While I see your point, I felt that the ending to RotK movie was more sad than it needed to be, and that The Scouring would have helped make it less sad overall. I dont know about anyone else, but I cracked a tear or two at the very end, which is rare. From the point where the hobbits are honored at Aragorns crowning on, its all 'downhill' emotionally. The Scouring would have helped offset that 'awww, im so sad that its all over now' feeling. I agree though they a massive battle or anything like that would be too much, but spending 10 - 15 minutes on the scouring portion would have made a difference in the feeling of the ending of the movie. As well, they could have focused less on the little human vs hobbit show down and more on the showdown between Saruman and the hobbits as well as wormtongue's final deed. No need to do a massive confrontation, more of a personal reckoning.
Re:Running to the Right requires undemanding voter
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The Nader Factor
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You have good points; after talking about this with some of my republican leaning friends, they said very similar to what you said about the 'Roe vs Wade' comments, and politically you are correct in that it was the smartest move.
I do not however agree with the latter part of your comments regarding slave labor as compared to stem cell research. Slave labor is wrong and theres no way it can be made to be just or moral as slavery is slavery. Yes, just killing babies to harvest stem cells would be wrong, but the fact of the matter is we're killing embryos anyway in abortion, so why not turn that loss into another's gain who might otherwise die? Embryos are thrown away as medical waste, which seems a grevious waste given how useful they could be if properly (and ethically) used to further stem cell research. I don't agree with killing embryos for research, nor with any other agressive action to make abortion anymore plentiful than it already is, but given the nature of the situation, it seems logical to turn that loss into a gain for everyone else. People can opt to have their organs donated; why can a mother not opt to donate her embryos or fetus's for such purposes? Unlike slavery, there does not seem to be a loss unless the research was done in a highly unethical manner with little thought to the lives of those involved. I do not advocate cloning people, nor cloning for purposes of harvesting, but rather to use what we already have and not merely throw it away. If you totally disagree with abortion of any form, then most likely you will totally disagree with what I've just said but otherwise, I see no reason to close down this avenue of technology as it can be persued in an ethical manner.
Re:Running to the Right requires undemanding voter
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The Nader Factor
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree with this; my breaking points are when social issues (more so than economic, since honestly speaking, I wish to have a greater understanding of economics until I decide whether 'trick-down' is crap, or if taxes are the answer; I honestly dont know at this point and need to read more to adequately state an opinion on it) have re-aligned to the right within the democratic party. As the above poster said and the one who also responded as well, when social issues like abortion, gun control, gay rights, stem cell research, environmental protection and such begin to slide to conservative positions within the greater part of the democratic party, this would be the breaking point. Probably one of the most telling things about Bush during the debates came out during the last debate when he sidestepped the question on whether he would repeal the Roe vs Wade decision. This is the sort of stuff that makes me fear for America's future within the greater world, which with the exception of some Arab states and 3rd world countries, is moving towards greater progression within science and human rights.
America has enjoyed a major technological boom within the last 30 years or so with computers. As the prime developers of the computer as well as the internet, we've enjoyed a superiority within the field for a long time and we still do in certain respects. If we apply this same idea to stem cell / bio-tech, I find it outragous that we'd just hand off the potentials of this to other countries; its a fact that someone is going to develop and bring this technology to fruitation and the first nations to seize upon it will be the ones who will most likely have the upperhand during atleast the first period of expansion within that industry. I am friends with several people who are doctors & hospital administrators here in the USA, and they often talk about how people from other nations come to America to have important surgeries as we have amongst the best medical practitioners in the world; imagine throwing that all away and now instead you goto China, Japan, Britain, India, etc for these operations. Whos the one who gets the benefits then? Its definitely not America.
Re:Running to the Right requires undemanding voter
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The Nader Factor
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· Score: 1
I don't disagree with your statements, however this particular election has too much at stake for me to let my idealism determine my vote. I am of the opinion that Bush, given 4 more years, will wreak greater harm upon our country than Kerry; his religous positions alone in relation to science (stem cell research), and their way of just ignoring science in favor of their own ideology is disturbing. There are many reasons why I am voting the way I am, and not going with the most idealistic candidate.
I am personally involve in an NPO organization that is, through grassroots efforts, trying to increase funding for progressive democratic canidates, and through this I feel lies potential improvements in the future. Improvements in politics start from the bottom, not from the top and so we must elect more progressive candidates on the municipal level, the state level, and finally the national level. The democratic party can be re-aligned back to its roots, but it will take time, effort, and money but is something I feel is worth working towards. The two party system is not going away anytime soon unfortunately, so I feel its better to work within the existing system to bring about change than work against inertia. While electing Kerry may not change any of that, which I doubt it will, I can rest assured that he will not be making decisions based on the results of his prayers.
Give me a break here...
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I am not a Nader fan, but hearing dems criticize Nader is like listening to neo-nazis bitch about being discriminated against. Yes, he will 'steal' some of Kerry's votes, but the fact of the matter is that the dems have been extremely active in trying to keep Nader off ballots via legal manuevers, rather underhanded if you ask me; not the sort of thing that I would find inspiring in my leaders.
