I'm sorry, maybe you're not reading the news. It's the US economy that's going to pot, not the EU. Have you seen the devaluation of the US$ compared to the Euro? Have you taken a look at our national debt? Granted, many of these trends may be reversed once we get a president who's not an idiot. But I think it's very ostrich-like to pretend that they're in economic trouble while we're doing great. We're not. What's worse, the lack of a socialist safety net means that in the US, an economic downturn leads directly to human misery, where in Europe, people get a chance to get back on their feet.
Yes, some countries have high unemployment. Germany is still not finished with the intergration and rebuilding of the former-GDR. But unlike here, people there aren't starving, and they are being retrained.
Oh geez, stop flaming! Surely even you can tell the difference between being paid to write a book review and being paid to submit a commercial that masquarades as academic work!
In essence, AOL/TW is paying academic philosophers to do product placement in their research papers. If you don't understand the difference between that and a book review, please don't reply.
As far as me daring to speak for philosophers in general in saying they hated 'Reloaded', let's first look at something you wrote:
...these folks were all fans of the film and all eager to contribute.
Let me remind you: you do not know these people. What makes you so sure you can tell what they're all fans of and what they're all eager to do?
The I'm quite sure "Philosophers hate Matrix Reloaded." is true. It's a bit like the sentences "Pacifists hate Bush" or "Monkeys like bananas". You don't have to know all the monkeys to make this observation. You only need to know enough of them, and have some reason for thinking you can extrapolate the observation you made about those you know to the rest. So don't try your amateur tricks on me.
I know several of the philosophers who contributed papers to this site.
One thing worth mentioning is that they were paid. Professional philosophers, many with excellent reputations, have been hired to be a part of the PR aparatus of the movie industry. That's not to say that what they wrote was stupid (and if you read the papers, most mention--delicately--that the movie had some serious coherency problems). But their work is supposed to be the seed of a certain new source of buzz behind the movie.
The idea is that you go into the sequel expecting something really deep to happen. (It doesn't. I saw the sequel on opening night with 4 Ph.D's in philosophy who thought it was the worst movie since Highlander 2.)
It's a clever marketing strategy, because now a "hip" site like this one is presenting all this as buzz, when in reality it's a bit like paying people to clap at a talk to make the speaker look more interesting than he is.
I'm sure that the payouts to the philosophers cost about the same as 60 seconds of pointless chase scene footage, and with everyone biting the hook, it was apparently money well spent.
But don't mistake this for what it isn't: philosophers hate Matrix Reloaded, and giggle about the many conceptual gaffes in M1.
Yeah, but since the Matrix is just a stupid ill-considered piece of trash, you try to make the best of it!
Any good open source precussion samples?
on
Open Source Music
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· Score: 1
Sometimes I mess around with making songs at home. I make beats with the computer and then layer other instruments over them. What I find very strange is that nobody has bothered to make a site with well-recorded precussion samples.
What I'm looking for are various samples of well miked intividual drum hits and cymbal strikes. I've resorted to sampling these from various CDs I own, but it's very rare that you get a well-recorded strike that's allowed to fully ring out.
There are many studios with good acoustics, professional mikes and pro digital recording gear. Why hasn't someone taken the 10 minutes to record individual drums? And it's not like it would be a lot of data to host. Most samples are less than 5 seconds long! Even at 24bit/96Hz lossless, it wouldn't produce big files.
I'd honestly be much more interested in an open source project like this than what the guys are doing on the website.
I don't think you understand. There was no such thing as the "philosophy of the film" to agree or disagree with. There was a lot of senseless babble about causality and free will, but it really was nothing more than babble.
The point is, anybody who takes an intro philosophy class and can't recognize that crap for the babble that it is deserves an F. One of the most important goals a philosophy instructor aims to accomplish is to give her students the tools to distinguish an intereting idea from complete, ill-considered bullshit. The reason why philosophy professors viscerally hated Reloaded is because it really was nothing but babble shamelessly presented as "deep."
Oh man, I wish that the projector had broken down in my theater! I would have been spared the torture of the worst sequel since Highlander 2! As it was, I had a $25 beer tab on Thursday night before my anger with that idiotic movie subsided. That's some expensive non-entertainment!
