I was very happy when you ported Eric's Solitaire, because it was a game my fiance could play. But it seems like that's the exception, and that the majority of commercial games for Linux either now or in the future will be these war mongering RPGs, 3D shooters and the like. I'm sure that these are more popular with the gaming audience as a whole, but does that mean that there's no hope for some more simple games, like maybe a nice board game collection or some card games? No, I don't want yet another tetris, but I do think that the 80's with the pacmans (pacmen?) and qberts was the pinnacle of gaming and would be happy to see more games like that show up on the shelves.
When Civ:CTP first came out and I couldn't find it brick and mortar, Loki advised me to just buy from online suppliers because brick and mortar would always lag far behind. When QuakeIII came out, Carmack urged the exact opposite and told people to go to retail and demand copies of Q3 for Linux.
Which method do you recommend, and why? I still hope for the day when I can go to the local software shop and see a Linux section.
...I wonder if he could get it open by June when the next JavaOne rolls around and 20,000+ geeks roll into town? Would they all attempt to show up at jwz's place simultaneously? Talk about a/. effect.;)
They have a poll on which editor you use to create web pages, and there's no mention of Emacs? What sort of true hackers would hang out on such a site that doesn't think to mention Emacs? Look at what they do list : Notepad, FrontPage... Yipes.
"Hi, I'm Ray. I invented every important technology that is going to be running your life in 50 years."
I read his book. I liked his book. But two things bugged me about his book:
Write an autobiography and get it over with. I hated the way he kept interruptig his predictions about the future to say "Oh yeah, by the way, I invented the music synthesizer, I invented voice recognition, etc..." I appreciate his accomplishments, but all I ever got was the feeling that he would say those things only so that in the next chapter he could say "In 2030 you'll be talking to your clothing using the KurzweilSmartCloth(tm).
The entire book is based on the premise that 1)Moore's Law is correct, and 2) Moore's Law is increasing. I don't believe that it can be used to accurately predict what will be happening 50 years from now. Isn't that like saying that 100 years ago somebody could have predicted what's going on today? Did they? How accurate were they?
Ummm...sorry, but just because Transmeta finally decided to share their toy with us publicly doesn't mean that it's the first time any of these companies is glimpsing it. I would suspect that those deals have been ready to go for a long time, and companies like Diamond have merely been sitting under NDA waiting until the Big Day. On the subject of quickly, how long has Transmeta been around? In theory, the marketroids could have cut the deals before work on the chip even began.
PDABuzz is reporting that Transmeta doesn't plan to get into the PDA market with their chip, instead choosing to go after the "sub 4lb notebook" category. Makes sense -- as people have pointed out, there are already processors out there like the StrongARM that make Crusoe look like not such a big accomplishement. PDA's don't necessarily need x86 compatibility, as we've seen. (Unless you're one of those evil Wince people:)).
You'd be surprised. One, there are WinCE packages available that claim to do voice recognition, though I don't know how well they work. Second, I used to have a device smaller than a deck of cards that did rudimentary voice recognition. I would press a button and say "Meeting with Dmitry." Then press another button and say "10 am Wednesday". sure enough, at 10am wednesday it would beep at me and say "Meeting with Dmitry". The latter, of course, was straight playback of my voice..but the former was in fact parsed appropriately and assigned in the schedule properly. So, in a way, one could argue that a voice interface *extends* the zen philosophy of keeping it simple.
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(A friend of mine who had a similar device trained it in babble, so that people would look at her funny when she spoke to it.:))
Good point. Two thoughts come to mind on that subject:
Will a day come when both voice synthesis and GPS are commonplace? Would it remove your need for a color map if your device were capable of saying "This is your stop. Exit here"?
Go back a few years, before PDAs. You are on the phone asking a friend directions to his house. You only have a black pen. What do you do? You either write out text directions, or you sketch yourself a black and white map.
Of course I can see where the whole idea of a PDA is to be more useful to you then a pen and paper (despite my dad telling me regularly that he can do anything I can and he never has to change batteries:)), but I guess my argument is on the whole question of necessity. A color map would be nice. Sometimes. But it's not really necessary.
What is necessary? Personally, I think a better input system is necessary. There are people in my life that I simply can't consider a Palm device for because graffiti will be forever beyond their grasp. A better display would be nice, too, something more like traditional paper. Everytime I show my pilot to a new person, the first words out of their mouths are "Holy god, you expect me to read that?" Then they blink a few times, hold it at arm's length, squint, hold it two inches away, squint, and then find a comfortable distance. These are two of the reasons that I am a big proponent of voice recognition/synthesis, and natural language processing. It's the most natural (pun not intended) interface in the world.
