if error = True:

Google vs Microsoft, who will win?

2009-10-23T01:02:00.000-07:00

High-tech companies are very exciting. Just like watching a game of baseball, where not much could happen for 7 innings, and then all of a sudden, a bad pitch, a good hit, and a stroke of luck could change the game immediately. Even big companies that's been winning game after game, could suddenly be toppled because of something as small as an obnoxious fan trying to catch a ball. IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Intel, AMD, Sun, all big name companies at one time or another, all went through phases of drastic change even within the few decades of operation. No company is immune, and they all need to stay vigilant to changes in the fickle market. And now two of the biggest tech companies have up'd the ante, and you better be at the edge of your seats because a homerun could change the game at any time. How does Windows 7 change things? Here's how it could play out:

How Microsoft could kill Google:
Bing Bling
Google does a lot of things, email, maps, web hosting, documents, but they really only make money from two things -- adwords and adsense, both of which are tied to their search engine. The billions of dollars they are paying their engineers to have fun and develop cool web apps come from the bidding of keywords that is displayed on the search results page. If Google lose the search engine market or even just a chunk of it, they would suddenly have too many engineers with not enough money to support them. If this were to happen, say goodbye to all the Google benefits, people would start losing their jobs, and the culture would have to be drastically changed to defend their core business. The company would not be able to sustain the heavy investments they have in R&D, and would have to resort to being like Microsoft, where they would only enter a market after someone else have proven its worth. Microsoft can then deal the final blow because, you know, Microsoft is better at being Microsoft than Google is.

So, how would they pull it off?
To put it simply, create a beachhead. Some may hear that Bing search offers pretty good search results, but still not use it. Why change to bing when Google works great?

What they need to do is to give a reason to start using Bing. It doesn't have to give better results for everything, or try to replace Google immediately, but it needs to have a "wow, this is awesome" feature to use Bing for. If Microsoft developed Google Scholar, Google Images, or Google News before Google did, they would have a very strong starting point. From there, after users get used to typing in www.bing.com to do those specific searches, users would seriously consider replacing Google since they both solve the need for search. What they need is a means of attracting a core audience, and then find ways of spreading that audience to use their service for all other purposes. Specific and useful searches, but simple and easy to switch to their main service.

Will it happen?
Microsoft picked real-time search for their first beachhead. It certainly has potential to be big. However, I don't know about you, but I'm still confused about the whole twitter and update things in facebook. I'm not sure what circumstances I would need to be in for me to think in my head, "hmmm, what should I use to help me solve this problem? Oh, I know, real-time search with Bing!" But I would keep an eye out for any developments along this front.

I personally wouldn't have signed both Twitter and Facebook at the same time, since they are pretty fierce competitors. Rather, I'd probably try to sign an exclusive deal with Twitter, just because Facebook doesn't seem to like Google a lot. Still, though, props to the big MS for seeing this market and getting the deals through.

So... maybe. It could happen. It depends on whether people are right about the importance of web 2.0 for search and how Google will respond to this threat.

side note:

How about make a 2d search result page, that offer the top results from each type of search, and the user can move through the results depending on which direction seems to match what the user is looking for the most? You can even eliminate the pagination delay with Ajax and make it like cool like iPhone.

How Google could kill Microsoft:
Cloud OS Online Office
Microsoft, even though they have significantly diversified, their core business and most of their innovation still comes from their operating system, Windows. Without it, their relationship with computer manufacturers couldn't be leveraged, and their dominance would fade when they don't have enough money to throw at new markets to compete with the leaders there.

So, how would they pull it off?
Well, Google is one of only a few companies in the world that can pull off the creation of a real cloud operating system, as I described here. But honestly, that's still a few years away from coming to market.

An alternative is to make operating systems a sort of commodity, making people care for operating systems as much as they care about the type of tissue they have in the bathroom. Once that happens, it would no longer make sense to pay $200 for an operating system when you can get one for free, or another one that gives you a personality.

What do you think of when you're thinking about changing operating systems? Usually, two things -- programs and files. Right now, there are a bunch of web tools that can do what have been traditionally done only on the computer. But out of all of those, the most important ones are the productive tools that you use to make the presentations to the boss. He doesn't care which program you use or which operating system you have, just that you get it done. If you can just upload your presentation to Google docs in an easy manner (like dropbox), and be able to make it show up when you're ready to present, it wouldn't matter that you made the slides on your Linux box, and you're presenting it on a computer in the conference room with a mac.

Will it happen?
No. As much as I like Google, and as much as I don't like Microsoft, I really don't they are positioned well enough to take on Microsoft. Honestly, it feels like they've given up on Google docs. They haven't updated it in ages. For the longest time, I tried to like it, but it's a lost cause. Now that more and more people are creating pptx files that Google docs can't naturally convert, they've lost the window of opportunity.

Google creates a lot of mediocre products, sprinkled with neat-o features, but that is really not going to make a dent in the Microsoft kingdom. Luckily for Google, Microsoft also has to worry about Apple. They just might distract Microsoft enough that Google comes out with something that makes even more money than search. yaa.. I won't count on it though.

Conclusion
To me, it seems like Microsoft is playing it very smart in an Armani-suit-businessy-way, whereas Google is just playing around with promising platforms and cool applications without a focused strategy. They would seriously be in a bad position if they suddenly find Microsoft with a significant portion of search and their newest gizmo's like Android, Wave, and App Engine turn out not to be the money-makers they expected. Microsoft have played defense and offense pretty well, and they are poised to keep their position as the top player. Let's hope the Google engineers have been using their 20 percent time well.

And no, Facebook won't be able to replace either of them.

resume business cards

2009-10-09T23:27:00.001-07:00

one liner: a business card that also has your resume on it

Especially in this economic environment, there are a lot of people looking for jobs. Sometimes you're at a gathering, and you find someone that would be interested in who you are, possibly a person from HR, or a manager, or an investor. It would be great if you could give him a business card, especially if it has your resume or your sales pitch or your business plan on it.

some options for how to do it. 1. put a detachable flash drive or sd card on it, but it might be expensive. 2. turn your resume into a qr code but the amount of stuff you put in is limited 3. print really really small, and offer a magnifying glass =P 4. link to your website, but the user has to type it in.

Any more ideas?

Detecting DNA with nanomachines

2009-10-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

DNA is small. Despite being the code that spells out how to make each of the billions upon billions of proteins that make up who you are, each base, or letter of DNA, is 2 nano meters wide, and 0.3 nanometers long. Even stretched out, 800,000 letters of DNA can fit around a single strand of hair. One difference in a million separates you from smelly Bob, and only a few changes in key places would give you cancer. So how would you read something so small, yet so important? Well, how about with tiny diving board?

In 2000, a significant work [1] from J. Fritz and the team at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory presented a method that have been commonly used to create CPUs to sense biomolecules, including DNA, RNA, and proteins. They used semiconductor fabrication technology to create silicon cantilevers, which are tiny diving boards measuring 1 x 500 x 100 microns to create a platform where the materials would be detected. These cantilevers are still much larger than biomolecules, but they are small enough that they would be affected by them.

So to detect a specific sequence of DNA, they put complementary sequences stacked vertically on the cantilever. When a sample is placed on the device, the DNA from the sample would pair up and bind with those on the platform. The surface that was already crowded would now be even more packed, and the stress that is only on only one side of the cantilever causes it to bend, which can then be detected with high accuracy by a laser.

