It would be expensive and would need closely watched piloting but a system of ceiling mounted (secured and closed up with the ventilation and such when not in deployment) turrets which a principal or other school official might be able to patch direct control to local police who would remotely interdict.
too expensive to make many firing mechanisms but could construct isolated ammo delivery and turret relocation system where one or more just goes to a chosen mount point. similar movable sensor / targeting modules to common faceplate or some such. In something like a bank / hospital vacuum tube transport system.
All students and staff should carry ID or wear a bracelet for identification, in such a case where full automated system use is required in emergency.
it needs to find a path to eliminate the threat, with a high degree of certainty.
The matter can be reduced to risk management. Securing a facility may be easier than trying to remove distributed weapons. It is more likely to succeed than trying to take guns from Americans (not going to happen without GENERATIONAL changes), who consider firearms part of their personal risk management strategy – or can certainly claim this argument.
Consider real cost – these are our nurseries. These lives have been polluted in ways that will take decades to unravel for each individual. These children bore the potential to see an absolute paradigm shift (increment be damned) in how we live our lives and could have been our first emmisaries into a world unborn. They might have lived for hundreds of years, or as long as they choose. We are that close and its been snuffed for them. Horrific.
Manage this risk. If you need 5sec system response time for execution of command you cannot use humans. the principal should be able to scream secure the school like they mean it and have it happen. period.
I have no children. If I have to pay 500 extra in taxes each year so that we can fit doors to isolate an intruder and compartmentalize damage that can be achieved by a madman tell me where to send the check.
SDD, known good hardware, known fixed 1080p screen size and multitouch capabilities, corporate control, pen (natural transition to touchiness)
MS should demo a locked GPO set with apps distro, system center stuff and lay it down in classrooms. it should all be driven by surface pros.
surface pros / known capability compute node units might be one day linked into clusters via a hyperv controller and made into slottable nodes for class / school scenarios.
Imagine a library or school or other system you will that might devote a percentage of their resources to business process / presence / running their sites, securing their gateways, and a percentage to presentation, or usage by users.
imagine again a selection of available capabilities for a corporation where I might only be able to have email services if I have 2 or more of the tablets docked with the server / charge / maintenance bay unit.
I might only be able to have live meeting / voip / sip capabilities for 16/32 users per surface pro tablet devoted to that. if there is a confirmed known good hardware node in known good network QoS configuration in appropriate locations.
I might choose to devote a system to extend Remote Desktop or application services to a group of relic but networked systems, or do some kind of multi point thing.
its all on ssd. the nodes (blade servers / surface pros in this case) all have good hardware, good enough cpu and capable IO storage and USB transfer speeds.
they could be rapidly reimaged to perform any number of tasks.
…they’d look so nice lined up in a special vertical charging station for 30 units a little more than they do spinning around with mean looking school girl anger dancers (odd commercial).
that’s the shit they hand out in shinji’s class on the first day at nerv. if he drops it in the tub mommy and daddy get a bill and he’s up online in the morning with his laundry and the IT man just smiles. there’s a market.
wipe them between classes. students please pick up your tablet, take exam. it gets wiped. recycle. student takes personal backup of exam, notes, recording of class audio / vid etc. on bitlocker-to-go ID device with integrated storage – that f*ing talks. yay.
excellent training for IT teams imo – so can be ready to deploy the coming wave of touch enabled laptops tablets and desktops.
sufficient storage to do some neat things, sufficient CPU and RAM to make hyperv do something creative. Good ramp to the bigger version.
known node ‘size’ and capabilities. might be useful for multi computer processing tasks, this cloudlet stuff they should be doing more of on cell phones for things like traffic jam avoidance systems (oncoming traffic comms you traffic data its seen if smartphone user running navigation etc.) over public wifi it tries to cluster along road in dynamic smartphone net (easier to put up when participating nodes jammed or slowed in traffic so they gather more data then. the when they move they tell oncoming traffic about jam, who go on to tell people behind slowed communicator).
it would be nice to have the idea of known hardware tether capability to other MS systems in cars like that sync thing. tethered processing resource / capabilities provider / storage / media etc. dnla can it do wifi? dunno at all.. nm for now.
they need to make a good messenger bag for it with solar charge sewn in.
also a fancy battery with a panel, or one of the soft keyboards they do with a panel on the underside.
even if its trickle, people would pay for the extension. especially with usb 3.0 charge port capabilities for cell phones and other devices over usb. it becomes a power station. make a pretty app that shows the world wide combined power generation. easy win. id pay 200-500 to the kickstand to have cells in it.
backside of kickstand so when open solar panel angles towards sky as user user uses in workstation mode.
