Tuesday, October 7, 2014

A Computing Design Philosophy

It's come to my attention that games have far outpaced desktop environments in raw functionality. Not just from an interface design of hyper efficiency or interactivity but also in utility. With Microsoft Smart Glass and Sony with remote play, continuous play, and second screen, we have entered into a reality where we can watch movies, and play games on multiple devices and screen simultaneously and independently of each other.

I envision in the near future where desktops namely windows finally adopt similar technology allowing for a singular unified workspace and hybrid computing. Like how I can take my vita which I'm using to play a game on the ps3 or 4 and as long as I already have it on my vita in some cases I can just walk away while I'm still playing and everything is fine, or in some cases I might need a short load function to resume the game right where I was. I see the near future where I can take a microsoft surface tablet and use it not only as a mirrored or extended display, but have a perfectly synced work environment that allows me to work on a word document on the surface and the desktop at the same time in such a way that while the host program might be on the desktop and the surface is only apparently mirroring the desktop in fact I could suffer catastrophic power failure and instead keep working on the tablet as if nothing had happened.

We can already do this with movies. I've literally been watching a movie which wasn't streaming but was on both my surface and my desktop and they were in sync having launched as a kind of second screen, then a blackout forced my computer into a blue screen in spite of my power supply and backup, yet on my surface the movie kept rolling without interruption.

We can do this with games on the ps3/4 with the vita. I don't mean remote play, or silly loading of save files however advanced they may be. I mean truly independent functionality of eachother in a singular environment. Consider something like luftrausers where you think you're playing it like remote play, you see it on your vita screen and on the tv, then suddenly power loss and the entire sytem loses power, wifi is down, system is down, etc, and yet your vita keeps on playing as if nothing happened because they were functioning on their own even if they were working on the exact same content. While this isn't an actual example my understanding is that it actually is extremely possible if it hasn't actually been done yet then you should expect it. Ruin for example was doing this in 2011 with a tiny save file that took a half a second or less between the two devices or save and or load and some remote play games have this with a one button command.

We already have workspace environments  where people can drop in and out while working on the same project, like 3d models, and puzzles, without it effecting the work. It would not be a leap to imagine that they could take a current progress snapshot of the project and keep working on it using a mobile device without being connected to the project.

Imagine if you will a group of people counting. Any member can leave and keep counting on their own and the group can keep counting without them. Multiple members can leave and the same is true. At any point those members can come back and keep counting, and ideally as if though they had never left. This is a metaphorical example of how modern desktops should function in a mobile world. I should be able to use a surface tablet and work on my windows desktop perhaps writing in word then walk away with the tablet and keep working on the same word document as though nothing had happened or changed. Two independent systems syncing together as a single hybrid unit so long as they are able to communicate and functioning on their own even in the face of abrupt termination of communications. It may be the case that I'm already working on a surface and then windows detects I pulled in the driveway and then loads up my surface and what I'm currently doing and simply opens word on its own, syncs up, and is ready for when I sit down at my desktop. At most this system integration if it couldn't be seamless should be no more than a single button or gesture to activate.

Most of this as I've been saying is already available and possible and not only can be done but has been done. I imagine someone reading this could even write an app to do it with minimal effort. My horrible programming skills even were enough to get a proof of concept up and running with notepad. I managed to sync notepads and inputs using keyboard inputs from both the surface and my physical keyboard for my desktop and when I got far enough out of range of the desktop where I could no longer use it as a mirrored display it pushed that view aside to reveal my surface environment running notepad with the same text already input and ready for new input. While this is a huge difference from say running photoshop in the same way, the fact it can be done with notepad is enough for me to conclude on top of other evidence that it is extremely possible.

So what do you think of a unified environment? Is anyone else hyped for the realistic possibility that your windows 10 and tablets might take your internet browsing and make it seamless? If you had this power in your hands would you actually use it?

As an edited in post note. If you can't wait for some intrepid developer to write proper code for this idea and make it a reality, and you've got the money, then I will direct you to the thunderbolt hardware technology. This tech can allow a tablet or laptop immediate access to additional hardware using a single small plug which can just as easily be removed like usb. It can support multiple connections for multiple devices which themselves may have multiple pieces of associated hardware and can do so at extreme speeds. In many example setups they have a small tower filled with additional ram, gpu's, hard drives, a monitor, and more which the laptop immediately reacts to and can utilize. There are also ports and cards on modern motherboards for desktops that could allow a tablet or laptop to gain access to all such hardware and the entire system. This while not quite the same as described above is functionally very similar. 

