Why does everyone keep saying there were holograms? The way I took it was that their suits did all the work, but they were in a mockup of the scene in real life. Why would the screenshots of the game include the buildings if not?
Maybe I missed a line or something in the show, I woul just thought the mock up of the scene was so they didn't have to stand in those dorky VR rings like we have now, this way when they ran or jumped they really ran and really jumped, making it more realistic on the physical side...
Esperandi If they made a game like this, I might even freaking work out... that'd be scary. We must stop these games. Screw the violence in society angle, think of the EXCERCISE this will introduce into our culture! Buff geeks! I think that's sorta like hell freezing over.
Not very realistic? Apparently you are not well-versed in the current state of virtual reality systems. No, the graphics aren't as good as they were on the show, but they're getting pretty damn good. They don't even require super-beefy equipment any more. One of the really cool things about the episode (and kinda stupid when you think about it) was that they weren't just standing in pods, they were really moving around in a mock scene. How kids are going to do this in their home when they release it I have no idea;) But when it gets right down to it, that game was not all that unrealistic. Give it 5 years, we'll have photo-quality visuals on PCs and all the other technology has been around for years...
One of the biggest problems with garbage collection is that it can't really be controlled. If you're writing Quake3, you do not want garbage collection. You don't want the program to start cleaning up memory right when you're trying to generate the next frame...
BUT, if they do this and make it so you can, say, force the garbage collection to do its thing at a given time, maybe that could be do-able... still pretty crappy for high-speed apps though that need consistent speed...
Do your research before you think I'm spouting political garbe (which I'm not). I post in plain text so I don't post links, so sue me. If you punch McCain Communications Decency Act into your web browser you will find that he authored the CDA2 most definitely and it does not simply implement filtering inschools, check the bill itself. It bans all content "harmful to minors" in a commercial context. The reason I posted this in the first place was because I was listening to a radio show and they were mentioning some things McCain has done in the past and they mentioned he authored the CDA. Now, if they were mistaken and they meant to say he authored the CDA2, I apologize, I should have been more explicit.
Further, you are wrong about who originally introduced the CDA, I'll even give you a link: http://www.cybertelecom.org/cda/cannon2.htm
No, the CDA2 was worse than that... it did what you said but the bulk of it was banning content which might be "harmful to minors" in a commercial context. Now, this sounds on the surface like it'd just block porn sites... but it would also ban (to steal an example I read somewhere awhile back) a website about sexual diseases that was deemed containing information harmful to minors (there is *NO* supreme court definition of harmful to minors like there is for obscene and offensive) that sold T-shirts on their site and I'd imagine any site with banner ads would also be fair game...
Esperandi P.S. From what I have heard and seen, McCain also authored the original CDA but it was sponsored by the infamous Senator Exon, so he got all the press... not good press either;) I searched McCains site and he has no information on either bill nor a section in his positions page about Internet legislation (he only mentions wanting to ban taxation of the net in his tax section)
The article (which was on the Drudge Report as an exclusive feature yesterday) only said it was an asian porn site hosted at theglobe.com. Apparently McCain signed up to advertise at theglobe.com based on the geographic location from which people came.... not based on the site or anything, so he inadvertently ended up posting his ads on a porn site... quite a laugh for me when i read that;)
After doing a few searches, it turns out McCain also sponsored a required key escrow bill... why aren;t we hearing about any of this anywhere, at least to prove that his legislative passing powers aren't that hot.
Esperandi Oh, and go search for anything about McCain on AltaVista and it will think you misspelled it... they think you were probably looking for cocaine.
I consider this on-topic since this story is about censorship and stuff... anyways, I didn't realize this until I heard it mentioned recently on the radio... John McCain is the guy who authored the CDA!
I think that's enough to say about that, and in case someone forgot (like I had) I thought I'd do a little public service reminding everyone.
Esperandi And McCain recently advertised on a porn site too, quite odd combo. Too bad Slashdot thought the story sucked. At least they declined it instead of rejecting it (anyone else notice that change?;)
I think this (someone always inventing the wheel in their own way) is a side-effect of open source and I don't really see it going away, ever. I mean, if you're looking at the code and you understand what you see, you could have done it yourself given the time most likely. When you want to go about and do it you usually don't just think about extending the standard, you think about how the standard could have been done better, and you probably hit on an idea or two you really want in there, but those are major changes, so why not just make your own? This happens a LOT, mostly because the programmers who help in open source projects are, well, progammers. They're not users that suggest feature upgrades, they write them, and they usually figure a way to improve/change the underlying structure of the program so they start over, not out of competition (you're not getting paid, what would you be competing for? Fame at best) but simply because you CAN!