In the upcoming election I will be voting for Kerry, but seeing dems attack Nader only further demonstrates how sad the state of affairs are in our country when the 2 parties involved need to resort to ridiculous legal strategies in order to secure their voter base. Between republican efforts to remove voters from the voter rolls and other various underhanded tactics involving misinformation (which, imo, is definitely worst), and the dems trying their hardest to keep 3rd party canidates off the ballot, this year's election is anything but exemplary for other countries and sure leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
The democratic party is, unfortunately, bankrupt in many metaphorical ways, amongst them ethically, progressively, and has lost many of the things that historically made them what they are. Its a sure sign that you need to seriously reassess your party's goals, orientation and voting base if you have to get court orders to remove candidates from the ballot in order to stay in power.
I know that one of the appeals of sports games (atleast on console, their prime location), is that you and your buddies can all enjoy a game together. I am not sure that sports gamers, who traditionally fall under the heading of casual gamers, would want to put in the time & energy that is often present with MMOs into the game. Realistically speaking, there seems to be bigger potential markets than this, however the one thing sports game have going for them is they have a very respectable market share and are highly marketable. Let MMOs develope a bit more and maybe such an idea could go somewhere, and grab those otherwise casual gamers.
I'm just wondering why I should shell out $50 for a steam copy of HL2, the same amount I'd pay for a physical copy in a store. Basically, are they going to drop the prices once HL2 comes out in stores to something more reasonable like $40, and thus are using their leverage since everyone wants HL2/CSS/etc so badly that theyll pay $50 for nothing more than HL2 & CS:S? I was going to buy it today, but I guess ill wait till the prices become a little more reasonable considering I dont even get a physical product.
People should take not that PC gamer is essentially a marketing tool to get gamers to buy the games that gives 'exclusives' to the mag. Expecting an honest assessment of HL2 or really any game from this would be rather naive. Driv3r comes to mind as a fine example of 'exclusive' reporting at work in the game review business, where certain publishers/reviewers somehow overlooked the many and obvious bugs in the game and still talked about it in a rather positive manner. Doom3 as well is a good example of this; nearly every single reviewer (both mags and sites) for the first few weeks acted as if this game was in fact the second coming of christ. While Doom3 was very well executed and obviously had amazing graphics, I am unsure how people felt so positively about a game that really got drudgerous after the 7th lab that you had to transverse to reach hell. And then you just go back to the labs after you reach hell for more hallway adventure. For all the amazingness of the engine, I was hoping for more variety in the environments, which with the exception of hell and outside on mars, there was very little that changed.
These rags are definitely not the place to get a real opinion on a game; their real value is for the screenshots they release as part of the exclusive. Otherwise, it is often difficult to tell the reviews from the advertisements themselves that share the pages.
I am really unsure as to how this would run the games at any respectable speed that they could be played. Unless VPC's performance has been massively increased since I last used it, it would be rather painful to play just about any 3D game on this type of emulation. This seems more like something that might work in theory, but when it comes to real-world performance, forget about it. As it is, normal desktop performance with VPC isnt the greatest for obvious reasons, let alone full-fledged 3D gaming engines. If this is in fact true and is realistically possible, then Mac gamers have much to rejoice for...
Ironically, I read this article yesterday stating how it is in India's best interest to keep Bush...
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5922_1020531,00 15002200000158.htm
A far geekier concert went down this weekend with c64 remxixes: http://www.backintimelive.com/
Concert with all live c64 remixes, unfortunately for the last time. Slay was good enough to broadcast the concert live for us non-brits (or poor folk).
I work at a pretty small advertising company, and while we have no traditions, we love nothing more than to kick back at 5pm once the day is over and all enjoy a couple beers on the roof (we're lucky enough to have a top office in a building in NYC) and talk about business, life, and so on. If the next day is probably going to be slow, maybe head down to the local bars for more drinks, no one has to go if they dont want to. Admitably, its a small group which helps its intimacy, but traditions seem a bit silly unless theyre started naturally, and smack of artificiality. I prefer the 'Hey, we're heading down to the bar for some drinks, wanna come?' to some official company thing arranged in advance.
I mistated my original statement, let me clarify: MS has announced they are discontinuing DX past the current version to launch DX under a new brand name & direction.
All I know is that this has been a long time in the coming and is great news, especially as MS has just announced the discontinuement of DX past the current version. Finally some competition to DX in modern games, however I really hope this will help people such as myself who do 3D work in Maya and such. Maya has just included a new feature that lets the viewports do a realtime high-quality openGL render as you work on your model/scene, so this can only make that faster and better (though as of right now, realistically speaking it isnt usable nor stable for actual work). Now for ATI to include serious openGL support for its cards & drivers...
Ever since I've taken several history classes at my college and read about the industrial revolution, I've begun to question whether opposing outsourcing is even worth it in the long run.
Basically, during the industrial revolution, countries like Britain, whom had large colonies overseas such as India, would export that colonies natural resources (in this case tea, silk, textiles, etc) back to Britain where the British public would buy these goods. Then people began realizing, you can hire the colony natives for far cheaper than your country men in Britain, so companies relocated their textile, silk, tea, etc factories in India where they would pay the native workers far less to work in often very poor conditions, and often polluting, etc the environment around the area. In Britain, many factory jobs were lost to the Indians, which naturally angered the workers, but economically made more sense. Figure: instead of carting some natural resource thousands of miles away, you dig/produce/farm/whatever said resource right there and then transport it 100 feet to the factory where it spits out goods, which you then ship to Britain, where people whom have the money can buy it (rarely can natives in these situations afford the products they produce). This generates more service jobs in the host country to sell said goods and more manufacturing jobs in the colony. Low-wage & menial jobs historically get divied out to the lowest bidder.
