First off, let's just start by saying that, reading TFA, he's just an idjit. "nobody but skype knows how skype works?" Check/. from a few months ago, and you'll find a scholarly article linked on how skype works. They ain't hiding anything. Likewise for the history lesson: a lot happened between 95 and now that didn't include Net2Phone; I remember trying to patch calls on Delta3 (which sucked).
Okay, so why _does_ skype work? 1) no malware/adware. Make all the Kazaa cracks you want, but the moment skype starts screwing with people's bandwidth, it's gone. (Note to self -- if I ever get a fat up pipe, choke the upload on the skype box so it doesn't get named a supernode). 2) secure communications: encryption matters, folks. Here's a messenger and VoIP program that doesn't send stuff in the clear; it's actually useful for business comms. 3) shady network code: by routing stuff through port 80 and NAT tricks, it bypasses the vast majority of firewalls; nobody gets a message that they can't get through. Instead, it works, but voice runs through a crappy high-latency, high-failure rate TCP connection (which, by the way, has gotten better). 4) most importantly, simplicity of installation. Most of the time, Skype requires zero configuration. Folks, this is the most important UI lesson of our time. Unless your primary market is Asia, you want installation and UI to involve the fewest steps possible. Each step you add loses about 90% of your audience. Skype works from when you hit "install".
Sure, there's the problem of "how do we pay for this?"; but with distributed networking their overhead right now is a website, some coding and a server in denmark. If they can make skypeout/in pay the bills, it will be good for all; if they can't, well, on the bright side, a lot of people turned on to the technology will start looking for FOSS solutions.
yeah, "well received" is a bit of an overstatement. Cool idea -- really cool idea -- but the execution was a little wanting. The end product felt like half the game was shelved when time/budget overruns pressed in. Unfortunately, that was the fun half.
As for
"It seems that today's games industry no longer has room for small independent developers wanting to work on innovative and original ideas. Perhaps there is no longer any need for them."
Maybe it's not enough that the ideas be innovative and original; maybe they've got to be good too. That's why big companies go for predictable mediocrity, and small indie companies (whatever the field) work on innovative and original ideas: most innovative and original ideas are not good ideas; and those that are rarely get implemented well.
Heh. Maybe where you are. Certainly not out at this end of the med. The cheapest (no-subscription) phones run around $150 USD, are way too small to cradle between shoulder and ear, get crappy battery life ('cos not only are thy so damn small, they've been given supersmall batteries), and have interfaces that are nightmares of bad design. My shitty little "bottom of the line" phone (a siemens C65 --okay, it cost $15 more than the bottom of the line model, and gave me a crappy CIF camera in the bargain), features the same processor and the rest of the line (superslow),an OS that was out of the box unstable (add another $50 to buy the proprietary USB serial cable needed to flash the ROM with a stable version; I won't even speak of how crappy their "mobile phone manager" software is; let's just say "unusable" is only the beginning), numerous really bad design decisions: big fat key in the middle of the keyboard launches the web browser causing a 15-second delay as the tiny processor tries to load that crap (thankfully, the finest in Russian hackers had figured out how to disable this feature), a "keyboard lock" feature that requires a single keypress to turn off -- nothing like walking to work and finding out the boss has already been talking to your pants for 10 minutes, crappy games that have some spooky DRM on them, and a backlit DSTN screen that sucks power and sucks in the sun. All I wanted was a simple LCD screen, a simple interface, and maybe some storage for messages and phone books. What I got was a entry level turd designed to make me envy the top of the line, but that only succeeds in making me pity those who have to use these things. Nobody makes "simple phones" any more; they make a "coherent product line". Mobile phones these days are the manifestation of the worst fears of the PC hardware market: Increasing complexity makes simple tasks more difficult, not less; poor interface design adds to the frustration; complete monopolistic integration along mobile networks (only use our equipment, lock-in contracts), individual bits o' hardware (DRM and "trusted computing" are already there and they blow ass; let's put the IR port outside of the sandbox for "security reasons", yet have no protection against bluetooth viruses), and "pay as you go" business models (gee, all these neat features, and not one that works or is affordable) make mobile telephony a decreasingly useful status symbol for the working class.
The Bodleian library (working with Google) had a pilot digitization project of the manuscript library for something like 10 years; then Google comes along and signs them up.
There's a group through the Czech national library that's been putting stuff up, and is exploring offerring it on a subscription basis (merely 3000 Euro/year, and institutions only need apply).
For me, the best online digitization of a library currently available is already the BNF, and that project has poor quality control (unreadable scans), shaky connection qualities and bad links galore (an essential reference dictionary for my field is missing the volumes containing the letters A-C, and S-Z).
Without doubt, the EU consortium is using anti-americanism and anti-corporatism to justify the tons of government payouts needed to fund this; without doubt the documents won't be as easy to access as Google's project. But hell, if it puts more books online, I'm all for it. And unlike Google, many of these libraries have been around for centuries; one would hope that in a few centuries, they'll still be here. Google may be doing great, but will it be here in ten years?
Dunno about Serenity, but it's interesting finding people trying to come to grips with Firefly.
First, I'll say that I've seen maybe 3 episodes of Buffy tops, and never seen Angel. I can't stand the silly prosthetics and nonsense of Babylon 5, and frankly haven't enjoyed much science fiction television lately. I happened to tune into to Firefly for Bushwacked, and saw maybe 4 episodes broadcast before it was pulled. Since then I bought the DVD set and have watched it religiously. It's just damn good, and I haven't met anyone whose seen (or to whom I've shown) the show who has found it anything less than great fun.
