I've had read TFA when it was new and I also thought that's a silly thing to say.
But we are propably very close at the end of the line for what the API DirectX can do for 3D graphics. We can do more polys, more lighting, higher res textures and that's it. Trouble is this is very expensive to create for games and AAA games have a lot of trouble recouping production costs.
In the other corner we have Intel beavering away on real-time rendering.
And the bugbear around the corner is that we are approaching the uncanny valley in games. Fast. Which is why we get a lot of cartoony only semi-realistic games. Think Brink faces only rendered at photorealism. That'd be problematic.
Also the better the graphics look the higher the impact of glitchy/inplausible animations will be. Which also are part of the uncanny valley. Think of those rubber-limb ragdoll animations. In Kingdoms of Amalur/Skyrim you could see big fat trolls rolling and flailing around as if they had no sinews and muscles.
Aaaand of course with all those console ports the best you can expect is DirectX9 level of graphics in games. With some luck you may even get a hires texture pack.Batman: Arkham City springs to mind. With all the DirectX11/nVidia hype and the brouhaha at release we have to ask ourselves if the hassle was really worth it.
And with mobile devices advancing as they are and multi-plattform support being a thing, locking yourself into a proprietary API of a dying plattform is not a wise move.
No DirectX after DirectX12 is a tall claim but it may be a while before we see another one.
I know that voice recognition has come a long way these 20 years. Back in the day we used ViaVoice for voice interaction with a robot. It worked quite nicely...unless we took it to an expo.
Even if the tech were flawless, voice control is very tedious and socially awkward if the people around you do not know what you are doing. You need large tasks with few parameters to get rid of the tedium. Ambient problems will remain. Awkwardness will be at the level of talking to a bluetooth headset.
Google Glass doesn't just present information; it can record, too. And if you record every little thing you see, it's possible to review and discover small, but critically important events later.....
Haven't you noticed that this is half of what makes Google Glass so horrifying?
What I find horrifying is that all of you seem to have either unlimited mobile upstream bandwidth OR unlimited storage on the go.
Anytime I hear a discussion about these glasses I get the impression I'm the only one who has neither of those two.
Where do you suggest to store this continuous video feed? Don't say on some kind of server somewhere(aka cloud) since mobile upstream bandwidth and cost will propably be a bitch.
I'm getting nerdgasms whenever I see a feature on these things but it still has problems:
-no AR since it is not in your direct field of view
-no proper UI and very limited interaction with it
-bone induction of sound means you propably can't listen to music with it
-may need specialised lenses for glasses since the display is close and you need to look up
But I will love these things and putz around with them a lot. If they can deliver at 750 bucks early next year these things are so going to be mine.
Really? Well, if I was riding shotgun and the guy next to us at the traffic light was using his mobile, I'd hold my shoe to my ear and start gesticulating.
Because I'm just that kind of person.
I can second that. It is really awkward to keep eyecontact since lazy eye sends you confusing signals.
That's got nothing to do with discrimination or being rude. It just makes face to face communication harder. I usually get by by maintaining eye contact with only one eye and would use the glasses to reminde me "Mr. XXX note: look into left eye".
Surgery is propably better if it is low-risk. I dunno if you actually had any problems with your vision since most of that goes on in your brain which compensates for an amazing number of things.
Yep, overlays over your surroundings will be hard to do since it is not in your field of view. True AR would require the display to be slap band in the middle of your fov and would also need to be on both eyes. You might get away with one camera if it were right in the center between your eyes but then you would give up on spatial awareness.
Geocaching, public transportation information near your position, incoming calls, email, time&date, navigation, not so sneaky teleprompter, accidently dropping it to get a good view up a skirt... that's what this is for.
I wonder about the UI. We need a completely new UI paradigm to interact with this thing since voice is...awkward. You'll be talking to stuff that only you see. Not ideal. Gestures that are registered by a camera that faces away from your body and at that height may also be problematic. Also lighting sensitive. And without a UI to interact with this thing you will severely limit its usefullness.
