This guys is a GAME DEVELOPER and is working on *SDL*. Where does it say to ask about GPL legalities and kernel distributions...???
SHeeeeesh....... Welcome to Slashdot - we only have one drum and we beat it loudly.
Why was this ever modded up to +5? It's not even flamebait - it's just totally off topic. Why don't we ask him about his opinion on stem cell research too....
Lets be clear here....... these watermarks are in the AUDIO - not in the specific digial representation. They are designed to survive thru generation loss, going from digital->analog->digital again (and maybe going form CD -> MP3 encoding back to CD) or any of a thousand variations.
If i make a recording that is a voice saying "DO NOT DUPLICATE" and every recording device on the market 'listens' for that sound, and if it hears it refused to record, the fact that you play via analog an re-record won't matter. The only way around it would be to remove the "DO NOT DUPLICATE". Now what these schemes do is exactly that - except they do lots of complicated and tricky ways to hide "DO NOT DUPLICATE", along with trying to encode it in the most robust fashion even if the signal gets modified. And in the same vein, they try to hide the signal in such a way that removing it would cause too much undesireable in the underlying music. The Stanford guys that broke the SDMI challege showed that it was possible to remove, but removing it ISN'T simple.
In your above 'cracking' example, it would only work if your recording device (not the microphones, the actual machine that persisted the music coming in) didn't respect/obey the watermark.
You haven't cracked anything. You've only demonstrated that you haven't a clue on how this technology works, nor a simple basic understanding of signal processing theory. If you ask Santa nicely he might bring you a spectrum analyzer for chrismas.....
First - digital audio contains VERY little frequencies that can't be heard by humans - what would be the point of encoding audio that can't be heard? For dogs? c.f. Nyquist sampling limit. Compact discs are sampled at 45Khz, so 22.5Khz is the upper limit of the sound that they can repro. That is outside of human range, but not by much.
Second - generally these watermarking schemes are very sophisticated. A simple band limiting/passing filter isn't going to do it. You need to do know the specifics of how it's encoded to remove it.... not that it can't be done (c.f. the guys that broke the SDMI challenge). Watermarks contain 'echo's' of themselves, time dependant bits, time independant bits, using one sound to mask another (a human wouldn't hear it), etc etc etc. They're pretty sophisticated.
About 4 years (?) ago at MIT i saw a demonstration of a watermarking scheme where they played music out of some speakers. They held a microphone up to the speaker, and their computer spit out what the watermark was. So the people who keep saying that they'd re-record watermarked audio this way can only do it if they have a recording device that doesn't obey/enforce the watermark. The fact that they've gone Digital->Analog and possibly back to digial doesn't matter a single bit.
and therin lies the problem. SGI's customers were tired of getting royally FUCKED buying overpriced hardware, memory, hard disks, etc etc etc. The performance margins that used to still make SGI attractive are almost eliminated, and all the software that used to be SGI only is now on NT and Linux. (That, and you had to use IRIX. Barf. "Oh we're sorry, our latest patch screwed up X11|NFS|OtherCriticalThing. Please wait till we get our act together").
Don't get me wrong, an Octane2 is a kickass piece of hardware (and HEAVY! Damn - my back!) but for the same price you can buy a dozen x86 boxes. Hard to justify. SGI killed themselves. And the shares I own are only $0.53 today:(
>>I would say that Industrial Light and
>>Magic is probably one of the world's largest
>>SGI companies,
True, but they (like PIXAR, and some of the other high profile houses), pay very little for their SGI hardware in exchange for SGI getting bragging rights.
>>he is wrong about 99% of movies being
>>rendered with renderman.
actually i'm not. Other than Antz/Shrek from PDI (which have their own in house renderer), i'd say 95% (conservative estimate) of the feature quality CGI put out is done with PRMan.
