No, rendering isn't the whole of the movie-making process -- but you're wrong to say that rendering doesn't take a lot of time from the production. The prospect of turning an hour-long render into minutes means that final video can be produced several times faster -- which also means it can be proofed and edited faster, and that (eventually) directors can test several angles, shots, or compositions without worrying about the amount of rendering time wasted.
Some time ago, Discover Magazine (and later, Slashdot) featured a chip designer who was doing just this sort of thing: giving it problems to solve, having it randomize and then naturally-select software models of chips to solve certain problems. Physical chips were built after a hundred software simulations or so to test the creations in real-life. Eventually they produced reliable results, at least to simple problems, and the best part was they did so with fewer logic gates than a human-designed circuit would. This happened because the evolved chips used certain tricks, like letting the magnetic flux of one wire affect the flow through another, to solve their problems.
However, the evolved solutions were limited in their scope. If the chip created through natural selection was tested in an environment of a moderately different humidity or temperature, it's tricks wouldn't work. Just like real-life animals, their niche tricks worked only in a niche environment. In a way, it's all a problem of chaos theory -- sensitivity to initial conditions.
I expect these evolved patents will face similar difficulties. Yes, they'll work great, but only in the specific environment or parameters for which the software originally was programmed. Change things just a little bit, and it has to start all over again. Which makes for great demonstrations of the software, but poor practial, patentable solutions that people will buy.
Re:It's not like they haven't announced the patch
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 2, Informative
not everyone is super connected and does know about this
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse", nor is ignorance of your upgrade cycle.
Its Microsoft's responisibilty to do everything they can to notify Win 2000 customers and solve this problem
As I said, they're already doing that. The problem is that too many people don't realize it's a problem they need to attend to. They think they can just install a server, run it, and forget about it.
their design flaw, not the admins. So they need to fix it.
What do you think the patch is for? Even Slashdotters' much-adored Apache software isn't immune to the occasional oversight. The difference is that, as yet, almost everyone who runs Apache is a responsible administrator who already knows the importance of keeping things up-to-date.
I'm not "blaming consumers for the corporation's mistakes," as you say. I'm saying that the corporation is doing everything it can be reasonably expected to, short of directly violating the privacy of every one of its registered customers by forcing a software upgrade down their broadband throats. At some point, you have to lay the blame on the users.
It's not like they haven't announced the patch
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Remember the recent Ford Explorer/Firestone fiasco? Firestone made a bunch of flawed tires (when and where is not important here) that were put on these Explorer SUVs, which in some cases fell apart and came off the wheel when driving at high speeds. Investigations were made, and eventually Firestone had to issue a complete recall of the tires.
The media talked about it for weeks. Ford sent out letters to customers as far as they could find them. People brought their SUVs in, got new tires put on them, drove out. That's how product recalls usually go.
Software patches aren't all that different. When a hole is discovered, a patch is made. Responsible Microsoft server administrators have the MS site automatically checked on a daily basis for critical updates and patches. Irresponsible admins don't bother, and they become vulnerable and the cause of the worm's spread.
But it would be insane to propose MS should force-feed this server patch to all their customers. The problem isn't the software, it's the admins. You'd be hard-pressed to find a major newspaper in the civilized world that hasn't mentioned this worm yet, and still there are people who don't bother to patch. They're the same ones who think that server software is just like desktop software, where you're the only one who uses it that really matters.
Firestone couldn't make its customers bring their SUVs in to have the tires replaced for free, and there's no way the customers could claim ignorance of the problem after the press got done with it. Likewise, Microsoft can't make its customers upgrade their software for free. They've honestly tried to make all their server customers aware of what's expected of them, but they're as powerless to force it to happen as Firestone is to force car drivers to rotate their tires every 6,000 miles.
Some time ago (I'm too lazy right now to look up the link), Slashdot published a story about how surprisingly few wireless LANs in the San Francisco area were being secured at all. Interested parties could simply walk out into the downtown area, turn on their laptops, scan for available wireless networks, and surf away.
Much like Microsoft's security patches for IIS, wireless networking was and is only as secure as the sysadmin implementing it makes it.
AUGUST 9, 2001 -- Apple Computer, Inc., immediately ordered the FBI to arrest Slashdot's site administrator, affectionately known as CmdrTaco, for illegally publishing information on how to break the encryption on their not-so-popular "Airport" wireless networking standard. He is currently in custody, pending a trial sometime in 2005.