I don't understand how people say that color is so important. Let's look at some of the things people use a PDA for:
Download and read news. No color needed.
Track dates and addresses. No color needed.
Read/send email. No color needed.
Exchange business cards. *Maybe* color would be nice if you want your biz card to look exactly like it does in real life. But necessary?
Surf existing sites. Any argument here is the same as dealing with Lynx. What are you more interested in, the information on the site, or the pretty pictures? If the argument is "Yeah, but the web exists now, with color, and I want to see it", then why didn't that same argument stand up in the gopher vs. www war? "www can do color." "Yeah, but gopher is text only, so the web needs to be text only too." There's a big difference between things that *can* perform a certain function, versus those that *should* or *must*. Whether or not a PDA *can* be made to do color, I don't really think that it either must or even should.
Surf sites specially intended for PDAs, that have been AvantGo or WML enabled. No color needed.
Play games. Color hasn't been needed thus far, but I'm sure it won't hurt. But do I want to add to my price and halve my battery life in order to see red hearts and black spades?
I fully expect one day to have a PDA that is the size of a hearing aid. I will talk to it, and it will talk to me. It will be completely wireless and be able to get my news and email, as well as handle an address book and date book. I will be able to always have it with me. It will use minimal battery power (heck, I might even be able to power it with a rechargeable battery in my shoe).
What I find interesting is that despite the apparent popularity of the V, that they are churning out so many variations with the III footprint. It's almost like they're saying "Ok, we made it as small and sleek as we could for the executives, but if you want it to *do* anything, you need this here workhorse-sized doohickey."
Ya got yer III, IIIx, IIIe. The VII is based on the III form factor. Soon you'll have the IIIc which I can only presume will be like a III (if not bigger!), and there's no reason not to think that the IIIxe won't be the same as the III sizewise.
I'm reminded of a device company I used to work for. A scientist sat in our weekly meeting and announced that the device would only produce acceptable results if measurement X was within something like 10 microns. Upon which the manufacturing manager demonstrated to him that by the time you got to measurement X you had to put together measurements A,B,C, each of which had a tolerance of 15 microns in the first place, so there's no way he could get what he asked for. He shrugged, apparently oblivious to the reality of the physical universe, and said that in that case, just wouldn't work.
Seems to me like people want it to be small (PalmV sized sounds nice), with a bigger screen and bigger writing area (huh?). More memory, please (16M would sound like lots now, but I'm sure it won't in a year), but I want to stuff a few MP3s on there so I'm going to fill it up quick anyway. Please add color and voice recognition, but don't make the batteries any thicker. Make them last longer.
I like my IIIx. I am hoping that, unlike the V/Vx, the IIIx will have an upgrade for that 8meg.
I guess the question everybody has is, what constitutes a transaction going wrong? Take, for example, my recent trip to landsend.com to attempt to find a pair of slippers for my fiance. Found em. Ordered them, filled out all my information. Then was told "That item is not available." This only after I had filled out numerous very slow pages over my 28.8 modem line. I wasn't happy. Why couldn't it have told me that immediately, before requiring all that information from me? Would that be considered a transaction that went wrong? I will give it one point. What it said was: "That item is not available in size medium and color hunter", then below that, "That item is not available in any other size" and below that "That item is available in heather gray." What I don't like is the fact that I had to wait until the end to get that information instead of right up and the beginning, which would have been most efficient.
Compare that to, say, Victoria's Secret where I was also shopping. When I selected the detail for items, not only did it say "This item will ship on XX date", if the item was out, it offered recommendations for similar items. I was quite impressed with that engine. Of course, after I ordered something I got a card in the mail saying "This item cannot be shipped on the expected date." D'oh. (But it still showed up!)
I ordered something from thinkgeek once pretty much as it was being slashdotted. Right at the final click to submit my order the site seemed to go down. What to do, what to do? You never resubmit, everybody knows that. Don't wanna get charged twice! So, I let the first one stand and then emailed them the timestamp (roughly) and what I'd ordered as a way of alerting them to my dilemma. I didn't hear back via email, but my package did arrive within a few days (if anything, it was even earlier than I would have expected). So whatever they're doing over there, it's pretty robust in my eyes.
Reminds me of a time back in college when three of us were assigned projects in an AI class. One guy had no experience, so he did nothing. Two of us spent all nighters working on the code. One night, around 4am, our Lisp code wasn't working and we were stuck. We'd stared at it for hours, no luck.
"Wait a second!" shouted my partner, leaning over my shoulder and beginning to type.
"WHAT?" I asked, watching him move the cursor.
