No, not anymore. MUDs are completely scalable because they use the same system that MMORPGs do - different cities for different races, different class management to do the scaling, and even different servers for different areas. This technology exists, though it isn't used much not because it can't be, but because even the biggest MUDs only have about 500 people playing at once.
The only exception to this is, once again, MajorMud.
These games are all pretty much completely scalable to any level - 100,000 is the same as 500 if you've got the server space.
Dispite popular belief, MMORPGs did not start when you started playing UO.
UO and Everquest are both game engines that have only been around for about 5 years. MMRPGs have been around for about 15-20, but they're all text based. The "engines" are already fully evolved, and in some cases are more complicated than Everquest's or UO's.
And they're free.
For some people, this interface is a problem, but really its only a temporary one. Because they're free, development is slower - less people are doing the development.
But that doesn't mean its not happening. Its quite likely that these rich, powerful systems will replace UO as soon as graphical interfaces are easy to deal with.
If you don't believe me, consider that the only text-based system that works quite well with a gui now - majormud - is actually quite successful as a commercial product system (this one you have to pay for though). If Origin and Everquest would release their game engine code, it would quickly be swallowed by the older mmorpgs and no one would pay for it.
Even if they don't, its only a matter of time before its all free because people like me would like to use their free time to work on this, and are quite entertained by creating worlds and having others interact in them.
I went to a school where I had to take TWO introductory courses before I could take the computer course - first a typing course (on typewriters - not computers) - and then an introductory course on 8086 machines that didn't have hard drives where we learned MS Works in DOS. Keep in mind that this was when 486-66 was the average machine, and some people had Pentiums. After taking the first two, I gave up. I was SO far above the level of the first two courses that I figured that I was ready for the fifth or sixth course in the series (which wasn't offered by this school).
I graduated from high school in 1997 - just five years ago. I know the teachers that I had, and knowing what I know now I have to say that I don't think there's any way they could do the job. I also know a lot of new tech teachers haven't been hired at my old school. I doubt that they would get a competent teacher, either, as anyone who understands the subject won't be teaching it there. If they have to teach, there are many venues that have higher benefits for the teachers.
If I wanted to teach high schoolers, I'd hire a bunch, show them the ropes and get them to work for me, and leave the education system out of it completely. I might make less with all the training I'd do, but it'd still be worth it more than the other way. Then I wouldn't have to deal with all of the red tape, the low pay, and those who don't want to learn - the things you find in the public school system.
So what should the public schools do? Let the private sector handle it. Make sure that students know about their chances to do that. Then maybe everything they learn won't be on their own, like they were for me.
I can read at about 400 WPM for normal text. If its really interesting, I cut down to 200. I'd say I read novels at about 200 - it lets the imagination kick in better.
If there's a lot of it, I ramp it up to up to 3000 (I think; at least its about a 8 1/2 x 11" page in under 2 seconds at about 10 point font).
Its all about the purpose of the reading. At the greatest speed, I don't even have enough time to put together whole sentences in my head (though I read every word), so I can't even completely get the general idea. However, if I'm searching for important words, it works well. This is how I read the front page of the newspaper and freshmeat.
I got as fast as I am by reading a LOT. About 30 pages every day at least. As I did it more, I got to where I could alter the speed (and comprehension) of what I read to suit the various kinds of reading that I did. Sure, there are lots of tricks - seeing everything at once, skip the articles, etc, but they just sort of happen naturally if you TRY to read faster - except for the change in the way you think.
Others have spoken correctly - you have to allow yourself to take on varying degrees of understanding. At the lowest level is merely catching the words - the highest level is imagery. I think most people read at the speech comprehension level (which is not even the same as sentence comprehension level) and are missing out on the others.
Now if you're lucky, you may be capable of actually thinking much, much faster than you speak, and may be capable of reading at around 1000 WPM without having to lose anything, but that ability is usually only reserved for geniuses.
What the article failed to mention was the current innovations that exist to solve bandwidth problems.
A few of the problems now: 1) The internet is a web, but routing is done with huge look-up tables - its not as web-like. 2) Packet-routing is fairly stupid.
