You're right, if Blizzard makes a good product, they have every right to do what they want with it. That's their freedom. It's within their rights to protect their product.
Your right to swing your fist ends at my face.
As soon as they start dictating what a third party can not develop because it isn't in their interest, we have a big fucking problem. I should have the right to compile and use whatever legally obtained source code I want. And I should also have the right to distribute software which I have engineered legally.
If Blizzard can't deal with the fruits of the rights that I have, they should try harder at exercising their rights to protect their product. That gives them a world of flexibility, and if they're too lazy to make good use of that flexibility, then it should be their ass that gets hurt.
On the topic of piracy... bnetd does not "circumvent" Blizzard's authentication, it undermines Blizzard's authentication by omitting it, because Blizzard has made sure that it can't be included. There's a bit of a difference there. That difference is crucial. There are lots of really good reasons to use bnetd other than to pirate Blizzard products. If Blizzard is worried about bnetd's lack of authentication, then they can give the necessary code to provide authentication to the bnetd project. And even then, it should be bnetd's decision to implement it. If they don't want to, they shouldn't have to. And if Blizzard can't do that because their system is too weak, then that's Blizzard's fault for making it weak.
If you want to charge for software, go on ahead. But it is up to you to bear the burden of piracy. You've an arsenal of rights with which to minimize that problem so don't start hacking away at my rights instead of doing the job you are responsible for.
Given the talent, team and budget, my focus would have been on the quality of the animation (not the detail of the modeling) from day one. I give them a large break because they're new, its their first film, and you can see the extra hours (and dollars) went into those oh-so-luscious models. If they made a few more films, or had even more time, I have no doubt they'd get it right.
There are really very few technical constraints on the amount of detail you can put into a 3D project. You can add detail after detail until you achieve photo realism (or better.) However, with each added detail it gets more expensive to render, and those details take time. The render (and thus financial) hit you take from animating something well is no where near as huge as adding more detail, but it often take a lot more time to do it right.
So there's a little bit of a tradeoff between what you have more of, time or money. Though 3D work like what you see in Final Fantasy takes a lot of both. MoCap is often used to speed up the animation process and get fluid animation, but it works a lot better in theory than in practice. MoCap can leave a lot of cleaning up to do, you spend a lot of time tweaking things here and there to get it just right. And in some situations, perfection requires that you skip MoCap altogether.
The visual quality of movies is constantly getting better. Final Fantasy was exciting because you can see the direction that 3D is going to be heading and it makes it less hard to imagine true photo realism. But the natural advancement of technology is responsible for that increase in quality, and I've come to anticipate it.
I get excited not when I see Moore's law in effect, but when I see the people behind a project holding themselves, not their machines, to a whole new standard of quality -- like at Pixar. That's where you see real art happen.
It definitely shows that people can connect and identify a lot more with fewer polygons that are more expressive and emotive than they can with near-photorealism that just isn't all there.
The biggest strike it had against it was that, while films like Shrek, Toy Story, and Monsters Inc. were cartoons with cartoon plots and cartoon characters, this was the first 3D anime, with an anime plot and anime characters. This is asking for poor levels of acceptance, especially with an American audience. Not that there is no American anime following, that couldn't be further from the truth. But mainstream moviegoing Americans don't have anime-goggles they can put on to watch this film through... They're either going to watch it through cartoon-goggles, video-game-movie-goggles, or sci-fi-goggles, and its likely to fail them in those capacities.
Poorly animated. I don't know how many casual viewers picked it up, but the animation just wasn't working in the movie. It might have been too much reliance on MoCap, but whatever the case, it was really distracting for me.
Quality animation is something you can't buy, even if you can afford the levels of detail that Final Fantasy had.
I think the reason it didn't do well was that the plot was just too "hunh?" for the average person to enjoy. Its sad to see this happen, they were really pushing some limits.
Exactly. They HAVE to. We are the United States of America and we don't have to; and we can't. You don't turn the most capable country in the history of the whole fucking world, and put them on the task of watching every fucking citizen with an eagle eye till a few specs of information on a computer a thousand miles away happen to come together in such a way worthy of alerting G.I. Joe at the airport.
We have an immature relationship with technology, and we don't yet have the ethical vocabulary to begin to describe what is wrong with this. On top of that, most of us don't even realize that we're missing anything. That is at the heart of the problem here. If we don't grow up fast, this technology will become our master.
