And if all three are annoying, what video game platform will people buy to connect to the SDTV in the other room?
A Windows PC would work. There are quite a few PC games these days that have full Xbox360 controller support and give you pretty much exactly the same experience you would get from a console once the game is running. On top of that PC games are often 10-20EURs cheaper then their console counter parts. The downside of course is that the number of PC games with Xbox360 controller support is a good bit smaller then real Xbox360 games, you still need a good PC, which costs a bit more then a Xbox360 and there is some more setup stuff involved.
If the number of PC games with controller support continues to grow a PC based console like the "famous" Phantom could actually work.
Now, tomorrow the physical distribution model evaporates, we're all buying direct, and the publishers refuse to take advantage of the opportunity to undercut one another to gain a competitive advantage.
Two problems, for one the whole digital distribution system so far seems to go heavily into the direction of monopolies. On consoles for example the console manufacturer controls the whole online business, with other media like PC games, eBooks or music the situation isn't quite as bad, but even there you have some quite dominant players (Steam, iTunes, AppleAppStore, Amazon). Having hardware that is tightly coupled with an online store so far seems to be the basis for success. Problem two is that the price fixing isn't a dark future fantasy, but current day reality, eBooks often don't cost any less then real paper books and games on Steam are often just as expensive or even more so then a boxed copy bought on Amazon, not even counting used sales.
You can't. The cost per chip is for most part constant. They get faster over time, but not much cheaper. Its easy enough to buy a PC that is 1000 times as fast as one 15 years ago for the same price, but you won't get one as fast as 15 years ago that only a thousands of the original price.
The amount of work and quality control per chip doesn't change all that much with the transitor count. It however does change with the size of the chip, but those don't half every 18 month.
Why would you expect the PS3 to use some half-assed psuedostandard that not all TVs can actually display?
PAL60 has been standard feature of a lot of games for almost a decade, quite a few even have it as mandatory requirement (Metroid Prime 2: Echoes on Gamecube, lots of stuff on Xbox360). Its just natural that people expect features in their new console, that they did have in their old ones already.
This is how software is different from other copyright-able works. With a song or book, the copyrighted thing is the end result and what is distributed to users.
That isn't correct. Other stuff has "source" in one form or another too. Books have their TeX/Quark/Framemarker/PDF/... source, music has unmixed tracks, images exist in some uncompressed and unresized RAW version somewhere or Photoshop files, movies have tons of material that never made it into the final result. And all of those would be extremely valuable for making derived works. There really isn't a clear cut between software and other stuff, especially when considering that a binary isn't all that uneditable either, as can be seen in numerous cracks, hacks and mods out there, it sure would be easier with real source code, but assembler is quite modifiable as well, just harder.
I think a law that requires source code would be awful, it might look nice from far away, but it would add a ton of bureaucracy and cost to anything that is created. It would also be very hard to specify source code in a way that is completly unambiguous. Should people get sued because they have compressed Javascript in their webpage and lost the source code of that specific version? I don't think so.
The real answer to this mess should simply be to purge EULAs from the face of the earth.
First time around? No, but I didn't bother to do the counting of the passes. Getting the pass count correct and noticing the gorilla is tricky, only getting one correct is rather easy. The trick might work better when watching in fullscreen instead of in a window, as with a window its easier to see the whole scene instead of just part of it.
The BBC had a nice variation of the thing once, they've shown the trick along with other stuff on a documentary, but they also had a gorilla running around in the background when the host was talking and I sure as hell missed those, because you simply didn't expect them and focused on other stuff.
If you don't already know the thing and actually follow the instructions and count the number of passes instead of just watching it, then yes, its very easy to fall for this. Another nice thing with the same purpose is this card trick.
You have to see it from an evolutionist point of view. The reason why we feel pain, is because it keeps us away from dangerous things. The reason why we don't mind killing pigs is because we have to eat something. The reason why we don't kill each other is because that wouldn't be very healthy for the survival of the race. The reason there is love is because it makes producing babies easier. And so on, we are what we are because it is good for survival and most of our core morals build up on that.
The fun part of course is that little of those morals still work when it comes to computers. Death for example becomes kind of a non-issue when you can copy, suspend and resume a program. Death on the other side is a big deal with biologic things, because you can't copy them. The death of a biologic thing is pretty final, the death of a computer program is not.
