This Slashdot post read so much like spam to me, that I thought there must be some catch, that maybe this was truly magic or a leap forward. So, I tried a few photos that I had paid someone on Upwork to crop, and it worked instantly. Had I had this tool, I would have saved $20 each. Then I googled, "Remove background from image" and tried the first results quickly, and none of them were auto-magical. You had to paint the foreground and background to crop.
So, yes this post is 100% written like spam, but upon closer inspection, it appears to be a novel leap in image editing.
We need to replicate the idea that we have a new sense, as opposed to a fast-acting hormonal response. One replication of this study could bring more clarity to the subject. Otherwise, in three years, it may fail replication but the gut-brain connection idea could have already gone viral by then, appearing in dumb TED talks, and spawning all sorts of pop psychobabble books.
I want to propagate a meme whereby any time a "new study" is cited, we ask reflexively, "has it been replicated?" Doing so seems to be the only way out of the replication crisis. We, as consumers of pop science, need to demand it.
Just add "on the Internet" to the key sentences and it all makes more sense.
The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.
... on the Internet
These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.
... on the Internet.
he aim of a collective, however, is to engineer a system where self-directed peers take responsibility for critical processes and where difficult decisions, such as sorting out priorities, are decided by all participants.
... on the Internet.
I wonder if these shocking cultural changes aren't as big of a deal as the Wired article makes it out to be, in that they're scoped only to the online world. The offline world may barely change in response. Then again, if everybody is more and more conducting most of their activities on the Internet, that's a different story.
Can we stop pretending that these changes are positive? Who the hell cares about corporations? Why must we keep making compromises for them? If we banned DRM, threw out copyright laws, yes, really expensive-to-produce content will appear less frequently. So what? We're moving to a world where culture comes from the bottom-up, not the top-down. From wikipedia to Torrents. It's a paradigm shift. And if we want to stop the RIAA from suing grandmas, we have to be willing to accept a world without copyright.
Not that I don't think a WebOS is interesting, I just think that the same giddy jump-to-conclusion is the same one that led a lot of search engines to become portals in the late 90s. Google succeeds largely by pushing the innovation to the edges, rather than centralizing everything. This creates more diversity in their product lines. The downside is that some of their products aren't that great (Froogle). Either way, all their products are largely freed from restrictions related to centralization.
Even minor centralization can be detrimental, such as how c|net and terralycos require corporate parent toolbars on all their subsidiaries. This little change dramatically affects the perceived utility of those services: all of a sudden, Gamespot no longer seems like its own powerful independent magazine but now rather just one of many departments in c|net's stable. There are, though, some old-Internet companies that have learned; for example, flickr has a conspicuous absence of Yahoo brand-flogging.
In that case, how would World of Warcraft play into the rankings. Running one raid requires more time than I spend on myspace in three months. I just pop into myspace, check comments, post a few comments, and check-out.
And people are paying to play WoW. There are those that would pay to use myspace, but if they ever proposed that, the next free service would take off. I'm also concerned about click-through rates on myspace. From what I see on myspace, all that exists are "FREE SMILEYS"-type ads. Whenever I see those ads, I quickly suppose that their demographic isn't profitable.
Artists pay to get promoted on myspace, that's for sure though, but I think that's just part of the fad. Artists can setup myspace profiles, and just link to and promote them through other channels.
Well, check out my avatar-unifying page: Pakhuda's profile on Leetster. It unifies communication for my GAIA online, Halo 2, and World of Warcraft characters.
It's called Leetster. We accept registrants from World of Warcraft, EQ 2, Asheron's Call, Matrix Online, City of Heroes etc.. eventually we'll cover all MMORPGs and other avatar-based systems, like GAIA online. The goal is to create a unifying identity for all your avatars. Check it out.
My friend and I created a website Leetster to create precisely that bridge. Users create profiles in a manner similar to myspace, but providing real life information is highly optional. The site is focused on WoW players, and we have a broad spectrum of profiles from those that go all out with real life info, to those with all WoW-related content, to fake profiles and funnies.
Don't be so shrill. Man, mobs and groups always encourage and prop up an extreme sounding speaker. Even if the individuals don't share the same level of intensity, they always support him because at least he'll more than enough cover at least part of their interests. Little does that shrill speaker know that deep down inside, the relaxed majority thinks he's an idiot. But a useful idiot for the moment.