To test out their device, they created two such cantilevers, one with a 12 letter DNA sequence and the other with a 16 letter sequence and then they put two samples with the complementary sequence one after the other on the device. Of course, we cannot perfectly predict the reactions between the things in the sample and the DNA molecules on the platform, but with two such platforms, any difference would be significant. If the things in the samples bound to one platform stronger than the other, we can assume it was caused by the very specific DNA pairing. Sure enough, the laser signal showed the cantilever wobble and then stabilize with one cantilever bent lower after the first sample was added, and then wobble and stabilize with the other cantilever bent lower after the second sample was added. Even DNA sequences that differed by only one base pair caused a noticeable difference. Other than just attaching DNA sequences to the platform, they also tried proteins -- to see whether it interacted with another protein, and antibodies -- which can be made to bind to just about anything.

Microarrays and high throughput sequencing also offer scientists information on the microscopic world, yet both require probes and a complex procedure to perform the experiment. These micro cantilevers offer an unique advantage in its simplicity. Since the publication of the paper, people have proposed microfluidic devices that pump samples into a chamber with many cantilevers for detection, incredibly complex, but completely automated and miniaturized to fit just about anywhere.

We now know a lot about DNA, proteins, and other tiny molecules that makes a big difference in a living organism, but so far we haven't been able to detect these molecules cheaply and reliably to help with medical diagnosis. The devices that we do have are large and clunky. Soon, however, we will have laboratories on a chip that will be able to put all this knowledge to good use for everyone. And it is all thanks to a very tiny diving board.

[1] Fritz, J. et al., “Translating Biomolecular Recognition into Nanomechanics,” Science 288, 316, 2000.

material design?

2009-09-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/phone-book-friction-unlocking-inter-connected-phone-books

could this be used to design new types of fabrics?

Online salesmen

2009-09-09T02:53:00.000-07:00

One liner: provide an easy, low pressure mechanism for online shoppers to get assistance online.

There are many things that websites do well. But one thing that is hard to replace is the human interaction that are vital to any physical shop. Going to a car lot, few people go there to just look at cars and their brochures by themselves, they usually do that with the assistance of a car salesman, who knows the product, and can talk you though what you are looking for to find you the best match for the car. They answer questions, offer suggestions, make sales pitches, and create a pleasant atmosphere for shopping. To see how it makes a difference, go to any restaurant in Japan, where at the moment you walk in the door, they greet you with a hearty welcome, "Irashaimasae!", and knowing that the store is ready to serve you makes you want to patronize at the store even more.

Many online stores have good search functions, helpful faqs, or useful descriptions that go unused and unread. When a user doesn't find something before their patience runs out (which is really fast), they just leave the site to look for it elsewhere. Of course, this is bad for the site.

This idea is to allow instant messenging integrated with websites and the use of online salesmen to promote shopping on your site. Users coming to the site would be drawn to see an initial greeting from the salesmen, after which, the messenging window would put in an inconspicuous place that would not distract the user from normal website navigation, but still be in view and available for questions.

On the backend, each salesperson would be able to customize their own greetings, and chat windows would appear only when users reply to the greeting. Once in a chat, the salesperson would be able to see information relating to the user, such as the webpages that the user has been to, and the username along with the shopping history if the person has logged in. More likely than not, the user will ask about things that are already on the site. Therefore, it would be helpful to have a prediction system that will offer answers to the questions, where the salesperson would be able to use for their responses, such as pressing ctrl-1 to insert the first canned response suggestion. It should be made in such a way that maximizes the ability of salespeople to serve as many people as possible without compromizing quality.

One great thing about selling stuff online is the metrics that measure the activity on your site, and this would be no exception. Information about how much this system has helped your store can be clearly logged. Neat charts and pretty graphs can be made for users that have used the feature, and the additional revenue that came from the salespeople. The sales ability of the salespeople would also be measured, and commissions and bonuses can be given fairly. Depending on the measurements, the site owner would be able to fine tune any of these things, such as only offer the feature for customers that have already purchased X amount, make the chat window visible for only certain parts of the site where the margin is much higher, or assign different salespeople to different parts of the site. This feature would also help the site become more user-friendly, where the salespeople would be able to offer specific suggestions on where users gets confused or what most people are interested in.

Another great thing about web technology is that it can be done anywhere. These online sales people would be able to work at home, and probably at all kinds of different hours. This would be a position opened to anyone that would want to apply. Given a little training, it wouldn't be too hard to work in such a position.

[edit] just found out that this is currently being done (well) by olark.com

request for articles

2009-08-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

one liner: in news aggregation sites, provide a voted request for for a certain topic

This one is simple, sometimes people are interested in certain things that no one wrote about, sometimes blog writers don't know what to write about. Make a way for readers to request information about a topic.

Ideas and Startups

2009-08-26T09:16:00.000-07:00

Something just clicked for me today while reading posts about bootstrapping startups (starting from here), that startups are businesses and businesses are supposed to make money. Ideas are like ammunition. You need to execute the ideas to get value, where each one can provide you with a slice of the market. However, having more ammunition doesn't mean you win the war. These ideas are supposed to be like resources that a company has to go from one profitable business to another. This sounds blindingly obvious, but there has always been this misconception in the back of my mind that startups are there to prove whether an idea is good or not. This post is just a self-reminder that the business comes first, ideas have no value on their own.
[of course... we'll see about all this when I actually start my first startup]

Rated Reading Lists of Blog Posts

2009-08-26T08:24:00.000-07:00

one liner: provide a web 2.0 reading list for websites

There are lots of news/recommendation sites out there: digg, reddit, hacker news, stumble upon, slashdot, fark not to mention all the copy cats in various languages and they all provide interesting new stories aggregated from around the web. One particular property of the links provided is that they are usually self-sufficient/self-contained -- each post has a particular point to make, and it's pretty short. These work well for many types of stories, such as current events, interesting stories, or opinions. However there are other types of information that do not fit into those categories. In particular are things that take a long time to learn, like programming, playing an instrument, controversial issues, which are way too complex to be explained through one blog post or webpage.

Taking a step back, to learn these things you can just grab a book (okay you technophiles can buy the ebook online), why learn about these things in blog posts? I think there are two reasons why I prefer learning about things online, rather than getting a book. One is attention span, mine's not that long. Blame it on the information overload or whatever, but I just can't sit down and finish a book unless every page is interesting. Blog posts are just the right size to keep a person interested in a subject long enough to finish reading through it, but not go overboard to cover stuff you don't care about. Second is "peer review," the whole idea of the web 2.0. Many many blogs are submitted to these sites every second, but only a few are rated by the community to be interesting enough for me to see them. Since blog posts are short and to the point, each idea is validated by the community. The filtered posts are what the community deems worth knowing.

However there are stuff that are too complex to learn in one post. Some things do have a learning curve, which are a bit frustrating to overcome with the web. If you do a google search, you will find all the information for a subject, but it will not be organized. Same with information from these aggregation sites. You can dig into the archives and read articles that may or may not be suitable for your level, but that would be too time consuming for the web.

What I would like to see is an organized list of stuff to read for these topics that span multiple posts. For example, if I want to learn how to make a website, I want to know html first, css, javascript, php/language of choice, sql, ajax, then a web framework. It doesn't make much sense to learn django if you don't know python, or sql, or html.

To build it, I would start with a news aggregator, and add a functionality for popular posts to be in the "hall of fame" or in web forums -- "stickied," then these post that are stickied that are good enough to represent a topic would be organized chronologically into the order in which they should be read in, this organization could also take other forms, such as a tree. Posts may be replaced by other posts, or even removed if they are outdated.