Enough about me. Folks around here seem to be posting a bunch of things about Firefly, and they don't quite seem to have "gotten it". Yes, Firefly is a science-fiction show. Science-fiction often gets used on television and in movies to explore irreal circumstances: time travel, the nature of reality, how many lines of probable-sounding technobabble an actor can read with a straight face. Firefly didn't do that. Firefly used science fiction as a= means to bridge several traditional genres of action entertainment: Submarine Movies, Heist films, and yes, some westerns. At times, the plot is lifted from somewhere else: Unforgiven and Silent Running are both "borrowed" for episodes. Like your 'Star Trek'-class show, the cast of Firefly play characters who are good at what they do; but they're not superheroes, and they're working neither for high-sounding ideals, nor for a faceless bureaucracy. Sure, there are times when the show slipped into cliche; almost always it would then wink and subvert tradition. And yeah, as science fiction and on television, it's about as light entertainment as you can get. Don't get all worked up about it; but yeah, I gotta say I'm excited, but slightly apprehensive. Can they actually get 9 characters to work convincingly in a 2-hour movie?
Militaries around the world are changing. AA is primarily a marketing tool, but the interest in using commercial video games as training tools is increasing.
And, on the other side, the number of recruits coming in who are already 1337 is increasing. An article on a recent miliatry FPS trial reported that a full 2/3 of the soldiers selected were familiar with FPS.
Those making mods for military-style games are finding their work being favorably mentioned in surprising places, and well, if some you receiving instant messages from warzones may have noted that what's going on often gets described in terms of video games.
Yeah, sure, you can get a bluetooth-enabled phone and run your laptop through that, but the point isn't simply to produce mobile wireless access. It's more about running a permanent network out of your automobile.
We've had the technology and the ability to do this, but the really cool applications are just too risky, too liability-prone, or too legally questionable to catch the attention of the developers. So while your luxocar has a bluetooth network that catches viruses, and a lot of handy value-added features go by the wayside. I mean, here's the things that are useful for an in-car network:
A) Porn. Porn drives technology, period. I strongly recommend that the next development in this field be a means to stream internet porn onto a heads-up (hands-free) display, possibly via voice command. Since we're all being open-sourcy about it, there should also be a facility to transmit and add to the global wealth of internet porn.
B) Anti-theft. This is talked about in the article, although I find it difficult to imagine a thief wanting anything as ugly as a Honda Element. Maybe if he riced it up a bit, and camouflaged the solar panel as a big-ass aftermarket wing or something; that and one of those "battery life extender" stickers that says "R-Type" on it C) Navigation: again, there are already factory-installed and aftermarket solutions for this, but we really could use some improvements that only proper geeks can provide:
1. The author mentions networking radar detectors, as well as other traffic indicators (speed, proximity). That's a good start.
2. Much more interesting would be to network a whole slew of sensors. Radar detectors are good; but why not slap in a cheap scanner that runs through a whole range of frequencies and plots spikes and intensities? With a few sensors around, you could provide real-time plots of a large amount of radio traffic, and even localize quite a few. Heck, many police and fire frequencies are already out there on the internet. Of course, y'all would need some centralized support for that, and if done wrong, it'd probably be the target of some congressman's ire, and attempts to shut it down. Then again, if you ran something like a series of IRC channels (one for each region, run through port 80 and otherwise made to look like web traffic), authenticated users and blocklists, that just echoed reports from rmeote users, and maybe queries ("anyone got a picture of the tollbooth?"), you'd have your geek comms paradise, and the guy riding shotgun would have plenty of tasks to perform to isolate and avoid the mundane threats of traffic jams, separate ATIS noise from highway patrols, keep a steady stream of porn going to the driver's HU/HDD, and try to avoid throwing up.
D) Don't forget the need to bridge with existing open WiFi access points. Starbucks offers their networks as a service to the community, after all.
Then again, it's just a car. Speeding is generally something best done away from other cars. VoIP won't work too well with 3G latency. Any nerd project that gets mainstream acceptance loses most of its utility as people figure out ways to nickle and dime the life out of it.
Reminds me of a fine overview of the phenomenon of flying cars, and in particular all the hype surrounding the Mitzar, a "flying Ford Pinto", that recorded one takeoff and no landings. Let's hope the SkyScooter, or whatever it's called, and the Mollar SkyCar don't meet the same fate of lots of hype and one tangled mess.
No offense, but I thought the linked article was a discussion of the stages that every permadeath discussion goes through.
"Permadeath" comes up so often as a debate topic because of the general conservativism of gaming imagination. Just look at the debate here. As long as these games are about A) encouraging risk-taking (the "Supersoldier syndrome" , to borrow a term from military simulation speak) B) building prestige among one's virtual peers and C) levelling through boring activities, "permadeath" ain't gonna work. People want to be rockstars, and these games let them be rockstars and socially important, but only through the investment of a lot of time and suffering. If you somehow make that rockstar status risky -- so that people routinely lose it, and have to repeat the same old stuff to get to their peer level again, permadeath ain't gonna work. "Dead is Dead" is one of the most obvious gaps of realism in these games, and that's why people mention it. The problem is that it reveals one of the fundamentally attractive features of on-line gaming (or anything else online): the appearance of being able to achieve the glory without the risk. Most people are cowards (or, in other words, socially crippled by a fear of the consequences of their actions), and uneasy with that. Games give them a chance to be brave, where the penalty is pretty slight. Make the penalty major, and people will go play something else.
Now, if you did want to do permadeath, the way I'd do it would be to take advantage of the progressive development model of MMPORGS: since they're worked on for several years after release, make the "updates" reflect a temporal progressivism: players choose skills for their "avatards" at a fixed point, and that avatard can advance in those skills. But as time goes on, new and more interesting skills are developed, which can only be adopted by younger avatards. That way, you make the aging superplayers gradually become obsolete. They may bitch and whine and stage their million-gnome marches, but every virtual year their numbers will grow fewer, as they give in and explore the game from a different angle.
