I know this is just a light joke, but this is a mistake that is oft repeated...
THX is *not* an audio format. Stereo, Dolby Digital, DTS, hell even MP3.. these are all audio stream formats.
THX is an equipment certification, that certifies a set of equipment meets certain quality standards. (For actual theatres, it goes beyond just the AV equipment and looks at the whole environment including seating, screen angles, etc)
I think you're talking about budget, basically then.:)
That, and time period, are the essential differences between the two Terminators. (Same lead, same writer/director, same effects team, etc)
I do get what you mean about not knowing what direction the series could head. By the sequel, the wonder is gone. That's why Raiders of the Lost Ark never had a chance of being topped.;)
I think both Alien and Aliens are brilliant in totally different ways. Aliens WAS original back in '86... everyone's tried to copy it since but never succeeded. You are right any idiot director can elicit cheap thrills from a "monster movie" (I give you 'Resident Evil' Ugh...) but it takes a lot more than that to create a good story, characters you care about, and great performances. (You know Sigourney was nominated for an Oscar for Aliens? That does NOT happen for "cheap action thrillers") Cameron has real vision and imagination, and the drive and talent to see it through.
I remember reading that Rob Reiner and his wife saw it in '77, walked out the theatre, and got right back in line.:) (I think the context was Fellowship of the Ring.. he said it was the first movie that made him want to do that again)
Cameron made Terminator 1 also... why would the second one be "dumbed down"? Honestly I watch T1 now and all I notice is the awful awful 80's hair and fashions.;) Oh, and Bill Paxton as a punk teenager.:D I will concede the plot was recycled though, other than the "Arnie as good guy" twist.
I have to completely disagree with you on the other two movies though... I thought both Aliens and Road Warrior had MORE of an "anything-can-happen" feeling than their predecessors.
Alien: Spaceship crew trapped with a killer alien. Hmm.. what will happen? Aliens: Squad of marines attacks an entire colony infested with em. Just seems like more possibilities for that scenario...
Mad Max: A cop (and his sweet helpless family), vs. motorcycle gang. What could happen? Road Warrior: The bloody world went and ended. Anything's possible.:) Mad Max had a very unique coolness to it though that has never been duplicated, I will admit.
Your sig says, 'Never insult religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual your post is.'
Why must a factual post be insulting then? An insult is a judgement on something.
A troll is someone deliberately trying to provoke a heated response. I can see how pronouncing judgement on someone's faith could be seen as trolling, no matter the facts that led to it.
I've found people on/. generally tolerant of religious observations, as long as you stay objective.
Now watch me get modded down for being offtopic, despite labelling the topic as such and cancelling my Karma Bonus...;)
It doesn't say anything about the cell sizes. (It does say "with a better power/weight ratio than anything on the market, Li-S could be easily packed into the tinniest devices"
The thing that's so attractive to me about NiMH's is they come in standard AAA and AA sizes. I make sure all my electronics take those (instead of say Lithimum Ion, which is usually proprietary), and then I can run everything on the same "fleet" of batteries.
I hope this tech follows suit. (I imagine it won't at first, but will eventually)
"I have been wondering how difficult it will be to get by without all the cheap plastics that we have today."
Hemp can be used for plastic. In fact hemp can be used for pretty much everything oil can be, including a cleaner burning, renewable fuel source. It's also great for paper, fabrics, and thousands of other uses. Popular Mechanics estimated 25,000 product uses for it back in 1938.
Banning hemp because of marijuana is as stupid as banning barley and oats during prohibition would've been. It's precisely because hemp is so useful (and threatens the profits of powerful people.. like oil and timber barons) that it was unfairly demonized and outlawed (with precisely zero medical or scientific basis) in the 30's, right after a means to mass-process it was developed. The resource barons killed the hemp industry in its infancy. Thankfully, it appears to coming back in some places, although certain powerful people whose family is in bed with oil interests don't want it to...
OK, disclaimer, I haven't even RTFA, but I have quit from a respected CS program (University of Waterloo), and one of the reasons was there was too much math. It just wasn't where my passion lay.
