Then imagine more serious applications coexisting with the shopping and the fun: Architectural firms taking advantage of There's near-real physics to stress-test building designs by coaxing crowds of avatars to visit the virtual structures. Or Army divisions training en masse in virtual replicas of enemy territory.
The parent is right, if There is seriously purposing some kind of jack-of-all-trades virtual world, they and their investors (their investors, There investors, very clever...) are completely stupid, or very desperate to attract interest.
Where do they get off thinking 'near-real physics' will allow them to do simulations of real-world crowd dynamics? And of what value to the Army is it to co-exist with 'shopping and fun'?
There's no commonality between these different applications and they all deserve dedicated software to meet individual requirements. You can't make a business plan out of something like: "We've created an approximation of the real world, so therefore anything people might want to do in reality they'll pay us to do here!"
This sounds exactly like all the VR huckster snake-oil cheerleading from ten years ago.
There's always the compelling vision of them breaking out of the ghetto, raising test scores and making teachers obsolete... First thing to do: get rid of the stupid 'edutainment' moniker.
I think games with extremely realistic physics are educational: a good car game can be a laboratory for rigid body physics, principles of friction, momentum, etc. Most people will never fly an airplane, but some games have decent flight models without getting bogged down with control-and-dials trivia, and could teach something about aerodynamics.
Self-consciously 'educational' components in a game is death for the most part, but maybe a good physics teacher could supplement the diagrams and math with the right kind of otherwise pure-entertainment games.
I thought The Bouncer was a good rental (as it only takes a few hours to play through). Light Guns are good installation/arcade games, with huge screens and big guns that recoil (sparks and smoke would be cool also- I haven't seen it done before), but arcades have been dying for a long time. It seems like most of these genres began life in the arcades and aren't sustainable without them.
The arcade model of progressing through scrolling screens while being continually sapped of energy (unless the player has memorized the layout or has prescient reflexes) at rate that will game-over frequently enough to make the game profitable isn't that interesting once you take it out of the pay-per-play context.
Text Adventures are obviously out, not because text is inherently dull, but because they would need Turing level language parsing to make them truly playable. Text adventures have been succeeded by the MMORPGs like/., which sidestep the AI problem with real people...
..these awards ceremonies are nothing buy self-congratulatory nonsense... I don't need an emmy, a grammy, an oscar, an MTV award, a Blockbuster award, a golden globe, or a people's choice award to know whether I'm good at what I do or not.
That's because you aren't famous, and wouldn't derive any profit from it even if you were. One persons 'Self-congratulatory nonsense' is anothers indispensable night to be seen by millions of people... It's work for them (though it's not exactly digging coal).
They're flat screens because they can't have the technology look too far ahead of what was in TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY.
Maybe they should let the whole franchise lie fallow for a few years (like between TOS and the first movie) so they can make a clean break from the the older series, technology-wise if not for overall timeline as well. Or, just tell the fans that anything and everything regarding the older series may be subject to change, or explain it away in-series with time-travel/alternate history.
Another option: re-edit, film new scenes, insert new special effects, etc. into 'special editions' (the George Lucas Method). But that would be prohibitively expensive for ST, considering the volume of old material.
Besides, unless you're displaying something where 3D would be useful there's no reason for a holographic screen.
There could be an omnidirectional display, that shows the same 2D image from every viewing angle, like the billboarding technique used in games. Even if it was 3D, you still might everyone in the room to see the visuals from a certain angle. The effect may look odd and cheap rather than futuristic (as in games it's used as a crude analog for true 3D), however useful it would be for circular meeting rooms. Heck, if it's possible with today's technology, there's got to be market for that.
It's more exciting to see everything as the events unfold, but you'd have to be stupid to think you're going to get anything near a complete or accurate picture of what's going on.
It takes years until documents are unclassifed, interviews can be done, military personnel retire, etc. and then a few more years for a good writer to digest it and put it into a good book.
The truth will come out sooner or later, and eventually some one will put it into a coherent package. Don't look for it on live television...
Don't forget about FreeGeek in Portland, Oregon and the Alameda County Computer Resource Center. The take donated equipment, recycle some and install Linux on the less antiquated computers for interesting projects and donation to needy individuals.
