Oh, I thought about that, but recommending my pet project would seem a little bit like astroturfing. LOL! Besides, we are way too early in development. If the poster wants to spend a couple months developing the various sub-libraries that make up OSMP, fine by me. If they want to get a prototype up and running fast, well, SL is already a finished product. I've been there for two years as Eggy Lippmann, since Public Beta started. If the poster needs any help regarding SL or OSMP feel free to to mail me: eggstasy - at everyone's favorite email - gmail.com
Second Life is ideal for this sort of thing. They even have a special program for universities. It's not just a graphics engine, it's a whole 3D world where you can collaboratively build and script stuff... it has very customizable humanoid avatars and is extremely user friendly. It's got physics too - based on the "industry standard" Havok engine.
Acceptable my ass. I haven't seen a hard drive last more than a year since, oh, single-digit capacities. I bought this box in mid-2001. I'm on my 4th HD and 3rd graphics card. The rest is all very much alive and kicking. A hard drive is a critical component. Its emphasis should be on reliability FIRST and then everything else.
How did this crap get modded up to 5? Wind is not finite or depletable. Wind is constinuously generated by the sun's differential heating of our planet. As the air warms, it expands and rises. As it cools, it contracts and falls down. We will never have "global stasis" and it would be hella difficult to globally impact the weather system. Global warming exists because gases travel and diffuse throughout the entire atmosphere. Windmills are fixed. Slowing down the wind a little bit here and there does not immediately affect anything, because there will always be one heck of a lot more untapped wind than the tapped amount. Actually, most air circulation happens high enough that we'll never get to it with a windmill, something you would know had you RTFA - that's the very reason they proposed this wacky kite system.
You misread me. I said they made a certain amount of money per page (by serving ads), and also that each page has an associated per-page cost. I didnt say that ISPs charged google on a per-page basis, but what google pays for their bandwidth is the sum of all pages served and in there lies your per-page bandwidth cost. Supermarkets dont charge you by the pea, but if you buy a bag of 500 peas for $5.00, then you have a per-pea cost of $0.01. Also, if you have 50 part-time monkeys making $10K/year to swap out broken servers, you will have a per-server maintenance cost, and indeed a per-page maintenance cost. Your total cost will be $500k/yr, so if you served 500 million pages that year you will have paid $0.001 per page in maintenance. And then there's the cost of acquiring the new servers, etc...
Google serves ads on every page. Assuming they are paid a fixed fee per page, then minimizing their per-page costs is the only way they can increase their revenue. Offering more free services draws in more people, who are served more ads. If they optimize those pages as well, they will earn more profit there. BTW... ever noticed how google uses text ads? Do you think the only reason they do that is because it's less intrusive? Wrong again - it also saves a lot of bandwidth compared to an image ad:) When you serve billions and billions of pages, shaving off a single byte on each page saves you GIGABYTES of traffic.
Uh, Second Life is entirely streamed from the server. The download is only 10 - 20 megs, and then everything you see and do is sent over the internet. It works great and does not require a very fat pipe. You can feasibly play it on a 128 kbit line, althought its bandwidth slider can be pushed up to 1 mbit.
Wrong. The cable companies are just being greedy. They dont even need $49 per user, let alone $99. In my country cable is a lot cheaper than in america and it also has no advertisement.
Uh, when was this NOT true? If you can't prove something, then it is reasonable to assume that its not true. Most companies require you to have a degree, and present proof that you do have it. A lot of companies require verifiable references that prove you have the work experience you claim you have. If you want to travel anywhere, you have to show a ticket to prove that you paid for it. Ditto for movies, concerts, sports events... if you want to get a refund, you have to show the receipt. Seriously, if you expect people to take your word as legal tender, you should probably go live with the Amish... I'm not american, and we do have national ID cards, we've had them forever and no one ever gave a damn about it, since we aren't into conspiracy theories and the whole fearing the government thing...
Ok, sorry I forgot this was slashdot:) Personally I like going to the movies. I dont have a home theater system, but surely you cant compare it to the big screen. Around here we have theaters banning food and drink in certain rooms. So all you have to do is wait a couple of weeks for a movie to be shown in the special no-eating room. Some cult movies are best appreciated in the theaters. Watching Star Wars with a crowd of other fans gives you a feeling of community. I remember when Episode 2 premiered and everyone went crazy when they saw Yoda fighting like that. And then at the end everyone stood up and clapped like a maniac:) I used to be a renter, but my gf insists on going to the movies. I dont think it's worth buying a DVD though. I dont have a lot of time to kill and I'm not the sort of person that watches a movie more than once. It's a matter of personal preference, I suppose.
