My girlfriend is going to grad school in the fall and didn't have a computer of her own. After looking at notebooks and desktop machines, she just ordered the Toshiba Portege 3505 tablet PC. A friend of hers has the Compaq tablet so she's had a chance to play with it a bit to see if she likes the platform. The Toshiba is one of the convertible ones with a keyboard, so she can use it for high-speed data entry as well as taking notes and drawing diagrams in class.
One interesting thing about tablet PCs, we found, is that the normal exponential curve of price/performance doesn't seem to apply -- the Toshiba is one of the most expensive ones out there, but while it's about 40% pricier than the other model she was looking at, it's about 40% faster, too, and has more memory and disk space.
I'm really having to restrain myself from ordering one of my own.
Mostly to show to friends, I can say from experience. I'm the first choice among my social group for "I was away a couple weeks ago and missed an episode of '24'" kinds of requests.
The thing that's stopping me from doing nearly as much taping as I used to, though, is that studios have started releasing DVDs of most of the shows I would have otherwise taped. Except in rare cases, they look much better than the original broadcasts, whether on DirecTV or analog, and they have commentaries, etc.
Also, having a TiVo with a large disk means that I don't have to keep shows around on tape for the purpose of showing recent stuff to friends who were out of town for a couple days, etc.
That said, I've been keeping DVD-Rs of a couple high-definition shows such as "Alias" -- HD-DVD is still a ways off and even when it becomes affordable, I imagine it'll be a while before the shows I enjoy are available. PC HD receivers rock. And I have been pulling shows from my DirecTiVo to archive to DVD, stuff I don't think is likely to be released any time soon.
Mostly I keep shows that I think there's a good chance I'll be able to addict other people to, e.g. "Twin Peaks" (which went through several sets of worn-out tapes from all the times I showed it.)
Salon's version of the story says they did account for that (by testing a group of non-gamers along with the gamers). The non-gamers didn't benefit from Tetris but did benefit from the fast-action games.
I refer you to any given post from any given article ever posted on Slashdot about this topic. It has been repeated so many times that I am frankly just astonished that anyone could still be ignorant of it.
If everything that's repeated over and over on Slashdot is true, we're all so screwed.
I have a homegrown challenge-response system on my mailbox and it's done wonders for my spam flow. The trick, though, is that it doesn't send a challenge to everyone -- it looks at incoming mail and determines how likely it is to be spam (using Bayesian analysis, collaborative filtering, some keyword filtering, and a couple other things). Mail that doesn't trip any of the checks goes through without a challenge. Mailing lists I subscribe to are also whitelisted, as are addresses I send outgoing mail to.
In theory, someone could send me a spamlike message and would have to reply to the autoresponder. In theory, a spammer could validate himself. In practice, those two things almost never happen. The system catches about 150 spams a day and over 90% of its autoreplies immediately bounce. Last time I analyzed it, only about 2% of my legitimate correspondents had hit the autoresponder (note, that's a fraction of a percent of my total legitimate email, since a given correspondent only has to validate once.)
I have yet to see a notification from Amazon, my bank, or other similar email trip the filter. Haven't had any of my correspondents complain yet, but I have had a couple of them ask how they can set up the same thing for themselves.
So if it's implemented carefully, I think this could be a big win for Earthlink subscribers and more or less invisible to everyone who communicates with them.
Only if Grandma changes E-mail addresses for each letter she sends.
Covered in a SF book
on
Brain Privacy
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This sort of thing is the premise of a book I read a few years back, The Truth Machine by James Halperin. The premise is that someone develops a brain scanner that can tell with absolute certainty whether someone is lying. Halperin paints a pretty optimistic picture of the results; I think he underestimates how profoundly uneasy this kind of thing would make people, but I think he's right on the money in predicting that if such a device existed and were available at an affordable price, there'd be no stopping the spread of it and no avoiding its profound impact on the way society works.
I'm one of the folks who feels uneasy, but on the other hand I'm not quite sure I can bring myself to believe that the potential harm of some of these developments outweighs the benefits -- if the technology can be applied in both directions, not just by the police. If I can quiz a politician on what his real motivations were for passing a law and be assured that he's not dodging the question, it might not be quite as onerous to be unable to lie about breaking it. But even with that thought in mind, I'm still uneasy.
I'd love to check this program out, but the company's site seems to be Slashdotted, and at my current transfer rate, the Windows installer will take about 4 days to finish downloading. Anyone have a BitTorrent link (or even a mirror site) for the installer?
