Coporate support of free software misses the point. I've written this before, but I believe the FOSS mechanism for growth is irrelevant to corporate use:
Hobbyist creates tool. User Groups merge/blend via the internet. Hobyists create a large, working library of software for all kinds of tasks.
General users find they can use such software without tweaking or knowing the internals = FOSS hits a new type of audience. Word of mouth helps spread usage, and rough edges are smoothed out for this audience.
Business functions can be performed by this software, and used in a reliable manner. Combined with the prior two audiences, there are both (1) maintainers of the software available and (2) experienced users available. However, this audience isn't necessary for FOSS to exist.
Viable business models spring up that package, support and extend the FOSS libraries. This is allowable by the license the FOSS adopts. These businesses can still rely on the hobbyist authors because FOSS is a cumulative effort, trying to discourage specialized ownership and protectionism.
Certain parts of the market rebel or refuse to view FOSS as "healthy" or "viable" in the long term. The problem here is that the output wasn't coerced, but volunteered. Nothing market-based started FOSS's arrival in the first place, so no commcercial model is necessary. It was created from the sheer existance of a hobbyist's curiosity.
Any other path would be nonsensical - like free libraries suddenly under a protectionist license, when really they are the effort of a class of authors that intended them to stay free. The original decisions never disappear: If you don't want to participate, don't add to the code. If you don't want to use the code, buy it or built it yourself. However, a single in-house or commercial author will find it tough to compete with an entire planet of hobbyists' cumulative knowledge.
Looking forward, it is silly to think each year's new generation of programming enthusiasts are going to abandon Free and Open software, with source, and instead use anything else - when they want to study the how of a solution. No, today intellectual capital reigns and the commoditization of algorithms is forcing commercial innovation to be elsewhere. Hobbyists have organized, and if the output is a viable product, it's because of diligence and effort, not a commercial model, corporate support or any other external hand out.
Sadly, Alaska is not alone in delivering boobs to elected office. However, the constitution still stands: no tests for the right to vote. Perhaps educating the populace a bit more would help.
You're in a losing battle, sir. Those pesky books are going to be become error-prone as more information makes its way to real-time. Do you print the addendums and errata and file those too? Do you scan for software updates and print the release notes? Howabout the common bugs and patches? Post-release common forum questions and answers? How do you index and search such material?
You'd be better to keep a room full of DVD's and print on demand, given the sheer metrics of security, space, fire hazards, power usage, paper and time consumption that bulk printing entails. Perhaps you only buy product from companies about to go belly-up and thus no information is available anywhere else on earth?
Eh. Then again, in a few years, you could open a museum. I'll visit - with a printout of our little chat here.
Why does Linux have to be popular? If folks want to make MS change their ways, there's Apple to eat market share. If the philosophy of "free" has few followers, no big deal. Linux and FOSS are movements with output, not a "market player" that needs some magic % to "become something."
I would much rather Linux and GNU-based systems to remain the true Techie Platform for projects than to see it injected explicitly into every home computer room across the globe. The user market isn't what matters to FOSS, it's the contributors. As long as folks are enticed to join in and help create useful applications on these platforms, building on one another, then it remains a useful tool - not an OS-market competitor, not an appliance, not a turkey for every pot.
The philosophy that "something must be changed for Linux to catch more market share" is misguided. Market share isn't the goal. Keeping a free platform available for technology experiments of all kinds is the goal. Linux/BSD, etc, will forever remain the platform for low-funded (academia, hobbyist) or long-lifecycle (embedded) systems. It doesn't need to become the Windows desktop platform alternative for families everywhere.
So if I don't "regularly read" this dork's blog, I shouldn't build an opinion about his writing? Riiiight. I'm all about having fun, and I read lots of different authors online and off, but my comment stands not on the author's style (which, if is always like this, I would quit reading him) but on the article content - which isn't fun in its volume of headings, it's stupid.
Like anyone who constantly interrupts with silly puns, alliterations, tired jokes while a real *message* is trying to get conveyed, is simply distracting to the point of annoyance. Once=OK. Constantly=Bad.
