I think most of these rating systems are from the standpoint that 0% is a total waste of bytes. The thing is that console games don't tend to get published until they're around the 30 or 40% level because of licensing and duplication costs. You see more true stinkers for the PC, where the startup is much lower.
Same goes for music and movie reviews. By the time you've gone pro, and at least have a professional production job, that's a free 25% or so right there.
Would it help if standard house circuitry came with their own 12vdc and 5vdc transformers? That way, you could have one relatively efficient large-spec transformer driving everything in the house, vs. a bunch of cheap small ones. Or would the loss from the inside wiring still cancel any gain?
I'm not seeing an upper limit to the number of rules in a Thunderbird filter. I just hit the "More" button a bunch of times and got a bunch of rules entries. I agree that a one-keystroke "add to Whitelist" would be a good thing, but this appears perfectly functional. Having to manually scan the list to find entries is a pain, but most of the whitelist implementations I've seen haven't been searchable either.
Re: marking it if it's been whitelisted, you can assign a label from a filter in 1.5. I'm assuming you can assign a tag from 2.0. So, you assign a "Whitelist" tag.
Just verified the behavior using the efextra spam test. If you create a filter that makes a message Not Junk, it's not moved into the Junk folder, effectively making the filter a whitelist.
OTOH, setting a filter that makes a message Junk doesn't make it move into the Junk folder; any sort of blacklist filter needs to move the message also.
I dunno about what they added in 2.0, but in 1.5, you can set up a filter that makes the message Not Junk, effectively creating your own whitelist.
Now, I'm not certain whether that happens before or after the native spam filtering moves it to the Junk folder, but you can make the same filter move it to the Inbox (or wherever that name/domain typically goes).
Well, you're going to select for two classes of people, right? One is the class of people with a greater than normal specific immunity to that disease. The other is the class of people with a greater than normal immunity in general (super-immunes, from here on), and who may therefore be more prone to auto-immune problems.
Of course, if you carry the theory through, you also deselect for the super-immunes because they die of auto-immune, asthma and diabetes complications, etc. OTOH, the de-selection process is less sure than the selection process was; by definition, all people who were super-immune enough to survive a plague survived, so you end up with a small population with a relatively high percentage of super-immunes (compared to before the plague). But not all of their descendents developed auto-immune complications, and of the ones who do, many will have probably already procreated, creating more super-immune kids.
Which makes it a minor wonder that it's quite so unconventional. You'd think more companies would want to limit their liability, since trying to keep secrets works less and less well as people become better informed through the internet.
Of course, I don't know if it's all that rare anymore. Microsoft did the same thing with the Xbox power cord issue, and the Xbox 360 warranty extensions, etc. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples where an infrequent issue was publicized reasonably widely and the company kicked down for a free replacement.
Nintendo still deserves a lot of kudos though. It didn't take them long to make the decision, and it's in line with the rest of their customer service. They're really exemplary in that regard.
Yeah, Nintendo's tried that glove thing before. It kinda sucked.
Part of the reason the remote works better is because you can hold it in different ways, depending on the type of motion it's trying to simulate, and because it can be used with either hand. And as you say, there's also something very immersive about actually -holding- something. The glove won't be ambidextrous, and it'd be much more difficult to "drive", as you'd have to hold and move your hand in an absolutely specific way to make the motion sensors output correctly. The same applies to the remote, but you have a range of grips you can use on it and still get it to move appropriately.
I must admit, though, I kind of like the concept of being able to use a pointed finger as a mouse pointer. I like the ankle sensor idea, too. Someone will no doubt do that eventually.
You know, over in the http://www.cheapassgamer.com/ forums, we have a word for the type of price break this guy was going for. It's called a "scam".
He's attempting to take advantage of the fact that Verizon CSRs aren't the sharpest, and that if you repeat the word cents enough and show someone a weird value in dollars, they're liable to call it cents. He -knew- it wasn't really 0.002 cents/KB, or else he wouldn't have gone through that whole (apparently useless) effort of having them note it in the file.
Yes, Verizon's employees are being rather uniformly dense, but he's being extremely disingenuous about this whole thing. As was noted earlier in this thread, the prices are posted on Verizon's website. Were I him, I'd take the $36 offer and thank my lucky stars I managed to put something over on Verizon.
Sure, I get that 0/0 is currently considered indeterminate. And while my number theory is more or less nonexistent, I imagined that you can posit a system where it's determinate, and probably do useful work that way.
