"Hey, Mike. Thank god you called. The mosquitos are really something out here, you should see them. Yowch! God dammit! Hey, do me a favor Mike? Hang up and call me back!"
This is a mind-bender to think about, because the premise is wrong. You are talking about an external viewpoint as if it exists "next to" time, as if you can still watch things unfold. Time is not like a flowing river that you can just step away from. If the timeline is predetermined, then the only way to examine all of it is to be at the end of it. From that point of view, everything is history. It has already happened.
Today, if you know about JFK's assassination, does that mean that the shooter did not have any choice and that he was fated to kill the president? No, it just means that that's how it happened in history. Likewise for if you examine the timeline from an external viewpoint.
Of course, time travel makes things very complicated. If going back in time is impossible, and thus round-trips are impossible, then it's not too bad - there's no such thing as foreknowledge, and besides being a little weird for people when you pop up out of nowhere in the future, nothing is fundamentally wrong. But if you can go back in time, all bets are off.
Here's where the "free will" paradox really gets weird. If you can go back in time, and you "change" something (ie, interact with the world around you), there are two possibilities. You can end up with a causal loop (being your own grandfather, or from the Matrix, "What's really going to bake your noodle is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?") or else you can end up with a paradox (you kill your ancestor).
One intepretation of the one-timeline approach is that paradoxes cannot occur; ie, something will happen and you can't kill your father. That is a blatent violation of "free will", no matter how you classify it. I have my own interpretation...
[I suppose that some will consider this as a venture into parellel universes. It's not quite the same, however.]
I believe that you can kill your grandfather. And that you always killed your grandfather, and that you always will kill your grandfather. So the question becomes, where did you come from? And the answer is, a detached loop on the timeline.
It's eaisest use the [poor and misleading] analogy of time as a ribbon. In a traditional causal loop, the ribbon doubles back on itself and repeats a portion of its length. Events from the future influence the past and cause it to repeat future history as you know it. But what if you changed history? Now the ribbon doubles back, but doesn't repeat that portion... it goes in a new direction. So there is a portion of the timeline that exists in an entirely different direction, and then doubles back at the point of time travel, and then goes on with its course. A detached loop, if you will.
Now here's the real trick. If you try to go forward in time again to return to your "present", what happens?
I believe that you cannot. Whatever mechanism you use for time travel is permenantly stuck on that detached loop. If you activate it, even just to go forward by five seconds, you will end up on that detached loop and it will seem as though you never killed your grandfather. And if you try to go beyind the point where you went back in time to change things, you will be unable to get there. At that point, where time loops back and begins a different path, everything along that branch of time simply ceases to exist.
The many-universes approach would say that you simultaneously did and did not kill your grandfather and that both universes continue from there to infinity. I say that you always killed your grandfather, except for that little detached part of the timeline, which loops back at the point of time travel and does not continue.
You make the classic mistake about a one-path deterministic future: "There is no free will."
From an external viewpoint, it would seem that free will must not exist, because the timeline is completely determined. But we exist as creatures in time, not external to it. At any moment, we are free to make our own choices. Just because these choices have already happened from another viewpoint does not mean that we did not have free will at the time of the choice.
The plastic mail was only for the extras and for battle shots. Still shots on primary characters often used real chain mail. They found some outfit that was selling whole sheets of thin chain link, and made armor out of it. Don't ask me how I know this.
There was heavy, heavy cutting on the Faramir plot line and especially at Osgiliath. It's unclear how much of it will be restored but we will see a lot of backstory with Faramir and a deeper understanding of his motivations to take the ring back to his father.
The ring in Osgiliath is a deviation, but I think it is a good one. The wraiths found the ring in Osgiliath, and thus Sauron believes that the ring is being taken to Denethor. This would be a better justification for him to unleash his armies, if he believes that Gondor will soon be under his power. It also provides further cover for Frodo, since Sauron believes that he knows what is happening with the ring, instead of just searching for it and not knowing.
It's not quite the events as they played out in Tolkein's mind, but I think it works out better in the end.
