The signals from the Galileo Positioning System are supposed to be able to penetrate buildings and that would be a vast improvement over GPS. It's not ready yet of course.
And as for bias, well, history books and lessons have it too.
You're absolutely right about that and it's particularly bad in schools. For example, during my schooling in the UK I don't remember learning about how 20,000 civilians died in British concentration camps in South Africa, or about how we let millions of Indians die in famines while simultaneously shipping food out of the country. I don't know about history in US schools but I should imagine the bad stuff is glossed over or omitted in a similar way. In fact at the same time all those children were dying in our camps, the US army was doing the same thing in the Philippines and people like Mark Twain were blowing their tops saying "we're as bad as the British!".
Countries have no appetite for examining their own crimes both past and recent, but we really do need to teach about our own crimes in schools.
Are you trying to be funny or are you just unimaginative?
Funny.
There are more types of games than just FPS. Many strategy games can teach economic concepts, math, and critical thinking.
Which contemporary strategy games do you feel are particularly valuable in teaching these concepts?
What kind of math? Simple subtraction an addition or anything more advanced?
I'm sure many people remember more about pioneer life from playing Oregon Trail than they do from history lessons.
That is a very old game! There were lots of educational games back in those days. You could learn quite a bit of history from a game like that. However, even when it comes to learning something like history, it's likely to be pretty one-sided in a modern game. I mean, they aren't going to make "Land Grab 1846 - The Unjust Mexican-American war". It would all be told from the US perspective with dastardly Mexicans shooting everything that moved shouting Ariba! Ariba!.
Games can very easily teach physics, math, logic, chemistry, biology, and much more.
There is lots of potential but not with most of the mainstream games available today. Now whether mainstream games could be designed to be really educational and simultaneously fun is another issue.
Unless you are unlucky enough to be in Iraq, shooting snipers and throwing grenades is not much of a useful skill. You may also find that your skills are not actually so useful in the real world. Trying going to Iraq and rapidly jumping up and down in the hope of avoiding enemy fire:)
We have the situation today where it's pretty much impossible to write a program without hitting loads of patents. If I was given the brief of writing a video player and I just did it in a way that seemed sensible, you can virtually guarantee that I would have infringed on dozens of patents. The only hope I would have of not getting sued is if the player was not at all popular or if patent holders felt it would generate bad publicity.
The word "VLC player" just popped into my head while I was writing this, and I did a search. As I predicted there are lots of patent threats against the player.
Good. That's exactly what they should do. Virgin Media are quite aggressive in their throttling policy. I only have to download about 1 TV program from itunes before they throttle me down. All the ISPs need a good kick in the arse though.
If you use Virgin Media "broadband" in the UK, you will find that after downloading a program from IPlayer, or any other legal service, your speed will be throttled right down as a punishment. It really makes their service look quite unusable in the modern world of legal video downloads. They even have the cheek to try to push their higher speed packages on you, but what's the point of a higher speed if you are just going to be throttled right down when you actually use it.
I agree. With still images people are often taking pictures of something interesting, a big moth on a wall, or a fancy looking bird in the garden etc. In contrast when the same people record video, it tends to be at a party with friends or a variety of other things that are not interesting enough to see, or there are privacy/embarrassment issues involved.
The other issues is that there are less people creating artistic video content because it's much more time consuming to do.
Hmm, the thing about 3D vision is that it really breaks down quite quickly over distance. A result of this is that 3D pictures look pretty boring unless there are lots of things in the foreground, like people ridiculously pointing into the camera or throwing things at the audience. So the storyline actually may suffer in order to make the most of the 3D.
We have the computer power for pretty good VR right now. Imagine walking around Bioshock with a stereoscopic human FOV headset. It would look pretty amazing. The problem is we don't have the visual hardware. We should do by now, but we don't. I find this really annoying since I've been waiting for it since the early 90s. We need HMDs that are affordable and give a full human Field of View (or as close as possible). At the moment the available HMDs cost thousands and only give you tunnel vision.
The games will have to change a little bit though. For example, you really need to have separate head and hand movement. I don't propose that games are written so you have to have your hand in the air all the time. It might feel more realistic, like you are really holding a gun, but your arm will get tired very quickly. I think most of the fun of VR will be looking around and feeling that you are really there. Shooting can still be done with a mouse.