We could cut down on the bandwidth considerably if we used different applications that didn't require this. In fact, it is quite possible to create an ad-hoc network (a network formed by joining lots of users but with no central hosts) that would behave like the internet does wirelessly given a dense enough population of broadcasters. Of course, we couldn't really use the ethernet protocol - we'd have to use another one, but its not outside of the realm of possibility or even probability.
Given a dense population, such ad-hoc systems are cheaper, wider bandwidth, more reliable, and more adaptive than the version of the web we get right now. I imagine that when we're ALL online, and we ALL have bandwidth problems, we'll leave the telecos en-masse in favor of the new technologies that exist today.
Do you see a flaw in this line of reasoning? Those who subscribe to Newton's gravitation law do so by citing the fact that we see that objects are attracted proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Things falling down are big news; things falling up are not.
You don't think that something which has never happened wouldn't be big news?
The biggest evolutionary change we've ever seen is a change in the protien coating of virii. It would be huge news if we could create a new species.
All of our efforts with higher lifeforms result in sterility of the new being if the change is enough to warrant calling it a new species. Also, the effect is usually harmful to the organism, such as the famous fruitfly mutations which resulted in flies with no wings.
Unless, of course you count seedless oranges and grapes. They can't reproduce - they must be grafted, and are therefore really all the same plant, which would consistently die out without human intervention.
I don't think business is at all like nature. In nature, most organisms achieve an equilibrium with the environment (not a survive by dominating effect which is often inferred from survival of the fittest). On the other hand, businesses are guided by humans - and humans by in large do not achieve equilibrium with any environment. Business behave the same way government do - they work well at first, and get progressively worse until they are destroyed. The destruction of the old is always followed by the birth of something new.
Sure, the process can be delayed. But its never been stopped.
And it happens at every level - from the biggest company to the smallest.
How hard Divx flopped? What are you talking about?
Perhaps you should put it in context. The Divx I'm thinking of is an mpeg-4 video codec that encodes at about 40% better than mpeg-2 a lot of the time. That codec is currently in widespread use on desktop machines everywhere. I don't see how this has any relavence to servers at all.
Re:"eightythree" TM infringing on TI-83?
on
Tiqit Handheld PC
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· Score: 2
"from that era?" TI-83 was made in the 1996, actually. In fact, all TI-80, the first of the 80s series was made in 1995. None of that era calculators was a BCD calculator, none of them were four bit. See for yourself. What era are you thinking of?
You do realize that the book was only a short story, right?
In fact, if you read the book, that's kind of what it feels like when it ends (I haven't seen the movie yet). It feels like it should keep going to some other time, because he only visited one time (for very long) before going to the end of time and then heading home. While I'm on the Time Machine subject, TECH HUBRIS??!!! Where's that in the book? He uses the machine to travel to a time when there is no technology, except to make clothing and food, and stays there for the entire book, until he goes on to see the earth's death as the sun dims, which also has little to do with technology (no technology caused that). I suppose the last sentence (ending which I won't give away) could be about that, but how can you say that the book is all about technological hubris based upon a single sentence?
I think someone is lumping all of their Victorian writers into the same category without reading very carefully. Its good if that's not in the movie, 'cause it sure ain't in the book.
Eh...when the airplane began its existance everyone thought that by about the year 2000 everyone would own one - that they would be as ubiquitous as cars. That hasn't happened. Why? Because after a decade or two of perfection, the airplane industry leveled off in its ability to improve. They just cost too much to fly.
Why do you expect anything different from any other piece of technology? We already know the physical limits of silicon, and we're close to predicting the limits of protien based chips. We'll hit those limits (within the industry) in between five and ten years. Even then, to make a desktop machine that fast will cost lots of space, electricity, and money.
Conclusion: we can't know much about what video games will be like in 20 years.
What you don't realize is that the universe is actually a butter pecan cookie about to be eaten by some giant, semi-sentient being who is sitting in front of his television doing nothing.
Its a program designed to advertise the amazing new security features built into the incredible.net framework!
