We don't really need 24-bit recordings. We need the producers to use 24-bit in the studio, and then a nice 16-bit final output with dithering, and we have all the dynamic range we really need.
16-bit gives you about 90 dB. That's enough to go from "barely audible in a quiet room" to "starting to make your ears hurt". It's enough dynamic range, really.
But look up the "loudness wars" and find that much music being sold these days doesn't even use all that dynamic range. They compress the daylights out of the music to make it "louder".
So, I'm sort of interested in the 24-bit standard, if and only if it implies that the music will be produced with some actual dynamic range. If Rush makes a new album, they can release the CD with the dynamic range compressed away to nothing; and they can release the 24-bit mastered with some actual dynamic range.
Will this actually happen? Who knows. But I'm cautiously optimistic. This will give the studios the chance to release two completely different mixes, the mass-market one that "has to be loud" and the one marketed at audiophiles which "has to be clean". I don't spend $2000 on a power cord for my stereo, but I do appreciate a clean mix, so I hope this does work out.
Much of the patented work on MP3 and related psycho-acoustic modeling technology were well predated by work on signal processing for cochlear implants.
As I understand it, it is possible to patent a really new application of known principles. For example, if you invent a new machine that includes a rotating axle, it is not a problem that axles are a known technology.
Some of the principles behind MP3 were known since the 1940s and even earlier. But nobody had ever applied them to the problem of reducing the bit rate of recorded music.
Not only was MP3 a novel invention, it was so novel it was an uphill battle to get MPEG to standardize it. It barely made it in, as the third and least of three audio coders; the "experts" figured everyone would use layer 1 or layer 2, because layer 3 was "too complicated". Those "experts" pointed out that the signal to noise ratio of layer 3 was worse than the other layers; that's actually true, but useless (MP3 was designed to exploit quirks in how the human auditory system works, so it can save space by chopping out parts of the signal that humans can't hear anyway). History has shown that the psychoacoustic approach was the correct one for a reduced bitrate coder, but it was far from "obvious" at the time.
I think the patents related to MP3 and AAC were examples of the patent system working, not the patent system being broken.
Disclaimer: I am not a patent lawyer, but I am working in the area of audio signal processing and I'm somewhat exposed to these issues (so I'm not just making stuff up, here).
My big hope for the future of movies is that technology is making movies less expensive to produce.
The more expensive a movie is, the harder it is to make the movie; and the more the studios start to mess with the creators of the movie. "We don't want that quirky unknown actor you like; you need to put in Johnny Depp." "The test audiences didn't understand the ending; you need to change it to make it clear that the good guy won." That sort of thing.
I read an interview with John Cusack right after Grosse Pointe Blank came out. He said something like "I'd love to give you a great story about how we fought the suits to realize our vision, but the reality is we were spending so little money that nobody cared about us, and we were able to make the movie the way we wanted to."
So, I predict that within the near future, it will be possible for a director to make a movie completely pure to his/her vision, by keeping the costs really low. Shoot everything with digital cameras. Have the special effects done at some unknown small computer effects shop in Korea or somewhere... or possibly even done by American university students for free. Hire unknown actors who will work just for the experience and accept royalties instead of big up-front money. (Or hire actors that Hollywood has already chewed up and spit out. I can think of several actors I liked who never got much respect in Hollywood.)
As for actors, you never know: you might even get semi-famous or famous people, as long as the time commitment is low. http://5secondfilms.com/ has had Peter Sormare do a couple of shorts for them, I presume for free. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was able to film all of Angelina Jolie's scenes in three days. Once Upon a Time in Mexico got all of Johnny Depp's scenes filmed early, and they had time to just improvise a couple of new scenes with him before he had to leave.
If you visit TheForce.net you can see a whole bunch of "fan films" that were done on a really tiny budget. The special effects are, in many cases, not bad at all.
I've seen plenty of stuff on TheForce.net that is better than Batman & Robin or Aeon Flux. For me at least, the best special effect is a good story; if I like the story, I'm quite willing to overlook a lot of other stuff.
I predict that not only is what I imagine possible, it is pretty much inevitable. Modern consumers have so many choices, that it is now impossible to drive everyone to see the same movies (or listen to the same music). Markets are fragmenting based on consumer's tastes, so it will be harder for movies to become true blockbusters. Keeping costs down and appealing to a specific demographic is one strategy for dealing with this, and I expect to see a lot more of it.
There is a thread here claiming The Tick is in the list, but if so, he's not in the slide from TFA, he's not in the Wikipedia article, and Google search doesn't know about it. It's a joke or a troll.
According to the graph, the performance to come is just crazy! Performance compared to the Tegra 2:
Kal-El: 5x Wayne: 10x Logan: 50x Stark: 75x? 80x?
I'm not sure how those numbers can be real, though. A Tegra 2 is already a substantial fraction of the performance of a desktop processor. If we can have 75x that performance in a few years, are they promising to outperform desktop processors in just a few years time? Or do they think desktop processors will stop plateauing and start ramping up performance dramatically again?
Now more than ever, I want a slim netbook with a full-size keyboard, a Tegra processor, and a Pixel Qi screen. It would be great for email and web, for taking notes, etc. It would be just the thing for carrying around at a conference or convention.
Mod parent up. A Tegra 2 is a "system on a chip" and you don't need much else. An Atom needs support chips, and you have to look at the total power budget of the Atom plus support chips.
A Tegra is much more power-efficient than an Atom. It is not an accident that Android 3.0 tablets will be running on Tegra 2 chips, and not on Atom chips.
Both codecs are free in different ways. WebM is gratis; free as in beer; it costs no money to implement and distribute, but not to contribute to. H.264 is libre; free as in speech; you must pay to distribute an implementation, but anyone can contribute to the spec.
No.
WebM has a frozen bitstream standard. You cannot contribute to this standard, because it is frozen. However, you are free to contribute to the support software: encoders, decoders, tools. And there is vast room for improvement of the encoders, plenty of work there to keep you busy.
H.264 also has a frozen bitstram standard. During the development phase, which is now over, you could have contributed to the development process, but only if you could afford the fees to attend the meeting. I am not sure exactly how much that cost, but I saw one posting here on Slashdot claiming it was on the order of $40,000 per person per meeting. In fairness, you could probably pitch your ideas for free to one of the large companies that was sending representatives (e.g. Microsoft, Apple) and possibly get your ideas in anyway.
H.265 is under development now. Go ahead and try to contribute some ideas to it. Please report back here on Slashdot for how well that works out for you.
