I think the most telling thing in your response is that it lacks a single positive point in favor of the movie, other than Jar-Jar being a very small part this time around.
I don't expect perfection from star wars. I hoped for an enjoyable moviegoing experience, though. Frankly, it was a bad movie. It continued and detailed the fall of the republic story line, and that was the only rewarding part for me, really. Sadly, I felt they missed a huge obvious opportunity to tell a better version of the story.
I don't doubt ILMs effects capabilities. I don't, however, think they lived up to their potential in this movie. Sadly, having recently seen ep 4,5,6 the spaceships look better in those movies. The CGI just isn't up to model quality in this movie, and it certainly could be. They probably wasted too much of their graphics horsepower animating the landing pads.
Even more sadly, while the CGI wasn't as good as it could have been, it was the only thing making the movie tolerable for me. I wouldn't say that this movie sucked, but it was pretty painful to watch a good portion of the movie, and could have been probably more than an hour shorter without losing any of the decent parts.
The originals weren't perfect. But they were better than this movie. I still feel confident that in a year when the newness has worn off, most people will rank this one as the worst of the 5 movies.
Bleah, went to see it last night, and I was completely disappointed.
CGI: not that impressive. i'm really pretty unable to name a specific scene that will lose out when converted to pan & scan. why see this movie in the theater?
Jar-Jar: around just enough to really set you on edge, but doesn't die so you don't know what scene he's going to pop up in next.
Action yoda: loses! So now we're left hoping to see him win a fight in ep 3, but i'm guessing we'll be left yearning to see him win a fight even after 3. Also, it was disappointingly obvious that yoda wasn't real since he at no point physically interacts with dokuu.
Dokuu: should have been a completely earnest good guy. Imagine how much better a place the storyline would be in right now if everything else had been left the same, but dokuu was earnestly good, and killed by yoda (personally or by his forces, or better yet by anakin).
Jedi sword fights: nothing comparable to ep1. Nothing really exciting. Decent battle with jango fett ends undecided, later jango is completely unable to do anything vs windu. Too obvious intent to have boba clone grow up to kill windu. Sadly, boba is the best actor in the whole movie.
Acting: awful all around except for kenobi, who was decently portrayed, and boba, who does a really pretty good job of being the kid of a bounty hunter. This kid could have said yahoo in ep 1 and made us believe it.
Love story development: just awful and unbelievable.
I'm sad to say, but i'm guessing that in the months ahead, people will ultimately wind up ranking this the lowest of the 5 movies.
Having recently read the re-release of the book, the ending (spoiler):
Humanity breeds to a perfect individual, and then decides that since that individual is perfect, they'll just make clones of that person so that humanity will be as efficient as possible.
Once a sufficient portion of humanity is made up of clones, they begin to form a group mind.
The human group mind contacts the tauran group mind (to me, implied telepathy) and they discover:
a) the taurans have been all-clones and group mind for a long time.
b) the taurans didn't start the war. Actually, some humans who wanted to profiteer off of producing war-time goods started the war.
c) the taurans are more than willing to bend over backwards to achieve peace now that they can comprehend 'human' thought.
Also, haldeman has brought out two pseudo sequels fairly recently, neither of which measures up to the first, but both of which do help to explain some of this stuff better.
The guy who read for that part was actually pretty pissed at getting reamed in his employment contract on that day. What he actually read into the microphone, and made it into the game, is:
You're the man, bastard.
But he mumbles it a bit, and it sounds enough like 'your command master' that most people still think that's what the orc says. But listen to it more carefully next time you play.:-)
No, actual black holes have been created in partical smashers. They're just too small to suck up any particles, and evaporate in the nano second time frame.
The importance here is that if your company is guarding, say $10 billion worth of data using 1024 bit encryption, you should be worried whether there might be competitors capable of spending $1 billion to steal that $10 billion. There are drug companies, banks, and research organizations for whom this is not an imaginary threat.
