Do you know about other CG effects? What was Monsters Inc. rendered at? T2? For a long time I figured movies ought to be rendering fx shots at 2000x3500 minimum, and all-CG movies at similar resolutions. Then recently I've been disappointed as I learn about all the limitations of film, the optical soundtrack taking up space, and general shortcuts. Gladiator, for example had terribly low resolution shots that were quite blurry, as did Minority Report. I read that Pleasantville was shot entirely in color,then digitally scanned at 4000x4000 to change it into black and white. Of course 4000x4000 doesn't work as an aspect ratio, and that seems high to be DPI. Any thoughts on this?
I'm updating my journal entry which is almost a copy of this post. Its very early in the morning where I am and this might be just as bad as my first entry, but I believe this is better. If you want to reply you can use the journal entry.
If you really read my journal you know I'm not initially or ever advocating "providing everybody with the same material wealth". Instead I would have the wealthy nations provide more food, birth control, and education to the poorer countries than currently happens.
Why is it that Marxism/Communism can only exist when it is enforced in oppressive authoritarian dictatorships? Because human nature causes most people to think only of themselves, their immediate friends, family, and about two generations of children ahead. Eventual great grandchildren will have to fend for themselves, as will the rest of the state/country/world. Consider the socialist properties of the Canadian health care system and several semi-socialist countries in northern Europe. I admit my ignorance about the details, but in general the haves pay a lot of taxes so the have-not get much more decent health care, and in the N.Euro. countries, education, and housing. These are not authoritarian dictatorships.
Remember when a lot of electronics were made in Japan, but as Japan became a first world country the factories moved to Taiwan and China? Same with clothing and shoes to Mexico, China, and Indonesia? What do you think will happen if eventually every country in the world raises itself to first world status? Where will Americans get cheap Nikes? Prices could double or triple as labor costs increase. How many middle-class Americans will pay for the equivalent of $200 Nikes? What will happen to Nike's bottom line? Just as poor Chinese and Mexicans today can get flip-flops and clothes for a fraction of American prices, so will the majority of the middle class in the future. Instead of brand name clothing, it will be as generic and cheap as possible.
This works for clothing, but what about electronics and other luxury items? I envision a mother-board going for $300 by today's prices because labor costs in Taiwan will cost the same there as in the USA. So there are massive layoffs in entertainment / electronics companies. All the out of work people will not be able to afford services putting others out of work and causing a global recession. Labor prices will drop in response and possibly there is a balance that can be achieved. At what cost though? The middle class as we know it in America is priced out of many luxury items and services, so for the same amount of work, a dollar doesn't go as far.
Here's where I start talking about the environment. The earth has 6,000,000,000 people living on it. Many educated people who make their living studying the effects of humanity on the planet think that is too many for the earth to remain in its present condition. If those six billion people all want to live a lifestyle like that of the average American, it would take eight earths to provide that much and still keep the nature and population balance. So either our planet ends up striped clean of all biodiversity and resources, at which point the six billion people go to war over what has been acquired, or some serious efforts are made to reduce the population and waste being generated. One way to reduce the population is with birth control. Half the people on this earth follow a religion that generally frowns on this. Another option is by education and feeding the people living now. In every nation where the standard of living improved, birthrates went down as families no longer needed huge families to work the fields, or help work in factories to support the family. Parents no longer felt they needed as many children caring for them in old age, and having large families became recognized as a financial burden. This is why if you look at paragraph two you see "I would have the wealthy nations provide more food, birth control, and education to the poorer countries than currently happens."
How to pay for these three things? Not an easy question and I'm no economist. I'm still in college and I wouldn't have posted that journal entry if I didn't want it ripped to shreds so I could learn more. I admit I want to turn some heads and get more people to think how I think about this topic, but I will gladly listen to anyone who can offer different future scenarios. Tell me why capitalism will educate the poor counties and save the planet before humans overrun earth like locusts. I see parts, not all, of socialism as the best solution to this problem. When it comes to reducing waste I am much less certain than I was when I wrote the first journal entry. Capitalism is excellent for finding a balance between supply and demand, but how is it possible to cut out the fat and waste? If companies quit competing against each other and instead worked together, huge marketing costs would be saved and prices could be lower for goods, but the marketing industry would lose jobs, not to mention companies wouldn't put as much into R&D. Innovation slows, and if profit is capped too low people won't work as hard because there won't be the same amount of gain. Like I said earlier, though, six billion people would require eight earths to let them drive SUVs, have 50" wide-screen TVs and bathe in scented oil from The Body Shop. It seems to me if six billion people want equality there are going to be many sacrifices ahead. Capitalism doesn't seem well suited for this job, but representative democratic socialism just might be.
