Other than that, I've attached a QuickCam Pro to a dedicated $50 laptop, and left it running. The whole setup cost about 130, and provided decent low-light performance for the time.
I'd love to see someone attempt to make a modern 2 hour game on a 30 million budget. I bet it would be amazing, and worth playing through a few dozen times.
Years ago I became addicted to Strider. That game can be played through in about 30 minutes from end-to-end. But the experience is so much fun and so varied that it is worth playing through again and again.
1. To a very traditional mind, an XXX domain name implies that it is OK to see pictures of boobies. It is implicit approval of the fad of this whole sex thing.
2. To a less traditional mind, it is the first step along the line of censoring the boobies out of the internet. Immediately upon creation, all of the XXX domain names will be censored from basically every company on the planet. Home networks will probably remain uncensored at first, but who knows what parental moral outrage and very, very old executives will pressure Comcast, etc to do.
3. By implication, there is the messy realm of regulation. Is it freeform, with any websites going on.xxx for any reason? Does.com then become non-porn? Does violence and drugs become XXX?
4. It is potentially pointless. To the website operators, xxx domain names were set to cost 10x as much as normal.com names, and the only advantage was that they're easier to filter out. You might get people randomly appending.xxx to common words in an attempt to find dirty bits, but chances are people will just keep searching through google.
Personally, I still think it's worth doing. But I can understand why people wouldn't want to bother. The new wave of alternative TLD's have basically been failures. 6 years in, and everyone is still a.com. Add in the controversial aspects, and it becomes less attractive.
As a game designer in this industry... There isn't a market for game concepts. Every member of every creative team out there will have 1-5 designs they really, really want to get off the ground. At any given company, that means the founders alone are kicking around 5 - 50 "must do" projects, of which they can do one every 4 years or so.
Publishers, on the other hand, are interested in funding game companies with concepts. If you can build a great concept, and a great demo, and prove that you have the chops to build a company around it, they might finance you. But as I said, that involves proving your ability to build a game and a company.
In House of Flying Daggers, the epic struggle was still a fight between people, and was resolved by the main character choosing to end his own life to protect the ruler he had come to kill. In Independence Day, the epic struggle was man against the cold unknown, and was resolved by pressing a big red button.
And that's really a big difference. In 24, Jack Bauer flies around faster than a car or a helicopter ever could take him. But it doesn't matter, as it is tangential to the plot. But when a hacker whips out a keyboard and removes your identity from history, that's key to making things work. A lot of the problems with hollywood movies and technology happen because the tech is integral to the plot, either finding ultimate resolution or driving it forward when the writer ran out of ideas. Oh look, we beat the international crime syndicate by hacking into their mainframe and re-routing their airplane to a prison in Detroit. I know, we'll hack into every cellphone in the city to find the bad guy. We remotely re-routed the bomb targeting mid-fall from New York City to the harbor where drug cartel boat was hiding.
Either as setup or resolution, it is just a ghost-in-the-machine to drive the plot forward. It has no character impact, it doesn't explain inner emotions, and it has no emotional satisfaction as a way of triumphing over evil. It's poor writing, plain and simple.
To be fair, sometimes Hollywood gets it right. In the total popcorn flick cellular, the writer actually had some knowledge about how telephone switching works. It comes off as real and authentic, and a badly-needed grounding point in a movie where everything else is basically impossible.
Yes, but some of these things are painfully obvious if you have the slightest knowledge of how computers work. It's like having a character jump into a car in Los Angeles, and magically arriving in Tokyo an hour later. Or having someone pick up a guitar for the first time, and play it backwards to steal music from the souls of children. Penicillin is going to create a race of jetpack-wearing zombies to invade the earth for Stalin. It breaks immersion. We the audience should not know more about the subject than the writer. When people "play videogames" on-screen by jumping up and down, whooping, and twiddling their thumbs like a rabbit on crack, whatever plausibility the movie has built up until that point is suddenly gone.
