The "drift racing" show idea is even dumber.
on
G4 Drops TechTV Name
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· Score: 2, Funny
OK, maybe nothing's dumber than the "Girls Gone Wired" idea, but "Formula D" is right up there:
"Formula D," the first-ever series to showcase the world of drift racing, will burn up the screen in April on G4.
For those who don't know, drifting is the act of powersliding your car sideways. It's something rally drivers do to maintain speed around tight corners, but apparently idiots get together in parking lots and just drift in big stupid circles for hours. So it's not even a sport, it's a small part of a sport. It's as if someone took away the football and just had 22 guys run up and down the field for three hours, and said, "look, a new sport."
I was going to tell Comcast to drop dead, but clearly they're trying to commit commercial suicide and don't need my encouragement.
What I was trying to say is that the Season 6 episodes shown in the US were "Scrapheap Challenge" episodes rebadged as "Junkyard Wars" (as were the early seasons), as opposed to the Season 5 and 7 shows which were originally filmed in the US as "Junkyard Wars" and intended specifically for the US audience.
Does that clear things up? (And was that was the only thing you had to say in response to my Post Of Epic Proportions?)
Junkyard Wars is in decline... but can be saved.
on
Junkyard Wars Wants You!
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Junkyard Wars used to be my favourite show. I watched it every week, chasing it around the schedule as it jumped from night to night, and would often watch the repeat on Saturday. The premise was and still is great. But here are the five things that truly made the show fun back in the old days:
Great host(s)
Fantastic machine builds
Interesting team characters
Wonderful sense of sportsmanship, that it was all in fun
Fair play
We had these things in seasons 1-4 and to some degree in season 6 (all British imports of the renamed "Scrapheap Challenge" with Robert). But in seasons 5 and 7, each of these things have been lost.
1. THE HOSTS: In the old says we had Robert Lewellyn, who was perfect. He was funny, had clever insights, and joked around with the teams. Who can forget his impersonation of a V8 engine? The show brought Cathy onscreen as a foil for him, and that worked out fine too -- they played well off each other. Then we got George Gray. Who was about 50% as fun and interesting as Robert (but still acceptable). Now they've hit rock-bottom with Tyler, who offers no ad-lib humour, no insights, nothing -- all he does is yell -- and a generic hollywood talking head chick who doesn't even have as much personality as Tyler.
2. MACHINE BUILDS: There was a time when it mattered if your machine worked or not, and if you really tried. Teams came up with brilliant designs, and there were failures, but they had to work at least a LITTLE. And teams did things that were ambitious. On one of the old British shows, a team actually built a demolition machine with a hydraulic claw. And it WORKED! Yes, they eventually had some hydraulic problems and their radiator sprung a leak, but when have we seen anything that great in the last three seasons? Nowadays we have things like "Mega Wars", where teams get two days to build an all-terrain amphibious vehicle, and in those two days, two of the teams manage to do nothing more than strip down an existing truck and hook some empty drums on for flotation in the water part of the challenge. Or we get challenges like the Hydrofoil, where the competition is a boat that can't hydrofoil vs. a boat that can't move at all. It's a disgrace.
3. TEAM CHARACTERS: The Bodgers, The Long Brothers, The Techno Teachers, even the original Orange and Yellow teams were full of interesting, likeable characters. We all loved Anne, Nosher, Dick, and the rest of the old crews. We cared about them and rooted for them.
In contrast, the teams that won the last two US seasons have had one thing in common: they're both comprised of obnoxious, cursing, unlikable jerks with no personalities. Our only hope in watching their progress through the season was that they'd lose and we wouldn't have to see them again.
Let's face it: when we're against the teams, we're against the show.
4. SPORTSMANSHIP: In the old days teams would trade with each other if they needed something. Nowadays they just steal it. Back then, teams joked around and had a good time. Our kids could watch the show and learn how to be a good sport, that there was such a thing as friendly competition, that winning wasn't everything. Now the teams mock each other's failures, openly berate the experts who try to help them, jump on each other's stolen stuff and are all-around poor sports. We can't let our kids watch the show anymore. It sends them the wrong message.
5. FAIR PLAY: I don't think it's news to anyone that season 7's team won by cheating. Twice. And the last US season was "won" by a big cheat-off in the demolition final where both teams just ran their trucks into the walls because neither of them could make even their basic machines work. What a disappointment.
What can JW do now?
If you ask me, it's a simple matter to address these five issues.