Domino's in my area once had a balloon attached to a human at a fair. He walked around promoting the company. The balloon was about 10 or 15 feet tall and could easily lift 50 or 100 pounds. A balloon big enough for a human would easily be less than 30 feet in any direction.
one half of the earth would bake itself dry except at the poles. on the other half most life would die except for what adapted to darkness, meaning alternates to photosynthesis. clouds would stop circulating the earth ending rainfall in many places. It would really really really suck for life as we know it.
I support PETA but I wear leather shoes and would get a leather interior car. Just because many members of PETA are vegetarian or vegan doesn't mean I have to be as well. Its possible to support the eff while disagreeing with some of the positions the eff might take. I happen to think annonyminity in public is a good thing, but privacy in public is unrealistic.
You'd have to give this person time to prepare. In a true anarchy environment, everyperson stocks up on supplies and defences for survival. This person would no doubt like to have semi automatic weapons as defense but cannot due to current state or federal regulations. Of course if anarchy happened tomorrow the race would be on to get the best guns and form private armies.
If we live on land controlled by the government I don't see why the air above the land can't also be controlled. The government declares who gets to send which frequencies through the air.
That would be a blessing and curse for fit people like myself. Pants will become more expensive because the largest sizes will use more material, but the price is set for all sizes. Given enough complaints, perhaps airline seats in coach will finally become wider, good for me, but that means there are fewer seats per plane, so prices go up per seat. At least fuel costs won't go up or down because the weight of the fat fucks in the seats counterballance the reduction of seats. Coffin prices will go up unless a new extra-wide coffin size is made. Cremation prices will go up unless the price is by the pound. So the fattening of America is mostly a curse for me, damn fat fucks. How many Denis Leary fans who are also fat fucks are reading this?
Ask your friend about vanilla coke vs. classic coke. i compared the ingredients of vanilla vs. classic and vanilla has even fewer so i'm guessing its easier to manufacture.
It depends on if there are free refills. If there aren't free refills the customer has to pay more. Stupid / forgetful people who don't ask for 'no ice' end up ordering a larger size because they want more to drink. Getting the smaller size without ice would work just as well.
Please, as if 30 seconds on CDnow counts. Amazon doesn't even let users listen to all the tracks and has many cds with no tracks to listen to at all. I need more than 30 seconds at 16 or 32 kbps to decide if I want to buy a song. Give me 90 seconds at 64kbps mono. That would drive the bandwidth costs of CDNow way up though, so I don't see that happening immediately.
Since you're unclear on the concept, I'll elaborate. Battlebots happens in a square arena about 50 feet per side and 30 feet tall. The sides and top of the arena are formed by 1" thick lexan panels held in place by a steel or aluminum grid. This is to protect the audience sitting outside. When the robots fight, lots of nasty shrapnel goes flying and ricochets off the lexan. I was proposing to let the robots fight in the open where shrapnel could fly free.
So start the bots 50 feet apart like in the ring. The operators stand at the perimeter looking into binoculars set on tripods. Its not like the perimeter will have lexan. Every person wears body armor like in paintball and if they want a lexan sheild they bring it themselves. The superheavyweights can easily reach 20 and perhaps 30mph, by the way.
Is Proxomitron easier to use than Guidescope? Is one more effective? I use Mozilla for pop-ups and keep the Flash plugin in its own folder for when I need it. That just leaves banner ads that bother me.
As of two or three years ago, AOL required a different name and credit card for each free trial. How is your friend circumventing this requirement? Does he just get other collecge students to agree that he can use their identitiy for a month?
Looks to me like bitboys' place is history will lie here.
Back in 1995, or was it 1996, a small Finnish company by the name of Bitboys Oy announced their Pyramid3D chip. As the months rolled by there emerged successive technology reports that detailed such things as a geometry engine (transform and lighting) and projected speeds well in excess of the first Voodoo card from 3Dfx. What was never seen however was the actual product itself. Were BitBoys for real, or was it all a hoax? As I understand it, BitBoys approached a company by the name of VLSI Solutions with a chip design that later turned out to be written on the back of an envelope. TriTech Microelectronics then purchased that envelope with the intention to design the chip themselves. VLSI would then fabricate the board and another company program the drivers. Eventually some pre-production models were produced and demonstrated at Assembly '97, but just before the cards went into mass production in 1998 Tritech pulled out of the project killing it stone dead.
