I built the first site for the North Korean famine (www.northkorea.org) over some years with a past Newsweek editor in Japan. I've had some time to think about how to converge people on sites and solve problems.
Actually since the Kobe quake I've thought about how to make systems that could help focus responses to a web thread and help people solve
problems. Slashdot might be better than nothing,
though it lacks an editor who can continually
digest and udpate info to provide a quick to consult page. On the web people tend to surf away and away from a given site, so while Slashdot is great for gathering a mass of people, you still are going to need a link at the top to someone's page. That someone will have to be a superhuman or have a lot of helpers to manage the information flood and remain of interest.
It seems there are a number of interesting components that could be useful in this case if they are not built monolithically, I'm thinking of sourceforge and open directory type collaborative services like dmoz.org.
There are a lot of other problems though, and one big one which it seems the people here might have a chance at solving, which is the political angle. It's everyone's business when there is a war, and lots of people may not want some information to be posted. There is also disinformation and the danger of getting people hurt.
In the North Korea project, we had a bank account closed in the U.S. and I kept my name off the board since I was worried about being able to travel. But the biggest reason and perhaps the only reason why it succeeded (we raised a quarter million dollars in food, medicine, clothing, and other items) is that it was masterminded by an ace journalist named Bernie Krisher who felt something had to be done, did it, documented it, and demonstrated integrity to people through the site. He pulled his contacts and he risked his life (just because he is elderly.. and still more active and energetic when it counts than most twenty-year olds) one of the trips he ended up hospitalized there. The story got out through the site's news items, essays, photo and video reports, faxes from the government of North Korea, and info about newspaper appearances around the world which were also very important.
I thought of using the web in the Kobe quake to help organize volunteers to assemble needed materials, but the fact is one manic person can do more than a CGI program. If you can somehow gather twenty manic networking people and filter everyone's energy through that you got something big. I say this because in the Kobe quake my own contribution was just to mirror a site on the beleaguered system that was still up in Kobe, and to direct people to a fantastic frequently updated site that everyone from student to megacorporation looked when it was the most important.
Where was the site? Standord University. A student there had the objectivity of five thousand miles and some incredible energy because before other companies took up the slack, and while the government was paralyzed, this guy was probably the most important communications channel.
You also will need to consider how to get people in and out. More information could be had from Eastern European linux people who have plenty of experience in this area. Even in a highly industrialized area you are likely to discover problems getting people physically in and out of the area. And the groups which can move freely may be highly politicized themselves. I think you will have a lot more luck if you try to be extremely focussed and selective about what you are trying to do and what you say you can do. In the end though if someone depends on your website, your ass is going to be on the line! Literally!
Sorry I couldn't find this science fiction book on the net either. I was referring to a technology brandnamed "Dreamtime" which in the book was a next-generation VR technology which allowed virtual scenes to be overlayed through glasses over a person's view. While used for theme parks, it turned out also to be wanted by quasi-military criminals, and the most powerful application of it was is incorporation into contact lenses.
A bad guy ninja type in the book wears a powerful computer on his belt with a portable device like an ultrasonic sonar. By integrating the audio returns, this soldier was able to "see through walls", seeing an overlayed display on his field of vision. It would be the ultimate in wearable computing and vr.
By commercial aspects I was referring to oil exploration, in which explosives generate a sonic wave through the ground and analysis of the returns lets you find pockets underground where there is oil. I worked with a company (musetech.com) which makes VR viewing and analysis software for this.
Visible astronomy is also generally about integrating the amount of radiation to fall on a ccd chip as you probably know. There is one cool (literally) device I saw in a catalog which, by building up an image over time, lets you see faint images through your telescope eyepiece including for example a nebula's colors which the human eye can't generally make out.
If you could do something similar with X-rays or sound waves it would be pretty neat I suppose.
As for the cremation device, don't ask me I don't want to know these guys. I did however make a homepage that gained a little popularity at the time, which is still up at http://telebody.com/mattr/tero/
This was a few years ago so I could be wrong, but I believe the Japanese media (I live in Tokyo) reported that the Aum cult was thought to have disposed of at least one body in an oil drum which had been turned into an exceedingly powerful microwave oven that could turn even bones into ash, leaving no evidence. The group's claim to fame was spreading Salin gas in the subways, when they weren't busy making LSD or drinking their guru's bathwater. They also were researching antipersonnel lasers and (I could have assigned this to the wrong people) I think they also shot a police chief near his home.
Sorry I don't know their design but I just found a reference to the microwave oven here.
http://www.cesnur.org/testi/aum_042.htm
There are a lot of links if you look up Aum and microwave in google.com. But apparently they had a supergenius as their science and technology officer and (looking now at http://www.copi.com/articles/guyatt/aumi.html) probably could have made a big oven if they had to.. can't answer your cavitation size question myself.
There is a metalanguage being developed now called UNL which is intended to enable precise communication, including not only data specification but also communication of state-of-mind, across human languages.
Currently 16 languages including English and Japanese are "online with UNL" and the goal is to build UNL bridges to 189 languages.
I asked Kay Nishi (founder of Ascii and now at MIT Media Lab) about this Friday at his first public talk about UNL and other projects of his at the Foreign Press Club in Tokyo. It is still very early in development but would be extremely useful in binding together humanity and using computers for humanizing projects.
I think it is if not a really great idea, at least a good compromise and to delay a Pluto probe.
While I am neither a propulsion scientist nor a molecular chemist, it does seem likely that setting themselves a tangible goal for next generation propulsion systems is good.
Likewise, it will make a lot more sense (of course, maybe too much worrying about "sense" when we should be thinking "pushing the envelope") to colonize the moon with nanoscale technology in perhaps 20 years.. this apparently passes up the human dramas that marked the world's space exploration efforts, of great adventure and risk on the bootstrap limb of history.
I'm pretty worried about cutbacks made in the first months of 2001 as it shows the new President of the United States, and his constituency by and large, do not share this sense of wonder or focus on learning as a species, of self-evolution. If they did in an organic, willful way I'd think people would feel an overwhelming urge to encompass the entire solar system and out to the Oort clouds in the sweep of an arm and say, We have been there and it is ours to give to our children.
It seems inevitable that no matter how much or little NASA may be doing, a contracting economy and provincialism require NASA to provide evidence of belt-tightening as well. My hopes are that the science and fiction on which we feed ourselves here makes itself true by realizing a manifest destiny kind of story in the first half of the twenty-first century.
It seems evident that the way we are teaching each other to think through Slashdot and similar media (well it looks that way surfing at 3..) must have a significant effect on the way this story unfolds, through philosophy, attitude to technology, political voice, and "Can do" spirit. I think some of this must be present in space entrepreneurs. They must be intent.
I'd say that in our networked lives that reach around the world to share information while at the same time, drilling down at solving the problem at one's own feet in gritty software code, we're playing an important part of building the foundation for this future and we must not imagine that we are not involved. Let intellect and vision lead our vacillating planet! How old do you intend to be when you call the Moon?
I was hoping against hope that the article would be about something cool like integrating an X-Ray exposure over time from plain old sunlight, perhaps with a cooled ccd and nifty software. (That's what I've been thinking about doing with starlight for a year anyway..)
Listen folks, you don't want to screw around with X-Rays unless you are heavily trained, okay? The lightest thing I can say is the article is irresponsible in light of modern technology and culture.
My grandfather (God rest his soul) always wore bandaids around his fingers. They were always coming off or getting soggy and wearing out, his fingernails were a mess (I think he missed them on one or two fingers completely), and it looked pretty painful. You see he was a dentist, I guess around when the article was written. Unfortunately they didn't know that your body is a pretty good integrator of radiation too.. so it was standard operating procedure to hold the film in a patient's mouth while beaming the X-rays into it and spraying it around his own fingers at the same time. They didn't think, 'lead aprons are for wooses', they just didn't know. Seems dumb and tragic now.
