Re:Emacs emulation in vim?
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 5, Funny
> Has anyone done an emacs emulation mode for vim?
No, because they haven't figured out how to compress the 75 megs of diskspace a fuly featured emacs takes into the vim source, to give you that true "emacs feel".
Apparently you didn't, because you flamed him anyways.
Stop being a hypersensitive Mac user and learn to laugh at yourself a little bit. It's no different than the amusement most unix users treat the emacs/vi debate with.
It's not just the hardware..
on
The Future Of 3D
·
· Score: 4, Informative
From the article:
> At least for now it is. As the great gods of
> technology continue to design new, unparalleled
> computing power, the detail will only become
> greater.
I really don't agree that the advancement of hardware is the main reason that 3D is becoming, or will become, more and more realistic. Fact of it is, us humans still haven't quite nailed down how to duplicate reality. Skin in FF looked plastic because we still don't know how to render skin well. They looked stiff when they ran because we still don't know how to add in the subtleties of movement. They looked fake when they talked because we still haven't mastered expressions.
I mean, people were doing production TV shows with Amiga's and Video Toasters a decade ago.. and that hardware couldn't hold a candle to today's machinery. It's not strictly hardware. I think 3d animation will only become more realistic once we've gotten better at figuring out how lighting works, how creatures move, and all the subtleties involved.
Bungie merely GPL'd the game engine. They still retain the copyrights to all game art, content, yadda yadda yadda. I think to legally play the full version of Marathon, you have to actually own a copy of the game.
I believe it works like Quake does; you pull the content files off your CD and dump them in a relevent directory. Do Bungie a favor and plop down the fifteen bucks it costs to get Marathon.. let 'em know we still love the game.:)
AlephOne is tres cool. They've completely updated the engine, and have been hacking at it for over a year now.. the source was released last January. I believe they distribute "demo" data files, so you can still play the game while not owning a full copy.
I'd verify the info, if b.org wasn't already hosed beyond accessibility.;)
In the EULA, Verant explicitly says that in order to be allowed to play their game, you MUST agree to NOT sell or transfer any in-game items for real-world money or services.
The issue of selling such items on auction sites (or otherwise) is valid, however. What constitutes property?
Beyond that, though, Verant has every right to close accounts for people selling in-game items. It's in the EULA. They said they would do it, players agreed by playing the game that it was an acceptable rule, and thus, these people have no reason to be pissed that their accounts get closed.
> That your own genetics, in a sea of six billion other
> bags of dna, actually have any significance?
I'm not insensitive to the suffering that orphaned / fostered children have to go through, but looked at through a telescope, this argument works both ways. Your argument is full of logical flaws, basically. If we're all so worthless.. why bother with children? They lose their parents, toss 'em to the wolves. Hell.. why reproduce, period? We're all worthless!
Of course, that doesn't address the issue that clones are created and orphans are already here, which is a valid debate topic.. but your logical flaws weaken your argument. Those scientists, if they aren't adopting now, probably wouldn't adopt if you forced them to stop cloning. The two issues are exclusive to each other.
Now, the REAL issue would be whether we have the right to play god..
Re:Responsibility and censorship
on
Nazis on Napster
·
· Score: 5
> I don't believe in censorship, nor do I believe
> that Napster or BMG have the right to censor any
> form of speech.
How is this censorship? People have debated this on Slashdot before, I believe. It's not censorship unless it comes from a government agency, merely because a business has such a limited control over you. At least, not in the sense most people here seem to take it; as if "the man" is stomping on your rights to have access to something you want.
Can't find it on Napster? Go look for a band's website. They don't have one? Go to music stores that carry a lot of underground labels. Failing that, go visit their shows.
If you object to the content a business makes available, or doesn't make available, it's really, really simple to fix: don't do business with them. Sure, Napster is a great tool, but they don't exactly hold a monopoly over the mp3 market. You have other channels of availability.
They have just as much a right to not give you something as you have a right to possess something.