I don't really doubt that we one day will be able to build a computer capable of human-like intelligence, but when we do that, our moral system will have a really hard time to keep up with reality, as its not build around logic, but for most part just on our survival instincts.
Thats coincidence and selective memory. If you have two people having random feelings, chances are, they end up feeling the same every now and then and if that happens on some special occasion, they remember it. On the other side they forget the thousands of hours in which nothing happened and in which they did feel completly different quite easily.
and people with transplanted organs perceiving memories of the donor.
Thats called making shit up. You can claim to perceive "memories" all day long, since as long as they are vague and unspecific, you can't prove anything with it. On the other side if you would remember specific stuff, like the name of an anonymous donor, his phone number, etc. then you would have some good testable evidence that something special is going on, but so far, I don't think that has ever happened.
Aside from the flag being knocked over from the blast on lift of, the flag was also made from plastic and that can't handle intense UV radiation all that well. So there is a good chance that not much stuff is left from the flag. Also I think the famous footprint photo was Aldrin's foot, not Neil's and the original first footprint might already have been run over numerous times.
Tell you what: tell me how that thing with the car keys works (you know, the one where you look at the table three times and it isn't there, you search for it for 10 minutes elsewhere, and suddenly you see it right there where you looked before), and I'll believe you.
What's so special about that? The human eye can only see a very tiny fraction of your field of view in focus, everything else is very blurry and pretty much impossible to recognize unless you already know its there. On top of that your eye has a blind spot, everything in that is completly invisible. Your pattern recognition also doesn't work 100% perfect, if you see something upside down instead of the way you expect it, you might not recognize it or not recognize it fast enough and so your eyes might have moved on before the key was recognized.
Or to sum it up: The brain actively recognizes only a very tiny fraction of the world, everything else is interpolation and guesswork and if your key hides in the later part, you won't find it, especially if you don't expect it there. Seen this? Pretty much the same thing.
As a result, any partial technological block will inevitably be defeated.
You assume that you have an unlimited number of retries to work around the block, but you don't. Circumvention tries can be traced and you will get locked up before you can get your message out. You also don't have to block, you can do white-listing instead, which is a lot harder to work around. Smuggling an SD card might in the end be easier way to get stuff out then trying to do it directly via the Internet, as the real world is a good bit harder to trace.
The crank was removed from the OLPC quite a while ago, there was some talk about bringing it back in an external form, but I am not sure if that ever reached mass production.
You can find videos about the next generation of OLPC screens and their use in normal laptops at:
he's going to know that what he's got isn't the "good stuff"
The OLPCs display still beats pretty much all commercial offerings out there when it comes to sunlight readability and resolution. In terms of robustness the OLPC kicks some major butt as well, mesh networking doesn't seem to be available on your average laptop either. Yes, its not the fasted computer in town, but speed aside its a damn fine machine.
The XO-1.5 will come soon and provide a good bit more CPU power, along with more storage and RAM. Overall, however, yes, the XO-1.0 is rather slowish. Its not to slow to watch video if you use mplayer and it is somewhat ok to browse normal webpages, but trying to watch Youtube video via a Flash plugin just doesn't work and using yum is completly ridiculous, that probably the lowest most unresponsive app I have ever seen. For quite a few of the border fade-in effects that are part of Sugar it also seems rather underpowered.
Perhaps the passphrase remembering problem has since been fixed
The problem still exist. In most cases you can just hit cancel on the password dialog box and then just click on the access point again and it will work, as the password still seems to be saved somewhere deep down in the Sugar internals, but getting the dialogbox is really annoying.
Sugar Journal works by search, just like pretty much any desktop search engine, this also happens to be the way that works best with how most people organize their files, i.e. not at all. The crux however is that Sugar records all Activities, not just those you save, but everything, so your Journal is always full of useless crap and there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to distinguish between Activity sessions used to created data and those that didn't produce anything. Another issue is that the Journal is pretty much unusable with foreign data, i.e. insert a USB stick with a hierachy and the Journal will display it as one long flat list, it will also polite the USB stick with some.olpc-... directory. A better way to work with legacy data storage would have been welcome.
