Even within the limits, I've seen people do some amazing things. For example: a murder mystery where you need to figure out which boss to defeat from the clues given, because you don't have time to defeat all four. Or a horror story where you're spending the entire mission finding nothing to fight and wondering when the statues scattered throughout the area are going to come to life and attack you. I've seen efforts at creating stealth-based missions, but the game mechanics aren't quite there: there's no way to make an automatic "you lose if you engage in combat" situation.
Yes, 99% of the missions are simply "defeat X/gather X/rescue X" missions, but the remaining 1% more than make up for it.
If you can get your kid riding somewhere where they aren't likely to be hit by a car, fuck a helmet...
It's hard (not impossible, but hard) to kill yourself doing 20 mph on a bike. If you're around cars, wear a helmet. If you're not, don't. Pick up some scars, get some stitches, cry washing gravel out of road rash, and live life.
When I was seven, I took out a neighbor's mailbox with my head while riding a bike. I'm very glad I was wearing a hard-shell helmet at the time -- the only injury I got was a bruise where the helmet strap ran under my chin. Things would have been far less pleasant if I hadn't been wearing a helmet.
Machine learning requires feedback. Where's the feedback? How can the system find out that a sensor is six inches from where it thinks it is, when the only position input is the sensor?
And what do you do when your environment suddenly acquires Guy With Large Steel Belt Buckle? Or Janitor Running Floor Buffer Upstairs? I ran a VR lab with one of these trackers for a year -- it simply isn't possible to pre-calibrate for all possible situations.
Back when I ran a university virtual reality lab, I used a controller similar to this: three tracking sensors (left hand, right hand, and head), plus gloves to provide gesture recognition. There are some major points that are being glossed over:
1) Magnetic tracking requires calibration. I spent an afternoon calibrating a ten-foot by ten-foot by ten-foot grid in front of the primary display; before calibration, position measurements were off by as much as six inches. You need to re-calibrate any time you move metal objects in the vincinity of the tracker.
2) 3D tracking works best with a 3D display. There's no real benefit to tracking in 3D space in front of the screen, when you can only display things that are behind the screen. This leads to
3) 3D tracking works best with a large display. On a small display (say, the 24" monitor used to manage the VR control computer), your hands block too much of the view, and errors in tracking become significant. Our displays were eight feet wide by six feet high, driven by a projector that costs $50,000 used.
4) 3D control is tiring. When I was developing software for the lab, I quickly discovered that most people can't handle "point-and-click" navigation requiring the hands to be held up for more than a minute or so.
WINE/WineX/Cedega/Cider/etc. are not emulators. They are implementations of the Windows API on Linux and MacOS, and have the potential to be at least as fast as Windows.
In a RATIONAL world, **one** terrorism flag (i.e. one-way ticket, buying with cash, no luggage, watch list, etc) would yield pulling the passenger aside and "enhanced investigation": two flags, and the person is getting a very thorough body and luggage search, and three or more flags, it's grab the latex gloves, because it's a strip-search and fine-tooth comb search through luggage and posessions.
Earlier this year, I bought a one-way ticket at the last minute with cash while carrying no luggage. Does this make me a terrorist? No, it just means I missed my connecting flight because the flight I was on was delayed by weather, and the airline lost my luggage.
In a RATIONAL world, I'd be permitted to walk from the ticket counter to the departure gate without any interference -- the determination that I'm not a terrorist would have taken place far from the airport and long before I arrived, through the actions of whichever three-letter agency is tasked with investigating and breaking up terrorist plots.
That's the reservoir -- the water that's being heated prior to using it to brew coffee. Once you've trickled it through room-temperature grounds and dripped it through room-temperature air, it's a good bit cooler when it hits the bottom of the pot.
Use a sacrificial computer. I keep an older computer around for just this purpose (tech-support types can't handle anything that isn't Windows), and when I'm done, I re-image the computer's hard drive.
190F? Hardly the standard serving temperature for coffee:
Take a swig of 140F coffee -- the temperature your home coffee maker produces. You'll swallow in a hurry, your mouth will feel tender for a few minutes, and you might express your discomfort.