In response, thousands of "Slashdotters" immediately raised a protest, sending hundreds of electronic petitions to FBI headquarters and generally making a pointless nuisance of themselves. It is not known whether the DOS attack on the FBI Web site is related to the incident, but investigations are underway.
... if you didn't read his columns, he wouldn't be a paid, featured columnist.
I don't sign his checks. Heck, I don't even click on the ad banners. I'm pleased you think me so influential; it makes my ultimate plans to take over the world that much easier to achieve. But I'm afraid Katz had secured this job long before I ever heard of Slashdot.
...that JonKatz himself proves that anybody with a few months' experience in reading technology books and surfing the Internet can become a paid, featured columnist on Slashdot every week.
As part of the NTF, the Petawatt will be open to the wider user community. Bauer and his colleagues plan to use it for fusion energy, plasma, atomic physics, environmental, and materials science studies, as well as in research for stockpile stewardship--
--and nobody's yet proposed taking charge of it for the sole purpose of world domination? What's wrong with these geeks??
The things I would do with a petawatt laser combined with, say, a small collection of orbiting satellites simply boggle the mind....
Every game on the market says it right on the box: Mac or Windows PC, 300Mz or 500Mz processor, 64MB of RAM or 128MB of RAM, 3D hardware required or not... And then, of course, there's the console games which run on one, and only one, hardware configuration.
Face it, games have been hardware-specific for years. This is merely the next level.
Illegal MP3 and DV file sharing, just like warez distribution, is a huge bandwidth hog for ISPs everywhere. Certainly it's a "murkier" issue when Napster-like software lets users keep the violating files on their own hard drives instead of on the ISP's servers, but the ISP's interests are still clear.
Remember, cable modems (the most popular form of consumer broadband) are shared bandwidth. If one user is hogging the pipe, other users experience degraded performance, and the ISP racks up complaints and loses customers. If a handful of their customers are taking up 75% of the available bandwidth by distributing MP3s all day long, it doesn't matter to the ISP if they themselves are liable or not. It's in their economic best interests to keep the pipe free for everyone's convenience.
"People who play games regularly seem to develop a mental state that we have seen before only in serious athletes or professionals such as astronauts" -- this doesn't mean it turns them into athletes or astronauts. Those professions require a lot more than fast mental reflexes -- things like physical stamina, endurance, and muscular strength which video games most certainly do not encourage.
Frankly, I'm tired of seeing Katz' columns focus on nothing more than the trailing edge of last week's/. stories. This column is nothing that wasn't already written in that article's comments. Do your own research, man, it's what you're paid for.
Eye strain is one of the biggest problems with CRT screens that LCDs overcome, are they not? It doesn't look like this "flat" CRT technology can overcome that. Along with power consumption and heat, these features might just be what the LCD market needs to advertise -- although most consumers won't care, seeing only the immediate cost savings instead of the long-term ones.
Any government can provide you with clean water, debt relief, and no war. China's notorious for just that sort of thing, in fact.
Full Internet access, on the other hand, gives access to information, freedom of speech, even international education. They may not be able to ship e-commerce out that way, but full access to the international community is nothing to sneeze at.
Sometimes, you need to pick the frosting you like best first.
Seriously, this column reads like a summary of hundreds of Slashdot reader postings from the past week's discussions on this topic. First the editors reject all my submissions for actual news, and then this happens?
Youngsters who play computer games regularly but not excessively also tend to have more friends and be better adjusted than those who make do with traditional pastimes such as reading and television.
That's compared to non-interactive activities like reading and television, not more-interactive activities like sports and playground play.
"People who play games regularly seem to develop a mental state that we have seen before only in serious athletes or professionals such as astronauts, whose life depends on concentration and co-ordination," said Jo Bryce, who led the research. "Their minds and bodies work together much better than those of most other people."
So they develop better reflexes and thumb-eye coordination than people who watch TV passively, which is no surprise. But that's not the same as being more intelligent or better educated.
She found that although there remained a minority of gamers who were obsessive, the majority had a healthy mix of other interests and varied social lives. Playing games helped them to do better in other areas, including schoolwork.