..why not get rid of timezones and daylight savings, too?
IIRC, daylight savings is a carryover from one of the world wars, and timezones are some kludge pushed on us by the railroads as they spread across the world.
To me, in today's world where "instant communications" makes timezones a major PITA, it seems like we should all function on a 24 hour clock, where it's 00:00 at the exact sime time, everywhere in the world.
That way, when you tell your buddy in New York that you'll be there at 14:00 in two days, you know that'll be early morning for you (coming from the pacific coast) and he'll know it's somewhere in the afternoon for him.
Sure it seems unnatural now, but after a few weeks, I wager people would get used to "morning" being, say, 12:00. Or wherever dawn actually happens to fall. It just seems to me that having our measure of time bound to when the sun rises is silly; what happens in a hundred or so years when people aren't even living on earth and they don't HAVE a sunrise?
It all winds down to the same reasons Americans aren't using the metric system yet and we all bang around on QWERTY keyboards; folks are just too resistant to change.
You know all those subways in New York? They're powered by electricity. Sure, the metaphor is a little different, but the idea is still there: Electric powered mass transit.
Pneumatic tubes? Bah, Home Depot and Costco use these systems to this day. I worked for a company a couple years ago that maintained these systems; cashiers use them to deliver money to the vault in the back.
Amiga? HAH. I still have a functioning Amiga 2000.
Don't many studios still use some varient of the 'ribbon microphone'? Admittedly my expertise is starting to peter out, but I do know it's common for either recording artists or movie people to use older technologies because they sound (or look) a certain way.
Reel mowers, bah. I had a friend during childhood who's parents still used one.. they made him mow the lawn with it as punishment.;)
Only commenting on the stuff I know.;) Good technology never dies; it seems more like the really good ideas get delegated to "fans" or people who don't fall prety to marketing and/or the feeling they need the latest and greatest.
Just because you don't see a representation of it on every street corner doesn't mean something has dissappeared.
Concerns over where Google is going to make it's money, and the fear current users have that Google is going to change, really only confirms one thing; the interests of customers and the interests of businesses are not compatiable with each other.
An obvious point, I guess, but it is pretty curious, seeing as how businesses exist strictly to perform a service for customers.
Here's hoping Google finds a way to thrive without "selling out" to banner ads or somesuch. I'd love to see conventional thinking get shaken up were Google to manage what most folks consider will be impossible.
..actually happened several months ago. It even made a Slashdot story IIRC, but damn if I'm gonna go scour the archives that far back.
What happened was that EQvault, an EverQuest game news site, lost their database. As they pressured their ISP to recover the most recent backup, they ran the site on an older database.. one from April.
It just so happened that the press release up above was the news posted that day.. and for most of this morning, it was the top story on EQvault.;)
Was kind of funny watching smaller news sites leech the information; kind of gave an example of how many people steal news from other sites without ever READING it. Highly amusing to see it appear on Slashdot, though I must admit, I'm not entirely surprised.:)
..whoever wrote it (not all convinced it was Gates himself) is a pretty good author. He interjects items that are blatantly incorrect or ignore obvious details in a move to aggravate the reader, but inserts just enough truth to keep the boat floating. It keeps the reader fairly well engaged (and pissed off).
Me, being suspicious, almost wonder if this memo wasn't INTENDED to be "leaked", that is, if it actually came from Microsoft at all.
It's the sort of writing where you disagree with it profoundly, but can't really pick a place to start responding because there's so many conflicts and things to disagree with.
Were that email to appear on usenet, it would be lauded as a troll. And a damn fine one.. just wait for Slashdot readers to devour this one if you want to see truth in that.;)
..but isn't the thing they're fixing here just one of many reasons for blindness?
I'm not a doctor, but it seems to me that there's more than one way for a person's eyes to not, or stop, work(ing), simply by excersising a bit of common sense. I mean, it's like saying that breast removal "cures cancer". Not quite.. it fixes one FORM of cancer (or, well, it can).
