Forcing the computer, a very brittle, nonadaptable thing, to do all the adaptation in the computer-human relationship, is not simply problematic- it is very, very inefficient. I don't mean 'get a 2Ghz CPU' inefficient- I mean people's workflow will be absolutely crippled by essentially playing a game of 'telephone' with their computer. Try this: spend an hour of your day working with your computer by getting a friend who knows you and what you're trying to accomplish, and having the friend at the mouse and keyboard- while you sit next to him and explain all actions verbally.
Sound like a nightmare (or tech support hell?) You're getting the picture. Even with an AI of human scope that is intimately familiar with your work, you will constantly be hitting inefficient areas- you'll get basically squat done and might end up very frustrated. Even if you don't end up frustrated- your productivity will be in the toilet.
This is a self-correcting development- anyone who gets heavy into using it will be removing themselves from the world's cutting edge. It is like a stagnant backwater, like a mechanism designed to take the non-geeky and hinder their ability to compete in a newly technological world by setting them up to be grossly less effective than the geeks.
For that reason it would be better if it did _not_ become a reality, but most likely Microsoft will figure out some way of doing it as it's very in line with their preferred approach. The ideal counter to this would be to continue to develop more efficient systems that require some user learning, so that the MS natural language users can occasionally be challenged by the sight of somebody accomplishing tasks many times faster- or faster by several orders of magnitude, which is not unthinkable. The best response to give when asked 'How do you do that?' is 'You learn how...' with more details if desired.
I can do that for ya, but I'm not enough of a programmer yet to have an actual game out of it:)
See ROTSOS, or as I like to think of it Return Of The Son Of Spacewar:) The demos I have so far consist of only a couple MPEG videos of essentially infinite consistent and entirely emergent terrain- and there's also a section on names generated the same way:)
What this means is that among the nineteen million stars of the galaxy you'll have several hundred that have a temperate habitable planet (and many that are borderline...), among which is the star Conard in the quadrant of the galaxy controlled by a feline sort of alien race, the planet being Diaceside. On this planet by the largest sea is the port city Corantial, which you can find from space by looking for the three surrounding mountains forming three points of a square with the city as the fourth...
Now. The trick is- all that is emergent. The three mountains would be blind luck- the city might end up named Sounirmas, or Fraeutnte, or Loeespgon, or even Asshot. However, given the proper algorithms to produce EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE from a single block of data read back and forth and up and down, you could go to thousands of stars and visit hundreds of planets and still, when you return, there's those three mountains again, and you are welcomed by the cat ladies of the port city of Corantial- because the mechanism, the algorithm, is totally rigid but _totally_ consistent and repeatable (also bloody fast, but that's another story:) )
I've GPLed everything I have so far but currently am hard at work on other things- but I do mean to pursue this further. The concept is so flexible you could use it for anything- as long as you can cope with the fact that everything has to be emergent. You can have a world-city, or countryside with cities down to the positioning of the trash barrels on the sidewalk- but you _cannot_ place even a single cigarette butt manually and expect it to be persistent, or you'd have to have a database terabytes in size to handle the sheer scope of the game world. If everything is emergent from the one database, you get to have a game world the size of a state, or country, or world, or the size of Ringworld if you wanted- all off a 16M file, all consistent down to the street-signs (but you're going to have street names like Bloangble:) )
The kick in the tail from all this is the security and consistency of multiplayer situations. Done properly (i.e. to extremes) the game world is unhackable barring clever executable tricks. You simply cannot change the bit of data that would say 'deposit of gold under place in the countryside I colonised' without simultanously changing many stars and planets in the universe, altering the very terrain you're standing on (gee, where'd the mountain go? Hell, where'd the _town_ go?) and possibly the name of the planet you're on:) it's a very effective way of keeping lots of data on the client side but making it resistant to tinkering- the data is so general purpose that any modification to it will put you in a parallel universe due to how extensively each byte is used for so many different purposes.
Seeing as my work is GPLed I would be happy to see other people take this idea and use it in their own stuff- the only trouble is, to get the proper benefits you have to build your world entirely this way. If you build the driving game you can spend a lot of time sorting out good algorithms so that if this quartermile is data value 123 and the next is data value 213 you have such and such a transition of roads (over varying-LOD terrain- see my flyover demos), but the one thing you can't do is draw a road freehand, or plunk down a gas station. Instead you make gas stations sub-data-value 107 and look to see if that's giving you an acceptable distribution of gas stations.
If you like exploring that much perhaps you'd like to _make_ a game of this nature:)
(yes, I'm the same guy who's always going on about his mp3.com music:) I was revamping my mp3.com site the other night instead of working on ROTSOS, and today I replaced a microphone cord plug and am making four high-resolution mini patchcords. But I'll get around to it- probably when I get really REALLY sick of wiring patchcords and winding bass pickups:) )
This might be out of line from me, but as an indie musician can I ask that you _not_ give money to the RIAA? They're my competition, and they use that money to cut off my air supply.
They certainly do NOT take care of promotion- most of that is your job, rapidly shifting to 'all' if you're on your second album or don't look like you're going to outsell Britney Spears. They arrange for the studio recordings- but you pay for them out of your advance against royalties- that's your money being spent, and you will have to take what they choose for you for studio and production, too. (Nirvana at the peak of their success was not able to choose its own production- and that's a 'grunge' band, not a 'produced' band). They do deal with distribution- the way the artist gets screwed there is not by them forcing you to pay for it out of your advance, it's by whittling away your already miniscule royalty through traditional fees and charges. Did you know that there is still a percentage knocked off the artist royalty for 'shellac breakage'? Once, a lot of 78s broke being shipped to music stores. Vinyl records didn't break so easy but the record labels liked the flat reduction in artist royalty from that fee, so they kept it. They're still keeping it- now it's to compensate the record company for the many times the shellac breaks on audio CDs. I wish I was making this up- props to Robert Fripp of King Crimson for, in his disputes with EG records, tracking down these details.
Sure: I'd be quite happy to see no intellectual property exist at all _provided_ you don't get corporations leveraging their vastly greater resources to stomp all over individuals.
Let's take the most extreme example short of patents- let's postulate somebody who goes and takes every one of my songs and claims them for his own, putting up his own page and taking money for them. Now, if he gets to use intellectual property, there's some chance he can stop _me_ from having the songs I wrote- or I could stop him, in theory. If there's no intellectual property I may not be able to stop him from doing this- but where is he going to make _new_ songs? He's not the one who created those things- that puts him at a disadvantage, he rapidly becomes one of a horde of people claiming they did my songs.
As the noise and argument of this spreads, it eventually becomes known to most people that I'm the one who did those songs that are being sold by unrelated people. If someone wants to get an existing song- there will be a lot of places they can go, very few of which compensate me in any way. If someone wants a _new_ song? They're going to have a tough time getting _that_ from dumb copiers- they will need to talk to me. If someone wants to do an interview or write a book or something about the songs? Very likely some 'distributors' will muscle in and want to tell the story their way (see the early history of reggae) but that is still another reason to talk to the original person.
I would happily abandon intellectual property, because my interaction with it is almost entirely defensive. It's not you DLing my song and then giving it to your friends that concerns me- it's Britney Spears (yah right;) ) DLing it, releasing it, and then enjoining me from using or reproducing it. It's not my inventing a thing and then not getting paid for every little use of it- it's my inventing a thing and then 3M inventing it, patenting it, and forbidding me from ever using it again. My interaction with IP is almost entirely defensive and I am a _creator_ of IP: that seems not right to me.
I've asked that my music (see URL link above) be traded on Napster. Partly this is an effort to get exposure (I'd love to be espousing some of my views on CNN or whatever as a 'representative internet musician', because I have some very strong arguments that I feel should be included in any consensus opinion) but that must be understood in the right context. The first thing people would think of is 'Oh, so it drives more people to mp3.com- while also diminishing the market- huh?' but the bottom line is: if I ended up being big on Napster (which will now never happen), it ESTABLISHES me as a person capable of doing MUSICAL WORK. Stop focusing on the created things (the IP) for a second and consider the act of creation. It's a very individual thing- some people can invent mechanical devices, some people write code, some write songs, some trick synthesisers into making abstract ear candy or write books or paint pictures. The emphasis is always on the created objects, even when they are very abstract (like the 'epigrammatist' I heard about who makes up lots of little phrases like 'Things are always worst when they suck' and _copyrights_ them and sues people for using them- a canonical example of wrong focus in IP. Look at people's ability to create, instead- how much would you pay that guy for a five word remark, versus how much you might pay me for background music to your TV commercial, composed and recorded to your specifications?
Nothing in intellectual property gives me that opportunity- only ability to _perform_ will do it (and, importantly, ability to do professional sound engineering). Remove intellectual property and that opportunity will still be there- may even be enhanced, since 'used music' will become nearly valueless. When all the car advertisements use the greatest Sixties hits for background (hey, they already DO), the value of that music is eroded and washed away- eventually, somebody is going to need NEW music, something that is both arresting and hasn't been heard a million times. It's the same for all other forms of IP- the creators are the edge of the chisel. You can focus on the final product all you want but without that edge you aren't going to get any more of it. Compare the price of wood with the price of a professional wood chisel, or perhaps one of the Japanese super-wide chisels used to replace sandpaper and abrasive finishing. Think about that edge and how much you might need to pay for it if you need what it does.
We don't have the strongest economy in the world. It's like Japan's 'new prosperity' which turned out to be a big hype bubble. We're no different, and we're headed for a fall if we continue to carry on like this. The economy has been devouring the middle class for _decades_... stratifying it into a small number of 'rich' middle class and a lot more 'poor' middle class. This is not a stable position- in order to remain a strong consumption-oriented economy there has to be a strong middle class with disposable income.
Yes, I'm anti-corporate.
If you want to call me another name probably Socialist comes closest- but you'll be misunderstanding some of what I believe, probably, and thinking I'm focused entirely on The Poor. 'The Poor' is of course a worthy concern, but faced with the mockery of this 'free market' economy, I would have to say the middle class deserve better help. If the middle class were well supported and secure (as in the postwar '50s) then there would be the foundation for a 'free market' economic engine that wasn't all smoke and mirrors. What we have now is a magic trick- it's not sustainable until the middle class can get fat and lazy again. Having the middle class madly speculating on stocks is NOT a replacement. It is a setup for another Great Depression- and where will your strongest economy be then? Read some history, look at the _signs_.
They don't support us at all- we have to support ourselves, just as if we were RIAA acts. mp3.com would rather advertise that they have a track by the Rolling Stones or a press conference (I am not making this up) by the Eagles, than us, so we need all the help we can get (that's why I posted a lot of fellow mp3.com acts to another thread).
They do tip us tho- we get a fixed amount divvied up among us for downloads, and we get 50% of CD sales. That alone is way better than anything any RIAA label has ever offered... so I have to encourage mp3.com, just don't think they will support their own bands as in promote or fund, because they totally won't:) they aren't loan sharks like the majors- break-even point is 'the moment you sign up' and you have to bring people there yourself. Once you do, you and mp3.com peacefully divvy up the returns if any:) in a way, this is a much humbler and more sensible way of working in the music business.