Mental ray - yeah i'd been used for a few things (e.g. Flubber) when you absolutely HAVE to use raytracing. But other than that, no way. It can't swallow the type of scenes that PRMan can handle, the memory requirements are FAR too high, and it's motion blur is weak at best in comparision. There have been plenty of post houses that have tried to use it, but once you start to throw large scenes at it that require quality anti-aliasing, motion blur, and HUGE geometry databases it just falls apart. MR3.0 will tackle *some* of these problems, but the fact that it's a raytracer gives it some inherent limitations of what it can handle.
And this isn't from somebody who hates mental ray --- i worked on it at Softimage for 3+ years. It's a good renderer, but it's no PRMan.
>> This isn't realy rendering, well... its
>>not raytraced.
That makes zero sense.
'real' rendering is not raytracing. Raytracing is one type of approach for simulation light propagation. It's not the end-all and be-all. it has it's own serious problems.
Go see a movie. 99% of the CGI that you will see in feature films is done with PRMan (Pixars implementation of the Renderman standard). PRMan doesn't raytrace. Ever.
Raytracing has it's place. So do a lot of other approaches. Open your mind.......
Re:Curiosity killed the cat
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 3
>>Nobody ever unravelled the basic fabric of
>>spacetime by studying Scripture.
Yup - but lots of nice people burnt at the stake.
Good thing the catholics finally worked out that whole 'sun round the earth thing'. Only took em 300 years.
So how are things in Kansas?
trollin trollin trollin
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 3
i assume you've heard of cosmic rays? Higher energy than anything we can create in the lab. Please extend your disseration to explain why they haven't caused this 'dark matter accretion' and whiped us out during the last, oh, 5 BILLION years or so.
Oh yeah - I forgot. You're a troll. nice try. Too bad the mods are smoking crack today.
>>One use of a watermark is to track copies.
>>So if Mr. X buys a DVD and copies it and
>>gives it to a friend and the copyright-police >>find Mr. X's watermark on his friends copy, >>they know to prosecute Mr.X.
Nope.... doesn't work that way. They can't prosecute Mr.X. It is unenforceable that you could be required to protect any media you bought from duplication. Just like now - if a friend photocopies a commerical book that you have - they can prosecute him, not you. You can't be legally required to guard a copyrighted work.
There are 2 reasons here:
1) They can prosecute the friend, because by the watermark they know he didn't buy it.
2)Automatic determination of content. Think Napster. All the noise about how can they block songs if they don't know who it's by (renaming, pig latin, etc). If all.mp3's had a watermark witth the artist, label, copyright etc it would be trivial to identify them automatically.
KDE blah blah KDE blah blah KDE blah blah blah.....
I use Qt. I use it at work. We pay for it. We love it. We DON'T use KDE. We will NEVER use KDE. Ergo, features in Qt and not in KDE are what are useful to us. Plenty of people are in the same boat.
>>WHY does QT want to develop their OWN object model?
They're not. Reread what the feature is.
Why does everybody in the linux world need to bitch and whine when a new feature is added that *they* don't need, that it's a colossal waste of time. Guess what - other people have different needs than you.
For example the database stuff.... personally i have zero interest in this (we've written our own DB layer), but plenty of people on the Qt mailing list have shown interest in this so i'd assume thats why they're doing it --- CUSTOMER DEMAND. And it's customers that pay the salaries of the Trolltech engineers... which also allows all the free software types access to such an excellent toolkit.
Qt has a huge user base and a lot of them are paying customers... And one thing about paying customers is that they don't usually get into these stupid religious turf wars that the Open Source community gets into. They just want a good toolkit. And Trolltech delivers that.
>Therefore, logically, when we reach 50 million
>polygons/second in calculation for a graphics
>chip, it is effectively impossible to make the
>graphics quality any better without improving
>the quality of the screen.
Oh Bollocks. Just spitting a pixel to the screen has nothing to do with the overall quality of the image that is produced. Anti-aliasing. Motion blur. Depth of field. Programmable shading (no more of this gourand/phong with badly mapped textures etc etc). Don't even get me started ---- TONS of effects that can be incorporated. Hair, fur, skin, particles, atmospheric effects, lens effects, volume rendering effects, etc etc etc.