On the client side there needs to be a mechanism for the user to keep track of what the user has read so far, which subjects the user was interested in, and suggest the next entry to read. On a side note, this could be an independent feature for browsers -- marking a website as one to be read later.

The business plan for this idea would be advertisement on those organized lists. They should be the finest quality that the community behind the website has to offer, and would attract a significant amount of traffic from very specific people.

Crime reporting online

2009-08-13T00:28:00.000-07:00

One Liner: offer a service to streamline the reporting of crimes online and also offer rewards for doing so.

Okay, even though I only use this blog to write down ideas, here's something personal: I live in Taiwan; and here's something political: the government sucks at managing the police. For those who have not visited an Asian country, you do not know the frustration at being stuck on the road because someone double parked on both sides of a narrow street, just because the driver didn't want to parallel park just a few meters away. Bad drivers, crazy motorists really drive me crazy, because they make it dangerous for so many other people to gain just a little bit of convenience for themselves.

But now that almost all cell phones have camera on them, and it is really easy to connect to websites, people should be able to report crimes easily. A streamlined service would accept pictures and other relevant information (speed, time, date, location) and try to automatically process the infraction (read the license plate) and send it to a police officer for review before sending the ticket. Reporters should be able to get a portion of the ticket as reward to encourage people reporting crimes. The tools that are used to report crimes should probably be certified for the obvious reasons, which the crime reporters would probably willingly pay as an investment for the reward money.

Chances are though, no matter how well it is thought out, this will probably not happen, since governments don't really try new things, and business that want to do this would need to jump through bureaucratic hoops.

Learning partners -- social network for collaboration

2009-07-21T13:04:00.000-07:00

one liner: offer a social network for people that would like to learn a new skill that offers suggestions for people to learn or work with.

When you are learning a new skill or learning about a new subject, it is very hard to do on your own. This is one of the advantages of being in a college environment, where you have classmates where you can form study groups with people in your dorm when an exam comes up. When you have a question, you can ask your study buddy. Studying with someone else would also help give you motivation to continue with your commitment. It is also a great way of making friends with someone... small talk only gets you so far. Matchmaking online (as far as I know) has been limited to dating, but there should be ways of extending it to other fields.

One natural area where this would help would be a language exchange, where two people that are good in two separate languages can help each other get better at each other's language. English learning makes is a very large market in asian countries. There would definitely be ways of monetising it.

For implementation, there are many considerations, but many things can be copied (or learned) from the online dating websites. It should be the easiest to integrate with facebook where people already have their information and their network of people. I think there will be a significant portion of people that will use the service as a way of meeting the opposite gender, but I'm not sure how that will affect the service.
This is still a brainstorm in progress.....

I just read an interesting piece on how to get learn things well, maybe it will be able to connect with this idea.

Activity suggesting software

2009-07-16T01:31:00.000-07:00

one liner: make a software that would recommend activities to do (for work or entertainment)
-or the integration of scheduling software with product searches.

Before I go into the details, this idea came up when I was thinking about how else to do advertising in the future. Advertising is THE way of making money online, all other options aren't really turning out to be great business plans. In general, I do not agree with the assumption that money making businesses are inherently unconscienable. In a perfect world, money would represent the value that a business offers, and advertising offers a lot of value to the world. Annoying advertisement and false advertising do not add value in the big picture of things.

During the course of the week, there are times where I find myself wondering what to do. I have lists of TODO for home, and for work, but I don't really have a habit of going to those when I have free time. It would be nice if a schedule / daily planner would be able to suggest things to do next. For work, it would grab your todo list, and your boss's todo list, and you coworkers todo list, and combine them in a way that would maximize productivity. For entertainment, when it sees that I have some time off, it could look at my history and suggest activities for me to do. If I want to do something with my friends, it could look at their iteneraries and offer suggestions as well. Here is where the revenue would come in for this idea. Depending on who I was with, what time of day it is, or a bunch of other factors, it would be able to tell me that there is a sale at so and so place, or new movies that came out that I want to watch, or that there is a new game that came out. Companies would be able to have targeted advertisement for people that want to do certain things.

I can plan to hang out with a few friends, and the software could be able to suggest restaurants to go to, or things to do. On the advertising side, companies could develop activities for people to do, and advertise it to the people who are interested.

Since we are often defined by the things we do, I hope that such a software would help us to become who we want to be.

Origami giraffe and bird

2009-07-02T04:27:00.000-07:00

Giraffe made from crease pattern by Noburu Miyajima

http://www.h5.dion.ne.jp/~origami/giraffe.html

bird made from diagram in Origami Design Secrets by Robert Lang

reverse textbook

2009-06-20T07:00:00.001-07:00

one liner: offer a service that organizes all the concepts you need to know to understand a specific topic.

In our day and age, it really is impossible to understand everything in the world, it usually works much better if you only pick things up as you go. But in order to understand a high level concept, there are often prerequisites before you can understand the deeper stuff. The only good reference materials are usually textbooks and textbooks that are often pretty annoyingly big. You don't want to go through the whole physics book if you only want to understand how circuits work. It may require some knowledge about trigonometry and complex numbers, but you will probably not use differential equations. Trying to look up all these things gets quite annoying. It would be much better if you can have a customized "textbook" that isn't about a broad subject, like "physics," but all the information about a particular subject, like "microprocessor fabrication".

The service should be able to start with the topic that you do want to understand, and figure out all the necessary information that you would need to understand the topic completely. To implement it, it will be written like any textbook (probably like wikipedia) but with extra information about dependencies. When a user finds a topic to understand, the service will start with a common knowledge assumed that the user has, and build up lessons to work up to the topic. If the assumptions are wrong, the user can skip a topic or go into more fundamental topics.

I really think this is necessary, because there are a lot of smart educated people that want to learn about certain topics but get frustrated when they realize how hard it is to find a reliable source that you can understand. People shouldn't feel embarassed that they do not understand any given topic -- science is wayy to complicated for any one person to understand. Besides, a need based education will show people the practicality of the skills they are learning, rather than memorizing millions of equations that they will never use.

finance management software on your cell phone

2009-06-19T06:53:00.000-07:00

one liner: record receipts with a cell phone camera and use location, time information to make a record of spendings.

I think financial management could be improved significantly with portable electronics. Finance is all about planning -- I'm going to put x amount into the bank to save up for y, I'm going to use z dollars in groceries this month. With any plan, there's always the review to see if you met the goals that you set out for -- Last month, I spent too much on eating out, so this month I'm going to have to try extra hard to cook for myself. When you are reviewing habits, it would help a great deal if you can have as much information as possible, organized as well as possible. It would be great to see how much money you have spent on weekends as opposed to weekdays, or how much you spend on entertainment compared to food.

With a cell phone, you can figure out a lot of things about what a person is doing, and deduce what the person is spending the money on. If a person is at a clothing store, chances are the person is spending money on clothes, and not on food. There can be many ways of getting the financial information all in one location -- you could take a picture of all the receipts that you spent money on, or match up the time on the credit card bill.

One of the benefits is that when you have all this information in one place, you can get instant feedback on your spending. Did you pay more money than you planned on a suit? Well, you will have to either have to take that money from the money you were going to use to buy a present for your friend or from money to buy video games.

mobile taxi service

2009-06-19T06:25:00.000-07:00

one liner: offer a one-touch app to call for a taxi

The basic service will provide an application where pressing a button will send the gps location of the user to the local taxi service and call for a cab. Preferably taxi companies would be able to respond to the particular phone with an update for the amount of time it would take for the taxi to arrive.