I can answer this for myself, anyway (btw, I just revamped my mp3.com page above a _lot_ to help people figure out what's there:) )
I create different sorts of music because there are sounds I want to hear that I'm not hearing from anybody else. This can be as direct as having a little analog synthesizer with a resonant filter that I hacked so it can feed back and overload, and wanting to hear an album based on that sound ('Cirrus'), or wanting to hear synthesisers playing in rhythms you normally don't get to hear ('Dragons') or what a dog would sound like as music ('anima').
I could try to find somebody to sell me music like this, and in fact often I have (for instance, I have a big King Crimson record collection bought largely because of my fascination with the unusual time signatures Krimso often uses). But now I do have the capacity, often, to produce the sort of music I'd want to hear- myself. I've found that when I do that, some people simply don't like the result, but then some other people like it a whole lot- or fixate on some small element of what I do, and like that a whole lot.
I feel I'm better off sharing my music for free, and allowing people to show enthusiasm in a direct fashion by downloading more, or by picking up a $5.99 CD, because I am entirely unwilling to 'summarise' my musical interests into one clearly labelled category so people can know what they're buying. You _don't_ know what I'm going to release next. I might do a new age piano album (got new tech- Kurzweil Micropiano and Lexicon Reverb) or a deep reverby 'ambient' album or an album of very well-tuned drum 'n bass. If I need to be able to do that, people need to be able to audition what I'm doing for free so they can _be_ warned how different all the CDs are, and go listen to _everything_ in case they might really connect with some of it.
And of course they can, mp3.com/chrisj is for just that purpose. I just redesigned it to explain better what each of the albums are like, it's no longer necessary to sit there lo-fiing or downloading track after track just to get a sense of what the music is like- or to try just 4 tracks and mistakenly think the whole catalog is like that;) And all of it is still free- my expectation is that _some_ people will want CDs too, and those that don't are at least giving it a listen. I swear, there is a 'business model' in that- it just doesn't include _guilt_ of giving out 'shareware' music. Imagine it like this- my mp3.com page is the ultimate radio, one I'm very proud of. By using it I can convey broadcast music anywhere in the world at any time of the day or night- anytime someone listens to one of the mp3s, that magic super radio is going 'bzzzzt' and broadcasting it out to be listened to, at no cost to me- in fact, I get a little bit of money for the initial download! It's not much- the total over all the months I've been doing it is about $300, but that's nearly enough to get a Yamaha DX7, and some music that I do would be much better if I got to program a whole Yamaha DX7- it's a six operator FM synth and the one I've got is only a two output 4 operator FM synth. So it does help me make better music, pretty directly...
Everybody knows by now that I have music (and CDs, hint hint- at only $5.99 too;) ) on mp3.com. I'd like to take maybe a half hour or so and put together a list of as many other cool mp3.com acts as I can think of. They deserve your attention too- and there are a lot of them- and I can only barely scratch the surface no matter how hard I try, because I have usually been busy _making_ music instead of listening to it.
S.O.U.- minimal drum 'n' bass from Sense, who is a passionate defender of real dnb (been talking to this cat by email, which is why he's the first one I think of)
Rally! cool Britpop trio from Glasgow who just rock like crazy- I particularly liked 'Shoot You Down'. Alec from Rally says that on the original master tapes you can hear the drummer smash his hand on the ride cymbal and yell 'fuck!':) The whole track rages on the brink of punkish anarchy and ultraviolence, I loved it:)
Corruptdata- weird techno from Vegas. Geek tie-in: these guys are fanatics over 'Pulse' soundcards! When I first heard them they had only a few tunes on the page, some of 'em not for download, but the cold techie feel of their stuff appealed to me- sort of 'Mr Data on slightly too much CPU supply voltage' music:) I am proud to say that I'm the guy who talked them into putting more stuff up for download (at mp3.com, that earns you more listens- more $) and damn, look at 'em now:) you can get _hours_ of corruptdata off that page for free, and help them out too by doing it.
Bassic. This guy's perhaps the #1 big mp3.com success story- that 50 grand on his page is from _listens_ alone, doesn't count CD sales. A lot of people want to be like him and a lot of people get upset at the amount of money he's earned off his music (any salaried day job would earn more tho) but the fact is he earned it fairly- his stuff is like electronic easy listening. He likes Mike Oldfield and you can hear some of that translated to synths- there's a relaxed, spacious quality about a lot of his music that makes it great to just unwind you. It's original enough to not be real derivative, and familiar enough to not be gratitiously original like, er, a lot of my stuff;) (see 'Bone Dragon' or 'Water Dragon' for examples!). Bassic's music is very Zen and sits effortlessly in a peaceful zone of making enjoyable sounds. To top it off, Martin Lindhe ('Bassic') himself is genuinely a really nice guy. Always worth a listen:) Regular Size Monster: And now for something _completely_ different... if you ever wanted to hear genuinely innovative rap look no farther than here. Gentle Jones is capable of diving into polysyllabic polyrhythmic utterances that charm and surprise, all with a signature effortless light delivery that's perfectly timed- over a wide variety of backing music. I particularly liked 'Gentle' and 'Pinky The Kid', but there's much more- and it does fit well with the traditional rap approach, isn't just a tangent from it. Gentle is well respected among mp3.com rappers for his brilliance and the skill of his delivery, and he's tried hard to get people who would normally refuse to listen to any rap to check his stuff out- often with very positive results. He's very worth hearing.
Preacher- OK, Rolling Stone called this 'guilty pleasures':) What that means is that this guy got himself a guitar, turned it up to about 12, and ever since then he's just been loving it:) as another competitive lil' guitar player I think I can cut this guy if we got in a guitar duel (I offer my 'Alleycat' or 'Horse' or especially 'Coyote' as arguments in this) but I dunno if I could enjoy wailing on the guitar half as much as Preacher. He's not always on time, bends not always in tune, but by God you do _feel_ the sheer guitarization of it all- unlike a lot of guitar players this guy is more than happy to go straight over the top without even thinking about it, all in a blues-rock classic style, but grungier and hairier and stinkier:) To top it off he gets a great fluid tone that rips and snorts. I realise some slashdotters will think this is garbage, but I don't care- Preacher's cool:)
Kaden. Can we say 'completely different' again? This guy, working at the moment in dark ambient, is relentlessly intellectual, rigorous, deadly competent, ruthlessly critical of both others and himself without fear or favor. Very professional work- he's been working in the music business for many, many years- this is adult music. mp3.com is not just a bunch of kids...
Roger McGuinn: Yes, this is the leader of the Byrds! He's not on mp3.com as a cynical ploy- he's playing the folk songs he loves, and he spoke before Congress about how the RIAA-controlled music business didn't make him enough money to feed his family (guess you have to be _bigger_ than The Byrds and write songs that last _longer_ than 'Eight Miles High' and do covers more successful than 'Mr. Tamborine Man' o_O )- so he went to mp3.com and was delighted with how the contract was actually (gasp!) _fair_. Who could imagine? So, here's one guy who made music you listened to growing up- who is _not_ a rich fat bastard siding with the RIAA. You can listen to his folk songs and help him feed his family, which is more than the RIAA ever did for him- and help further convince him how much better the new way of doing things is. He's definitely on our side...
Chris J/The Room Full Of Windows: um, modesty prevents...;) well, this is the dude who just gave a lot of props to other mp3.com artists above:)
To be rigorously accurate, I as an indie musician do have access to media and the ability to be heard.
What I object to is the bit about 'no substantial legitimate use'. Now, I asked for my stuff to be put on Napster by anyone who used it, but I know that I and other indie guys don't add up to 'substantial' use. However, I don't think 'substantial' is the point here! The point is that the judge, in caving to a large and rich faction, has taken action that _injures_ my access to media and cuts off my options. I have a problem with that. I might grudgingly tolerate it from private companies, for instance if Napster went "Hey, let's ONLY do RIAA acts just to piss them off!", but I have a real problem with my access to distribution channels being choked of by the judicial system of MY government just to benefit MY competition (who do not need help! sheesh! They have a freaking stranglehold)
I don't think I need to argue that I represent a zillion indie musicians to illustrate that there's a problem there. It's not that I am simply not being represented- I am being _injured_ specifically to prop up my deeply entrenched competition.
Frankly, I think they _want_ to stamp out all alternative forms of distribution that could be accessible to indies. You will never see them saying this, and in fact it would go against antitrust law _and_ popular opinion, but I do honestly think that a good big part of their motivation is to stamp out alternative forms of distribution that they do not act as gatekeeper for.
I've been playing music for more than twenty years, bought all my recording equipment one painful bit at a time (sometimes I have to choose strings over food, dear), spent uncountable hours learning everything from soldering to dual-integrator EQ networks so I could reconstruct that which I wasn't able to afford for gear, and I choose to give my music away, selling only to enthusiastic fans who want to help me get more gear, strings and food;) which is also my best shot at the most expensive musician cost of all- attention. I rely upon new media such as Napster to provide distribution at no cost to me. I've asked publically for my tunes to be put on Napster by anyone who can spare the time to download them and put 'em up for sharing. I remember having to physically transport cassette tapes around in order for anyone to hear my music, not so many years ago. Now I don't have to pay anything to get my music into someone's hands, thanks to Napster and other services like it, and thanks to mp3. You talk like I ought to be selling individual CDs to every single listener 'to make profit' on my music- like I should want no more mp3, that I should want only purchasable, accountable physical media.
I should have to buy _trucks_ for my distribution because people like you want to prop up the RIAA?
Everybody goes on about the poor music listeners, but what about me? Let me go over this so we're all on the same page, OK? Let's look at what's _really_ happening.
I am a musician (see URL link above- please visit it if you haven't already?). A NON-RIAA musician. The RIAA labels are my competition, and crushing, stifling competition they are too, and I have to work really hard to get production values comparable to the majors (or better).
I had songs on Napster BY REQUEST. I publically asked people to put my songs off mp3.com in their Napster directories, if they could, if they didn't mind taking the trouble to do so. I own my songs AND the mechanical recordings of 'em and I have an absolute right to permit such distribution. It's _my_ say-so, not the RIAAs, not mp3.com's.
Napster is being shut down anyhow- the RIAA lawyers successfully convinced the judge that _I_ don't exist, just like the RIAA continually tries to convince the listening public that I don't exist, that nobody like me exists.
So- the judge is taking away a _major_ distribution channel from me, at the request of... my competition.
Who thought _this_ one up? Wait, don't tell me, it might just possibly be the the same trade organisation that taxes the blank tapes I record MY MUSIC on, said taxes again going to my competition. Yes, the same people who arranged that I have to pay money to help the Backstreet Boys out-PR me have now arranged to sabotage a _key_ internet distribution mechanism that could work in my favor- and of course are also suing the 'label' (mp3.com) that I signed with (ever hear Roger McGuinn's take on the mp3.com contract? This is the leader of The Byrds. He loves the mp3.com contract- it's actually _fair_. Quick, kill it before more people realise how brutal standard major label contracts are! Competition must die!)