So, the important thing here is: H.264 and WebM are both frozen standards. Both have free software projects implementing them, to which anyone can contribute. But only one of them is fully free. H.264 is controlled by MPEG-LA, so you can only distribute H.264 (or even use H.264) with their permission, on their terms. If they decide "no H.264 licenses will be offered to Linux users" then the Linux users will have no legal way to use it. (That's a silly, extreme example, and I have no reason to think they will do that. However, they really are asserting that the mere act of using a camera that records in H.264 makes you subject to their whims, which is intolerable.)
Like I said, I think the ability to contribute the codec vastly outweighs the ability to implement it for free.
I'm sorry, but H.264 is frozen too. You are simply mistaken on this point.
That's silly; if two failure modes have been corrected (or at least made far less likely), then by definition the overall safety has gone up.
Then please allow me to rephrase. I see no reason to think that the space shuttle has suddenly become 99.999% reliable instead of 99% reliable. And while identifying two failure modes lowers the risk, the shuttle aging may be increasing the risk.
I'm not an expert on risk or an expert on space flight hardware. The basic point is: I would not try to run a business with hardware this dangerous.
If cargo ships only had a 99% chance of crossing the ocean, with a 1% chance of losing the ship at sea, I wouldn't want to be in the shipping business, either.
There is no way a private company could keep the shuttles flying and make any sort of profit.
Even when they were brand-new, the shuttles needed an insane amount of work to service them after each flight. According to Henry Spencer, in postings on sci.space, it took a "standing army" of NASA employees months of work to prep a shuttle for the next launch. The main engines need to be pulled and overhauled, tiles need to be inspected and damaged tiles replaced, and I don't even remember all the details.
I remember he said it takes a million signatures to launch a shuttle. As in: work gets done, someone runs down a checklist and makes sure everything is good, and someone signs off that the work is complete. That, times a million.
As others have noted here, the payload capacity of the shuttle is rather large, which isn't actually that useful most of the time. On the other hand, the shuttle can only reach a low orbit, which is also not ideal. So basically a shuttle flight can lift a stupidly large payload to low orbit, then it needs man-centuries of maintenance before it can do it again.
Adding spice and excitement is the chance the shuttle will be destroyed during the mission. (The people on board might or might not die: historically each shuttle lost has killed everyone, but one of the exciting failure modes would be for the landing gear to fail and the shuttle skid to a stop, never to fly again.) Henry Spencer estimated that the shuttle is only 99% likely to avoid being destroyed, which is terrible odds. (I believe he made that estimate after Challenger and before Columbia.) The shuttle has had 132 missions and two catastrophes; I have no reason to think it has gotten safer since then. (Yes, lessons have been learned and applied, so I shouldn't expect the exact same catastrophes again. But what other catastrophes might happen with an aging space shuttle?) Also according to Henry Spencer, if two tires on any single landing gear arm blow out during landing, that would total the shuttle (probably without hurting any astronauts). That has never happened, but one tire blowing out has, more than once.
As many have said for many years, what we really need is a "space pickup truck". There are times you want a giant moving van, but much of the time you are better off with the smaller capacity pickup truck.
What we really need is a launch vehicle that can take a small payload (one single ton would be plenty for many useful purposes) into orbit, then land, be minimally serviced, and then do it again tomorrow. You could ferry people and supplies up and down quickly and easily. You could have one or even several on stand-by to launch in case of some sort of emergency. You could send large things up in modules, and connect the modules once in orbit.
The ideal reusable vehicle would be a "single stage to orbit" (SSTO) design. You want your space pickup truck to have as low a total cost of operations as possible, so having pieces fall off it during launch is a complication you want to avoid.
If you must, do a two-stage to orbit. Some serious proposals have called for two manned vehicles, docked, with one lifting the other part-way up and then a pilot flying it back down while the other vehicle goes the rest of the way to orbit.
I believe that, when we get our "space pickup truck", it will have been developed by private industry. Armadillo Aerospace, SpaceX, XCOR, and various others are trying various things, and after enough generations of prototypes, somebody will get an affordable system for moving things and people in and out of space.
Many things become possible once you have cheap and reliable access to space. For example, if you want to send people to Mars, you would do well to ship fuel, oxygen, and other supplies up in a bunch of little cheap flights, rather than trying to do the Apollo thing of having a complete and self-contained system launch from Earth.
Sometimes people get really lost and a GPS could have saved them.
In particular I am thinking of the story of James Kim and his family. In December 2006 they were driving south in Oregon, and they missed their planned exit. It was almost an hour of driving later before they realized they had missed the exit. Not wanting to waste another hour by doubling back, they got off the highway and took a road that looked okay on their map, but was pretty much impassible in winter. (In fact there was supposed to be a gate closing off the road with a sign saying "Closed in Winter".) They ended up stuck, completely outside cellular phone coverage areas, with nobody having any clue where to look for them, and no emergency food or clothes in the car. After a week (a week! no food, only snow for water, two adults and two children, imagine how horrible it must have been!) Mr. Kim made the decision to set out on foot and try to find help. He froze to death, but fortunately a search helicopter spotted the car and the rest of the family was saved.
I have always figured that a GPS could have prevented this tragedy; with a GPS they wouldn't have missed their exit, and if they did they would have realized it immediately and would have simply gone back and taken the intended exit.
Now, while I have no desire to say anything disrespectful about Mr. Kim, I do also wonder at their common sense. According to one report I read, they found the road to be difficult going, and they had to stop and get out of the car and move obstacles out of the road (fallen trees? I don't remember the details). Their common sense should have told them that this road was a bad idea, and they should have just turned around and backtracked before it was too late.
So, common sense could have saved them, or a GPS could have saved them.
The sad irony is that Mr. Kim was an editor on CNet and he reviewed gadgets like GPS navigators. But he didn't have one in his car.
P.S. Blindly trusting a GPS is also increasingly leading to trucks trying to go under low bridges, as in this story.
The reference decoder implementation has been changed recently (15 months ago) and that includes bug fixes.
And what of it? Are you implying that the bitstream format was changed such that old Theora files won't play back anymore? Are you saying that new Theora files won't play back on 16+ month old decoders? Or are you implying that it would be terribly expensive for Microsoft to accept patches to free software that they are using for free?
There isnt a single device doing hardware accelerated WebM right now
Google is paying people to develop reference code for hardware acceleration of WebM on existing DSP chips. WebM is close enough to H.264 in basic ways (e.g. both are based on discrete cosine transform) that hardware to accelerate H.264 can likely be used to accelerate WebM. So, it is very possible that a simple software upgrade will enable hardware accelerated WebM on existing devices; and Google is paying to make it happen.
H.264 is miles ahead of Theora, *especially* at low bit rates
I agree with this statement.