I am hoping that mobile video will spur the development of better HMDs. This year sees the release of the Indicube which is a portable video player that uses video glasses instead of a screen. The glasses have 800x600 resolution with an FOV equivalent to about a 17 inch monitor on your desk. Not great, but a step in the right direction and it might stir things up a bit.
The graphics in today's games are already pretty damn good. Yet, even with the great graphics we have today, there is no immersive VR available. After 20 years of waiting I still can't go into a shop and buy a VR headset that covers my entire field of view with decent resolution. The best you can buy is something with the field of view of a postage stamp stuck to your glasses.
At the moment all of these great games are still stuck behind a little screen. By now we should really be inside the games. When I am in front of a tall building in a game, I should be able to tilt my head to look up and see how high it is. There doesn't seem to be any drive to bring good VR into the market, yet I'm sure it would sell well. People would love the idea of really feeling like they are inside the game, looking around.
Virgin Media are always trying to push their high-speed service, but they all include throttling after you have downloaded any significant amount of data. If you buy a TV show from ITunes and download it, you will suddenly find your speed switched right down.
Not really. Just take a look at the BBC, which is routinely being accused of being left wing. One of the main things that anti-war protesters discuss (and want discussed) is the strategic and economic reasons for the Iraq war. However, if you look at the BBC's coverage of the war, it does not cover these critical issues. In the recent BBC "Iraq Anniversary" articles there is only one sentence that could be considered to be addressing this issue. Here it is...
The critics countered that the threat was an illusion, that the US was invading illegally and sought control over the region and Iraq's oil.
Just one sentence out of all those articles to cover such an important issue. The media just refuse to discuss the issue despite all these "left-wingers" screaming about it.
I still do not understand why everything is left/right.
I agree. One of the problems with the mainstream media is self censorship. How do you classify the failure to discuss particular topics? For example, the BBC has recently had a series of 5 year Iraq anniversary articles and in all of that coverage there is only one sentence devoted to any kind of discussion of the strategic and economic reasons for war. Does the BBC's failure to discuss this topic make them left or right wing? The real problem with the media is not about left and right, it is about being "embedded with power" as Pepe Escobar put it. The media tend to act as a megaphone for governments, whether they are right or left wing and there is a general failure by journalists to seek the opinions of independent experts.
In left wing countries, journalists who try to analyse and second guess the government are slammed as being right-wing and biased. In right-wing countries, the same kind of journalists are slammed as being left-wing and biased. What they really are, are people who scrutinise and keep check on the powerful and that is a concept that transcends the idea of left and right-wing.
It was a typo I am now powerless to fix. However, it's likely that M16 butts have been used on the Al Jazeera cameraman incarserated in Guantanamo Bay without charge for years. He's currently being force-fed I believe.
NATO always intended to bomb Serbia despite pretending to get an agreement signed. They presented something called the Rambouillet Agreement to the Serb government, but it was totally unsignable by any country (and deliberately so). It would have effectively ended Serbian sovereignty and allowed NATO troops to travel anywhere in the country. The war was really to get rid of Slobo, weaken Serbia (a key Russian ally) and to establish a NATO presence. The Campbondsteel base in Kosovo is absolutely massive.
The other issue is that NATO were engineering the crisis right from the beginning. British forces were training the KLA in Northern Albania before the uprising. This was an organisation that was on the US terror list and had taken part in ethnic cleansing among numerous other crimes. If Serbia had been a US ally, none of this would have happened and the KLA would have been denounced as Islamic terrorists rather than being trained and armed.
There is simply no point to democracy if government officials have unlimited power to feed the public with lies, and to force the cooperation of civil servants and the military. The people can't rule themselves if they are making political decisions based on phony stories being fed to them, even indirectly.
Superbly put. For this reason, lying to the public should be treated as seriously as purgery in a court of law. Except it isn't treated as remotely as seriously as that. It's just allowed to go unpunished.