Mangling catchphrases into cutesy descriptions for a smart, conflicted character in a game is distracting.
I think the only thing with more hubris than Shodan is the melodramatic headings in TFA. The author is...Too Much For Any Human To Bear:
SHODAN is ...the Comeback Queen ...Her Own Impersonal Jesus ...Our Ghost-story in the Machine. ...Human, All too Human. That is, Inhuman. ...Just a Girl In the World. ...the Hand that Wrecks the Cradle ...The Girl Your Mother Warned You About ...Lost In Format Translation. Thankfully.
In a few days, tune it to see a "portal" opened by this company, and then "evil things" pop out of it. It's a marketing campaign for a new game, movie, or similar. Borrring!
...is a nice mea culpa of past mistakes. However, I feel some of the situation he learns from is staged by the decisions made early in the process. If they'd hired a full time producer, a contractor "wrangler" and perhaps an admin or two, then their headcount would've been 16, the burn rate probably closer to 150/month, but the excess stress of the game (the "crunch time" finale) could've been reduced (it never goes away).
The game itself looks cute and well made, although I'm beginning to join the "repackaging an FPS engine sucks" camp.
Heh - TSA employees are now going to be greeting us with the whitest of smiles, fresh and minty. Complete with slick-gelled hair and large keychains full of LED-fobs.
Au Contraire! When you step off a plane at your destination, be sure to pick up your free-refill selection of lighters, pens, pencils, toothpaste, keychains, etc. Every airport will now have giant barrels of them.
It is fascinating that TFA explains how if a boot routine can initialize a "debugger attached" flag, the PatchGuard system is not initialized. From this aspect alone, I'd say MS should start playing more nicely with the vendors, since any malicious code worth it's salt should set this value permanently and then replace kernal routines on disk as necessary.
Also, given the fact that MS intends to making patching the standard for releasing a secure OS, the vendors can't really do this kernal checking themselves. Thus, I think it's safe to say from the perspective of this article, the OS's kernel is patchable by anyone.
The extensively cross-referenced content of a true "how to fix it" encyclopedia may be desired, but the market for Windows PC's are a bit large for such an undertaking. Any author is going to approach with the "here's some background, check these categories" and leave you to discern the details.
From TFA:"How something connects to the internet..." is by no means a simple process, when actually debugging connections.
Overall, this review may be a bit negative because the reviewer did not have a fuller background in the technology. Perhaps a deeper "windows networking" textbook is a an overdue read before deciding if the networking chapter is too light.
I was surprised to see that folks stuck to hits when Rhapsody scanned their usage lists. I think many sites are trying to entice folks to follow the "sounds like" and "genre" trails for new music, but in the end Promotion does indeed play a role.
Promotion on the internet may best come from "word-of-mouth" sources, where hot links of the week propogate through blogs and link-lists and such. The SNL rap-spoof is just such an example from earlier this year. Every past popular web meme is just such an example. I think podcasts(audio & video) are underrated, since the future of web may be to "leave the chair" and use portables to continue the experience.
Perhaps in the future a portal will present a Busker-style downloadable playlist of music, completely copyright free "for personal use and sharing" - and then simply ask for donations that go directly to the artist. Popularity and payment mixed into one. For the large portion of music history, this is how such performance careers worked anyway. Then at least a band could make use of the File Sharing networks as a promotion layer, rather than constantly having them viewed as evil.
Like the Long Tail purports, lowest overhead can make the most profit from the smaller market segments. I cannot see a lower operating margin than online distribution from the artists themselves. The sacrifice is promotion: Labels fight hard for airtime, shelf space, billboard pasteup and DJ chatter. There is a strong argument that "the music world is full of crap and the public wants someone to cull the list for them." But perhaps if these concepts of web meme, genre/artist linking and a modern payment system all converge, things will change.