Bugger me if I go about shouting at this thing in full view of the public. Mobile headsets are bad enough.
You could do an AR version of Angry Birds. Simulate a slingshot with your fingers, have the camera capture that and have the glasses display animated irritaded poultry crashing through a Starbucks window to the indignation of the porcines located within.
Which will be harder to achieve than everybody thinks. The display is not in your direct field of view, so overlays over your environment would be hard to align. The camera doesn't see your lower body parts(which I consider a blessing), so no hip-shots. Only one camera makes spatial awareness quite hard.
So anybody who actually accomplishes that with any success will be my personal hero.
It takes only a couple of specialised applications for it to make it a must-buy for a couple of professionals. Just don't expect it to be usable for reading a book since it is just outside of your direct field of view and can display just about one tweet at a time.
I honestly doubt it has anything to do with ads. Keep in mind that, ever since they bought Motorola, Google is now also a hardware company. If they can put out a must-have hardware device with decent margins, there will be absolutely no need to have ads anywhere near the thing.
And since this thing has not that much screen real estate ads will propably only come in form of a directory service. The only kind of automated unsolicited invitations to spend money would come as it does now with Google Now.
"Mr. Lister, it is dinner time. I've already located the nearest Indian restaurant, preordered dinosaur vindaloo and have informed them to roll up a couple of kegs from the cellar."
The worst thing that could happen is "Does anyone want some toast?" when your household appliances also connect to the display.
"I've detected that you are leaving the bar alone. I found 14 houses of ill repute in your area, and 3 are fairly close to you. Shall I make a reservation?"
"According to your browsing preferences I have narrowed these down to 3 establishments that offer multiple participants but only one cup."
I think he is under the impression that these things send a constant video feed wherever you go. I wish I had that sort of relyable bandwidth and a contract that wouldn't bankrupt me to achieve this.
A lot of the complaints lodged against those things have not been properly thought through.
They are not directly in your vield of view and offer too little screen real estate for huge ads. And since this is Google, Flash ads are out of the question. This is not an Oculus Rift. Completely different thing.
The consumer versions are rumored to come with a 750$ price tag at the end of the year(don't expect to get one before 2014, though). That's still too much for a mass market but I will definitely get me a pair of those.
They propably are incapable to display more information than you get in a tweet and I may have to have a sit-down with an optician to get me specialised glasses so I will propably have to pay more to make them actually usable. Not sure about using bone induction for sound, tho. The tech has been around for a long time but I doubt it will be really usable for phone calls. Could be wrong, never tried it myself.
There's not enough screen real estate for a lot of ads. It's more like a heads-up display. With a very low resolution. I think you guys might confuse this with the Oculus Rift.
If this thing isn't overly expensive I will get one just to putz around with it. Dunno if it has any practical use. I could put weather information on it but I don't need specialised hardware to know wether I am being rained upon or not.
The biggest issue I see with it is user interface. There is a word for people who shout at stuff only they can see. So voice control might not be the best way to do it. The same word also applies to people who gesticulate at things only they can see. And gesticulate you will. Especially if your mates deliberately send you naughty images. Which they already do.
Depends on where you live. In most European countries the amount of overtime you can do and how you get compensated for it is heavily regulated. And any employer offering US working conditions would find themselves on the losing end of a lawsuit AND get a lot of press for it.
Which doesn't mean that we don't regularly not comply with these regulations. But that is done in agreement with the employees who in turn have the option to opt out and will get handsome bonuses in pay and time off for overtime.