He cursored over to a piece of Lisp code, and pressed the space bar. "Sorry," he said, "That was bugging me. Now it's indented properly."
The only reason I didn't buy a Tivo for the folks this xmas is that I want to see the difference in quality of the recording. In the 14 hour version, you only get that much if you record at the lowest quality, which their chart shows as being good for "talking heads" whatever the hell that means. If you want to record "action" you're down to 4 hours, which is barely enough for 2 movies. Would that even hold an entire football game, ya think? The best use of this device is NOT, as they're marketing it, to be an "instant rewind" for when you go to the bathroom. The best feature is the idea of the preferences, and of smart recording. If every week I record Computer Chronicles and push the "thumbs up" button, then when PBS shows Triumph of the Nerds again, Tivo will *automatically* record it for me because it knows I like computer shows. And for that feature, it is important to have lots of disk space so that it can record a bunch of stuff for you.
What I hope to see by next xmas is several companies come out with these things. Possibly a standard or two. And a 30-50 hour version for about $400-$600, instead of $1000. Then, I'd buy one in a snap.
I thought it would be cool to add a voice synthesizer. You come home from work, turn it on, and it tells you "Hello, Duane. Jenna Jameson was on Good Morning America this morning, and I thought you might like that so I recorded it."
Well, yes. They are bunk. That's why it's fiction. I'm not sure anybody, even Asimov, necessarily expected them to be taken as a serious model. For an interesting slam on them, check on the Harrison/Minsky book "The Turing Option", where the characters discuss their failed attempts to mimick the three laws.
Having said that, the three laws are an excellent model on which to build the huge base of work that Asimov did. Three simple laws, and yet he found enough material to write numerous stories, several novels, etc... He even evolved the idea, commenting in his later stories to the effect that "Earlier robots were of the 'if x more harm than y then do y' variety", while later robots were better able to weigh potentials.
The entire idea behind the three laws is the notion that human beings are not comfortable with their own creations unless they are convinced that there is some sort of built in protection. Sort of like a frankenstein-complex clause. We are afraid of being harmed, therefore the first law MUST be do no harm (hell, we even make our doctors swear that in the hippocratic oath!). The risk to Andrew Martin throughout his entire life is "You are human, I am not, therefore my 'life' is worth less than yours." At the root of all Asimov's robot stories is: "We are capable of creating better than our equals, yet we will deliberately cripple them to be beneath us."
Andrew was present for deaths in the original story, too, so I can't really argue that this is a violation. I will presume that sufficiently advanced robots understand age, disease and mortality.
The way Asimov wrote it in the original story is that Andrew chose between the death of his body, and the death of his hopes and aspirations. The latter is the "greater death", and thus he prevented that.
Good point, I hadn't thought of that one. I suppose you could argue that with her new "personality chip" that she had more freedom to do that, but even the *thought* of a single chip being able to override the laws would again have the good doctor reaching for an airsick bag.
That's the one I was referring to. I meant arguably because I was allowing people the possibility of arguing that euthanasia is a way to end harm by ending life. When a robot sees a suffering human, and through inaction the human continues to feel harm, that's a violation. That would have to be one hell of an advanced robot, though.
I disagree that the movie is faithful to Asimov's original. I just reread the short story a week before seeing the movie. Perhaps you're thinking of the longer bookified version? I'll have to go back and look, but I don't remember the short story (which is what I would deem "original") having: the love story at the end, that whole Rupert guy, the quest for others of his kind. And, unlike any Asimov original which would have focused almost entirely on the restrictions of the three laws (I remember the scene from the story in which some jerks almost ordered Andrew to take himself apart, because after all, protecting his own existence is third law and second law says that he must obey orders), this movie doesn't mention them at all except for a quick comedy scene in the beginning. Arguably, the ending contains a sequence that is so *contrary* to the laws that Sir Asimov is likely spinning in his grave.
Having said that, I was surprised at how good the movie turned out. I knew that it wouldn't be true to the original, because I don't expect the mass of moviegoers to understand the three laws and their implications. Take, as an example, my non-geek fiance. She loved this movie. Heck, she cried. I thought she was crying over the romance, and the father/daughter story, but was very surprised when she said that she loved the robot.
Although I hate to quote Jurassic Park, I liked it when Jeff Goldblum said "We were so busy wondering whether we could that we didn't stop to think if we should."
Does anybody else find it weird that science has to basically ask religion if its ok to do something? Is that the right path? Is an answer of "Only God should create living things" an acceptable scientific argument?
I do not believe in the same God that the world's religious leaders believe in. Therefore is it right to deprive me of this scientific advance?
