Buy a gaming console. These days I consider it much more likely that commercial PC gaming will go down the drain, then that Linux actually will be getting some decent native support.
Thats not to say that there aren't plenty games in Linux, especially taking Wine and emulation into account and there are plenty of indie titles that get Linux versions, but in big commercial gaming there really hasn't been any real progress in a long long while.
Its the story of the player overcoming the challenge that is created in the process of playing it. Now given, not exactly the most interesting story to be told to other people, but a kind of story non the less and achievements keep track of that. The "story creation through gameplay" thing makes more sense when you look at open ended games such as SimCity, Civilization or The Sims. They don't have any build in narration, but people can tell you long stories about all things that happened in those games, the narration is dynamically created through gameplay.
People are easily compelled to try and "compete" against things to beat them, it's the same mechanic that leaves people playing games like World of Warcraft for hours upon hours even if they're not enjoying it.
I think achievements are quite a different deal then WoW. WoW works by providing very little challenge and constant progress, so people get easily addicted, as the frustration is low and the "just one more quest" factor is extremely high. WoW also has this as its core gameplay mechanics, its pretty much all the game has to offer. Achievements on the other side are something build on top of an already existing game, so you can completly ignore them and still get to see everything the game has to offer. Achievements also provide neither constant progress nor easy challenges, many can be extremely hard. Achievements also have a clear end, ones you completed them, you are done, nothing left to do. What achievements do is basically just a way to increase the replay value of a game. Instead of setting up new challenges for the game yourself, the game comes with predefined challenges and keeps track of them. It gives incentive to play the game some more, play it in a different style then normal and such, but it doesn't really do much to give a game WoW like addiction factor.
Those who seriously expected that Ubuntu would change the world had a little unrealistic expectation, but then I don't really know anybody who expected that. It delivered what I was expecting perfectly well: An enduser friendly version of Debian. Also Ubuntu has grabbed a very large part of the Linux distribution market share, so yeah, for Linux users it actually has changed things around quite a bit.
Anyway, when it comes to Linux related technologies I'd put the OLPC on there. That thing got a ton of hype and while actually a really fine product, it utter failed in the enduser segment and Eee and other competitors took over. Not so much the fault of the thing itself, but more the fault of terrible marketing and complete lack of normal commercial sales to end users.
For actual writing (whether code or prose) nothing beats a full-sized keyboard like the one I'm using in front of my keyboard.
Speech is easily twice as fast as typing. Its just the voice recognition software and natural language processing that is still a little to fragile for mass market penetration.
To be clear, my favorite games will always be those played in front of a monitor (possibly with some gesture interface) and a full-fledged keyboard.
The keyboard was never a good game controller to begin with and the monitor is kind of the wrong tool for the job as well, a big TV screen or a VR helmet (real 3d) are much prettier.
When you have an explosion in space, the space is no longer a vacuum, as there is plenty of expanding gas from the explosion and that also happens to expand faster then the sound travels. That still doesn't give you StarWars style space battles, but I am wondering what a nearby explosion in space would sound like.
It was pretty innovative with respect to all the interaction you could have with your surroundings.
What interactions where there? You could shoot people in the face and maybe look at a new paper pinned to a wall and play around with physic engine techdemo tool (aka gravity gun), but thats pretty much all there was, you couldn't even talk to NPCs. Might have been innovative for FPS standards, but those standards are rather low to begin with. Games like The Last Express are a lot more impressive when it comes to interactive storytelling.
If Google would actually suppress search results of competition you might have a point, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. As far as I understand it, its just Google selling targeted advertisment space. Nothing wrong with that. How is it illegal for Ford to place an advertisment next to a GM dealership?
this is intellectually dishonest of you, because you know it is impossible to get what you demand.