Now, I'm pretty good at math, and truly talented at CS (self-taught coding since age 7, way beyond teachers in high school, etc), but by the time I was getting to things like Calc 2 and Calc 3, I simply wasn't motivated to apply myself to it.
Now, there were other reasons I left... there was the cost factor, and some people I knew were starting a company back in the dot-com days. I tried to go there as a co-op term, but the co-op dept said I had to take another job with a company that indicated they wanted me, and I couldn't work where I wanted to. I told them where to go.
BUT... the fact that the program seemed too math intensive for what I wanted was still a significant factor. I HAVE an excellent foundation in math. I'm great with the CS. But I was still soured away from the CS program at the leading Canadian CS university.
I did get 2 full years in though. I think the most important thing I learned was "big O" notation... analyzing algorithm efficiency. You can apply that to everything.
I think that would be a great hiring test too... show someone a simple algorithm like a nested loop (in anything... even pseudo-code) and ask them what order of efficiency it is. If they don't understand that it's n^2 and the MATH behind what that means, seeya later.
In the years since I left, I've been able to tackle every problem that came my way. And I'm not talking about "connecting web servers to DBs" (although there has been plenty of that, and there is an art to doing it as efficiently as possible). I've written file sharing and communications networks, servers that deal with thousands of simultaneous clients, streaming compression, encryption, you name it. If I can master things like multithreading, advanced networking, cryptography, etc.. what exactly am I missing from something like say, Calc 3?
I do sometimes wish I had opted to stay and finish. There were some interesting CS things in the final years like AI and operating system design (I've heard that one is hell... but then I heard that about 'multithreading' too and it wasn't too hard). But I wonder if I could pick these up too myself anyway with a few books and the 'net.
I understand UW has a new "Software Engineering" program now, with less emphasis on advanced mathematics. Perhaps that's something that is more suited to me.
"If there are any who have made it past Singularity, then their existence must surely be so far advanced as to be unrecognizable; like we are to ants."
This is the part I don't follow. What makes you think we would be incapable of recognizing intelligence, even vastly beyond our own? Why wouldn't it be distinguishable from natural phenomena?
The ant analogy seems more related to scale, than intelligence. I bet if I was a super intelligent ant, other ants would notice me.
What REALLY kills me, is that the vast majority of the time when Explorer seizes up, I'm doing ridiculously simple filesystem operations, like creating a new folder, or renaming or deleting a file.
IS THAT REALLY SO HARD!? Why can't they get basic file operations in their main shell working right, after a half-dozen major OS revisions?
What on earth are they doing that screws up the filesystem so much?? Are they registering new/renamed files with some complex indexer or something? Drives me nuts when I have to reboot because I'm bringing Windoze to its knees by CREATING DIRECTORIES.
This has happened on every machine I've used, in every Windows I can recall from Win95. (Maybe it was there in 3.x too but I never used File Manager back then)
So what? It has 10 times the clockspeed. The GP32 runs SNES graphics pretty damn good, (and at full TV resolution, I might add.. something the GBA will never pull off.
It DOES have hardware scrolling support, and a "pseudo" two-layer mode. http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/jikorhon/condev/gp32/
The real problem (for both GP32 and GBA) is still the sound chip. The GP32 has better hardware for that. GBA has 4 music channels and 2 wav channels. GP32 has 16 and 4.
As for "unplayable"... not at all. I've been playing Street Fighter II Turbo, Final Fight, MegaManX, and Final Fantasy II (4j), WITH sound, all week. With sound you can play most games with frame skip of 2 or 3. If you turn off sound, everything runs at pretty much full speed.
I hope if they can rewrite the sound mixer in ARM assembler they can get it running at full speed with sound.
GP32 can also play DivX, MP3/OGG, and Doom I & II at 320x240, 60 fps.
I'm replying to your sig.. this is something of interest to me.
How does "Any sufficiently advanced civilization either destroys itself or transcends to superintelligence." solve Fermi's Paradox? Why wouldn't we have seen some indication of superintelligent races?
