Sorry, i think I worded it incorrectly. My understanding is that ALL of the film's space sequences were done CGI -- Star Trek and other films had used CGI before for some scenes, but still relied on miniatures and other traditional effects for much of their creation.
I thought the Last Starfighter was a pretty groundbreaking film -- IIRC, it was the first film to have totally computer-generated space sequences.
I can't help but think it would make a pretty kickass space sim, now that we have the GPU power to render in real-time even higher quality than they had originally. The one arcade game I remember didn't compare well to the classic Star Wars 3D polygon arcade game in terms of sheer fun (damn that game was fun).
For example, good luck using a Mac to record a digital HDTV broadcast to Xvid with a mu-law soundtrack and subtitles in Farsi, storing it to a network file server attached via IP-over-1394.
Good luck? It would be easier to do on a mac than a Linux box. Anything you can't find a native OS X app for, you can usually grab the unix tools and install to fill in the gaps. And you never have to recompile the kernel to get your hardware to work.
Why do you manually update iTunes? Set up smart playlists to auto-synch and restrict the playlist by size if its a size issue.
They key to Apple software is that if you do things the way they intend, everything is amazingly elegant. Get all your tags in shape, add keywords to music files, and you'll find it amazing you ever spent more than a minute or two making a playlist before.
Given their previous tactics, it would be disingenuous to claim they have no violent intent behind that, especially after yesterday's near-fatal beating of a cop.
Yeah, with 400,000+ protesters, certainly a single incident of a person being assaulted is evidence of a mass conspiracy to commit violence.::rolleyes::
Dear God, i wonder what these execs are thinking sometimes. Don't they realize how much trouble the +- wars caused in consumer acceptance of DVD Recorders?
And in the end of course it didn't make any difference whatsoever because as new hardware and software came out, the negligible differences and advantages each format had became fairly unimportant.
I still have nightmares about the guy who wouldn't let me leave Best Buy until I explained to him what kind of discs he needed for his computer.
OS/2 was also the OS choice of Photoshop professionals who had to work on i386 hardware. OS/2 actually made good use of large memory configurations, and had a GOOD virtual memory system, so running PS (2.5 I think?) with the Win32s extensions on OS/2 was far faster on the same hardware than running it on Wfwg/w32s or Win95.
Of course that's based on the incorrect assumption that most users actually USE many of the features of MS Office. Most typical office drones could use Wordpad and never know the difference (between MS Office), except that Wordpad wouldn't do wacky automatic shit to them that they'd have to keep manually undoing.
I remember a few years ago when i realized this exact thing -- I just do text documents with headings, subheads, etc. I've never used word to do tables, HTML, or layout just because it fights you so much. I started using Wordpad for all my text documents and now everything is much smoother, plus any system anywhere can open up an RTF file.
Unfortunately, this is actually something GOOD for the video card companies (from a sales standpoint). Because the consumers need blazing DX speed, but the workstation market needs OGL, they can still charge a hefty premium for the better OGL support in a workstation version of the card, even though the hardware is 99% the same.
They'd have us believe they sat some engineers down in a room who had never looked at an iPod or iTunes (much less crack them) but yet were somehow able to "recreate their own version"?
You do know how the IBM-PC clone business got started, right? Compaq had a bunch of engineers sit in a room, never looking at the IBM BIOS or specs, and recreated it entirely through black-box I/O tests.
The 20-year boom that followed should be enough to show ANYONE the economic and social benefits of reverse-engineering, but none are so blind as those who will not see.
Spam really isn't the biggest problem i have with the domain mail -- as others have said, most spam will actually go to the addresses you actively use.
Use an email service that offers server-side spam and virus filtering and it'll be nothing to worry about. I use Fastmail.fm, and they use spamassassin and some AV service. It's great, cut down about 95% of the junk I used to get, and it's TOTALLY geek-friendly so you can customize it however you want or turn it off if you are a masochist.
The thing that is annoying are all the "error" messages i get from email servers because some virus attached some randomly generated name to my domain when sending out copies of itself. I can't very well automatically delete mail bounce messages, so i have to actually LOOK at those to make sure it wasn't something real.
