And there are plans to sell them commercially for three times the regular price, and pump the profit back into the charity program, so you won't have to buy the thing in eBay for $1000.
Wrong. There are no plans to sell these on the open market in any way whatsoever. Many people have suggested a one-for-two or one-for-three, but the people behind the project have consistently stated that this will not happen.
I'd like to get my hands on one, as I believe that as a low-power entry-level laptop it should form a worldwide developer's baseline, but I won't get my hands on one and I respect the reasons for that decision. I'm sure some hacker will make an emulator as a developer's kit soon enough anyway.
Say I deploy ComputerApplication 2006 today to the entire company. Next year, installs for new users/PCs will have to be ComputerApplication 2007, as most software companies don't sell licenses for out-of-date software versions. The year after, it'll be ComputerApplication 2008. By ComputerApplication 2009, if not sooner, staff will be using so-called "enhanced features" that mean their files aren't backward-compatible with previous versions of the software. At this point, team by team the business starts falling apart and requiring urgent upgrades.
This is exactly what the software companies want. Force one to buy the new version and you force the department to buy it, even though they produce the same stuff in the end.
When it comes to high-end software (such as CAD), a three-year-old business computer (and few businesses ever deploy cutting edge) rarely meets the minimum spec, so.... "tech refresh"!
Nor do I believe that dumping things that we wouldn't use on the 3rd world is going to make the [technology] gap disappear -- au contraire. I'd rather see them receive one $1000 laptop than ten $100 ones that aren't similar to what the rest of the world use. "Better than what they have" isn't a valid argument, as it serves to keep the gap.
Developing countries cannot maintain a "fleet" of up-to-date computers, as every PC is rendered obsolete by "progress" within 3 years. "what the rest of the world uses" is a con -- p*ss-poor programming and planned obsolescence mean we spend ridiculous amounts of money to continue to be able to do the same thing year-on-year.
I work in an IT support department -- my PC is used for email, word-processing and browsing, and as a Citrix client for connecting to our SMS servers. All this could be done adequately on a Win95-era Pentium. However, my current 2.8 GHz, 248MB WinXP PC continues to grind along far too slowly.
One of the key benefits of the OLPC project is that unlike the schemes that redeploy old corporate kit, it defines a closed platform. It can run word processors; it can do email; it can run a Xterm/Citrix/TS/etc client, and it will never become obsolete as it has an established user base. It would become a reference minimum-spec platform for a great deal of Linux development.
Knock-on effects? Maybe the developed world would break out of the continual upgrade cycle. With a fixed minimum-spec machine for office tasks, maybe network computing would finally take off, with every office deploying application servers for the (rare) processor intensive apps. Perhaps we'd see more efficient, non-bloat software. Perhaps the developed countries would say "That's neat -- I bet I could fit that in a palmtop" and finally bridge the gap between desktop and handheld computing.
I emailed them when the OLPC first went public, suggesting a buy-two-get-one thing. I was ready to pledge, but I never heard about it. Nowhere, nowhen, nohow.
I admit to wondering how referring to printed handouts after the fact can be seen as "impractical."
Five years into my computing career, I've already been given more course notes than I can realistically store at my desk. They'd all fit on single CD if they were in electronic form.
When the students look at the presentation again they'll (hopefully) remember whay you said,
Highly unlikely. I've never been able to use presentation slides as any sort of aide-memôire -- there's just too little information in them. It's generally the finer details that you forget, and PowerPoint presentations don't have space for the finer details.
I fail to see the point in an open standard document format.
In photos, sound and video: yes. Umpteen different photo programs can perform umpteen transformations on photos in umpteen different ways, and then save the file as a picture again, without needing to encode any information about what was done. A picture is a picture is a picture. A sound is a sound is a sound. A video is a video is a video.
Documents, however, are a little different. The file is a series of transformations. The functions of a word-processor are thus totally prescribed: the standard and nothing more. That leaves next to nothing for Word Processor X to differentiate itself from Word Processor Y -- so why bother writing one? Why not just use OpenOffice.