YES – if MS is serious – 3.5kUSD lmited ed version of surface pro. suitably specced. WACOM digitizer built in (see sony duo 11!) – that’d be showcase and openly stated forward test model. like a front webcam version of kinect, or a nub that sticks out a bit and gives near touch sense capabilities with IR – i’m imagining air hockey rink edges catching IR in a manner perhaps like that which is used for the wrist mounted camera MS is working on – Digits . http://youtu.be/Tm2IuVfNEGk. perhaps a targeted version that scans the area near the surface of the touch screen. they could call it the surface ; line. change the color of it with every edition. OFFER 1000 dollar full graphic lazer engraving customization option… yes… this things supposed to be the best you can do.
sweeten the deal with a tier of msdn universal that comes with a swap program where you get to trade up your included version of this thing with every new edition. couple that with live dev support. make it UNGODLY expensive.
envy, and available power. not in anyones face, just there for those that know it.
that or an untrasound thingama-bogobob that does the sme thing but with v low power.
mayhaps they’ll figure out how to do short range, low power scintillations to project image up off side mounted things. who knows? someone did make a machine that’d make cloud’s indoors. steamy laptops? Gorilla glass has got their work cut out for them.
;
paste eating Microsoft needs to play hard, fast red-black.
I have come to realize that as an American it is impossible to exist without a credit card.
Case in point… When renting a minivan to cross the USA from VA to CA I went into the Dulles Airport National Car Rental location thinking I could pay with my VISA debit no bother. Turns out when I got there they told me the only way I could rent with a debit card is if I had a plane ticket. I did not have a plane ticket…
I do have one credit card, having deliberately closed all others I had. This card is for absolute emergencies and only has a 500 dollar limit. You cannot rent a minivan for a week for 500 dollars from National (or anyone else in my searching for that matter). This presented a problem.
The manager at National came up with a clever solution – he’d pre-authorize 4 days worth – which was within my 500 cap. Note I say pre-authorize, not charge. I told him ‘this won’t work if you try to pre-authorize more as the cap is 500’. He told me not to worry and that everything would be OK – and that he’d put a note on the rental agreement.
So today comes and I call them to sort out the remainder of the payment. I explain plan was to pay off the amount owed and then to pre-authorize or charge the rest. I get told this is impossible and that the ONLY option would be to pre-authorize more on the credit card. If I couldn’t do this then I’d need to return the car to Dulles immediately. That wasn’t going to happen as I’m currently in middle-of-nowhere Iowa.
So the National person told me they’d be issuing a warrant for my arrest! This, of course, I found quite disturbing. I then called the Dulles place again, to try to speak with the manager who came up with this scheme.
The on-duty manageress was insisting that I should have not rented the car if I knew my credit card limit was 500. I contested that I should never have been rented the car if the payment arrangement I explained at the outset was a problem.
After 2 hours of hoping I didn’t get picked up by the next state trooper I get a call back saying they’ll take my debit card now – which sorted everything.
Moral of the story is… you need a damned credit card to do anything in this country.
My postings have been disrupted by a combination of being focused on work I cannot discuss publicly (there’s a hint in my previous post) and preparations to move cross country!
…So I’m packing up my stuff and moving to CA. Staying with my current employer, who are wonderfully flexible to say the least.
To keep expenses down I’ve opted to work with a moving company which charges reasonably as long as you have 10 or fewer ‘things’. These can be boxes, a piece of furniture or bed etc. Anything 2 men can lift.
This is a good exercise for me in looking at attachment – and perhaps a vision into my weaknesses. I’ve never been a very materially focused person but this reduction is quite sharp. So with that in mind… My 10 things (computers don’t count as I’m lugging them in the car) :
1. Box of clothes (not really optional)
2. Another box of clothes
3. TV 1
4. TV 2
5. Box of books
6. Kitchen Aid Food Mixer / microwave / blender / cutlery all disguised in one box
7. Bed
8. Table
9. Chair 1
10. Chair 2
I’ll be eating off paper plates for a while 😉
The 14th of March brings for Justin, the two dogs and I one hell of a trip. I’ve never had the pleasure of driving across the States (VA >>> CA), and am really looking forward to it. Justin’s convinced the journey can be done in 3 days… I’m not so sure. I think 5. At least…
Ran across a forum post and felt compelled to respond earlier this morning. The OP’s post in purple and my thoughts below. from http://bit.ly/eXu8C1 :
“People will spout off nonsense about how casuals make up a certain large percentage of an MMO. For the most part, they are probably right. Casuals do make up a larger percentage than hardcore players do. When I say hardcore players I mean the ones that play the game to be challenged, don’t expect equal rewards for logging on an hour a day to accept and complete mindless quests, and most importantly want to GROUP up to tackle new adventures.