On the whole I think the biggest fault with Sugar is that isn't self-hosting. Sugar Activities can't be developed in Sugar, you have to develop them elsewhere and then copy them over to the OLPC or by pass all of Sugar and develop with the Terminal. The cool source button feature that was announced very early on still doesn't work.
A problem that seems to be ignored here is the limit of fair use. Wikipedia allows only low-res pictures of some items (video game box-art for example), so the quality of the pictures comes out rather awful not because of lack of people contributing higher quality pictures, but because a higher quality picture could be considered a copyright violation of the original and are thus not allowed.
Wikipedia aside, low quality pictures is a general web problem, your average news side won't feature 10 megapixel photos either, just a lumpy scaled down version, thanks to everybody being overly careful with copyright and licensing.
It wasn't that long ago we thought the same about the parallel port.
My Dual Core computer still has a good old parallel port and even if it wouldn't have one, getting a USB adapter isn't that hard. The tricky part isn't the port, but finding drivers for the device you want to connect to the port. On Linux it is in general not that complicated, but on Windows its pretty much completly impossible. Most manufacturers don't bother supporting their hardware for more then two generations of Windows and an old Windows version on new hardware won't work all that great either. On top of that most manufacturers don't even bother to keeping their old drivers available on the Internet or didn't publish them there in the first place.
Over the years I found that the most troublesome part with long time archival isn't the tech, but choosing what you want to archive. I still have a whole bunch of StarTrek:TNG on VHS tape along with the devices to play them, but I don't need them as that stuff is easily available in better quality on DVD. On the other side I would be quite interested in having the commercial that where shown between the episodes, since those would be quite interesting from a historical perspective and far harder to obtain then the episodes themselves. But I cut those out because I considered them annoying and uninteresting back then. Its quite hard to judge today what will be interesting a few decades down the road, most of the time its exactly that stuff that you don't consider as important.
CNN just had a front page article where they stated that around 25% of 18-25 year olds doubted the truth of the landing. That is utterly depressing, showing the current level of science education.
I wouldn't read to much into that. It's really not that far fetched to have some doubt into the moon landing when you look at the facts (not the hard scientific ones, just the very basic stuff):
a) in 1969 we have the tech to land on the moon b) in 2008 we don't even have the tech to make pictures of the landing sites, let alone land there with people c) we have very nice pictures of the Mars landing sites
Yes, there are perfectly good explanation for everything there (budget cuts, focus shifted away from the moon, etc.), but not having the technology today to do something that was done 40 years ago just doesn't sound all that plausible from far away.
In addition to that it annoys me a lot that the moon hoax debunker like to point to the retro reflectors so much. Yes, having them there shows that something landed on the moon, but it doesn't demonstrate that we landed there with people, that stuff that could have been done with simple automatic probes.
The only way to make science compatible with cookery...
You can explore and explain the art of cooking perfectly well with science, there is no conflict between the two. Cooking is after all not about magic unexplainable things, but about reproducible 'experiments' with food.
Science and religion are two entirely separate things.
No, they are not. When religion says the earth is 6000 years old and science can tell you why that is wrong then religion is claiming bullshit. Basically everything that has any influence on our lives can be explored with the scientific method, so there is simply no place for god to have an influence. What you are left with is a god of the gaps, constantly shrinking as our knowledge of the universe increases. Of course you can try to believe in that and say that it doesn't conflict with science and that might be right, but it would be pretty useless as that god doesn't have any influence on our world and you would have no idea what kind of god that would be. The believe in god makes as much sense as believe in invisible pink unicorns.
The only way to make religion compatible with science is by limiting religion to those subjects where science can't give you an answer, which of course has the nasty side effect that the area of religions shrinks as science gains more knowledge, but more importantly it means that religions has no point in our everyday reality, as that is something that science does cover quite fine already. Its hard to argue why you should pray and to other religions stuff like that when science can show that it does in fact not work.
Slashdot Mirror
And if all three are annoying, what video game platform will people buy to connect to the SDTV in the other room?
A Windows PC would work. There are quite a few PC games these days that have full Xbox360 controller support and give you pretty much exactly the same experience you would get from a console once the game is running. On top of that PC games are often 10-20EURs cheaper then their console counter parts. The downside of course is that the number of PC games with Xbox360 controller support is a good bit smaller then real Xbox360 games, you still need a good PC, which costs a bit more then a Xbox360 and there is some more setup stuff involved.
