Not to mention the problems cause by concentrations of cars. It's not like they're going to instantly dissipate. Our cities will be clogged with cars, while our parks and forests will be abandoned by people who can't out for the weekend.
There are already problems with "jams" of traffic in cities already. I think cars that are 1/3 the price would make it even worse.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
how long til the naysayers finally admit that ZEV electric vehicles are the future?
How long til the ZEV-boosters come up with car that has the range, power, and convenience of a gas car for the same or a lower price?
Come back when you've got those ultra capacitors, and we'll talk.
IMHO, before electric cars are so superior to chemical cars that it's worth the bother to switch over, we'll have gone into the true post-industrial age and be flying around without any visible apparatus, assuming we ever bother to move our bodies around for trips not measured in light-minutes or more.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
As someone who subsists entirely on corn, I feel that my very survival is threatened by this scheme.
All kidding aside, I think we're better off using cropland for food and generating our energy with fission. Fission or giant orbiting arrays of solar panels.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
You can carry methanol around in a gas can and with minor modifications, you can burn methanol in your current car.
Methanol can be generated from CO2 and water, to which it, of course, returns when burned. It can also be manufactured easily from vegetable matter.
Like hydrogen, it supports a simple closed cycle using the atmosphere as the return pipe without polluting it with toxins, and can be easily burned or used in a fuel cell to generate electricity. Unlike hydrogen, it's energy-dense and simple to handle under even the most primitive conditions by unskilled labour.
A little added complexity on the manufacturing side for a big payoff in simplicity everywhere else is why methanol is a much more likely "fuel of the future" than hydrogen (methane is intermediate between the two in almost every way, but it's another gas so I'm still betting on methanol).
If we could just stop the damned blind rednecks from drinking it all, we'd have no trouble with supply.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Just so we don't get stupid arguments like "if we can get energy from the air, why can't we just make an engine that runs on air?", the thermodynamic principle here is that a heat engine can produce work from a temperature difference, by letting the energy flow from hotter to cooler while "skimming" off part of the energy to transform into work. The percentage that it skims is the complement of the efficiency, which obviously can't be higher than 100%.
So a theoretically generalized heat engine doesn't care whether you carry around a fire or a block of ice, or (for that matter) if you skim along with one ski in a trough of cold water and another ski in a trough of hot water, as long as it's got access to a temperature difference. In practice, of course, you've got to design different engines if you want reasonable efficiency.
Incidentally, being from the frosty Northern near-state of Canada, I'd really rather not have a car without a toasty hot engine. While you can use liquid nitrogen to heat your cab, it's not terribly efficient. However, people who live in hot places might appreciate the cheap, efficient, and simple air-conditioning.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I just had to establish that my penis is larger than yours (that's length and girth, mind you).
Isn't that what all this was about? You don't really care about frame rates, do you?
I reserve words like "submoronic" for festive occasions, like when someone starts a flamewar with a long, pompous, patronizing "correction" (especially on a dead or near-dead thread).
(BTW, I don't moderate: when a thread interests me, I post. Also, I rather expected that I'd pissed someone else off with my rampage on a near-dead thread. Every time I go off like that, usually a half-dozen other posts of mine go down at random. Like I said, I find it amusing. I don't care about karma, I just post whatever I feel like - on topic, off topic, flames, trolls, pissing contests, stupid jokes, made-up figures, oddball theories, anything - and I've still mysteriously got karma coming out the wazoo.)
Hey, you're the bastard that moderated down my "this idea should work for more than music" aren't you? Now that's just rude. That's the most on-topic, relevant post I've ever written, on a subject that I've given years of consideration to, and you, with your perceptions colored by our recent exchange of flames, moderate it down long after the thread is dead.
Bad form! Psuedointellectual flame war rule #1 is "Flaming only! No backstabbing."
The "overrated" and "underrated" moderation choices are stupid. If you can't come up with a better reason than "overrated", you shouldn't bother moderating someone down.
(yeah, the 50 point barrier is down, karma is unfrozen, and mine has tragically fallen to 190; unshed tears blur my vision;_; )
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Knowing that tells you nothing about the bizarre equipment that interprets all that information in the visual cortex and beyond, and you cannot pronounce on what it does or doesn't require without knowing that.
Once again, you are arguing "we don't know anything" as a general counterargument to anything I say. You propose no alternate model and offer no useful information. It's pathetic.
it isn't swayed by what happens in one rod or cone
Gee, then I guess we can take out all the rods and cones, and you'll still be able to see just fine. Since the information is filtered and processed, I guess we can just ignore what gets gathered.
The actual function of the rods and cones is essential to this issue. The information they provide is the limit of visual data gathered. The brain can throw a lot of it away, but it can't conjure more information from somewhere. The maximum firing rate of the light-detecting cells and their number set absolute maximum limits of temporal and pixel resolution.
Motion blur isn't a psychological effect.
Again, semantics. You baselessly assert a different meaning to my words than the one I have clearly explained I intended, and then use the words you thus put in my mouth to attack my arguments. If you want to argue about proper usage, keep it seperate. Otherwise, just try to maintain a consistent semantic standard throughout the discussion, so some meaning might be extracted from it.
