Considering that these are lifetime appointments, do we really want this to be decided quickly? I'm all in favour of it taking a year or two to pick a new Supreme Court Justice, if it has to. We have an almost 2-year campaign cycle before the elections for the other two branches, why not take our time with the Supreme Court?
Rushing nominees through the confirmation process just leads to inadequuate Justices who we know nothing about.
Ignoring your hostility, I'll take this post to clarify that I wasn't being snarky about perl at all. If I was frequently in situations like what the authour described, I would indeed be interested in perl. But I'm not, so learning perl for such a minor thing would be wasteful for me.
you go on about CMYK when bugger all people *care* about that sort of thing
That kind of attitude certainly won't help the GIMP. Either you're being willfully ignorant or you honestly don't realize that the lack of CMYK support is usually the #1 or #2 reason (behind the interface) graphic designers decide not to use the GIMP. I mean, the inability to work in the colour space of your target medium is something of a majour hurdle for graphic designers who want to adopt the GIMP.
But you can insist that no one cares about CMYK if you like.
The ability to script out something like that sounds great - if I was in situations like that often enough and knew perl worth a dime I'm sure I'd be interested in it. Though let's be honest - for most of us it's hardly the kind of thing that's going to decide the difference between the GIMP and Photoshop.
At first, the GIMP sounds great if all you want to do is web design and non-print work. After all, you don't want to spend too much extra money if you won't need the tool's extra functions. But there's a lot more work out there for those of us who do choose to work for print, as well as non-print, and for a mere $600 (because really, in terms of art software, $600 is pretty cheap) it's hardly worth thinking twice about it. And what's more, the problem of interface still stands. Even if all you want to do is digital work, and never work in print, the GIMP's interface remains an issue. If you decide to go down that route, great, you can trade X hours in learning the interface for a $600 savings. For you, that may work - for me, especially since I work in print as well as on the web, it's impractical, and that holds true for my colleagues - I've never worked with someone who uses the GIMP regularly.
If things change in the future and the GIMP becomes a more viable option I'll be one of the first to jump ship. But for now I'll stick with Photoshop - $150 upgrades every year or two is less than I'm paying to play World of Warcraft, so I'm not complaining =) Who knows, perhaps you'll subcontract one of those posters to me some day =)
More along the lines of: GIMP::Photoshop New Military Technology::Tired old civilian technology Photoshop is ok, but GIMP is better. Have you ever even used it? The interface is a bit rough around the edges, less so these days than the past, but it has an enourmous amount of power behind it.
How do you figure?
Photoshop is the compilation of years of work, hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D, and -- most importantly -- over 15 years of industry feedback and exposure. Adobe has crafted Photoshop to fit real world needs, based on input from people who actually use it in a professional setting.
Indeed, at this point, it's impossible to say which has more influence: industry over Photoshop, or Photoshop over industry.
The GIMP, while an admirable effort -- and certainly one worth continuing -- is nowhere NEAR ready to take a place on the professional stage. Just the lack of native CMYK support alone is enough to render it useless for pretty much every company, individual graphic designer, and photographer I can think of.
Saying that the GIMP's interface "is a bit rough around the edges" exposes you as an enthusiast, but probably not a professional user (that is, one who earns his living off of graphic design). The difference between a good, familiar interface and a rough, unfamiliar interface can translate into massive ammounts of lost time. At this point, after 15 years, the Photoshop interface has become something of a standard; when you open a graphic design program you expect certain hotkeys to do certain things, certain menus to be in certain places, and certain tools to work certain ways. Everything that deviates from those expectations translates into lost time. The GIMP is rife with breaks from the "standard" interface.
I know that slashdot is hardly the place for Adobe users, but uninformed "our OSS product is better because it's free" thinking is bad for all of us. I'd love to be able to replace Photoshop with the GIMP some day, and maybe I will. But if people really believe that the GIMP is a viable replacement for Photoshop today, I fear that day will never come.
Now these same industries, who tried their damndest to ban the technology completely, are embracing it.
I wouldn't call it "embracing" the technology so much "grudgingly admitting that there may be some merit to the technology that has completely usurped a large chunk of their business."