Sunday, October 5, 2014

A new world model

I may have discussed economic models lightly in the past perhaps also suggesting existing alternatives or theoretical solutions such as described in the venus project. However many of them are to some extent impractical or unrealistic even if technically feasible. In particular the human element and long term conditioning make radical changes hard to accept. I would now try to contemplate an entire system to replace what we have. Not just economics but laws and social contract and government in general. This is likely going to come in parts due to sheer length and will include education, government, laws, among other facets and what their roles should be. I will be attempting to design a system in both micro and macro ideals to function on any scale. I'll also try to compartmentalize them so each can function on its own independent of the other concepts though I will often try to tie them together if it makes sense to do so. The idea being that while they may function on their own they will be better together.

I've been influenced by many authors over the years and some of this will undoubtedly include their concepts or ideals though likely not verbatim. I don't plan to give them their proper credit nor do I plan to take the credit for myself rather that the concepts and information presented should be free to all who read them without concern for origin for the sake of forward thinking. The idea being that each author assembles their own masterpiece of smaller pieces they collect and this is to be a presentation of one piece just as theirs were and thus each element should not be broken from the whole except for validation. Remember that if any part is wrong the collective as a whole even if correct is also technically wrong.

I start by asking what is the current state of affairs and what is necessary to support life. I proceed to ask what must change to make life possible for all without disparity if it is not already so. Then what is necessary to leave the individual free to pursue their own happiness without constraint. Food and shelter are paramount to survival. The quality of the food and shelter have effect on the quality of life. In order to accommodate the most people a balance of minimum acceptable standards must first be derived which I am unqualified to do. Suffice to say an individual does not need the same amount as a family and should be treated as such.

Beyond survival a functioning society requires more if its members are to be minimally prosperous. Some rudimentary medicine is also needed. Since medicine is a trained skill then education is also thus necessary.

How then are we to provide these things to the people? How should we determine priority of who gets first access to the resources if we should even do so to begin with? Is trade, barter, or a monetary economic system relevant in modern times or can a superior solution be instituted?

What about amenities which are a luxury? Should they be used as community items temporarily borrowed, or fixed in a single location, or should they instead be available as property items? How should property be defined or protected and to what extent should an individual be allowed to protect property? All these questions and more will be detailed in upcoming sections.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

A flaw in the virtue of selfishness

If we all hold that self interest is paramount or half of us even hold it as an ideal in which we seek to acquire more and our greed keeps us from using the money we hold the entire economic system collapses

Free market is based on the principals of keeping the money flowing and changing hands, the selfish among as try to hoard it, and from the time we were kids we're told to save our money
its no wonder then the economy collapses when nobody spends their money.

Then again we always hear about how we're the ones living beyond our means and how we're under water leveraged to the hilt in upside down mortgages. This greed and selfishness tells us to acquire more and more things and to be materialistic. So what then is our problem? Are we spending or saving?

The real answer is more likely to be that we are not the problem. You may ask where did I say that we were? The fact is that its a hidden premise suppressed by our own mind for a myriad of reasons. In establishing that we are or are not spending our money and that is somehow a problem it becomes that we are the problem through transitive properties. Yet as I said it is more likely in fact that given a small handful of people control the economy given that they control more than 90% of the money we realize that they are the problem. Those few hundred perhaps a thousand at most that have failed their duty to us and our economy simply hoarding it all as they slowly choke the life out of us and we do nothing to fight back.

This seems like an inevitability within the philosophy without some level of regulation. Though to each their own I guess, perhaps one day we'll realize how little we need money in the future.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

Current misperceptions of Atlas Shrugged

I tried to avoid this topic for as long as I could. I tend to agree that selfishness is good and that altruism to some degree should be limited. I don't go to the extreme in saying a handout endangers the world or anything close but I will dispute what the handout should be. I finally get to this topic because partly of how popular the book has become and how people are using it to defend big business. There's an enormous misconception though and people keep leaning on it without realizing the real meaning of it.

