I'm a musician, and I told it some songs I liked and it's playing a customized radio station of songs that I should like... and it's dead on.
The best part is that you can ask it "Why are you playing this song", and it will explain it to you.. in terms of the song structure and things like that.
These are real people analyzing these songs.. this seems like a great service to find new music from bands you don't know. Taking bands out of the context of a "social circle" (like Amazon and itunes do by simply looking at 'people who purchased this also purchased...') is a GREAT idea.
I urge you to support this project if you are a music lover, or at least check it out and listen for a couple hours.
Anyone else find it funny that if you watch the demo on their website, during installation the software the default security question is: "What's your favorite movie?"
Aint nothing like giving the program a head start;-)
Tools like Firefox's "remember password" make these kinds of shared identity systems obosolete, don't they? Who cares how many passwords you have to remember? You don't have to remember ANY of them anymore, really.
Not really.. if you aren't remembering passwords, you're pretty much out of luck when you go to another terminal, or forget to backup your firefox directory and lose your data.
Maybe this type of system isn't for you, but I can definitely see some use for it.
Also, just because something is complicated doesn't mean it'll eventually get exploited. Things can be complex, yet well thought out and secure.
Re:What kind of glasses are you wearing?
on
The Phantom...Lives?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Also, you wont be spending $300 on the box. He makes that clear.. the box will cost little or no money... and that's what makes this so appealing. Say it costs 20 bucks a month.. say I'd spend 800 dollars on a gaming PC. That's 40 months of gaming...
Re:What kind of glasses are you wearing?
on
The Phantom...Lives?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
And when you participate in this scheme, what exactly do you own?
I don't know.. what do you own when you purchase a satellite radio receiver? You listen to the songs they decided to play, and you trust that they stay true to offering the best music for whatever channel you listen to. If the Phantom Network treats me as good as Sirius, I don't feel bad about not owning the content. I'm paying a service fee for premium, easily accessible content.
There are very few games I will play after the initial release.. I could care less if I own GTA6 after I beat it.. and it's perfect for sports games.. I don't have to blow 50 bucks a year for each title.. I can play it, when the new one comes out, I play that one.
If you care about owning that kind of media, I can see where you are coming from. I wouldn't use this type of service for music or movies, but when it comes to games, honestly, I would rather pay for a subscription based service, and I think there are other casual gamers out there that feel the same way.
Your argument isn't original.. it's been brought in every thread about any type of subscription based service. All I was saying is that if this thing works out, you can count me in. $9.00 a game so I can play it for a couple months is much cheaper than $50.
For those who care, go spend $450 on your next-gen console, and $50 bucks a game.. but I'm tired of my game and console graveyard building up and wasting space. Next stop, eBay!
Did anyone else actually watch the video? I think this is a great idea. The pricing model seems right too... he wants to go the "cable tv" route, where you pay a monthly fee with a contract and get the hardware for free, or the "satellite radio" route where you pay a little for the hardware, and don't have to bind yourself with a yearly contract.
Either way, this is a great idea. It obviously plays PC games (as I understand it). I currently run two linux machines, no dual booting or anything, and the the only thing I miss from a few years ago when I ran windows is the gaming. This console will be a dream come true.. it's powerful, and it'll only cost a fraction of the price if I were to buy another box just to install windows on for games.
I really hope this does well.. I'm looking forward to it.
This guy rocks.. he did the music for The 7th Guest way back... Do you guys remember that? It had the second disk that was like live recorded versions instead of MIDI. I miss those days when people cared about the quality of the releases.
Anyways, I'm glad he made it available for us to hear.. it's interesting to hear about the things that go on behind the scenes that you don't hear about normally.
Response is subdued because the Slashdot community is still reeling over the shocking news that the Wayback Machine web archive archives web pages, even extremely popular ones like Google.
It's funny you should say that. I posted the parent, and since that time I've been looking at the google article and reading everyones comments.. And that was almost 30 mins ago!;-)
I'm stunned that there is not more of a response to this news here on Slashdot. OpenLaszlo is a great product. You can author some really nice applications using their framework, and it's open source to top if off.
The ability to deploy standalone SWF files is most definitely a direct result of the folks over at Laszlo opening the source. Before, the server side "engine" was, really, their product. You would have to install that in order to serve up a Laszlo application. This is just like Macromedia/Adobe's business model with Flex. When they opened the source, the first thing they wanted to do was be able to publish stand alone SWF files because now the business model no longer centered around their server app.
So how do they make their money now? Well, they've got a few big time clients using their technology, and who better to apply the technology than those who designed it? Laszlo now hopes to generate cash flow by offering professional laszlo development. This is the type of business plan I would love to see more software vendors follow. I really hope Laszlo thrives as a company.. it would really make a statement. It's a great addition to the open source community in an area that has been littered with closed-source solutions (RIA).