Now, if we can just get them to consider $3 BitTorrent downloads of their movies...
My guild is quite good - we run raids on all the majour instances (UBRS, Scholo, Strath, DM, etc) at least 3 times a week (3 scheduled raids, lots of non-scheduled ones). We make runs on Blightcaller as often as we can. We made a run on Kazzak on Friday, a full, guild-only raid of level 60s. We didn't drop him, but the 3 hours we spent trying were damn fun. We're going to try again this weekend. We've dropped Azuregos within 15 minutes of him spawning. We've trained Volchan on Goldshire, just for yucks.
The problem is, after a while, it starts to wear on you. We can't do Onyxia yet because we need more keys, so that requires more grinding in UBRS (we refuse to do it with pubbies). To have any kind of shot at MC, you've gotta have absolutely maxxed gear, and that means running instances. A lot. More than we do, and we do it quite a bit already. And there's only so many times you can do Scholo, Strath, UBRS, BRD, etc before it becomes, quite frankly, boring. We run those so often that we can actually go a fair amount of time without talking, simply because we know what to do without having to speak about it - we understand each other's play styles so well that it's no longer an issue.
I guess my point is that, yes, the game is fun, and it's especially fun if you have a good, smart, strong guild. But even playing the best people won't make the endgame worthwhile if the endgame content wears out on you.
I agree with you that this is the single best MMO ever made. It's even one of the best games I've ever played. But it is not without its problems, and those problems are heightened by the $15/month pricetag attached to the game. I'm not dropping my subscription. Yet. But I'm not going to lie when responding to another person's post and tell them that it's all sunshine and flowers all the way and forever./shrug
That may be so - I no longer play on a PVP server because the ganking just got to be too much for me. Personally, though, I've found very little reward in what PVP I have participated in.
Actually, what I was trying to say is that ~25-40 is a lot of fun, and 50-60 can be a lot of fun if you have a good guild. I miscommunicated that last part a bit, though; I wanted to say that 50-60 can be a lot of fun with the right guild, but if you have to solo it or do it in pickup groups, it can be quite boring and frustrating.
For what it's worth, depending on what class you played, the game doesn't really "start" until a bit later.
I have a hunter, a rogue, and a priest that I play regularly - for my hunter, 30 was where it got really interesting; for my rogue it was 20; for my priest... well, i'm still waiting on that one, and she's 21 right now.
My roomates and I were discussing it the other night, and basically came up with this:
Levels 1-10 are training. They're the turorial levels, where you learn how MMOs work, the basic mechanics and all.
Levels 11-20 are advanced training. Class-specific stuff starts popping up, basic grouping and instances, that sort of thing.
Levels 21-30 are when the training wheels come off. Around 25ish, depending on class, tons of zones open up for you, and you get a much better feel for the world. If 11-20 is High School, this is the college phase of the game.
31-40 are the first red meat you get. Lots of quests, lots of instances, lots of stuff to do and see. Most of the world is open to you now. This is when you should be joining a guild, learning to PVP, etc.
41-50 is endurance. Sadly, this is the most painful part. I almost quit, myself, around level 47 or so. At 40-41, you just got your mount, and by god you'll need it. Be ready to spend lots of time traveling - FedEx quests, lots of grinding, etc are the norm here.
51-56 is where you learn that you are pretty weak on your own. Sure, you can grind out those levels, if you want to, but soloing is much tougher, and the options for where to go are pretty limited.
57-60 are the final meat of the game. Scholomance, Stratholme, BRD, LBRS, UBRS, etc. Sadly, this is also where the fun starts to taper off. After a few days you realize this is all you've got left, except maybe runs against Onyxia, MC, Azuregos, and Kazzak. And, of course, farming set gear and epics =\
If your account is still active, you might want to try making it to 30 or so. You might find that the interest level picks up quite a bit from there.
"... you have to have a boxed game on a store shelf... in order to have a profitable game you have to both sell the game _and_ charge a monthly fee."
Well, a simple response to this might be to give away the first THREE months of gameplay for free, rather than just one month's play with the initial purchase.