It's interesting how strongly persistent natural selection makes life forms. On Planet Earth, life forms have advanced so far in their ability for self-persistence that they've evolved sentient beings who then developed technology to allow them to gird the seeds of life for survival against the most extreme of natural disasters.
The most interesting development in the 1.9 patch is the introduction of a server-wide event.
Skip this paragraph if you are already familiar with WoW: There are about 100+ servers in WoW, with anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 gamers per server. And on each server there are numerous guilds with anywhere from 30-200 members. And every server has like 10 elite guilds, those that have killed some of the top bosses like Nefarian or Ragnaros.
With Ahn'Qiraj, apparently they're letting guilds compete in a mission to be the first to open up the gates to Ahn'Qiraj. The gates can only be open once per server. And the guild that does it, rumor has it, gets an artifact item. This is rarer than legendaries (orange), which are rarer than epics (purple). Most of the elite guilds only have one legendary among their whole guild. Now there will be at most one guild on each server with an artifact.
Mad props to Blizzard for adding this. My friend who is in a hardcore guild is saying that their guild is gathering together like an armada to be the first to open these gates. Yay for WoW crack. If you're not already playing WoW, you need to get on it.
The company that backs an MMO seriously makes a difference. I now lump Turbine into the same camp as Sony (SOE). They are both companies that don't take their userbases seriously.
SOE screwed the Star Wars Glaxies (SWG) fanbase by pretty much cutting out half of the things that made SWG fun, and hardly giving the existing base warning.
The executives that run these companies are out of touch with the gamers that play their games. At the very least with Asheron's Call 2, they should allow someone else to run the servers. People invest their lives into these games. If you spend more than 80% of your waking hours, for example, playing these games, then you take them just as seriously as you do your existence in the real world. These people will work an entire month just to get a pair of rare, magical shoes. And those shoes are just as important to them as they are to someone who saved up to put a downpayment on a new car.
Turbine is behind a new game, Dungeons and Dragons Online. So my reaction when reading this article is I will vote with my dollar, and avoid companies that treat their userbases like crap.
The press just won't "get it" about games. Even game developers don't seem to get it. I saw the topic list for some game conference and one of them bemoaned the lack of innovation in gaming.
These articles follow this format: 1) Person states, "there is no innovation in gaming." 2) Audience nods because everybody likes to agree with negative criticism. 3) Same person then states, "here is my answer."
It's the standard format to force people to listen to your stupid thesis.
But really, we mustn't ignore the biggest elephant in the room right now in gaming: MMORPGs. Korea shows MMO matches on television. World of Warcraft has made over a billin dollars, and has 5 million people subscribed right now. The creation of these worlds are huge undertakings, and oftentimes require budgets larger than Hollywood blockbusters.
TFA talks about an open-ended narative? That's what World of Warcraft is! You pick and choose the quests and plotlines you want to follow. Every guild has its own character and drama and storyline as well.
TFA also talks about some supposed golden age in narratives in gaming. Please. Sure the XBOX 360 is an upgrade in graphical detail, but I think there's just something fundamental about gaming that makes it skew toward action and less to story. There have been games with great open-ended stories, but they don't sell too well, and as a result, we don't see too many of them. But then there are the MUDs, with wonderful stories. Improvements in graphics won't magically permit the innovation of open-ended narratives. If open-ended narratives were going to fly with gaming, they would already be successful, graphics are not the problem. The market is.
so TFA is just some lucky writer who found a gullible editor to promote his stupid game.
I find the new lingo in WoW a little bit of an annoying phenomena. I've been playing WoW for a year, and I still hear stuff in the game that I don't recognize. Everything is concatenated and abbreviated, and to a newbie it must sound like these guys have been playing forever and are too tired of retyping long strings of text. But the reality is, it's just the same old in-group/out-group language evolution that occurs. And I find myself falling into the same folly.
First, if someone mentions a term that I don't understand, I don't ask for the definition because I don't want to flood the chatlines. And also, I just don't like asking stupid questions. My guess is that this is a widespread reaction, and therefore this creates the mass mis-perception that everybody understands everybody.
Second, I find myself using the concatenations and abbreviations so as to not talk down to people. If I say, "Looking for Group: Sunken Temple" when people are already saying "LFG ST" then it makes my statement look like some stupid grand announcement/advertisement.
So in summary, as soon as members of the WoW community learn new lingo, they bring it into use in order to fit-in, and not because it's easier to use. Then, because people don't appear to mis-understand the new lingo, it makes the lingo a standard.