Until you can make a CG image indistingishable from a live source at that resolution there is TONS that can be improved.
>Or would you have us go back to the time when
>it took weeks to figure out the election, every
>election?
BAH! That shows how screwed up the US system is. How long did it take them do to a recount in florida for 2-3million ballots? The canadians count ALL their ballots BY HAND within about 4 hours of the polls closing (if memory servers it was 13+ million votes cast).
>Furthermore, electronic voting, if it can be
>perfected, is a good way to extend the direct
>initiative and referendum on more issues to
>citizens.
Bollocks. If something is contested, what do you do? You can't do anything but have a total revote. If you have all those pieces of paper in a box u just count them again.
>and referendum on more issues to
>citizens.
ugh. That is the LAST thing that we need. We need politicians with backbones that can actually do the right thing, even if it is unpopular. Instead of the current bunch that are swayed by the whim of polls. Just having a referendum on every damn issue makes it worse - nobody thinks of the BIG picture, every little minutia is debated on it's own merits ONLY. Issues don't exist in vacuums.
>>>Saying this is 'tax dollars'
>>>or 'international' is just a cop out. People
>>>can't do their best work when the work under a
>>>magnifying glass.
>Tell that to the guys who worked on Apollo, eh? >They had an unrealistic deadline and met it with
>four months and eleven days to spare.
I wouldn't put the Apollo gang even in the same ballpark as this. Part of it is the general media atmosphere now that loves a failure to get eyeballs. The Apollo team was given a TON of respect and their failures and screwups weren't trumpeted across the front page. A failure or a setback was 'par for the course' when you're doing something brand new that's never been done before. Nor for every little thing that went wrong were they hauled up in front of congres to justify themselves. They were allowed to do their job.
There is also a point about 'airing dirty laundry'. Now I DO NOT agree with just sealing all the logs in a vault and only those on a need to know can look at them. But at the same time the world isn't perfect. Glitches happen. You you want your neighbors to be able to know EVERY detail of your life? No - of course not. At some point freedom of information becomes an actual hinderance to getting the job done because of all the second guessing and 'monday morning quarterbacks' that are out there. For some jobs, it is important from getting from A->Z, not every last stupid little detail (and foulup) that took you to get there.
You develop payloads for the spacestation right? When you deliver your payload do you document every foulup, screw up, bad design decision, backtrack, and everything else that went wrong during the project? I doubt it. You produce the final thing, the specs, how it has passed the requirements, etc etc. Why doesn't NASA get the same treatment?
Saying this is 'tax dollars' or 'international' is just a cop out. People can't do their best work when the work under a magnifying glass.
(I personally do my BEST work when i have a boss i don't see for weeks at a time. It's the micromanagement types that want a status every 12 minutes that kill productivity).
>>I loath so much, with the possible exception of RealPlayer.
i agree - realplayer is nasty, but clearcase? I'm in heaven. The visual branch management just rules. I just switched companies and now i'm back using VSS. Kill me now please.....
AMEN! ClearCase rocks! If you can afford it go for it. Things like the visual tools for branch management are heaven. It is a bit of a monster to set up, but it's worth it - ESPECIALLY when you have dozens of developers working on the same project.
I meant 'cross section' as it attitudes, not race. Should women be suing Microsoft (and any other tech company for that matter) because the percentages don't match up with the general population? Less women go into tech than men, it's just a fact. It isn't Microsofts fault (My university had TONS of scholarships that were ONLY for women to try to get them into tech, but the numbers were still way low).
I worked for MSFT for 4 years and damn - i'd do it again in a second. I've never worked for a compnay that treated it's employees as well. You're going to stay late? Let us order dinner for you..... anything you want to drink. Shuttle buses. Great stock options If you worked your ass off and did good work, expect to get nice fat bonuses (twice annually) and promotions. Nobody I ever met gave a rats ass if you were white, black, purple, straight, gay, male, female, etc. Your work is what mattered - period.