Ah, but we make the same mistake as then, thinking that only *now* is the situation static. Of course not. The era, the 100 years from 1950 to 2050 (and beyond) is the "Information Revolution" or "Information Age". It subsists not on the year-by-year declarations of "Information wants to be free" or "digital is open" and so on, but merely from the combined long-term effects of:
Information and the machines to store/access it are ubiquitous and relatively cheap.
The more open flow of information creates a multitude of societal changes, some overlapping and some trumping each other.
Society thrashes and skitters on new concepts until they slowly settle, limited only by scientific physical barriers. Attempts to control these changes politically or with laws consume huge amounts of energy, but are eventually defeated.
The pioneers of the era are defined by pushing information's movement and creation. Cataloging, summarizing, capturing, copying and distributing information causes a flood of public experiments to fork and mature. Best of breed winners, fragmentation and eventually encapsulation make the interim market.
Societal change happens, and yet concepts that divide groups migrate to new mediums, continuing much of the stife between these groups across the globe. Group-based feedback systems repeatedly report that the era's new platforms do little to change minds, and much to only reflect them.
The era only ends when the feedback loops on this information are on a slowing curve. At the moment, these loops are only expanding, where new systems to re-process the growing body of information create ever more metadata. Decision-based systems using this metadata are the most useful levels of the era - and only when slowing will the era be in decline.
As of 2006, we are in the prime of this era. Make sure you understand and participate in it!
Municipalities are pushing wireless access. Home networking is hot. Wireless access is unibquitous. Add it up. Soon enough, links from one cloud to another will start to happen. When enough content exists within those hops to let users surf for longer and longer time periods before hopping to a big-pipe ISP, you're going to see this mess move on. The largest middleman of the internet to get cut is...the backbone!
To read the (some of) local newspapers in my hometown (oregonlive), I may be able to go from the city to them. I want more wireless hosting, or perhaps mirrors. It seems this is the only path towards skipping these monopoly wires. Then, they'll have to again offer better price/value points than this garbage bill.
I'm not sure where "north" is for you, but folks do indeed bike in all weather. The trick is to integrate it into your lifestyle when it's easy, then approach the occasional nasty day with determined vigor. Only when enough people do this, and band together to shout at city hall, do things really change.
Here in Portland, OR, weather varies (much wider than some think) and folks bike year round. In fact, there is a large population of completely "car-free" people, who use short-term rentals for bigger jobs.
10-15 miles one way does seem too far for a typical 10-20mph bike ride. Perhaps integrating with public transportation (I bus+bike to/from jobs at about 1 hour distances) or refusing work that far from your home?
The money is not the game here. It never was. The court of public opinion is open and largely uneducated. This leaves the judge to summarize and rule on the concepts here. If the RIAA is told Yes, No, Maybe on the details of this case, folks will begin to see P2P in a different light.
Like the players already know - the cash is for the publicity. I fully expect the players/laywers to release extravagant and sweeping statements all along the way (avoiding details of the case per se).
Hogan must see a few cracks he wants to prod. If any succeed, there goes the fluid nature of the future cases, if at all possible.
Building AI that understands how to write software - then pointing it at itself and pushing for refinement - even in an evolutionary sandbox - is frought with issues. In the end, there is the nature of the goal itself that any autoprogramming wants to accomplish.
For example, you can tell your AI-programmer to (in effect) make said the target faster/smaller (and even have it determine best ways to apply concepts on its own), but beyond that, you're can just say "make it smarter".
NLP/Computationial Liguistics seems to suffer from a lack of fluidity in communication, a contextual issue - driving the problem back to having machines incorporate several senses together to build a proper context. Otherwise, there is only weighted guessing (as humans), but without the references of spacial knowledge, chronological/temporal knowledge, etc.
I'm of the opinion that AI will continue to exceed in restricted circumstances, but generalizations of these wins will fail. Until a maturity on several fronts is reached (vision, language, storage and relations) and then an integration of these things occurs, we're going to continue to see things such as
Very word-smart program does not adapt to new concepts easily
Vision program can model accurately from immediate surroundings, but cannot deconstruct/name objects unknown to it originally, then research these new objects.