There can be a lot of incentives that could go along with it. It can offer 1/2 off discounts to certain partnership malls or other services. It can offer to sync up with your schedule, so the taxi would be outside waiting for you when you are done with your meting and such.

drum where you go

2009-06-19T01:36:00.000-07:00

one liner: make a portable drum kit by using accelerometers and sensors connected to a portable device

so I was doing air drumming today cuz I was bored. and I realized that most of the motions can be detected by a device you wear... nike already have sensors in shoes, and they wirelessly transmit the info to a handheld device. Hand motions can be sensed by acclerometers put in watches or cell phones attached to the arm. It really wouldn't be too hard to have a portable device that combines all these information to produce real sound (either on the device or on a better speaker).

I am a huge fan of being able to play music everywhere you go. With a portable computing device like a cell phone, you can do stuff like having an autotune microphone, karaoke machine, or portable musical devices right on your cell phone.

Karaoke never got big in the states for some reason, but in asian countries, going to karaoke is just as common as going to the movies for entertainment. I'd think that these types of music games/activities would have a huge market that could use some more innovation.

cell phone, where are thou?

2009-06-15T22:53:00.000-07:00

one liner: have the cell phone email you its gps location when it's running short of juice.

I just got woken up by my obnoxious cell phone cuz it was running low of power. It's like ridiculous how long it can keep beeping loudly when it claims it's low on power.

Anyways, so to tell me that it's low on power without being obnoxious is to email me when it's low on power. And just in case I forgot where the cell phone is, turn on the gps and tell me where you are exactly, then go to low power mode. I can still call the phone if I reallly need it to ring.

printer for cellphones

2009-06-14T09:07:00.000-07:00

one liner: make a printer for cell phones by exposing polaroid pictures to the cellphone display

I think I saw like a tiny version of polaroid cameras where the polaroid is like a little sticker that you can just stick anywhere. It'll be really useful if you can just find and print out figures from google and stick it on stuff.

typically other methods of printing require a lot of moving parts and possibly heat to finalize the printed material. This method would allow printing with the minimum amount of extra parts.

not sure if the contrast on the cell phone display is good enough for this though, it may take some experimenting to see how it works

web 2.0 top 10 list

2009-06-13T01:36:00.000-07:00

one liner: web 2.0 creation of top 10 list

A list will have a name and the categories it belongs to.
Each item in the list will have a name, multiple descritions and rating.
The discriptions of the items on the list will have ratings.

The order of the list will be decided through ratings. The description of each item will be the highest rated description.

Product Review Website

2009-06-13T01:03:00.000-07:00

one liner: a website with superior product reviews and ratings by offering coupons for helpful reviews.

Reviewing a product well isn't an easy job, you need to have some kind of expertise in the area, you need to know other products in the market, and you need to be able to communicate your feelings about the product in a clear manner. Just look at movie critics, game review magazines, zagat guides, etc. There are millions of people who make their living off of reviewing different kinds of products.

Many restaurants pay bloggers to review their food and make posts of it, but when reading any of those things, you can't help but question whether they really like the restaurant or they just got paid a lot to like it. It's an inherent paradox in product review -- people base their judgment on independant reviewers, but reviewers make their money from companies that make the product they review, which makes them biased. It would be much better if the reward system is fully disclosed or controlled.

But what is interesting is that these kinds of reviews can be analyzed statistically. There are plenty of signs that would tell if the review is really accurate or not. If people who expected a 5-star hotel, but only got a 2-star service, the probability of them complaining is very high. So it is completely feasible to find out how good the rating is by product sales, amount of use of the product, amount of complaints, etc. Reviewers that have both popularity and accurate ratings are the most valuable for a product review website, and it would be profitable to the website to provide such people some kind of compensation, whether it is a free product to let the reviewer review or a monetary compensation.

Linux command line game

2009-05-06T11:58:00.000-07:00

One thing that has turned people off about linux is the scary white-computery-text-on-black-background command line. People who actually use it knows how much easier it is to just type in the commands, instead of looking for the menu for the feature; but for those that don't, it's like opening up a mechanical clock, who knows what will happen if you make a mistake.

Even though they look the same, text-based adventure games are really fun. Way back before graphics were 3d, heck even 2d, there were the text-based games. Just type in what you want to do, and your virtual avatar will try to do it in the virtual world. It is one step up from those choose-your-own-adventure books, ya know, the one where there's a choice at the bottom of each page, and you flip to the page that corresponds to the option that you chose. Good writing and some imagination makes them better than a lot of million-dollar games that are just boring.

Anyways, so I was doing some work on the terminal and I was also thinking about making a text-based game for a friend of mine and I made the connection: a text-based game in the termainal. So, each directory that you are in is a location, files in the directory are the different things that you can interact with, and /usr/bin will contain the actions that you can perform. Since there are symbolic links, it is totally possible to create a map that is arbitarily complex. Say you're in /start/room1/ there will be two files: LOOK and useSwitch. When you first ssh'd into the terminal, it will display a quick tutorial like, "to look around a location use: cat LOOK; and to perform an action use ./useSwitch". The file "LOOK" will contain a quick description of the room: "You are currently in a room that has a switch, use it by typing ./useSwitch", and when you type ./useSwitch, it will echo the text: " you flipped the switch, and a door appears" and add a symbolic link to the current directory to the next room.

There are two goals for this game: it's coooooooooolllllllllll, and it'll be a fun way to learn how to use the terminal. Right now, I'm making up the list of commands that should be in it, and how to make it a fun game... if you have suggestions, please leave it in the comment section!

directory - location
ls - find what's at a location
cd - change location
LOOK - text file of the description of the room
./executable - do something, may add files to the directory, or display text
john.person - binary file of information
/bin/talk john.person - start the program to have a conversation with john
/bin/attack john.person - start the program to attack this person -- after you beat him, something may happen
processes - this can be your party
ps - list your current party
kill signal pid - signal your party to perform an action.. or dismiss them
~/ contains your inventory, stat information? use "cd -" to return to the adventure
/bin/save - creates a symbolic link from your home directory to the current level.

cp/rm/mkdir - these commands might mess things up.....
pipe/direct to file/grep/wc/sudo/aptitude/

ideally this will actually be done in the filesystem, but... it may have to be done outside.

The Future of Computing

2008-12-29T07:57:00.000-08:00

Imagine this: you're on the public transportation coming home from school, and since you got nothing better to do, you put on some fancy goggles, and using your cell phone's touch screen as the controller, you start playing Crysis 2 with your buddies on a virtual 50" screen. Then, when you get bored of that, you were reminded that the newest Batman sequel came out, so you go online, buy the movie, and watch it right away.
You'd prolly miss your stop and end up getting kicked off by the bus driver after you beg him to take you home, but you get the idea. It is the future of computing, and believe it or not, it is possible in a few short years. It might even be possible before the next crysis game or batman movie comes out.
This device that I am talking about will be ultra-portable, it will run as fast as any desktop, with as much storage as you need, and you can access any software, game, movie, song anytime, anywhere. And guess what? The device could be free with a two year subscription.

