I'm so glad someone raised this. I was thinking just yesterday that the internet was *seeming* to have become smaller. The linking pagerank system google uses is strange IMHO because not all pages are massively linked.. or have reason to be linked.. it turns the net into some kind of boys club...
With that said, I have found that my more obscure and better quality sites have been found on the last pages of google, with the first few pages being generally filled with amazon and other *for sale* sites...
There are sites i've seen that have been around for years and don't even get a mention on google. Word of mouth was the only way I found out about them. I also remember how much the internet opened up when I first used the "stumble to" firefox extension. Who knew these sites even existed?!
I'd say the google solution would be so somehow incorporate a similar "word of mouth" type ranking system as "stumble to" (or slashdot for that matter), so individual users can rank results "useful/not useful" to modify page ranks... Also their "similar page" section would also benefit from a "useful/not useful" to help google learn similarities...
I bought an MP3 player for the same price as an Ipod shuffle and it was the single most infuriating thing i've ever used. I don't @#@$ understand why we, as consumers, can't get what we pay for. sorry.. pardon my punctuation... See, the unit didn't have a random mode on it and it took about 40 seconds to go through all the menus to change to another CD. It was madenning. (not that an ipod would necessarily be any better)
I should have been able to write my own bit of code for this. The buttons could have been assigned to *any* function... (hell.. I should be able to have the unit work as a crap e-book reader if I really wanted.. right?) anyway.. enough ranting.. The "tape deck sans line-in" was probably the godfather of this absolutely criminal marketing practice... it constantly infuriates me the way we are patronised by deliberately disfunctional products designed to make us lust after a more expensive but fundamentally no more functional product...
a more obvious application for this tech would be to modify this for rotoscoping...
Assuming it can get clean lines in the colourisation, It should be able to give you a clean colour map you could then use to quickly and easily extract a single character from footage...
I'm still struggling to understand this line of thinking... (and also the current line of thinking of phone manufacturers, although I can see how it is economically favourable to lock you into proprietary systems)
Why can't we be running bluetooth enabled mobile PDAs? Ie. A PDA running the same file system as a PC, running the OS of your choice (probably a lean VNC capable version of linux?) It would only need very basic specs as it would simply be an input and network device =======
1/ You could simply VNC to your home PC when in a wi-fi area or use the phone company network to VNC when not in a wi-fi area -
2/ You could access itunes from your PC to stream MP3s from yours or anyone's computer... (300gig of music in your pocket anyone?)
3/ Hell, you could even play Halflife 2 (optimistic perhaps.. i'm not sure of the limitations of mobile data rates, but I can't imagine this is too far away for wi-fi these days)
4/ I could buy a PDA with a camera on it (if they don't make them, they should) or I could buy a camera with bluetooth support (if they don't make them they should).
5/ Literally any software I wanted to run... Voice recognition... anything I need a 3ghz to process could pass instructions back to a PDA for offline use.. I could stack commands and send at once to avoid using too much online call time (until call costs go down, or until people stop considering "calls" and start accepting nothing less than permanent mobile net connectivity..)
6/ The possibilities are endless... Hey I'm just thinking even something crazy like if someone said "I just bought a new dirigible" I could press a button and say "define dirigible" and it would send it to by home PC running dragon dictate or some such, DD would send it to google and audio stream back the response in text to speech, allowing me to know what a dirigible was and how much I wanted one of my own... *within seconds*.... ("Tank, I need the program to operate a 1930s dirigible" or your matrix quote of choice) Hey! Try do that with a motorola!...
7/ And last but not least, I could make phone calls on it on the road over the telephone system and VOIP calls when in wi-fi areas.. just like a regular mobile (but with VOIP!)
=====
My life is on my desktop PC. I don't want to be trying to duplicate it on 512mb.
Any comments? Am I missing something? This is just a modern application of existing technology as far as i'm aware... Has anyone got a system like this one running currently?