But it's not like the rules for real numbers were handed to us. They were a combination of observations about nature and a way to make the system consistent, as well as a set of emergent corrolaries from our initial axioms. But in the case of N/0, you already have an inconsistency. 0*x = 0, but 0/0 != x (necessarily). Similarly, in the limit case, you effectively approach an undefined hole at 0/0 instead of a discontinuity. And the multiplication/division rule, (a/b)*b=a, is broken, since (0/0)*0 != 0, whereas defining 0/0=0 would have made it work.
Why did we choose to make 0/0 indeterminate? Would making it determinate break other things that aren't undefined or indeterminate now?
I'm aware of the argument that multiplication and division are inverse, that so [any value]*0=0, thus 0/0=[any value], but that seems to be a byproduct of defining division in terms of multiplication. I'm also aware that it would create a disparity between the lim x/x as x->0, and the value of x/x where x=0.
However, given that division models iterative subtraction in the real world, why can't it be defined as the least number of times you need to subtract one number from another to reach zero? Then 0/[any value, including 0] equals 0. Seems rather impossible that, thousands of years later, it turns out we just got division wrong, so I'm assuming there's something I'm missing.
What does it break to make 0/0=0, and make multiplication and division non-inverse for that one case?
Unfortunately, between "Date Modified: September 26, 2005" and the speed at which 3rd party MP3 players have been improving, that's not as helpful as one might like.
It does. For one, in roommate ads, you can specify gender. Also, you are allowed to tacitly discriminate against pretty much anything/anyone when picking a roommate--you just can't -advertise- or admit out loud that you're discriminating. If you were renting out a vacant dwelling, you wouldn't be able to discriminate at all. Sounds like a subtle distinction, but it basically means you can't be sued for discrimination when picking a roommate, as long as you're not silly enough to tell them that you're discriminating.
On a side note, there's nothing preventing you from discriminating against collegiate status. One might argue that discriminates against families with children (or families, period), but I'm sure you could have found a way around that with some careful wording.
No amen from me. As far as I'm concerned, tightly integrated online is the current killer feature in gaming consoles. Prior to that, I'd never consider not gaming on my home PC. Now I'm considering buying a Mac for my next box.
I agree with you on questionable tech, but nobody's forcing you to buy the PS3, and they're not doing you a disservice by delaying it. They're arguably doing themselves a disservice by not putting it out there for you to buy, but it's not like they owe you.
Most real-life services have an "install" or some other start-up fee. Failing that, they have a contract with a disconnection charge. Both of these are ways to be able to recoup a guaranteed amount of expense. But if you don't like that, then why not wait until after the startup expenses are fully recouped, the box costs the same as a month of service, and includes a free month?
Nobody's making you buy "shovelware". There's legitimate value in a Super Mario World rerelease for people who didn't have a Super Nintendo. You had one, so why buy the game again? Oh, it's portable. But...that sounds like value for your money! Horrors!
Aha. Thanks for pointing that out--I hadn't gotten that far in the documentation (obviously). Sounds like they're already addressing this to whatever extent.
I'm actually looking forward to trying something simple out in this. As I said previously, I think the overall experience is going to be a little strange for the casual game player, but I can see getting a lot of "ooh, neat" out of the emergent behavior.
I wonder if you could use this technology to simulate and predict the responses of small groups in real-life.
Imagine an office-politics simulator. You create Actors for the influential people on your, above your, and immediately adjacent to your team. You probably have some observations about those persons' reactions to different situations and ideas, as well as existing personal dynamics, so translate those into Inclinations and Roles.
Obviously, you wouldn't be able to pitch a completely fleshed out idea or situation against it, but you could probably generalize. For example, for ideas and proposals, an idea could have properties as to whether it's highly technical or not, fully developed or still under review, who thought of it, who participated, stuff like that. Then you toss the idea into the group of Actors, let them Role it out, and see what the end responses are.
Being able to observe that sort of thing in play-by-play, over a series of tests, might actually reveal some interesting things and demystify the whole group influence/leadership process to an extent.
In Storytron, the stimulus responses can be scripted, and roles can be created such that different Actors respond quite differently. The Sims comparison is valid--I think both have cascading reactions, and go for the some sort of emergence--but this probably involves a somewhat tighter level of control with more possibilities for reactions.
It's been a year or so since I've played Facade, but I thought they had cascading reactions there too...you say something to the husband, he says something back, the wife comments on it, etc. Am I misremembering?