Now, all of this can be applied to the current 'information revolution' in which we are currently undergoing. Countries that have only recenty industrialized, (India, China) are now becoming computerized and are rapidly attracting foriegn investors who realize these places are the frontlines of this revolution, and the people who will be employed in it. Can we realistically expect to be paid the big bucks for now-menial jobs? Programmers arent such an exclusive job anymore, nor is a lot of things that used to be rare/lucrative skills only 5 - 8 years ago.
I am a computer animator, one of the jobs currently entering embattled grounds of outsourcing. They have these companies in Eastern Europe & Asia where they hire 100 guys who know Maya, 3D studio max, etc and these guys pump out huge blocks of finished animation in a matter of weeks for about $10 - $50/day (which is rich by sweat-shop standards), where the same project would take 8 - 12 months in America or Europe at easily 50 - 1000x the cost. Can I really fight this? Other than making sure that I can offer something none of those 3d-slaves can offer, theres not too much, so what can I really do?
I think this process is inevitable though I do not totally welcome, the best thing to do in the longterm is putting yourself in a position where some guy who codes for 16hrs a day for $10 does not have leg up on you; though this sounds hard, remember, chances are this guy can do nothing except that task even though he does it very well. Also, removing things like tax-cuts for companies that outsource is something I agree with, and I think will result in a healthier transition in the longrun.
I think the author of this article is not very informed, because though sandbox games have been becoming more common, they are still very rare. The main sandbox game that I know of are GTA, Morrowind , X2 the Threat, and a small game called Flatspace. If anyone else knows of some, add em to the list, but I can only hope more people would make games like this as I tend to play them longer.
As a Maya user since version 3.5, the latest 6.0 release is dissappointing, mainly because it seems to be more of a PR release than a real finished release. If you are unaware, SGI recently sold AliasWavefront to a holding company who'll likely sell it to another company sometime in the future. Shortly after this holding company aquired AW, they released Maya 6.0 (previous version was 5.01) breaking their tradition of using the.5 release (in this case 5.5) for bug fixes & general feature additions.
Maya right now is in the position to either solidify their market hold (which is pretty good) or lose it to its competitors, 3D Studio Max and SoftImage XSI. As of right now there are many low level issues (not quite bugs) such as the export/import skin weighting being broken, a debatable method of storing vertice information which makes it difficult to correct these issues yourself, built in IK-FK blending is broken, and so on. In addition they changed the documentation around (like they do w/ every new release), only this time they altered it to the way it was catagorized during v4.0/4.5 which IMO (and to most people I've talked to) is inferior to the interface in 5.
This doesn't mean Maya is bad but youd think that the company would fix these issues which have existed since (in many cases) since the first version. While I think the ocean generator is awesome, the new hardware rendering tools very useful, as well as the inclusion of the built-in Mental Ray render engine, and so on, a higher priority should be attached to these baseline issues which affect Maya often on the lowest level. I hope Maya 6.5 offers some solutions to these issues and we don't get another PR release. If AW does this again for a v7 release, I think they can expect to start losing users as these are the most basic of issues.
Whilst I don't disagree with you, you're citing of the WTO thing is not quite correct in relation to your other example. The WTO event got out of hand mostly due to an over-zealous police that actively went out of its way to make issues where their were none. Ironically, the national media played it all off as 'some bad kids causing trouble where none was needed'. If you dont believe me, there was only 1 incident cited in which there was actual vandalism and that was when a buncha kids went down town and I believe it was a shoe store, and they basically busted up the facade & looted some stuff. With the exception of these few, sad individuals, everyone else was acting quite civil. Watch some home-footage sometime of the WTO event, I think itll change your opinion on police actions during the WTO. Somehow, the videos of protestors using non-violent protesting techniques such as sitting down in the middle of sidewalks & streets, but then being beaten w/ batons, maced, and tear-gassed werent exactly the most endearing of images as far as the police go. Shit, they were even attacking old ladies, the type that you see at state caucuses; very sad. They reminded me a lot of those videos you see of protests that go on in Asia but then the police lines move in beating the ever living hell out of everyone they see indiscriminately. So the WTO event was a victory for those who are proponents of police brutality, repression of expression, and other such civil rights violations as well as for the media whom displayed the event so inaccurately (but naturally played very well in their owner's pockets). As an aside, after legal observers filed many reports citing the overt abuses that took place, the police chief of Seattle was forced to resign & new guidelines were written up for future similar events. As someone who is training for first-aid to act as a street medic during the RNC I hope nothing of this sort happens in NYC...
I am going to say the latter two Matrix movies, especially the 2nd one would take this vote for me, for reasons that are not technical. I can name many movies which were technically (meaning the actual tasks of editing, music, camera work, etc) were crap. The recent 'House of the Dead' movie comes to mind, it had a respectable budget but quite literally the actors would start laughing in the middle of lines and it seems the director hired his nephews to do the music, camera work, and the script.
