but isn't the Internet designed to route around this kind of stuff? I mean, if the FCC were to, someday in the future, try to "fundamentally alter the Internet", wouldn't folks just pull out the back up copies of today's Internet, and ignore what the FCC was trying to do? I once read a great quote about the Internet, which basically stated that "the Interenet interprets censorship as damage; and routes around it." It seems to me like neither the FCC nor the companies listed can do anything to fundamentally alter the Internet...
The network owners could also limit the types of devices that could be connected to their network, potentially stifling innovation.
Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't sound like the Internet protocol that I know and love... I liken this situation to the start-up of AOL-like companies... lot's of people might describe the service as "internet-like", or the company as an "Interenet service provider"; however, it's not the Internet if it's running a proprietary protocol and doesn't use TCP/IP. Obviously, there are more details involved, but it seems like this article is a bit of hyperbole and sensationalism...
Ok guys, these games are becoming scarily beautiful and realistic...now where is my virtual reality? Hell, even something as simple as the original Doom series (or even better, Doom Legacy) in fully immersive 3D would be a nice start.
Lawnmower Man? I want that. Come on, it must be trivial now!
Try: StereoQuake for the stereovisualization code. Stereographics for the goggle systems. Barco for the monitor. Immersion for the gloves and haptic devices.
Windows NT/2000, Irix, and Solaris support most all of this equipment.
Have fun... (I use to work as an "information technologies associate" setting up this equipment for a major research universities... you can find your Lawnmower Man style VR equipment in the nuclear engineer and genetic engineering laboratories of research universities.... "Digital Media Laboratory" is another moniker for it....)
At the University of Chicago, we all had the general title of "Information Technologies Associate" if one was maintaining computing systems... As I understood it, ITAs were subdivided into categories from 5 through 10... 5 being a librarian or computer operator; 6 being a programmer or systems engineer of sorts; 7 being a systems administrator; 8 being a network administrator; 9 being a director; 10 being a VP or divisional head....
Don't you just love the 1984ness of it all? (We actually had a network monitoring computer called "Big Brother")
This is just my two cents worth, but I would point out modern video games (specifically of the Quake genre) use rather robust vector mathematic models and are basically just "physics engines" that model the basic vector mathematics of reality (i.e. spacial orientation, time progression, velocity, momentum, particle physics, lighting, etc.).
In answer to your question, this has to do with comparing reality and video games in regards to the "fact" (?) that video games are developing better physics engines, and reality is being better modeled by computer simulations, multimedia databases, etc.
Fact of the matter is that, if one wanted to, someone could program the A.I. of a smart missle with the Quake codebase; alternativly, one could easily program a video game which uses satellite photos, networked video feeds, and whatnot...
The plan is to set up a numerical system that categorizes and groups system levels, and when this goes into effect in 2005 or so, a level-1 system might represent the current or year-old value-priced PC configurations, while level 2 and level 3 group systems that define the mainstream and high-end performance of the time.
This numerical system could also be described as a "commodification system", a "social-engineering system", or a "market manipulation system". Be wary of this numerical system. This plan is begging to commodify PCs into more "bundled" and "console" like systems. Which, of course, is contrary to the concept of a generalized computing device, which many people believe a PC should be. My suggestion would be to clamor and veto this plan, if possible... It seems to have bad karma written all over it...
Lester revealed that DirectX 9 packs enough features to be future-proof and is a temporary stopping place for DX development.
A rather bold statement, all things considered. Does it support autostereoscopic monitors? How about lectiliniar monitors? What about multi-layer LCD or wave-monitors?
And what multi-head display configurations? Will it support a 9 screen configuration, in case I decide to build a dedicated MechWarrior station? (Anybody remember LucasArt's "X-Wing"? Heh... I always wanted to build a multi-head game pod for that game...)
Also, what about DICOM datasets and other volumetric biomedical datasets? Them algorithm based games are nice and all, but what about future games which may want to encorporate medical-grade bioinformatics? "Future-proof" is an awefully strong statement, it seems to me...
Anyhow... I don't know where I was going with this post. Just a couple of cents to add to the discussion...
Well, back in the 80's, I was into AD&D and Palladium, thereafter. Palladium eventually lead to playing Rifts, which I think is a great game... I was especially into the Cyberneticist OCC and the Rouge Scientist OCC. That was in the mid 90's, about the same time I was applying to college. So, I decided to apply to a major research University, and the Cyberneticist and Rouge Scientist classes from Rifts led me to look at the University of Chicago, located in ChiTown, of course...
So, I actually wound up going to the University of Chicago, and wound up working at the Enrico Fermi Institute, which happens to also be the home of the Laboratory of Advanced Space Research. Well, at the same time, I began stopping by the RPG groups, and I found that nobody would touch AD&D or Palladium systems with a 10 foot pole. All the student gaming groups were pretty much strictly Mage, Vampire, or Legend of the Five Rings groups.
So, I played alot of VRAdept characters, which is a fairly good archtype and job description of modern-day molecular chemists and nuclear engineers. Along the way, I learned how to operate stereo-visualization equipment (VR goggles, VRML), turing machines (TMML), AI constructs (Lisp programming), etc. etc. Anyhow, somewhere along the way, I wound up helping the astrophysics department build a nuclear powered satellite...
And that is the connection to the VoidEngineer of the M:tA.
FYI, I've been playing M:tA for about 5 years now, and it's now definately my RPG of choice.
Anyhow, in M:tA game terms, chantry and artifact construction might be described along the following lines (but it's just a concept for narrative building, so please take this with a grain of salt):
News for Nerds. Stuff that matters?
