This is a game I keep wanting to play (Like one of those classic books you keep meaning to read), but it's never held my attention somehow.
Pug
Yes and no... three starts so far and I never seem to get very far in the story line, but the melee mode is as hilarious as ever. No, because *I* am chewing my way through all the classics, and that's going rather well actually.
As an analog device, I can't think of any reason off the top of my head why such devices wouldn't record outside of human hearing ranges
It's rather simple, really; even analogue devices have a maximum 'resolution'. For film, this is the graininess. For tape, there's a certain magnetic response time.
Imagine, if you will, a nice 440Hz waveform; this is stored as a nicely wavy pattern in the magnetic particles. Well, if you were to store a 0.01Hz signal, there just wouldn't be enough offset, inch-by-inch, to detect it (that is to say, generate a magnetic current) when playing back (at normal speeds, anyway). In the opposite case, the wave pattern of a 1GHz signal would be way too steep for the magnetic head and tape to handle; I suppose there's no telling what the recorded signal would actually end up being, but my guess is it'd be rather like white noise.
Put another way, look at an analogue gauge -- sound would correspond to movement of the needle. Very slow movements would be effectively undetectable, and an overly fast signal would just result in a jittering (and lagging) needle because it can't keep up.
Imagine, if you will, a cross between a Facebook style interface and an Apache style implementation: that is, something that will let you (as a user) connect to any other user and not give a damn about how or where, and at the same time let anyone run their own standards-compliant server with the exact settings that they prefer.
To get this right, it needs to take a long hard look at user data privacy *as the first thing*, and that's exactly what the Appleseed Project (http://appleseed.sourceforge.net) was intended to showcase.
One reason why Facebook made it big is because they got their commercial model right (don't tell anyone, but the users are actually the product, not the customers).
The trouble is not so much that an Appleseed style implementation won't work (we know it does, because that's how the whole everyman's Internet got off the ground) but that it's not a pioneering effort (citing the same example, because the crummy early-day Internet had no competition other than itself). In this day and age, such an effort needs to stack up against Facebook -- imagine Mosaic trying to get market share from Chrome!
What bummed me out was not only the crummosity of the movies, but also the fact that I live in a backward place where I can't get them from Blockbuster (and forget about downloading anything on my 3/4Mbit line), so I *bought* them when I finally saw them in a record shop. Worst money I ever spent!
Really? Funny, I sort of have the opposite impression; that when a new technology is created, people [here] often think of how the cesspool we call humanity (and the corporations they've unleashed) is going to use and pervert it, forgetting the best outcome.
That's an ingenious idea though, installing AdBlockPlusPlus directly on your retina instead of having to install AdBlockPlus on every browser you come in contact with.
I'm not sure I follow (and pretty sure I don't agree with) your screed on the destruction of civilisation solely because of personalised in-eye displays. Alas, I do agree that we'll get there soon enough by any event, but I don't think this "eye" thing is going to be that much of a step forward.
I expect that we'll be interfacing with our pda's and entertainment devices using neuro and brain wave readers long before the judicial system will rely on that kind of tech. As you say, technology does not change the way people think, and the governing/judicial system is a rather sluggish thing. But yes, regardless of what the governing/judicial system is up to, the social change is going to imprison the non-believers. Really: mail, the telegraph, the Internet, and Facebook; these are all iterations towards greater coherence. For an average individual, not having a Facebook account today is comparable to not having a phone twenty years ago. Twenty years from now, I'm sure you'll be allowed to not wear "digi-eyes", but the resulting social isolation is going to make it mindbogglingly less acceptable, not to mention totally impractical (after all, in our present day it is still possible to lead some manner of social life without a Facebook account, but that of course ends if you can no longer get a meal or a job without digi-eyes).
So tell me, where does that leave us when those sensory experiences become artificial and malleable?