The original page, comparing Theora to YouTube videos, was not trying to trick people into thinking Theora is better than H.264. A guy at Google famously claimed: "If [youtube] were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet." The Theora guy compared the quality available per bit with Theora, with the actual quality of actual videos from YouTube; and he concluded that Theora was able to meet or beat the quality of the example videos he pulled from YouTube. At the bottom, in the conclusions section, he noted that YouTube uses H.263, and just a subset at that, for many videos, making it easier for Theora to match YouTube; and even for H.264, YouTube isn't making full use of the standard. He speculated that perhaps YouTube was making a tradeoff, allowing the files to be bigger to make them easier to seek within or some such. Here's the link again; go read what he actually wrote.
I'm sure there are idiotic, deranged Theora fanboys out there who claimed it is better in all ways than H.264, but I am not one. If you make effective use of H.264 you get the highest quality per bit possible with current video technology, full stop. The only advantage of Theora is that it is patent-free and BSD-licensed. That is a very large advantage for some purposes.
But now we have VP8, which is much better than Theora, while still freely available for use. It's not as good as H.264, but it seems to be better than everything else, and good enough for practical use. It will have its place.
H.264 isn't going away. But short of a successful patent challenge, WebM isn't going away either. Its advantages in freedom will make it the top choice for many purposes, even though it can't match the ultimate quality per bit of H.264.
..and by "free" you mean that if Microsoft includes the theora codec with windows, then they also have to provide source code upon request... that whole GPL thing that Theora falls under...
If you were correct, and Theora were under GPL, Microsoft could trivially discharge this obligation simply by putting a Theora.tar.gz file (or.zip file if they prefer) on one of the many Microsoft web servers. Microsoft would not be obliged to share the entire source code for Windows.
But in fact Theora is released under the BSD license so Microsoft wouldn't even need to do that much.
..and lets suppose they included the theora codec in 2009.. well you know that the reference implementation has been changed multiple times since then, right?
What matters for Theora support is the Theora decoder, which has been finished for years. The Theora bitstream format has been frozen since 2004 and any decoder written since then can play Theora files.
It's true that the Theora project has made huge improvements to the encoder, but that has exactly zero impact on the cost to Microsoft of supporting Theora for playback in Windows.
"irrevocable.. 'cept for those cases where we reserve the right to revoke..."
Rockoon, I am wondering what your axe to grind is here. I've seen you write insightful stuff here on Slashdot, but not today.
Google hasn't reserved any right to revoke. They did specify one condition where you can forfeit your rights under the patent grant: if you sue to attack the patents, you lose your grant to use the patents. That's unusual (maybe even never seen before?) and it's sort of odd. But it doesn't leave Google with the power to say "We have decided we don't like you and we are taking away your patent grant."
So it really comes down to arguing over what "irrevocable" means. If it means "no third party has the ability to take away the grant" then this grant is "irrevocable". If it means "nothing will ever, ever, ever take away the grant", then this grant is not "irrevocable".
Personally, I think the fact that no third party can take away your patent grant rights means it really is "irrevocable". Google can't revoke your rights; nobody can; that's "irrevocable" enough for me. The fact that there is one, clearly spelled out, way that you can forfeit your patent grant does not cause any hidden dangers or uncertainty around the patent grant.
Compare with the H.264 patent holders, who have decided that if you use a camera that records in H.264 format, you have to dance to their tune, even if you immediately convert the H.264 video to some other format. Engadget asked MPEG-LA if the license agreement means what it says, and received official word that the license agreement doesn't mean what it says; that even though the license says you will need to pay extra if you used an H.264 camera for a "commercial" purpose, that you won't have to pay extra. But as I understand it, the patent laws give them the power to start enforcing that clause any time before the patents run out.
I'll take a format with an irrevocable patent grant (even if there is a way I could forfeit the grant) any day, over H.264. If you build a business on H.264, you have no idea how much you will have to pay to use it later; with WebM you know exactly how much you will have to pay, and that is zero.
Quote: Actually, you will pay more for an ebook over the paper back.
Well, it depends. If you are buying from the Kindle store, I guess you are right.
If you are buying from Baen, you can spend $15 and get six to eight books.
If you are pulling from the Baen Free Library or from the (legal!) Fifth Imperium archive of Baen books, you are getting books for free.
If you are pulling public domain books from feedbooks.com or direct from Project Gutenberg, you are getting books for free.
I have spent hundreds of dollars over the past decade buying ebooks from Baen. Most of them I bought in those $15 bundles where you get multiple books. I have hundreds of Baen books now, not even counting the Free Library books or the ones from Fifth Imperium.
I used to use a Handspring Visor to read the books; later a Palm TX; and now my phone (a Motorola Droid 2 running Android Froyo). None of these devices get heavier when I load more books on them. I can bring my entire collection of Baen books on every trip I take.
Meanwhile many of the books I bought as a teenager (cheap paperbacks) have pages turning brown and getting brittle. Everything has pluses and minuses.
You should really start with basics and build up gradually. Get them to learn how to open a command line shell, then start typing commands in command lines. A fun place to start is the fortune command, which you could make sure is available by installing the "fortune" package; this prints a random message. Next tell them the basics of command line editing and the "history" command. Then have them use the command line to launch the GUI text editor (gedit) to make them understand that tasks launched at the command line are just as good as things run using icons in the GUI.
IMHO shell scripting is tricky and difficult. It starts easy, but very quickly becomes insane as you try to learn the weird quoting rules. I suggest to show them a very simple shell script basically just running a few commands in a row; for anything more complicated than that go straight to Python.
Definitely teach them about package management. Have them boot an Ubuntu live CD and then have them install the fortune package, run it, remove it again.
I am a huge fan of vi, and have been for decades, so believe me when I tell you to not try to teach vi or emacs. Just have them use GEdit and focus on the tasks at hand.
I am wondering if MPEG-LA called Google up and asked for money.
Consider the history of MP3. The company holding the patents was lax about enforcing them for a few years; during those years, MP3 became entrenched as the standard way to encode audio. Then the company with the patents started actually enforcing them, and any company whose business depended on MP3 had to simply pay up.
H.264 have been available under very cheap and generous terms. However, there is no guarantee that in future those terms might become less cheap and less generous. And Google, who run YouTube, is on the hook for a lot of money if H.264 becomes essential to YouTube's operation.
If Google uses H.264 instead of WebM they could save some money on bandwidth; but that savings could be totally wiped out if the licensing fees get ratcheted up. WebM will require more bits for the same quality as H.264, but Google will know for sure and certain that their licensing fees are zero and will remain zero. This seems like good business to me.