More power to these guys if it helps even a fraction of the blind folks out there.. but without more information than a press release, I remain skeptical that this is going to help everyone that has an eye problem. All the information available indicates it only repairs a rather narrow brand of blindness.
I'd just be wary of labelling these guys gods. Minor deity's, perhaps, because the achievment is pretty major.. but it seems to me it's only one step in the entire staircase.
It's almost a "social" form of protecting data: Don't leave your laptop laying around.
Would this guy's laptop have been stolen if he'd put it into his briefcase and taken it home with him after work? If this company was a small startup, they probably don't have the building security features that they'd like to have protecting their hardware. Thus, leaving nothing at work seems prudent.. depending on how important it is to the guy.
Of course, I suppose someone could have mugged him at night and taken the briefcase, but by that point, I think the scenario would have become a James Bond movie.
Encrypting data is one obvious method of protection; prevention of hardware theft itself is a lot more basic, and a tad more simple to implement.
I mean, what happens when an intern is swapping around petri dishes one night and he trips over his shoelaces? Does he dump into our modern world some parasite that absolutely nothing currently alive today has an immunity to?
Or, even if it's a "good" bacteria, it could cause more harm than anything.
Chalk my suspicion up to all kinds of media-fed paranoia about biological attacks and too many B-grade sci-films as a kid.;)
It is pretty astounding.. but considering what bringing domesticated animals into Australia did (as an off the shelf example), what's going to happen when we bring 250 million year old lifeforms back to life?
That's what the Amiga was FOR. The Video Toaster and all those neat applications that made Amiga famous? Those came later.. by several years.
As with many things from the early days of personal computers, the history is muddy and filled with opinon, but if you poke around for a bit, you can pick up one common thread: They were striving to build the next hot gaming platform.
One example of this would be a history found here.
There's dozens more out there.. I reccomend looking them up and getting a lot of opinions before making your own. But playing games exclusively wouldn't be an insult to the Amiga.:) It'd be using it for exactly what it was meant to do.
Pointing out the Martin Luther King one in specific, you can tell the "looks like a computer game" was just a gimmick to kind of tweak the emotions of the scene a little bit. In the same image, imperfections in the right angles help to keep it from being too "computery".
I do like the idea. Kind of a way to link bad stuff that happens in the world to computers. I wonder if the artist had some kind of underlying motivation to point out the (supposed) links between video games and violence in the world (physical or otherwise).
Can look at it two ways.. either these images point out that bad scenes aren't nearly so horrifying when done on a computer (and thus people need not worry about video game violence), or computers trivialize the reality of violence to the extent that it is unable to effect us like it should.
No further comments.:) 'Grats to the artist though.. pretty cool pieces he's done.
Ignoring the obvious problems with this thing congress is attempting, I noticed something else in the article:
"[...] state chapters of the Christian Coalition and American Family Association [are] opposing the initiative".
Is it just me, or this interesting? The article reports that these groups are saying this is a "bad way" to educate children about internet usage.
Again: Huh, what? Isn't this directly against what these groups have sought to achieve in the past? Even in the same article, CNN comments on this:
"Internet filtering has been a priority of many conservative groups, including Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition and the American
Family Association."
What's going on here? Can anyone maybe offer some insight as to what's going on with these groups to bring about such an apparent turnaround?
Are they afraid that if one extreme (pornography) gets censored, the the other extreme (conservative views) will get the same treatment? Or is this
merely them stating that, while they want sexual content filtered, they do NOT want the government enforcing it?
If it's the latter that's true, I may alter my view on these people a tad. Not enough to hop in bed with them, but it is an interesting insight.
Check out the work some fellow has done over at this website.
He's using a fairly cheap Sony "Handycam" to do his filming, the model he names is the TR-101 hi8. Having problems finding that specific model online, so it may be discontinued. But the Sony cam line runs from anywhere between $500 and $5000. Check out this link to get a pretty detailed explanation of how he makes his movies.