I don't remember agreeing to steadily pay off my biggest, most implacable competition to bury me. Please, Judge Ma'am, stop the music industry, I'd like to get off? Seems that owning my own music, owning my own equipment, recording only my own songs, attempting no samples and expecting no industry PR is not enough for me to be allowed things like non-RIAA distribution channels and the ability to buy tapes at the store to put MY MUSIC on and not pay taxes to my biggest competitors. So please, Judge Ma'am, if you hear of a free market out there somewhere won't you let me know? Apparently me buying all my own gear and recording all my own stuff and trying to put it out there through services like Napster is not permissible. Tell me, is this for my own good? Should I learn to behave?:P
(this is turning into a song- now if only my lungs will hold out to put out a quick single- fighting off chest-cold from hell)
Survival in the entertainment industry is and has always been about ATTENTION. Somebody with gigs and gigs of mp3s is not abusing the system, they basically don't count. They are sitting on a lot of music that they're essentially ignoring- they are doing the equivalent of playing about 6 radios at once all tuned to different stations. It's drowning in choice, being so swamped by the amount of mp3s they have that few wind up worthy of particular attention. There is effectively no difference between three mp3s you don't listen to and three million mp3s you don't listen to- and the psychology of this type of uber-hoarder is to have the three million mp3s and sit around with the speakers off. It's about collecting, not listening- so it entirely fails to connect to the industry using the only relevant currency, the currency of attention.
Matt, you're a bit out of date- comparing max signal with what the theoretical minimum noise should be is not a useful measurement:) the trouble is, most forms of digital audio (including Red Book CD audio) are _linear_ encodings. Sony has some kind of DVD-audio scheme going where it encodes phase change of the waveform's angle- they are alone in this, it's linear encoding all the way for pretty much any form of digital audio you care to name in use today.
This is simply not finely grained enough for professional use. Do some calculations- first, you know what 8 bit audio sounds like? Familiarize yourself with how bad that sounds and how grungy it is. In 16 bit linear encoding, 8 bit sound is present at a volume level of 0.39 percent of the total volume of the recording (less than a hundredth of full volume). This does not sound significant, but check that out in _db_- volume is _logarithmic_. In decibels, that 'grunge zone' with eight bit resolution is not 96 db down, not 80, but around _50_ db down. 50 db and 96 db are pretty damn different, aren't they? 50 db is within the range of any junky thing with speakers on it.
When you say that 16 bit is 96 db and 96 db down is 'the quietest sounds you can hear' you are conveniently overlooking the fact that those 'sounds' 96 db down are _one_ _bit_. One bit is not 'sound'. One bit is old PC speakers or music played over the one-bit tone generator on old Apple IIs. I would argue that 8 bits is not sound either, but cheap noise to send over the web or something- and if you listened to 8 bit audio even at 44.1K you'd likely agree. Yet that 8 bit zone is in _all_ 16 bit recordings, a mere 50 db down. Anything around 50 db down is being represented by merely 8 bits... hell, 12 bits is still noticably compromised and that is a mere 20 db down. This sort of thing is not acceptable for professional work- hence the amazing and deeply needed proliferation of 20 and 24 bit devices, and of internal busses of DSPs running at 24 or 32 or even 48 bits or more, for doing calculations without losing everything to rapidly accumulating bit error.
20 bits, 24 bits are not perfect, but they are a hell of a lot better. A 20 bit unit like my ADAT is running around 12 bits where a CD would be down to 8- which is enough better (it's 50 db down after all) to leave little room to gripe. 20 db down, the 20 bit unit is at 16 bits. If you have a fully 24 bit unit, it's going to have 16 bits available a whole 50 db down, and get very close in practice to what you mistakenly believe for 16 bit digital audio- that you'll get infinitesimally faint sounds recorded and sounding convincing and believable. There's no way you're going to do that with 50 db down having all the resolution of a Sun.au file, but it doesn't take all that many more bits to fix matters.
I should thank you for inspiring me to hunt down these various formulas and tables and to work this out mathematically- I didn't realise it was quite as bad as it is!:) It's a piss-poor engineer who can't get 50 db of dynamic range out of his recordings if he tries:)
When you are looking at your specs, use these numbers for a reference of what the maximum signal quality is for various bit depths (given linear encoding these are the SAME NUMBERS as Matt gives- but ouch, when you get a sense of what it actually means in practice!)
Who of course would be so much shapely dead meat when the revolution came;P survival traits in wartime are not linked to ability to make pouty faces, and ability to socialise with the in crowd is not linked to ability to aim a gun accurately (well, at least not for most 'in' crowds I've heard of).
Basically the compensatory mechanism people aren't seeing here is that this would be quite a lot of effort and money directed towards unuseful ends, and it would be strictly upper class. It's a setup for class warfare- and wiry manicdepressive ADD povertystricken geeks would make better guerillas, soldiers and terrorists than big studly Adonises with lots of muscle density who have never caught a cold. Muscle bulk DOES NOT matter when you are using modern weaponry. Arnold S's impressive bulk in violent films is just for looks... Lara Croft tits would be even less useful under war conditions.
So, although this issue is certainly a concern and in some ways an inevitability, it is a far cry from producing a ruling class. It is much more likely to produce a fragile and hated upper class that polarises class consciousness and further polarises the middle class into upper and lower, with no-man's land between (tastefully decorated in Abercrombie and Fitch logos- a trademark which once was known for upper class sporting goods, as much as a century ago, if I'm not mistaken)
48K is just tolerable, but it can only output 16 bit digital audio? That's poor- for a bit of perspective my UberGeekyProjectStudio (see above URL for examples of its work) will do 8 output channels, 48K, at _20_ bits. (It is a second-generation ADAT studio) If you've worked with high resolution analog, 20 bits is just becoming seriously acceptable- 16 bits is a poor joke, there just isn't the subtlety for professional mastering work.
It would at least be helpful if someone could get info on the thing's internal bus bit-depth: if _that_ is 16 bit too, we're talking 'The Horror! The Horror!' time. Even a sound-tracker I've occasionally worked with (PlayerPro) has gone to running internal DSP busses at 32 bits and dithering to 16 for output- outputting 20 or 24 bit would be better still for professional work. The bar's being raised pretty damn rapidly when a ill-funded audiogeek like me can work in 20 bit analog mixing, all ready to feed DVD-audio at full resolution. If this GScube is not capable of doing better than 16 bit output that's a major problem. Can't it at least do 8 outputs at 24 bit by storing the least significant bits on dedicated tracks? Hell, my _ADAT_ can do that (or could if I had two of 'em:) )
Oh, by all means. Nobody seems to be taking into consideration how efficient water is for wave transmission. Ever heard of the Yangtze River Dolphin? It's an endangered species (not sure of its current status) in a very busy river. Douglas Adams wrote a book about endangered creatures called 'Last Chance To See', one of which was the Yangtze River Dolphin. One problem of the dolphin's was the amount of background noise in the river from just plain old outboard motors- lots of them- interfering with the dolphin's echolocation, its sonar. Douglas Adams tried to check out what noises were in the river, and put a hydrophone into the water (a waterproof mike), expecting to hear something like New York City rush hour, only with outboard motors...
Water is a very efficient transmitter of soundwaves. Adams heard no outboard motors, no dolphins- nothing but a continuous, ceaseless, raging white noise so intense no information could be heard from it at all. All those outboard motors echoed and echoed until the river was one unbearable shriek of sound...
Now. How much louder than a cheap outboard motor is a rocketpowered submarine creating a cavitation bubble so great that a _ship_ fits inside it?
This might work as a military weapon where you don't give much of a damn what else you hit, but use as sea transportation will, surprisingly quickly, leave _no_ form of sonar available for anybody. Not whales, not fish, not oil tankers. I'm not sure how many of these subs it would take but you have to understand how incredibly 'live' water is- sound does not propagate like it does in air. The ambient noise level will simply rise and rise until you can't use sonar for anything anymore- by which time of course, huge amounts of the sea's ecosystem will be hosed, which could also be considered a Bad Thing. That _is_ where the earth gets most of its oxygen y'know;P
Re:My $0.02 from my talks with pals who work at MS
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The Myth Of The Borg
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· Score: 2
Interesting that you should mention Madison... who made a very tight case that there's no such thing as free people once you get a big enough crowd of them together. Free people will happily stomp all over anyone who gets in their path, and most sensible people understand this- if not from observation and experience, then from a certain level of respectable cynicism.
For this reason, any childish pleas along the lines of 'We are just a group of free people, why should the big nasty government threaten us when all we want is to do what we want?' should not merit much respect. It's ludicrous to expect that a large faction will not stomp all over smaller ones, and nothing in history suggests the existence of overwhelming factions that are helpful or useful.
A few simple questions- exactly why would Microsoft employees _not_ want to own and entirely control computing, the net, online services: fill in the blank. What in the self interest of these people would discourage this? Given that a lot of people enjoy Linux, exactly why would such people _not_ want to destroy Linux and sabotage its general usefulness by any means necessary? People keep going on about 'oh, they are nice guys for the most part' but what do you get when you get down to the self interest? In a word, power- and even if these guys did NOT believe that for them to win everyone else has to lose, the reality is still closer to a zero-sum game than you think, so the end result is that any choice, any power, even _self_ empowerment, is power that's not in the hands of Microsoft and the people who work there. And every single factor that gives more power to MS is part of establishing that overall control.
It's ridiculous to go looking for Evil Mad Scientists cackling and going 'I want to take over the world and grind it beneath my boot!'. Instead, look for the people going 'But why would you want to use anything else?', because those are the ones who will smile as they cut off your options and your right to your own opinion- and believe that they are doing you a favor, not an injury.
And the world is full of those people- _everyone_ is like that when you look hard enough. The trick is, as long as all these kindly opponents continue to oppose each other and struggle in equilibrium, the world gets to move on with some degree of fluidity. The instant anyone (Linus included) begins to have enough clout to decree "YOU WILL use this because why would you want to use anything else?" (or believe this, or behave thus), you start getting feedback, and people with varying notions start getting crushed.
The Microsoft people do not _have_ to be out to do harm. They are far more disturbing- they are out to do good- as they see it. Key words being 'as they see it': you don't get an opinion. How can this not be a problem when they have power enough to continually do damage to any alternate way of seeing things?
In the interests of full disclosure: I use MacOS pretty much all the time, mostly for Internet use. Yet, I think there are some major flaws with _misinterpreting_ what works in the MacOS UI, and almost everyone working on interface design has seized on the wrong issues- 'metaphors' or interaction like 'Do you really want to delete that file forever?' and all that stuff.
The fact is, there are some very important principles in MacOS that would apply directly to the 'Anti-Mac' interface- but, typically, do not. The single most important principle is structure.