If you want to do something much more interesting than the proposed project, and maybe make a ton of money at the same time, why not work on integrating ambient radiation, whether sonic, electromagnetic, or nuclear. There was a good novel called Hollywood Dreamtime which talked about it a lot. The last thing we all need is for a young smart person excited by open source, hacking, and network effects, to start screwing around with unshielded spark coils. Odds are someone is going to get electrocuted or permanently damaged (maybe with malevolent intent).
On a lighter note, you could also learn to build a fucking powerful microwave oven with an oil drum and similar parts. That's what the Om cultists did in Japan a couple years ago, to turn their victims into ash. I'd say that's safer than building X-Ray generators and maybe leaving them plugged in over night by mistake.. X-Rays are great and 100% natural but they are too energetic to fuck around with for a household hobby.
We just had the PalmSource show in Japan last week and a bunch of people came from California. It was huge, over a thousand people here.
Getting into Palm development myself, I still drool over the Zaurus. The Zaurus has a gorgeous screen, freehand kanji entry, a landscape web browser, and if you try a little game that comes with it where you corral lots of flying stars with your stylus you will realize that it is really a fast and rich experience. I mean arcade-style animation. Not sure if that is in Java or not, I would expect optimized C.
Seriously that one little game application is to die for, very sexy and I am not a gamer.
The Palm I was told has something called Google Pen for kanji stroke input, haven't tried it yet.
But if localized as-is into English language only, I'd think the Zaurus would be pretty popular in the U.S...It's just that everyone already has palms. I'd have to steal my friend's unit for a bit longer to try it out more but I found the keyboard very small. Not sure if it would allow faster input than Graffiti on Palm, which I find too error-prone (obviously that part is my fault) and slow (limited by recognition speed).
But I could totally see telnetting in and doing something useful on the BIG, high-resolution, high-contrast, gorgeous Zaurus screen with that keyboard. In terms of useability (comparing the latest version of Palmscape to Zaurus web browser, it felt like the screen was 2-3 times the size and maybe twice the resolution.
Though I wanted to do gcc based development I had to buy CodeWarrior for PalmOS (with $100 show discount still about $200 for Japanese v6) because it is what everyone is using and I heard the Sony CLIE SDK requires it. CW 6 Japanese is used because 7 English is unstable for Japanese environment still.
Seriously I would not discount anything on the Zaurus platform. They have been doing it for a long time in Japan, it's just that their flagship units have suddenly gotten a lot cheaper. Also memory is getting cheaper too.. those stamp sized SD chips are 64MB and 128MB now, and they said 1GB on a static-free, chicklet-like package could be reality next year. SD based hardware prototypes we saw actually had memory and executables inside the hardware which took over the device when snapped on, so I wouldn't be surprised if it gets easy to carry a bunch of linux distros in your pocket.
I was just about to say that if Zaurus supported that you know what my Christmas list would be, but looking into the next cubicle I just found out the Zaurus actually does support SD memory chips, plus it has another slot for a quarter-size wireless cartridge and "maybe" microdrive hd. Time to do some more research..
Anyone have one with more info? Maybe someone else has more experience with Palm in Japan as well; my Clie has an initial version of ATOK (kanji front end processor) but there are apparently 2 more levels as well.
More old news.. I have a bookmark to this company from June 1998. And I remember finding that through a search engine after remembering an article from many years earlier (maybe Scientific American's Amateur Scientist column..) about it. I was looking into strategies for a Cambodian rural network between villages scattered hundreds of miles apart, which would require very large antennas for line of sight around the curvature of the earth.
Don't know what on Earth happened to the company since then (I think it was the same company anyway) but at the time there was much info on the web site about how it was used to do periodic downloads of results from many very remote automated data collectors, like atmospheric stations and so on. There was something about shipping too. But the data rate was extremely short, and it seemed only useful to communications that could be accomplished with a handful of bytes each signal.
I remember at the time worrying about security, since antennas and signals might draw fire from military on innocent villages etc. There still is hardly any phone infrastructure, and any really good solution (like the phone system in the sky one satellite company built for Thailand) seemed prey to a rapacious telecom ministry. Well that's a few years ago. I think I suggested more research into either a store and forward to satellites, or a line of site ham network using a specialized linux type distribution.
Anyway, I said "Amateur Scientist meteor radio" to Google and Google showed me some very nice links!
Meteorscatter Links--Make More Miles on VHF
A link on this page (
Meteor Burst Communication) mentions the noise floor is limited to the noise emitted by the galaxy, which changes through the day as you scan different parts of it. Cool! It says you really ought to be away from cities and highways to keep the floor as low as possible.
Skyrocketing cell phone use in Japan has had one unfortunate effect: Train conductors now make repeated requests to passengers that they refrain from using cell phones while on the train. It seems the signals interfere with medical devices, particularly *pace makers*.
Don't know about other countries, but common Japanese cell phones at any rate are pretty powerful. If you point one at your tv set the screen really takes a fit. Could some lightweight shield in a jacket lining provide significant protection for people whose lives depend on a quiet electromagnetic environment?
Thank you very much for your comment. Unfortunately the eeoracle link you provided ends up with a Slashdot error page as if it was discarded by the management..
And I found no mention of Oracle9i being available for Linux, though perhaps it exists somewhere. 9i has some new clustering and failover capabilities over 8i it seems.
Hewlett-Packard is providing discount hardware to the startup as part of a special program they have in Japan for selected startups.
The only good news is that we may end up having it hosted at the provider where the SE went! Thanks for your help.
I'm a private developer and am also managing a project which is about to purchase a cluster for a venture that expects a great need to scale. But the chief SE (who seems knowledgeable and likes Linux.. but just left the company) thought we should put Windows 2000, instead of Linux, on the HP cluster we are getting. The system will be mainly Apache for the web server and BEA WebLogic for the J2EE app server.
The main reasons were that Oracle does not guarantee its Linux version, and that while there is clustering for Linux (I had made up a list of info including LVS, Linux-HA, and Convolvo/Kimberlite to consider), database clustering is not ready yet for Linux. While we are probably starting much smaller, his target was a highly redundant system from two routers down to two DB servers for no single point of failure. He said since Solaris is not recommended for HP (the hardware vendor is already set) and Oracle is needed to work well spreading a db across a number of machines, we should go for Win2k. And he is actually a Linux advocate.
This is not so much a question about human support as a question about the "ready for enterprise scale" and Oracle-related posts here. I suspect the 5 nines redundancy is really more than we need for the project (an online business venture which could grow fast), but would like to recommend Linux for future projects where possible and wonder if it is ready in this area, and where there may be more information about impelementation with case studies. And is it really true that db cluster support is shaky on Linux, and that Oracle doesn't support Linux. It seems believable, but Oracle was pushing Linux pretty hard last time I checked and inability to support multiple database servers would be a problem for them. I'd like to know if there are other database vendors, or other clustering solutions, that would make it safer to host databases on linux.
on the Sony Clie. They have been monochrome but will or may even now be color. Also Clie (runs PalmOS is part of Sony's Memory Stick strategy, meaning there will be plenty of color photos and video clips to print in color on these devices.
Right as in "Right Honourable" of course, but
this is the only time the "R" word shall be
allowed in common discourse.
At all other times when not addressing vicars,
barristers, Members of Parliament, &Etc. the word "Left" shall be used instead, viz. "Leftenant", left wing (this is a football term).
Latin terms shall be interposed when at all possible and fully pronounced (if you can alread), viz. ibid., op. cit., ad astra. ("et al" and "aka" shall not be allowed).