In the real world, if you tell somebody something they don't understand, usually they'll react funny or ask you what that is. But in chat-based programs like WoW, where non-response is often accepted, it's too easy for miscommunication to be misread as comprehension.
I liked the suggestion by Jimbo himself that maybe Wikipedia would consider putting ads on just their search feature. That page itself would generate millions of dollars, which would permit wikipedia to make some money without violating it's neutrality.
Having ads on the individual articles themselves would be a major no-no I think.
Is this going to be the first billion dollar game? 5 million people paying monthly subscription fees... over the course of five years, that's gonna be a billion dollars.
Re:What about World of Warcraft and the burgeoning
on
The MySpace Generation
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, this whole myspace glut quickly reminds me of geocities. And we know what happened to them.
Communication Tools versus Social Scenes
on
The MySpace Generation
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Myspace is a club. And just like real world clubs, its popularity will be transient. In 3 years, there will be some other Internet social scene that will dominate. And 3 years from then, another one. The existence of this BusinessWeek article alone makes myspace that much less cooler to be on. Remember Friendster? That was becoming like what myspace was, until myspace became cooler. Now Friendster's going bankrupt.
Communication tools, on the other hand, stick around. Look at AOL Instant Messenger. Crappy tool, but still the most popular. I even think facebook will survive this social networking service bubble. Facebook is also like a tool in that it functions as your school's better yearbook/directory.
Quality tools and services are long-term. Clubs and social scenes are ephemeral.
What about World of Warcraft and the burgeoning ..
on
The MySpace Generation
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What about World of Warcraft and the burgeoning MMORPG space? There are 5.5 million subscribers to WoW, and in total, maybe 20 million people who play these MMORPGs worldwide, from games like Lineage to EverQuest.
I don't think myspace deserves to be associated with a "generation" because myspace hasn't generated its own unique subculture. And it's not really a "generation" as a large portion of the traffic on myspace is by older men looking for skanks.
The WoW and gamer culture, on the other hand, has its own languages and inside jokes. Plus guilds are way more cohesive than these loose organizations or "networks."
I'm creating a social network just for gamers, and WoW players specifically right now: Leetster. This is a link to my profile: pakhuda
Slashdot Mirror
This Slashdot post read so much like spam to me, that I thought there must be some catch, that maybe this was truly magic or a leap forward. So, I tried a few photos that I had paid someone on Upwork to crop, and it worked instantly. Had I had this tool, I would have saved $20 each. Then I googled, "Remove background from image" and tried the first results quickly, and none of them were auto-magical. You had to paint the foreground and background to crop.
So, yes this post is 100% written like spam, but upon closer inspection, it appears to be a novel leap in image editing.
We need to replicate the idea that we have a new sense, as opposed to a fast-acting hormonal response. One replication of this study could bring more clarity to the subject. Otherwise, in three years, it may fail replication but the gut-brain connection idea could have already gone viral by then, appearing in dumb TED talks, and spawning all sorts of pop psychobabble books.
I want to propagate a meme whereby any time a "new study" is cited, we ask reflexively, "has it been replicated?" Doing so seems to be the only way out of the replication crisis. We, as consumers of pop science, need to demand it.
Just add "on the Internet" to the key sentences and it all makes more sense.
... on the Internet
... on the Internet.
... on the Internet.
I wonder if these shocking cultural changes aren't as big of a deal as the Wired article makes it out to be, in that they're scoped only to the online world. The offline world may barely change in response. Then again, if everybody is more and more conducting most of their activities on the Internet, that's a different story.
Can we stop pretending that these changes are positive? Who the hell cares about corporations? Why must we keep making compromises for them? If we banned DRM, threw out copyright laws, yes, really expensive-to-produce content will appear less frequently. So what? We're moving to a world where culture comes from the bottom-up, not the top-down. From wikipedia to Torrents. It's a paradigm shift. And if we want to stop the RIAA from suing grandmas, we have to be willing to accept a world without copyright.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Not that I don't think a WebOS is interesting, I just think that the same giddy jump-to-conclusion is the same one that led a lot of search engines to become portals in the late 90s. Google succeeds largely by pushing the innovation to the edges, rather than centralizing everything. This creates more diversity in their product lines. The downside is that some of their products aren't that great (Froogle). Either way, all their products are largely freed from restrictions related to centralization.