Now, I'm not arguing that we should just run right out and do it. Like I said at the top, "whether we should" is indeed a valid question. I just find it weird to think of science as asking religion, as if they are the ones that should be consulted. If we'd done that 300+ years ago would anybody have bothered to try sailing around the planet?
You may have the brains, but I'm not sure where you apply them. You took from my post that I was somehow not attempting to solve the problem, but instead trying only to get all the information into one place where it would still be fully accessible. I never said "identify yourself to every website you visit" or "set preferences at every website". As a matter of fact, for your "most sites I visit once" argument I specifically said that you could/would set up an "anonymous" mode where the card was completely off.
Read what I wrote again, and you'll see that you still get to use your brain. All the card does it regulate and structure the flow of information. You still get to set up the whole "trust" mechanism. If you trust no one, and it sounds like you don't, then don't use the thing. But you must not be a customer many places, though, because I would think that you'd be willing to identify yourself to a web site in order to get a look at your stock portfolio, or the status of your new order of blowup dolls.
As for pretending to be a 75yr old lesbian, your personal life is your business. Sounds to me like wearing a different disguise to the supermarket every week so that nobody recognizes you as a regular shopper, though. Kinda pointless. But if that's where you want to spend your time and energy, more power to ya. I'm just trying to spend mine coming up with ways that might actually benefit both people and industry. It can happen, ya know.
The reason this shit has failed in the past, and will fail in the future is two-fold.
This logic implies that "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it" is incorrect. That industry does not learn from its mistakes. This might be true, I don't know. I don't think it is. You're welcome to. There's no real way to tell if it's an absolute truth, now is there?
First, every company will get into an endless Beta-VHS standards war seeking to control the standard and therefore the royalties.
And by this logic, we would never have settled on the magnetic stripe card, would we? Somewhere along the line competing plcaes like Visa and Mastercard got together enough to agree on the format. Why is it so unbelievable a stretch that this couldn't happen with smart cards, which are often compared very closely to magnetic stripe cards? There's a darwinistic element to the introduction of a standard, no question about it. And we all know that it's not usually the technically superior standard that wins. But a standard does usually emerge. It's not an endless battle.
Second, this type of "universal profile" turns people off.
Define "people" in this case. You forget that most people out there are not freedom fighters. They are consumers. More than that, they are lazy, cheap consumers. It's cost-benefit analysis. What am I giving up by having the card? What benefit does the card give me? If people perceive that the card makes life easier, they are likely to use it. If you don't wnat to use it, fine. I know people that don't use ATM cards for many of the reasons you list. Fine. But that hasn't stopped them from becoming very popular.
Sounds like a great idea. I assume you intend a company to market these cards? Would they be free, or would you have to pay an annual fee?
The business logic of the poor adoption of smart cards has been that they're currently too expensive. Nobody will pay $5 just for a card, especially if there are a number of different entities that each expect you to get your own card. As an example, they have "SpeedPass" at my local gas station. It's a smart card that's in a keychain, you wave it at the pump instead of having to get out a credit card. This is a free service. I don't think anybody would pay for the card. Because then they would be worry about if they lost the card, or it got worn out, or whatever. When it's free they can always get a new one.
So, smart cards won't be truly adopted until they're "relatively" free (maybe a cost of $1 or something could be eaten by other fees). As for who sponsors/provides them, the question turns to one of identification. Traditionally you rely on a government agency to provide your identification (passport, driver's license, birth certificate...) so it's logical to extend that into this arena. But again, people will go bananas if you start talking about the government being involved in such a thing when it relates to the web.
Who knows. Maybe some enterprising company will figure out a way to market the cards as essentially free, but then sell the readers. The trick there would be in fostering the adoption of the card/standard. You'd need to get all kinds of retailers on board that use your card, so that people would get use out of it. This has been tried numerous times with a variety of "electronic cash" methods, but none have really caught on that I know of.
A few years ago I did a commercial system for using digital certificates to identify yourself to a web site. It was generally liked as being nice and secure, but hated as being too hard for the consumer to understand. That was before smart cards.
Imagine that, as a web surfer, you have a smart card that identifies you as a web surfer. Personally I am a believer that you should have to identify yourself as adult/child in order to cruise some areas of the web, but that's my personal opinion. But that's not for this thread to discuss. Add to the smart card some sort of bio sensitive way to identify yourself, maybe a thumb, maybe an iris scan. The key being that everything you need (short of the reader hardware) is stored on the card. You can take it with you to any browser (unlike cookies).