Seriously? That's not an easy question to answer, but I do believe that --assuming we ever find a way to not start WWIII --- we'll continue on the path towards greater intellectuality, past the point where we leave our physical bodies behind. Imagine what that will do to concepts of identity, privacy, family and so on!....and then, there'll be a power outage and kill us all.
I have an Android phone, and while the on-screen keyboard is okay, it does have severe disadvantages (as explained by others above).
The thing that I miss the most is definitely handwriting recognition -- it allows a small device to have a relatively big UI during input, it is not affected by regional layout differences, and it's fairly easy to extend and personalise by the individual user. TealScript is a prime example, really, doing full-screen transparent handwriting capture for any application.
Too bad most (all?) modern phone OS'es are too badly broken to even allow something like this to be implemented by a 3rd party (or even without serious core OS design changes).
Seconded. Get some quality gear. As in, contact your local university or museum, they are bound to have (connections to some place with) the proper equipment.
What's this for? If you would be willing to donate digital copies, or even the originals (if you feel they would be better able to take proper care of them), I bet they would gladly provide the time and resources.
Exactly. Good stuff CAN be done with GOTO statements.
The original Zork game basically has the player wandering from room to room. In the source code, believe it or not, each room has its own 6-digit label, and the game uses nothing but GOTO statements to move the player around.
I like Germany very much, but it's not a destination I'd recommend *specifically* for avoiding stupid (IT) regulation.
Before you pack up your wagon, google around a bit for the recent (~2 years) data laws passed in Germany. As a brief taste, it's apparently ok for the government to install spyware on their citizens' computers, but not okay for citizens to use network snooping (aka diagnostics) software.
Not than anywhere else is really a lot better. (Except maybe Iceland, soon?)
I'm not saying that you're right, but it's definitely the case that the tools his company offers, and the explanations about how they work, are unbelievably amazing. Either they're truly brilliant, or the man's a fraud. I don't have the insight to tell which is the case.
I have a generic programmable remote with a couple of hard-buttons and a biggish touch LCD. As with the topical device, each key is fixed in size and location but can vary in function. The hard-buttons are fine, but I keep wanting to overlay some form of grid to help my sense the key boundaries (but I never get around to doing anything about it).
Okay, I've now had time to do a bit of digging. I think I was thinking more of these graphs regarding performance: http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/ I do concede, however, that (1) these have nothing to do with netcraft, (2) far from show FreeBSD as the winner in all cases, and (3) are more than a few years old. I have not been keeping up to date.
I still haven't found the info on "server market share"; I'm positive I used to have good info that a respectable number of truly large systems, but I also concede that eBay, Amazon, and Google are now all apparently linux-hosted.
I'm sorry, but I don't see the pertinence of the link to the "most reliable hosting companies". The other link is interesting; the preceding pages simply show that various OS'es lead for various tasks; there clearly is no overall leader (the GCrypt test on page 3 is appalling).
So yes, I was over the top up there. I stand corrected.
And you have modern, meaningful benchmarks demonstrating this to be the case, I presume?
Apparently not, no. The benchmarks I was thinking of had the gall to let themselves get several years old since I thought of them last! So nevermind me, I'm living in the past.
Well yes, from Netcraft, in spite of the almost mandatory "is dead" joke... not that I can find the figures for you right now, though.
I didn't intend to be boastful or nitpicky; perhaps I should have rephrased it to something in along "many very large web sites are hosted on BSD systems.
True, the linux wins in mind share, and to some extent therefore also in market share. But the BSDs do provide superior performance, which is very evident in the server market share.
But hey, why not offer server performance for desktops, too?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
if only "I hate printers." totally ruined any sense of expertise you built up in the text...
This is a game I keep wanting to play (Like one of those classic books you keep meaning to read), but it's never held my attention somehow.
Pug
Yes and no ... three starts so far and I never seem to get very far in the story line, but the melee mode is as hilarious as ever. No, because *I* am chewing my way through all the classics, and that's going rather well actually.