Even minor centralization can be detrimental, such as how c|net and terralycos require corporate parent toolbars on all their subsidiaries. This little change dramatically affects the perceived utility of those services: all of a sudden, Gamespot no longer seems like its own powerful independent magazine but now rather just one of many departments in c|net's stable. There are, though, some old-Internet companies that have learned; for example, flickr has a conspicuous absence of Yahoo brand-flogging.
What about time-spent using a service?
In that case, how would World of Warcraft play into the rankings. Running one raid requires more time than I spend on myspace in three months. I just pop into myspace, check comments, post a few comments, and check-out.
And people are paying to play WoW. There are those that would pay to use myspace, but if they ever proposed that, the next free service would take off. I'm also concerned about click-through rates on myspace. From what I see on myspace, all that exists are "FREE SMILEYS"-type ads. Whenever I see those ads, I quickly suppose that their demographic isn't profitable.
Artists pay to get promoted on myspace, that's for sure though, but I think that's just part of the fad. Artists can setup myspace profiles, and just link to and promote them through other channels.
Well, check out my avatar-unifying page: Pakhuda's profile on Leetster. It unifies communication for my GAIA online, Halo 2, and World of Warcraft characters.
It's called Leetster. We accept registrants from World of Warcraft, EQ 2, Asheron's Call, Matrix Online, City of Heroes etc.. eventually we'll cover all MMORPGs and other avatar-based systems, like GAIA online. The goal is to create a unifying identity for all your avatars. Check it out.
My friend and I created a website Leetster to create precisely that bridge. Users create profiles in a manner similar to myspace, but providing real life information is highly optional. The site is focused on WoW players, and we have a broad spectrum of profiles from those that go all out with real life info, to those with all WoW-related content, to fake profiles and funnies.
The article also forgot to mention a CES highlight from YapperNut: The YapperMouse. A USB mouse that doubles as a skype phone for $39.95
Looks promising imo...
Don't be so shrill. Man, mobs and groups always encourage and prop up an extreme sounding speaker. Even if the individuals don't share the same level of intensity, they always support him because at least he'll more than enough cover at least part of their interests. Little does that shrill speaker know that deep down inside, the relaxed majority thinks he's an idiot. But a useful idiot for the moment.
"Freedom is free of the need to be free"
that's a meaningless statement because it's a contradition.
It's interesting how strongly persistent natural selection makes life forms. On Planet Earth, life forms have advanced so far in their ability for self-persistence that they've evolved sentient beings who then developed technology to allow them to gird the seeds of life for survival against the most extreme of natural disasters.
The most interesting development in the 1.9 patch is the introduction of a server-wide event.
Skip this paragraph if you are already familiar with WoW: There are about 100+ servers in WoW, with anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 gamers per server. And on each server there are numerous guilds with anywhere from 30-200 members. And every server has like 10 elite guilds, those that have killed some of the top bosses like Nefarian or Ragnaros.
With Ahn'Qiraj, apparently they're letting guilds compete in a mission to be the first to open up the gates to Ahn'Qiraj. The gates can only be open once per server. And the guild that does it, rumor has it, gets an artifact item. This is rarer than legendaries (orange), which are rarer than epics (purple). Most of the elite guilds only have one legendary among their whole guild. Now there will be at most one guild on each server with an artifact.
Mad props to Blizzard for adding this. My friend who is in a hardcore guild is saying that their guild is gathering together like an armada to be the first to open these gates. Yay for WoW crack. If you're not already playing WoW, you need to get on it.
Turbine is behind the upcoming D&D online.
The company that backs an MMO seriously makes a difference. I now lump Turbine into the same camp as Sony (SOE). They are both companies that don't take their userbases seriously.
SOE screwed the Star Wars Glaxies (SWG) fanbase by pretty much cutting out half of the things that made SWG fun, and hardly giving the existing base warning.
The executives that run these companies are out of touch with the gamers that play their games. At the very least with Asheron's Call 2, they should allow someone else to run the servers. People invest their lives into these games. If you spend more than 80% of your waking hours, for example, playing these games, then you take them just as seriously as you do your existence in the real world. These people will work an entire month just to get a pair of rare, magical shoes. And those shoes are just as important to them as they are to someone who saved up to put a downpayment on a new car.
Turbine is behind a new game, Dungeons and Dragons Online. So my reaction when reading this article is I will vote with my dollar, and avoid companies that treat their userbases like crap.