FreeGeek has an interesting concept: anyone who volunteers for 8 hours can take one of the Linux boxes home and take classes on how to use it.
There's a small profit to be made on scrap and precious metals that can be stripped out of old computers, which is part of the reason these non-profit organizations can sustain themselves. They don't charge for computer donations, but monitors are such a pain and hazard to dispose of properly there's a fee involved.
If anyone wants to start up something similar in Seattle, email my username at my homepage domain.
The author seems to be incapable just getting to the subject and explaining himself in a clear and consise manner. Instead, he embarks on these long, florid poetry-filled diatribes about the imagination, and a yellow tulip.
There's a lot of this in 'popular science' type books. The authors know that to actually present an equation and explain the actual math will be death for book sales, and so start with a problem, throw in some anecdotal story on how the solution was found, skip the math, and then declare the results to be very beautiful and profound (hence the yellow tulip etc.).
At times they do attempt to explain the math, equations are skipped, and in doing so there are paragraphs of confusing and frustrating explanation.
Then the authors use their results of their convoluted explanation as a building block for the next more complicated topic, and expect the reader to realize the brilliance: "So you see, because I've told you to accept my previous hand-waving, you now can see how this further hand-waving would fail utterly if not for the former, and you now are capable of seeing the elegance of my beautiful yellow tulip analogy."
Few characters or computationally intensive objects on screen at any time.
Short range of vision, caused by weather effects, darkness, or short twisty hallways.
Lack of or extremely simplistic collisions: Characters shoot each other rather than getting into a wrestling match.
Characters lack emotion: no complex facial skin folding and animation required, just basic lip movements for near-deadpan speech.
Simple physics: exploding objects are obscured by the fireball rather than display deforming, twisting, buckling, and shattering physics. Also, clothing is snug, either skin-tight or padded and obscuring.
Simplified lighting, often masquerading as style: single blue lights, red lights, etc that obscure details and leave much in shadows.
Sci-fi setting to account for all of the above (and to appeal with most likely audience). It's post apocalyptic or in the depths of space so crowds of people are hard to come by, spaceships rarely have anything to run into, lasers or blaster bolts that just leave a blackened mark are easier than bullets with their complicated ballistics, collisions, object deforming penetrations, etc.
Interestingly, many of the same are true for low-budget live-actor productions, with the exception of human body and cloth physics.
I haven't been able to download the video, but the screenshots make it look like it falls fits my profile pretty well.
Are actors *that* much more expensive than the combined cost of the brilliant artists and voice actors?
It's not the cost. It's about absolute complete control over every aspect of the look of the final production. If you have the ego the size of the planet you don't want someone else's brilliance compromising your perfect vision. And you want actors to be able to repeat the last scene exactly as before in the last 214 'takes', but this time shift their gaze 2.6 degrees to the left starting on frame 3498.
The problem is that the capability for increased control over all aspects requires that that control be actually exercised over every aspect, because there's no brilliant actor to fill in the blanks.
Btw, FF (movie) seemed weird and creepy but you CAN'T explain what's no "not real" about it - a good example of the "chasm."
Discontinuity between the actor's voice and their CG face did it for me. James Woods has a unique nasally voice and played the generic looking villain: James Woods has a big nose, the CG puppet didn't, and acoustically that didn't make sense. Donald Sutherland's character was a close match to the character's, so there wasn't a problem there.
There's a asymptotic curve of increased content creation and computer processing power that perfect photorealism lies at the unattainable heights of. (Per-photon-and-atom rendering anyone?) Fooling-most-of-the-people-most-of-the-time is probably readably achieveable within a decade, but there will always be a audience members capable of discerning that the long fiber muscle contraction models were only 2nd order approximations and 'just look wrong'...
Ever notice if you say a word repeatedly, it starts to sound like gibberish?
A few years down the road, how will we quickly label and villify anyone responsible for some horrible attack, when terrorist has been completely watered to down to mean nothing at all?
Try Government Surplus Auctions if you want some drug dealer cars, or heavy industrial equipment. Also check your local University for a surplus store and periodic auctions like UW's. If you want to get your garage genetics lab off the ground and don't mind using ten-year-old equipment, these outlets can be ideal.