That's one. Now, how many other games have been released for windows but not for other platforms? And it's not just the games. F/OSS is fine and dandy, but people would rather just continue to use what they have become accustomed to. So, ironically, when Linux has more proprietary software available for it, more people will be likely to try it.
If you studied some chemistry and biology you might get a clue. Chemistry tells us that carbon and water are very special substances, exhibiting many properties that I am too lazy to bore you with. Evolutionary biology tells us that "nature", if you'll excuse the personification, pretty much tries all possibilities at random and selects the ones that work. And, like the other guy said, we can only build sensors for things we know very well.
So, let me get this straight. These people have no concept of numbers, and upon testing them for mathematical skills, you found them lacking? Why does that not surprise me. It's not so much that language shapes thought, it's entirely the other way around. If you and your tribe have never discovered mathematics, it's only natural that you have no words to express them. These people are making it sound like if we recite a list of number names we will become genius mathematicians.
I am one of the richest people in SL, I have a girlfriend, friends, and I do get out of the house, thank you very much. I have made $800 USD without much of an effort. This isnt Everquest. It doesnt require insane amounts of time. The value in SL derives from your RL skills like programming and 3D modeling. Skills that I had already developed long before I heard about SL. There's people in SL who learned how to program because of the builtin scripting language and then decided they wanted to to become real programmers. It is quite a positive thing in your life, unlike the stupid MMORPG treadmills everyone in the gaming biz is churning out these days.
Stop posting about that which you know nothing about. Oh, wait, this is slashdot, I should be expecting this kind of thing already. Buying and selling money is a normal aspect of SL, encouraged by the developers. And SL is not a game either.
Second Life is not a game. The developers ENCOURAGE online money trading. SL is more like massively multiplayer productivity software with a social aspect. In it, you can create just about anything you can imagine, you can build 3D objects, script them, you can customize your avatars to the hilt and make custom animations for them in poser. It is a dream for machinima. After setting up a shop and making a few cool items, you can make money without spending a single minute in world. Since 99% of the content in SL is provided by the players, the developers offer the players monetary rewards in US dollars every month for the most popular content, and encourage anyone who is left out of the "rewarded few" to sell their game money on GOM and IGE, so that they are still rewarded for their content development effort. The amounts of money involved are nowhere near trivial. I have made the equivalent of $800 USD, and my lifetime membership only cost me $160.
I think both you and Kurzweil greatly overestimate the ability for technology to evolve. IMHO all exponential growth is unsustainable, and there will soon be a point where technological growth will no longer be exponential, so most of what the dreamers of today are imagining will never come to fruition, for reasons we will have to discover the hard way. My vision for the future is that things wont really change that much except we will be a little smarter, healthier, wealthier and with one heck of a lot of cool new toys:)
I think that if you compare just about anyone on slashdot to the drooling masses of TV-watching idiots, "genius" would be a fairly accurate description. The vast majority of people in this world has no goal in life, no ambition, dont know the difference between a job and a career, are unfamiliar with the concept of self-improvement and the expression "thirst for knowledge". So those of us who would be considered "normal" in an ideal world end up looking like geniuses in comparison.
The problem of adventure games is that they were very easy to code, and so there was a flood of utter crap where the gameplay consisted of hunting the right spot to click, and the puzzle solving was so illogic that people had to brute force it by trying every item with every other item... The ones that were actually logic (like the lost files of sherlock holmes and most of lucasarts's stuff) got labeled as "too easy" which encouraged people (*cough*sierra*cough) to churn out crappy illogical ones.
Yes, but to run a car, you need to actually have formal training in driving, and if you screw up, you get heavy fines, or your license taken from you. I would REALLY love it if this "information highway" we call the internet would have the same requirements and penalties. Take the zombied puters away from the illiterate users, and then hit them with a fine and mandatory training.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I thought about that, but recommending my pet project would seem a little bit like astroturfing. LOL! Besides, we are way too early in development. If the poster wants to spend a couple months developing the various sub-libraries that make up OSMP, fine by me. If they want to get a prototype up and running fast, well, SL is already a finished product. I've been there for two years as Eggy Lippmann, since Public Beta started.
