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Comment Re:Annoying closeups (Score 2) 118

by wasme (#37011938) Attached to: L.A. Artist Contemplates Future Traffic Flow, With Hot Wheels

I could be wrong, but the impression I got from the video was that the artist wasn't trying to produce a [realistic] model of traffic flow (future, present, or past) at all. I think people get confused when he makes the comment about the cars' going 230 miles per hour and how that gives him 'hope for the future.' I don't think that's equivalent to saying 'this is (my idea of) the traffic flow of the future.'

A couple of quotes from the artist in the video I think show otherwise:

"the idea that the car runs free. Those days are about to close. So it's a little bit like making a model of New York city at the turn of the last century and your modeling horse buggies everywhere and then the automobile is about to arrive. So something else is about to arrive."

So he's making a 'model' of a car-centric city on the idea that soon that will be an anachronism.

"It wasn't about trying to make this a scale model of something. It was more to invoke the energy of a city."

In other words this is art for art's sake. Something I personally am often rather ambivilant about but I still think this is cool for the sake of the amount of time and effort put into this. It's a giant working mechanism. If he called himself a 'geek' instead of an 'artist' would the comments here have been less hostile?

And who doesn't remember playing with Hot Wheels and the like as a kid. Wouldn't you have loved to have a setup like this back then?

Comment Re:Did the author completely overlook,,, (Score 1) 289

by wasme (#32862338) Attached to: What Nokia Must Do To Stay Relevant In Mobile

No, they're moving their high-end phones to running MeeGo.

MeeGo is the product of the merger of Maemo (Nokia in-house developed Debian (and thus linux) based OS) and Moblin (Intel in-house developed OS (based on Fedora?)). Unlike Android MeeGo won't use just the linux kernel but rather the entire standard linux tool-chain and user-space right up to and including X.

Everyone that's used Maemo agrees it has a lot of potential but requires a lot more 'polish' on Nokia's part before it'll really be able to compete with Android, et. al. Maybe co-operating with Intel will help them there.

Although on the other hand a lot of 'smartphone' buzz is around app stores, and MeeGo is pretty much destined to be a 3rd-place runner (after Apple's iPhoneOS and Google's Android) in that space. (Although since Android is a modified JVM on top of linux I wonder if there's any reason why someone couldn't just port the Android JVM to run ontop of MeeGo ...)
Government

Submission + - US Gov Finally Admits Most Piracy Estimates Are Bo (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: US Gov Finally Admits Most Piracy Estimates Are Bogus:

We've all seen the studies trumpeting massive losses to the US economy from piracy. One famous figure, used literally for decades by rightsholders and the government, said that 750,000 jobs and up to $250 billion a year could be lost in the US economy thanks to IP infringement. A couple years ago, we thoroughly debunked that figure ( http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/10/dodgy-digits-behind-the-war-on-piracy.ars ). For years, Business Software Alliance reports on software piracy assumed that each illicit copy was a lost sale. And the MPAA's own commissioned study on movie piracy turned out to overstate collegiate downloading by a factor of three ( http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/01/oops-mpaa-admits-college-piracy-numbers-grossly-inflated.ars ).

Can we trust any of these claims about piracy? The US doesn't think so.

In a new report out yesterday, the government's own internal watchdog took a close look at "efforts to quantify the economic effects of counterfeit and pirated goods." After examining all the data and consulting with numerous experts inside and outside of government, the Government Accountability Office concluded ( http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10423.pdf ) that it is "difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts."

ARS Technica : http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-government-finally-admits-most-piracy-estimates-are-bogus.ars
Canada

Submission + - The Pirate Party of Canada is official! 3

Submitted by wasme
wasme writes: The Pirate Party of Canada (PPCA) has become the first Pirate Party outside of Europe to become an official political party. Elections Canada confirmed with the party on the 12th that the PPCA has gained "eligible for registration" status, and can run in elections starting June 14, 2010. Read the Party's official announcement:

"We are pleased to announce that as of April 12, 2010, the Pirate Party of Canada (PPCA) is officially eligible for Party Status.

