Considering that Playboy's current target market is frat boys, I think that for Playboy it's currently a choice between being classy and being financially buoyant.
This has got to be the second stupidest idea for a game I've ever heard of. WTF is their target market? Computer-addicted teenagers who feel the need to combine electronics with masturbation but haven't yet discovered internet porn? yeah right
(only saying it's the second stupidest because it's still nowhere near Custer's Revenge.)
No offense, but trying to cram all of creation into a system of predicate logic is _NOT_ the big picture, nor has it proven useful for creating a system that can learn autonomously.
Since Minsky's prime, AI researchers have realized that they can't replicate in a few decades what it took life several million years (or God seven days) to produce, so they've gone back to starting small. Yeah, it's a bit harder to start making extravagant claims about things when you study your field one step at a time, but just as behaviorist psychology has taught us more about how we thnk than Freud, Jung, etc. ever did, I think the current approach is what is going to produce results.
So let them start with projects like Cog that try to get a machine to figure out how to move its hand toward an object. From what I can tell, the work is coming along quite nicely (although I do agree that it would be nice if this stuff were being done in simulations rather than fooling around with soldering irons all the time).
Ever seen The Matrix? We can do the same thing with our AI research software - let it live in a simulated world. It would not be left with no senses and no method of communication, it just wouldn't be aware of the outside world, per se.
And no, AI is not pure math, but the amount and level of math used in many AI applications (such as vision) is pretty high compared to many other CS tasks.
I'm currently working on a project in scene reconstruction, and I can't say how annoyed I was to discover that the only freely available robotics simulators I could find were of the type that simulate a 2-D robot in a 2-D world. Nothing that attempts to even simulate 3 dimensions, let alone physics or the ability to design all sorts of robots.
Nothing promising in the commercial sector, either.
I realize that creating software that could provide a good simulation that is usable in many situations is a difficult undertaking, but in the long run it would be a hell of a lot chaper for the universities, and would probably lead to a lot better work coming out of the graduate schools.
except that a huge percentage of the code that the open source movement has produced is nowhere near 64-bit safe, so even if you compile it for a 64-bit architecture the software is going to dance fandango on core like it's free drinks night at the beach club.
My experience has been that even if a paper is submitted to a teacher or professor (I played this game five years ago in high school), the teacher immediately prints it and pulls out a red pen rather than grading it electronically.
It's especially cute that the department at my college that seems the least inclined to grade and return my papers electronically rather than printing them out is the environmental studies department. The most inclined is the Math dept., where some professors won't even accept hardcopies anymore.
Plus, using electronic sources leads to paper wastage, too. A textbook is used over and over. If you hand students an electronic source, many of them will print it out, then throw it away. And again next year. And again. And again. And again.
And then there's all of the cute pictures people find on the 'net and print out. ..
Download Blender, and buy the Blender Book. After a few weeks of struggling with Blender's interface, I bought the Blender Book and within a couple days I was already making some fairly decent-looking animations using IKA's and fun stuff like that.
Previous to learning Blender, I was already familiar with 3D Studio MAX and Lightwave, & I have to say that I much prefer Blender's interface now that I've gotten used to it.
That and $30 bucks for a book and a free peice of software is a hell of a lot cheaper than what they're charging for Lightwave.
(NaN also released a manual for Blender which may now be sold by the Blender community, but it's more of a reference guide. Buy it if you like pretty pictures, but it's worthless as a tutorial.)
There are still a few shows that come out which are meant for older audences as much as kids. Animaniacs, Rocko's Modern Life, Invader Zim (in my opinion), Ren and Stimpy.
Thank Ghod Cartoon Network has figured out there is such a big audience for Cartoons among adults, although I wish they would put more effort into making cartoons like Rocko that have jokes that are clearly engineered to be equally funny to small children and adults, but for different reasons. I have infinite respect for scriptwriters and animators who can pull that off well.
I don't know, but it seems like the industry is also missing out on some of the most sensible types of integrations.