A couple of my clients have serious issues with the bills we send them. We bill by the hour nicely broken down by day and activity. We often get ourselves into death marches for which we will take higher hourly rates and need double the effort in project management. Last year I myself had a period where I worked 16 hrs a day each day for a couple of weeks and during the Christmas holidays(and went on a nice long vacation on the bonuses we divided amongst us and time off due to amassed overtime). The client was the Asian tentacle of one of our larger corporate behemoths. The European HQ told us not to bill more than 10 hrs a day and nothing for Sunday because their working agreements also extended to contractors. We got official encouragement to invent employees to divide that time more evenly.
In short you need regulation. Best way to do it is having an agreement between unions and employers. Worse way would be to have regulation by law. And yu are thouroughly fux0red if you need a legally mandated minimum wage to make sure that your people can actually LIVE on what they earn during 40hrs a week.
Salaried pay only is bad when your market for employment is heavily stacked against the employees.
That type of translation is fairly bad. Like, really bad.
You can't translate word by word even if by some insane miracle the grammatical integrity of the sentences remains intact.
Literal translations are shit. They do not take into account that you can't literally translate phrases but rather need to replace them with substitutes in your target language. Semantics of words also widely differ between languages. Words can have multiple holonymes and they can differ between source and target language and you need a lot of context. Since holonymy also tends to shift over time you will have to build an awefully huge database for semantic relations that also includes time period and cultural bias. The research has already been done, building the database can be automated to some extent but the most egregious words will have to be manually corrected.
Worst of all is translating from English into just about anything. That language is rife with words that are rich in the multiple holonym department. With the added fun of polysemes. It is also famous for its fair share of homographs. Then add in the cultural dimorphism of English(UK)/English(US). An Englishman calling you an ass might refer to you as a donkey. A US American calling you an ass will propably refer to a popular body part that's fond to be sat on. The former is noteworthy, the latter is punchworthy.
Witticisms and word play are hard to translate and need to be completely rewritten in the traget language. I've read a couple of good Terry Pratchett translations and even more really bad ones.
If I need manuals I will get a professional to write them. If I need a translation then I will hire the original writer to have a sit down with a professional translator. And I marvel at the prices they ask. They are like 10% of what they should ask.
When we need freelancers we typically also go through agencies. They are nothing new. You call them up, send them the required skill set and be done with it. They know that they won't be used again if their take is too high or if they sell you a dud.
Headhunters OTOH are despicable. They try to poach your employees just to sell you back somebody for the new vacancy they created. I get a couple of calls myself and when pressed for more information they clam up.
RTFA. Apple apparently tolerated straight sex from this publisher, but kicked them out when they put in something gay themed that was much more tame. And the outrage isn't "faux" and it isn't even over discrimination. The outrage is that Apple pretends to be a modern and liberal company, but then behaves like some Christian conservative family organization. And the solution is simply not to buy Apple, for the simple reason that their products are boring, their content is boring, and it is beyond anybody's power to change that.
The outrage is even broader.
If stuff in their shop doesn't match their whims then letting it should not go in it. Never. Not be put in it. Once it has been on the shop they can't get rid of it. That should teach them due dilligence.
This is also precisely the reason why each of my Amazon purchases get deDRMed and backupped. You can't trust those guys either.
No, my intent of this purchase wasn't obtaining a license at the price of the real paper thing. No, you don't get to revoke that license you somehow insist on having granted me. Yes, it is absolutely my right to have a USABLE backup out of your control.
Honestly it is high time to deal with this sale of electronic goods thing. The licensing model that has been used is being abused to the detriment of the customer. We're less fussy about the sale of guns, for pete's sake!
Slashdot Mirror
April, 2013 nVidia tells investors Kepler Mobile chip will be powerful enough to run DirectX 11 graphics in cellphones
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/11/nvidia-shows-off-stunning-graphics-with-kepler-mobile-chip/
Might be BS or whenever. They were talking to investors.
Hrm. I only remember luke-warm reviews and claims this game was un-LucasArty. Could be reviewers being reviewers.
I will have to look for it on GoG or Steam.
I've had read TFA when it was new and I also thought that's a silly thing to say.