That would be the kick in the pants that I would need to buy a copy. I have never purchased a copy of an MMO simply because of the price - $60-80 for the first three months of a game too much to ask, especially since I could purchase two non-MMO games for that price and potentially get more life out of them (I've been playing the same game for 5 months now).
Just as a side note, I find it curious that these companies always talk about the massive price of running the servers and generating new content. I can understand the servers, but new content? Since when does Everquest (for example) offer new content for free? They charge for that in the form of expansion packs. Are you telling me that players are paying for the expansions twice?
Also, the server maintenance prices have me wondering as well, given that ArenaNet is releasing Guild Wars with no monthly fee (I played the E3 for Everyone Alpha Demo, and it was amazing - I'm buying that one, for certain). Is it so really so different from other MMOs that they can afford not to charge monthly fees?
I'm an animation student at one of the better art schools in the US, and one thing you'll find is universally true for art students (ESPECIALLY students of digital media) is that they HATE to learn the basics. You would be amazed at the number of my fellow animation students here who have absolutely ZERO interest (or ability) in drawing. Most animation students here are part of the 3d pack (I'm one of the very few 2d/3d crossover character animators) and when any one of them is asked to draw something they inevitably whine about how "I don't need to know this, I'm going to do it on the computer!"
This is equally true of our other students. A few months ago on our official school forum a graphic design student was complaining that the teachers were all interested in instructing us on the fundamentals. He started the thread as a rallying cry for people who didn't want to be bothered with the basics -- they were asking that students be allowed to immediately jump into the advanced stuff. I tore him up one side and down the other, but his response was that I was buying into "their" philosophy, that I needed to transcend that and not think about my grades, etc.
Needless to say, with people like that around here, it amazes me that we're still rated as one of the better art colleges out there. But there are some people around here who are still trying to be artists first, and animators/graphic designers/etc second. CG and hand animation really are great media, but as others have said, they are just that: different media. The root of all visual art -- be it film, animation, jewlery, fashion, illustration, sculpture, whatever -- is drawing. There was never a great artist who couldn't draw. Any and every artist can benefit from drawing.
(Brief aside: Megatokyo's artist could use a few classes on character design, and his character's are volumetrically pretty flat, but they do come up with some FUNNY stuff over there sometimes. A hand-animated MT movie would be interesting, but on an artistic level it would take a decent overhaul of the series to get it looking good.)
Great news about the new section, but what good is it if we can't read it? The colours are blinding and SUPER saturated -- you guys should know that one of the first rules of good layout is to AVOID using garish, high-intensity, saturated colours on the periphery that might distract readers. Come on, guys! Your developers section has great colours -- medium intensity, not too saturated. You really kind of dropped the ball on this one...
Warblogging.com has been covering Hawash's story, as well as the Total Information Awareness story for a good while now. "George Paine" is a well-informed writer and his links are usually pretty good.
Every six months or so I make a 1000 mile drive with my dad down the eastern seaboard. That's a decent drive -- about 14 hours -- so we like to keep ourselves entertained. I have a laptop for school, so I just bring an inverter, hook up my laptop to the car's power supply, attach a gamepad to my serial port, and play on my NES, SNES, N64, or PSX, depending on my mood. It's quite fun -- I can beat the entire Super Mario Series (SM All-stars, the SM Worlds, and SM64) in the time it takes to get from Georgia to Virginia (before we switch and I drive while my dad takes a break).
As far more recent stuff -- my laptop (Inspiron 4000, 950 PIII w/ an older ATI Rage Mobility) does Q3A at 60FPS in 800x600 with pretty high details. The only thing that sucks is the LCD screen -- it sucks ass quality-wise. More recent 3d games (UT2003, SOF2 etc) don't run that great, but adventure games (Longest Journey, MGS -- still a classic) and 2d games (Worms, my emulation stuff) run very clean and very fast. (it also plays DivX movies, so all of my LEGAL LEGITIMATE rips of my own movies run quite nicely). The only thing that sucks about the whole setup is that after a while my lap tends to get a bit hot.::shrug::
"In 1969, as part of its global empire, Union Carbide Corporation set up its pesticide formulation unit in the northern end of the city of Bhopal in central India. Initially it mixed and packaged pesticides imported from the US but was gradually expanded. In December 1979 its Methyl Iso Cyanate (MC) plant with an imtalled capacity of 5000 tonnes went into production.