Also, I think that putting a price tag on breaking 1024 bit encryption definitely qualifies as news for nerds. Who else would want to know?
oh the kuroshin jealousy is just so transparent it's painful to watch. many people who submit stories submit them to multiple sites, hoping to get noticed somewhere. slashdot just has better quality control than kuroshin, so it takes a little longer for the stories to get posted (not that slashdot quality is perfect, just better than kuroshin).
> Here's a great idea. Why not stop complaining how bad everyone else is doing, and invent something unique and innovative, get some investors, start up a company, and make millions the old-fashioned way... earn it! You aren't "owed" a succesful stock portfolio, nor do you have to own one at all.
I don't think he meant to suggest he was owed a successful stock portfolio, he suggested it wasn't a good reason to be participating in the online revolution anymore. Inventing something and making money the old fashioned way would in fact be precisely the point, taking people away from the drive to be online.
> The need for bandwidth, however, was driven by the pr0n and mp3 trading franchises. You're still talking about theft again. Pirating a copy of Microsoft Windows by sending it to your friends on the internet is the same as walking into CompUSA [compusa.com] and tucking a boxed copy under your jacket.
Pirating a copy of Microsoft Windows is not nearly the same as taking the boxed cardboard copy. This gets talked about and talked about, but physical theft is not nearly the same as unauthorized replication. The boxed copy has a box, a CD, and i'm not sure what else since all of my OSs have come OEM. The box and CD have production and packaging costs that aren't lost in the case of unauthorized reproduction. Yes, Microsoft does not get paid for their investment, but the two actions are not the same and should be argued seperately.
Umm, he's claiming a 30:1 error in reporting, and you're claiming a 3:1 error in reporting, and finally the other responder is claiming a 24:1 error in reporting.
That actually means the first post was the most dramatic error.
Scientific American mainly invites articles by people who are working in the field in question, to give the 'insiders' view of what is going on in a given field.
Unfortunately, the real nightmare of this situation is that Kevin earns a commission based on the sale price of the item. Therefore, knowing the truth or not, it is in his best interest to sell the more expensive P4, even if he knows it is not actually faster. In fact, as long as he thinks you are uneducated, it's really in his best financial interest to go ahead and trick you.
Check out your hard drive... my compile is disk load bound on a medium size project, I would expect any project with more than 10 meg of source code or so, particularly with a lot of small files would tend to be disk bound on most modern machines.
Not that I think it was a coincidence necessarily, but the easiest argument to make in favor of 'just a coincidence' is this:
Try to pick a date which would have been meaningless to any hypothetical terrorists because nothing of importance has occurred on that date in any of the last 200 years.
Unless we discover who is responsible and why, we won't really know if the date meant anything.
That's of course only $2k (the limit actually i think) in direct contributions over the table. The real question being asked here is how much money he is getting under the table. If you haven't noticed, most politicians live very extravagantly wealthy lives, without earning very much money. Most of them far beyond their inherited wealth, so where do you imagine the money comes from?
Human anatomy can last more than long enough to get to mars, in no gravity. However, to get to mars, we'd be using thrust, which would provide some gravity, and give the mars travellers a better medical condition to live in.
Mars has more gravity than the moon, so you're better off there also. Probably enough gravity on mars to keep people functioning properly for life, though that hasn't really been tested yet.
Mars is a good target for long term settlement because of the higher gravity. Given our current technology, it's the best choice for this reason (venus turns into an instantly better option the day we figure out how to make it cooler, or to build habitats that can take the heat with a very near 0 failure rate). There are also a lot more exploitable mineral resources on mars/venus than on the moon.
No, the highest frame rate people can distinguish has not been proven to be around 30fps. It's far far higher. In fact 20 fps is only where people begin to see animation rather than frames. Most people see animation rather than frames at 30 (something like 5-10% still see frames, particularly if they concentrate. these people tend to get headaches watching TV too long). At around 60 fps, virtually no one can see frames anymore, which means that if you want to guarantee that your audience is seeing smooth animation, you need to aim for 60 fps. However, most people can still see the improvement in frame rate (in terms of a perceived improvement in the quality of the smoothness) well beyond 60 fps.