The problem you're having is not that Jackson did not handle the Ents well. The problem is that there are giant, moving, slow-talking trees (or tree-like beings) that play a pivotal role in the story. Some people have even suggested that Tolkein designed the Ents specifically so that the books could never be translated to a visual medium like film. You give them an F in the film, but can you even think about what another director or less-talented effects house would have done? You have to give them at least a C- for effort.
That strikes me as incredibly stupid, for several reasons.
1) The line is 'Let's hunt some Orc', and it is not out of character when you consider that it's one of the few times he is opening up and talking to characters that he feels at ease with. With the elves, he must be proper; with Boromir, he is slightly distrustful. With Frodo, he feels overbearing responsibility. Now at last he is with two good friends who need some cheering up and some motivation, and he can speak plainly to them. OK, the wording is hardly Tolkein-esque, but then again, Tolkein's was never good at writing plain, friendly dialogue.
2) Please explain how this line is an Americanism when the screenplay was written, storyboarded, filmed, produced, edited, and audio-mastered in New Zealand.
OK people can stop modding my parent post already. The site is not about censorship, its just supposed to be a discussion board for people who came across things that they wish they hadn't seen. I judged it on a few posts' contents, which you should never judge an entire public message board by.
Anyway, it still has no place as a news item here, IMO. And many of the posters there are just as twisted as the fanart they are linking to. But whatever.
Hrm. I just glanced at a couple posts there and all I saw were 2 camps of people: those saying it shouldn't be allowed on the net, and those laughing and saying thanks for the links. I really don't feel like staying around that site for any longer than I have to; if you say that I've misjudged them, I'll believe you.
Oh no, you were exposed to someone else's thoughts and you didn't like them. Wah.
Seriously, I understand where people are coming from on this - I, too, have a special place in my heart for the stories I read/watched as a young child - but what would you prefer? Censorship? There's not really a middle ground. You don't like it, don't look at it. Sorry if you got offended but that's your problem.
Now then, this site... Is this even about "broken memories" or "raped childhoods"? No. This is just a set of links to every dirty cartoon or story ever drawn. It's more like "cartoon porn paradise". So, nice try on the part of a bleeding heart/. editor to encourage censorship, but this story shouldn't have been approved. And nice job by the submittor to get a cartoon porn site on the front page.
Just saw the other comment on possibly buggy network drivers... I don't think that this is the cause, since my no-name network cards are from different brands and different chipsets, but I suppose it's possible.
It's still very strange that Kazaa, Gnucleus, and other P2P apps don't exhibit this behavior. What is BitTorrent doing so differently?
On all of my VIA chipset athlons, whenever I try the BitTorrent client I am guaranteed a hard crash or a bluescreen within ten minutes. The error messages are different, but always imply a hardware error. Yet burn-in tests and local LAN filetransfers can run for days without any problem.
Flaw in Win2K SP3's net stack? Probably. It shouldn't even be possible for a user application to cause a bluescreen. I don't blame BitTorrent directly but I do wish that someone would hunt down the cause and find a workaround. Until then, I'll get my releases days later from Kazaa Lite, just like everyone else...
I don't know... I "got" the plot (though it seemed a bit hokey to my Western-trained mind), that wasn't my issue with the movie.
My problem was the formulaic and completely uninteresting script. Within moments of each new scene, it was easy to guess what would happen in the next five minutes. There were times in the movie when I could predict the dialogue right down to the timing. The lines (and actor's delivery) of the trecherous general were especially pathetic; he was like an amalgam of every bad movie-villian cliche. At the scene near the end where he pounds the controls in ultimate frustration, only to look up and mutter a soft "Oh...", I nearly walked out.
The CGI didn't look exactly "real" but I was willing to buy it, it was the cheesy characters that turned me off. Square would have had a gold mine if they had brought in a writer who could handle dialogue and real personalities.
The Geforce 4 MX isn't really a Geforce 4 at all. In fact, it isn't even a Geforce 3. It has a core very similar to the Geforce 2 series, with only fixed-function pipelines. In other words, it is a DirectX 8.0 part and cannot run programs that rely on vertex programs or pixel shaders. It can't do any of the really cool things that programmable pipeline cards can, like per-pixel environment reflection mapping, motion blur, or special lighting effects (saturation/desaturation, color warping, etc).