So people who play video games obsessively still rot their brains, but kids who practice healthy moderation do well. So what? Seems to me that kids who practice any activity in moderation with other activities will do well.
Mark Griffiths, a psychologist at Nottingham Trent University and an expert in computer gaming, found recently in a study of 800 children that those who played games "moderately"- no more than two hours a day-tended to do more sport than those who played no games. They had more friends, were better adjusted and tended to read more.
Of course, it's also possible that not being interested in sports shares the same cause as not being interested in games. This study was not scientific; it didn't raise one group of kids with video games, one group without, and expose both groups to an equal amount of other social activities. Correlation does not mean causation.
There is a certain scientific approach to the claim that video games help kids and adults develop better reflexes and hand-eye coordination, but that's no surprise, and it's completely different from claiming it makes them "smarter".
Your analogy falls apart at the beginning, I'm afraid. The ability to rip CD tracks to MP3 files is not a "standard feature" on ordinary CDs, it's a trick performed using technology the CD manufacturers never foresaw.
A more appropriate comparison would be a car manufacturer who disables the cruise control at any speed faster than 75mph. It's designed to keep you from breaking the law, even though you may have a perfectly legal reason for cruising faster than 75. It's annoying, but circumventable (just keep your foot on the gas). And while you may have a certain loyalty to the particular make and model of car which added this "feature", there's plenty of other cars out there that don't have it which you can choose to buy instead.
The tests highlight the questionable legal status of what is now a widespread practice of making digital copies of CDs, if only for home MP3 collections or to transfer to MP3 players.
The Audio Home Recording Act, a law passed in 1992, says that copyright holders can't sue people who are making personal home copies of music. But lawyers note that the act does not require copyright holders to make this power available to consumers.
"There's no affirmative obligation to make this available," said Leonard Rubin, a copyright attorney with Gordon & Glickson. "They just can't sue you if you do it."
Moreover, legal precedents have clouded the issue of whether a PC is actually protected by this law. In the course of a case that gave Diamond Multimedia the right to create and distribute MP3 players, judges ruled that a personal computer was not deemed a "digital recording device." Although the ruling helped protect the legality of MP3 players, it called into question whether copying a CD to a hard drive is in fact protected by law, even solely for personal use, some lawyers said.
The upshot of this is that consumers may not have much recourse if the ability to rip new CDs begins to go away.
"There might be consumer expectations here," McNealy said. "But there is no legal right."
Unfortunately, capitalism in the US isn't as free as we'd all like it to be. It's no big secret that corporate interests are integral to the lawmaking process here, thanks to corporate-sponsored lobbying in Congress and the high costs of running for re-election (not to mention some plain-old corruption here and there).
That, combined with general apathy on the part of the citizenry, is how things like the DCMA get passed in the first place. It's the reason we have Macrovision on all our VCRs and region encoding on all our DVD players. Companies demand protection for their media, so the technology manufacturers are left with no choice but to comply. Stopping piracy (theft from media owners) is more important than the freedoms of the individual (inconvenience for the voters), and while intellectual theft is and should be a crime, it gets taken to such insane extremes sometimes.
Take digital television, for instance. All broadcasters must carry it by 2006, but are consumers really demanding this sort of "advanced" picture capacity yet? No, but the TV makers demanded it be enforced in law because there was a Catch-22: why buy the digital TV if there's no broadcasts, and why make the broadcasts if there's no TVs? Better features will sell products regardless -- DVDs have caught on mainly because of the added features and conveniences, not because any law requires them to be produced.
Now the companies are demanding enforced copy protection along with enforced broadcast technology, and they'll probably get it. There will be hacks, but they won't be widespread, because they'll still be illegal. Never mind that I would rather have an enhanced DVD from the producer than a digital "videotape" of the show anyhow; anything that stops me from having to sit through paid commercials must be prevented. Someday it'll be a law that I can't leave my chair once I've sat down, or I'll be violating a license agreement.
I'm just tired of it all. There's not enough good content out there on the channels for me to pay their ever-increasing prices anyways, so I settle for local antenna-based TV and a DVD collection of my favorites with no commercials. As long as it costs me as much time and trouble as this to get something for free, I'll continue to just pay up front and keep it simple.