The basic story of Atlas Shrugged is what if big business left us to our own devices and its heroes are the selfish industrialists while the villains are big government and those on welfare or looking for handouts which are described succinctly as moochers and leeches, the non contributing zeroes of society. The story itself was written in a time where the majority of people were self employed usually through agriculture or were in a service industry with no fear for technological outsourcing. Back when big business and industrialists and the wealthy were real entrepreneurs making changes in the world and creating entirely new things or finding ways to mass produce them. This is when we had new tech for making industrial steel faster and cheaper than ever before, mass production of automobiles, the invention of the fridge, toaster, early tv's, and more. The real concept of Atlas Shrugged was what if all the thinkers and creators were to leave the moochers behind for their own society.

Today we have people leaning on this idea that somehow big business and the multi billion dollar capitalists are somehow the real creators and inventors of everything these days and produce a society worth living in. If this were truly the case I wouldn't mind the fact they have their huge tax breaks, I might ignore the wealth gap and disparity, I might agree that government should find new ways to pay for public services and let free market rule. Instead you find me saying we need more public service and higher taxes a real middle class as opposed to the few hundred or so people that control over 90% of the US economy, and complaining about inequality and the lack of proper opportunity for social mobility. That is because I have deemed these wealthiest of people as hoarders and leeches on the belly of society. They produce waste and deliberately cause inefficiency seeking to maximize profits which only fuels their greed for more and to hold on to as much as possible. Many of the most successful failing to realize that holding on to their wealth so tightly is stagnating the economy into failure.

The simple truth of our world today is creators are punished and cheated out of their intellectual property only to have nothing done with it other than collect dust on a shelf. You won't see the rise of electric cars until oil has run dry with inflating cost on the way and only truly hyper fuel efficient cars at the same time to hold on till the bitter end. Then electric cars will still be inefficient with hyper inflated electrical cost to compensate for what is already an overburdened system with frequent failures in complete disrepair. These billionaires are sucking the nation dry and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they packed up and moved once we're dead from our current state of decay, likely they may even seek to make this literal if conspiracy theorists are right.

My only solution is the most upsetting which is that those with the money if they can't learn to use it and keep it moving then they should have it taken from them to the benefit of others. This only results in yet a communist system rife with corruption itself though and in turn is no solution at all. So how then do we balance the scales? We must work to find a solution together.

Friday, September 26, 2014

Changing Post Dates

Now moving from Friday to either monday or wednesday to avoid conflicting with my game blog and promote frequent repeat visitors.

A thought for the day though. If you found out you were immortal how would that change your life? What would you do if you knew you would never die?

I think I'd be a lot more aggressive in changing the world and stop worrying over day to day survival, I would free myself from being a debt slave to the capitalist economy. 

Friday, September 19, 2014

We are all 8th dimensional travelers

When we think and consider what if all universe met at a single point. We come to realize that what we do here on earth by having actors and emulating these stories is that we're really opening portals into another dimension that for a short time we live in. Yet we're so unaware of our own power that we have an abstraction of it that we call acting, which we separate into theater, tv, movies, and more such as that of literature which in some universe somewhere is the same as a written history of events. In my travels I have found the simple truth that we are all higher beings merely waiting to be awakened.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Movie Philosophy "In Time"

I thought a change of pace might be good. Today I consider a movie and some of the ideas in it, and if it does well then perhaps I'll do more in a similar nature. The movie I'm detailing today is "In Time" with Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. This isn't a complete movie review or commentary on the collective as I'm sure there's a mixed bag of views on how subjectively good the movie is or not and I don't feel a need to add to it. Instead we're focusing on the focal point of the movie which is time as a currency both literally and metaphorically.

Since the metaphor is fairly straight forward it's comparatively short to discuss. The way I see it is that the movie uses it as a social commentary on how we spend our time or waste it doing everything. We all start out in life knowing that someday we die which can be equated to a fixed time of some degree. We then spend huge chunks of it doing repetitive things, some out of necessity like sleep, and others like labor as a means of survival. It could be taken a bit further that from the context of the movie we only have a couple years in our early years to truly live, suggestively in the 25 to 26 range after which a life of freedom essentially ends. Smaller notes posted throughout show some support for this concept such as the 3 minutes for coffee moment, which I know people will spend much more time in line waiting on their coffee. The time given to help out others and a subtle suggestion that the rich are stealing your life one second at a time. Quite honestly it's one of the most thought out concepts I've seen in a movie in quite some time.