Also, non-profits can sometimes get the surplus stuff free or at a cut rate.
In Howard Rheingold's Tools For Thought it is mentioned that three decades ago many top scientists working on the government funded computer and communications projects left their posts out of dissatisfaction with government policy:
In 1970, a combination of growing opposition to the Vietnam war, and the militarization of all ARPA research, meant that an extraordinary collection of talent in the new fields of computer networks and interactive computing were looking for greener pastures...
Luckily, XEROX and other private companies were around to snatch them up and not let their talents go to waste.
This kind of phenomenon can't be do much good: It doesn't help legitimate national security interests, and scientists and engineers without the means to innovate don't benefit the economy. If young persons decide to avoid engineering or science completely when a perceived immoral government taints those fields, there's even more fallout...
Shoot a movie, but keep all the unused material from the cutting room floor
Every few months, splice some of these back into the film, think of a new name for the film like "Special Edition", "Director's Cut", "Colllector's Edition" or any combination of the above, or reformat it to widescreen. Sell this new film at full price in the stores.
Sometimes it's greed, but mostly I'd think it's common business sense. Normal editions for less popular films probably don't sell many copies, and the special editions even less. The special edition doesn't come 'free.' Editing costs money, developing and color processing film and tweaking individual frames, mixing sound, etc. costs money. Therefore if enough people buy the regular edition, it may be profitable to produce a special edition. The time difference also gives more people a chance to discover the film and a larger fan base to grow- which may be critical for lower profile movies.
It may be standard practice these days to plan for dvd extras during production, but the actors still have to be brought back to see a finalized version in order to do commentaries. The commentaries probably get better if a few months (or years) have passed since the film was released to the public, so the actors and directories have a chance to see it fresh in new light, rather than: "What I was trying to do here in this scene when I directing/acting earlier this morning was..."
The timed content release business method works pretty well for generating fresh buyers as well as pleasing current fans. Most movies will not have a perpetual shelf life- if you want to maintain interest in a movie (while perhaps also testing the markets for sequels or similar films), there needs to be constant new content for fans to repeatedly get excited about- and the newcomers will see on the shelf something new (and old) that would have otherwise been relegated to specialty stores or the bottom of bargain bins.
On the "UHF" DVD, during the deleted scenes section, Al says several times that, basically, there's a reason that the scenes were deleted.
And then, somewhat rudely, he fast-forwards through a bunch of them... (though the extra Kramer-er Michael Richards stuff was pretty good).
For FOTR, the length would have had theaters throwing a fit if the extended version was the one to be shown on the big screen, and the casual movie goers who aren't hard core fans may have been put off. Releasing the special edition after the theatrical and regular release gives a chance for some of those casual movie goers to turn into hard core fans.
What annoys me is that so many of the extra scenes ons dvds aren't from developed film- it's from the video (of a poor quality) the cameras simultaneously shoot so the director can watch the take instantly without having to develop the film. Of course, it takes lots of money to develop and color process film, so for marginal movies with even more marginal 'extra scenes', it's not worth it.
you could use 64-bit integers to repleace floating point numbers
Sure, but why?
You wouldn't have the same accuracy that you would get from using floats
Correct...
it's a nice middle-ground between 32-bit ints, floats, and double-precision floats
Absolutely wrong. Anything that is going to be scaled or rotated (think matrix transformations, vector multiplication, and physics calculations) needs to have floating point representation, unless the processor architecture is incapable of it (the Gameboy Advance or other embedded platforms, say). You can have pseudo floating point with ints (last x bits are behind the decimal, say), but the software needs to do extra work: there's special cases for multiplication, etc. Most processors these days are designed to do floating point operations as fast as anything else, so adding unnecessary overhead that ignores basic funtionality would be stupid.
If you have a 64-bit cpu, use 64-bit floats instead of 32. 64-bit floats are superior for games because of increased dynamic range for lighting (less color banding with scaling) and other values, and of course less floating point round-off errors (less matrix drift).
