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Slashback: Drivers, Bodycomputing, Farscape
Maybe customer service isn't dead. On November 28th, we posted a report that OEM cards using ATI chips had trouble with the official drivers from ATI. Terry Makedon (Senior Product Manager, Software for ATI Technologies) writes "Last week we posted a set of unified Linux drivers. These drivers were only loading up on 'Built by ATI' cards. Through our various feedback mechanisms we have determined that there is a large community of 'Powered by ATI' Linux users that did not benefit from our Linux drivers. At this point we are happy to announce an update to our Linux driver (ver. 2.5.1) which will work on both 'Powered by' and 'Built by.' ATI's driver and software strategy is firmly based on responsiveness and we greatly appreciate the feedback our Linux users have provided. Please use http://apps.ati.com/linuxDfeedback/ for a direct feedback line to ATI.
Thanks again for the feedback."
But what if we put the show into this Interdimensional Fungubulon, and then jumped through this here "wormhole"? xagon7 writes "David Kemper, the producer/writer of Farscape, mentioned that it would be theoretically and legally possible for a group to set up a non-profit organization for fans to donate money to, in order to finance an episode and make Farscape all that much tastier to Sci-Fi for the 5th season. They have done just that. They have $200,000 worth of pledges and only need $800,000 total....I hope this gets Slashdotted. Read the story here and you can pledge here."
You're getting less happy to see me? man_of_mr_e writes "Check out MIThril, the next generation research platform for context aware wearable computing. It's been about 18 months since this was last talked about here on Slashdot, and it's kind of cool to see how far the technology has come since then. For those that aren't aware of what it is, it's essentially a project to prototype human wearable computers, complete with schematics, pictures, and a cvs repository for software. Now you too can be like that guy in the IBM commercials trading stock while feeding the pigeons."
Flattening the slope to entry. Catskul writes "You don't need the libwine hack, mentioned in the previous news entry. Just follow the New QT Howto, download the codecs and start MPlayer."
Don't look at me in that tone of voice! 1010011010 writes "On Nov. 26, you ran a story on SpeechView, 'software that translates the voice on the other side of the line into a three dimensional animated face on the computer.' The North Carolina State University Department of Computer Science's 'Voice IO Group' is also working on that problem. Their software looks like it might be better. Read about it here. Includes quicktime movies of the results."
Victory, or a reprieve? A non moose cow writes "Just noticed that a couple of my favorite "Killed by the RIAA" webcast stations are back... like Soma-FM and Monkey Radio (get the streams at Shoutcast). The saving grace came via the recent passage of HR5469 [PDF] by the US Legislature. Thank you to all that sent letters and/or money to fix this problem. If you have been yearning for the resurrection of your favorite stream, go check, it might be back. If you would like to trace the chronology of this mess, check out the Soma-FM news page."
Save Farscape was created for the explicit effort of saving Farscape. I sure hope it is saved, since it's probably one of the best sci-fi shows in existence. Pretty much all I watch for TV shows are Junkyard Wars, Farscape and Enterprise.
I hope this gets Slashdotted.
Are you some kind of computer sadist?
The great advantage of having a reputation for being stupid: People are less suspicious of you.
And while you're donating $800,000 so a bunch of guys 'n gals can run around in rubber and vinyl while stuff blows up around them, why not donate a few bucks to charity so a few kids can eat for a year?
:)
No, seriously.. you'll feel better about yourself.
I must agree. I prefer the excellent writing of star trek: enterprise (and voyager before it) to fill my need for good original sci-fi.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
However, if this actually takes off, I believe it will not set a good precedent (AFAIK this is not being done anywhere else, unless I'm mistaken, please feel free to correct me).
Think about it - the SciFi channel is not free. I already pay ~$50 for cable... and in order to enjoy a show I like I have to pay even more??? What's next? Viewer-supported Buffy The Vampire Slayer? Does anyone think low-life TV execs (which are no better than record company ones) are not going to see this and go oooohh! Let's threaten to cut Zim The Invader and start raking up the dough!!!
It's a noble cause, assuming I can pick it up using an antenna. Otherwise it's a bad idea.
Rant off.
The final eleven episodes of Farscape begin in January of next year.