If the poster needs any help regarding SL or OSMP feel free to to mail me:
eggstasy - at everyone's favorite email - gmail.com
Second Life is ideal for this sort of thing.
They even have a special program for universities.
It's not just a graphics engine, it's a whole 3D world where you can collaboratively build and script stuff... it has very customizable humanoid avatars and is extremely user friendly.
It's got physics too - based on the "industry standard" Havok engine.
Acceptable my ass. I haven't seen a hard drive last more than a year since, oh, single-digit capacities.
I bought this box in mid-2001. I'm on my 4th HD and 3rd graphics card. The rest is all very much alive and kicking.
A hard drive is a critical component. Its emphasis should be on reliability FIRST and then everything else.
How did this crap get modded up to 5?
Wind is not finite or depletable.
Wind is constinuously generated by the sun's differential heating of our planet.
As the air warms, it expands and rises. As it cools, it contracts and falls down.
We will never have "global stasis" and it would be hella difficult to globally impact the weather system.
Global warming exists because gases travel and diffuse throughout the entire atmosphere.
Windmills are fixed.
Slowing down the wind a little bit here and there does not immediately affect anything, because there will always be one heck of a lot more untapped wind than the tapped amount.
Actually, most air circulation happens high enough that we'll never get to it with a windmill, something you would know had you RTFA - that's the very reason they proposed this wacky kite system.
Does your witty one-liner do any better?
You misread me. I said they made a certain amount of money per page (by serving ads), and also that each page has an associated per-page cost.
I didnt say that ISPs charged google on a per-page basis, but what google pays for their bandwidth is the sum of all pages served and in there lies your per-page bandwidth cost.
Supermarkets dont charge you by the pea, but if you buy a bag of 500 peas for $5.00, then you have a per-pea cost of $0.01.
Also, if you have 50 part-time monkeys making $10K/year to swap out broken servers, you will have a per-server maintenance cost, and indeed a per-page maintenance cost. Your total cost will be $500k/yr, so if you served 500 million pages that year you will have paid $0.001 per page in maintenance. And then there's the cost of acquiring the new servers, etc...
Google serves ads on every page. Assuming they are paid a fixed fee per page, then minimizing their per-page costs is the only way they can increase their revenue. Offering more free services draws in more people, who are served more ads. If they optimize those pages as well, they will earn more profit there. :)
BTW... ever noticed how google uses text ads? Do you think the only reason they do that is because it's less intrusive? Wrong again - it also saves a lot of bandwidth compared to an image ad
When you serve billions and billions of pages, shaving off a single byte on each page saves you GIGABYTES of traffic.
Uh, Second Life is entirely streamed from the server. The download is only 10 - 20 megs, and then everything you see and do is sent over the internet.
It works great and does not require a very fat pipe.
You can feasibly play it on a 128 kbit line, althought its bandwidth slider can be pushed up to 1 mbit.
Wrong. The cable companies are just being greedy. They dont even need $49 per user, let alone $99.
In my country cable is a lot cheaper than in america and it also has no advertisement.
Ultima Underworld was one of my favorite games. It was far more immersive than anything else I have ever played.
Uh, when was this NOT true?
If you can't prove something, then it is reasonable to assume that its not true.
Most companies require you to have a degree, and present proof that you do have it. A lot of companies require verifiable references that prove you have the work experience you claim you have.
If you want to travel anywhere, you have to show a ticket to prove that you paid for it. Ditto for movies, concerts, sports events... if you want to get a refund, you have to show the receipt.
Seriously, if you expect people to take your word as legal tender, you should probably go live with the Amish...
I'm not american, and we do have national ID cards, we've had them forever and no one ever gave a damn about it, since we aren't into conspiracy theories and the whole fearing the government thing...
Ok, sorry I forgot this was slashdot :) :)
Personally I like going to the movies. I dont have a home theater system, but surely you cant compare it to the big screen. Around here we have theaters banning food and drink in certain rooms. So all you have to do is wait a couple of weeks for a movie to be shown in the special no-eating room.