"most analysts agree" that HP is the technology leader in inkjet printing?
Hogwash, HP hasn't been on top technology-wise since the mid-90's. Epson, ever since their initial Stylus Color line 10 years ago, has more or less led the inkjet field in the most demanding graphic arts output.
HP is strong in CAD and large format, corporate work and lasers, but any analyst who claims they are on top in inkjets under 20" wide has slept through about 6 generations of printing technology.
Dell can probably easily defeat HP in the home and office inkjet printer market, HP doesn't have anything special for those customers that any other manufacturer can't OEM to Dell for less.
When Dell beats Epson and Canon in a market that is more concerned about quality than price, this theory may hold water, but I can't imagine how they would do it.
The thing is, they really make a killing when you have no options (or don't know any better). I had to get a dozen, 25' Cat5 cables IMMEDIATELY for a project we were doing in the field, so we had no resources other than the local Best Buy.
The company paid something like $400+ for those cables, I literally had my mouth hanging open in disbelief when the cashier rang them up, and she just kind of shrugged.
If we had had more than an hour or two to get it up and running, it would have been cheaper to buy a plane ticket to a city with a real computer store!
I haven't seen them sell returned items as NEW, but yeah they dump stuff back on the shelves without testing. I think they wait for something to be returned 2 or 3 times before they send it back.
What's crazy is that it makes sense, because most things don't actually have problems, it's usually the user not getting it set up right or knowing how to use it. I buy a LOT of open-box stuff from BB, and have never had a problem with any of it (you still have the 30-day return, so it's no big gamble).
He didn't mention, however, that when system updates are installed, the final stage of setup is to defragment. Apple is very proactive about avoiding fragmentation, and OSX really does a great job of making sure things run smoothly without requiring the user to know anything about it.
This is so true. Half the fun of checking out the Spot was hanging out in the message boards and arguing over whether it was real or not.
At the beginning, it was well-done enough that it really was not a slam-dunk either way. It was only in the last 6-9 months or so when it started REALLY coming out that it was an advertising experiment that people lost interest.
For those who weren't active at the time, the best analogy would be the Blair Witch Project, back when it was still a bit "underground". It was just well-done enough and crazy enough the audience was happy to play along, but you wonder why anyone would waste their time making a sequel when all the mystery is sucked out of it.
For XP, you DO need 512 to run Word and IE. I added 256 megs to my (technically illiterate) friend's stock Dell box (which had 256 megs to begin with) and she called me the next day asking what the heck I did, it ran so much faster!
I did probably cost Dell a sale, though -- she was all ready to buy a new computer because hers was "too slow"...
So it records vital signs on a bluetooth enabled PDA, which can later be used to transmit the data when they get back to the satellite system. That's great -- if there is an emergency, all they have to do is find the bodies, hope that they used the kit during the emergency to gather data, bring back the PDAs, and they'll know exactly what killed the climbers!
Forgive my sarcasm, we did this in 1998 and 1999 (Everest Extreme"), except we were sending the data in real time over 900mhz radio to the doctor at base camp and via sat back to the hospital in the USA. And it was gathered 24/7 because they were wearing the monitors, not some box of medical tools to be used briefly. That way, if someone was having trouble, we could actually tell what was wrong and where to find the climber (GPS is handy that way).
The things that kill on Everest are getting lost/falling off in bad weather and hypothermia (dehydration is actually the biggest medical problem, but it doesn't usually kill).
This is a perfect example of why building web navigation in Flash is a horrible idea -- I'm on a T3 and it took literally a full minute for the nav bar to download.
I should note (as an artist) that different kinds of water behave differently in paint. I would have just assumed it was distilled water had I seen the bottles. Not that you would need particularly pure water for latex paint, but some people like to buy the Rolls Royce of everything.
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Sorry, i think I worded it incorrectly. My understanding is that ALL of the film's space sequences were done CGI -- Star Trek and other films had used CGI before for some scenes, but still relied on miniatures and other traditional effects for much of their creation.
I thought the Last Starfighter was a pretty groundbreaking film -- IIRC, it was the first film to have totally computer-generated space sequences.