Hardcore people albiet make up a minority now, are still the most vocal when it comes to their games. If the hardcore players are not satisfied with a game, and subsequently leave, what happends to the game? Even a game like vangaurd with a devoited following of semi to hardcore players manages to survive. We are the ones that come up with the good specs, the strategies to defeat end game content in the most effiecent way possible, ways to pvp well, and we are usually the ones sending bug reports and feedback into the devs.
What does all of this mean? It means the devs shouldn’t listen to all this pander about casual gear and causual that. If you dont’ have time to play an MMO then there are other hobbies you can enjoy and get more from. Hardcore players are the ones which will always truely keep a game afloat…every game has them. Just because you can’t meet the system requirements of the game, (which along with a dual core processor should include 20+ hours a week of game time) you shouldn’t impose your watered down gameplay mechanics on all of us that want to play this game in a state that is actually concitered to be entertainment.
Thank you for listening to my rant!!”
remember OP – the ‘hardcore’ provide for the casuals an image of something they can never have. Its important to generate envy as a form of desire – “it should have been me, it should belong to me”… keeps them subs goin.
You’re not going to please both camps entirely when both follow the same pattern of loot lust and longing; and gone are the days where people put more time into their mmo than they do into their career / education / lives. This is not true for everybody, but a likely majority. I don’t think people have the attention span for such things any more, let alone the time. For the majority, like it or not, an mmo which requires 4-8 hours a day 7 days a week to be properly competitive with regard to progression has become an obscenity.
As the gaming populace continues to expand, the hardcore of the early 2000s and before move into career / familial / blah responsibilities that require their attention to the point where it impacts such devotion to a game. New folk come in, with a different mindset and fully aware of the hundreds of virtual worlds they can pay / free-to-play. As a concept, the online world is diluted, and no one of them is as unique as it used to be. When such wide choice exists, and with time as a constraint, the casuals seek maximum fulfillment per unit time invested. They’re going to pick the wow over the aion, if you catch my drift. Designers are of course aware of this.
Additionally we have artists and creators as game developers and the plethora of disciplines that surround creating such a complex system. Those creators are likely to want people to see their works. they’re going to lower the bar.
At best you’re going to get a world that is tolerable to the spectrum of playerbase (extreme fluff casual <-> darkest of hardcore). That’s going to require a flattening of requirement / complexity / what it takes time wise as investment to achieve goals.
As designers shift away from things like attunements, hard gap tiering etc. the hardcore player might feel disillusioned. but they’re forgetting something – status fades. if you want the best stuff available now then you need to work your ass off for it. but guess what?! in 6-8 months at most it’ll be garbage.
the system must continue to provide incentive. the most powerful incentive is loot.
the casual sees the Bugati the hardcore is driving around in and longs for that power… and now they can get it, it just takes longer and when they do they find the hardcore has the newer model with 10% more horsepower or whatever. stupid analogy aside the wheel of progression must continue to rotate for all players. just as the hardcore must compete with themselves and stay ahead of the scrubs, so exist multiple other tiers trying to do the same at all levels of player skill / time / capability. Hardcore chase the dragon, casuals chase your shadow.
least that’s why I think we see a flattening.
All hail the addiction engine! casuals and hardcore alike.
We’ve killed countless thousands in video games, often tangible reward is measured from split skulls and dismembered corpses. After no time at all the crimson tide that accompanies the grand theft auto enthusiast or hero of legend x becomes a muted background – a vehicle for and mantra in delivery to progression. So much so that anyone thinking video game violence will somehow motivate a player to war must take note that most of the butality is SO amplified that it becomes unreal in the mind of the player. A distilled vision of dark elements of the mind. The flailing overdone ragdoll physics as a protaganist zaps some poor sod’s ruining with arsenals that range from the modern soldier’s wet dream to the ancient, powerful and arcane is something that’s neat to do and watch but is more about the experience of doing than taking with you after play.
That was… until earlier today.