I know people who don't go to movie theatres precisely because a 24fps quantised image pisses them off.
Yes, there are rare people for whom 30 fps is insufficient (I am one of those for whom 24 fps is insufficient and annoying; the moment any action starts I see distinct blurred frames). There are also people who have seizures when exposed to flickering lights and other people who don't see at all. They are called "freaks" and left out of general discussions.
My explanation was a good enough analogy to explain why motion-blurred 30 fps is adequate for most people. Just as it is when they watch TV (I don't hear anybody complaining that TV frame rates are too low). The same explanation would apply to explain why 40 fps is adequate for 99.9% or why 60 fps is adequate for 99.9999%.
The problem of needing a higher monitor refresh rate is entirely distinct and non-psychological.
Incidentally, I'm not making ad hominem attacks, moron. I'm using arguments to support personal insults, not the other way around. If I said, "You, being a moron, are wrong" that would be an ad hominem attack, but I've said "You, being wrong, are a moron."
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
They're part of the same real world they're reacting to, and thus not quantised either.
The real world is quantized (hmm... how did that go? [something] mechanics. It'll come to me...). The human nervous system is quantized (not globally synchronized to a fixed clock, but definitely quantized). Neurons fire or don't fire. The light-sensing mechanisms of the eye are connected to neurons, which they cause to fire or not fire periodically. There are definite limits to the speed of transmission and firing rate of neurons, whether they've been measured 100% accurately or not.
there aren't any pixels,
Rods and cones. 'nuff said.
Running extra frames doesn't really create any sort of motion blur unless you specifically render that motion blur
If you consider motion blur to be a psychological effect rather than a mechanism, it creates motion blur. It should have been clear to the most minimally adequate mind that I meant this from my opening statement, "the real world is motion-blurred".
The bottom line is that 30FPS isn't just fine.
Go ahead. Tell me you can distinguish individual frames of a TV signal. 30 FPS is fine as long as you make your camera (or rendering engine) act enough like a human eye.
The whole purpose of improving rendering engines is to recreate the quality of a competently recorded video display of a real-life scene. To counter a claim that a certain method is sufficient for this with the argument that the purpose is insufficient for the purpose is submoronic.
I hate people who play with semantics and insist on taking the literal meanings of expressions and then attacking this straw man when the language is inadequate for literal discussion.
Arguing that explaining the theory used to justify the FPS rate of recorded video is a mistake because, despite the fact that it has yielded useful results, it may yet be proven false by some new test in the future, goes beyond pomposity... but I can't think of a word low enough for someone who utterly rejects the description of a practical model because it's not Certain Eternal Truth ("skeptic" doesn't have the bite it should, having long since swallowed its opposite meaning).
Why didn't you just save yourself some time and reply with "knowing nothing, we can know nothing"?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I find that in the design stage, there is no useful distinction between "at work" and "at home". You're working 24 hours, with ideas popping up from all over the place. Might as well leave at 5 and be more comfortable while you think; for that matter, you might as well leave at noon, and sit in your back yard with a beer and a pad of paper close at hand, staring at clouds and contemplating data structures.
However, in the coding stage, I find that immediately dropping everything and leaving at five works great, as long as things are rolling along when you leave. The best time to quit is when you're getting lots done and you know exactly what you're going to do next. Tomorrow morning, you'll know exactly what you've got to start with, and once you do that, you're in the flow again.
If you just keep coding untill you can't get any further, you'll come in the next day, tired out and wondering where to begin. You'll spend hours just getting rolling again.
That's been my personal experience, anyway. I've done some pretty neat stuff on 40-hour coding sprees, but usually the project died there. Sure, I'd get a week's work done in a day, maybe more, but somehow I'd never seem to get anywhere else with the hack-attack code. Eventually, I'd end up rewriting the project from scratch.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
So what are you doing now? Don't give up your schooling, that's a decision you'll regret later in life...
It was a couple of years ago, and I'm not regretting it yet.
Continuing university would have meant years more of the endless, pointless exams that leave little time for learning, and a debt that would obligate me to immediately take one of those corporate jobs.
I went into the game programming business for myself (well, half into business, half into private study), and while I'm not in the black yet, I've learned a lot about programming. I read Knuth's TAoCP books, learned a couple dozen programming languages, and learned to hack out a new programming language in a couple of days. Aside from that, I've had time to study linguistics and human languages, physics, history, economics, etc.
A couple of programming job offers have fallen into my lap, but I left the only one I took because it didn't pay well enough (some people have funny ideas about what "trial salary" means; I thought it meant "we'll talk about pay after you've seen what I can do" and they thought it meant "a low salary we can pay you forever"). I learned a new programming environment and language by my second day, and had 4 complete products out by the end of the month.
From what I've seen, I can go out and get a job any time I want, even with practically no paid experience on my resume, and I'd be able to get a good paying job (by programmer standards) within a year. But I've consistently chosen to stick with my private business, because I still think it'll make me rich. After a few years of dropping product ideas just short of completion, because I realized they wouldn't sell (at least not enough to be worth the trouble of releasing them), I think I finally understand the market well enough to turn a serious profit.
When I think of the years I wasted sitting in classrooms listening to some stuffed shirt drone on about things I already knew, I wish I'd had the courage to drop out at junior high. School is nothing but an attempt at brainwashing to create perfect corporate wage slaves. Any learning is purely coincidental.