I would think that's proof that the Mozilla/Firefox guys did NOT ignore the warning... not proof that they did. I'm assuming you meant that.. it is Monday after all;-)
If the Janet Jackson incident would have been on HBO, or some other cable channel, it wouldn't have been a problem. That would be the equivalent of Sirius or XM. However, it happened on a network station, one that is freely available to anyone with a TV and an antenna (much like FM radio)... that's why the FCC was able to penalize the station/Janet.
I haven't gotten a chance to try out the beta, but I guess my question to you now is: How easy is it to flip between renderers? All the screen shots I've seen only show where in the pref. panel to do that. Is there a hot key, or an accessible button?
Right click / open in IE is pretty quick when using the extension. Does the new Netscape provide a faster/easier way?
But really, how hard is it to open up IE and view the page to QA your site? You mentioned that it "would alleviate any need for IE"... but what are you going to do, uninstall IE? You still need the control in order to render pages in IE in Netscape... and uninstalling IE isn't exactly easy to do.
What did you do in order to get it to work under Linux? Is it still compatible with iTunes on a Windows/Mac PC after writing to it with whatever you use?
I know your reply was probably was probably intended to be flamebait, but for what it's worth, I recently installed Gentoo on a new machine to try it out. Historically I run Slackware on most of machines, and RedHat on a couple. Gentoo was installed on my best machine (hardware wise), hence the reason why I felt it was fast. What I was trying to say is that when I install arch over it, I noticed the system was much more responsive, and it was obvious that the apparent "speed" of my Gentoo system was only because I was finally using Linux on a high-end machine.
I should have revised my statement to say that I think Arch is the best distro for workstations. When it comes to a desktop system, I really don't think it can be beat when weighing in all factors.
I think it's great to see a smaller distro getting some exposure. The arch linux forums are a great place to head for information, and the packages are kept up to date. I would still recommend this distro...
Arch has been amazing. I've run many different distros, but none have compared to Arch. First off, the speed is incredible. I thought my Gentoo system flew, but Arch felt a lot faster (don't forget: Arch is a binary dist.). The packages available are up to date, and very easy to install with pacman. Pacman is also resolves dependencies quickly, which I definitely like (compared to, say, 'yum').
Within the first night I had Arch up and running I was already building my own packages using ABS. There is also a "trusted user repository" website where you can find packages that might not be in the official respository, though I usually just build the package myself.
My favorite thing is the fact that you can download the "core" arch CD distro which is actually under 100megs. You install the core, and simply use pacman to install the stuff you want. I finally feel like my linux system has only the software I want/need, instead of tons of applications/utilities/libraries I will never use.
Arch doesn't put anything in/usr/local.
I've been using Arch for a few months now, and I have found the idea of putting certain things in/opt rather nice.
Right now it's reporting 2,312K + 2,148K + 1,792K of memory usage, as well as 0 percent of my CPU. It's got three processes running for it. Not too bad.. fyi, explorer takes up 10,696K, aim takes up 9... firefox takes up 41,392K.
Somehow I think Google didn't just take their "Google engine" and throw it in an.exe file. In fact, the amount of files on a typical computer could be solved using some kind of SQL database engine, or a simple XML storage system. I don't think this application is about the engine, but about the indexing that takes place. Unless you have a billions of files on your computer, the Google engine would be overkill.
I'd go as far to say that this product has absolutely nothing to do with the "google engine". Just another nice app courtesy of the Google labs. The way it integrates into google.com is kind of freaky, though.
Yeah you're right.. I should have expanded on that. Bandwidth is an issue though, becaues the amount of seamingly "real-time" data that would have to go down the pipe to support, say, 20 human players at one time would be incredible. Plus, given the instability of a lot of home network connections, the likelyhood of one person causing a lag in the game would be high, so yes, latency would be a huge contributor to diminishing the gameplay.
I do, however, agree that this capability might not be too far off, and most likely because of the transport medium getting better, not the programming techniques or anything.
A lot of it comes down to bandwidth problems. Compared to sports games, RPG-ish games take considerably less updating and refreshing, and are also less time crucial than sports games.
If each person could control a player on the team, you would have to have every client synched, otherwise the play experience would be terrible. It's no problem if one person happens to see you walk in a slightly different path than someone else does in an online RPG, but if I'm playing football, you better be running the same route that my fellow defender sees. These types of synchronization problems are what made simple two player online sports games take so long to perfect. A lot of games use some type of motion prediction algorithm to make these games seem smoother than they are, but this is unacceptable for sports games where accurate "reproductions" of athletic skill need to be created using joystick commands.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a musician, and I told it some songs I liked and it's playing a customized radio station of songs that I should like... and it's dead on.