If nothing else, click around on the dude's movies. A ton of fun to watch.:) These aren't superior quality movies, but you can see what happens to stuff when it gets shot with a high power weapon, which is rather entertaining.
Check out what happens when you view this URL with Netscape under Linux (version 4.72 is what I'm using). Or get to the results manually with this link.
Here's a snippet of the javascript responsible for the mis-viewing:
var agt=navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
var isWin = agt.indexOf('win') != -1;
var isMac = agt.indexOf('mac') != -1;
if (isWin) { }
else if (isMac) parent.location="macindex.html";
else parent.location="index_unsupported.html";
For even more entertainment value, check out what you see if you go to macindex.html.;)
A lot of entertainment has to do with hightening your "immersion" in the experience. Be it an orchestra in a huge opera house, a movie theatre with THX sound, or a ten thousand dollar home audio setup, it's all there for the same purpose: to trigger a bigger reaction in the person experiencing some form of input.
That's not to say PacMan wasn't immersive; the goal was to forget about real life for a while and see how many points you could stack up.
But the human philosophy is 'bigger, better, faster, more', and you can guarantee there were people who spent an hour at PacMan, and said 'what's next'?
Smoothly rendered hills with details fading realistically into the background, animated cloud cover, and dynamic lighting.. they're kind of the answer to that question. It doesn't make the games themselves any better, but it improves our perception of them.
Playing Q3, I find it impossible to ask the question of "do better graphics help?" seriously. There's times where you're so glued to the action and visual stimulae, when suddenly the fraglimit is hit and action halts, you come out of the game with a buzz.. and you're like, 'woa, that was awesome'.
PacMan was fun, yes, but I would be hesitant to accept that anyone ever got an adrenaline high off it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
> Has anyone done an emacs emulation mode for vim?
No, because they haven't figured out how to compress the 75 megs of diskspace a fuly featured emacs takes into the vim source, to give you that true "emacs feel".
> I know you meant it as a joke.
Apparently you didn't, because you flamed him anyways.
Stop being a hypersensitive Mac user and learn to laugh at yourself a little bit. It's no different than the amusement most unix users treat the emacs/vi debate with.
From the article:
> At least for now it is. As the great gods of
> technology continue to design new, unparalleled
> computing power, the detail will only become
> greater.
I really don't agree that the advancement of hardware is the main reason that 3D is becoming, or will become, more and more realistic. Fact of it is, us humans still haven't quite nailed down how to duplicate reality. Skin in FF looked plastic because we still don't know how to render skin well. They looked stiff when they ran because we still don't know how to add in the subtleties of movement. They looked fake when they talked because we still haven't mastered expressions.
I mean, people were doing production TV shows with Amiga's and Video Toasters a decade ago.. and that hardware couldn't hold a candle to today's machinery. It's not strictly hardware. I think 3d animation will only become more realistic once we've gotten better at figuring out how lighting works, how creatures move, and all the subtleties involved.
You get to see your "art" immediatley, there. And my site's been up nearly a year now. ;)
Course, my goals were also different..
Bungie merely GPL'd the game engine. They still retain the copyrights to all game art, content, yadda yadda yadda. I think to legally play the full version of Marathon, you have to actually own a copy of the game.
:)
;)
I believe it works like Quake does; you pull the content files off your CD and dump them in a relevent directory. Do Bungie a favor and plop down the fifteen bucks it costs to get Marathon.. let 'em know we still love the game.
AlephOne is tres cool. They've completely updated the engine, and have been hacking at it for over a year now.. the source was released last January. I believe they distribute "demo" data files, so you can still play the game while not owning a full copy.
I'd verify the info, if b.org wasn't already hosed beyond accessibility.
In the EULA, Verant explicitly says that in order to be allowed to play their game, you MUST agree to NOT sell or transfer any in-game items for real-world money or services.
The issue of selling such items on auction sites (or otherwise) is valid, however. What constitutes property?
