Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Google Chrome: Good.
September 5th, 2008
Everyone knows by now that Google’s finally thrown its own offering, Chrome, into the Great Second Browser Wars. It’s been called “soft, yet elegant” and a “smart, innovative browser” and everyone everywhere is crowing about everything from its simplicity to its speed. Sure, there was a little craziness about Chrome’s EULA, but that’s been taken care of. If you’re reading this, though, chances are you just want my take on the browser. Well, here it is! As a nod to Chrome’s absolutely-no-nonsense, no-frills approach to the browser’s interface, I’m going to restrain my usual logorrhea and deliver a nice, calm, minimalist review.
The GUI is incredibly sparse, but (like all Google products) quite intuitive: tabs, back and forth buttons, a stop/reload button, a bookmark star next to the URL/search bar, and two control buttons (one for page-related activities like opening new tabs and printing, and one for browser preferences). No menus. No titles. That’s it. It’s the browser equivalent of a Mondrian painting.
Whenever you open a new tab, the default home page shows you nine of your most frequented sites (somewhat like Opera’s Speed Dial) plus a list of recent searches. Also, new tabs display your bookmark bar, which you can also select to have shown at all times. When you mouse over a link, its URL appears in a little pop-up line in the lower lefthand corner of the window. And, of course, it’s got your usual pop-up blockers, cache clearers, etc. Nothing revolutionary, just handy.
When you download a file, its download progress pops up at the bottom of the tab. Chrome’s downloads manager opens up a new tab in which all recently downloads are listed by date. Cool.
I particularly like the “Omnibar” that combines Google search with the traditional URL bar so you can easily search Google and your own browsing history at once. Again, nothing earthshaking here, just neat.
Now here’s the really impressive shit.
Google Chrome is very fast. Pages render with lightning speed and JavaScript executes smoothly and quickly. The WebKit HTML engine and v8 JavaScript engine are top-notch. But big deal, right? Firefox renders pages quickly, too, as does IE8 and Opera—and the new JavaScript framework Mozilla has been working on for Firefox will be just as good, if not better, than v8. But what makes Google Chrome so neat is this: each tab, each JavaScript process, is run in its own processor thread.
What’s that mean to non-geeks? Simple: if a JavaScript or plugin glitch makes a tab’s processes choke, only the tab closes, not the whole browser. Now, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 implements this as well, and I’m sure Mozilla will be doing the same shortly too—but neither IE8 nor Firefox 3 have built-in process managers that let you track individual tabs and individual JavaScript engines’ memory usage and stability. Yes. Chrome has its own Windows-style Task Manager.
Don’t think that’s cool or useful? Try opening it up the next time Chrome seems to be acting really slow or some page doesn’t want to reload. You’ll be able to recognize the problem and axe it without causing any of your other Chrome tabs or windows so much as a shiver.
So, yeah….Google Chrome is good. Damn good, in fact.
But it’s not great. Not yet, that is.
The version of Chrome available right now is prettymuch just a proof-of-concept beta. An initial offering to publicly test some new concepts and technologies. It works great—hasn’t crashed on me yet, and I’ve been running it for two days, loading it up with tons of tabs containing everything from Flash games to extremely Ajax-heavy webapps.
But it’s limited. It presently offers no extensibility aside from support for common plugins like Flash and Shockwave, but Google has announced that the browser will support extensions like Firefox soon. In fact, I’m betting it will probably support any and all Firefox extensions, or at least Google will release an API to make it easy to port FF extensions to Chrome.
And they’d better not prevent developers from offering ad-blocking extensions. Or that will kill their browser before it even has a chance to grow. Google text ads are fine by me, but if I can’t click an annoying Flash ad and say, “Go the hell away,” I’m jumping ship without a second thought.
The tab bar definitely needs work, too. Whereas FF3 will allow tabs that do not fit all on one screen to scroll, Chrome merely makes tabs smaller and smaller as it tries to squeeze more and more into the row. Eventually, they turn into nothing more than tiny white peaks with little X’s in their corners. Hint: copy Firefox’s scrolling capability.