I demand numbers of people from that industry that have been prosecuted and children that have been freed. That are very simple numbers that should be no problem to produce, as they are the direct result of law enforcement. How large the industry itself is, is then of course a different question, but I am not asking for that. All I am asking for is hard evidence that it actually exists and numbers of people of it being prosecuted would be a very good start.
and there are well-meaning stodgy bureaucrats in your government who... get this... actually mean well and are concerned about it?
I don't doubt that there are "well-meaning bureaucrats", but thats exactly the problem as "well-meaning" is pretty much the opposite of "rational people basing their doing on hard facts".
the technological methods at their disposal for stopping and controlling child porn is weak. so the best alternative for them to pursue it is via censorship of the child pornography material, and only the child pornography material
You obviously didn't bother to check the sources I provided, as what you say there is completly factually wrong:
1) The tools they have are very strong. A child porn hosting server can be taken down in no time, just by mailing the admin. If the admin refuses, they can send police and raid the server hosting. By far the largest part of child porn servers is hosted in countries that have outlawed child porn. All of which can be done with todays laws, but surprise, they do none of that, a third party has to jump in and actually take the servers on the ban list down. Ironically, this will get more difficult in the future as the ban list itself is banned.
2) Censoring the Web helps nothing, as most of the child porn that is out there is not hosted on public HTTP server in the first place. And as said, stays reachable even after the censoring simply by adjusting your DNS server.
3) Wikileaks among others is directly threatened by the new law and do not host child porn.
you are a weak mind
So blind trust in political propaganda is what makes a strong mind?
Lots of talk about people sharing picture on the net, nothing people prosecuted for producing child porn for money. I want proof that there is a child porn industry. I don't doubt that there are child abusers and I don't doubt that pictures of that are on the net and people are sharing them, but that is a very different thing that an industry producing child porn on demand.
The data in that link is even self contradicting, little example:
"The United States Department of Justice estimates that pornographers have recorded the abuse of more than one million children in the United States alone."
"At any one time there are estimated to be more than one million pornographic images of children on the Internet"
So what is it? Do the child porn producers just make a single photo per child? Sounds kind of unlikely. Seems more the case of inflating data by lack of technological understanding. Internet makes copying easier, it also makes copying child porn easier. That however gives no indication on how many children are actually abused for child porn for money, as most of that stuff either was once legal or produce without any monetary interest.
I am still waiting to have some actual hard numbers on people prosecuted and children freed from the child porn industry.
how do you argue with someone who bases their statements in direct contradiction to reality?
By providing some actual references? Name me some court cases that involved producing child porn for money. Or cases of children held in captivity for the production of child porn. If its such a huge issue, it shouldn't be to find quite a few of those, right?
I can't, as that is a crime in the case of childporn, so I have to base my knowledge on third party accounts.
right now, your thoughts have nothing to do with reality
Really? How come then that while there have been a ton of raids due to childporn material, not once have I heard the story of children being freed in those raids from their porn producing molesters? When there are a million of children molested as that Wikipedia article claims, it shouldn't be to hard to free a handful of them, yet that never seems to happen in reality. Yet, I hear storys of Wikileaks getting raided, a contra-censorship politician stepping down due to child porn accusations and of course children themselves being treated as sex offenders because they took pictures from themselves for their girl/boyfriends all the time. And on top of all that there is that "weird" little fact that the server on the censorship lists actually stay up and running, even so they are perfectly within reach of juristic. It took a third party all of two days to mail the provider to shut down half the domains on the list. Why hasn't the police done that? Why do we need a huge censorship infrastructure instead? Make no sense at all.
As far as I can tell the truth of the matter is very simple. Child abuse is a very real problem and something should be done about it, but it happens in the families themselves, not in the Internet and not for money. Any witch hunting for the childporn industry is doomed to failure, as it doesn't exist and is just distraction from the actual child abuse.
you honestly wish to assert that the creation and consumption of child pornography is a myth
No, the myth is that:
1) There is an industry behind it with millions of dollars. - Not the case, it happens for most part non-commercially. 2) That its a real problem. - There is virtually no child porn on public webpages as they would get shut down really quick. 3) That it would actually protect children. - Child abuse happens at home, not on the Internet and not on demand. Also lots of stuff qualified as child porn was produced without harming children (FKK pictures, nude pictures from back when it was legal, pictures they took from themselves, etc.).
that censoring child porn is worse than sanctioning someone just for speaking their political opinion!