Okay, it is a poorly written review. And the author does appear fairly full of himself: he dismisses out-of-hand game genres as stuff he doesn't like, then, to top it all off, he manages to get his story on slashdot. I mean, heck, I dislike just about all portable games, but if I'm going to write a review (And no, I haven't and won't), at the very least I'll give some witty description of the suffering involved (like "the nauseating experience of scrolling under gobs of gaily-textured molasses" or something equally dumb, but at least evocative), rather than just "I don't like it".
And it's not surprising that stuff gets canned, especially stuff suspected -- rightly or wrongly -- of being a troll. Heck, here on/., all you need is to slip in some criticism of Apple, Inc., or the Open Source movement, and you'll find that someone will moderate you a Troll. That's why trolls work: because some people have trouble distinguishing between criticism and provocation. Some of those are the forum idiots who get provoked by criticism; and some are the moderator idiots who see criticism as provocation. The lesson? If you're gonna slap out some criticism, even in a review that has some balance (as his does), do it with an eye to making the moderator snicker. And if you are gonna moderate something, never comment on your actions. An absolute monarch's actions are law, and above scrutiny. Besides, if you smite a review as a troll, it may not be; but the complaint "my review was smitten" that follows necessarily is a troll. Don't bite -- retreat into the mist of mystery and let the white noise of the intardnet do the rest, as the pointed debate on a thousand forums inexorably deteriorates towards yet another case of Godwin's Law.
exactly... in photoshop it's something like transform path/distort. -- mark the screen location on the picture, crop to that area, transform it to the proper dimensions, then set as wallpaper.
Might also want a rear-lit background...
Many folks are claiming the easy routes:
A) Take a picture, and move the screen where the picture was.
The problem with this is perspective. lenses are not flat scans of the world, and you'll see (in fact in some of the shots you do see) some perspective distortion, especially with stuff like vertical lines.
B)Take picture with and without screen and photochop it.
Actually, the best non-cheating way to do this is: C) 1) Set your camera up on a tripod, at the scene where you want your monitor. 2) Remove monitor. 3) Take picture. 4) replace montor. 5) Take another picture.
up to here this is the same as method B), the photochopping. But instead of pasting the background (And cheating), you crop the first photo to the dimensions of the monitor in the second photo. 6) Set the cropped picture as background. 7) Take the money shot. 8) Wait for the pulitzer folks to get back to you.
Interesting how the "authority" in the article repeated over and over that the kids who do these things do them to overcome being branded as "losers". He does have a few buried points about the nasty effects of conformism and homogeneity on adolescents: let's face it, if you set up and enforce a single system of human worth in a society, the community will seem very "safe", but there are gonna be as many "losers" as "winners". And "big losers" aren't going to have an easy time of finding an alternative value system that empowers them. Video games may provide the script, but then again so did John Ford. Homogenous communities are dangerous for just that reason: there's no social control at all on good old-fashioned deviants.
Anyone have the link to the animation they're talking about (I don't wanna install IE/SW7)
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Was it battery life? The Lynx had many cool things going for it. You could hook eight of them together (hmmm, and I think the hardware would support up to 256, or in any case a helluva lot more than the 2/4 that the GB had), and play all sorts of games. The active-matrix, backlit color screen was bright. The real problem was the lack of software support. Of course, while gaming historians may point to battery life, it could have been something else. Perhaps, if my memory serves me right, it was because Epyx developed it, with substantial financial backing from Atari, but somehow went bankrupt (the gossip and rumours -- nothing more -- at the time was something about their main financial backer being slow on paying the bills, causing them to lose liquidity), and Atari wound up with the Lynx. With a cool thing like that, you needed games and advertising. Lynx had neither; I don't think anyone ever developed a game that fully exploited the Lynx's connectivity (and hence the origin of the name "Lynx").
Sorry for replying to my own post, these things fascinate me though:
If you look through the fine print, you'll see that Fridays, between 6PM and 9PM, they "Adjust" the market prices to proportions of the "Buzz Value". Now, if you investigate say, Ad services, you'll find that Google Adsense leads at $17/share, followed by Yahoo Overture at $7.50. Yet Google Adsense has 20-odd keywords to Overture's 48, and Overture has 58% of the buzz to google's 25%. So, come tomorrow, people are going to be shocked when their Adsense stock plummets to 1/3 its current valuation, and Overture doubles.
A few weeks of this, and maybe Yahoo brand awareness will be higher up in the minds of Alpha Geeks around the world.
So I guess I'll reconsider C). Contrary to what they claim, this isn't a measurement; it's a direct attempt to influence market awareness for Yahoo products among IT professionals.
The idea is rather interesting: predict the "hot items" in advance by a stock market. Unfortunately, they threw in Yahoo Search Results as an additional factor. So, we have three problems:
A) A Disconnect between the whole "Buzz market" and that represented by Yahoo search. For example, those who use Yahoo search are more likely to use Yahoo services, and so Yahoo services will have a disproportionately higher "Buzz Rating". If you doubt me, check out a few of those markets and you'll find Yahoo with 58-70% "buzz rating" and yet considerably lower capitalization.
B) The criteria used for buzz are not only public, but also linked on the page. For example, I bought 1000 shares of EMUSIC. Clicking on the "Buzz Words" section tells me that the "EMUSIC" buzz value can be raised by clicking on one of 5 links:
emusic");
emusic download");
free emusic");
emusic tag");
emusic live");
(I am not signed up for any sort of prize, nor does my sig line offer you a free mac mini in exchange for e-sodomization; nor do I even know what emusic is; but feel free to check these links out for integrity)
C) Thus, if you're going to measure anything, rewarding unrelated behaviour will ruin the measurement. Then again, I suppose it's a good way to bombard people with ads and increase site traffic.
Still, who knows? Maybe this game will predict the next Junk Bond king.
Well, sure, it's easy as hell to sit back here and throw out ideas. Implementing them in a multimillion-dollar venture is a different story. But you're dead on about capitalism, if you take it in the sense of providing a free market with unrestrained controls on wealth. I'm not sure most gamers will want to play in a socialist worker's paradise either, though. There has to be the illusion of glory.