Disregarding this however, I state the last 2 Matrix movies as a) They had huuuuuuuuuge budgets to work with b) they took a very strong concept/story and butchered it c) it was pretentious with its hollywood arm chair philosophy which it tried to use as a mask for its lack of real substance (the first one had philosophic concepts, but did not attempt to say 'HEY LOOK WE'RE BEING PHILOSOPHICAL!' like the 2nd movie did quite a bit) d) they managed to cheapen their own effects further, which was impressive because I thought every other movie had already cheapened it enough (I speak of the neo-smith clone fight scene which was quite frankly boring) e) They took what could have been a trilogy that could have stood next to the likes of star wars orig and LOTR and instead turned it into dime-novel philosophy & hollywood same-old-shit (i know, i repeat myself, but this point irritates me). I dont claim that matrix was going to be some film classic, like Citizen Kane, but shit, it could have been better. I am not a massive Matrix fanboy, especially since as a reader of science-fiction, theres a lot out there storywise thats far superior, but its dissappointing to see a movie that really was genre-redefining in certain respects be relegated to another trilogy best not watched beyond the first.
Matrix aside, as far as recently made bad movies, House of the Dead though gets my vote however for worst overall, though Scary Movie 2 takes a close lead (after watching it, I was 99% sure they filmed the entire movie w/o a script, and in-fact just gathered all the actors and said 'DO STUFF' and captured it on camera, so its not so much a movie as a slightly above amature home video with better lighting).
The answer is relatively simple and that is that 3D is more labor intensive than 2D, and thus to achieve the results you are looking for will take much longer. For example, a friend of mine's thesis for 3D, had a couple very nice looking backgrounds which he originally intended to do in 3D. However, the time it would have taken to add all the detail, textures, lighting and so on (backgrounds were rustic forest-like settings), he would have needed to spend several weeks upon just the backgrounds, and thats not including all the animation he needed to do with his character. Instead however, using photoshop in conjuction with a simple 3D render of a preliminary forest and some hi-res photos, he was able to create a much more detailed & realistic looking forest backgrounds within about 7 days. There was almost no way in hell he could have gotten the same results purely from 3D due to the number of factors & elements involved (try lighting in 3D, its not easy; theres people who dedicate their entire study to lighting in 3D).
Another thing people need to understand is that in movies where theres pure 3D, such as Toy Story, theres not a single frame of that movie that hasnt been retouched in some manner or fashion, so thus you end up with very nice results combined with good 3D work and a lot of post-editing work. Games do not have the advantage of post-editing, so all that work must be done in the 3D stages, which is often very difficult; where you thought 2 lights was ok, you now need 2 negative lights to eliminate some lighting errors, etc etc. I find generally speaking, theres almost ALWAYS something that can be fixed/improved in ANY 3D scene/game/whatever. The medium is extremely complex so thus to yield those results takes a shitload of time.
As a side note, games are now including post-render effects, which is the first step in what this article is talking about, but we still have a long ways to go.
I had an ATI TV Wonder USB, and the thing was crap all around. Image quality blew, as did sound unless you hooked your sound right up to the VCR (assuming you had one). If that wasn't bad enough, the ATI TV software is absolutely wretched. Unstable as hell, basic stuff like crashing if you click the channel-down button past the first channel (in my case, channel 2), etc. Pretty shoddy all around. I've heard good things about Leadtek's TV2000, though that is an internal card. Definitely be careful about these external TV devices, and stay away from really cheap stuff.
What level of experience is this book?
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I am just curious cause I've been looking for something like this to explain to my parents, both of whom are self-described computer-stupid, and are in need of such knowledge due to some past issues. They're the type of people who might use the acronym CPU and mean a hard drive, if you know what I mean, when describing computer problems. Is this something I could give to them and they'd understand, or is this something I give to someone who's already has a technical understanding of computers?
I see a lot of posters saying this would be useful for 3D work (a pretty obvious answer), and as a 3D animator I'm unsure as to how this would really help with the way things currently work. Using Maya as an example, Maya simulates 3D in 2D to display it on the screen, and its current workflow is based entirely upon its 2D-manipulating-3D nature. Unless this approach was made radically different, there would be no difference in the process really except in the way objects translate; however then you run into issues of local and world-translation. Are you moving in 3D in relation to the camera or are you moving in relation to worldspace. Is the space that the mouse moves in absolute or relative? In order for such systems to become useful, the actual interfaces themselves must be adapted to take advantage of such features.
3D mice are useless/merely gee-wiz gadgets until a company developes an application that genuinely takes advantage of both working in a 3D space and moving a real-life analog to navigate & manipulate that space. I can see such technology being useful with holograms, or as another poster mentioned, with medical simulations that involve volumes, like a simulation of operating upon a person where everything about the way you handle your tools matter. Until z-space becomes an actual factor in application environments, 3D mice will not rise above other such technological toys such as 3D shutter-glasses, and the 3D gloves (though that nurbs modeling glove system shown on slashdot a couple days actually sounded interesting for once, and not just 'gee-wiz this is cool just cause its 3D').
What exactly is the point of posting this kind of pseudo-science correlation crap? Editors must be bored and trying to incite arguments or something. I mean seriously here, come on. I think we can all sit here, sift data, and come up with all sorts of crazy correlations & conclusions, doesn't mean they have any basis in reality nor that they even matter.