Ooooh, you're so fucking deep. I'm sorry, but your brilliant observation is obvious to any C- college student in my intro philosophy class, and that was long before this second movie came out. As you can imagine, we were expecting something a bit deeper than this tiresome and predictable "twist". Not that it's a bad idea, but it takes 10 minutes of screentime to develop fully--and then the story needs to go somewhere. But the actual movie is 2 hours of pure garbage and then the most predictable 'surprise' ever filmed.
I agree wholeheartedly, and I challange anyone to explain to me Neo's motivation for just one of the many long fight scenes. It's not like he can finish anyone off. If he were anything more than an idiot, he'd just superman away before all the tiresome kung fu. Unless it was all recreation to him... but then why did we have to watch?
Sorry, but honestly, didn't you see this coming from a mile away? I mean, it's just such an obvious move: "the 'experiences' of Neo's 'awakening' (and afterwards) are themselves simulated by the same computer that simulated his life up to that point.
I honestly found myself wondering why Neo, Morpheus, etc. were too dumb to think of this possibility in the first movie. Every kid in an intro philosophy class who thinks for 10 minutes about these sorts of matters inevitably stumbles on that thought: There is no difference between the red and blue pills. They just determine what program you go into next. (I should know--I've been teaching intro philosophy courses since '99. Even C- students come up with this on their own.)
It's just shameful that this is the only real item of plot developmet in the tiresome second movie.
I swear I must have paid more in late fees than I ever paid for video rentals. I bet I'm not alone. Late fees are an important revenue stream for video stores. Since there is no chance of them collecting late fees on these disposable disks, they will definitely have to charge each customer more per rental. And that's saying nothing about the actual cost of the disposable disk itself...
I fucking hate you if you thought there was one shread of decent anything in this crappiest of movies. So please put me on your enemies list so that I will know to ignore anything you have to say in the future. And get an MRI to make sure you actually have a frontal lobe.
Trying to learn Philosophy from this crap is like trying to learn Physics from Star Trek. Sure, they use some of the same words as the actual researchers. The parallels end there, in both cases.
Tonight I saw the movie with 4 philosophy professors at a major research university. Every single one thought this one of the worst and dumbest movies ever made, worse than Highlander 2.
Please don't confuse that drivel for philosophy. That movie was totally incoherent. The writers knew it and tried to patch it up with gratuitous and expensive kung fu scenes. Maybe I should mention this: the professors vowed that if any element of a student's paper so much as reminds them of M2, that paper gets an F. Not out of spite, but because they won't tolerate the passing off of vacuous crap as deep insight. And they can tell the difference.
I seriously thing your friend should change majors, lest be be laughed out of every philosophy graduate program on earth.
And that might be the reason why the researchers didn't just sell this algo to one of Google's competitors before making any announcement at all. Don't you think MSN would are drooling about the possibility of getting their slimy hands on it? (Just wait--they still might...)
I don't like where this is headed
on
DVRs for Cop Cars
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm not a cop and I probably wouldn't be good at it if I tried. But seriously, what reasonable person would accept a job where every single move you make is recorded on high-resolution camera and reviewed by the chief downtown?
I will tell you a secret: people goof off sometimes when they work. One example: I bet at least a third of comments posted here during the day were written by people "on the clock." If you think there is something "wrong" with that, screw you. In western countries, we do enough work, goofing off and all.
It pisses me off that it's exactly the public servants who absolutely need to be competent who are eating the brunt of our "accountability on the job" insanity. Public school teachers and cops are perfect examples: We don't pay either very well, and both are losing more and more flexibility each year. It seems like in the USA, you are probably "down-and-out" with a liberal arts degree if you become a school teacher, and to become a cop, you are probably a complete asshole who trips on power because nobody liked you in high school. That's because no one in their right minds would work these jobs with "purer" motivations.
This is not how it should be! We should be making these public professions attractive to reasonable, intelligent people! Instead, it seems we just make them crappier every year with new restrictions and new Orwellian "accountability" measures.