If the number of PC games with controller support continues to grow a PC based console like the "famous" Phantom could actually work.
Alot of Kids don't have Credit Cards
Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have their own fantasy money that you buy via regular money, thus no need to own a credit card.
Now, tomorrow the physical distribution model evaporates, we're all buying direct, and the publishers refuse to take advantage of the opportunity to undercut one another to gain a competitive advantage.
Two problems, for one the whole digital distribution system so far seems to go heavily into the direction of monopolies. On consoles for example the console manufacturer controls the whole online business, with other media like PC games, eBooks or music the situation isn't quite as bad, but even there you have some quite dominant players (Steam, iTunes, AppleAppStore, Amazon). Having hardware that is tightly coupled with an online store so far seems to be the basis for success. Problem two is that the price fixing isn't a dark future fantasy, but current day reality, eBooks often don't cost any less then real paper books and games on Steam are often just as expensive or even more so then a boxed copy bought on Amazon, not even counting used sales.
There is a 2D Contra coming to the Wii, not sure if thats a remake, a sequel or something in between, but it looks pretty classic.
Thus you CAN halve the price every 18 months.
You can't. The cost per chip is for most part constant. They get faster over time, but not much cheaper. Its easy enough to buy a PC that is 1000 times as fast as one 15 years ago for the same price, but you won't get one as fast as 15 years ago that only a thousands of the original price.
The amount of work and quality control per chip doesn't change all that much with the transitor count. It however does change with the size of the chip, but those don't half every 18 month.
Why would you expect the PS3 to use some half-assed psuedostandard that not all TVs can actually display?
PAL60 has been standard feature of a lot of games for almost a decade, quite a few even have it as mandatory requirement (Metroid Prime 2: Echoes on Gamecube, lots of stuff on Xbox360). Its just natural that people expect features in their new console, that they did have in their old ones already.
This is how software is different from other copyright-able works. With a song or book, the copyrighted thing is the end result and what is distributed to users.
That isn't correct. Other stuff has "source" in one form or another too. Books have their TeX/Quark/Framemarker/PDF/... source, music has unmixed tracks, images exist in some uncompressed and unresized RAW version somewhere or Photoshop files, movies have tons of material that never made it into the final result. And all of those would be extremely valuable for making derived works. There really isn't a clear cut between software and other stuff, especially when considering that a binary isn't all that uneditable either, as can be seen in numerous cracks, hacks and mods out there, it sure would be easier with real source code, but assembler is quite modifiable as well, just harder.
I think a law that requires source code would be awful, it might look nice from far away, but it would add a ton of bureaucracy and cost to anything that is created. It would also be very hard to specify source code in a way that is completly unambiguous. Should people get sued because they have compressed Javascript in their webpage and lost the source code of that specific version? I don't think so.
The real answer to this mess should simply be to purge EULAs from the face of the earth.
I know there are plenty of card and magic tricks
Watch the video with the card trick.
Did you fall for the basketball-pass trick?
First time around? No, but I didn't bother to do the counting of the passes. Getting the pass count correct and noticing the gorilla is tricky, only getting one correct is rather easy. The trick might work better when watching in fullscreen instead of in a window, as with a window its easier to see the whole scene instead of just part of it.
The BBC had a nice variation of the thing once, they've shown the trick along with other stuff on a documentary, but they also had a gorilla running around in the background when the host was talking and I sure as hell missed those, because you simply didn't expect them and focused on other stuff.
Does anyone actually fall for this?
If you don't already know the thing and actually follow the instructions and count the number of passes instead of just watching it, then yes, its very easy to fall for this. Another nice thing with the same purpose is this card trick.
You have to see it from an evolutionist point of view. The reason why we feel pain, is because it keeps us away from dangerous things. The reason why we don't mind killing pigs is because we have to eat something. The reason why we don't kill each other is because that wouldn't be very healthy for the survival of the race. The reason there is love is because it makes producing babies easier. And so on, we are what we are because it is good for survival and most of our core morals build up on that.