Slashdot Mirror
While I see your point, I felt that the ending to RotK movie was more sad than it needed to be, and that The Scouring would have helped make it less sad overall. I dont know about anyone else, but I cracked a tear or two at the very end, which is rare. From the point where the hobbits are honored at Aragorns crowning on, its all 'downhill' emotionally. The Scouring would have helped offset that 'awww, im so sad that its all over now' feeling. I agree though they a massive battle or anything like that would be too much, but spending 10 - 15 minutes on the scouring portion would have made a difference in the feeling of the ending of the movie. As well, they could have focused less on the little human vs hobbit show down and more on the showdown between Saruman and the hobbits as well as wormtongue's final deed. No need to do a massive confrontation, more of a personal reckoning.
You have good points; after talking about this with some of my republican leaning friends, they said very similar to what you said about the 'Roe vs Wade' comments, and politically you are correct in that it was the smartest move.
I do not however agree with the latter part of your comments regarding slave labor as compared to stem cell research. Slave labor is wrong and theres no way it can be made to be just or moral as slavery is slavery. Yes, just killing babies to harvest stem cells would be wrong, but the fact of the matter is we're killing embryos anyway in abortion, so why not turn that loss into another's gain who might otherwise die? Embryos are thrown away as medical waste, which seems a grevious waste given how useful they could be if properly (and ethically) used to further stem cell research. I don't agree with killing embryos for research, nor with any other agressive action to make abortion anymore plentiful than it already is, but given the nature of the situation, it seems logical to turn that loss into a gain for everyone else. People can opt to have their organs donated; why can a mother not opt to donate her embryos or fetus's for such purposes? Unlike slavery, there does not seem to be a loss unless the research was done in a highly unethical manner with little thought to the lives of those involved. I do not advocate cloning people, nor cloning for purposes of harvesting, but rather to use what we already have and not merely throw it away. If you totally disagree with abortion of any form, then most likely you will totally disagree with what I've just said but otherwise, I see no reason to close down this avenue of technology as it can be persued in an ethical manner.
I agree with this; my breaking points are when social issues (more so than economic, since honestly speaking, I wish to have a greater understanding of economics until I decide whether 'trick-down' is crap, or if taxes are the answer; I honestly dont know at this point and need to read more to adequately state an opinion on it) have re-aligned to the right within the democratic party. As the above poster said and the one who also responded as well, when social issues like abortion, gun control, gay rights, stem cell research, environmental protection and such begin to slide to conservative positions within the greater part of the democratic party, this would be the breaking point. Probably one of the most telling things about Bush during the debates came out during the last debate when he sidestepped the question on whether he would repeal the Roe vs Wade decision. This is the sort of stuff that makes me fear for America's future within the greater world, which with the exception of some Arab states and 3rd world countries, is moving towards greater progression within science and human rights.
America has enjoyed a major technological boom within the last 30 years or so with computers. As the prime developers of the computer as well as the internet, we've enjoyed a superiority within the field for a long time and we still do in certain respects. If we apply this same idea to stem cell / bio-tech, I find it outragous that we'd just hand off the potentials of this to other countries; its a fact that someone is going to develop and bring this technology to fruitation and the first nations to seize upon it will be the ones who will most likely have the upperhand during atleast the first period of expansion within that industry. I am friends with several people who are doctors & hospital administrators here in the USA, and they often talk about how people from other nations come to America to have important surgeries as we have amongst the best medical practitioners in the world; imagine throwing that all away and now instead you goto China, Japan, Britain, India, etc for these operations. Whos the one who gets the benefits then? Its definitely not America.
I don't disagree with your statements, however this particular election has too much at stake for me to let my idealism determine my vote. I am of the opinion that Bush, given 4 more years, will wreak greater harm upon our country than Kerry; his religous positions alone in relation to science (stem cell research), and their way of just ignoring science in favor of their own ideology is disturbing. There are many reasons why I am voting the way I am, and not going with the most idealistic candidate.
I am personally involve in an NPO organization that is, through grassroots efforts, trying to increase funding for progressive democratic canidates, and through this I feel lies potential improvements in the future. Improvements in politics start from the bottom, not from the top and so we must elect more progressive candidates on the municipal level, the state level, and finally the national level. The democratic party can be re-aligned back to its roots, but it will take time, effort, and money but is something I feel is worth working towards. The two party system is not going away anytime soon unfortunately, so I feel its better to work within the existing system to bring about change than work against inertia. While electing Kerry may not change any of that, which I doubt it will, I can rest assured that he will not be making decisions based on the results of his prayers.
I am not a Nader fan, but hearing dems criticize Nader is like listening to neo-nazis bitch about being discriminated against. Yes, he will 'steal' some of Kerry's votes, but the fact of the matter is that the dems have been extremely active in trying to keep Nader off ballots via legal manuevers, rather underhanded if you ask me; not the sort of thing that I would find inspiring in my leaders.