Sort of. I'm sort of distilling this from his whole "comparisons with existing technologies" riff on the Overview, but here goes:
Interactive Fiction is primarily Fiction--that is, a semi-fixed story. It has multiple detours (and perhaps even multiple endings) based on choices you make, but a start, middle, and finish was envisioned before you got there. The primary craft in Interactive Fiction is to hide that from the player, such that they believe they have a large effect on what's going on. In fact, you've artfully constrained the number of possibilities, via the verb and object list usually, such that they actually have a relatively small effect. With some exceptions, the plot resolution is the primary attraction, providing a carrot to draw you through the interactions. In especially well-crafted ones, the interactions themselves are equally entertaining.
Interactive Storytelling is primarily Interactive, with a largely un-fixed story. You and the computer interact to make the story together (the Storytelling part). The craft in Interactive Storytelling is in defining and weighting the dramatic elements (Actors, Stages, Inclinations, etc.) such that the stories that emerge will be interesting more often than not. The primary attraction is in the spontaneity of the interaction, as well as exploring the range of stories that can emerge from different interactions. To use a science-fiction reference, it's like a very limited version of a Holodeck vacation.
Yeah. By the same token, trying to program an independent actor in Inform can be a challenge. I think Crawford has a good model for independence with Storytron, which means you can do one hell of an interaction simulator with it. It's just that a story includes a plot, plus actors, and I'm not really seeing how one could define a plot.
Seems like if you could define a timeline for outside events--that is, ones that don't directly result from an Actor's Verb--and then possibly have Verbs (yours and Actors') add or remove things on that timeline, that would be a big step forward. Then events can happen, independent of any one Actor, and everyone (you included) can be affected by them. The timeline becomes the plot.
To be fair, I've only given it the most cursory of looks so far. It's possible you can do some of this stuff. But if so, they're not talking about it in the high-level documentaiton.
Slashdot Mirror
I think most of these rating systems are from the standpoint that 0% is a total waste of bytes. The thing is that console games don't tend to get published until they're around the 30 or 40% level because of licensing and duplication costs. You see more true stinkers for the PC, where the startup is much lower.
Same goes for music and movie reviews. By the time you've gone pro, and at least have a professional production job, that's a free 25% or so right there.
He's saying that if you click on the title bar of the browser application, you get a classic address bar. You don't need to use Google for everything.
Would it help if standard house circuitry came with their own 12vdc and 5vdc transformers? That way, you could have one relatively efficient large-spec transformer driving everything in the house, vs. a bunch of cheap small ones. Or would the loss from the inside wiring still cancel any gain?
I'm not seeing an upper limit to the number of rules in a Thunderbird filter. I just hit the "More" button a bunch of times and got a bunch of rules entries. I agree that a one-keystroke "add to Whitelist" would be a good thing, but this appears perfectly functional. Having to manually scan the list to find entries is a pain, but most of the whitelist implementations I've seen haven't been searchable either.
Re: marking it if it's been whitelisted, you can assign a label from a filter in 1.5. I'm assuming you can assign a tag from 2.0. So, you assign a "Whitelist" tag.
Just verified the behavior using the efextra spam test. If you create a filter that makes a message Not Junk, it's not moved into the Junk folder, effectively making the filter a whitelist.
OTOH, setting a filter that makes a message Junk doesn't make it move into the Junk folder; any sort of blacklist filter needs to move the message also.
I dunno about what they added in 2.0, but in 1.5, you can set up a filter that makes the message Not Junk, effectively creating your own whitelist.
Now, I'm not certain whether that happens before or after the native spam filtering moves it to the Junk folder, but you can make the same filter move it to the Inbox (or wherever that name/domain typically goes).
And as a bonus, you can pretend you're pitching for the San Francisco Giants!
Well, you're going to select for two classes of people, right? One is the class of people with a greater than normal specific immunity to that disease. The other is the class of people with a greater than normal immunity in general (super-immunes, from here on), and who may therefore be more prone to auto-immune problems.
Of course, if you carry the theory through, you also deselect for the super-immunes because they die of auto-immune, asthma and diabetes complications, etc. OTOH, the de-selection process is less sure than the selection process was; by definition, all people who were super-immune enough to survive a plague survived, so you end up with a small population with a relatively high percentage of super-immunes (compared to before the plague). But not all of their descendents developed auto-immune complications, and of the ones who do, many will have probably already procreated, creating more super-immune kids.