Imagine the scene (from fallout: new vegas, a game I heartily recommend). My fellow is dark, and almost impossibly strong. He wears armor he stole from the corpse of an official; a member of a group of beleaguered militia men known as the New California Republic. My character and these folk are not friends. He is in their territory looking for a place to sleep away the battles of the day. Its not a nice place, this distopian Las Vegas. It was devastated in the nuclear war of 2077 with China (no prizes, mutually assured and realized destruction), and much of the surrounds beyond the damaged but still workable Hoover dam and Vegas strip are overrun with neglect, the worst of mankinds mind, and radiation which has seeped into the ground over the 11 years that precede my character’s birth in this land.
So there’s houses, it looks like a beat up part of Baltimore, MD (really Novac) – wooden buildings with metal roofs, left in the rain too long. Stuff’s rusty. Hardly surprising considering the developers, Bethesda Softworks is based in Baltimore. Like Fallout 3 before it (set in and around DC, a blast to play if you’ve lived in the area) you can see the influences of baltimore architecture (particularly the slummy areas, all twisted, cave like industrial era) echoed in the games art and map design, a mark left when transposed to the Mohave by Obsidian Entertainment.
I open the back door of the home; one of my skills for the apocalypse is a proficiency at lock picking – and a good supply of bobby pins. I make for the bedroom to rest. There’s a lady though, a wastelander woman. There may have been kids once, there’s a sodden teddy bear stained with spilled sunset sarsaparilla next to some surgical tubing and a spent needle. yep… Baltimore. Her dead kids or not i need a bed. She challenges me, dragging my character into a dialogue.
Typical Days for Wasteland Cowboys
In New Vegas your character has many options to customize him or herself. In conversations with the various ai NPCs throughout the game options will vary greatly based on how you’ve chosen to customize your character as well as how you’ve conducted yourself with both an NPCs faction and as a karmic alignment you can consider as -1000<x<1000. If a character has great knowledge of science they may be able to command robot to cease guarding an arms cache, or a woman with special customizations or ‘perks’ might be able to use her charms to convince bandits to let her by ‘unharmed’. The result is wildly varying play experiences throughout the path of a character’s advancement based on forcing development into areas all of which one character could not easily achieve high aptitude with.
My guys strong, smart, cant handle big iron cowboy gun crap worth a damn but can swing his fists to the point he can punch the head off raiders who dare approach him. When you save your game the file is titled with a summary of your character karmic standing. Mine now is refered to simply as ‘fiend’. Apt.
“Who the fuck are you? Why the hell are you in my house. Get Out!” This seems reasonable, I’ve broken in at night – a big afro-american brawler in bloody leather armor with a machete.
“Hang on, I just want to ask you some questions…” I’m still thinking she might be another generic plot advancing blip of xp I can milk before slaying.
“I don’t care who you are or what the fuck you want. you get out of my house right now!” I’d be terrified, and would like to think I’d muster the same response. I’m about to leave, she’s basically right – I did come into her house.
But the system presents me with a couple of dialogue options. One of which is too hard for my character to resist:
“<ATTACK> Bitch you had your chance!”
Now this is it! We’ve gone past ludicrous to a sublime of satisfaction. She wouldn’t answer my character’s questions, wasn’t instantly helpful. So she would pay the price. I punched her head off in a special slo-mo version of combat a player can invoke at will for extra damage, accuracy and death cinematics.
I’m chuckling away to myself even after hours of doing this. A perfect capture of how a situation can escalate from tense to absurd in seconds – what it would be to exist as a ‘fiend’, an unhinged murderer in a post-apoc lightly steampunk vegas. Best not get in his way.
So you can tear through however you like. Its really nice to see how the writers have given options even in tiny encounters like that for you to play however you like.
Vegas is all busted
I hear were I a woman character, and if I were both highly charismatic and a good talker that I could have a brief evening of sexy time with my character’s poor murder victim. So that NPC you brutally slaughtered – in some other player’s universe – is watching the radon glow of the sunrise after a night which went entirely differently. That kind of lets you disconnect yourself from the violence.
You really need to, and look on games like this as reflections of aspects of yourself. I’m not saying the player is a murderer deep down. But the ridiculous amplification of violence being repeated over and over is a form of meditation on the subject, and on the root delusion of hate. The video game experience allows the player to examine the thoughts that arise when this part of the mind is given attention. Compassion be extended to the person who chooses to over-nuture and encourage abstraction of that examination of the extreme into something they take with them into the real world.
Warping of art, that being the said meditation on violence or other negative aspect of humanity, can occur as vividly via any media – and if present strongly in the person, sponteneously. A book or speech can motivate a man to war as feverently as the giggled-up on ritalin angst filled teen is moved by Modern Warefare: Covert Ops to beat street people with a stick.
enjoying himself? sounds dangerous!