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Playing with Google
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
I dunno... Playing with Google doesn't seem to be News for Nerds, and it doesn't seem like it matters, all that much.
Honestly... one would think that there would be a bit more war coverage on Slashdot... political events which do matter, are going to affect Nerds around the world (and the US), and which has plenty of nerdy computer and tech related issues.
But Google search hacks? Please... Post news articles which matter.
Ironically, if a treehouse owner fell out of their tree, and ended up in a wheelchair, they'd have no way of getting back into their house.
Which makes you wonder... if a treehouse owner fell out of their tree and nobody was around to hear their cries of 'Help! I've fallen, and I can't get up!'.... would they make any sound?
How do you make one of these handicapped accessible?
It needs one of them red buttons, commonly found in hospital restrooms, one foot off the ground, marked "Emergency. Press button for assistance." =)
Been there, done that...
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Back to the Trees
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· Score: 4, Interesting
So, I grew up in an underground house, and it's actually a mixed blessing. On the minus side, you have to mow your roof, it can be freakin difficult to move furniture into/outof the house (unless you have an access garage or elevator), and people generally think you're nuts. On the plus side, underground houses tend to be fire/earthquake/tornado/blizzard proof, and the utility bills are rather low, because of solar and geothermal energy, and you also get to live in a hobbit-hole of sorts. The biggest problem, however, is that there is no market for underground houses, because Muggles/Sleepers/Luddites don't understand the concept... the best real-estate appraisal we can get is about $100K, because we can't get the house un-registered as a "basement house"... never mind the fact that it's got marble, custom stone work throughout, can withstand most any natural/unnatural disaster, etc. We've sunk way more money into the house than we're ever going to get out of it.
If you ever find/buy a dormant volcano, contact me and/or my brother, and we'll build you the undergound volcano fortress. We got the architectural blueprints already...
Anyhow, in an attempt to make sure that this post isn't ranked as a troll or flame-bait, I'll point out the story of the wolf and the three pigs who made their houses out of straw, wood, and brick. Better to make your house out of brick/stone than out of a treehouse, it seems to me...
Nice post and well articulated. I've included some comments for discussion:
First of all, I want to mention the concept of Turing Tests, and the old sci-fi show, "Max Headroom", and the newer movie "Simone". Also, I want to mention MTV's Carson Daly, as much of his top-40's anouncements are computer generated for local stations. So, the network engineers at MTV ought to submit their algorithms and equipment used to video-hack Carson Daly as an entry into Loebner's competition, as his "likeness" may very well qualify as an AI. Most people cannot distinguish between the "real" Carson Daly, and the computer generated versions of him, so his "likeness" or "avatar" could very well pass a turing test... especially if the test were to determine, when calling into MTV, whether or not you were talking to the real Carson Daly, or his AI avatar. I bet Loebner would buy into the sex, drugs, and rock&roll concept, and be willing to award the prize to Carson Daly's avatar.
Turing stipulated in the Turing test (TT) that the "interrogator" specifically has the goal of trying to determine which of the contestants is human and which is the machine.
Turing proposed a number of tests, games, and criteria, while researching the question of whether or not machines could think. Most of these games were "black-box" information games, which studied models of information flow within open and closed systems.
We are very far from building bots that will pass it.
I'm not so sure about that. While I was working at the University of Chicago, we were setting up a biomedical visualization laboratory, complete with 3D virtual reality systems. We had the biology department custom design the hardware specifications for a "virtual reality workstation", which could act as a "turring machine". We used a modification of the turring test, and designed a visualization test for virtual environments.
It worked like this: The human eye sees 32bit colors; at 20/20 vision, a 1200x1600 resolution screen fills the entire human field of vision at about 4' feet away, on a 6'x8' projection screen. Full motion video is flicker free at 60hz. We see in stereoscopic vision, so you need to two video streams. The thinking was that if you "reverse-engineer" the parameters of the human visualization system, and build a machine or visualization system which can handle those parameters, then the machine will be able to "trick" the brain into percieving whatever stimulus needs to be visualized (3D molecules, proteins, internal organs, continents, galaxies, etc).
Our Specs: 32 x 1200 x 1600 x 60 x 2 = 9.2MBytes/sec
So, our visualization studio, was pushing about 9.2MB/sec in full color, stereoscopic video which filled the entire range of human vision (sort of like an 3D IMAX theater, but in a conference room). For the tech geeks, the machine was a Sun Ultra80 with 4Gigs of RAM, running Java3D on a Creator3D graphics card. CrystalEyes Goggles, Barco 808s monitors, Extron video adapters, et al... (Notice that I don't call this a "computer", but rather, a "visualization system")
So, then, we ran applications on the machine, such as stereo-Quake and Sense8. If you run QuakeII as a visual Turing Test, it's very difficult, as the interrigator, to determine between a 'bot contestant, and a human contestant. Anyhow, the point is: a turing test is a test of "to-what-extent" can a person differentiate between the natural and the articial. When the artificial approximates the natural to the point that the human cannot distinguish between the two, the artificial has "passed the test" of indistinguisability.
Now, I don't know if the University of Chicago is way ahead of other places in the areas of AI, but we considered it fairly commonplace to install an AI or a Turing Machine to perform certain types of tasks. Moreover, I was taught that, despite common concensus to the contrary, a number of the major network channels, movie studios, and universities had a variety of AI bots up and running, already...
It has long been known in the AI community that get anywhere near passing the TT, a bot would need what is known as "world knowledge".
