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adwf

1,819 karma · joined August 2, 2012

adwf
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adwf··on The Problem with Reality
Yeah that's the way I see it going too. Anything where you can just kinda sit there and not worry about moving much other than your head and arms is probably a great match. So virtual work apps, VR tourism, VR concerts and sport, racing games, etc.

It's just the whole movement thing I don't buy.

They've really got to think about the size of their market as well. Time and time again, any gadget or gizmo with limited hardware penetration has failed in the past. Motion + VR not only requires some fairly expensive hardware, but also requires a large clear space in your house somewhere. They're heavily limiting their market with that. No big publisher will seriously risk making a AAA game with such a small market.

Motionless VR has some serious potential though.

adwf··on The Problem with Reality
Yeah I just saw this snippet on reddit:

https://imgur.com/topic/Gaming/swpjI58

That does actually look like a great use for VR in gaming. Stationary character, mobile viewpoint.

adwf··on The Problem with Reality
Not to be too much of a downer, but I still think the main problem with VR isn't the technicality, but the practicality.

We had the exact same problems with motion controls. They might momentarily enjoy the novelty of a motion game, but it's just a gimmick. When you get down to it, a lot of people enjoy just sitting on the couch twiddling their thumbs to get the character to do all the work.

They play games to relax, not get a workout. If you force them to stand up and move, you've already failed.

Where I do see VR having some interesting applications is in the workplace. Replacing all your monitors and work environment with a virtual space of unlimited scope.

Imagine remote working - where one moment you could be typing away on a sunny beach, the next you're in a scheduled meeting room with all your colleagues, without having to move an inch.

adwf··on Matt Harrigan – Grand Central Tech [audio]
Can we get an Audio warning on this? Never a nice surprise when something autoplays.
adwf··on 37M Compilations: Investigating Novice Programming Mistakes [pdf]
I was thinking much the same. 90% of these errors don't even exist in some other languages.
adwf··on Spain Runs Out of Workers with Almost 5M Unemployed
After Brexit, I'm very tempted to move in the opposite direction. If the Spanish consulting firms can be undercut to that extent, there's a potentially lucrative market.

Unfortunately I only know French and German, but I could learn Spanish relatively quickly I guess. The corruption and politics is troubling however.

adwf··on Happy Tau Day
Relax, the whole thing is a joke, including my comment above.
adwf··on Happy Tau Day
To use your own argument, 2*pi is far, far more common to encounter in physics/maths ie. real world examples, therefore minimizing friction would be using Tau ;)
adwf··on Britain is sailing into a storm with no one at the wheel
I'm guessing he means helping inflate the housing bubble as a means of pumping our GDP. The UK may be one of the fastest recovering economies since the recession, but a lot of the growth is in housing. And if you don't happen to live in the south-east where the housing pressure is at its worst, you probably aren't benefiting from it at all. Hence the North/South divide in the referendum.
adwf··on Brexit and the Failure of Western Establishment Institutions
The commissioner is appointed by the PM, so you vote for him every general election. The idea that the EU is undemocratic is absurd. It's doubly absurd considering we still have a House of Lords...

The reason people feel they don't have a say in the EU is because they keep voting for UKIP, whose entire mandate was to make the EU look bad by racking up expenses and not doing anything.

The gall of Farage when he was campaigning for the fishermen during the referendum was astounding. He attended 1, ONE, out of 42 fisheries council meetings while he was an MEP and he was on the committee. Then he turns around and says that it was the EU that screwed our fishing industry.

No, he betrayed the fishing industry just to make the EU look bad.

adwf··on David Cameron announces resignation
Another possibility is that we might have to hold an early general election now that Cameron has resigned. If the Conservatives lose, it's possible that the referendum loses it's legitimacy.

Very slim chance though, seeing as it was mostly the Labour heartland that voted for Leave.

adwf··on Raw Organic Apricot Kernels
Well supposedly, cyanide gas smells like bitter almonds, so maybe that's the relation you're tasting?

(I say supposedly, because it's the kind of thing I've never desired to test...)

adwf··on David Cameron announces resignation
The odd thing is that after all the years of being staunchly British, Gibraltar might well accept. They were 95% in favour of the EU. Having that border heavily restricted will be a nightmare for them.
adwf··on David Cameron announces resignation
Yep, not Britain's finest hour at the moment. Scotland have already begun the process for a 2nd independence referendum and will probably win it this time. Northern Ireland are likely to follow.

In 5 years time we'll just be talking about England alone. With maybe Cornwall and the North splitting from London and the South East.

Might be time to dig up my Scottish ancestry and get a dual passport...

adwf··on David Cameron announces resignation
Yes, people forget that he'd already had two MPs jump ship to UKIP. If he hadn't promised a referendum the party would've split down the middle.

What I don't get, and didn't get with the Scots referendum either, is why on earth they didn't require a super-majority? Surely with something as critical as this, you'd want a bit more convincing than a 2% margin?

It doesn't have to be a 3/4ths or even 2/3rds, but a 60.1/39.9 split would've been nicely convincing that one side is definitely in a minority. Instead we've just proven once again that the UK is fractured politically North/South/Scotland/NI/etc.

adwf··on British business ‘benefits massively from EU’
It's also a condition of the Ireland peace agreement that we keep it open. No EU, no peace. We'd have to renegotiate the deal, amongst all the others...