Your smart card not only identifies you, it has a profile on you. It can keep your web site preferences, but it can also keep your buying habits, etc. And your age, marital status, and so on. It's here that people scream bloody murder about privacy on the net. But here's my hopeful suggestion : that your profile will come with trust zones. If you're doing anonymous surfing, maybe all the site gets is your age -- or maybe nothing at all. For sites you want to register with long enough to read a story (like NYTimes), you let them have your name but not your profile. And so on. For trusted sites like slashdot you set up preferences. For sites where you are actually a customer of some sort, you let them have your profile (linking in yesterday's discussion about IBM's miniature vegetable commercials).
Wouldn't this be nice? My company has a large number of business units, each with their own web site, and we've worked to setup a shared profile system so that, once you've told us something once, you don't have to tell us again. Wouldn't it be good if this extended to multiple businesses? Don't you think it's a pain in the ass to have to continually identify yourself and set up preferences on every site you want? Wouldn't it be nice to have a mini-profile that you could use to bootstrap your registration to new sites?
My point is that, with a self contained smart card, you can have a level of control over the information that you provide. It's the card that has the brains. A web site couldn't just tell the card "Give me the whole profile". It would have to say "Please validate me as being a trusted site and give me whatever information I am entitled to." And then, in something of an ironic twist, *it* has to identify itself to *you*, and you get to decide what to do next.
Will this happen anytime soon? I wish. I think the reason that digital certificate authentication didn't catch on is that it was too confusing to get the certificates into the browsers, people didn't want to give up their passwords, and the certificates weren't portable. In a world where you have a smart card reader built into your keyboard, these problems seem like they might go away. Nobody thinks twice about having to flash a passport when flying internationally, and they usually only grumble a little bit about being carded at the local bar. Is it really that much of a stretch to think that there'll come a day when you take your webId card out, stick it in the slot, and then periodically answer a question about how much information you want to provide to the web site you just visitd? I don't think it's really all that bad.
I'm curious to know if I'm, like, *way* off on this one. Are people going to flame the hell out of me on this one? Or agree completely?
The battle over "true AI" has still got a long, long way to go. It's likely to never be solved, based on the earlier argument that "life" is a construct of our own perception of ourself, which implies that we will never bestow that designation onto anything else. There is a constant running through all "living" things that we recognize and accept, but what is that constant, and how far can we stray from it? Carbon based life forms? That would explain why all the Star Treks always insist on having the aliens be human. Is it then likely that people will simply never make the leap that there can be true silicon-based life? Are our minds not capable of it? They say that man can only create a subset of himself, not a superset.
Although it's a bit pop-culturish, Stephen Levy has a pretty good book on Artificial Life that addresses many of these issues. Mostly from the perspective of battles that Chris Langton has had to face.
Think of it this way. 50 years ago Turing proposed his famous test. And I will point out that he did make certain conditions -- within X amount of questioning time, a person would have Y% chance of guessing correctly. According to him, we should just about be there. Realistically, not only are we not even close on the natural language front, but we're just now only coming to agreement on what his test is supposed to test for!
There are two ways you can argue the condition of "life" - what conditions are "necessary" and which are "sufficient". For any condition that you say "In order to be alive, X must have Y" it has thus far been pretty likely that someone can find an exception to Y. A sufficient condition merely implies "If X has Y, then X is alive." But in that situation people are willing to accept the sufficiency condition right up until it is about to be met, and then they decide its not sufficient anymore. (I'm reminded of very early arguments that said a chess program beating a grandmaster would be a sufficient condition of AI. Later people changed their minds).
there are experiments going on now to use the internet to form a huge, distributed neural net. THAT could be pretty cool. Whether or not it would ever exhibit signs of life, I don't know. But it would sure be neat.
Actually, good point. I used the word spam far too much in my reply. Almost that whole time I was thinking "You've come to my site voluntarily and I want to direct useful messages at you", but I kept saying "spam". My bad.
You're right. Spam sucks in all flavors. But if you've voluntarily walked through the door of my hardwareshop.com, I'm hoping that you will appreciate me knowing that you have kids ready to go off to college so I can point you to the deal on bookcases.
And now I bet somebody's gonna moderate me down as being overrated. I hate it when that happens.:) It's not my fault I'm posting at a natural 2!
Slashdot Mirror
I was very happy when you ported Eric's Solitaire, because it was a game my fiance could play. But it seems like that's the exception, and that the majority of commercial games for Linux either now or in the future will be these war mongering RPGs, 3D shooters and the like. I'm sure that these are more popular with the gaming audience as a whole, but does that mean that there's no hope for some more simple games, like maybe a nice board game collection or some card games? No, I don't want yet another tetris, but I do think that the 80's with the pacmans (pacmen?) and qberts was the pinnacle of gaming and would be happy to see more games like that show up on the shelves.