You can certainly have taxes though, especially ones that can be bypassed using an expenditure of time several times the cost of the tax (e.g., toll bridges), or where a valued service is being offered (such as a secure two-party financial transaction).
But there's more to economics than just free-market capitalism. Hell, you could create a game where any form of interest was considered illegal (since money is "dead"), and the official rules varied considerably from economics (they already do). Or you could use the classic technique employed in many marginal economies (such as illegal ones in federal penitentiaries), of using multiple currencies and "flipping" the exchange rates periodically. With a couple of monopolistic organizations (=run by the company) aware of when the flips are going to occur, the company can eliminate or severely reduce concentrations of wealth that it does not control. Besides, imagine the chaos of an ebay auction during the periods of wild currency fluctuations. What? My 400 quatloons are now worth peanuts?
Ultimately, the problem is in your comment about character development vs. gadget hoarding. I've always preferred games that rely on skill and ability rather than supertoys, but the problem is not everybody has an equal shot at skill and ability. Let's face it, at any game based on such things, most people suck. And people play games to escape their own mediocrity. The advantages of time-based levelling and gadget-driven gameplay are A) like gambling you get intermittent positive feedback that keeps players addicted, B) Nobody's excluded on the basis of incompetence. Play long enough, and you'll get where you need to go. and C) It's really, really easy to write. Experience points, levels and level-based narratives. the only downside is that some people will pay to enjoy the social benefits of higher-levels (including that of seeming a bad-ass in front of one's peers), and to avoid the tedium of playing the game.
Well, shucks. If you design a game where being logged in and doing something mindless generates value, and where social status is determined by a simplicistic system of fancy items and levels, then yeah, you're going to have a market of people willing to do the mindless things to sell to the rest of the world.
It's a basic problem with this design, especially in an open economy were cash and value are just spawned in game. I don't think you can effectively police it; and I doubt you can social-engineer the problem. But you could consider bringing economists in on your next game design session, and figure out how to make hoarding and transfer of resources unprofitable. For example, have a large closed economy where hoarded wealth beyond a certain quantity has to be stored in a PvP-friendly area of the game. Got a lot of cash? Well, it's gonna cost you security to store it. Suddenly cash farming, while still possible, costs three times as much (one person to collect, one person to guard, plus losses), and its value to the average player decreases considerably. But what do I know?
For the most part, academic journals are not and have never been cash cows. Many of them exist on the fringes of profitability. Many keep their expenses down by skimpling on payment to editors, peer-reviewers and authors. In my field, academics do all these tasks (even to the point of delivering camera-ready material) and receive no compensation beyond a line in the CV. And right now, editing and peer-reviewing CV lines are not the way to success in any field. Universities value and pay for the results, but not those who generate them.
If they slashed their prices to increase the volume, would subscriptions increase? I highly doubt it. Even if I could afford them, I would subscribe to few journals, and the publishers would make less money, not more. Making authors pay for the editing costs is likewise dumb. Uh, in some fields, such as mine, we don't get much grant money at all. Finding an extra $3000 is rather hard when we're lucky to get someone to pay for us to give a paper at a conference.
Preserving open access and the quality of peer review is going to be difficult. But the model is: open production -> critical publication -> open access. Open production and Open Access should not be mutable parts of the equation: that's how the scientific process works. Ideally, we need people who can freely submit their findings, theories and interpretations unfettered by financial, political, institutional or social obstacles, and we need people who can access that information without such obstacles either. The filtration provided by academic journals is a valuable service, but one that incurs real cost. And someone's got to cover that.
mutatis mutandis, you could say the same about Open Source Software.
BTW Gallica rocks! It's not all french, there's plenty of other great stuff on there. Hell, I use their incunabula scans of Averroes and Avicenna daily! Ducange is an irreplaceable resource (But somebody please tell them 3 volumes are missing); and I grabbed the complete 20-volume Recueil des Historiens des Croisades for the guy in the office at the end of the hall. It's a totally kick-ass site, and the BNF is providing a resource unmatched in the world, some of the fruit of which occupies a couple gigs on my HDD.
Yes, reading the article, he's basically arguing for a publicly funded version of the same thing, from a European perspective. And, as a proud Amurrican, I concur. The BNF has pioneered putting useful but not commercially interesting (read public domain, often _really funkin' old_ and really rare) E-texts online, and is in the process of revolutionizing fields of research. Five years ago, I had to read this crap in rooms with big ass warning signs telling me how long I had before the Halon killed me -- and most of the IT devices in that room were over 300 years old.
Google can make money doing this; the BNF can further research. When governments invest money in making information accessible, everybody wins. What's to complain about?
I found some M$ notes inside a copy of Book Delta of the Metaphysics:
1. beginning (//START) 2. Cause 3. Element (+Arrays) 4. Nature (tyupe) 5. Necessary 6. One (probably prior art here) 7. Being (perfect! self-evident, but not obvious!) 8. Substance 9. The Same (PENDED: IsNot) 10. Opposite (Not) 11. Prior and Posterior: (patent this one first to protect against "Prior Art")) 12. Potency 13. Quantity 14. Quality (no rush on this one) 15. Relative ($$$) 16. Complete (n.b., get 'perpetual beta' first and nail those Google geeks). 17. Limit 18. Substrate (if we can't patent embedded apps, amybe we can patent the hardware they're embedded in) 19. Disposition 20. Habit (Eventhandlers!) 21. Passion 22. Privation 23. Possession (think those subclasses are obvious? think again!) 24. generation 25. Part 26. Whole 27. Corrupt (strong case) 28. Genus (class) 29. False
Responding to my own thread -- doh! I looked at the site and saw that there was a PC game. Forgive me; I was traumatized by having to do final QA on the NES version, which (thank God), never was released.
Vanilla Ice I'm pretty sure was an abortion. One of the guys who was coding it used to come through the office, and we'd crack jokes about it. As for california raisins, I had some horrible flashbacks... check my journal for the full story.