How?
Right now, internet connection speeds are getting faster and faster. Both wired and wireless technology is improving at an incredible speed. That along with compression/decompression techniques, such as codecs like divx, there will be a point where the connection between your computer and the internet will be comparable with the connection speed between a monitor and a desktop computer. Then you can connect to your computer from anywhere. Think of being able to bring your monitor (and keyboard and mouse) with you while they are wirelessly connected to your desktop.
You might say... "What? I can do it now!" And you would be right, this technology has been around for a long long time. Right now, you can use remote desktop (which is already included in windows) or VNC (which is free) or one of other various alternatives. One company already have a product to allow you to play Crysis on an eeepc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4cUl9WFv7g (streammygame.com) with this technology.
However what is lacking in all current systems is a reliable desktop replacement service. You might be able to connect to your computer if you have a server running 24/7, but latency will be a problem once you move out of your home wifi. But if there are multiple servers at strategic locations, latency can be overcome with fast connections to local servers. We got electricity to run to every house, it isn't unthinkable to have a reliable broadband there within the decade (but you have to give them the incentive).
This is different from the current trend of online utilities such as Google docs, where everything has to go through the browser and all the output changed into html. Using remote desktop technology, programmers will have more control over input and output, and users will still be able to choose between versions of the program to be installed on their virtual desktop.

Why?
Everything you need with a full desktop computer, you can do with a cellphone and a dataplan, but now you won't be wasting your hardware when you're not using it, which can make it cheaper. Connect any input/output device you want (monitor, keyboard, mouse, projector, speaker) and you have a cellphone-sized (and priced) computer. Even if you don't plan on taking your computer everywhere, you can save money on the computer you leave at home, and use it to get a better monitor and sound system.
Also, now that "your computer" is a virtual one running on servers, you will be able to access any content that is on the servers instantaneously (movies, songs, software) since they are actually on the same system. You will still need to pay for it, of course, but you can have your entire HD movie collection online, and it wouldn't take up any of your personal disc space the server only needs one copy.
Now what the "stupid user" actually have is only a connection device, servicing or replacement wouldn't be too bad. When there is a hardware problem, it will be solved at the server. When you have a software problem, just ask for techsupport to get a professional to fix your virtual computer online.

DRM, piracy, and online distribution
For this system, it makes much more sense to have all the content with the service provider, and have them distribute it to the user. Instead of everyone having a copy of a 700mb movie, it will save space to have just one copy which everyone that bought it can access. Here's where DRM comes into play.
DRM, or digital rights management, is a hated phrase for anyone who knows what it is. Instead of protecting your digital rights, as the acronym implies, it restricts them. You may only install this game on 3 computers, and no more. You can only listen to these songs if you have an internet connection to verify their authenticity. You have to jump through burning hoops if you wanted to make a parody out of the material you bought, as you are entitled to do. But what if DRM's actually protected everyone's rights, not just the content providers?
Instead of bringing some DVD's to a friends home only to find that no one likes them except you, just sign on to your account and you will be able to choose from an entire collection of your bad taste in movies.
Instead of going through the trouble of ripping a CD, then labelling it, then choosing the songs you like, then putting it on your sd card for your mp3 player and cellphone, you will be able to have complete access to everything you own on every device you have.
Instead of being sued for the theme song of the movie you made for a charity, your movie-making software will automatically credit the songwriter in the credits, and notify you how much you will need to pay for every commericial sale of your flick.
This is what will happen when all the content is on the centralized servers. You can buy access to the content, and they will be synchronized with every device you have through DRM. Your digital rights will be managed well. Piracy will be too much work for the general public to cut into the profits of anyone.

But!
So now, this technology will allow for a great cheap consumer product and might even eliminate piracy, but it comes with two huge caveats. In order for this to work well, you almost require a monopoly. If you switch providers, you instantly lose access to all of your digital possessions, so you're locked to a single provider (like ipod with itunes). In order to access your computer without lag, the provider will need to have servers in many local areas. It would be a great waste of money to have too many providers put up that many servers. This is good for the company with the monopoly, and it may also be good for the public because there will be enough profit from all the content being sold on the platform for the service to be free. However the risk of mismanagement is great.
Second, privacy will be another problem. Suppose this system was introduced in China or Australia, what will prevent the government from issuing a subpoena for all of your emails and documents? Even a single malicious hacker would be able to cause significant damage to your privacy.

Conclusion
Way back before computers weren't personal, universities used to have only a few computers that many researchers had to share together because they were so expensive. Now computers might come full circle, and return to big rooms with only a single wire connecting it to the world. Except now we can finally play Crysis on it.

The Search Engine That Could

2008-07-30T09:08:00.000-07:00

The cool thing about the technology behind search engines like Google is that it is the source to find ANYTHING. Whether you want recipes, telephone numbers, latest news, or pictures of your favorite rock star, you can type it into a search engine and find the stuff you want. The technology is pretty complex, because you're not just looking for a phrase in a large text, sometimes you need to understand the semantics of the language to pick up on the key phrases or determine the relevancy of the sites you index. It's very hard to get it right. But when you do, you got a money maker on your hands.

Even though we use search engines for pretty much anything online, I think that search engines are not doing anywhere near enough what they could be. Here's what I mean. Search engines are natural and essential when you have a database, and you can market a search algorithm for almost anything.

If you have a database of people's information, you need a search engine to find people. If you have a database of clothes, you need a search engine to find the clothes you want. Amazon, iTunes, Netflix are all high profile web companies that would dissolve into chaos if their search algorithm went bad. And I would suggest that all such algorithms are connected in some way.

Suppose someone wrote on their blog analyzing the moral complexities in the relatively unknown comic Dodobirdman and it gets a lot of page links in the next few hours, getting on the front page of Digg the next day, naturally, when you are browsing for books and you type in birdman, it'll suggest Dodobirdman and automatically spit out the newest volume of the comic, as well as Dodobirdman backpacks, and of course the popular Dodoman key chains. While when the reverse happens, and a book gets rave reviews and becomes a bestseller, webpages that refer to the things related to the book online should get more attention.

So the first idea is that a search engine company should be a search engine company. Sure, website search engines are very different than Amazon's recommendation system or the Digg algorithm, but they are all related. Why should a company spend money to go make the hardware with enough computing power to analyze all of its data, including the staff required to maintain it, or write a svm multiple tree and constantly update it with the latest in machine language research, when they have the option of outsourcing it to a reliable company?

There are many ways of providing such a search engine service and it might be pretty tricky to find the right way. The content and all the "signals" (as google puts it) may be confidential information from the client, and the search algorithm would be the business secret of the service, but the algorithm needs the data to work and when you're optimizing something like that, you're bound to access a little bit of both. One way is to make servers with a collection of different search engine tools built-in, that you can put your data on, as well as getting it processed the way you want to. Even if the hardware isn't top-notch, if your software is unique, companies would buy them like hot cakes.

I can probably write more about the subject, but unless you're microsoft, yahoo, or google, you probably won't be interested, so let's move on to IDEA 2!!!

One of the problems with search engines is the trade-off between search engine effectiveness and privacy. You can find out all of the interests of a particular user, and recommend them everything they are interested in with high accuracy, but you would need training data that people don't really want big-name companies to be keeping in their database. If search engines now can already provide relevant results, imagine what they could do with your private data.

So idea 2 would be to create a client-side search engine the keeps track of things you buy, the searches you do, the kinds of website that you like that does not in any way reveal your information to anyone else. It will be your personalized search engine. When you encounter any kind of large collection, say search result from google or recommendations from buy.com, the local search engine would take those results and reorder the priorities depending on past behavior of the user. Of course, to protect the privacy of its user, it will have to non-discriminately download the information about the things it wants to look for, increasing the bandwidth in a world where bandwidth matters less and less to companies.