Take a swig of 165F coffee -- the temperature your local restaraunt keeps theirs at. You might swallow, you might spit it out, you'll probably curse for a bit, and your mouth will stop hurting by the end of the day.
Take a swig of 190F coffee -- the temperature McDonalds used to keep theirs at. You'll shriek in agony, and if you don't spit it out in a hurry, you'll spend the next few days in the hospital on an IV drip while the doctors see if your mouth and throat need reconstructive surgery.
Painting all of Africa with a single brush is just as foolish. This $100 laptop might not be such a hot idea in Zimbabwe, but I expect it will do just fine in Kenya or South Africa.
Admittedly the range would have to be increased to be able to reach the US from Saudia Arabia, which is where attacks like this would obviously originate, but that's a relatively minor technical problem given current materials and engine technologies.
Extreme-range aircraft are a lot harder to build than you think. Only two airplanes have ever been built that could go from Saudi Arabia to the US and return to Saudi Arabia while still carrying a worthwhile cargo: the Rutan Voyager and the GlobalFlyer.
A fixed-handle mower is easier to make and stronger. We had one of the flip-handle mowers. It needed to be repaired every year or so, and every single time, the failure was related to the flip mechanism.
Having used a satnav with a rental recently, I have to say... it's really hard to misunderstand "Turn left in 120 feet" "Turn left in 50 feet" "Turn left".
At which point I turn 45 degrees to the left, putting me on the approach ramp for the 7th Street bridge, when the GPS wanted me to turn 90 degrees to the left onto Smith Street.
the editor completely misunderstands the point (or misuses his/her GPS). The potential clutter of the user interface/map/traffic aside, GPS is the most dramatic simplification in driving to emerge in years -- provided you just listen to the voice prompts.
When the voice prompts are correct, sure. All too often, the prompts are incomplete, incorrect, or misleading:
"Keep left": describing a suicide merge onto a freeway.
"Bear right": a Y intersection where the right-hand fork passes over the left-hand fork while curving 270 degrees to the left.
"Turn right as soon as possible": Multipath reflection off a skyscraper caused the vehicle's position to jump by half a mile, resulting in the device computing a new, incorrect route and assuming the vehicle was going 100+ miles per hour.
"Turn left": A one-way street splits into four: 45 degrees right, straight ahead, 45 degrees left, and 90 degrees left.
I'd hate to see how it describes a traffic circle.
You see that "D" in the patent number? This is a design patent, on the appearance of their particular user interface for displaying patents. For the next 14 years, nobody else can copy the "decorative ornamentation" of their page. Since it's not a utility patent, anybody can copy the underlying idea of displaying patents.
It's actually rather amazing how much data you can get from monitoring this sort of thing. For example, I used to track the CPU temperature of my computer. From looking at fluctuations in the graph, I could tell when when the furnace was running, when I entered and left the room, when the ceiling light was on, and so forth. I'm sure you could do the same thing with electricity usage: a spike of X watts represents the refridgerator, a shift of Y watts is the bathroom lights, etc.
As for music, I hate to break it to you, buddy, but someone manually created that metadata for you. You just get to benefit from their labour.
It took me about 20 seconds per CD to type in the CD title and artist name. The computer then did the heavy work of ripping the tracks, converting them to FLAC, and sorting them into the correct folders. Not exactly hard.
Organizing is easy: my photos are categorized by location, then sub-categorized by date. My emails are categorized by sender or by mailing list. My music is categorized by artist, and subcategorized by CD. All this is done automatically, with very little effort on my part.
Now, what about semantic tagging? I've got 54,000 photos. Manual tagging would take months: I'd need to inspect each photo to figure out what tags to apply ("daylight, clear sky, bald eagle, ponderosa pine...now, do I also want to tag it to indicate that the eagle is flying rather than perching? Do I want to distinguish the fact that it's soaring from photos of birds taking off, flapping their wings, diving, or landing? If I tag it as 'soaring', do I want to indicate that it's riding thermals rather than ridge lift? It's in a wilderness-style city park: do I tag it as 'urban', or 'wilderness'?") This is a slow process, and it's not clear that the benefits would outweigh the costs.