That one is by Microvision and uses raster-scanning Lasers. It's a different technology and there have been reports of nasty artefacts due to laser speckle, but we'll have to wait and see. There's another company called Light Blue Optics who are also working on a small projector for mobile phones. Theirs is a different technology too and rather than raster-scanning, it bounces lasers off a Fourier transform of the desired image. Somehow it all comes together to form the actual image you want. One advantage of this is that if there is a fault with an individual pixel, the "badness" is imperceptibly spread over the whole image rather than showing up really obviously.
I still prefer the idea of video goggles though. It makes much more sense if you want a mobile "big screen". The Indicube is a portable video player using video goggles and will be released soon. The screen will have an FOV equivalent to something like a 17 inch monitor on your desk with a 800x600 resolution.
It's when they actually start talking about killing reporters to silence dissent [wikipedia.org] that they REALLY get nasty.
During the Kosovo crisis Serbian State TV (equivalent to the BBC) was showing the effects of NATO bombing on civilians. To stop this NATO bombed the Serbian State TV station killing 15 civilians. NATO justified this by saying that the station was a tool of propaganda. By this rational, if the US/UK go to war with Iran, the BBC and many American news outlets will be viable targets. General Wesley Clark was confronted with this war crime during a conference and he seemed very sheepish about it and resorted to saying that his orders had come from the top.
Well a lot of it is about contrast really. The ambient light screws up the contrast because the blacks are no longer very black. There are screens available that try to eliminate ambient light by only reflecting very narrow red green and blue wavelengths which correspond to the output of certain projectors. Of course, that means you'd have to carry a screen around with you.
For the personal big screen experience I really think video goggles make a lot more sense. The Indicube will be released soon. It's a portable video player that uses video goggles rather than a screen. The apparent screen size will be something like a 17 inch monitor on your desk with a 800x600 resolution. That's a lot better than any other portable video player I know of. Also, it can only be a matter of time before they offer a 1080p resolution with an even wider field of view.
This doesn't seem to compare to "Operation Mass Appeal" which was a programme by M16 to plant stories in the British media in the run up to the Iraq War. They needn't have bothered really though since the Mainstream Media is quite capable of printing flimsy government accusations as fact without the intervention of the Secret Service.
Slashdot Mirror
The signals from the Galileo Positioning System are supposed to be able to penetrate buildings and that would be a vast improvement over GPS. It's not ready yet of course.
..you should wash them immediately.
"Shut up Linux underpants! I'm on a date!"
You're absolutely right about that and it's particularly bad in schools. For example, during my schooling in the UK I don't remember learning about how 20,000 civilians died in British concentration camps in South Africa, or about how we let millions of Indians die in famines while simultaneously shipping food out of the country. I don't know about history in US schools but I should imagine the bad stuff is glossed over or omitted in a similar way. In fact at the same time all those children were dying in our camps, the US army was doing the same thing in the Philippines and people like Mark Twain were blowing their tops saying "we're as bad as the British!".
Countries have no appetite for examining their own crimes both past and recent, but we really do need to teach about our own crimes in schools.
Funny.
There are more types of games than just FPS. Many strategy games can teach economic concepts, math, and critical thinking.
Which contemporary strategy games do you feel are particularly valuable in teaching these concepts? What kind of math? Simple subtraction an addition or anything more advanced?
I'm sure many people remember more about pioneer life from playing Oregon Trail than they do from history lessons.
That is a very old game! There were lots of educational games back in those days. You could learn quite a bit of history from a game like that. However, even when it comes to learning something like history, it's likely to be pretty one-sided in a modern game. I mean, they aren't going to make "Land Grab 1846 - The Unjust Mexican-American war". It would all be told from the US perspective with dastardly Mexicans shooting everything that moved shouting Ariba! Ariba!.
Games can very easily teach physics, math, logic, chemistry, biology, and much more.
There is lots of potential but not with most of the mainstream games available today. Now whether mainstream games could be designed to be really educational and simultaneously fun is another issue.
Especially if Josey Wales is on the opposite side.
Unless you are unlucky enough to be in Iraq, shooting snipers and throwing grenades is not much of a useful skill. You may also find that your skills are not actually so useful in the real world. Trying going to Iraq and rapidly jumping up and down in the hope of avoiding enemy fire :)
That's how I used to treat the internet in the dial up days when I had to pay for all the calls. It's wasn't very enjoyable at all.