Arrrrgghhhh... is this just a troll? The human eye can easily distinguish framerates over 70fps, at least virtually everyone can. Most people's eyes don't lose the capability to distinguish framerate until somewhere over 200 fps.
You can test this pretty easily for yourself. Get a game that can code-restrict framerate, but that is old enough to run really fast on a modern video card. Run it and a good monitor at various refresh rates. Try comparing (game/monitor) at 75/75 to 75/150 to 150/150 fps. Most people can easily tell the difference between 75/150 and 150/150. Try 120/150 and 150/150. Again, most people you'll ask will be able to see the difference, and identify which is smoother.
An estimate has already been made that vs reusable launch vehicles, a space elevator may be able to achieve an advantage of 1000:1 or better in price per kilogram lifted into orbit. Possibly as much as 10K:1 advantage.
There are plenty of companies who lift kilograms into orbit to make this financially viable if the construction costs can be brought into the range where either a government or a very large aerospace firm can consider constructing one.
Scientific American had a very good discussion of the subject back in decemberish?
I'm going to second this just to make sure it gets noticed. I've worked in the game industry for 3 years now.
Game Designer is the title for the guy with a management hat who gets the last word in making gameplay mechanics decisions and balance decisions. He is typically responsible for the game design documentation. He may or may not do any programming on the project. There is typically only one per title, this is a very hard job to get, and will involve working from the inside of an established company over a period of years most likely.
Game Programmer is the title for me, the guy who actually sits down and writes some code to make the game do what the Game Designer says. I take art resources and load them up and make them display at the right place at the right time. I make the king's prefix add damage (up to 150% damage, as specified in a spreadsheet by the game designer). There will likely be something like 4 to a dozen programmers, and one lead programmer on a title. The lead programmer gets more influence on design since he may be laying out engine features that create or restrain the type of content possible in the game.
The game programmer job typically gets some input on how the game works. Sometimes if you have a great idea, you just code it up, put it in the game, then ask the game designer: is this not cool? And if he says it is cool, you get to leave it in. This can be a fun and rewarding job, though frustrating when you lock horns with the game designer and lose. You get to mold the game somewhat, but it does not come from your vision.
If you have programming skills, and you'd like the game programmer job, a good way to get started is to prove you can do it by working on a game-mod project (say something like LMCTF for quake 2... that project got at least 3 people jobs with serious companies, including 2 game programmers now working for a top 3 game company).
I will also chime in on the glamour issue. It's all fun and games until the 15 months of 18 hour days starts. Then it is pretty rough on your family life, since you can't really drive home to sleep in your own bed when you're that tired. The pay is also typically significantly less than what you'd get applying equal skills to a business environment job. I've had offers at least 75% higher than what i'm making now, but I do enjoy being able to walk into fry's in my development team sweatshirt and have people in the games aisle ask me about it.
In any case, good luck with your dreams and ambitions.:-)
we can keep our weapons out of other galaxies for now.
also, the aliens would have to bring their weapons off their home planet, into their local space, transport them across the galaxy, and _use them_ here in order to destroy us....
We're at least 10-15 years away from photorealism, quite possibly more. If you look at what the GeForce 3 can do in the XBOX, it's at least one thousand times short on polygons to let us render in real time the kinds of models that would be convincingly realistic. On the PC you're even worse off because of the bus interface.
Likewise, there are things we could do to improve realism that would take a thousand times the memory, and the kind of AI and physics that would help to convince you that you were looking at something alive could easily chew up that many more general purpose cpu cycles.
So if we manage to double computing power every year for 10 years we should be there. But I wouldn't bet on it for 15.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the most telling thing in your response is that it lacks a single positive point in favor of the movie, other than Jar-Jar being a very small part this time around.