Maybe in those high-falutin ivy league AI communities, but not in the Chicago school of thought... If the test is kept short enough, "real world" knowledge isn't needed. Case in point: Carson Daly's 'bot doesn't need world knowledge, as long as the bot keeps the conversation focused on the top 40 music charts. Every time a caller asks MTV or an affiliated station for a song to played, and doesn't realize that they've just listened to a 'bot on the radio, or watched a 'bot on the telvision, the AI has passed a turing test.
To build world knowledge, you need memory approximately the capacity of the human brain: estimated to be the order of a petabyte.
I personally think that number is a low estimate. Consider a person with photographic memory (hypermnesia) who remembers everything (a type of autism, usually)
9MB/sec * 60s/min * 60min/hour * 12hr/day * 365days/yr = 140TB/yr ~ 1.5PB/decade
And that's from visual stimulation alone. Anyhow, Goggle search engine lists that it has about 3 billion web pages... if you go out on a limb, and agree that each web page is about 1kb in size, then that puts Goggle at about 3TB of information... about 1% of a human brain, perhaps? And that's just Google. The entire internet may well approximate a petabyte. My point is that a web-bot or google-bot would be a success-oriented strategy for coding a modern day 'bot which could pass a turing test. Hardware may very well already be available for AIs, but the hardware is distributed, and would require a distributed architecture (which may be as simple as internet-searching capabilities, built onto a quake-server.).
Anyhow, good post & nice points.
ps. and, yes, nearly everybody working on the project was a long-haired computer geek.
Will there be some kind of latency / higher traffic usage due to larger headers or some such with ipv6 traffic due to the extra "detail" it provides (apologies on lack of terminology)
The answer depends on how you measure latency and traffic usage... so, in some sense, the answer is both yes and no. The packets are larger, by protocol definition, so there will definately be higher overhead. This is offset, however, due to the fact that IPv6 is a protocol which has been designed and formulated with specific technologies in mind... specifically, high bandwidth connections. As fiber optics, fast ethernet, and gigabit-copper become more common, total bandwidth will increase, and the relative increase in latency/traffic is offset by higher bandwith availability. Call it information inflation, if you will...
In some sense, IPv6 was designed with fiber optic backbones and routers in mind... so, yes.. there will be slightly more traffic usage and latency, but the next generation of network cards and routers are expected to be optimized for 128 bit mathematics... (specifically, in order to deal with 128 bit address routing tables) so, the latency and traffic usage will be offset by the reduced processor overhead needed to calculate the 'details' which are incorporated into the header (such as quality of service and such...). That is, the network engineers know that fiber is becoming more common, and this protocol was designed with forward-thinking concepts: high network bandwidth, very large numbers of nodes, dynamic network topologies, security and cryptology, etc. etc.
In the long run, IPv6 won't cause excessive latency or traffic usage on future networks... It may be a resource-hog on circa-1990s network equipment, however...
Anyhow... I'm rambling... there are people more knowledgable than I in this matter, and I'm sure they'll post their 2 cents worth as well. Best of luck in learning more...
who's actually using IPv6? I know some use it privately within their org, but are there any publicly using it?
ah, lots of people, actually... it's all over the routers and servers, nowdays... but the local network admin and network engineers are probably doing their best to make the migration as invisible as possible.
A good starting point to learn more about IPv6 would be www.internet2.edu. If you check out the corporate partners, you'll notice that ATT&T, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Lucent, Microsoft, Nortel, Qwest, SBC, and Sun are all in on the "Internet2" act, which includes the IPv6 protocol And the list of affiliated universities stretches nearly 200 members long...
Anyhow, Sun Solaris 9, Microsoft Windows2000, Microsoft WindowsXP, and Cisco IOS all have support for IPv6, as I understand... They're publicaly using it and supporting it.
If you want to know more about IPv6, check out this link and just search for the term "IPv6"... you should get about 93 articles regarding the Request For Comments (RFC) procedure used to define the protocol... As you will notice, IPv6 is a 128bit protocol, and was designed to be able to be broken up into 4 32bit packets, which allows it to interoperate with older IPv4 networks...
Moral of the story is that there are millions of people already using IPv6 on their client machines, who already don't know and don't care about the specific protocol implementations...
The article refers to an award for application developers to develop IPv6 enabled applications... If you calculate the ratio between IPv6 address and the total surface area of the earth, you will notice that there are approximately 2,000 IP addresses per square meter, with the IPv6 protocol... enough to give an address to every nut, bolt, and widget in every plane, train, and automobile on earth, with billions and billions left over... The awards will be going to people who figure out not just how to use IPv6, but how to code new applications and new uses for that kind of domain space...
Uh... Ok. Spam's bad. Sorry for being off-topic, but what's up with slashdot? I seriously doubt that I'm the first post on this message, as I've alreadly re-loaded it twice on a friday night... \. isn't acting like it usually does...
LOL... rotflmao! That's the coolest link I've seen in, like, a month!
Yo, I had no idea that folks were building wacked out stuff like that over there! What's up with the control seat?! It looks like a freakin back-hoe operator's chair! LOL.
Seriously, though... they need to port Mechwarior, and write device driver's for that thing! Put a couple of LCD moniters in there, a throttle control and joy-stick, maybe some foot pedals... Yo, if anybody want's to open a file on source-forge, and make a port of MechWarrior for Gundam-mech, there, count me in! =)
Mod the parent up! That's the coolest link on this thread!
Ohmygosh! rotflmao!. That's the coolest thing I've seen in, like, a month!