I believe the future of all this "convergence" is just to have a simple single function PDA/Mobile phone which can VNC to directly control your home PC.. a PDA permanently connected to the net.. its possible right now and makes all these "breakthroughs" obsolete.. its just the phone call costs which are making it impractical...
How about musicians who don't want to be signed up to the greedy red handed "industry" and would prefer to distribute their media under creative commons... Not a convincing argument for the RIAA, but the inevitable future...
Copyright's death is unstoppable, and trying to put an end to P2P will just push it deeper underground and help it proliferate by pushing more people onto the cause... 'plex
Who is deciding how much they have to pay?
Do you guys have some sort of regulatory body that handles this stuff?
If so, seems like there being a bit easy on Diebold doesn't it? wonder why.
Yeah I'd agree with a lot of that... However, Australia is only beginning to find its own two feet and I think extreme US policy will tend to turn Aussie citizens away from the natural "follow in big bro's footsteps" type mentality.
People are generally educated enough to dislike being patronised by an overbearing government (at least, in my experience Australians are). Micromanagement is, I believe, inherently unstable. We're just lucky that a large amount of this instability is put on display for us well in advance of any policy making...
Australias stance seems to be one of economic and military convenience rather than a righteous moral code. This is a country which abhors capitol punishment and citizens bearing arms. It prides itself (apparently) on tolerance and multiculturalism.
If we could have claimed economic or military independence, I doubt that alot of those policies would have been implemented. As Australia asserts its independence over the course of the century, I think we will see our *values* shine through all the cluttered 'strategic policy making'
I didn't vote for him, and you can hate him as much as you want, but to be fair to the Australian people, its not as if John Howard had any competition...
The reason for peoples paranoia is obvious... Peoples privacy *IS* gradually being infringed upon. Some people have an interest in micromanaging society, and "paranoia" is a natural reaction to a violation of civil rights.
Australia's lucky we have the USA to serve as a test bed for many controversial ideas. We can see mistakes USA has made (or is moving toward making) and can steer clear of them in advance.
Part of me can't stand the terrible errors in judgement that other global powers have made, but deep down I know that their foolishness, while eating away at their own stability, is serving to strengthen Aussie liberal values...
I've only played one map, and it largely consisted of me throwing tables at fellows and them dodging and then throwing office chairs back at me... Sort'of like some game of furniture pong (shiny anistropic shaded pong, but pong none the less)
I've always maintained that in the land of FPS, they made just one game (Mario's swat the fly game) and the graphics gave just got better over the years...
I can't say much for petty complaints claiming that 'when a thief returns the goods to pay for them, he ceases to be a thief', but steam does offer some very real problems which should be addressed by valve with priority.
For example, right now i'm typing in slashdot because the HL2 SDK is "updating" with no evidence of progress... Meanwhile, i'm unable to *play* HL2, let alone download the HL2 update while playing a different game (CS Source or Codename Gordon for example) because valve have decided to set us back 20 years to the days before multi-tasking. "Cannot Run Game. You currently have another game in progress, please quit this first"
Last time I checked, waiting for a massive *questionmark* sized download over ADSL wasn't much of a game... but what do I know?
Not to mention the conflict of interest brought up by the posting of ads on steam update pages when coupled with the potential(?) for product usage and market information harvesting.
If I was commercially developing a mod for HL2 and I was physically unable to access the SDK or HL2 until it had finished updating, I would be furious... as it is, I think i might take a nap:)
Is that really the best business model? I can imagine running a loss could be advantageous in the long run to push along some innovations ahead of their time...
I'm surprised noone has expressed concerns over constant connections to steam when you want to play HL2 SP...
I would have expected conspiracy loving/.ers and dystopia hating HL2 players to have raised the question of whether or not steam has the ability to log the use of the games we play?
