Eh? Then you should go to the movie to get back at Fox. Fox isn't making the movie - Wheldon sold the movie rights to Universal when Fox screwed over the show.
Therefore, the best revenge is to have the Fox execs weep to see their competitor make an absolute killing on a show they couldn't be bothered airing.:-)
I think there is a fair chance that the sounds are just in the trailer. Trailers have to be flashy and exciting, and appeal to people who have never seen the show, and that means sound fx.
Once they're in the cinema watching the movie, THEN you have the time to introduce them to a world where space is silent and six-shooters go hand in hand with spaceships. Trying to do that in a trailer is risky. This is more of a USA thing, trailers elsewhere are a bit less action-focused. (The "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon DVD has the US trailer in addition to the normal trailer, watch them one after the other and you might think they're different movies:-)
I imagine Browncoats == bluecoats, not brownshirts, or something like that - the background theme is a kind of "the US civil war, but in the future, except the other side won" thing.
Regardless of the outcome in this example, we know RFID is going to be used in a host of ways we don't care for. As I see it, it would be useful to have my own RFID scanner that tells me when something I have has an RFID tag in it (you often won't know otherwise), and if I deem it worth the time, allows me to read/write to the RFID tag.
Does anyone know of any homebrew RFID scanner projects?
I get the impression that most commercial scanners are probably no good, since the companies are all trying to lock clients into their own proprietary format, and so their scanners only read from their brand of tag (though they will tell you if a not-our-brand tag is present, just not any information about it).
Also, most commercial scanners have the normal range (less than a foot), it'd be cool to do a homebrew scanner with a boosted range.
Sure, criticise that he calls the article "advanced" when you're all light-years ahead, but I read the article expected to be a noobie way over my head, and discovered that I was actually an advanced system builder who simply hadn't realised how 1337 I was.
Compared to the care that went into the rest of the FX scenes, why would they screw up the lightsabres like that? The time consuming part of those FX is in the rotoscoping, not the design and rendering of the blades, yet they've rendered the blades as a crisp-edged 2" fat white cylinder + glow effect, which looks nothing like a lightsabre blade, and a lot like a glowing foam bat. I wasn't even looking at the blades the first time I watched the trailer (looking at the actors) and white-foam-baseball-bat design bizzareness of the blades still made me go "WTF?"
Judging by the rest, it can't possibly be a lack of technical ability. I'm wondering if their prop master made the blades too thick (perhaps due to an SCA background) and the SFX people were forced to use a big white cylinder to cover up the fat prop blades.
Hats off to the production. I have criticisms, but they all fall into the category of being very justifiable for this kind of production. Those nerf-sabres, however, seem to be an unnecessary screwup.
This movie demonstrates that motivated by the right thing (star wars) there are plenty of geeks who will pour their SFX skills into a pet project. I can't help but feel that this is another game of the universe - you need technical film talent, and somewhere out there will be a group of film enthusiests who need your costume and acting crew, and if the two (or more) groups met, it would be a match made in heaven, but how do they find each other?
All I can say is, keep looking. Don't let the universe's perverse sense of humour get the last laugh:)
Sure they've got the knack of a winning smile, or a particularly "sexy pout" or whatever, but on the whole the difference isn't that great.
While I agree on the lighting/costume/makeup budget making a huge difference, and a comparison of faces would reveal little difference, a huge difference is in posture, body language, and how they move. In this trailer, geeks in costume look like geeks in costume instead of SW characters even when they're too far away to see that their faces are no less attractive that your average SW actor.
"Geek" body language is very strong, at complete odds with "macho hero" body language (which is also strong), so the gut-wrenchingly awful picture of someone in clearly-hero-attire-and-dialogue moving with clearly-a-geek-character, makes me squirm. (Yes, I do a LOT of squirming at conventions:-) Hint to the costume enthusiests at cosplay/conventions - there is a point of diminishing returns you've probably already reached where to improve your costume, you will get more mileage out of posture training than from sewing on more and more detail, or building more and more authentic props. Seriously. Obsessively replicating the costume is only half the job, and you do all your wonderful craftmanship a big disservice if you spend all that time on the outfit and don't work on the wearer.