Game servers do no graphical calculations, so there's no advantage there, but some of the physics could be done centrally to prevent the clients from making up their own and cheating.
The gameplay still seems oriented around individuals or small party adventuring: If a thousand players are individually killing bugs on different parts of the map, are any of them gaining a more enriching experience for being in the same massive and persistent world?
So ummm... how do we go about inputting books ourself? I mean, there are some decent books in the system that need rating and reviews, but none that I've read recently enough to write a decent review.
They've gone and wasted all their temporary slashdot attention didn't they? They can try for a dupe story as soon as they've recovered from the/.ing and added a submission form...
The main think the IMDB has over a similar book site is the interconnectedness of movies... With books all you can really index are the titles and the authors - and crossovers are rare.
But surely sometimes authors base parts of their works on other books they've read before. Imagine for a moment if someone were to write a book, and included with it a list of every other work that they found useful in doing so- you could call that section, say, a bibliography!
Seriously, you and the moderators should try the non-fiction section, there's a whole world there. But even science fiction and fantasy books are going to have similar plot elements, themes, situations, etc that would be worth cataloging.
I would love to be able to find in a database a history or science book I've just read, and be able to click on any listing in the bibliography and browse on backwards through time. Or find what the most cited book ever was, or play six-steps-to-Stanley-Karnow or some other author (I wouldn't love that, but someone might). Imagine a grand family tree of books with chains of links stretching back for centuries that existed on the web for anyone to browse and search- I think it would be a powerful device for showing the accretion of human knowledge. (There are systems like this for peer-reviewed papers, but they're relatively inaccessible)
Does anyone know if reproducing a bibliography whole would be fair use?
...skeptics will notice that, despite his flawless credentials, staggering intelligence, and depth of knowledge, Wolfram possesses many attributes of a pseudoscientist: (1) he makes grandiose claims, (2) works in isolation, (3) did not go through the normal peer-review process, (4) published his own book, (5) does not adequately acknowledge his predecessors, and (6) rejects a well-established theory of at least one famous scientist.
Wolfram spent the last decade exploring cellular automata and recently published a massive book about it. I saw him give a fascinating presentation at the University of Washington a few months back, and he seemed on the level. The consensus of the critics: he has valid contributions to CA but needs to keep his ego in check...
>>Facial recognition and similar tech will be of age around the same time it'll possible to fabricate the same quality video with 3D animation software for less expenditure in resources.
> So you're saying that since it will be possible for Joe Sixpack to forge anyone's presence in video, that facial recognition won't be trusted? What if the video was "digitally signed" by evil DRM hardware?:)
I think easy forgery will muddy the waters, at the very least.
Traditional news networks should probably digitally sign their own content starting at the source with the camera and microphone (in combination with reporter signatures) if they want to maintain internal credibility (while still retaining the ability to forge their own footage, they at least wouldn't want to be manipulated by anyone anonymously submitting footage or altering their own broadcasts in transmission).
Individuals who want to acquire and distribute footage of their own would want to sign it with their own personal signature and work towards establishing credibility for themselves. There could be tons of people with zero credibility producing a lot of forged or real content with no signatures, and their presence would add value to trustworthy organizations and individuals.
Uncracked 'Evil DRM' signatures would ascertain that particular hardware actually recorded the signed image, but everything on the other side of the lens and DRM is in the 'Analog Hole'. In other words, forge the footage, and then point your signed camera at the display. Though the display or 3D software may be introducing watermarks...
It still comes down to traditional large organizations with the resources to acquire their own data directly or the newer webs of trust (which in effect will just be a different kind of large organization, though composed of volunteers). There's significant barriers to entry both ways, keeping out most of the 'little brother' hordes.
The likely net effect- many people will lose privacy over all, but escape hatches will exist for people who highly value their privacy. Privacy is kind of a separate issue but overlapping issue to credibility, though...
This is an extremely fertile topic, so probably I should stop before I reinvent what others have already worked out in greater detail, or end up saying the exact opposite of what I started out saying.
Instead of Big Brother we get gazillions of networked Little Brothers
The million little brothers have a lot of decentralized and unsearchable low quality videos that'll probably be deleted sooner than not. Facial recognition and similar tech will be of age around the same time it'll possible to fabricate the same quality video with 3D animation software for less expenditure in resources. Not to say that the two will balance out...
