That's just as bad, and extreme, an alternative as a world where we teach them that "atrocities are fun" and, as with everything, a middle-ground is required. That middle ground would not involve pretending these things don't exist OR encouraging players to commit virtual atrocities (which I've NEVER seen a game do).
You seem to be unaware of the Grand Theft Auto series. I prefer games which give the player freedom to kill, but encourage or allow for non-violent or non-lethal approaches. Games which incorporate stealth, such as those from the Deus Ex and Thief serieses often give bonuses when the player kills no one, which is typically much harder than killing. Role playing games such as those in the Fallout series often have ways to accomplish quests by persuasion or otherwise avoiding combat.
That's a trademark issue and the Red Cross is hardly the only one to claim infringement. Why do think so many guns in games have made up names even though they're clearly supposed to be a real world design?
Games can certainly be very influential, as can movies, TV and books. I've played many first person shooters from the silly to very realistic and they've made it very clear to me that I never want to be in real combat, though the virtual combat is a lot of fun. It doesn't take much imagination to understand that each of the thousands of times one is killed when playing such a game, one would be dead or mortally wounded in a real battle. I think I have a much better understanding of how random death and survival are in battle as a result of playing games.
They are not talking about prosecuting the real gamers if they violate laws or international treaties inside of a game.
They want game developers to include features in their games, that your game character has to face court martial if the gamer breaks laws or rules of engagement. So they want virtual consequenses for virtual crimes. Sounds fair enough for me.
RedShirt
If the facts in the summary are wrong, it's because the article was wrong or intentionally misleading.
Now, a committee of the Red Cross is debating if gamers might be violating the International Humanitarian Law as they slaughter each other online.
Whether or not gamers who had won the longest 'killstreaks' - an uninterrupted run of kills in online games - could be prosecuted is another question.
There's no mention of virtual prosecution and the concept of a "killstreak" isn't formalized in real world law.
The committee's action is aimed more towards developers: as war games become more realistic, do they have a responsibility to add humanitarian elements to their games?
If they were only discussing how to change the games, why would it say the committee's action is aimed more towards developers?
Much of military training is conditioning soldiers to be able to follow orders unquestioningly even when it means the death of enemy or compatriots, something they wouldn't naturally do and would be considered murder outside a battlefield. It wouldn't be the least bit surprising for a military to use games in that process, but the concept is thousands of years old. The basic issue is not the tools used for this training but the utter cognitive dissonance it's designed to overcome. This episode from Gwynne Dyer's 1983 documentary "War" explains it very well.
The article makes it sound like the idea is that one can break a law just by playing a game. I hope the Red Cross committee isn't wasting time on something so idiotic; the article could simply be wrong. However, if the committee tried to convince game designers to add in-game consequences for doing things that would violate International Humanitarian Law, that might be a good idea. There are lots of ways to gain or lose points in games and this could simply be another aspect of the challenge. I already like to play games with friendly fire on to add a realistic challenge.
A Sci-Fi movie, and I am talking space opera here because REAL hard core Science Fiction needs no special effects at all ("That morning, the sun rose in the west", The last man on earth is sitting in room, there is a knock on the door), has to feel "right" and that doesn't come with special effects but with making the story engaging.
What if two suns rose in the West? Binary star systems are very common, but if you don't happen to live in one, how do you show it? All Science Fiction involves technologies and/or places that we cannot reach or do not currently exist. Therefore, a visual medium like film needs to use special effects to portray them. To say that one set of techniques is inherently better for all purposes than another set is simply closed-minded. Perhaps you like the cheesy special effects in Star Trek: TOS, but you can't seriously claim they're more convincing than those in the more recent movies.
The great irony is that these filmmakers seem to be making the exact same mistake as those they're criticizing. They're focusing on special effects techniques more than the story and characters. If they want to convince us they're making a story-driven movie, they shouldn't even mention how they're doing special effects.
To ask whether you "need" CGI is just as silly as asking whether you need special effects at all. Some stories need special effects to tell them well in a movie and some don't. When effects are called for, there are some things for which CGI is well suited to and others which are still better done with models or "old school" techniques. You must be aware of this, since you use "Lord of the Rings" as an example. Those movies blend models, actors in suits and CGI so well that it's sometimes hard to tell which is which. While exclusively CGI effects would have greatly weakened the visuals, no CGI would have been similarly devastating. Would you really take Gollum seriously if he were just a guy in a suit? How impressive would the battles have been if there were only a couple hundred combatants instead of thousands?