Yeah, well, just wait until WiiJarts comes out. Oh, the carnage...
Which makes it a minor wonder that it's quite so unconventional. You'd think more companies would want to limit their liability, since trying to keep secrets works less and less well as people become better informed through the internet.
Of course, I don't know if it's all that rare anymore. Microsoft did the same thing with the Xbox power cord issue, and the Xbox 360 warranty extensions, etc. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples where an infrequent issue was publicized reasonably widely and the company kicked down for a free replacement.
Nintendo still deserves a lot of kudos though. It didn't take them long to make the decision, and it's in line with the rest of their customer service. They're really exemplary in that regard.
Yeah, Nintendo's tried that glove thing before. It kinda sucked.
Part of the reason the remote works better is because you can hold it in different ways, depending on the type of motion it's trying to simulate, and because it can be used with either hand. And as you say, there's also something very immersive about actually -holding- something. The glove won't be ambidextrous, and it'd be much more difficult to "drive", as you'd have to hold and move your hand in an absolutely specific way to make the motion sensors output correctly. The same applies to the remote, but you have a range of grips you can use on it and still get it to move appropriately.
I must admit, though, I kind of like the concept of being able to use a pointed finger as a mouse pointer. I like the ankle sensor idea, too. Someone will no doubt do that eventually.
You know, over in the http://www.cheapassgamer.com/ forums, we have a word for the type of price break this guy was going for. It's called a "scam".
He's attempting to take advantage of the fact that Verizon CSRs aren't the sharpest, and that if you repeat the word cents enough and show someone a weird value in dollars, they're liable to call it cents. He -knew- it wasn't really 0.002 cents/KB, or else he wouldn't have gone through that whole (apparently useless) effort of having them note it in the file.
Yes, Verizon's employees are being rather uniformly dense, but he's being extremely disingenuous about this whole thing. As was noted earlier in this thread, the prices are posted on Verizon's website. Were I him, I'd take the $36 offer and thank my lucky stars I managed to put something over on Verizon.
Sure, I get that 0/0 is currently considered indeterminate. And while my number theory is more or less nonexistent, I imagined that you can posit a system where it's determinate, and probably do useful work that way.
But it's not like the rules for real numbers were handed to us. They were a combination of observations about nature and a way to make the system consistent, as well as a set of emergent corrolaries from our initial axioms. But in the case of N/0, you already have an inconsistency. 0*x = 0, but 0/0 != x (necessarily). Similarly, in the limit case, you effectively approach an undefined hole at 0/0 instead of a discontinuity. And the multiplication/division rule, (a/b)*b=a, is broken, since (0/0)*0 != 0, whereas defining 0/0=0 would have made it work.
Why did we choose to make 0/0 indeterminate? Would making it determinate break other things that aren't undefined or indeterminate now?
Can a math-type comment for me?
I'm aware of the argument that multiplication and division are inverse, that so [any value]*0=0, thus 0/0=[any value], but that seems to be a byproduct of defining division in terms of multiplication. I'm also aware that it would create a disparity between the lim x/x as x->0, and the value of x/x where x=0.
However, given that division models iterative subtraction in the real world, why can't it be defined as the least number of times you need to subtract one number from another to reach zero? Then 0/[any value, including 0] equals 0. Seems rather impossible that, thousands of years later, it turns out we just got division wrong, so I'm assuming there's something I'm missing.
What does it break to make 0/0=0, and make multiplication and division non-inverse for that one case?
From his board:
1/0 = infinity
0/0 = nullity
(1/0) * (0/1) = infinity * 0 = nullity
So nullity is a whole lot of nothing.
Got it.
And once you know that 2 != 1 and 2 =1, it turns out you can prove quite a bit...
On the plus side, you can now get past the Screening Door of the Heart of Gold.
Unfortunately, between "Date Modified: September 26, 2005" and the speed at which 3rd party MP3 players have been improving, that's not as helpful as one might like.
It does. For one, in roommate ads, you can specify gender. Also, you are allowed to tacitly discriminate against pretty much anything/anyone when picking a roommate--you just can't -advertise- or admit out loud that you're discriminating. If you were renting out a vacant dwelling, you wouldn't be able to discriminate at all. Sounds like a subtle distinction, but it basically means you can't be sued for discrimination when picking a roommate, as long as you're not silly enough to tell them that you're discriminating.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/FHA.html
On a side note, there's nothing preventing you from discriminating against collegiate status. One might argue that discriminates against families with children (or families, period), but I'm sure you could have found a way around that with some careful wording.