Finally schoolchildren shall be taught proper history including the feats of British generals in the War and the correct reasons for the hiatus in proper government of the colonies, in order to pass the A and O levels to get into a proper institution of higher education, or failing that, to go on the dole. And all [potatoe] chips shall be wrapped in newspaper, God Save the Queen.
Well SuSE and SGI are porting Failsafe to linux-ha.org High Availability project.. and SGI supposedly has much experience with that package. I'd look more at RedHat if their installation process didn't suck the big snarfborg.
(as the SuSE liker nevertheless ends up developing for RH..)
But missioncriticallinux.com's Convolvo says "any deestro".
But for actual stability like trying to get the job done? The last two VA Linux boxes I bought had RedHat on them already, and hardware cost is a pretty big factor. Or did you want to start repartitioning that 50GB RAID array? Is there such a big difference between deestros after you shut everything down? How about which HA distros not which Linux distro?
Someone's going to say BSD or die, etc etc. I'd much rather see people with actual experience responding and backing up what they say, and hear people with experience using the HA tools.
Better yet screw the distro idea, someone just post a list of tools they like and ideas about compiling, resource management, and security.
What a marvellous image from the Hubble crew, yet again!
And yet.. the scentists totally overlooked one of the most inspiring and self-validating discoveries about this cataclysm: they rotated the image Too Far! Yes, rotating the image just 90 degrees to the right instead of 180 degrees, the photo is quite obviously Tux.
It may be interpreted as an Emperor penguin staring regally off into the reaches of space, or (more likely) his wings close against his body after their downbeat against the freezing depths he swims, our mascot is about to swallow a most appealing morsel of a miniature galaxy.
Come to think of it, no matter which way you rotate this pic it is most definitely a penguin. Where did those scientists learn taxonomy? A golf club? Feh! Maybe they need to rethink their choice of OS?... And how do they know it wasn't just a penguin galaxy to start off with? The dopplers should show the little fishie galaxy fleeing most convincingly.
Phenomenal tool, not a replacement
on
Grokking The Gimp
·
· Score: 1
I built an autocompositing facility I'm calling
Magic Hands (no hp yet, will be at telebody.com) when I was asked to do the impossible: based on a few photoshop layouts build a thousand page site (no database) with as many photos in a matter of days.. a combination of using Perl to grok file names, templates, and navigation rules, and execute various image processing tasks while considering the logic of the site.. for example the layout changes if the image is vertically or horizontally oriented. I also was able to set up alpha masks, and frames for compositing by trying out different sequences by hand (using a batch version I made of the pgshell script so I could paste in blocks of code and watch the Gimp try them out).
It was both Fun and Terrible! An inability to open some of the Photoshop files was the least of the story. It all started with debugging Scheme on a deadline..
But paid off when I got a whole CD of new photos to drop in at the last minute. Then I could just run a few scripts and it would all be reprocessed, rebuilt in 5 minutes. The most satisfying part was self highlighting thumbnails which would rotate in a circle as you clicked through successive pages (this was for a hotel chain called Mandarin Oriental), automatically adjusting for the number of photos available for each hotel. Program once and forget, it would have been even easier if we were allowed to use a database on the site.
Until photoshop makes a server edition built like SGI versions of popular 3dcg tools (alias, softimage) Gimp is the last word. (Sorry maybe it is already like that on SGI, haven't felt the urge to drop that much cash lately.) But actually trying to do serious graphic design in it is far more difficult than in Photoshop.. the interface (partly not fault of Gimp creators) is difficult to use, and the feeling of using Photoshop on a Macintosh is just incredibly tactile and trustworthy in comparison, for now. Also Photoshop or batch tools like debabelizer probably could do a lot of simple jobs faster. For example a simple job like building an icon legend (click on the question mark in the corner of http://www.oranda.or.jp/) was accomplished in Gimp/KDE/Suse Linux, in a taxi cab, on my Inspiron7.5K but I felt like I had to scream at the Gimp's graphic interface in comparison to the quick strokes I knew could have accomplished it in maybe a minute or two in Photoshop on a Mac. Also, presentations just look better on Mac screens than any other computer I've seen so far.. though I haven't tried the latest version of X, things just feel more cinematic and satisfying on a Mac so far, the widgets and decorations feel real like you can sink into them if you get what I mean. Perhaps Eazel and friends are working to fix some of that.
Also there is the problem that Mac OS and the feeling of the interface and its purity and responsiveness have convinced me that doing Photoshop in Windows for example will result in different work from an artistic perspective, either infected by the corporate droniness of Windows and its feckless mouse tracking, or the somewhat scientific ultraclarity of SGI Irix. I've felt this with CG tools as well. Win2K is better than Win98 used to be, and Photoshop in that environment might be more acceptable, no experience there.
But now with the Gimp and the system I built, I feel like I have a swiss army knife that can tackle most any task, even if the client is allergic to databases for some reason. I can chomp() any template, build a thousand pages in 2 minutes (on a PIII), and wait until you sit a designer in front of the screen when the Gimp windows are popping in and out as if a phantom designer on megacaffeine was sitting at the keyboard. There are tools out there for people to build graphics programmatically, but the Gimp seems to provide relatively high quality operations.
If Photoshop was there on linux, open source and with a perl server I'd be there, but then hey, that's the Gimp you're talking about! The best thing to do is figure out what tool is right for the task at hand, and unless you need to lift weights, use Photoshop on a Mac. Macs have been designers' best friends for a long time for a good reason. Then get a lot of free time and start studying the Gimp! You get out of it what you put in.
The name of the software was Bikkuri Mouse (Surprise Mouse) not Magic Mouse.
Publisher is Sony Computer Entertainment. It uses
USB mice, 1 or 2 players. There is a brief description of it at <a href=http://ps2.ign.com/news/20185.html> http://ps2.ign.com/news/20185.html</a>.
You can never get enough graphics, but you can be blown away by a game with none. After seeing on the technical side high end SGI Infinite Reality equipment, or on the artistic side the things the best artists (like Jeffrey Shaw of ZKM) can do with them (or anything, they don't need tech it is just a great tool), you begin to realize that when you depend on just pixels without any real intention or signification behind them you get a product that pales quickly. Especially when you've gone a generation or two past it in graphics card evolution. Honestly a large part of my feeling about this is I would probably have more fun building some PS2 soft than buying games for it.
On the other hand I remember firing up Zork from Infocom on an Apple II emulator and being drawn into it much as I did 20 years ago, while I don't enjoy doom very much. I thought Nights was the best Sega game (think it was Sega anyway), and it looks like there are some good games for PS2 now as well. There is a good driving game and another fun one about leading middle-ages Japanese armies singlehandedly. One of the most interesting to me perhaps is I think called Magic Mouse, a drawing game for kids. It was designed by a well known artist named Toshio Iwai. You can draw a horizontal line for example and a tree grows up from this horizon line, etc., so the fun comes from playing with your imagination.
So I think it is true that even with a machine that can do live animation of the Visible Human (a voxel model based on scanned slices of a corpse), you can still keep adding features until the machine gets overwhelmed without getting to a level of satisfaction or satedness. And some games that don't depend on graphics at all achieve this total immersion and enjoyment of the player..
it depends on how the tech is used, not what level of graphics you've got (except for the first time you play, when you are watching a fireworks show, not playing inside a game).
Some of the most interesting talk I've heard about game design was from Roe R. Adams III who was designer of Ultima IV and Wizardry (IV?) as well as Tokyo Dungeon (Playstation 1) I believe among others. I knew him for some years in Japan and found his stress on the necessity of game *designers* as opposed to programmers or graphic artists as a very important distinction. The graphics were not as important as the Quest, and the ability for the player to have valuable experiences in the game which he could take away from it. Roe often talked about psychology and how to intentionally lead users through game spaces, and there was a whole legend and history behind these things. Roe was knighted by Scotland for his contribution to promoting such traditional values as chivalry and honor.