Then there's the literal sense of time as currency. Early on we hear about the cost of bills and a breakdown of how much time it will cost to pay them. We then determine rent is surprisingly cheap depending on how much they get paid per shift at work which have to assume is more than the time they put in at the work itself. In terms of exact numbers it could be anywhere from 12 to 36 hours cost in rent which for their tiny apartment in a slum would be between 90 and 270$ and in my experience it's usually closer to 400$ so that's not an entirely unrealistic cost. Then we find out a single bus ride used to cost 1 hour and now costs 2. I don't know about you but I wouldn't be spending more than 3 dollars on a bus ride let alone 7 to 15 or more. So the pricing is a little out of control, going back to the 3 minutes for a cup of coffee this becomes much more extreme. If we consider the price of the coffee and compare it to a standard cost of coffee we find a minute is worth nearly a dollar or almost a direct transition. Meaning an hour is 60$ Would you spend 120$ a day for a bus ride plus however long it takes to get there, or would you just walk the 2 hours? Consider this a function of marginal utility in economics, and I guarantee you no sane person would do this on a regular basis. If we adjust rent for this pricing instead of using a sliding scale we find their slum rent is 2160$ which we don't know if that's per week or per month though I'm inclined to believe it's monthly. As an economics system this sounds so horrifically flawed.

Then we must also consider one of the most important things. This currency expires constantly and is supposedly nonrenewable. Consider how the time cop requests his "tritium /tridium" to be wired to him. This suggests that time can be transferred wirelessly and thus is not some chemical resource being introduced to the body. If this were somehow computer based as a binary countdown it'd be relatively easy to hack even if there were some genetic component to it. Stopping the timer, making it count up, changing it's values, stopping the kill switch/trigger at zero thus allowing negative values, etc. We have to then assume this somehow is not the case. That the time is static unchangeable and constantly decaying. How then does this not become a systemic crisis? Consider the cost of raising a child for 25 years, you're probably not going to have multiple kids to somehow renew the resource of time. Where and how does the time you get paid for working come from? How are there rich people in this system? If this were introduced tomorrow, firing up the "what if machine" and say everyone had these timers counting down. Billions would be dead by this time next year and that number only gets smaller each successive year even if there were a few select rich people collecting time with all of it counting down on the arm of every person this inevitably would have to kill everyone.

This is actually pretty clear to break down actually. If instituted today assuming the population is roughly 7.6 billion on the planet and that children's timers remain frozen until the age of 25 thus children born today have 26 years to live, knowing that the 1 year every person has expires one second at a time then we know that if nobody uses their time for anything and lets it expire then the majority of the population is gone by the end of the year. For people to continue to live it would become a necessity to give up time to others, or have children at much earlier ages knowing you wouldn't be able to finish raising them. The human race in order to survive would literally have to have kids when they're just hitting puberty at the average age of 13 raise them for the next 12 years in time to see them ready to have their own kids before their time starts to expire. Going the other route we see likely half of the population giving up it's time to the other half and dying out, repeated year after year assuming we don't use time as a currency we go from 7.6 billion to 3.8 after the first year, 1.9 the second, rounded up we'd have 1 billion the third year, 500 million the fourth, 250 the fifth, 125 the sixth, 67 the seventh, 38 the eighth, 19, etc with time expiring literally each person would revolve around having only that year left with everyone around them dying. That's the most people surviving as long as they can. Alternatively the majority of people could sacrifice themselves to a minor few concentrating 7 billion years into 600 million people, giving everyone an extra 11 to 12 years. Still though nobody could make it 25 years to raise kids unless that number gets concentrated down much further. It's possible some people might continue to live a bit longer, in particular children born in this timeframe will make it a bit longer but eventually all the time would expire and there'd be nobody left. If this movie worked as it claimed then that one city would be the only one left by the logic that your main characters mother is turning 50, thus 25+ years expired, and that one man is worth more than 1 million years easily betting a thousand.

By necessity I'm forced to conclude the machines they use to adjust time are just that some form of computer or machine designed with function and purpose which could be hacked to make alterations thus breaking the entire system. As an economic method it's horribly unbalanced and downright evil bordering on nonviable. As a metaphorical social commentary it's pure genius.