Similarly, LSD is capable of demonstrating the incredible new navigation (flight) features of Windows XP, and my assault rifle is useful to demonstrate windows new, millisecond speed shutdown procedure (along with security lock to ensure that no one who is not unauthorized won't be able to boot the machine). Its the best, isn't it?
Yes, smoothwall is good, and yes, Clark Connect is even better. I haven't tried this Freesco thing, but I'd have to say it may not serve you if you want to have more services than the average router. If you look in the nearly unnoticable corner of the web you'll find the "shop" with the real beauty - the Start-up server. This is a router with a lot of interesting features, including a console menu system called "smat" that lets you do everything you need, and which, I might add, is highly configurable because its written in Bash (you also get webmin). Its also based upon Slackware, so you get to download any of its packages if you need them. The one feature I particularly like about this distro is the fact that it uses the keyboard LEDs (num, caps, and scroll) as status indicators for the network, so you don't have to plug in a monitor to troubleshoot the connection at the source if anything goes wrong.
He's almost completely the father of wearable computing. He wore a pair of glasses and a "keyboard" interface everywhere he goes, and worked for MIT media lab. People who have met him say he seemed more intelligent than he actually is, because his vision sensors send information back to the lab which he can route to others for aid in identification, and he asked questions on the LAN IRC (I don't think they actually use that protocol) and got the answers from the minds of MIT. Its as though he can answer any question.
His page is at the University of Toronto now, and those glasses he's wearing are exactly the ones that I mentioned - at least, they're the fourth draft of the ones I mentioned.
"Taxes are never levied for the benefit of the taxed."
There are a hundred ways you could skim off the top of a program like this; this isn't even something that necessarily needs to happen. Computers can be reused almost indefinitely. Why don't we have a tax on televisions, Saturn automobiles, and everything else with reusable plastic (which means too expensive for recycling to pay for itself) stuff as well?
The sort of reminds me of the old tax that Feudal Lords used to put on their fiefs when the came for dinner - the "tooth wear and tear" tax, which taxed based upon the fact that the dinner caused the teeth to wear down to some degree.
Well, see, you prove it by taking a whole bunch of people and trying a wide variety of sounds at different volumes and locations and getting them to identifiy how far away the sound are.
They won't be able to. The test have been done before, though I can't tell you where right now. Why don't we use phase shift or spectrum spread?
Because it isn't a reliable indicator of anything. Different frequencies propagate at different speeds, true, but you have to know what the sound is like at the source, and about everything in between - something we do not know reliably. Did you know that a sound coming from a source on a wooden stage will usually reverberate with more of the lows than the highs? If we depended upon sound spread for distance, it would make the sound appear closer. What about audio amplification? Using pretty much any means - electrical or acoustical - the result is a phase shift and a spreading of the sound - something you would expect if the sound is farther away. Also, due to the nature of reflection, out of phase sources that meet at a wall will only reflect their in-sync portions, confusing the distance based on phase for both of them.
What does all this show? That the interaction of sound waves with the surrounding media is so complicated that there is no way to accurately use them to guage distance with an unknown sound.
A computer may be able to tell the difference between a computer generated pulse specifically used for distancing that has traveled 1 meter and one that has traveled 100 meters, but it wouldn't be able to know the difference between a live band heard 100 meters away and one heard 1 meter away.
For the most part, (with a few exceptions), most humans are only able to distinguish thing in front of them from things behind them, and its quite easy to prove that we can't guage distance from sound (because we don't know how loud it was at the point source).
However, anyone can train to improve their selective listening skills and achieve more 3d awareness. Its quite a common skill among conductors, musicians, and most of all sound technicians.
I understand, and agree that this is different. But you have to admit, it produces the same effect, though the device can be smaller than the necessary parabolic dish.
Parabolic microphones and speakers have been around (commericially, even) forever. They already pretty much do this - picking up sound in a straight line from the source from a long distance away.
I guess this might work over a longer distance than parabolic stuff, but they haven't really shown that. So basically, they have a technology that can be duplicated by taking a regular speaker as the focus surrounded by a plastic parabola.
I wonder why they didn't bring that up in the article? Surely they've heard of it?
You seem to be missing one of the fundamental qualities of life: everyone learns all of the time. There are things that are extremely difficult to learn on one's own: the in depth knowledge, which must often be learned in the classroom.