I know a lot of military people who feel that way when munitions, etc are talked about. And Hollywood has gotten much better about hiring military consultants in order to avoid painfully obvious gaffes. Yet when people say things like "I'll write a GUI in Visual Basic" to solve a crime in CSI, anybody who has actually worked in computers suddenly loses all interest in what they're saying. Zooming in to hundreds of times the original magnification and reading someone's nametag? Writing a virus on a macbook that takes down an alien warship? You might as well say that the tooth fairy opened a magic door. That would be easy, fast, and would make more sense.
Also notice that nobody ever backs anything up. "The hackers stole our plans for this zillion dollar airplane. We never made a backup, so we'd better steal the one and only copy of this data back from them."
I had always heard estimates of Moore's Law breaking down sometime in 2006 or so, which means we're on borrowed time.
Of course, what he really meant was that to keep improving the power of modern CPU's, we need to massively parallelize them. And he's right. Of course, that's also the direction Intel, AMD, and other primary CPU makers have been going.
How would this be any different than the current state of domain-name squatting? I'm personally afraid that as soon as the black market finds it, the naming bodies will start auctioning off IPv4 addresses to the highest bidder. As more and more number blocks go, the remaining few become more and more valuable. What would be their incentive to switch everyone over to IPv6, any more than ICANN might want to fix its broken naming system?
Speech recognition accuracy. Flatlined years ago. It works great for small vocabulary on your cell phone but basically computer still can't understand language prospects for a are dimmed and we seem to need AI for peters to make progress in this area time to rewrite the story of the future from the article the language universe is large google street words is a mere scrawl on a surface one estimate puts the number of possible sentences of 10 to the 570 though constant talking and writing more the possibilities of language enter into our possession but plenty of unanticipated combinations are made much for speech recognizes and risky guesses even where data are lush picking what's most likely to be a mistake because meeting often pools and keyword or two recognition systems going with the best that are prone to interpret the meaning of terms of the more common but similar sounding words draining sense from the set.
- As transcribed by Dragons' server-based iPhone interpreter.
You might want to set the bar lower than a second-language user. According to Dragon Naturally Speaking's iphone app, you said:
"Most people get the parse the sentence though I know I can't I know I got interpreted as anything but string of bounds my guess is even fewer that would be the person spoken the B., R., I assume important. If it would be unrealistic and unproductive to require speech systems actually do better than most humans on the task is made of cat person send them I expect computer to do so better overall benchmark required have the ability of a competent but not perfect second language user would long used to dealing with that level of proviciency with it because the cumbersome to the former are a child or has a different dialect from our own."
This is run from their server, using their latest code, in non-realtime. I enunciated like a pro, in a reasonably quiet room. This is, essentially, the best circumstance that it could hope for. It's not even within the ballpark of what a second-language user could produce. It's only barely legible in spots because we have some sort of idea of what it should be talking about. At this point, any system that can do anything useful with an arbitrary (rather than limited) language input would be a huge breakthrough.
Also, tech moved so fast that it made less sense to invest.
I have been using the same laptop for 5 years, and it's still considered pretty good. It started with XP, ran Vista, and now competently handles Windows 7.
5 years in the 80's was a huge generation in computing. That would take you from DOS to Windows 3.0. Nothing you knew or loved about computing would be the same.
Give a kid a computer today, and it will probably be viable for years and years. Give them a computer in the 80's, and welcome to constant upgrade hell.
The only advantage of plastic slides is during the winter. Plastic slides + snow = basically a frictionless surface. Metal seems to provide a higher degree of friction in cold weather, though that could just be my impression.
Obviously, some physics thesis is waiting to be written on this.
I remember people falling out of jungle gyms and breaking their arms as a kid. It's not great, but it happens. There was a woman at my college who fell backwards walking around the campus, hit her head just wrong on the cement, and died. I broken an arm riding a bike, and nearly shattered my hip rollerblading. My sister broke a finger running through the house. A friend destroyed most of the cartilidge in his back playing football. By comparison, hopping a fence, sticking your fingers into a giant rotating drum, and having them severed is just dumb.
Really, the question isn't "are there injuries?" Put a drinking fountain in a park, and given enough time and people someone is going to trip and break their teeth on it. The question is "how frequently are the injuries?" Are the injuries more frequent than other activities in life? They've had 3.5 million in attendance since 2005, and 24 known incidents that spawned a lawsuit. That's 150k people through for every known injury. Or, looked at another way, assuming each trip is 8 hours long, that's 1 injury for every 50,000 days of living. That's 1 lawsuit-worthy injury per 136 years of life.