So it would seem that the Pyramid3D project did eventually become legitimate, even if Bitboys never were. The following left-hand image is purported to be a pre-production version of the card, but the right-hand image has been sent in by Mark Vojkovich who actually owns one today. It has 8MB of SDRAM and a pass-though connection similar to that found on a Voodoo board.
Figure 4.6/// Bitboys Pyramid3DFigure 4.7/// TriTech Pyramid 3D
In May 1998 BitBoys Oy raised their heads once again and announced their Glaze3D chip. This chip would have a projected performance four times greater than that of the current all-conquering Voodoo2 chipset! At the time this statement caused a considerable stir, especially considering the fiasco surrounding their previous attempt. However once everyone realized that the chip would not be produced for over a year, this interest soon dissipated.
Figure 4.8/// No.9 Ticket to Ride IV
At Siggraph99 in August the Bitboys were back. This time with an updated Glaze3D specification that included every feature under the sun, including 9MB of embedded DRAM memory and four pixel pipelines capable of rendering 600Mpixels/sec and 1.2Gtexels/sec. In addition to this, the new chips could be connected in parallel to produce a phenomenal 1.2Gpixel/sec and 2.4Gtexel/sec. Was it merely a coincidence that this specification seemed to mirror many of the forthcoming features from NVIDIA and 3dfx. Would we ever see a Glaze3D chip? Don't hold your breath.
Can you believe it, in January 2000 the Bitboys were back again. Don't these guys know when to stay down! Having shelved their Glaze3D chip (surprise, surprise) they now announced their new XBA(TM) or Xtreme Bandwidth Architecture! Yeah right. By this time few were taking the Bitboys seriously, as demonstrated by the following press releases.
Bitboys are famous for announcing graphics cards and then never delivering. Over the past five years or so, there have been plans and supposed agreements with other companies for at least three graphics cards which would blow the competition away. Not a single card has ever been released.
You've got to be kidding. com2kid's id number is about 150,000 which means its at least three years old. I have 331 comments over three years. You have that many in six months.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know about other CG effects? What was Monsters Inc. rendered at? T2? For a long time I figured movies ought to be rendering fx shots at 2000x3500 minimum, and all-CG movies at similar resolutions. Then recently I've been disappointed as I learn about all the limitations of film, the optical soundtrack taking up space, and general shortcuts. Gladiator, for example had terribly low resolution shots that were quite blurry, as did Minority Report. I read that Pleasantville was shot entirely in color ,then digitally scanned at 4000x4000 to change it into black and white. Of course 4000x4000 doesn't work as an aspect ratio, and that seems high to be DPI. Any thoughts on this?
I'm updating my journal entry which is almost a copy of this post. Its very early in the morning where I am and this might be just as bad as my first entry, but I believe this is better. If you want to reply you can use the journal entry.
If you really read my journal you know I'm not initially or ever advocating "providing everybody with the same material wealth". Instead I would have the wealthy nations provide more food, birth control, and education to the poorer countries than currently happens.
Why is it that Marxism/Communism can only exist when it is enforced in oppressive authoritarian dictatorships? Because human nature causes most people to think only of themselves, their immediate friends, family, and about two generations of children ahead. Eventual great grandchildren will have to fend for themselves, as will the rest of the state/country/world. Consider the socialist properties of the Canadian health care system and several semi-socialist countries in northern Europe. I admit my ignorance about the details, but in general the haves pay a lot of taxes so the have-not get much more decent health care, and in the N.Euro. countries, education, and housing. These are not authoritarian dictatorships.
Remember when a lot of electronics were made in Japan, but as Japan became a first world country the factories moved to Taiwan and China? Same with clothing and shoes to Mexico, China, and Indonesia? What do you think will happen if eventually every country in the world raises itself to first world status? Where will Americans get cheap Nikes? Prices could double or triple as labor costs increase. How many middle-class Americans will pay for the equivalent of $200 Nikes? What will happen to Nike's bottom line? Just as poor Chinese and Mexicans today can get flip-flops and clothes for a fraction of American prices, so will the majority of the middle class in the future. Instead of brand name clothing, it will be as generic and cheap as possible.
This works for clothing, but what about electronics and other luxury items? I envision a mother-board going for $300 by today's prices because labor costs in Taiwan will cost the same there as in the USA. So there are massive layoffs in entertainment / electronics companies. All the out of work people will not be able to afford services putting others out of work and causing a global recession. Labor prices will drop in response and possibly there is a balance that can be achieved. At what cost though? The middle class as we know it in America is priced out of many luxury items and services, so for the same amount of work, a dollar doesn't go as far.
