Come on, he installed four alarm system and didn't bother with a single surveillance camera? I am not saying that there wasn't somebody in his apartment, but it's hard not to think this might have just been a case of a malfunctioning alarm system and a whole bunch of paranoia on top. If the government is after you, at least make sure you get some pretty pictures of them, cams are cheap these days.
Both the technology and price is already there. The devkit cost just $300, which is already extremely low for a highend non-mass-market tech gadget. The mass-market version is targeting the same price while getting some additional features. Given how the price for small displays is developing there is no reason to assume that the thing won't be $150 or less in a few years.
It won't give you a headache like the 3DS, as the 3D is done via a display strapped to your head instead of lenticular lenses, shutter glasses, so the image that hits your eyes is always the proper one and there is no cross talk. The current devkit will however give you motion sickness as there is both latency between your head movement and the display updates as well as a lack of positional tracking, meaning there will be a small offset between where the image is and where it should be.
However people who have tried the latest prototype of what Oculus is currently developing behind closed doors have commented that they have basically solved those issues and can generate a motion sickness free experience even for people for which motion sickness was a big problem with the released devkits.
This seems like a great underhanded way to make it illegal to run Tor exit nodes, free VPNs, proxies or similar services that give anonymous people ways to interact with the net.
That assumes that there was a point where he said "screw this". I have plenty of projects that I just stopped working on, but with none of them I had a clear point were I knew I would stop working on them, it was mostly just getting busy with other stuff and then just never finding the time or motivation to come back to them. The projects just fizzled out, there was never a point were I gave up on them and in theory I might pick them up again one day.
They may have changed it in one of their redesigns, but for a long time your subscription list was public. You could disable it from your profile, but even then that info was still available in the channels list of subscribers. Does the owner still get a mail when you subscribe to his channel? Either way, that's basically the point, it's quite unclear what gets shared and with whom.
Well, it affects your freedoms, but those are worthless, so who cares?
It's not the data that affects my freedom, it's the laws and regulations of the government that do that.
The fact that the government can change the rules, misinterpret the data, and use it to harass virtually anyone doesn't matter at all.
Misinterpreting the data is what I would consider a minor annoyance. Sure it will happen, but it's not like not collecting the data would magically stop the SWAT team from knocking on the wrong door. Mistakes happen and if anything, data provides a way to reduce them.
The government snooping around doesn't bother me all that much, as while it might be a waste of money, it really doesn't affect me. It's just dead data sitting around on some NSA server. There is more interesting stuff to read then my email. What I am bothered by is the leaking of private data that happens all over the place, things like the people you follow on Twitter or Youtube being publicly visible information. Why exactly does every modern social webpage treat what are essentially bookmarks as public information and publishes it to the world? Why is everybody just accepting that and not complaining about? You can't even switch it off most of the time. I find that incredible annoying and avoid any service that does that when I can. I don't have much of a problem with my information being out there, but at the very least a service should make it very clear what kind of information is public and what is private and modern services don't really do that.
Another thing I have a real issue with is the starting pervasiveness of requiring real life authentication to log into a webpages. Mobile phone numbers started as just a way to get your password back, but now quite a few webpages are requiring them and Google+ and Facebook have their real name requirements. Furthermore there are more and more webpages that only allow you to access them via your Facebook or Twitter login, not via a webpage specific account. So once Facebook or Google switching on the requirement for a mobile phone number or real name and enforce that, that means your real life identity is linked to a ton of a webpages and you can't stop that from happening unless you completely avoid that webpage, as even Tor doesn't give you a free anonymous mobile phone number.
AR is coming, but it's still years away from being practical, so Valve focuses on VR instead which is right around the corner. Also CastAR isn't really suited for general purpose AR, as it needs a special surface to project on. So it's probably an evolutionary dead end in the long run. Finally CastAR seems overall more focused on the toy/boardgame market then on the gamer market and Valve is mainly interested in gamers.
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prohibited without permission from the copyright holders.
The gimping is a feature, it means parents don't have to worry about the kid gaining access to the Internet, buying stuff on their credit card or all the other things that can go wrong with an Internet enabled console. This thing plays the games grandma buys them for Christmas and nothing else. For everybody else the Wii Mini might not be a good buy, but they are not the target audience, this thing is made as Christmas present for 6 year olds.