If this doesn't bother you, ask yourself this: how would you feel about your job if every single thing you do were recorded on digital video, and then reviewed? We might be heading to a world like that in our constant obsession with economic growth. We will have paid video reviewers who are themselves videoed and reviewed by other reviewers.
What you say makes a lot of sense, but it still won't be enough to get any major GPU company to release open-source drivers.
The reason why these drivers will always be closed is to protect hardware IP. Sure, even dilligent students can find out in rough terms what a GPU does, but the really cool optimization stuff is hidden from view. Every optimized GPU has little hacks and clever routines that improve redering performance. These little routines are exactly what optimized, company drivers address and exploit. It often takes months of expensive research and testing to discover hardware ways to improve performance. I bet many of these are hack-ish, but the sum of them together probably makes a pretty big difference in ultimate performace.
Now, if these optimized drivers were to be GPL'd, everyone in the world would see just what little hardware hacks nVidia uses on their GPU. Basically, any potential competitor could benefit from all of their very expensive hardware optimization research/testing with no investment at all.
Remember that despite appearances, nVidia and ATi are basically nothing more than intellectual property companies. They design chips and drivers. That's it. They don't actually make anything. All their manufacturing is done by Taiwanese chip printing mega-factories, who would be happy to print any chip design you and I want to send them if we paid market price. The only reason why those companies have any value is 1. brand recognition and (more importantly) 2. a lot of knowledge about how to make GPUs run fast.
Open sourcing their drivers would basically mean that anyone in the world can look through their research files and reconstruct what in-house engineers have spent millions to discover. But those discoveries are all they have!
Maybe you are such a conniseur of animation that you can't enjoy a movie in which the rendering isn't photorealistic. It's sorta like someone who can't enjoy a concert because they think the equalizer settings are wrong or the stage props look too cheap.
That attitude looks neurotic to most people. Bands with fancy props can very easily put on a terrible show, and movies with "uptown" (to contrast with "ghetto") effects can be catastrophically unwatchable--I have Final Fantasy in mind, but I'm sure there are others.
This movie looks far less lame. Maybe this is the start of animated features actually having stories that are more than mere afterthoughts. I'm optimistic, because the French have a good record of making movies that feel real and are easy to connect with on a human level. Animated features need that element much more than they need a more advanced motion blur.
This is terrible! It's going to look almost as crappy as all those Japanese cartoons overdubbed with totally inappropriate English voices. You know, the most of the audience for a feature like this knows how to read. Why not have subtitles?
You're right that 256Kbps is far too crappy for an MP3. However, an MP3 made at a sampling rate of 96 kHz with 24 bit encoding would sound much better than a CDA file twice its size.
I think it makes sense to have a portable recorder that lossy-compresses the input. Since storage space will always be limited in a portable device, compression gives you at least 5X more recording time. It sure beats the alternative, which is to record uncompressed at only 44 kHz and 16 bits. That sounds terrible--merely CD quality.
So yeah, these guys dropped the ball. To me it's a no-brainer that they need compression up to at least 1Mbps with 96kHzX24b. But that will still make smaller files than crappy CD wav's.
Slashdot Mirror
That link was a pretty good read! I'll get to work as soon as my Magneto helmet is done. (I'm kidding about the last part, but not about the thanks.)
Yes, some countries have high unemployment. Germany is still not finished with the intergration and rebuilding of the former-GDR. But unlike here, people there aren't starving, and they are being retrained.
In essence, AOL/TW is paying academic philosophers to do product placement in their research papers. If you don't understand the difference between that and a book review, please don't reply.
As far as me daring to speak for philosophers in general in saying they hated 'Reloaded', let's first look at something you wrote:
Let me remind you: you do not know these people. What makes you so sure you can tell what they're all fans of and what they're all eager to do?
The I'm quite sure "Philosophers hate Matrix Reloaded." is true. It's a bit like the sentences "Pacifists hate Bush" or "Monkeys like bananas". You don't have to know all the monkeys to make this observation. You only need to know enough of them, and have some reason for thinking you can extrapolate the observation you made about those you know to the rest. So don't try your amateur tricks on me.