I'm surprised no one here knows this. The FTL comment comes from the initial unveiling of the G4 where they were discussing the velocity engine and gigaflops. They had some science guy talk about how many calculations the processor can do before the light from the monitor hits your face.
That's probably where they got that label. Not that it isn't dumb.
To be redundant, you probably won't pay this 'tax' if you're buying generic media.
It's worth noting that you probably pay taxes for many things you aren't responsible for, but the responsible attitude to take should be a willingness to sacrifice a few pennies if it's going to help balance things out. Beyond morality and economy, the underlying theme of all our laws and governing is intended to be one of balance. And this "pirating tax" (I wouldn't call it that) is supposed to balance the effects (and the perceived effects) of open and easily copied formats. If they take away that openness then we're off balance again. If they took away the tax AND left things open, we're probably still off balance (still in the RIAA/MPAA's favor), but that is where we begin to debate the effects of "piracy" -- which can barely be resolved on/. much less by our government.
I say keep the tax, distribute it fairly, and let me use what I've bought license to.
More importantly, has anyone considered a revised "slave galley" design for a plane that is powered by chickens rather than humans? If I were in possession of such a design, where might I be able to test it without violating any animal cruelty laws?
I am an American and I have a right to steal. To anyone who says otherwise, I say, quite plainly, fuck you! We stole land from the natives, sovereignty from the British, and slaves from Africa. I live in California (taken by the U.S. in 1850, and again by the Propellerheads in 1998) and my tax dollars are stolen for rich people by the Bush administration, which wouldn't even be the administration if it weren't for stealing!
The ideas behind the games we steal have probably been stolen from a Hollywood movie script. Applications steal features from each other regularly. And music! Don't get me started, that whole fucking industry is about stealing!
Which is fine! But as an American, I'm afraid this means that stealing is my birthright.
The biggest problem with stealing is that we've given it a stigma. Somewhere, at some point in time, we engrained into our common morality this bullshit idea that stealing is wrong, and because every one of us and every law we've crafted agrees on that premise, we can't admit when we're doing it. So what happens? We cover that up with more bullshit, because bullshit also happens to be this country's leading industry.
"Yes, that's right, America's most profitable business is still the manufacture, packaging, distribution, and marketing of bullshit. High quality, Grade-A, prime cut, pure, American bullshit." -- George Carlin, "You Are All Diseased"
So the little guy gets squashed not because he's stealing, but simply because he can't produce as much bullshit as the forces he's opposing. But what's interesting about the situation is that there is so much bullshit involved that it actually begins to fold in on itself. However, this is still all built on one bullshit idea, that stealing is wrong. And if we recognized that the idea that stealing is wrong is bullshit to begin with, well... you'd better run because a big tower of bullshit is going to fall.
I hack software regularly, and perhaps do some things which are technically illegal, but don't involve using software that I don't have a license for. Is it technically illegal to have a copy of the MSDN Windows 98 release so I don't have to pull out Windows 3.1 floppies for my upgrade CD every time I want to reinstall Windows 98 for my kids? Probably. Am I stealing anything I didn't pay for? No. Would Microsoft's lawyers destroy me if they had a chance? You bet.
And I would like to do the redundant thing and underscore the fact that it's not what you're using that would get you destroyed by Microsoft's lawyers, but how you're using it. This is the real threat to freedom.
Awww, but that means we'll have to buy new cases! Cases with more buttons! Unless of course you have schematics for the button in question.
Any technological advance not capable of fitting in my current case is not really a technological advance.
Re:Cutting edge for a few months
on
New AIBO Demo'd
·
· Score: 1
New dalmations are being born every day. Technology ages, just like flesh. What's special about AIBO, or at least a design goal, is that you can grow attached to it. You develop feelings for the little guy (or gal) and no amount of new technology will make those feelings go away, even if it doesn't have all the latest features. But even with these new whiz-bang features, the product itself isn't entirely worthwhile or remarkable, its just such a direct appeal to emotion that most people can't help but grow attached.
But I hope it evolves beyond even this, into a "personality vehicle" -- where the capabilities of the hardware are of secondary importance to the personality that you've spent so much time "growing" through day-to-day interaction. The hardware will need to be changed out everytime your AIBO falls in the pool, gets hit by a car, or when Sony releases a new model with capabilities worth paying for -- but the carefully (or perhaps not so carefully) trained network of reactions that you have perfected for your robotic pal will be the same as you've ever known, and you'll only have to spend time making sure your AIBO learns to properly use whatever new features it's been granted, as opposed to trying to make sure that it relearns everything from scratch to be exactly the way it was before (which with complex AI is pretty much impossible to do.)
