Many years ago, there was a toy electronics kit like this. Each component was sealed in a little plastic brick, and the bricks were connected by magnetized plates. You could put together an AM radio, and it looked like a Scrabble board.
Sorry, "Beverly Hills Cop" only made it to 3, although a #4 is in development hell.
I was thinking of "Police Academy 5". They didn't stop at 5, either. Police Academy 6 (1989) and 7 (1994) were made, released, and ignored. Police Academy 8 is in development, for release in 2006.
Lucas is making noises about Episodes 7, 8, and 9.
But for now, Police Academy holds the record for numbered sequels.
It's perfectly reasonable to have multiple graphics processors, but if they weren't designed to work together, don't expect a huge performance gain.
Dynamic Pictures used to make boards with 1, 2, or 4 GPUs. But the GPU was designed for that. Display lists and textures were shared, and Z-buffer and screen buffer were not, which is what you want. If you have to duplicate everything for each GPU, as apparently is done here, it's much less of an improvement. Not only do you need more RAM, but the main CPU has to fill each board separately.
You're going to get really great Quake refresh rates. Less improvement on newer games that push the CPU to graphics bus harder. Probably won't do much for Maya/Softimage/3DS Max/etc.
"Luxury gaming" market, right. As in "there's one born every minute".
Will somebody kill off that stupid "franchise"? Now that Lucas has made two movies which are generally agreed to suck, it's time to give this thing a decent burial. It's getting to be like "Beverly Hills Cop". "Beverly Hills Cop I" was funny. It went downhill from there. #3 was bad. #5 was so bad it went direct to video. Fortunately, at that point the studio pulled the plug. Better late than never.
Even Speilberg sometimes blows it. "Jurassic Park III", anyone? That effectively went direct to video, although there was some brief, minimal theatrical release. He had the sense to stop at that point.
At some point in the sequel business, it's time to give it up.
Although we'll probably have to endure "Ocean's 13".
The obvious union for EA LA is The Animation Guild, local 839, IATSE, which represents most Hollywood animators and CGI artists.
Local 839 is growing, bigger than it was ten years ago, because of the growth in CGI effects.
The basic five day workweek for this computer graphics unit is 45 hours (40 hours of straight time and 5 hours of (1.5 times rate) overtime. This workweek is a flexible one, allowing the employee to work as many as 12 hours in a day without additional pay as long as the aggregate hours worked in the five day period does not exceed 45. Hours worked in excess of 12 in one day or 45 in the five day workweek will be compensated at 1.5 times the hourly rate. All overtime beyond 9 hours in any day or 45 hours in any week must be expressly pre-approved by the employee's supervisor. Any employee who works more than five (5) days out of any seven (7) consecutive days shall be compensated (i) for time worked on the sixth day at a rate not less than one and one-half times the hourly rate for the classification of the employee and (ii) for time worked on the seventh day at a rate not less than two times the hourly rate for the classification of tfie employee.
With a contract like that, "crunches" mean huge overtime pay. They still happen, but the paychecks go way up when they do. So employers don't understaff.
IATSE also represents Dreamworks SKG employees, who work in the same building complex as EA Redwood City, doing very similar jobs.
An IATSE organizer can be found at most Bay Area SIGGRAPH meetings. The links above will take you to the union web sites.
If ".biz" is kept, the registration requirements for ".com" should be tightened, so that to get into ".com", you have to have a corporation, a DUNS number, or a business license, with that data in WHOIS. Then the slimeballs can be migrated to ".biz".
The WIPO Broadcast Treaty, if it goes anywhere, only covers "broadcasting" on Government-licensed stations. Some British museum group paid a lawyer in the UK to write an opinion that Bridgeman vs. Corel didn't apply broadly, but that's just a brief.
In practice, nobody seems to have taken a copyright claim on a photo or scan of a public domain image to court since Bridgeman vs. Corel. The museum commmunity seems to have accepted Bridgeman vs. Corel. As it turns out, selling slides of pictures hasn't declined, the coffee-table book business is still good, and it just isn't a economic issue.
A digital copy of an old work which is in the public domain is considered in law to be a new work that can be fully protected by copyright, even though the copyright on the original work has expired.
C++ is already becoming a legacy language. Java and C# are taking over for business apps. C++ is too hard and too bug-prone, and its flaws aren't being fixed.