Has anyone checked to see when/why steam accesses the internet, and what information, if any, is transmitted? (Eg, Time of day, hardware, IP address, Email address etc)
The "steam" model is very new, and I can think of several examples of its potential for exploitation. The ground rules have to be set... it doesn't matter how good the games are.
'plex BTW the game is utterly brilliant... "best thing ever" (not best game ever.... best. thing. ever.)
in Doom 3 there were a few limited outdoor scenes (travelling through large outdoor areas from the confines of a train) which led me to believe that the D3 engine is capable of some truly competitive GFX...
The bumpmapping is also much better implemented in doom 3 IMHO.
As well as that, within days of D3 being released, there were patches released by the modding community which improved the engine in various ways... full dynamic self shadowing, parallax mapping, not to mention improvements to the actual game itself (making bodies, decals, shells remain, improving the appearance of weapons etc)
HL2 seem to have completely missed the opportunity for this by locking the original HL2 data out to modders (or am i missing something here?) so its a little hard to compare without truly being able to push the engine to its limit like we could with doom 3.
Both of them suffer from too low 'max size' texture maps, and a far too limited library of textures & props from which to create the environment.
If I was a developer/serious modder, I would take into consideration:
PRO HL2: The sheer number of HL2 players, the brilliantly implemented HL2 SDK
PRO Doom3: HL2's apparent limited embrace of true open source, The big brother "steam" ball and chain
ahh who am i kidding.. i'd mod for fascist HL2... "HL2... its safer here"
I guess you could ask a similar questions such as:
"why is my SB Live severely limited when using the creative drivers, and only reveals its true potential with the KX project drivers"
or
"why were four of my rendering pipelines disabled by default on my 9800se?"
These days, there seems to be an incentive for companies to limit the quality on certain products in order to justify the existence of "high end" products. The cheapest way to do this is to design one product, and disable half of the features for a "low end" version... While this trend remains, the community will continuably be able to milk more from the products they purchase than the company wants...
Has the question of "When, Where, How is steam logging/using this authentication" been asked? is it a one off process, or does the steam software send packets to the server each time the SP is played?
This model of software distrubution will no doubt attract the attention of other distributors, so these questions need to be asked, and the groundrules laid out early on...
It is possible, without a close eye being kept on this, for the model to turn into the old "RFID tag in both the toothpaste cap and the tube" type consumer information harvesting.
------------ POOM POOM POOM POOM. I blew him out of the gas station, and ever since then, I always carry this.
(He pulls out a revolver)
I hear you. A well-armed populace is the best defense against tyranny.
I'll drink to that. And you know, I haven't fired this for such a long time I don't even know if it'll work.
Well, why don't you pull the trigger and find out.
(BOOM. He shoots the bartender in the chest. The bartender gets up, grabs the gun hidden behind the counter, and shoots the other guy. Both fall dead. Blood is everywhere.) --------------
"We were looking at a beautiful white-tail buck and my friend said 'If you just had a gun for that.' A little light bulb went off in my head," he said.
"If I just put strychnine in mine and my good buddies coffee, the world would be two morons closer to perfection!" he elaborated.
The problem isn't in people not having good reasons. The problem is in peoples differing perceptions as to what a good reason is... Right and wrong are concepts which can be understood inside peoples heads, but are far to intricate and complex to be layed bare in some kind of "well if you're not doing anything wrong" big brother nightmare...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm so glad someone raised this. I was thinking just yesterday that the internet was *seeming* to have become smaller. The linking pagerank system google uses is strange IMHO because not all pages are massively linked.. or have reason to be linked.. it turns the net into some kind of boys club...
With that said, I have found that my more obscure and better quality sites have been found on the last pages of google, with the first few pages being generally filled with amazon and other *for sale* sites...
There are sites i've seen that have been around for years and don't even get a mention on google. Word of mouth was the only way I found out about them. I also remember how much the internet opened up when I first used the "stumble to" firefox extension. Who knew these sites even existed?!