It's reasonably fast at what it does, so it will run Doom 3 at a decent framerate. But it doesn't support the expected features for a card of its generation, so it will be running at low detail with no special effects.
FTP supports a single connection (Passive, or PASV in the actual protocol), which is what most web browsers use by default.
No, no, no. Jesus. Everyone always gets this wrong. FTP in any mode uses two TCP connections. Passive or not, there is a channel for data and a separate channel for commands.
The difference is that passive-mode means that the client initiates the data connection. The default FTP behavior is for the client to connect to port 21 on the server, and then the server initiates a data connection to the client.
Non-passive FTP clients are very hard for firewalls to keep track of, especially when NAT is involved. Passive is a little better because both connections are outgoing.
But at the same time, passive mode makes the server firewall's job tougher, because it requires an large range of incoming ports for the data connections.
No matter what the mode, FTP is not very firewall-friendly.
I've seen a fair share of bootleg DVDs and the subtitles are always aweful. Usually its just a lack of proofreading, but if there's an accent involved (especially something thick and heavily European) then all bets are off. "Bring your pretty face to my axe" is actually pretty close, if you consider that the sound during battles can be overwhelming. And by the 2-hour mark, the transcriber probably lost what little grasp he had of the plot to begin with.
Also, as another commenter pointed out, the guy didn't have a way to do screengrabs from a DVD so he took stills from the XviD screener floating around Kazaa. The text was added by hand but faithfully transcribed from his TV screen.
FYI, subtitles on DVDs are just a 16-color bitmap overlay. They can be as big or as small as you want, with graphics or text, on top or on the bottom or in the middle of the screen.
Patents are only public when they are finally approved. During the interim between filing and approval, they are not visible. These so-called "submarine patents" can be kept invisible for years, if you know the appropriate paperwork tricks. That whole aspect of the patent process is under close scrutiny and it is already much harder to pull off than it was a few years ago.
But the point is that RAMBUS filed for a patent, then pushed their idea as part of the SDRAM standard so that when their patent was finally granted, everyone would owe them money.
There is no amount of diligence or research that could have unearthed those patents during the approval process, short of torturing the RAMBUS representatives.
I mean, find a store that has it hooked up to a computer you can use, and scroll around a bit on a colorful web page. Just get an idea of the "smear" factor. Check out online reviews for models from the same manufacturer, then if it all seems good, find the cheapest price you can get on the web.
Well, if you think about it, the "smear" must be in the direction of movement when multiple frames are combined. Consider an object moving a small distance between two frames. As the first frame transitions into the second frame, the object appears to cross-fade or dissolve into its new location. As long as the inter-frame movements remain small and the image refreshes quickly enough (neither is a worry at 70+fps), the cross-fade looks identical to proper motion blur.
You haven't looked at LCD recently, I guess. I paid under $280 for a KDS 15" LCD to replace a 17" (16.1 viewable) Trinitron and it has no smearing whatsoever. The only thing I have ever noticed is when quickly scrolling white text over a black background, the text is visibly dimmer (but still readable).
There are plenty of LCD monitors with a total response time under 35 ms now, which is enough for 30 crisp, fully-contrasted frames per second. Quake 3 and other fast high-contrast games might lose some crispness, but the images are still clear and bright enough for the average joe. (Maybe even better-looking, since there's just the slightest hint of motion blur:)
Of course some very cheap LCDs have serious issues with ghosting, but you shouldn't have any problems as long as you try before you buy.
Btw, a ^= b ^= a ^= b is technically invalid code. There is no guarantee on the order of evaluations, and it could vary from compiler to compiler or with optimization level. I've seen it used all over the place and it pisses me off; it means the author assumed that 'this works for me so I'll assume it works for everyone'. Makes me wonder what other non-portable or compiler-specific tricks were used.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hey, Mike. Thank god you called. The mosquitos are really something out here, you should see them. Yowch! God dammit! Hey, do me a favor Mike? Hang up and call me back!"