Except when you do (under Windows, at least), it changes your screen resolution!
Um, gee, thanks Apple, but sometimes I'm watching your videos on a monitor that I have to calibrate for each resolution, and it looks like crap if you decide you don't want to use my video card's very capable scaling capability. Plus changing the resolution under Windows can cause other apps to resize themselves because they think the available screen real estate has shrunk, meaning my desktop is all messed up when the video ends.
Half-Life proved that a first person shooter can have a story line.
Jedi Knight was released a year before Half-Life was. And although it wasn't much technologically speaking even at the time, Strife came out a year before that, in 1996.
Half-Life was well-executed in a lot of ways, but I don't think it was the first out of the gate with many (if any at all) of the "innovations" that get so much praise heaped on it.
Sure, you can fall back on "you are the protagonist" to fill in the massive blanks -- and I should add that I did talk to every person I could find in that game, and poked into every nook and cranny I could reach -- but to me that's just a copout, an excuse for a minimally sketched story with little emotional resonance, thematic meat, or deep characterization.
When the briefcase man was revealed, did you find yourself saying, "Aha, now what he was doing earlier in the game all fits together?" I didn't. He could have walked up to me at the end of the game and said he was a really shy Swiss-cheese salesman looking to sell to interdimensional clients, and it would have explained his earlier actions in the game equally well.
When I talked to one of the scientists, since I was the one playing the main character, how could I express that I had no time to deal with him and wanted him to go find his own way out? I couldn't, because I could only listen to his predetermined lines or blow his brains out, nothing in between. The so-called "conversations" were really monologues, which kind of shoots in the foot the whole notion of "I am the main character" -- how can I put myself into the game if I can't even choose how to interact with the other people in the world? Apart from causing me to die, no choice I made in Half-Life made the least bit of difference to the progression of the story or my interactions with the game world.
Now take Planescape: Torment. Do everything you just described, playing the story with yourself in the starring role, and the game adapts to what you're doing. Play it as an egomaniacal jerk with a chip on his shoulder (and yes, it gives you the expressive power to have that attitude in-game) and NPCs who might otherwise cooperate with you will barely give you the time of day, but you may earn the respect of others who want nothing to do with a lily-white hero type. And all the while, you'll explore your way through a story about loss, self-discovery, revenge, and redemption, full of fleshed-out, memorable characters and spanning a world every bit as epic as Half-Life's.
On the other end of the spectrum is a game like Jedi Knight. Very linear, and similar to Half-Life in that the story is really a set of vignettes to explain why you've gone from level X to level Y. It gives you about the same power of self-expression that Half-Life does (which is to say, very little) but in exchange, your character discovers his true heritage, follows a trail of clues to solve a mystery, sneaks deep into enemy territory to recover something that rightfully belongs to him, and runs up against a villain whose motives put the two of them on a collision course.
Both modes of storytelling are fine by me. What I don't like is a story that gives me no expressive power, then fails to make up for it by giving my character no personality to speak of and nobody very interesting to interact with along the way. If a game wants me to role-play, put myself in the shoes of the protagonist to fill in the details of his personality, it had better supply the tools to give him a personality in a way that affects the game. Half-Life didn't.
It was still a damn fine shooter, though, don't get me wrong. For all that I don't think it served up much of a story, it did a great job serving up an environment, and it was fun to play. It certainly deserved all the action-game-of-the-year awards it got. But I can't understand why people hold it up as an example of great game storytelling when there are so many better examples to choose from.
Fantastic story line? Was I playing some other game called Half-Life? When someone says "fantastic story line" about a video game, I think of, say, Planescape: Torment, Jedi Knight, Xenogears, Deus Ex, or most of the Final Fantasy games. Even Freedom Force, with its paper-thin comic-book plot, had a more involving story than Half-Life.
Don't get me wrong, Half-Life had some great set pieces and lots of cool moments, but that's not the same thing as a story. By way of demonstration, a few questions you can answer about all of the games I listed but not about Half-Life:
What does the main character want in life?
How do the events in the story change that character?
Who's standing in the way of the character's goals? Why?
What unexpected events along the way force the character to look at his goals in a different light?
This isn't sophisticated abstract stuff, just the kind of thing they expect you to already know in Creative Writing 101. None of it is required to make a fun game, but it's all required to make a fun game story.