Slashdot Mirror
Then imagine more serious applications coexisting with the shopping and the fun: Architectural firms taking advantage of There's near-real physics to stress-test building designs by coaxing crowds of avatars to visit the virtual structures. Or Army divisions training en masse in virtual replicas of enemy territory.
The parent is right, if There is seriously purposing some kind of jack-of-all-trades virtual world, they and their investors (their investors, There investors , very clever...) are completely stupid, or very desperate to attract interest.
Where do they get off thinking 'near-real physics' will allow them to do simulations of real-world crowd dynamics? And of what value to the Army is it to co-exist with 'shopping and fun'?
There's no commonality between these different applications and they all deserve dedicated software to meet individual requirements. You can't make a business plan out of something like: "We've created an approximation of the real world, so therefore anything people might want to do in reality they'll pay us to do here!"
This sounds exactly like all the VR huckster snake-oil cheerleading from ten years ago.
Is it possible to make a real life living in a virtual economy?
There was a good Wired article on this- the minimum wage averages out to be $3.42/hour, though for a different game (UO and/or EQ) than There.com.
nobody misses the ghetto edutainment crap.
There's always the compelling vision of them breaking out of the ghetto, raising test scores and making teachers obsolete... First thing to do: get rid of the stupid 'edutainment' moniker.
I think games with extremely realistic physics are educational: a good car game can be a laboratory for rigid body physics, principles of friction, momentum, etc. Most people will never fly an airplane, but some games have decent flight models without getting bogged down with control-and-dials trivia, and could teach something about aerodynamics.
Self-consciously 'educational' components in a game is death for the most part, but maybe a good physics teacher could supplement the diagrams and math with the right kind of otherwise pure-entertainment games.
I thought The Bouncer was a good rental (as it only takes a few hours to play through). Light Guns are good installation/arcade games, with huge screens and big guns that recoil (sparks and smoke would be cool also- I haven't seen it done before), but arcades have been dying for a long time. It seems like most of these genres began life in the arcades and aren't sustainable without them.
/., which sidestep the AI problem with real people...
The arcade model of progressing through scrolling screens while being continually sapped of energy (unless the player has memorized the layout or has prescient reflexes) at rate that will game-over frequently enough to make the game profitable isn't that interesting once you take it out of the pay-per-play context.
Text Adventures are obviously out, not because text is inherently dull, but because they would need Turing level language parsing to make them truly playable. Text adventures have been succeeded by the MMORPGs like
..these awards ceremonies are nothing buy self-congratulatory nonsense... I don't need an emmy, a grammy, an oscar, an MTV award, a Blockbuster award, a golden globe, or a people's choice award to know whether I'm good at what I do or not.
That's because you aren't famous, and wouldn't derive any profit from it even if you were. One persons 'Self-congratulatory nonsense' is anothers indispensable night to be seen by millions of people... It's work for them (though it's not exactly digging coal).
They're flat screens because they can't have the technology look too far ahead of what was in TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY.
Maybe they should let the whole franchise lie fallow for a few years (like between TOS and the first movie) so they can make a clean break from the the older series, technology-wise if not for overall timeline as well. Or, just tell the fans that anything and everything regarding the older series may be subject to change, or explain it away in-series with time-travel/alternate history.
Another option: re-edit, film new scenes, insert new special effects, etc. into 'special editions' (the George Lucas Method). But that would be prohibitively expensive for ST, considering the volume of old material.
Besides, unless you're displaying something where 3D would be useful there's no reason for a holographic screen.
There could be an omnidirectional display, that shows the same 2D image from every viewing angle, like the billboarding technique used in games. Even if it was 3D, you still might everyone in the room to see the visuals from a certain angle. The effect may look odd and cheap rather than futuristic (as in games it's used as a crude analog for true 3D), however useful it would be for circular meeting rooms. Heck, if it's possible with today's technology, there's got to be market for that.
There's so much propaganda on both sides.