In case you still don't see what I'm saying, an example:
I take a picture with my camera, and load it into Photoshop. I apply a pincushion effect to squeeze the middle of the picture in, giving it a "waist". I save it in.JPG and put it on my webpage. I can open it in Opera, Mozilla, IE etc, and none of the browsers need know how to "pincushion" a picture.
I open a text document in a word processor, apply formatting and then apply a pincushion effect to squeeze the middle part of the text in. Format X saves it as blahblahblah. If I open it in a word processor without pincushion, it doesn't work.
I can't see where you get this idea from that there is a "reluctance to change" open standards. TCP/IP is an open standard that has changed drastically over the past 15-20 years or so
TCP/IP is a standard for techies & geeks. Techies and geeks (A) Like shiny new things & (B) Like things that work better.
Joe Bloggs MBA is not a techy and not a geek. He likes what he knows. He is happy with "good enough", and doesn't wire his washing machine to a 100 Base T network just so his PC will tell him when his clothes are clean!
Would it be terribly bad for a quarterly or twice yearly video game that continued and expanded over time.
Would you watch a quarterly or twice-yearly TV series? No, a TV series comes at you in one hour chunks once a week for three months -- regular as clockwork. The delay between episodes is small enough that you get to keep the story in your head. Would you buy a game that you played for only an hour or two in a week? Increase the episode size and the delay between episodes will go up, because dev time won't be coming down.
We also have to consider how the episodes are scheduled. On TV, the majority of series are at least halfway through filming before the first episode is aired. The lions share of the investment has been made and spent, and they have a month's contingency for delays on the filming of the remainder.
Look at amateur episodic media on the net: serial prose, web comics, machinima. The vast bulk of this is published immediately on completion. Without several episodes as contingency, there is no way to fill a gap if the writer falls ill, has exams, etc. The audience gets bored and never comes back. Even the few who stick around often get disappointed when the author gets sick of it and never finishes the story. (And anyone who remembers some of the early Image Comics titles will know that this isn't just a problem for amateurs!)
The new wave of episodic games is very new, but it seems to me that they are falling into the publish-when-ready category: lack of pre-written follow-up episodes, no fixed release schedules, not even any guarantee of any other episodes.
I don't buy the start if I can't be reasonably sure of getting the end.
Turing's test was different from the modern so-called Turing test. In Turing's model, an observer would read the text of a real-time interaction between two other parties and try to determine if each of them were a computer or a human participant. There wasn't the opportunity for the observer to ask trick questions. Turing was talking about natural language, while Loebner prize discussions become a sort of unnatural interogation.
But in one respect these bots are successful -- they elicit an emotional response from me: anger. Even though I know they aren't real, my brain still screams "You're Not Listening To Me!!!!!!!"
But: re-use is not plagiarism. Cheating yes, plagiarism no.
Every speaker/writer has an idiolect, a set of habitual terms and turns-of-phrase sometimes referred to as a "linguistic fingerprint". In searching for plagiarism, you must investigate similarities in phraseology in order to show disputed authorship. However, when looking for reuse in two texts written by the same person, you must discount similarity in phraseology and look instead for larger units of copying -- overall arguement structure, thematic progression etc. If I were to write two essays on the same topic, I would fully expect to see a high number of sentences of 80%-90% similarity in th two.
The TurnItIn system is in my opinion critically flawed. If it does not generate false positives on two texts from the same author, then it can't be doing a thourough enough comparison when it has texts with different authors.
HAL, taking a break from an essay on forensic stylistics.
Given your logic, we should also ban all violent TV, Movies, and Theater. kids watch violent TV all the time, and if mirror neuron responses are shown when we watch TV.... you get the idea.
Precisely.
The trick is to not let kids who are too young to play Mature games play Mature games.
There's nothing "mature" about violence. That term is just another way of glamorising it. And it's not just about age -- adults can be affected by violence too.
I've drunk enough beers to know from first-hand experience that self-control is a very thin veneer. I've also seen enough people suffer nervous breakdowns and depressive episodes to know how dangerous a crack in that veneer can be.