Here's where I start talking about the environment. The earth has 6,000,000,000 people living on it. Many educated people who make their living studying the effects of humanity on the planet think that is too many for the earth to remain in its present condition. If those six billion people all want to live a lifestyle like that of the average American, it would take eight earths to provide that much and still keep the nature and population balance. So either our planet ends up striped clean of all biodiversity and resources, at which point the six billion people go to war over what has been acquired, or some serious efforts are made to reduce the population and waste being generated. One way to reduce the population is with birth control. Half the people on this earth follow a religion that generally frowns on this. Another option is by education and feeding the people living now. In every nation where the standard of living improved, birthrates went down as families no longer needed huge families to work the fields, or help work in factories to support the family. Parents no longer felt they needed as many children caring for them in old age, and having large families became recognized as a financial burden. This is why if you look at paragraph two you see "I would have the wealthy nations provide more food, birth control, and education to the poorer countries than currently happens."
How to pay for these three things? Not an easy question and I'm no economist. I'm still in college and I wouldn't have posted that journal entry if I didn't want it ripped to shreds so I could learn more. I admit I want to turn some heads and get more people to think how I think about this topic, but I will gladly listen to anyone who can offer different future scenarios. Tell me why capitalism will educate the poor counties and save the planet before humans overrun earth like locusts. I see parts, not all, of socialism as the best solution to this problem. When it comes to reducing waste I am much less certain than I was when I wrote the first journal entry. Capitalism is excellent for finding a balance between supply and demand, but how is it possible to cut out the fat and waste? If companies quit competing against each other and instead worked together, huge marketing costs would be saved and prices could be lower for goods, but the marketing industry would lose jobs, not to mention companies wouldn't put as much into R&D. Innovation slows, and if profit is capped too low people won't work as hard because there won't be the same amount of gain. Like I said earlier, though, six billion people would require eight earths to let them drive SUVs, have 50" wide-screen TVs and bathe in scented oil from The Body Shop. It seems to me if six billion people want equality there are going to be many sacrifices ahead. Capitalism doesn't seem well suited for this job, but representative democratic socialism just might be.
not if the orbit is geostationary. just keep going 90 degrees away from the planar-tangent of the launch pad.
unbunch your panties. the proper response is 'touché'
Domino's in my area once had a balloon attached to a human at a fair. He walked around promoting the company. The balloon was about 10 or 15 feet tall and could easily lift 50 or 100 pounds. A balloon big enough for a human would easily be less than 30 feet in any direction.
Battlebots this aint. Battlebots IS the product. Redbull IS the product. Flugtag is not, only part of the advertising.
Didn't you see Eight Legged Freaks? The government covered up the giant mutant spiders. Sure it became a movie, but nobody believes it, except me.
one half of the earth would bake itself dry except at the poles. on the other half most life would die except for what adapted to darkness, meaning alternates to photosynthesis. clouds would stop circulating the earth ending rainfall in many places. It would really really really suck for life as we know it.
unfortunately what you say is so true and sad that it isn't as funny as the bullshit jokes others make.
I support PETA but I wear leather shoes and would get a leather interior car. Just because many members of PETA are vegetarian or vegan doesn't mean I have to be as well. Its possible to support the eff while disagreeing with some of the positions the eff might take. I happen to think annonyminity in public is a good thing, but privacy in public is unrealistic.
You'd have to give this person time to prepare. In a true anarchy environment, everyperson stocks up on supplies and defences for survival. This person would no doubt like to have semi automatic weapons as defense but cannot due to current state or federal regulations. Of course if anarchy happened tomorrow the race would be on to get the best guns and form private armies.
If we live on land controlled by the government I don't see why the air above the land can't also be controlled. The government declares who gets to send which frequencies through the air.
That would be a blessing and curse for fit people like myself. Pants will become more expensive because the largest sizes will use more material, but the price is set for all sizes. Given enough complaints, perhaps airline seats in coach will finally become wider, good for me, but that means there are fewer seats per plane, so prices go up per seat. At least fuel costs won't go up or down because the weight of the fat fucks in the seats counterballance the reduction of seats. Coffin prices will go up unless a new extra-wide coffin size is made. Cremation prices will go up unless the price is by the pound. So the fattening of America is mostly a curse for me, damn fat fucks. How many Denis Leary fans who are also fat fucks are reading this?
Great comments like yours are why I DON'T read /. while drinking anything. Thanks.
Ask your friend about vanilla coke vs. classic coke. i compared the ingredients of vanilla vs. classic and vanilla has even fewer so i'm guessing its easier to manufacture.