I'd say the google solution would be so somehow incorporate a similar "word of mouth" type ranking system as "stumble to" (or slashdot for that matter), so individual users can rank results "useful/not useful" to modify page ranks... Also their "similar page" section would also benefit from a "useful/not useful" to help google learn similarities...
my 2c
'plex
I bought an MP3 player for the same price as an Ipod shuffle and it was the single most infuriating thing i've ever used. I don't @#@$ understand why we, as consumers, can't get what we pay for. sorry.. pardon my punctuation... See, the unit didn't have a random mode on it and it took about 40 seconds to go through all the menus to change to another CD. It was madenning. (not that an ipod would necessarily be any better)
I should have been able to write my own bit of code for this. The buttons could have been assigned to *any* function... (hell.. I should be able to have the unit work as a crap e-book reader if I really wanted.. right?) anyway.. enough ranting.. The "tape deck sans line-in" was probably the godfather of this absolutely criminal marketing practice... it constantly infuriates me the way we are patronised by deliberately disfunctional products designed to make us lust after a more expensive but fundamentally no more functional product...
'plex
a more obvious application for this tech would be to modify this for rotoscoping...
:)
Assuming it can get clean lines in the colourisation, It should be able to give you a clean colour map you could then use to quickly and easily extract a single character from footage...
Just a thought there if you are reading this
'Plex
A six figure sum for using John Cage's work?
I hope noone finds out about my vast collection of illegal copies of cage/batt recordings I have on this here spool...
'plex
I'm still struggling to understand this line of thinking... (and also the current line of thinking of phone manufacturers, although I can see how it is economically favourable to lock you into proprietary systems)
Why can't we be running bluetooth enabled mobile PDAs? Ie. A PDA running the same file system as a PC, running the OS of your choice (probably a lean VNC capable version of linux?) It would only need very basic specs as it would simply be an input and network device
=======
1/ You could simply VNC to your home PC when in a wi-fi area or use the phone company network to VNC when not in a wi-fi area -
2/ You could access itunes from your PC to stream MP3s from yours or anyone's computer... (300gig of music in your pocket anyone?)
3/ Hell, you could even play Halflife 2 (optimistic perhaps.. i'm not sure of the limitations of mobile data rates, but I can't imagine this is too far away for wi-fi these days)
4/ I could buy a PDA with a camera on it (if they don't make them, they should) or I could buy a camera with bluetooth support (if they don't make them they should).
5/ Literally any software I wanted to run... Voice recognition... anything I need a 3ghz to process could pass instructions back to a PDA for offline use.. I could stack commands and send at once to avoid using too much online call time (until call costs go down, or until people stop considering "calls" and start accepting nothing less than permanent mobile net connectivity..)
6/ The possibilities are endless... Hey I'm just thinking even something crazy like if someone said "I just bought a new dirigible" I could press a button and say "define dirigible" and it would send it to by home PC running dragon dictate or some such, DD would send it to google and audio stream back the response in text to speech, allowing me to know what a dirigible was and how much I wanted one of my own... *within seconds*.... ("Tank, I need the program to operate a 1930s dirigible" or your matrix quote of choice) Hey! Try do that with a motorola!...
7/ And last but not least, I could make phone calls on it on the road over the telephone system and VOIP calls when in wi-fi areas.. just like a regular mobile (but with VOIP!)
=====
My life is on my desktop PC. I don't want to be trying to duplicate it on 512mb.
Any comments? Am I missing something? This is just a modern application of existing technology as far as i'm aware... Has anyone got a system like this one running currently?
'plex
I believe the future of all this "convergence" is just to have a simple single function PDA/Mobile phone which can VNC to directly control your home PC.. a PDA permanently connected to the net.. its possible right now and makes all these "breakthroughs" obsolete.. its just the phone call costs which are making it impractical...
anyone got this setup up and running?
'plex
How about musicians who don't want to be signed up to the greedy red handed "industry" and would prefer to distribute their media under creative commons... Not a convincing argument for the RIAA, but the inevitable future...