Why then the perception that video games are a special case? I would suggest that it is an acceleration of the media’s capability to interact with the user’ mind, and the changes we’ve seen in media form factor and interface. There is an immediacy of message delivery associated with intense visual and auditory stimulation, coupled with ever increasing interactivity that older media simply cannot replicate. I am physically tired after my ‘kinect adventures’ – running in place or about to some dance game or swinging my arms slicing people up or holding a fake rifle which appears on the screen where I point it. Chucking grenades for 2h is tiring. I’m sleepy and dreamy after Alice in Wonderland but I’m not exhausted and I’ve had no physical experience tying me to the media’s plot. Different. Maybe better? More capable as a delivery vector of content producer stuff into the minds of consumers? yes, ultimately more than likely.
The multi-sensory stimulation of video games, and the grip the experience has on people, can be intimidating to the onlooker. To those not familiar the practice appears to border on obsession. This is because the media experience is more intense than what can be otherwise achieved and users tend over time to seek like entertainment as other stuff seems ‘boring’. Why play the scrabble board game when I can play with 31 friends in a virtual tournament with voice and video chat? Statego or Civ 5? Why read a book for 4 hours a day before sleep (once upon a time a common practice) when my villages in Fable 3 require upkeep so that shop keepers do not strike and my renters keep paying? In a world where time exists as a currency of cost the value of the family bonding that comes from playing a board game or the relaxation of reading fiction is not undone but is diminished by instant gratification and what amounts to simply more experience per unit time. The rate of experience is higher when a more interactive medium is utilized for the experience. In gaming terms better xp.
The human seeks maximum return on investment for its leisure activities. Thus after exposure to a medium which delivers entertainment more effectively per unit time the user can find other media lack luster, and will gravitate towards the medium providing maximum return on invested time. The user may appear to become ‘addicted’ to video games, as an example. But this can happen with anything. Hand’s up all the children who were a bit spacey and disconnected from the real world (because it didnt seem quite real) and really enjoyed reading. The activity encourages the activity but also disassociation with the ‘real’, and rewards interface proficiency with further capability to exploit the topic proficiency, and awards knowledge or emotional growth to the user. A cyclical model which tends to reinforce the patterns of behavior. The better reader moves on from Harry Potter and Tolkien. ‘Pro’ gamers do not play Hello Kitty Island Adventure.
note the 110$ cost, nice though
Couple now with a culture with uniforms of non-conformity and special bits and pieces ranging from keyboards which look scary when placed by the standard office affair to porcelain blue designer ear-phones with utility bottle openers tucked inside the band, or a Darpa Hoodie mathematically designed (at 110$) to keep you a little less windy and to substantially buff your outfit’s cosplay points. The gamer kid offends the eye of the outsider, not through his activities – but because he is a reflection of societal change. His periphery as eccentric as the ‘leisure activity’ is hard to equate to paradigm change in interaction.
The modern user adopts persona for interaction as interchangeable as the game cartridges they stuff into their 3DSs on the way to their Tokyo Beijing (LA) schools.
gotta catch em all
An element amplified (like bright blue over-ear earphones) is not out of place when the user sees objects in a different way. As distillations of aggregrate elements their games individually examine, given form. Like waving wii-mote at icon effecting response requires hand movement and specific motion, acts become rites of invocation and objects become their expression in form. Thus sound requires equipment, equipment is blue. There’s little thought beyond that, other than perhaps blue is pleasing.
odd black hoodie completing 'look' - check.
Video game masters (I do not use this term lightly) behind the Shin Megami Tensei series of video games have for over a decade explored the concept of gaming as meditation. There is a defined flow of subject matter and pace which directs the player towards a personal realization through trance like repetition, and literal mantra. If you have not played Nocturne do so.
best look twice
Their latest will come in 2011, Catherine. There’s not too much known on the plot as of yet. But this is my game of 2011 already. SMT is just that good.
beats carrying around a schoolbag weighing 40lbs
Perhaps we should not let our infants play with iPads so they learn to use touchscreens before they can talk? I think not. To do so limits us, it is scary that they surpass us – but we must usher in their ascendancy, not shy from it and cling to ancient precepts.
We need to start thinking of interface as intimidating, not art as bannable (burnable).
Got bored today and decided to try out Adobe Premier Pro CS5. Very intuitive design, sufficiently so that a complete novice like myself could easily utilize the application.
The song for this little AMV is “Dog Days are Over” by Florence and the Machine. It sort of sums up my feelings about the current project and state of my job – I’ll leave it at that.
Dissemination Machine 