We are trapped in our bodies for now, but AIBO and other A.I. "creatures" already have the possibility of an indefinite lifespan presented to them. Even if this doesn't become the reality of AIBO (which would be a mistake), don't pretend to not be ruled by your emotions. I know you still play your Atari 2600.
Not entirely true. This fault was present in the 2F13 installer (not sure if that's the same as 2.0) and it completely wasted my friend's Classic partition. He probably should have reported it, but it was a prerelease copy so he figured it'd be fixed by the final. If Apple did any quality testing, they'd have found the problem, too. That said, it should be pointed out that the flaw is with the installer and not the program itself. iTunes 2 itself seems to be wonderfully coded. This could also explain why the problem wasn't caught, if they were focused on testing the application itself and not the installation process, too.
Its an expensive lesson for Apple to learn. Few can even afford to even begin to offer compensation or be held otherwise accountable for the loss of data -- it's precious stuff. But I'd bet whoever made that installer feels really shitty right now. Karma.
You're absolutely right. The games need to slow down, but this can only be done one way without significantly impacting playability: we need bigger maps and more detailed terrain. I think the standard practice of "must be playable at 640x480" has contributed to ridiculously short unit ranges, ridiculously small maps, and game play that is so fast and condensed that you can't make out the distinct advantages of some units over others. The other issues like supply lines, detailed unit status, etc. will seem more obvious when your base doesn't occupy one side of the screen and their base the other.
A good example of this is Starcraft's Vulture unit. A very nimble unit, potentially the fastest in the game if I'm not mistaken. Hardly ever used. Why? There's no need for recon in Starcraft. If their base isn't at spawn point 1, then you know they're at spawn point 2. Once actual recon is actually useful, I think much of the rest of the strategy will fall into place nicely.
Total Annihilation was kindof getting the map thing right, but not completely. The gameplay just wasn't as well done as Starcraft.
After seeing this, I'm scared. For a long time I've wanted to *paint* (not dye) the outer two panels on the cover of my PowerBook G3 (glossy primary red). After seeing a moron do it wrong, someone mind producing a clear and definitive guide to doing it right?
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, if Blizzard makes a good product, they have every right to do what they want with it. That's their freedom. It's within their rights to protect their product.
Your right to swing your fist ends at my face.
As soon as they start dictating what a third party can not develop because it isn't in their interest, we have a big fucking problem. I should have the right to compile and use whatever legally obtained source code I want. And I should also have the right to distribute software which I have engineered legally.
If Blizzard can't deal with the fruits of the rights that I have, they should try harder at exercising their rights to protect their product. That gives them a world of flexibility, and if they're too lazy to make good use of that flexibility, then it should be their ass that gets hurt.
On the topic of piracy... bnetd does not "circumvent" Blizzard's authentication, it undermines Blizzard's authentication by omitting it, because Blizzard has made sure that it can't be included. There's a bit of a difference there. That difference is crucial. There are lots of really good reasons to use bnetd other than to pirate Blizzard products. If Blizzard is worried about bnetd's lack of authentication, then they can give the necessary code to provide authentication to the bnetd project. And even then, it should be bnetd's decision to implement it. If they don't want to, they shouldn't have to. And if Blizzard can't do that because their system is too weak, then that's Blizzard's fault for making it weak.
If you want to charge for software, go on ahead. But it is up to you to bear the burden of piracy. You've an arsenal of rights with which to minimize that problem so don't start hacking away at my rights instead of doing the job you are responsible for.
Given the talent, team and budget, my focus would have been on the quality of the animation (not the detail of the modeling) from day one. I give them a large break because they're new, its their first film, and you can see the extra hours (and dollars) went into those oh-so-luscious models. If they made a few more films, or had even more time, I have no doubt they'd get it right.
There are really very few technical constraints on the amount of detail you can put into a 3D project. You can add detail after detail until you achieve photo realism (or better.) However, with each added detail it gets more expensive to render, and those details take time. The render (and thus financial) hit you take from animating something well is no where near as huge as adding more detail, but it often take a lot more time to do it right.