The fun part of course is that little of those morals still work when it comes to computers. Death for example becomes kind of a non-issue when you can copy, suspend and resume a program. Death on the other side is a big deal with biologic things, because you can't copy them. The death of a biologic thing is pretty final, the death of a computer program is not.
I don't really doubt that we one day will be able to build a computer capable of human-like intelligence, but when we do that, our moral system will have a really hard time to keep up with reality, as its not build around logic, but for most part just on our survival instincts.
like twins feeling what the other feels
Thats coincidence and selective memory. If you have two people having random feelings, chances are, they end up feeling the same every now and then and if that happens on some special occasion, they remember it. On the other side they forget the thousands of hours in which nothing happened and in which they did feel completly different quite easily.
and people with transplanted organs perceiving memories of the donor.
Thats called making shit up. You can claim to perceive "memories" all day long, since as long as they are vague and unspecific, you can't prove anything with it. On the other side if you would remember specific stuff, like the name of an anonymous donor, his phone number, etc. then you would have some good testable evidence that something special is going on, but so far, I don't think that has ever happened.
Aside from the flag being knocked over from the blast on lift of, the flag was also made from plastic and that can't handle intense UV radiation all that well. So there is a good chance that not much stuff is left from the flag. Also I think the famous footprint photo was Aldrin's foot, not Neil's and the original first footprint might already have been run over numerous times.
Tell you what: tell me how that thing with the car keys works (you know, the one where you look at the table three times and it isn't there, you search for it for 10 minutes elsewhere, and suddenly you see it right there where you looked before), and I'll believe you.
What's so special about that? The human eye can only see a very tiny fraction of your field of view in focus, everything else is very blurry and pretty much impossible to recognize unless you already know its there. On top of that your eye has a blind spot, everything in that is completly invisible. Your pattern recognition also doesn't work 100% perfect, if you see something upside down instead of the way you expect it, you might not recognize it or not recognize it fast enough and so your eyes might have moved on before the key was recognized.
Or to sum it up: The brain actively recognizes only a very tiny fraction of the world, everything else is interpolation and guesswork and if your key hides in the later part, you won't find it, especially if you don't expect it there. Seen this? Pretty much the same thing.
As a result, any partial technological block will inevitably be defeated.
You assume that you have an unlimited number of retries to work around the block, but you don't. Circumvention tries can be traced and you will get locked up before you can get your message out. You also don't have to block, you can do white-listing instead, which is a lot harder to work around. Smuggling an SD card might in the end be easier way to get stuff out then trying to do it directly via the Internet, as the real world is a good bit harder to trace.
The crank was removed from the OLPC quite a while ago, there was some talk about bringing it back in an external form, but I am not sure if that ever reached mass production.
You can find videos about the next generation of OLPC screens and their use in normal laptops at:
http://olpc.tv/
he's going to know that what he's got isn't the "good stuff"
The OLPCs display still beats pretty much all commercial offerings out there when it comes to sunlight readability and resolution. In terms of robustness the OLPC kicks some major butt as well, mesh networking doesn't seem to be available on your average laptop either. Yes, its not the fasted computer in town, but speed aside its a damn fine machine.
The XO-1.5 will come soon and provide a good bit more CPU power, along with more storage and RAM. Overall, however, yes, the XO-1.0 is rather slowish. Its not to slow to watch video if you use mplayer and it is somewhat ok to browse normal webpages, but trying to watch Youtube video via a Flash plugin just doesn't work and using yum is completly ridiculous, that probably the lowest most unresponsive app I have ever seen. For quite a few of the border fade-in effects that are part of Sugar it also seems rather underpowered.
Perhaps the passphrase remembering problem has since been fixed
The problem still exist. In most cases you can just hit cancel on the password dialog box and then just click on the access point again and it will work, as the password still seems to be saved somewhere deep down in the Sugar internals, but getting the dialogbox is really annoying.
I couldn't imagine how it could work,
Sugar Journal works by search, just like pretty much any desktop search engine, this also happens to be the way that works best with how most people organize their files, i.e. not at all. The crux however is that Sugar records all Activities, not just those you save, but everything, so your Journal is always full of useless crap and there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to distinguish between Activity sessions used to created data and those that didn't produce anything. Another issue is that the Journal is pretty much unusable with foreign data, i.e. insert a USB stick with a hierachy and the Journal will display it as one long flat list, it will also polite the USB stick with some .olpc-... directory. A better way to work with legacy data storage would have been welcome.