2 years ago I also met the chief architect of Grandia, which took eons to make and was designed to lead 14 year old troubled boys in particular to face their demons (real to them, many young boys commit suicide in Japan from bullying and despair) through a quest through imaginary lands.
As Roe Adams had said many times, there are already enough stories in our collective pasts, and these legends can be used over and over again in games. I think the point is you get something out of the retelling, or reexperienceing of the story whereas most rehashes of arcade-style games, like doom or virtual fighter, are basically upgraded graphics on top of what was already a big selling muscle-flicker title. The most interesting parts seem to be the rendering of the costumes and their suggestion (kimono, or african medicine man, etc) of deep hidden strengths welling out of mastery of some obscure religion or discipline.
I remember the main reason I liked the Source (Compuserve forerunner). Their Zork was so fleshed out it seemed real even though it was text. They must have made piles of gold from the adventure program. I don't know who originally wrote it, and don't understand why Infocom didn't make more money with their natural language parsing engine. I don't think Scott Adams' work translated or maybe was executed well in the semi graphical format that came soon thereafter.. it was just enough to destroy the scenery you created in your head.
But it seems that there are at least two ways for you to go about building a game, either hire tons of talented people (mostly programmers and graphic artists) and blow a lot of cash, taking on a lot of risk, and when you hit something lucrative stick with it. The other way is to get the key persons you need to build a game - the kind that will be interesting and succeed to some extent almost no matter what direction they take, like Roe above, or the Myst brothers, or other game authors featured at/. I remember doing an interview with Sega's main game team a couple years ago for a video documentary. It took a while to find out that while this was the team they claimed that made Nights, the main guy had left and in fact almost nobody from the original team was still there.. just the team name!
I think people who "get it", who are making the psychological life of the player a top priority, are probably as important to the big companies' game development efforts as to smaller teams. And that while nostalgia and human perception focusing on the highlights of the past are undoubtedly real, the presence or not of these individuals, given the freedom to follow their training and instincts, in the development cycle is a major factor in whether the software stands up over time.
I've been a big fan of Motorola (CPUs) for the past twenty years until this afternoon when I read this article. It turns my stomach to read that Motorola has always acted this way ("Motorola's way or the highway"). Holy cow!
If this is their enlightened turn-of-the-century conduct, then what is in store for computer users?
Is this DUN number unassailable? Seems like a server loaded either with fake names, or with names of large institutional customers who are already listed in Motorola's database, might be of use..
Oh yeah, Japan does have a privacy law but then again nobody raises a cry when this kind of thing happens..
A month of heavy 64K use, i.e. slashdot, open source development, etc. I have found runs just about the same as the OCN economy 128K 38000 yen fee. Now, that is. I once got screwed by OCN (64 Kbps again) for 1200 bucks for a month, when the NTT built soho router (early adopter..) dialed out and wouldn't hang up, every time Windows wanted to poll Microsoft or some such idiocy. Also had NTT come make a sales call for some hair brained scheme to lower my bills, except that if you make lots of small dialup calls from an autodialing router/ta (ntt's of course) you probably pay a heck of a lot more. Asked for proof this was not a scam and never heard from them again.
Where you live you probably don't have IP Setsuzoku service, though you might want to ask again. That is the 64K service just rolled out for all of Tokyo in May, for what was it around 6000 yen? I had to sign up for it but was furious at the same time.. since I had also checked with their competitor ODN, which depended on ports which were actually at NTT's OCN service. NTT was screwing with them so that ODN (this was Shinagawa area, 1999) had to say they had no lines available for 3 months but OCN said they could come install right away (i.e. 1 month).
NTT of course didn't know about a deal that the ISP DTI (Dream Train Internet, Mitsubishi Elec.) had where you pay another 80 bucks a month for static ip.
If there is any way at all not to use NTT and get useable service let me know (started an ISP in Tokyo 1994 and NTT was killing us then too of course). Spread spectrum or net over utility lines in the next year or so is not total fantasy, so long as NTT isn't doing it.. Keep an eye on Sony!
Yes, this is what I meant. There have been a number of announcements of multi-qubit computers being made out of groups of ions, individual atoms, or what have you. The SciAm article I referred to was about this, the author was a scientist in the field and had invented a search algorithm which used superimposed states in the quantum computer. It apparently was proven to be the fastest such search algorithm possible.
But this and other articles have noted that there is a limit to the number of quantum bits (qubits) that can be assembled in a reasonably stable fasion. I do not know why, but I think we are up to between 4 and 7 qubits (IBM built something recently I think/. noted), with the limit being around 14 or so. Maybe this limitation has nothing to do with qubits made out of one atom-wide wire or dots in a semiconductor chip. I was just thinking that if you could take one electron (or an atom, or a group of a bazillion atoms) and impose a bit pattern of arbitrary length on this single piece of matter, then there would be no qubit limitation.
I'll look on the net some more (more than I usually do), thanks.
The suggestion of modifying plastic to have metal characteristics by modulating these Coulomb potentials their laser can access is very wild. I remember a science fiction story (Doc E.E.Smith's lensman series, or possible A.E. Van Vogt.. or the Rama series?) in which the skin of a space battleship was strengthed to withstand weapons that would destroy ordinary metal in an instant, by using "molecular force generators"!! Sound familiar? I suppose if you just shined your laser on a corner of the piece of metal, the entire metal structure might be strengthened.. neat!
Thank you very much for your kind words. I often wonder (like perhaps many people do) about potential connections between the quantum reality of physicists and our networked world. Maybe no connection at all and all we are seeing are the natural results of network effects and wishful pattern matching, when you seem to get unexpected synergies coming at you.
One question I have is whether the "waveform collapse" of entangled systems is complete even for very weak environmental interactions like gas molecules bouncing off an object. Come to think of it, if I had a thermal random number generator in my laptop, would its chips be entangled to any degree each time a new number was generated?
If anyone knows of an online forum for this kind of Q&A or similar articles, would appreciate information.. thanks again.
Oh and cable connectivity is very cheap in Japan, you can get from 256Kbps to 15Mbps, for perhaps $50/month, depending on the cable provider in your area (in Tokyo). Anybody with line of sight from West Akabane?
No press release at Sony, but a little more information from this morning's Yomiuri Daily News (not on their website). Apparently NTT will only provide a fiber connection for a group of homes, to save money, as predicted by two earlier posters. Sony will provide the music and other software contents.
You can slag the big boys but it does cost a lot of money to develop these machines, one false move and companies can go under. In one fell swoop Sony basically created the DVD market with Playstation 2 sales.
Also, not in the article but noticed that in March NTT Docomo bought into Playstation.com Corp. (which was set up in Feb.) to use I-Mode service to distribute software to Playstation terminals. Possibly I-Mode would just be a way to spread news about new titles, and handle ordering and billing (download before you get home?) but there is no security in most of those phones yet. Newer phones I believe have 40 bit RSA. Also the new EZ Web
phones which use a competing service from I-mode,
have 40 bit RSA from Phone.com in Japan. Using I-mode to unlock games from DVDs might be a bigger business than fiber downloads for a while, but the unlocking business hasn't taken off in Japan when it was tried in the past.
NTT has only in May and due to competition started an almost reasonable ISDN service, 64K unlimited use for I think $50/month (ISP charge separate). But NTT Metallic and other companies are coming out with DSL, and the best deal is Cable if you can get it (I can't living 3 minutes from a major train station but silly me, on top of a hill behind an old temple.. no cable).