There are probably as many C++ programmers today as there will ever have to be.
"Our servers are all China-based to ensure no problems arise from complaints generated by email you send. We do not allow: Scam or Anti-Chinese Government sites.
Most "bulletproof" hosts are made to jump between connectivity providers and countries very frequently to avoid being shut down. In comparison, we are allowed by our upstream to operate freely and openly. This makes our operation simple and reliable.
Our ISP allows us and our customers to send bulk email. They will never shut us down due to complaints. Most other so-called "bulletproof" hosting providers cannot guarantee this.
However, they're really a US company run by a known spammer in Ann Arbor, MI. Microsoft is suing them.
You could probably buy the rights to the XFL really, really cheap.
Keyhole - one of the few useful 3D interfaces
on
3D User Interfaces
·
· Score: 1
Keyhole has one of the few useful 3D interfaces. You start with a globe and can pan, tilt, and zoom through the huge photo database all the way down to reading road markings.
It's quite clever in subtle ways. When you click on a "bookmark", you move to the new location in a smooth trajectory that takes you up to a high altitude and then back down.
I was doing Falling Bodies right at the time Hollywood was beginning to switch from SGI to PCs. The high-end packages like Softimage ran on SGI only. The studios had wall to wall SGI workstations. PCs were considered toys. SGI had a Silicon Studios division, with an impressive building in Mountain View. (It's now the Computer Museum.)
Then Microsoft bought Softimage, and made them come out with an NT version. The first serious OpenGL graphics cards (DirectX was stil in the future) came from vendors like Fujitsu and Dynamic Pictures. They didn't work very well. Installation required direct cooperation with the board developers. But they did have the 4x4 matrix multiplier for geometric transforms and a hardware Z buffer, just like an SGI machine.
That's when the studios started gettting NT-based animation systems. They weren't standard desktop PCs at first, though. Intergraph sold "high end NT workstations", and it was worth it simply because they could make the graphics board play nice with the motherboard. Softimage on NT on the DEC Alpha had a following.
One real issue for a few years was that it was seen as "unprofessional" to be using a PC for animation. At one point I had a Pentium Pro in a black rackmount case, and industry people asked me where they could get one like that, so their shop would look "professional".
Then came mainstream motherboards with AGP slots, and finally, the graphics board had enough memory bandwidth to work right. Then serious graphics boards went mainstream, and it was all downhill for Silicon Graphics after that.
PayPal is for sellers so small they can't qualify for a merchant account and take credit cards. Why would anyone use PayPal to buy from Apple?
Re:My dads invention is missing
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Wave cam hydraulic motors have been around for decades. The IBM RS-1 electrohydraulic robot from the 1980s used them. You can see the wave cam rail here,
above the gripper. The cylinder block, with four cylinders controlled by Moog valves, is visible at the top of the picture. It's a nice linear motion device.
The only new thing in the patent is that the wave cam comes in pieces, rather than being made as one big unit.
You can get home solar systems from Real Goods, which has been selling solar systems in Californa for years.
Silicon Valley has already done its part. Inverters are available for around a dollar a watt, produce good AC waveforms (early units output square waves, causing excessive heating in inductive loads), will synch to and intertie with the power grid, and work reliably.
In California, there are huge tax incentives, the power company has to buy power back from solar installations at retail rates, and adding solar won't increase your property taxes.
And still nobody does it. You have to pave the roofs of the world with solar panels. In fact, solar power production in California dropped slightly during the 1990s. Wind power is way up.
But wind power is not a home solution. As Real Goods puts it, "We generally advise that a good, year-round wind turbine site isn't a place that you'd want to live. It takes average wind speeds of 8 to 9 mph and up, to make a really good site. That's honestly more wind than most folks are comfortable living with."
Don't worry about it too much. When the price of oil doubles, we'll see more solar panels.
If Pest Patrol thinks it's bad, I'm not going to argue with them.
From the GameSpy EULA:
"B). IGN/GameSpy Advertising. The IGN/GameSpy Sites and Services rely on advertisers to help fund the services that we offer to our members. In order to continue our service, you agree that the IGN/GameSpy Sites and Services may display advertisements and promotions of all kinds in and with the services."