One of my favorites too, but it does seem to fall flat for some people. It's so chock full of random weirdness, you either dig it or run screaming from the room.
I'm skeptical, though, that there'll be much speedup from Mozilla -> Phoenix+Minotaur -- quite likely it'll be slower, since you'll spend time loading a lot of duplicate code. Mozilla Mail already fires up pretty darned fast if you've already launched a Mozilla browser window, and vice versa. If speed is the only reason you're using Phoenix this may not be much help. (And if it is, then that says there may be a problem with Mozilla other than simple code bloat.)
To me, there are two beneficiaries from this sort of project: people who use a browser other than Mozilla (IE, Opera, Phoenix for some reason other than simply launch speed, etc.) and want to use the Mozilla mail client, and people who want to experiment with the mail code. They'll get a less complex development environment with a shorter learning curve once all the non-mail-related code is trimmed out.
Hopefully they'll just use this to prevent overclocking, not underclocking -- I underclock one of my PCs so its CPU runs cooler and thus requires less noisy cooling. It would be pretty odd of Intel to essentially say, "No, we won't let you pay us more per MHz than our list price, and we will make you run your PC hotter and louder than you need to."
Except they're different gestures. I prefer Opera's gestures to Optimoz's (and I say that even though Mozilla is my browser of choice for other reasons.) For instance, Opera's "back" and "forward" gestures don't require moving the mouse and work when the cursor is over a link.
Tell me about it. At work there's a Windows fileserver I use once a month or so. The password expiration time is set to less than the average amount of time between my uses of the server -- so every single time I want to access the thing, I have to not only choose a new password (which I'll only ever use twice) but also remember the previous password (which I've only used once before.)
The irony is that this has caused me to use much less secure passwords on that host than I use elsewhere -- my usual passwords are based on made-up phrases and would be pretty tough to crack even if you knew other passwords of mine (an old one was wh2EaTB for "we hate to eat at Taco Bell") but on this server I use a more predictable scheme that lets me figure out what I most likely chose as the password last month.
The bigger irony is that I'm told the sysadmin of this particular server has his password set to never expire! Apparently he can pick a good one but nobody else can.
You're only sort of wrong about that, at least -- the maximum horizontal 480i ATSC resolution is 704 pixels (see the atsc.org PDF above) compared to 720 for a DVD. However, the missing 16 pixels are in the form of the overscan area on the left and right sides of the picture, which is included on DVDs but not in ATSC. The actual picture has the same pixel density.
with some bit errors introduced.
Depends entirely on where you live and which stations you're tuned into. I get very few bit errors in the ATSC video I watch (most of them comparable in impact to a DVD layer change on a cheap player) but if you're in a rural area or using a lousy antenna it probably won't look so great.
None of the RPTVs are certified for 1080p... only the $30k+ front projector CRTs are.
They're not anywhere near $30K if you buy them used. I have one (hence my interest in 1080p) and it didn't cost me more than a top-end HD RPTV. Of course, the room to put it in, that's a different story, but while that's underway it also works fine in my living room pointed at a white wall.
And I beg to differ about a 2GHz PC having enough horsepower -- that's absolutely true for simple 3:2 pulldown detection, but not for some of the more sophisticated motion-compensation algorithms that provide good results on video material such as 1080i sports broadcasts.
I'm glad 1080i seems to be more popular, because once we have fast enough computers, we'll be able to run it through deinterlacing software and get (pseudo-)1080p video out the far end. The high-end Faroudja Labs scalers are already capable of line-doubling HDTV, and it's only a matter of time before software solutions catch up. (Ha, and people say home users have no use for a 4GHz PC!)
I suspect line-doubled 1080i will look better than 720p, though of course that'll vary depending on the source material -- it'll probably be true for anything transferred from film, though, since you'd be able to apply the same 3:2 pulldown algorithm to 60Hz 1080i that you do to 60Hz 480i NTSC to extract progressive-scan film frames.
There's lots of HD content being broadcast today. No, not everything is in HD, but enough that you'll probably find something you like. And even without HD, DTV broadcasts often look a lot cleaner and crisper than analog NTSC broadcasts. Think over-the-air DVD-quality video.
Slashdot Mirror
One interesting thing about tablet PCs, we found, is that the normal exponential curve of price/performance doesn't seem to apply -- the Toshiba is one of the most expensive ones out there, but while it's about 40% pricier than the other model she was looking at, it's about 40% faster, too, and has more memory and disk space.