If people find what they want, they'll buy more things. So the development of this software (like a browser plug-in, or browser feature) can be a collaborative effort from major web companies that will give the sponsors an advantage of understanding the inner workings of the local search engine for optimization, while still giving the means for startups to take advantage of the local search with little investment.

If this program REALLY behaves itself, maybe it will also be able to expand to giving adword-like little popups when you aren't online at all. It could respond to the text that it sees you typing into your computer, or programs that you have running. If this idea evolves to this stage though, there are many other things you can do with the personal e-butler. It might become so good that you won't ever miss out on any of the Dodobirdman memorabilia, ever again! WOOT!

side view mirrors

2008-07-07T05:56:00.001-07:00

Here's a quickee that's kinda related to the previous post.

In a car, you have a back-view mirror, and a rear-view mirror, and even with the 3 mirrors and windows on everyside, cars still have blindspots. Blindspots are dangerous.

If you have driven on mountain roads before, you should have seen some safety mirrors that show you what is around the corner. They are there so you can notice if there are any cars coming, but not necessarily to identify which kind of car it is. Those mirrors are not flat. They are convex so that you can see the widest range on the other side of the bend. So why are side-view mirrors flat?

When you look in your sideview, you may want to tell what is passing by behind you, so it should be flat for most of its surface area. But if the edges of these mirrors are rounded, even though you can't really see too clearly what is there, you can notice if there is something in your blind spot. That can make a difference between being 10 seconds late to your destination and flattening a scooter.... that has a whole family on it.

Bird's eye view glasses

2008-07-01T01:44:00.000-07:00

Skiing goggles are pretty cool. Since they have to block out the UV rays, the goggles have a lot of reflexive paint, so they come in all different kinds of colors. Yet even if the goggles were yellow, your eyes can adjust to the color, and after a few minutes, everything will look normal again. When you take them off, since your eyes had to compensate for the color, everything looks blue.

Despite how cool it is, people wearing glasses for the first time definitely should not go skiing, in fact, they are a bit dangerous even when they walk. That is because glasses not only refocus what they see, the skew their vision. If you're wearing glasses right now, just take a look at the rim of your glasses, and you will see that the refocused vision doesn't match up with your original vision. Yet your eyes can still adjust to them.

Back in the days when quake 2 was popular, some people would change their field of view to a much higher angle than normal. Even though targets become smaller, you get to see more of what is going on. With training, this becomes an advantage when you can frag opponents before they see you, and not vice-versa.

So, chances are likely that our visual system will be able to adjust if we make a helmet that feeds a 360 vision into our eyes. It can be done with cameras and monitors on your helmet. Birds typically have 300~340 field of vision, but they have little overlap in their vision, which reduces clarity and sense of 3D. So, ideally, there would still be a high overlapping region, but the other regions would be at a reduced scale, to increase peripheral vision. It might look weird if a guy walks around with a ball on his head. But for vehicles, such a helmet would increase reaction time.

Anyone could be trained to use the helmet, probably within a week. You might have to spend some time on hands-eye coordination, like playing catch a few other people, adjusting to the change in vision.

Then you won't have an excuse when you crash into a tree when you're skiiing.

The creation of a new catch phrase!

2008-06-30T23:48:00.000-07:00

Aighty, for this one, we'll need everybody's participation. Today, you will witness the start of a new catch phrase! Move over Shakespeare, we are going to change the spoken English language! So here it is:

"When I was my age, ..."

Usage:

1. The current state of affairs: When I was my age, I was the coolest kid on the block.

2. A statement of the norm: When I was my age, people didn't steal other people's girlfriends.

3. A sarcastic response to a well known fact. When I was my age, a nickel only cost a nickel. (meaning: thank you, captain obvious)

As of right now - July 1, 2008, there are Google 17 entries for "when I was my age":

Let's see how long it will take for this phrase to catch on. 5 years? 10 years? The countdown will officially stop when it gets picked up by a writer for a movie or tv show. I want to hear people saying this EVERYWHERE!

So people! Get to it! Be a part of the history of the English language and say it to everyone you know!

online videos

2008-06-29T23:45:00.000-07:00

I love online videos, they're so cool. Except when I'm at home where the internet's ridiculously slow. Then they just become sooo not cool. They make you wait and wait and wait until you accidentally close firefox as you try to click the maximize button to enjoy the video, and when you finally find the page in the history, the video needs to be loaded again...

But... I dunno, even with fast internet, the online videos doesn't really stream well. I get bursts of download stuff, and then nothing for the next five minutes. So with the internet being so unreliable, is it okay if there's a "preload" button for each flash video? When I find a video I like, I open it in a new tab, start it up, then pause it, and then go on checking out other stuff until it's done loading. Do other people do that too? Well, I'm lazy. 4 actions are too much. why can't there be a html link with a GET entry to tell the flash to start loading the video? Then I'll be able to just ctrl- click on that link, and keep checking out the other cool videos, and go back to that when it's done loading.

I've been using veoh.com's veoh tv. It's pretty cool, it lets you preload the videos you wanna see, and you can put it in a playlist and watch all those videos together. GREAT IDEA! Well, now that you made internet videos into tv, why don't we go ALL the way? yes. Make the internet into a tv channel. uh huh. REVENGE OF THE COUCH POTATOES!

Here's how it'll work. First, go to the top blog aggregator.. whatever it is. Use RSS to figure out a schedule for the posts. Go download the text, and pipe it into your favorite text-to-speech software. Display the corresponding media according to how it was arranged in the post. There we go! blog-to-tv converter. Now, if someone has even more time on their hands, make the text-to-speech software also produce a video of someone saying it. Depending on the mood -- which you can find out by matching some keywords to the blog or the post. You can have your own news broadcast just by typing up an article, and uploading some pictures. On the client-side, we can make couch potatoes just like that. But if the content creator wants more control, there could be a css-like entry, except it will be for how to display the page in video.

Okay. But the magic of internet is that you can choose what you want to see. The HT in HTML is about how a web page connects to another. So, to make an tv service outta the internet, you can't do what tv does now with numbers as channels. Web content needs a different method of navigation. Opera had a feature that showed all the links in a webpage, but just listing them off would give too many links for it to be usable. Find all the important ones, or categorize the links according to their role in the webpage. Navigational links in the webpage should always be accessible. If a link shows up where the automated reader is reading, that should be easily accessible too. Search should be incorporated as well. It should allow you to easily search the key phrases in the text.

The internet is better than TV in every way possible. Media companies just need to figure out how to make it into a good consumer product. So GET OFF your lazy butts and make me a product, so we can go back to the good ol' days of sitting on the couch and being lazy butts!

Can you hear me now? No? Good!

2008-06-24T06:46:00.000-07:00

Don't you just hate it when you go to church or class or meeting, and then your cell phone goes off, and then everyone looks at you weird, and then they start giving warnings to tell people to turn off their cell phones? YA awkward.... So here's one for whoever's trying to beat Apple's iphone.

Cell phone! you KNOW where I am. I personally don't mind at all (and I doubt many people care) if you snoop on my life a bit and find out where I go, listen in on the surrounding, GIVEN that you don't tell everyone and their moms, especially not the cell phone company CEO's mom. So help me by following these simple rules:

1. Check my schedule --
I scheduled an meeting with Mr. Mai P. Lowe in the afternoon at one. It's important. Go to silent automatically.