We cannot tell in advance who will be afflicted with mental illness. Someone steeped in a culture of violence can "go postal" when they break down, whereas people without the exposure to violence don't.
Protecting the vulnerable is more important to me than protecting the "right" to the morally dubious pleasure of watching faked deaths.
Tons of hardware support was dropped from the 2.6 kernel, not all of it legacy hardware by any means. I still have a computer with a Via 10/100 ethernet card that worked perfectly with the 2.4 kernel and still works fine with DSL, but no distro with a 2.6 kernel can configure it.
And this is why Linux will never be a serious desktop OS. Server guys can be expected to compile their own custom kernal with their choice of drivers, but not all desktop users can; so a consumer monolithic kernal only works in a closed hardware environment, otherwise it bloats. Drivers for a consumer OS cannot be part of the kernal.
Why is Linux monolithic? Because it was originally one man's hobby and a monolithic kernal is easier to write than a microkernal architecture. Linux was always something of a hack, and in my opinion it has reached the end of its life. Let's have a modern micro-kernal architecture, folks!
The mirror neuron, scientists tell us, takes things that we see others do and makes us feel like we're doing it ourselves. It's why we like watching things like TV and dancing. It's how we learn to imitate.
15 years ago, were graphics real enough to trigger a mirror neuron response in a human? Possibly -- I don't know. However, as we approach photorealism, isn't it time we studied this? See if a mirror neuron response is set up in a game-player? If so, then maybe the outraged parent mob are right -- maybe the computer games do train the behaviour.
Yes, there are further environmental triggers needed to cause the player to actually go out and kill someone -- a perfectly happy, balanced individual isn't going to pick up a gun just out of computer-learned habit -- but if we find that the behaviour is taught, then surely we are obliged to keep the games out of the hands of those who they may harm. Can we do a psychological assessment of every single consumer who wants to buy a PS3? No -- that would be thouroughly impractical.
So, if studies consistently showed a mirror neuron response while playing shooters, would we not be obliged to take violent games off the shelf...?
They're not changing away from sailing vessels now, the whole industry changed over 100 years ago.
More like 50 years ago. Coal steamers did not replace the tall ships -- they relied on them for their fuel! The size and weight of coal made it impractical to transport by steamer, so it was delivered by sailing vessels to ports the world over. It wasn't until the middle of last century that enough diesel and diesel-powered boats were available for the tall ships to be retired.
If this does for AI what "3D accelerators" did for graphics, then AI is doomed to atrophy.
Prior to the invention of the 3D accelerator card, 3D graphics was awash with variety and innovation: Duke Nukem 3D's sprite-based engine allowed 3D Realms to simulate real-time mirrored surfaces; Shattered Steel used voxels to create a smooth, contoured landscape oozing atmosphere, then dotted it with metallic polygonal buildings and polygonal enemy vehicles; the Wing Commander games of the time used phong shading to give a strong metallic sheen and mimic the harsh directional light of space; while Earth-based flight sims stuck to full polygon engines used the computationally less intensive gourad shading to handle the higher polygon count of terrain modelling, also putting a softer shade on the polygons; and some people were even exploring the possibilities of early ray-tracing technologies.
Each game had its own individual visual style.
However, now every game generates a polygon landscape, with polygon enemies and polygon allies, all shaded in a soft, plasticy gourad shading. All alike, all indistinct; no style, no individuality; the unique strengths and weaknesses of different styles of rendering all swept aside in favour of a "convenient" gourad-shaded-polygon model supported by cheap consumer electronics.
As a result, improvements in 3D graphics technology have meant little more to the gamer than an increased polygon count.
By hard-coding AI routines into silicon, AI development will be similarly stunted, with innovation seen as the overpriced alternative to relying on what's on the accelerator board. The end result for the user is a more predictable, less interesting experience.
What you describe can be accomplished by simply organizing a list of links to the relevant articles.