Slashdot Mirror
No, rendering isn't the whole of the movie-making process -- but you're wrong to say that rendering doesn't take a lot of time from the production. The prospect of turning an hour-long render into minutes means that final video can be produced several times faster -- which also means it can be proofed and edited faster, and that (eventually) directors can test several angles, shots, or compositions without worrying about the amount of rendering time wasted.
However, the evolved solutions were limited in their scope. If the chip created through natural selection was tested in an environment of a moderately different humidity or temperature, it's tricks wouldn't work. Just like real-life animals, their niche tricks worked only in a niche environment. In a way, it's all a problem of chaos theory -- sensitivity to initial conditions.
I expect these evolved patents will face similar difficulties. Yes, they'll work great, but only in the specific environment or parameters for which the software originally was programmed. Change things just a little bit, and it has to start all over again. Which makes for great demonstrations of the software, but poor practial, patentable solutions that people will buy.
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse", nor is ignorance of your upgrade cycle.
Its Microsoft's responisibilty to do everything they can to notify Win 2000 customers and solve this problem
As I said, they're already doing that. The problem is that too many people don't realize it's a problem they need to attend to. They think they can just install a server, run it, and forget about it.
their design flaw, not the admins. So they need to fix it.
What do you think the patch is for? Even Slashdotters' much-adored Apache software isn't immune to the occasional oversight. The difference is that, as yet, almost everyone who runs Apache is a responsible administrator who already knows the importance of keeping things up-to-date.
I'm not "blaming consumers for the corporation's mistakes," as you say. I'm saying that the corporation is doing everything it can be reasonably expected to, short of directly violating the privacy of every one of its registered customers by forcing a software upgrade down their broadband throats. At some point, you have to lay the blame on the users.
The media talked about it for weeks. Ford sent out letters to customers as far as they could find them. People brought their SUVs in, got new tires put on them, drove out. That's how product recalls usually go.
Software patches aren't all that different. When a hole is discovered, a patch is made. Responsible Microsoft server administrators have the MS site automatically checked on a daily basis for critical updates and patches. Irresponsible admins don't bother, and they become vulnerable and the cause of the worm's spread.
But it would be insane to propose MS should force-feed this server patch to all their customers. The problem isn't the software, it's the admins. You'd be hard-pressed to find a major newspaper in the civilized world that hasn't mentioned this worm yet, and still there are people who don't bother to patch. They're the same ones who think that server software is just like desktop software, where you're the only one who uses it that really matters.
Firestone couldn't make its customers bring their SUVs in to have the tires replaced for free, and there's no way the customers could claim ignorance of the problem after the press got done with it. Likewise, Microsoft can't make its customers upgrade their software for free. They've honestly tried to make all their server customers aware of what's expected of them, but they're as powerless to force it to happen as Firestone is to force car drivers to rotate their tires every 6,000 miles.
Much like Microsoft's security patches for IIS, wireless networking was and is only as secure as the sysadmin implementing it makes it.
AUGUST 9, 2001 -- Apple Computer, Inc., immediately ordered the FBI to arrest Slashdot's site administrator, affectionately known as CmdrTaco, for illegally publishing information on how to break the encryption on their not-so-popular "Airport" wireless networking standard. He is currently in custody, pending a trial sometime in 2005.
In response, thousands of "Slashdotters" immediately raised a protest, sending hundreds of electronic petitions to FBI headquarters and generally making a pointless nuisance of themselves. It is not known whether the DOS attack on the FBI Web site is related to the incident, but investigations are underway.
I don't sign his checks. Heck, I don't even click on the ad banners. I'm pleased you think me so influential; it makes my ultimate plans to take over the world that much easier to achieve. But I'm afraid Katz had secured this job long before I ever heard of Slashdot.
...that JonKatz himself proves that anybody with a few months' experience in reading technology books and surfing the Internet can become a paid, featured columnist on Slashdot every week.
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Tim+Berne rs-Lee
--and nobody's yet proposed taking charge of it for the sole purpose of world domination? What's wrong with these geeks??
The things I would do with a petawatt laser combined with, say, a small collection of orbiting satellites simply boggle the mind....
Every game on the market says it right on the box: Mac or Windows PC, 300Mz or 500Mz processor, 64MB of RAM or 128MB of RAM, 3D hardware required or not... And then, of course, there's the console games which run on one, and only one, hardware configuration. Face it, games have been hardware-specific for years. This is merely the next level.