All that aside - racism? Have you seen the racial makeup of any tech company in the US? 'Whites' (whatever that means) are generally in the minority.... in my current company a SUBSTANTIAL minority. People get promoted according to ability, talent, social skills (YES - to manage other people you can't just be a code genius, you have to be able to work with people as well). Just because you are 'qualified' for a promotion doesn't mean you are the MOST qualified. Sorry - that's life.
Don't get me wrong - i'm not about to say that there couldn't possibly be individuals whos actions may be suspect. But they would be just that - individuals. A coroporate racist policy? Give me a friggin break. People forget that MSFT in Redmond is what - 18000 employees? It's a small city! And you'll get the same kind of cross secion of people there that you get anywhere....
And FIVE BILLION? Well, that just speaks for itself...
j
>You are right that computers don't write the
>story. However, they do a lot of things that
>used to be done better by people. For example, >an animator will draw two scenes, and the >computer will fill in the missing frames. Great -> from the point of view that it is cheaper and >faster. Not so good from a qualitative point of >view though.
Um, no. Computera aren't used for inbetweening (thats that it's called). The lead animator will draw the main poses, and then a secondary animator will fill in the middle bits, just like it's always been done.... This is all STILL done on paper. At this point the cells will be scanned in and inked/painted, cleaned up, etc etc.
Computers ARE used in inbetweening in places like saturday morning animation, where they're pounding out tons of animation every day. But thats fine - there the are going for quantity over quality. Remember the old spider man TV show - where at least half of the show was generic 'spidey flying between buildings' shots that were constantly recycled, or scenes where none of the characters moved except for their mouths? That is the alternative..... which i don't think is any worse.
Computers DON'T animate... people do. The only people who think computers DO animate are people who have no idea how the animation industry works....
Slashdot Mirror
This guys is a GAME DEVELOPER and is working on *SDL*. Where does it say to ask about GPL legalities and kernel distributions...???
SHeeeeesh....... Welcome to Slashdot - we only have one drum and we beat it loudly.
Why was this ever modded up to +5? It's not even flamebait - it's just totally off topic. Why don't we ask him about his opinion on stem cell research too....
you are correct sir.
Lets be clear here....... these watermarks are in the AUDIO - not in the specific digial representation. They are designed to survive thru generation loss, going from digital->analog->digital again (and maybe going form CD -> MP3 encoding back to CD) or any of a thousand variations.
If i make a recording that is a voice saying "DO NOT DUPLICATE" and every recording device on the market 'listens' for that sound, and if it hears it refused to record, the fact that you play via analog an re-record won't matter. The only way around it would be to remove the "DO NOT DUPLICATE". Now what these schemes do is exactly that - except they do lots of complicated and tricky ways to hide "DO NOT DUPLICATE", along with trying to encode it in the most robust fashion even if the signal gets modified. And in the same vein, they try to hide the signal in such a way that removing it would cause too much undesireable in the underlying music. The Stanford guys that broke the SDMI challege showed that it was possible to remove, but removing it ISN'T simple.
In your above 'cracking' example, it would only work if your recording device (not the microphones, the actual machine that persisted the music coming in) didn't respect/obey the watermark.
You haven't cracked anything. You've only demonstrated that you haven't a clue on how this technology works, nor a simple basic understanding of signal processing theory. If you ask Santa nicely he might bring you a spectrum analyzer for chrismas.....
nope.
First - digital audio contains VERY little frequencies that can't be heard by humans - what would be the point of encoding audio that can't be heard? For dogs? c.f. Nyquist sampling limit. Compact discs are sampled at 45Khz, so 22.5Khz is the upper limit of the sound that they can repro. That is outside of human range, but not by much.
Second - generally these watermarking schemes are very sophisticated. A simple band limiting/passing filter isn't going to do it. You need to do know the specifics of how it's encoded to remove it.... not that it can't be done (c.f. the guys that broke the SDMI challenge). Watermarks contain 'echo's' of themselves, time dependant bits, time independant bits, using one sound to mask another (a human wouldn't hear it), etc etc etc. They're pretty sophisticated.