With political censorship I at least would know what and why they censor and there would be a public outcry against it, with that whole child porn witch-hunt is a hell of a lot less predictable and it also untouchable, as nobody likes to argue against something that is supposed to "protecting the children".
Or to put it in practical terms: Wikileaks.de got raided by the police because it provides copies of a censorship lists and has a good chance to get put on one of those censorship lists itself in the next few month in Germany. None of that happened directly due to oppression of political opinion, all of that happens under the cover of childporn, while its really just the former.
The trouble with childporn is that its a perfect tool to shut people up. Don't like somebody? Mail him childporn and let the police raid his home. Public branding of "child porn consumer" will in turn to a good job that even those that might agree with him, distance themselves from that person. You can't pull stunts like that with political speech without getting caught. And no, thats not fiction, a case quite a bit like that has happened to a German politician just a few weeks ago.
censoring child pornography is nothing remotely like censoring political speech
Its actually worse. Censoring political speech at least tackles a real concern, it tackles it for all the wrong reason, but at least its a real enough issue. The whole hunt on child porn on the other side is nothing more then a witch hunt, that whole child molesting mafia that the politician like to focus on, just doesn't exist in reality. Even worse, the censoring, as implemented today, isn't even removing the child porn, the server stay are up and running and everybody who knows how setup an alternative DNS can still get it. So not only is it not working, the whole reason on why to censor is also a big fat lie. And of course implementing a information censorship infrastructure will quickly find use aside from childporn.
Are you sure that other technologies are more save? The people that die through the pollution produced by coal power plants might not die the same spectacular way as those that die through radiation poisoning, but they die non the less. Same is true for many other technologies. With nuclear stuff you simply have all the deadly stuff in one tiny spot, instead of spreading all over the world.
All well and true, but for me that worked only for the first 15 minutes of Half Life 2. After that the game quickly falls apart. Not knowing things and feeling confused is all right and good as a start, because thats just where your character might be, but it just doesn't work when your job is to safe the world, as that is a thing that should require knowledge and talent which you should gain in the course of the game. But what Half Life 2 does is basically world saving by lucky coincidence, without any proper backstory, missions to accomplish or any clear structure, thats neither very interesting nor does it make good storytelling. Having G-man fucking with the timeline of course doesn't make things any better.
Mystery is a good way to start a story, but its a terrible one to end it on, because then it becomes just way to clear that the writers follow the "make shit up as we go" kind of story writing and that never leads to satisfying conclusions.
Read my post again, under certain circumstances xterm *is* processor intensive (or well, gnome-term to be exactly, don't use xterm) and its not IO, its drawing millions of anti-alised characters to a large screen, which is always slow in software.
Take xterm for example, what possible benefits could be reaped?
How about just being faster? You might not notice that your terminal is slow when you type in stuff, but when you have an app that produces large amounts of output, say a game printing debugging stuff, Wine producing warnings or something like strace it has quite a noticeable impact on the performance and things will go quite a lot faster when you redirect the output to a file instead of to the terminal.
To really have the full benefit of multi-core, you simply need all applications to take advantage of it. I am kind of tired of having to wait for an app to finish while my computer is only utilizing 50% of the available computing power and that amount of underutilization will get much worse when we move to 32 cores or more a few years down the line.
On Wikipedia you might find either, on alternate days.
No, you won't. Because those articles tend to be heavily guarded and reversed in a manner of minutes, if not seconds. Also Wikipedia is on its way to get stable article versions, so the latest article hack won't show up to normal users unless it is first checked. Your whole idea about Wikipedia seems to come from fantasy land, not reality. Wikipedia never was a tool to print everybody's opinion, quite the opposite, it will only allow things that have well proper sources. Can you find sources for lot of crazy quack? Sure, but such stuff won't end up in Wikipedia as "The Truth[tm]", it will end up as alternative theory deep down in the article properly sourced, along with all the good sources on why it is wrong.