One thing worth mentioning is that they were paid. Professional philosophers, many with excellent reputations, have been hired to be a part of the PR aparatus of the movie industry. That's not to say that what they wrote was stupid (and if you read the papers, most mention--delicately--that the movie had some serious coherency problems). But their work is supposed to be the seed of a certain new source of buzz behind the movie.
The idea is that you go into the sequel expecting something really deep to happen. (It doesn't. I saw the sequel on opening night with 4 Ph.D's in philosophy who thought it was the worst movie since Highlander 2.)
It's a clever marketing strategy, because now a "hip" site like this one is presenting all this as buzz, when in reality it's a bit like paying people to clap at a talk to make the speaker look more interesting than he is.
I'm sure that the payouts to the philosophers cost about the same as 60 seconds of pointless chase scene footage, and with everyone biting the hook, it was apparently money well spent.
But don't mistake this for what it isn't: philosophers hate Matrix Reloaded, and giggle about the many conceptual gaffes in M1.
Yeah, but since the Matrix is just a stupid ill-considered piece of trash, you try to make the best of it!
What I'm looking for are various samples of well miked intividual drum hits and cymbal strikes. I've resorted to sampling these from various CDs I own, but it's very rare that you get a well-recorded strike that's allowed to fully ring out.
There are many studios with good acoustics, professional mikes and pro digital recording gear. Why hasn't someone taken the 10 minutes to record individual drums? And it's not like it would be a lot of data to host. Most samples are less than 5 seconds long! Even at 24bit/96Hz lossless, it wouldn't produce big files.
I'd honestly be much more interested in an open source project like this than what the guys are doing on the website.
Bah, I've had worse crashes than that! I was one of the poor suckers to actually pay for Windows ME! (Shudder...)
The point is, anybody who takes an intro philosophy class and can't recognize that crap for the babble that it is deserves an F. One of the most important goals a philosophy instructor aims to accomplish is to give her students the tools to distinguish an intereting idea from complete, ill-considered bullshit. The reason why philosophy professors viscerally hated Reloaded is because it really was nothing but babble shamelessly presented as "deep."
Oh man, I wish that the projector had broken down in my theater! I would have been spared the torture of the worst sequel since Highlander 2! As it was, I had a $25 beer tab on Thursday night before my anger with that idiotic movie subsided. That's some expensive non-entertainment!
Ooooh, you're so fucking deep. I'm sorry, but your brilliant observation is obvious to any C- college student in my intro philosophy class, and that was long before this second movie came out. As you can imagine, we were expecting something a bit deeper than this tiresome and predictable "twist". Not that it's a bad idea, but it takes 10 minutes of screentime to develop fully--and then the story needs to go somewhere. But the actual movie is 2 hours of pure garbage and then the most predictable 'surprise' ever filmed.
I agree wholeheartedly, and I challange anyone to explain to me Neo's motivation for just one of the many long fight scenes. It's not like he can finish anyone off. If he were anything more than an idiot, he'd just superman away before all the tiresome kung fu. Unless it was all recreation to him... but then why did we have to watch?
Uhh, no they weren't. Didn't you watch the movie to the end? That was in the Matrix. Ooh, big surprising plot twist! (/makes wankie motion)
I honestly found myself wondering why Neo, Morpheus, etc. were too dumb to think of this possibility in the first movie. Every kid in an intro philosophy class who thinks for 10 minutes about these sorts of matters inevitably stumbles on that thought: There is no difference between the red and blue pills. They just determine what program you go into next. (I should know--I've been teaching intro philosophy courses since '99. Even C- students come up with this on their own.)
It's just shameful that this is the only real item of plot developmet in the tiresome second movie.
How about "Lodi"?
I swear I must have paid more in late fees than I ever paid for video rentals. I bet I'm not alone. Late fees are an important revenue stream for video stores. Since there is no chance of them collecting late fees on these disposable disks, they will definitely have to charge each customer more per rental. And that's saying nothing about the actual cost of the disposable disk itself...
I fucking hate you if you thought there was one shread of decent anything in this crappiest of movies. So please put me on your enemies list so that I will know to ignore anything you have to say in the future. And get an MRI to make sure you actually have a frontal lobe.
It sounds like you took philosophy from a crappy department.