Looks like we're inching towards William Gibson's "deck". But first things first, gotta sell a lot of movies!
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry that was Stanford University, not "Standord".
--Matt
I built the first site for the North Korean famine (www.northkorea.org) over some years with a past Newsweek editor in Japan. I've had some time to think about how to converge people on sites and solve problems.
Actually since the Kobe quake I've thought about how to make systems that could help focus responses to a web thread and help people solve problems. Slashdot might be better than nothing, though it lacks an editor who can continually digest and udpate info to provide a quick to consult page. On the web people tend to surf away and away from a given site, so while Slashdot is great for gathering a mass of people, you still are going to need a link at the top to someone's page. That someone will have to be a superhuman or have a lot of helpers to manage the information flood and remain of interest.
It seems there are a number of interesting components that could be useful in this case if they are not built monolithically, I'm thinking of sourceforge and open directory type collaborative services like dmoz.org.
There are a lot of other problems though, and one big one which it seems the people here might have a chance at solving, which is the political angle. It's everyone's business when there is a war, and lots of people may not want some information to be posted. There is also disinformation and the danger of getting people hurt.
In the North Korea project, we had a bank account closed in the U.S. and I kept my name off the board since I was worried about being able to travel. But the biggest reason and perhaps the only reason why it succeeded (we raised a quarter million dollars in food, medicine, clothing, and other items) is that it was masterminded by an ace journalist named Bernie Krisher who felt something had to be done, did it, documented it, and demonstrated integrity to people through the site. He pulled his contacts and he risked his life (just because he is elderly.. and still more active and energetic when it counts than most twenty-year olds) one of the trips he ended up hospitalized there. The story got out through the site's news items, essays, photo and video reports, faxes from the government of North Korea, and info about newspaper appearances around the world which were also very important.
I thought of using the web in the Kobe quake to help organize volunteers to assemble needed materials, but the fact is one manic person can do more than a CGI program. If you can somehow gather twenty manic networking people and filter everyone's energy through that you got something big. I say this because in the Kobe quake my own contribution was just to mirror a site on the beleaguered system that was still up in Kobe, and to direct people to a fantastic frequently updated site that everyone from student to megacorporation looked when it was the most important.
Where was the site? Standord University. A student there had the objectivity of five thousand miles and some incredible energy because before other companies took up the slack, and while the government was paralyzed, this guy was probably the most important communications channel.
You also will need to consider how to get people in and out. More information could be had from Eastern European linux people who have plenty of experience in this area. Even in a highly industrialized area you are likely to discover problems getting people physically in and out of the area. And the groups which can move freely may be highly politicized themselves. I think you will have a lot more luck if you try to be extremely focussed and selective about what you are trying to do and what you say you can do. In the end though if someone depends on your website, your ass is going to be on the line! Literally!
Sorry I couldn't find this science fiction book on the net either. I was referring to a technology brandnamed "Dreamtime" which in the book was a next-generation VR technology which allowed virtual scenes to be overlayed through glasses over a person's view. While used for theme parks, it turned out also to be wanted by quasi-military criminals, and the most powerful application of it was is incorporation into contact lenses.
A bad guy ninja type in the book wears a powerful computer on his belt with a portable device like an ultrasonic sonar. By integrating the audio returns, this soldier was able to "see through walls", seeing an overlayed display on his field of vision. It would be the ultimate in wearable computing and vr.
By commercial aspects I was referring to oil exploration, in which explosives generate a sonic wave through the ground and analysis of the returns lets you find pockets underground where there is oil. I worked with a company (musetech.com) which makes VR viewing and analysis software for this.
Visible astronomy is also generally about integrating the amount of radiation to fall on a ccd chip as you probably know. There is one cool (literally) device I saw in a catalog which, by building up an image over time, lets you see faint images through your telescope eyepiece including for example a nebula's colors which the human eye can't generally make out.
If you could do something similar with X-rays or sound waves it would be pretty neat I suppose.
As for the cremation device, don't ask me I don't want to know these guys. I did however make a homepage that gained a little popularity at the time, which is still up at http://telebody.com/mattr/tero/
This was a few years ago so I could be wrong, but I believe the Japanese media (I live in Tokyo) reported that the Aum cult was thought to have disposed of at least one body in an oil drum which had been turned into an exceedingly powerful microwave oven that could turn even bones into ash, leaving no evidence. The group's claim to fame was spreading Salin gas in the subways, when they weren't busy making LSD or drinking their guru's bathwater. They also were researching antipersonnel lasers and (I could have assigned this to the wrong people) I think they also shot a police chief near his home.
Sorry I don't know their design but I just found a reference to the microwave oven here.
http://www.cesnur.org/testi/aum_042.htm
There are a lot of links if you look up Aum and microwave in google.com. But apparently they had a supergenius as their science and technology officer and (looking now at http://www.copi.com/articles/guyatt/aumi.html) probably could have made a big oven if they had to.. can't answer your cavitation size question myself.
There is a metalanguage being developed now called UNL which is intended to enable precise communication, including not only data specification but also communication of state-of-mind, across human languages.
Currently 16 languages including English and Japanese are "online with UNL" and the goal is to build UNL bridges to 189 languages.
I asked Kay Nishi (founder of Ascii and now at MIT Media Lab) about this Friday at his first public talk about UNL and other projects of his at the Foreign Press Club in Tokyo. It is still very early in development but would be extremely useful in binding together humanity and using computers for humanizing projects.
I think it is if not a really great idea, at least a good compromise and to delay a Pluto probe.
While I am neither a propulsion scientist nor a molecular chemist, it does seem likely that setting themselves a tangible goal for next generation propulsion systems is good.
Likewise, it will make a lot more sense (of course, maybe too much worrying about "sense" when we should be thinking "pushing the envelope") to colonize the moon with nanoscale technology in perhaps 20 years.. this apparently passes up the human dramas that marked the world's space exploration efforts, of great adventure and risk on the bootstrap limb of history.
I'm pretty worried about cutbacks made in the first months of 2001 as it shows the new President of the United States, and his constituency by and large, do not share this sense of wonder or focus on learning as a species, of self-evolution. If they did in an organic, willful way I'd think people would feel an overwhelming urge to encompass the entire solar system and out to the Oort clouds in the sweep of an arm and say, We have been there and it is ours to give to our children.
It seems inevitable that no matter how much or little NASA may be doing, a contracting economy and provincialism require NASA to provide evidence of belt-tightening as well. My hopes are that the science and fiction on which we feed ourselves here makes itself true by realizing a manifest destiny kind of story in the first half of the twenty-first century.
It seems evident that the way we are teaching each other to think through Slashdot and similar media (well it looks that way surfing at 3..) must have a significant effect on the way this story unfolds, through philosophy, attitude to technology, political voice, and "Can do" spirit. I think some of this must be present in space entrepreneurs. They must be intent.
I'd say that in our networked lives that reach around the world to share information while at the same time, drilling down at solving the problem at one's own feet in gritty software code, we're playing an important part of building the foundation for this future and we must not imagine that we are not involved. Let intellect and vision lead our vacillating planet! How old do you intend to be when you call the Moon?
I was hoping against hope that the article would be about something cool like integrating an X-Ray exposure over time from plain old sunlight, perhaps with a cooled ccd and nifty software. (That's what I've been thinking about doing with starlight for a year anyway..)
Listen folks, you don't want to screw around with X-Rays unless you are heavily trained, okay? The lightest thing I can say is the article is irresponsible in light of modern technology and culture.