But we are propably very close at the end of the line for what the API DirectX can do for 3D graphics. We can do more polys, more lighting, higher res textures and that's it. Trouble is this is very expensive to create for games and AAA games have a lot of trouble recouping production costs.
In the other corner we have Intel beavering away on real-time rendering.
And the bugbear around the corner is that we are approaching the uncanny valley in games. Fast. Which is why we get a lot of cartoony only semi-realistic games. Think Brink faces only rendered at photorealism. That'd be problematic.
Also the better the graphics look the higher the impact of glitchy/inplausible animations will be. Which also are part of the uncanny valley. Think of those rubber-limb ragdoll animations. In Kingdoms of Amalur/Skyrim you could see big fat trolls rolling and flailing around as if they had no sinews and muscles.
Aaaand of course with all those console ports the best you can expect is DirectX9 level of graphics in games. With some luck you may even get a hires texture pack.Batman: Arkham City springs to mind. With all the DirectX11/nVidia hype and the brouhaha at release we have to ask ourselves if the hassle was really worth it.
And with mobile devices advancing as they are and multi-plattform support being a thing, locking yourself into a proprietary API of a dying plattform is not a wise move.
No DirectX after DirectX12 is a tall claim but it may be a while before we see another one.
I know that voice recognition has come a long way these 20 years. Back in the day we used ViaVoice for voice interaction with a robot. It worked quite nicely...unless we took it to an expo.
Even if the tech were flawless, voice control is very tedious and socially awkward if the people around you do not know what you are doing. You need large tasks with few parameters to get rid of the tedium. Ambient problems will remain. Awkwardness will be at the level of talking to a bluetooth headset.
Google Glass doesn't just present information; it can record, too. And if you record every little thing you see, it's possible to review and discover small, but critically important events later.....
Haven't you noticed that this is half of what makes Google Glass so horrifying?
What I find horrifying is that all of you seem to have either unlimited mobile upstream bandwidth OR unlimited storage on the go.
Anytime I hear a discussion about these glasses I get the impression I'm the only one who has neither of those two.
Where do you suggest to store this continuous video feed? Don't say on some kind of server somewhere(aka cloud) since mobile upstream bandwidth and cost will propably be a bitch.
I'm getting nerdgasms whenever I see a feature on these things but it still has problems:
-no AR since it is not in your direct field of view
-no proper UI and very limited interaction with it
-bone induction of sound means you propably can't listen to music with it
-may need specialised lenses for glasses since the display is close and you need to look up
But I will love these things and putz around with them a lot. If they can deliver at 750 bucks early next year these things are so going to be mine.
Really? Well, if I was riding shotgun and the guy next to us at the traffic light was using his mobile, I'd hold my shoe to my ear and start gesticulating.
Because I'm just that kind of person.
Glassholes is nice. But I will use Glarses.
I can second that. It is really awkward to keep eyecontact since lazy eye sends you confusing signals.
That's got nothing to do with discrimination or being rude. It just makes face to face communication harder. I usually get by by maintaining eye contact with only one eye and would use the glasses to reminde me "Mr. XXX note: look into left eye".
Surgery is propably better if it is low-risk. I dunno if you actually had any problems with your vision since most of that goes on in your brain which compensates for an amazing number of things.
I still look at people oddly when they talk on a blue-tooth headset, because it looks like they're talking to themselves.
What chaps my ass is when they look at me like I'm the crazy one, when I mistakenly think they're talking to me.
With this thing you can send them pictures of how stupid they look.
Yep, overlays over your surroundings will be hard to do since it is not in your field of view. True AR would require the display to be slap band in the middle of your fov and would also need to be on both eyes. You might get away with one camera if it were right in the center between your eyes but then you would give up on spatial awareness.
Geocaching, public transportation information near your position, incoming calls, email, time&date, navigation, not so sneaky teleprompter, accidently dropping it to get a good view up a skirt... that's what this is for.