No, not at all. You don't "flick through" a list of links. If they put an order to the articles and had "next" and "previous" links then you could almost do it, but my point was not what people could -- it's what people would do. And they won't read an entire web issue. Humans don't think (or act) logically, they think psychologically.
This avoids the whole silly PDF on the Web thing...
You haven't read the editorial, have you. They have a website, but they want to make a magazine. They are running this PDF thing as a print-out-at-home magazine while they pilot the concept. I believe they hope one day to have a real magazine sold on real paper to real people. There are a number of notable flaws in the first issue that would have killed a print magazine stone-dead. This way they'll get feedback from people like me and they'll be able to iron out the creases before heading to the print-shop.
HAL.
An organised group could attempt to flood this with nonsense. If people taking it seriously find that they're not getting "paid" for their time and (sensible) answers because their partners are inserting nonsense words (aardvole, kangarobin, lagnofragnalum), they'll give up.
So, much black-hat negative karma points to the antisocial *** who writes the first trojan that does this distributedly. (Do black hats like negative karma?)
If I buy a magazine, I tend to do a three or four pass approach:
Pick out the articles that interest me from the contents page and read
flick through the mag and read any articles that catch my eye
go through the mag, start to finish, reading any articles that I haven't read.
In that way, I read the whole mag, and quite often it's the articles that I didn't think were interesting that present something truly new.
However, websites are big, and structured to help you find what you're looking for. Your average browser is looking for something when he goes onto the website -- he only does pass one, using the site index. He never gets to those bits he didn't think would be interesting and as such discovers nothing new.
Putting a magazine together, even if not a paper one, means editorial decisions and space considerations that websites just don't apply otherwise. (Although they could.)
This is an area of internet law that the world's judges and lawyers still haven't come to an agreement over.
Apple have several different iTunes sites, with different pricing structures and licensing agreements because, regardless of where the server is hosted, they are publishing the material to people that they know are in a different country, and there are different copyright laws, publishing agreements and standard prices in different countries. If they were allowed to use not-in-your-country as a legal defence, some enterprising soul would have set up shop in a small country with a ten-year duration of copyright and would now be legally selling the Beatles back-catalogue for a couple of pennies per track.
If the not-in-your-country defence doesn't work for sound recordings, why should it work for written text? The New York Times are perfectly capable of knowing where their readers are, so they can't conveniently ignore it when something like this comes up. The article is illegal for distribution in the UK, so the NYT have rightly seen fit not to distribute it to the UK.
Riddle me this, Batman. Cases have been thrown out of court because press reports have been ruled to have prejudiced the outcome: would it do the reputation of NYT -- and indeed the press in general -- much good if this case was thrown out of court on a technicality?
Re:Read "The Pianist's Talent"
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The Expert Mind
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· Score: 1
Sorry about the late reply.
Inner Game is a series of books written by a number of authors reapplying the principles laid out in W T Gallwey's book The Inner Game of Tennis -- see www.innergame.com .
So while the music may be free as in beer, it'll likely only be free in the most limited sense of the word.
Thanks, but I'll pass.
You don't watch TV or listen to the radio then? I do: they're free, and they're supported by adds. But it doesn't give me the option to view or listen to the program at any time I want. So sometimes I buy DVDs or CDs.
The proposed service has more freedom than radio, if we disregard DRM for the moment, so what's the big deal?
Plus, if you're one of UMG's artists, you can download your own song twice a day for a source of extra income!
Right tools, or the tools at hand...?
on
A New Kind of OS
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· Score: 1
Unfortunately, a system like this leads to laziness. It's a particular type of laziness that I've seen all too often.
Many PowerPoint presentations plagued with meaningless charts because there is a simple chart-generator in PowerPoint. Making a meaningful chart only requires opening up another program, but hey - why bother when you've got the PowerPoint chart generator?
Important business data that deserves a proper database is stored in Excel spreadsheets, because Excel is part of the standard software. Without data constraints, the whole shebang becomes grossly inconsistent. But it was less hassle to start off with....