On MacOS, the menu nearest to the 'Apple Menu' (which is always there) is the 'File' menu. It contains 'quit' and other commands including 'open' and 'close' and 'new' if present. Why? No reason- there's no reason why quitting should be considered a file action. But the structure is the reason- not structure in 'this is how we force developers to code a certain way' but structure in that the user can quickly form a mental model in which there is always this menu that says File, and Quit is in it. It's not important that the menu be called file, or that it be in a particular place- or even that quitting must be a menu action! The important thing is that the user jumps to a conclusion which continues to be valid across the entire interface.
The same is possible for text mode interaction- it just takes different forms.
I wrote a program for my own use to remind myself of things. It's not very elaborate (now that I have a small second monitor I might try making it more elaborate) but one way it works is very important in the Anti-Mac style of interface. It runs off a list of events that's kept, and edited, just as a plain text file (something that could be edited by other programs too), and you enter a date or day and event and priority.
The priority ended up being almost meaningless as a feature because there aren't loads and loads of events in the file- but it is important in another way because it is a 'punctuation mark' for the event data format, and that's where the 'user concept' comes in. Basically, the idea was to define a format which could be parsed quite forgivingly by the computer, but which did not get into full-on natural language parsing- instead, you are given one very simple rule. "Type date, then priority in parentheses, then the event text."
That's it. Friday(2) Visit Fred. Or Thu(e)Dance Naked. Or 11/3(1)Third Of December Day. Or just "Go Fishing" (which will always display, until removed. There is an expectation for US date formats, but it's opensource;) ) The point is that you can get very weird with the data (for instance with the weekdays, it uses a string comparison routine that is case insensitive) but there is an element of structure to focus and direct you- one that is very, very simple to remember. Date(priority)Entry, and the parsing keys off the parentheses.
The reason this matters at all is because it's so easy with natural language parsing to get into a game of 'Do What I Mean', to get so seduced by the challenge of parsing weird inputs that you basically go, "Okay! The user's inputs have NO FORM whatsoever- complete freedom! That is the ideal interface!" That's a crock- the thing you want to do is present interface elements that must be learned, but the elements (textual, conceptual, graphical) are SO SIMPLE that they're nothing to learn. "Quit and file stuff are in File menu" is a very small piece of information when you think about how widely useful it's been made (do _you_ have a File menu in front of you right now?). "Date(priority)Event" is partly textual but it is just as easy to grasp and use- it's syntactically obvious, with the key concept being Parentheses- if you don't have the ( then it's a degenerate case like a quickie-note to be always presented.
There are similar issues to HTML- the bracketed tags like B and I (yes, I know those are stylistic not logical tags) are easy to understand- yet I have so often messed up in Slashdot posts by failing to close a bold tag properly or something- just repeating the 'b' with no / to close the tag. This is possibly unavoidable because of the complexity of HTML, but it's an interface screwup because when typing a message the user does not use the tags the same way as the computer does. To the computer it is an opening and closing tag (entirely distinct entities). To the user the tags are used more like toggles: you hit (b) to turn on bold, and then hit it again to turn it off, only you have to remember to make it (/b). In the flow of writing it's easy to fall back on the opening form of the tag and use it as a toggle- which of course does not work. The funny thing is, it's as if the special closing form is used to make sure that you remember to keep track of the 'stack' of tags more easily- instead of having to count instances of a tag (which the computer can easily do), but if you do forget to keep track the result is just the same as if you treated the tags as toggles and failed to close them with the special closing tags. The result is a special form of the tag to be kept track of by the user, so that the user must be aware of not only 'entering/leaving styled area' but which way you're going- and if you don't correctly specify, the HTML screws up. Treating simple 'off/on' tags as toggles (granted, much HTML can't be reduced in this way) makes the mental model of the style setting much simpler- "hit (b) tag to switch boldface on and off", and suddenly you don't have to keep track of phase at all, only the opening and closing locations of what you want to stylize.
There is no reason this capacity to define simple behavioral models can't be used to improve text-based interfaces, or even Unix shell. Of course, it's mostly not;P you have certain things. Typing a letter causes it to appear on the screen! Hitting return executes commands (woops, unless you're in a subshell, then it's what, ctrl-D?) Arguments for programs take the form -a -r -g -s, unless it's -args. And so on- the problem is NOT that it's a text based interface, or that it requires learning, the problem is simply that so little of the learning is globally applicable- but that can change. Not with Unix shell, as it would be throwing away a lot of backward compatibility- but in any new text or hybrid interface that comes onto the scene.
I'm picturing a sort of 'agent', but one that you talk to in clearly defined forms and not natural language. It'd be there ready for input or puttering along keeping an eye on things and you'd type Fiday(2)Get ready for job interview! and hit return, and because of the (2) it would know you meant to make an entry in the day-planner, and would figure out from context that 'Fiday' (a real typo that I actually typed just then, fixed, then put back for purposes of the argument) was Friday. You'd be working on something and would suddenly realise that you hadn't coded anything game-related in months and would type Games++ and hit return and it would understand from context that you were establishing a priority level in a simple 'geek code' sort of way- and it might also have the job of sorting your mail and would keep an eye out for 'Games' and sort it up higher based on this new priority level (which you may have just created by typing that). Or you'd read Joakim Ziegler's article and in a fit of admiration type Joakim Ziegler++++++, an 'item' that might never come up in email, but if it did you'd not only be given a priority boost, but would also be reminded that there was something about Joakim Ziegler worth remembering and paying attention to. And the ability to, dare I say it, 'intuitively' plug this things into the computer is the ability to not rely entirely on your own head for all that.
But the important thing is not to devise the most sophisticated arrangement for such things, not to devise the most fiendishly clever way to get data out of sloppy natural language- the important thing is to come up with these simple strokes that can become internalised rules. I happen to think Fri(2)Friday Meeting is a very sensible 'form' for a reminder, because for some reason having a 'priority' there in parens makes sense for me and serves as a suitable 'punctuation mark'. By the same token, you can't go wrong with strings of plusses and minuses to indicate the changing of priority levels for a keyword or key phrase. Possibly the exclamation point and question mark can be used similarly- for instance, the 'agent' might react to OpenGL?(return) by a quick search of other entries in its databanks for things that match this. It becomes even handier if you say Rob Malda? and the agent gives you references including his email address and phone number because you'd entered them into your address book:) You might even end up with web search results if you set it up that way. The exclamation point might serve as an indicator of a command- Slashdot! would launch your web browser and point it at slashdot, email! might be set up to return the 20 highest-priority emails you currently have. The 20 would be a setting kept in some other place- the interface of it would not be about going email-20-all-mail-agents! (unless you really wanted to be constantly specifying all that), it would be about going email! and also being able to go set up email! and have the control panels right there. And of course the basic assumption here is that the exclamation point distinguishes running programs from other actions- it seems fairly obvious, and that is a _good_ thing.
*g* time for me to start working on this I guess;) it's sounding neat enough that I'm getting pretty interested in exploring it;)
I can't get over the number of people who can't tell the difference between a Rage128 and a Rage Pro. One is a bit better than a Voodoo2 (and 32 bit), the other... is not;)
That's as may be, and it's understood the Rage128 is not a 'super accelerator' chip like a Ge or maybe a Radeon. But there are some important issues including one that _nobody_ seems to be picking up on:
If you were going to get a Radeon and go for total peak performance, you would get a full size dual G4, not an 8" cube. Why would you _get_ The Cube if you wanted performance over all else? It's another consumer/prosumer form factor, not a horsepower monster design. Get the full size dual G4- lots of extra space for goodies in that, plenty of fans and cooling etc.
Nobody ever mentions this. Do GeForces have quickdraw and Quicktime acceleration? Rage128s do. I picked up one recently, after the prices came well down, and the QT acceleration is real and very effective. Quickdraw acceleration is part of what makes those Photoshop scores perform so well- the Mac screen redraw gets accelerated by the 128 card while the PC relies on the poor 'ol CPU for everything. If you are working with prepress graphics at huge resolutions this becomes a constant, in-your-face issue, and the Rage128 addresses it. I think very few PC cards accelerate Color Quickdraw;)
Add that up plus the relatively humble cooling requirements of a Rage128 and it doesn't suck. Its _game_ performance sucks compared with the latest and greatest, but here's a secret from a mac geek who dabbles in programming- all Mac cards _but_ ATI suck for OpenGL! You just cannot get OpenGL to work properly on a Mac 3dfx card even though they can get better framerate- and Glide is kind of fading away. The Voodoo3 uses some very ugly hacks to come up with a render-in-a-window mode: not a problem with the 'suckier' ATI. I run X-Plane (killer flightsim- now only $79!) and changing from voodoo2 to ATI128 was huge- not only did all of Austin Meyer's OpenGL tricks (from 'city lights' overlays to the airplanes' landing light) suddenly work perfectly and look great, but the sim immediately got better framerate IN 32 BIT than it ever got from the Voodoo in 16. This is not entirely because of the Voodoo- it's because X-Plane uses OpenGL and the ATI supports it directly, the Voodoo2 (which has a comparable max framerate with the 128) had to go through Mesa...
The trouble is not that Microsoft is trying to do this, but that anybody is trying to do it at all.
Interface is a constant problem with computer software, and there are many approaches- the Linux "Do whatever, the user is a geek and can learn or reprogram anything", the Mac "Thou Shalt Code It THIS Way To Fit With The HIG", the Windows "If the user has a problem we'll put in a wizard to do it for them".
People seem to be analyzing this idea from Linux standards- the assumption being that you're going to spend hours reprogramming it to get it to work the way you want. That may not be an option...
The problem is this- defining interface systems in such a way that they can be learned by a user. Everything is learned- even the simplest things are learned (ever see someone use a mouse for the first time and not be able to immediately correlate sliding movement with pointer movement?).
The Mac approach (somewhat weakened with age but still alive and kicking) was to define everything beforehand and force UI to go a certain predictable way. All Edit menus will have cut copy paste IN THAT ORDER, followed by Clear if present. If Select All is present it is under Clear. File menu contains new, open, close, print, and quit. Print has an ellipsis (...) after it because ALL THINGS that pause for further input have ellipsis after them. They also ALWAYS allow the user to cancel out of the operation, meaning 'you can always select a thing with an ellipsis, even if you don't know what it is, because you get to cancel it if you didn't mean to do that'. And so on, for an inch-thick book... In this paradigm, all the energy is spent organising the UI passively. The user is the prime mover and everything sits there until you use it.
The Linux approach is similar- except that the user is expected to do their own organizing! All systems, passive or active, are for being customised by the user. The ones who get the most enthusiastic about Linux (or any Unix) tend to be the most adept at defining interfaces for themselves and improvising new functionality that doesn't necessarily exist in consumer OSes. The elaborate shell script is the highest peak of this art (barring the writing of entire programs) because it is encapsulating whole known behaviors into the computer's interface, behaviors that are personal to that particular user. Defining/configuring X is very similar.