Taxonomy is huge but defining new objects in terms of old requires concepts of age/locale/culture/standards/authority which have not yet been captured.
I find AI fascinating. However, Singularity can't really be described in terms of when, or what's necessary, because each time an AI experiment (at any size) is accomplished, a new hurdle emerges. Prior hurdles do *not* predict future ones, so who can say when AI is simply going to "snap" and suddenly we have all the mimicry of sentience. I doubt all predictions on this.
Most sci-fi (and futurist) visions are of some sort of "N-1" AI, where we have *almost* all the capabilities of a human, but there's no...enter term of your choice: emotion, personality, dynamics, etc. Really, though, these missing parts are ingrained into the finest of aspects of intelligence. The foibles and flaws of human personality are what most think will make AI "real," until then, we have a big internet based speak-n-spell, or voice-interaction computer. Intelligent, true. Alive - no. Singularity - far from it.
Wireless is sexy, but not sure if it'll beat firewire/USB2.0. That said, media at the GB level is a huge bandwidth issue, and I for one do not want to drop "out of range" while transferring.
Like most of their value-added attempts, MS is attempting not so much innovation, but integration of modern concepts into a unified machine. Folks are always pushing this boundary, and when marketing speaks before a beta is out, customers usually burn money.
Then of course, we'll have a licensed provider market for content under MS DRM. Fun! I totally expect Apple to begin the same (perhaps they have, I'm out of the loop). Then of course, I get mad skills writing a Apple/MS crossover hack, then (4) profit! Content agnosticism again pushed lower, propping up the Old Ways. We're going to need a desktop tool for stripping all the DRM out these user-owned files.
There are folks working on battery tech, and the latest focus is on Fuel Cell and Hydrogen.
This backs up to *where does the energy come from in the first place* since a battery is not a source of energy, just a carrier. With that, there are no good sources. Consolidating on electric borne of nuclear sources is perhaps the highest volumetric consolidation of waste, but the willpower isn't there yet.
Regardless of battery tech and applications, the side-effects of the current energy production infrastructure are only going to increase with demand (population size). If you're looking for a snappy solution-oriented comment here, forget it. Just get ready for some incredible sprials ("energy production->global warming->energy demand..." as just one) that push our society to the edge of survival.
Re:Couldn't be worse than some that I've had...
on
The Robot Professor
·
· Score: 1
Um, they have teachers like this. It's called a "book on tape", or equiv. Skip the Disney rubber face BS.
That said, the learning process should be much more interactive with a mentor that that. If you're not able eto dialog with your prof., then you may be in the wrong class. (Maybe you're talking to a mannequin?)
When walking through any content generated procedurally, I find it lacks something. Without knowing how content came about, the elegance is in the cohesive nature of the layout. The realism begins to derive from the logical connsistency of the map, not the beauty of the textures and variations achieved when compared to size.
For example, when someone built a map in (say) the Thief series, most recent release included, I felt as though I was in a planned setting. The pathways and places had an appeal that a Endless Dungeon(TM) format didn't. Dating myself even more, the maps of 2D Mario or pov-style Myst games probably wouldn't be as interesting if created procedurally.
That said, the landscapes created via Terragen are indeed astounding, but they too require quite a bit of work to detail well. Overall, I'd say procedural generation of content is a great way to save space, but it cannot achieve the "suspension of disbelief" that many FP games desire, once you start learning the character space.
Microsoft today released a beta version for their solution to their ever-shrinking developer workforce: The Developer Upgrade and Creation Kit. Thinly disguised as a "robot modeler" sandbox application, the Developer Upgrade and Creation Kit (DUCK).
Slashdot Mirror
Any other path would be nonsensical - like free libraries suddenly under a protectionist license, when really they are the effort of a class of authors that intended them to stay free. The original decisions never disappear: If you don't want to participate, don't add to the code. If you don't want to use the code, buy it or built it yourself. However, a single in-house or commercial author will find it tough to compete with an entire planet of hobbyists' cumulative knowledge.