After ten months of dedication and hard work, we have reached eligible status, which only leaves a 60-day “purgatory” period. After that, we will field candidates in subsequent federal elections, and begin the real work of a political party."
Games

Revisiting the "Holy Trinity" of MMORPG Classes 362

Posted by Soulskill from the or-druid-as-the-case-may-be dept.
A feature at Gamasutra examines one of the foundations of many MMORPGs — the idea that class roles within such a game fall into three basic categories: tank, healer, and damage dealer. The article evaluates the pros and cons of such an arrangement and takes a look at some alternatives. "Eliminating specialized roles means that we do away with boxing a class into a single role. Without Tanks, each class would have features that would help them participate in and survive many different encounters like heavy armor, strong avoidance, or some class or magical abilities that allow them to disengage from direct combat. Without specialized DPS, all classes should be able to do damage in order to defeat enemies. Some classes might specialize in damage type, like area of effect (AoE) damage; others might be able to exploit enemy weaknesses, and some might just be good at swinging a sharpened bit of metal in the right direction at a rapid rate. This design isn't just about having each class able to fill any trinity role. MMO combat would feel more dynamic in this system. Every player would have to react to combat events and defend against attacks."
Games

Imagination In Games 94

Posted by Soulskill from the oh-no-aliens-are-attacking-earth-again dept.
In a recent article for Offworld, Jim Rossignol writes about how the experiences offered by games are broadening as they become more familiar and more popular among researchers and educators. He mentions Korsakovia, a Half-Life 2 mod which is an interpretation of Korsakoff's syndrome, a brain disorder characterized by confusion and severe memory problems, and makes the point that games (and game engines) can provide interesting and evocative experiences without the constraint of being "fun," much as books and movies can be appreciated without "fun" being an appropriate description. Quoting: "Is this collective imagining of games one of the reasons why they tend to focus on a narrow band of imagination? Do critics decry games because games need, more than any other media, to be something a group of people can all agree on? Isn't that why diversions from the standard templates are always met with such excitement or surprise? Getting a large number of creative people to head out into the same imaginative realm is a monumental task, and it's a reason why game directors like to riff off familiar films or activities you can see on TV to define their projects. A familiar movie gets everyone on the same page with great immediacy. 'Want to know what this game is going to be like? Go watch Aliens, you'll soon catch up.' We are pushed into familiar, well-explored areas of imagination. However, there are also teams who are both exploring strange annexes and also creating games that are very much about imaginative exploration. These idiosyncratic few do seem like Alan Moore's 'exporters,' giving us something genuinely new to investigate and explore. Once the team has figured out how to drag the thing back from their imaginations, so we get to examine its exotic experiences — like the kind we can't get at home."

Comment Re:You've just scratched the surface (Score 1) 438

by wasme (#13833731) Attached to: A Clock That Runs for 10,000 Years

Ok, this reply is coming so late that nobody will ever look at it, but ...

I used to agree that all alarm clocks sucked, but then I found a good one a couple years ago from RCA. Model number RP3711A, which, oddly enough, I can't find a picture of anywhere on the web. It's not listed on RCA's website either - the closest looking model currently avaliable seems to be the RP3720, which looks like a bit of a step back towards the 'cluster all the little buttons together rather than sanely spacing them out and making them large and easy to find when sleepy'.

Anyway, the RP3771A isn't perfect, but its by far the best alarm clock I've used. For one thing it has a nice big clock display that I can actually read when I wake up, before I put on my glasses. It also has some nice big buttons for common controls (snooze, changing the station, a fairly big volume wheel). The alarm is nice and loud to :) Etc. Etc. As I said, its not perfect. It still has a few too many features and buttons for my tastes. Also, the speaker is in the back (mostly, it seems, in order to make the clock display bigger, and that's a good thing), so the sound is pointed in the wrong direction, but that's a minor complaint really, and a demonstration that all designs involve compromise.

Anyway, my point, believe it or not, is not to pitch a clock radio/alarm clock that appears to be no longer in production, but rather to point out that if you look long and hard enough you do find products with semi-sane designs. If more people did that, rather then settling on the first thing they see at walmart, then companies would have more incentive to spend more time creating better designs.

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