In the upcoming election I will be voting for Kerry, but seeing dems attack Nader only further demonstrates how sad the state of affairs are in our country when the 2 parties involved need to resort to ridiculous legal strategies in order to secure their voter base. Between republican efforts to remove voters from the voter rolls and other various underhanded tactics involving misinformation (which, imo, is definitely worst), and the dems trying their hardest to keep 3rd party canidates off the ballot, this year's election is anything but exemplary for other countries and sure leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
The democratic party is, unfortunately, bankrupt in many metaphorical ways, amongst them ethically, progressively, and has lost many of the things that historically made them what they are. Its a sure sign that you need to seriously reassess your party's goals, orientation and voting base if you have to get court orders to remove candidates from the ballot in order to stay in power.
I know that one of the appeals of sports games (atleast on console, their prime location), is that you and your buddies can all enjoy a game together. I am not sure that sports gamers, who traditionally fall under the heading of casual gamers, would want to put in the time & energy that is often present with MMOs into the game. Realistically speaking, there seems to be bigger potential markets than this, however the one thing sports game have going for them is they have a very respectable market share and are highly marketable. Let MMOs develope a bit more and maybe such an idea could go somewhere, and grab those otherwise casual gamers.
I'm just wondering why I should shell out $50 for a steam copy of HL2, the same amount I'd pay for a physical copy in a store. Basically, are they going to drop the prices once HL2 comes out in stores to something more reasonable like $40, and thus are using their leverage since everyone wants HL2/CSS/etc so badly that theyll pay $50 for nothing more than HL2 & CS:S? I was going to buy it today, but I guess ill wait till the prices become a little more reasonable considering I dont even get a physical product.
People should take not that PC gamer is essentially a marketing tool to get gamers to buy the games that gives 'exclusives' to the mag. Expecting an honest assessment of HL2 or really any game from this would be rather naive. Driv3r comes to mind as a fine example of 'exclusive' reporting at work in the game review business, where certain publishers/reviewers somehow overlooked the many and obvious bugs in the game and still talked about it in a rather positive manner.
Doom3 as well is a good example of this; nearly every single reviewer (both mags and sites) for the first few weeks acted as if this game was in fact the second coming of christ. While Doom3 was very well executed and obviously had amazing graphics, I am unsure how people felt so positively about a game that really got drudgerous after the 7th lab that you had to transverse to reach hell. And then you just go back to the labs after you reach hell for more hallway adventure. For all the amazingness of the engine, I was hoping for more variety in the environments, which with the exception of hell and outside on mars, there was very little that changed.
These rags are definitely not the place to get a real opinion on a game; their real value is for the screenshots they release as part of the exclusive. Otherwise, it is often difficult to tell the reviews from the advertisements themselves that share the pages.
I am really unsure as to how this would run the games at any respectable speed that they could be played. Unless VPC's performance has been massively increased since I last used it, it would be rather painful to play just about any 3D game on this type of emulation. This seems more like something that might work in theory, but when it comes to real-world performance, forget about it. As it is, normal desktop performance with VPC isnt the greatest for obvious reasons, let alone full-fledged 3D gaming engines. If this is in fact true and is realistically possible, then Mac gamers have much to rejoice for...
Ironically, I read this article yesterday stating how it is in India's best interest to keep Bush... http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5922_1020531,00 15002200000158.htm
A far geekier concert went down this weekend with c64 remxixes: http://www.backintimelive.com/ Concert with all live c64 remixes, unfortunately for the last time. Slay was good enough to broadcast the concert live for us non-brits (or poor folk).
I work at a pretty small advertising company, and while we have no traditions, we love nothing more than to kick back at 5pm once the day is over and all enjoy a couple beers on the roof (we're lucky enough to have a top office in a building in NYC) and talk about business, life, and so on. If the next day is probably going to be slow, maybe head down to the local bars for more drinks, no one has to go if they dont want to. Admitably, its a small group which helps its intimacy, but traditions seem a bit silly unless theyre started naturally, and smack of artificiality. I prefer the 'Hey, we're heading down to the bar for some drinks, wanna come?' to some official company thing arranged in advance.
I mistated my original statement, let me clarify: MS has announced they are discontinuing DX past the current version to launch DX under a new brand name & direction.
All I know is that this has been a long time in the coming and is great news, especially as MS has just announced the discontinuement of DX past the current version. Finally some competition to DX in modern games, however I really hope this will help people such as myself who do 3D work in Maya and such. Maya has just included a new feature that lets the viewports do a realtime high-quality openGL render as you work on your model/scene, so this can only make that faster and better (though as of right now, realistically speaking it isnt usable nor stable for actual work). Now for ATI to include serious openGL support for its cards & drivers...
Ever since I've taken several history classes at my college and read about the industrial revolution, I've begun to question whether opposing outsourcing is even worth it in the long run.
Basically, during the industrial revolution, countries like Britain, whom had large colonies overseas such as India, would export that colonies natural resources (in this case tea, silk, textiles, etc) back to Britain where the British public would buy these goods. Then people began realizing, you can hire the colony natives for far cheaper than your country men in Britain, so companies relocated their textile, silk, tea, etc factories in India where they would pay the native workers far less to work in often very poor conditions, and often polluting, etc the environment around the area. In Britain, many factory jobs were lost to the Indians, which naturally angered the workers, but economically made more sense. Figure: instead of carting some natural resource thousands of miles away, you dig/produce/farm/whatever said resource right there and then transport it 100 feet to the factory where it spits out goods, which you then ship to Britain, where people whom have the money can buy it (rarely can natives in these situations afford the products they produce). This generates more service jobs in the host country to sell said goods and more manufacturing jobs in the colony. Low-wage & menial jobs historically get divied out to the lowest bidder.