It's more exciting to see everything as the events unfold, but you'd have to be stupid to think you're going to get anything near a complete or accurate picture of what's going on.
It takes years until documents are unclassifed, interviews can be done, military personnel retire, etc. and then a few more years for a good writer to digest it and put it into a good book.
The truth will come out sooner or later, and eventually some one will put it into a coherent package. Don't look for it on live television...
Don't forget about FreeGeek in Portland, Oregon and the Alameda County Computer Resource Center. The take donated equipment, recycle some and install Linux on the less antiquated computers for interesting projects and donation to needy individuals.
FreeGeek has an interesting concept: anyone who volunteers for 8 hours can take one of the Linux boxes home and take classes on how to use it.
There's a small profit to be made on scrap and precious metals that can be stripped out of old computers, which is part of the reason these non-profit organizations can sustain themselves. They don't charge for computer donations, but monitors are such a pain and hazard to dispose of properly there's a fee involved.
If anyone wants to start up something similar in Seattle, email my username at my homepage domain.
The author seems to be incapable just getting to the subject and explaining himself in a clear and consise manner. Instead, he embarks on these long, florid poetry-filled diatribes about the imagination, and a yellow tulip.
There's a lot of this in 'popular science' type books. The authors know that to actually present an equation and explain the actual math will be death for book sales, and so start with a problem, throw in some anecdotal story on how the solution was found, skip the math, and then declare the results to be very beautiful and profound (hence the yellow tulip etc.).
At times they do attempt to explain the math, equations are skipped, and in doing so there are paragraphs of confusing and frustrating explanation.
Then the authors use their results of their convoluted explanation as a building block for the next more complicated topic, and expect the reader to realize the brilliance: "So you see, because I've told you to accept my previous hand-waving, you now can see how this further hand-waving would fail utterly if not for the former, and you now are capable of seeing the elegance of my beautiful yellow tulip analogy."
I slightly misread the comment I quoted in my post, if there's some discontinuity on my part in evidence...
Few characters or computationally intensive objects on screen at any time.
Short range of vision, caused by weather effects, darkness, or short twisty hallways.
Lack of or extremely simplistic collisions: Characters shoot each other rather than getting into a wrestling match.
Characters lack emotion: no complex facial skin folding and animation required, just basic lip movements for near-deadpan speech.
Simple physics: exploding objects are obscured by the fireball rather than display deforming, twisting, buckling, and shattering physics. Also, clothing is snug, either skin-tight or padded and obscuring.
Simplified lighting, often masquerading as style: single blue lights, red lights, etc that obscure details and leave much in shadows.
Sci-fi setting to account for all of the above (and to appeal with most likely audience). It's post apocalyptic or in the depths of space so crowds of people are hard to come by, spaceships rarely have anything to run into, lasers or blaster bolts that just leave a blackened mark are easier than bullets with their complicated ballistics, collisions, object deforming penetrations, etc.
Interestingly, many of the same are true for low-budget live-actor productions, with the exception of human body and cloth physics.
I haven't been able to download the video, but the screenshots make it look like it falls fits my profile pretty well.
Are actors *that* much more expensive than the combined cost of the brilliant artists and voice actors?
It's not the cost. It's about absolute complete control over every aspect of the look of the final production. If you have the ego the size of the planet you don't want someone else's brilliance compromising your perfect vision. And you want actors to be able to repeat the last scene exactly as before in the last 214 'takes', but this time shift their gaze 2.6 degrees to the left starting on frame 3498.
The problem is that the capability for increased control over all aspects requires that that control be actually exercised over every aspect, because there's no brilliant actor to fill in the blanks.
Btw, FF (movie) seemed weird and creepy but you CAN'T explain what's no "not real" about it - a good example of the "chasm."
Discontinuity between the actor's voice and their CG face did it for me. James Woods has a unique nasally voice and played the generic looking villain: James Woods has a big nose, the CG puppet didn't, and acoustically that didn't make sense. Donald Sutherland's character was a close match to the character's, so there wasn't a problem there.