Beyond that, though, Verant has every right to close accounts for people selling in-game items. It's in the EULA. They said they would do it, players agreed by playing the game that it was an acceptable rule, and thus, these people have no reason to be pissed that their accounts get closed.
> That your own genetics, in a sea of six billion other
> bags of dna, actually have any significance?
I'm not insensitive to the suffering that orphaned / fostered children have to go through, but looked at through a telescope, this argument works both ways. Your argument is full of logical flaws, basically. If we're all so worthless.. why bother with children? They lose their parents, toss 'em to the wolves. Hell.. why reproduce, period? We're all worthless!
Of course, that doesn't address the issue that clones are created and orphans are already here, which is a valid debate topic.. but your logical flaws weaken your argument. Those scientists, if they aren't adopting now, probably wouldn't adopt if you forced them to stop cloning. The two issues are exclusive to each other.
Now, the REAL issue would be whether we have the right to play god..
> I don't believe in censorship, nor do I believe
> that Napster or BMG have the right to censor any
> form of speech.
How is this censorship? People have debated this on Slashdot before, I believe. It's not censorship unless it comes from a government agency, merely because a business has such a limited control over you. At least, not in the sense most people here seem to take it; as if "the man" is stomping on your rights to have access to something you want.
Can't find it on Napster? Go look for a band's website. They don't have one? Go to music stores that carry a lot of underground labels. Failing that, go visit their shows.
If you object to the content a business makes available, or doesn't make available, it's really, really simple to fix: don't do business with them. Sure, Napster is a great tool, but they don't exactly hold a monopoly over the mp3 market. You have other channels of availability.
They have just as much a right to not give you something as you have a right to possess something.
..why not get rid of timezones and daylight savings, too?
IIRC, daylight savings is a carryover from one of the world wars, and timezones are some kludge pushed on us by the railroads as they spread across the world.
To me, in today's world where "instant communications" makes timezones a major PITA, it seems like we should all function on a 24 hour clock, where it's 00:00 at the exact sime time, everywhere in the world.
That way, when you tell your buddy in New York that you'll be there at 14:00 in two days, you know that'll be early morning for you (coming from the pacific coast) and he'll know it's somewhere in the afternoon for him.
Sure it seems unnatural now, but after a few weeks, I wager people would get used to "morning" being, say, 12:00. Or wherever dawn actually happens to fall. It just seems to me that having our measure of time bound to when the sun rises is silly; what happens in a hundred or so years when people aren't even living on earth and they don't HAVE a sunrise?
It all winds down to the same reasons Americans aren't using the metric system yet and we all bang around on QWERTY keyboards; folks are just too resistant to change.
They're just not mainsteam. :)
;)
;) Good technology never dies; it seems more like the really good ideas get delegated to "fans" or people who don't fall prety to marketing and/or the feeling they need the latest and greatest.
You know all those subways in New York? They're powered by electricity. Sure, the metaphor is a little different, but the idea is still there: Electric powered mass transit.
Pneumatic tubes? Bah, Home Depot and Costco use these systems to this day. I worked for a company a couple years ago that maintained these systems; cashiers use them to deliver money to the vault in the back.
Amiga? HAH. I still have a functioning Amiga 2000.
Don't many studios still use some varient of the 'ribbon microphone'? Admittedly my expertise is starting to peter out, but I do know it's common for either recording artists or movie people to use older technologies because they sound (or look) a certain way.
Reel mowers, bah. I had a friend during childhood who's parents still used one.. they made him mow the lawn with it as punishment.
Only commenting on the stuff I know.
Just because you don't see a representation of it on every street corner doesn't mean something has dissappeared.
Images at NASA from the Pioneer robot, and a whole slew of links from one Dr. Meshkati.
The images, in particular, are of very high quality, but are uncaptioned.
NASA's page, with commentary, is found here.
Concerns over where Google is going to make it's money, and the fear current users have that Google is going to change, really only confirms one thing; the interests of customers and the interests of businesses are not compatiable with each other.