A little more polish, a little more user-end functionality would be nice, too, but I know that will be coming soon enough.
Nonetheless, for being an early technical beta, Chrome is quite polished. It works great. It’s stable as can be. I’ve been using it almost exclusively for three days now. I really like it.
In a few months, once more functionality—and, even more importantly, more support for functionality—gets added…I’ll probably love it.
I haven’t been this excited about a stupid browser since I first discovered Firefox’s 0.1 beta years ago. Chrome manages to capture the minimal aesthetic of that ancient Firefox progenitor and add an HTML/v8 framework to it that makes it perfectly suited for today’s interactive Web.
In fact, I would recommend this beta—this right-out-the-door, slapped-together first-run beta—to any web user, novice to expert, who wants a faster, more stable browsing experience. Yes, it’s that good already.
So yeah. Way to go, Google guys! But you’ve still got stuff to work on. Quite fuckin’ around with Picasa and get down on it.
[Errata: Is it just me, or does the Chrome “ball” logo look like a Pokemon sphere? “I choose you WebKit!” *Peewwww-p-p-peww-pewwwwww!*]
Technorati Tags: google,chrome,google chrome,browser,windows
ME, Two? The Sins of Windows Vista
April 16th, 2008
One year ago today I was happily using Windows Vista. I had even written a few times on this very blog hyar that all the alarmist bullshit being flung around about how Vista eats up all your computer’s resources and is so full of DRM it won’t even let you play a CD unless you have a signed and notarized affidavit from the copyright holder was all just that: bullshit. Last year at this time, the only problems I was running into with Windows Vista were application incompatibilities…but you just expect that kind of thing to happen when a new OS is released. I did notice, however, that a lot of the early complaints about Windows Vista were coming from audio enthusiasts and computer-based musicians, who were mentioning all manner of driver problems. Creative and M-Audio were the two companies receiving the most criticism concerning driver problems, but the beta driver I was using to make my SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum work under Vista didn’t seem to be giving me any problems….
It is now one year later. On Monday, I wiped Windows Vista off of my computer and replaced it with the default installation of Windows XP that had come with it. It took that particular copy of XP about two hours to download all the hundreds upon hundreds of updates that it needed to get caught up, but once it was fully updated and I’d spent a few more hours reinstalling all my software and copying my data back from its temporary exile on an external hard-drive, I’m happy to say that I am rockin’ and rollin’ (and bloggin’ and cussin’) more effectively than ever once more.
“So, Pegritz?” you ask. “What finally killed your love of Vista? I mean, just a few months ago you were still saying that it was a perfectly serviceable OS and that the many people calling it a waste of time and a major mistake for Microsoft were completely full of shit. So, what gives? Did you catch Vista doin’ your girlfriend or something?”
OK, then—here’s your answer.
Let me begin by reiterating a few things I’ve said a few times about Windows Vista. First of all, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the OS from a usability point of view: despite a lot of bitching and moaning about “Oh, they moved my Command Line shortcut! Those horrible bastards!”, the GUI is no more nor less accessible than that of Windows XP. In fact, I prefer it a lot to XP. Not only is it better looking, but simple things like the list of “favorite” folders visible in every Explorer window makes it so easy to keep data nicely organized by keeping all your most-used folders a single click away. It doesn’t take six video cards, each with a gig of memory apiece, to run Aero with full transparency effects. Vista did not run one bit slower than XP on my machine, and actually started up faster. Finally, I never once ran into any form of DRM- or protected-media-related problems because I do not own or use any DRM-encumbered media, period.
So what’s so wrong with the OS that I don’t want to use it anymore? Let’s see:
SIN 1: AUDIO.