Which method do you recommend, and why? I still hope for the day when I can go to the local software shop and see a Linux section.
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...I wonder if he could get it open by June when the next JavaOne rolls around and 20,000+ geeks roll into town? Would they all attempt to show up at jwz's place simultaneously? Talk about a /. effect. ;)
They have a poll on which editor you use to create web pages, and there's no mention of Emacs? What sort of true hackers would hang out on such a site that doesn't think to mention Emacs? Look at what they do list : Notepad, FrontPage... Yipes.
I read his book. I liked his book. But two things bugged me about his book:
Ummm...sorry, but just because Transmeta finally decided to share their toy with us publicly doesn't mean that it's the first time any of these companies is glimpsing it. I would suspect that those deals have been ready to go for a long time, and companies like Diamond have merely been sitting under NDA waiting until the Big Day. On the subject of quickly, how long has Transmeta been around? In theory, the marketroids could have cut the deals before work on the chip even began.
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(A friend of mine who had a similar device trained it in babble, so that people would look at her funny when she spoke to it. :))
Of course I can see where the whole idea of a PDA is to be more useful to you then a pen and paper (despite my dad telling me regularly that he can do anything I can and he never has to change batteries :)), but I guess my argument is on the whole question of necessity. A color map would be nice. Sometimes. But it's not really necessary.
What is necessary? Personally, I think a better input system is necessary. There are people in my life that I simply can't consider a Palm device for because graffiti will be forever beyond their grasp. A better display would be nice, too, something more like traditional paper. Everytime I show my pilot to a new person, the first words out of their mouths are "Holy god, you expect me to read that?" Then they blink a few times, hold it at arm's length, squint, hold it two inches away, squint, and then find a comfortable distance. These are two of the reasons that I am a big proponent of voice recognition/synthesis, and natural language processing. It's the most natural (pun not intended) interface in the world.
I fully expect one day to have a PDA that is the size of a hearing aid. I will talk to it, and it will talk to me. It will be completely wireless and be able to get my news and email, as well as handle an address book and date book. I will be able to always have it with me. It will use minimal battery power (heck, I might even be able to power it with a rechargeable battery in my shoe).
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Ya got yer III, IIIx, IIIe. The VII is based on the III form factor. Soon you'll have the IIIc which I can only presume will be like a III (if not bigger!), and there's no reason not to think that the IIIxe won't be the same as the III sizewise.
I'm reminded of a device company I used to work for. A scientist sat in our weekly meeting and announced that the device would only produce acceptable results if measurement X was within something like 10 microns. Upon which the manufacturing manager demonstrated to him that by the time you got to measurement X you had to put together measurements A,B,C, each of which had a tolerance of 15 microns in the first place, so there's no way he could get what he asked for. He shrugged, apparently oblivious to the reality of the physical universe, and said that in that case, just wouldn't work.
Seems to me like people want it to be small (PalmV sized sounds nice), with a bigger screen and bigger writing area (huh?). More memory, please (16M would sound like lots now, but I'm sure it won't in a year), but I want to stuff a few MP3s on there so I'm going to fill it up quick anyway. Please add color and voice recognition, but don't make the batteries any thicker. Make them last longer.
I like my IIIx. I am hoping that, unlike the V/Vx, the IIIx will have an upgrade for that 8meg.
Compare that to, say, Victoria's Secret where I was also shopping. When I selected the detail for items, not only did it say "This item will ship on XX date", if the item was out, it offered recommendations for similar items. I was quite impressed with that engine. Of course, after I ordered something I got a card in the mail saying "This item cannot be shipped on the expected date." D'oh. (But it still showed up!)
I ordered something from thinkgeek once pretty much as it was being slashdotted. Right at the final click to submit my order the site seemed to go down. What to do, what to do? You never resubmit, everybody knows that. Don't wanna get charged twice! So, I let the first one stand and then emailed them the timestamp (roughly) and what I'd ordered as a way of alerting them to my dilemma. I didn't hear back via email, but my package did arrive within a few days (if anything, it was even earlier than I would have expected). So whatever they're doing over there, it's pretty robust in my eyes.
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"Wait a second!" shouted my partner, leaning over my shoulder and beginning to type.
"WHAT?" I asked, watching him move the cursor.
He cursored over to a piece of Lisp code, and pressed the space bar. "Sorry," he said, "That was bugging me. Now it's indented properly."
