this is why keyboards like textblade, with touch sensitive keys that actually don't send an input signal until you push down will be important for vr.
with that kind of keyboard, you can have a u.i. representation of the keyboard (e.g. like if you look down) and you can tell where your fingers are by glows that correspond to what keys you're touching... but the touch doesn't mean that you are entering any text yet. it's just to orient yourself on the keyboard. then you push down on the key as normal and send commands or whatever.
and i hate hate hate that because of it, when a program installs, it has to send cruft all over the freaking drive instead of, in a nice and orderly fashion, just pack all of itself into one self contained folder. i would literally fall to my knees and fellate myself if i never ever had to wonder where a config or settings file was stored ever again.
especially these days, computing is cheap. i daresay that those who have to share the computer with a household is outnumbered by those for whom the computer is genuinely PERSONAL.
and other reasons for putting.dll and files everywhere, like to save disk space by sharing resources... gah - disk drive storage is ludicrously cheap.
howabout we chew through some resources so that we can have a sane, intuitive computing environment?
it seems like for most people, digital reading is fine when it's just "straight ahead" fiction reading. you're approaching the material linearly and with the exception of a couple of flip backs every now and again, you're just going from start to finish one page at a time. i read almost all my novels like this.
it's really different if you're reading a textbook or manual where you might have to access information in a wide variety of places at any moment. in such cases, books tend to be better and faster because you can go immediately to any page that you've dog eared or even by pure muscle memory remember about where it is relative to the thickness of the book. and page flips are instant. try flipping 25 pages with a book looking for information and then doing the same on a kindle. screen refresh on e-paper is still VASTLY inferior to a moist thumb. even in this day, there's all kinds of inexplicable delays in just going to page 124 on digital vs on paper. paper really is superior for instantly going to any page and the interface for doing that is faaaaaaaar better with paper.
there are ways to get close to this speed on a pc or a laptop but only by really changing up the paradigm of how one searches a book for information - i.e. not flipping pages looking but explicitly using the search function. and in any case where you would be looking through the glossary, digital would be better and faster.
not to mention that taking notes on the book pages itself is better and faster in analog. lots of apps where you CAN do this... but none of them are as fast as hiliter and pen in hand.
for learning things like programming, or a graphics program or even the dungeon master's guide, if i could choose only one medium, i prefer paper books with pens and sticky notes and hiliters. ideally though, i'd have both.
i really wish reading and writing code were like literacy.
i've been circling coding for a looooong time and i can do some scripting in maya mel but even there, it's on the order of copying and pasting and writing some connective tissue to make things work.
the problem that i've found is that it's not like literacy where you pick a language and you learn the syntax. that would be GREAT if that were true. but in modern programming, it's also like you have to start learning neurology, biology and psychology at the same time. there is just a tremendous amount of infrastructure whether it's libraries, APIs or different OSs and there's a whole host of just simple questions that would illuminate the "lay of the land" that remain mysteries to me.
it feels like it's something that would have been within grasp back in the c64 days but nowadays, it feels like there's simply too many layers.
perhaps i can get good enough to write programs that input and output to the console....
are you denying that there is such a thing? that we are currently actively cooling parts and attaching heat sinks and radiators for merely decorative purposes?
and if waste heat is an actual phenomenon... why NOT harvest energy from it? complexity is low with no moving parts. price is currently high but as with most things, that can come down with research.
i think this is the most misleading thing about cyberpunk and hollywood hacking tropes... that there is a cyberspace that actually exists in some allegorical way and that a user's avatar can actually "travel" from point to point looking upon and travel to floating pyramids of information. that analogy is totally wrong.
the far more accurate analogy is simply making telephone calls. if you are anywhere at all, you are right smack dab, ass down in chair in front of your computer. and your computer itself doesn't ever travel anywhere. all it is doing is sending and receiving messages. sure, you're getting messages from different nodes but that's just like receiving lots of phone calls from different people.
you can surreptitiously send messages that cause unexpected behavior or make a call under an assumed identity... but ultimately, all hacking is about sending and receiving messages...
