Think on the bright side. There's ton's of new editions of all the books coming out, and not just LotR, but the Hobbit, Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, even paperback versions of Christopher Tolkien's work (hah!). Every Barnes and Noble I've seen has a massive rack of Tolkien. If even one person who somehow hasn't read any of his books yet, decides to pick up a copy, and likes it, then I'll be happy.
www.versiontracker.com, a popular Mac software download site, charges a small fee for their premium service (which no one buys, that's the other side of the coin).
Nintendo games are infectious around my dorm. More and more people are picking up Pokemon, and not putting it down. Scary. But it's the perfect release for jaded college students.
Right, but keep in mind that when the latest generation of games comes out (think the new DooM here), it makes all current hardware look like crap. Case in point: Carmack says that the new DooM should run at about 30 fps on a GeForce 3, and a bit faster on the Radeon 7500. That's fast enough to provide the illusion of motion, but it's a far cry from silky smooth graphics. Games, and maybe video encoding, are the only thing that are going to push Joe Bloe's 2 ghz P4 to the limit.
Indeed. There's about a million and one new editions of Tolkien's books out right now, what with the movies and all. Make sure every member in your family who doesn't own LotR does by the time Christmas is over!
I think I see where you're coming from... but did you see the Final Fantasy Movie? That can hardly be "crap" special effects. But then again, there weren't live actors mingling with the CGI ones, so it's a bit different.
I think there's two reasons that Jurassic Park's effects have stood the test of time: one, no-one had seen anything like that before. People are jaded enough these days from cheap movie CGI that we pick out the tiniest flaws easily. Back then, the CGI work was few and far between, and what there was was gold standard work (we can thank Silicon Graphics, back when they were at their height, for that).
Second, there really aren't that many CGI shots in JP. Most of the dinosaur closeups are animatronic, I think.
I'm not fully literate in Carmack-speak, but I recall a number of.plan updates of his talking about the need for fully programmable, fully generic, 3d cards. The somewhat limited, though still impressive, vertex and pixel shaders are just the first step. Such things probably won't be around for a few years.
I dunno how they relate to FPGA's, but hell, they sure would be configurable.
Perhaps I went in with low standards, but I liked this one. True, it was a Matrix ripoff a lot of the time, but the parallel universe concept was a neat one. Yeah, it's been done before, but hasn't everything "been done," somewhere before? Perhaps I'm jaded, but it's impossibe to expect true innovation in cinema these days.
I thought the special effects were pretty good, and the superhuman stunts that Jet Li did were most impressive. The plot was a bit silly at times; a bit more backstory might have helped. But then again, almost every martial arts movie I've seen has had goofy moments. (/me points at the Flying Sleeve of Death in Iron Monkey)
In the end, for someone who's seen The Matrix a few too many times, The One was well worth the $3.75 I paid to see it.
I seem to recall that SETI@Home records a 36 gigabyte (or was it terabyte?) tape every day from their receiver at Aricebo, to give people some perspective. If you want digital, a tape/DAT system seems to be the only way of storage (unless you can get your hands on those 100 gig DVD's that are supposedly coming out one day).
As another poster said, go distributed. Instead of having some insanely massive centralized system, build 1000 smaller ones, at each camera. Or a good number of midsized systems.
Think of it: in 6 years, on an Pentium 8 and GeForce 13, can could probably render the Final Fantasy Movie in realtime (or close to it). What more need I say?
Personally, in an effort on my part to reduce eye strain, I went for the Ti. The iBook's screen really should have been set to a default of 800*600 or 832*624 or something 1024*768 makes the icons/text just tiny. Well, that was what I thought, at least.
Right, but we don't live in the world of Neuromancer or Ghost in the Shell. Encryption is a mellow and abstract thing. Unlike your tiger pits, it's not hurting anybody.
Oh, you should hate her for Waco. You have NO IDEA who big of a cover-up that was (or maybe you do). You know, how the FBI mowed down everybody with assault rifles (prolly the women and kids too), then let the fire burn to destroy the evidence? The guy who figured this out "committed suicide" not long after he figured this out. I kid you not.
Oh, and only white conservative christian men like asscroft.
No, that's a perfect analogy. I faxed my senators saying as much. Criminals, who by definition break the law, would obviously have no qualms using illegal encryption. I mean really, would terrorists run off and download a new version of PGP that they knew had back doors? If they did, they would be... fucking stupid. Oh wait, Ashcroft is too.
I urge everybody to go to to the ACLU website and use their web form to email/fax a message to your senator. (all you USians, of course)
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Maybe you should switch phones? I've got a Vtech 2.4 ghz wireless, and I've never seen this happen with my Airport.
Best advice I've heard yet, especially for those who don't have six figure salaries (or no salaries at all, aka college students).
Think on the bright side. There's ton's of new editions of all the books coming out, and not just LotR, but the Hobbit, Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, even paperback versions of Christopher Tolkien's work (hah!). Every Barnes and Noble I've seen has a massive rack of Tolkien. If even one person who somehow hasn't read any of his books yet, decides to pick up a copy, and likes it, then I'll be happy.
www.versiontracker.com, a popular Mac software download site, charges a small fee for their premium service (which no one buys, that's the other side of the coin).