There's a asymptotic curve of increased content creation and computer processing power that perfect photorealism lies at the unattainable heights of. (Per-photon-and-atom rendering anyone?) Fooling-most-of-the-people-most-of-the-time is probably readably achieveable within a decade, but there will always be a audience members capable of discerning that the long fiber muscle contraction models were only 2nd order approximations and 'just look wrong'...
Ever notice if you say a word repeatedly, it starts to sound like gibberish?
A few years down the road, how will we quickly label and villify anyone responsible for some horrible attack, when terrorist has been completely watered to down to mean nothing at all?
Try Government Surplus Auctions if you want some drug dealer cars, or heavy industrial equipment. Also check your local University for a surplus store and periodic auctions like UW's. If you want to get your garage genetics lab off the ground and don't mind using ten-year-old equipment, these outlets can be ideal.
Also, non-profits can sometimes get the surplus stuff free or at a cut rate.
Luckily, XEROX and other private companies were around to snatch them up and not let their talents go to waste.
This kind of phenomenon can't be do much good: It doesn't help legitimate national security interests, and scientists and engineers without the means to innovate don't benefit the economy. If young persons decide to avoid engineering or science completely when a perceived immoral government taints those fields, there's even more fallout...
Shoot a movie, but keep all the unused material from the cutting room floor
Every few months, splice some of these back into the film, think of a new name for the film like "Special Edition", "Director's Cut", "Colllector's Edition" or any combination of the above, or reformat it to widescreen. Sell this new film at full price in the stores.
Sometimes it's greed, but mostly I'd think it's common business sense. Normal editions for less popular films probably don't sell many copies, and the special editions even less. The special edition doesn't come 'free.' Editing costs money, developing and color processing film and tweaking individual frames, mixing sound, etc. costs money. Therefore if enough people buy the regular edition, it may be profitable to produce a special edition. The time difference also gives more people a chance to discover the film and a larger fan base to grow- which may be critical for lower profile movies.
It may be standard practice these days to plan for dvd extras during production, but the actors still have to be brought back to see a finalized version in order to do commentaries. The commentaries probably get better if a few months (or years) have passed since the film was released to the public, so the actors and directories have a chance to see it fresh in new light, rather than: "What I was trying to do here in this scene when I directing/acting earlier this morning was..."
The timed content release business method works pretty well for generating fresh buyers as well as pleasing current fans. Most movies will not have a perpetual shelf life- if you want to maintain interest in a movie (while perhaps also testing the markets for sequels or similar films), there needs to be constant new content for fans to repeatedly get excited about- and the newcomers will see on the shelf something new (and old) that would have otherwise been relegated to specialty stores or the bottom of bargain bins.
On the "UHF" DVD, during the deleted scenes section, Al says several times that, basically, there's a reason that the scenes were deleted.
And then, somewhat rudely, he fast-forwards through a bunch of them... (though the extra Kramer-er Michael Richards stuff was pretty good).
For FOTR, the length would have had theaters throwing a fit if the extended version was the one to be shown on the big screen, and the casual movie goers who aren't hard core fans may have been put off. Releasing the special edition after the theatrical and regular release gives a chance for some of those casual movie goers to turn into hard core fans.
What annoys me is that so many of the extra scenes ons dvds aren't from developed film- it's from the video (of a poor quality) the cameras simultaneously shoot so the director can watch the take instantly without having to develop the film. Of course, it takes lots of money to develop and color process film, so for marginal movies with even more marginal 'extra scenes', it's not worth it.
you could use 64-bit integers to repleace floating point numbers
Sure, but why?
You wouldn't have the same accuracy that you would get from using floats
Correct...
it's a nice middle-ground between 32-bit ints, floats, and double-precision floats
Absolutely wrong. Anything that is going to be scaled or rotated (think matrix transformations, vector multiplication, and physics calculations) needs to have floating point representation, unless the processor architecture is incapable of it (the Gameboy Advance or other embedded platforms, say). You can have pseudo floating point with ints (last x bits are behind the decimal, say), but the software needs to do extra work: there's special cases for multiplication, etc. Most processors these days are designed to do floating point operations as fast as anything else, so adding unnecessary overhead that ignores basic funtionality would be stupid.
