OK, to sum up:
- A program.
- It could be done by Jeff.
- It could do stuff like reality check reminders and subliminal messages and it can play mp3s too!
- It could tell you whether you had entered stuff in your journal today.
- It could ask you how your day was, and you could reply yes or no.
- It could have every single word and sentence in the forum and it could automagically jumble them up to create coherent articles about LD related topics. This would also provide links back to threads in the forum.
- Like Ask Jeeves, it could find a thread which will answer your question.
- It could be commercial.
- (next post now)
- The program would only be useful with the forum because it is connected.
- People can click on some letters and then the program brings up something to do with it.
- It could come up next to or above the forum while you are browsing it.
OK, um, where to start with my refutation? I’ll make my bullet points align with those above.
- No problem.
- Also no problem, if he really wants to.
- This is what tends to be called ‘bloat’. It is too much for one program. Why create your own mp3 player with play, pause, and stop at least? People can just open winamp or windows media player and open the mp3 files that came with the program.
If I wanted to use my computer to aid my lucidity (which I would not do because I can only use it one day in two) then I would run seperate programs for reality checks, a dream journal, and an “information resource” (like the forums, or this program…) - Why would I want to know whether I had entered in my dream journal?
- Again, why would I want that? I want a tool for lucidity, not a timewaster. There’s no point and it’s far too hard to program: extremely hard, requiring knowledge of linguistics as well as programming skills. Again, bloat. Consider your Windows computer. You have a spellchecker in Microsoft Office (or similar program). If you want your browser (Firefox or similar) to spellcheck, the people working at the browser have to do it themselves; they aren’t able to use Microsoft Office spellchecker, even if you already have it! Similarly, many (bad) programs (perhaps a DVD player or CD burner) will re-create their own style of buttons, etc. Why bother? It’s duplication of work. (I was going to start about how the UNIX/Linux way is different but this point is getting too long anyway and I’m beginning to veer off-course.)
- Firstly, much of the forum, even the parts officially for lucid dreaming discussion, is irrelevant, off-topic, and most importantly, redundant. Answers (and questions too) are repeated tens of times over. Here’s a tip: Skip to page 10 (I picked this at random) of Intro or Quest, and read every post in every thread. Rather a lot, isn’t it? u need to b able 2 handle this – style of comment occassionally!!!11 – and indeed this style too, whereas – some, people misplace their commas – and end sentences often like this… – providing paragraph breaks every line – or indeed not at all (look back at your own posts). It is not feasible for a computer, or even a group of humans, to attempt to in any way completely summarise all ~~~60,000 posts in the LD sections.
- I don’t think you quite understand how Ask Jeeves works or worked. First (my father tells me), they tried artificial intelligence. Obviously a computer cannot understand that this page answers the question “How can I speed up my minimax without sacrificing accuracy?” or even that this answers the question “When was ‘The Incredible Machine 2’ released?” and they could never manage to provide this as an understood answer for the hard style of question, “What is a good site for information on {lucid dreaming}?”.
What they therefore used was a keywords-based “understanding” of pages. This still worked badly and must have been a pain to “tune” too.
What they then used was a database of questions compiled by humans. Searching for “What cheats are there for The Sims?”, it would probably notice ‘cheats’, ‘What’ (suggesting a multiple-choice answer), and ‘The Sims’, a name. It might then present the question, with “The Sims” replaced with a dropdown of many, many, many games. Clicking on the “Ask!” button to the left would then send you directly to the correct page at some massive cheats site which probably payed Ask Jeeves!.
This was most certainly an ass to maintain. They would have to keep up not only with the common questions, but with reasonable coverage of “rare” fields. They failed.
Ask Jeeves turned from a new attempt for artifical intelligence to what it is now, a pathetic search engine which works pretty much like any other. - Commercial? Well, there’s a limited market of users, and all its information would be freely available here (learn to use the “Search” link everybody!), and that wish to collaborate for a hypnosis audio file still hasn’t produced anything (I think), and it might end up having loads of extra crap like a damned computer asking me how my day was.
- next post, and sorry I got a bit carried away just now.
- Again, not good if you want it to sell. By the way, are you even sure that we are allowed to just package in everybody’s comments and sell it? There is some sort of license I’m writing this under, whether my text is being owned by pasQuale or me.
- Eh? Um, like a glossary?
- That would be nice, I suppose, but I really don’t need that. Honestly. I just don’t. It probably wouldn’t work in Firefox. Or IE. Or both. Personally, the thread I’m reading is what I want to read.
Additionally, I’ll try to be a bit polite about this: consider adding line breaks (I prefer double, to make them paragraph breaks, but it’s your choice), consider capitalising your “I”-s, consider previewing your post instead of always using Quick Reply like I did before I realised it was inadequate, and consider not drafting Jeff into this automatically, and consider splitting up long sentences. This would improve your posts’ readability and increase your audience and improve your… um… good word… credibility. 