I don't think theres anything particularly wrong with this, but I don't see any great point in making Linux easy enough for Grandma... I think the greatest possible evolution for Linux would be to evolve into a high-class OS. This is going to be hard without a high price, but make it seem like the OS used by big-wigs and hard-hitters in the computing industry. Clean lines and powerful simplicity... but this might require changing the publics attitude towards computer geeks since they're usually not viewed as the type to sit around a fire and swirl cognac while smoking a fine cigar...
Is the watch band non-removable, flush with the skin, and lasts for the rest of my life? i currently have a conventional watch and band and it gets caught on things, isn't that much of a conversation starter, and it tends to rot through after a couple of years...
I was thinking that this new technology might make that infection problem easier to deal with, perhaps do some sort of weld with the skin...
And the power source would definitely either have to be biopower or maybe nanotech turbines in the bloodstream, maybe just put one of those things in those watches that wind themselves in em, that's somethign we've had for years...
Next step will be to integrate a GPS into it so that it changes time zones whenever I travel;)
Esperandi I don't HAVE to have the far-out crazy stuff, but man I don't want to have to worry about my watch band breaking or anything like that...
I've called for this before in many forums and with a loud voice, I'll repeat the call here since its relevant.
I am looking for any surgeon to implant a digital watch face into my left forearm. I will gladly be your guinea pig or keep your identity completely secret if you're afraid you'll do your license. Hell, I'll even provide my own anisthetic...
oh, and I wanna webcast the operation, but you can cover your face if you wish.
Please, there's got to be a black market surgeon around here someplace!
Esperandi Would black market surgeons and mad scientists read Slashdot? I certainly think so.
Isn't it quite easy to alter the magnetic direction of things? I know most computers are densitive to magnets, but wouldn't these super-small chips be even MORE damaged by magnetic fields? I don't know much about magnetics, I'm just thinking back to elementary school when you could rub a magnet upside a nail for 5 minutes and turn it magnetic one way and then rub it with the other pole and change its direction. As far as I understood it, little bits of the iron in the nail were being magnetized towards the north with each pass of the magnet. Well, with these chips theres nothing BUT little bits....
FLAMEBAIT?!? 90% of the posts in reply to this story are talking about how terrible Cyrix has been in the past! I've never complained about moderation before, but this is completely ridiculous. I did not post this as a troll or to get flamed, I posted it because Cyrix's service is worse than their chips and if they don't improve that, whatever chip they produce won't matter!
Well, they seem to be aiming at the portable market... and these are not going to be bare chips you can plug into a mobo, they're going to be combos with sound/video/networking all built in. If Cyrix repeats their past performances, attempting to replace any of the default stuff will result in extreme disaster. Sparks and smoke and such.
If they're competing with the K6 series, they better be selling these things for a pittance. I know my K6-2 350 chip can be had on pricewatch.com for under $35 right now. Unless they're going to sell these Cyrix setups for even less than that or maybe right around there, they'll fail miserably.
As for the floating point, if it was so all-important, why aren't people bad-mouthing Intel like they bad-mouthed AMD back then? The difference between a Pentium 2 FPU and a K6-2 FPU is LESS than the difference between an Athlon and a Pentium 3, this time the slacking done by Intel.
Esperandi Just looking for equality in the mud-slinging;)
I'm just wondering if you know that calling it a PR 166 was a PR move by Cyrix? It's a 133MHz chip. yet another reason to gag at the mention of the name Cyrix, if you needed one.
Esperandi MediaGX boards most certinaly have their uses though, for in-car MP3 players they sing. Like $2 for a mobo and processor and you don't have to worry about incompaitiblity because you're using it like Cyrix wanted you to - no extra hardware to mess things up!
The thing that really put the nail in the coffin for me with Cyrix was reading about a guy who had a Cyrix machine and he bought an AWE64. The Cyrix didn't like the AWE64 and the system wouldn't boot. After going thru everything he could think, weeks of testing and hours on the tech supprt lines to different places, he calls Cyrix. Their response? "Oh yeah, we're not compatible with the AWE64, get a different sound card. No, we're not planning on fixing it. Bye."
I'm not too impressed by that, even if they put out a 5GHz chip that made the Athlon look like a Penitum 3 I don't think I'd want to get something that was all-integrated with no support at all for anyone who wants to add their own components...
Esperandi Hasn't bought a "system" since he was 12, its just been parts and upgrades since then.