The best part is that you can ask it "Why are you playing this song", and it will explain it to you.. in terms of the song structure and things like that.
These are real people analyzing these songs.. this seems like a great service to find new music from bands you don't know. Taking bands out of the context of a "social circle" (like Amazon and itunes do by simply looking at 'people who purchased this also purchased...') is a GREAT idea.
I urge you to support this project if you are a music lover, or at least check it out and listen for a couple hours.
Anyone else find it funny that if you watch the demo on their website, during installation the software the default security question is: "What's your favorite movie?"
;-)
Aint nothing like giving the program a head start
Tools like Firefox's "remember password" make these kinds of shared identity systems obosolete, don't they? Who cares how many passwords you have to remember? You don't have to remember ANY of them anymore, really.
Not really.. if you aren't remembering passwords, you're pretty much out of luck when you go to another terminal, or forget to backup your firefox directory and lose your data.
Maybe this type of system isn't for you, but I can definitely see some use for it.
Also, just because something is complicated doesn't mean it'll eventually get exploited. Things can be complex, yet well thought out and secure.
Also, you wont be spending $300 on the box. He makes that clear.. the box will cost little or no money... and that's what makes this so appealing. Say it costs 20 bucks a month.. say I'd spend 800 dollars on a gaming PC. That's 40 months of gaming...
And when you participate in this scheme, what exactly do you own?
I don't know.. what do you own when you purchase a satellite radio receiver? You listen to the songs they decided to play, and you trust that they stay true to offering the best music for whatever channel you listen to. If the Phantom Network treats me as good as Sirius, I don't feel bad about not owning the content. I'm paying a service fee for premium, easily accessible content.
There are very few games I will play after the initial release.. I could care less if I own GTA6 after I beat it.. and it's perfect for sports games.. I don't have to blow 50 bucks a year for each title.. I can play it, when the new one comes out, I play that one.
If you care about owning that kind of media, I can see where you are coming from. I wouldn't use this type of service for music or movies, but when it comes to games, honestly, I would rather pay for a subscription based service, and I think there are other casual gamers out there that feel the same way.
Your argument isn't original.. it's been brought in every thread about any type of subscription based service. All I was saying is that if this thing works out, you can count me in. $9.00 a game so I can play it for a couple months is much cheaper than $50.
For those who care, go spend $450 on your next-gen console, and $50 bucks a game.. but I'm tired of my game and console graveyard building up and wasting space. Next stop, eBay!
Did anyone else actually watch the video? I think this is a great idea. The pricing model seems right too... he wants to go the "cable tv" route, where you pay a monthly fee with a contract and get the hardware for free, or the "satellite radio" route where you pay a little for the hardware, and don't have to bind yourself with a yearly contract.
Either way, this is a great idea. It obviously plays PC games (as I understand it). I currently run two linux machines, no dual booting or anything, and the the only thing I miss from a few years ago when I ran windows is the gaming. This console will be a dream come true.. it's powerful, and it'll only cost a fraction of the price if I were to buy another box just to install windows on for games.
I really hope this does well.. I'm looking forward to it.
This guy rocks.. he did the music for The 7th Guest way back... Do you guys remember that? It had the second disk that was like live recorded versions instead of MIDI. I miss those days when people cared about the quality of the releases.
Anyways, I'm glad he made it available for us to hear.. it's interesting to hear about the things that go on behind the scenes that you don't hear about normally.
Response is subdued because the Slashdot community is still reeling over the shocking news that the Wayback Machine web archive archives web pages, even extremely popular ones like Google.
;-)
It's funny you should say that. I posted the parent, and since that time I've been looking at the google article and reading everyones comments.. And that was almost 30 mins ago!
I'm stunned that there is not more of a response to this news here on Slashdot. OpenLaszlo is a great product. You can author some really nice applications using their framework, and it's open source to top if off.
The ability to deploy standalone SWF files is most definitely a direct result of the folks over at Laszlo opening the source. Before, the server side "engine" was, really, their product. You would have to install that in order to serve up a Laszlo application. This is just like Macromedia/Adobe's business model with Flex. When they opened the source, the first thing they wanted to do was be able to publish stand alone SWF files because now the business model no longer centered around their server app.
So how do they make their money now? Well, they've got a few big time clients using their technology, and who better to apply the technology than those who designed it? Laszlo now hopes to generate cash flow by offering professional laszlo development. This is the type of business plan I would love to see more software vendors follow. I really hope Laszlo thrives as a company.. it would really make a statement. It's a great addition to the open source community in an area that has been littered with closed-source solutions (RIA).
Just get a nightly if you don't want to wait. It's fixed on the trunk since April 1st.