About 4 years (?) ago at MIT i saw a demonstration of a watermarking scheme where they played music out of some speakers. They held a microphone up to the speaker, and their computer spit out what the watermark was. So the people who keep saying that they'd re-record watermarked audio this way can only do it if they have a recording device that doesn't obey/enforce the watermark. The fact that they've gone Digital->Analog and possibly back to digial doesn't matter a single bit.
>>Margins were really great,
:(
and therin lies the problem. SGI's customers were tired of getting royally FUCKED buying overpriced hardware, memory, hard disks, etc etc etc. The performance margins that used to still make SGI attractive are almost eliminated, and all the software that used to be SGI only is now on NT and Linux. (That, and you had to use IRIX. Barf. "Oh we're sorry, our latest patch screwed up X11|NFS|OtherCriticalThing. Please wait till we get our act together").
Don't get me wrong, an Octane2 is a kickass piece of hardware (and HEAVY! Damn - my back!) but for the same price you can buy a dozen x86 boxes. Hard to justify. SGI killed themselves. And the shares I own are only $0.53 today
>>I would say that Industrial Light and
>>Magic is probably one of the world's largest
>>SGI companies,
True, but they (like PIXAR, and some of the other high profile houses), pay very little for their SGI hardware in exchange for SGI getting bragging rights.
>>The shader language can raytrace.
Correct. and PRMan returns BLACK whenever you call trace. Therefor PRMan doesn't raytrace - ever.
You can hook it up to another renderer (e.g. BMRT, RenderDotC) to handle the trace() calls, but that raises it's own issues.
>>he is wrong about 99% of movies being
>>rendered with renderman.
actually i'm not. Other than Antz/Shrek from PDI (which have their own in house renderer), i'd say 95% (conservative estimate) of the feature quality CGI put out is done with PRMan.
Mental ray - yeah i'd been used for a few things (e.g. Flubber) when you absolutely HAVE to use raytracing. But other than that, no way. It can't swallow the type of scenes that PRMan can handle, the memory requirements are FAR too high, and it's motion blur is weak at best in comparision. There have been plenty of post houses that have tried to use it, but once you start to throw large scenes at it that require quality anti-aliasing, motion blur, and HUGE geometry databases it just falls apart. MR3.0 will tackle *some* of these problems, but the fact that it's a raytracer gives it some inherent limitations of what it can handle.
And this isn't from somebody who hates mental ray --- i worked on it at Softimage for 3+ years. It's a good renderer, but it's no PRMan.
>> This isn't realy rendering, well... its
>>not raytraced.
That makes zero sense.
'real' rendering is not raytracing. Raytracing is one type of approach for simulation light propagation. It's not the end-all and be-all. it has it's own serious problems.
Go see a movie. 99% of the CGI that you will see in feature films is done with PRMan (Pixars implementation of the Renderman standard). PRMan doesn't raytrace. Ever.
Raytracing has it's place. So do a lot of other approaches. Open your mind.......
>>Nobody ever unravelled the basic fabric of
>>spacetime by studying Scripture.
Yup - but lots of nice people burnt at the stake.
Good thing the catholics finally worked out that whole 'sun round the earth thing'. Only took em 300 years.
So how are things in Kansas?
i assume you've heard of cosmic rays? Higher energy than anything we can create in the lab. Please extend your disseration to explain why they haven't caused this 'dark matter accretion' and whiped us out during the last, oh, 5 BILLION years or so.
Oh yeah - I forgot. You're a troll. nice try. Too bad the mods are smoking crack today.
Scalable Processor ARCitecture
>>One use of a watermark is to track copies.
.mp3's had a watermark witth the artist, label, copyright etc it would be trivial to identify them automatically.
>>So if Mr. X buys a DVD and copies it and
>>gives it to a friend and the copyright-police >>find Mr. X's watermark on his friends copy, >>they know to prosecute Mr.X.
Nope.... doesn't work that way. They can't prosecute Mr.X. It is unenforceable that you could be required to protect any media you bought from duplication. Just like now - if a friend photocopies a commerical book that you have - they can prosecute him, not you. You can't be legally required to guard a copyrighted work.