Robokoneko is to this robotic cat as AIBO is to a pet rock. Another group in Japan (the ATR Group) has been developing Robokoneko for a long time and their progress is staggering... their AI model they use is stellar, and in the creation of it they invented the fastest AI processing machines to date in the area they are using. They are using cellular automata systems to simulate the neural net of the cat and the fastest machine to do this kind of thing to date was the MIT CAM-8. In order to get the kind of processing power to run the cat in realtime, learning and reacting to real-world stimulus, they needed a machine that could do the cellular automata stuff at LEAST 400 times faster than the MIT CAM-8. Well, their machine (as far as I know its only name is CAM Brain) runs 500 times faster!
Robokoneko wasn't developed to be a virutal pet, though, it is a proof in theory of the AI principles behind it. And from what they've doen so far, it seems they've just about proven everything they set out to do. A company in America called Genobyte is providing a lot of the funding and may very well release Robokoneko as a toy in the future... a cat that can actually start off as a kitten and "grow" (not physically of course) into a full cat.
There's so much cool stuff about Robokoneko I can't put it all in this post. They're using a distributed community model to figure out what to do with all the parts of the brain and how to interconnect them (there are thousands and thousands of modules, they think sight, hearing, the usual stuff will only take a few hundred modules, so they've got a lot of extra space).
If you're interested in genetic algorithms, neural networks, cellular automata theories, artificial intelligence in general, or anything like that, do a quick Google for Robokoneko and I promise you won't be disappointed.
Esperandi Their machine is made of simple FPGAs too, so theoretically you could build one yourself if you knew how to do that kinda thing, they explain the way they have done it in great detail in their documents.
The problem is, when you play a wizard, you're just playing a wizard. When you play a woman, you are lavished with gifts and an abundance of unfair advantages by guys who somehow think they're increasing their karma with the fairer sex by giving their game players nonexistant goodies...
Most men playing women on online games are not in it for the gender exploration I'd bet... my bet would be on them playing it because they suck at games and are too cheap to buy a cheat book, so they take a "legal" cheat built into the brain of all those guys that help chicks out in online games.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does everyone keep saying there were holograms? The way I took it was that their suits did all the work, but they were in a mockup of the scene in real life. Why would the screenshots of the game include the buildings if not?
Maybe I missed a line or something in the show, I woul just thought the mock up of the scene was so they didn't have to stand in those dorky VR rings like we have now, this way when they ran or jumped they really ran and really jumped, making it more realistic on the physical side...
Esperandi
If they made a game like this, I might even freaking work out... that'd be scary. We must stop these games. Screw the violence in society angle, think of the EXCERCISE this will introduce into our culture! Buff geeks! I think that's sorta like hell freezing over.
Ever read Snow Crash?
Esperandi
Not very realistic? Apparently you are not well-versed in the current state of virtual reality systems. No, the graphics aren't as good as they were on the show, but they're getting pretty damn good. They don't even require super-beefy equipment any more. One of the really cool things about the episode (and kinda stupid when you think about it) was that they weren't just standing in pods, they were really moving around in a mock scene. How kids are going to do this in their home when they release it I have no idea ;) But when it gets right down to it, that game was not all that unrealistic. Give it 5 years, we'll have photo-quality visuals on PCs and all the other technology has been around for years...
Esperandi
Make transferring 50,000 polygons to a 3D accelerator atomic?
Esperandi
One of the biggest problems with garbage collection is that it can't really be controlled. If you're writing Quake3, you do not want garbage collection. You don't want the program to start cleaning up memory right when you're trying to generate the next frame...
BUT, if they do this and make it so you can, say, force the garbage collection to do its thing at a given time, maybe that could be do-able... still pretty crappy for high-speed apps though that need consistent speed...
Esperandi
Do your research before you think I'm spouting political garbe (which I'm not). I post in plain text so I don't post links, so sue me. If you punch McCain Communications Decency Act into your web browser you will find that he authored the CDA2 most definitely and it does not simply implement filtering inschools, check the bill itself. It bans all content "harmful to minors" in a commercial context. The reason I posted this in the first place was because I was listening to a radio show and they were mentioning some things McCain has done in the past and they mentioned he authored the CDA. Now, if they were mistaken and they meant to say he authored the CDA2, I apologize, I should have been more explicit.
Further, you are wrong about who originally introduced the CDA, I'll even give you a link:
http://www.cybertelecom.org/cda/cannon2.htm
Esperandi
No, the CDA2 was worse than that... it did what you said but the bulk of it was banning content which might be "harmful to minors" in a commercial context. Now, this sounds on the surface like it'd just block porn sites... but it would also ban (to steal an example I read somewhere awhile back) a website about sexual diseases that was deemed containing information harmful to minors (there is *NO* supreme court definition of harmful to minors like there is for obscene and offensive) that sold T-shirts on their site and I'd imagine any site with banner ads would also be fair game...