If you make certain tools more readily available than others, people will overuse them. Besides, since when was it quicker to drag a mouse across two screens than to type CTRL+T,P,Z?
Slashdot Mirror
And there are plans to sell them commercially for three times the regular price, and pump the profit back into the charity program, so you won't have to buy the thing in eBay for $1000.
Wrong. There are no plans to sell these on the open market in any way whatsoever. Many people have suggested a one-for-two or one-for-three, but the people behind the project have consistently stated that this will not happen.
I'd like to get my hands on one, as I believe that as a low-power entry-level laptop it should form a worldwide developer's baseline, but I won't get my hands on one and I respect the reasons for that decision. I'm sure some hacker will make an emulator as a developer's kit soon enough anyway.
HAL.
Say I deploy ComputerApplication 2006 today to the entire company. Next year, installs for new users/PCs will have to be ComputerApplication 2007, as most software companies don't sell licenses for out-of-date software versions. The year after, it'll be ComputerApplication 2008. By ComputerApplication 2009, if not sooner, staff will be using so-called "enhanced features" that mean their files aren't backward-compatible with previous versions of the software. At this point, team by team the business starts falling apart and requiring urgent upgrades.
This is exactly what the software companies want. Force one to buy the new version and you force the department to buy it, even though they produce the same stuff in the end.
When it comes to high-end software (such as CAD), a three-year-old business computer (and few businesses ever deploy cutting edge) rarely meets the minimum spec, so .... "tech refresh"!
HAL.
Nor do I believe that dumping things that we wouldn't use on the 3rd world is going to make the [technology] gap disappear -- au contraire. I'd rather see them receive one $1000 laptop than ten $100 ones that aren't similar to what the rest of the world use. "Better than what they have" isn't a valid argument, as it serves to keep the gap.
Developing countries cannot maintain a "fleet" of up-to-date computers, as every PC is rendered obsolete by "progress" within 3 years. "what the rest of the world uses" is a con -- p*ss-poor programming and planned obsolescence mean we spend ridiculous amounts of money to continue to be able to do the same thing year-on-year.
I work in an IT support department -- my PC is used for email, word-processing and browsing, and as a Citrix client for connecting to our SMS servers. All this could be done adequately on a Win95-era Pentium. However, my current 2.8 GHz, 248MB WinXP PC continues to grind along far too slowly.
One of the key benefits of the OLPC project is that unlike the schemes that redeploy old corporate kit, it defines a closed platform. It can run word processors; it can do email; it can run a Xterm/Citrix/TS/etc client, and it will never become obsolete as it has an established user base. It would become a reference minimum-spec platform for a great deal of Linux development.
Knock-on effects? Maybe the developed world would break out of the continual upgrade cycle. With a fixed minimum-spec machine for office tasks, maybe network computing would finally take off, with every office deploying application servers for the (rare) processor intensive apps. Perhaps we'd see more efficient, non-bloat software. Perhaps the developed countries would say "That's neat -- I bet I could fit that in a palmtop" and finally bridge the gap between desktop and handheld computing.
HAL
I emailed them when the OLPC first went public, suggesting a buy-two-get-one thing. I was ready to pledge, but I never heard about it. Nowhere, nowhen, nohow.
If people don't know, they can't pledge.
HAL
Accelerating a large chunk of metal to its escape velocity releases a massive volume of greenhouse gas.
HAL
I admit to wondering how referring to printed handouts after the fact can be seen as "impractical."
Five years into my computing career, I've already been given more course notes than I can realistically store at my desk. They'd all fit on single CD if they were in electronic form.
HAL
When the students look at the presentation again they'll (hopefully) remember whay you said,
Highly unlikely. I've never been able to use presentation slides as any sort of aide-memôire -- there's just too little information in them. It's generally the finer details that you forget, and PowerPoint presentations don't have space for the finer details.
HAL
Do specialist Heavy-Metal music shops "ban" classical music? No, they just choose not to stock it.
Why? Because they don't think their intended audience want to see it in the shop.
That's all DSG are doing: choosing their stock to suit their market.