Wikipedia is a silly idea that is just getting worse all the time.
And yet, time and time again when compared to "real" Encyclopedias it come out just as good if not better.
Sorting them out is important, and you will never, ever be able to sort them out using Wikipedia as a reference.
Ok, so where is that "Ministry of Truth" that is going to decide the one true world view? You can't find it in science, as science doesn't work by defining truth, but by repeatably testing claims, if they are found out to be wrong and replaced by better ones, happens all the time and really isn't that different from how Wikipedia works.
The whole reason why Wikipedia is awesome is because it never claimed to be "The Truth" and have the one true answer for everything. Wikipedia is a collection of articles, most of them heavily sourced and along with that you have editing history and talk pages. If you don't trust the article itself, its trivial to check the Talk page, the history and the sources itself. That is something that you can't do with a newspaper or a TV show, as they never bother to tell you all their sources. Also its utterly stupid to paint this incident as a fault of Wikipedia. Wikipedia now has the correct information, while all your newspaper will have the wrong one forever and I doubt that most of them will bother to print a correction.
Is Wikipedia perfect? Certainly not. The stable versions are overdue and their deletionism is really annoying, but for all its fault, its most freaking awesome encyclopedia man kind has.
In terms of hardware multi-cores are delivering quite fine, its only the software that is lacking behind a lot, as todays programming language are pretty ill suited for parallel programming, but then the brain itself is a parallel processor, so that might not be that big of a problem for AI.
And anyway, just imagine a ship full of these these. Just because we might no longer be able to cram everything on a single chip, doesn't mean that we won't have a shitload of computing power in the future. The only real problem I see in slowing down Kurzweil's vision is the lack of a market. Its like the flying car thing, of course we can build them, but there wouldn't be many people with enough money to actually buy them, so they never got created in the first place.
Thats because humans are still humans, not because technology hasn't involved at an rapid pace. Sure, cars still drive you from A to B, television still shows you the daily news and newspapers haven't really changed in a while, but on the other site I can buy for 100 bucks a device that can store two years of non-stop, 24/7 music, more music then I will likely ever listen to in my entire lifetime or be able to buy legally. For as little as ten bucks I can buy a finger nail sized storage device that can store all software ever released on the NES, C64, AtariST and Amiga combined. With the right phone you can today live stream video to the Internet, combine that with a big HD and you can start recording your complete life 24/7. On GoogleEarth I can see my house and soon I'll be able to virtually drive by it. Millions of people waste gazillions of hours in a virtual world as WoW or SecondLife. And another million of people have written an online encyclopedia.
Not impressive enough? Well, there are certainly things that haven't changed much. Programming computers still feels like a rather low tech. Lisp is 50 years old and yet programming languages still haven't really surpassed it in a significant way and GUIs haven't really changed all that much either. And no direct brain-input in sight, we still have to read and watch information to consume it. But doesn't stop the progress in other areas to be pretty gigantic.
people don't know their neighbors and can't let their kids wander the neighborhood.
Thats the result of the real world becoming more and more replaced by a virtual one, when you have a mobile and can phone all your friends anytime you want, there just isn't much need to talk to your neighbor anymore.
iPhones, PDAs, Laptops and all that other stuff costs just as much if not more so and yet people carry them around all the time. As long as the devices are not super fragile, there really isn't that much to worry about, after all a book doesn't react all that good either when dipped into water.
Slashdot Mirror
Buy a gaming console. These days I consider it much more likely that commercial PC gaming will go down the drain, then that Linux actually will be getting some decent native support.
Thats not to say that there aren't plenty games in Linux, especially taking Wine and emulation into account and there are plenty of indie titles that get Linux versions, but in big commercial gaming there really hasn't been any real progress in a long long while.