I'm really having to restrain myself from ordering one of my own.
The thing that's stopping me from doing nearly as much taping as I used to, though, is that studios have started releasing DVDs of most of the shows I would have otherwise taped. Except in rare cases, they look much better than the original broadcasts, whether on DirecTV or analog, and they have commentaries, etc.
Also, having a TiVo with a large disk means that I don't have to keep shows around on tape for the purpose of showing recent stuff to friends who were out of town for a couple days, etc.
That said, I've been keeping DVD-Rs of a couple high-definition shows such as "Alias" -- HD-DVD is still a ways off and even when it becomes affordable, I imagine it'll be a while before the shows I enjoy are available. PC HD receivers rock. And I have been pulling shows from my DirecTiVo to archive to DVD, stuff I don't think is likely to be released any time soon.
Mostly I keep shows that I think there's a good chance I'll be able to addict other people to, e.g. "Twin Peaks" (which went through several sets of worn-out tapes from all the times I showed it.)
Salon's version of the story says they did account for that (by testing a group of non-gamers along with the gamers). The non-gamers didn't benefit from Tetris but did benefit from the fast-action games.
If everything that's repeated over and over on Slashdot is true, we're all so screwed.
Copyrights and patents aren't the same thing; you appear to be using them interchangeably and they're really very different.
Here's hoping lots of sites don't want to pay the license fee and stop using popups.
In theory, someone could send me a spamlike message and would have to reply to the autoresponder. In theory, a spammer could validate himself. In practice, those two things almost never happen. The system catches about 150 spams a day and over 90% of its autoreplies immediately bounce. Last time I analyzed it, only about 2% of my legitimate correspondents had hit the autoresponder (note, that's a fraction of a percent of my total legitimate email, since a given correspondent only has to validate once.)
I have yet to see a notification from Amazon, my bank, or other similar email trip the filter. Haven't had any of my correspondents complain yet, but I have had a couple of them ask how they can set up the same thing for themselves.
So if it's implemented carefully, I think this could be a big win for Earthlink subscribers and more or less invisible to everyone who communicates with them.
Only if Grandma changes E-mail addresses for each letter she sends.
I'm one of the folks who feels uneasy, but on the other hand I'm not quite sure I can bring myself to believe that the potential harm of some of these developments outweighs the benefits -- if the technology can be applied in both directions, not just by the police. If I can quiz a politician on what his real motivations were for passing a law and be assured that he's not dodging the question, it might not be quite as onerous to be unable to lie about breaking it. But even with that thought in mind, I'm still uneasy.
I'd love to check this program out, but the company's site seems to be Slashdotted, and at my current transfer rate, the Windows installer will take about 4 days to finish downloading. Anyone have a BitTorrent link (or even a mirror site) for the installer?
Um, gee, thanks Apple, but sometimes I'm watching your videos on a monitor that I have to calibrate for each resolution, and it looks like crap if you decide you don't want to use my video card's very capable scaling capability. Plus changing the resolution under Windows can cause other apps to resize themselves because they think the available screen real estate has shrunk, meaning my desktop is all messed up when the video ends.
Jedi Knight was released a year before Half-Life was. And although it wasn't much technologically speaking even at the time, Strife came out a year before that, in 1996.
Half-Life was well-executed in a lot of ways, but I don't think it was the first out of the gate with many (if any at all) of the "innovations" that get so much praise heaped on it.
When the briefcase man was revealed, did you find yourself saying, "Aha, now what he was doing earlier in the game all fits together?" I didn't. He could have walked up to me at the end of the game and said he was a really shy Swiss-cheese salesman looking to sell to interdimensional clients, and it would have explained his earlier actions in the game equally well.
When I talked to one of the scientists, since I was the one playing the main character, how could I express that I had no time to deal with him and wanted him to go find his own way out? I couldn't, because I could only listen to his predetermined lines or blow his brains out, nothing in between. The so-called "conversations" were really monologues, which kind of shoots in the foot the whole notion of "I am the main character" -- how can I put myself into the game if I can't even choose how to interact with the other people in the world? Apart from causing me to die, no choice I made in Half-Life made the least bit of difference to the progression of the story or my interactions with the game world.