The only thing that makes university worthwhile is the people you meet. I miss that a great deal. Now, for the most part, I only meet my peers online.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
"Here, free software! Give me money, and other people will give you free software because they see I got money, so they think you might give them some." It's that simple.
Acting civilized pays off in the long term.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...according to the spec I was given in a few days, and went to explain it to the guy in charge.
He took one look at my documentation, said "This'll never work." and apparently got stuck on that setting. I explained that it was done, and it did work already, but that didn't faze him. Eventually, he got me to throw away all my work and rewrite it so it didn't meet the original spec, ran slower, and used more file space.
The reason? He couldn't understand anything with a data structure more complicated than an array, and didn't believe in using dynamic allocation or pointers. Ever. Seriously.
Hundreds of globals, gotos in every function, 20,000 line undocumented source files, hidden arbitrary limits to data size: all that was okay, but no linked lists or trees. Certainly not something as complex and mysterious as a hash table! Stuff like that causes bugs!
I won't mention where this was, but if you ever wonder why an automated telephone response system is so screwed up and useless, maybe it came out of this shop.
It was then that I realized I could never tolerate the corporate environment, and stopped pursuing the university degree I'd need for such a job.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...and big movie studios will make money by providing makeup services to actors and a typing pool for script writiers.
Recording companies can't survive on the thin revenues of services to musicians. Of course the people who work in the studios and set up lighting at concerts will still be able to make a living doing what they know. A few might even acquire the names of the big record labels they work for now. That can't be described by any stretch of the imagination as record companies doing okay.
But they shouldn't exploit artists as if they were strawberry pickers.
Now we're drifting off topic, but I find this funny. Musicians are artists as in "starving artist", as in someone who works in a field that most people don't consider work and many participate in for free (a bit like trying to make a living as a male prostitute who only hires out to attractive women; too many others are willing to do it for free for it to be considered a reasonable business). I could take a walk around town today and find a dozen musicians with as much ability as the the ones I hear on the radio. The labels create their massive commercial value with large investments, it's totally artificial.
The ones who aren't being "exploited" usually aren't even making a living.
I have a lot more sympathy for an honest strawberry picker, getting a wage for a physically taxing job they'd rather not do, than for musicians, who chose their career because it is the thing they most enjoy doing, but they expect to get paid for it anyway.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The human eye can only detect about 30 FPS; each light sensor basically adds up all the light that hits it in 1/30th of a second and presents that as a "pixel" in that "frame" (which is why things like raster scanning monitors: your eyes' natural motion blur at work!). However, games render views as still-frames. So if you're moving fast enough that the world would be a blur, instead you get what is effectively random garbage on the screen. That is the rendering engine breaking down under conditions it was not built to handle properly; much like when you walk right up to a wall in Doom and walk sideways (ooo, look at the squares!).
Running extra frames faster than the eye can see creates a fake motion blur. The higher the frame rate, the faster things can move and still look okay. For games like Quake, the necessary speed for effective blurring tops out around 200 fps. I imagine very high speed racing games could benefit from even higher fps rates.
However, if and when rendering engines start to incorporate true motion-blurring (which nobody seems terribly inclined to bother with, since the fake blurring looks just fine, and is probably cheaper and definitely simpler to compute), 30 FPS will be just fine.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Think about *who* you really support (I'm guessing you are pro-[your favorite band] not pro-[free music, gimme!]). While it tastes great, Naptster's free beer (music for free) is blocking Metallica's free speech (self-determination on what and how they express themselves to fans). I think the artists know just a little bit what they're talking about. Get behind them.
I don't care about these "artists" (I'm talking about all popular musicians here). They are absurdly rich because they entered into deals with the promoter/distributors to play their music for free into the ears of youth over the only convenient distribution systems that existed (radio, TV), until they got used to the music and felt a need to hear more. Their fame and riches stem from this deal more than from special musical ability. They are part of the machine, not victims of it.
Yes, good musicians deserve some compensation, but control is not part of the bargain! Any musician who wants to tell me how much I have to pay him to hear his music is never getting a cent from me. There are plenty of other musicians out there, and I've got money for them, when I like their music and when they don't try to attack me legally.
Compensation does not require control! Getting enormously rich from your mediocre talent plus a large promotion budget does, though. That's what Metallica did, and that's what they're trying to protect.
To hell with them. I have no special love for the tiny wealthy minority of musicians in bed with the record companies (who then bitch that they aren't getting a big enough slice of the absurdly large revenue). I have a lot more sympathy for the other 99% of musicians who are working second jobs to support their hobby. Without control, maybe we'd see fewer rich whiners and more decent musicians making a living.
You're damned right I'm selfish. That's the way you're supposed to be in commercial transactions. Not stupidly selfish, but putting your own interests first. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to pick your pocket with his tongue.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Why would you think that? They have nothing of value to sell. They are simply acquisition-promotion-litigation engines which purchase IP at a low price, and pump the demand for it to sell access for a high price.