Trying to learn Philosophy from this crap is like trying to learn Physics from Star Trek. Sure, they use some of the same words as the actual researchers. The parallels end there, in both cases.
Please don't confuse that drivel for philosophy. That movie was totally incoherent. The writers knew it and tried to patch it up with gratuitous and expensive kung fu scenes. Maybe I should mention this: the professors vowed that if any element of a student's paper so much as reminds them of M2, that paper gets an F. Not out of spite, but because they won't tolerate the passing off of vacuous crap as deep insight. And they can tell the difference.
I seriously thing your friend should change majors, lest be be laughed out of every philosophy graduate program on earth.
And that might be the reason why the researchers didn't just sell this algo to one of Google's competitors before making any announcement at all. Don't you think MSN would are drooling about the possibility of getting their slimy hands on it? (Just wait--they still might...)
I will tell you a secret: people goof off sometimes when they work. One example: I bet at least a third of comments posted here during the day were written by people "on the clock." If you think there is something "wrong" with that, screw you. In western countries, we do enough work, goofing off and all.
It pisses me off that it's exactly the public servants who absolutely need to be competent who are eating the brunt of our "accountability on the job" insanity. Public school teachers and cops are perfect examples: We don't pay either very well, and both are losing more and more flexibility each year. It seems like in the USA, you are probably "down-and-out" with a liberal arts degree if you become a school teacher, and to become a cop, you are probably a complete asshole who trips on power because nobody liked you in high school. That's because no one in their right minds would work these jobs with "purer" motivations.
This is not how it should be! We should be making these public professions attractive to reasonable, intelligent people! Instead, it seems we just make them crappier every year with new restrictions and new Orwellian "accountability" measures.
If this doesn't bother you, ask yourself this: how would you feel about your job if every single thing you do were recorded on digital video, and then reviewed? We might be heading to a world like that in our constant obsession with economic growth. We will have paid video reviewers who are themselves videoed and reviewed by other reviewers.
The reason why these drivers will always be closed is to protect hardware IP. Sure, even dilligent students can find out in rough terms what a GPU does, but the really cool optimization stuff is hidden from view. Every optimized GPU has little hacks and clever routines that improve redering performance. These little routines are exactly what optimized, company drivers address and exploit. It often takes months of expensive research and testing to discover hardware ways to improve performance. I bet many of these are hack-ish, but the sum of them together probably makes a pretty big difference in ultimate performace.
Now, if these optimized drivers were to be GPL'd, everyone in the world would see just what little hardware hacks nVidia uses on their GPU. Basically, any potential competitor could benefit from all of their very expensive hardware optimization research/testing with no investment at all.
Remember that despite appearances, nVidia and ATi are basically nothing more than intellectual property companies. They design chips and drivers. That's it. They don't actually make anything. All their manufacturing is done by Taiwanese chip printing mega-factories, who would be happy to print any chip design you and I want to send them if we paid market price. The only reason why those companies have any value is 1. brand recognition and (more importantly) 2. a lot of knowledge about how to make GPUs run fast.
Open sourcing their drivers would basically mean that anyone in the world can look through their research files and reconstruct what in-house engineers have spent millions to discover. But those discoveries are all they have!
That attitude looks neurotic to most people. Bands with fancy props can very easily put on a terrible show, and movies with "uptown" (to contrast with "ghetto") effects can be catastrophically unwatchable--I have Final Fantasy in mind, but I'm sure there are others.
This movie looks far less lame. Maybe this is the start of animated features actually having stories that are more than mere afterthoughts. I'm optimistic, because the French have a good record of making movies that feel real and are easy to connect with on a human level. Animated features need that element much more than they need a more advanced motion blur.
Apart from that, everything looks pretty cool.
I think it makes sense to have a portable recorder that lossy-compresses the input. Since storage space will always be limited in a portable device, compression gives you at least 5X more recording time. It sure beats the alternative, which is to record uncompressed at only 44 kHz and 16 bits. That sounds terrible--merely CD quality.
So yeah, these guys dropped the ball. To me it's a no-brainer that they need compression up to at least 1Mbps with 96kHzX24b. But that will still make smaller files than crappy CD wav's.