Remixes! Get your remixes! Right here for no cost at all.
http://www.medievalfuture.com/precursors/
As an analog device, I can't think of any reason off the top of my head why such devices wouldn't record outside of human hearing ranges
It's rather simple, really; even analogue devices have a maximum 'resolution'. For film, this is the graininess. For tape, there's a certain magnetic response time.
Imagine, if you will, a nice 440Hz waveform; this is stored as a nicely wavy pattern in the magnetic particles. Well, if you were to store a 0.01Hz signal, there just wouldn't be enough offset, inch-by-inch, to detect it (that is to say, generate a magnetic current) when playing back (at normal speeds, anyway). In the opposite case, the wave pattern of a 1GHz signal would be way too steep for the magnetic head and tape to handle; I suppose there's no telling what the recorded signal would actually end up being, but my guess is it'd be rather like white noise.
Put another way, look at an analogue gauge -- sound would correspond to movement of the needle. Very slow movements would be effectively undetectable, and an overly fast signal would just result in a jittering (and lagging) needle because it can't keep up.
I used this for a while:
^^ö^^
as my email sig, back when I used a certain Chiroptera-named email client.
Imagine, if you will, a cross between a Facebook style interface and an Apache style implementation: that is, something that will let you (as a user) connect to any other user and not give a damn about how or where, and at the same time let anyone run their own standards-compliant server with the exact settings that they prefer.
To get this right, it needs to take a long hard look at user data privacy *as the first thing*, and that's exactly what the Appleseed Project (http://appleseed.sourceforge.net) was intended to showcase.
One reason why Facebook made it big is because they got their commercial model right (don't tell anyone, but the users are actually the product, not the customers).
The trouble is not so much that an Appleseed style implementation won't work (we know it does, because that's how the whole everyman's Internet got off the ground) but that it's not a pioneering effort (citing the same example, because the crummy early-day Internet had no competition other than itself). In this day and age, such an effort needs to stack up against Facebook -- imagine Mosaic trying to get market share from Chrome!
Yeah, I second that.
What bummed me out was not only the crummosity of the movies, but also the fact that I live in a backward place where I can't get them from Blockbuster (and forget about downloading anything on my 3/4Mbit line), so I *bought* them when I finally saw them in a record shop. Worst money I ever spent!
Only when you read that in your head, and not in your own voice!
Really? Funny, I sort of have the opposite impression; that when a new technology is created, people [here] often think of how the cesspool we call humanity (and the corporations they've unleashed) is going to use and pervert it, forgetting the best outcome.
That's an ingenious idea though, installing AdBlockPlusPlus directly on your retina instead of having to install AdBlockPlus on every browser you come in contact with.
I'm not sure I follow (and pretty sure I don't agree with) your screed on the destruction of civilisation solely because of personalised in-eye displays. Alas, I do agree that we'll get there soon enough by any event, but I don't think this "eye" thing is going to be that much of a step forward.
I expect that we'll be interfacing with our pda's and entertainment devices using neuro and brain wave readers long before the judicial system will rely on that kind of tech. As you say, technology does not change the way people think, and the governing/judicial system is a rather sluggish thing. But yes, regardless of what the governing/judicial system is up to, the social change is going to imprison the non-believers. Really: mail, the telegraph, the Internet, and Facebook; these are all iterations towards greater coherence. For an average individual, not having a Facebook account today is comparable to not having a phone twenty years ago. Twenty years from now, I'm sure you'll be allowed to not wear "digi-eyes", but the resulting social isolation is going to make it mindbogglingly less acceptable, not to mention totally impractical (after all, in our present day it is still possible to lead some manner of social life without a Facebook account, but that of course ends if you can no longer get a meal or a job without digi-eyes).
So tell me, where does that leave us when those sensory experiences become artificial and malleable?
Seriously? That's not an easy question to answer, but I do believe that --assuming we ever find a way to not start WWIII --- we'll continue on the path towards greater intellectuality, past the point where we leave our physical bodies behind. Imagine what that will do to concepts of identity, privacy, family and so on!. ...and then, there'll be a power outage and kill us all.