HAL
I fail to see the point in an open standard document format.
In photos, sound and video: yes. Umpteen different photo programs can perform umpteen transformations on photos in umpteen different ways, and then save the file as a picture again, without needing to encode any information about what was done. A picture is a picture is a picture. A sound is a sound is a sound. A video is a video is a video.
Documents, however, are a little different. The file is a series of transformations. The functions of a word-processor are thus totally prescribed: the standard and nothing more. That leaves next to nothing for Word Processor X to differentiate itself from Word Processor Y -- so why bother writing one? Why not just use OpenOffice.
In case you still don't see what I'm saying, an example:
I take a picture with my camera, and load it into Photoshop. I apply a pincushion effect to squeeze the middle of the picture in, giving it a "waist". I save it in .JPG and put it on my webpage. I can open it in Opera, Mozilla, IE etc, and none of the browsers need know how to "pincushion" a picture.
I open a text document in a word processor, apply formatting and then apply a pincushion effect to squeeze the middle part of the text in. Format X saves it as blahblahblah. If I open it in a word processor without pincushion, it doesn't work.
HAL.
I can't see where you get this idea from that there is a "reluctance to change" open standards. TCP/IP is an open standard that has changed drastically over the past 15-20 years or so
TCP/IP is a standard for techies & geeks. Techies and geeks (A) Like shiny new things & (B) Like things that work better.
Joe Bloggs MBA is not a techy and not a geek. He likes what he knows. He is happy with "good enough", and doesn't wire his washing machine to a 100 Base T network just so his PC will tell him when his clothes are clean!
HAL.
Would it be terribly bad for a quarterly or twice yearly video game that continued and expanded over time.
Would you watch a quarterly or twice-yearly TV series? No, a TV series comes at you in one hour chunks once a week for three months -- regular as clockwork. The delay between episodes is small enough that you get to keep the story in your head. Would you buy a game that you played for only an hour or two in a week? Increase the episode size and the delay between episodes will go up, because dev time won't be coming down.
We also have to consider how the episodes are scheduled. On TV, the majority of series are at least halfway through filming before the first episode is aired. The lions share of the investment has been made and spent, and they have a month's contingency for delays on the filming of the remainder.
Look at amateur episodic media on the net: serial prose, web comics, machinima. The vast bulk of this is published immediately on completion. Without several episodes as contingency, there is no way to fill a gap if the writer falls ill, has exams, etc. The audience gets bored and never comes back. Even the few who stick around often get disappointed when the author gets sick of it and never finishes the story. (And anyone who remembers some of the early Image Comics titles will know that this isn't just a problem for amateurs!)
The new wave of episodic games is very new, but it seems to me that they are falling into the publish-when-ready category: lack of pre-written follow-up episodes, no fixed release schedules, not even any guarantee of any other episodes.
I don't buy the start if I can't be reasonably sure of getting the end.
HAL.Turing's test was different from the modern so-called Turing test. In Turing's model, an observer would read the text of a real-time interaction between two other parties and try to determine if each of them were a computer or a human participant. There wasn't the opportunity for the observer to ask trick questions. Turing was talking about natural language, while Loebner prize discussions become a sort of unnatural interogation.
But in one respect these bots are successful -- they elicit an emotional response from me: anger. Even though I know they aren't real, my brain still screams "You're Not Listening To Me!!!!!!!"
HAL.
Yes, re-use is cheating. Fine.
But: re-use is not plagiarism. Cheating yes, plagiarism no.
Every speaker/writer has an idiolect, a set of habitual terms and turns-of-phrase sometimes referred to as a "linguistic fingerprint". In searching for plagiarism, you must investigate similarities in phraseology in order to show disputed authorship. However, when looking for reuse in two texts written by the same person, you must discount similarity in phraseology and look instead for larger units of copying -- overall arguement structure, thematic progression etc. If I were to write two essays on the same topic, I would fully expect to see a high number of sentences of 80%-90% similarity in th two.