What I hope to see by next xmas is several companies come out with these things. Possibly a standard or two. And a 30-50 hour version for about $400-$600, instead of $1000. Then, I'd buy one in a snap.
I thought it would be cool to add a voice synthesizer. You come home from work, turn it on, and it tells you "Hello, Duane. Jenna Jameson was on Good Morning America this morning, and I thought you might like that so I recorded it."
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Having said that, the three laws are an excellent model on which to build the huge base of work that Asimov did. Three simple laws, and yet he found enough material to write numerous stories, several novels, etc... He even evolved the idea, commenting in his later stories to the effect that "Earlier robots were of the 'if x more harm than y then do y' variety", while later robots were better able to weigh potentials.
The entire idea behind the three laws is the notion that human beings are not comfortable with their own creations unless they are convinced that there is some sort of built in protection. Sort of like a frankenstein-complex clause. We are afraid of being harmed, therefore the first law MUST be do no harm (hell, we even make our doctors swear that in the hippocratic oath!). The risk to Andrew Martin throughout his entire life is "You are human, I am not, therefore my 'life' is worth less than yours." At the root of all Asimov's robot stories is: "We are capable of creating better than our equals, yet we will deliberately cripple them to be beneath us."
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Having said that, I was surprised at how good the movie turned out. I knew that it wouldn't be true to the original, because I don't expect the mass of moviegoers to understand the three laws and their implications. Take, as an example, my non-geek fiance. She loved this movie. Heck, she cried. I thought she was crying over the romance, and the father/daughter story, but was very surprised when she said that she loved the robot.
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Does anybody else find it weird that science has to basically ask religion if its ok to do something? Is that the right path? Is an answer of "Only God should create living things" an acceptable scientific argument?
I do not believe in the same God that the world's religious leaders believe in. Therefore is it right to deprive me of this scientific advance?
Now, I'm not arguing that we should just run right out and do it. Like I said at the top, "whether we should" is indeed a valid question. I just find it weird to think of science as asking religion, as if they are the ones that should be consulted. If we'd done that 300+ years ago would anybody have bothered to try sailing around the planet?
Read what I wrote again, and you'll see that you still get to use your brain. All the card does it regulate and structure the flow of information. You still get to set up the whole "trust" mechanism. If you trust no one, and it sounds like you don't, then don't use the thing. But you must not be a customer many places, though, because I would think that you'd be willing to identify yourself to a web site in order to get a look at your stock portfolio, or the status of your new order of blowup dolls.
As for pretending to be a 75yr old lesbian, your personal life is your business. Sounds to me like wearing a different disguise to the supermarket every week so that nobody recognizes you as a regular shopper, though. Kinda pointless. But if that's where you want to spend your time and energy, more power to ya. I'm just trying to spend mine coming up with ways that might actually benefit both people and industry. It can happen, ya know.
This logic implies that "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it" is incorrect. That industry does not learn from its mistakes. This might be true, I don't know. I don't think it is. You're welcome to. There's no real way to tell if it's an absolute truth, now is there?
First, every company will get into an endless Beta-VHS standards war seeking to control the standard and therefore the royalties.
And by this logic, we would never have settled on the magnetic stripe card, would we? Somewhere along the line competing plcaes like Visa and Mastercard got together enough to agree on the format. Why is it so unbelievable a stretch that this couldn't happen with smart cards, which are often compared very closely to magnetic stripe cards? There's a darwinistic element to the introduction of a standard, no question about it. And we all know that it's not usually the technically superior standard that wins. But a standard does usually emerge. It's not an endless battle.
Second, this type of "universal profile" turns people off.
Define "people" in this case. You forget that most people out there are not freedom fighters. They are consumers. More than that, they are lazy, cheap consumers. It's cost-benefit analysis. What am I giving up by having the card? What benefit does the card give me? If people perceive that the card makes life easier, they are likely to use it. If you don't wnat to use it, fine. I know people that don't use ATM cards for many of the reasons you list. Fine. But that hasn't stopped them from becoming very popular.
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The business logic of the poor adoption of smart cards has been that they're currently too expensive. Nobody will pay $5 just for a card, especially if there are a number of different entities that each expect you to get your own card. As an example, they have "SpeedPass" at my local gas station. It's a smart card that's in a keychain, you wave it at the pump instead of having to get out a credit card. This is a free service. I don't think anybody would pay for the card. Because then they would be worry about if they lost the card, or it got worn out, or whatever. When it's free they can always get a new one.
So, smart cards won't be truly adopted until they're "relatively" free (maybe a cost of $1 or something could be eaten by other fees). As for who sponsors/provides them, the question turns to one of identification. Traditionally you rely on a government agency to provide your identification (passport, driver's license, birth certificate...) so it's logical to extend that into this arena. But again, people will go bananas if you start talking about the government being involved in such a thing when it relates to the web.