I don't expect perfection from star wars. I hoped for an enjoyable moviegoing experience, though. Frankly, it was a bad movie. It continued and detailed the fall of the republic story line, and that was the only rewarding part for me, really. Sadly, I felt they missed a huge obvious opportunity to tell a better version of the story.
I don't doubt ILMs effects capabilities. I don't, however, think they lived up to their potential in this movie. Sadly, having recently seen ep 4,5,6 the spaceships look better in those movies. The CGI just isn't up to model quality in this movie, and it certainly could be. They probably wasted too much of their graphics horsepower animating the landing pads.
Even more sadly, while the CGI wasn't as good as it could have been, it was the only thing making the movie tolerable for me. I wouldn't say that this movie sucked, but it was pretty painful to watch a good portion of the movie, and could have been probably more than an hour shorter without losing any of the decent parts.
The originals weren't perfect. But they were better than this movie. I still feel confident that in a year when the newness has worn off, most people will rank this one as the worst of the 5 movies.
Bleah, went to see it last night, and I was completely disappointed.
CGI: not that impressive. i'm really pretty unable to name a specific scene that will lose out when converted to pan & scan. why see this movie in the theater?
Jar-Jar: around just enough to really set you on edge, but doesn't die so you don't know what scene he's going to pop up in next.
Action yoda: loses! So now we're left hoping to see him win a fight in ep 3, but i'm guessing we'll be left yearning to see him win a fight even after 3. Also, it was disappointingly obvious that yoda wasn't real since he at no point physically interacts with dokuu.
Dokuu: should have been a completely earnest good guy. Imagine how much better a place the storyline would be in right now if everything else had been left the same, but dokuu was earnestly good, and killed by yoda (personally or by his forces, or better yet by anakin).
Jedi sword fights: nothing comparable to ep1. Nothing really exciting. Decent battle with jango fett ends undecided, later jango is completely unable to do anything vs windu. Too obvious intent to have boba clone grow up to kill windu. Sadly, boba is the best actor in the whole movie.
Acting: awful all around except for kenobi, who was decently portrayed, and boba, who does a really pretty good job of being the kid of a bounty hunter. This kid could have said yahoo in ep 1 and made us believe it.
Love story development: just awful and unbelievable.
I'm sad to say, but i'm guessing that in the months ahead, people will ultimately wind up ranking this the lowest of the 5 movies.
Having recently read the re-release of the book, the ending (spoiler):
Humanity breeds to a perfect individual, and then decides that since that individual is perfect, they'll just make clones of that person so that humanity will be as efficient as possible.
Once a sufficient portion of humanity is made up of clones, they begin to form a group mind.
The human group mind contacts the tauran group mind (to me, implied telepathy) and they discover:
a) the taurans have been all-clones and group mind for a long time.
b) the taurans didn't start the war. Actually, some humans who wanted to profiteer off of producing war-time goods started the war.
c) the taurans are more than willing to bend over backwards to achieve peace now that they can comprehend 'human' thought.
Also, haldeman has brought out two pseudo sequels fairly recently, neither of which measures up to the first, but both of which do help to explain some of this stuff better.
The guy who read for that part was actually pretty pissed at getting reamed in his employment contract on that day. What he actually read into the microphone, and made it into the game, is:
:-)
You're the man, bastard.
But he mumbles it a bit, and it sounds enough like 'your command master' that most people still think that's what the orc says. But listen to it more carefully next time you play.
No, actual black holes have been created in partical smashers. They're just too small to suck up any particles, and evaporate in the nano second time frame.
The importance here is that if your company is guarding, say $10 billion worth of data using 1024 bit encryption, you should be worried whether there might be competitors capable of spending $1 billion to steal that $10 billion. There are drug companies, banks, and research organizations for whom this is not an imaginary threat.
Also, I think that putting a price tag on breaking 1024 bit encryption definitely qualifies as news for nerds. Who else would want to know?