On the night of December 2, 1984, during routine maintenance operations in the Methyl Iso Cyanate (MC) plant, at about 9.30 p.m., a large quantity of water entered storage tank no. 610 containing over 60 tonnes of AEC.
This triggered off a runaway reaction resulting in a tremendous increase of temperature and pressure in the tank and 40 tonnes of MIC along with Hydrogen Cyanide and other reaction products burst past the ruptured disc and into the night air of Bhopal at around 12.30 a.m. Safety systems were grossly under-designed and inoperative. Senior factory officials knew of the lethal build-up in the tank at least one hour before the leakage, yet the siren to warn neighbourhood communities was sounded more than one hour after the leak started.
By then, the poisons had enveloped an area of 40 sq.kms. killing thousands of people in its immediate wake. Over 500 thousand suffered from acute breathlessness, pain in the eyes and vomiting as they ran in panic to get away from the poison clouds that hung close to the ground for more than four hours."
Nothing to do with programming errors here that I can see. Sounds more like gross negligence and incompetence to me.
"... in defining any kind of purchase, the buyer sets conditions which relate to the proposed use of the good or service. From the start, this excludes certain manufacturers from the possibility of competing, but does not exclude them "a priori", but rather based on a series of principles determined by the autonomous will of the purchaser, and so the process takes place in conformance with the law. And in the Bill it is established that *no one* is excluded from competing as far as he guarantees the fulfillment of the basic principles."
"... the huge costs caused by non-functioning software ("blue screens of death", malicious code such as virus, worms, and trojans, exceptions, general protection faults and other well-known problems) are reduced considerably by using more stable software; and it is well known that one of the most notable virtues of free software is its stability."
"Your first argument, that migration implies high costs, is in reality an argument in favor of the Bill. Because the more time goes by, the more difficult migration to another technology will become; and at the same time, the security risks associated with proprietary software will continue to increase. In this way, the use of proprietary systems and formats will make the State ever more dependent on specific suppliers. Once a policy of using free software has been established (which certainly, does imply some cost) then on the contrary migration from one system to another becomes very simple, since all data is stored in open formats. On the other hand, migration to an open software context implies no more costs than migration between two different proprietary software contexts, which invalidates your argument completely."
"Questions of intellectual property fall outside the scope of this bill, since they are covered by specific other laws. The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietary software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity)."
Amen to that. Here at my art school, and I can tell you first hand that there are very few students at my school (pop: 5500 students) that are planning on going into buisness for themselves. Sure, some film students dream of indie work, and the Illustration students are planning on going into solo work (living job-to-job), but the rest of us are being prepared for work as part of a company. From 2d animators to 3d animators, from fashion designers to jewlery designers, from sequential artists to graphic designers, we all understand that we will most likely end up doing work for a big megacorporation, because that's the only way to make a living as an artist any more. Independent work in today's market simply can't survive -- thanks to companies like Disney, Microsoft, Sony, etc. I'm going into 3d animation, and while I'd love to work for Sony/Verant or Blizzard or Pixar, I'd much rather be able to do my own work or work for a smaller company (id, Valve, etc) and still make an honest living. If this media consolidation continues, artists won't be able to create anything without the blessing of a majour corporation. And media consolidation is the next logical step if this legislation gets passed...
I've always enjoyed reading this author's speculations about the future -- he seems to be slightly off-target on some things, and his work is a bit optimistic at times, but overall it's an interesting read.
Slashdot Mirror
Corresponding ammendment attached to Korea's copyright laws:
Chapter 13, Section 3, Paragraph 7:
"All copyrights held by Microsoft, past, present and future, are now to released to the public domain. Who's the doodyhead now, poopypants?"
like that's gonna find someone quickly :P.