2. Check my location --
If I'm in a school building, in a classroom, and sitting in the front row seat, I want to make sure I don't miss a call from my buddy asking if I left for class yet. YA. Go to silent.

3. Check the surrounding --
The ambient noise is really quiet, only one voice is speaking with great emotional distress. Que the theme song for Naruto! WOOT! no. Go to silent.

4. Respond to signals --
Make a cross platform device that will signal cell phones to go silent, and make sure cell phones obey it! If the CEO's of cell phone companies won't cooperate, call bomb them while they're all at a meeting discussing why they don't need the device.

Use machine learning techniques and learn where the user wants the cell phone on silent -- like when he fumbles to get out his cell phone as soon as possible to turn it off. Of course, when you're trying to be smart, always show the user what you've learned so the user can change the setting manually in case you were wrong.

Here's another thing... I want my cell phone on vibrate because even though it has to be quiet, I would like to know if someone needs to find me for something important. So, first off, if I'm carrying the phone and didn't realize that it's been going off for a long time, it's okay, make a little beep.

Second, can we have a cell phone service for emergencies or really important calls? Like charge an extra cent per minute or something, but make sure that the ringer is on loud enough on the other end. When the automatic response comes up for the voicemail, add one more option for important calls. Of course, calls from Mr. Boss will always be important, especially when my alarm clock didn't go off in the morning. Make the ringing louder and louder until I respond. It'll save more than a few lives, it'll like save bad murder mystery novels that need non-responsive phones as a plot device.
(NOTE: if you like this idea, PLEASE REMEMBER to allow users to disable important calls from their obnoxious friends.)

Will you look at that! Right now my schedule says: sleep, my location: bed, so interweb, please go silent!

Goal Achievement Programming Language -prologue

2008-06-23T07:27:00.000-07:00

Okok, this is going to be one that you'll get to see to more than vague ideas. Here's one that I'll be trying to really carry out. So if you have any suggestions, please lemme know, I'll try to put it into the project!

Programming. Did that scare you off? Well, it should. LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND hWnd,UINT message,WPARAM wParam,LPARAM lParam); How about now? Well, pretty much every program in windows needs that line. It will take you forever to figure out what each of those really mean, which you will need to do to for ANY kind of simple windows program. And, when you finally do know how to use each argument, CONGRATS! that was only the first line. you have 9,999 to go to make your tic-tac-toe game. WOOT!

Now you see why the biggest software company in the world have trouble making a new operating system? Yes, you can write "Hello World" in your favorite language. No, you won't be able to write a commercial program anytime soon.

There is a great book on programming, called "the Mythical Man-Month," and in it was an article about the hope of developing a silver bullet that will kill the werewolf that is programming. Programming projects look all innocent and friendly at first, but whenever the moon shines, they turn into creatures that will rip you from limb to limb.

Yet, why does it have to be so complicated? What is programming? "Programming is planning how to solve a problem. No matter what method is used -- pencil and paper, slide rule, adding machine, or computer -problem solving requires programming. Of course, how one programs depends on the device one uses in problem solving." (http://bytes.com) Okay, who knows how to explain how to cook something? What you explained is a plan to solve a problem. You know how to program. Who knows a winning strategy for tic-tac-toe? A strategy is a plan. You know how to program. Who has written a schedule for an assignment? That's a plan. You know how to program. Get the idea? You know how to program, no matter who you are.

So why is it so hard to program? Well, let's look back to the example.

... WndProc(...) is a function call. LRESULT is a "long" integer that saves information about how it ran. CALLBACK is to make this function callable by the windows kernel which you'll need to know about whatever happens in the OS.... etc, etc.

and what did you want to do?

Make a 3x3 board, click on the board, making either an "x" or an "o," and display "x wins" when there's a line of 3 x's.

So what is programming? Translation. To "program" your little sister to bake a cake, you have to first know what she can understand, and explain the recipe to her in her language -- "open up this case-y waysee, pour it into the bowl-y wolee, add water and mix-y wicksee". What makes it hard? There are too many details to understand for computers.

In our first example, "LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND hWnd,UINT message,WPARAM wParam,LPARAM lParam)." You need to know the structure of windows programs. You need to know how to set certain properties. You need to know LRESULT has typically been used for windows procedure return values, but can be #define'd as something else and give you weird error messages when you compile. The problem, the big problem is that how we think about windows isn't how the computer thinks of windows. So when you want to resize a window, you're clueless about what to tell the computer.

Now, some of it is necessary. You need to know that Windows calls each program and sends messages (like mouse-clicks) that you need to respond to. Others aren't. You shouldn't have to know memory management, stacks, scheduling algorithms. They are important, yes. Necessary, no. You should be able to tweak each aspect to work exactly the way you want it to, but you shouldn't HAVE to program the details everytime.

A programming language should allow you to describe the algorithm (how to do it), and a good one should allow you to not worry about anything else. When you're playing chess, you should focus on what pieces to move, and not how you're going to signal your arms and hands to move your pieces.

The solution? Program the algorithm, and not the process. That's it. There's your silver bullet.

Shuffle the cards, then deal out the cards.
-- This is an algorithm.

#include "Cards.h"
int main(void){
Cards myDeck;
shuffle(myDeck);
deal(myDeck);
return 0;
}
-- This is a process. It looks like an algorithm, but this is a totally different animal. It creates an object myDeck, then calls two functions on the object. To the compiler, the names mean nothing. Even though you want to create a set of new "Cards" named "myDeck," shuffle it, then deal it, the computer may understand it as create a nuclear bomb, set it, then detonate it in insert-favorite-city-here. It all depends on what you told the computer "Cards" are, and how to "shuffle," and how to "deal." You see? This is programming a process, it includes EVERY minute detail about how this program will run. Don't be fooled by the compiler, linker, or the included files/libraries. The entire process of register assignment, stack creation, memory allocation is included in this code. They are just hidden for readability.

Let's look at the algorithm again, because I kinda cheated. We didn't specify what "shuffle" and "deal" was. If they are function calls, we've just created another process. What you meant by "shuffle the cards" doesn't mean you do EXACTLY what you did last time you played poker, including scratching your itchy arms (calling some specific function), but "make the cards random", which is what shuffle means. Just as long as you got the cards random, it doesn't matter if you riffled the cards, pulled out a bunch and put it on the top, or played 52 card pickup, just as long as it is done. The algorithm actually means:

Get the cards randomized, then get the cards dealt.

This is goal achievement programming. Specify the sequence of goals to accomplish, and not the functions to call. Tell the computer the algorithm, and let it figure out the rest. Not too hard right?

There's a reason why "Artificial Intelligence" is a programming problem. Intelligence, regardless of its form, at its core, is programming. Anyone intelligent enough to speak could learn how to program IF you can make the computer understand you by only telling it the algorithm. "Open a new window, draw a 3x3 grid, make each box clickable." Your little sister can understand it, so why can't a computer?

RPG's rock, are cool to throw at boys

2008-06-22T17:29:00.000-07:00

RPG's have been around for a while. It's a really funny thing. You could hear "I've just used up my mana replenishing HP for my team, " and it would be so common, you wouldn't even know which game they were playing. However, 20 years ago, "mana" was the bread-like thing in the ark, and HP was a novelist that had a cool last name (Lovecraft for you lame-o's). Now almost every game have some kind of hp and some kinda mana and some kinda hp replenishing thing.