The comma was not incorrect, and is preferred by most writing guides.
oh the kuroshin jealousy is just so transparent it's painful to watch. many people who submit stories submit them to multiple sites, hoping to get noticed somewhere. slashdot just has better quality control than kuroshin, so it takes a little longer for the stories to get posted (not that slashdot quality is perfect, just better than kuroshin).
> Here's a great idea. Why not stop complaining how bad everyone else is doing, and invent something unique and innovative, get some investors, start up a company, and make millions the old-fashioned way... earn it! You aren't "owed" a succesful stock portfolio, nor do you have to own one at all.
I don't think he meant to suggest he was owed a successful stock portfolio, he suggested it wasn't a good reason to be participating in the online revolution anymore. Inventing something and making money the old fashioned way would in fact be precisely the point, taking people away from the drive to be online.
> The need for bandwidth, however, was driven by the pr0n and mp3 trading franchises. You're still talking about theft again. Pirating a copy of Microsoft Windows by sending it to your friends on the internet is the same as walking into CompUSA [compusa.com] and tucking a boxed copy under your jacket.
Pirating a copy of Microsoft Windows is not nearly the same as taking the boxed cardboard copy. This gets talked about and talked about, but physical theft is not nearly the same as unauthorized replication. The boxed copy has a box, a CD, and i'm not sure what else since all of my OSs have come OEM. The box and CD have production and packaging costs that aren't lost in the case of unauthorized reproduction. Yes, Microsoft does not get paid for their investment, but the two actions are not the same and should be argued seperately.
Umm, he's claiming a 30:1 error in reporting, and you're claiming a 3:1 error in reporting, and finally the other responder is claiming a 24:1 error in reporting.
That actually means the first post was the most dramatic error.
Scientific American mainly invites articles by people who are working in the field in question, to give the 'insiders' view of what is going on in a given field.
Unfortunately, the real nightmare of this situation is that Kevin earns a commission based on the sale price of the item. Therefore, knowing the truth or not, it is in his best interest to sell the more expensive P4, even if he knows it is not actually faster. In fact, as long as he thinks you are uneducated, it's really in his best financial interest to go ahead and trick you.
Check out your hard drive ... my compile is disk load bound on a medium size project, I would expect any project with more than 10 meg of source code or so, particularly with a lot of small files would tend to be disk bound on most modern machines.
Not that I think it was a coincidence necessarily, but the easiest argument to make in favor of 'just a coincidence' is this:
Try to pick a date which would have been meaningless to any hypothetical terrorists because nothing of importance has occurred on that date in any of the last 200 years.
Unless we discover who is responsible and why, we won't really know if the date meant anything.
That's of course only $2k (the limit actually i think) in direct contributions over the table. The real question being asked here is how much money he is getting under the table. If you haven't noticed, most politicians live very extravagantly wealthy lives, without earning very much money. Most of them far beyond their inherited wealth, so where do you imagine the money comes from?
Human anatomy can last more than long enough to get to mars, in no gravity. However, to get to mars, we'd be using thrust, which would provide some gravity, and give the mars travellers a better medical condition to live in.
Mars has more gravity than the moon, so you're better off there also. Probably enough gravity on mars to keep people functioning properly for life, though that hasn't really been tested yet.
Mars is a good target for long term settlement because of the higher gravity. Given our current technology, it's the best choice for this reason (venus turns into an instantly better option the day we figure out how to make it cooler, or to build habitats that can take the heat with a very near 0 failure rate). There are also a lot more exploitable mineral resources on mars/venus than on the moon.
I think the key here though is 'yet' ... with that kind of media exposure, it really is just a matter of time before your first murderous rampage.
No, the highest frame rate people can distinguish has not been proven to be around 30fps. It's far far higher. In fact 20 fps is only where people begin to see animation rather than frames. Most people see animation rather than frames at 30 (something like 5-10% still see frames, particularly if they concentrate. these people tend to get headaches watching TV too long). At around 60 fps, virtually no one can see frames anymore, which means that if you want to guarantee that your audience is seeing smooth animation, you need to aim for 60 fps. However, most people can still see the improvement in frame rate (in terms of a perceived improvement in the quality of the smoothness) well beyond 60 fps.