and it's amusing how far hollywood and narrative fiction has to go to make that seem dramatically interesting.
if it never or rarely converted to government backed cash, then it is viable. goods and services for bitcoins. that's a closed loop system that can be completely independent of all the players its purporting to avoid.
but since people are buying into and cashing out and even SPECULATING with real currency, then you have an achilles heel.
the point at which conversion happens IS regulated and guarded by government players and is actually and IDEAL place for governments to actually sabotage the entire endeavor if they wanted to.
so until bitcoins slash any and all ties with real currencies and certainly until it loses all DEPENDENCE on them, they are just a new forex player that is highly unstable and insecure.
one thing to remember about the birthday problem is that in a given classroom or other populated gathering, it's very likely that two people will have the same birthday... BUT... it says nothing about the possibility of any two people having any PARTICULAR birthday. so as long as you don't care what the date is, yes, two people will more than likely have one in common. but the odds that anyone will have a particular one or one that is the same as yours - those are still pretty big odds against.
actually, it's long been historically understood that secrets have a short shelf life and have a tendency to proliferate sooner or later. moreso in the internetted era.
ellsberg wasn't the first and snowden won't be the last. govs have their asses blowing in the wind too and that provides a nice little incentive to keep their goddamn motherfucking noses clean. it's nice that they've been recently reminded of that.
the fact of gov activity as well as the work product is more or less guaranteed to be wide-banded at some point can serve as a protection where civil rights fail us. as in the cold war, the thing that keeps us safe is MAD... mutually assured destruction... sure you COULD use the breadth and depth to spy on kate upton's auto erotic escapades but that just means that at some point, that fact and the titillating surveillance itself will fall into the public some day. if you have a system composed of human beings, you're gonna have leaks.
eventually, it will be that stalemate that saves us... the fact that gov or private citizen, anyone can spy on anyone else but the fact that all activity and all resulting data will be public information at some point will enforce restraint.
actually, i think that MAD is the only thing that really works in this world. mexican stand-offs for all. because human beings are fucking dicks and the only thing keeping us from ass raping others is a gigantic, barbed wired cock poise at our own back doors.
apple already has both. using their existing OS incurs no additional cost. and it is a framework that they already know how to work around.
even if they wanted to make a dirt cheap phone based off of an iphone 3gs, it would be a matter of making hardware that would fit the bill as secondary market product. they ALREADY HAVE the os and ecosystem.
so WHY... in the WORLD... would apple do that? why in the world would woz say that?
and i come at this as a pc user with an android phone... this is truly mystifying.
these gmo mofos have been making life extremely hard for average joe farmer so fantastic. let the deluge of chinese copies hit the market and drive these guys into the ground. serve them right.
not just societal bias... but luck and fate in general.
you have NOT earned ANYTHING you have fair and square. you owe EVERYTHING to a fate and destiny that you had NOTHING to do with:
- health (mental, physical, deformities, etc) - race - intelligence - height - beauty - constitution and the very ability to work hard - place of birth
only the delusional think they'd be in the same place they are now if they were retarded, with no limbs, cancer ridden and born in botswana.
your very ability to pursue your own good are byproducts from essential factors that you are blessed with.
it's not insulting because nothing you have is rightfully "earned" in the way you mean it.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's only there because Lucas decided he wanted us to say "Hey, look at that big creature"
actually, i believe it's being used as a wipe to combine to two different shots. clumsily. but still... it had a purpose.