...when we have brand new Transformers to waste our hard-earned money on?
...Magneto knew just the tool to use, that bastard! Iceman, you will be avenged!
Remember, cable modems (the most popular form of consumer broadband) are shared bandwidth. If one user is hogging the pipe, other users experience degraded performance, and the ISP racks up complaints and loses customers. If a handful of their customers are taking up 75% of the available bandwidth by distributing MP3s all day long, it doesn't matter to the ISP if they themselves are liable or not. It's in their economic best interests to keep the pipe free for everyone's convenience.
...are right here.
"People who play games regularly seem to develop a mental state that we have seen before only in serious athletes or professionals such as astronauts" -- this doesn't mean it turns them into athletes or astronauts. Those professions require a lot more than fast mental reflexes -- things like physical stamina, endurance, and muscular strength which video games most certainly do not encourage.
Frankly, I'm tired of seeing Katz' columns focus on nothing more than the trailing edge of last week's /. stories. This column is nothing that wasn't already written in that article's comments. Do your own research, man, it's what you're paid for.
Eye strain is one of the biggest problems with CRT screens that LCDs overcome, are they not? It doesn't look like this "flat" CRT technology can overcome that. Along with power consumption and heat, these features might just be what the LCD market needs to advertise -- although most consumers won't care, seeing only the immediate cost savings instead of the long-term ones.
Full Internet access, on the other hand, gives access to information, freedom of speech, even international education. They may not be able to ship e-commerce out that way, but full access to the international community is nothing to sneeze at.
Sometimes, you need to pick the frosting you like best first.
Seriously, this column reads like a summary of hundreds of Slashdot reader postings from the past week's discussions on this topic. First the editors reject all my submissions for actual news, and then this happens?
There is a certain scientific approach to the claim that video games help kids and adults develop better reflexes and hand-eye coordination, but that's no surprise, and it's completely different from claiming it makes them "smarter".
A more appropriate comparison would be a car manufacturer who disables the cruise control at any speed faster than 75mph. It's designed to keep you from breaking the law, even though you may have a perfectly legal reason for cruising faster than 75. It's annoying, but circumventable (just keep your foot on the gas). And while you may have a certain loyalty to the particular make and model of car which added this "feature", there's plenty of other cars out there that don't have it which you can choose to buy instead.
..."free speech" or "free beer"?
Apple's previous low-end mac had a CD-ROM only. This one is a bit faster and adds a CD-RW. That's the cost increase.
Unfortunately, capitalism in the US isn't as free as we'd all like it to be. It's no big secret that corporate interests are integral to the lawmaking process here, thanks to corporate-sponsored lobbying in Congress and the high costs of running for re-election (not to mention some plain-old corruption here and there).
That, combined with general apathy on the part of the citizenry, is how things like the DCMA get passed in the first place. It's the reason we have Macrovision on all our VCRs and region encoding on all our DVD players. Companies demand protection for their media, so the technology manufacturers are left with no choice but to comply. Stopping piracy (theft from media owners) is more important than the freedoms of the individual (inconvenience for the voters), and while intellectual theft is and should be a crime, it gets taken to such insane extremes sometimes.
Take digital television, for instance. All broadcasters must carry it by 2006, but are consumers really demanding this sort of "advanced" picture capacity yet? No, but the TV makers demanded it be enforced in law because there was a Catch-22: why buy the digital TV if there's no broadcasts, and why make the broadcasts if there's no TVs? Better features will sell products regardless -- DVDs have caught on mainly because of the added features and conveniences, not because any law requires them to be produced.
Now the companies are demanding enforced copy protection along with enforced broadcast technology, and they'll probably get it. There will be hacks, but they won't be widespread, because they'll still be illegal. Never mind that I would rather have an enhanced DVD from the producer than a digital "videotape" of the show anyhow; anything that stops me from having to sit through paid commercials must be prevented. Someday it'll be a law that I can't leave my chair once I've sat down, or I'll be violating a license agreement.
I'm just tired of it all. There's not enough good content out there on the channels for me to pay their ever-increasing prices anyways, so I settle for local antenna-based TV and a DVD collection of my favorites with no commercials. As long as it costs me as much time and trouble as this to get something for free, I'll continue to just pay up front and keep it simple.