Simon; what's the story there?
Its the story of the player overcoming the challenge that is created in the process of playing it. Now given, not exactly the most interesting story to be told to other people, but a kind of story non the less and achievements keep track of that. The "story creation through gameplay" thing makes more sense when you look at open ended games such as SimCity, Civilization or The Sims. They don't have any build in narration, but people can tell you long stories about all things that happened in those games, the narration is dynamically created through gameplay.
People are easily compelled to try and "compete" against things to beat them, it's the same mechanic that leaves people playing games like World of Warcraft for hours upon hours even if they're not enjoying it.
I think achievements are quite a different deal then WoW. WoW works by providing very little challenge and constant progress, so people get easily addicted, as the frustration is low and the "just one more quest" factor is extremely high. WoW also has this as its core gameplay mechanics, its pretty much all the game has to offer. Achievements on the other side are something build on top of an already existing game, so you can completly ignore them and still get to see everything the game has to offer. Achievements also provide neither constant progress nor easy challenges, many can be extremely hard. Achievements also have a clear end, ones you completed them, you are done, nothing left to do. What achievements do is basically just a way to increase the replay value of a game. Instead of setting up new challenges for the game yourself, the game comes with predefined challenges and keeps track of them. It gives incentive to play the game some more, play it in a different style then normal and such, but it doesn't really do much to give a game WoW like addiction factor.
Those who seriously expected that Ubuntu would change the world had a little unrealistic expectation, but then I don't really know anybody who expected that. It delivered what I was expecting perfectly well: An enduser friendly version of Debian. Also Ubuntu has grabbed a very large part of the Linux distribution market share, so yeah, for Linux users it actually has changed things around quite a bit.
Anyway, when it comes to Linux related technologies I'd put the OLPC on there. That thing got a ton of hype and while actually a really fine product, it utter failed in the enduser segment and Eee and other competitors took over. Not so much the fault of the thing itself, but more the fault of terrible marketing and complete lack of normal commercial sales to end users.
For actual writing (whether code or prose) nothing beats a full-sized keyboard like the one I'm using in front of my keyboard.
Speech is easily twice as fast as typing. Its just the voice recognition software and natural language processing that is still a little to fragile for mass market penetration.
To be clear, my favorite games will always be those played in front of a monitor (possibly with some gesture interface) and a full-fledged keyboard.
The keyboard was never a good game controller to begin with and the monitor is kind of the wrong tool for the job as well, a big TV screen or a VR helmet (real 3d) are much prettier.
The near vacuum of space does not transmit sound.
When you have an explosion in space, the space is no longer a vacuum, as there is plenty of expanding gas from the explosion and that also happens to expand faster then the sound travels. That still doesn't give you StarWars style space battles, but I am wondering what a nearby explosion in space would sound like.
It was pretty innovative with respect to all the interaction you could have with your surroundings.
What interactions where there? You could shoot people in the face and maybe look at a new paper pinned to a wall and play around with physic engine techdemo tool (aka gravity gun), but thats pretty much all there was, you couldn't even talk to NPCs. Might have been innovative for FPS standards, but those standards are rather low to begin with. Games like The Last Express are a lot more impressive when it comes to interactive storytelling.
If Google would actually suppress search results of competition you might have a point, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. As far as I understand it, its just Google selling targeted advertisment space. Nothing wrong with that. How is it illegal for Ford to place an advertisment next to a GM dealership?
42.
this is intellectually dishonest of you, because you know it is impossible to get what you demand.
I demand numbers of people from that industry that have been prosecuted and children that have been freed. That are very simple numbers that should be no problem to produce, as they are the direct result of law enforcement. How large the industry itself is, is then of course a different question, but I am not asking for that. All I am asking for is hard evidence that it actually exists and numbers of people of it being prosecuted would be a very good start.
and there are well-meaning stodgy bureaucrats in your government who... get this... actually mean well and are concerned about it?