Considering that these are lifetime appointments, do we really want this to be decided quickly? I'm all in favour of it taking a year or two to pick a new Supreme Court Justice, if it has to. We have an almost 2-year campaign cycle before the elections for the other two branches, why not take our time with the Supreme Court?
Rushing nominees through the confirmation process just leads to inadequuate Justices who we know nothing about.
"how long till intrepid game hackers start putting ad-blocker mods out for these games?"
About 5 seconds less than it will take Sony to ban anyone caught using the mods.
No, but might get to stay at a Holiday Inn Express.
If I was feeling clever, I'd go back through the post earlier today and repost some of the things that got +5s, just for the extra karma.
But I'm feeling lazy.
Ignoring your hostility, I'll take this post to clarify that I wasn't being snarky about perl at all. If I was frequently in situations like what the authour described, I would indeed be interested in perl. But I'm not, so learning perl for such a minor thing would be wasteful for me.
you go on about CMYK when bugger all people *care* about that sort of thing
That kind of attitude certainly won't help the GIMP. Either you're being willfully ignorant or you honestly don't realize that the lack of CMYK support is usually the #1 or #2 reason (behind the interface) graphic designers decide not to use the GIMP. I mean, the inability to work in the colour space of your target medium is something of a majour hurdle for graphic designers who want to adopt the GIMP.
But you can insist that no one cares about CMYK if you like.
The ability to script out something like that sounds great - if I was in situations like that often enough and knew perl worth a dime I'm sure I'd be interested in it. Though let's be honest - for most of us it's hardly the kind of thing that's going to decide the difference between the GIMP and Photoshop.
At first, the GIMP sounds great if all you want to do is web design and non-print work. After all, you don't want to spend too much extra money if you won't need the tool's extra functions. But there's a lot more work out there for those of us who do choose to work for print, as well as non-print, and for a mere $600 (because really, in terms of art software, $600 is pretty cheap) it's hardly worth thinking twice about it. And what's more, the problem of interface still stands. Even if all you want to do is digital work, and never work in print, the GIMP's interface remains an issue. If you decide to go down that route, great, you can trade X hours in learning the interface for a $600 savings. For you, that may work - for me, especially since I work in print as well as on the web, it's impractical, and that holds true for my colleagues - I've never worked with someone who uses the GIMP regularly.
If things change in the future and the GIMP becomes a more viable option I'll be one of the first to jump ship. But for now I'll stick with Photoshop - $150 upgrades every year or two is less than I'm paying to play World of Warcraft, so I'm not complaining =) Who knows, perhaps you'll subcontract one of those posters to me some day =)
More along the lines of: GIMP::Photoshop New Military Technology::Tired old civilian technology Photoshop is ok, but GIMP is better. Have you ever even used it? The interface is a bit rough around the edges, less so these days than the past, but it has an enourmous amount of power behind it.
How do you figure?
Photoshop is the compilation of years of work, hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D, and -- most importantly -- over 15 years of industry feedback and exposure. Adobe has crafted Photoshop to fit real world needs, based on input from people who actually use it in a professional setting.
Indeed, at this point, it's impossible to say which has more influence: industry over Photoshop, or Photoshop over industry.
The GIMP, while an admirable effort -- and certainly one worth continuing -- is nowhere NEAR ready to take a place on the professional stage. Just the lack of native CMYK support alone is enough to render it useless for pretty much every company, individual graphic designer, and photographer I can think of.
Saying that the GIMP's interface "is a bit rough around the edges" exposes you as an enthusiast, but probably not a professional user (that is, one who earns his living off of graphic design). The difference between a good, familiar interface and a rough, unfamiliar interface can translate into massive ammounts of lost time. At this point, after 15 years, the Photoshop interface has become something of a standard; when you open a graphic design program you expect certain hotkeys to do certain things, certain menus to be in certain places, and certain tools to work certain ways. Everything that deviates from those expectations translates into lost time. The GIMP is rife with breaks from the "standard" interface.
I know that slashdot is hardly the place for Adobe users, but uninformed "our OSS product is better because it's free" thinking is bad for all of us. I'd love to be able to replace Photoshop with the GIMP some day, and maybe I will. But if people really believe that the GIMP is a viable replacement for Photoshop today, I fear that day will never come.