And I think a fair number of the people at Google want to do this because they want to do something good for the community. I for one would love to have video work perfectly on a fresh Linux install. I'd love to be able to create videos, edit them, upload them, and not have to worry about owing patent licensing fees, so I am cheering for WebM.
I also want to get a video camera that records in WebM to avoid this problem. I am shocked and angered that the H.264 patent holders want to tell me what I can and cannot do with a video camera that I bought, and I am stunned that a $12,000 camera still comes with this non-commercial-use limitation.
But is there a market for small handheld computers without cell phone capability? Google doesn't seem to think so
Here is my take on things.
Google announced both Android and ChromeOS. You might ask yourself, "Why do we need both?"
So far, Google has been saying that Android is a "phone OS" and ChromeOS is a "device OS". Google has also said that Android is "not really designed" for tablets.
So it looks to me like Google is trying to artificially segment the market, and is using the one tool they really have, Android Market, to try to enforce their idea that Android is only a "phone OS". This is to encourage the uptake of ChromeOS. But ChromeOS isn't ready and isn't compelling, so device makers are pushing hard to just use Android. And in several cases, they are doing so even if it means they have to put up their own app store!
This is hurting Android and it is therefore hurting Google. And I really don't see any payoff that compensates. I cannot think of any logical reason for this.
Meanwhile, I have read up on ChromeOS and I still can't figure out why I would want it. It's Linux, but set up to discourage me from using local storage? Huh? Device makers don't want it and I don't want it. Who wants it?
I expect that Google is going to change the policy, probably with Honeycomb. I predict that the official Honeycomb will not require a phone capability.
Also, I have read that the nVidia Tegra 2 is going to be the reference platform for Honeycomb. We can expect to see many tablets using it. I consider that an 8-core chip, but most of the cores are special-purpose; the general-purpose cores are a pair of Cortex A9 cores at 1GHz (which is why many articles call the Tegra 2 a "dual-core" chip). One of the special-purpose cores is a 3D accelerator; I'm hoping that Honeycomb will be able to go direct to that hardware for top performance.
I really want a small, light device with a Tegra 2 and a Pixel Qi screen. It should be dramatically faster than the current iPad, better in bright light, and potentially have longer battery life.
Here is my advice on how to make a good sequel: figure out what people like about the original, and make sure not to strip out those parts.
You might think this is totally obvious. But I'm not much of a gamer, and I can still think of several cases where this simple rule was not followed. Here are a few:
Doom vs. Doom 3: In Doom (and Doom II), most of the time you were surrounded by large numbers of monsters, sometimes ridiculously large numbers of monsters. Also, if you played it right, you could often get that ridiculously large crowd of monsters to start fighting amongst themselves, and I took an evil joy in doing that. Doom 3? Advanced 3D engine with detailed monsters, i.e. not very many monsters. It was a totally different game.
Battlezone vs. Battlezone II: (These are the 1990's hybrid FPS/RTS games.) The most basic thing you had to do in Battlezone was send out "scrap collectors" to pick up "scrap", which you could use to build stuff. Also, when you blew up the enemy's stuff, it would turn into scrap you could collect. (But of course not at a 1:1 exchange rate; it would take about 3 enemy tanks to get enough scrap to build one tank.) In Battlezone II this mechanic was totally discarded; now your build units would drill into the ground and extract all the scrap they needed, making scrap just a function of time and not a resource you had to really manage.
Spy Hunter vs. Spy Hunter 2: (These are the hybrid racing/FPS games, not the arcade games) The original Spy Hunter game was a blast. You really were racing the clock; you were shooting lots of bad guys, but you had to do it quickly. Your car was tough, so you could afford to focus on the racing and the killing. Spy Hunter 2 changed the gameplay completely: now your car was very vulnerable, and you had to focus on carefully keeping yourself alive. You also, inexplicably, now had to run over power-ups, and there were lots of boss battles.
In both Battlezone and Spy Hunter, I really wish someone could take the original game engines and just make new maps. I would pay full price for sequels that were really just more maps for those game engines.
I have no problem with depth perception as such; I know when the curb is in front of my foot and how far the approaching car is away from my own vehicle. How do I do it?
Probably the same way I do it. You know how big cars are, roughly, and the perspective view of the car lets you figure the distance. You know how big your foot is. And so on.
Where I work, some people play ping-pong. I have found my lack of depth perception really hurts my ping-pong game. That fast-moving ball confuses me and I sometimes swat at a distinctly incorrect spot and miss the ball.
Oh, and those "magic eye" 3D images that were the rage in the 1990s? I've always had real trouble seeing the 3D images.
Maybe this is just over-cautiousness in an age of lawyers. But there might be something to it.
I have one eye that is much better than the other. The eye doctor told me that, as I was growing, I somehow got in the habit of mostly using one eye and not using the other much; he said that as you grow, your eyes need exercise so they will grow correctly, and one of my eyes didn't get that exercise. Had this been caught when I was younger, I might have had a bandage put over my better eye for a while, to force me to use my worse eye. (But my eye doctor told me that the modern thinking is just to correct the vision of the worse eye; if the brain gets good input from both eyes, it will go ahead and use both of them instead of just one. So the modern thinking is not to cover the good eye, just correct the vision in the bad eye.) My eye doctor never called it "lazy eye" but I wonder if that is what I had.
Probably because of the above, I have terrible 3D depth perception. (I think it has improved a bit since I started wearing glasses that correct my vision from my worse eye, but it's still bad.)
Then there are the 3D headaches. I have read that the problem is that the actual distance to the screen is fixed, but the images can be nearer or farther away from the actual screen. So it makes me wonder if hours of 3D gaming could train a child's eyes to fix on a near distance and be detrimental to development in some way.
There might be nothing to this, but it seems sensible to take precautions. We don't have a large body of medical knowledge yet on the possible effects of 3D gaming, and if I were a parent, I wouldn't dismiss this warning.
It might take many many hours for 3D video to mess up a growing child's vision. But there are children out there who might invest those hours in a really fun 3D game. Heck, my nephew can watch the same movie over and over for hours, let alone a fun video game.
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Sorry, but I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about here. Does it relate in some way to my posting?
P.S. I believe in psychoacoustics, too; MP3 and AAC wouldn't work otherwise. But I still don't get your point.
steveha
We don't really need 24-bit recordings. We need the producers to use 24-bit in the studio, and then a nice 16-bit final output with dithering, and we have all the dynamic range we really need.
16-bit gives you about 90 dB. That's enough to go from "barely audible in a quiet room" to "starting to make your ears hurt". It's enough dynamic range, really.
But look up the "loudness wars" and find that much music being sold these days doesn't even use all that dynamic range. They compress the daylights out of the music to make it "louder".