Slashdot Mirror
but Acroread 7.0 locked up on the pdf (again!).
First off, let's just start by saying that, reading TFA, he's just an idjit. "nobody but skype knows how skype works?" Check /. from a few months ago, and you'll find a scholarly article linked on how skype works. They ain't hiding anything. Likewise for the history lesson: a lot happened between 95 and now that didn't include Net2Phone; I remember trying to patch calls on Delta3 (which sucked).
Okay, so why _does_ skype work?
1) no malware/adware. Make all the Kazaa cracks you want, but the moment skype starts screwing with people's bandwidth, it's gone. (Note to self -- if I ever get a fat up pipe, choke the upload on the skype box so it doesn't get named a supernode).
2) secure communications: encryption matters, folks. Here's a messenger and VoIP program that doesn't send stuff in the clear; it's actually useful for business comms.
3) shady network code: by routing stuff through port 80 and NAT tricks, it bypasses the vast majority of firewalls; nobody gets a message that they can't get through. Instead, it works, but voice runs through a crappy high-latency, high-failure rate TCP connection (which, by the way, has gotten better).
4) most importantly, simplicity of installation. Most of the time, Skype requires zero configuration. Folks, this is the most important UI lesson of our time. Unless your primary market is Asia, you want installation and UI to involve the fewest steps possible. Each step you add loses about 90% of your audience. Skype works from when you hit "install".
Sure, there's the problem of "how do we pay for this?"; but with distributed networking their overhead right now is a website, some coding and a server in denmark. If they can make skypeout/in pay the bills, it will be good for all; if they can't, well, on the bright side, a lot of people turned on to the technology will start looking for FOSS solutions.
As for
Maybe it's not enough that the ideas be innovative and original; maybe they've got to be good too. That's why big companies go for predictable mediocrity, and small indie companies (whatever the field) work on innovative and original ideas: most innovative and original ideas are not good ideas; and those that are rarely get implemented well.
Anyway, sorry to see them go.
Heh. Maybe where you are. Certainly not out at this end of the med. The cheapest (no-subscription) phones run around $150 USD, are way too small to cradle between shoulder and ear, get crappy battery life ('cos not only are thy so damn small, they've been given supersmall batteries), and have interfaces that are nightmares of bad design.
My shitty little "bottom of the line" phone (a siemens C65 --okay, it cost $15 more than the bottom of the line model, and gave me a crappy CIF camera in the bargain), features the same processor and the rest of the line (superslow),an OS that was out of the box unstable (add another $50 to buy the proprietary USB serial cable needed to flash the ROM with a stable version; I won't even speak of how crappy their "mobile phone manager" software is; let's just say "unusable" is only the beginning), numerous really bad design decisions: big fat key in the middle of the keyboard launches the web browser causing a 15-second delay as the tiny processor tries to load that crap (thankfully, the finest in Russian hackers had figured out how to disable this feature), a "keyboard lock" feature that requires a single keypress to turn off -- nothing like walking to work and finding out the boss has already been talking to your pants for 10 minutes, crappy games that have some spooky DRM on them, and a backlit DSTN screen that sucks power and sucks in the sun. All I wanted was a simple LCD screen, a simple interface, and maybe some storage for messages and phone books. What I got was a entry level turd designed to make me envy the top of the line, but that only succeeds in making me pity those who have to use these things.
Nobody makes "simple phones" any more; they make a "coherent product line". Mobile phones these days are the manifestation of the worst fears of the PC hardware market: Increasing complexity makes simple tasks more difficult, not less; poor interface design adds to the frustration; complete monopolistic integration along mobile networks (only use our equipment, lock-in contracts), individual bits o' hardware (DRM and "trusted computing" are already there and they blow ass; let's put the IR port outside of the sandbox for "security reasons", yet have no protection against bluetooth viruses), and "pay as you go" business models (gee, all these neat features, and not one that works or is affordable) make mobile telephony a decreasingly useful status symbol for the working class.
The Bodleian library (working with Google) had a pilot digitization project of the manuscript library for something like 10 years; then Google comes along and signs them up.
There's a group through the Czech national library that's been putting stuff up, and is exploring offerring it on a subscription basis (merely 3000 Euro/year, and institutions only need apply).
For me, the best online digitization of a library currently available is already the BNF, and that project has poor quality control (unreadable scans), shaky connection qualities and bad links galore (an essential reference dictionary for my field is missing the volumes containing the letters A-C, and S-Z).
Without doubt, the EU consortium is using anti-americanism and anti-corporatism to justify the tons of government payouts needed to fund this; without doubt the documents won't be as easy to access as Google's project. But hell, if it puts more books online, I'm all for it. And unlike Google, many of these libraries have been around for centuries; one would hope that in a few centuries, they'll still be here. Google may be doing great, but will it be here in ten years?
Dunno about Serenity, but it's interesting finding people trying to come to grips with Firefly.
First, I'll say that I've seen maybe 3 episodes of Buffy tops, and never seen Angel. I can't stand the silly prosthetics and nonsense of Babylon 5, and frankly haven't enjoyed much science fiction television lately. I happened to tune into to Firefly for Bushwacked, and saw maybe 4 episodes broadcast before it was pulled. Since then I bought the DVD set and have watched it religiously. It's just damn good, and I haven't met anyone whose seen (or to whom I've shown) the show who has found it anything less than great fun.
Enough about me.
Folks around here seem to be posting a bunch of things about Firefly, and they don't quite seem to have "gotten it".
Yes, Firefly is a science-fiction show.
Science-fiction often gets used on television and in movies to explore irreal circumstances: time travel, the nature of reality, how many lines of probable-sounding technobabble an actor can read with a straight face. Firefly didn't do that. Firefly used science fiction as a= means to bridge several traditional genres of action entertainment: Submarine Movies, Heist films, and yes, some westerns. At times, the plot is lifted from somewhere else: Unforgiven and Silent Running are both "borrowed" for episodes.