For example, I haven't seen much with integrating pagers, but I sure know that if I had both cell phone and pager service, I'd much rather have an integrated cell phone and pager than I would an integrated cell phone and PDA or cell phone and digital camera. (Heck, I'd rather have a pager/PDA than a cell phone/pda, too.)
On top of that, the button layout is just idiotic for gaming. It looks like four buttons are arranged for use as a D-pad, with three more buttons positioned at the D-pad's center, left, and right, respectively.
That'll be clunky as hell for any game that involves using more than the D-pad plus one other button - you'll have to use both hands for action buttons, or even both hands for both directions and actions. Which is exactly why action games like Dreadling (a 3D shooter) haven't taken off on PalmOS devices.
You'd think if they were designing a handheld for gaming, they'd take the time to give it an interface that's actually usable for gaming.
I just read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that discusses the fact that the correlation between SAT scores and college GPA is about 10%.
I have a p133 with 8 megs of RAM. I tried Slack on it first, thinking it would be the most friendly. It was okay - the machine was responsive, but it would go into swapping hell if I tried to run a web browser.
Then I have FreeBSD a try. Much, much better. At least, enough better to make X something that I could actually run applications under and not just a bunch of pretty pictures. I'm not sure what all makes it run a bit faster, but I have a feeling part of the story is the libc and the better VM system.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that Playboy's current target market is frat boys, I think that for Playboy it's currently a choice between being classy and being financially buoyant.
That article has given me a new goal in life.
.. GAME!!!!!
I.. MUST PLAY. . THAT.
This has got to be the second stupidest idea for a game I've ever heard of. WTF is their target market? Computer-addicted teenagers who feel the need to combine electronics with masturbation but haven't yet discovered internet porn? yeah right
(only saying it's the second stupidest because it's still nowhere near Custer's Revenge.)
Probably about the same as number of notes in my RCS-files that just say, "fucked with it" or "blah". Which is about 99%.
No offense, but trying to cram all of creation into a system of predicate logic is _NOT_ the big picture, nor has it proven useful for creating a system that can learn autonomously.
Since Minsky's prime, AI researchers have realized that they can't replicate in a few decades what it took life several million years (or God seven days) to produce, so they've gone back to starting small. Yeah, it's a bit harder to start making extravagant claims about things when you study your field one step at a time, but just as behaviorist psychology has taught us more about how we thnk than Freud, Jung, etc. ever did, I think the current approach is what is going to produce results.
So let them start with projects like Cog that try to get a machine to figure out how to move its hand toward an object. From what I can tell, the work is coming along quite nicely (although I do agree that it would be nice if this stuff were being done in simulations rather than fooling around with soldering irons all the time).
Ever seen The Matrix? We can do the same thing with our AI research software - let it live in a simulated world. It would not be left with no senses and no method of communication, it just wouldn't be aware of the outside world, per se.
And no, AI is not pure math, but the amount and level of math used in many AI applications (such as vision) is pretty high compared to many other CS tasks.
I'm currently working on a project in scene reconstruction, and I can't say how annoyed I was to discover that the only freely available robotics simulators I could find were of the type that simulate a 2-D robot in a 2-D world. Nothing that attempts to even simulate 3 dimensions, let alone physics or the ability to design all sorts of robots.
Nothing promising in the commercial sector, either.
I realize that creating software that could provide a good simulation that is usable in many situations is a difficult undertaking, but in the long run it would be a hell of a lot chaper for the universities, and would probably lead to a lot better work coming out of the graduate schools.
luser@gentoo-box:~> emerge apt-get emerge apt-get emerge apt-get emerge
---> fuck you
luser@gentoo-box:~>
except that a huge percentage of the code that the open source movement has produced is nowhere near 64-bit safe, so even if you compile it for a 64-bit architecture the software is going to dance fandango on core like it's free drinks night at the beach club.
Gentoo is a distro based on a package management system similar to BSD's ports system.
www.gentoo.org
My experience has been that even if a paper is submitted to a teacher or professor (I played this game five years ago in high school), the teacher immediately prints it and pulls out a red pen rather than grading it electronically.