On the whole I think the biggest fault with Sugar is that isn't self-hosting. Sugar Activities can't be developed in Sugar, you have to develop them elsewhere and then copy them over to the OLPC or by pass all of Sugar and develop with the Terminal. The cool source button feature that was announced very early on still doesn't work.
A problem that seems to be ignored here is the limit of fair use. Wikipedia allows only low-res pictures of some items (video game box-art for example), so the quality of the pictures comes out rather awful not because of lack of people contributing higher quality pictures, but because a higher quality picture could be considered a copyright violation of the original and are thus not allowed.
Wikipedia aside, low quality pictures is a general web problem, your average news side won't feature 10 megapixel photos either, just a lumpy scaled down version, thanks to everybody being overly careful with copyright and licensing.
It wasn't that long ago we thought the same about the parallel port.
My Dual Core computer still has a good old parallel port and even if it wouldn't have one, getting a USB adapter isn't that hard. The tricky part isn't the port, but finding drivers for the device you want to connect to the port. On Linux it is in general not that complicated, but on Windows its pretty much completly impossible. Most manufacturers don't bother supporting their hardware for more then two generations of Windows and an old Windows version on new hardware won't work all that great either. On top of that most manufacturers don't even bother to keeping their old drivers available on the Internet or didn't publish them there in the first place.
Over the years I found that the most troublesome part with long time archival isn't the tech, but choosing what you want to archive. I still have a whole bunch of StarTrek:TNG on VHS tape along with the devices to play them, but I don't need them as that stuff is easily available in better quality on DVD. On the other side I would be quite interested in having the commercial that where shown between the episodes, since those would be quite interesting from a historical perspective and far harder to obtain then the episodes themselves. But I cut those out because I considered them annoying and uninteresting back then. Its quite hard to judge today what will be interesting a few decades down the road, most of the time its exactly that stuff that you don't consider as important.
CNN just had a front page article where they stated that around 25% of 18-25 year olds doubted the truth of the landing. That is utterly depressing, showing the current level of science education.
I wouldn't read to much into that. It's really not that far fetched to have some doubt into the moon landing when you look at the facts (not the hard scientific ones, just the very basic stuff):
a) in 1969 we have the tech to land on the moon
b) in 2008 we don't even have the tech to make pictures of the landing sites, let alone land there with people
c) we have very nice pictures of the Mars landing sites
Yes, there are perfectly good explanation for everything there (budget cuts, focus shifted away from the moon, etc.), but not having the technology today to do something that was done 40 years ago just doesn't sound all that plausible from far away.
In addition to that it annoys me a lot that the moon hoax debunker like to point to the retro reflectors so much. Yes, having them there shows that something landed on the moon, but it doesn't demonstrate that we landed there with people, that stuff that could have been done with simple automatic probes.
The only way to make science compatible with cookery...
You can explore and explain the art of cooking perfectly well with science, there is no conflict between the two. Cooking is after all not about magic unexplainable things, but about reproducible 'experiments' with food.
Science and religion are two entirely separate things.
No, they are not. When religion says the earth is 6000 years old and science can tell you why that is wrong then religion is claiming bullshit. Basically everything that has any influence on our lives can be explored with the scientific method, so there is simply no place for god to have an influence. What you are left with is a god of the gaps, constantly shrinking as our knowledge of the universe increases. Of course you can try to believe in that and say that it doesn't conflict with science and that might be right, but it would be pretty useless as that god doesn't have any influence on our world and you would have no idea what kind of god that would be. The believe in god makes as much sense as believe in invisible pink unicorns.
The only way to make religion compatible with science is by limiting religion to those subjects where science can't give you an answer, which of course has the nasty side effect that the area of religions shrinks as science gains more knowledge, but more importantly it means that religions has no point in our everyday reality, as that is something that science does cover quite fine already. Its hard to argue why you should pray and to other religions stuff like that when science can show that it does in fact not work.
Eratosthenes calculated the radius of the earth back then in 240 BCE, thats long before science as we know it today even existed.