Now, all of this can be applied to the current 'information revolution' in which we are currently undergoing. Countries that have only recenty industrialized, (India, China) are now becoming computerized and are rapidly attracting foriegn investors who realize these places are the frontlines of this revolution, and the people who will be employed in it. Can we realistically expect to be paid the big bucks for now-menial jobs? Programmers arent such an exclusive job anymore, nor is a lot of things that used to be rare/lucrative skills only 5 - 8 years ago.
I am a computer animator, one of the jobs currently entering embattled grounds of outsourcing. They have these companies in Eastern Europe & Asia where they hire 100 guys who know Maya, 3D studio max, etc and these guys pump out huge blocks of finished animation in a matter of weeks for about $10 - $50/day (which is rich by sweat-shop standards), where the same project would take 8 - 12 months in America or Europe at easily 50 - 1000x the cost. Can I really fight this? Other than making sure that I can offer something none of those 3d-slaves can offer, theres not too much, so what can I really do?
I think this process is inevitable though I do not totally welcome, the best thing to do in the longterm is putting yourself in a position where some guy who codes for 16hrs a day for $10 does not have leg up on you; though this sounds hard, remember, chances are this guy can do nothing except that task even though he does it very well. Also, removing things like tax-cuts for companies that outsource is something I agree with, and I think will result in a healthier transition in the longrun.
I think the author of this article is not very informed, because though sandbox games have been becoming more common, they are still very rare. The main sandbox game that I know of are GTA, Morrowind , X2 the Threat, and a small game called Flatspace. If anyone else knows of some, add em to the list, but I can only hope more people would make games like this as I tend to play them longer.
As a Maya user since version 3.5, the latest 6.0 release is dissappointing, mainly because it seems to be more of a PR release than a real finished release. If you are unaware, SGI recently sold AliasWavefront to a holding company who'll likely sell it to another company sometime in the future. Shortly after this holding company aquired AW, they released Maya 6.0 (previous version was 5.01) breaking their tradition of using the .5 release (in this case 5.5) for bug fixes & general feature additions.
Maya right now is in the position to either solidify their market hold (which is pretty good) or lose it to its competitors, 3D Studio Max and SoftImage XSI. As of right now there are many low level issues (not quite bugs) such as the export/import skin weighting being broken, a debatable method of storing vertice information which makes it difficult to correct these issues yourself, built in IK-FK blending is broken, and so on. In addition they changed the documentation around (like they do w/ every new release), only this time they altered it to the way it was catagorized during v4.0/4.5 which IMO (and to most people I've talked to) is inferior to the interface in 5.
This doesn't mean Maya is bad but youd think that the company would fix these issues which have existed since (in many cases) since the first version. While I think the ocean generator is awesome, the new hardware rendering tools very useful, as well as the inclusion of the built-in Mental Ray render engine, and so on, a higher priority should be attached to these baseline issues which affect Maya often on the lowest level. I hope Maya 6.5 offers some solutions to these issues and we don't get another PR release. If AW does this again for a v7 release, I think they can expect to start losing users as these are the most basic of issues.
Whilst I don't disagree with you, you're citing of the WTO thing is not quite correct in relation to your other example. The WTO event got out of hand mostly due to an over-zealous police that actively went out of its way to make issues where their were none. Ironically, the national media played it all off as 'some bad kids causing trouble where none was needed'. If you dont believe me, there was only 1 incident cited in which there was actual vandalism and that was when a buncha kids went down town and I believe it was a shoe store, and they basically busted up the facade & looted some stuff. With the exception of these few, sad individuals, everyone else was acting quite civil. Watch some home-footage sometime of the WTO event, I think itll change your opinion on police actions during the WTO. Somehow, the videos of protestors using non-violent protesting techniques such as sitting down in the middle of sidewalks & streets, but then being beaten w/ batons, maced, and tear-gassed werent exactly the most endearing of images as far as the police go. Shit, they were even attacking old ladies, the type that you see at state caucuses; very sad. They reminded me a lot of those videos you see of protests that go on in Asia but then the police lines move in beating the ever living hell out of everyone they see indiscriminately. So the WTO event was a victory for those who are proponents of police brutality, repression of expression, and other such civil rights violations as well as for the media whom displayed the event so inaccurately (but naturally played very well in their owner's pockets). As an aside, after legal observers filed many reports citing the overt abuses that took place, the police chief of Seattle was forced to resign & new guidelines were written up for future similar events. As someone who is training for first-aid to act as a street medic during the RNC I hope nothing of this sort happens in NYC...
I am going to say the latter two Matrix movies, especially the 2nd one would take this vote for me, for reasons that are not technical. I can name many movies which were technically (meaning the actual tasks of editing, music, camera work, etc) were crap. The recent 'House of the Dead' movie comes to mind, it had a respectable budget but quite literally the actors would start laughing in the middle of lines and it seems the director hired his nephews to do the music, camera work, and the script.