1. HOSTS: Put Robert and Cathy together again. Period.
2. BUILDS: Talk to your experts before challenges. Make sure they have interesting ideas to present. Talk to your teams. Make sure everyone knows that their machines need to work. Do more creative editing if necessary. Find more good challenges. Ice racers, with 4-wheel drive, 4-wheel steering and homemade studded tires? Pipe sleds that need to travel inside big pipes and be invertable, with wheels top and bottom? Pole climbing machines? OK, my ideas aren't all gems, but that's 2 minutes' work off the top of my head. I'll bet Cathy & co. can do a lot better than I can -- or than what we've been getting lately.
3. CHARACTERS: Rather than making everyone on the team required to be a welder, pick teams that are going to be fun to watch and who demonstrate some imagination. If necessary, bring back teams from previous seasons. Why not? We liked them before. We'd like to see them again. Particularly some of the early teams, whom new viewers might have never seen at all.
4. SPORTSMANSHIP: This springs from #3, but is something you can enforce too.
5. FAIR PLAY: Make the rules clear and stick to them.
Making these changes would cost the show almost nothing, and would in my opinion save the show. Longtime fans would be thrilled to see a new golden age of JW, and new fans would be won over.
Considering that after a few years at Yale and countless hours of coaching he still can't pronounce "nuclear" (nukeyular?), I kind of doubt his speechwriters will ever toss him a word as complicated as "peroxide".
Right on, brother. In the same spirit of this article -- a groundbreaking combination of being both extremely old news (like 7+ years) and painfully obvious to anyone who would read a "news for nerds" site -- I'm currently working on the following articles:
Light Bulbs -- The Candle Saver
Underpants -- A New Way To Avoid Skid-Marks In Your Trousers
How do you even measure it down that that level? Interference patterns?
OK, this is going to sound like I have no life, but I swear I do.
What I did was set up an electronic drum pad to trigger a percussive sample in Logic (using the EXS24 software sampler). I put a contact microphone on the drum pad and recorded the sound of the stick striking the pad in the left channel, with the triggered EXS24 output in the right channel. Then I loaded the resulting WAV file into Sound Forge, selected the distance between the two peaks, and worked out the math based on the sampling rate and number of intervening samples.
Maybe not the most scientific method, but there it is!
A little perspective on Taco's summary and the use of music technology in general.
The days of playing sequences off a DAT are not numbered -- they're already long gone. Laptops have been used as sequencers to drive outboard MIDI gear for almost as long as there have been laptops (for me it started in 1992 with an Atari STacy). The new development, as mentioned in the CNN article, is using software synths (usually VSTi's) as live performance tools.
I disagree that there are "limitations to the power and ability of software synthesizers". By example, I offer Absynth from Native Instruments. From the 68-stage envelopes(!) to the wave fractalization and spectral editing tools, this offers sound shaping tools that no hardware synth can compete with.
Up until recently, you could argue that the latency problem with software synths kept them second-class citizens behind hardware boxes -- you'd hit a key and get your note a split-second later. This final limitation has been defeated with the advent of faster computers and cheap professional audio hardware. I use a 1.2 GHz computer and a $300 EmagicEMI audio interface, and my softsynth latency is about 2.5ms. Not perfect, but it actually beats some of my hardware synths. (Hit a fat chord with layered patches on an Emu Morpheus sometime and you'll see what I mean -- you get a flam, not a unison attack.) And when you play back sequenced software instruments, they're sample-accurate.
So the story is not laptops on stage, or computers making everyone a musician (if you can't write songs, the computer will not help you), but rather, software synths coming into their own as valid replacements for hardware on stage and in the studio.
You make a good point, but there's actually a considerable amount of debate in the recording world as to the acceptability of 44.1 KHz / 16-bit audio (aka CD-quality). My own hardware records up to 48 KHz / 24-bit, and there's gear out there that will go up to like 96 KHz, for making DVD-audio or some freakin' thing.
Now, 44.1 KHz / 16-bit is just fine for me, but I can at least consider the idea that there are things happening in the frequencies above 22.05 KHz (the top frequency 44.1 can record) that have some affect on us even if we can't consciously hear them. Well, fine, but I'm not going to record everything at 96 KHz and increase all my audio file sizes to 218% of their current size just so that SuperAudioFileMan can hear the dog whistle in the background. But if I can get a variable sampling scheme that will grab some extra frequencies when the source material's spectral content warrants it, and maybe even sample below 44.1 when the tympani solo comes along, that works for me and is at least an improvement for the hypertreble freaks.
I use a notebook computer for live performances, and bought the Emagic EMI 2|6 USB audio interface. It's great. 24-bit DAC, 48 KHz, 2 ins, 6 outs, coaxial S/PDIF, $325. If you use Logic Audio like me, then it gives you the added bonus of low-latency virtual instrument playback. Check it out.