Very cool examples. Except, none of them show a tounge! There were portions of the speech where the lips weren't moving, and the tounge would have been.
Once a tounge is added to the render, this tech will be sweet for games. Imagine playing someone in UT and seeing their mouth move properly as they talk to you. Cool for sure.
Everyone has priorities. Your logic is headed down a very slippery, liberal slope.
Before you suggest that we have a responsibility to donate to the lowest/needest rung, think for a second on what a race to the bottom looks like. If you're having trouble, read Atlas Shrugged.
-R
And how does this fund help those of us that are too cheap to buy cable?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I don't know about y'all, but for me "only" and "$800,000" don't come in the same sentence. (Except maybe "If I only had $800,000...") And I thought pay-per-view was steep!
... maybe that was not USD. For our non-American audience, $800,000 is real money. I think you can buy a cruise missile for that much -- which I note might be much more persuasive to those SciFi twits. You know, call a meeting, then appear on the videophone with your demands....
I had heard the episode price was closer to $1.7 million
Ambitious project! Damn! Farscapers are making us Mac zealots look pretty tame -- at least when we send Cupertino a couple thousand we get back a computer and a couple window stickers.
If you feel like making your own non-instrusive wearable, one that DOESN'T make you look like a dork, and doesn't require specialist hardware, please check out http://riot.com.au/
Disclaimer: this is one of my projects.
So... how many of those pledges are going to fall through when it comes time to pay up? Yeah...
On second thought, never mind. I love that show. I'll pledge the other $600,000!
These guys are doing speech to animation. It is being used in phones. No, I don't work there, though I used to work with one of the people there (a long time ago).
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
The Bud Light site has had a similar feature to this for a while. They call it "making faces" and you can look at it here: http://veepers.budlight.com/
You can upload your own picture and make it say anything you want, it will animate your face for you and looks pretty passable if you use a good picture.
The company that makes this technology is Pulse Entertainment and they are located at http://www.pulse3d.com/ in case you wanted to check them out too.
Where do we send thank-you cards or fruitbaskets? Emails, too, of course, but it's important to let the folks at ATI know that we appreciate their support of the Linux community, and somehow fruitbaskets seem to speak louder than electrons.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It sounds to me like you just want everyone else to accept your priorities. Funny though, they haven't landed you in a very tenable position, so I'd think they'd be some of the last for society to adopt as a whole.
Some people need a helping hand, but the epidemic is not at such a level as to begin to decry any spending which does not have immediate and obvious charitable effects (the net effect of your initial post). Even accepting your ethos, you're forgetting that there are hundreds of people who will be losing their jobs if Farscape is canceled. Not just overpaid actors, but average Joe set builders &c.
Your worldview is too narrow. I don't think your initial post was well thought out. If you still hold by the tenets put forth there, then I don't think I have the power or desire to continue to show the error of your ways.
-R
That's the dream, anyway. I'd love to see it happen, but I'm sure you've all got a thing or two to say about blind idealism right about now.
My deviantArt site
Yes, good point, and their begathon comes every year! Meanwhile the number and wordiness of thank-yous to corporate sponsors has been growing. (I mostly listen to NPR -- same problem.) Yet membership accounts for only 25% of revenue, so "viewer supported" is true but misleading. One-fourth supporting.
I went to the trouble of looking this up on the CPB site, so feast your eyes. Their financing is complex to say the least. The item "CPB Appropriation" appears to represent the federal government's $300 million share -- a pittance if you compare it to the $800,000 they want here for one episode of one show.
The point is probably just to get the pledges, to make an impression on SciFi whose bottomline motivation is money.
You, um, seem to be under the misapprehension that everyone here is 15 and lives at home. Lay off the "coffee and pixie sticks" diet.
;-)
Anyway, the group of people that lives in my house is a bunch of leeches. Especially the kids. And I'm not too impressed with the cat, either.
Until the money ran out and the mouths got hungry again, the needy wouldn't need as much. You're completely correct. You premise that we'd be helping people by feeding them, however, is completely flawed. That money would buy a lot of food, but when I thought of how much that million was, I thought it would buy a lot of tools and education and basic agricultural reform.