And if we leave it open? All the migrants will just flood through NI. The whole idea that we can control migration by leaving is absurd nonsense.

adwf··on British business ‘benefits massively from EU’
The problem with the Brexit campaign is that they just don't trust any experts:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/16/eu-referendum-lea...

If people don't listen to evidence, then how can anyone have a proper debate?

adwf··on British business ‘benefits massively from EU’
Yeah I've heard similar things about said Japanese manufacturers. One of the big reasons they are regionally headquartered in the UK is because it is part of the EU. Given that cars make up a sizable fraction (~10% I think) of our economy, it would be a disaster if even 1 major company left for foreign shores over this.

Speaking from an IT perspective, I know of quite a few companies that have brought forward datacentre builds in the Frankfurt region, prepping for a Brexit just in case. They have to do with business with the EU and that involves complying with EU data protection regulations which require the data stored in an EU country. There's a lot of business going to disappear overseas if Brexit happens.

adwf··on British business ‘benefits massively from EU’
Very much so. It's turned into the UKs very own replica of the US primaries, with much the same arguments.

I guarantee if we had a land border with Europe, someone on the leave campaign would be talking about building a wall :D

adwf··on Why Did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School?
How old is 8th grade? I'm just curious to compare it to the UK school system where the subjects aren't broken up so rigidly. I only learnt Maths, not Algebra 1/Calc 1, etc.
adwf··on The contested papyrus “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”
Good thing Jesus wasn't in Western Europe ;)

Good point though, upvote nonetheless.

adwf··on The contested papyrus “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”
If you think about it logically for the era, it's incredibly unlikely that Jesus was actually unmarried. The typical age for marriage all the way up until the 20th century was somewhere between puberty and 20. Jesus didn't start his ministry until he was 30. It's really very possible that he was married, maybe even a widower. The fact that no gospel mentions it, could be the exact same reason women get ignored throughout the rest of history.
adwf··on Buffer Layoffs
Ouch. Never a pleasant thing to do.

I just hope they made the cut deep enough. A common mistake is to cut enough to just get back to break even, when what you really need in that situation is to get back to a decent level of profitability. The number of times I've seen a second round of layoffs because people got that wrong...

From the looks of their projections, they've done the right thing, back to profitability and growth.

adwf··on The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative makes its first investment
Whether you believe he is doing a good thing because it's a good thing, or just because he wants to be seen doing a good thing, it doesn't change the fact that the good thing is being done.

Tax deductibility does indeed incentivise charitable giving, possibly for selfish reasons. But the person on the recieving end of education/healthcare/whatever, doesn't really care do they? The effect is what's important, not the motivation.

adwf··on Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy
Yep - this is the kind of thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XydeHaqxBbg

It's almost impossible to imagine that someone could bribe that many people to influence an election in the UK. There are 650 seats with over 100k population per seat. I just can't imagine it being bribable on a large scale. Maybe some tiny constituency in a tiny district might get influenced, but the absolute smallest is about 20k votes. That's very difficult to rig.

adwf··on Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy
You can still hack open source though. Some of the highest profile security projects like openssl get hacked. Sometimes it just takes a simple misconfiguration to get hacked, like with Debian a few years ago.

The point is, computers provide a single point of failure. Bribing enough of a country's electoral officials to shift a vote without being detected is immensely more difficult in comparison to finding a zero-day in some voting software.

The only guarantee that open source provides, is that we'll probably find the bug eventually. A malicious state actor that wants to influence an election has absolutely no incentive to let people know that they've found a vulnerability with any sense of alacrity.

adwf··on Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy
It's still a 3-point of failure versus a thousand in a paper vote.

I've seen the British election many times, there are hundreds of people in the counting hall for every district. They count, then they shuffle the ballots around and have different people recount. It would take the bribery of thousands upon thousands of people. People who are under constant scrutiny, not just by those around them, but on TV also.

A computer is almost trivially suborned in comparison. Even our most important pieces of security software, such as openssl and others, get hacked from time to time. If such hugely important - massively used, massively tested - open-source projects get hacked, why on earth would you want to risk computer voting?

It's just standard programmer NIH hubris; we think we can do it better, therefore we should.

adwf··on Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy
Not really. Whilst paper voting fraud is definitely possible - maybe even easier than online fraud - in an election, paper ballots are distributed across an entire country. They require "hacking" 1000's of people in order to corrupt a national vote. Computer hacking just requires breaking the security of one application.
adwf··on Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy
The biggest problem with online/computerised voting is that it is a single point of attack for malicious actors. Even the best software security gets broken from time to time, online voting would allow zero-day attacks on elections - an absolute disaster.

Whilst standard paper voting may also be subject to fraud, it takes the manipulation of thousands of people in order to alter ballots across a whole country. Computers just need the one hack.

adwf··on Facebook Instant Articles create a better reading experience for users
I was going to say much the same. Completely uninstalled the FB app the other day as it was driving me up the wall. The messenger app will probably not be far behind.

I don't even use the website anymore as it's so clunky. FB are dropping the ball in a big way at the moment.

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