Our Sites and Services provide you with opportunities to link to, or otherwise use, sites and services offered through our third-party service providers, including email. Your use of these third-party services is subject to terms posted by these third-party service providers. We have no control over any third-party site or service and we are not responsible for any changes to any third-party service or for the contents thereof, including, without limitation, any links that may be contained in or accessible through such third-party service. These links are provided solely as a convenience to our visitors. Such third-party linked sites are not under IGN/GameSpy control and IGN/GameSpy is not responsible for and does not endorse their content. You will need to make your own independent judgment regarding your interaction with these third-party sites or services. Our inclusion of advertisements for, or links to, a third-party site or service does not constitute an endorsement. By opting into third-party offers, you will be subject to terms posted by these third-parties. Opting into these offers signifies your agreement to those additional terms of the respective third parties."
When "Lucky, the magazine about shopping" first came out, the comment was "You mean there are magazines that aren't about shopping?" Game magazines started at that level and went down from there.
If the attackers are getting that organized, they presumably can find their own vulnerabilities, instead of relying on published ones like the script kiddies.
Rolex is being hurt by the billions of Rolex spams. All they really have is their "luxury" reputation; their watch movements are made by Swatch. Some fake Rolexes have authentic movements. The "case carved out of a single block of stainless steel" today means "made on a CNC milling machine".
The embarassing thing about the "luxury" market is that quite often, the manufacturing costs are low.
A billion spams a day really trashes the "exclusive" image.
Next status symbol target: Tiffany's. The spam is out there.
Slashdot Mirror
See NSA Kid's Page.
Many years ago, there was a toy electronics kit like this. Each component was sealed in a little plastic brick, and the bricks were connected by magnetized plates. You could put together an AM radio, and it looked like a Scrabble board.
I was thinking of "Police Academy 5". They didn't stop at 5, either. Police Academy 6 (1989) and 7 (1994) were made, released, and ignored. Police Academy 8 is in development, for release in 2006.
Lucas is making noises about Episodes 7, 8, and 9. But for now, Police Academy holds the record for numbered sequels.
You're going to get really great Quake refresh rates. Less improvement on newer games that push the CPU to graphics bus harder. Probably won't do much for Maya/Softimage/3DS Max/etc.
"Luxury gaming" market, right. As in "there's one born every minute".
Even Speilberg sometimes blows it. "Jurassic Park III", anyone? That effectively went direct to video, although there was some brief, minimal theatrical release. He had the sense to stop at that point.
At some point in the sequel business, it's time to give it up.
Although we'll probably have to endure "Ocean's 13".
For EA Redwood City, IATSE Local 16 has jurisdiction. Here's the union contract for Industrial Light and Magic, whose CGI employees are represented by IATSE Local 16, San Francisco.
Some key clauses:
-
The basic five day workweek for this computer graphics unit is 45 hours (40 hours of straight time and 5 hours of (1.5 times rate) overtime. This workweek is a flexible one, allowing the employee to work as many as 12 hours in a day without additional pay as long as the aggregate hours worked in the five day period does not exceed 45. Hours worked in excess of 12 in one day or 45 in the five day workweek will be compensated at 1.5 times the hourly rate. All overtime beyond 9 hours in any day or 45 hours in any week must be expressly pre-approved by the employee's supervisor. Any employee who works more than five (5) days out of any seven (7) consecutive days shall be compensated (i) for time worked on the sixth day at a rate not less than one and one-half times the hourly rate for the classification of the employee and (ii) for time worked on the seventh day at a rate not less than two times the hourly rate for the classification of tfie employee.
With a contract like that, "crunches" mean huge overtime pay. They still happen, but the paychecks go way up when they do. So employers don't understaff.IATSE also represents Dreamworks SKG employees, who work in the same building complex as EA Redwood City, doing very similar jobs.
An IATSE organizer can be found at most Bay Area SIGGRAPH meetings. The links above will take you to the union web sites.
".int" has an organizational purpose. It's for major international organizations, like the United Nations the the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Confederation of Independent States (the former USSR) and the Organization of American States.
If ".biz" is kept, the registration requirements for ".com" should be tightened, so that to get into ".com", you have to have a corporation, a DUNS number, or a business license, with that data in WHOIS. Then the slimeballs can be migrated to ".biz".
In practice, nobody seems to have taken a copyright claim on a photo or scan of a public domain image to court since Bridgeman vs. Corel. The museum commmunity seems to have accepted Bridgeman vs. Corel. As it turns out, selling slides of pictures hasn't declined, the coffee-table book business is still good, and it just isn't a economic issue.