Some cult movies are best appreciated in the theaters. Watching Star Wars with a crowd of other fans gives you a feeling of community. I remember when Episode 2 premiered and everyone went crazy when they saw Yoda fighting like that. And then at the end everyone stood up and clapped like a maniac
I used to be a renter, but my gf insists on going to the movies. I dont think it's worth buying a DVD though. I dont have a lot of time to kill and I'm not the sort of person that watches a movie more than once. It's a matter of personal preference, I suppose.
That's one. Now, how many other games have been released for windows but not for other platforms?
And it's not just the games. F/OSS is fine and dandy, but people would rather just continue to use what they have become accustomed to. So, ironically, when Linux has more proprietary software available for it, more people will be likely to try it.
If you studied some chemistry and biology you might get a clue.
Chemistry tells us that carbon and water are very special substances, exhibiting many properties that I am too lazy to bore you with.
Evolutionary biology tells us that "nature", if you'll excuse the personification, pretty much tries all possibilities at random and selects the ones that work.
And, like the other guy said, we can only build sensors for things we know very well.
Goodbye simoniker. Thank you for always covering Second Life so extensively. The slashdottings really helped the world grow :)
So, let me get this straight. These people have no concept of numbers, and upon testing them for mathematical skills, you found them lacking?
Why does that not surprise me.
It's not so much that language shapes thought, it's entirely the other way around. If you and your tribe have never discovered mathematics, it's only natural that you have no words to express them. These people are making it sound like if we recite a list of number names we will become genius mathematicians.
I am one of the richest people in SL, I have a girlfriend, friends, and I do get out of the house, thank you very much. I have made $800 USD without much of an effort. This isnt Everquest. It doesnt require insane amounts of time. The value in SL derives from your RL skills like programming and 3D modeling. Skills that I had already developed long before I heard about SL. There's people in SL who learned how to program because of the builtin scripting language and then decided they wanted to to become real programmers. It is quite a positive thing in your life, unlike the stupid MMORPG treadmills everyone in the gaming biz is churning out these days.
Stop posting about that which you know nothing about. Oh, wait, this is slashdot, I should be expecting this kind of thing already.
Buying and selling money is a normal aspect of SL, encouraged by the developers. And SL is not a game either.
Second Life is not a game. The developers ENCOURAGE online money trading.
SL is more like massively multiplayer productivity software with a social aspect. In it, you can create just about anything you can imagine, you can build 3D objects, script them, you can customize your avatars to the hilt and make custom animations for them in poser. It is a dream for machinima.
After setting up a shop and making a few cool items, you can make money without spending a single minute in world. Since 99% of the content in SL is provided by the players, the developers offer the players monetary rewards in US dollars every month for the most popular content, and encourage anyone who is left out of the "rewarded few" to sell their game money on GOM and IGE, so that they are still rewarded for their content development effort.
The amounts of money involved are nowhere near trivial. I have made the equivalent of $800 USD, and my lifetime membership only cost me $160.
I think both you and Kurzweil greatly overestimate the ability for technology to evolve. IMHO all exponential growth is unsustainable, and there will soon be a point where technological growth will no longer be exponential, so most of what the dreamers of today are imagining will never come to fruition, for reasons we will have to discover the hard way. :)
My vision for the future is that things wont really change that much except we will be a little smarter, healthier, wealthier and with one heck of a lot of cool new toys
I think that if you compare just about anyone on slashdot to the drooling masses of TV-watching idiots, "genius" would be a fairly accurate description.
The vast majority of people in this world has no goal in life, no ambition, dont know the difference between a job and a career, are unfamiliar with the concept of self-improvement and the expression "thirst for knowledge". So those of us who would be considered "normal" in an ideal world end up looking like geniuses in comparison.
The problem of adventure games is that they were very easy to code, and so there was a flood of utter crap where the gameplay consisted of hunting the right spot to click, and the puzzle solving was so illogic that people had to brute force it by trying every item with every other item...
The ones that were actually logic (like the lost files of sherlock holmes and most of lucasarts's stuff) got labeled as "too easy" which encouraged people (*cough*sierra*cough) to churn out crappy illogical ones.
Yes, but to run a car, you need to actually have formal training in driving, and if you screw up, you get heavy fines, or your license taken from you.
I would REALLY love it if this "information highway" we call the internet would have the same requirements and penalties. Take the zombied puters away from the illiterate users, and then hit them with a fine and mandatory training.
Once you know which 4 digits make up the PIN, there arent that many combinations to try.
More like, chop it into pieces, swallow it, and turn it into crap.