Nintendo games are infectious around my dorm. More and more people are picking up Pokemon, and not putting it down. Scary. But it's the perfect release for jaded college students.
Look into a used Mac, then. You could probably find a very decent G4 for under $1000 USD.
Right, but keep in mind that when the latest generation of games comes out (think the new DooM here), it makes all current hardware look like crap. Case in point: Carmack says that the new DooM should run at about 30 fps on a GeForce 3, and a bit faster on the Radeon 7500. That's fast enough to provide the illusion of motion, but it's a far cry from silky smooth graphics. Games, and maybe video encoding, are the only thing that are going to push Joe Bloe's 2 ghz P4 to the limit.
I'm pretty sure it does, actually.
But for criminal misuse of a book/piece of software, the publisher/developer does seem liable (DeCSS, anyone?). Shame, shame...
Indeed. There's about a million and one new editions of Tolkien's books out right now, what with the movies and all. Make sure every member in your family who doesn't own LotR does by the time Christmas is over!
That would just be an hour and a half long Geeks in Space Episode, with video (CmdrTaco's webcam) along with the audio.
Or if you and a bunch of drunk friends offered your own commentary...
I think I see where you're coming from... but did you see the Final Fantasy Movie? That can hardly be "crap" special effects. But then again, there weren't live actors mingling with the CGI ones, so it's a bit different.
I think there's two reasons that Jurassic Park's effects have stood the test of time: one, no-one had seen anything like that before. People are jaded enough these days from cheap movie CGI that we pick out the tiniest flaws easily. Back then, the CGI work was few and far between, and what there was was gold standard work (we can thank Silicon Graphics, back when they were at their height, for that).
Second, there really aren't that many CGI shots in JP. Most of the dinosaur closeups are animatronic, I think.
Agreed. I have given the RIAA (and the artists) far more money after Napster/Limewire came along than before.
Another alternative: buy used CD's! They're cheaper, so The Man gets less money from you!
I'm not fully literate in Carmack-speak, but I recall a number of .plan updates of his talking about the need for fully programmable, fully generic, 3d cards. The somewhat limited, though still impressive, vertex and pixel shaders are just the first step. Such things probably won't be around for a few years.
I dunno how they relate to FPGA's, but hell, they sure would be configurable.
Perhaps I went in with low standards, but I liked this one. True, it was a Matrix ripoff a lot of the time, but the parallel universe concept was a neat one. Yeah, it's been done before, but hasn't everything "been done," somewhere before? Perhaps I'm jaded, but it's impossibe to expect true innovation in cinema these days.
I thought the special effects were pretty good, and the superhuman stunts that Jet Li did were most impressive. The plot was a bit silly at times; a bit more backstory might have helped. But then again, almost every martial arts movie I've seen has had goofy moments. (/me points at the Flying Sleeve of Death in Iron Monkey)
In the end, for someone who's seen The Matrix a few too many times, The One was well worth the $3.75 I paid to see it.
"Attack of the Clones" reminds me of "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes," actually....
I seem to recall that SETI@Home records a 36 gigabyte (or was it terabyte?) tape every day from their receiver at Aricebo, to give people some perspective. If you want digital, a tape/DAT system seems to be the only way of storage (unless you can get your hands on those 100 gig DVD's that are supposedly coming out one day).
As another poster said, go distributed. Instead of having some insanely massive centralized system, build 1000 smaller ones, at each camera. Or a good number of midsized systems.
Think of it: in 6 years, on an Pentium 8 and GeForce 13, can could probably render the Final Fantasy Movie in realtime (or close to it). What more need I say?
Personally, in an effort on my part to reduce eye strain, I went for the Ti. The iBook's screen really should have been set to a default of 800*600 or 832*624 or something 1024*768 makes the icons/text just tiny. Well, that was what I thought, at least.
Quake runs on the DC too.
That's Quake 1, mind, not Quake 3 or somesuch nonsense.
Right, but we don't live in the world of Neuromancer or Ghost in the Shell. Encryption is a mellow and abstract thing. Unlike your tiger pits, it's not hurting anybody.
Oh, you should hate her for Waco. You have NO IDEA who big of a cover-up that was (or maybe you do). You know, how the FBI mowed down everybody with assault rifles (prolly the women and kids too), then let the fire burn to destroy the evidence? The guy who figured this out "committed suicide" not long after he figured this out. I kid you not.
Oh, and only white conservative christian men like asscroft.
Also a 1,000 and 100,000, I think.
No, that's a perfect analogy. I faxed my senators saying as much. Criminals, who by definition break the law, would obviously have no qualms using illegal encryption. I mean really, would terrorists run off and download a new version of PGP that they knew had back doors? If they did, they would be... fucking stupid. Oh wait, Ashcroft is too.
I urge everybody to go to to the ACLU website and use their web form to email/fax a message to your senator. (all you USians, of course)