-forbid the consumption of a substance that vested commercial interests have totally convinced me is salubrious?
i would be shocked if NSA weren't involved.
why in the hell WOULD they upgrade....
this is why keyboards like textblade, with touch sensitive keys that actually don't send an input signal until you push down will be important for vr.
with that kind of keyboard, you can have a u.i. representation of the keyboard (e.g. like if you look down) and you can tell where your fingers are by glows that correspond to what keys you're touching... but the touch doesn't mean that you are entering any text yet. it's just to orient yourself on the keyboard. then you push down on the key as normal and send commands or whatever.
and i hate hate hate that because of it, when a program installs, it has to send cruft all over the freaking drive instead of, in a nice and orderly fashion, just pack all of itself into one self contained folder. i would literally fall to my knees and fellate myself if i never ever had to wonder where a config or settings file was stored ever again.
especially these days, computing is cheap. i daresay that those who have to share the computer with a household is outnumbered by those for whom the computer is genuinely PERSONAL.
and other reasons for putting .dll and files everywhere, like to save disk space by sharing resources... gah - disk drive storage is ludicrously cheap.
howabout we chew through some resources so that we can have a sane, intuitive computing environment?
if aging becomes obsolescent, all bets are off. you can't assume "we can't tell them not to reproduce".
the best policy would be that you can EITHER reproduce or never get old and die of old age. not both. and that would be a wonderfully balanced system.
this is an absurd sentiment and always has been.
if you live to the fullest every day, you'd have nothing left for tomorrow nevermind retirement.
it seems like for most people, digital reading is fine when it's just "straight ahead" fiction reading. you're approaching the material linearly and with the exception of a couple of flip backs every now and again, you're just going from start to finish one page at a time. i read almost all my novels like this.
it's really different if you're reading a textbook or manual where you might have to access information in a wide variety of places at any moment. in such cases, books tend to be better and faster because you can go immediately to any page that you've dog eared or even by pure muscle memory remember about where it is relative to the thickness of the book. and page flips are instant. try flipping 25 pages with a book looking for information and then doing the same on a kindle. screen refresh on e-paper is still VASTLY inferior to a moist thumb. even in this day, there's all kinds of inexplicable delays in just going to page 124 on digital vs on paper. paper really is superior for instantly going to any page and the interface for doing that is faaaaaaaar better with paper.
there are ways to get close to this speed on a pc or a laptop but only by really changing up the paradigm of how one searches a book for information - i.e. not flipping pages looking but explicitly using the search function. and in any case where you would be looking through the glossary, digital would be better and faster.
not to mention that taking notes on the book pages itself is better and faster in analog. lots of apps where you CAN do this... but none of them are as fast as hiliter and pen in hand.
for learning things like programming, or a graphics program or even the dungeon master's guide, if i could choose only one medium, i prefer paper books with pens and sticky notes and hiliters. ideally though, i'd have both.
i really wish reading and writing code were like literacy.
i've been circling coding for a looooong time and i can do some scripting in maya mel but even there, it's on the order of copying and pasting and writing some connective tissue to make things work.
the problem that i've found is that it's not like literacy where you pick a language and you learn the syntax. that would be GREAT if that were true. but in modern programming, it's also like you have to start learning neurology, biology and psychology at the same time. there is just a tremendous amount of infrastructure whether it's libraries, APIs or different OSs and there's a whole host of just simple questions that would illuminate the "lay of the land" that remain mysteries to me.
it feels like it's something that would have been within grasp back in the c64 days but nowadays, it feels like there's simply too many layers.
perhaps i can get good enough to write programs that input and output to the console....
lot of assumptions and unproved assertions here...
that would be really useful for extracting mattes and such in photoshop!
1. http://news.sciencemag.org/che...
2. NOT HEAT ENGINE. THERMOELECTRICS!
nothing to do with heat engines. THERMOELECTRICS.
why is waste heat "garbage"?
are you denying that there is such a thing? that we are currently actively cooling parts and attaching heat sinks and radiators for merely decorative purposes?
and if waste heat is an actual phenomenon... why NOT harvest energy from it? complexity is low with no moving parts. price is currently high but as with most things, that can come down with research.
so waste heat exists. power can be harvested.
i don't see what the point of your tirade is.
nobody talking about steam engines....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
i think this is the most misleading thing about cyberpunk and hollywood hacking tropes... that there is a cyberspace that actually exists in some allegorical way and that a user's avatar can actually "travel" from point to point looking upon and travel to floating pyramids of information. that analogy is totally wrong.