Other things can be obtained with a less in-depth analysis, often based upon a more simplistic understanding of the hard stuff.
For example, once you understand statistical analysis of Neural Networks, economic formulas can just be light reading from the library; you've got all the needed skills.
As far as managing people, that's certianly not something you need to train for in that manner.
When I got to college, I took a program called L.E.A.D., which teaches basic leadership and management skills. I felt like I was learning rudimentary psych stuff - stuff you could teach a 10 year old. So, whats the difference between a driven Computer Scientist, or a driven Communication Theorist, or a driven Mathematician, and someone trained as management or in Commerce? The commerce guy doesn't know anything that is difficult to learn by simply reading.
You're forgetting that packets are being transmitted across a network, and if you've got a router, they might go through your computer. Are you telling me its illegal for me to put my network card in promiscious mode and look at the packets flying around my local network?
Its more like having your postcard hand delivered by people who don't agree not to invade your privacy. In other words, currently, anyone who can has the right to invade your privacy on the internet, just so long as they don't hack into your computer to do it.
At the moment, freedom of usage exceeds freedom of privacy. I'm quite glad this is the case because the particular form of usage is necessary to allow for not hierarchical networking, such as ethernet. After all, if the hardware isn't allowed to examine all packets, it can't determine which ones belong to it.
I remember learning the basics of arithmatic from one of those little learning calculators - I used it a lot. I think that little thing was the beginning of what I loved about Mathematics.
I also remember learning to read with the help of a Tape device with buttons that formed a menu - it was called a "Talk 'n Play," I believe.
A few years later (about third grade) I started using the computers, and learned about the order of operations, flowcharts, and basically everything that I needed to know to start thinking about writing programs. I also read at least 8 novels a year for from third grade on until about my 9th grade year (I don't actually remember how many I read anymore; that was a while ago, so I did a low estimate).
When I got to use an X86 finally, I really took off, learning things left and right.
Whats the point? Computer-like learning interface enhanced my ability to learn and accelerated my education.
If you ever read anything about learning, you must know that there is a special case of learning: the untainted learner - the person who fundamentally desires to learn as much as possible in an area (or in all areas) with whatever means of learning are available.
For these people, the best way to teach them is to try to transfer the knowledge to them as fast and as much as possible, and they will work hard to absorb it. This is exactly possible with today's computers and computer-based learning interfaces. They are totally designed for this.
It IS possible to work on gaining knowledge without worrying about learning "computers."
This is not always the case, however, and certainly doesn't apply to most learners. Usually, its much better to give a little bit at a time and give periods of absorption.
I totally understand this article's sentiment, and I'm not even that old. I remember when I was in third grade I went to a form of summer school, and learned to program on the Apple IIE on the side. I still remember the first real program I wrote, that is the first one with more than 10 lines - a simple three frame animation created by manually turning on and off individual pixels. I was really proud of that (remember, I was very young, and working on my own, so even though it wasn't much, it was hard for me).
I still have it on a totally useless 5 1/4" disk, though I can't use it, and its totally worthless and pathetic compared to today's stuff.
..Sigh..
I don't even think I use most of the knowledge I learned from back then.
Flowcharts, goto loops, and even BASIC have all been declared bad because they lead to obscurity in coding, and even the interfaces (both command and within the major programs - sort of GUIish) of my first two computers (school used Apple IIE, while I used the Commodore 64 at home) have completely gone the way of the dinosaurs.
I used to read Nintendo Power back in the day when 8 bit systems walked the earth.
One of the soldiers took his gameboy with him to Desert Storm, and it got toasted by a grenade, according to one issue.
They showed a picture that looked about like that Palm Pilot did - but Tetris was running on it. It still worked! Of course, the screen was really difficult to see, since half of it was burnt off, but at least it did *something*.
There used to be a gameboy "game" called a workboy, which was basically a PDA. Maybe I should get one of those instead of a Palm. Then I won't have to worry about it breaking.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not anymore. MUDs are completely scalable because they use the same system that MMORPGs do - different cities for different races, different class management to do the scaling, and even different servers for different areas. This technology exists, though it isn't used much not because it can't be, but because even the biggest MUDs only have about 500 people playing at once.