-F.
I wouldn't call it "embracing" the technology so much "grudgingly admitting that there may be some merit to the technology that has completely usurped a large chunk of their business."
Now, if we can just get them to consider $3 BitTorrent downloads of their movies
They're working on that. It's called Battlegrounds =)
My guild is quite good - we run raids on all the majour instances (UBRS, Scholo, Strath, DM, etc) at least 3 times a week (3 scheduled raids, lots of non-scheduled ones). We make runs on Blightcaller as often as we can. We made a run on Kazzak on Friday, a full, guild-only raid of level 60s. We didn't drop him, but the 3 hours we spent trying were damn fun. We're going to try again this weekend. We've dropped Azuregos within 15 minutes of him spawning. We've trained Volchan on Goldshire, just for yucks.
/shrug
The problem is, after a while, it starts to wear on you. We can't do Onyxia yet because we need more keys, so that requires more grinding in UBRS (we refuse to do it with pubbies). To have any kind of shot at MC, you've gotta have absolutely maxxed gear, and that means running instances. A lot. More than we do, and we do it quite a bit already. And there's only so many times you can do Scholo, Strath, UBRS, BRD, etc before it becomes, quite frankly, boring. We run those so often that we can actually go a fair amount of time without talking, simply because we know what to do without having to speak about it - we understand each other's play styles so well that it's no longer an issue.
I guess my point is that, yes, the game is fun, and it's especially fun if you have a good, smart, strong guild. But even playing the best people won't make the endgame worthwhile if the endgame content wears out on you.
I agree with you that this is the single best MMO ever made. It's even one of the best games I've ever played. But it is not without its problems, and those problems are heightened by the $15/month pricetag attached to the game. I'm not dropping my subscription. Yet. But I'm not going to lie when responding to another person's post and tell them that it's all sunshine and flowers all the way and forever.
To each their own, I suppose.
That may be so - I no longer play on a PVP server because the ganking just got to be too much for me. Personally, though, I've found very little reward in what PVP I have participated in.
Actually, what I was trying to say is that ~25-40 is a lot of fun, and 50-60 can be a lot of fun if you have a good guild. I miscommunicated that last part a bit, though; I wanted to say that 50-60 can be a lot of fun with the right guild, but if you have to solo it or do it in pickup groups, it can be quite boring and frustrating.
For what it's worth, depending on what class you played, the game doesn't really "start" until a bit later.
... well, i'm still waiting on that one, and she's 21 right now.
I have a hunter, a rogue, and a priest that I play regularly - for my hunter, 30 was where it got really interesting; for my rogue it was 20; for my priest
My roomates and I were discussing it the other night, and basically came up with this:
Levels 1-10 are training. They're the turorial levels, where you learn how MMOs work, the basic mechanics and all.
Levels 11-20 are advanced training. Class-specific stuff starts popping up, basic grouping and instances, that sort of thing.
Levels 21-30 are when the training wheels come off. Around 25ish, depending on class, tons of zones open up for you, and you get a much better feel for the world. If 11-20 is High School, this is the college phase of the game.
31-40 are the first red meat you get. Lots of quests, lots of instances, lots of stuff to do and see. Most of the world is open to you now. This is when you should be joining a guild, learning to PVP, etc.
41-50 is endurance. Sadly, this is the most painful part. I almost quit, myself, around level 47 or so. At 40-41, you just got your mount, and by god you'll need it. Be ready to spend lots of time traveling - FedEx quests, lots of grinding, etc are the norm here.
51-56 is where you learn that you are pretty weak on your own. Sure, you can grind out those levels, if you want to, but soloing is much tougher, and the options for where to go are pretty limited.
57-60 are the final meat of the game. Scholomance, Stratholme, BRD, LBRS, UBRS, etc. Sadly, this is also where the fun starts to taper off. After a few days you realize this is all you've got left, except maybe runs against Onyxia, MC, Azuregos, and Kazzak. And, of course, farming set gear and epics =\
If your account is still active, you might want to try making it to 30 or so. You might find that the interest level picks up quite a bit from there.