There are 2 reasons here:
1) They can prosecute the friend, because by the watermark they know he didn't buy it.
2)Automatic determination of content. Think Napster. All the noise about how can they block songs if they don't know who it's by (renaming, pig latin, etc). If all
j
>>From the release notes, there seems to be
>>no implication of a GUI - am I wrong?
Congratulations genius... you've figured out what the word *KERNEL* means...
KDE blah blah KDE blah blah KDE blah blah blah.....
I use Qt. I use it at work. We pay for it. We love it. We DON'T use KDE. We will NEVER use KDE. Ergo, features in Qt and not in KDE are what are useful to us. Plenty of people are in the same boat.
>>WHY does QT want to develop their OWN object model?
They're not. Reread what the feature is.
Why does everybody in the linux world need to bitch and whine when a new feature is added that *they* don't need, that it's a colossal waste of time. Guess what - other people have different needs than you.
For example the database stuff.... personally i have zero interest in this (we've written our own DB layer), but plenty of people on the Qt mailing list have shown interest in this so i'd assume thats why they're doing it --- CUSTOMER DEMAND. And it's customers that pay the salaries of the Trolltech engineers... which also allows all the free software types access to such an excellent toolkit.
Qt has a huge user base and a lot of them are paying customers... And one thing about paying customers is that they don't usually get into these stupid religious turf wars that the Open Source community gets into. They just want a good toolkit. And Trolltech delivers that.
j
ah kiss --- such nonsense.
>Therefore, logically, when we reach 50 million
>polygons/second in calculation for a graphics
>chip, it is effectively impossible to make the
>graphics quality any better without improving
>the quality of the screen.
Oh Bollocks. Just spitting a pixel to the screen has nothing to do with the overall quality of the image that is produced. Anti-aliasing. Motion blur. Depth of field. Programmable shading (no more of this gourand/phong with badly mapped textures etc etc). Don't even get me started ---- TONS of effects that can be incorporated. Hair, fur, skin, particles, atmospheric effects, lens effects, volume rendering effects, etc etc etc.
Until you can make a CG image indistingishable from a live source at that resolution there is TONS that can be improved.
Have u worked in the graphics biz? I have......
j
this, dear ladies and gentleman is a troll.
Please do not feed the troll.
>Or would you have us go back to the time when
>it took weeks to figure out the election, every
>election?
BAH! That shows how screwed up the US system is. How long did it take them do to a recount in florida for 2-3million ballots? The canadians count ALL their ballots BY HAND within about 4 hours of the polls closing (if memory servers it was 13+ million votes cast).
>Furthermore, electronic voting, if it can be
>perfected, is a good way to extend the direct
>initiative and referendum on more issues to
>citizens.
Bollocks. If something is contested, what do you do? You can't do anything but have a total revote. If you have all those pieces of paper in a box u just count them again.
>and referendum on more issues to
>citizens.
ugh. That is the LAST thing that we need. We need politicians with backbones that can actually do the right thing, even if it is unpopular. Instead of the current bunch that are swayed by the whim of polls. Just having a referendum on every damn issue makes it worse - nobody thinks of the BIG picture, every little minutia is debated on it's own merits ONLY. Issues don't exist in vacuums.
>>>Saying this is 'tax dollars'
>>>or 'international' is just a cop out. People
>>>can't do their best work when the work under a
>>>magnifying glass.
>Tell that to the guys who worked on Apollo, eh? >They had an unrealistic deadline and met it with
>four months and eleven days to spare.
I wouldn't put the Apollo gang even in the same ballpark as this. Part of it is the general media atmosphere now that loves a failure to get eyeballs. The Apollo team was given a TON of respect and their failures and screwups weren't trumpeted across the front page. A failure or a setback was 'par for the course' when you're doing something brand new that's never been done before. Nor for every little thing that went wrong were they hauled up in front of congres to justify themselves. They were allowed to do their job.
I can see your point, but i disagree.