The TurnItIn system is in my opinion critically flawed. If it does not generate false positives on two texts from the same author, then it can't be doing a thourough enough comparison when it has texts with different authors.
HAL, taking a break from an essay on forensic stylistics.
Given your logic, we should also ban all violent TV, Movies, and Theater. kids watch violent TV all the time, and if mirror neuron responses are shown when we watch TV.... you get the idea.
Precisely.
The trick is to not let kids who are too young to play Mature games play Mature games.
There's nothing "mature" about violence. That term is just another way of glamorising it. And it's not just about age -- adults can be affected by violence too.
I've drunk enough beers to know from first-hand experience that self-control is a very thin veneer. I've also seen enough people suffer nervous breakdowns and depressive episodes to know how dangerous a crack in that veneer can be.
We cannot tell in advance who will be afflicted with mental illness. Someone steeped in a culture of violence can "go postal" when they break down, whereas people without the exposure to violence don't.
Protecting the vulnerable is more important to me than protecting the "right" to the morally dubious pleasure of watching faked deaths.
HAL.
Tons of hardware support was dropped from the 2.6 kernel, not all of it legacy hardware by any means. I still have a computer with a Via 10/100 ethernet card that worked perfectly with the 2.4 kernel and still works fine with DSL, but no distro with a 2.6 kernel can configure it.
And this is why Linux will never be a serious desktop OS. Server guys can be expected to compile their own custom kernal with their choice of drivers, but not all desktop users can; so a consumer monolithic kernal only works in a closed hardware environment, otherwise it bloats. Drivers for a consumer OS cannot be part of the kernal.
Why is Linux monolithic? Because it was originally one man's hobby and a monolithic kernal is easier to write than a microkernal architecture. Linux was always something of a hack, and in my opinion it has reached the end of its life. Let's have a modern micro-kernal architecture, folks!
HAL.
Mirror neurons are noticeably absent from the debate.
Have a look at an essay by V S Ramachandran a leading neuroscientist.
The mirror neuron, scientists tell us, takes things that we see others do and makes us feel like we're doing it ourselves. It's why we like watching things like TV and dancing. It's how we learn to imitate.
15 years ago, were graphics real enough to trigger a mirror neuron response in a human? Possibly -- I don't know. However, as we approach photorealism, isn't it time we studied this? See if a mirror neuron response is set up in a game-player? If so, then maybe the outraged parent mob are right -- maybe the computer games do train the behaviour.
Yes, there are further environmental triggers needed to cause the player to actually go out and kill someone -- a perfectly happy, balanced individual isn't going to pick up a gun just out of computer-learned habit -- but if we find that the behaviour is taught, then surely we are obliged to keep the games out of the hands of those who they may harm. Can we do a psychological assessment of every single consumer who wants to buy a PS3? No -- that would be thouroughly impractical.
So, if studies consistently showed a mirror neuron response while playing shooters, would we not be obliged to take violent games off the shelf...?
HAL
They're not changing away from sailing vessels now, the whole industry changed over 100 years ago.
More like 50 years ago. Coal steamers did not replace the tall ships -- they relied on them for their fuel! The size and weight of coal made it impractical to transport by steamer, so it was delivered by sailing vessels to ports the world over. It wasn't until the middle of last century that enough diesel and diesel-powered boats were available for the tall ships to be retired.
HAL.
If this does for AI what "3D accelerators" did for graphics, then AI is doomed to atrophy.
Prior to the invention of the 3D accelerator card, 3D graphics was awash with variety and innovation: Duke Nukem 3D's sprite-based engine allowed 3D Realms to simulate real-time mirrored surfaces; Shattered Steel used voxels to create a smooth, contoured landscape oozing atmosphere, then dotted it with metallic polygonal buildings and polygonal enemy vehicles; the Wing Commander games of the time used phong shading to give a strong metallic sheen and mimic the harsh directional light of space; while Earth-based flight sims stuck to full polygon engines used the computationally less intensive gourad shading to handle the higher polygon count of terrain modelling, also putting a softer shade on the polygons; and some people were even exploring the possibilities of early ray-tracing technologies.