Yo, I had no idea that there was anybody building wacked out stuff like that... What's up with that control seat?! It looks like a fricking back-hoe operators seat! =)
They totally need to get a copy of the code to MechWarrior and rewrite the device drivers! If anybody want's to work on a Gundam-mech port of Mechwarrior, count me in! (I'm totally serious... I'd open up a site on sourceforge, and recode the entire fricken game, if it meant getting to fly back and forth from the US to Japan to write Mech code!!!)
LOL... Yo, mod the parent up!!! That's the coolest link on this thread! =)
OK, so I'm only vaguely impressed with Ace's gaming system... Seems to me like they're splitting hairs over upgrades of off-the-shelf equipment. Here's my question for all of you slashdotters:
Given the above article, and the premise that slashdotters have a wider range of experience than Ace, what would be the ideal configuration for a stereo-video enabled gaming system? Say I want something that can run Stereo-Quake or Stereo-Descent... Also assume that cost isn't really a factor (wish that were true, but I'm just pipe dreaming here...).
Besides the CPU and motherboard, there's also things like monitors (stereo projection monitors?), controllers (throttles, immersion gloves, goggles), stereo audio systems (THX?), and even room design. What would slashdotters put together with a beefy $50K to $100K budget, eh? Assume that the project is to put together the ultimate stereo-Quake VR simulator, and that you have access to the code of the game...
For information on who wants it, and where it's being pioneered, check out the Chicago CivicNet project.
Imagine:
Real-time, video-on-demand services which act as video phones, and replaces the telephone as the major telecommunications medium which American society uses.
Real time autostereoscopic 3D television.
Virtual reality applications, such as the Street, the Matrix, the University, ChalkBoard, and so forth. Imagine walking into a virtual classroom or office, from home, when it's too cold and snowy out to drive to school or work.
Real time stock trading from your home to the local city's stock market or board of trade.
Real time browsing of Hubble Telescope data and Sloan data...
Imagine all of this in 1200x1600 32 bit color resolution, in stereoscopic 3D. And imagine it running 100 times faster than your current DSL connection.
That's why you want fiber in the home, and that's why people like Mayor Daley and 60+ corporations in Chicago are working to make it happen...
Yes, very much so. It uses an X for hardware management, and for many years has used CDE (Common Desktop Environment) for mime-type association and related activities, which KDE was based off of. Gnome has gotten into the market, however, and is to be the new desktop environment for future releases of Solaris. For many years Solaris has competed with the likes of AIX and IRIX. Solaris supports stereo-3D graphics (read: Virtual Reality, VRML, CAVE, OpenGL) and high performance SVGA, PAL, and NTSC graphics configurations. Because it supports things like multi-head, multi-processor, and multi-threaded applications and configurations, movie studios and game-design companies often use Solaris workstation and server solutions to design and render special effects for Hollywood movies and the like (I may be mistaken, but I believe that Industrial Light & Magic is a Solaris shop... ever see Jurassic Park?).
Is it easier to use than Linux?
Yes and no. It's easier to design special effects for movies, install virtual reality caves, and run scientific data analysis with Solaris. They are both flavors of unix, so the difficulty is about the same, in terms of learning arcane commands and stuff. It's probably easiest to say that Solaris is as easy as Linux... just different. (Your questions is like asking whether or not vanilla icecream is warmer/colder than chocolate icecream...)
And, most importantly, is there any way I could run Windows games on it?:P
Sure. You could install WINE libraries on your machine, I suppose... But if you get a Solaris box, and download your OpenGL and Java3D libraries, why play Windows games, when you can design your own games? Why play windows games, when you can play VR games?:P
Enlightenment vs. Metacity?
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Gnome 2.2 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Does anybody know what's going on between Gnome and Enlightenment? It seems like Gnome is developing it's own window-manager-which-pretends-its-not-a-window-man ager (Metacity); meanwhile, Enlightenment is developing it's own desktop shell... kind of like two ships passing each other in the dark...
I'm going to hate the day when I'm forced to make a choice between Gnome and Enlightenment 0.17... I'll miss those footprints...
I don't know the answers to all of your questions, but I can provide some information for two of them....
How long untill we're not ALLOWED to turn off our TVs?
Maybe sooner than you think... Autostereoscopic Displays being worked on at MIT's Spatial Imaging Group run on SGI O2s. In answer to your question, we won't be allowed to turn off out televisions when our televisions get user level (and group level?) security installed... This will probably coincide with televisions getting file-level security. I can only imagine having to fill out forms and register with an application/internet service provider in order to upgrade from being a 'user' to being a 'poweruser'... "Damn. I had to pay $49.95 and go take a user-training course to be allowed to turn off my television..."
How long before our TVs watch what WE'RE doing so advertisers can see what effect they're having?
You will note that the design setup for the Mark II Autostereoscopic Display utilizes a video camera to watch the viewers and generate virtual 3D goggles. It's already built into the system design of next-generation 3D televisions...
Slashdot Mirror
but isn't the Internet designed to route around this kind of stuff? I mean, if the FCC were to, someday in the future, try to "fundamentally alter the Internet", wouldn't folks just pull out the back up copies of today's Internet, and ignore what the FCC was trying to do? I once read a great quote about the Internet, which basically stated that "the Interenet interprets censorship as damage; and routes around it." It seems to me like neither the FCC nor the companies listed can do anything to fundamentally alter the Internet...
The network owners could also limit the types of devices that could be connected to their network, potentially stifling innovation.
Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't sound like the Internet protocol that I know and love... I liken this situation to the start-up of AOL-like companies... lot's of people might describe the service as "internet-like", or the company as an "Interenet service provider"; however, it's not the Internet if it's running a proprietary protocol and doesn't use TCP/IP. Obviously, there are more details involved, but it seems like this article is a bit of hyperbole and sensationalism...