It won't work when the the most convenient delivery system is controlled by end-user choice rather than 3rd-party payments. Their only value to the musicians is that they can get the musicians' music into the ears of the paying public, which would be almost impossible otherwise. When, instead of a dozen radio stations, there are a million playlists to choose from, the listeners won't choose those on which a spot can be bought with bribes, and the record companies will no longer have the ear of the listening public. Musicians will start to do fine without signing on with a label, and then it will all be over.
They will "do fine" in the new information media, about as well as the currency traders would "do fine" if everyone went back to the gold standard.
They are dying, with no hope of survival. Their existence no longer makes sense, so we can't expect their actions to make sense. They will continue to thrash around wildly until they run out of money.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I think people forget just how hokey the original three were.
Episode I was just following in the footsteps of the original trilogy. Did anyone else notice when Obi-Wan whacks a robot with his lightsabre, and it falls over? That's classic Star Wars cheese, right up there with "Two figh-ters a-gainst a Star De-stroyer?" ("Worst delivery ever.") and the Hallowe'en masks in the Mos Eisley cantina.
100% pure American processed cheese.
Star Wars is like Shakespeare: everyone loves it, and nobody wants to admit what derivative tripe it is.
It is fun, though. Kind of like Futurama, with a straight face. And the "used universe" set building philosophy is something that modern sci-fi could use a refresher-course in.
I've drifted, but my point was, try not to compare your fresh vision of the new Star Wars films with your nostalgia-fogged vision of the old ones, nothing can live up to that.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Senator Palpatine at his most evil: he clones Jar Jar by the thousands!
His own people, deeply ashamed by the proliferation of this most pathetic example of their species, feel obligated to fix it.
The latter hour of the movie consists entirely of thousands of Jar Jars being launched out of the catapults they used in the Episode I, some with explosives, some against cliff walls, others into spiked pits. Every last Jar Jar gets catapulted to a gory death, rendered in exquisite detail with the latest CGI techniques.
This "leak" is just a clever ploy to make sure that the real plot of Episode II is not over-hyped to the point that it is disappointing as many found Episode I.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
chipsets/CPUs need to have crypto on-board, to prevent nasty people from doing a post-mortem debugging session on your RAM.
I find your excessive concern for keeping secrets disturbing. You must be doing something illegal. That's why your computer (and all the other computers purchased with the "secure memory" feature) will, in fact, be equipped with a remote monitoring device which periodically broadcasts a memory dump and can be used to give you a paralysing shock through the keyboard.
We're out to get you, you know. All of us.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I can see some severe problems in communicating in Japanese with lousy radio voice equipment. Often, one missed or slightly mispronounced syllable can completely change the meaning, and speaking clearly and loudly in Japanese is slower than doing the same in English (you might have heard emergency warnings in anime, and know that the very generic "ABUNAI!" (danger) tends to be used where a more specific "DUCK!", "RUN!", or "BEHIND YOU!" is likely to be used in English); it lacks some of the natural redundancy of English and the handy Anglo-Saxon selection of clear, short emergency words. Terseness in Japanese is achieved by leaving out words that are clear by context (by this method, often a rather astoundingly complicated concept can be expressed in only a few words, which is why you can sometimes read several paragraphs in English that explain a phrase used as a name for something in Japanese), and there isn't always a lot that's clear by context in short commands. Speed is achieved by abbreviating groups of syllables as rather subtle compounds that can be difficult to hear under bad conditions. Furthermore, back in the days before transistor radio and TV Japanese was strongly dialectized, which would surely have added to their problems.
I suspect that this might have added somewhat to the top-down military structure, and further restricted the ability of individual units to improvise in a coordinated manner. Of course, that's hard to say, as this was already something of a feature of the Japanese military. This isn't to say that it's strictly a negative thing, there are advantages and disadvantages to having troops either more or less willing to strike out on their own when they think they know better than their commanders (either way, any military operation usually has some spectacular screw-ups caused by this feature).
As for those other replies that dismiss Churchill's comments as wrong in principle or "just plain racist", with the implication that all languages are alike, I would insist that there are very significant differences in the capabilities of languages. This requires different amounts of training to learn the specialized sub-language of any new field. There's a reason you can't understand what the drill sergeant is yelling, or the impenetrable babble of doctors in emergency surgery ("sew up that hole", "give him some painkillers", "saw off his foot", "he bumped his noggin").
If daily Japanese speech is more different from Japanese military commands than daily English speech from English military commands, it's going to take more training to learn a large and flexible vocabulary, so this ability will tend to be restricted to higher ranks.
Churchill was exaggerating, if not flat-out wrong (after all, ambiguity is a special feature of Japanese, but it is also purely optional), but IMHO it's at least plausible that the features of the language were a factor in the organization of the Japanese military.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Sure, his grammar isn't the greatest, but the big misunderstanding is all his editor's fault.
In the pre-edited version, he also explains how undocumented in-house modifications to the source can give your company a business advantage over other people who use the vanilla unmodified Linux or especially people who run Windows.
Unfortunately, his poor writing skills caused him to refer to this advantage as "dis advantage", which the editor took for a typo.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the problems cause by concentrations of cars. It's not like they're going to instantly dissipate. Our cities will be clogged with cars, while our parks and forests will be abandoned by people who can't out for the weekend.