I can't help but think it would make a pretty kickass space sim, now that we have the GPU power to render in real-time even higher quality than they had originally. The one arcade game I remember didn't compare well to the classic Star Wars 3D polygon arcade game in terms of sheer fun (damn that game was fun).
For example, good luck using a Mac to record a digital HDTV broadcast to Xvid with a mu-law soundtrack and subtitles in Farsi, storing it to a network file server attached via IP-over-1394.
Good luck? It would be easier to do on a mac than a Linux box. Anything you can't find a native OS X app for, you can usually grab the unix tools and install to fill in the gaps. And you never have to recompile the kernel to get your hardware to work.
Why do you manually update iTunes? Set up smart playlists to auto-synch and restrict the playlist by size if its a size issue.
They key to Apple software is that if you do things the way they intend, everything is amazingly elegant. Get all your tags in shape, add keywords to music files, and you'll find it amazing you ever spent more than a minute or two making a playlist before.
Given their previous tactics, it would be disingenuous to claim they have no violent intent behind that, especially after yesterday's near-fatal beating of a cop.
::rolleyes::
Yeah, with 400,000+ protesters, certainly a single incident of a person being assaulted is evidence of a mass conspiracy to commit violence.
Dear God, i wonder what these execs are thinking sometimes. Don't they realize how much trouble the +- wars caused in consumer acceptance of DVD Recorders?
And in the end of course it didn't make any difference whatsoever because as new hardware and software came out, the negligible differences and advantages each format had became fairly unimportant.
I still have nightmares about the guy who wouldn't let me leave Best Buy until I explained to him what kind of discs he needed for his computer.
OS/2 was also the OS choice of Photoshop professionals who had to work on i386 hardware. OS/2 actually made good use of large memory configurations, and had a GOOD virtual memory system, so running PS (2.5 I think?) with the Win32s extensions on OS/2 was far faster on the same hardware than running it on Wfwg/w32s or Win95.
They're not dolls! They're Action Figures!
Of course that's based on the incorrect assumption that most users actually USE many of the features of MS Office. Most typical office drones could use Wordpad and never know the difference (between MS Office), except that Wordpad wouldn't do wacky automatic shit to them that they'd have to keep manually undoing.
I remember a few years ago when i realized this exact thing -- I just do text documents with headings, subheads, etc. I've never used word to do tables, HTML, or layout just because it fights you so much. I started using Wordpad for all my text documents and now everything is much smoother, plus any system anywhere can open up an RTF file.
Unfortunately, this is actually something GOOD for the video card companies (from a sales standpoint). Because the consumers need blazing DX speed, but the workstation market needs OGL, they can still charge a hefty premium for the better OGL support in a workstation version of the card, even though the hardware is 99% the same.
They'd have us believe they sat some engineers down in a room who had never looked at an iPod or iTunes (much less crack them) but yet were somehow able to "recreate their own version"?
You do know how the IBM-PC clone business got started, right? Compaq had a bunch of engineers sit in a room, never looking at the IBM BIOS or specs, and recreated it entirely through black-box I/O tests.
The 20-year boom that followed should be enough to show ANYONE the economic and social benefits of reverse-engineering, but none are so blind as those who will not see.
Spam really isn't the biggest problem i have with the domain mail -- as others have said, most spam will actually go to the addresses you actively use.
Use an email service that offers server-side spam and virus filtering and it'll be nothing to worry about. I use Fastmail.fm, and they use spamassassin and some AV service. It's great, cut down about 95% of the junk I used to get, and it's TOTALLY geek-friendly so you can customize it however you want or turn it off if you are a masochist.
The thing that is annoying are all the "error" messages i get from email servers because some virus attached some randomly generated name to my domain when sending out copies of itself. I can't very well automatically delete mail bounce messages, so i have to actually LOOK at those to make sure it wasn't something real.
"most analysts agree" that HP is the technology leader in inkjet printing?
Hogwash, HP hasn't been on top technology-wise since the mid-90's. Epson, ever since their initial Stylus Color line 10 years ago, has more or less led the inkjet field in the most demanding graphic arts output.