I don't doubt that there are "well-meaning bureaucrats", but thats exactly the problem as "well-meaning" is pretty much the opposite of "rational people basing their doing on hard facts".
the technological methods at their disposal for stopping and controlling child porn is weak. so the best alternative for them to pursue it is via censorship of the child pornography material, and only the child pornography material
You obviously didn't bother to check the sources I provided, as what you say there is completly factually wrong:
1) The tools they have are very strong. A child porn hosting server can be taken down in no time, just by mailing the admin. If the admin refuses, they can send police and raid the server hosting. By far the largest part of child porn servers is hosted in countries that have outlawed child porn. All of which can be done with todays laws, but surprise, they do none of that, a third party has to jump in and actually take the servers on the ban list down. Ironically, this will get more difficult in the future as the ban list itself is banned.
2) Censoring the Web helps nothing, as most of the child porn that is out there is not hosted on public HTTP server in the first place. And as said, stays reachable even after the censoring simply by adjusting your DNS server.
3) Wikileaks among others is directly threatened by the new law and do not host child porn.
you are a weak mind
So blind trust in political propaganda is what makes a strong mind?
Lots of talk about people sharing picture on the net, nothing people prosecuted for producing child porn for money. I want proof that there is a child porn industry. I don't doubt that there are child abusers and I don't doubt that pictures of that are on the net and people are sharing them, but that is a very different thing that an industry producing child porn on demand.
The data in that link is even self contradicting, little example:
"The United States Department of Justice estimates that pornographers have recorded the abuse of more than one million children in the United States alone."
"At any one time there are estimated to be more than one million pornographic images of children on the Internet"
So what is it? Do the child porn producers just make a single photo per child? Sounds kind of unlikely. Seems more the case of inflating data by lack of technological understanding. Internet makes copying easier, it also makes copying child porn easier. That however gives no indication on how many children are actually abused for child porn for money, as most of that stuff either was once legal or produce without any monetary interest.
I am still waiting to have some actual hard numbers on people prosecuted and children freed from the child porn industry.
how do you argue with someone who bases their statements in direct contradiction to reality?
By providing some actual references? Name me some court cases that involved producing child porn for money. Or cases of children held in captivity for the production of child porn. If its such a huge issue, it shouldn't be to find quite a few of those, right?
absorb reality.
I can't, as that is a crime in the case of childporn, so I have to base my knowledge on third party accounts.
right now, your thoughts have nothing to do with reality
Really? How come then that while there have been a ton of raids due to childporn material, not once have I heard the story of children being freed in those raids from their porn producing molesters? When there are a million of children molested as that Wikipedia article claims, it shouldn't be to hard to free a handful of them, yet that never seems to happen in reality. Yet, I hear storys of Wikileaks getting raided, a contra-censorship politician stepping down due to child porn accusations and of course children themselves being treated as sex offenders because they took pictures from themselves for their girl/boyfriends all the time. And on top of all that there is that "weird" little fact that the server on the censorship lists actually stay up and running, even so they are perfectly within reach of juristic. It took a third party all of two days to mail the provider to shut down half the domains on the list. Why hasn't the police done that? Why do we need a huge censorship infrastructure instead? Make no sense at all.
And when it actually comes to prosecuting those childporn owners, nothing shows up that points to a childporn industry. How do you explain that? (Hint: Reality ain't what politicians want you to believe.)
As far as I can tell the truth of the matter is very simple. Child abuse is a very real problem and something should be done about it, but it happens in the families themselves, not in the Internet and not for money. Any witch hunting for the childporn industry is doomed to failure, as it doesn't exist and is just distraction from the actual child abuse.
PS: Most links are in German, apply http://translate.google.com/ when needed.
you honestly wish to assert that the creation and consumption of child pornography is a myth
No, the myth is that:
1) There is an industry behind it with millions of dollars. - Not the case, it happens for most part non-commercially.