There are already problems with "jams" of traffic in cities already. I think cars that are 1/3 the price would make it even worse.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
how long til the naysayers finally admit that ZEV electric vehicles are the future?
How long til the ZEV-boosters come up with car that has the range, power, and convenience of a gas car for the same or a lower price?
Come back when you've got those ultra capacitors, and we'll talk.
IMHO, before electric cars are so superior to chemical cars that it's worth the bother to switch over, we'll have gone into the true post-industrial age and be flying around without any visible apparatus, assuming we ever bother to move our bodies around for trips not measured in light-minutes or more.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
As someone who subsists entirely on corn, I feel that my very survival is threatened by this scheme.
All kidding aside, I think we're better off using cropland for food and generating our energy with fission. Fission or giant orbiting arrays of solar panels.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
You can carry methanol around in a gas can and with minor modifications, you can burn methanol in your current car.
Methanol can be generated from CO2 and water, to which it, of course, returns when burned. It can also be manufactured easily from vegetable matter.
Like hydrogen, it supports a simple closed cycle using the atmosphere as the return pipe without polluting it with toxins, and can be easily burned or used in a fuel cell to generate electricity. Unlike hydrogen, it's energy-dense and simple to handle under even the most primitive conditions by unskilled labour.
A little added complexity on the manufacturing side for a big payoff in simplicity everywhere else is why methanol is a much more likely "fuel of the future" than hydrogen (methane is intermediate between the two in almost every way, but it's another gas so I'm still betting on methanol).
If we could just stop the damned blind rednecks from drinking it all, we'd have no trouble with supply.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Just so we don't get stupid arguments like "if we can get energy from the air, why can't we just make an engine that runs on air?", the thermodynamic principle here is that a heat engine can produce work from a temperature difference, by letting the energy flow from hotter to cooler while "skimming" off part of the energy to transform into work. The percentage that it skims is the complement of the efficiency, which obviously can't be higher than 100%.
So a theoretically generalized heat engine doesn't care whether you carry around a fire or a block of ice, or (for that matter) if you skim along with one ski in a trough of cold water and another ski in a trough of hot water, as long as it's got access to a temperature difference. In practice, of course, you've got to design different engines if you want reasonable efficiency.
Incidentally, being from the frosty Northern near-state of Canada, I'd really rather not have a car without a toasty hot engine. While you can use liquid nitrogen to heat your cab, it's not terribly efficient. However, people who live in hot places might appreciate the cheap, efficient, and simple air-conditioning.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I just had to establish that my penis is larger than yours (that's length and girth, mind you).
;_; )
Isn't that what all this was about? You don't really care about frame rates, do you?
I reserve words like "submoronic" for festive occasions, like when someone starts a flamewar with a long, pompous, patronizing "correction" (especially on a dead or near-dead thread).
(BTW, I don't moderate: when a thread interests me, I post. Also, I rather expected that I'd pissed someone else off with my rampage on a near-dead thread. Every time I go off like that, usually a half-dozen other posts of mine go down at random. Like I said, I find it amusing. I don't care about karma, I just post whatever I feel like - on topic, off topic, flames, trolls, pissing contests, stupid jokes, made-up figures, oddball theories, anything - and I've still mysteriously got karma coming out the wazoo.)
Hey, you're the bastard that moderated down my "this idea should work for more than music" aren't you? Now that's just rude. That's the most on-topic, relevant post I've ever written, on a subject that I've given years of consideration to, and you, with your perceptions colored by our recent exchange of flames, moderate it down long after the thread is dead.
Bad form! Psuedointellectual flame war rule #1 is "Flaming only! No backstabbing."
The "overrated" and "underrated" moderation choices are stupid. If you can't come up with a better reason than "overrated", you shouldn't bother moderating someone down.
(yeah, the 50 point barrier is down, karma is unfrozen, and mine has tragically fallen to 190; unshed tears blur my vision
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I think it's pretty funny when I annoy someone enough to go around moderating down all of my old posts in dead threads.
It's happened a few times before. I wonder how my congenial personality inspires such hatred...
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Knowing that tells you nothing about the bizarre equipment that interprets all that information in the visual cortex and beyond, and you cannot pronounce on what it does or doesn't require without knowing that.
Once again, you are arguing "we don't know anything" as a general counterargument to anything I say. You propose no alternate model and offer no useful information. It's pathetic.
it isn't swayed by what happens in one rod or cone
Gee, then I guess we can take out all the rods and cones, and you'll still be able to see just fine. Since the information is filtered and processed, I guess we can just ignore what gets gathered.
The actual function of the rods and cones is essential to this issue. The information they provide is the limit of visual data gathered. The brain can throw a lot of it away, but it can't conjure more information from somewhere. The maximum firing rate of the light-detecting cells and their number set absolute maximum limits of temporal and pixel resolution.
Motion blur isn't a psychological effect.
Again, semantics. You baselessly assert a different meaning to my words than the one I have clearly explained I intended, and then use the words you thus put in my mouth to attack my arguments. If you want to argue about proper usage, keep it seperate. Otherwise, just try to maintain a consistent semantic standard throughout the discussion, so some meaning might be extracted from it.
I know people who don't go to movie theatres precisely because a 24fps quantised image pisses them off.