The first and most serious problem with Windows Vista is entirely related to audio. You think inferior NVIDIA drivers caused a lot of Vista crashes? You should see Creative’s track record. To put it mildly, audio in Windows Vista sucks. Big time. Though Creative’s beta Vista drivers for my SoundBlaster X-Fi worked just fine, their official Vista drivers are completely nonfunctional. They would work for anywhere between five and twenty minutes before crashing with a horrific !!!SQUEIIEIEIENK!!! that nearly destroyed my speakers and scared me so badly a number of times I nearly shat my pants. I would then have to reboot the damned system to enjoy another five-to-twenty minutes of good sound before OHMYCHRISTWHATTHEFUCKWASTHATHORRIDSCREECH?!!?! Oh. It was Creative’s useless fucking drivers blooching again. Between April 2007 and March 2008, Creative has issued at least five, or maybe more, revisions to their Vista X-Fi drivers. Guess what? Not a single one of them worked with my X-Fi. Not one. I attempted to ask what the hell was going on at Creative on their discussion boards, but never received a reply of any sort. I finally discarded the X-Fi card after Creative pulled the ultimate boner by asking a fan who actually made functioning Vista drivers for the X-Fi to cease and desist. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll never own another Creative product.
I eventually purchased an M-Audio MobilePre USB audio system because it was portable (it connects via any plain ol’ USB port), it was much higher-quality than the X-Fi, and it featured a number of inputs to let me record live instruments into my computer. Of course, the reputation of M-Audio’s Vista drivers is not much better than Creative’s, but the MobilePre USB came highly recommended and, even better, was cheaper than any other audio solution. In fact, it was so cheap I even could afford to purchase two studio-quality monitors to go with it! When I brought it home, I downloaded the Vista drivers from M-Audio’s website, installed them, and plugged the MobilePre in. Worked like a charm. Until, that is, I had to reboot the computer for an unrelated issue a few days later. Vista would not recognize the device. I had to uninstall and re-install the driver, and then it worked again. Great, I thought, I’m gonna have to do this every time I reboot the damned machine? I contacted M-Audio to ask about that. Their answer: All of our Vista drivers are betas (STILL?! After the fucking OS has been in the marketplace for over a year?), and, besides, none of them support Vista SP1 yet.
Wait a second. As far as I know, Vista Service Pack 1 has nothing at all to do with the OS’s audio system. Why the driver would work under Vista but not Vista SP1 is completely beyond me but, hey, I’m not a programmer. Either M-Audio is incredibly lax when it comes to writing drivers, or Vista’s new audio subsystem is harder to parse than a Klingon translation of Finnegans Wake.
Audio hardware under Vista was not my only cause of grief, however. Audio software was even worse. Cakewalk Sonar was the first (and, to my knowledge, still the only) major DAW that released a version capable of running under Vista…but “capable of running under Vista” and “running well under Vista” are too completely different things. Fortunately, my alltime favorite audio workstation, Renoise, worked just fine under Vista…provided that I had User Account Control shut down completely. For some reason, none of my VST plugins would work on Vista if UAC was turned on (as, by default, it is). Needless to say, UAC was turned off immediately and never turned back on. I have no need for a goddamned operating system to ask me again and again and again if I’m sure I want to copy something.
Ultimately, though, between hardware problems and software problems—neither of which are present in XP—I finally decided that it was time for Vista to go. One of my primary uses of this computer, after all, is music production. It’s why I bought this particular machine in the first place: it had plenty of memory and a super-fast dual-core processor so I could run lots of effects! But…with Vista, it just got to a point where I do that anymore.
SIN 2: WEIRD INSTABILITY.
ANY pre-SP1 Microsoft OS has problems, because Microsoft always, always rushes stuff out the door before it’s actually ready. Considering it took five years and extensive beta testing to get Vista ready, though, you’d think the bugs would’ve been fewer. Nonetheless, they were there. But no big deal. Bugs happen, and after a month or two of working with Vista, I’d grown to know those bugs pretty well. Subsequent Windows updates even eliminated a great deal of them.