We have the situation today where it's pretty much impossible to write a program without hitting loads of patents. If I was given the brief of writing a video player and I just did it in a way that seemed sensible, you can virtually guarantee that I would have infringed on dozens of patents. The only hope I would have of not getting sued is if the player was not at all popular or if patent holders felt it would generate bad publicity.
The word "VLC player" just popped into my head while I was writing this, and I did a search. As I predicted there are lots of patent threats against the player.
Good. That's exactly what they should do. Virgin Media are quite aggressive in their throttling policy. I only have to download about 1 TV program from itunes before they throttle me down. All the ISPs need a good kick in the arse though.
If you use Virgin Media "broadband" in the UK, you will find that after downloading a program from IPlayer, or any other legal service, your speed will be throttled right down as a punishment. It really makes their service look quite unusable in the modern world of legal video downloads. They even have the cheek to try to push their higher speed packages on you, but what's the point of a higher speed if you are just going to be throttled right down when you actually use it.
I agree. With still images people are often taking pictures of something interesting, a big moth on a wall, or a fancy looking bird in the garden etc. In contrast when the same people record video, it tends to be at a party with friends or a variety of other things that are not interesting enough to see, or there are privacy/embarrassment issues involved.
The other issues is that there are less people creating artistic video content because it's much more time consuming to do.
Hmm, the thing about 3D vision is that it really breaks down quite quickly over distance. A result of this is that 3D pictures look pretty boring unless there are lots of things in the foreground, like people ridiculously pointing into the camera or throwing things at the audience. So the storyline actually may suffer in order to make the most of the 3D.
I'm not sure the new show will be that successfull, but here's a possible theme song...
Gator-Man, Gator-Man,
Hides in water wherever he can,
Grabs a leg, Just like light,
Lets the corpse rot overnight,
Hey man, here comes the Gator-Man,
Gator-Man, Gator-Man, Deadly neighbourhood Gator-Man, Wealth and fame, he's ignored,
Chunks of flesh are his reward,
Hey man, here comes the Gator Man
We have the computer power for pretty good VR right now. Imagine walking around Bioshock with a stereoscopic human FOV headset. It would look pretty amazing. The problem is we don't have the visual hardware. We should do by now, but we don't. I find this really annoying since I've been waiting for it since the early 90s. We need HMDs that are affordable and give a full human Field of View (or as close as possible). At the moment the available HMDs cost thousands and only give you tunnel vision.
The games will have to change a little bit though. For example, you really need to have separate head and hand movement. I don't propose that games are written so you have to have your hand in the air all the time. It might feel more realistic, like you are really holding a gun, but your arm will get tired very quickly. I think most of the fun of VR will be looking around and feeling that you are really there. Shooting can still be done with a mouse.
I am hoping that mobile video will spur the development of better HMDs. This year sees the release of the Indicube which is a portable video player that uses video glasses instead of a screen. The glasses have 800x600 resolution with an FOV equivalent to about a 17 inch monitor on your desk. Not great, but a step in the right direction and it might stir things up a bit.
The graphics in today's games are already pretty damn good. Yet, even with the great graphics we have today, there is no immersive VR available. After 20 years of waiting I still can't go into a shop and buy a VR headset that covers my entire field of view with decent resolution. The best you can buy is something with the field of view of a postage stamp stuck to your glasses.
At the moment all of these great games are still stuck behind a little screen. By now we should really be inside the games. When I am in front of a tall building in a game, I should be able to tilt my head to look up and see how high it is. There doesn't seem to be any drive to bring good VR into the market, yet I'm sure it would sell well. People would love the idea of really feeling like they are inside the game, looking around.
Virgin Media are always trying to push their high-speed service, but they all include throttling after you have downloaded any significant amount of data. If you buy a TV show from ITunes and download it, you will suddenly find your speed switched right down.
The critics countered that the threat was an illusion, that the US was invading illegally and sought control over the region and Iraq's oil.
Just one sentence out of all those articles to cover such an important issue. The media just refuse to discuss the issue despite all these "left-wingers" screaming about it.