Really? When were you last in touch then? The seventies?;)
Fairlight has been around forever, they were leading the scene back when the C64 was hot shit. Right-or-wrong, I'll be sad to see them dissapear. They put the "old" in "old school".;)
Hemp competes (rather effectively) with oil & petrochemicals, wood pulp, durable fabrics, and thousands of other uses. (It truly is nature's miracle plant)
Yes, I said oil. You can run a car on hemp oil. You can grow hemp in your backyard.
Now, ask yourself, who would suffer enormous losses if the general public could start growing their own fuel?
Ergo, hemp is suppressed at all levels of the corporate and political arena. (In the States, anyway. Other nations like UK and Canada seem to be coming around). Marijunana is just a convenient strawman to keep hemp down. (Did they ban barley during prohibition? Of course not)
Oil makes the world go round, and the rich richer. No threats to its dominance will be tolerated while they can keep squeezing profits from it. (And these profits will only rise as oil becomes more scarce)
They're choking the world in the name of profit, while supressing viable natural alternatives. Great species we have here, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is just a light joke, but this is a mistake that is oft repeated...
THX is *not* an audio format. Stereo, Dolby Digital, DTS, hell even MP3.. these are all audio stream formats.
THX is an equipment certification, that certifies a set of equipment meets certain quality standards. (For actual theatres, it goes beyond just the AV equipment and looks at the whole environment including seating, screen angles, etc)
If you're interested, here's an excellent article on it.
I think you're talking about budget, basically then. :)
;)
That, and time period, are the essential differences between the two Terminators. (Same lead, same writer/director, same effects team, etc)
I do get what you mean about not knowing what direction the series could head. By the sequel, the wonder is gone. That's why Raiders of the Lost Ark never had a chance of being topped.
I think both Alien and Aliens are brilliant in totally different ways. Aliens WAS original back in '86... everyone's tried to copy it since but never succeeded. You are right any idiot director can elicit cheap thrills from a "monster movie" (I give you 'Resident Evil' Ugh...) but it takes a lot more than that to create a good story, characters you care about, and great performances. (You know Sigourney was nominated for an Oscar for Aliens? That does NOT happen for "cheap action thrillers") Cameron has real vision and imagination, and the drive and talent to see it through.
"nobody else has done much better space opera"
Not on the big screen, no. But I'd humbly submit that Babylon 5 is better space opera (and much more) on almost every level imaginable.
No, that's unneccesary.
:P
His copyright of Star Wars will last forever because Disney will keep protecting their fucking mouse every 20 years.
I remember reading that Rob Reiner and his wife saw it in '77, walked out the theatre, and got right back in line. :) (I think the context was Fellowship of the Ring.. he said it was the first movie that made him want to do that again)
Cameron made Terminator 1 also... why would the second one be "dumbed down"? Honestly I watch T1 now and all I notice is the awful awful 80's hair and fashions. ;) Oh, and Bill Paxton as a punk teenager. :D I will concede the plot was recycled though, other than the "Arnie as good guy" twist.
:) Mad Max had a very unique coolness to it though that has never been duplicated, I will admit.
I have to completely disagree with you on the other two movies though... I thought both Aliens and Road Warrior had MORE of an "anything-can-happen" feeling than their predecessors.
Alien: Spaceship crew trapped with a killer alien. Hmm.. what will happen? Aliens: Squad of marines attacks an entire colony infested with em. Just seems like more possibilities for that scenario...
Mad Max: A cop (and his sweet helpless family), vs. motorcycle gang. What could happen? Road Warrior: The bloody world went and ended. Anything's possible.
Your sig says, 'Never insult religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual your post is.'
/. generally tolerant of religious observations, as long as you stay objective.
;)
Why must a factual post be insulting then? An insult is a judgement on something.
A troll is someone deliberately trying to provoke a heated response. I can see how pronouncing judgement on someone's faith could be seen as trolling, no matter the facts that led to it.