2) That its a real problem. - There is virtually no child porn on public webpages as they would get shut down really quick.
3) That it would actually protect children. - Child abuse happens at home, not on the Internet and not on demand. Also lots of stuff qualified as child porn was produced without harming children (FKK pictures, nude pictures from back when it was legal, pictures they took from themselves, etc.).
that censoring child porn is worse than sanctioning someone just for speaking their political opinion!
With political censorship I at least would know what and why they censor and there would be a public outcry against it, with that whole child porn witch-hunt is a hell of a lot less predictable and it also untouchable, as nobody likes to argue against something that is supposed to "protecting the children".
Or to put it in practical terms: Wikileaks.de got raided by the police because it provides copies of a censorship lists and has a good chance to get put on one of those censorship lists itself in the next few month in Germany. None of that happened directly due to oppression of political opinion, all of that happens under the cover of childporn, while its really just the former.
The trouble with childporn is that its a perfect tool to shut people up. Don't like somebody? Mail him childporn and let the police raid his home. Public branding of "child porn consumer" will in turn to a good job that even those that might agree with him, distance themselves from that person. You can't pull stunts like that with political speech without getting caught. And no, thats not fiction, a case quite a bit like that has happened to a German politician just a few weeks ago.
censoring child pornography is nothing remotely like censoring political speech
Its actually worse. Censoring political speech at least tackles a real concern, it tackles it for all the wrong reason, but at least its a real enough issue. The whole hunt on child porn on the other side is nothing more then a witch hunt, that whole child molesting mafia that the politician like to focus on, just doesn't exist in reality. Even worse, the censoring, as implemented today, isn't even removing the child porn, the server stay are up and running and everybody who knows how setup an alternative DNS can still get it. So not only is it not working, the whole reason on why to censor is also a big fat lie. And of course implementing a information censorship infrastructure will quickly find use aside from childporn.
Thats why don't just copy data with rsync, but use its --backup option as well.
Are you sure that other technologies are more save? The people that die through the pollution produced by coal power plants might not die the same spectacular way as those that die through radiation poisoning, but they die non the less. Same is true for many other technologies. With nuclear stuff you simply have all the deadly stuff in one tiny spot, instead of spreading all over the world.
Expect of course that was it presented was pure fantasy, not reality. CoD is deeply routed in military propaganda, not in actual real wars.
All well and true, but for me that worked only for the first 15 minutes of Half Life 2. After that the game quickly falls apart. Not knowing things and feeling confused is all right and good as a start, because thats just where your character might be, but it just doesn't work when your job is to safe the world, as that is a thing that should require knowledge and talent which you should gain in the course of the game. But what Half Life 2 does is basically world saving by lucky coincidence, without any proper backstory, missions to accomplish or any clear structure, thats neither very interesting nor does it make good storytelling. Having G-man fucking with the timeline of course doesn't make things any better.
Mystery is a good way to start a story, but its a terrible one to end it on, because then it becomes just way to clear that the writers follow the "make shit up as we go" kind of story writing and that never leads to satisfying conclusions.
Read my post again, under certain circumstances xterm *is* processor intensive (or well, gnome-term to be exactly, don't use xterm) and its not IO, its drawing millions of anti-alised characters to a large screen, which is always slow in software.
Take xterm for example, what possible benefits could be reaped?
How about just being faster? You might not notice that your terminal is slow when you type in stuff, but when you have an app that produces large amounts of output, say a game printing debugging stuff, Wine producing warnings or something like strace it has quite a noticeable impact on the performance and things will go quite a lot faster when you redirect the output to a file instead of to the terminal.
To really have the full benefit of multi-core, you simply need all applications to take advantage of it. I am kind of tired of having to wait for an app to finish while my computer is only utilizing 50% of the available computing power and that amount of underutilization will get much worse when we move to 32 cores or more a few years down the line.
On Wikipedia you might find either, on alternate days.