When you get into Windows, some of the rules change. There's always been a profoundly influential desire to out-convenience all other OSes by secondguessing the user and doing stuff for them, like an automatic door that opens when you walk towards it (hey, it works for supermarkets). This desire is also expressed in the use of, and concept for, Wizards: the problem is not seen as making the UI comprehensible for specific tasks (which might assume user learning), the problem is seen as DOING the tasks for the user and requiring no learning at all.
Here is the fatal flaw: systems of this nature are complex! The tasks being done are likely to be complicated (prioritizing email and workflow is VERY complicated). While being 'wizard walked' through a task is timeconsuming but mindless (with every step explained as you get to it), having your life actively managed by such a software process BEFORE you get to it is another story. It cannot fall back on being mindless- it must try to be clever, but the more clever it is, the less predictable it is likely to be.
That is the fatal flaw in a nutshell: there will always be a mental model of the process being done. Failing to have a mental model is basically resigning yourself to cluelessness about what is going to happen- you'd need to at least think "It is sending personal email to my home and work email to work" or _something_. As these systems get more complicated and intrusive, the model becomes more complicated, and the more 'clever' it becomes, the less predictable it will be- the goal is 'do what I mean' but the result cannot be other than 'why the hell did it do that?' because it is an externalisation of a process that is also, inevitably, running inside the user's head. There will always be that parallel evaluation of significance and priorities- and the computer does not have the mind's ability to associate, does not have X many years of back data to associate with. The computer is bound to lose because it's not playing chess- it's trying to run parallel with a _particular_ very associative and dynamic human brain, that of its owner. It can't possibly win. Other HUMANS don't always win at this game (long-married couples still misinterpret each other fairly often and renegotiate things as a result). No computer can do it- unless its 'owner' is simply another computer- because it is not a purely logical process, and the computer can't match human bandwidth.
A quick example from a book by Grant Fjermedal: "What's the population of Kampala?" Most people will respond immediately, "I don't know". How do you know so quickly that you don't have that information in your head? It's much the same as remembering "Aunt Millie's cousin Fred lost both knees in the War, causing him to be unable to walk and needing to travel in a special van with lifts. Aunt Millie does all the shopping for her cousins. Aunt Millie has no clue about any sort of technology." Now, take that background, and when you read in Uncle Bob's email, "Millie is van-shopping and is all in a frazzle", the human reaction would be to quickly associate all these things and perhaps inquire if it was Fred's van that died, and if Millie can use some techie help with the special-van issues. But how are you going to load all the information of a lifetime into a computer and expect it to make priority calls like this- and who is going to KEEP loading the data in as life goes on? It's flat impossible, unreasonable.
This is why the only reasonable approach to future interface is finding ways to make it predictable and understandable by the intended user- which of course is how Apple survived the '90s when by all rights it should have been crushed. The Mac interface is only one of many possible interfaces but it was rigorously defined in a consistent and predictable way. Almost any interface will do if you define it consistently enough and STICK to it. In something like Linux, what ends up happening is you either end up defining your personal idea of an interface and sticking with it happily, or you give up.
In something like Windows, people learn (sometimes with the aid of community college courses!) the rules of an ill-defined interface much of which is not intended to be clearly understood by the user- when things are supposed to 'do themselves' there isn't the same motivation to make the process clear and visible. This attempt by Microsoft to go still further in that direction is DOOMED, because it will either end up so trivial as to seem a total joke, or it will proliferate the 'problem space' of possible computer actions so vastly that the resulting behavior is entirely unpredictable, yet still grossly inadequate for matching its user's priority 'rules'. That is worst of both worlds- and if this ever ships, expect a certain amount of excusemaking by its users along the lines of 'my computer screwed up' to explain the user's worse-than-average ability to interact with others, and their failures to deal with important things. And there's only so much of that you can get away with.
Nobody should attempt to copy this 'feature' for Linux. Instead, figure out ways of making the 'map' for computer systems' behavior more clear and predictable, get some consistent rules in there and then let the user use those rules and take their own actions.
If I might ask, what exactly in this evaluation do you find factually wrong? I have no problem with being criticised for disliking Microsoft- I do dislike Microsoft and consider the notion that I would have to like Microsoft in order to be unbiased, a foolish notion. Given that I don't like Microsoft, exactly what is wrong with the evaluation? In particular, are you claiming that the bit you quoted is not the truth? I admit it is unflattering but MS's overall strategies are hardly a mystery at this point, and I think I summed them up quite accurately.
Slashdot Mirror
Sound like a nightmare (or tech support hell?) You're getting the picture. Even with an AI of human scope that is intimately familiar with your work, you will constantly be hitting inefficient areas- you'll get basically squat done and might end up very frustrated. Even if you don't end up frustrated- your productivity will be in the toilet.
This is a self-correcting development- anyone who gets heavy into using it will be removing themselves from the world's cutting edge. It is like a stagnant backwater, like a mechanism designed to take the non-geeky and hinder their ability to compete in a newly technological world by setting them up to be grossly less effective than the geeks.
For that reason it would be better if it did _not_ become a reality, but most likely Microsoft will figure out some way of doing it as it's very in line with their preferred approach. The ideal counter to this would be to continue to develop more efficient systems that require some user learning, so that the MS natural language users can occasionally be challenged by the sight of somebody accomplishing tasks many times faster- or faster by several orders of magnitude, which is not unthinkable. The best response to give when asked 'How do you do that?' is 'You learn how...' with more details if desired.
See ROTSOS, or as I like to think of it Return Of The Son Of Spacewar :) The demos I have so far consist of only a couple MPEG videos of essentially infinite consistent and entirely emergent terrain- and there's also a section on names generated the same way :)
What this means is that among the nineteen million stars of the galaxy you'll have several hundred that have a temperate habitable planet (and many that are borderline...), among which is the star Conard in the quadrant of the galaxy controlled by a feline sort of alien race, the planet being Diaceside. On this planet by the largest sea is the port city Corantial, which you can find from space by looking for the three surrounding mountains forming three points of a square with the city as the fourth...
Now. The trick is- all that is emergent. The three mountains would be blind luck- the city might end up named Sounirmas, or Fraeutnte, or Loeespgon, or even Asshot. However, given the proper algorithms to produce EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE from a single block of data read back and forth and up and down, you could go to thousands of stars and visit hundreds of planets and still, when you return, there's those three mountains again, and you are welcomed by the cat ladies of the port city of Corantial- because the mechanism, the algorithm, is totally rigid but _totally_ consistent and repeatable (also bloody fast, but that's another story :) )
I've GPLed everything I have so far but currently am hard at work on other things- but I do mean to pursue this further. The concept is so flexible you could use it for anything- as long as you can cope with the fact that everything has to be emergent. You can have a world-city, or countryside with cities down to the positioning of the trash barrels on the sidewalk- but you _cannot_ place even a single cigarette butt manually and expect it to be persistent, or you'd have to have a database terabytes in size to handle the sheer scope of the game world. If everything is emergent from the one database, you get to have a game world the size of a state, or country, or world, or the size of Ringworld if you wanted- all off a 16M file, all consistent down to the street-signs (but you're going to have street names like Bloangble :) )
The kick in the tail from all this is the security and consistency of multiplayer situations. Done properly (i.e. to extremes) the game world is unhackable barring clever executable tricks. You simply cannot change the bit of data that would say 'deposit of gold under place in the countryside I colonised' without simultanously changing many stars and planets in the universe, altering the very terrain you're standing on (gee, where'd the mountain go? Hell, where'd the _town_ go?) and possibly the name of the planet you're on :) it's a very effective way of keeping lots of data on the client side but making it resistant to tinkering- the data is so general purpose that any modification to it will put you in a parallel universe due to how extensively each byte is used for so many different purposes.
Seeing as my work is GPLed I would be happy to see other people take this idea and use it in their own stuff- the only trouble is, to get the proper benefits you have to build your world entirely this way. If you build the driving game you can spend a lot of time sorting out good algorithms so that if this quartermile is data value 123 and the next is data value 213 you have such and such a transition of roads (over varying-LOD terrain- see my flyover demos), but the one thing you can't do is draw a road freehand, or plunk down a gas station. Instead you make gas stations sub-data-value 107 and look to see if that's giving you an acceptable distribution of gas stations.
If you like exploring that much perhaps you'd like to _make_ a game of this nature :)
(yes, I'm the same guy who's always going on about his mp3.com music :) I was revamping my mp3.com site the other night instead of working on ROTSOS, and today I replaced a microphone cord plug and am making four high-resolution mini patchcords. But I'll get around to it- probably when I get really REALLY sick of wiring patchcords and winding bass pickups :) )
This might be out of line from me, but as an indie musician can I ask that you _not_ give money to the RIAA? They're my competition, and they use that money to cut off my air supply.
They certainly do NOT take care of promotion- most of that is your job, rapidly shifting to 'all' if you're on your second album or don't look like you're going to outsell Britney Spears. They arrange for the studio recordings- but you pay for them out of your advance against royalties- that's your money being spent, and you will have to take what they choose for you for studio and production, too. (Nirvana at the peak of their success was not able to choose its own production- and that's a 'grunge' band, not a 'produced' band). They do deal with distribution- the way the artist gets screwed there is not by them forcing you to pay for it out of your advance, it's by whittling away your already miniscule royalty through traditional fees and charges. Did you know that there is still a percentage knocked off the artist royalty for 'shellac breakage'? Once, a lot of 78s broke being shipped to music stores. Vinyl records didn't break so easy but the record labels liked the flat reduction in artist royalty from that fee, so they kept it. They're still keeping it- now it's to compensate the record company for the many times the shellac breaks on audio CDs. I wish I was making this up- props to Robert Fripp of King Crimson for, in his disputes with EG records, tracking down these details.
Let's take the most extreme example short of patents- let's postulate somebody who goes and takes every one of my songs and claims them for his own, putting up his own page and taking money for them. Now, if he gets to use intellectual property, there's some chance he can stop _me_ from having the songs I wrote- or I could stop him, in theory. If there's no intellectual property I may not be able to stop him from doing this- but where is he going to make _new_ songs? He's not the one who created those things- that puts him at a disadvantage, he rapidly becomes one of a horde of people claiming they did my songs.
As the noise and argument of this spreads, it eventually becomes known to most people that I'm the one who did those songs that are being sold by unrelated people. If someone wants to get an existing song- there will be a lot of places they can go, very few of which compensate me in any way. If someone wants a _new_ song? They're going to have a tough time getting _that_ from dumb copiers- they will need to talk to me. If someone wants to do an interview or write a book or something about the songs? Very likely some 'distributors' will muscle in and want to tell the story their way (see the early history of reggae) but that is still another reason to talk to the original person.
I would happily abandon intellectual property, because my interaction with it is almost entirely defensive. It's not you DLing my song and then giving it to your friends that concerns me- it's Britney Spears (yah right ;) ) DLing it, releasing it, and then enjoining me from using or reproducing it. It's not my inventing a thing and then not getting paid for every little use of it- it's my inventing a thing and then 3M inventing it, patenting it, and forbidding me from ever using it again. My interaction with IP is almost entirely defensive and I am a _creator_ of IP: that seems not right to me.