Ok guys, these games are becoming scarily beautiful and realistic...now where is my virtual reality? Hell, even something as simple as the original Doom series (or even better, Doom Legacy) in fully immersive 3D would be a nice start.
Lawnmower Man? I want that. Come on, it must be trivial now!
Try:
StereoQuake for the stereovisualization code.
Stereographics for the goggle systems.
Barco for the monitor.
Immersion for the gloves and haptic devices.
Windows NT/2000, Irix, and Solaris support most all of this equipment.
Additional applications and systems can be found at Sense8, Fakespace, and Mechdyne.
Have fun... (I use to work as an "information technologies associate" setting up this equipment for a major research universities... you can find your Lawnmower Man style VR equipment in the nuclear engineer and genetic engineering laboratories of research universities.... "Digital Media Laboratory" is another moniker for it....)
At the University of Chicago, we all had the general title of "Information Technologies Associate" if one was maintaining computing systems... As I understood it, ITAs were subdivided into categories from 5 through 10... 5 being a librarian or computer operator; 6 being a programmer or systems engineer of sorts; 7 being a systems administrator; 8 being a network administrator; 9 being a director; 10 being a VP or divisional head....
Don't you just love the 1984ness of it all? (We actually had a network monitoring computer called "Big Brother")
This is just my two cents worth, but I would point out modern video games (specifically of the Quake genre) use rather robust vector mathematic models and are basically just "physics engines" that model the basic vector mathematics of reality (i.e. spacial orientation, time progression, velocity, momentum, particle physics, lighting, etc.).
In answer to your question, this has to do with comparing reality and video games in regards to the "fact" (?) that video games are developing better physics engines, and reality is being better modeled by computer simulations, multimedia databases, etc.
Fact of the matter is that, if one wanted to, someone could program the A.I. of a smart missle with the Quake codebase; alternativly, one could easily program a video game which uses satellite photos, networked video feeds, and whatnot...
Anyhow... just my two cents...
It will take forever for the 3d holograms to load over a broadband cable connection. Also, the psychic popup ads will be a real pain....
There is no doubt that holographic televisions is in our near future. But, with holographic video and autosterescopic lenticular screens, I think that the next major step is going to be something like a VR-Grid Browser, which runs in the 3D Window Manager.
As far as the psychic popup ads... I don't know anything about that....
So, I'll add my two cents, as an MCSE...
The plan is to set up a numerical system that categorizes and groups system levels, and when this goes into effect in 2005 or so, a level-1 system might represent the current or year-old value-priced PC configurations, while level 2 and level 3 group systems that define the mainstream and high-end performance of the time.
This numerical system could also be described as a "commodification system", a "social-engineering system", or a "market manipulation system". Be wary of this numerical system. This plan is begging to commodify PCs into more "bundled" and "console" like systems. Which, of course, is contrary to the concept of a generalized computing device, which many people believe a PC should be. My suggestion would be to clamor and veto this plan, if possible... It seems to have bad karma written all over it...
Lester revealed that DirectX 9 packs enough features to be future-proof and is a temporary stopping place for DX development.
A rather bold statement, all things considered. Does it support autostereoscopic monitors? How about lectiliniar monitors? What about multi-layer LCD or wave-monitors?
And what multi-head display configurations? Will it support a 9 screen configuration, in case I decide to build a dedicated MechWarrior station? (Anybody remember LucasArt's "X-Wing"? Heh... I always wanted to build a multi-head game pod for that game...)
Also, what about DICOM datasets and other volumetric biomedical datasets? Them algorithm based games are nice and all, but what about future games which may want to encorporate medical-grade bioinformatics? "Future-proof" is an awefully strong statement, it seems to me...
Anyhow... I don't know where I was going with this post. Just a couple of cents to add to the discussion...
Well, back in the 80's, I was into AD&D and Palladium, thereafter. Palladium eventually lead to playing Rifts, which I think is a great game... I was especially into the Cyberneticist OCC and the Rouge Scientist OCC. That was in the mid 90's, about the same time I was applying to college. So, I decided to apply to a major research University, and the Cyberneticist and Rouge Scientist classes from Rifts led me to look at the University of Chicago, located in ChiTown, of course...
So, I actually wound up going to the University of Chicago, and wound up working at the Enrico Fermi Institute, which happens to also be the home of the Laboratory of Advanced Space Research. Well, at the same time, I began stopping by the RPG groups, and I found that nobody would touch AD&D or Palladium systems with a 10 foot pole. All the student gaming groups were pretty much strictly Mage, Vampire, or Legend of the Five Rings groups.
So, I played alot of VRAdept characters, which is a fairly good archtype and job description of modern-day molecular chemists and nuclear engineers. Along the way, I learned how to operate stereo-visualization equipment (VR goggles, VRML), turing machines (TMML), AI constructs (Lisp programming), etc. etc. Anyhow, somewhere along the way, I wound up helping the astrophysics department build a nuclear powered satellite...
And that is the connection to the VoidEngineer of the M:tA.
FYI, I've been playing M:tA for about 5 years now, and it's now definately my RPG of choice.