My grandfather (God rest his soul) always wore bandaids around his fingers. They were always coming off or getting soggy and wearing out, his fingernails were a mess (I think he missed them on one or two fingers completely), and it looked pretty painful. You see he was a dentist, I guess around when the article was written. Unfortunately they didn't know that your body is a pretty good integrator of radiation too.. so it was standard operating procedure to hold the film in a patient's mouth while beaming the X-rays into it and spraying it around his own fingers at the same time. They didn't think, 'lead aprons are for wooses', they just didn't know. Seems dumb and tragic now.
If you want to do something much more interesting than the proposed project, and maybe make a ton of money at the same time, why not work on integrating ambient radiation, whether sonic, electromagnetic, or nuclear. There was a good novel called Hollywood Dreamtime which talked about it a lot. The last thing we all need is for a young smart person excited by open source, hacking, and network effects, to start screwing around with unshielded spark coils. Odds are someone is going to get electrocuted or permanently damaged (maybe with malevolent intent).
On a lighter note, you could also learn to build a fucking powerful microwave oven with an oil drum and similar parts. That's what the Om cultists did in Japan a couple years ago, to turn their victims into ash. I'd say that's safer than building X-Ray generators and maybe leaving them plugged in over night by mistake.. X-Rays are great and 100% natural but they are too energetic to fuck around with for a household hobby.
Hi,
..It's just that everyone already has palms. I'd have to steal my friend's unit for a bit longer to try it out more but I found the keyboard very small. Not sure if it would allow faster input than Graffiti on Palm, which I find too error-prone (obviously that part is my fault) and slow (limited by recognition speed).
We just had the PalmSource show in Japan last week and a bunch of people came from California. It was huge, over a thousand people here.
Getting into Palm development myself, I still drool over the Zaurus. The Zaurus has a gorgeous screen, freehand kanji entry, a landscape web browser, and if you try a little game that comes with it where you corral lots of flying stars with your stylus you will realize that it is really a fast and rich experience. I mean arcade-style animation. Not sure if that is in Java or not, I would expect optimized C.
Seriously that one little game application is to die for, very sexy and I am not a gamer.
The Palm I was told has something called Google Pen for kanji stroke input, haven't tried it yet.
But if localized as-is into English language only, I'd think the Zaurus would be pretty popular in the U.S.
But I could totally see telnetting in and doing something useful on the BIG, high-resolution, high-contrast, gorgeous Zaurus screen with that keyboard. In terms of useability (comparing the latest version of Palmscape to Zaurus web browser, it felt like the screen was 2-3 times the size and maybe twice the resolution.
Though I wanted to do gcc based development I had to buy CodeWarrior for PalmOS (with $100 show discount still about $200 for Japanese v6) because it is what everyone is using and I heard the Sony CLIE SDK requires it. CW 6 Japanese is used because 7 English is unstable for Japanese environment still.
Seriously I would not discount anything on the Zaurus platform. They have been doing it for a long time in Japan, it's just that their flagship units have suddenly gotten a lot cheaper. Also memory is getting cheaper too.. those stamp sized SD chips are 64MB and 128MB now, and they said 1GB on a static-free, chicklet-like package could be reality next year. SD based hardware prototypes we saw actually had memory and executables inside the hardware which took over the device when snapped on, so I wouldn't be surprised if it gets easy to carry a bunch of linux distros in your pocket.
I was just about to say that if Zaurus supported that you know what my Christmas list would be, but looking into the next cubicle I just found out the Zaurus actually does support SD memory chips, plus it has another slot for a quarter-size wireless cartridge and "maybe" microdrive hd. Time to do some more research..
Anyone have one with more info? Maybe someone else has more experience with Palm in Japan as well; my Clie has an initial version of ATOK (kanji front end processor) but there are apparently 2 more levels as well.
Don't know what on Earth happened to the company since then (I think it was the same company anyway) but at the time there was much info on the web site about how it was used to do periodic downloads of results from many very remote automated data collectors, like atmospheric stations and so on. There was something about shipping too. But the data rate was extremely short, and it seemed only useful to communications that could be accomplished with a handful of bytes each signal.
I remember at the time worrying about security, since antennas and signals might draw fire from military on innocent villages etc. There still is hardly any phone infrastructure, and any really good solution (like the phone system in the sky one satellite company built for Thailand) seemed prey to a rapacious telecom ministry. Well that's a few years ago. I think I suggested more research into either a store and forward to satellites, or a line of site ham network using a specialized linux type distribution.
Anyway, I said "Amateur Scientist meteor radio" to Google and Google showed me some very nice links!
Meteorscatter Links--Make More Miles on VHF
A link on this page ( Meteor Burst Communication) mentions the noise floor is limited to the noise emitted by the galaxy, which changes through the day as you scan different parts of it. Cool! It says you really ought to be away from cities and highways to keep the floor as low as possible.
The American Meteor Society Radiometeor Project
(a reprint posted last summer of a 1997 article from the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers)
Skyrocketing cell phone use in Japan has had one unfortunate effect: Train conductors now make repeated requests to passengers that they refrain from using cell phones while on the train. It seems the signals interfere with medical devices, particularly *pace makers*.
Don't know about other countries, but common Japanese cell phones at any rate are pretty powerful. If you point one at your tv set the screen really takes a fit. Could some lightweight shield in a jacket lining provide significant protection for people whose lives depend on a quiet electromagnetic environment?
Thank you very much for your comment. Unfortunately the eeoracle link you provided ends up with a Slashdot error page as if it was discarded by the management..
And I found no mention of Oracle9i being available for Linux, though perhaps it exists somewhere. 9i has some new clustering and failover capabilities over 8i it seems.
Hewlett-Packard is providing discount hardware to the startup as part of a special program they have in Japan for selected startups.
The only good news is that we may end up having it hosted at the provider where the SE went! Thanks for your help.
Hope this is not too far off topic.
I'm a private developer and am also managing a project which is about to purchase a cluster for a venture that expects a great need to scale. But the chief SE (who seems knowledgeable and likes Linux.. but just left the company) thought we should put Windows 2000, instead of Linux, on the HP cluster we are getting. The system will be mainly Apache for the web server and BEA WebLogic for the J2EE app server.
The main reasons were that Oracle does not guarantee its Linux version, and that while there is clustering for Linux (I had made up a list of info including LVS, Linux-HA, and Convolvo/Kimberlite to consider), database clustering is not ready yet for Linux. While we are probably starting much smaller, his target was a highly redundant system from two routers down to two DB servers for no single point of failure. He said since Solaris is not recommended for HP (the hardware vendor is already set) and Oracle is needed to work well spreading a db across a number of machines, we should go for Win2k. And he is actually a Linux advocate.
This is not so much a question about human support as a question about the "ready for enterprise scale" and Oracle-related posts here. I suspect the 5 nines redundancy is really more than we need for the project (an online business venture which could grow fast), but would like to recommend Linux for future projects where possible and wonder if it is ready in this area, and where there may be more information about impelementation with case studies. And is it really true that db cluster support is shaky on Linux, and that Oracle doesn't support Linux. It seems believable, but Oracle was pushing Linux pretty hard last time I checked and inability to support multiple database servers would be a problem for them. I'd like to know if there are other database vendors, or other clustering solutions, that would make it safer to host databases on linux.
on the Sony Clie. They have been monochrome but will or may even now be color. Also Clie (runs PalmOS is part of Sony's Memory Stick strategy, meaning there will be plenty of color photos and video clips to print in color on these devices.
Right as in "Right Honourable" of course, but
this is the only time the "R" word shall be
allowed in common discourse.
At all other times when not addressing vicars,
barristers, Members of Parliament, &Etc. the word "Left" shall be used instead, viz. "Leftenant", left wing (this is a football term).
Latin terms shall be interposed when at all possible and fully pronounced (if you can alread), viz. ibid., op. cit., ad astra. ("et al" and "aka" shall not be allowed).