I won't dontate money to "needy" charities unless I know the money goes towards things which help build a less needy future, not non-sustainable, stopgap measures. For exmple, I'd give to "Feed the African Children", or whatever, only if I knew the money was going towards improving farming methods, animal husbandry skills, education, water supply improvement, birth control and reproductive education, etc. rather than just plain food (which is usually just stolen and sold anyway). I all I continue to give is just food, when will I be able to stop? When will the people I feed get to the point where they no longer need my help and can provide for themselves?
Yeah, there are grey areas here (it's a shame the US destroys perfectly good crops to keep prices balanced, for example), but by and large terminally hungry people could use the ability to make food as opposed to merely food. Has Sally Struthers helped anyone get out of poverty and become self-sustaining? Have those "adopt a kid" programs gotten to the point where they've run out of kids? I'm not being cynical or contrary; I just can't help but think of it as the orgnic system it is. Energy is constantly flowing into it, but energy demand only increases as more flows in (probably due to unsustainable growth). Rather than building any sort of foundation, all the food does is create a positive feedback loop of needing more food. The hungriest nations are not going to get less hungry if we continue to feed them. They need to know how to help themselves. Looked at one way, one caould say that we're almost doing them a disservice by helping them. Metaphorically speaking, we're putting phosphates in the pond and complaining that all the algae don't have enough to eat. We're not part of the solution.
I know you need to have the basics first, and that there will always be the itinerant and/or temporarily hungry, but the handout mentality really needs to shift towards helping people help themselves or the needy will be forever needful. IM(H)O.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
If you're having trouble, read Atlas Shrugged.
Now you have more trouble. Not to mention a hernia.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
"ATI's driver and software strategy is firmly based on responsiveness"
Oh really? So when thousands of older-ATI-card Macintosh owners(basically, any Macintosh released from about 1998 to about 2000) BEGGED Apple and ATI for drivers(even signing a massive petition), I suppose ATI listened intently, and then released drivers for MacOS X? Hahahaahaha.
For those who don't know, Apple and ATI passed the issue back and forth like a hot potato, and eventually, Apple released rather half-assed(read: you could finally bear using the system in more than 16bit color) drivers for older systems like the iMacs and Powerbook Lombard/Pismo, rolled into a system update; you had to edit a config file buried in the system to even get the driver to load!
I have a Powerbook Lombard, G3/400mhz, and I can't watch movie previews under MacOS X because the thing can't push a frame rate higher than maybe 10-15fps. Text scrolling is slow as molassis and 3D is -completely- unaccelerated. Apple's advice, for taking me back +5 years in graphics performance, is to take me back +10 years in graphics technology: "set it to 16 bit color for better performance."
Folks, this is pure marketing BS/backpedalling(ie, "oops, oh shit, we just screwed a large customer base. Quick, someone do something!") I believe the expression is "knowing which side your bread is buttered on." It has NOTHING to do with warm fuzzy feelings for penguins. I cannot STAND companies that tout how they "listen to the customer"...
I won't dontate money to "needy" charities unless I know the money goes towards things which help build a less needy future, not non-sustainable, stopgap measures.
Are we still talking about Farscape, or starving africans? I agree, farscape is needy because there aren't enough fans to justify the expense of production, and africans are starving because there are so many of them living in a desert. neither is going to change by giving them $1Mil.
Sometimes it's better to just let it go. It's not politically correct to point out but starvation is natural. population is balanced against available resources and equilibrium is reached. Should we drop protein reseqeuencers on a hungry primitive planet? no, even though it's hard to watch people suffer, it's still the wrong thing to do.
should we fund a sick show that's been earmarked for extinction? sorry, I like farscape but it's time to say goodbye.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
So let me get this straight- we have a record # of homeless people in the US, food pantries are empty, massive budget cuts for the poor(social services, medicare, etc.)... ...but a bunch of people donated $200,000 to go towards paying to make A TV EPISODE, for a FOR PROFIT cable network?
I take it you've never bought a video tape, b ut only give away all your disposable cash to charity?
For the record - I donate $20/paycheck directly to United Way, plus hundreds more throughout the year; I also spent a hundred or two on Farscape this year. Maybe I'll donate an additional $20 to say "screw you" to SciFi.