The problem is not with the techniques used, but with the emphasis on technique rather than story, characters and plot. Saying "our movie will be better than the others because we don't use CGI" is just as silly as saying "cutting edge CGI makes this an awesome movie." I'd be a lot more impressed if they just talked about how the plot will be different from typical movies.
What good is it to shoot at a higher frame rate if it has to be shown at 24fps? To shoot at a higher frame rate would be in the same category as 3D: little more than a gimmick.
I think CGI is often used today to save money. However, like anything else, you get what you pay for. It's possible that with their budget, they can get better results using miniatures, but to say that's an inherently better approach is ludicrous, especially for SciFi, fantasy or any other genre which requires visuals of things we don't encounter in everyday life. The most effective filmmakers know that different techniques are better for different things. One of the best examples I know of is "Lord of the Rings," which used a lot of miniatures, actors in suits and CGI characters and effects. With a few exceptions, it's not obvious which is which. Would Gollum been as believable if he were portrayed by an actor in a suit with no CGI?
Chances are that 500HP V10 will last a lot longer than a 500HP I4/H4. Boosting something to hell and back tends to have a negative effect on reliability.
That only makes sense if you assume the cylinders are all the same size. It would be more logical to assume the cylinders in the 4 cylinder engine have a much greater displacement. Aviation engines often have much larger cylinders than automotive ones.
Of course it shouldn't matter to customers how many transistors a chip has. It should only matter what it can do and how much power it needs to do it. However, I think more transistors generally means more power dissipation, so AMD may be trying to allay fears that the chip will be a power hog.
If the university can't competently provide its own IT infrastructure, why should they be expected to provide anything else competently? Perhaps it's just time to privatize the whole thing. I can't wait for GoogleU and Inteliversity.
There are often situations when it makes sense to add comments to explain why you did something a certain way based on knowledge of things outside of the local code, like database schema or quirky behavior of a function you're calling. It's easy to comment too much or too little; the right balance is an exercise in judgment and almost an art form itself.
There's so much code in common between Unix and Unix-like operating systems today that the distinction really only matters to lawyers and marketdroids.
Keep on fragmenting each distro... at a certain point, people will just get tired of distro-hopping and dump the whole mess.
And people ask when the Year f the Linux Desktop will be. It's things likie this, and the constant breakage because of change for the sake of change or to "be different", rather than focusing on stability, that drive people to non-free vendors.
Yeah, Microsoft and Apple never break things just to be (or think) different. Differences between RedHat and other distributions are only a problem to users when they switch, so this will likely discourage distro-hopping. That could even be part of RedHat's motive. They are making their systems more proprietary (in the general sense, not related to copyright licenses) just as Canonical is by using their own desktop environment. This is part of a trend of Linux vendors doing things more like non-free vendors. If it works for Microsoft and Apple, why not for RedHat?
Whether you "lose everything" is not necessarily function of whether a format is textual or not. There are plenty of robust binary formats such as file systems and MPEG streams. However, being able to read logs from a different system is essential, so the lack of commitment to a set format is troubling.
A human paying attention to one car can probably predict whether that car will run the red light, but a human can't pay attention to all potential runners simultaneously.
I don't like Steve Jobs or the direction Apple has gone in the past twenty years but I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that "what I like" is "what everyone wants and needs"; there are enough people here already doing that.
Steve Jobs was famous for declaring what people wanted and needed. Why was he any less delusional than you? If making a buttload of money means one is right, then we of the 99% should always defer to the 1%.
It's easy to find detailed images of the rifle. That, combined with general knowledge about its operation (easy since it's based on existing designs including the M-16) is all the designers needed. Since the game designers knew they'd be pissing of the Iranian government with the basic plot, do you really think they cared about "licensing" images of Iranian weapons?
People can't accurately predict much about the progression of human technology even a few decades into the future. Anyone who thinks they can predict what hypothetical alien technology would be like is delusional in the extreme.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just as bad, and extreme, an alternative as a world where we teach them that "atrocities are fun" and, as with everything, a middle-ground is required. That middle ground would not involve pretending these things don't exist OR encouraging players to commit virtual atrocities (which I've NEVER seen a game do).