Finally schoolchildren shall be taught proper history including the feats of British generals in the War and the correct reasons for the hiatus in proper government of the colonies, in order to pass the A and O levels to get into a proper institution of higher education, or failing that, to go on the dole. And all [potatoe] chips shall be wrapped in newspaper, God Save the Queen.
Well SuSE and SGI are porting Failsafe to linux-ha.org High Availability project.. and SGI supposedly has much experience with that package. I'd look more at RedHat if their installation process didn't suck the big snarfborg.
(as the SuSE liker nevertheless ends up developing for RH..)
But missioncriticallinux.com's Convolvo says "any deestro".
But for actual stability like trying to get the job done? The last two VA Linux boxes I bought had RedHat on them already, and hardware cost is a pretty big factor. Or did you want to start repartitioning that 50GB RAID array? Is there such a big difference between deestros after you shut everything down? How about which HA distros not which Linux distro?
Someone's going to say BSD or die, etc etc. I'd much rather see people with actual experience responding and backing up what they say, and hear people with experience using the HA tools.
Better yet screw the distro idea, someone just post a list of tools they like and ideas about compiling, resource management, and security.
What a marvellous image from the Hubble crew, yet again!
And yet.. the scentists totally overlooked one of the most inspiring and self-validating discoveries about this cataclysm: they rotated the image Too Far! Yes, rotating the image just 90 degrees to the right instead of 180 degrees, the photo is quite obviously Tux.
It may be interpreted as an Emperor penguin staring regally off into the reaches of space, or (more likely) his wings close against his body after their downbeat against the freezing depths he swims, our mascot is about to swallow a most appealing morsel of a miniature galaxy.
Come to think of it, no matter which way you rotate this pic it is most definitely a penguin. Where did those scientists learn taxonomy? A golf club? Feh! Maybe they need to rethink their choice of OS?... And how do they know it wasn't just a penguin galaxy to start off with? The dopplers should show the little fishie galaxy fleeing most convincingly.
I built an autocompositing facility I'm calling
Magic Hands (no hp yet, will be at telebody.com) when I was asked to do the impossible: based on a few photoshop layouts build a thousand page site (no database) with as many photos in a matter of days.. a combination of using Perl to grok file names, templates, and navigation rules, and execute various image processing tasks while considering the logic of the site.. for example the layout changes if the image is vertically or horizontally oriented. I also was able to set up alpha masks, and frames for compositing by trying out different sequences by hand (using a batch version I made of the pgshell script so I could paste in blocks of code and watch the Gimp try them out).
It was both Fun and Terrible! An inability to open some of the Photoshop files was the least of the story. It all started with debugging Scheme on a deadline..
But paid off when I got a whole CD of new photos to drop in at the last minute. Then I could just run a few scripts and it would all be reprocessed, rebuilt in 5 minutes. The most satisfying part was self highlighting thumbnails which would rotate in a circle as you clicked through successive pages (this was for a hotel chain called Mandarin Oriental), automatically adjusting for the number of photos available for each hotel. Program once and forget, it would have been even easier if we were allowed to use a database on the site.
Until photoshop makes a server edition built like SGI versions of popular 3dcg tools (alias, softimage) Gimp is the last word. (Sorry maybe it is already like that on SGI, haven't felt the urge to drop that much cash lately.) But actually trying to do serious graphic design in it is far more difficult than in Photoshop.. the interface (partly not fault of Gimp creators) is difficult to use, and the feeling of using Photoshop on a Macintosh is just incredibly tactile and trustworthy in comparison, for now. Also Photoshop or batch tools like debabelizer probably could do a lot of simple jobs faster. For example a simple job like building an icon legend (click on the question mark in the corner of http://www.oranda.or.jp/) was accomplished in Gimp/KDE/Suse Linux, in a taxi cab, on my Inspiron7.5K but I felt like I had to scream at the Gimp's graphic interface in comparison to the quick strokes I knew could have accomplished it in maybe a minute or two in Photoshop on a Mac. Also, presentations just look better on Mac screens than any other computer I've seen so far.. though I haven't tried the latest version of X, things just feel more cinematic and satisfying on a Mac so far, the widgets and decorations feel real like you can sink into them if you get what I mean. Perhaps Eazel and friends are working to fix some of that.
Also there is the problem that Mac OS and the feeling of the interface and its purity and responsiveness have convinced me that doing Photoshop in Windows for example will result in different work from an artistic perspective, either infected by the corporate droniness of Windows and its feckless mouse tracking, or the somewhat scientific ultraclarity of SGI Irix. I've felt this with CG tools as well. Win2K is better than Win98 used to be, and Photoshop in that environment might be more acceptable, no experience there.
But now with the Gimp and the system I built, I feel like I have a swiss army knife that can tackle most any task, even if the client is allergic to databases for some reason. I can chomp() any template, build a thousand pages in 2 minutes (on a PIII), and wait until you sit a designer in front of the screen when the Gimp windows are popping in and out as if a phantom designer on megacaffeine was sitting at the keyboard. There are tools out there for people to build graphics programmatically, but the Gimp seems to provide relatively high quality operations.
If Photoshop was there on linux, open source and with a perl server I'd be there, but then hey, that's the Gimp you're talking about! The best thing to do is figure out what tool is right for the task at hand, and unless you need to lift weights, use Photoshop on a Mac. Macs have been designers' best friends for a long time for a good reason. Then get a lot of free time and start studying the Gimp! You get out of it what you put in.
The name of the software was Bikkuri Mouse (Surprise Mouse) not Magic Mouse.
Publisher is Sony Computer Entertainment. It uses
USB mice, 1 or 2 players. There is a brief description of it at <a href=http://ps2.ign.com/news/20185.html> http://ps2.ign.com/news/20185.html</a>.
You can never get enough graphics, but you can be blown away by a game with none. After seeing on the technical side high end SGI Infinite Reality equipment, or on the artistic side the things the best artists (like Jeffrey Shaw of ZKM) can do with them (or anything, they don't need tech it is just a great tool), you begin to realize that when you depend on just pixels without any real intention or signification behind them you get a product that pales quickly. Especially when you've gone a generation or two past it in graphics card evolution. Honestly a large part of my feeling about this is I would probably have more fun building some PS2 soft than buying games for it.
/. I remember doing an interview with Sega's main game team a couple years ago for a video documentary. It took a while to find out that while this was the team they claimed that made Nights, the main guy had left and in fact almost nobody from the original team was still there.. just the team name!
On the other hand I remember firing up Zork from Infocom on an Apple II emulator and being drawn into it much as I did 20 years ago, while I don't enjoy doom very much. I thought Nights was the best Sega game (think it was Sega anyway), and it looks like there are some good games for PS2 now as well. There is a good driving game and another fun one about leading middle-ages Japanese armies singlehandedly. One of the most interesting to me perhaps is I think called Magic Mouse, a drawing game for kids. It was designed by a well known artist named Toshio Iwai. You can draw a horizontal line for example and a tree grows up from this horizon line, etc., so the fun comes from playing with your imagination.
So I think it is true that even with a machine that can do live animation of the Visible Human (a voxel model based on scanned slices of a corpse), you can still keep adding features until the machine gets overwhelmed without getting to a level of satisfaction or satedness. And some games that don't depend on graphics at all achieve this total immersion and enjoyment of the player..
it depends on how the tech is used, not what level of graphics you've got (except for the first time you play, when you are watching a fireworks show, not playing inside a game).