I've found people on
Now watch me get modded down for being offtopic, despite labelling the topic as such and cancelling my Karma Bonus...
Boycott PayPal... they're *NOT* helping fund Thing FreeNet!
;P
That oughta get'em.
It doesn't say anything about the cell sizes. (It does say "with a better power/weight ratio than anything on the market, Li-S could be easily packed into the tinniest devices"
The thing that's so attractive to me about NiMH's is they come in standard AAA and AA sizes. I make sure all my electronics take those (instead of say Lithimum Ion, which is usually proprietary), and then I can run everything on the same "fleet" of batteries.
I hope this tech follows suit. (I imagine it won't at first, but will eventually)
Just buggin ya... it was a good post. :)
Sorry didn't see this.
A pair of NiMH AA's last 10-15 hours, easy. Days and days of regular usage. (The frontlight will drain it quicker)
"I have been wondering how difficult it will be to get by without all the cheap plastics that we have today."
Hemp can be used for plastic. In fact hemp can be used for pretty much everything oil can be, including a cleaner burning, renewable fuel source. It's also great for paper, fabrics, and thousands of other uses. Popular Mechanics estimated 25,000 product uses for it back in 1938.
Banning hemp because of marijuana is as stupid as banning barley and oats during prohibition would've been. It's precisely because hemp is so useful (and threatens the profits of powerful people.. like oil and timber barons) that it was unfairly demonized and outlawed (with precisely zero medical or scientific basis) in the 30's, right after a means to mass-process it was developed. The resource barons killed the hemp industry in its infancy. Thankfully, it appears to coming back in some places, although certain powerful people whose family is in bed with oil interests don't want it to...
"Yeah, for example a solar system to generate enough power for the average home would cost anywhere from $20k to $30k."
;)
That's incredible! An entire solar system for only $30K? I call dibs on Alpha Centauri.
We must have pretty different definitions of "average" though if this can only power a single house...
OK, disclaimer, I haven't even RTFA, but I have quit from a respected CS program (University of Waterloo), and one of the reasons was there was too much math. It just wasn't where my passion lay.
Now, I'm pretty good at math, and truly talented at CS (self-taught coding since age 7, way beyond teachers in high school, etc), but by the time I was getting to things like Calc 2 and Calc 3, I simply wasn't motivated to apply myself to it.
Now, there were other reasons I left... there was the cost factor, and some people I knew were starting a company back in the dot-com days. I tried to go there as a co-op term, but the co-op dept said I had to take another job with a company that indicated they wanted me, and I couldn't work where I wanted to. I told them where to go.
BUT... the fact that the program seemed too math intensive for what I wanted was still a significant factor. I HAVE an excellent foundation in math. I'm great with the CS. But I was still soured away from the CS program at the leading Canadian CS university.
I did get 2 full years in though. I think the most important thing I learned was "big O" notation... analyzing algorithm efficiency. You can apply that to everything.
I think that would be a great hiring test too... show someone a simple algorithm like a nested loop (in anything... even pseudo-code) and ask them what order of efficiency it is. If they don't understand that it's n^2 and the MATH behind what that means, seeya later.
In the years since I left, I've been able to tackle every problem that came my way. And I'm not talking about "connecting web servers to DBs" (although there has been plenty of that, and there is an art to doing it as efficiently as possible). I've written file sharing and communications networks, servers that deal with thousands of simultaneous clients, streaming compression, encryption, you name it. If I can master things like multithreading, advanced networking, cryptography, etc.. what exactly am I missing from something like say, Calc 3?
I do sometimes wish I had opted to stay and finish. There were some interesting CS things in the final years like AI and operating system design (I've heard that one is hell... but then I heard that about 'multithreading' too and it wasn't too hard). But I wonder if I could pick these up too myself anyway with a few books and the 'net.
I understand UW has a new "Software Engineering" program now, with less emphasis on advanced mathematics. Perhaps that's something that is more suited to me.
Can't find a rom image, but you can buy it in a game pack here:
http://www.cdaccess.com/html/pc/vault3.htm
QUICK you say? ;)
/.