BTW, Don't 'spose you'll be passing through the Seattle area any time soon Jed?/Geek struggling to throw off the shackles of body language.:-)
Garbage numbers that is, at least with regard to the cost of nuclear power, because those numbers only include some of the costs of producing that power (typically, the cost that the company running the plant has to pay to built and run it), whilst ignoring that time and time again, the taxpayer has been hit with expenses well in excess of those charged to the plant. For instance, a small part of the price of each kWh is payed to the Govt, since the Govt is going to be handling things like waste transport and disposal, but when the price payed in comapared to the actual costs the taxpayer incurs, the phrase "government subsidised energy" rings as loudly as at any alternative energy plant.
The generator nearest to me (Handford) was only recently evaluated as needing a further $5 Billion for a partial cleanup, and that money is not going to be back-billed to the people who got their electricity from it over the years. (In other words, the next generation is stuck paying off the credit card bills of parents who were living beyond their means.) Of course, Handford is worse than normal, because it was an early plant, and so presumably operated in a manner more lax than a modern plant would be, and and presumably much heavier on the side-business as well (most (all?) generators help pay their way with non-electrical side business eg . selling various byproducts to industry and military), but it's the generator closest to me. Furthermore, it's looking like the current administration has decided that the cost of even this partial cleanup is simply too much for our struggling economy to cope with, and probably a lot more corners will be cut.
I get the opposite impression - consoles are becoming harder and harder to use. It used to be that you just stick in the game and play. But now, you gotta deal with file management, media swapping, boot times, RAM requirements, periphiral devices, it's almost like you're back to a PC.
That said, I haven't had any console experience even remotely as bad as Half Life 2. But I'm not sure I've had any game experience as frustrating as HL2, so that's not really saying much:-)
The artists at Valve trying to make a great gaming experience had their work sabotaged by whoever designed the installation process. At the end of it, there was no way I could get immersed in the game or even enjoy it. I wanted to hit it with a sledgehammer.
I had no Steam delays (other than my 56k connection), but the installation was still a nightmare of frustration, as being on a modem I was dumb enough to think a CD or DVD could be installed painlessly, on the grounds that all my other game do, compared to this never-ending hodge-podge of authentications, decryptions, copying, registrations, downloading parts through my modem instead of being on the DVD I bought, more authentications, endless windows... ARGH!
I didn't want or need any of that garbage, I wanted a DVD I could put in my computer and install, so that I could enjoy the game.
Adding insult to injury (in my case), HL2 crashes during level transistions, and crashes when saving a game, rendering it utterly unplayable until some patches come out. (Tech support currently doesn't cover these problems) If only I'd known that before wasting 3 hours on installation! I now hate the sight of the G-man, against my will he is permanently associated in my mind with waaaaaiting to see if it will crash again.
So far, my HL2 experience has been the exact opposite of fun. I can't remember a game I've played that has wasted so much of my time and been so infuriating while doing so.
My best bet might be to return it to the store, maybe consider buying it again in a few weeks once they've pulled it together, and the price has come down a bit.
Games take big money if you are talking a high-level or cutting edge game, but I know some people that make a small living from simple games with limited graphics. Probably pretty similar to the Cell-phone games you mention:)
It's not an income to envy, but if you're doing what you love, sometimes that counts for more than a nice paycheck.
Yeah but... that was what the USA was. Why would our space in the tropics not end up the same way?
The lack of copyrights kickstarts a powerful culture of creativity, which is then sold the rest of the world for mega$$$. People used of a mega$$$ standard of living rapidly come to see the creative output being sold, as a product that only they should be able to control and profit from, and the next thing you know, that view is the law of the land and it's a criminal offense to tell your kids bedtime stories about your made-up adventures of their favourite characters, Luke Skywalker and Artoo, because they don't own their culture.
What is stopping us regressing into a banana republic the same way the USA has?
Wouldn't authentic (in design, materials, and construction) paper and wax caps be the easiest thing in the world to make yourself?