The only exception to this is, once again, MajorMud.
These games are all pretty much completely scalable to any level - 100,000 is the same as 500 if you've got the server space.
Dispite popular belief, MMORPGs did not start when you started playing UO.
UO and Everquest are both game engines that have only been around for about 5 years. MMRPGs have been around for about 15-20, but they're all text based. The "engines" are already fully evolved, and in some cases are more complicated than Everquest's or UO's.
And they're free.
For some people, this interface is a problem, but really its only a temporary one. Because they're free, development is slower - less people are doing the development.
But that doesn't mean its not happening. Its quite likely that these rich, powerful systems will replace UO as soon as graphical interfaces are easy to deal with.
If you don't believe me, consider that the only text-based system that works quite well with a gui now - majormud - is actually quite successful as a commercial product system (this one you have to pay for though).
If Origin and Everquest would release their game engine code, it would quickly be swallowed by the older mmorpgs and no one would pay for it.
Even if they don't, its only a matter of time before its all free because people like me would like to use their free time to work on this, and are quite entertained by creating worlds and having others interact in them.
I went to a school where I had to take TWO introductory courses before I could take the computer course - first a typing course (on typewriters - not computers) - and then an introductory course on 8086 machines that didn't have hard drives where we learned MS Works in DOS. Keep in mind that this was when 486-66 was the average machine, and some people had Pentiums. After taking the first two, I gave up. I was SO far above the level of the first two courses that I figured that I was ready for the fifth or sixth course in the series (which wasn't offered by this school).
I graduated from high school in 1997 - just five years ago. I know the teachers that I had, and knowing what I know now I have to say that I don't think there's any way they could do the job. I also know a lot of new tech teachers haven't been hired at my old school. I doubt that they would get a competent teacher, either, as anyone who understands the subject won't be teaching it there. If they have to teach, there are many venues that have higher benefits for the teachers.
If I wanted to teach high schoolers, I'd hire a bunch, show them the ropes and get them to work for me, and leave the education system out of it completely. I might make less with all the training I'd do, but it'd still be worth it more than the other way. Then I wouldn't have to deal with all of the red tape, the low pay, and those who don't want to learn - the things you find in the public school system.
So what should the public schools do? Let the private sector handle it. Make sure that students know about their chances to do that. Then maybe everything they learn won't be on their own, like they were for me.
I can read at about 400 WPM for normal text. If its really interesting, I cut down to 200. I'd say I read novels at about 200 - it lets the imagination kick in better.
If there's a lot of it, I ramp it up to up to 3000 (I think; at least its about a 8 1/2 x 11" page in under 2 seconds at about 10 point font).
Its all about the purpose of the reading. At the greatest speed, I don't even have enough time to put together whole sentences in my head (though I read every word), so I can't even completely get the general idea. However, if I'm searching for important words, it works well. This is how I read the front page of the newspaper and freshmeat.
I got as fast as I am by reading a LOT. About 30 pages every day at least. As I did it more, I got to where I could alter the speed (and comprehension) of what I read to suit the various kinds of reading that I did. Sure, there are lots of tricks - seeing everything at once, skip the articles, etc, but they just sort of happen naturally if you TRY to read faster - except for the change in the way you think.
Others have spoken correctly - you have to allow yourself to take on varying degrees of understanding. At the lowest level is merely catching the words - the highest level is imagery. I think most people read at the speech comprehension level (which is not even the same as sentence comprehension level) and are missing out on the others.
Now if you're lucky, you may be capable of actually thinking much, much faster than you speak, and may be capable of reading at around 1000 WPM without having to lose anything, but that ability is usually only reserved for geniuses.
What the article failed to mention was the current innovations that exist to solve bandwidth problems.
A few of the problems now:
1) The internet is a web, but routing is done with huge look-up tables - its not as web-like.
2) Packet-routing is fairly stupid.