Like your 'Star Trek'-class show, the cast of Firefly play characters who are good at what they do; but they're not superheroes, and they're working neither for high-sounding ideals, nor for a faceless bureaucracy. Sure, there are times when the show slipped into cliche; almost always it would then wink and subvert tradition.
And yeah, as science fiction and on television, it's about as light entertainment as you can get. Don't get all worked up about it; but yeah, I gotta say I'm excited, but slightly apprehensive. Can they actually get 9 characters to work convincingly in a 2-hour movie?
Militaries around the world are changing. AA is primarily a marketing tool, but the interest in using commercial video games as training tools is increasing.
And, on the other side, the number of recruits coming in who are already 1337 is increasing. An article on a recent miliatry FPS trial reported that a full 2/3 of the soldiers selected were familiar with FPS.
Those making mods for military-style games are finding their work being favorably mentioned in surprising places, and well, if some you receiving instant messages from warzones may have noted that what's going on often gets described in terms of video games.
Yeah, sure, you can get a bluetooth-enabled phone and run your laptop through that, but the point isn't simply to produce mobile wireless access. It's more about running a permanent network out of your automobile.
We've had the technology and the ability to do this, but the really cool applications are just too risky, too liability-prone, or too legally questionable to catch the attention of the developers. So while your luxocar has a bluetooth network that catches viruses, and a lot of handy value-added features go by the wayside.
I mean, here's the things that are useful for an in-car network:
A) Porn. Porn drives technology, period. I strongly recommend that the next development in this field be a means to stream internet porn onto a heads-up (hands-free) display, possibly via voice command. Since we're all being open-sourcy about it, there should also be a facility to transmit and add to the global wealth of internet porn.
B) Anti-theft. This is talked about in the article, although I find it difficult to imagine a thief wanting anything as ugly as a Honda Element. Maybe if he riced it up a bit, and camouflaged the solar panel as a big-ass aftermarket wing or something; that and one of those "battery life extender" stickers that says "R-Type" on it
C) Navigation: again, there are already factory-installed and aftermarket solutions for this, but we really could use some improvements that only proper geeks can provide:
1. The author mentions networking radar detectors, as well as other traffic indicators (speed, proximity). That's a good start.
2. Much more interesting would be to network a whole slew of sensors. Radar detectors are good; but why not slap in a cheap scanner that runs through a whole range of frequencies and plots spikes and intensities? With a few sensors around, you could provide real-time plots of a large amount of radio traffic, and even localize quite a few. Heck, many police and fire frequencies are already out there on the internet.
Of course, y'all would need some centralized support for that, and if done wrong, it'd probably be the target of some congressman's ire, and attempts to shut it down.
Then again, if you ran something like a series of IRC channels (one for each region, run through port 80 and otherwise made to look like web traffic), authenticated users and blocklists, that just echoed reports from rmeote users, and maybe queries ("anyone got a picture of the tollbooth?"), you'd have your geek comms paradise, and the guy riding shotgun would have plenty of tasks to perform to isolate and avoid the mundane threats of traffic jams, separate ATIS noise from highway patrols, keep a steady stream of porn going to the driver's HU/HDD, and try to avoid throwing up.
D) Don't forget the need to bridge with existing open WiFi access points. Starbucks offers their networks as a service to the community, after all.
Then again, it's just a car. Speeding is generally something best done away from other cars. VoIP won't work too well with 3G latency. Any nerd project that gets mainstream acceptance loses most of its utility as people figure out ways to nickle and dime the life out of it.
Reminds me of a fine overview of the phenomenon of flying cars, and in particular all the hype surrounding the Mitzar, a "flying Ford Pinto", that recorded one takeoff and no landings. Let's hope the SkyScooter, or whatever it's called, and the Mollar SkyCar don't meet the same fate of lots of hype and one tangled mess.
No offense, but I thought the linked article was a discussion of the stages that every permadeath discussion goes through.
"Permadeath" comes up so often as a debate topic because of the general conservativism of gaming imagination. Just look at the debate here. As long as these games are about A) encouraging risk-taking (the "Supersoldier syndrome" , to borrow a term from military simulation speak) B) building prestige among one's virtual peers and C) levelling through boring activities, "permadeath" ain't gonna work. People want to be rockstars, and these games let them be rockstars and socially important, but only through the investment of a lot of time and suffering. If you somehow make that rockstar status risky -- so that people routinely lose it, and have to repeat the same old stuff to get to their peer level again, permadeath ain't gonna work. "Dead is Dead" is one of the most obvious gaps of realism in these games, and that's why people mention it. The problem is that it reveals one of the fundamentally attractive features of on-line gaming (or anything else online): the appearance of being able to achieve the glory without the risk. Most people are cowards (or, in other words, socially crippled by a fear of the consequences of their actions), and uneasy with that. Games give them a chance to be brave, where the penalty is pretty slight. Make the penalty major, and people will go play something else.
Now, if you did want to do permadeath, the way I'd do it would be to take advantage of the progressive development model of MMPORGS: since they're worked on for several years after release, make the "updates" reflect a temporal progressivism: players choose skills for their "avatards" at a fixed point, and that avatard can advance in those skills. But as time goes on, new and more interesting skills are developed, which can only be adopted by younger avatards. That way, you make the aging superplayers gradually become obsolete. They may bitch and whine and stage their million-gnome marches, but every virtual year their numbers will grow fewer, as they give in and explore the game from a different angle.
Okay, it is a poorly written review. And the author does appear fairly full of himself: he dismisses out-of-hand game genres as stuff he doesn't like, then, to top it all off, he manages to get his story on slashdot.
/., all you need is to slip in some criticism of Apple, Inc., or the Open Source movement, and you'll find that someone will moderate you a Troll. That's why trolls work: because some people have trouble distinguishing between criticism and provocation. Some of those are the forum idiots who get provoked by criticism; and some are the moderator idiots who see criticism as provocation.