So there's a little bit of a tradeoff between what you have more of, time or money. Though 3D work like what you see in Final Fantasy takes a lot of both. MoCap is often used to speed up the animation process and get fluid animation, but it works a lot better in theory than in practice. MoCap can leave a lot of cleaning up to do, you spend a lot of time tweaking things here and there to get it just right. And in some situations, perfection requires that you skip MoCap altogether.
The visual quality of movies is constantly getting better. Final Fantasy was exciting because you can see the direction that 3D is going to be heading and it makes it less hard to imagine true photo realism. But the natural advancement of technology is responsible for that increase in quality, and I've come to anticipate it.
I get excited not when I see Moore's law in effect, but when I see the people behind a project holding themselves, not their machines, to a whole new standard of quality -- like at Pixar. That's where you see real art happen.
It definitely shows that people can connect and identify a lot more with fewer polygons that are more expressive and emotive than they can with near-photorealism that just isn't all there.
The biggest strike it had against it was that, while films like Shrek, Toy Story, and Monsters Inc. were cartoons with cartoon plots and cartoon characters, this was the first 3D anime, with an anime plot and anime characters. This is asking for poor levels of acceptance, especially with an American audience. Not that there is no American anime following, that couldn't be further from the truth. But mainstream moviegoing Americans don't have anime-goggles they can put on to watch this film through... They're either going to watch it through cartoon-goggles, video-game-movie-goggles, or sci-fi-goggles, and its likely to fail them in those capacities.
Poorly animated. I don't know how many casual viewers picked it up, but the animation just wasn't working in the movie. It might have been too much reliance on MoCap, but whatever the case, it was really distracting for me.
Quality animation is something you can't buy, even if you can afford the levels of detail that Final Fantasy had.
I think the reason it didn't do well was that the plot was just too "hunh?" for the average person to enjoy. Its sad to see this happen, they were really pushing some limits.
Exactly. They HAVE to. We are the United States of America and we don't have to; and we can't. You don't turn the most capable country in the history of the whole fucking world, and put them on the task of watching every fucking citizen with an eagle eye till a few specs of information on a computer a thousand miles away happen to come together in such a way worthy of alerting G.I. Joe at the airport.
We have an immature relationship with technology, and we don't yet have the ethical vocabulary to begin to describe what is wrong with this. On top of that, most of us don't even realize that we're missing anything. That is at the heart of the problem here. If we don't grow up fast, this technology will become our master.
I'm surprised no one here knows this. The FTL comment comes from the initial unveiling of the G4 where they were discussing the velocity engine and gigaflops. They had some science guy talk about how many calculations the processor can do before the light from the monitor hits your face.
That's probably where they got that label. Not that it isn't dumb.
What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge SPAM?
No, I'm trying to tell you that when your legal team is ready, you won't have to.
To be redundant, you probably won't pay this 'tax' if you're buying generic media.
/. much less by our government.
It's worth noting that you probably pay taxes for many things you aren't responsible for, but the responsible attitude to take should be a willingness to sacrifice a few pennies if it's going to help balance things out. Beyond morality and economy, the underlying theme of all our laws and governing is intended to be one of balance. And this "pirating tax" (I wouldn't call it that) is supposed to balance the effects (and the perceived effects) of open and easily copied formats. If they take away that openness then we're off balance again. If they took away the tax AND left things open, we're probably still off balance (still in the RIAA/MPAA's favor), but that is where we begin to debate the effects of "piracy" -- which can barely be resolved on
I say keep the tax, distribute it fairly, and let me use what I've bought license to.
More importantly, has anyone considered a revised "slave galley" design for a plane that is powered by chickens rather than humans? If I were in possession of such a design, where might I be able to test it without violating any animal cruelty laws?
I am an American and I have a right to steal. To anyone who says otherwise, I say, quite plainly, fuck you! We stole land from the natives, sovereignty from the British, and slaves from Africa. I live in California (taken by the U.S. in 1850, and again by the Propellerheads in 1998) and my tax dollars are stolen for rich people by the Bush administration, which wouldn't even be the administration if it weren't for stealing!
The ideas behind the games we steal have probably been stolen from a Hollywood movie script. Applications steal features from each other regularly. And music! Don't get me started, that whole fucking industry is about stealing!
Which is fine! But as an American, I'm afraid this means that stealing is my birthright.