So, I'm sort of interested in the 24-bit standard, if and only if it implies that the music will be produced with some actual dynamic range. If Rush makes a new album, they can release the CD with the dynamic range compressed away to nothing; and they can release the 24-bit mastered with some actual dynamic range.
Will this actually happen? Who knows. But I'm cautiously optimistic. This will give the studios the chance to release two completely different mixes, the mass-market one that "has to be loud" and the one marketed at audiophiles which "has to be clean". I don't spend $2000 on a power cord for my stereo, but I do appreciate a clean mix, so I hope this does work out.
steveha
Much of the patented work on MP3 and related psycho-acoustic modeling technology were well predated by work on signal processing for cochlear implants.
As I understand it, it is possible to patent a really new application of known principles. For example, if you invent a new machine that includes a rotating axle, it is not a problem that axles are a known technology.
Some of the principles behind MP3 were known since the 1940s and even earlier. But nobody had ever applied them to the problem of reducing the bit rate of recorded music.
Not only was MP3 a novel invention, it was so novel it was an uphill battle to get MPEG to standardize it. It barely made it in, as the third and least of three audio coders; the "experts" figured everyone would use layer 1 or layer 2, because layer 3 was "too complicated". Those "experts" pointed out that the signal to noise ratio of layer 3 was worse than the other layers; that's actually true, but useless (MP3 was designed to exploit quirks in how the human auditory system works, so it can save space by chopping out parts of the signal that humans can't hear anyway). History has shown that the psychoacoustic approach was the correct one for a reduced bitrate coder, but it was far from "obvious" at the time.
I think the patents related to MP3 and AAC were examples of the patent system working, not the patent system being broken.
Disclaimer: I am not a patent lawyer, but I am working in the area of audio signal processing and I'm somewhat exposed to these issues (so I'm not just making stuff up, here).
steveha
My big hope for the future of movies is that technology is making movies less expensive to produce.
The more expensive a movie is, the harder it is to make the movie; and the more the studios start to mess with the creators of the movie. "We don't want that quirky unknown actor you like; you need to put in Johnny Depp." "The test audiences didn't understand the ending; you need to change it to make it clear that the good guy won." That sort of thing.
I read an interview with John Cusack right after Grosse Pointe Blank came out. He said something like "I'd love to give you a great story about how we fought the suits to realize our vision, but the reality is we were spending so little money that nobody cared about us, and we were able to make the movie the way we wanted to."
So, I predict that within the near future, it will be possible for a director to make a movie completely pure to his/her vision, by keeping the costs really low. Shoot everything with digital cameras. Have the special effects done at some unknown small computer effects shop in Korea or somewhere... or possibly even done by American university students for free. Hire unknown actors who will work just for the experience and accept royalties instead of big up-front money. (Or hire actors that Hollywood has already chewed up and spit out. I can think of several actors I liked who never got much respect in Hollywood.)
As for actors, you never know: you might even get semi-famous or famous people, as long as the time commitment is low. http://5secondfilms.com/ has had Peter Sormare do a couple of shorts for them, I presume for free. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was able to film all of Angelina Jolie's scenes in three days. Once Upon a Time in Mexico got all of Johnny Depp's scenes filmed early, and they had time to just improvise a couple of new scenes with him before he had to leave.
If you visit TheForce.net you can see a whole bunch of "fan films" that were done on a really tiny budget. The special effects are, in many cases, not bad at all.
I've seen plenty of stuff on TheForce.net that is better than Batman & Robin or Aeon Flux. For me at least, the best special effect is a good story; if I like the story, I'm quite willing to overlook a lot of other stuff.
I predict that not only is what I imagine possible, it is pretty much inevitable. Modern consumers have so many choices, that it is now impossible to drive everyone to see the same movies (or listen to the same music). Markets are fragmenting based on consumer's tastes, so it will be harder for movies to become true blockbusters. Keeping costs down and appealing to a specific demographic is one strategy for dealing with this, and I expect to see a lot more of it.
steveha
An atom CPU is a bit more than just those 330 whatevers you can still find. There are literally dozens of variants of the "Atom" chips now.
The Atom I am familiar with is in a netbook, and it blows lots of hot air out the side vent. Way too much power dissipation.
After reading your comment, I Googled for "Atom system on a chip" and found:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/atom-soc-system-on-chip-e600-processor,11304.html
Looks like it is actually shipping, too, not just vapor. I haven't heard of any phones shipping with it. I wonder if it will show up first in tablets.
steveha
From the slide:
2011 Kal-el
2012 Wayne
2013 Logan
2014 Stark
That's Superman, Batman, Wolverine, and Iron Man.
There is a thread here claiming The Tick is in the list, but if so, he's not in the slide from TFA, he's not in the Wikipedia article, and Google search doesn't know about it. It's a joke or a troll.
According to the graph, the performance to come is just crazy! Performance compared to the Tegra 2:
Kal-El: 5x
Wayne: 10x
Logan: 50x
Stark: 75x? 80x?
I'm not sure how those numbers can be real, though. A Tegra 2 is already a substantial fraction of the performance of a desktop processor. If we can have 75x that performance in a few years, are they promising to outperform desktop processors in just a few years time? Or do they think desktop processors will stop plateauing and start ramping up performance dramatically again?
Now more than ever, I want a slim netbook with a full-size keyboard, a Tegra processor, and a Pixel Qi screen. It would be great for email and web, for taking notes, etc. It would be just the thing for carrying around at a conference or convention.
steveha
Mod parent up. A Tegra 2 is a "system on a chip" and you don't need much else. An Atom needs support chips, and you have to look at the total power budget of the Atom plus support chips.
A Tegra is much more power-efficient than an Atom. It is not an accident that Android 3.0 tablets will be running on Tegra 2 chips, and not on Atom chips.
steveha
Both codecs are free in different ways. WebM is gratis; free as in beer; it costs no money to implement and distribute, but not to contribute to. H.264 is libre; free as in speech; you must pay to distribute an implementation, but anyone can contribute to the spec.
No.
WebM has a frozen bitstream standard. You cannot contribute to this standard, because it is frozen. However, you are free to contribute to the support software: encoders, decoders, tools. And there is vast room for improvement of the encoders, plenty of work there to keep you busy.
H.264 also has a frozen bitstram standard. During the development phase, which is now over, you could have contributed to the development process, but only if you could afford the fees to attend the meeting. I am not sure exactly how much that cost, but I saw one posting here on Slashdot claiming it was on the order of $40,000 per person per meeting. In fairness, you could probably pitch your ideas for free to one of the large companies that was sending representatives (e.g. Microsoft, Apple) and possibly get your ideas in anyway.