It seems to me that a restoration philosophy of using only equally-old replacement parts, instead of identical-to-the-original replacement parts, is self-defeating. It ensures that (in complete opposition to the goal) the radio will never survive the ages, and is pretty much guarenteed to not even survive the next several decades.
I can see there being some appeal in having a radio work on aged parts, but as far as restoration goes, it seems, well, stupidly counter-productive. Am I missing something?
Reading the article, his criticism does not appear to be "this area needs improvement", but "wikipedia can never work".
I'm not connected to wikipedia, and I agree that it will never be the same thing as a funded encylopedia written by a smaller group of professionals.
But I think he and other critics miss an important question:
"Should wikipedia exist?"
Is it a worthwhile endevour? Is there merit to building an encyclopedia that aims for the qualities of traditional ones, but with "free" thrown in?
Yes.
End of story.
I'm not going to present my reasoning behind that "yes" here, since I'd be preaching to the choir here, and different people have different reasons. My point is that Wiki isn't what it's most rabit proponents want it to be, but it has merit, and is worthwhile, and should exist.
So criticisms like his can be fairly criticised as lazy rather than constructive. He points to known problems, but isn't interested in doing anything about them, instead suggesting it can never work, while for many people, it already works.
The ox is quite clearly not a horse, but only an idiot would shoot it because it's unlikely to win at the racetrack.
It seems ok to me. As long as it's cheaper to use what is already availible than it is to make more, why make more? Your problem is that you wish it was cheaper to make more, well, fair enough, but it doesn't strike me that there is anything that is a pity about the situation.
I use a lot of photomultiplier tubes in my hobby projects. These are not obsolete for various medical imaging and scientific equipment, and so are manufactured today. They cost around $400 each.
I guess that means that I'm used to the idea that tubes are not cheap to produce, or cheap to buy, compared to solid state.
Fortunately in my case, the market for new tubes (for medical gear, etc), is much larger than the market for used tubes salvaged from scrapped medical gear - manufacturers of medical equipement want brand new, quality-assured parts, not used crap pulled out of a busted machine. That means I can get tubes for my hobby projects at more like $20 each.
There are areas where market economic goes wrong and frustrates me, but I think the tube market is closer to a good example of how economics should work, than something to sigh about.
Also, call me sentimental, but the rarity creates The Hunt and The Mystery. The Hunt is part of the thrill, magic, and magestry, of tube-based electronics:-)
I think I actually prefer the current situation to one where Radioshack has a range of tubes at every store.:-)
Ooh, interesting, I didn't know people had made glass semiconductors.
Also, I think an electron tube is way easier to make than a lightbulb. A lightbulb needs a filiment, while I a tube just needs some unconnected metal in vaguely the right place - bent wire would probably do it (poorly). OTOH, you could see it as the tube needs better design, while the bulb needs better materials and manufacturing skillz:-)
Unless it's a neon bulb... then all it needs is the right gas:-)
Sure, but doping your own silicon isn't easy, doped silicon isn't a raw material:-) You need elements that are either hard-to-get/refine, or very toxic, or both, and some seriously hot temperatures. While a tube is glass blowing and vacuum pumping.
I imagine a simple transistor from scratch is quite possible, but I think a simple tube would be a little easier.
While I personally don't think tube-distorted sound is "better", ("different" is a better word - if that's what you want, fine, if someone else, such as the Rest Of The World, doesn't care for it, Deal With It:), I am quite interested in building my own tubes in order to build some electrical devices from raw materials. Caps, batteries, etc are easy. Transistors are harder than tubes, so... anyone know of any good books on making your own tubes?
In other words, it's not a proportional system. And more to the point, in modern systems, you get proportionality AND local representation. The US system is antiquated junk in comparison, the laughing stock of the world for good reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh? Then you should go to the movie to get back at Fox. Fox isn't making the movie - Wheldon sold the movie rights to Universal when Fox screwed over the show.
:-)
Therefore, the best revenge is to have the Fox execs weep to see their competitor make an absolute killing on a show they couldn't be bothered airing.
I think there is a fair chance that the sounds are just in the trailer. Trailers have to be flashy and exciting, and appeal to people who have never seen the show, and that means sound fx.