Yes, there are rare people for whom 30 fps is insufficient (I am one of those for whom 24 fps is insufficient and annoying; the moment any action starts I see distinct blurred frames). There are also people who have seizures when exposed to flickering lights and other people who don't see at all. They are called "freaks" and left out of general discussions.
My explanation was a good enough analogy to explain why motion-blurred 30 fps is adequate for most people. Just as it is when they watch TV (I don't hear anybody complaining that TV frame rates are too low). The same explanation would apply to explain why 40 fps is adequate for 99.9% or why 60 fps is adequate for 99.9999%.
The problem of needing a higher monitor refresh rate is entirely distinct and non-psychological.
Incidentally, I'm not making ad hominem attacks, moron. I'm using arguments to support personal insults, not the other way around. If I said, "You, being a moron, are wrong" that would be an ad hominem attack, but I've said "You, being wrong, are a moron."
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
They're part of the same real world they're reacting to, and thus not quantised either.
The real world is quantized (hmm... how did that go? [something] mechanics. It'll come to me...). The human nervous system is quantized (not globally synchronized to a fixed clock, but definitely quantized). Neurons fire or don't fire. The light-sensing mechanisms of the eye are connected to neurons, which they cause to fire or not fire periodically. There are definite limits to the speed of transmission and firing rate of neurons, whether they've been measured 100% accurately or not.
there aren't any pixels,
Rods and cones. 'nuff said.
Running extra frames doesn't really create any sort of motion blur unless you specifically render that motion blur
If you consider motion blur to be a psychological effect rather than a mechanism, it creates motion blur. It should have been clear to the most minimally adequate mind that I meant this from my opening statement, "the real world is motion-blurred".
The bottom line is that 30FPS isn't just fine.
Go ahead. Tell me you can distinguish individual frames of a TV signal. 30 FPS is fine as long as you make your camera (or rendering engine) act enough like a human eye.
The whole purpose of improving rendering engines is to recreate the quality of a competently recorded video display of a real-life scene. To counter a claim that a certain method is sufficient for this with the argument that the purpose is insufficient for the purpose is submoronic.
I hate people who play with semantics and insist on taking the literal meanings of expressions and then attacking this straw man when the language is inadequate for literal discussion.
Arguing that explaining the theory used to justify the FPS rate of recorded video is a mistake because, despite the fact that it has yielded useful results, it may yet be proven false by some new test in the future, goes beyond pomposity... but I can't think of a word low enough for someone who utterly rejects the description of a practical model because it's not Certain Eternal Truth ("skeptic" doesn't have the bite it should, having long since swallowed its opposite meaning).
Why didn't you just save yourself some time and reply with "knowing nothing, we can know nothing"?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I find that in the design stage, there is no useful distinction between "at work" and "at home". You're working 24 hours, with ideas popping up from all over the place. Might as well leave at 5 and be more comfortable while you think; for that matter, you might as well leave at noon, and sit in your back yard with a beer and a pad of paper close at hand, staring at clouds and contemplating data structures.
However, in the coding stage, I find that immediately dropping everything and leaving at five works great, as long as things are rolling along when you leave. The best time to quit is when you're getting lots done and you know exactly what you're going to do next. Tomorrow morning, you'll know exactly what you've got to start with, and once you do that, you're in the flow again.
If you just keep coding untill you can't get any further, you'll come in the next day, tired out and wondering where to begin. You'll spend hours just getting rolling again.
That's been my personal experience, anyway. I've done some pretty neat stuff on 40-hour coding sprees, but usually the project died there. Sure, I'd get a week's work done in a day, maybe more, but somehow I'd never seem to get anywhere else with the hack-attack code. Eventually, I'd end up rewriting the project from scratch.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
So what are you doing now? Don't give up your schooling, that's a decision you'll regret later in life...
It was a couple of years ago, and I'm not regretting it yet.
Continuing university would have meant years more of the endless, pointless exams that leave little time for learning, and a debt that would obligate me to immediately take one of those corporate jobs.
I went into the game programming business for myself (well, half into business, half into private study), and while I'm not in the black yet, I've learned a lot about programming. I read Knuth's TAoCP books, learned a couple dozen programming languages, and learned to hack out a new programming language in a couple of days. Aside from that, I've had time to study linguistics and human languages, physics, history, economics, etc.
A couple of programming job offers have fallen into my lap, but I left the only one I took because it didn't pay well enough (some people have funny ideas about what "trial salary" means; I thought it meant "we'll talk about pay after you've seen what I can do" and they thought it meant "a low salary we can pay you forever"). I learned a new programming environment and language by my second day, and had 4 complete products out by the end of the month.
From what I've seen, I can go out and get a job any time I want, even with practically no paid experience on my resume, and I'd be able to get a good paying job (by programmer standards) within a year. But I've consistently chosen to stick with my private business, because I still think it'll make me rich. After a few years of dropping product ideas just short of completion, because I realized they wouldn't sell (at least not enough to be worth the trouble of releasing them), I think I finally understand the market well enough to turn a serious profit.
When I think of the years I wasted sitting in classrooms listening to some stuffed shirt drone on about things I already knew, I wish I'd had the courage to drop out at junior high. School is nothing but an attempt at brainwashing to create perfect corporate wage slaves. Any learning is purely coincidental.