Anyhow, in M:tA game terms, chantry and artifact construction might be described along the following lines (but it's just a concept for narrative building, so please take this with a grain of salt):
Nuclear Fallout Chantry
Spheres: Forces 5, Matter 5, Prime 5, Correspondence 5, Entropy 5, Time 5
Requires: ResistAtomicForce, EarthWorks, GridTelecomunications, ResistAtomicEntropy, DeepTimePlanning
TreeHouse Chantry
Spheres: Forces 2, Matter 4, Prime 5, Entropy 2, Time 2
Requires: ResistStorm, BonzaiSculpting, ResistWarping, ResistRot
Nuclear Powered Satellite
Spheres: Forces 5, Matter 5, Prime 5, Entropy 2, Time 2, Correspondence 4
Requires: ThermoNuclearFuelCell, Plutonium, ResistSpaceDebris, AtomicSynchronization, SatelliteTelecommunications
I dunno... Playing with Google doesn't seem to be News for Nerds, and it doesn't seem like it matters, all that much.
Honestly... one would think that there would be a bit more war coverage on Slashdot... political events which do matter, are going to affect Nerds around the world (and the US), and which has plenty of nerdy computer and tech related issues.
But Google search hacks? Please... Post news articles which matter.
Ironically, if a treehouse owner fell out of their tree, and ended up in a wheelchair, they'd have no way of getting back into their house.
Which makes you wonder... if a treehouse owner fell out of their tree and nobody was around to hear their cries of 'Help! I've fallen, and I can't get up!'.... would they make any sound?
How do you make one of these handicapped accessible?
It needs one of them red buttons, commonly found in hospital restrooms, one foot off the ground, marked "Emergency. Press button for assistance." =)
So, I grew up in an underground house, and it's actually a mixed blessing. On the minus side, you have to mow your roof, it can be freakin difficult to move furniture into/outof the house (unless you have an access garage or elevator), and people generally think you're nuts. On the plus side, underground houses tend to be fire/earthquake/tornado/blizzard proof, and the utility bills are rather low, because of solar and geothermal energy, and you also get to live in a hobbit-hole of sorts. The biggest problem, however, is that there is no market for underground houses, because Muggles/Sleepers/Luddites don't understand the concept... the best real-estate appraisal we can get is about $100K, because we can't get the house un-registered as a "basement house"... never mind the fact that it's got marble, custom stone work throughout, can withstand most any natural/unnatural disaster, etc. We've sunk way more money into the house than we're ever going to get out of it.
If you ever find/buy a dormant volcano, contact me and/or my brother, and we'll build you the undergound volcano fortress. We got the architectural blueprints already...
Anyhow, in an attempt to make sure that this post isn't ranked as a troll or flame-bait, I'll point out the story of the wolf and the three pigs who made their houses out of straw, wood, and brick. Better to make your house out of brick/stone than out of a treehouse, it seems to me...
Nice post and well articulated. I've included some comments for discussion:
First of all, I want to mention the concept of Turing Tests, and the old sci-fi show, "Max Headroom", and the newer movie "Simone". Also, I want to mention MTV's Carson Daly, as much of his top-40's anouncements are computer generated for local stations. So, the network engineers at MTV ought to submit their algorithms and equipment used to video-hack Carson Daly as an entry into Loebner's competition, as his "likeness" may very well qualify as an AI. Most people cannot distinguish between the "real" Carson Daly, and the computer generated versions of him, so his "likeness" or "avatar" could very well pass a turing test... especially if the test were to determine, when calling into MTV, whether or not you were talking to the real Carson Daly, or his AI avatar. I bet Loebner would buy into the sex, drugs, and rock&roll concept, and be willing to award the prize to Carson Daly's avatar.
Turing stipulated in the Turing test (TT) that the "interrogator" specifically has the goal of trying to determine which of the contestants is human and which is the machine.
Turing proposed a number of tests, games, and criteria, while researching the question of whether or not machines could think. Most of these games were "black-box" information games, which studied models of information flow within open and closed systems.
We are very far from building bots that will pass it.
I'm not so sure about that. While I was working at the University of Chicago, we were setting up a biomedical visualization laboratory, complete with 3D virtual reality systems. We had the biology department custom design the hardware specifications for a "virtual reality workstation", which could act as a "turring machine". We used a modification of the turring test, and designed a visualization test for virtual environments.
It worked like this: The human eye sees 32bit colors; at 20/20 vision, a 1200x1600 resolution screen fills the entire human field of vision at about 4' feet away, on a 6'x8' projection screen. Full motion video is flicker free at 60hz. We see in stereoscopic vision, so you need to two video streams. The thinking was that if you "reverse-engineer" the parameters of the human visualization system, and build a machine or visualization system which can handle those parameters, then the machine will be able to "trick" the brain into percieving whatever stimulus needs to be visualized (3D molecules, proteins, internal organs, continents, galaxies, etc).
Our Specs: 32 x 1200 x 1600 x 60 x 2 = 9.2MBytes/sec
So, our visualization studio, was pushing about 9.2MB/sec in full color, stereoscopic video which filled the entire range of human vision (sort of like an 3D IMAX theater, but in a conference room). For the tech geeks, the machine was a Sun Ultra80 with 4Gigs of RAM, running Java3D on a Creator3D graphics card. CrystalEyes Goggles, Barco 808s monitors, Extron video adapters, et al... (Notice that I don't call this a "computer", but rather, a "visualization system")
So, then, we ran applications on the machine, such as stereo-Quake and Sense8. If you run QuakeII as a visual Turing Test, it's very difficult, as the interrigator, to determine between a 'bot contestant, and a human contestant. Anyhow, the point is: a turing test is a test of "to-what-extent" can a person differentiate between the natural and the articial. When the artificial approximates the natural to the point that the human cannot distinguish between the two, the artificial has "passed the test" of indistinguisability.
Now, I don't know if the University of Chicago is way ahead of other places in the areas of AI, but we considered it fairly commonplace to install an AI or a Turing Machine to perform certain types of tasks. Moreover, I was taught that, despite common concensus to the contrary, a number of the major network channels, movie studios, and universities had a variety of AI bots up and running, already...