I seem to recall it taking YEARS before Java (and Sun's role in it) stopped being badmouthed on
"Cross-platform? Bah.. write it in portable C and compile for whatever you like." was the reigning chant of the day.
Thanks for the response.
"If there are any who have made it past Singularity, then their existence must surely be so far advanced as to be unrecognizable; like we are to ants."
This is the part I don't follow. What makes you think we would be incapable of recognizing intelligence, even vastly beyond our own? Why wouldn't it be distinguishable from natural phenomena?
The ant analogy seems more related to scale, than intelligence. I bet if I was a super intelligent ant, other ants would notice me.
Myself, I couldn't care less if GamePark fell into the earth tomorrow.
;)
;)
I have a working unit, and more software for it (thanks to emulation) than I could go through in a lifetime.
You are right though... GamePark is not for Joe Average. It's more like a retro-hacker's wet dream.
Amen.
What REALLY kills me, is that the vast majority of the time when Explorer seizes up, I'm doing ridiculously simple filesystem operations, like creating a new folder, or renaming or deleting a file.
IS THAT REALLY SO HARD!? Why can't they get basic file operations in their main shell working right, after a half-dozen major OS revisions?
What on earth are they doing that screws up the filesystem so much?? Are they registering new/renamed files with some complex indexer or something? Drives me nuts when I have to reboot because I'm bringing Windoze to its knees by CREATING DIRECTORIES.
This has happened on every machine I've used, in every Windows I can recall from Win95. (Maybe it was there in 3.x too but I never used File Manager back then)
Online-shopping-phobic?
;)
What on earth are you doing on Slashdot?
Dead? No.
Gone? Why yes, actually. It's sold out all over the place.
They're coming out with a new backlit version next month too. Pretty lively for a "dead and gone" product.
So what? It has 10 times the clockspeed. The GP32 runs SNES graphics pretty damn good, (and at full TV resolution, I might add.. something the GBA will never pull off.
It DOES have hardware scrolling support, and a "pseudo" two-layer mode. http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/jikorhon/condev/gp32/
The real problem (for both GP32 and GBA) is still the sound chip. The GP32 has better hardware for that. GBA has 4 music channels and 2 wav channels. GP32 has 16 and 4.
As for "unplayable"... not at all. I've been playing Street Fighter II Turbo, Final Fight, MegaManX, and Final Fantasy II (4j), WITH sound, all week. With sound you can play most games with frame skip of 2 or 3. If you turn off sound, everything runs at pretty much full speed.
I hope if they can rewrite the sound mixer in ARM assembler they can get it running at full speed with sound.
GP32 can also play DivX, MP3/OGG, and Doom I & II at 320x240, 60 fps.
I'm replying to your sig.. this is something of interest to me.
How does "Any sufficiently advanced civilization either destroys itself or transcends to superintelligence." solve Fermi's Paradox? Why wouldn't we have seen some indication of superintelligent races?
Really? When were you last in touch then? The seventies? ;)
;)
Fairlight has been around forever, they were leading the scene back when the C64 was hot shit. Right-or-wrong, I'll be sad to see them dissapear. They put the "old" in "old school".
It's called a conflict of interests.
Hemp competes (rather effectively) with oil & petrochemicals, wood pulp, durable fabrics, and thousands of other uses. (It truly is nature's miracle plant)
Yes, I said oil. You can run a car on hemp oil. You can grow hemp in your backyard.
Now, ask yourself, who would suffer enormous losses if the general public could start growing their own fuel?
Ergo, hemp is suppressed at all levels of the corporate and political arena. (In the States, anyway. Other nations like UK and Canada seem to be coming around). Marijunana is just a convenient strawman to keep hemp down. (Did they ban barley during prohibition? Of course not)
Oil makes the world go round, and the rich richer. No threats to its dominance will be tolerated while they can keep squeezing profits from it. (And these profits will only rise as oil becomes more scarce)
They're choking the world in the name of profit, while supressing viable natural alternatives. Great species we have here, isn't it?