I mean, heck, I dislike just about all portable games, but if I'm going to write a review (And no, I haven't and won't), at the very least I'll give some witty description of the suffering involved (like "the nauseating experience of scrolling under gobs of gaily-textured molasses" or something equally dumb, but at least evocative), rather than just "I don't like it".
And it's not surprising that stuff gets canned, especially stuff suspected -- rightly or wrongly -- of being a troll. Heck, here on
The lesson? If you're gonna slap out some criticism, even in a review that has some balance (as his does), do it with an eye to making the moderator snicker.
And if you are gonna moderate something, never comment on your actions. An absolute monarch's actions are law, and above scrutiny. Besides, if you smite a review as a troll, it may not be; but the complaint "my review was smitten" that follows necessarily is a troll. Don't bite -- retreat into the mist of mystery and let the white noise of the intardnet do the rest, as the pointed debate on a thousand forums inexorably deteriorates towards yet another case of Godwin's Law.
exactly... in photoshop it's something like transform path/distort. -- mark the screen location on the picture, crop to that area, transform it to the proper dimensions, then set as wallpaper. Might also want a rear-lit background...
Many folks are claiming the easy routes:
A) Take a picture, and move the screen where the picture was.
The problem with this is perspective. lenses are not flat scans of the world, and you'll see (in fact in some of the shots you do see) some perspective distortion, especially with stuff like vertical lines.
B)Take picture with and without screen and photochop it.
Actually, the best non-cheating way to do this is:
C)
1) Set your camera up on a tripod, at the scene where you want your monitor.
2) Remove monitor.
3) Take picture.
4) replace montor.
5) Take another picture.
up to here this is the same as method B), the photochopping. But instead of pasting the background (And cheating), you crop the first photo to the dimensions of the monitor in the second photo.
6) Set the cropped picture as background.
7) Take the money shot.
8) Wait for the pulitzer folks to get back to you.
Interesting how the "authority" in the article repeated over and over that the kids who do these things do them to overcome being branded as "losers".
He does have a few buried points about the nasty effects of conformism and homogeneity on adolescents: let's face it, if you set up and enforce a single system of human worth in a society, the community will seem very "safe", but there are gonna be as many "losers" as "winners". And "big losers" aren't going to have an easy time of finding an alternative value system that empowers them. Video games may provide the script, but then again so did John Ford.
Homogenous communities are dangerous for just that reason: there's no social control at all on good old-fashioned deviants.
Anyone have the link to the animation they're talking about (I don't wanna install IE/SW7)
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Was it battery life?
The Lynx had many cool things going for it. You could hook eight of them together (hmmm, and I think the hardware would support up to 256, or in any case a helluva lot more than the 2/4 that the GB had), and play all sorts of games. The active-matrix, backlit color screen was bright.
The real problem was the lack of software support. Of course, while gaming historians may point to battery life, it could have been something else. Perhaps, if my memory serves me right, it was because Epyx developed it, with substantial financial backing from Atari, but somehow went bankrupt (the gossip and rumours -- nothing more -- at the time was something about their main financial backer being slow on paying the bills, causing them to lose liquidity), and Atari wound up with the Lynx. With a cool thing like that, you needed games and advertising. Lynx had neither; I don't think anyone ever developed a game that fully exploited the Lynx's connectivity (and hence the origin of the name "Lynx").
Sorry for replying to my own post, these things fascinate me though:
If you look through the fine print, you'll see that Fridays, between 6PM and 9PM, they "Adjust" the market prices to proportions of the "Buzz Value". Now, if you investigate say, Ad services, you'll find that Google Adsense leads at $17/share, followed by Yahoo Overture at $7.50. Yet Google Adsense has 20-odd keywords to Overture's 48, and Overture has 58% of the buzz to google's 25%.
So, come tomorrow, people are going to be shocked when their Adsense stock plummets to 1/3 its current valuation, and Overture doubles.
A few weeks of this, and maybe Yahoo brand awareness will be higher up in the minds of Alpha Geeks around the world.
So I guess I'll reconsider C). Contrary to what they claim, this isn't a measurement; it's a direct attempt to influence market awareness for Yahoo products among IT professionals.
The idea is rather interesting: predict the "hot items" in advance by a stock market. Unfortunately, they threw in Yahoo Search Results as an additional factor. So, we have three problems:
A) A Disconnect between the whole "Buzz market" and that represented by Yahoo search. For example, those who use Yahoo search are more likely to use Yahoo services, and so Yahoo services will have a disproportionately higher "Buzz Rating". If you doubt me, check out a few of those markets and you'll find Yahoo with 58-70% "buzz rating" and yet considerably lower capitalization.
B) The criteria used for buzz are not only public, but also linked on the page. For example, I bought 1000 shares of EMUSIC. Clicking on the "Buzz Words" section tells me that the "EMUSIC" buzz value can be raised by clicking on one of 5 links: emusic");
emusic download");
free emusic");
emusic tag");
emusic live");
(I am not signed up for any sort of prize, nor does my sig line offer you a free mac mini in exchange for e-sodomization; nor do I even know what emusic is; but feel free to check these links out for integrity)
C) Thus, if you're going to measure anything, rewarding unrelated behaviour will ruin the measurement. Then again, I suppose it's a good way to bombard people with ads and increase site traffic.
Still, who knows? Maybe this game will predict the next Junk Bond king.
Well, sure, it's easy as hell to sit back here and throw out ideas. Implementing them in a multimillion-dollar venture is a different story.
But you're dead on about capitalism, if you take it in the sense of providing a free market with unrestrained controls on wealth.
I'm not sure most gamers will want to play in a socialist worker's paradise either, though. There has to be the illusion of glory.