Apple and the makeup accessory trend
on
New iMac Announced
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
I don't understand Apple's trend of making low-end devices that look like makeup accessories. The first iBook (in orange and pink, I think) looked for all the world like a Barbie Makeup Case. Now they give us an iMac that is clearly modeled after a makeup mirror. What gives? Does Steve Jobs have an adolescent teenage daughter making design decisions or something?
This model seems extremely similar, perhaps slightly inferior, to the new HP Jornada 560 series, which is due out October 4 (only a week away!)
In light of the HP/Compaq merger, it seems likely that at least one of these products will either never see the light of day or will be killed in short order. (I vote for croaking the iPaq.)
Zoid was the best thing that ever happened to Quake. I remember downloading Quake 1 for the first time, playing a bit, and thinking, "Hey, what a cool 3D engine. Somebody should make a game out of it." Zoid did.
Zoid's Quake 1 CTF took a horrible mess of a game and turned it into an amazing, addictive team event that kept the program on my machine longer than anything else before it. I always thought that the grappling hook was kinda stupid, particularly when you could latch onto someone with it and drain their health down to nothing, but it didn't prevent Q1 CTF from being extremely fun.
Then Quake 2 CTF came along and looked beautiful, but didn't play quite as well. The wide-open spaces allowed low-ping grapplers to fly around ceilings like tarzan and team assaults were replaced by the single LPB monkey-swinging around and running away at high speed. But again, the useful life of the game was extended tenfold by the CTF mod -- without it, Q2 was maps full of brain-dead monsters or mindless deathmatch.
Now we have Quake 3 CTF. The grapple is thankfully history, but the magic is almost gone. I usually find myself playing Unreal Tournament's CTF instead -- let me shoot cool weapons at other soldiers in gritty settings instead of plugging away at big mechanical eyeballs in shiny, brightly-coloured funhouses.
Maybe Quake 3 Arena is too much of a goofy cartoon for even Zoid to save, or maybe he's run out of steam at last. Whatever the case:
Zoid's work made every version of Quake more fun, and we should give him props.
Judging by Q3A CTF, I'd say it is certainly time to move on.
>I'm sure someone will make a laptop with a >16.5" screen. It might be great for graphic >artists to show things to clients, or in >other situations where portability doesn't matter.
I've always wanted a computer for precisely that! Specifically, I'd like a very flat computer that could be built into an 11"x17" portfolio case. Theoretically, you could put a display approaching 20" into such a form factor -- the same viewable area as a 21" CRT.
If you could also add a pressure-sensitive stylus that would work directly on the screen, you'd have a neat machine for digital artists, some of whom would like to truck out of the studio and work on-site just like those beret-wearing guys with the charcoal pads and easels and watercolours.
This would be a great specialty item for architects and designers and so on. As long as we need to carry a big ol' case containing our comps or blueprints, it might as well have a neat computer in it too.
Another good use for PNG that is not strictly web-based is kiosks. When you have control over the client software, and can pick a PNG-supporting browser, you can PNG to your heart's content.
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to tell Comcast to drop dead, but clearly they're trying to commit commercial suicide and don't need my encouragement.
If by "popular" you mean "only used by a handful of dorks performing a sort of digital circle-jerk", then yeah, it's popular...
That's good, because I would hope that any live CD containing a CD player application would, you know, not hog the CD drive.
Does that clear things up? (And was that was the only thing you had to say in response to my Post Of Epic Proportions?)
- Great host(s)
- Fantastic machine builds
- Interesting team characters
- Wonderful sense of sportsmanship, that it was all in fun
- Fair play
We had these things in seasons 1-4 and to some degree in season 6 (all British imports of the renamed "Scrapheap Challenge" with Robert). But in seasons 5 and 7, each of these things have been lost.1. THE HOSTS: In the old says we had Robert Lewellyn, who was perfect. He was funny, had clever insights, and joked around with the teams. Who can forget his impersonation of a V8 engine? The show brought Cathy onscreen as a foil for him, and that worked out fine too -- they played well off each other. Then we got George Gray. Who was about 50% as fun and interesting as Robert (but still acceptable). Now they've hit rock-bottom with Tyler, who offers no ad-lib humour, no insights, nothing -- all he does is yell -- and a generic hollywood talking head chick who doesn't even have as much personality as Tyler.