I wonder about the UI. We need a completely new UI paradigm to interact with this thing since voice is...awkward. You'll be talking to stuff that only you see. Not ideal. Gestures that are registered by a camera that faces away from your body and at that height may also be problematic. Also lighting sensitive. And without a UI to interact with this thing you will severely limit its usefullness.
Bugger me if I go about shouting at this thing in full view of the public. Mobile headsets are bad enough.
You could do an AR version of Angry Birds. Simulate a slingshot with your fingers, have the camera capture that and have the glasses display animated irritaded poultry crashing through a Starbucks window to the indignation of the porcines located within.
Which will be harder to achieve than everybody thinks. The display is not in your direct field of view, so overlays over your environment would be hard to align. The camera doesn't see your lower body parts(which I consider a blessing), so no hip-shots. Only one camera makes spatial awareness quite hard.
So anybody who actually accomplishes that with any success will be my personal hero.
It takes only a couple of specialised applications for it to make it a must-buy for a couple of professionals. Just don't expect it to be usable for reading a book since it is just outside of your direct field of view and can display just about one tweet at a time.
I honestly doubt it has anything to do with ads. Keep in mind that, ever since they bought Motorola, Google is now also a hardware company. If they can put out a must-have hardware device with decent margins, there will be absolutely no need to have ads anywhere near the thing.
And since this thing has not that much screen real estate ads will propably only come in form of a directory service. The only kind of automated unsolicited invitations to spend money would come as it does now with Google Now.
"Mr. Lister, it is dinner time. I've already located the nearest Indian restaurant, preordered dinosaur vindaloo and have informed them to roll up a couple of kegs from the cellar."
The worst thing that could happen is "Does anyone want some toast?" when your household appliances also connect to the display.
"I've detected that you are leaving the bar alone. I found 14 houses of ill repute in your area, and 3 are fairly close to you. Shall I make a reservation?"
"According to your browsing preferences I have narrowed these down to 3 establishments that offer multiple participants but only one cup."
I think he is under the impression that these things send a constant video feed wherever you go. I wish I had that sort of relyable bandwidth and a contract that wouldn't bankrupt me to achieve this.
A lot of the complaints lodged against those things have not been properly thought through.
They are not directly in your vield of view and offer too little screen real estate for huge ads. And since this is Google, Flash ads are out of the question.
This is not an Oculus Rift. Completely different thing.
The consumer versions are rumored to come with a 750$ price tag at the end of the year(don't expect to get one before 2014, though). That's still too much for a mass market but I will definitely get me a pair of those.
They propably are incapable to display more information than you get in a tweet and I may have to have a sit-down with an optician to get me specialised glasses so I will propably have to pay more to make them actually usable. Not sure about using bone induction for sound, tho. The tech has been around for a long time but I doubt it will be really usable for phone calls. Could be wrong, never tried it myself.
There's not enough screen real estate for a lot of ads. It's more like a heads-up display. With a very low resolution. I think you guys might confuse this with the Oculus Rift.
If this thing isn't overly expensive I will get one just to putz around with it. Dunno if it has any practical use. I could put weather information on it but I don't need specialised hardware to know wether I am being rained upon or not.
The biggest issue I see with it is user interface. There is a word for people who shout at stuff only they can see. So voice control might not be the best way to do it. The same word also applies to people who gesticulate at things only they can see. And gesticulate you will. Especially if your mates deliberately send you naughty images. Which they already do.
Depends on where you live. In most European countries the amount of overtime you can do and how you get compensated for it is heavily regulated. And any employer offering US working conditions would find themselves on the losing end of a lawsuit AND get a lot of press for it.
Which doesn't mean that we don't regularly not comply with these regulations. But that is done in agreement with the employees who in turn have the option to opt out and will get handsome bonuses in pay and time off for overtime.