the far more accurate analogy is simply making telephone calls. if you are anywhere at all, you are right smack dab, ass down in chair in front of your computer. and your computer itself doesn't ever travel anywhere. all it is doing is sending and receiving messages. sure, you're getting messages from different nodes but that's just like receiving lots of phone calls from different people.
you can surreptitiously send messages that cause unexpected behavior or make a call under an assumed identity... but ultimately, all hacking is about sending and receiving messages...
and it's amusing how far hollywood and narrative fiction has to go to make that seem dramatically interesting.
right... zoom and boom vs. turn and burn
its value is pegged to "real" money.
if it never or rarely converted to government backed cash, then it is viable. goods and services for bitcoins. that's a closed loop system that can be completely independent of all the players its purporting to avoid.
but since people are buying into and cashing out and even SPECULATING with real currency, then you have an achilles heel.
the point at which conversion happens IS regulated and guarded by government players and is actually and IDEAL place for governments to actually sabotage the entire endeavor if they wanted to.
so until bitcoins slash any and all ties with real currencies and certainly until it loses all DEPENDENCE on them, they are just a new forex player that is highly unstable and insecure.
one thing to remember about the birthday problem is that in a given classroom or other populated gathering, it's very likely that two people will have the same birthday... BUT... it says nothing about the possibility of any two people having any PARTICULAR birthday. so as long as you don't care what the date is, yes, two people will more than likely have one in common. but the odds that anyone will have a particular one or one that is the same as yours - those are still pretty big odds against.
thanks to the likes of snowden and wikileaks...
actually, it's long been historically understood that secrets have a short shelf life and have a tendency to proliferate sooner or later. moreso in the internetted era.
ellsberg wasn't the first and snowden won't be the last. govs have their asses blowing in the wind too and that provides a nice little incentive to keep their goddamn motherfucking noses clean. it's nice that they've been recently reminded of that.
the fact of gov activity as well as the work product is more or less guaranteed to be wide-banded at some point can serve as a protection where civil rights fail us. as in the cold war, the thing that keeps us safe is MAD... mutually assured destruction... sure you COULD use the breadth and depth to spy on kate upton's auto erotic escapades but that just means that at some point, that fact and the titillating surveillance itself will fall into the public some day. if you have a system composed of human beings, you're gonna have leaks.
eventually, it will be that stalemate that saves us... the fact that gov or private citizen, anyone can spy on anyone else but the fact that all activity and all resulting data will be public information at some point will enforce restraint.
actually, i think that MAD is the only thing that really works in this world. mexican stand-offs for all. because human beings are fucking dicks and the only thing keeping us from ass raping others is a gigantic, barbed wired cock poise at our own back doors.
amen.
android provides two things:
- free, ready to go OS
- app ecosystem
apple already has both. using their existing OS incurs no additional cost. and it is a framework that they already know how to work around.
even if they wanted to make a dirt cheap phone based off of an iphone 3gs, it would be a matter of making hardware that would fit the bill as secondary market product. they ALREADY HAVE the os and ecosystem.
so WHY... in the WORLD... would apple do that? why in the world would woz say that?
and i come at this as a pc user with an android phone... this is truly mystifying.
oooo nice... a little fight club action goin'.
these gmo mofos have been making life extremely hard for average joe farmer so fantastic. let the deluge of chinese copies hit the market and drive these guys into the ground. serve them right.
not just societal bias... but luck and fate in general.
you have NOT earned ANYTHING you have fair and square. you owe EVERYTHING to a fate and destiny that you had NOTHING to do with:
- health (mental, physical, deformities, etc)
- race
- intelligence
- height
- beauty
- constitution and the very ability to work hard
- place of birth
only the delusional think they'd be in the same place they are now if they were retarded, with no limbs, cancer ridden and born in botswana.
your very ability to pursue your own good are byproducts from essential factors that you are blessed with.
it's not insulting because nothing you have is rightfully "earned" in the way you mean it.