We could cut down on the bandwidth considerably if we used different applications that didn't require this. In fact, it is quite possible to create an ad-hoc network (a network formed by joining lots of users but with no central hosts) that would behave like the internet does wirelessly given a dense enough population of broadcasters. Of course, we couldn't really use the ethernet protocol - we'd have to use another one, but its not outside of the realm of possibility or even probability.
Given a dense population, such ad-hoc systems are cheaper, wider bandwidth, more reliable, and more adaptive than the version of the web we get right now. I imagine that when we're ALL online, and we ALL have bandwidth problems, we'll leave the telecos en-masse in favor of the new technologies that exist today.
Do you see a flaw in this line of reasoning?
Those who subscribe to Newton's gravitation law do so by citing the fact that we see that objects are attracted proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
Things falling down are big news; things falling up are not.
You don't think that something which has never happened wouldn't be big news?
The biggest evolutionary change we've ever seen is a change in the protien coating of virii. It would be huge news if we could create a new species.
All of our efforts with higher lifeforms result in sterility of the new being if the change is enough to warrant calling it a new species. Also, the effect is usually harmful to the organism, such as the famous fruitfly mutations which resulted in flies with no wings.
Unless, of course you count seedless oranges and grapes. They can't reproduce - they must be grafted, and are therefore really all the same plant, which would consistently die out without human intervention.
I don't think business is at all like nature. In nature, most organisms achieve an equilibrium with the environment (not a survive by dominating effect which is often inferred from survival of the fittest). On the other hand, businesses are guided by humans - and humans by in large do not achieve equilibrium with any environment. Business behave the same way government do - they work well at first, and get progressively worse until they are destroyed. The destruction of the old is always followed by the birth of something new.
Sure, the process can be delayed. But its never been stopped.
And it happens at every level - from the biggest company to the smallest.
How hard Divx flopped? What are you talking about?
Perhaps you should put it in context. The Divx I'm thinking of is an mpeg-4 video codec that encodes at about 40% better than mpeg-2 a lot of the time. That codec is currently in widespread use on desktop machines everywhere. I don't see how this has any relavence to servers at all.
"from that era?"
TI-83 was made in the 1996, actually. In fact, all TI-80, the first of the 80s series was made in 1995. None of that era calculators was a BCD calculator, none of them were four bit. See for yourself.
What era are you thinking of?
You do realize that the book was only a short story, right?
In fact, if you read the book, that's kind of what it feels like when it ends (I haven't seen the movie yet). It feels like it should keep going to some other time, because he only visited one time (for very long) before going to the end of time and then heading home.
While I'm on the Time Machine subject, TECH HUBRIS??!!! Where's that in the book? He uses the machine to travel to a time when there is no technology, except to make clothing and food, and stays there for the entire book, until he goes on to see the earth's death as the sun dims, which also has little to do with technology (no technology caused that). I suppose the last sentence (ending which I won't give away) could be about that, but how can you say that the book is all about technological hubris based upon a single sentence?
I think someone is lumping all of their Victorian writers into the same category without reading very carefully. Its good if that's not in the movie, 'cause it sure ain't in the book.
Eh...when the airplane began its existance everyone thought that by about the year 2000 everyone would own one - that they would be as ubiquitous as cars. That hasn't happened. Why? Because after a decade or two of perfection, the airplane industry leveled off in its ability to improve. They just cost too much to fly.
Why do you expect anything different from any other piece of technology? We already know the physical limits of silicon, and we're close to predicting the limits of protien based chips. We'll hit those limits (within the industry) in between five and ten years. Even then, to make a desktop machine that fast will cost lots of space, electricity, and money.
Conclusion: we can't know much about what video games will be like in 20 years.
What you don't realize is that the universe is actually a butter pecan cookie about to be eaten by some giant, semi-sentient being who is sitting in front of his television doing nothing.
At least your universe is. My universe is purple.
Its a program designed to advertise the amazing new security features built into the incredible .net framework!
Similarly, LSD is capable of demonstrating the incredible new navigation (flight) features of Windows XP, and my assault rifle is useful to demonstrate windows new, millisecond speed shutdown procedure (along with security lock to ensure that no one who is not unauthorized won't be able to boot the machine).
Its the best, isn't it?
I should be on MS's marketing staff.