An obvious point, I guess, but it is pretty curious, seeing as how businesses exist strictly to perform a service for customers.
Here's hoping Google finds a way to thrive without "selling out" to banner ads or somesuch. I'd love to see conventional thinking get shaken up were Google to manage what most folks consider will be impossible.
What happened was that EQvault, an EverQuest game news site, lost their database. As they pressured their ISP to recover the most recent backup, they ran the site on an older database.. one from April.
It just so happened that the press release up above was the news posted that day.. and for most of this morning, it was the top story on EQvault. ;)
Was kind of funny watching smaller news sites leech the information; kind of gave an example of how many people steal news from other sites without ever READING it. Highly amusing to see it appear on Slashdot, though I must admit, I'm not entirely surprised. :)
..whoever wrote it (not all convinced it was Gates himself) is a pretty good author. He interjects items that are blatantly incorrect or ignore obvious details in a move to aggravate the reader, but inserts just enough truth to keep the boat floating. It keeps the reader fairly well engaged (and pissed off).
;)
Me, being suspicious, almost wonder if this memo wasn't INTENDED to be "leaked", that is, if it actually came from Microsoft at all.
It's the sort of writing where you disagree with it profoundly, but can't really pick a place to start responding because there's so many conflicts and things to disagree with.
Were that email to appear on usenet, it would be lauded as a troll. And a damn fine one.. just wait for Slashdot readers to devour this one if you want to see truth in that.
..but isn't the thing they're fixing here just one of many reasons for blindness?
I'm not a doctor, but it seems to me that there's more than one way for a person's eyes to not, or stop, work(ing), simply by excersising a bit of common sense. I mean, it's like saying that breast removal "cures cancer". Not quite.. it fixes one FORM of cancer (or, well, it can).
More power to these guys if it helps even a fraction of the blind folks out there.. but without more information than a press release, I remain skeptical that this is going to help everyone that has an eye problem. All the information available indicates it only repairs a rather narrow brand of blindness.
I'd just be wary of labelling these guys gods. Minor deity's, perhaps, because the achievment is pretty major.. but it seems to me it's only one step in the entire staircase.
It's almost a "social" form of protecting data: Don't leave your laptop laying around.
Would this guy's laptop have been stolen if he'd put it into his briefcase and taken it home with him after work? If this company was a small startup, they probably don't have the building security features that they'd like to have protecting their hardware. Thus, leaving nothing at work seems prudent.. depending on how important it is to the guy.
Of course, I suppose someone could have mugged him at night and taken the briefcase, but by that point, I think the scenario would have become a James Bond movie.
Encrypting data is one obvious method of protection; prevention of hardware theft itself is a lot more basic, and a tad more simple to implement.
> Accepted: a poor takeoff on www.fuckedcompany.com.
News flash: Nerds like to laugh, too.
Not all news reports have to detail bad and horrible things that are happening in the world, you know.
Lighten up. I think it's good that Slashdot isn't totally a doom-and-gloom site. You want that, go flip open a newspaper sometime.
So what's this bacteria DO?
;)
I mean, what happens when an intern is swapping around petri dishes one night and he trips over his shoelaces? Does he dump into our modern world some parasite that absolutely nothing currently alive today has an immunity to?
Or, even if it's a "good" bacteria, it could cause more harm than anything.
Chalk my suspicion up to all kinds of media-fed paranoia about biological attacks and too many B-grade sci-films as a kid.
It is pretty astounding.. but considering what bringing domesticated animals into Australia did (as an off the shelf example), what's going to happen when we bring 250 million year old lifeforms back to life?
That's what the Amiga was FOR. The Video Toaster and all those neat applications that made Amiga famous? Those came later.. by several years.
As with many things from the early days of personal computers, the history is muddy and filled with opinon, but if you poke around for a bit, you can pick up one common thread: They were striving to build the next hot gaming platform.