;) I searched McCains site and he has no information on either bill nor a section in his positions page about Internet legislation (he only mentions wanting to ban taxation of the net in his tax section)
Esperandi
P.S. From what I have heard and seen, McCain also authored the original CDA but it was sponsored by the infamous Senator Exon, so he got all the press... not good press either
The article (which was on the Drudge Report as an exclusive feature yesterday) only said it was an asian porn site hosted at theglobe.com. Apparently McCain signed up to advertise at theglobe.com based on the geographic location from which people came.... not based on the site or anything, so he inadvertently ended up posting his ads on a porn site... quite a laugh for me when i read that ;)
Esperandi
After doing a few searches, it turns out McCain also sponsored a required key escrow bill... why aren;t we hearing about any of this anywhere, at least to prove that his legislative passing powers aren't that hot.
Esperandi
Oh, and go search for anything about McCain on AltaVista and it will think you misspelled it... they think you were probably looking for cocaine.
I don't know, but I'd be the guinea pig any day of the week, bring it ON!
Esperandi
You forgot that McCain *AUTHORED* the CDA...
Esperandi
I consider this on-topic since this story is about censorship and stuff... anyways, I didn't realize this until I heard it mentioned recently on the radio... John McCain is the guy who authored the CDA!
;)
I think that's enough to say about that, and in case someone forgot (like I had) I thought I'd do a little public service reminding everyone.
Esperandi
And McCain recently advertised on a porn site too, quite odd combo. Too bad Slashdot thought the story sucked. At least they declined it instead of rejecting it (anyone else notice that change?
Sweet, is is waterproof? I *NEVER* take my watch off ;)
;)
Esperandi
Wearing a crappy Timex right now, I love the Indiglo since I'm nocturnal, but this thing is like almost 10 years old now...
I think this (someone always inventing the wheel in their own way) is a side-effect of open source and I don't really see it going away, ever. I mean, if you're looking at the code and you understand what you see, you could have done it yourself given the time most likely. When you want to go about and do it you usually don't just think about extending the standard, you think about how the standard could have been done better, and you probably hit on an idea or two you really want in there, but those are major changes, so why not just make your own? This happens a LOT, mostly because the programmers who help in open source projects are, well, progammers. They're not users that suggest feature upgrades, they write them, and they usually figure a way to improve/change the underlying structure of the program so they start over, not out of competition (you're not getting paid, what would you be competing for? Fame at best) but simply because you CAN!
I don't think theres anything particularly wrong with this, but I don't see any great point in making Linux easy enough for Grandma... I think the greatest possible evolution for Linux would be to evolve into a high-class OS. This is going to be hard without a high price, but make it seem like the OS used by big-wigs and hard-hitters in the computing industry. Clean lines and powerful simplicity... but this might require changing the publics attitude towards computer geeks since they're usually not viewed as the type to sit around a fire and swirl cognac while smoking a fine cigar...
Esperandi
Is the watch band non-removable, flush with the skin, and lasts for the rest of my life? i currently have a conventional watch and band and it gets caught on things, isn't that much of a conversation starter, and it tends to rot through after a couple of years...
Esperandi
I was thinking that this new technology might make that infection problem easier to deal with, perhaps do some sort of weld with the skin...
;)
And the power source would definitely either have to be biopower or maybe nanotech turbines in the bloodstream, maybe just put one of those things in those watches that wind themselves in em, that's somethign we've had for years...
Next step will be to integrate a GPS into it so that it changes time zones whenever I travel
Esperandi
I don't HAVE to have the far-out crazy stuff, but man I don't want to have to worry about my watch band breaking or anything like that...
I've called for this before in many forums and with a loud voice, I'll repeat the call here since its relevant.
I am looking for any surgeon to implant a digital watch face into my left forearm. I will gladly be your guinea pig or keep your identity completely secret if you're afraid you'll do your license. Hell, I'll even provide my own anisthetic...
oh, and I wanna webcast the operation, but you can cover your face if you wish.
Please, there's got to be a black market surgeon around here someplace!
Esperandi
Would black market surgeons and mad scientists read Slashdot? I certainly think so.
Isn't it quite easy to alter the magnetic direction of things? I know most computers are densitive to magnets, but wouldn't these super-small chips be even MORE damaged by magnetic fields? I don't know much about magnetics, I'm just thinking back to elementary school when you could rub a magnet upside a nail for 5 minutes and turn it magnetic one way and then rub it with the other pole and change its direction. As far as I understood it, little bits of the iron in the nail were being magnetized towards the north with each pass of the magnet. Well, with these chips theres nothing BUT little bits....