The only thing that makes university worthwhile is the people you meet. I miss that a great deal. Now, for the most part, I only meet my peers online.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Mass market busking
"Here, free software! Give me money, and other people will give you free software because they see I got money, so they think you might give them some." It's that simple.
Acting civilized pays off in the long term.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...according to the spec I was given in a few days, and went to explain it to the guy in charge.
He took one look at my documentation, said "This'll never work." and apparently got stuck on that setting. I explained that it was done, and it did work already, but that didn't faze him. Eventually, he got me to throw away all my work and rewrite it so it didn't meet the original spec, ran slower, and used more file space.
The reason? He couldn't understand anything with a data structure more complicated than an array, and didn't believe in using dynamic allocation or pointers. Ever. Seriously.
Hundreds of globals, gotos in every function, 20,000 line undocumented source files, hidden arbitrary limits to data size: all that was okay, but no linked lists or trees. Certainly not something as complex and mysterious as a hash table! Stuff like that causes bugs!
I won't mention where this was, but if you ever wonder why an automated telephone response system is so screwed up and useless, maybe it came out of this shop.
It was then that I realized I could never tolerate the corporate environment, and stopped pursuing the university degree I'd need for such a job.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...and big movie studios will make money by providing makeup services to actors and a typing pool for script writiers.
Recording companies can't survive on the thin revenues of services to musicians. Of course the people who work in the studios and set up lighting at concerts will still be able to make a living doing what they know. A few might even acquire the names of the big record labels they work for now. That can't be described by any stretch of the imagination as record companies doing okay.
But they shouldn't exploit artists as if they were strawberry pickers.
Now we're drifting off topic, but I find this funny. Musicians are artists as in "starving artist", as in someone who works in a field that most people don't consider work and many participate in for free (a bit like trying to make a living as a male prostitute who only hires out to attractive women; too many others are willing to do it for free for it to be considered a reasonable business). I could take a walk around town today and find a dozen musicians with as much ability as the the ones I hear on the radio. The labels create their massive commercial value with large investments, it's totally artificial.
The ones who aren't being "exploited" usually aren't even making a living.
I have a lot more sympathy for an honest strawberry picker, getting a wage for a physically taxing job they'd rather not do, than for musicians, who chose their career because it is the thing they most enjoy doing, but they expect to get paid for it anyway.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...the real world is motion-blurred.
The human eye can only detect about 30 FPS; each light sensor basically adds up all the light that hits it in 1/30th of a second and presents that as a "pixel" in that "frame" (which is why things like raster scanning monitors: your eyes' natural motion blur at work!). However, games render views as still-frames. So if you're moving fast enough that the world would be a blur, instead you get what is effectively random garbage on the screen. That is the rendering engine breaking down under conditions it was not built to handle properly; much like when you walk right up to a wall in Doom and walk sideways (ooo, look at the squares!).
Running extra frames faster than the eye can see creates a fake motion blur. The higher the frame rate, the faster things can move and still look okay. For games like Quake, the necessary speed for effective blurring tops out around 200 fps. I imagine very high speed racing games could benefit from even higher fps rates.
However, if and when rendering engines start to incorporate true motion-blurring (which nobody seems terribly inclined to bother with, since the fake blurring looks just fine, and is probably cheaper and definitely simpler to compute), 30 FPS will be just fine.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Think about *who* you really support (I'm guessing you are pro-[your favorite band] not pro-[free music, gimme!]). While it tastes great, Naptster's free beer (music for free) is blocking Metallica's free speech (self-determination on what and how they express themselves to fans). I think the artists know just a little bit what they're talking about. Get behind them.
I don't care about these "artists" (I'm talking about all popular musicians here). They are absurdly rich because they entered into deals with the promoter/distributors to play their music for free into the ears of youth over the only convenient distribution systems that existed (radio, TV), until they got used to the music and felt a need to hear more. Their fame and riches stem from this deal more than from special musical ability. They are part of the machine, not victims of it.
Yes, good musicians deserve some compensation, but control is not part of the bargain! Any musician who wants to tell me how much I have to pay him to hear his music is never getting a cent from me. There are plenty of other musicians out there, and I've got money for them, when I like their music and when they don't try to attack me legally.
Compensation does not require control! Getting enormously rich from your mediocre talent plus a large promotion budget does, though. That's what Metallica did, and that's what they're trying to protect.
To hell with them. I have no special love for the tiny wealthy minority of musicians in bed with the record companies (who then bitch that they aren't getting a big enough slice of the absurdly large revenue). I have a lot more sympathy for the other 99% of musicians who are working second jobs to support their hobby. Without control, maybe we'd see fewer rich whiners and more decent musicians making a living.
You're damned right I'm selfish. That's the way you're supposed to be in commercial transactions. Not stupidly selfish, but putting your own interests first. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to pick your pocket with his tongue.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I think that the record companies will do fine,
Why would you think that? They have nothing of value to sell. They are simply acquisition-promotion-litigation engines which purchase IP at a low price, and pump the demand for it to sell access for a high price.