Now take Planescape: Torment. Do everything you just described, playing the story with yourself in the starring role, and the game adapts to what you're doing. Play it as an egomaniacal jerk with a chip on his shoulder (and yes, it gives you the expressive power to have that attitude in-game) and NPCs who might otherwise cooperate with you will barely give you the time of day, but you may earn the respect of others who want nothing to do with a lily-white hero type. And all the while, you'll explore your way through a story about loss, self-discovery, revenge, and redemption, full of fleshed-out, memorable characters and spanning a world every bit as epic as Half-Life's.
On the other end of the spectrum is a game like Jedi Knight. Very linear, and similar to Half-Life in that the story is really a set of vignettes to explain why you've gone from level X to level Y. It gives you about the same power of self-expression that Half-Life does (which is to say, very little) but in exchange, your character discovers his true heritage, follows a trail of clues to solve a mystery, sneaks deep into enemy territory to recover something that rightfully belongs to him, and runs up against a villain whose motives put the two of them on a collision course.
Both modes of storytelling are fine by me. What I don't like is a story that gives me no expressive power, then fails to make up for it by giving my character no personality to speak of and nobody very interesting to interact with along the way. If a game wants me to role-play, put myself in the shoes of the protagonist to fill in the details of his personality, it had better supply the tools to give him a personality in a way that affects the game. Half-Life didn't.
It was still a damn fine shooter, though, don't get me wrong. For all that I don't think it served up much of a story, it did a great job serving up an environment, and it was fun to play. It certainly deserved all the action-game-of-the-year awards it got. But I can't understand why people hold it up as an example of great game storytelling when there are so many better examples to choose from.
Don't get me wrong, Half-Life had some great set pieces and lots of cool moments, but that's not the same thing as a story. By way of demonstration, a few questions you can answer about all of the games I listed but not about Half-Life:
This isn't sophisticated abstract stuff, just the kind of thing they expect you to already know in Creative Writing 101. None of it is required to make a fun game, but it's all required to make a fun game story.
One of my favorites too, but it does seem to fall flat for some people. It's so chock full of random weirdness, you either dig it or run screaming from the room.
To me, there are two beneficiaries from this sort of project: people who use a browser other than Mozilla (IE, Opera, Phoenix for some reason other than simply launch speed, etc.) and want to use the Mozilla mail client, and people who want to experiment with the mail code. They'll get a less complex development environment with a shorter learning curve once all the non-mail-related code is trimmed out.
Hopefully they'll just use this to prevent overclocking, not underclocking -- I underclock one of my PCs so its CPU runs cooler and thus requires less noisy cooling. It would be pretty odd of Intel to essentially say, "No, we won't let you pay us more per MHz than our list price, and we will make you run your PC hotter and louder than you need to."
Except they're different gestures. I prefer Opera's gestures to Optimoz's (and I say that even though Mozilla is my browser of choice for other reasons.) For instance, Opera's "back" and "forward" gestures don't require moving the mouse and work when the cursor is over a link.
The irony is that this has caused me to use much less secure passwords on that host than I use elsewhere -- my usual passwords are based on made-up phrases and would be pretty tough to crack even if you knew other passwords of mine (an old one was wh2EaTB for "we hate to eat at Taco Bell") but on this server I use a more predictable scheme that lets me figure out what I most likely chose as the password last month.
The bigger irony is that I'm told the sysadmin of this particular server has his password set to never expire! Apparently he can pick a good one but nobody else can.
They're not anywhere near $30K if you buy them used. I have one (hence my interest in 1080p) and it didn't cost me more than a top-end HD RPTV. Of course, the room to put it in, that's a different story, but while that's underway it also works fine in my living room pointed at a white wall.
And I beg to differ about a 2GHz PC having enough horsepower -- that's absolutely true for simple 3:2 pulldown detection, but not for some of the more sophisticated motion-compensation algorithms that provide good results on video material such as 1080i sports broadcasts.
I suspect line-doubled 1080i will look better than 720p, though of course that'll vary depending on the source material -- it'll probably be true for anything transferred from film, though, since you'd be able to apply the same 3:2 pulldown algorithm to 60Hz 1080i that you do to 60Hz 480i NTSC to extract progressive-scan film frames.
Nah, I use one of these.
There's lots of HD content being broadcast today. No, not everything is in HD, but enough that you'll probably find something you like. And even without HD, DTV broadcasts often look a lot cleaner and crisper than analog NTSC broadcasts. Think over-the-air DVD-quality video.