Looking forward, it is silly to think each year's new generation of programming enthusiasts are going to abandon Free and Open software, with source, and instead use anything else - when they want to study the how of a solution. No, today intellectual capital reigns and the commoditization of algorithms is forcing commercial innovation to be elsewhere. Hobbyists have organized, and if the output is a viable product, it's because of diligence and effort, not a commercial model, corporate support or any other external hand out.
Sadly, Alaska is not alone in delivering boobs to elected office. However, the constitution still stands: no tests for the right to vote. Perhaps educating the populace a bit more would help.
You're in a losing battle, sir. Those pesky books are going to be become error-prone as more information makes its way to real-time. Do you print the addendums and errata and file those too? Do you scan for software updates and print the release notes? Howabout the common bugs and patches? Post-release common forum questions and answers? How do you index and search such material?
You'd be better to keep a room full of DVD's and print on demand, given the sheer metrics of security, space, fire hazards, power usage, paper and time consumption that bulk printing entails. Perhaps you only buy product from companies about to go belly-up and thus no information is available anywhere else on earth?
Eh. Then again, in a few years, you could open a museum. I'll visit - with a printout of our little chat here.
Why does Linux have to be popular? If folks want to make MS change their ways, there's Apple to eat market share. If the philosophy of "free" has few followers, no big deal. Linux and FOSS are movements with output, not a "market player" that needs some magic % to "become something."
I would much rather Linux and GNU-based systems to remain the true Techie Platform for projects than to see it injected explicitly into every home computer room across the globe. The user market isn't what matters to FOSS, it's the contributors. As long as folks are enticed to join in and help create useful applications on these platforms, building on one another, then it remains a useful tool - not an OS-market competitor, not an appliance, not a turkey for every pot.
The philosophy that "something must be changed for Linux to catch more market share" is misguided. Market share isn't the goal. Keeping a free platform available for technology experiments of all kinds is the goal. Linux/BSD, etc, will forever remain the platform for low-funded (academia, hobbyist) or long-lifecycle (embedded) systems. It doesn't need to become the Windows desktop platform alternative for families everywhere.
So if I don't "regularly read" this dork's blog, I shouldn't build an opinion about his writing? Riiiight. I'm all about having fun, and I read lots of different authors online and off, but my comment stands not on the author's style (which, if is always like this, I would quit reading him) but on the article content - which isn't fun in its volume of headings, it's stupid.
Like anyone who constantly interrupts with silly puns, alliterations, tired jokes while a real *message* is trying to get conveyed, is simply distracting to the point of annoyance. Once=OK. Constantly=Bad.
Mangling catchphrases into cutesy descriptions for a smart, conflicted character in a game is distracting.
I think the only thing with more hubris than Shodan is the melodramatic headings in TFA. The author is...Too Much For Any Human To Bear:
...the Comeback Queen
...Her Own Impersonal Jesus
...Our Ghost-story in the Machine.
...Human, All too Human. That is, Inhuman.
...Just a Girl In the World.
...the Hand that Wrecks the Cradle
...The Girl Your Mother Warned You About
...Lost In Format Translation. Thankfully.
SHODAN is
The finest Sophomoric Dorky Puns one can muster
In a few days, tune it to see a "portal" opened by this company, and then "evil things" pop out of it. It's a marketing campaign for a new game, movie, or similar. Borrring!
The game itself looks cute and well made, although I'm beginning to join the "repackaging an FPS engine sucks" camp.
Heh - TSA employees are now going to be greeting us with the whitest of smiles, fresh and minty. Complete with slick-gelled hair and large keychains full of LED-fobs.
Au Contraire! When you step off a plane at your destination, be sure to pick up your free-refill selection of lighters, pens, pencils, toothpaste, keychains, etc. Every airport will now have giant barrels of them.
It is fascinating that TFA explains how if a boot routine can initialize a "debugger attached" flag, the PatchGuard system is not initialized. From this aspect alone, I'd say MS should start playing more nicely with the vendors, since any malicious code worth it's salt should set this value permanently and then replace kernal routines on disk as necessary.