Cheers to ya,
-A.
"... you have to have a boxed game on a store shelf ... in order to have a profitable game you have to both sell the game _and_ charge a monthly fee."
Well, a simple response to this might be to give away the first THREE months of gameplay for free, rather than just one month's play with the initial purchase.
That would be the kick in the pants that I would need to buy a copy. I have never purchased a copy of an MMO simply because of the price - $60-80 for the first three months of a game too much to ask, especially since I could purchase two non-MMO games for that price and potentially get more life out of them (I've been playing the same game for 5 months now).
Just as a side note, I find it curious that these companies always talk about the massive price of running the servers and generating new content. I can understand the servers, but new content? Since when does Everquest (for example) offer new content for free? They charge for that in the form of expansion packs. Are you telling me that players are paying for the expansions twice?
Also, the server maintenance prices have me wondering as well, given that ArenaNet is releasing Guild Wars with no monthly fee (I played the E3 for Everyone Alpha Demo, and it was amazing - I'm buying that one, for certain). Is it so really so different from other MMOs that they can afford not to charge monthly fees?
Just some thoughts.
-A.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9110&cid=59484 4
I'm pathetic. Cheers =)
-A.
This is equally true of our other students. A few months ago on our official school forum a graphic design student was complaining that the teachers were all interested in instructing us on the fundamentals. He started the thread as a rallying cry for people who didn't want to be bothered with the basics -- they were asking that students be allowed to immediately jump into the advanced stuff. I tore him up one side and down the other, but his response was that I was buying into "their" philosophy, that I needed to transcend that and not think about my grades, etc.
Needless to say, with people like that around here, it amazes me that we're still rated as one of the better art colleges out there. But there are some people around here who are still trying to be artists first, and animators/graphic designers/etc second. CG and hand animation really are great media, but as others have said, they are just that: different media. The root of all visual art -- be it film, animation, jewlery, fashion, illustration, sculpture, whatever -- is drawing. There was never a great artist who couldn't draw. Any and every artist can benefit from drawing.
(Brief aside: Megatokyo's artist could use a few classes on character design, and his character's are volumetrically pretty flat, but they do come up with some FUNNY stuff over there sometimes. A hand-animated MT movie would be interesting, but on an artistic level it would take a decent overhaul of the series to get it looking good.)
Peace,
-A.
Great news about the new section, but what good is it if we can't read it? The colours are blinding and SUPER saturated -- you guys should know that one of the first rules of good layout is to AVOID using garish, high-intensity, saturated colours on the periphery that might distract readers. Come on, guys! Your developers section has great colours -- medium intensity, not too saturated. You really kind of dropped the ball on this one ...
-A.
Warblogging.com has been covering Hawash's story, as well as the Total Information Awareness story for a good while now. "George Paine" is a well-informed writer and his links are usually pretty good.
Every six months or so I make a 1000 mile drive with my dad down the eastern seaboard. That's a decent drive -- about 14 hours -- so we like to keep ourselves entertained. I have a laptop for school, so I just bring an inverter, hook up my laptop to the car's power supply, attach a gamepad to my serial port, and play on my NES, SNES, N64, or PSX, depending on my mood. It's quite fun -- I can beat the entire Super Mario Series (SM All-stars, the SM Worlds, and SM64) in the time it takes to get from Georgia to Virginia (before we switch and I drive while my dad takes a break).
::shrug::
.02USD
As far more recent stuff -- my laptop (Inspiron 4000, 950 PIII w/ an older ATI Rage Mobility) does Q3A at 60FPS in 800x600 with pretty high details. The only thing that sucks is the LCD screen -- it sucks ass quality-wise. More recent 3d games (UT2003, SOF2 etc) don't run that great, but adventure games (Longest Journey, MGS -- still a classic) and 2d games (Worms, my emulation stuff) run very clean and very fast. (it also plays DivX movies, so all of my LEGAL LEGITIMATE rips of my own movies run quite nicely). The only thing that sucks about the whole setup is that after a while my lap tends to get a bit hot.
My
-Aaron.