I've asked that my music (see URL link above) be traded on Napster. Partly this is an effort to get exposure (I'd love to be espousing some of my views on CNN or whatever as a 'representative internet musician', because I have some very strong arguments that I feel should be included in any consensus opinion) but that must be understood in the right context. The first thing people would think of is 'Oh, so it drives more people to mp3.com- while also diminishing the market- huh?' but the bottom line is: if I ended up being big on Napster (which will now never happen), it ESTABLISHES me as a person capable of doing MUSICAL WORK. Stop focusing on the created things (the IP) for a second and consider the act of creation. It's a very individual thing- some people can invent mechanical devices, some people write code, some write songs, some trick synthesisers into making abstract ear candy or write books or paint pictures. The emphasis is always on the created objects, even when they are very abstract (like the 'epigrammatist' I heard about who makes up lots of little phrases like 'Things are always worst when they suck' and _copyrights_ them and sues people for using them- a canonical example of wrong focus in IP. Look at people's ability to create, instead- how much would you pay that guy for a five word remark, versus how much you might pay me for background music to your TV commercial, composed and recorded to your specifications?
Nothing in intellectual property gives me that opportunity- only ability to _perform_ will do it (and, importantly, ability to do professional sound engineering). Remove intellectual property and that opportunity will still be there- may even be enhanced, since 'used music' will become nearly valueless. When all the car advertisements use the greatest Sixties hits for background (hey, they already DO), the value of that music is eroded and washed away- eventually, somebody is going to need NEW music, something that is both arresting and hasn't been heard a million times. It's the same for all other forms of IP- the creators are the edge of the chisel. You can focus on the final product all you want but without that edge you aren't going to get any more of it. Compare the price of wood with the price of a professional wood chisel, or perhaps one of the Japanese super-wide chisels used to replace sandpaper and abrasive finishing. Think about that edge and how much you might need to pay for it if you need what it does.
Yes, I'm anti-corporate.
If you want to call me another name probably Socialist comes closest- but you'll be misunderstanding some of what I believe, probably, and thinking I'm focused entirely on The Poor. 'The Poor' is of course a worthy concern, but faced with the mockery of this 'free market' economy, I would have to say the middle class deserve better help. If the middle class were well supported and secure (as in the postwar '50s) then there would be the foundation for a 'free market' economic engine that wasn't all smoke and mirrors. What we have now is a magic trick- it's not sustainable until the middle class can get fat and lazy again. Having the middle class madly speculating on stocks is NOT a replacement. It is a setup for another Great Depression- and where will your strongest economy be then? Read some history, look at the _signs_.
They do tip us tho- we get a fixed amount divvied up among us for downloads, and we get 50% of CD sales. That alone is way better than anything any RIAA label has ever offered... so I have to encourage mp3.com, just don't think they will support their own bands as in promote or fund, because they totally won't :) they aren't loan sharks like the majors- break-even point is 'the moment you sign up' and you have to bring people there yourself. Once you do, you and mp3.com peacefully divvy up the returns if any :) in a way, this is a much humbler and more sensible way of working in the music business.
I create different sorts of music because there are sounds I want to hear that I'm not hearing from anybody else. This can be as direct as having a little analog synthesizer with a resonant filter that I hacked so it can feed back and overload, and wanting to hear an album based on that sound ('Cirrus'), or wanting to hear synthesisers playing in rhythms you normally don't get to hear ('Dragons') or what a dog would sound like as music ('anima').
I could try to find somebody to sell me music like this, and in fact often I have (for instance, I have a big King Crimson record collection bought largely because of my fascination with the unusual time signatures Krimso often uses). But now I do have the capacity, often, to produce the sort of music I'd want to hear- myself. I've found that when I do that, some people simply don't like the result, but then some other people like it a whole lot- or fixate on some small element of what I do, and like that a whole lot.
I feel I'm better off sharing my music for free, and allowing people to show enthusiasm in a direct fashion by downloading more, or by picking up a $5.99 CD, because I am entirely unwilling to 'summarise' my musical interests into one clearly labelled category so people can know what they're buying. You _don't_ know what I'm going to release next. I might do a new age piano album (got new tech- Kurzweil Micropiano and Lexicon Reverb) or a deep reverby 'ambient' album or an album of very well-tuned drum 'n bass. If I need to be able to do that, people need to be able to audition what I'm doing for free so they can _be_ warned how different all the CDs are, and go listen to _everything_ in case they might really connect with some of it.
And of course they can, mp3.com/chrisj is for just that purpose. I just redesigned it to explain better what each of the albums are like, it's no longer necessary to sit there lo-fiing or downloading track after track just to get a sense of what the music is like- or to try just 4 tracks and mistakenly think the whole catalog is like that ;) And all of it is still free- my expectation is that _some_ people will want CDs too, and those that don't are at least giving it a listen. I swear, there is a 'business model' in that- it just doesn't include _guilt_ of giving out 'shareware' music. Imagine it like this- my mp3.com page is the ultimate radio, one I'm very proud of. By using it I can convey broadcast music anywhere in the world at any time of the day or night- anytime someone listens to one of the mp3s, that magic super radio is going 'bzzzzt' and broadcasting it out to be listened to, at no cost to me- in fact, I get a little bit of money for the initial download! It's not much- the total over all the months I've been doing it is about $300, but that's nearly enough to get a Yamaha DX7, and some music that I do would be much better if I got to program a whole Yamaha DX7- it's a six operator FM synth and the one I've got is only a two output 4 operator FM synth. So it does help me make better music, pretty directly...
_Nice_ troll...
What I object to is the bit about 'no substantial legitimate use'. Now, I asked for my stuff to be put on Napster by anyone who used it, but I know that I and other indie guys don't add up to 'substantial' use. However, I don't think 'substantial' is the point here! The point is that the judge, in caving to a large and rich faction, has taken action that _injures_ my access to media and cuts off my options. I have a problem with that. I might grudgingly tolerate it from private companies, for instance if Napster went "Hey, let's ONLY do RIAA acts just to piss them off!", but I have a real problem with my access to distribution channels being choked of by the judicial system of MY government just to benefit MY competition (who do not need help! sheesh! They have a freaking stranglehold)
I don't think I need to argue that I represent a zillion indie musicians to illustrate that there's a problem there. It's not that I am simply not being represented- I am being _injured_ specifically to prop up my deeply entrenched competition.
Frankly, I think they _want_ to stamp out all alternative forms of distribution that could be accessible to indies. You will never see them saying this, and in fact it would go against antitrust law _and_ popular opinion, but I do honestly think that a good big part of their motivation is to stamp out alternative forms of distribution that they do not act as gatekeeper for.
Roger McGuinn already made it, more or less :P didn't seem to make a lot of difference.
I've been playing music for more than twenty years, bought all my recording equipment one painful bit at a time (sometimes I have to choose strings over food, dear), spent uncountable hours learning everything from soldering to dual-integrator EQ networks so I could reconstruct that which I wasn't able to afford for gear, and I choose to give my music away, selling only to enthusiastic fans who want to help me get more gear, strings and food ;) which is also my best shot at the most expensive musician cost of all- attention. I rely upon new media such as Napster to provide distribution at no cost to me. I've asked publically for my tunes to be put on Napster by anyone who can spare the time to download them and put 'em up for sharing. I remember having to physically transport cassette tapes around in order for anyone to hear my music, not so many years ago. Now I don't have to pay anything to get my music into someone's hands, thanks to Napster and other services like it, and thanks to mp3. You talk like I ought to be selling individual CDs to every single listener 'to make profit' on my music- like I should want no more mp3, that I should want only purchasable, accountable physical media.
I should have to buy _trucks_ for my distribution because people like you want to prop up the RIAA?
- I am a musician (see URL link above- please visit it if you haven't already?). A NON-RIAA musician. The RIAA labels are my competition, and crushing, stifling competition they are too, and I have to work really hard to get production values comparable to the majors (or better).
- I had songs on Napster BY REQUEST. I publically asked people to put my songs off mp3.com in their Napster directories, if they could, if they didn't mind taking the trouble to do so. I own my songs AND the mechanical recordings of 'em and I have an absolute right to permit such distribution. It's _my_ say-so, not the RIAAs, not mp3.com's.
- Napster is being shut down anyhow- the RIAA lawyers successfully convinced the judge that _I_ don't exist, just like the RIAA continually tries to convince the listening public that I don't exist, that nobody like me exists.
- So- the judge is taking away a _major_ distribution channel from me, at the request of... my competition.
Who thought _this_ one up? Wait, don't tell me, it might just possibly be the the same trade organisation that taxes the blank tapes I record MY MUSIC on, said taxes again going to my competition. Yes, the same people who arranged that I have to pay money to help the Backstreet Boys out-PR me have now arranged to sabotage a _key_ internet distribution mechanism that could work in my favor- and of course are also suing the 'label' (mp3.com) that I signed with (ever hear Roger McGuinn's take on the mp3.com contract? This is the leader of The Byrds. He loves the mp3.com contract- it's actually _fair_. Quick, kill it before more people realise how brutal standard major label contracts are! Competition must die!)I don't remember agreeing to steadily pay off my biggest, most implacable competition to bury me. Please, Judge Ma'am, stop the music industry, I'd like to get off? Seems that owning my own music, owning my own equipment, recording only my own songs, attempting no samples and expecting no industry PR is not enough for me to be allowed things like non-RIAA distribution channels and the ability to buy tapes at the store to put MY MUSIC on and not pay taxes to my biggest competitors. So please, Judge Ma'am, if you hear of a free market out there somewhere won't you let me know? Apparently me buying all my own gear and recording all my own stuff and trying to put it out there through services like Napster is not permissible. Tell me, is this for my own good? Should I learn to behave? :P
(this is turning into a song- now if only my lungs will hold out to put out a quick single- fighting off chest-cold from hell)
Survival in the entertainment industry is and has always been about ATTENTION. Somebody with gigs and gigs of mp3s is not abusing the system, they basically don't count. They are sitting on a lot of music that they're essentially ignoring- they are doing the equivalent of playing about 6 radios at once all tuned to different stations. It's drowning in choice, being so swamped by the amount of mp3s they have that few wind up worthy of particular attention. There is effectively no difference between three mp3s you don't listen to and three million mp3s you don't listen to- and the psychology of this type of uber-hoarder is to have the three million mp3s and sit around with the speakers off. It's about collecting, not listening- so it entirely fails to connect to the industry using the only relevant currency, the currency of attention.