An object has state, you have to initialize it, use it's functions in the right order or things will explode. Flow based programming is more like your Unix shell, where you have "cat | sort | uniq |..." and don't have to worry about the state "sort", you simply throw data into it at once end and data comes out at the other.
The problem is that technology is getting flexible and powerful enough that it is reaching a point where all those shiny new "jobs" that get created will be staffed by machines right from the start.
So, the guy didn't learn from the Industrial Revolution (and revolutions since) that all the fear of 'no more jobs for anyone' ended up being unfounded?
That is unless you were a horse. I don't see all that many horses employed any more, there are still a tiny few jobs left for horses, but for most part the talents that a horse provided has been completely replaced with machines, leaving the horse job less. With humans it's going to take a little longer till all our talents can be replaced by machines, but I don't see any reason to assume that won't happen and that we will end up just as jobless as the horses.
The core problem is that you record a video in 1080x1920 which is then scaled down to 608x1080 to fit into a horizontal player, thus you lose information. The trivial fix would be to simply not squish vertical video into a horizontal player, instead play it in a vertical player, thus preserving all the image detail.
While the variety isn't bad, one problem is that the mid-level games have largely disappear. There used to be a time when many games where done by 10 or 15 people. Today on the other side you either have indie games done by like three people and the AAA blockbuster done by 300 people. There is very little in between and that in turn means that a lot of the indie games just feel a little unsatisfying, as a three man team can't produce the same quality as a team of 15. So even technology has advanced a lot, a lot of games end up feeling like a downgrade. The AAA games of course have the personal, but they don't have the freedom to experiment like the smaller teams could. The recent Kickstarter hype might be a way out of the problem and help get funding back into smaller teams, but if that is actually sustainable or will collapse on itself once the first few flops come in we have to wait and see.
What are people going to print with their fancy home 3d printer? It's always easy to complain about the lack of imagination, but I have yet to see a plausible scenario where home 3d printer will be in 20 years and what the heck I would be doing with them. Computers never had that problem and there were always plenty of visionaries pointing where things would be going. With 3d printers on the other side it's:
1) Printers for useless plastic toys 2) ??? 3) Star Trek replicators
I doubt that home 3D printers will ever be a serious danger for regular products. A user might print a case for his iPhone or something like that, but even the most simplistically functional objects tend to be far beyond what a home 3D printer can do. Even when a 3D printer can compete, it's often more expensive then the same product done regularly somewhere in China and shipped over here.
I think the copyright with 3D printings won't be with the big manufacturers, but within the realm of the hacker/maker crowd itself, people taking each others design without following the license and stuff that like. Wouldn't surprise me if some Chinese company would start mass producing a popular object without paying royalties either. But that's basically the same set of problems we already have with Open Source, music, films and even Youtube videos.
In general I consider home 3D printing rather overhyped, there is only so much plastic crap you can print and most people won't have any use for a personal 3D printer. Outside of the home, 3D printers are for more interesting, be it to create rocket parts or organ replacements, but your home printer won't ever be capable of that.
It doesn't take more than a poke or two for them to learn.
And it doesn't take more then two Buckyballs to kill you. The whole problem with Buckyballs is that their danger isn't obvious. They look like a toy, play like a toy, are packaged like toy and when swallowed might kill you.
Worse then that, in other industries when the product isn't up to quality, you return it and get your money back. In the game industry on the other side refunds are generally not only not given, the industry is also putting in all kinds of locks to prevent you from executing your right to sell the game used.
MNG is not the correct solution, it's a solution looking for a problem. It's feature bloated and designed without any kind of thought put into how tools for it would work. It has support for sprites, tiling, fading, magnification, loops and a bunch of other stuff, none of which maps very well into the tools people actually use to produce animations. It's not so much an animated image format, but a language to write animations in.
The proper solution is video, WebM or whatever. Which makes no assumptions about how you structure your animation and instead simply tries to compress the resulting image sequence as best as possible. Or in case you actually need structured animation, you can use SVG which providers a much richer tool set then MNG and is full programmability via Javascirpt.