:-)
Once they're in the cinema watching the movie, THEN you have the time to introduce them to a world where space is silent and six-shooters go hand in hand with spaceships. Trying to do that in a trailer is risky. This is more of a USA thing, trailers elsewhere are a bit less action-focused. (The "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon DVD has the US trailer in addition to the normal trailer, watch them one after the other and you might think they're different movies
I imagine Browncoats == bluecoats, not brownshirts, or something like that - the background theme is a kind of "the US civil war, but in the future, except the other side won" thing.
Regardless of the outcome in this example, we know RFID is going to be used in a host of ways we don't care for.
As I see it, it would be useful to have my own RFID scanner that tells me when something I have has an RFID tag in it (you often won't know otherwise), and if I deem it worth the time, allows me to read/write to the RFID tag.
Does anyone know of any homebrew RFID scanner projects?
I get the impression that most commercial scanners are probably no good, since the companies are all trying to lock clients into their own proprietary format, and so their scanners only read from their brand of tag (though they will tell you if a not-our-brand tag is present, just not any information about it).
Also, most commercial scanners have the normal range (less than a foot), it'd be cool to do a homebrew scanner with a boosted range.
Sure, criticise that he calls the article "advanced" when you're all light-years ahead, but I read the article expected to be a noobie way over my head, and discovered that I was actually an advanced system builder who simply hadn't realised how 1337 I was.
It left me with a warm fuzzy feeling.
Compared to the care that went into the rest of the FX scenes, why would they screw up the lightsabres like that? The time consuming part of those FX is in the rotoscoping, not the design and rendering of the blades, yet they've rendered the blades as a crisp-edged 2" fat white cylinder + glow effect, which looks nothing like a lightsabre blade, and a lot like a glowing foam bat. I wasn't even looking at the blades the first time I watched the trailer (looking at the actors) and white-foam-baseball-bat design bizzareness of the blades still made me go "WTF?"
Judging by the rest, it can't possibly be a lack of technical ability. I'm wondering if their prop master made the blades too thick (perhaps due to an SCA background) and the SFX people were forced to use a big white cylinder to cover up the fat prop blades.
Hats off to the production. I have criticisms, but they all fall into the category of being very justifiable for this kind of production. Those nerf-sabres, however, seem to be an unnecessary screwup.
This movie demonstrates that motivated by the right thing (star wars) there are plenty of geeks who will pour their SFX skills into a pet project. I can't help but feel that this is another game of the universe - you need technical film talent, and somewhere out there will be a group of film enthusiests who need your costume and acting crew, and if the two (or more) groups met, it would be a match made in heaven, but how do they find each other?
:)
All I can say is, keep looking. Don't let the universe's perverse sense of humour get the last laugh
Sure they've got the knack of a winning smile, or a particularly "sexy pout" or whatever, but on the whole the difference isn't that great.
:-) Hint to the costume enthusiests at cosplay/conventions - there is a point of diminishing returns you've probably already reached where to improve your costume, you will get more mileage out of posture training than from sewing on more and more detail, or building more and more authentic props. Seriously. Obsessively replicating the costume is only half the job, and you do all your wonderful craftmanship a big disservice if you spend all that time on the outfit and don't work on the wearer.
/Geek struggling to throw off the shackles of body language. :-)
While I agree on the lighting/costume/makeup budget making a huge difference, and a comparison of faces would reveal little difference, a huge difference is in posture, body language, and how they move. In this trailer, geeks in costume look like geeks in costume instead of SW characters even when they're too far away to see that their faces are no less attractive that your average SW actor.
"Geek" body language is very strong, at complete odds with "macho hero" body language (which is also strong), so the gut-wrenchingly awful picture of someone in clearly-hero-attire-and-dialogue moving with clearly-a-geek-character, makes me squirm. (Yes, I do a LOT of squirming at conventions
BTW, Don't 'spose you'll be passing through the Seattle area any time soon Jed?