The idea I've got today isn't to eliminate the tradition and make a game without hp or experience or levels, which are great for a progressive interactive game, but just to change the environment a bit. Make RPG's for sports, or racing, or cooking. No, no, not like the way they do it now, an action game with some skills, and some stats for cars and players. Like a real RPG, with random encounters, items, HP's, and missions.

Look how cool it would work out. You "walk around" with your car on the world map, and randomly encounter 3 patrol cars. The first round, you were surprised and the three patrol cars bump you for 15 damage total. It's your turn, and you cast "turn into alley," the spell misses one patrol car, but causes the remainding two to crash into obstacles dealing 30 damage each and removing them from the chase. The last enemy casts "NOS," bumps into you from behind, and forces you to use your own NOS, minus 20 mana and 20 health for you. You use the item oil, and cause the enemy to slide on the slick pavement and crash into a parked car. Victory! You gain 70 gp and 100 exp and find "motor oil". You see, it'll work.

Okay, whatever... right? It's just the same ol' stuff, except some unimportant stuff are changed around. But with this, you can do a lotta cool things with an already accepted system. Developers wouldn't have to waste money on trying out different systems and testing it out to make sure it's fun then changing the whole thing when it isn't. They get to focus on the story and the graphics. You know how some people like to see cool car chases, but aren't nimble enough with their gaming thumbs to be good at racing games? Well, the random battles can be like a racing simulation, but controlled by an AI. Games are supposed to make people feel like they are a part of the action. Programmers can make that part of the action really cool, without making it too hard for players to enjoy it.

Also, with a new environment, the RPG genre would have more ways to innovate. Say you have a basketball rpg game, where positioning matters a lot. If you can make a rpg outta that, future sword-and-magic rpg games would be able to incorporate some positioning ideas in different ways than before.

If the Japanese can make season-long drama's about random stuff like cooking and hair-cutting and architecture, why are rpg's always in the same fantasy world? Here is a system that has withstood the trial of time, but kept away from its true potential. So equip your compiler, cast level 3 haste on your party, and make us a cool game!

desktop-like Desktops

2008-06-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

I know it's hard to believe for young'ens, but most of you out there probably remember a time before all the computer terms. Remember the "information superhighway"? Or the first time you used "bookmarks". Now, what about "desktops"? like way back in windows 3.1... when you start windows by typing "win" do you remember first hearing about those?

Wasn't that an interesting way of introducing a new user interface? See this picture thing? It's just like your desktop, you can put stuff on it and it's where you can do your work. Except back in 3.1, computers weren't very impressive. The "desktop" was just a wallpaper image with files and shortcuts.

Fast forward fifteen years, to Windows Vista, Apple Leopard, Ubuntu H. The "desktop" works exactly the same way it did before -- namely, nothing. "Go to Desktop" actually means "clear off all these pesky windows." Oh, there are little things here and there, like the pretty windows effects, cool alt-tab animations, and apple has them cool things for show-offs to show off, but it's pretty much the same ol' useless desktop that you'll need to clear off every few months.

When I'm in the office, whether I'm busy filing papers or pretending to file papers with a stapler and some post-it notes, my desktop is always packed with stuff I need. Student records, telephone book, pens, blank sheets of paper, a sycophant made out of 7 staples on a sticky note, it's all there, right where I need them.

On Windows, when you are trying to be productive, you'll probably have word, email, online thesaurus, some classical music, and minesweeper all opened at the same time. You don't really want your aim on (at least not with sound), and probably want excel and pdf to be preloaded so checking some xls files won't take up 2 minutes each, and you ABSOLUTELY do not want windows update to restart your computer for any reason(unless you're really desperate for an excuse).

It would also be nice to have friendly timer that reminds you of lunch breaks and when you get off work and when your boss is in a meeting. You'll also want to access all the latest documents without searching through each subfolder in "my documents."

Yet, this is only if you're at work. If you bring your computer back home, you don't want to look at all the files that you almost finished at work or any of your TODO lists. It just needs to open up the walkthough for mass effect and start the game.

So, to design a desktop-like Desktop, the experience has to be about productivity -- what does a user need to do their work? How does an operating system help the user to get stuff done? We have the machinery, just gotta put it together. Why did people care about tabbed browsing? It's the SAME EXACT thing as having multiple windows opened, except that you can actually read the words on the toolbar when you open more than five webpages. Organize the desktop programmers!

First off, programs. Each program needs to have different session information. Look at unix. Boot up, and it'll automatically load the programs you had when you shut it off. That's great, but let's have more of that. Give users the ability to save the session and come back to it later. I'm opening up wikipedia, dictionary.com, google, work gmail on firefox, and I'm gonna have a sleepy music playlist on winamp for work. At home, I want to have ebay, personal gmail, amazon.com opened on firefox, and some cool music playlist on winamp. If your program have sessions, let the user save them.

Second, workspace. Don't have just one, have many. Look at how cool compiz fusion is. Linux/unix have had them around for ages. But it's not just a cool, geeky feature, it helps the user organize the programs that are running. Which also means each workspace should have its own session information. Place the time widget on the workspace for work, and don't put it on the workspace for play, and remember it the next time I get on those workspaces. Make it easy for the user to change between different workspaces. In fact, forget about "creating a new workspace" and "closing this workspace". Do it automatically. When the user leaves the workspace for a set period of time or need the resources for something else, set that workspace to standby. Save sessions, autosave documents, copy the memory to the disc and free the memory.

Third, files. Each workspace should remember the files that have changed when it's opened. If the os doesn't want to do it, save enough information someplace and let other programs suggest the files you'll be interested in. Have I ever told anyone how much I hate organizing my desktop? URG! common, stuff I put on there from 8:00~4:00 are for work, and stuff after are for play. If I only accessed the file once ever (like an installation file), it probably doesn't need to waste space on my cluttered desktop. It's common sense, people! Now, of course files needs to be saved somewhere so that you can find it from your file directory. But is it really necessary to have the desktop to only contain files in the c:\documents and settings\username\desktop ? Having a video in the background, and do a little google magic to find out what programs I wanna run and what files I want to use, okay?

Speaking of which, here's a little tangrant on files -- WHY ARE THERE SO MANY FILES!!!!???? Out of the 5 gazillion files I have on my hd, I created 50, regularly use 70, want to keep 90, and what are all the other 5 gazillion minus 210 files doing there? They're just waiting for me to mistakenly delete them and destroy my computer. Yahyah, I know what you're thinking, you need those files to run windows, and it's the data file for such and such program, and you need the dll's to be separate files so other programs can use it, blah blah. WHO cares!!?? The user only wants to know what it is and what to do with it. Windows has the right idea when it hides system files, but what about other program's "system files"? Use metadata and organize the filesystem, which programs uses which files, which ones are supposedly user accessible, and which aren't. Unless they are 1337 programmers, users probably won't be changing any binary files, so don't let the user or other programs change binary files with any program without a sudo. It's user permission for programs. File x belongs to program y, other programs may read x, but only program y can change the file. Linux/unix uses home directories to separate user stuff from system stuff. But what if I want to see which files WoW has accessed, or I suspect a program is infected? Permissions / easily accessed log files will go a long way.

We use computers everyday but with the way we have to bend over backwards to get the simplest stuff to work the way we want it, it's like computers are using us. Here are just a few of my ideas to make the desktop better. So... Anyone up to the task?

Post-it art

2008-06-17T23:26:00.000-07:00

Post-it-to-the-staple people!!

A good day at the office

A bad day at the office

HAR HAR HAR

Why I am forced to make more ...