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Come on, he installed four alarm system and didn't bother with a single surveillance camera? I am not saying that there wasn't somebody in his apartment, but it's hard not to think this might have just been a case of a malfunctioning alarm system and a whole bunch of paranoia on top. If the government is after you, at least make sure you get some pretty pictures of them, cams are cheap these days.
Both the technology and price is already there. The devkit cost just $300, which is already extremely low for a highend non-mass-market tech gadget. The mass-market version is targeting the same price while getting some additional features. Given how the price for small displays is developing there is no reason to assume that the thing won't be $150 or less in a few years.
It won't give you a headache like the 3DS, as the 3D is done via a display strapped to your head instead of lenticular lenses, shutter glasses, so the image that hits your eyes is always the proper one and there is no cross talk. The current devkit will however give you motion sickness as there is both latency between your head movement and the display updates as well as a lack of positional tracking, meaning there will be a small offset between where the image is and where it should be.
However people who have tried the latest prototype of what Oculus is currently developing behind closed doors have commented that they have basically solved those issues and can generate a motion sickness free experience even for people for which motion sickness was a big problem with the released devkits.
This seems like a great underhanded way to make it illegal to run Tor exit nodes, free VPNs, proxies or similar services that give anonymous people ways to interact with the net.
That assumes that there was a point where he said "screw this". I have plenty of projects that I just stopped working on, but with none of them I had a clear point were I knew I would stop working on them, it was mostly just getting busy with other stuff and then just never finding the time or motivation to come back to them. The projects just fizzled out, there was never a point were I gave up on them and in theory I might pick them up again one day.
They may have changed it in one of their redesigns, but for a long time your subscription list was public. You could disable it from your profile, but even then that info was still available in the channels list of subscribers. Does the owner still get a mail when you subscribe to his channel? Either way, that's basically the point, it's quite unclear what gets shared and with whom.
Well, it affects your freedoms, but those are worthless, so who cares?
It's not the data that affects my freedom, it's the laws and regulations of the government that do that.
The fact that the government can change the rules, misinterpret the data, and use it to harass virtually anyone doesn't matter at all.
Misinterpreting the data is what I would consider a minor annoyance. Sure it will happen, but it's not like not collecting the data would magically stop the SWAT team from knocking on the wrong door. Mistakes happen and if anything, data provides a way to reduce them.
The government snooping around doesn't bother me all that much, as while it might be a waste of money, it really doesn't affect me. It's just dead data sitting around on some NSA server. There is more interesting stuff to read then my email. What I am bothered by is the leaking of private data that happens all over the place, things like the people you follow on Twitter or Youtube being publicly visible information. Why exactly does every modern social webpage treat what are essentially bookmarks as public information and publishes it to the world? Why is everybody just accepting that and not complaining about? You can't even switch it off most of the time. I find that incredible annoying and avoid any service that does that when I can. I don't have much of a problem with my information being out there, but at the very least a service should make it very clear what kind of information is public and what is private and modern services don't really do that.
Another thing I have a real issue with is the starting pervasiveness of requiring real life authentication to log into a webpages. Mobile phone numbers started as just a way to get your password back, but now quite a few webpages are requiring them and Google+ and Facebook have their real name requirements. Furthermore there are more and more webpages that only allow you to access them via your Facebook or Twitter login, not via a webpage specific account. So once Facebook or Google switching on the requirement for a mobile phone number or real name and enforce that, that means your real life identity is linked to a ton of a webpages and you can't stop that from happening unless you completely avoid that webpage, as even Tor doesn't give you a free anonymous mobile phone number.
AR is coming, but it's still years away from being practical, so Valve focuses on VR instead which is right around the corner. Also CastAR isn't really suited for general purpose AR, as it needs a special surface to project on. So it's probably an evolutionary dead end in the long run. Finally CastAR seems overall more focused on the toy/boardgame market then on the gamer market and Valve is mainly interested in gamers.
Against the license:
The gimping is a feature, it means parents don't have to worry about the kid gaining access to the Internet, buying stuff on their credit card or all the other things that can go wrong with an Internet enabled console. This thing plays the games grandma buys them for Christmas and nothing else. For everybody else the Wii Mini might not be a good buy, but they are not the target audience, this thing is made as Christmas present for 6 year olds.