This is a mind-bender to think about, because the premise is wrong. You are talking about an external viewpoint as if it exists "next to" time, as if you can still watch things unfold. Time is not like a flowing river that you can just step away from. If the timeline is predetermined, then the only way to examine all of it is to be at the end of it. From that point of view, everything is history. It has already happened.
... it goes in a new direction. So there is a portion of the timeline that exists in an entirely different direction, and then doubles back at the point of time travel, and then goes on with its course. A detached loop, if you will.
:)
Today, if you know about JFK's assassination, does that mean that the shooter did not have any choice and that he was fated to kill the president? No, it just means that that's how it happened in history. Likewise for if you examine the timeline from an external viewpoint.
Of course, time travel makes things very complicated. If going back in time is impossible, and thus round-trips are impossible, then it's not too bad - there's no such thing as foreknowledge, and besides being a little weird for people when you pop up out of nowhere in the future, nothing is fundamentally wrong. But if you can go back in time, all bets are off.
Here's where the "free will" paradox really gets weird. If you can go back in time, and you "change" something (ie, interact with the world around you), there are two possibilities. You can end up with a causal loop (being your own grandfather, or from the Matrix, "What's really going to bake your noodle is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?") or else you can end up with a paradox (you kill your ancestor).
One intepretation of the one-timeline approach is that paradoxes cannot occur; ie, something will happen and you can't kill your father. That is a blatent violation of "free will", no matter how you classify it. I have my own interpretation...
[I suppose that some will consider this as a venture into parellel universes. It's not quite the same, however.]
I believe that you can kill your grandfather. And that you always killed your grandfather, and that you always will kill your grandfather. So the question becomes, where did you come from? And the answer is, a detached loop on the timeline.
It's eaisest use the [poor and misleading] analogy of time as a ribbon. In a traditional causal loop, the ribbon doubles back on itself and repeats a portion of its length. Events from the future influence the past and cause it to repeat future history as you know it. But what if you changed history? Now the ribbon doubles back, but doesn't repeat that portion
Now here's the real trick. If you try to go forward in time again to return to your "present", what happens?
I believe that you cannot. Whatever mechanism you use for time travel is permenantly stuck on that detached loop. If you activate it, even just to go forward by five seconds, you will end up on that detached loop and it will seem as though you never killed your grandfather. And if you try to go beyind the point where you went back in time to change things, you will be unable to get there. At that point, where time loops back and begins a different path, everything along that branch of time simply ceases to exist.
The many-universes approach would say that you simultaneously did and did not kill your grandfather and that both universes continue from there to infinity. I say that you always killed your grandfather, except for that little detached part of the timeline, which loops back at the point of time travel and does not continue.
I told you it was a mind-bender.
You make the classic mistake about a one-path deterministic future: "There is no free will."
From an external viewpoint, it would seem that free will must not exist, because the timeline is completely determined. But we exist as creatures in time, not external to it. At any moment, we are free to make our own choices. Just because these choices have already happened from another viewpoint does not mean that we did not have free will at the time of the choice.
The plastic mail was only for the extras and for battle shots. Still shots on primary characters often used real chain mail. They found some outfit that was selling whole sheets of thin chain link, and made armor out of it. Don't ask me how I know this.
There was heavy, heavy cutting on the Faramir plot line and especially at Osgiliath. It's unclear how much of it will be restored but we will see a lot of backstory with Faramir and a deeper understanding of his motivations to take the ring back to his father.
The ring in Osgiliath is a deviation, but I think it is a good one. The wraiths found the ring in Osgiliath, and thus Sauron believes that the ring is being taken to Denethor. This would be a better justification for him to unleash his armies, if he believes that Gondor will soon be under his power. It also provides further cover for Frodo, since Sauron believes that he knows what is happening with the ring, instead of just searching for it and not knowing.
It's not quite the events as they played out in Tolkein's mind, but I think it works out better in the end.
The problem you're having is not that Jackson did not handle the Ents well. The problem is that there are giant, moving, slow-talking trees (or tree-like beings) that play a pivotal role in the story. Some people have even suggested that Tolkein designed the Ents specifically so that the books could never be translated to a visual medium like film. You give them an F in the film, but can you even think about what another director or less-talented effects house would have done? You have to give them at least a C- for effort.