HP is strong in CAD and large format, corporate work and lasers, but any analyst who claims they are on top in inkjets under 20" wide has slept through about 6 generations of printing technology.
Dell can probably easily defeat HP in the home and office inkjet printer market, HP doesn't have anything special for those customers that any other manufacturer can't OEM to Dell for less.
When Dell beats Epson and Canon in a market that is more concerned about quality than price, this theory may hold water, but I can't imagine how they would do it.
Hey, if there had been a Radio Shack available, we would have gone there.
The thing is, they really make a killing when you have no options (or don't know any better). I had to get a dozen, 25' Cat5 cables IMMEDIATELY for a project we were doing in the field, so we had no resources other than the local Best Buy.
The company paid something like $400+ for those cables, I literally had my mouth hanging open in disbelief when the cashier rang them up, and she just kind of shrugged.
If we had had more than an hour or two to get it up and running, it would have been cheaper to buy a plane ticket to a city with a real computer store!
Save you the trouble of remembering which cable is a crossover?
I haven't seen them sell returned items as NEW, but yeah they dump stuff back on the shelves without testing. I think they wait for something to be returned 2 or 3 times before they send it back.
What's crazy is that it makes sense, because most things don't actually have problems, it's usually the user not getting it set up right or knowing how to use it. I buy a LOT of open-box stuff from BB, and have never had a problem with any of it (you still have the 30-day return, so it's no big gamble).
Unlike tha Axis powers, terrorists can't take over the United States. They have neither the manpower nor the resources.
But we can certainly destroy the US ourselves, out of fear and paranoia.
He didn't mention, however, that when system updates are installed, the final stage of setup is to defragment. Apple is very proactive about avoiding fragmentation, and OSX really does a great job of making sure things run smoothly without requiring the user to know anything about it.
Yeah, and I've been trying to buy a dozen standalone 1600x1200 15" LCD monitors for almost two years now.
Maybe if I cryogenically sleep for a few more years, computer companies will realize some people want that resolution on a DESKTOP.
This is so true. Half the fun of checking out the Spot was hanging out in the message boards and arguing over whether it was real or not.
At the beginning, it was well-done enough that it really was not a slam-dunk either way. It was only in the last 6-9 months or so when it started REALLY coming out that it was an advertising experiment that people lost interest.
For those who weren't active at the time, the best analogy would be the Blair Witch Project, back when it was still a bit "underground". It was just well-done enough and crazy enough the audience was happy to play along, but you wonder why anyone would waste their time making a sequel when all the mystery is sucked out of it.
For XP, you DO need 512 to run Word and IE. I added 256 megs to my (technically illiterate) friend's stock Dell box (which had 256 megs to begin with) and she called me the next day asking what the heck I did, it ran so much faster!
I did probably cost Dell a sale, though -- she was all ready to buy a new computer because hers was "too slow"...
So it records vital signs on a bluetooth enabled PDA, which can later be used to transmit the data when they get back to the satellite system. That's great -- if there is an emergency, all they have to do is find the bodies, hope that they used the kit during the emergency to gather data, bring back the PDAs, and they'll know exactly what killed the climbers!
Forgive my sarcasm, we did this in 1998 and 1999 (Everest Extreme"), except we were sending the data in real time over 900mhz radio to the doctor at base camp and via sat back to the hospital in the USA. And it was gathered 24/7 because they were wearing the monitors, not some box of medical tools to be used briefly. That way, if someone was having trouble, we could actually tell what was wrong and where to find the climber (GPS is handy that way).
The things that kill on Everest are getting lost/falling off in bad weather and hypothermia (dehydration is actually the biggest medical problem, but it doesn't usually kill).
This is a perfect example of why building web navigation in Flash is a horrible idea -- I'm on a T3 and it took literally a full minute for the nav bar to download.
XHTML and CSS, they exist for a reason people!
I should note (as an artist) that different kinds of water behave differently in paint. I would have just assumed it was distilled water had I seen the bottles. Not that you would need particularly pure water for latex paint, but some people like to buy the Rolls Royce of everything.