An object has state, you have to initialize it, use it's functions in the right order or things will explode. Flow based programming is more like your Unix shell, where you have "cat | sort | uniq | ..." and don't have to worry about the state "sort", you simply throw data into it at once end and data comes out at the other.
The problem is that technology is getting flexible and powerful enough that it is reaching a point where all those shiny new "jobs" that get created will be staffed by machines right from the start.
So, the guy didn't learn from the Industrial Revolution (and revolutions since) that all the fear of 'no more jobs for anyone' ended up being unfounded?
That is unless you were a horse. I don't see all that many horses employed any more, there are still a tiny few jobs left for horses, but for most part the talents that a horse provided has been completely replaced with machines, leaving the horse job less. With humans it's going to take a little longer till all our talents can be replaced by machines, but I don't see any reason to assume that won't happen and that we will end up just as jobless as the horses.
The core problem is that you record a video in 1080x1920 which is then scaled down to 608x1080 to fit into a horizontal player, thus you lose information. The trivial fix would be to simply not squish vertical video into a horizontal player, instead play it in a vertical player, thus preserving all the image detail.
While the variety isn't bad, one problem is that the mid-level games have largely disappear. There used to be a time when many games where done by 10 or 15 people. Today on the other side you either have indie games done by like three people and the AAA blockbuster done by 300 people. There is very little in between and that in turn means that a lot of the indie games just feel a little unsatisfying, as a three man team can't produce the same quality as a team of 15. So even technology has advanced a lot, a lot of games end up feeling like a downgrade. The AAA games of course have the personal, but they don't have the freedom to experiment like the smaller teams could. The recent Kickstarter hype might be a way out of the problem and help get funding back into smaller teams, but if that is actually sustainable or will collapse on itself once the first few flops come in we have to wait and see.
You don't need to paste into the URL bar, you can paste straight into the browser window.
What are people going to print with their fancy home 3d printer? It's always easy to complain about the lack of imagination, but I have yet to see a plausible scenario where home 3d printer will be in 20 years and what the heck I would be doing with them. Computers never had that problem and there were always plenty of visionaries pointing where things would be going. With 3d printers on the other side it's:
1) Printers for useless plastic toys
2) ???
3) Star Trek replicators
What exactly will happen at 2?
I doubt that home 3D printers will ever be a serious danger for regular products. A user might print a case for his iPhone or something like that, but even the most simplistically functional objects tend to be far beyond what a home 3D printer can do. Even when a 3D printer can compete, it's often more expensive then the same product done regularly somewhere in China and shipped over here.
I think the copyright with 3D printings won't be with the big manufacturers, but within the realm of the hacker/maker crowd itself, people taking each others design without following the license and stuff that like. Wouldn't surprise me if some Chinese company would start mass producing a popular object without paying royalties either. But that's basically the same set of problems we already have with Open Source, music, films and even Youtube videos.
In general I consider home 3D printing rather overhyped, there is only so much plastic crap you can print and most people won't have any use for a personal 3D printer. Outside of the home, 3D printers are for more interesting, be it to create rocket parts or organ replacements, but your home printer won't ever be capable of that.
In case anybody is wondering of the state of the game, there is a nice video review of it.
It doesn't take more than a poke or two for them to learn.
And it doesn't take more then two Buckyballs to kill you. The whole problem with Buckyballs is that their danger isn't obvious. They look like a toy, play like a toy, are packaged like toy and when swallowed might kill you.
Lego blocks don't kill you when you eat them.
I can tell quite a few of you pussies have never been in the military.
If you end up in the military you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Worse then that, in other industries when the product isn't up to quality, you return it and get your money back. In the game industry on the other side refunds are generally not only not given, the industry is also putting in all kinds of locks to prevent you from executing your right to sell the game used.
MNG is not the correct solution, it's a solution looking for a problem. It's feature bloated and designed without any kind of thought put into how tools for it would work. It has support for sprites, tiling, fading, magnification, loops and a bunch of other stuff, none of which maps very well into the tools people actually use to produce animations. It's not so much an animated image format, but a language to write animations in.
The proper solution is video, WebM or whatever. Which makes no assumptions about how you structure your animation and instead simply tries to compress the resulting image sequence as best as possible. Or in case you actually need structured animation, you can use SVG which providers a much richer tool set then MNG and is full programmability via Javascirpt.