You can certainly have taxes though, especially ones that can be bypassed using an expenditure of time several times the cost of the tax (e.g., toll bridges), or where a valued service is being offered (such as a secure two-party financial transaction).
But there's more to economics than just free-market capitalism. Hell, you could create a game where any form of interest was considered illegal (since money is "dead"), and the official rules varied considerably from economics (they already do).
Or you could use the classic technique employed in many marginal economies (such as illegal ones in federal penitentiaries), of using multiple currencies and "flipping" the exchange rates periodically. With a couple of monopolistic organizations (=run by the company) aware of when the flips are going to occur, the company can eliminate or severely reduce concentrations of wealth that it does not control. Besides, imagine the chaos of an ebay auction during the periods of wild currency fluctuations.
What? My 400 quatloons are now worth peanuts?
Ultimately, the problem is in your comment about character development vs. gadget hoarding. I've always preferred games that rely on skill and ability rather than supertoys, but the problem is not everybody has an equal shot at skill and ability. Let's face it, at any game based on such things, most people suck. And people play games to escape their own mediocrity. The advantages of time-based levelling and gadget-driven gameplay are A) like gambling you get intermittent positive feedback that keeps players addicted, B) Nobody's excluded on the basis of incompetence. Play long enough, and you'll get where you need to go. and C) It's really, really easy to write. Experience points, levels and level-based narratives. the only downside is that some people will pay to enjoy the social benefits of higher-levels (including that of seeming a bad-ass in front of one's peers), and to avoid the tedium of playing the game.
Well, shucks. If you design a game where being logged in and doing something mindless generates value, and where social status is determined by a simplicistic system of fancy items and levels, then yeah, you're going to have a market of people willing to do the mindless things to sell to the rest of the world.
It's a basic problem with this design, especially in an open economy were cash and value are just spawned in game. I don't think you can effectively police it; and I doubt you can social-engineer the problem. But you could consider bringing economists in on your next game design session, and figure out how to make hoarding and transfer of resources unprofitable. For example, have a large closed economy where hoarded wealth beyond a certain quantity has to be stored in a PvP-friendly area of the game. Got a lot of cash? Well, it's gonna cost you security to store it. Suddenly cash farming, while still possible, costs three times as much (one person to collect, one person to guard, plus losses), and its value to the average player decreases considerably. But what do I know?
For the most part, academic journals are not and have never been cash cows. Many of them exist on the fringes of profitability. Many keep their expenses down by skimpling on payment to editors, peer-reviewers and authors. In my field, academics do all these tasks (even to the point of delivering camera-ready material) and receive no compensation beyond a line in the CV. And right now, editing and peer-reviewing CV lines are not the way to success in any field. Universities value and pay for the results, but not those who generate them.
If they slashed their prices to increase the volume, would subscriptions increase? I highly doubt it. Even if I could afford them, I would subscribe to few journals, and the publishers would make less money, not more.
Making authors pay for the editing costs is likewise dumb. Uh, in some fields, such as mine, we don't get much grant money at all. Finding an extra $3000 is rather hard when we're lucky to get someone to pay for us to give a paper at a conference.
Preserving open access and the quality of peer review is going to be difficult. But the model is: open production -> critical publication -> open access. Open production and Open Access should not be mutable parts of the equation: that's how the scientific process works. Ideally, we need people who can freely submit their findings, theories and interpretations unfettered by financial, political, institutional or social obstacles, and we need people who can access that information without such obstacles either. The filtration provided by academic journals is a valuable service, but one that incurs real cost. And someone's got to cover that.
mutatis mutandis, you could say the same about Open Source Software.
BTW Gallica rocks! It's not all french, there's plenty of other great stuff on there. Hell, I use their incunabula scans of Averroes and Avicenna daily! Ducange is an irreplaceable resource (But somebody please tell them 3 volumes are missing); and I grabbed the complete 20-volume Recueil des Historiens des Croisades for the guy in the office at the end of the hall. It's a totally kick-ass site, and the BNF is providing a resource unmatched in the world, some of the fruit of which occupies a couple gigs on my HDD.
Yes, reading the article, he's basically arguing for a publicly funded version of the same thing, from a European perspective. And, as a proud Amurrican, I concur. The BNF has pioneered putting useful but not commercially interesting (read public domain, often _really funkin' old_ and really rare) E-texts online, and is in the process of revolutionizing fields of research. Five years ago, I had to read this crap in rooms with big ass warning signs telling me how long I had before the Halon killed me -- and most of the IT devices in that room were over 300 years old.
Google can make money doing this; the BNF can further research. When governments invest money in making information accessible, everybody wins. What's to complain about?
I found some M$ notes inside a copy of Book Delta of the Metaphysics:
1. beginning (//START)
2. Cause
3. Element (+Arrays)
4. Nature (tyupe)
5. Necessary
6. One (probably prior art here)
7. Being (perfect! self-evident, but not obvious!)
8. Substance
9. The Same (PENDED: IsNot)
10. Opposite (Not)
11. Prior and Posterior: (patent this one first to protect against "Prior Art"))
12. Potency
13. Quantity
14. Quality (no rush on this one)
15. Relative ($$$)
16. Complete (n.b., get 'perpetual beta' first and nail those Google geeks).
17. Limit
18. Substrate (if we can't patent embedded apps, amybe we can patent the hardware they're embedded in)
19. Disposition
20. Habit (Eventhandlers!)
21. Passion
22. Privation
23. Possession (think those subclasses are obvious? think again!)
24. generation
25. Part
26. Whole
27. Corrupt (strong case)
28. Genus (class)
29. False
Responding to my own thread -- doh! I looked at the site and saw that there was a PC game. Forgive me; I was traumatized by having to do final QA on the NES version, which (thank God), never was released.
Vanilla Ice I'm pretty sure was an abortion. One of the guys who was coding it used to come through the office, and we'd crack jokes about it. As for california raisins, I had some horrible flashbacks... check my journal for the full story.