2. MACHINE BUILDS: There was a time when it mattered if your machine worked or not, and if you really tried. Teams came up with brilliant designs, and there were failures, but they had to work at least a LITTLE. And teams did things that were ambitious. On one of the old British shows, a team actually built a demolition machine with a hydraulic claw. And it WORKED! Yes, they eventually had some hydraulic problems and their radiator sprung a leak, but when have we seen anything that great in the last three seasons? Nowadays we have things like "Mega Wars", where teams get two days to build an all-terrain amphibious vehicle, and in those two days, two of the teams manage to do nothing more than strip down an existing truck and hook some empty drums on for flotation in the water part of the challenge. Or we get challenges like the Hydrofoil, where the competition is a boat that can't hydrofoil vs. a boat that can't move at all. It's a disgrace.
3. TEAM CHARACTERS: The Bodgers, The Long Brothers, The Techno Teachers, even the original Orange and Yellow teams were full of interesting, likeable characters. We all loved Anne, Nosher, Dick, and the rest of the old crews. We cared about them and rooted for them.
In contrast, the teams that won the last two US seasons have had one thing in common: they're both comprised of obnoxious, cursing, unlikable jerks with no personalities. Our only hope in watching their progress through the season was that they'd lose and we wouldn't have to see them again.
Let's face it: when we're against the teams, we're against the show.
4. SPORTSMANSHIP: In the old days teams would trade with each other if they needed something. Nowadays they just steal it. Back then, teams joked around and had a good time. Our kids could watch the show and learn how to be a good sport, that there was such a thing as friendly competition, that winning wasn't everything. Now the teams mock each other's failures, openly berate the experts who try to help them, jump on each other's stolen stuff and are all-around poor sports. We can't let our kids watch the show anymore. It sends them the wrong message.
5. FAIR PLAY: I don't think it's news to anyone that season 7's team won by cheating. Twice. And the last US season was "won" by a big cheat-off in the demolition final where both teams just ran their trucks into the walls because neither of them could make even their basic machines work. What a disappointment.
What can JW do now?
If you ask me, it's a simple matter to address these five issues.
1. HOSTS: Put Robert and Cathy together again. Period.
2. BUILDS: Talk to your experts before challenges. Make sure they have interesting ideas to present. Talk to your teams. Make sure everyone knows that their machines need to work. Do more creative editing if necessary. Find more good challenges. Ice racers, with 4-wheel drive, 4-wheel steering and homemade studded tires? Pipe sleds that need to travel inside big pipes and be invertable, with wheels top and bottom? Pole climbing machines? OK, my ideas aren't all gems, but that's 2 minutes' work off the top of my head. I'll bet Cathy & co. can do a lot better than I can -- or than what we've been getting lately.
3. CHARACTERS: Rather than making everyone on the team required to be a welder, pick teams that are going to be fun to watch and who demonstrate some imagination. If necessary, bring back teams from previous seasons. Why not? We liked them before. We'd like to see them again. Particularly some of the early teams, whom new viewers might have never seen at all.
4. SPORTSMANSHIP: This springs from #3, but is something you can enforce too.
5. FAIR PLAY: Make the rules clear and stick to them.
Making these changes would cost the show almost nothing, and would in my opinion save the show. Longtime fans would be thrilled to see a new golden age of JW, and new fans would be won over.
Considering that after a few years at Yale and countless hours of coaching he still can't pronounce "nuclear" (nukeyular?), I kind of doubt his speechwriters will ever toss him a word as complicated as "peroxide".
Math isn't my strong suit, but I'm pretty sure that's three things...
What is that, a mountaintop that creeps up on you?
Everyone has a spelling pet peeve. That's mine.
OK, this is going to sound like I have no life, but I swear I do.
What I did was set up an electronic drum pad to trigger a percussive sample in Logic (using the EXS24 software sampler). I put a contact microphone on the drum pad and recorded the sound of the stick striking the pad in the left channel, with the triggered EXS24 output in the right channel. Then I loaded the resulting WAV file into Sound Forge, selected the distance between the two peaks, and worked out the math based on the sampling rate and number of intervening samples.
Maybe not the most scientific method, but there it is!
- The days of playing sequences off a DAT are not numbered -- they're already long gone. Laptops have been used as sequencers to drive outboard MIDI gear for almost as long as there have been laptops (for me it started in 1992 with an Atari STacy). The new development, as mentioned in the CNN article, is using software synths (usually VSTi's) as live performance tools.
- I disagree that there are "limitations to the power and ability of software synthesizers". By example, I offer Absynth from Native Instruments. From the 68-stage envelopes(!) to the wave fractalization and spectral editing tools, this offers sound shaping tools that no hardware synth can compete with.