H.265 is under development now. Go ahead and try to contribute some ideas to it. Please report back here on Slashdot for how well that works out for you.
So, the important thing here is: H.264 and WebM are both frozen standards. Both have free software projects implementing them, to which anyone can contribute. But only one of them is fully free. H.264 is controlled by MPEG-LA, so you can only distribute H.264 (or even use H.264) with their permission, on their terms. If they decide "no H.264 licenses will be offered to Linux users" then the Linux users will have no legal way to use it. (That's a silly, extreme example, and I have no reason to think they will do that. However, they really are asserting that the mere act of using a camera that records in H.264 makes you subject to their whims, which is intolerable.)
Like I said, I think the ability to contribute the codec vastly outweighs the ability to implement it for free.
I'm sorry, but H.264 is frozen too. You are simply mistaken on this point.
steveha
That's silly; if two failure modes have been corrected (or at least made far less likely), then by definition the overall safety has gone up.
Then please allow me to rephrase. I see no reason to think that the space shuttle has suddenly become 99.999% reliable instead of 99% reliable. And while identifying two failure modes lowers the risk, the shuttle aging may be increasing the risk.
I'm not an expert on risk or an expert on space flight hardware. The basic point is: I would not try to run a business with hardware this dangerous.
If cargo ships only had a 99% chance of crossing the ocean, with a 1% chance of losing the ship at sea, I wouldn't want to be in the shipping business, either.
steveha
There is no way a private company could keep the shuttles flying and make any sort of profit.
Even when they were brand-new, the shuttles needed an insane amount of work to service them after each flight. According to Henry Spencer, in postings on sci.space, it took a "standing army" of NASA employees months of work to prep a shuttle for the next launch. The main engines need to be pulled and overhauled, tiles need to be inspected and damaged tiles replaced, and I don't even remember all the details.
I remember he said it takes a million signatures to launch a shuttle. As in: work gets done, someone runs down a checklist and makes sure everything is good, and someone signs off that the work is complete. That, times a million.
As others have noted here, the payload capacity of the shuttle is rather large, which isn't actually that useful most of the time. On the other hand, the shuttle can only reach a low orbit, which is also not ideal. So basically a shuttle flight can lift a stupidly large payload to low orbit, then it needs man-centuries of maintenance before it can do it again.
Adding spice and excitement is the chance the shuttle will be destroyed during the mission. (The people on board might or might not die: historically each shuttle lost has killed everyone, but one of the exciting failure modes would be for the landing gear to fail and the shuttle skid to a stop, never to fly again.) Henry Spencer estimated that the shuttle is only 99% likely to avoid being destroyed, which is terrible odds. (I believe he made that estimate after Challenger and before Columbia.) The shuttle has had 132 missions and two catastrophes; I have no reason to think it has gotten safer since then. (Yes, lessons have been learned and applied, so I shouldn't expect the exact same catastrophes again. But what other catastrophes might happen with an aging space shuttle?) Also according to Henry Spencer, if two tires on any single landing gear arm blow out during landing, that would total the shuttle (probably without hurting any astronauts). That has never happened, but one tire blowing out has, more than once.
As many have said for many years, what we really need is a "space pickup truck". There are times you want a giant moving van, but much of the time you are better off with the smaller capacity pickup truck.
What we really need is a launch vehicle that can take a small payload (one single ton would be plenty for many useful purposes) into orbit, then land, be minimally serviced, and then do it again tomorrow. You could ferry people and supplies up and down quickly and easily. You could have one or even several on stand-by to launch in case of some sort of emergency. You could send large things up in modules, and connect the modules once in orbit.
The ideal reusable vehicle would be a "single stage to orbit" (SSTO) design. You want your space pickup truck to have as low a total cost of operations as possible, so having pieces fall off it during launch is a complication you want to avoid.
If you must, do a two-stage to orbit. Some serious proposals have called for two manned vehicles, docked, with one lifting the other part-way up and then a pilot flying it back down while the other vehicle goes the rest of the way to orbit.
I believe that, when we get our "space pickup truck", it will have been developed by private industry. Armadillo Aerospace, SpaceX, XCOR, and various others are trying various things, and after enough generations of prototypes, somebody will get an affordable system for moving things and people in and out of space.
Many things become possible once you have cheap and reliable access to space. For example, if you want to send people to Mars, you would do well to ship fuel, oxygen, and other supplies up in a bunch of little cheap flights, rather than trying to do the Apollo thing of having a complete and self-contained system launch from Earth.
steveha
"Given enough eyeballs, all tombs are shallow."
steveha
Sometimes people get really lost and a GPS could have saved them.
In particular I am thinking of the story of James Kim and his family. In December 2006 they were driving south in Oregon, and they missed their planned exit. It was almost an hour of driving later before they realized they had missed the exit. Not wanting to waste another hour by doubling back, they got off the highway and took a road that looked okay on their map, but was pretty much impassible in winter. (In fact there was supposed to be a gate closing off the road with a sign saying "Closed in Winter".) They ended up stuck, completely outside cellular phone coverage areas, with nobody having any clue where to look for them, and no emergency food or clothes in the car. After a week (a week! no food, only snow for water, two adults and two children, imagine how horrible it must have been!) Mr. Kim made the decision to set out on foot and try to find help. He froze to death, but fortunately a search helicopter spotted the car and the rest of the family was saved.
I have always figured that a GPS could have prevented this tragedy; with a GPS they wouldn't have missed their exit, and if they did they would have realized it immediately and would have simply gone back and taken the intended exit.
Now, while I have no desire to say anything disrespectful about Mr. Kim, I do also wonder at their common sense. According to one report I read, they found the road to be difficult going, and they had to stop and get out of the car and move obstacles out of the road (fallen trees? I don't remember the details). Their common sense should have told them that this road was a bad idea, and they should have just turned around and backtracked before it was too late.
So, common sense could have saved them, or a GPS could have saved them.
The sad irony is that Mr. Kim was an editor on CNet and he reviewed gadgets like GPS navigators. But he didn't have one in his car.
P.S. Blindly trusting a GPS is also increasingly leading to trucks trying to go under low bridges, as in this story.
steveha
The reference decoder implementation has been changed recently (15 months ago) and that includes bug fixes.
And what of it? Are you implying that the bitstream format was changed such that old Theora files won't play back anymore? Are you saying that new Theora files won't play back on 16+ month old decoders? Or are you implying that it would be terribly expensive for Microsoft to accept patches to free software that they are using for free?