That strikes me as incredibly stupid, for several reasons.
1) The line is 'Let's hunt some Orc', and it is not out of character when you consider that it's one of the few times he is opening up and talking to characters that he feels at ease with. With the elves, he must be proper; with Boromir, he is slightly distrustful. With Frodo, he feels overbearing responsibility. Now at last he is with two good friends who need some cheering up and some motivation, and he can speak plainly to them. OK, the wording is hardly Tolkein-esque, but then again, Tolkein's was never good at writing plain, friendly dialogue.
2) Please explain how this line is an Americanism when the screenplay was written, storyboarded, filmed, produced, edited, and audio-mastered in New Zealand.
OK people can stop modding my parent post already. The site is not about censorship, its just supposed to be a discussion board for people who came across things that they wish they hadn't seen. I judged it on a few posts' contents, which you should never judge an entire public message board by.
Anyway, it still has no place as a news item here, IMO. And many of the posters there are just as twisted as the fanart they are linking to. But whatever.
Hrm. I just glanced at a couple posts there and all I saw were 2 camps of people: those saying it shouldn't be allowed on the net, and those laughing and saying thanks for the links. I really don't feel like staying around that site for any longer than I have to; if you say that I've misjudged them, I'll believe you.
Oh no, you were exposed to someone else's thoughts and you didn't like them. Wah.
... Is this even about "broken memories" or "raped childhoods"? No. This is just a set of links to every dirty cartoon or story ever drawn. It's more like "cartoon porn paradise". So, nice try on the part of a bleeding heart /. editor to encourage censorship, but this story shouldn't have been approved. And nice job by the submittor to get a cartoon porn site on the front page.
Seriously, I understand where people are coming from on this - I, too, have a special place in my heart for the stories I read/watched as a young child - but what would you prefer? Censorship? There's not really a middle ground. You don't like it, don't look at it. Sorry if you got offended but that's your problem.
Now then, this site
Just saw the other comment on possibly buggy network drivers... I don't think that this is the cause, since my no-name network cards are from different brands and different chipsets, but I suppose it's possible.
It's still very strange that Kazaa, Gnucleus, and other P2P apps don't exhibit this behavior. What is BitTorrent doing so differently?
On all of my VIA chipset athlons, whenever I try the BitTorrent client I am guaranteed a hard crash or a bluescreen within ten minutes. The error messages are different, but always imply a hardware error. Yet burn-in tests and local LAN filetransfers can run for days without any problem.
Flaw in Win2K SP3's net stack? Probably. It shouldn't even be possible for a user application to cause a bluescreen. I don't blame BitTorrent directly but I do wish that someone would hunt down the cause and find a workaround. Until then, I'll get my releases days later from Kazaa Lite, just like everyone else...
I don't know about you but I certainly don't check my watch to find out the day of the week.
I don't know ... I "got" the plot (though it seemed a bit hokey to my Western-trained mind), that wasn't my issue with the movie.
My problem was the formulaic and completely uninteresting script. Within moments of each new scene, it was easy to guess what would happen in the next five minutes. There were times in the movie when I could predict the dialogue right down to the timing. The lines (and actor's delivery) of the trecherous general were especially pathetic; he was like an amalgam of every bad movie-villian cliche. At the scene near the end where he pounds the controls in ultimate frustration, only to look up and mutter a soft "Oh...", I nearly walked out.
The CGI didn't look exactly "real" but I was willing to buy it, it was the cheesy characters that turned me off. Square would have had a gold mine if they had brought in a writer who could handle dialogue and real personalities.
The Geforce 4 MX isn't really a Geforce 4 at all. In fact, it isn't even a Geforce 3. It has a core very similar to the Geforce 2 series, with only fixed-function pipelines. In other words, it is a DirectX 8.0 part and cannot run programs that rely on vertex programs or pixel shaders. It can't do any of the really cool things that programmable pipeline cards can, like per-pixel environment reflection mapping, motion blur, or special lighting effects (saturation/desaturation, color warping, etc).