You seem to be unaware of the Grand Theft Auto series. I prefer games which give the player freedom to kill, but encourage or allow for non-violent or non-lethal approaches. Games which incorporate stealth, such as those from the Deus Ex and Thief serieses often give bonuses when the player kills no one, which is typically much harder than killing. Role playing games such as those in the Fallout series often have ways to accomplish quests by persuasion or otherwise avoiding combat.
That's a trademark issue and the Red Cross is hardly the only one to claim infringement. Why do think so many guns in games have made up names even though they're clearly supposed to be a real world design?
Games can certainly be very influential, as can movies, TV and books. I've played many first person shooters from the silly to very realistic and they've made it very clear to me that I never want to be in real combat, though the virtual combat is a lot of fun. It doesn't take much imagination to understand that each of the thousands of times one is killed when playing such a game, one would be dead or mortally wounded in a real battle. I think I have a much better understanding of how random death and survival are in battle as a result of playing games.
They are not talking about prosecuting the real gamers if they violate laws or international treaties inside of a game.
They want game developers to include features in their games, that your game character has to face court martial if the gamer breaks laws or rules of engagement. So they want virtual consequenses for virtual crimes. Sounds fair enough for me.
RedShirt
If the facts in the summary are wrong, it's because the article was wrong or intentionally misleading.
Now, a committee of the Red Cross is debating if gamers might be violating the International Humanitarian Law as they slaughter each other online.
Whether or not gamers who had won the longest 'killstreaks' - an uninterrupted run of kills in online games - could be prosecuted is another question.
There's no mention of virtual prosecution and the concept of a "killstreak" isn't formalized in real world law.
The committee's action is aimed more towards developers: as war games become more realistic, do they have a responsibility to add humanitarian elements to their games?
If they were only discussing how to change the games, why would it say the committee's action is aimed more towards developers?
Much of military training is conditioning soldiers to be able to follow orders unquestioningly even when it means the death of enemy or compatriots, something they wouldn't naturally do and would be considered murder outside a battlefield. It wouldn't be the least bit surprising for a military to use games in that process, but the concept is thousands of years old. The basic issue is not the tools used for this training but the utter cognitive dissonance it's designed to overcome. This episode from Gwynne Dyer's 1983 documentary "War" explains it very well.
The article makes it sound like the idea is that one can break a law just by playing a game. I hope the Red Cross committee isn't wasting time on something so idiotic; the article could simply be wrong. However, if the committee tried to convince game designers to add in-game consequences for doing things that would violate International Humanitarian Law, that might be a good idea. There are lots of ways to gain or lose points in games and this could simply be another aspect of the challenge. I already like to play games with friendly fire on to add a realistic challenge.
A Sci-Fi movie, and I am talking space opera here because REAL hard core Science Fiction needs no special effects at all ("That morning, the sun rose in the west", The last man on earth is sitting in room, there is a knock on the door), has to feel "right" and that doesn't come with special effects but with making the story engaging.
What if two suns rose in the West? Binary star systems are very common, but if you don't happen to live in one, how do you show it? All Science Fiction involves technologies and/or places that we cannot reach or do not currently exist. Therefore, a visual medium like film needs to use special effects to portray them. To say that one set of techniques is inherently better for all purposes than another set is simply closed-minded. Perhaps you like the cheesy special effects in Star Trek: TOS, but you can't seriously claim they're more convincing than those in the more recent movies.
The great irony is that these filmmakers seem to be making the exact same mistake as those they're criticizing. They're focusing on special effects techniques more than the story and characters. If they want to convince us they're making a story-driven movie, they shouldn't even mention how they're doing special effects.
To ask whether you "need" CGI is just as silly as asking whether you need special effects at all. Some stories need special effects to tell them well in a movie and some don't. When effects are called for, there are some things for which CGI is well suited to and others which are still better done with models or "old school" techniques. You must be aware of this, since you use "Lord of the Rings" as an example. Those movies blend models, actors in suits and CGI so well that it's sometimes hard to tell which is which. While exclusively CGI effects would have greatly weakened the visuals, no CGI would have been similarly devastating. Would you really take Gollum seriously if he were just a guy in a suit? How impressive would the battles have been if there were only a couple hundred combatants instead of thousands?
