on at some point, but I think the drive to lower their initial price point, along with a desire not to trample all over their DVD player sales will leave it out of the base unit. IMHO, completely, of course. The economics of a box like this one are strange to say the least.
(rambling off-topic)
What gets me is that Sony, along with Toshiba, are plumping down the cash for large-scale
"Right, we've designed it. Let's drop a few billion into factories to make it with."
Sheesh.
This follows reading a coupla threads, and doing a bit of looking around.
1. Backward compatibility: The I/O processor in the PSX2 is the old chip. They're guaranteeing no improvements to old games, 'cos they're just interfacing that chip it so that it will be running the old games (apparently). Not software emulation, good old 100% hardware. It'll take the old controllers, too; a lot of the demos were done with dual-shocks hooked up.
2. DVD capability. So far, they're still undecided about DVD movie support; It *does* have MPEG2 (used for texture compression, interestingly) and DVD-ROM, AC-3/DTS sound support, so it would certainly kick some serious hiney if they did, but they haven't implemented the interface and are unwilling to go on record either way yet. I'd imagine it would depend on how much they want to compete with their own products.
3. Interesting tidbits: it may not ship with a modem. But, I/O wise, it will apparently include PCMCIA (not sure about # ports or anything),IEEE 1394 (FireWire), and USB capability. Graphics: NTSC, PAL, HDTV and VESA compatible. Software-lib wise, they're also going to be trying to provide extensive physics libs for real time rendering, and avoiding motion capture. Criminy.
4. One comment had a Sony rep saying they'd be using their own proprietary stuff for internal OS, as they didn't want to use "inefficient" external stuff. Seems fair, they need a RTOS. Doesn't trying to make Linux go on that HW sound tempting, tho?
I hope I have only decreased the UD ratio.
Sources:
Australian Playstation Review Page- psx2 news
Gamefan
Sony Playstation pages