Also, given the fact that MS intends to making patching the standard for releasing a secure OS, the vendors can't really do this kernal checking themselves. Thus, I think it's safe to say from the perspective of this article, the OS's kernel is patchable by anyone.
The extensively cross-referenced content of a true "how to fix it" encyclopedia may be desired, but the market for Windows PC's are a bit large for such an undertaking. Any author is going to approach with the "here's some background, check these categories" and leave you to discern the details.
From TFA:"How something connects to the internet..." is by no means a simple process, when actually debugging connections.
Overall, this review may be a bit negative because the reviewer did not have a fuller background in the technology. Perhaps a deeper "windows networking" textbook is a an overdue read before deciding if the networking chapter is too light.
I was surprised to see that folks stuck to hits when Rhapsody scanned their usage lists. I think many sites are trying to entice folks to follow the "sounds like" and "genre" trails for new music, but in the end Promotion does indeed play a role.
Promotion on the internet may best come from "word-of-mouth" sources, where hot links of the week propogate through blogs and link-lists and such. The SNL rap-spoof is just such an example from earlier this year. Every past popular web meme is just such an example. I think podcasts(audio & video) are underrated, since the future of web may be to "leave the chair" and use portables to continue the experience.
Perhaps in the future a portal will present a Busker-style downloadable playlist of music, completely copyright free "for personal use and sharing" - and then simply ask for donations that go directly to the artist. Popularity and payment mixed into one. For the large portion of music history, this is how such performance careers worked anyway. Then at least a band could make use of the File Sharing networks as a promotion layer, rather than constantly having them viewed as evil.
Like the Long Tail purports, lowest overhead can make the most profit from the smaller market segments. I cannot see a lower operating margin than online distribution from the artists themselves. The sacrifice is promotion: Labels fight hard for airtime, shelf space, billboard pasteup and DJ chatter. There is a strong argument that "the music world is full of crap and the public wants someone to cull the list for them." But perhaps if these concepts of web meme, genre/artist linking and a modern payment system all converge, things will change.
Municipalities are pushing wireless access. Home networking is hot. Wireless access is unibquitous. Add it up. Soon enough, links from one cloud to another will start to happen. When enough content exists within those hops to let users surf for longer and longer time periods before hopping to a big-pipe ISP, you're going to see this mess move on. The largest middleman of the internet to get cut is...the backbone!
To read the (some of) local newspapers in my hometown (oregonlive), I may be able to go from the city to them. I want more wireless hosting, or perhaps mirrors. It seems this is the only path towards skipping these monopoly wires. Then, they'll have to again offer better price/value points than this garbage bill.
I'm not sure where "north" is for you, but folks do indeed bike in all weather. The trick is to integrate it into your lifestyle when it's easy, then approach the occasional nasty day with determined vigor. Only when enough people do this, and band together to shout at city hall, do things really change.
Here in Portland, OR, weather varies (much wider than some think) and folks bike year round. In fact, there is a large population of completely "car-free" people, who use short-term rentals for bigger jobs.
10-15 miles one way does seem too far for a typical 10-20mph bike ride. Perhaps integrating with public transportation (I bus+bike to/from jobs at about 1 hour distances) or refusing work that far from your home?
Wait! Before you type your opinion, is it already here?
The money is not the game here. It never was. The court of public opinion is open and largely uneducated. This leaves the judge to summarize and rule on the concepts here. If the RIAA is told Yes, No, Maybe on the details of this case, folks will begin to see P2P in a different light.
Like the players already know - the cash is for the publicity. I fully expect the players/laywers to release extravagant and sweeping statements all along the way (avoiding details of the case per se).
Hogan must see a few cracks he wants to prod. If any succeed, there goes the fluid nature of the future cases, if at all possible.
For example, you can tell your AI-programmer to (in effect) make said the target faster/smaller (and even have it determine best ways to apply concepts on its own), but beyond that, you're can just say "make it smarter".