Yes, smoothwall is good, and yes, Clark Connect is even better. I haven't tried this Freesco thing, but I'd have to say it may not serve you if you want to have more services than the average router. If you look in the nearly unnoticable corner of the web you'll find the "shop" with the real beauty - the Start-up server. This is a router with a lot of interesting features, including a console menu system called "smat" that lets you do everything you need, and which, I might add, is highly configurable because its written in Bash (you also get webmin). Its also based upon Slackware, so you get to download any of its packages if you need them. The one feature I particularly like about this distro is the fact that it uses the keyboard LEDs (num, caps, and scroll) as status indicators for the network, so you don't have to plug in a monitor to troubleshoot the connection at the source if anything goes wrong.
He's almost completely the father of wearable computing. He wore a pair of glasses and a "keyboard" interface everywhere he goes, and worked for MIT media lab. People who have met him say he seemed more intelligent than he actually is, because his vision sensors send information back to the lab which he can route to others for aid in identification, and he asked questions on the LAN IRC (I don't think they actually use that protocol) and got the answers from the minds of MIT. Its as though he can answer any question.
His page is at the University of Toronto now, and those glasses he's wearing are exactly the ones that I mentioned - at least, they're the fourth draft of the ones I mentioned.
"Taxes are never levied for the benefit of the taxed."
There are a hundred ways you could skim off the top of a program like this; this isn't even something that necessarily needs to happen. Computers can be reused almost indefinitely. Why don't we have a tax on televisions, Saturn automobiles, and everything else with reusable plastic (which means too expensive for recycling to pay for itself) stuff as well?
The sort of reminds me of the old tax that Feudal Lords used to put on their fiefs when the came for dinner - the "tooth wear and tear" tax, which taxed based upon the fact that the dinner caused the teeth to wear down to some degree.
Well, see, you prove it by taking a whole bunch of people and trying a wide variety of sounds at different volumes and locations and getting them to identifiy how far away the sound are.
They won't be able to. The test have been done before, though I can't tell you where right now.
Why don't we use phase shift or spectrum spread?
Because it isn't a reliable indicator of anything. Different frequencies propagate at different speeds, true, but you have to know what the sound is like at the source, and about everything in between - something we do not know reliably. Did you know that a sound coming from a source on a wooden stage will usually reverberate with more of the lows than the highs? If we depended upon sound spread for distance, it would make the sound appear closer. What about audio amplification? Using pretty much any means - electrical or acoustical - the result is a phase shift and a spreading of the sound - something you would expect if the sound is farther away. Also, due to the nature of reflection, out of phase sources that meet at a wall will only reflect their in-sync portions, confusing the distance based on phase for both of them.
What does all this show? That the interaction of sound waves with the surrounding media is so complicated that there is no way to accurately use them to guage distance with an unknown sound.
A computer may be able to tell the difference between a computer generated pulse specifically used for distancing that has traveled 1 meter and one that has traveled 100 meters, but it wouldn't be able to know the difference between a live band heard 100 meters away and one heard 1 meter away.
--From an acoustical engineer
Yes, we hear sound in 3d...sort of.
For the most part, (with a few exceptions), most humans are only able to distinguish thing in front of them from things behind them, and its quite easy to prove that we can't guage distance from sound (because we don't know how loud it was at the point source).
However, anyone can train to improve their selective listening skills and achieve more 3d awareness. Its quite a common skill among conductors, musicians, and most of all sound technicians.
I understand, and agree that this is different. But you have to admit, it produces the same effect, though the device can be smaller than the necessary parabolic dish.
Does it warrant the expense?
Parabolic microphones and speakers have been around (commericially, even) forever. They already pretty much do this - picking up sound in a straight line from the source from a long distance away.
I guess this might work over a longer distance than parabolic stuff, but they haven't really shown that. So basically, they have a technology that can be duplicated by taking a regular speaker as the focus surrounded by a plastic parabola.
I wonder why they didn't bring that up in the article? Surely they've heard of it?
You seem to be missing one of the fundamental qualities of life: everyone learns all of the time. There are things that are extremely difficult to learn on one's own: the in depth knowledge, which must often be learned in the classroom.