Yet…Vista was always a shaky system, regardless. Every now and again, it would do something extraordinarily weird—so weird that I could never be sure whether the problem was a hiccup in the OS, a user error, or some kind of demonic possession. For instance, every now and then I’d get what I took to calling a “sour boot”: for whatever reason, Vista would boot improperly—certain startup programs wouldn’t start up, certain services wouldn’t start, and Vista would then either run very slow, its processor usage would spike at odd times, it memory usage would go through the roof, or the OS became next to unresponsive. One time, when I got a “sour boot” (just a few weeks ago), I attempted to open Firefox 3 beta 4. It took twelve minutes for Firefox to load. I know I keep a lot of tabs open, but DAMN! That’s a little excessive.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the many times my temperamental audio player, J. River Media Jukebox, suddenly stopped working or played mp3s backwards.
The only way to get Vista back to working normally was to reboot and hope I didn’t get another “sour boot.” At first, I used to get them only once in a blue moon. By January, though, I was getting “sour boots” at least one in ten times. By March, it was happening almost every other time I restarted the damn machine. This, along with a few other issues, was something I was hoping SP1 would get rid of. But it didn’t. Which brings me to Sin Numero Tres:
SIN 3: SP1 MADE EVERYTHING WORSE.
I remember fondly when Windows XP SP1 was released. I didn’t really know what a “Service Pack” even was, then (I don’t remember there being Service Packs for Windows 98 or ME), but I installed it and…Windows XP just kept working like it always did. Windows SP2, on the other hand, did show some marked improvements in the system. Needless to say, I was pretty hyped for the release of Vista SP1, which I figured would solve a lot of the various “rushed-to-market” bugs and issues. I should’ve known something was up when Microsoft kept pushing the release of SP1 back further and further and further….Finally, though, it arrived, and I installed it.
The number of odd instabilities—random program freezes (that would last up to two minutes before the program would just come back to life), crashes, strange error windows, and, of course, even more audio problems—that had been making the OS more and more annoying to use in the past few months TRIPLED. It was like SP1 literally made the OS more unstable than ever before.
One of the great Vista irritants that I was hoping and praying Vista SP1 would correct would be the interminable file-copy or file-moving times. I frequently move large amounts of data from one external drive to another (for example, when I’m backing up my sample library or all the music I’ve composed). Try moving 15 gigs of data with pre-SP1 Vista. Oh, look at that: the little copy windows is telling me that it will take 1 hour and 45 minutes to move 15 GB of files. “Oh, pshaw,” you think, “it can’t take that long. XP used to give weird copy-time numbers too.” But look at that…it really did take Vista 1 hour and 45 minutes to move 15 GB of data. This was a well-known Vista headache and SP1 promised to fix it.
Well, it didn’t. In fact, as I was moving all my digital photos and documents to a safe external drive prior to wiping Vista out and replacing XP, it took nearly four hours to move 69GB of data. I guess that fix wasn’t actually included in SP1.
Regardless of the copy-time issue, the sheer frequency of instabilities and problems increased noticeably after SP1 was installed. Thank the Other Gods I didn’t have any problems installing SP1, as many others did…but, unfortunately, though SP1 installed successfully, it only seemed to make things worse.
SIN 4: GETTING PROGRESSIVELY WORSE INSTEAD OF BETTER.
The final sin of Windows Vista is sort of a metasin, being a sin comprised, in part, of all previous sins. When I first upgraded my old computer to Windows XP way back in 2001 or ‘02, I noticed a few bugs and problems here and there in XP that Windows 98 didn’t have. Regardless, XP was a HUGE improvement over 98, and a VAST improvement over Windows ME. As time went on and Microsoft added hotfixes and patches to the OS, its performance got better and better. Today, after greater than half a decade of refinement, Windows XP is a tank. Everything runs just fine on it, and weird problems are rare.
I expected the same experience from Windows Vista. Actually, I even expected it to be a little worse with Vista, because the difference between Vista and XP was so much greater than the difference between XP and Win 98/ME. Nonetheless, when I first installed Vista, I was impressed: it really ran pretty well, and the various audio and application problems I experienced with it would eventually vanish as better drivers were produced, Vista-compatibility issues were worked out. That’s just how it went with XP, after all!
