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Slashback: Drivers, Bodycomputing, Farscape

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the stupid-air-force dept.

Slashback with news on ATI drivers for non-ATI branded cards, the viewer-led movement to save Farscape, wearable computing from MIT, text-to-facial-expression software, and more. Read on for the details

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."

21 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. On the topic of Farscape... by Freston+Youseff · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --

  2. What? by jdkincad · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  3. Donate.. by Forkenhoppen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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. :)

    1. Re:Donate.. by Telastyn · · Score: 5, Funny

      Or at least get it released on Spice rather than SciFi :P

    2. Re:Donate.. by shiffman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And what makes you think we don't already donate a few bucks, or more than a few, to deserving charities?

      Or do you think museums and symphonies should be plowed under to make way for soup kitchens? Supporting the arts, and I do consider Farscape to be art, shouldn't have to apologize for not being about subsistance.

    3. Re:Donate.. by ottffssent · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Because:

      Farscape and well-fed children are not substitutes, in an economic sense. Each satisfy a unique need on the part of the donator.

      Thus, while you may be correct that donating to a feed-the-children charity will make one feel better about one's self, that does not imply that donating to a feed-the-children charity INSTEAD of donating to a save-the-Farscape charity will make one feel MORE good. The law of diminishing utility implies that donating some money to save Farscape and some to save children will make a person MOST happy overall.

      --
      High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
    4. Re:Donate.. by Forkenhoppen · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you do, then I commend you for it. It's people like you who make this world a better place.

      I respect the arts. I just felt obligated to put it into perspective, that's all. $1,000,000 is an awful lot of money, and the first thing that came to mind is that an amount like that could feed a fair number of mouths. (It may have had something to do with my just having listened to the evening news.)

      I apologize if I came across as heavy-handed.

    5. Re:Donate.. by Sloppy · · Score: 5, Funny
      why not donate a few bucks to charity so a few kids can eat for a year?
      Dress the kids up in rubber costumes, and we can kill two birds with one stone.
      --
      As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
  4. Re:Egg Troll has $800,000 by GoatPigSheep · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  5. A word of caution... by The+Bungi · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I think it's very cool that there are people out there who feel passionately enough about a goot TV program to fork over money and keep it running.

    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.

    1. Re:A word of caution... by susano_otter · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, the cable system has some obvious flaws...

      With network TV, you pay for shampoo, and the shampoo manufacturer pays for your TV programs.

      With "perfect" cable TV, you pay for shampoo, and you also pay for your TV programs, but at least you don't have to watch shampoo commercials.

      With "typical" cable TV, you pay for shampoo, and programs, and you still get shampoo commercials.

      You can't expect to fix the whole problem at once, but viewer-supported cable programming is a step in the right direction.

      If this works, and becomes widely adopted, it could shift the whole paradigm for television programming. In time, viewers and cable stations would renegotiate the arrangement to be more efficient and profitable for all parties concerned.

      In the mean time, threatening to cancel a show would be a great market metric. If nobody offers to save it, you probably weren't picking up any viewers for it to begin with. And that, of course, is bad business in the first place.

      --

      Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.

    2. Re:A word of caution... by gladed · · Score: 5, Funny
      In summary,
      1. SciFi creates show for geeks...
      2. ...who buy DVRs so they can skip the ads...
      3. ...so the advertisers pull their funding and SciFi cancels the show...
      4. ...and the geeks start whining.
      Here's the solution: to watch a TV show you "subscribe" to it for a small fee, but you get a small credit back every time you sit through a commercial. Kinda like a metered sewer system, but in reverse.
    3. Re:A word of caution... by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 4, Funny

      Kinda like a ... sewer system, but in reverse.

      Thats an image I'd want to keep in mind, a reversed sewer system. Mmm, good.

    4. Re:A word of caution... by shayne321 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If I'm using a Tivo, the Tivo's recorded the commercial -- the cable company can't tell whether or not, on a subsequent viewing of the show, I fast forward through the commercial.

      Actually, they (Tivo) can. Tivo has always stated they collect anonymous viewing statistics, and I've read that commercial skipping is among the statistics they collect. Assuming that's one of the statistics Tivo would be willing to sell, it would be trivial for them to say "of 58,000 tivo owners that recorded last week's farscape, 96% of them skipped or fast-forwarded through the commercials". Of course, it's probably in Tivo's best interest NOT to release those numbers.. It would only reinforce what network execs already suspect: tivo owners (generally) don't watch commercials. This is why Tivo is starting to test other methods of getting ads in front of you, such as pushing them down to your box in nightly updates and displaying them prominently on your Tivo Central menu. *For now* you still have the option of whether you want to watch or not, but how long before Tivo forces you to sit through at least one ad before watching something you've recorded? Not trying to sound conspiratorial, just food for thought.

      Shayne

      --
      Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
  6. $$$ money $$$ by MacAndrew · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    I had heard the episode price was closer to $1.7 million ... 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....

    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.

    1. Re:$$$ money $$$ by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Interesting

      $1.7 mil USD is likely the production budget per episode, but $800,000 USD per episode is the ammount of money Sci-Fi network gave the production company at the start, with the theory being that the remaining half of the money would come in from other sources such as the infinite future of rerun rights (which Sci-Fi is apparently still buying) and other intellectual property licensing rights. Remember, all this money would buy them just one episode to wrap things up, they'd need to multiply it all by 10-20 if they want a full season.

      As for this TVC entity, it should be very interesting to see what this builds into. If it were to be able to build up enough of warchest, it could finance the production of borderline shows that it knows there are enough fans to make viable, then collect a share of the revenues and use that income to finance future show-saving efforts. Of course, the whole point of this organization would be to finance shows that are good TV but are being canceled because they lose money, so TVC should seek non-profit status and always be soliciting donations.

      As for distributing the show to maximize profits, I would suggest that TVC first sell the new episodes via DVD and pay-per-view at about $10-20 per episode in order to capture the outright hardcore fans who are willing to pay big to see the show continued. Then, about six months later enter into a prime-time time exchange with a TV network where TVC provides the show for free to a cable network in exchange for TVC being allowed to sell all but 2 minutes or so of the ad time. (Of course, if there is a network willing to pay for the show, that is the safer bet...) The idea of putting the show on free TV would be to attract new fans, and hopefully enough new fans would be brought in to make the show once again viable, at which point TVC could begin to pull its financial involvement out and find another show to rescue.

  7. personal wearable efforts by FrenZon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. Anthropics by hondo77 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  9. text to face by sarcast · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:text to face by nurightshu · · Score: 4, Funny

      Unfortunately, Anheuser-Busch gave Pulse Entertainment a whole lot of money to add that feature to their website -- money that could have been spent on research and development of a Budweiser-brand domestic beer that doesn't taste like month-old horse urine. The advertising for that sort of breakthrough would practically write itself:

      Want a great-tasting beer, but don't want to send your money over to Fritz and his Nazi pals? Buy new Budweiser Good(TM), the revolutionary new brew from Anheuser-Busch! This is the first domestic beer that won't leave an aftertaste like the floor of a stable -- and because it's made in America by Americans, you know you're getting a quality product. Bud Good(TM): it's your new brew.

      And all the while they could have the vaguely homoerotic American working-man images that seem to be so popular these days (which is bizarre because they always remind me of those old Soviet labor propaganda posters). But at least the lip-synching thing is pretty cool.

      --
      They that would sacrifice their .sig space for that cliched Franklin quote deserve neither.
  10. Public broadcasting by MacAndrew · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.