Copyright's death is unstoppable, and trying to put an end to P2P will just push it deeper underground and help it proliferate by pushing more people onto the cause...
'plex
Who is deciding how much they have to pay? Do you guys have some sort of regulatory body that handles this stuff? If so, seems like there being a bit easy on Diebold doesn't it? wonder why.
"future trips to Mars that will have probes return with samples of the martian surface may contain deadly microbes of course, foreign to our world."
:)
microbes... from HELL!
slashdot is just Doom:The Movie's IloveBees.com as far as I can tell
'plex
Yeah I'd agree with a lot of that... However, Australia is only beginning to find its own two feet and I think extreme US policy will tend to turn Aussie citizens away from the natural "follow in big bro's footsteps" type mentality.
People are generally educated enough to dislike being patronised by an overbearing government (at least, in my experience Australians are). Micromanagement is, I believe, inherently unstable. We're just lucky that a large amount of this instability is put on display for us well in advance of any policy making...
Australias stance seems to be one of economic and military convenience rather than a righteous moral code. This is a country which abhors capitol punishment and citizens bearing arms. It prides itself (apparently) on tolerance and multiculturalism.
If we could have claimed economic or military independence, I doubt that alot of those policies would have been implemented. As Australia asserts its independence over the course of the century, I think we will see our *values* shine through all the cluttered 'strategic policy making'
I didn't vote for him, and you can hate him as much as you want, but to be fair to the Australian people, its not as if John Howard had any competition...
The reason for peoples paranoia is obvious...
Peoples privacy *IS* gradually being infringed upon. Some people have an interest in micromanaging society, and "paranoia" is a natural reaction to a violation of civil rights.
'plex
Hows about this (I'm going to regret saying this when Bush implements it)
When the system hears a gunshot, it turns around and (drumroll) shoots the culprit!
Huzzah!
Better yet, hows the system at pinpointing illicit substances? Stolen Rfid Items? Dissent? Turbans?
'plex
Australia's lucky we have the USA to serve as a test bed for many controversial ideas. We can see mistakes USA has made (or is moving toward making) and can steer clear of them in advance.
Part of me can't stand the terrible errors in judgement that other global powers have made, but deep down I know that their foolishness, while eating away at their own stability, is serving to strengthen Aussie liberal values...
'plex
I've only played one map, and it largely consisted of me throwing tables at fellows and them dodging and then throwing office chairs back at me...
Sort'of like some game of furniture pong (shiny anistropic shaded pong, but pong none the less)
I've always maintained that in the land of FPS, they made just one game (Mario's swat the fly game) and the graphics gave just got better over the years...
'plex
I can't say much for petty complaints claiming that 'when a thief returns the goods to pay for them, he ceases to be a thief', but steam does offer some very real problems which should be addressed by valve with priority.
:)
For example, right now i'm typing in slashdot because the HL2 SDK is "updating" with no evidence of progress...
Meanwhile, i'm unable to *play* HL2, let alone download the HL2 update while playing a different game (CS Source or Codename Gordon for example) because valve have decided to set us back 20 years to the days before multi-tasking.
"Cannot Run Game. You currently have another game in progress, please quit this first"
Last time I checked, waiting for a massive *questionmark* sized download over ADSL wasn't much of a game... but what do I know?
Not to mention the conflict of interest brought up by the posting of ads on steam update pages when coupled with the potential(?) for product usage and market information harvesting.
If I was commercially developing a mod for HL2 and I was physically unable to access the SDK or HL2 until it had finished updating, I would be furious... as it is, I think i might take a nap
'plex
"At what level is a chimera 'too' human?"
When Universal decides to use the premise as a Rob Schneider vehicle, I think we can safely say they've gone too far...
Is that really the best business model? I can imagine running a loss could be advantageous in the long run to push along some innovations ahead of their time...