But…no. Rather than getting better, as the months wore on, my Vista experience grew progressively worse. Applications seemed to develop more problems. Hell, I couldn’t even get the Beta Version of Internet Explorer 8 to install on the damn thing: it would copy all files and finish the installation, but the second I clicked on the IE button to open the browser the program would instantly crash.
The file-copying problem got worse and worse.
I even began to have trouble with Renoise—the most trouble-free piece of software I’ve ever owned! I would click on the Samples folder to access my audio files…and every single hard-drive attached to my system, either internally or via USB or Firewire, would grind and grind and grind for about three minutes before the list of sample folders would finally appear. Renoise never did that on XP! In fact…Renoise had never done that on Vista, either. Until I installed SP1.
A lot of people have been comparing Windows Vista to Windows ME, the strange, buggy, half-assed successor to Windows 98 that generally stands beside Windows Bob in the Microsoft Hall of Shame. I used to laugh at such comparisons. ME was a thousand times buggier than Vista, and its performance actually worsened as time went on. In fact, one of my friends at Laurel Computers in Uniontown once told me that the only way to keep ME running okay was the completely reinstall it every two to three months.
It didn’t strike me until Monday, when I was thinking about reinstalling Windows Vista again to get rid of SP1 that…I had reinstalled Windows Vista at least four times, every two to three months. That was the only way I’d managed to keep it running smoothly. By the end of that two/three-month grace period, something weird would happen that would kill the OS’s effectiveness and then I’d have to reinstall it.
Wow. Could those comparisons actually be right? Is Windows Vista merely ME 2?
Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t have a test machine anymore that I can install Vista onto to see how it works on a different computer, so I can’t independently verify that. Perhaps someone reading this would like to let me know about his or her experiences with Vista. Are you experienced “ME Two” behavior, or has it been smooth sailing from Day One? Inquiring nerds want to know!
But anyway, there you have it: the reasons why I gave Vista the boot. I have been running all of my software just fine on XP these last few days, and haven’t discovered any discernible problems. None of the weirdness I experienced in Vista is happening under XP. The problem obviously lay with the OS, and not with my hardware (which I was actually beginning to suspect).
The question now stands: Will I ever return to Vista?
Not any time soon. Eventually, I would really like to, because, quite frankly, I found Vista’s GUI to be perfect to my computer usage style and I liked a lot of Vista’s features. Vista will, eventually, I hope, prove to be a worthy successor to XP…but until the day comes that it can demonstrate the same stability and lack of weirdness that XP actually displayed from Day One, my Vista installation DVD will be tucked in the back of my software shelf, next to an ancient set of Castle Wolfenstein floppies that I keep for sentimentality’s sake and the pencil sharpener I haven’t used in fifteen years.
Technorati Tags: vista,windows vista,vista ap1 xp,windows xp,microsoft,operating systems,problems,headaches
HP’s Upline: Good Idea, HORRIBLY Executed
April 16th, 2008
A few days ago, on one of my favorite sites, TechCrunch, I discovered Hewlett-Packard’s new Upline online storage service. I’m a big HP fan, and Upline’s unlimited online storage for just $59 a year sounded like a flatout amazing deal—especially since hard-drive crashes in the past several years have cost me well over $3000 to retrieve vital data from the failed disks. I immediately signed up for the Upline “Home” plan for $59/year, created an Upline account, and downloaded the Upline client. Wooyeah! I was ready to upload everything from my entire mp3 collection to all my documents, every musical track I’ve ever written, and even my vast sample library…to a place where it would remain safe even if the Magneto were to bust into my house and destroy all of my external backup drives with one gigantic kilogauss “Fuck you!”
Yeah, well, that’s when the trouble started.
At the time, I was running Windows Vista Home Premium on my home computer, the HPL Laboratories of Pennsylvania Mainframe (an HP m7580n). Installing the Upline client went smoothly, but after the client had been running for a few minutes, scanning over the folder that I had selected for backup, the client just…vanished. I’d gone to the ‘fridge for a drink and when I came back, it was just gone. We’re talking Natalee Holloway Gone here: no traces, no crash warnings, nothing. Puzzled, I restarted it, and it again needed to go through its initial account set-up procedure (none of that info had apparently been saved the first time), then once more started scanning for files to upload. This time, it got as far as beginning to upload the files. After only 1gb of data had gone “up” the “line”, the client again…*POOF*. This time I witnessed it with my own shocked widdle eyes: both client windows, the large detailed one and the little “basic” one that appeared above the system tray just disappeared.