The problem is not with the techniques used, but with the emphasis on technique rather than story, characters and plot. Saying "our movie will be better than the others because we don't use CGI" is just as silly as saying "cutting edge CGI makes this an awesome movie." I'd be a lot more impressed if they just talked about how the plot will be different from typical movies.
What good is it to shoot at a higher frame rate if it has to be shown at 24fps? To shoot at a higher frame rate would be in the same category as 3D: little more than a gimmick.
I think CGI is often used today to save money. However, like anything else, you get what you pay for. It's possible that with their budget, they can get better results using miniatures, but to say that's an inherently better approach is ludicrous, especially for SciFi, fantasy or any other genre which requires visuals of things we don't encounter in everyday life. The most effective filmmakers know that different techniques are better for different things. One of the best examples I know of is "Lord of the Rings," which used a lot of miniatures, actors in suits and CGI characters and effects. With a few exceptions, it's not obvious which is which. Would Gollum been as believable if he were portrayed by an actor in a suit with no CGI?
Chances are that 500HP V10 will last a lot longer than a 500HP I4/H4. Boosting something to hell and back tends to have a negative effect on reliability.
That only makes sense if you assume the cylinders are all the same size. It would be more logical to assume the cylinders in the 4 cylinder engine have a much greater displacement. Aviation engines often have much larger cylinders than automotive ones.
Of course it shouldn't matter to customers how many transistors a chip has. It should only matter what it can do and how much power it needs to do it. However, I think more transistors generally means more power dissipation, so AMD may be trying to allay fears that the chip will be a power hog.
If the university can't competently provide its own IT infrastructure, why should they be expected to provide anything else competently? Perhaps it's just time to privatize the whole thing. I can't wait for GoogleU and Inteliversity.
There are often situations when it makes sense to add comments to explain why you did something a certain way based on knowledge of things outside of the local code, like database schema or quirky behavior of a function you're calling. It's easy to comment too much or too little; the right balance is an exercise in judgment and almost an art form itself.
TFA says that he was paid much more than his previous salary.
There's so much code in common between Unix and Unix-like operating systems today that the distinction really only matters to lawyers and marketdroids.
Keep on fragmenting each distro ... at a certain point, people will just get tired of distro-hopping and dump the whole mess.
And people ask when the Year f the Linux Desktop will be. It's things likie this, and the constant breakage because of change for the sake of change or to "be different", rather than focusing on stability, that drive people to non-free vendors.
Yeah, Microsoft and Apple never break things just to be (or think) different. Differences between RedHat and other distributions are only a problem to users when they switch, so this will likely discourage distro-hopping. That could even be part of RedHat's motive. They are making their systems more proprietary (in the general sense, not related to copyright licenses) just as Canonical is by using their own desktop environment. This is part of a trend of Linux vendors doing things more like non-free vendors. If it works for Microsoft and Apple, why not for RedHat?
Whether you "lose everything" is not necessarily function of whether a format is textual or not. There are plenty of robust binary formats such as file systems and MPEG streams. However, being able to read logs from a different system is essential, so the lack of commitment to a set format is troubling.
A human paying attention to one car can probably predict whether that car will run the red light, but a human can't pay attention to all potential runners simultaneously.
Cryptographic verification is just one of many features. It seems the binary format is motivated by efficiency, both processing and space.
I don't like Steve Jobs or the direction Apple has gone in the past twenty years but I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that "what I like" is "what everyone wants and needs"; there are enough people here already doing that.
Steve Jobs was famous for declaring what people wanted and needed. Why was he any less delusional than you? If making a buttload of money means one is right, then we of the 99% should always defer to the 1%.
It's easy to find detailed images of the rifle. That, combined with general knowledge about its operation (easy since it's based on existing designs including the M-16) is all the designers needed. Since the game designers knew they'd be pissing of the Iranian government with the basic plot, do you really think they cared about "licensing" images of Iranian weapons?
People can't accurately predict much about the progression of human technology even a few decades into the future. Anyone who thinks they can predict what hypothetical alien technology would be like is delusional in the extreme.