Might want to be careful posting about fraud in a public forum, with a traceable UserID. :)
No amen from me. As far as I'm concerned, tightly integrated online is the current killer feature in gaming consoles. Prior to that, I'd never consider not gaming on my home PC. Now I'm considering buying a Mac for my next box.
I agree with you on questionable tech, but nobody's forcing you to buy the PS3, and they're not doing you a disservice by delaying it. They're arguably doing themselves a disservice by not putting it out there for you to buy, but it's not like they owe you.
Most real-life services have an "install" or some other start-up fee. Failing that, they have a contract with a disconnection charge. Both of these are ways to be able to recoup a guaranteed amount of expense. But if you don't like that, then why not wait until after the startup expenses are fully recouped, the box costs the same as a month of service, and includes a free month?
Nobody's making you buy "shovelware". There's legitimate value in a Super Mario World rerelease for people who didn't have a Super Nintendo. You had one, so why buy the game again? Oh, it's portable. But...that sounds like value for your money! Horrors!
Aha. Thanks for pointing that out--I hadn't gotten that far in the documentation (obviously). Sounds like they're already addressing this to whatever extent.
I'm actually looking forward to trying something simple out in this. As I said previously, I think the overall experience is going to be a little strange for the casual game player, but I can see getting a lot of "ooh, neat" out of the emergent behavior.
I wonder if you could use this technology to simulate and predict the responses of small groups in real-life.
Imagine an office-politics simulator. You create Actors for the influential people on your, above your, and immediately adjacent to your team. You probably have some observations about those persons' reactions to different situations and ideas, as well as existing personal dynamics, so translate those into Inclinations and Roles.
Obviously, you wouldn't be able to pitch a completely fleshed out idea or situation against it, but you could probably generalize. For example, for ideas and proposals, an idea could have properties as to whether it's highly technical or not, fully developed or still under review, who thought of it, who participated, stuff like that. Then you toss the idea into the group of Actors, let them Role it out, and see what the end responses are.
Being able to observe that sort of thing in play-by-play, over a series of tests, might actually reveal some interesting things and demystify the whole group influence/leadership process to an extent.
In Storytron, the stimulus responses can be scripted, and roles can be created such that different Actors respond quite differently. The Sims comparison is valid--I think both have cascading reactions, and go for the some sort of emergence--but this probably involves a somewhat tighter level of control with more possibilities for reactions.
It's been a year or so since I've played Facade, but I thought they had cascading reactions there too...you say something to the husband, he says something back, the wife comments on it, etc. Am I misremembering?
Sort of. I'm sort of distilling this from his whole "comparisons with existing technologies" riff on the Overview, but here goes:
Interactive Fiction is primarily Fiction--that is, a semi-fixed story. It has multiple detours (and perhaps even multiple endings) based on choices you make, but a start, middle, and finish was envisioned before you got there. The primary craft in Interactive Fiction is to hide that from the player, such that they believe they have a large effect on what's going on. In fact, you've artfully constrained the number of possibilities, via the verb and object list usually, such that they actually have a relatively small effect. With some exceptions, the plot resolution is the primary attraction, providing a carrot to draw you through the interactions. In especially well-crafted ones, the interactions themselves are equally entertaining.
Interactive Storytelling is primarily Interactive, with a largely un-fixed story. You and the computer interact to make the story together (the Storytelling part). The craft in Interactive Storytelling is in defining and weighting the dramatic elements (Actors, Stages, Inclinations, etc.) such that the stories that emerge will be interesting more often than not. The primary attraction is in the spontaneity of the interaction, as well as exploring the range of stories that can emerge from different interactions. To use a science-fiction reference, it's like a very limited version of a Holodeck vacation.
Yeah. By the same token, trying to program an independent actor in Inform can be a challenge. I think Crawford has a good model for independence with Storytron, which means you can do one hell of an interaction simulator with it. It's just that a story includes a plot, plus actors, and I'm not really seeing how one could define a plot.
Seems like if you could define a timeline for outside events--that is, ones that don't directly result from an Actor's Verb--and then possibly have Verbs (yours and Actors') add or remove things on that timeline, that would be a big step forward. Then events can happen, independent of any one Actor, and everyone (you included) can be affected by them. The timeline becomes the plot.
To be fair, I've only given it the most cursory of looks so far. It's possible you can do some of this stuff. But if so, they're not talking about it in the high-level documentaiton.