Arrrrgghhhh ... is this just a troll? The human eye can easily distinguish framerates over 70fps, at least virtually everyone can. Most people's eyes don't lose the capability to distinguish framerate until somewhere over 200 fps.
You can test this pretty easily for yourself. Get a game that can code-restrict framerate, but that is old enough to run really fast on a modern video card. Run it and a good monitor at various refresh rates. Try comparing (game/monitor) at 75/75 to 75/150 to 150/150 fps. Most people can easily tell the difference between 75/150 and 150/150. Try 120/150 and 150/150. Again, most people you'll ask will be able to see the difference, and identify which is smoother.
shift click on the potions that are left in your inventory after you die. they reload into the belt automatically.
An estimate has already been made that vs reusable launch vehicles, a space elevator may be able to achieve an advantage of 1000:1 or better in price per kilogram lifted into orbit. Possibly as much as 10K:1 advantage.
There are plenty of companies who lift kilograms into orbit to make this financially viable if the construction costs can be brought into the range where either a government or a very large aerospace firm can consider constructing one.
Scientific American had a very good discussion of the subject back in decemberish?
I'm going to second this just to make sure it gets noticed. I've worked in the game industry for 3 years now.
... that project got at least 3 people jobs with serious companies, including 2 game programmers now working for a top 3 game company).
:-)
Game Designer is the title for the guy with a management hat who gets the last word in making gameplay mechanics decisions and balance decisions. He is typically responsible for the game design documentation. He may or may not do any programming on the project. There is typically only one per title, this is a very hard job to get, and will involve working from the inside of an established company over a period of years most likely.
Game Programmer is the title for me, the guy who actually sits down and writes some code to make the game do what the Game Designer says. I take art resources and load them up and make them display at the right place at the right time. I make the king's prefix add damage (up to 150% damage, as specified in a spreadsheet by the game designer). There will likely be something like 4 to a dozen programmers, and one lead programmer on a title. The lead programmer gets more influence on design since he may be laying out engine features that create or restrain the type of content possible in the game.
The game programmer job typically gets some input on how the game works. Sometimes if you have a great idea, you just code it up, put it in the game, then ask the game designer: is this not cool? And if he says it is cool, you get to leave it in. This can be a fun and rewarding job, though frustrating when you lock horns with the game designer and lose. You get to mold the game somewhat, but it does not come from your vision.
If you have programming skills, and you'd like the game programmer job, a good way to get started is to prove you can do it by working on a game-mod project (say something like LMCTF for quake 2
I will also chime in on the glamour issue. It's all fun and games until the 15 months of 18 hour days starts. Then it is pretty rough on your family life, since you can't really drive home to sleep in your own bed when you're that tired. The pay is also typically significantly less than what you'd get applying equal skills to a business environment job. I've had offers at least 75% higher than what i'm making now, but I do enjoy being able to walk into fry's in my development team sweatshirt and have people in the games aisle ask me about it.
In any case, good luck with your dreams and ambitions.
we can keep our weapons out of other galaxies for now.
....
also, the aliens would have to bring their weapons off their home planet, into their local space, transport them across the galaxy, and _use them_ here in order to destroy us
Even better is thinking carefully about the connection between more tv watching and independence.
I work in the industry.
We're at least 10-15 years away from photorealism, quite possibly more. If you look at what the GeForce 3 can do in the XBOX, it's at least one thousand times short on polygons to let us render in real time the kinds of models that would be convincingly realistic. On the PC you're even worse off because of the bus interface.
Likewise, there are things we could do to improve realism that would take a thousand times the memory, and the kind of AI and physics that would help to convince you that you were looking at something alive could easily chew up that many more general purpose cpu cycles.
So if we manage to double computing power every year for 10 years we should be there. But I wouldn't bet on it for 15.