some more

instead of AIs, use people playing videogames:

I read the headline "more US residents playing farmville than there are farmers in the US"

Why not have those decisions impact the real world? Risk and reward come into play, in a good way. We don't need heavy mental lifting to be done by machines which aren't yet well equipped, but we can advance the state of the art of robotic machinery and workers, and let swarms of game players control the machinery through a heavily abstracted system of interaction and reward. Offer a small stipend, which increases based on personal success, and you have some seriously cool potential. Not just farms - anything labour intensive that could be roboticised except for the difficult decisions and analyses occasionally required.

is there an optimal svn usage?

if there's a set of operations which should pretty much always be done in order to have consistent backups and a well maintained repository, that should be automated. This is quite likely to already have been done / not be as useful as it sounded in my head when I first thought it.

why isn't everything under revision control and on/offline accessible what the hell

also, all apps should be networked/backed up/offline-networked. ex: your word documents are automatically backed up to your server and when you turn on your work computer they are automatically beamed down, with a full revision history

this is probably already done - is it done well?

windows bash

windows needs the linux command line in a fashion that integrates fully into windows. The only thing I really dislike about windows is not having scp, ssh, grep, cat, vim, vimdiff, ps, forward slashes, that sort of thing in my command line. I am aware that cygwin effectively provides this, but it does not (in my experience) integrate into the actual windows system. You are provided with a way to use linux while you are booted into windows. It's like a really shitty VM.

I want to be able to use my Windows system, use its interfaces and files and utilities and windowsisms, but make it so that when I pop open a command line I'm using what looks like UNIX. This should not be difficult. I intend to write a simple shell / collection of windows ported utilities and, after using it a bit, make it available to other people. I really want this.

Could already be done - I'll probably glance around a bit first.


That's all for this week.