A couple of my clients have serious issues with the bills we send them. We bill by the hour nicely broken down by day and activity. We often get ourselves into death marches for which we will take higher hourly rates and need double the effort in project management. Last year I myself had a period where I worked 16 hrs a day each day for a couple of weeks and during the Christmas holidays(and went on a nice long vacation on the bonuses we divided amongst us and time off due to amassed overtime). The client was the Asian tentacle of one of our larger corporate behemoths. The European HQ told us not to bill more than 10 hrs a day and nothing for Sunday because their working agreements also extended to contractors. We got official encouragement to invent employees to divide that time more evenly.
In short you need regulation. Best way to do it is having an agreement between unions and employers. Worse way would be to have regulation by law. And yu are thouroughly fux0red if you need a legally mandated minimum wage to make sure that your people can actually LIVE on what they earn during 40hrs a week.
Salaried pay only is bad when your market for employment is heavily stacked against the employees.
That type of translation is fairly bad. Like, really bad.
You can't translate word by word even if by some insane miracle the grammatical integrity of the sentences remains intact.
Literal translations are shit. They do not take into account that you can't literally translate phrases but rather need to replace them with substitutes in your target language. Semantics of words also widely differ between languages. Words can have multiple holonymes and they can differ between source and target language and you need a lot of context. Since holonymy also tends to shift over time you will have to build an awefully huge database for semantic relations that also includes time period and cultural bias. The research has already been done, building the database can be automated to some extent but the most egregious words will have to be manually corrected.
Worst of all is translating from English into just about anything. That language is rife with words that are rich in the multiple holonym department. With the added fun of polysemes. It is also famous for its fair share of homographs. Then add in the cultural dimorphism of English(UK)/English(US). An Englishman calling you an ass might refer to you as a donkey. A US American calling you an ass will propably refer to a popular body part that's fond to be sat on. The former is noteworthy, the latter is punchworthy.
Witticisms and word play are hard to translate and need to be completely rewritten in the traget language. I've read a couple of good Terry Pratchett translations and even more really bad ones.
If I need manuals I will get a professional to write them. If I need a translation then I will hire the original writer to have a sit down with a professional translator. And I marvel at the prices they ask. They are like 10% of what they should ask.
When we need freelancers we typically also go through agencies. They are nothing new. You call them up, send them the required skill set and be done with it. They know that they won't be used again if their take is too high or if they sell you a dud.
Headhunters OTOH are despicable. They try to poach your employees just to sell you back somebody for the new vacancy they created. I get a couple of calls myself and when pressed for more information they clam up.
Not porn. But sex. Of the brutal conquest variety. "Judge Dredd: America" springs to mind.
No. I know Apple's policies. That's why I don't buy them.
...unless you give them halberds. Then they at least try.
How do you think stuff gets changed if you aren't emotional about it?
Complacently chewing regurgitated stuff is for bovines. They don't collectively complain about being turned into hamburger.
RTFA. Apple apparently tolerated straight sex from this publisher, but kicked them out when they put in something gay themed that was much more tame. And the outrage isn't "faux" and it isn't even over discrimination. The outrage is that Apple pretends to be a modern and liberal company, but then behaves like some Christian conservative family organization. And the solution is simply not to buy Apple, for the simple reason that their products are boring, their content is boring, and it is beyond anybody's power to change that.
The outrage is even broader.
If stuff in their shop doesn't match their whims then letting it should not go in it. Never. Not be put in it. Once it has been on the shop they can't get rid of it. That should teach them due dilligence.
This is also precisely the reason why each of my Amazon purchases get deDRMed and backupped. You can't trust those guys either.
No, my intent of this purchase wasn't obtaining a license at the price of the real paper thing. No, you don't get to revoke that license you somehow insist on having granted me. Yes, it is absolutely my right to have a USABLE backup out of your control.
Honestly it is high time to deal with this sale of electronic goods thing. The licensing model that has been used is being abused to the detriment of the customer. We're less fussy about the sale of guns, for pete's sake!