I really don't understand your point.
steveha
There isnt a single device doing hardware accelerated WebM right now
Google is paying people to develop reference code for hardware acceleration of WebM on existing DSP chips. WebM is close enough to H.264 in basic ways (e.g. both are based on discrete cosine transform) that hardware to accelerate H.264 can likely be used to accelerate WebM. So, it is very possible that a simple software upgrade will enable hardware accelerated WebM on existing devices; and Google is paying to make it happen.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1946532&cid=34846252
It's not done yet, so you are correct that there is currently no hardware acceleration of WebM on current mobile devices.
steveha
H.264 is miles ahead of Theora, *especially* at low bit rates
I agree with this statement.
The original page, comparing Theora to YouTube videos, was not trying to trick people into thinking Theora is better than H.264. A guy at Google famously claimed: "If [youtube] were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet." The Theora guy compared the quality available per bit with Theora, with the actual quality of actual videos from YouTube; and he concluded that Theora was able to meet or beat the quality of the example videos he pulled from YouTube. At the bottom, in the conclusions section, he noted that YouTube uses H.263, and just a subset at that, for many videos, making it easier for Theora to match YouTube; and even for H.264, YouTube isn't making full use of the standard. He speculated that perhaps YouTube was making a tradeoff, allowing the files to be bigger to make them easier to seek within or some such. Here's the link again; go read what he actually wrote.
I'm sure there are idiotic, deranged Theora fanboys out there who claimed it is better in all ways than H.264, but I am not one. If you make effective use of H.264 you get the highest quality per bit possible with current video technology, full stop. The only advantage of Theora is that it is patent-free and BSD-licensed. That is a very large advantage for some purposes.
But now we have VP8, which is much better than Theora, while still freely available for use. It's not as good as H.264, but it seems to be better than everything else, and good enough for practical use. It will have its place.
H.264 isn't going away. But short of a successful patent challenge, WebM isn't going away either. Its advantages in freedom will make it the top choice for many purposes, even though it can't match the ultimate quality per bit of H.264.
steveha
..and by "free" you mean that if Microsoft includes the theora codec with windows, then they also have to provide source code upon request... that whole GPL thing that Theora falls under...
If you were correct, and Theora were under GPL, Microsoft could trivially discharge this obligation simply by putting a Theora .tar.gz file (or .zip file if they prefer) on one of the many Microsoft web servers. Microsoft would not be obliged to share the entire source code for Windows.
But in fact Theora is released under the BSD license so Microsoft wouldn't even need to do that much.
What matters for Theora support is the Theora decoder, which has been finished for years. The Theora bitstream format has been frozen since 2004 and any decoder written since then can play Theora files.
It's true that the Theora project has made huge improvements to the encoder, but that has exactly zero impact on the cost to Microsoft of supporting Theora for playback in Windows.
steveha
"irrevocable.. 'cept for those cases where we reserve the right to revoke..."
Rockoon, I am wondering what your axe to grind is here. I've seen you write insightful stuff here on Slashdot, but not today.
Google hasn't reserved any right to revoke. They did specify one condition where you can forfeit your rights under the patent grant: if you sue to attack the patents, you lose your grant to use the patents. That's unusual (maybe even never seen before?) and it's sort of odd. But it doesn't leave Google with the power to say "We have decided we don't like you and we are taking away your patent grant."
So it really comes down to arguing over what "irrevocable" means. If it means "no third party has the ability to take away the grant" then this grant is "irrevocable". If it means "nothing will ever, ever, ever take away the grant", then this grant is not "irrevocable".
Personally, I think the fact that no third party can take away your patent grant rights means it really is "irrevocable". Google can't revoke your rights; nobody can; that's "irrevocable" enough for me. The fact that there is one, clearly spelled out, way that you can forfeit your patent grant does not cause any hidden dangers or uncertainty around the patent grant.
Compare with the H.264 patent holders, who have decided that if you use a camera that records in H.264 format, you have to dance to their tune, even if you immediately convert the H.264 video to some other format. Engadget asked MPEG-LA if the license agreement means what it says, and received official word that the license agreement doesn't mean what it says; that even though the license says you will need to pay extra if you used an H.264 camera for a "commercial" purpose, that you won't have to pay extra. But as I understand it, the patent laws give them the power to start enforcing that clause any time before the patents run out.
I'll take a format with an irrevocable patent grant (even if there is a way I could forfeit the grant) any day, over H.264. If you build a business on H.264, you have no idea how much you will have to pay to use it later; with WebM you know exactly how much you will have to pay, and that is zero.
steveha
Quote: Actually, you will pay more for an ebook over the paper back.
Well, it depends. If you are buying from the Kindle store, I guess you are right.
If you are buying from Baen, you can spend $15 and get six to eight books.
If you are pulling from the Baen Free Library or from the (legal!) Fifth Imperium archive of Baen books, you are getting books for free.
If you are pulling public domain books from feedbooks.com or direct from Project Gutenberg, you are getting books for free.
I have spent hundreds of dollars over the past decade buying ebooks from Baen. Most of them I bought in those $15 bundles where you get multiple books. I have hundreds of Baen books now, not even counting the Free Library books or the ones from Fifth Imperium.
I used to use a Handspring Visor to read the books; later a Palm TX; and now my phone (a Motorola Droid 2 running Android Froyo). None of these devices get heavier when I load more books on them. I can bring my entire collection of Baen books on every trip I take.
Meanwhile many of the books I bought as a teenager (cheap paperbacks) have pages turning brown and getting brittle. Everything has pluses and minuses.
steveha
Wouldn't that be the iEye ?
iEye? Aye!
(Ai yi yi!)
Bye.
You should really start with basics and build up gradually. Get them to learn how to open a command line shell, then start typing commands in command lines. A fun place to start is the fortune command, which you could make sure is available by installing the "fortune" package; this prints a random message. Next tell them the basics of command line editing and the "history" command. Then have them use the command line to launch the GUI text editor (gedit) to make them understand that tasks launched at the command line are just as good as things run using icons in the GUI.
IMHO shell scripting is tricky and difficult. It starts easy, but very quickly becomes insane as you try to learn the weird quoting rules. I suggest to show them a very simple shell script basically just running a few commands in a row; for anything more complicated than that go straight to Python.
Definitely teach them about package management. Have them boot an Ubuntu live CD and then have them install the fortune package, run it, remove it again.
I am a huge fan of vi, and have been for decades, so believe me when I tell you to not try to teach vi or emacs. Just have them use GEdit and focus on the tasks at hand.
steveha
I am wondering if MPEG-LA called Google up and asked for money.
Consider the history of MP3. The company holding the patents was lax about enforcing them for a few years; during those years, MP3 became entrenched as the standard way to encode audio. Then the company with the patents started actually enforcing them, and any company whose business depended on MP3 had to simply pay up.