NLP/Computationial Liguistics seems to suffer from a lack of fluidity in communication, a contextual issue - driving the problem back to having machines incorporate several senses together to build a proper context. Otherwise, there is only weighted guessing (as humans), but without the references of spacial knowledge, chronological/temporal knowledge, etc.
I'm of the opinion that AI will continue to exceed in restricted circumstances, but generalizations of these wins will fail. Until a maturity on several fronts is reached (vision, language, storage and relations) and then an integration of these things occurs, we're going to continue to see things such as
I find AI fascinating. However, Singularity can't really be described in terms of when, or what's necessary, because each time an AI experiment (at any size) is accomplished, a new hurdle emerges. Prior hurdles do *not* predict future ones, so who can say when AI is simply going to "snap" and suddenly we have all the mimicry of sentience. I doubt all predictions on this.
Most sci-fi (and futurist) visions are of some sort of "N-1" AI, where we have *almost* all the capabilities of a human, but there's no...enter term of your choice: emotion, personality, dynamics, etc. Really, though, these missing parts are ingrained into the finest of aspects of intelligence. The foibles and flaws of human personality are what most think will make AI "real," until then, we have a big internet based speak-n-spell, or voice-interaction computer. Intelligent, true. Alive - no. Singularity - far from it.
Wireless is sexy, but not sure if it'll beat firewire/USB2.0. That said, media at the GB level is a huge bandwidth issue, and I for one do not want to drop "out of range" while transferring.
Like most of their value-added attempts, MS is attempting not so much innovation, but integration of modern concepts into a unified machine. Folks are always pushing this boundary, and when marketing speaks before a beta is out, customers usually burn money.
Then of course, we'll have a licensed provider market for content under MS DRM. Fun! I totally expect Apple to begin the same (perhaps they have, I'm out of the loop). Then of course, I get mad skills writing a Apple/MS crossover hack, then (4) profit! Content agnosticism again pushed lower, propping up the Old Ways. We're going to need a desktop tool for stripping all the DRM out these user-owned files.
There are folks working on battery tech, and the latest focus is on Fuel Cell and Hydrogen.
This backs up to *where does the energy come from in the first place* since a battery is not a source of energy, just a carrier. With that, there are no good sources. Consolidating on electric borne of nuclear sources is perhaps the highest volumetric consolidation of waste, but the willpower isn't there yet.
Regardless of battery tech and applications, the side-effects of the current energy production infrastructure are only going to increase with demand (population size). If you're looking for a snappy solution-oriented comment here, forget it. Just get ready for some incredible sprials ("energy production->global warming->energy demand..." as just one) that push our society to the edge of survival.
Um, they have teachers like this. It's called a "book on tape", or equiv. Skip the Disney rubber face BS.
That said, the learning process should be much more interactive with a mentor that that. If you're not able eto dialog with your prof., then you may be in the wrong class. (Maybe you're talking to a mannequin?)
TFA is a serious bloat of splashy eyewhore for the amount of content-per-page.
When walking through any content generated procedurally, I find it lacks something. Without knowing how content came about, the elegance is in the cohesive nature of the layout. The realism begins to derive from the logical connsistency of the map, not the beauty of the textures and variations achieved when compared to size.
For example, when someone built a map in (say) the Thief series, most recent release included, I felt as though I was in a planned setting. The pathways and places had an appeal that a Endless Dungeon(TM) format didn't. Dating myself even more, the maps of 2D Mario or pov-style Myst games probably wouldn't be as interesting if created procedurally.
That said, the landscapes created via Terragen are indeed astounding, but they too require quite a bit of work to detail well. Overall, I'd say procedural generation of content is a great way to save space, but it cannot achieve the "suspension of disbelief" that many FP games desire, once you start learning the character space.
Microsoft today released a beta version for their solution to their ever-shrinking developer workforce: The Developer Upgrade and Creation Kit. Thinly disguised as a "robot modeler" sandbox application, the Developer Upgrade and Creation Kit (DUCK).