I agree. One of the problems with the mainstream media is self censorship. How do you classify the failure to discuss particular topics? For example, the BBC has recently had a series of 5 year Iraq anniversary articles and in all of that coverage there is only one sentence devoted to any kind of discussion of the strategic and economic reasons for war. Does the BBC's failure to discuss this topic make them left or right wing? The real problem with the media is not about left and right, it is about being "embedded with power" as Pepe Escobar put it. The media tend to act as a megaphone for governments, whether they are right or left wing and there is a general failure by journalists to seek the opinions of independent experts.
In left wing countries, journalists who try to analyse and second guess the government are slammed as being right-wing and biased. In right-wing countries, the same kind of journalists are slammed as being left-wing and biased. What they really are, are people who scrutinise and keep check on the powerful and that is a concept that transcends the idea of left and right-wing.
It was a typo I am now powerless to fix. However, it's likely that M16 butts have been used on the Al Jazeera cameraman incarserated in Guantanamo Bay without charge for years. He's currently being force-fed I believe.
NATO always intended to bomb Serbia despite pretending to get an agreement signed. They presented something called the Rambouillet Agreement to the Serb government, but it was totally unsignable by any country (and deliberately so). It would have effectively ended Serbian sovereignty and allowed NATO troops to travel anywhere in the country. The war was really to get rid of Slobo, weaken Serbia (a key Russian ally) and to establish a NATO presence. The Campbondsteel base in Kosovo is absolutely massive.
The other issue is that NATO were engineering the crisis right from the beginning. British forces were training the KLA in Northern Albania before the uprising. This was an organisation that was on the US terror list and had taken part in ethnic cleansing among numerous other crimes. If Serbia had been a US ally, none of this would have happened and the KLA would have been denounced as Islamic terrorists rather than being trained and armed.
Superbly put. For this reason, lying to the public should be treated as seriously as purgery in a court of law. Except it isn't treated as remotely as seriously as that. It's just allowed to go unpunished.
That one is by Microvision and uses raster-scanning Lasers. It's a different technology and there have been reports of nasty artefacts due to laser speckle, but we'll have to wait and see. There's another company called Light Blue Optics who are also working on a small projector for mobile phones. Theirs is a different technology too and rather than raster-scanning, it bounces lasers off a Fourier transform of the desired image. Somehow it all comes together to form the actual image you want. One advantage of this is that if there is a fault with an individual pixel, the "badness" is imperceptibly spread over the whole image rather than showing up really obviously.
I still prefer the idea of video goggles though. It makes much more sense if you want a mobile "big screen". The Indicube is a portable video player using video goggles and will be released soon. The screen will have an FOV equivalent to something like a 17 inch monitor on your desk with a 800x600 resolution.
During the Kosovo crisis Serbian State TV (equivalent to the BBC) was showing the effects of NATO bombing on civilians. To stop this NATO bombed the Serbian State TV station killing 15 civilians. NATO justified this by saying that the station was a tool of propaganda. By this rational, if the US/UK go to war with Iran, the BBC and many American news outlets will be viable targets. General Wesley Clark was confronted with this war crime during a conference and he seemed very sheepish about it and resorted to saying that his orders had come from the top.
Well a lot of it is about contrast really. The ambient light screws up the contrast because the blacks are no longer very black. There are screens available that try to eliminate ambient light by only reflecting very narrow red green and blue wavelengths which correspond to the output of certain projectors. Of course, that means you'd have to carry a screen around with you.
For the personal big screen experience I really think video goggles make a lot more sense. The Indicube will be released soon. It's a portable video player that uses video goggles rather than a screen. The apparent screen size will be something like a 17 inch monitor on your desk with a 800x600 resolution. That's a lot better than any other portable video player I know of. Also, it can only be a matter of time before they offer a 1080p resolution with an even wider field of view.
This doesn't seem to compare to "Operation Mass Appeal" which was a programme by M16 to plant stories in the British media in the run up to the Iraq War. They needn't have bothered really though since the Mainstream Media is quite capable of printing flimsy government accusations as fact without the intervention of the Secret Service.