If you have a 64-bit cpu, use 64-bit floats instead of 32. 64-bit floats are superior for games because of increased dynamic range for lighting (less color banding with scaling) and other values, and of course less floating point round-off errors (less matrix drift).
Game servers do no graphical calculations, so there's no advantage there, but some of the physics could be done centrally to prevent the clients from making up their own and cheating.
The gameplay still seems oriented around individuals or small party adventuring: If a thousand players are individually killing bugs on different parts of the map, are any of them gaining a more enriching experience for being in the same massive and persistent world?
So ummm... how do we go about inputting books ourself? I mean, there are some decent books in the system that need rating and reviews, but none that I've read recently enough to write a decent review.
/.ing and added a submission form...
They've gone and wasted all their temporary slashdot attention didn't they? They can try for a dupe story as soon as they've recovered from the
The main think the IMDB has over a similar book site is the interconnectedness of movies... With books all you can really index are the titles and the authors - and crossovers are rare.
But surely sometimes authors base parts of their works on other books they've read before. Imagine for a moment if someone were to write a book, and included with it a list of every other work that they found useful in doing so- you could call that section, say, a bibliography!
Seriously, you and the moderators should try the non-fiction section, there's a whole world there. But even science fiction and fantasy books are going to have similar plot elements, themes, situations, etc that would be worth cataloging.
I would love to be able to find in a database a history or science book I've just read, and be able to click on any listing in the bibliography and browse on backwards through time. Or find what the most cited book ever was, or play six-steps-to-Stanley-Karnow or some other author (I wouldn't love that, but someone might). Imagine a grand family tree of books with chains of links stretching back for centuries that existed on the web for anyone to browse and search- I think it would be a powerful device for showing the accretion of human knowledge. (There are systems like this for peer-reviewed papers, but they're relatively inaccessible)
Does anyone know if reproducing a bibliography whole would be fair use?
Wolfram spent the last decade exploring cellular automata and recently published a massive book about it. I saw him give a fascinating presentation at the University of Washington a few months back, and he seemed on the level. The consensus of the critics: he has valid contributions to CA but needs to keep his ego in check...
>>Facial recognition and similar tech will be of age around the same time it'll possible to fabricate the same quality video with 3D animation software for less expenditure in resources.
:)
> So you're saying that since it will be possible for Joe Sixpack to forge anyone's presence in video, that facial recognition won't be trusted? What if the video was "digitally signed" by evil DRM hardware?
I think easy forgery will muddy the waters, at the very least.
Traditional news networks should probably digitally sign their own content starting at the source with the camera and microphone (in combination with reporter signatures) if they want to maintain internal credibility (while still retaining the ability to forge their own footage, they at least wouldn't want to be manipulated by anyone anonymously submitting footage or altering their own broadcasts in transmission).
Individuals who want to acquire and distribute footage of their own would want to sign it with their own personal signature and work towards establishing credibility for themselves. There could be tons of people with zero credibility producing a lot of forged or real content with no signatures, and their presence would add value to trustworthy organizations and individuals.
Uncracked 'Evil DRM' signatures would ascertain that particular hardware actually recorded the signed image, but everything on the other side of the lens and DRM is in the 'Analog Hole'. In other words, forge the footage, and then point your signed camera at the display. Though the display or 3D software may be introducing watermarks...
It still comes down to traditional large organizations with the resources to acquire their own data directly or the newer webs of trust (which in effect will just be a different kind of large organization, though composed of volunteers). There's significant barriers to entry both ways, keeping out most of the 'little brother' hordes.
The likely net effect- many people will lose privacy over all, but escape hatches will exist for people who highly value their privacy. Privacy is kind of a separate issue but overlapping issue to credibility, though...
This is an extremely fertile topic, so probably I should stop before I reinvent what others have already worked out in greater detail, or end up saying the exact opposite of what I started out saying.
Ever read "The Light of Other Days" by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clark?
yes
Instead of Big Brother we get gazillions of networked Little Brothers
The million little brothers have a lot of decentralized and unsearchable low quality videos that'll probably be deleted sooner than not. Facial recognition and similar tech will be of age around the same time it'll possible to fabricate the same quality video with 3D animation software for less expenditure in resources. Not to say that the two will balance out...