This is simply not finely grained enough for professional use. Do some calculations- first, you know what 8 bit audio sounds like? Familiarize yourself with how bad that sounds and how grungy it is. In 16 bit linear encoding, 8 bit sound is present at a volume level of 0.39 percent of the total volume of the recording (less than a hundredth of full volume). This does not sound significant, but check that out in _db_- volume is _logarithmic_. In decibels, that 'grunge zone' with eight bit resolution is not 96 db down, not 80, but around _50_ db down. 50 db and 96 db are pretty damn different, aren't they? 50 db is within the range of any junky thing with speakers on it.
When you say that 16 bit is 96 db and 96 db down is 'the quietest sounds you can hear' you are conveniently overlooking the fact that those 'sounds' 96 db down are _one_ _bit_. One bit is not 'sound'. One bit is old PC speakers or music played over the one-bit tone generator on old Apple IIs. I would argue that 8 bits is not sound either, but cheap noise to send over the web or something- and if you listened to 8 bit audio even at 44.1K you'd likely agree. Yet that 8 bit zone is in _all_ 16 bit recordings, a mere 50 db down. Anything around 50 db down is being represented by merely 8 bits... hell, 12 bits is still noticably compromised and that is a mere 20 db down. This sort of thing is not acceptable for professional work- hence the amazing and deeply needed proliferation of 20 and 24 bit devices, and of internal busses of DSPs running at 24 or 32 or even 48 bits or more, for doing calculations without losing everything to rapidly accumulating bit error.
20 bits, 24 bits are not perfect, but they are a hell of a lot better. A 20 bit unit like my ADAT is running around 12 bits where a CD would be down to 8- which is enough better (it's 50 db down after all) to leave little room to gripe. 20 db down, the 20 bit unit is at 16 bits. If you have a fully 24 bit unit, it's going to have 16 bits available a whole 50 db down, and get very close in practice to what you mistakenly believe for 16 bit digital audio- that you'll get infinitesimally faint sounds recorded and sounding convincing and believable. There's no way you're going to do that with 50 db down having all the resolution of a Sun .au file, but it doesn't take all that many more bits to fix matters.
I should thank you for inspiring me to hunt down these various formulas and tables and to work this out mathematically- I didn't realise it was quite as bad as it is! :) It's a piss-poor engineer who can't get 50 db of dynamic range out of his recordings if he tries :)
When you are looking at your specs, use these numbers for a reference of what the maximum signal quality is for various bit depths (given linear encoding these are the SAME NUMBERS as Matt gives- but ouch, when you get a sense of what it actually means in practice!)
Basically the compensatory mechanism people aren't seeing here is that this would be quite a lot of effort and money directed towards unuseful ends, and it would be strictly upper class. It's a setup for class warfare- and wiry manicdepressive ADD povertystricken geeks would make better guerillas, soldiers and terrorists than big studly Adonises with lots of muscle density who have never caught a cold. Muscle bulk DOES NOT matter when you are using modern weaponry. Arnold S's impressive bulk in violent films is just for looks... Lara Croft tits would be even less useful under war conditions.
So, although this issue is certainly a concern and in some ways an inevitability, it is a far cry from producing a ruling class. It is much more likely to produce a fragile and hated upper class that polarises class consciousness and further polarises the middle class into upper and lower, with no-man's land between (tastefully decorated in Abercrombie and Fitch logos- a trademark which once was known for upper class sporting goods, as much as a century ago, if I'm not mistaken)
It would at least be helpful if someone could get info on the thing's internal bus bit-depth: if _that_ is 16 bit too, we're talking 'The Horror! The Horror!' time. Even a sound-tracker I've occasionally worked with (PlayerPro) has gone to running internal DSP busses at 32 bits and dithering to 16 for output- outputting 20 or 24 bit would be better still for professional work. The bar's being raised pretty damn rapidly when a ill-funded audiogeek like me can work in 20 bit analog mixing, all ready to feed DVD-audio at full resolution. If this GScube is not capable of doing better than 16 bit output that's a major problem. Can't it at least do 8 outputs at 24 bit by storing the least significant bits on dedicated tracks? Hell, my _ADAT_ can do that (or could if I had two of 'em :) )
Water is a very efficient transmitter of soundwaves. Adams heard no outboard motors, no dolphins- nothing but a continuous, ceaseless, raging white noise so intense no information could be heard from it at all. All those outboard motors echoed and echoed until the river was one unbearable shriek of sound...
Now. How much louder than a cheap outboard motor is a rocketpowered submarine creating a cavitation bubble so great that a _ship_ fits inside it?
This might work as a military weapon where you don't give much of a damn what else you hit, but use as sea transportation will, surprisingly quickly, leave _no_ form of sonar available for anybody. Not whales, not fish, not oil tankers. I'm not sure how many of these subs it would take but you have to understand how incredibly 'live' water is- sound does not propagate like it does in air. The ambient noise level will simply rise and rise until you can't use sonar for anything anymore- by which time of course, huge amounts of the sea's ecosystem will be hosed, which could also be considered a Bad Thing. That _is_ where the earth gets most of its oxygen y'know ;P
For this reason, any childish pleas along the lines of 'We are just a group of free people, why should the big nasty government threaten us when all we want is to do what we want?' should not merit much respect. It's ludicrous to expect that a large faction will not stomp all over smaller ones, and nothing in history suggests the existence of overwhelming factions that are helpful or useful.
A few simple questions- exactly why would Microsoft employees _not_ want to own and entirely control computing, the net, online services: fill in the blank. What in the self interest of these people would discourage this? Given that a lot of people enjoy Linux, exactly why would such people _not_ want to destroy Linux and sabotage its general usefulness by any means necessary? People keep going on about 'oh, they are nice guys for the most part' but what do you get when you get down to the self interest? In a word, power- and even if these guys did NOT believe that for them to win everyone else has to lose, the reality is still closer to a zero-sum game than you think, so the end result is that any choice, any power, even _self_ empowerment, is power that's not in the hands of Microsoft and the people who work there. And every single factor that gives more power to MS is part of establishing that overall control.
It's ridiculous to go looking for Evil Mad Scientists cackling and going 'I want to take over the world and grind it beneath my boot!'. Instead, look for the people going 'But why would you want to use anything else?', because those are the ones who will smile as they cut off your options and your right to your own opinion- and believe that they are doing you a favor, not an injury.
And the world is full of those people- _everyone_ is like that when you look hard enough. The trick is, as long as all these kindly opponents continue to oppose each other and struggle in equilibrium, the world gets to move on with some degree of fluidity. The instant anyone (Linus included) begins to have enough clout to decree "YOU WILL use this because why would you want to use anything else?" (or believe this, or behave thus), you start getting feedback, and people with varying notions start getting crushed.
The Microsoft people do not _have_ to be out to do harm. They are far more disturbing- they are out to do good- as they see it. Key words being 'as they see it': you don't get an opinion. How can this not be a problem when they have power enough to continually do damage to any alternate way of seeing things?
The fact is, there are some very important principles in MacOS that would apply directly to the 'Anti-Mac' interface- but, typically, do not. The single most important principle is structure.
On MacOS, the menu nearest to the 'Apple Menu' (which is always there) is the 'File' menu. It contains 'quit' and other commands including 'open' and 'close' and 'new' if present. Why? No reason- there's no reason why quitting should be considered a file action. But the structure is the reason- not structure in 'this is how we force developers to code a certain way' but structure in that the user can quickly form a mental model in which there is always this menu that says File, and Quit is in it. It's not important that the menu be called file, or that it be in a particular place- or even that quitting must be a menu action! The important thing is that the user jumps to a conclusion which continues to be valid across the entire interface.
The same is possible for text mode interaction- it just takes different forms.
I wrote a program for my own use to remind myself of things. It's not very elaborate (now that I have a small second monitor I might try making it more elaborate) but one way it works is very important in the Anti-Mac style of interface. It runs off a list of events that's kept, and edited, just as a plain text file (something that could be edited by other programs too), and you enter a date or day and event and priority.
The priority ended up being almost meaningless as a feature because there aren't loads and loads of events in the file- but it is important in another way because it is a 'punctuation mark' for the event data format, and that's where the 'user concept' comes in. Basically, the idea was to define a format which could be parsed quite forgivingly by the computer, but which did not get into full-on natural language parsing- instead, you are given one very simple rule. "Type date, then priority in parentheses, then the event text."
That's it. Friday(2) Visit Fred. Or Thu(e)Dance Naked. Or 11/3(1)Third Of December Day. Or just "Go Fishing" (which will always display, until removed. There is an expectation for US date formats, but it's opensource ;) ) The point is that you can get very weird with the data (for instance with the weekdays, it uses a string comparison routine that is case insensitive) but there is an element of structure to focus and direct you- one that is very, very simple to remember. Date(priority)Entry, and the parsing keys off the parentheses.
The reason this matters at all is because it's so easy with natural language parsing to get into a game of 'Do What I Mean', to get so seduced by the challenge of parsing weird inputs that you basically go, "Okay! The user's inputs have NO FORM whatsoever- complete freedom! That is the ideal interface!" That's a crock- the thing you want to do is present interface elements that must be learned, but the elements (textual, conceptual, graphical) are SO SIMPLE that they're nothing to learn. "Quit and file stuff are in File menu" is a very small piece of information when you think about how widely useful it's been made (do _you_ have a File menu in front of you right now?). "Date(priority)Event" is partly textual but it is just as easy to grasp and use- it's syntactically obvious, with the key concept being Parentheses- if you don't have the ( then it's a degenerate case like a quickie-note to be always presented.
There are similar issues to HTML- the bracketed tags like B and I (yes, I know those are stylistic not logical tags) are easy to understand- yet I have so often messed up in Slashdot posts by failing to close a bold tag properly or something- just repeating the 'b' with no / to close the tag. This is possibly unavoidable because of the complexity of HTML, but it's an interface screwup because when typing a message the user does not use the tags the same way as the computer does. To the computer it is an opening and closing tag (entirely distinct entities). To the user the tags are used more like toggles: you hit (b) to turn on bold, and then hit it again to turn it off, only you have to remember to make it (/b). In the flow of writing it's easy to fall back on the opening form of the tag and use it as a toggle- which of course does not work. The funny thing is, it's as if the special closing form is used to make sure that you remember to keep track of the 'stack' of tags more easily- instead of having to count instances of a tag (which the computer can easily do), but if you do forget to keep track the result is just the same as if you treated the tags as toggles and failed to close them with the special closing tags. The result is a special form of the tag to be kept track of by the user, so that the user must be aware of not only 'entering/leaving styled area' but which way you're going- and if you don't correctly specify, the HTML screws up. Treating simple 'off/on' tags as toggles (granted, much HTML can't be reduced in this way) makes the mental model of the style setting much simpler- "hit (b) tag to switch boldface on and off", and suddenly you don't have to keep track of phase at all, only the opening and closing locations of what you want to stylize.
There is no reason this capacity to define simple behavioral models can't be used to improve text-based interfaces, or even Unix shell. Of course, it's mostly not ;P you have certain things. Typing a letter causes it to appear on the screen! Hitting return executes commands (woops, unless you're in a subshell, then it's what, ctrl-D?) Arguments for programs take the form -a -r -g -s, unless it's -args. And so on- the problem is NOT that it's a text based interface, or that it requires learning, the problem is simply that so little of the learning is globally applicable- but that can change. Not with Unix shell, as it would be throwing away a lot of backward compatibility- but in any new text or hybrid interface that comes onto the scene.