Each game had its own individual visual style.
However, now every game generates a polygon landscape, with polygon enemies and polygon allies, all shaded in a soft, plasticy gourad shading. All alike, all indistinct; no style, no individuality; the unique strengths and weaknesses of different styles of rendering all swept aside in favour of a "convenient" gourad-shaded-polygon model supported by cheap consumer electronics.
As a result, improvements in 3D graphics technology have meant little more to the gamer than an increased polygon count.
By hard-coding AI routines into silicon, AI development will be similarly stunted, with innovation seen as the overpriced alternative to relying on what's on the accelerator board. The end result for the user is a more predictable, less interesting experience.
HAL.
No, not at all. You don't "flick through" a list of links. If they put an order to the articles and had "next" and "previous" links then you could almost do it, but my point was not what people could -- it's what people would do. And they won't read an entire web issue. Humans don't think (or act) logically, they think psychologically.
This avoids the whole silly PDF on the Web thing...
You haven't read the editorial, have you. They have a website, but they want to make a magazine. They are running this PDF thing as a print-out-at-home magazine while they pilot the concept. I believe they hope one day to have a real magazine sold on real paper to real people. There are a number of notable flaws in the first issue that would have killed a print magazine stone-dead. This way they'll get feedback from people like me and they'll be able to iron out the creases before heading to the print-shop. HAL.So, much black-hat negative karma points to the antisocial *** who writes the first trojan that does this distributedly. (Do black hats like negative karma?)
HAL.
If I buy a magazine, I tend to do a three or four pass approach:
However, websites are big, and structured to help you find what you're looking for. Your average browser is looking for something when he goes onto the website -- he only does pass one, using the site index. He never gets to those bits he didn't think would be interesting and as such discovers nothing new.
Putting a magazine together, even if not a paper one, means editorial decisions and space considerations that websites just don't apply otherwise. (Although they could.)
HAL.
Apple have several different iTunes sites, with different pricing structures and licensing agreements because, regardless of where the server is hosted, they are publishing the material to people that they know are in a different country, and there are different copyright laws, publishing agreements and standard prices in different countries. If they were allowed to use not-in-your-country as a legal defence, some enterprising soul would have set up shop in a small country with a ten-year duration of copyright and would now be legally selling the Beatles back-catalogue for a couple of pennies per track.
If the not-in-your-country defence doesn't work for sound recordings, why should it work for written text? The New York Times are perfectly capable of knowing where their readers are, so they can't conveniently ignore it when something like this comes up. The article is illegal for distribution in the UK, so the NYT have rightly seen fit not to distribute it to the UK.
Riddle me this, Batman. Cases have been thrown out of court because press reports have been ruled to have prejudiced the outcome: would it do the reputation of NYT -- and indeed the press in general -- much good if this case was thrown out of court on a technicality?
Inner Game is a series of books written by a number of authors reapplying the principles laid out in W T Gallwey's book The Inner Game of Tennis -- see www.innergame.com .
So while the music may be free as in beer, it'll likely only be free in the most limited sense of the word. Thanks, but I'll pass.
You don't watch TV or listen to the radio then? I do: they're free, and they're supported by adds. But it doesn't give me the option to view or listen to the program at any time I want. So sometimes I buy DVDs or CDs.
The proposed service has more freedom than radio, if we disregard DRM for the moment, so what's the big deal?
Plus, if you're one of UMG's artists, you can download your own song twice a day for a source of extra income!
Many PowerPoint presentations plagued with meaningless charts because there is a simple chart-generator in PowerPoint. Making a meaningful chart only requires opening up another program, but hey - why bother when you've got the PowerPoint chart generator?
Important business data that deserves a proper database is stored in Excel spreadsheets, because Excel is part of the standard software. Without data constraints, the whole shebang becomes grossly inconsistent. But it was less hassle to start off with....
If you make certain tools more readily available than others, people will overuse them. Besides, since when was it quicker to drag a mouse across two screens than to type CTRL+T,P,Z?