.
It's especially cute that the department at my college that seems the least inclined to grade and return my papers electronically rather than printing them out is the environmental studies department. The most inclined is the Math dept., where some professors won't even accept hardcopies anymore.
Plus, using electronic sources leads to paper wastage, too. A textbook is used over and over. If you hand students an electronic source, many of them will print it out, then throw it away. And again next year. And again. And again. And again.
And then there's all of the cute pictures people find on the 'net and print out. .
Download Blender, and buy the Blender Book. After a few weeks of struggling with Blender's interface, I bought the Blender Book and within a couple days I was already making some fairly decent-looking animations using IKA's and fun stuff like that.
Previous to learning Blender, I was already familiar with 3D Studio MAX and Lightwave, & I have to say that I much prefer Blender's interface now that I've gotten used to it.
That and $30 bucks for a book and a free peice of software is a hell of a lot cheaper than what they're charging for Lightwave.
(NaN also released a manual for Blender which may now be sold by the Blender community, but it's more of a reference guide. Buy it if you like pretty pictures, but it's worthless as a tutorial.)
Not nearly as fast as sex with people does.
There are still a few shows that come out which are meant for older audences as much as kids. Animaniacs, Rocko's Modern Life, Invader Zim (in my opinion), Ren and Stimpy.
Thank Ghod Cartoon Network has figured out there is such a big audience for Cartoons among adults, although I wish they would put more effort into making cartoons like Rocko that have jokes that are clearly engineered to be equally funny to small children and adults, but for different reasons. I have infinite respect for scriptwriters and animators who can pull that off well.
The truth is, they're sleeping a lot later due to being up playing CounterStrike all night.
No, because thankfully Australia has superior "get a life" technology, which renders wi-fi at telephone booths hopelessly obsolete.
heh heh heh
It'd limit games to two players, and force those two players to sit facing each other and hold their PDA's in the right position.
If I get wireless gaming on my PDA, I want it over Bluetooth or 802.11b/g.
(warning, slightly OT)
I don't know, but it seems like the industry is also missing out on some of the most sensible types of integrations.
For example, I haven't seen much with integrating pagers, but I sure know that if I had both cell phone and pager service, I'd much rather have an integrated cell phone and pager than I would an integrated cell phone and PDA or cell phone and digital camera. (Heck, I'd rather have a pager/PDA than a cell phone/pda, too.)
On top of that, the button layout is just idiotic for gaming. It looks like four buttons are arranged for use as a D-pad, with three more buttons positioned at the D-pad's center, left, and right, respectively.
That'll be clunky as hell for any game that involves using more than the D-pad plus one other button - you'll have to use both hands for action buttons, or even both hands for both directions and actions. Which is exactly why action games like Dreadling (a 3D shooter) haven't taken off on PalmOS devices.
You'd think if they were designing a handheld for gaming, they'd take the time to give it an interface that's actually usable for gaming.
I just read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that discusses the fact that the correlation between SAT scores and college GPA is about 10%.
The truth is, SAT scores fall on a range of 400-1600 because they are calculated by rolling 4d4.
Lots and lots of people are in the top 2% of humanity.
Judging from a quick mental run-through of the SAT scores and IQs of people I know, I'd say about 1/3 of everybody fits in the 98th percentile.
And about 2/3 of everybody has at least one shoebox full of blue ribbons.
We're one spart pack of motherfuckers, I tell ya.
Like using a Diesel engine, perhaps?
I have a p133 with 8 megs of RAM. I tried Slack on it first, thinking it would be the most friendly. It was okay - the machine was responsive, but it would go into swapping hell if I tried to run a web browser.
Then I have FreeBSD a try. Much, much better. At least, enough better to make X something that I could actually run applications under and not just a bunch of pretty pictures. I'm not sure what all makes it run a bit faster, but I have a feeling part of the story is the libc and the better VM system.