Some of the most interesting talk I've heard about game design was from Roe R. Adams III who was designer of Ultima IV and Wizardry (IV?) as well as Tokyo Dungeon (Playstation 1) I believe among others. I knew him for some years in Japan and found his stress on the necessity of game *designers* as opposed to programmers or graphic artists as a very important distinction. The graphics were not as important as the Quest, and the ability for the player to have valuable experiences in the game which he could take away from it. Roe often talked about psychology and how to intentionally lead users through game spaces, and there was a whole legend and history behind these things. Roe was knighted by Scotland for his contribution to promoting such traditional values as chivalry and honor.
2 years ago I also met the chief architect of Grandia, which took eons to make and was designed to lead 14 year old troubled boys in particular to face their demons (real to them, many young boys commit suicide in Japan from bullying and despair) through a quest through imaginary lands.
As Roe Adams had said many times, there are already enough stories in our collective pasts, and these legends can be used over and over again in games. I think the point is you get something out of the retelling, or reexperienceing of the story whereas most rehashes of arcade-style games, like doom or virtual fighter, are basically upgraded graphics on top of what was already a big selling muscle-flicker title. The most interesting parts seem to be the rendering of the costumes and their suggestion (kimono, or african medicine man, etc) of deep hidden strengths welling out of mastery of some obscure religion or discipline.
I remember the main reason I liked the Source (Compuserve forerunner). Their Zork was so fleshed out it seemed real even though it was text. They must have made piles of gold from the adventure program. I don't know who originally wrote it, and don't understand why Infocom didn't make more money with their natural language parsing engine. I don't think Scott Adams' work translated or maybe was executed well in the semi graphical format that came soon thereafter.. it was just enough to destroy the scenery you created in your head.
But it seems that there are at least two ways for you to go about building a game, either hire tons of talented people (mostly programmers and graphic artists) and blow a lot of cash, taking on a lot of risk, and when you hit something lucrative stick with it. The other way is to get the key persons you need to build a game - the kind that will be interesting and succeed to some extent almost no matter what direction they take, like Roe above, or the Myst brothers, or other game authors featured at
I think people who "get it", who are making the psychological life of the player a top priority, are probably as important to the big companies' game development efforts as to smaller teams. And that while nostalgia and human perception focusing on the highlights of the past are undoubtedly real, the presence or not of these individuals, given the freedom to follow their training and instincts, in the development cycle is a major factor in whether the software stands up over time.
I've been a big fan of Motorola (CPUs) for the past twenty years until this afternoon when I read this article. It turns my stomach to read that Motorola has always acted this way ("Motorola's way or the highway"). Holy cow!
If this is their enlightened turn-of-the-century conduct, then what is in store for computer users?
Is this DUN number unassailable? Seems like a server loaded either with fake names, or with names of large institutional customers who are already listed in Motorola's database, might be of use..
Oh yeah, Japan does have a privacy law but then again nobody raises a cry when this kind of thing happens..
Post in MIME?
A month of heavy 64K use, i.e. slashdot, open source development, etc. I have found runs just about the same as the OCN economy 128K 38000 yen fee. Now, that is. I once got screwed by OCN (64 Kbps again) for 1200 bucks for a month, when the NTT built soho router (early adopter..) dialed out and wouldn't hang up, every time Windows wanted to poll Microsoft or some such idiocy. Also had NTT come make a sales call for some hair brained scheme to lower my bills, except that if you make lots of small dialup calls from an autodialing router/ta (ntt's of course) you probably pay a heck of a lot more. Asked for proof this was not a scam and never heard from them again.
Where you live you probably don't have IP Setsuzoku service, though you might want to ask again. That is the 64K service just rolled out for all of Tokyo in May, for what was it around 6000 yen? I had to sign up for it but was furious at the same time.. since I had also checked with their competitor ODN, which depended on ports which were actually at NTT's OCN service. NTT was screwing with them so that ODN (this was Shinagawa area, 1999) had to say they had no lines available for 3 months but OCN said they could come install right away (i.e. 1 month).
NTT of course didn't know about a deal that the ISP DTI (Dream Train Internet, Mitsubishi Elec.) had where you pay another 80 bucks a month for static ip.
If there is any way at all not to use NTT and get useable service let me know (started an ISP in Tokyo 1994 and NTT was killing us then too of course). Spread spectrum or net over utility lines in the next year or so is not total fantasy, so long as NTT isn't doing it.. Keep an eye on Sony!
Yes, this is what I meant. There have been a number of announcements of multi-qubit computers being made out of groups of ions, individual atoms, or what have you. The SciAm article I referred to was about this, the author was a scientist in the field and had invented a search algorithm which used superimposed states in the quantum computer. It apparently was proven to be the fastest such search algorithm possible.
/. noted), with the limit being around 14 or so. Maybe this limitation has nothing to do with qubits made out of one atom-wide wire or dots in a semiconductor chip. I was just thinking that if you could take one electron (or an atom, or a group of a bazillion atoms) and impose a bit pattern of arbitrary length on this single piece of matter, then there would be no qubit limitation.
But this and other articles have noted that there is a limit to the number of quantum bits (qubits) that can be assembled in a reasonably stable fasion. I do not know why, but I think we are up to between 4 and 7 qubits (IBM built something recently I think
I'll look on the net some more (more than I usually do), thanks.
The suggestion of modifying plastic to have metal characteristics by modulating these Coulomb potentials their laser can access is very wild. I remember a science fiction story (Doc E.E.Smith's lensman series, or possible A.E. Van Vogt.. or the Rama series?) in which the skin of a space battleship was strengthed to withstand weapons that would destroy ordinary metal in an instant, by using "molecular force generators"!! Sound familiar? I suppose if you just shined your laser on a corner of the piece of metal, the entire metal structure might be strengthened.. neat!
Thank you very much for your kind words. I often wonder (like perhaps many people do) about potential connections between the quantum reality of physicists and our networked world. Maybe no connection at all and all we are seeing are the natural results of network effects and wishful pattern matching, when you seem to get unexpected synergies coming at you.
One question I have is whether the "waveform collapse" of entangled systems is complete even for very weak environmental interactions like gas molecules bouncing off an object. Come to think of it, if I had a thermal random number generator in my laptop, would its chips be entangled to any degree each time a new number was generated?
If anyone knows of an online forum for this kind of Q&A or similar articles, would appreciate information.. thanks again.
Oh and cable connectivity is very cheap in Japan, you can get from 256Kbps to 15Mbps, for perhaps $50/month, depending on the cable provider in your area (in Tokyo). Anybody with line of sight from West Akabane?
No press release at Sony, but a little more information from this morning's Yomiuri Daily News (not on their website). Apparently NTT will only provide a fiber connection for a group of homes, to save money, as predicted by two earlier posters. Sony will provide the music and other software contents.
You can slag the big boys but it does cost a lot of money to develop these machines, one false move and companies can go under. In one fell swoop Sony basically created the DVD market with Playstation 2 sales.
Also, not in the article but noticed that in March NTT Docomo bought into Playstation.com Corp. (which was set up in Feb.) to use I-Mode service to distribute software to Playstation terminals. Possibly I-Mode would just be a way to spread news about new titles, and handle ordering and billing (download before you get home?) but there is no security in most of those phones yet. Newer phones I believe have 40 bit RSA. Also the new EZ Web
phones which use a competing service from I-mode,
have 40 bit RSA from Phone.com in Japan. Using I-mode to unlock games from DVDs might be a bigger business than fiber downloads for a while, but the unlocking business hasn't taken off in Japan when it was tried in the past.
NTT has only in May and due to competition started an almost reasonable ISDN service, 64K unlimited use for I think $50/month (ISP charge separate). But NTT Metallic and other companies are coming out with DSL, and the best deal is Cable if you can get it (I can't living 3 minutes from a major train station but silly me, on top of a hill behind an old temple.. no cable).
Looks like we're inching towards William Gibson's "deck". But first things first, gotta sell a lot of movies!