I'd want to investigate this park specifically to see what steps they are and aren't taking to keep the play areas safe. But the numbers above just don't look bad to me.
A big reason why sites use flash is protection of the video stream. Netflix, for example, has to assure their content providers that their streaming video won't be trivially ripped and re-uploaded. HTML5 / H.264 have no way of handling that particular situation.
HTML 5, also, is not done. It is in draft stage, and should be a standard in 2012. At that point, it will be years before you can assume that your user's browsers support it. Right now, none of the big 4 rendering engines support HTML5 fully. Most of them don't even come close.
HTML 5 also does not support what video formats need to be supported within the tag. This is unfortunate, as if Microsoft declares that IE9 supports only H.264 in tags, then becomes a tag. No amount of post-humous arguing will change that MPEG-LA suddenly owns video on the web. Personally, I'd be willing to support a little higher bandwidth with Theora to prevent another GIF situation. After all, JPEG as a standard is greatly inferior to JPEG 2000, but when was the last time you used a JPEG 2000?
To be fair, Apple is offering an unfinished proprietary implementation of something that is scheduled to become an open standard in 2012, vs the theory of a proprietary implementation of a closed standard that has been around for 10 years.
If Apple finds a problem in flash, they can't fix it. If Apple finds a problem in HTML 5, it's probably because the standard isn't finished and neither is their implementation, nor are websites built with it. Considering the debate around "Is it safe to ignore I.E. 6," a browser that that shipped in 2001, it will probably be years before it is safe to assume your users can access HTML 5. Heck, it's scheduled to be recommended in 2022.
HTML 5 is a bunch of handwaving. It will get there eventually, but as of now it doesn't exist.
This is the thing we need to get through to the content producers.
Once the movie or game has been ripped and put on a torrent site, the ONLY people who encounter DRM are your customers. It's vaguely like having a security checkpoint at a concert with no fences. All of the people who are legitimately standing in line for hours and giving money will be inconvenienced, and all of the people you're trying to keep out will just walk right in. By definition, you're only stopping legitimate customers to verify that they're legitimate customers. Or, in this case, absolutely everyone the DRM is catching and rejecting is by definition a legitimate customer. Otherwise, they wouldn't encounter the DRM, and they wouldn't be rejected.
From my time in IT, I guarantee that at least 1 in 10 of those personal laptops is compromised in a major way. You can encrypt the hard drive against physical theft, but you can't encrypt the OS against being rooted. Personally I'm shocked they let private data on personal laptops at all.
Also, HTML 5 isn't an adopted standard yet: it is still in draft form. It won't be a standard until 2012 or so.
And then it will be years before you can assume that all of your users can view HTML 5. Internet Explorer 6 is 9 years old, and still has 10-20% of the browser market.
I want web standards to replace flash as much as the next guy. But realistically speaking, that's still years off.
The other thing with "dumbed down OS" is that they have actually been re-examined and re-written. Windows is still hampered by concepts it introduced in 95 (No sane OS would ever have a registry in Window's current form). Linux is still a naked server OS at heart with all of it's fidgety bits dangling out. Even OSX is starting to get crufty around the edges.
But millions of dollars and a complete revision of what it means to compute are going into these "dumbed down" operating systems. Sure, there is no file system. But you also never misplace a file, and your desktop isn't cluttered with downloaded junk. You can't multitask. But you don't have a half-dozen apps all bouncing up at you for your attention. They don't have the tools to kill individual processes. But they reboot in about 20 seconds.
I'm still not sold on the iPad. But anything that gets rid of this awful user interface design that we've been hampered with for years is good in my book.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone tried the linksys N?
Other than that, I've attached a QuickCam Pro to a dedicated $50 laptop, and left it running. The whole setup cost about 130, and provided decent low-light performance for the time.
I'd love to see someone attempt to make a modern 2 hour game on a 30 million budget. I bet it would be amazing, and worth playing through a few dozen times.