It's reasonably fast at what it does, so it will run Doom 3 at a decent framerate. But it doesn't support the expected features for a card of its generation, so it will be running at low detail with no special effects.
Yeah, no kidding. I hope he washes his hands.
FTP supports a single connection (Passive, or PASV in the actual protocol), which is what most web browsers use by default.
No, no, no. Jesus. Everyone always gets this wrong. FTP in any mode uses two TCP connections. Passive or not, there is a channel for data and a separate channel for commands.
The difference is that passive-mode means that the client initiates the data connection. The default FTP behavior is for the client to connect to port 21 on the server, and then the server initiates a data connection to the client.
Non-passive FTP clients are very hard for firewalls to keep track of, especially when NAT is involved. Passive is a little better because both connections are outgoing.
But at the same time, passive mode makes the server firewall's job tougher, because it requires an large range of incoming ports for the data connections.
No matter what the mode, FTP is not very firewall-friendly.
I've seen a fair share of bootleg DVDs and the subtitles are always aweful. Usually its just a lack of proofreading, but if there's an accent involved (especially something thick and heavily European) then all bets are off. "Bring your pretty face to my axe" is actually pretty close, if you consider that the sound during battles can be overwhelming. And by the 2-hour mark, the transcriber probably lost what little grasp he had of the plot to begin with.
Also, as another commenter pointed out, the guy didn't have a way to do screengrabs from a DVD so he took stills from the XviD screener floating around Kazaa. The text was added by hand but faithfully transcribed from his TV screen.
FYI, subtitles on DVDs are just a 16-color bitmap overlay. They can be as big or as small as you want, with graphics or text, on top or on the bottom or in the middle of the screen.
"Bring your pretty face to my axe", spoken by Gimli the Dwarf to the oncoming Warg.
Just before the overly pretty elf boy looses an arrow into its skull and Gimli says that it should count as his kill.
Have I seen this movie too many times? Yes.
I wonder what the final company will be called? LucasEgo Intergalactic?
Patents are only public when they are finally approved. During the interim between filing and approval, they are not visible. These so-called "submarine patents" can be kept invisible for years, if you know the appropriate paperwork tricks. That whole aspect of the patent process is under close scrutiny and it is already much harder to pull off than it was a few years ago.
But the point is that RAMBUS filed for a patent, then pushed their idea as part of the SDRAM standard so that when their patent was finally granted, everyone would owe them money.
There is no amount of diligence or research that could have unearthed those patents during the approval process, short of torturing the RAMBUS representatives.
I mean, find a store that has it hooked up to a computer you can use, and scroll around a bit on a colorful web page. Just get an idea of the "smear" factor. Check out online reviews for models from the same manufacturer, then if it all seems good, find the cheapest price you can get on the web.
Well, if you think about it, the "smear" must be in the direction of movement when multiple frames are combined. Consider an object moving a small distance between two frames. As the first frame transitions into the second frame, the object appears to cross-fade or dissolve into its new location. As long as the inter-frame movements remain small and the image refreshes quickly enough (neither is a worry at 70+fps), the cross-fade looks identical to proper motion blur.
You haven't looked at LCD recently, I guess. I paid under $280 for a KDS 15" LCD to replace a 17" (16.1 viewable) Trinitron and it has no smearing whatsoever. The only thing I have ever noticed is when quickly scrolling white text over a black background, the text is visibly dimmer (but still readable).
:)
There are plenty of LCD monitors with a total response time under 35 ms now, which is enough for 30 crisp, fully-contrasted frames per second. Quake 3 and other fast high-contrast games might lose some crispness, but the images are still clear and bright enough for the average joe. (Maybe even better-looking, since there's just the slightest hint of motion blur
Of course some very cheap LCDs have serious issues with ghosting, but you shouldn't have any problems as long as you try before you buy.
Btw, a ^= b ^= a ^= b is technically invalid code. There is no guarantee on the order of evaluations, and it could vary from compiler to compiler or with optimization level. I've seen it used all over the place and it pisses me off; it means the author assumed that 'this works for me so I'll assume it works for everyone'. Makes me wonder what other non-portable or compiler-specific tricks were used.