A NES is about as complex as a Commodore 64 or an 8086. A Super Nintendo is similar to an Apple IIGS or an 80286. Odds are, the DOS games you're running are targeted for a 33MHz 80486 or faster.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't steer an electron beam with a mirror. You need magnets, and those can't generate sharp turns.
Even within the limits, I've seen people do some amazing things. For example: a murder mystery where you need to figure out which boss to defeat from the clues given, because you don't have time to defeat all four. Or a horror story where you're spending the entire mission finding nothing to fight and wondering when the statues scattered throughout the area are going to come to life and attack you. I've seen efforts at creating stealth-based missions, but the game mechanics aren't quite there: there's no way to make an automatic "you lose if you engage in combat" situation.
Yes, 99% of the missions are simply "defeat X/gather X/rescue X" missions, but the remaining 1% more than make up for it.
When I was seven, I took out a neighbor's mailbox with my head while riding a bike. I'm very glad I was wearing a hard-shell helmet at the time -- the only injury I got was a bruise where the helmet strap ran under my chin. Things would have been far less pleasant if I hadn't been wearing a helmet.
Machine learning requires feedback. Where's the feedback? How can the system find out that a sensor is six inches from where it thinks it is, when the only position input is the sensor?
Machine learning is a tool, not a magic wand.
And what do you do when your environment suddenly acquires Guy With Large Steel Belt Buckle? Or Janitor Running Floor Buffer Upstairs? I ran a VR lab with one of these trackers for a year -- it simply isn't possible to pre-calibrate for all possible situations.
Back when I ran a university virtual reality lab, I used a controller similar to this: three tracking sensors (left hand, right hand, and head), plus gloves to provide gesture recognition. There are some major points that are being glossed over:
1) Magnetic tracking requires calibration. I spent an afternoon calibrating a ten-foot by ten-foot by ten-foot grid in front of the primary display; before calibration, position measurements were off by as much as six inches. You need to re-calibrate any time you move metal objects in the vincinity of the tracker.
2) 3D tracking works best with a 3D display. There's no real benefit to tracking in 3D space in front of the screen, when you can only display things that are behind the screen. This leads to
3) 3D tracking works best with a large display. On a small display (say, the 24" monitor used to manage the VR control computer), your hands block too much of the view, and errors in tracking become significant. Our displays were eight feet wide by six feet high, driven by a projector that costs $50,000 used.
4) 3D control is tiring. When I was developing software for the lab, I quickly discovered that most people can't handle "point-and-click" navigation requiring the hands to be held up for more than a minute or so.
ECA was a great company. Whatever happened to them?
WINE/WineX/Cedega/Cider/etc. are not emulators. They are implementations of the Windows API on Linux and MacOS, and have the potential to be at least as fast as Windows.
Earlier this year, I bought a one-way ticket at the last minute with cash while carrying no luggage. Does this make me a terrorist? No, it just means I missed my connecting flight because the flight I was on was delayed by weather, and the airline lost my luggage.
In a RATIONAL world, I'd be permitted to walk from the ticket counter to the departure gate without any interference -- the determination that I'm not a terrorist would have taken place far from the airport and long before I arrived, through the actions of whichever three-letter agency is tasked with investigating and breaking up terrorist plots.
That's the reservoir -- the water that's being heated prior to using it to brew coffee. Once you've trickled it through room-temperature grounds and dripped it through room-temperature air, it's a good bit cooler when it hits the bottom of the pot.
Use a sacrificial computer. I keep an older computer around for just this purpose (tech-support types can't handle anything that isn't Windows), and when I'm done, I re-image the computer's hard drive.
190F? Hardly the standard serving temperature for coffee:
Take a swig of 140F coffee -- the temperature your home coffee maker produces. You'll swallow in a hurry, your mouth will feel tender for a few minutes, and you might express your discomfort.