Who knows. Maybe some enterprising company will figure out a way to market the cards as essentially free, but then sell the readers. The trick there would be in fostering the adoption of the card/standard. You'd need to get all kinds of retailers on board that use your card, so that people would get use out of it. This has been tried numerous times with a variety of "electronic cash" methods, but none have really caught on that I know of.
Imagine that, as a web surfer, you have a smart card that identifies you as a web surfer. Personally I am a believer that you should have to identify yourself as adult/child in order to cruise some areas of the web, but that's my personal opinion. But that's not for this thread to discuss. Add to the smart card some sort of bio sensitive way to identify yourself, maybe a thumb, maybe an iris scan. The key being that everything you need (short of the reader hardware) is stored on the card. You can take it with you to any browser (unlike cookies).
Your smart card not only identifies you, it has a profile on you. It can keep your web site preferences, but it can also keep your buying habits, etc. And your age, marital status, and so on. It's here that people scream bloody murder about privacy on the net. But here's my hopeful suggestion : that your profile will come with trust zones. If you're doing anonymous surfing, maybe all the site gets is your age -- or maybe nothing at all. For sites you want to register with long enough to read a story (like NYTimes), you let them have your name but not your profile. And so on. For trusted sites like slashdot you set up preferences. For sites where you are actually a customer of some sort, you let them have your profile (linking in yesterday's discussion about IBM's miniature vegetable commercials).
Wouldn't this be nice? My company has a large number of business units, each with their own web site, and we've worked to setup a shared profile system so that, once you've told us something once, you don't have to tell us again. Wouldn't it be good if this extended to multiple businesses? Don't you think it's a pain in the ass to have to continually identify yourself and set up preferences on every site you want? Wouldn't it be nice to have a mini-profile that you could use to bootstrap your registration to new sites?
My point is that, with a self contained smart card, you can have a level of control over the information that you provide. It's the card that has the brains. A web site couldn't just tell the card "Give me the whole profile". It would have to say "Please validate me as being a trusted site and give me whatever information I am entitled to." And then, in something of an ironic twist, *it* has to identify itself to *you*, and you get to decide what to do next.
Will this happen anytime soon? I wish. I think the reason that digital certificate authentication didn't catch on is that it was too confusing to get the certificates into the browsers, people didn't want to give up their passwords, and the certificates weren't portable. In a world where you have a smart card reader built into your keyboard, these problems seem like they might go away. Nobody thinks twice about having to flash a passport when flying internationally, and they usually only grumble a little bit about being carded at the local bar. Is it really that much of a stretch to think that there'll come a day when you take your webId card out, stick it in the slot, and then periodically answer a question about how much information you want to provide to the web site you just visitd? I don't think it's really all that bad.
I'm curious to know if I'm, like, *way* off on this one. Are people going to flame the hell out of me on this one? Or agree completely?
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Oh, is that what that means? Hmmm. shows what I get for not r-ing the fm. :)
Although it's a bit pop-culturish, Stephen Levy has a pretty good book on Artificial Life that addresses many of these issues. Mostly from the perspective of battles that Chris Langton has had to face.
Think of it this way. 50 years ago Turing proposed his famous test. And I will point out that he did make certain conditions -- within X amount of questioning time, a person would have Y% chance of guessing correctly. According to him, we should just about be there. Realistically, not only are we not even close on the natural language front, but we're just now only coming to agreement on what his test is supposed to test for!
There are two ways you can argue the condition of "life" - what conditions are "necessary" and which are "sufficient". For any condition that you say "In order to be alive, X must have Y" it has thus far been pretty likely that someone can find an exception to Y. A sufficient condition merely implies "If X has Y, then X is alive." But in that situation people are willing to accept the sufficiency condition right up until it is about to be met, and then they decide its not sufficient anymore. (I'm reminded of very early arguments that said a chess program beating a grandmaster would be a sufficient condition of AI. Later people changed their minds).
there are experiments going on now to use the internet to form a huge, distributed neural net. THAT could be pretty cool. Whether or not it would ever exhibit signs of life, I don't know. But it would sure be neat.
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You're right. Spam sucks in all flavors. But if you've voluntarily walked through the door of my hardwareshop.com, I'm hoping that you will appreciate me knowing that you have kids ready to go off to college so I can point you to the deal on bookcases.
And now I bet somebody's gonna moderate me down as being overrated. I hate it when that happens. :) It's not my fault I'm posting at a natural 2!