The press just won't "get it" about games. Even game developers don't seem to get it. I saw the topic list for some game conference and one of them bemoaned the lack of innovation in gaming.
These articles follow this format: 1) Person states, "there is no innovation in gaming." 2) Audience nods because everybody likes to agree with negative criticism. 3) Same person then states, "here is my answer."
It's the standard format to force people to listen to your stupid thesis.
But really, we mustn't ignore the biggest elephant in the room right now in gaming: MMORPGs. Korea shows MMO matches on television. World of Warcraft has made over a billin dollars, and has 5 million people subscribed right now. The creation of these worlds are huge undertakings, and oftentimes require budgets larger than Hollywood blockbusters.
TFA talks about an open-ended narative? That's what World of Warcraft is! You pick and choose the quests and plotlines you want to follow. Every guild has its own character and drama and storyline as well.
TFA also talks about some supposed golden age in narratives in gaming. Please. Sure the XBOX 360 is an upgrade in graphical detail, but I think there's just something fundamental about gaming that makes it skew toward action and less to story. There have been games with great open-ended stories, but they don't sell too well, and as a result, we don't see too many of them. But then there are the MUDs, with wonderful stories. Improvements in graphics won't magically permit the innovation of open-ended narratives. If open-ended narratives were going to fly with gaming, they would already be successful, graphics are not the problem. The market is.
so TFA is just some lucky writer who found a gullible editor to promote his stupid game.
I find the new lingo in WoW a little bit of an annoying phenomena. I've been playing WoW for a year, and I still hear stuff in the game that I don't recognize. Everything is concatenated and abbreviated, and to a newbie it must sound like these guys have been playing forever and are too tired of retyping long strings of text. But the reality is, it's just the same old in-group/out-group language evolution that occurs. And I find myself falling into the same folly.
First, if someone mentions a term that I don't understand, I don't ask for the definition because I don't want to flood the chatlines. And also, I just don't like asking stupid questions. My guess is that this is a widespread reaction, and therefore this creates the mass mis-perception that everybody understands everybody.
Second, I find myself using the concatenations and abbreviations so as to not talk down to people. If I say, "Looking for Group: Sunken Temple" when people are already saying "LFG ST" then it makes my statement look like some stupid grand announcement/advertisement.
So in summary, as soon as members of the WoW community learn new lingo, they bring it into use in order to fit-in, and not because it's easier to use. Then, because people don't appear to mis-understand the new lingo, it makes the lingo a standard.
In the real world, if you tell somebody something they don't understand, usually they'll react funny or ask you what that is. But in chat-based programs like WoW, where non-response is often accepted, it's too easy for miscommunication to be misread as comprehension.
I liked the suggestion by Jimbo himself that maybe Wikipedia would consider putting ads on just their search feature. That page itself would generate millions of dollars, which would permit wikipedia to make some money without violating it's neutrality. Having ads on the individual articles themselves would be a major no-no I think.
Is this going to be the first billion dollar game? 5 million people paying monthly subscription fees... over the course of five years, that's gonna be a billion dollars.
alright.
Yeah, this whole myspace glut quickly reminds me of geocities. And we know what happened to them.
Myspace is a club. And just like real world clubs, its popularity will be transient. In 3 years, there will be some other Internet social scene that will dominate. And 3 years from then, another one. The existence of this BusinessWeek article alone makes myspace that much less cooler to be on. Remember Friendster? That was becoming like what myspace was, until myspace became cooler. Now Friendster's going bankrupt.
Communication tools, on the other hand, stick around. Look at AOL Instant Messenger. Crappy tool, but still the most popular. I even think facebook will survive this social networking service bubble. Facebook is also like a tool in that it functions as your school's better yearbook/directory.
Quality tools and services are long-term. Clubs and social scenes are ephemeral.
What about World of Warcraft and the burgeoning MMORPG space? There are 5.5 million subscribers to WoW, and in total, maybe 20 million people who play these MMORPGs worldwide, from games like Lineage to EverQuest.
I don't think myspace deserves to be associated with a "generation" because myspace hasn't generated its own unique subculture. And it's not really a "generation" as a large portion of the traffic on myspace is by older men looking for skanks.
The WoW and gamer culture, on the other hand, has its own languages and inside jokes. Plus guilds are way more cohesive than these loose organizations or "networks."
I'm creating a social network just for gamers, and WoW players specifically right now: Leetster. This is a link to my profile: pakhuda