Take a swig of 165F coffee -- the temperature your local restaraunt keeps theirs at. You might swallow, you might spit it out, you'll probably curse for a bit, and your mouth will stop hurting by the end of the day.
Take a swig of 190F coffee -- the temperature McDonalds used to keep theirs at. You'll shriek in agony, and if you don't spit it out in a hurry, you'll spend the next few days in the hospital on an IV drip while the doctors see if your mouth and throat need reconstructive surgery.
Painting all of Africa with a single brush is just as foolish. This $100 laptop might not be such a hot idea in Zimbabwe, but I expect it will do just fine in Kenya or South Africa.
Extreme-range aircraft are a lot harder to build than you think. Only two airplanes have ever been built that could go from Saudi Arabia to the US and return to Saudi Arabia while still carrying a worthwhile cargo: the Rutan Voyager and the GlobalFlyer.
A fixed-handle mower is easier to make and stronger. We had one of the flip-handle mowers. It needed to be repaired every year or so, and every single time, the failure was related to the flip mechanism.
At which point I turn 45 degrees to the left, putting me on the approach ramp for the 7th Street bridge, when the GPS wanted me to turn 90 degrees to the left onto Smith Street.
When the voice prompts are correct, sure. All too often, the prompts are incomplete, incorrect, or misleading:
"Keep left": describing a suicide merge onto a freeway.
"Bear right": a Y intersection where the right-hand fork passes over the left-hand fork while curving 270 degrees to the left.
"Turn right as soon as possible": Multipath reflection off a skyscraper caused the vehicle's position to jump by half a mile, resulting in the device computing a new, incorrect route and assuming the vehicle was going 100+ miles per hour.
"Turn left": A one-way street splits into four: 45 degrees right, straight ahead, 45 degrees left, and 90 degrees left.
I'd hate to see how it describes a traffic circle.
Swamp gas.
The full equation is
E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2
where E is energy, m is mass, p is momentum, and c is the speed of light. The "m^2 c^4" part is known as the object's "rest mass".
The Proxomitron runs perfectly under Wine.
You see that "D" in the patent number? This is a design patent, on the appearance of their particular user interface for displaying patents. For the next 14 years, nobody else can copy the "decorative ornamentation" of their page. Since it's not a utility patent, anybody can copy the underlying idea of displaying patents.
It's actually rather amazing how much data you can get from monitoring this sort of thing. For example, I used to track the CPU temperature of my computer. From looking at fluctuations in the graph, I could tell when when the furnace was running, when I entered and left the room, when the ceiling light was on, and so forth. I'm sure you could do the same thing with electricity usage: a spike of X watts represents the refridgerator, a shift of Y watts is the bathroom lights, etc.
It took me about 20 seconds per CD to type in the CD title and artist name. The computer then did the heavy work of ripping the tracks, converting them to FLAC, and sorting them into the correct folders. Not exactly hard.
Organizing is easy: my photos are categorized by location, then sub-categorized by date. My emails are categorized by sender or by mailing list. My music is categorized by artist, and subcategorized by CD. All this is done automatically, with very little effort on my part.
Now, what about semantic tagging? I've got 54,000 photos. Manual tagging would take months: I'd need to inspect each photo to figure out what tags to apply ("daylight, clear sky, bald eagle, ponderosa pine...now, do I also want to tag it to indicate that the eagle is flying rather than perching? Do I want to distinguish the fact that it's soaring from photos of birds taking off, flapping their wings, diving, or landing? If I tag it as 'soaring', do I want to indicate that it's riding thermals rather than ridge lift? It's in a wilderness-style city park: do I tag it as 'urban', or 'wilderness'?") This is a slow process, and it's not clear that the benefits would outweigh the costs.
A NES is about as complex as a Commodore 64 or an 8086. A Super Nintendo is similar to an Apple IIGS or an 80286. Odds are, the DOS games you're running are targeted for a 33MHz 80486 or faster.