It has long been known in the AI community that get anywhere near passing the TT, a bot would need what is known as "world knowledge".
Maybe in those high-falutin ivy league AI communities, but not in the Chicago school of thought... If the test is kept short enough, "real world" knowledge isn't needed. Case in point: Carson Daly's 'bot doesn't need world knowledge, as long as the bot keeps the conversation focused on the top 40 music charts. Every time a caller asks MTV or an affiliated station for a song to played, and doesn't realize that they've just listened to a 'bot on the radio, or watched a 'bot on the telvision, the AI has passed a turing test.
To build world knowledge, you need memory approximately the capacity of the human brain: estimated to be the order of a petabyte.
I personally think that number is a low estimate. Consider a person with photographic memory (hypermnesia) who remembers everything (a type of autism, usually)
9MB/sec * 60s/min * 60min/hour * 12hr/day * 365days/yr = 140TB/yr ~ 1.5PB/decade
And that's from visual stimulation alone. Anyhow, Goggle search engine lists that it has about 3 billion web pages... if you go out on a limb, and agree that each web page is about 1kb in size, then that puts Goggle at about 3TB of information... about 1% of a human brain, perhaps? And that's just Google. The entire internet may well approximate a petabyte. My point is that a web-bot or google-bot would be a success-oriented strategy for coding a modern day 'bot which could pass a turing test. Hardware may very well already be available for AIs, but the hardware is distributed, and would require a distributed architecture (which may be as simple as internet-searching capabilities, built onto a quake-server.).
Anyhow, good post & nice points.
ps. and, yes, nearly everybody working on the project was a long-haired computer geek.
AbRASiON,
Great question and well asked...
Will there be some kind of latency / higher traffic usage due to larger headers or some such with ipv6 traffic due to the extra "detail" it provides (apologies on lack of terminology)
The answer depends on how you measure latency and traffic usage... so, in some sense, the answer is both yes and no. The packets are larger, by protocol definition, so there will definately be higher overhead. This is offset, however, due to the fact that IPv6 is a protocol which has been designed and formulated with specific technologies in mind... specifically, high bandwidth connections. As fiber optics, fast ethernet, and gigabit-copper become more common, total bandwidth will increase, and the relative increase in latency/traffic is offset by higher bandwith availability. Call it information inflation, if you will...
In some sense, IPv6 was designed with fiber optic backbones and routers in mind... so, yes.. there will be slightly more traffic usage and latency, but the next generation of network cards and routers are expected to be optimized for 128 bit mathematics... (specifically, in order to deal with 128 bit address routing tables) so, the latency and traffic usage will be offset by the reduced processor overhead needed to calculate the 'details' which are incorporated into the header (such as quality of service and such...). That is, the network engineers know that fiber is becoming more common, and this protocol was designed with forward-thinking concepts: high network bandwidth, very large numbers of nodes, dynamic network topologies, security and cryptology, etc. etc.
In the long run, IPv6 won't cause excessive latency or traffic usage on future networks... It may be a resource-hog on circa-1990s network equipment, however...
Anyhow... I'm rambling... there are people more knowledgable than I in this matter, and I'm sure they'll post their 2 cents worth as well. Best of luck in learning more...
who's actually using IPv6? I know some use it privately within their org, but are there any publicly using it?
ah, lots of people, actually... it's all over the routers and servers, nowdays... but the local network admin and network engineers are probably doing their best to make the migration as invisible as possible.
A good starting point to learn more about IPv6 would be www.internet2.edu. If you check out the corporate partners, you'll notice that ATT&T, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Lucent, Microsoft, Nortel, Qwest, SBC, and Sun are all in on the "Internet2" act, which includes the IPv6 protocol And the list of affiliated universities stretches nearly 200 members long...
Anyhow, Sun Solaris 9, Microsoft Windows2000, Microsoft WindowsXP, and Cisco IOS all have support for IPv6, as I understand... They're publicaly using it and supporting it.
If you want to know more about IPv6, check out this link and just search for the term "IPv6"... you should get about 93 articles regarding the Request For Comments (RFC) procedure used to define the protocol... As you will notice, IPv6 is a 128bit protocol, and was designed to be able to be broken up into 4 32bit packets, which allows it to interoperate with older IPv4 networks...
Moral of the story is that there are millions of people already using IPv6 on their client machines, who already don't know and don't care about the specific protocol implementations...
The article refers to an award for application developers to develop IPv6 enabled applications... If you calculate the ratio between IPv6 address and the total surface area of the earth, you will notice that there are approximately 2,000 IP addresses per square meter, with the IPv6 protocol... enough to give an address to every nut, bolt, and widget in every plane, train, and automobile on earth, with billions and billions left over... The awards will be going to people who figure out not just how to use IPv6, but how to code new applications and new uses for that kind of domain space...
It's been nearly an hour, and slashdot's still saying that there aren't any posts to this article...
I'm sure I posted nearly an hour ago on this topic.
Testing... 1, 2, 3...
Testing...
Uh... Ok. Spam's bad. Sorry for being off-topic, but what's up with slashdot? I seriously doubt that I'm the first post on this message, as I've alreadly re-loaded it twice on a friday night... \. isn't acting like it usually does...
Anyhow... anti-spam = good. spam = bad.
LOL... rotflmao! That's the coolest link I've seen in, like, a month!
Yo, I had no idea that folks were building wacked out stuff like that over there! What's up with the control seat?! It looks like a freakin back-hoe operator's chair! LOL.