From the site:
"In 1969, as part of its global empire, Union Carbide Corporation set up its pesticide formulation unit in the northern end of the city of Bhopal in central India. Initially it mixed and packaged pesticides imported from the US but was gradually expanded. In December 1979 its Methyl Iso Cyanate (MC) plant with an imtalled capacity of 5000 tonnes went into production.
On the night of December 2, 1984, during routine maintenance operations in the Methyl Iso Cyanate (MC) plant, at about 9.30 p.m., a large quantity of water entered storage tank no. 610 containing over 60 tonnes of AEC.
This triggered off a runaway reaction resulting in a tremendous increase of temperature and pressure in the tank and 40 tonnes of MIC along with Hydrogen Cyanide and other reaction products burst past the ruptured disc and into the night air of Bhopal at around 12.30 a.m. Safety systems were grossly under-designed and inoperative. Senior factory officials knew of the lethal build-up in the tank at least one hour before the leakage, yet the siren to warn neighbourhood communities was sounded more than one hour after the leak started.
By then, the poisons had enveloped an area of 40 sq.kms. killing thousands of people in its immediate wake. Over 500 thousand suffered from acute breathlessness, pain in the eyes and vomiting as they ran in panic to get away from the poison clouds that hung close to the ground for more than four hours."
Nothing to do with programming errors here that I can see. Sounds more like gross negligence and incompetence to me.
-A.
there's something about anime that just can't be done right with live-action and real actors.
I agree. The classic "anime eye twitch" is far beyond the abilities of even the most talented actors today.
Some gems from the response letter:
"... in defining any kind of purchase, the buyer sets conditions which relate to the proposed use of the good or service. From the start, this excludes certain manufacturers from the possibility of competing, but does not exclude them "a priori", but rather based on a series of principles determined by the autonomous will of the purchaser, and so the process takes place in conformance with the law. And in the Bill it is established that *no one* is excluded from competing as far as he guarantees the fulfillment of the basic principles."
"... the huge costs caused by non-functioning software ("blue screens of death", malicious code such as virus, worms, and trojans, exceptions, general protection faults and other well-known problems) are reduced considerably by using more stable software; and it is well known that one of the most notable virtues of free software is its stability."
"Your first argument, that migration implies high costs, is in reality an argument in favor of the Bill. Because the more time goes by, the more difficult migration to another technology will become; and at the same time, the security risks associated with proprietary software will continue to increase. In this way, the use of proprietary systems and formats will make the State ever more dependent on specific suppliers. Once a policy of using free software has been established (which certainly, does imply some cost) then on the contrary migration from one system to another becomes very simple, since all data is stored in open formats. On the other hand, migration to an open software context implies no more costs than migration between two different proprietary software contexts, which invalidates your argument completely."
"Questions of intellectual property fall outside the scope of this bill, since they are covered by specific other laws. The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietary software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity)."
Amen to that. Here at my art school, and I can tell you first hand that there are very few students at my school (pop: 5500 students) that are planning on going into buisness for themselves. Sure, some film students dream of indie work, and the Illustration students are planning on going into solo work (living job-to-job), but the rest of us are being prepared for work as part of a company. From 2d animators to 3d animators, from fashion designers to jewlery designers, from sequential artists to graphic designers, we all understand that we will most likely end up doing work for a big megacorporation, because that's the only way to make a living as an artist any more. Independent work in today's market simply can't survive -- thanks to companies like Disney, Microsoft, Sony, etc. I'm going into 3d animation, and while I'd love to work for Sony/Verant or Blizzard or Pixar, I'd much rather be able to do my own work or work for a smaller company (id, Valve, etc) and still make an honest living. If this media consolidation continues, artists won't be able to create anything without the blessing of a majour corporation. And media consolidation is the next logical step if this legislation gets passed...
~Aaron
I've always enjoyed reading this author's speculations about the future -- he seems to be slightly off-target on some things, and his work is a bit optimistic at times, but overall it's an interesting read.
Main site:
http://kurellian.tripod.com/spint.html
Storage site:
http://members.aol.com/kurellian/spint.html
~A.