Wrong. Bridgeman vs. Corel, 36 F. Supp. 2d 191.
However, there's the "Corbis copyright hack":
There are probably as many C++ programmers today as there will ever have to be.
Most "bulletproof" hosts are made to jump between connectivity providers and countries very frequently to avoid being shut down. In comparison, we are allowed by our upstream to operate freely and openly. This makes our operation simple and reliable.
Our ISP allows us and our customers to send bulk email. They will never shut us down due to complaints. Most other so-called "bulletproof" hosting providers cannot guarantee this.
However, they're really a US company run by a known spammer in Ann Arbor, MI. Microsoft is suing them.
Or will they try to lock them up with an EULA, the DMCA, and some eBook system?
You could probably buy the rights to the XFL really, really cheap.
It's quite clever in subtle ways. When you click on a "bookmark", you move to the new location in a smooth trajectory that takes you up to a high altitude and then back down.
This is way ahead of, say, Mapquest.
Yeah, and he even changed his URL. Maybe he was in too many spam blocklists. Does he spam other places too, or just Slashdot?
Then Microsoft bought Softimage, and made them come out with an NT version. The first serious OpenGL graphics cards (DirectX was stil in the future) came from vendors like Fujitsu and Dynamic Pictures. They didn't work very well. Installation required direct cooperation with the board developers. But they did have the 4x4 matrix multiplier for geometric transforms and a hardware Z buffer, just like an SGI machine.
That's when the studios started gettting NT-based animation systems. They weren't standard desktop PCs at first, though. Intergraph sold "high end NT workstations", and it was worth it simply because they could make the graphics board play nice with the motherboard. Softimage on NT on the DEC Alpha had a following.
One real issue for a few years was that it was seen as "unprofessional" to be using a PC for animation. At one point I had a Pentium Pro in a black rackmount case, and industry people asked me where they could get one like that, so their shop would look "professional".
Then came mainstream motherboards with AGP slots, and finally, the graphics board had enough memory bandwidth to work right. Then serious graphics boards went mainstream, and it was all downhill for Silicon Graphics after that.
PayPal is for sellers so small they can't qualify for a merchant account and take credit cards. Why would anyone use PayPal to buy from Apple?
The only new thing in the patent is that the wave cam comes in pieces, rather than being made as one big unit.
Silicon Valley has already done its part. Inverters are available for around a dollar a watt, produce good AC waveforms (early units output square waves, causing excessive heating in inductive loads), will synch to and intertie with the power grid, and work reliably.
In California, there are huge tax incentives, the power company has to buy power back from solar installations at retail rates, and adding solar won't increase your property taxes.
And still nobody does it. You have to pave the roofs of the world with solar panels. In fact, solar power production in California dropped slightly during the 1990s. Wind power is way up. But wind power is not a home solution. As Real Goods puts it, "We generally advise that a good, year-round wind turbine site isn't a place that you'd want to live. It takes average wind speeds of 8 to 9 mph and up, to make a really good site. That's honestly more wind than most folks are comfortable living with."
Don't worry about it too much. When the price of oil doubles, we'll see more solar panels.
From the GameSpy EULA:
Our Sites and Services provide you with opportunities to link to, or otherwise use, sites and services offered through our third-party service providers, including email. Your use of these third-party services is subject to terms posted by these third-party service providers. We have no control over any third-party site or service and we are not responsible for any changes to any third-party service or for the contents thereof, including, without limitation, any links that may be contained in or accessible through such third-party service. These links are provided solely as a convenience to our visitors. Such third-party linked sites are not under IGN/GameSpy control and IGN/GameSpy is not responsible for and does not endorse their content. You will need to make your own independent judgment regarding your interaction with these third-party sites or services. Our inclusion of advertisements for, or links to, a third-party site or service does not constitute an endorsement. By opting into third-party offers, you will be subject to terms posted by these third-parties. Opting into these offers signifies your agreement to those additional terms of the respective third parties."
At the bottom is GameSpy, which is now a malware distributor.
"Next Generation" was worth reading, in its day.
If the attackers are getting that organized, they presumably can find their own vulnerabilities, instead of relying on published ones like the script kiddies.
(Yes, the Segway is still being sold.)
A billion spams a day really trashes the "exclusive" image.
Next status symbol target: Tiffany's. The spam is out there.