The biggest problem with stealing is that we've given it a stigma. Somewhere, at some point in time, we engrained into our common morality this bullshit idea that stealing is wrong, and because every one of us and every law we've crafted agrees on that premise, we can't admit when we're doing it. So what happens? We cover that up with more bullshit, because bullshit also happens to be this country's leading industry.
So the little guy gets squashed not because he's stealing, but simply because he can't produce as much bullshit as the forces he's opposing. But what's interesting about the situation is that there is so much bullshit involved that it actually begins to fold in on itself. However, this is still all built on one bullshit idea, that stealing is wrong. And if we recognized that the idea that stealing is wrong is bullshit to begin with, well... you'd better run because a big tower of bullshit is going to fall.
Someone grab the pr0n before we go down!
And I would like to do the redundant thing and underscore the fact that it's not what you're using that would get you destroyed by Microsoft's lawyers, but how you're using it. This is the real threat to freedom.
Awww, but that means we'll have to buy new cases! Cases with more buttons! Unless of course you have schematics for the button in question.
Any technological advance not capable of fitting in my current case is not really a technological advance.
New dalmations are being born every day. Technology ages, just like flesh. What's special about AIBO, or at least a design goal, is that you can grow attached to it. You develop feelings for the little guy (or gal) and no amount of new technology will make those feelings go away, even if it doesn't have all the latest features. But even with these new whiz-bang features, the product itself isn't entirely worthwhile or remarkable, its just such a direct appeal to emotion that most people can't help but grow attached.
But I hope it evolves beyond even this, into a "personality vehicle" -- where the capabilities of the hardware are of secondary importance to the personality that you've spent so much time "growing" through day-to-day interaction. The hardware will need to be changed out everytime your AIBO falls in the pool, gets hit by a car, or when Sony releases a new model with capabilities worth paying for -- but the carefully (or perhaps not so carefully) trained network of reactions that you have perfected for your robotic pal will be the same as you've ever known, and you'll only have to spend time making sure your AIBO learns to properly use whatever new features it's been granted, as opposed to trying to make sure that it relearns everything from scratch to be exactly the way it was before (which with complex AI is pretty much impossible to do.)
We are trapped in our bodies for now, but AIBO and other A.I. "creatures" already have the possibility of an indefinite lifespan presented to them. Even if this doesn't become the reality of AIBO (which would be a mistake), don't pretend to not be ruled by your emotions. I know you still play your Atari 2600.
Agreed completely. Illegitimate copies breed paranoia, I guess. Another reason why open development is the way to go.
Not entirely true. This fault was present in the 2F13 installer (not sure if that's the same as 2.0) and it completely wasted my friend's Classic partition. He probably should have reported it, but it was a prerelease copy so he figured it'd be fixed by the final. If Apple did any quality testing, they'd have found the problem, too. That said, it should be pointed out that the flaw is with the installer and not the program itself. iTunes 2 itself seems to be wonderfully coded. This could also explain why the problem wasn't caught, if they were focused on testing the application itself and not the installation process, too.
Its an expensive lesson for Apple to learn. Few can even afford to even begin to offer compensation or be held otherwise accountable for the loss of data -- it's precious stuff. But I'd bet whoever made that installer feels really shitty right now. Karma.
You're absolutely right. The games need to slow down, but this can only be done one way without significantly impacting playability: we need bigger maps and more detailed terrain. I think the standard practice of "must be playable at 640x480" has contributed to ridiculously short unit ranges, ridiculously small maps, and game play that is so fast and condensed that you can't make out the distinct advantages of some units over others. The other issues like supply lines, detailed unit status, etc. will seem more obvious when your base doesn't occupy one side of the screen and their base the other.
A good example of this is Starcraft's Vulture unit. A very nimble unit, potentially the fastest in the game if I'm not mistaken. Hardly ever used. Why? There's no need for recon in Starcraft. If their base isn't at spawn point 1, then you know they're at spawn point 2. Once actual recon is actually useful, I think much of the rest of the strategy will fall into place nicely.
Total Annihilation was kindof getting the map thing right, but not completely. The gameplay just wasn't as well done as Starcraft.
After seeing this, I'm scared. For a long time I've wanted to *paint* (not dye) the outer two panels on the cover of my PowerBook G3 (glossy primary red). After seeing a moron do it wrong, someone mind producing a clear and definitive guide to doing it right?