One example of this would be a history found here.
There's dozens more out there.. I reccomend looking them up and getting a lot of opinions before making your own. But playing games exclusively wouldn't be an insult to the Amiga. :) It'd be using it for exactly what it was meant to do.
Dammit, if it only costs 2 bucks a day to get someone on a spacewalk, how come *I* can't do it yet?!
Heck, I'll even double the payment to assure they get a profit and pay FOUR bucks a day for a spacewalk.
Dangitall anyways.
Pointing out the Martin Luther King one in specific, you can tell the "looks like a computer game" was just a gimmick to kind of tweak the emotions of the scene a little bit. In the same image, imperfections in the right angles help to keep it from being too "computery".
:) 'Grats to the artist though.. pretty cool pieces he's done.
I do like the idea. Kind of a way to link bad stuff that happens in the world to computers. I wonder if the artist had some kind of underlying motivation to point out the (supposed) links between video games and violence in the world (physical or otherwise).
Can look at it two ways.. either these images point out that bad scenes aren't nearly so horrifying when done on a computer (and thus people need not worry about video game violence), or computers trivialize the reality of violence to the extent that it is unable to effect us like it should.
No further comments.
"[...] state chapters of the Christian Coalition and American Family Association [are] opposing the initiative".
Is it just me, or this interesting? The article reports that these groups are saying this is a "bad way" to educate children about internet usage.
Again: Huh, what? Isn't this directly against what these groups have sought to achieve in the past? Even in the same article, CNN comments on this:
"Internet filtering has been a priority of many conservative groups, including Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition and the American Family Association."
What's going on here? Can anyone maybe offer some insight as to what's going on with these groups to bring about such an apparent turnaround?
Are they afraid that if one extreme (pornography) gets censored, the the other extreme (conservative views) will get the same treatment? Or is this merely them stating that, while they want sexual content filtered, they do NOT want the government enforcing it?
If it's the latter that's true, I may alter my view on these people a tad. Not enough to hop in bed with them, but it is an interesting insight.
If it's the former.. heh.. no comment. :)
He's using a fairly cheap Sony "Handycam" to do his filming, the model he names is the TR-101 hi8. Having problems finding that specific model online, so it may be discontinued. But the Sony cam line runs from anywhere between $500 and $5000. Check out this link to get a pretty detailed explanation of how he makes his movies.
If nothing else, click around on the dude's movies. A ton of fun to watch. :) These aren't superior quality movies, but you can see what happens to stuff when it gets shot with a high power weapon, which is rather entertaining.
Here's a snippet of the javascript responsible for the mis-viewing:
var agt=navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
var isWin = agt.indexOf('win') != -1;
var isMac = agt.indexOf('mac') != -1;
if (isWin) { }
else if (isMac) parent.location="macindex.html";
else parent.location="index_unsupported.html";
For even more entertainment value, check out what you see if you go to macindex.html. ;)
A lot of entertainment has to do with hightening your "immersion" in the experience. Be it an orchestra in a huge opera house, a movie theatre with THX sound, or a ten thousand dollar home audio setup, it's all there for the same purpose: to trigger a bigger reaction in the person experiencing some form of input.
:)
That's not to say PacMan wasn't immersive; the goal was to forget about real life for a while and see how many points you could stack up.
But the human philosophy is 'bigger, better, faster, more', and you can guarantee there were people who spent an hour at PacMan, and said 'what's next'?
Smoothly rendered hills with details fading realistically into the background, animated cloud cover, and dynamic lighting.. they're kind of the answer to that question. It doesn't make the games themselves any better, but it improves our perception of them.
Playing Q3, I find it impossible to ask the question of "do better graphics help?" seriously. There's times where you're so glued to the action and visual stimulae, when suddenly the fraglimit is hit and action halts, you come out of the game with a buzz.. and you're like, 'woa, that was awesome'.
PacMan was fun, yes, but I would be hesitant to accept that anyone ever got an adrenaline high off it.