Seriously, though... they need to port Mechwarior, and write device driver's for that thing! Put a couple of LCD moniters in there, a throttle control and joy-stick, maybe some foot pedals... Yo, if anybody want's to open a file on source-forge, and make a port of MechWarrior for Gundam-mech, there, count me in! =)
Mod the parent up! That's the coolest link on this thread!
Ohmygosh! rotflmao!. That's the coolest thing I've seen in, like, a month!
Yo, I had no idea that there was anybody building wacked out stuff like that... What's up with that control seat?! It looks like a fricking back-hoe operators seat! =)
They totally need to get a copy of the code to MechWarrior and rewrite the device drivers! If anybody want's to work on a Gundam-mech port of Mechwarrior, count me in! (I'm totally serious... I'd open up a site on sourceforge, and recode the entire fricken game, if it meant getting to fly back and forth from the US to Japan to write Mech code!!!)
LOL... Yo, mod the parent up!!! That's the coolest link on this thread! =)
OK, so I'm only vaguely impressed with Ace's gaming system... Seems to me like they're splitting hairs over upgrades of off-the-shelf equipment. Here's my question for all of you slashdotters:
Given the above article, and the premise that slashdotters have a wider range of experience than Ace, what would be the ideal configuration for a stereo-video enabled gaming system? Say I want something that can run Stereo-Quake or Stereo-Descent... Also assume that cost isn't really a factor (wish that were true, but I'm just pipe dreaming here...).
Besides the CPU and motherboard, there's also things like monitors (stereo projection monitors?), controllers (throttles, immersion gloves, goggles), stereo audio systems (THX?), and even room design. What would slashdotters put together with a beefy $50K to $100K budget, eh? Assume that the project is to put together the ultimate stereo-Quake VR simulator, and that you have access to the code of the game...
Sorry... that was a .org address, not a .net
Chicago CivicNet
For information on who wants it, and where it's being pioneered, check out the Chicago CivicNet project.
Imagine:
Real-time, video-on-demand services which act as video phones, and replaces the telephone as the major telecommunications medium which American society uses.
Real time autostereoscopic 3D television.
Virtual reality applications, such as the Street, the Matrix, the University, ChalkBoard, and so forth. Imagine walking into a virtual classroom or office, from home, when it's too cold and snowy out to drive to school or work.
Real time stock trading from your home to the local city's stock market or board of trade.
Real time browsing of Hubble Telescope data and Sloan data...
Imagine all of this in 1200x1600 32 bit color resolution, in stereoscopic 3D. And imagine it running 100 times faster than your current DSL connection.
That's why you want fiber in the home, and that's why people like Mayor Daley and 60+ corporations in Chicago are working to make it happen...
Good questions, and well asked.
:P
:P
Is Solaris a graphical OS?
Yes, very much so. It uses an X for hardware management, and for many years has used CDE (Common Desktop Environment) for mime-type association and related activities, which KDE was based off of. Gnome has gotten into the market, however, and is to be the new desktop environment for future releases of Solaris. For many years Solaris has competed with the likes of AIX and IRIX. Solaris supports stereo-3D graphics (read: Virtual Reality, VRML, CAVE, OpenGL) and high performance SVGA, PAL, and NTSC graphics configurations. Because it supports things like multi-head, multi-processor, and multi-threaded applications and configurations, movie studios and game-design companies often use Solaris workstation and server solutions to design and render special effects for Hollywood movies and the like (I may be mistaken, but I believe that Industrial Light & Magic is a Solaris shop... ever see Jurassic Park?).
Is it easier to use than Linux?
Yes and no. It's easier to design special effects for movies, install virtual reality caves, and run scientific data analysis with Solaris. They are both flavors of unix, so the difficulty is about the same, in terms of learning arcane commands and stuff. It's probably easiest to say that Solaris is as easy as Linux... just different. (Your questions is like asking whether or not vanilla icecream is warmer/colder than chocolate icecream...)
And, most importantly, is there any way I could run Windows games on it?
Sure. You could install WINE libraries on your machine, I suppose... But if you get a Solaris box, and download your OpenGL and Java3D libraries, why play Windows games, when you can design your own games? Why play windows games, when you can play VR games?
Ack! I've got Queks multiplying all over my webbrowser! Help!
You may be thinking of either of these two projects:
Sarien
Indiana Java & the Network of Doom
Does anybody know what's going on between Gnome and Enlightenment? It seems like Gnome is developing it's own window-manager-which-pretends-its-not-a-window-man ager (Metacity); meanwhile, Enlightenment is developing it's own desktop shell... kind of like two ships passing each other in the dark...
I'm going to hate the day when I'm forced to make a choice between Gnome and Enlightenment 0.17... I'll miss those footprints...
I don't know the answers to all of your questions, but I can provide some information for two of them....
How long untill we're not ALLOWED to turn off our TVs?
Maybe sooner than you think... Autostereoscopic Displays being worked on at MIT's Spatial Imaging Group run on SGI O2s. In answer to your question, we won't be allowed to turn off out televisions when our televisions get user level (and group level?) security installed... This will probably coincide with televisions getting file-level security. I can only imagine having to fill out forms and register with an application/internet service provider in order to upgrade from being a 'user' to being a 'poweruser'... "Damn. I had to pay $49.95 and go take a user-training course to be allowed to turn off my television..."
How long before our TVs watch what WE'RE doing so advertisers can see what effect they're having?
You will note that the design setup for the Mark II Autostereoscopic Display utilizes a video camera to watch the viewers and generate virtual 3D goggles. It's already built into the system design of next-generation 3D televisions...