This time, thinking some kind of serious shit was happening, I consulted my computer’s event logs. Both Application and System logs showed no crash alerts or even informational entries related to the Upline client. It simply would not stay active for very long. And when it decided it was finally time to catch a bus to Reno, it slipped away from my desktop as quietly as a cat in the night, leaving no traces of any ill activity behind.
I immediately reported this via email to HP who, after a few bounces back and forth providing outputs of my System/Application logs and some other technical info, responded that
There is no known issues with upline application with VISTA home premium 32 bit. You could either try clean boot to troubleshoot the issue .
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135Also if you have different computer you could try on that and see whether upline application is shutting down.
Now, I have been having more and more strange problems with Windows Vista over the past few weeks than I’ve ever had before, so I figured this was just yet another Vista problem. (My frustration with Windows Vista had been growing since October, and SP1 had actually made many of the problems, mostly of an audio nature, worse than they’d ever been—but I’ll post about that later.) I decided that the camel’s back had finally broken. My patience had finally worn out. It was finally time to “upgrade” back to Windows XP, which I did today. I restored the original XP installation to my computer and, after cleaning out the usual crapware, installing a few hundred updates, and just generally tinkering around with various settings to make sure everything was the way I liked it, had a nice, clean, perfectly stable Windows XP environment running.
After copying my personal data (y’know, all the stories I’ve written, Cthulhu pr0n I’ve downloaded, and illegal XviD rips of Andy Griffith) into XP’s “My Documents” from their temporary exile on one of my external drives, I decided it was time to set up and configure Upline once more—hopefully without any goddamned, weird-ass Vista craziness.
Instead, guess what? I experienced even stranger problems. Twilight Zone problems, people. Seriously. Witness:
To begin with, the installation crashed twice. Never a good sign. I finally got the client to install, however, and entered my account information and selected folders to back up once again. The familiar two Upline windows appeared and the client began scanning the files in the selected folders, just like before. It was chugging along just fine when—wait for it—my monitor went black. Black as the depths of the interdimensional portal at the heart of the Event Horizon. The computer was still running, and the hard-drive was still grinding as if it were being indexed, but…the monitor was in power-down mode. It’s power light had turned orange and NO DVI INPUT was flashing on the screen. Now let me tell you…I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life. Not even when I had a video card go bad. All that happened that time was the screen resolution went wonky. It didn’t turn into a gateway to the Chaos Dimension.
So I pulled the plug on my computer and restarted it. Once it restarted, the Upline client launched automatically at start-up and—you guessed it—I had to input all the login information, select folders, yadda yadda yadda. I was thoroughly sick of the damn thing by this point, but “Hey,” curiosity said to me, “Lessee how it fucks up this time!” Well, this time the screen didn’t blank out, and the client finished scanning, but when I clicked the Backup button the client froze. Froze up like you’d just thrown its processor thread into a vat of liquid nitrogen.
To cut a long story short, I attempted to get the client to work precisely six more times. Four of those times, it froze the second I clicked Backup (and could not be shutdown by any means short of killing the process in the Task Manager [interesting sidenote: the client was using upwards of 300MB of memory each time the process had to be killed]). Twice more, it made my monitor/video-card/what-the-hell-ever completely shut down and blackness, the vile blackness of complete unknowing, prevailed once more.
Needless to say, I called to cancel the service and demand a refund. Prior to this, my experience with HP products and services has been top-notch: I’ve never had any trouble with my desktop or my laptop (both HPs), nor with my printer/scanner, nor with any of the software or drivers I’ve ever gotten from HP. Anytime I’ve ever contacted HP Customer Service, they were incredibly helpful, too—and they were this time, as well: the lady whom I spoke to on the phone took down all of the information needed to refund my payment via PayPal and even provided me with a case number to consult to ensure my refund is received. HP Customer Service is excellent. Too bad their Upline client, however, is a total piece of shit.