You'd need to put it in a loop, but sure ... if you really want to. :p
I have an Android phone, and while the on-screen keyboard is okay, it does have severe disadvantages (as explained by others above).
The thing that I miss the most is definitely handwriting recognition -- it allows a small device to have a relatively big UI during input, it is not affected by regional layout differences, and it's fairly easy to extend and personalise by the individual user. TealScript is a prime example, really, doing full-screen transparent handwriting capture for any application.
Too bad most (all?) modern phone OS'es are too badly broken to even allow something like this to be implemented by a 3rd party (or even without serious core OS design changes).
Seconded. Get some quality gear. As in, contact your local university or museum, they are bound to have (connections to some place with) the proper equipment.
What's this for? If you would be willing to donate digital copies, or even the originals (if you feel they would be better able to take proper care of them), I bet they would gladly provide the time and resources.
Good luck!
Exactly. Good stuff CAN be done with GOTO statements.
The original Zork game basically has the player wandering from room to room. In the source code, believe it or not, each room has its own 6-digit label, and the game uses nothing but GOTO statements to move the player around.
And yet, it's a pretty decent game.
I like Germany very much, but it's not a destination I'd recommend *specifically* for avoiding stupid (IT) regulation.
Before you pack up your wagon, google around a bit for the recent (~2 years) data laws passed in Germany. As a brief taste, it's apparently ok for the government to install spyware on their citizens' computers, but not okay for citizens to use network snooping (aka diagnostics) software.
Not than anywhere else is really a lot better. (Except maybe Iceland, soon?)
Companies are not People
You're absolutely right. In many regards they enjoy superior rights than people. :-/
I'm a European. I'm not particularly proud that it took this bloody long for some common sense to throw a spanner in those works.
Heck, there are even guys out there who hand build their own radio tubes...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl-QMuUQhVM
If the carrier sound is decreasing in frequency, that should indicate that the probe is accelerating, which, in space, is very much like falling.
I'm not saying that you're right, but it's definitely the case that the tools his company offers, and the explanations about how they work, are unbelievably amazing. Either they're truly brilliant, or the man's a fraud. I don't have the insight to tell which is the case.
So I don't use his software.
+1 Agree
I have a generic programmable remote with a couple of hard-buttons and a biggish touch LCD. As with the topical device, each key is fixed in size and location but can vary in function. The hard-buttons are fine, but I keep wanting to overlay some form of grid to help my sense the key boundaries (but I never get around to doing anything about it).
Okay, I've now had time to do a bit of digging. I think I was thinking more of these graphs regarding performance:
http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/
I do concede, however, that (1) these have nothing to do with netcraft, (2) far from show FreeBSD as the winner in all cases, and (3) are more than a few years old. I have not been keeping up to date.
I still haven't found the info on "server market share"; I'm positive I used to have good info that a respectable number of truly large systems, but I also concede that eBay, Amazon, and Google are now all apparently linux-hosted.
I'm sorry, but I don't see the pertinence of the link to the "most reliable hosting companies". The other link is interesting; the preceding pages simply show that various OS'es lead for various tasks; there clearly is no overall leader (the GCrypt test on page 3 is appalling).
So yes, I was over the top up there. I stand corrected.
And you have modern, meaningful benchmarks demonstrating this to be the case, I presume?
Apparently not, no. The benchmarks I was thinking of had the gall to let themselves get several years old since I thought of them last! So nevermind me, I'm living in the past.
Well yes, from Netcraft, in spite of the almost mandatory "is dead" joke ... not that I can find the figures for you right now, though.
I didn't intend to be boastful or nitpicky; perhaps I should have rephrased it to something in along "many very large web sites are hosted on BSD systems.
Touché.
True, the linux wins in mind share, and to some extent therefore also in market share. But the BSDs do provide superior performance, which is very evident in the server market share.
But hey, why not offer server performance for desktops, too? :-)