It depends on if there are free refills. If there aren't free refills the customer has to pay more. Stupid / forgetful people who don't ask for 'no ice' end up ordering a larger size because they want more to drink. Getting the smaller size without ice would work just as well.
Please, as if 30 seconds on CDnow counts. Amazon doesn't even let users listen to all the tracks and has many cds with no tracks to listen to at all. I need more than 30 seconds at 16 or 32 kbps to decide if I want to buy a song. Give me 90 seconds at 64kbps mono. That would drive the bandwidth costs of CDNow way up though, so I don't see that happening immediately.
Since you're unclear on the concept, I'll elaborate. Battlebots happens in a square arena about 50 feet per side and 30 feet tall. The sides and top of the arena are formed by 1" thick lexan panels held in place by a steel or aluminum grid. This is to protect the audience sitting outside. When the robots fight, lots of nasty shrapnel goes flying and ricochets off the lexan. I was proposing to let the robots fight in the open where shrapnel could fly free.
So start the bots 50 feet apart like in the ring. The operators stand at the perimeter looking into binoculars set on tripods. Its not like the perimeter will have lexan. Every person wears body armor like in paintball and if they want a lexan sheild they bring it themselves. The superheavyweights can easily reach 20 and perhaps 30mph, by the way.
Just one day a year, could Battlebots fans please use those 600 acres? I'd really like to see how far Nightmare's blade sends shrapnel.
Is Proxomitron easier to use than Guidescope? Is one more effective? I use Mozilla for pop-ups and keep the Flash plugin in its own folder for when I need it. That just leaves banner ads that bother me.
As of two or three years ago, AOL required a different name and credit card for each free trial. How is your friend circumventing this requirement? Does he just get other collecge students to agree that he can use their identitiy for a month?
Back in 1995, or was it 1996, a small Finnish company by the name of Bitboys Oy announced their Pyramid3D chip. As the months rolled by there emerged successive technology reports that detailed such things as a geometry engine (transform and lighting) and projected speeds well in excess of the first Voodoo card from 3Dfx. What was never seen however was the actual product itself. Were BitBoys for real, or was it all a hoax? As I understand it, BitBoys approached a company by the name of VLSI Solutions with a chip design that later turned out to be written on the back of an envelope. TriTech Microelectronics then purchased that envelope with the intention to design the chip themselves. VLSI would then fabricate the board and another company program the drivers. Eventually some pre-production models were produced and demonstrated at Assembly '97, but just before the cards went into mass production in 1998 Tritech pulled out of the project killing it stone dead.
So it would seem that the Pyramid3D project did eventually become legitimate, even if Bitboys never were. The following left-hand image is purported to be a pre-production version of the card, but the right-hand image has been sent in by Mark Vojkovich who actually owns one today. It has 8MB of SDRAM and a pass-though connection similar to that found on a Voodoo board.
Figure 4.6
In May 1998 BitBoys Oy raised their heads once again and announced their Glaze3D chip. This chip would have a projected performance four times greater than that of the current all-conquering Voodoo2 chipset! At the time this statement caused a considerable stir, especially considering the fiasco surrounding their previous attempt. However once everyone realized that the chip would not be produced for over a year, this interest soon dissipated.
Figure 4.8
At Siggraph99 in August the Bitboys were back. This time with an updated Glaze3D specification that included every feature under the sun, including 9MB of embedded DRAM memory and four pixel pipelines capable of rendering 600Mpixels/sec and 1.2Gtexels/sec. In addition to this, the new chips could be connected in parallel to produce a phenomenal 1.2Gpixel/sec and 2.4Gtexel/sec. Was it merely a coincidence that this specification seemed to mirror many of the forthcoming features from NVIDIA and 3dfx. Would we ever see a Glaze3D chip? Don't hold your breath.
Can you believe it, in January 2000 the Bitboys were back again. Don't these guys know when to stay down! Having shelved their Glaze3D chip (surprise, surprise) they now announced their new XBA(TM) or Xtreme Bandwidth Architecture! Yeah right. By this time few were taking the Bitboys seriously, as demonstrated by the following press releases.
www.3dspotlight.com
www.somethingawful.com
If the Bitboys had ever done more than just PR this announcement might be cause for caring. You say they did a tech demo, great. Now so what?
Bitboys are famous for announcing graphics cards and then never delivering. Over the past five years or so, there have been plans and supposed agreements with other companies for at least three graphics cards which would blow the competition away. Not a single card has ever been released.
You've got to be kidding. com2kid's id number is about 150,000 which means its at least three years old. I have 331 comments over three years. You have that many in six months.