No, you won't. Because those articles tend to be heavily guarded and reversed in a manner of minutes, if not seconds. Also Wikipedia is on its way to get stable article versions, so the latest article hack won't show up to normal users unless it is first checked. Your whole idea about Wikipedia seems to come from fantasy land, not reality. Wikipedia never was a tool to print everybody's opinion, quite the opposite, it will only allow things that have well proper sources. Can you find sources for lot of crazy quack? Sure, but such stuff won't end up in Wikipedia as "The Truth[tm]", it will end up as alternative theory deep down in the article properly sourced, along with all the good sources on why it is wrong.
Wikipedia is a silly idea that is just getting worse all the time.
And yet, time and time again when compared to "real" Encyclopedias it come out just as good if not better.
Sorting them out is important, and you will never, ever be able to sort them out using Wikipedia as a reference.
Ok, so where is that "Ministry of Truth" that is going to decide the one true world view? You can't find it in science, as science doesn't work by defining truth, but by repeatably testing claims, if they are found out to be wrong and replaced by better ones, happens all the time and really isn't that different from how Wikipedia works.
The whole reason why Wikipedia is awesome is because it never claimed to be "The Truth" and have the one true answer for everything. Wikipedia is a collection of articles, most of them heavily sourced and along with that you have editing history and talk pages. If you don't trust the article itself, its trivial to check the Talk page, the history and the sources itself. That is something that you can't do with a newspaper or a TV show, as they never bother to tell you all their sources. Also its utterly stupid to paint this incident as a fault of Wikipedia. Wikipedia now has the correct information, while all your newspaper will have the wrong one forever and I doubt that most of them will bother to print a correction.
Is Wikipedia perfect? Certainly not. The stable versions are overdue and their deletionism is really annoying, but for all its fault, its most freaking awesome encyclopedia man kind has.
In terms of hardware multi-cores are delivering quite fine, its only the software that is lacking behind a lot, as todays programming language are pretty ill suited for parallel programming, but then the brain itself is a parallel processor, so that might not be that big of a problem for AI.
And anyway, just imagine a ship full of these these. Just because we might no longer be able to cram everything on a single chip, doesn't mean that we won't have a shitload of computing power in the future. The only real problem I see in slowing down Kurzweil's vision is the lack of a market. Its like the flying car thing, of course we can build them, but there wouldn't be many people with enough money to actually buy them, so they never got created in the first place.
life is almost exactly like it was 40 years ago.
Thats because humans are still humans, not because technology hasn't involved at an rapid pace. Sure, cars still drive you from A to B, television still shows you the daily news and newspapers haven't really changed in a while, but on the other site I can buy for 100 bucks a device that can store two years of non-stop, 24/7 music, more music then I will likely ever listen to in my entire lifetime or be able to buy legally. For as little as ten bucks I can buy a finger nail sized storage device that can store all software ever released on the NES, C64, AtariST and Amiga combined. With the right phone you can today live stream video to the Internet, combine that with a big HD and you can start recording your complete life 24/7. On GoogleEarth I can see my house and soon I'll be able to virtually drive by it. Millions of people waste gazillions of hours in a virtual world as WoW or SecondLife. And another million of people have written an online encyclopedia.
Not impressive enough? Well, there are certainly things that haven't changed much. Programming computers still feels like a rather low tech. Lisp is 50 years old and yet programming languages still haven't really surpassed it in a significant way and GUIs haven't really changed all that much either. And no direct brain-input in sight, we still have to read and watch information to consume it. But doesn't stop the progress in other areas to be pretty gigantic.
people don't know their neighbors and can't let their kids wander the neighborhood.
Thats the result of the real world becoming more and more replaced by a virtual one, when you have a mobile and can phone all your friends anytime you want, there just isn't much need to talk to your neighbor anymore.
iPhones, PDAs, Laptops and all that other stuff costs just as much if not more so and yet people carry them around all the time. As long as the devices are not super fragile, there really isn't that much to worry about, after all a book doesn't react all that good either when dipped into water.