'plex
I'm surprised noone has expressed concerns over constant connections to steam when you want to play HL2 SP...
/.ers and dystopia hating HL2 players to have raised the question of whether or not steam has the ability to log the use of the games we play?
I would have expected conspiracy loving
Has anyone checked to see when/why steam accesses the internet, and what information, if any, is transmitted? (Eg, Time of day, hardware, IP address, Email address etc)
The "steam" model is very new, and I can think of several examples of its potential for exploitation. The ground rules have to be set... it doesn't matter how good the games are.
'plex
BTW the game is utterly brilliant... "best thing ever" (not best game ever.... best. thing. ever.)
in Doom 3 there were a few limited outdoor scenes (travelling through large outdoor areas from the confines of a train) which led me to believe that the D3 engine is capable of some truly competitive GFX...
The bumpmapping is also much better implemented in doom 3 IMHO.
As well as that, within days of D3 being released, there were patches released by the modding community which improved the engine in various ways... full dynamic self shadowing, parallax mapping, not to mention improvements to the actual game itself (making bodies, decals, shells remain, improving the appearance of weapons etc)
HL2 seem to have completely missed the opportunity for this by locking the original HL2 data out to modders (or am i missing something here?) so its a little hard to compare without truly being able to push the engine to its limit like we could with doom 3.
Both of them suffer from too low 'max size' texture maps, and a far too limited library of textures & props from which to create the environment.
If I was a developer/serious modder, I would take into consideration:
PRO HL2: The sheer number of HL2 players, the brilliantly implemented HL2 SDK
PRO Doom3: HL2's apparent limited embrace of true open source, The big brother "steam" ball and chain
ahh who am i kidding.. i'd mod for fascist HL2...
"HL2... its safer here"
'plex
I guess you could ask a similar questions such as:
"why is my SB Live severely limited when using the creative drivers, and only reveals its true potential with the KX project drivers"
or
"why were four of my rendering pipelines disabled by default on my 9800se?"
These days, there seems to be an incentive for companies to limit the quality on certain products in order to justify the existence of "high end" products. The cheapest way to do this is to design one product, and disable half of the features for a "low end" version... While this trend remains, the community will continuably be able to milk more from the products they purchase than the company wants...
'plex
Has the question of "When, Where, How is steam logging/using this authentication" been asked? is it a one off process, or does the steam software send packets to the server each time the SP is played?
This model of software distrubution will no doubt attract the attention of other distributors, so these questions need to be asked, and the groundrules laid out early on...
It is possible, without a close eye being kept on this, for the model to turn into the old "RFID tag in both the toothpaste cap and the tube" type consumer information harvesting.
Yeah, I guess we've had the RIAA/MPAA soften us up for an imminent violation of our consumer rights...
"Stop whinging! They already monitor us in the streets! whats a few subdermal tags going to matter?"
My favourite movie gun reference:
------------
POOM POOM POOM POOM. I blew him out of the gas station, and ever since then, I always carry this.
(He pulls out a revolver)
I hear you. A well-armed populace is the best defense against tyranny.
I'll drink to that. And you know, I haven't fired this for such a long time I don't even know if it'll work.
Well, why don't you pull the trigger and find out.
(BOOM. He shoots the bartender in the chest. The bartender gets up, grabs the gun hidden behind the counter, and shoots the other guy. Both fall dead. Blood is everywhere.)
--------------
Classic
'plex
"We were looking at a beautiful white-tail buck and my friend said 'If you just had a gun for that.' A little light bulb went off in my head," he said.
"If I just put strychnine in mine and my good buddies coffee, the world would be two morons closer to perfection!" he elaborated.
The problem isn't in people not having good reasons. The problem is in peoples differing perceptions as to what a good reason is... Right and wrong are concepts which can be understood inside peoples heads, but are far to intricate and complex to be layed bare in some kind of "well if you're not doing anything wrong" big brother nightmare...