I'm picturing a sort of 'agent', but one that you talk to in clearly defined forms and not natural language. It'd be there ready for input or puttering along keeping an eye on things and you'd type Fiday(2)Get ready for job interview! and hit return, and because of the (2) it would know you meant to make an entry in the day-planner, and would figure out from context that 'Fiday' (a real typo that I actually typed just then, fixed, then put back for purposes of the argument) was Friday. You'd be working on something and would suddenly realise that you hadn't coded anything game-related in months and would type Games++ and hit return and it would understand from context that you were establishing a priority level in a simple 'geek code' sort of way- and it might also have the job of sorting your mail and would keep an eye out for 'Games' and sort it up higher based on this new priority level (which you may have just created by typing that). Or you'd read Joakim Ziegler's article and in a fit of admiration type Joakim Ziegler++++++, an 'item' that might never come up in email, but if it did you'd not only be given a priority boost, but would also be reminded that there was something about Joakim Ziegler worth remembering and paying attention to. And the ability to, dare I say it, 'intuitively' plug this things into the computer is the ability to not rely entirely on your own head for all that.
But the important thing is not to devise the most sophisticated arrangement for such things, not to devise the most fiendishly clever way to get data out of sloppy natural language- the important thing is to come up with these simple strokes that can become internalised rules. I happen to think Fri(2)Friday Meeting is a very sensible 'form' for a reminder, because for some reason having a 'priority' there in parens makes sense for me and serves as a suitable 'punctuation mark'. By the same token, you can't go wrong with strings of plusses and minuses to indicate the changing of priority levels for a keyword or key phrase. Possibly the exclamation point and question mark can be used similarly- for instance, the 'agent' might react to OpenGL?(return) by a quick search of other entries in its databanks for things that match this. It becomes even handier if you say Rob Malda? and the agent gives you references including his email address and phone number because you'd entered them into your address book :) You might even end up with web search results if you set it up that way. The exclamation point might serve as an indicator of a command- Slashdot! would launch your web browser and point it at slashdot, email! might be set up to return the 20 highest-priority emails you currently have. The 20 would be a setting kept in some other place- the interface of it would not be about going email-20-all-mail-agents! (unless you really wanted to be constantly specifying all that), it would be about going email! and also being able to go set up email! and have the control panels right there. And of course the basic assumption here is that the exclamation point distinguishes running programs from other actions- it seems fairly obvious, and that is a _good_ thing.
*g* time for me to start working on this I guess ;) it's sounding neat enough that I'm getting pretty interested in exploring it ;)
That's as may be, and it's understood the Rage128 is not a 'super accelerator' chip like a Ge or maybe a Radeon. But there are some important issues including one that _nobody_ seems to be picking up on:
- If you were going to get a Radeon and go for total peak performance, you would get a full size dual G4, not an 8" cube. Why would you _get_ The Cube if you wanted performance over all else? It's another consumer/prosumer form factor, not a horsepower monster design. Get the full size dual G4- lots of extra space for goodies in that, plenty of fans and cooling etc.
- Nobody ever mentions this. Do GeForces have quickdraw and Quicktime acceleration? Rage128s do. I picked up one recently, after the prices came well down, and the QT acceleration is real and very effective. Quickdraw acceleration is part of what makes those Photoshop scores perform so well- the Mac screen redraw gets accelerated by the 128 card while the PC relies on the poor 'ol CPU for everything. If you are working with prepress graphics at huge resolutions this becomes a constant, in-your-face issue, and the Rage128 addresses it. I think very few PC cards accelerate Color Quickdraw
;)
Add that up plus the relatively humble cooling requirements of a Rage128 and it doesn't suck. Its _game_ performance sucks compared with the latest and greatest, but here's a secret from a mac geek who dabbles in programming- all Mac cards _but_ ATI suck for OpenGL! You just cannot get OpenGL to work properly on a Mac 3dfx card even though they can get better framerate- and Glide is kind of fading away. The Voodoo3 uses some very ugly hacks to come up with a render-in-a-window mode: not a problem with the 'suckier' ATI. I run X-Plane (killer flightsim- now only $79!) and changing from voodoo2 to ATI128 was huge- not only did all of Austin Meyer's OpenGL tricks (from 'city lights' overlays to the airplanes' landing light) suddenly work perfectly and look great, but the sim immediately got better framerate IN 32 BIT than it ever got from the Voodoo in 16. This is not entirely because of the Voodoo- it's because X-Plane uses OpenGL and the ATI supports it directly, the Voodoo2 (which has a comparable max framerate with the 128) had to go through Mesa...Interface is a constant problem with computer software, and there are many approaches- the Linux "Do whatever, the user is a geek and can learn or reprogram anything", the Mac "Thou Shalt Code It THIS Way To Fit With The HIG", the Windows "If the user has a problem we'll put in a wizard to do it for them".
People seem to be analyzing this idea from Linux standards- the assumption being that you're going to spend hours reprogramming it to get it to work the way you want. That may not be an option...
The problem is this- defining interface systems in such a way that they can be learned by a user. Everything is learned- even the simplest things are learned (ever see someone use a mouse for the first time and not be able to immediately correlate sliding movement with pointer movement?).
The Mac approach (somewhat weakened with age but still alive and kicking) was to define everything beforehand and force UI to go a certain predictable way. All Edit menus will have cut copy paste IN THAT ORDER, followed by Clear if present. If Select All is present it is under Clear. File menu contains new, open, close, print, and quit. Print has an ellipsis (...) after it because ALL THINGS that pause for further input have ellipsis after them. They also ALWAYS allow the user to cancel out of the operation, meaning 'you can always select a thing with an ellipsis, even if you don't know what it is, because you get to cancel it if you didn't mean to do that'. And so on, for an inch-thick book... In this paradigm, all the energy is spent organising the UI passively. The user is the prime mover and everything sits there until you use it.
The Linux approach is similar- except that the user is expected to do their own organizing! All systems, passive or active, are for being customised by the user. The ones who get the most enthusiastic about Linux (or any Unix) tend to be the most adept at defining interfaces for themselves and improvising new functionality that doesn't necessarily exist in consumer OSes. The elaborate shell script is the highest peak of this art (barring the writing of entire programs) because it is encapsulating whole known behaviors into the computer's interface, behaviors that are personal to that particular user. Defining/configuring X is very similar.
When you get into Windows, some of the rules change. There's always been a profoundly influential desire to out-convenience all other OSes by secondguessing the user and doing stuff for them, like an automatic door that opens when you walk towards it (hey, it works for supermarkets). This desire is also expressed in the use of, and concept for, Wizards: the problem is not seen as making the UI comprehensible for specific tasks (which might assume user learning), the problem is seen as DOING the tasks for the user and requiring no learning at all.
Here is the fatal flaw: systems of this nature are complex! The tasks being done are likely to be complicated (prioritizing email and workflow is VERY complicated). While being 'wizard walked' through a task is timeconsuming but mindless (with every step explained as you get to it), having your life actively managed by such a software process BEFORE you get to it is another story. It cannot fall back on being mindless- it must try to be clever, but the more clever it is, the less predictable it is likely to be.
That is the fatal flaw in a nutshell: there will always be a mental model of the process being done. Failing to have a mental model is basically resigning yourself to cluelessness about what is going to happen- you'd need to at least think "It is sending personal email to my home and work email to work" or _something_. As these systems get more complicated and intrusive, the model becomes more complicated, and the more 'clever' it becomes, the less predictable it will be- the goal is 'do what I mean' but the result cannot be other than 'why the hell did it do that?' because it is an externalisation of a process that is also, inevitably, running inside the user's head. There will always be that parallel evaluation of significance and priorities- and the computer does not have the mind's ability to associate, does not have X many years of back data to associate with. The computer is bound to lose because it's not playing chess- it's trying to run parallel with a _particular_ very associative and dynamic human brain, that of its owner. It can't possibly win. Other HUMANS don't always win at this game (long-married couples still misinterpret each other fairly often and renegotiate things as a result). No computer can do it- unless its 'owner' is simply another computer- because it is not a purely logical process, and the computer can't match human bandwidth.
A quick example from a book by Grant Fjermedal: "What's the population of Kampala?" Most people will respond immediately, "I don't know". How do you know so quickly that you don't have that information in your head? It's much the same as remembering "Aunt Millie's cousin Fred lost both knees in the War, causing him to be unable to walk and needing to travel in a special van with lifts. Aunt Millie does all the shopping for her cousins. Aunt Millie has no clue about any sort of technology." Now, take that background, and when you read in Uncle Bob's email, "Millie is van-shopping and is all in a frazzle", the human reaction would be to quickly associate all these things and perhaps inquire if it was Fred's van that died, and if Millie can use some techie help with the special-van issues. But how are you going to load all the information of a lifetime into a computer and expect it to make priority calls like this- and who is going to KEEP loading the data in as life goes on? It's flat impossible, unreasonable.
This is why the only reasonable approach to future interface is finding ways to make it predictable and understandable by the intended user- which of course is how Apple survived the '90s when by all rights it should have been crushed. The Mac interface is only one of many possible interfaces but it was rigorously defined in a consistent and predictable way. Almost any interface will do if you define it consistently enough and STICK to it. In something like Linux, what ends up happening is you either end up defining your personal idea of an interface and sticking with it happily, or you give up.
In something like Windows, people learn (sometimes with the aid of community college courses!) the rules of an ill-defined interface much of which is not intended to be clearly understood by the user- when things are supposed to 'do themselves' there isn't the same motivation to make the process clear and visible. This attempt by Microsoft to go still further in that direction is DOOMED, because it will either end up so trivial as to seem a total joke, or it will proliferate the 'problem space' of possible computer actions so vastly that the resulting behavior is entirely unpredictable, yet still grossly inadequate for matching its user's priority 'rules'. That is worst of both worlds- and if this ever ships, expect a certain amount of excusemaking by its users along the lines of 'my computer screwed up' to explain the user's worse-than-average ability to interact with others, and their failures to deal with important things. And there's only so much of that you can get away with.
Nobody should attempt to copy this 'feature' for Linux. Instead, figure out ways of making the 'map' for computer systems' behavior more clear and predictable, get some consistent rules in there and then let the user use those rules and take their own actions.
If I might ask, what exactly in this evaluation do you find factually wrong? I have no problem with being criticised for disliking Microsoft- I do dislike Microsoft and consider the notion that I would have to like Microsoft in order to be unbiased, a foolish notion. Given that I don't like Microsoft, exactly what is wrong with the evaluation? In particular, are you claiming that the bit you quoted is not the truth? I admit it is unflattering but MS's overall strategies are hardly a mystery at this point, and I think I summed them up quite accurately.