nrbd
If the final product is anywhere CLOSE to this good, I’ll be absolutely stunned. Is there *any* AI that can have a voice conversation with someone this fluidly right now, let alone in the context of a game?(via davemorin)
An application of Microsoft’s Project Natal, for the XBox.
This is mind-blowing stuff. Peter Molyneux has a history of aiming high, and while some would argue his results are mixed, personally I feel he always manages to capture the essence of something amazing with each game he releases, even if the framework surrounding it doesn’t weather quite as well.
Also, this seems like the most dreadfully boring game ever. Hang Out With Children is my least-favorite MMRL game already, the last thing I want is the at-home version. (1 week ago)
Thoughts on AIM and iPhone Push notification
It’s really fast. Less than a second from sending the message to receiving it on my phone. That’s cool.
That said: AOL, having been in the instant messaging business for 12+ years, still doesn’t have a fucking clue what they’re doing.
Being able to remain online after I close the AIM iPhone app is a great idea, but horribly executed. I, like most humans, sleep every night. I don’t want my phone to buzz any time someone IMs me at 3AM. Granted, that probably wouldn’t happen often, but one time would be enough to piss me off. Why can’t software developers remember that we’re human beings?
Why can I only stay online for up to 24 hours after closing the app? What if I just always want to be “on”, but with varying states? I want my client at work to say “At Work”, my home client to say “At Home”, and the rest of the time I want it to have me as away, but with a submessage of “iPhone!” or something. From a technical standpoint, this is stupidly easy.
Has anyone been able to get their buddy icon to work across multiple clients? I mean, at any point in the last 10 years? I never have. Meebo can propagate an icon to Gtalk, AIM, Jabber, and whatever else I want, no sweat, but my iPhone AIM app doesn’t know what my buddy icon is.
In conclusion, I’m sleepy and I just want an IM client that doesn’t suck. Let me use my iPhone as an IM beeper, but don’t buzz me between 11PM and 7AM - just save those messages silently. Let my screenname status reflect my location and/or client, without having to manually update every time I log in. And for the love of jebus, just make the fucking buddy icons work already. It’s 2009, why haven’t we solved this problem yet?
(1 week ago)
Pizza Hut’s possible rebranding to “The Hut” (via Lee)
Did anyone at Pizza Hut consider the possibility that fewer people are eating there because the food isn’t very good and is incredibly unhealthy, which people are finally starting to care about a little more, rather than the restaurant’s name being one word too long for the “texting generation” to handle?
(via marco)The name change makes sense to me. They haven’t served pizza for years. (2 weeks ago)
Photos released by In Touch Weekly show Gosselin holding her squirming child by the arm, and the next image of Leah crying and holding her rear. The photos do not actually reveal Gosselin’s hand touching her daughter.
According to the magazine, Leah had been asked to stop blowing a whistle and was not listening.
Agreed, it’s funny. Interesting fact: the font they use throughout the video is Helvetica, not Arial - the font Microsoft created to rip off Helvetica. The capital R tipped me off. (2 weeks ago)Internet Explorer 8: S.H.Y.N.E.S.S.
And then, surprisingly, there’s this—a genuinely funny ad for IE8. It doesn’t insult other browsers, it’s simple and to the point, and it’s good. Granted, it won’t convince anyone to use IE8, but still. Also: DEAN CAIN.
And like I said on Twitter - if you’re not following the Iran election and the protests that have followed, you should be. This is important. (2 weeks ago)
Allocation, allocation, allocation. If the machines become self-aware, they’ll have no problem leeching all the power they need from the grid, no matter how much they require.As James Hamilton of Amazon Web Services observed recently at a Google-hosted data-center-efficiency summit, there is no Moore’s Law for power — while servers become progressively more powerful (and cheaper to deploy) and software boosts server productivity, the cost of energy (as well as water, needed for cooling) stays constant or rises.
More evidence for my argument against the Singularity. There’s a lot more interesting info in the full article.
Not to mention, there are spacial improvements to be made. From the article:
The huge power draws have spurred innovation in the form factor of the data center itself. For its Chicago center, Microsoft is outfitting half the building with shipping containers packed with servers. “Imagine a data center that’s about 30 megawatts, with standard industry average density numbers you can probably fit 25,000 to 30,000 servers in a facility like that,” says Microsoft’s Chrapaty. “You can do 10 times that in a container-based facility, because the containers offer power density numbers that are very hard to realize in a standard rack-mount environment.”(2 weeks ago)
I’ve had a Tumblr account for years, but only recently reactivated it, having finally found a use of sorts for it. In the period I wasn’t paying attention, the Tumblr team have created a thing called Tumblarity: a number derived from your recent activity on your account. If you get a new follower, you get a certain number of tumblarity points. If you reblog something from another Tumblr user, your tumblarity goes up. And so on. If you leave your Tumblr unused for a while, your tumblarity starts to drop. The bigger your tumblarity number, the higher your Tumblr blog is ranked. It’s obviously just a bit of fun.
But now I see this number winking at me on the dashboard. And I start to realise how clever this is. It’s a Tamagotchi number. You log in, see your tumblarity’s dropped, and you can’t help but suddenly think “oh my god, my Tumblr’s dying.” There’s almost an urge to do something to feed it, to pipette precious drops of life-giving tumblarity into your Tumblr.
Until, obviously, one day you look at it and say, “ah, fuck it, let’s watch the little bastard die.”
Ah, fuck it. Let’s watch the little bastard die. (2 weeks ago)