H.264 have been available under very cheap and generous terms. However, there is no guarantee that in future those terms might become less cheap and less generous. And Google, who run YouTube, is on the hook for a lot of money if H.264 becomes essential to YouTube's operation.
If Google uses H.264 instead of WebM they could save some money on bandwidth; but that savings could be totally wiped out if the licensing fees get ratcheted up. WebM will require more bits for the same quality as H.264, but Google will know for sure and certain that their licensing fees are zero and will remain zero. This seems like good business to me.
And I think a fair number of the people at Google want to do this because they want to do something good for the community. I for one would love to have video work perfectly on a fresh Linux install. I'd love to be able to create videos, edit them, upload them, and not have to worry about owing patent licensing fees, so I am cheering for WebM.
I also want to get a video camera that records in WebM to avoid this problem. I am shocked and angered that the H.264 patent holders want to tell me what I can and cannot do with a video camera that I bought, and I am stunned that a $12,000 camera still comes with this non-commercial-use limitation.
steveha
But is there a market for small handheld computers without cell phone capability? Google doesn't seem to think so
Here is my take on things.
Google announced both Android and ChromeOS. You might ask yourself, "Why do we need both?"
So far, Google has been saying that Android is a "phone OS" and ChromeOS is a "device OS". Google has also said that Android is "not really designed" for tablets.
So it looks to me like Google is trying to artificially segment the market, and is using the one tool they really have, Android Market, to try to enforce their idea that Android is only a "phone OS". This is to encourage the uptake of ChromeOS. But ChromeOS isn't ready and isn't compelling, so device makers are pushing hard to just use Android. And in several cases, they are doing so even if it means they have to put up their own app store!
This is hurting Android and it is therefore hurting Google. And I really don't see any payoff that compensates. I cannot think of any logical reason for this.
Meanwhile, I have read up on ChromeOS and I still can't figure out why I would want it. It's Linux, but set up to discourage me from using local storage? Huh? Device makers don't want it and I don't want it. Who wants it?
I expect that Google is going to change the policy, probably with Honeycomb. I predict that the official Honeycomb will not require a phone capability.
Also, I have read that the nVidia Tegra 2 is going to be the reference platform for Honeycomb. We can expect to see many tablets using it. I consider that an 8-core chip, but most of the cores are special-purpose; the general-purpose cores are a pair of Cortex A9 cores at 1GHz (which is why many articles call the Tegra 2 a "dual-core" chip). One of the special-purpose cores is a 3D accelerator; I'm hoping that Honeycomb will be able to go direct to that hardware for top performance.
I really want a small, light device with a Tegra 2 and a Pixel Qi screen. It should be dramatically faster than the current iPad, better in bright light, and potentially have longer battery life.
steveha
Here is my advice on how to make a good sequel: figure out what people like about the original, and make sure not to strip out those parts.
You might think this is totally obvious. But I'm not much of a gamer, and I can still think of several cases where this simple rule was not followed. Here are a few:
Doom vs. Doom 3: In Doom (and Doom II), most of the time you were surrounded by large numbers of monsters, sometimes ridiculously large numbers of monsters. Also, if you played it right, you could often get that ridiculously large crowd of monsters to start fighting amongst themselves, and I took an evil joy in doing that. Doom 3? Advanced 3D engine with detailed monsters, i.e. not very many monsters. It was a totally different game.
Battlezone vs. Battlezone II: (These are the 1990's hybrid FPS/RTS games.) The most basic thing you had to do in Battlezone was send out "scrap collectors" to pick up "scrap", which you could use to build stuff. Also, when you blew up the enemy's stuff, it would turn into scrap you could collect. (But of course not at a 1:1 exchange rate; it would take about 3 enemy tanks to get enough scrap to build one tank.) In Battlezone II this mechanic was totally discarded; now your build units would drill into the ground and extract all the scrap they needed, making scrap just a function of time and not a resource you had to really manage.
Spy Hunter vs. Spy Hunter 2: (These are the hybrid racing/FPS games, not the arcade games) The original Spy Hunter game was a blast. You really were racing the clock; you were shooting lots of bad guys, but you had to do it quickly. Your car was tough, so you could afford to focus on the racing and the killing. Spy Hunter 2 changed the gameplay completely: now your car was very vulnerable, and you had to focus on carefully keeping yourself alive. You also, inexplicably, now had to run over power-ups, and there were lots of boss battles.
In both Battlezone and Spy Hunter, I really wish someone could take the original game engines and just make new maps. I would pay full price for sequels that were really just more maps for those game engines.
steveha
I have no problem with depth perception as such; I know when the curb is in front of my foot and how far the approaching car is away from my own vehicle. How do I do it?
Probably the same way I do it. You know how big cars are, roughly, and the perspective view of the car lets you figure the distance. You know how big your foot is. And so on.
Where I work, some people play ping-pong. I have found my lack of depth perception really hurts my ping-pong game. That fast-moving ball confuses me and I sometimes swat at a distinctly incorrect spot and miss the ball.
Oh, and those "magic eye" 3D images that were the rage in the 1990s? I've always had real trouble seeing the 3D images.
steveha
Maybe this is just over-cautiousness in an age of lawyers. But there might be something to it.
I have one eye that is much better than the other. The eye doctor told me that, as I was growing, I somehow got in the habit of mostly using one eye and not using the other much; he said that as you grow, your eyes need exercise so they will grow correctly, and one of my eyes didn't get that exercise. Had this been caught when I was younger, I might have had a bandage put over my better eye for a while, to force me to use my worse eye. (But my eye doctor told me that the modern thinking is just to correct the vision of the worse eye; if the brain gets good input from both eyes, it will go ahead and use both of them instead of just one. So the modern thinking is not to cover the good eye, just correct the vision in the bad eye.) My eye doctor never called it "lazy eye" but I wonder if that is what I had.
Probably because of the above, I have terrible 3D depth perception. (I think it has improved a bit since I started wearing glasses that correct my vision from my worse eye, but it's still bad.)
Then there are the 3D headaches. I have read that the problem is that the actual distance to the screen is fixed, but the images can be nearer or farther away from the actual screen. So it makes me wonder if hours of 3D gaming could train a child's eyes to fix on a near distance and be detrimental to development in some way.
There might be nothing to this, but it seems sensible to take precautions. We don't have a large body of medical knowledge yet on the possible effects of 3D gaming, and if I were a parent, I wouldn't dismiss this warning.
It might take many many hours for 3D video to mess up a growing child's vision. But there are children out there who might invest those hours in a really fun 3D game. Heck, my nephew can watch the same movie over and over for hours, let alone a fun video game.
steveha