The numbers can be verified here:
Garbage numbers that is, at least with regard to the cost of nuclear power, because those numbers only include some of the costs of producing that power (typically, the cost that the company running the plant has to pay to built and run it), whilst ignoring that time and time again, the taxpayer has been hit with expenses well in excess of those charged to the plant. For instance, a small part of the price of each kWh is payed to the Govt, since the Govt is going to be handling things like waste transport and disposal, but when the price payed in comapared to the actual costs the taxpayer incurs, the phrase "government subsidised energy" rings as loudly as at any alternative energy plant.
The generator nearest to me (Handford) was only recently evaluated as needing a further $5 Billion for a partial cleanup, and that money is not going to be back-billed to the people who got their electricity from it over the years. (In other words, the next generation is stuck paying off the credit card bills of parents who were living beyond their means.)
Of course, Handford is worse than normal, because it was an early plant, and so presumably operated in a manner more lax than a modern plant would be, and and presumably much heavier on the side-business as well (most (all?) generators help pay their way with non-electrical side business eg . selling various byproducts to industry and military), but it's the generator closest to me. Furthermore, it's looking like the current administration has decided that the cost of even this partial cleanup is simply too much for our struggling economy to cope with, and probably a lot more corners will be cut.
The ground has already been paved over - the area of roofs is enough. Problem solved.
Hey wow, you're the first DVD-version user I've heard from who didn't run into problems. Congrats! :) /envy
I get the opposite impression - consoles are becoming harder and harder to use. It used to be that you just stick in the game and play. But now, you gotta deal with file management, media swapping, boot times, RAM requirements, periphiral devices, it's almost like you're back to a PC.
:-)
That said, I haven't had any console experience even remotely as bad as Half Life 2. But I'm not sure I've had any game experience as frustrating as HL2, so that's not really saying much
The artists at Valve trying to make a great gaming experience had their work sabotaged by whoever designed the installation process. At the end of it, there was no way I could get immersed in the game or even enjoy it. I wanted to hit it with a sledgehammer.
I had no Steam delays (other than my 56k connection), but the installation was still a nightmare of frustration, as being on a modem I was dumb enough to think a CD or DVD could be installed painlessly, on the grounds that all my other game do, compared to this never-ending hodge-podge of authentications, decryptions, copying, registrations, downloading parts through my modem instead of being on the DVD I bought, more authentications, endless windows... ARGH!
I didn't want or need any of that garbage, I wanted a DVD I could put in my computer and install, so that I could enjoy the game.
Adding insult to injury (in my case), HL2 crashes during level transistions, and crashes when saving a game, rendering it utterly unplayable until some patches come out. (Tech support currently doesn't cover these problems)
If only I'd known that before wasting 3 hours on installation!
I now hate the sight of the G-man, against my will he is permanently associated in my mind with waaaaaiting to see if it will crash again.
So far, my HL2 experience has been the exact opposite of fun. I can't remember a game I've played that has wasted so much of my time and been so infuriating while doing so.
My best bet might be to return it to the store, maybe consider buying it again in a few weeks once they've pulled it together, and the price has come down a bit.
Games take big money if you are talking a high-level or cutting edge game, but I know some people that make a small living from simple games with limited graphics. Probably pretty similar to the Cell-phone games you mention :)
It's not an income to envy, but if you're doing what you love, sometimes that counts for more than a nice paycheck.
Yeah but... that was what the USA was. Why would our space in the tropics not end up the same way?
The lack of copyrights kickstarts a powerful culture of creativity, which is then sold the rest of the world for mega$$$. People used of a mega$$$ standard of living rapidly come to see the creative output being sold, as a product that only they should be able to control and profit from, and the next thing you know, that view is the law of the land and it's a criminal offense to tell your kids bedtime stories about your made-up adventures of their favourite characters, Luke Skywalker and Artoo, because they don't own their culture.
What is stopping us regressing into a banana republic the same way the USA has?
Wouldn't authentic (in design, materials, and construction) paper and wax caps be the easiest thing in the world to make yourself?
It seems to me that a restoration philosophy of using only equally-old replacement parts, instead of identical-to-the-original replacement parts, is self-defeating. It ensures that (in complete opposition to the goal) the radio will never survive the ages, and is pretty much guarenteed to not even survive the next several decades.