Disregarding this however, I state the last 2 Matrix movies as a) They had huuuuuuuuuge budgets to work with b) they took a very strong concept/story and butchered it c) it was pretentious with its hollywood arm chair philosophy which it tried to use as a mask for its lack of real substance (the first one had philosophic concepts, but did not attempt to say 'HEY LOOK WE'RE BEING PHILOSOPHICAL!' like the 2nd movie did quite a bit) d) they managed to cheapen their own effects further, which was impressive because I thought every other movie had already cheapened it enough (I speak of the neo-smith clone fight scene which was quite frankly boring) e) They took what could have been a trilogy that could have stood next to the likes of star wars orig and LOTR and instead turned it into dime-novel philosophy & hollywood same-old-shit (i know, i repeat myself, but this point irritates me). I dont claim that matrix was going to be some film classic, like Citizen Kane, but shit, it could have been better. I am not a massive Matrix fanboy, especially since as a reader of science-fiction, theres a lot out there storywise thats far superior, but its dissappointing to see a movie that really was genre-redefining in certain respects be relegated to another trilogy best not watched beyond the first.
Matrix aside, as far as recently made bad movies, House of the Dead though gets my vote however for worst overall, though Scary Movie 2 takes a close lead (after watching it, I was 99% sure they filmed the entire movie w/o a script, and in-fact just gathered all the actors and said 'DO STUFF' and captured it on camera, so its not so much a movie as a slightly above amature home video with better lighting).
The answer is relatively simple and that is that 3D is more labor intensive than 2D, and thus to achieve the results you are looking for will take much longer. For example, a friend of mine's thesis for 3D, had a couple very nice looking backgrounds which he originally intended to do in 3D. However, the time it would have taken to add all the detail, textures, lighting and so on (backgrounds were rustic forest-like settings), he would have needed to spend several weeks upon just the backgrounds, and thats not including all the animation he needed to do with his character. Instead however, using photoshop in conjuction with a simple 3D render of a preliminary forest and some hi-res photos, he was able to create a much more detailed & realistic looking forest backgrounds within about 7 days. There was almost no way in hell he could have gotten the same results purely from 3D due to the number of factors & elements involved (try lighting in 3D, its not easy; theres people who dedicate their entire study to lighting in 3D).
Another thing people need to understand is that in movies where theres pure 3D, such as Toy Story, theres not a single frame of that movie that hasnt been retouched in some manner or fashion, so thus you end up with very nice results combined with good 3D work and a lot of post-editing work. Games do not have the advantage of post-editing, so all that work must be done in the 3D stages, which is often very difficult; where you thought 2 lights was ok, you now need 2 negative lights to eliminate some lighting errors, etc etc. I find generally speaking, theres almost ALWAYS something that can be fixed/improved in ANY 3D scene/game/whatever. The medium is extremely complex so thus to yield those results takes a shitload of time.
As a side note, games are now including post-render effects, which is the first step in what this article is talking about, but we still have a long ways to go.
Oh wait thats right: nothing... But remember, you can buy Halo 2 when it comes out in stores!
I had an ATI TV Wonder USB, and the thing was crap all around. Image quality blew, as did sound unless you hooked your sound right up to the VCR (assuming you had one). If that wasn't bad enough, the ATI TV software is absolutely wretched. Unstable as hell, basic stuff like crashing if you click the channel-down button past the first channel (in my case, channel 2), etc. Pretty shoddy all around. I've heard good things about Leadtek's TV2000, though that is an internal card. Definitely be careful about these external TV devices, and stay away from really cheap stuff.
I am just curious cause I've been looking for something like this to explain to my parents, both of whom are self-described computer-stupid, and are in need of such knowledge due to some past issues. They're the type of people who might use the acronym CPU and mean a hard drive, if you know what I mean, when describing computer problems. Is this something I could give to them and they'd understand, or is this something I give to someone who's already has a technical understanding of computers?
I see a lot of posters saying this would be useful for 3D work (a pretty obvious answer), and as a 3D animator I'm unsure as to how this would really help with the way things currently work. Using Maya as an example, Maya simulates 3D in 2D to display it on the screen, and its current workflow is based entirely upon its 2D-manipulating-3D nature. Unless this approach was made radically different, there would be no difference in the process really except in the way objects translate; however then you run into issues of local and world-translation. Are you moving in 3D in relation to the camera or are you moving in relation to worldspace. Is the space that the mouse moves in absolute or relative? In order for such systems to become useful, the actual interfaces themselves must be adapted to take advantage of such features.
3D mice are useless/merely gee-wiz gadgets until a company developes an application that genuinely takes advantage of both working in a 3D space and moving a real-life analog to navigate & manipulate that space. I can see such technology being useful with holograms, or as another poster mentioned, with medical simulations that involve volumes, like a simulation of operating upon a person where everything about the way you handle your tools matter. Until z-space becomes an actual factor in application environments, 3D mice will not rise above other such technological toys such as 3D shutter-glasses, and the 3D gloves (though that nurbs modeling glove system shown on slashdot a couple days actually sounded interesting for once, and not just 'gee-wiz this is cool just cause its 3D').
What exactly is the point of posting this kind of pseudo-science correlation crap? Editors must be bored and trying to incite arguments or something. I mean seriously here, come on. I think we can all sit here, sift data, and come up with all sorts of crazy correlations & conclusions, doesn't mean they have any basis in reality nor that they even matter.