Years ago I became addicted to Strider. That game can be played through in about 30 minutes from end-to-end. But the experience is so much fun and so varied that it is worth playing through again and again.
1. To a very traditional mind, an XXX domain name implies that it is OK to see pictures of boobies. It is implicit approval of the fad of this whole sex thing.
2. To a less traditional mind, it is the first step along the line of censoring the boobies out of the internet. Immediately upon creation, all of the XXX domain names will be censored from basically every company on the planet. Home networks will probably remain uncensored at first, but who knows what parental moral outrage and very, very old executives will pressure Comcast, etc to do.
3. By implication, there is the messy realm of regulation. Is it freeform, with any websites going on .xxx for any reason? Does .com then become non-porn? Does violence and drugs become XXX?
4. It is potentially pointless. To the website operators, xxx domain names were set to cost 10x as much as normal .com names, and the only advantage was that they're easier to filter out. You might get people randomly appending .xxx to common words in an attempt to find dirty bits, but chances are people will just keep searching through google.
Personally, I still think it's worth doing. But I can understand why people wouldn't want to bother. The new wave of alternative TLD's have basically been failures. 6 years in, and everyone is still a .com. Add in the controversial aspects, and it becomes less attractive.
As a game designer in this industry... There isn't a market for game concepts. Every member of every creative team out there will have 1-5 designs they really, really want to get off the ground. At any given company, that means the founders alone are kicking around 5 - 50 "must do" projects, of which they can do one every 4 years or so.
Publishers, on the other hand, are interested in funding game companies with concepts. If you can build a great concept, and a great demo, and prove that you have the chops to build a company around it, they might finance you. But as I said, that involves proving your ability to build a game and a company.
Good luck!
In House of Flying Daggers, the epic struggle was still a fight between people, and was resolved by the main character choosing to end his own life to protect the ruler he had come to kill. In Independence Day, the epic struggle was man against the cold unknown, and was resolved by pressing a big red button.
And that's really a big difference. In 24, Jack Bauer flies around faster than a car or a helicopter ever could take him. But it doesn't matter, as it is tangential to the plot. But when a hacker whips out a keyboard and removes your identity from history, that's key to making things work. A lot of the problems with hollywood movies and technology happen because the tech is integral to the plot, either finding ultimate resolution or driving it forward when the writer ran out of ideas. Oh look, we beat the international crime syndicate by hacking into their mainframe and re-routing their airplane to a prison in Detroit. I know, we'll hack into every cellphone in the city to find the bad guy. We remotely re-routed the bomb targeting mid-fall from New York City to the harbor where drug cartel boat was hiding.
Either as setup or resolution, it is just a ghost-in-the-machine to drive the plot forward. It has no character impact, it doesn't explain inner emotions, and it has no emotional satisfaction as a way of triumphing over evil. It's poor writing, plain and simple.
To be fair, sometimes Hollywood gets it right. In the total popcorn flick cellular, the writer actually had some knowledge about how telephone switching works. It comes off as real and authentic, and a badly-needed grounding point in a movie where everything else is basically impossible.
Yes, but some of these things are painfully obvious if you have the slightest knowledge of how computers work. It's like having a character jump into a car in Los Angeles, and magically arriving in Tokyo an hour later. Or having someone pick up a guitar for the first time, and play it backwards to steal music from the souls of children. Penicillin is going to create a race of jetpack-wearing zombies to invade the earth for Stalin. It breaks immersion. We the audience should not know more about the subject than the writer. When people "play videogames" on-screen by jumping up and down, whooping, and twiddling their thumbs like a rabbit on crack, whatever plausibility the movie has built up until that point is suddenly gone.
I know a lot of military people who feel that way when munitions, etc are talked about. And Hollywood has gotten much better about hiring military consultants in order to avoid painfully obvious gaffes. Yet when people say things like "I'll write a GUI in Visual Basic" to solve a crime in CSI, anybody who has actually worked in computers suddenly loses all interest in what they're saying. Zooming in to hundreds of times the original magnification and reading someone's nametag? Writing a virus on a macbook that takes down an alien warship? You might as well say that the tooth fairy opened a magic door. That would be easy, fast, and would make more sense.