I can see there being some appeal in having a radio work on aged parts, but as far as restoration goes, it seems, well, stupidly counter-productive. Am I missing something?
Reading the article, his criticism does not appear to be "this area needs improvement", but "wikipedia can never work".
I'm not connected to wikipedia, and I agree that it will never be the same thing as a funded encylopedia written by a smaller group of professionals.
But I think he and other critics miss an important question:
"Should wikipedia exist?"
Is it a worthwhile endevour? Is there merit to building an encyclopedia that aims for the qualities of traditional ones, but with "free" thrown in?
Yes.
End of story.
I'm not going to present my reasoning behind that "yes" here, since I'd be preaching to the choir here, and different people have different reasons. My point is that Wiki isn't what it's most rabit proponents want it to be, but it has merit, and is worthwhile, and should exist.
So criticisms like his can be fairly criticised as lazy rather than constructive. He points to known problems, but isn't interested in doing anything about them, instead suggesting it can never work, while for many people, it already works.
The ox is quite clearly not a horse, but only an idiot would shoot it because it's unlikely to win at the racetrack.
It seems ok to me. As long as it's cheaper to use what is already availible than it is to make more, why make more? Your problem is that you wish it was cheaper to make more, well, fair enough, but it doesn't strike me that there is anything that is a pity about the situation.
:-)
:-)
:)
I use a lot of photomultiplier tubes in my hobby projects. These are not obsolete for various medical imaging and scientific equipment, and so are manufactured today. They cost around $400 each.
I guess that means that I'm used to the idea that tubes are not cheap to produce, or cheap to buy, compared to solid state.
Fortunately in my case, the market for new tubes (for medical gear, etc), is much larger than the market for used tubes salvaged from scrapped medical gear - manufacturers of medical equipement want brand new, quality-assured parts, not used crap pulled out of a busted machine. That means I can get tubes for my hobby projects at more like $20 each.
There are areas where market economic goes wrong and frustrates me, but I think the tube market is closer to a good example of how economics should work, than something to sigh about.
Also, call me sentimental, but the rarity creates The Hunt and The Mystery. The Hunt is part of the thrill, magic, and magestry, of tube-based electronics
I think I actually prefer the current situation to one where Radioshack has a range of tubes at every store.
Yes, you may call me insane
Why all of a sudden am I getting motion sickness with this game
I'm pretty sure HL2 uses a narrower FOV than CS:Source and most other FPS games. Maybe this difference is responsible?
Ooh, interesting, I didn't know people had made glass semiconductors.
:-)
:-)
Also, I think an electron tube is way easier to make than a lightbulb. A lightbulb needs a filiment, while I a tube just needs some unconnected metal in vaguely the right place - bent wire would probably do it (poorly). OTOH, you could see it as the tube needs better design, while the bulb needs better materials and manufacturing skillz
Unless it's a neon bulb... then all it needs is the right gas
Come on. Many metals can be mined pure, or very very easily refined from ore. Doping silicon is in a different league alltogether.
Egyptions were using copper 10,000 years ago. Smelting ore is childs play compared to doping silicon.
That looks really good. Thanks!
Sure, but doping your own silicon isn't easy, doped silicon isn't a raw material :-)
You need elements that are either hard-to-get/refine, or very toxic, or both, and some seriously hot temperatures. While a tube is glass blowing and vacuum pumping.
I imagine a simple transistor from scratch is quite possible, but I think a simple tube would be a little easier.
While I personally don't think tube-distorted sound is "better", ("different" is a better word - if that's what you want, fine, if someone else, such as the Rest Of The World, doesn't care for it, Deal With It :), I am quite interested in building my own tubes in order to build some electrical devices from raw materials. Caps, batteries, etc are easy. Transistors are harder than tubes, so... anyone know of any good books on making your own tubes?
In other words, it's not a proportional system. And more to the point, in modern systems, you get proportionality AND local representation. The US system is antiquated junk in comparison, the laughing stock of the world for good reason.