There is also a point about 'airing dirty laundry'. Now I DO NOT agree with just sealing all the logs in a vault and only those on a need to know can look at them. But at the same time the world isn't perfect. Glitches happen. You you want your neighbors to be able to know EVERY detail of your life? No - of course not. At some point freedom of information becomes an actual hinderance to getting the job done because of all the second guessing and 'monday morning quarterbacks' that are out there. For some jobs, it is important from getting from A->Z, not every last stupid little detail (and foulup) that took you to get there.
You develop payloads for the spacestation right? When you deliver your payload do you document every foulup, screw up, bad design decision, backtrack, and everything else that went wrong during the project? I doubt it. You produce the final thing, the specs, how it has passed the requirements, etc etc. Why doesn't NASA get the same treatment?
Saying this is 'tax dollars' or 'international' is just a cop out. People can't do their best work when the work under a magnifying glass.
(I personally do my BEST work when i have a boss i don't see for weeks at a time. It's the micromanagement types that want a status every 12 minutes that kill productivity).
j
>>I loath so much, with the possible exception of RealPlayer. i agree - realplayer is nasty, but clearcase? I'm in heaven. The visual branch management just rules. I just switched companies and now i'm back using VSS. Kill me now please.....
AMEN! ClearCase rocks! If you can afford it go for it. Things like the visual tools for branch management are heaven. It is a bit of a monster to set up, but it's worth it - ESPECIALLY when you have dozens of developers working on the same project.
ok - i'll bite.
I meant 'cross section' as it attitudes, not race. Should women be suing Microsoft (and any other tech company for that matter) because the percentages don't match up with the general population? Less women go into tech than men, it's just a fact. It isn't Microsofts fault (My university had TONS of scholarships that were ONLY for women to try to get them into tech, but the numbers were still way low).
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
j
shit like this bugs me, but whatever.....
I worked for MSFT for 4 years and damn - i'd do it again in a second. I've never worked for a compnay that treated it's employees as well. You're going to stay late? Let us order dinner for you..... anything you want to drink. Shuttle buses. Great stock options If you worked your ass off and did good work, expect to get nice fat bonuses (twice annually) and promotions. Nobody I ever met gave a rats ass if you were white, black, purple, straight, gay, male, female, etc. Your work is what mattered - period.
All that aside - racism? Have you seen the racial makeup of any tech company in the US? 'Whites' (whatever that means) are generally in the minority.... in my current company a SUBSTANTIAL minority. People get promoted according to ability, talent, social skills (YES - to manage other people you can't just be a code genius, you have to be able to work with people as well). Just because you are 'qualified' for a promotion doesn't mean you are the MOST qualified. Sorry - that's life.
Don't get me wrong - i'm not about to say that there couldn't possibly be individuals whos actions may be suspect. But they would be just that - individuals. A coroporate racist policy? Give me a friggin break. People forget that MSFT in Redmond is what - 18000 employees? It's a small city! And you'll get the same kind of cross secion of people there that you get anywhere....
And FIVE BILLION? Well, that just speaks for itself...
j
Dude
>You are right that computers don't write the
>story. However, they do a lot of things that
>used to be done better by people. For example, >an animator will draw two scenes, and the >computer will fill in the missing frames. Great -> from the point of view that it is cheaper and >faster. Not so good from a qualitative point of >view though.
Um, no. Computera aren't used for inbetweening (thats that it's called). The lead animator will draw the main poses, and then a secondary animator will fill in the middle bits, just like it's always been done.... This is all STILL done on paper. At this point the cells will be scanned in and inked/painted, cleaned up, etc etc.
Computers ARE used in inbetweening in places like saturday morning animation, where they're pounding out tons of animation every day. But thats fine - there the are going for quantity over quality. Remember the old spider man TV show - where at least half of the show was generic 'spidey flying between buildings' shots that were constantly recycled, or scenes where none of the characters moved except for their mouths? That is the alternative..... which i don't think is any worse.
Computers DON'T animate... people do. The only people who think computers DO animate are people who have no idea how the animation industry works....
j