Here's a link
I would think that's proof that the Mozilla/Firefox guys did NOT ignore the warning... not proof that they did. I'm assuming you meant that.. it is Monday after all ;-)
If the Janet Jackson incident would have been on HBO, or some other cable channel, it wouldn't have been a problem. That would be the equivalent of Sirius or XM. However, it happened on a network station, one that is freely available to anyone with a TV and an antenna (much like FM radio)... that's why the FCC was able to penalize the station/Janet.
I haven't gotten a chance to try out the beta, but I guess my question to you now is: How easy is it to flip between renderers? All the screen shots I've seen only show where in the pref. panel to do that. Is there a hot key, or an accessible button?
Right click / open in IE is pretty quick when using the extension. Does the new Netscape provide a faster/easier way?
But really, how hard is it to open up IE and view the page to QA your site? You mentioned that it "would alleviate any need for IE"... but what are you going to do, uninstall IE? You still need the control in order to render pages in IE in Netscape... and uninstalling IE isn't exactly easy to do.
What did you do in order to get it to work under Linux? Is it still compatible with iTunes on a Windows/Mac PC after writing to it with whatever you use?
Links to cases... please :o)
Now this isn't the actual Beta though, right? It's a demo of the beta (meaning it's time limited, right?).
I know your reply was probably was probably intended to be flamebait, but for what it's worth, I recently installed Gentoo on a new machine to try it out. Historically I run Slackware on most of machines, and RedHat on a couple. Gentoo was installed on my best machine (hardware wise), hence the reason why I felt it was fast. What I was trying to say is that when I install arch over it, I noticed the system was much more responsive, and it was obvious that the apparent "speed" of my Gentoo system was only because I was finally using Linux on a high-end machine.
I should have revised my statement to say that I think Arch is the best distro for workstations. When it comes to a desktop system, I really don't think it can be beat when weighing in all factors.
I think it's great to see a smaller distro getting some exposure. The arch linux forums are a great place to head for information, and the packages are kept up to date. I would still recommend this distro...
Arch has been amazing. I've run many different distros, but none have compared to Arch. First off, the speed is incredible. I thought my Gentoo system flew, but Arch felt a lot faster (don't forget: Arch is a binary dist.). The packages available are up to date, and very easy to install with pacman. Pacman is also resolves dependencies quickly, which I definitely like (compared to, say, 'yum').
Within the first night I had Arch up and running I was already building my own packages using ABS. There is also a "trusted user repository" website where you can find packages that might not be in the official respository, though I usually just build the package myself.
My favorite thing is the fact that you can download the "core" arch CD distro which is actually under 100megs. You install the core, and simply use pacman to install the stuff you want. I finally feel like my linux system has only the software I want/need, instead of tons of applications/utilities/libraries I will never use.
If you haven't used Arch yet, give it a shot!
Arch doesn't put anything in /usr/local.
I've been using Arch for a few months now, and I have found the idea of putting certain things in /opt rather nice.
Right now it's reporting 2,312K + 2,148K + 1,792K of memory usage, as well as 0 percent of my CPU. It's got three processes running for it. Not too bad.. fyi, explorer takes up 10,696K, aim takes up 9... firefox takes up 41,392K.
Somehow I think Google didn't just take their "Google engine" and throw it in an .exe file. In fact, the amount of files on a typical computer could be solved using some kind of SQL database engine, or a simple XML storage system. I don't think this application is about the engine, but about the indexing that takes place. Unless you have a billions of files on your computer, the Google engine would be overkill.
I'd go as far to say that this product has absolutely nothing to do with the "google engine". Just another nice app courtesy of the Google labs. The way it integrates into google.com is kind of freaky, though.
Yeah you're right.. I should have expanded on that. Bandwidth is an issue though, becaues the amount of seamingly "real-time" data that would have to go down the pipe to support, say, 20 human players at one time would be incredible. Plus, given the instability of a lot of home network connections, the likelyhood of one person causing a lag in the game would be high, so yes, latency would be a huge contributor to diminishing the gameplay.
I do, however, agree that this capability might not be too far off, and most likely because of the transport medium getting better, not the programming techniques or anything.
A lot of it comes down to bandwidth problems. Compared to sports games, RPG-ish games take considerably less updating and refreshing, and are also less time crucial than sports games.
If each person could control a player on the team, you would have to have every client synched, otherwise the play experience would be terrible. It's no problem if one person happens to see you walk in a slightly different path than someone else does in an online RPG, but if I'm playing football, you better be running the same route that my fellow defender sees. These types of synchronization problems are what made simple two player online sports games take so long to perfect. A lot of games use some type of motion prediction algorithm to make these games seem smoother than they are, but this is unacceptable for sports games where accurate "reproductions" of athletic skill need to be created using joystick commands.
I hope someday this does become a reality though.