To sum it all up…HP’s Upline sounds like it could be a really amazing service. Only $60 a year to back up literally all your data? That’s serious value there, folks. But not if the software client you need to get your data up that Upline can’t even stay afloat long enough to tally up a single folder’s worth of Microsoft Word documents. Pathetic.
HP, if someone one of your tech people gets wind of this blog entry, listen up: I will gladly repurchase an Upline Home Account again if you can prove to me that your client isn’t some half-assed hunk of schizophrenic code anymore. If you get the goddamn thing to work—and by work I don’t mean “work every now and then” but work as well as the drivers to my Photosmart C6280 All-in-One printer/scanner/toaster thingee do—then I’ll gladly hop back on board.
Because right now, I can’t afford to buy 500gb external hard-drive to backup still more data onto. I’ve run out of USB ports! I have a USB hub plugged in to another USB hub and I still don’t have enough damn ports….If USB ports were dollar bills I’d be a…a…well, I’d have enough money to buy another USB hub at Staples.
Goodbye, Joystick—Hello, Joy…Head
February 20th, 2008
Well, the good ol’ Singularity is creepin’ closer with every day. Today, Direct Neural Interfacing–the Holy Grail of every cyberpunk geek since the day Gibson’s Neuromancer hit the world like a Terminator sent back in time by SKY_NET to ensure it’s creation–drew another step closer with Emotiv Systems Inc.’s announcement that later this year their EPOC neuroheadset (seen at left) will be available for $299.
Now, don’t get too excited yet. But definitely get excited because this a major step toward direct brain/computer interfacing. According to the company, “the headset can detect emotions such as anger, excitement and tension, as well as facial expressions and cognitive actions like pushing and pulling objects.”
It’s purpose? No, not porn. Video games.
The EPOC, you see, is being touted as the next-generation game controller. The EPOC
will be sold with a game developed by Emotiv, but it can also be made to work with existing PC games, the company said. Users will also be able to access an online portal to play more games, chat or upload their own content such as music or photos.
That’s pretty fresh–but here’s where things really get neat:
Emotiv plans to work with IBM Corp. to explore applications beyond video gaming. The “brain computer interface” technology could transform not only gaming, but how humans and computers interact, said Paul Ledak, vice president of IBM’s Digital Convergence business. [Emphasis added.]
I’ve been a transhumanist since I first started reading science-fiction and began to ponder bioengineering and the destiny of the Human Species, and I’ve been Singularitarian ever since I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines back in 2000. However, I’m not one of those Singularitarians who believe that the Rapture of the Nerds is something implicit in the nature of technological evolution, anymore than I believe that Tipler’s/deChardin’s Omega Point Entity is implicit in physics. Technological evolution may be advancing exponentially toward a Singularity-like point in the near future (that is, anytime between 20 and 100 years from today), but something must be actively driving that evolution. Something must be inspiring people to dream the dreams and design the next-gen technologies that keep the Curve rising ever more sharply.
Of course, that “something” is a composite of a wide variety of societal factors–but the most important factor is, has been, and, I believe, always shall be economics. The Allmighty Dollar. Why design a more powerful computer every 12 to 18 months? Why, to beat your competitor and make a buck from a public whose appetite for technological gadgetry to make life easier or more fun grows every year? The obvious feedback loop that dynamic between manufacturers/inventors and the public keeps the Curve accelerating.
And what is one of the prime technological outlets for consumers? Video games.
The world of video games has already given us rudimentary AI, virtual worlds, and now Direct Neural Interface.
Rather sobering to think that, ultimately, Pac-Man may be someday recognized as the godfather of the Singularity, isn’t it?
Technorati Tags: epoc,neuroheadset,video games,gaming,technology,neurology,dni,direct neural interface,singularity