Other things can be obtained with a less in-depth analysis, often based upon a more simplistic understanding of the hard stuff.
For example, once you understand statistical analysis of Neural Networks, economic formulas can just be light reading from the library; you've got all the needed skills.
As far as managing people, that's certianly not something you need to train for in that manner.
When I got to college, I took a program called L.E.A.D., which teaches basic leadership and management skills. I felt like I was learning rudimentary psych stuff - stuff you could teach a 10 year old.
So, whats the difference between a driven Computer Scientist, or a driven Communication Theorist, or a driven Mathematician, and someone trained as management or in Commerce? The commerce guy doesn't know anything that is difficult to learn by simply reading.
Why do you even need a college degree for that?
You're forgetting that packets are being transmitted across a network, and if you've got a router, they might go through your computer. Are you telling me its illegal for me to put my network card in promiscious mode and look at the packets flying around my local network?
Its more like having your postcard hand delivered by people who don't agree not to invade your privacy. In other words, currently, anyone who can has the right to invade your privacy on the internet, just so long as they don't hack into your computer to do it.
At the moment, freedom of usage exceeds freedom of privacy. I'm quite glad this is the case because the particular form of usage is necessary to allow for not hierarchical networking, such as ethernet. After all, if the hardware isn't allowed to examine all packets, it can't determine which ones belong to it.
Is this a corporate payoff advertisement for the upcoming Scorpion King movie? What's next? A giant quidditch ball fossil off the coast of Asia?
I remember learning the basics of arithmatic from one of those little learning calculators - I used it a lot. I think that little thing was the beginning of what I loved about Mathematics.
I also remember learning to read with the help of a Tape device with buttons that formed a menu - it was called a "Talk 'n Play," I believe.
A few years later (about third grade) I started using the computers, and learned about the order of operations, flowcharts, and basically everything that I needed to know to start thinking about writing programs. I also read at least 8 novels a year for from third grade on until about my 9th grade year (I don't actually remember how many I read anymore; that was a while ago, so I did a low estimate).
When I got to use an X86 finally, I really took off, learning things left and right.
Whats the point? Computer-like learning interface enhanced my ability to learn and accelerated my education.
If you ever read anything about learning, you must know that there is a special case of learning: the untainted learner - the person who fundamentally desires to learn as much as possible in an area (or in all areas) with whatever means of learning are available.
For these people, the best way to teach them is to try to transfer the knowledge to them as fast and as much as possible, and they will work hard to absorb it. This is exactly possible with today's computers and computer-based learning interfaces. They are totally designed for this.
It IS possible to work on gaining knowledge without worrying about learning "computers."
This is not always the case, however, and certainly doesn't apply to most learners. Usually, its much better to give a little bit at a time and give periods of absorption.
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I totally understand this article's sentiment, and I'm not even that old. I remember when I was in third grade I went to a form of summer school, and learned to program on the Apple IIE on the side. I still remember the first real program I wrote, that is the first one with more than 10 lines - a simple three frame animation created by manually turning on and off individual pixels. I was really proud of that (remember, I was very young, and working on my own, so even though it wasn't much, it was hard for me).
I still have it on a totally useless 5 1/4" disk, though I can't use it, and its totally worthless and pathetic compared to today's stuff.
..Sigh..
I don't even think I use most of the knowledge I learned from back then.
Flowcharts, goto loops, and even BASIC have all been declared bad because they lead to obscurity in coding, and even the interfaces (both command and within the major programs - sort of GUIish) of my first two computers (school used Apple IIE, while I used the Commodore 64 at home) have completely gone the way of the dinosaurs.
I used to read Nintendo Power back in the day when 8 bit systems walked the earth.
One of the soldiers took his gameboy with him to Desert Storm, and it got toasted by a grenade, according to one issue.
They showed a picture that looked about like that Palm Pilot did - but Tetris was running on it. It still worked! Of course, the screen was really difficult to see, since half of it was burnt off, but at least it did *something*.
There used to be a gameboy "game" called a workboy, which was basically a PDA. Maybe I should get one of those instead of a Palm. Then I won't have to worry about it breaking.