Also notice that nobody ever backs anything up. "The hackers stole our plans for this zillion dollar airplane. We never made a backup, so we'd better steal the one and only copy of this data back from them."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU
Only 75%? Considering that all DVD's are copies, all local caches are copies, I wouldn't be surprised if that number was much larger.
Also, cutting out all the copies would only reduce the problem to .3 zettabytes. For day-to-day IT purposes, that's about the same number.
I had always heard estimates of Moore's Law breaking down sometime in 2006 or so, which means we're on borrowed time.
Of course, what he really meant was that to keep improving the power of modern CPU's, we need to massively parallelize them. And he's right. Of course, that's also the direction Intel, AMD, and other primary CPU makers have been going.
How would this be any different than the current state of domain-name squatting? I'm personally afraid that as soon as the black market finds it, the naming bodies will start auctioning off IPv4 addresses to the highest bidder. As more and more number blocks go, the remaining few become more and more valuable. What would be their incentive to switch everyone over to IPv6, any more than ICANN might want to fix its broken naming system?
Speech recognition accuracy. Flatlined years ago. It works great for small vocabulary on your cell phone but basically computer still can't understand language prospects for a are dimmed and we seem to need AI for peters to make progress in this area time to rewrite the story of the future from the article the language universe is large google street words is a mere scrawl on a surface one estimate puts the number of possible sentences of 10 to the 570 though constant talking and writing more the possibilities of language enter into our possession but plenty of unanticipated combinations are made much for speech recognizes and risky guesses even where data are lush picking what's most likely to be a mistake because meeting often pools and keyword or two recognition systems going with the best that are prone to interpret the meaning of terms of the more common but similar sounding words draining sense from the set.
- As transcribed by Dragons' server-based iPhone interpreter.
You might want to set the bar lower than a second-language user. According to Dragon Naturally Speaking's iphone app, you said:
"Most people get the parse the sentence though I know I can't I know I got interpreted as anything but string of bounds my guess is even fewer that would be the person spoken the B., R., I assume important. If it would be unrealistic and unproductive to require speech systems actually do better than most humans on the task is made of cat person send them I expect computer to do so better overall benchmark required have the ability of a competent but not perfect second language user would long used to dealing with that level of proviciency with it because the cumbersome to the former are a child or has a different dialect from our own."
This is run from their server, using their latest code, in non-realtime. I enunciated like a pro, in a reasonably quiet room. This is, essentially, the best circumstance that it could hope for. It's not even within the ballpark of what a second-language user could produce. It's only barely legible in spots because we have some sort of idea of what it should be talking about. At this point, any system that can do anything useful with an arbitrary (rather than limited) language input would be a huge breakthrough.
Also, tech moved so fast that it made less sense to invest.
I have been using the same laptop for 5 years, and it's still considered pretty good. It started with XP, ran Vista, and now competently handles Windows 7.
5 years in the 80's was a huge generation in computing. That would take you from DOS to Windows 3.0. Nothing you knew or loved about computing would be the same.
Give a kid a computer today, and it will probably be viable for years and years. Give them a computer in the 80's, and welcome to constant upgrade hell.
The only advantage of plastic slides is during the winter. Plastic slides + snow = basically a frictionless surface. Metal seems to provide a higher degree of friction in cold weather, though that could just be my impression.
Obviously, some physics thesis is waiting to be written on this.
I remember people falling out of jungle gyms and breaking their arms as a kid. It's not great, but it happens. There was a woman at my college who fell backwards walking around the campus, hit her head just wrong on the cement, and died. I broken an arm riding a bike, and nearly shattered my hip rollerblading. My sister broke a finger running through the house. A friend destroyed most of the cartilidge in his back playing football. By comparison, hopping a fence, sticking your fingers into a giant rotating drum, and having them severed is just dumb.
Really, the question isn't "are there injuries?" Put a drinking fountain in a park, and given enough time and people someone is going to trip and break their teeth on it. The question is "how frequently are the injuries?" Are the injuries more frequent than other activities in life? They've had 3.5 million in attendance since 2005, and 24 known incidents that spawned a lawsuit. That's 150k people through for every known injury. Or, looked at another way, assuming each trip is 8 hours long, that's 1 injury for every 50,000 days of living. That's 1 lawsuit-worthy injury per 136 years of life.