Esperandi
FLAMEBAIT?!? 90% of the posts in reply to this story are talking about how terrible Cyrix has been in the past! I've never complained about moderation before, but this is completely ridiculous. I did not post this as a troll or to get flamed, I posted it because Cyrix's service is worse than their chips and if they don't improve that, whatever chip they produce won't matter!
Esperandi
Well, they seem to be aiming at the portable market... and these are not going to be bare chips you can plug into a mobo, they're going to be combos with sound/video/networking all built in. If Cyrix repeats their past performances, attempting to replace any of the default stuff will result in extreme disaster. Sparks and smoke and such.
Esperandi
If they're competing with the K6 series, they better be selling these things for a pittance. I know my K6-2 350 chip can be had on pricewatch.com for under $35 right now. Unless they're going to sell these Cyrix setups for even less than that or maybe right around there, they'll fail miserably.
;)
As for the floating point, if it was so all-important, why aren't people bad-mouthing Intel like they bad-mouthed AMD back then? The difference between a Pentium 2 FPU and a K6-2 FPU is LESS than the difference between an Athlon and a Pentium 3, this time the slacking done by Intel.
Esperandi
Just looking for equality in the mud-slinging
I'm just wondering if you know that calling it a PR 166 was a PR move by Cyrix? It's a 133MHz chip. yet another reason to gag at the mention of the name Cyrix, if you needed one.
Esperandi
MediaGX boards most certinaly have their uses though, for in-car MP3 players they sing. Like $2 for a mobo and processor and you don't have to worry about incompaitiblity because you're using it like Cyrix wanted you to - no extra hardware to mess things up!
The thing that really put the nail in the coffin for me with Cyrix was reading about a guy who had a Cyrix machine and he bought an AWE64. The Cyrix didn't like the AWE64 and the system wouldn't boot. After going thru everything he could think, weeks of testing and hours on the tech supprt lines to different places, he calls Cyrix. Their response? "Oh yeah, we're not compatible with the AWE64, get a different sound card. No, we're not planning on fixing it. Bye."
I'm not too impressed by that, even if they put out a 5GHz chip that made the Athlon look like a Penitum 3 I don't think I'd want to get something that was all-integrated with no support at all for anyone who wants to add their own components...
Esperandi
Hasn't bought a "system" since he was 12, its just been parts and upgrades since then.
Robokoneko is to this robotic cat as AIBO is to a pet rock. Another group in Japan (the ATR Group) has been developing Robokoneko for a long time and their progress is staggering... their AI model they use is stellar, and in the creation of it they invented the fastest AI processing machines to date in the area they are using. They are using cellular automata systems to simulate the neural net of the cat and the fastest machine to do this kind of thing to date was the MIT CAM-8. In order to get the kind of processing power to run the cat in realtime, learning and reacting to real-world stimulus, they needed a machine that could do the cellular automata stuff at LEAST 400 times faster than the MIT CAM-8. Well, their machine (as far as I know its only name is CAM Brain) runs 500 times faster!
Robokoneko wasn't developed to be a virutal pet, though, it is a proof in theory of the AI principles behind it. And from what they've doen so far, it seems they've just about proven everything they set out to do. A company in America called Genobyte is providing a lot of the funding and may very well release Robokoneko as a toy in the future... a cat that can actually start off as a kitten and "grow" (not physically of course) into a full cat.
There's so much cool stuff about Robokoneko I can't put it all in this post. They're using a distributed community model to figure out what to do with all the parts of the brain and how to interconnect them (there are thousands and thousands of modules, they think sight, hearing, the usual stuff will only take a few hundred modules, so they've got a lot of extra space).
If you're interested in genetic algorithms, neural networks, cellular automata theories, artificial intelligence in general, or anything like that, do a quick Google for Robokoneko and I promise you won't be disappointed.
Esperandi
Their machine is made of simple FPGAs too, so theoretically you could build one yourself if you knew how to do that kinda thing, they explain the way they have done it in great detail in their documents.
The problem is, when you play a wizard, you're just playing a wizard. When you play a woman, you are lavished with gifts and an abundance of unfair advantages by guys who somehow think they're increasing their karma with the fairer sex by giving their game players nonexistant goodies...
Most men playing women on online games are not in it for the gender exploration I'd bet... my bet would be on them playing it because they suck at games and are too cheap to buy a cheat book, so they take a "legal" cheat built into the brain of all those guys that help chicks out in online games.
Esperandi