It won't work when the the most convenient delivery system is controlled by end-user choice rather than 3rd-party payments. Their only value to the musicians is that they can get the musicians' music into the ears of the paying public, which would be almost impossible otherwise. When, instead of a dozen radio stations, there are a million playlists to choose from, the listeners won't choose those on which a spot can be bought with bribes, and the record companies will no longer have the ear of the listening public. Musicians will start to do fine without signing on with a label, and then it will all be over.
They will "do fine" in the new information media, about as well as the currency traders would "do fine" if everyone went back to the gold standard.
They are dying, with no hope of survival. Their existence no longer makes sense, so we can't expect their actions to make sense. They will continue to thrash around wildly until they run out of money.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I think people forget just how hokey the original three were.
Episode I was just following in the footsteps of the original trilogy. Did anyone else notice when Obi-Wan whacks a robot with his lightsabre, and it falls over? That's classic Star Wars cheese, right up there with "Two figh-ters a-gainst a Star De-stroyer?" ("Worst delivery ever.") and the Hallowe'en masks in the Mos Eisley cantina.
100% pure American processed cheese.
Star Wars is like Shakespeare: everyone loves it, and nobody wants to admit what derivative tripe it is.
It is fun, though. Kind of like Futurama, with a straight face. And the "used universe" set building philosophy is something that modern sci-fi could use a refresher-course in.
I've drifted, but my point was, try not to compare your fresh vision of the new Star Wars films with your nostalgia-fogged vision of the old ones, nothing can live up to that.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Senator Palpatine at his most evil: he clones Jar Jar by the thousands!
His own people, deeply ashamed by the proliferation of this most pathetic example of their species, feel obligated to fix it.
The latter hour of the movie consists entirely of thousands of Jar Jars being launched out of the catapults they used in the Episode I, some with explosives, some against cliff walls, others into spiked pits. Every last Jar Jar gets catapulted to a gory death, rendered in exquisite detail with the latest CGI techniques.
This "leak" is just a clever ploy to make sure that the real plot of Episode II is not over-hyped to the point that it is disappointing as many found Episode I.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Make me an offer.
I bid one novelty T-shirt, marked "I sold my vote, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
chipsets/CPUs need to have crypto on-board, to prevent nasty people from doing a post-mortem debugging session on your RAM.
I find your excessive concern for keeping secrets disturbing. You must be doing something illegal. That's why your computer (and all the other computers purchased with the "secure memory" feature) will, in fact, be equipped with a remote monitoring device which periodically broadcasts a memory dump and can be used to give you a paralysing shock through the keyboard.
We're out to get you, you know. All of us.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
a person who asks whether you know a second language?
A: Bicurious!
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I can see some severe problems in communicating in Japanese with lousy radio voice equipment. Often, one missed or slightly mispronounced syllable can completely change the meaning, and speaking clearly and loudly in Japanese is slower than doing the same in English (you might have heard emergency warnings in anime, and know that the very generic "ABUNAI!" (danger) tends to be used where a more specific "DUCK!", "RUN!", or "BEHIND YOU!" is likely to be used in English); it lacks some of the natural redundancy of English and the handy Anglo-Saxon selection of clear, short emergency words. Terseness in Japanese is achieved by leaving out words that are clear by context (by this method, often a rather astoundingly complicated concept can be expressed in only a few words, which is why you can sometimes read several paragraphs in English that explain a phrase used as a name for something in Japanese), and there isn't always a lot that's clear by context in short commands. Speed is achieved by abbreviating groups of syllables as rather subtle compounds that can be difficult to hear under bad conditions. Furthermore, back in the days before transistor radio and TV Japanese was strongly dialectized, which would surely have added to their problems.
I suspect that this might have added somewhat to the top-down military structure, and further restricted the ability of individual units to improvise in a coordinated manner. Of course, that's hard to say, as this was already something of a feature of the Japanese military. This isn't to say that it's strictly a negative thing, there are advantages and disadvantages to having troops either more or less willing to strike out on their own when they think they know better than their commanders (either way, any military operation usually has some spectacular screw-ups caused by this feature).
As for those other replies that dismiss Churchill's comments as wrong in principle or "just plain racist", with the implication that all languages are alike, I would insist that there are very significant differences in the capabilities of languages. This requires different amounts of training to learn the specialized sub-language of any new field. There's a reason you can't understand what the drill sergeant is yelling, or the impenetrable babble of doctors in emergency surgery ("sew up that hole", "give him some painkillers", "saw off his foot", "he bumped his noggin").
If daily Japanese speech is more different from Japanese military commands than daily English speech from English military commands, it's going to take more training to learn a large and flexible vocabulary, so this ability will tend to be restricted to higher ranks.
Churchill was exaggerating, if not flat-out wrong (after all, ambiguity is a special feature of Japanese, but it is also purely optional), but IMHO it's at least plausible that the features of the language were a factor in the organization of the Japanese military.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I think I might have heard it before, but it's a still terrific joke.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Sure, his grammar isn't the greatest, but the big misunderstanding is all his editor's fault.
In the pre-edited version, he also explains how undocumented in-house modifications to the source can give your company a business advantage over other people who use the vanilla unmodified Linux or especially people who run Windows.
Unfortunately, his poor writing skills caused him to refer to this advantage as "dis advantage", which the editor took for a typo.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.