- Up until recently, you could argue that the latency problem with software synths kept them second-class citizens behind hardware boxes -- you'd hit a key and get your note a split-second later. This final limitation has been defeated with the advent of faster computers and cheap professional audio hardware. I use a 1.2 GHz computer and a $300 Emagic EMI audio interface, and my softsynth latency is about 2.5ms. Not perfect, but it actually beats some of my hardware synths. (Hit a fat chord with layered patches on an Emu Morpheus sometime and you'll see what I mean -- you get a flam, not a unison attack.) And when you play back sequenced software instruments, they're sample-accurate.
So the story is not laptops on stage, or computers making everyone a musician (if you can't write songs, the computer will not help you), but rather, software synths coming into their own as valid replacements for hardware on stage and in the studio.You make a good point, but there's actually a considerable amount of debate in the recording world as to the acceptability of 44.1 KHz / 16-bit audio (aka CD-quality). My own hardware records up to 48 KHz / 24-bit, and there's gear out there that will go up to like 96 KHz, for making DVD-audio or some freakin' thing.
Now, 44.1 KHz / 16-bit is just fine for me, but I can at least consider the idea that there are things happening in the frequencies above 22.05 KHz (the top frequency 44.1 can record) that have some affect on us even if we can't consciously hear them. Well, fine, but I'm not going to record everything at 96 KHz and increase all my audio file sizes to 218% of their current size just so that SuperAudioFileMan can hear the dog whistle in the background. But if I can get a variable sampling scheme that will grab some extra frequencies when the source material's spectral content warrants it, and maybe even sample below 44.1 when the tympani solo comes along, that works for me and is at least an improvement for the hypertreble freaks.
I use a notebook computer for live performances, and bought the Emagic EMI 2|6 USB audio interface. It's great. 24-bit DAC, 48 KHz, 2 ins, 6 outs, coaxial S/PDIF, $325. If you use Logic Audio like me, then it gives you the added bonus of low-latency virtual instrument playback. Check it out.
I don't understand Apple's trend of making low-end devices that look like makeup accessories. The first iBook (in orange and pink, I think) looked for all the world like a Barbie Makeup Case. Now they give us an iMac that is clearly modeled after a makeup mirror. What gives? Does Steve Jobs have an adolescent teenage daughter making design decisions or something?
In light of the HP/Compaq merger, it seems likely that at least one of these products will either never see the light of day or will be killed in short order. (I vote for croaking the iPaq.)
Zoid was the best thing that ever happened to Quake. I remember downloading Quake 1 for the first time, playing a bit, and thinking, "Hey, what a cool 3D engine. Somebody should make a game out of it." Zoid did.
Zoid's Quake 1 CTF took a horrible mess of a game and turned it into an amazing, addictive team event that kept the program on my machine longer than anything else before it. I always thought that the grappling hook was kinda stupid, particularly when you could latch onto someone with it and drain their health down to nothing, but it didn't prevent Q1 CTF from being extremely fun.
Then Quake 2 CTF came along and looked beautiful, but didn't play quite as well. The wide-open spaces allowed low-ping grapplers to fly around ceilings like tarzan and team assaults were replaced by the single LPB monkey-swinging around and running away at high speed. But again, the useful life of the game was extended tenfold by the CTF mod -- without it, Q2 was maps full of brain-dead monsters or mindless deathmatch.
Now we have Quake 3 CTF. The grapple is thankfully history, but the magic is almost gone. I usually find myself playing Unreal Tournament's CTF instead -- let me shoot cool weapons at other soldiers in gritty settings instead of plugging away at big mechanical eyeballs in shiny, brightly-coloured funhouses.
Maybe Quake 3 Arena is too much of a goofy cartoon for even Zoid to save, or maybe he's run out of steam at last. Whatever the case:
>16.5" screen. It might be great for graphic
>artists to show things to clients, or in
>other situations where portability doesn't matter.
I've always wanted a computer for precisely that! Specifically, I'd like a very flat computer that could be built into an 11"x17" portfolio case. Theoretically, you could put a display approaching 20" into such a form factor -- the same viewable area as a 21" CRT.
If you could also add a pressure-sensitive stylus that would work directly on the screen, you'd have a neat machine for digital artists, some of whom would like to truck out of the studio and work on-site just like those beret-wearing guys with the charcoal pads and easels and watercolours.
This would be a great specialty item for architects and designers and so on. As long as we need to carry a big ol' case containing our comps or blueprints, it might as well have a neat computer in it too.
Now if we can just work on that Tesla/Edison business...
It's a great format.