I'd want to investigate this park specifically to see what steps they are and aren't taking to keep the play areas safe. But the numbers above just don't look bad to me.
A big reason why sites use flash is protection of the video stream. Netflix, for example, has to assure their content providers that their streaming video won't be trivially ripped and re-uploaded. HTML5 / H.264 have no way of handling that particular situation.
HTML 5, also, is not done. It is in draft stage, and should be a standard in 2012. At that point, it will be years before you can assume that your user's browsers support it. Right now, none of the big 4 rendering engines support HTML5 fully. Most of them don't even come close.
HTML 5 also does not support what video formats need to be supported within the tag. This is unfortunate, as if Microsoft declares that IE9 supports only H.264 in tags, then becomes a tag. No amount of post-humous arguing will change that MPEG-LA suddenly owns video on the web. Personally, I'd be willing to support a little higher bandwidth with Theora to prevent another GIF situation. After all, JPEG as a standard is greatly inferior to JPEG 2000, but when was the last time you used a JPEG 2000?
- Chris
How is that Hardware Support going? Just curious.
To be fair, Apple is offering an unfinished proprietary implementation of something that is scheduled to become an open standard in 2012, vs the theory of a proprietary implementation of a closed standard that has been around for 10 years.
If Apple finds a problem in flash, they can't fix it. If Apple finds a problem in HTML 5, it's probably because the standard isn't finished and neither is their implementation, nor are websites built with it. Considering the debate around "Is it safe to ignore I.E. 6," a browser that that shipped in 2001, it will probably be years before it is safe to assume your users can access HTML 5. Heck, it's scheduled to be recommended in 2022.
HTML 5 is a bunch of handwaving. It will get there eventually, but as of now it doesn't exist.
This is the thing we need to get through to the content producers.
Once the movie or game has been ripped and put on a torrent site, the ONLY people who encounter DRM are your customers. It's vaguely like having a security checkpoint at a concert with no fences. All of the people who are legitimately standing in line for hours and giving money will be inconvenienced, and all of the people you're trying to keep out will just walk right in. By definition, you're only stopping legitimate customers to verify that they're legitimate customers. Or, in this case, absolutely everyone the DRM is catching and rejecting is by definition a legitimate customer. Otherwise, they wouldn't encounter the DRM, and they wouldn't be rejected.
From my time in IT, I guarantee that at least 1 in 10 of those personal laptops is compromised in a major way. You can encrypt the hard drive against physical theft, but you can't encrypt the OS against being rooted. Personally I'm shocked they let private data on personal laptops at all.
If it's just checking mail, get a dedicated netbook. Light, easy to drag around, and if the damned thing is shattered... so what?
Alternatively, have them issue blackberries. This is still a hospital, right?
Could someone write a plug-in for older browsers that supports HTML 5? Say, that overloads the video tag and runs a mini-webkit in the space?
Convincing users to install a plug-in might speed adoption beyond waiting the 10 years for people to update their browsers.
Also, HTML 5 isn't an adopted standard yet: it is still in draft form. It won't be a standard until 2012 or so.
And then it will be years before you can assume that all of your users can view HTML 5. Internet Explorer 6 is 9 years old, and still has 10-20% of the browser market.
I want web standards to replace flash as much as the next guy. But realistically speaking, that's still years off.
The other thing with "dumbed down OS" is that they have actually been re-examined and re-written. Windows is still hampered by concepts it introduced in 95 (No sane OS would ever have a registry in Window's current form). Linux is still a naked server OS at heart with all of it's fidgety bits dangling out. Even OSX is starting to get crufty around the edges.
But millions of dollars and a complete revision of what it means to compute are going into these "dumbed down" operating systems. Sure, there is no file system. But you also never misplace a file, and your desktop isn't cluttered with downloaded junk. You can't multitask. But you don't have a half-dozen apps all bouncing up at you for your attention. They don't have the tools to kill individual processes. But they reboot in about 20 seconds.
I'm still not sold on the iPad. But anything that gets rid of this awful user interface design that we've been hampered with for years is good in my book.