Watched the new Harry Potter last night in 3D at the behest of my housemate. It was a good story told well but 3D added nothing to it. The depth of view effect was nice but having to accommodate 3D filming means they rely overly on slow panning shots and the like a lot of the film's shot selection seemed to be based on trying to shoehorn the direction into the format. Also due to the limitations on frame rates many of the action shots simply became a blurry jaggedy mess.
They didn't accommodate 3D filming. Like most "3D" films these days, it was shot in 2D and digitally processed into faux-3D. Which I find just stupid. As Sony said (in interest of having some decent content produced to better show off their expensive new 3D TVs, no doubt), if you are going to do 3D then do it right. That means actually filming in 3D instead of just adding the effect in post production.
Actually, don't. That would probably just end up making the 2D version look worse.
Mind you, I've only seen the 3D portions of Gran Turismo 5 and Sly 3, but each of those games only seemed to have a divergence of about 5 horizontal pixels onscreen between the 2 views even at the farthest Z-buffer depth. The actual 3D effect was incredibly understated and pointless. Sure as a graphics geek, I'm all for having superfluous 3D just for random kicks once in a while, but even from that end of things it did not deliver.
Interesting, I'd heard that the 3D in GT5 actually worked pretty well, making it easier to judge braking points and hit apexes. I had heard that it was pretty understated, but that's how 3D should be IMO. That's the only game I've really had any interest in seeing in 3D up to this point.
Or can somebody tell me if the cooling of the HDs is ok if they are stacked like in the picture?
According to their blog post about it, they see a variation of ~5 degrees within unit (middle drives to outside drives) and about 2 degrees from the lowest unit in a rack to the highest. They also indicate that the drives stay within the spec operating temperature range with only two of the six fans in each chassis running.
Keep in mind these are 5400 RPM drives, not the 10K+ drives you would expect in an application where performance is critical. These are designed for one thing - lots of storage, cheap. No real worries about access times, IOPS, or a lot of the other performance measures that a more flexible storage solution would need to be concerned with. These are for backup only - nice large chunks of data written and (hopefully) never looked at again.
True, I love it every time a sheikh does something extravagant like this because jealousy at the wealth of non-American oil barons is the only thing that motivates US right-wingers into supporting alternative energy.
FTFY
Obviously the disgust is for the fact that the oil barons are non-American, not for what they choose to do with their money.
Unreal Tournament: length of a single "game" is less than ten minutes
A round may be less than 10 minuites (though IIRC other than assault all the rounds in the "tournament" are limited by score not time) playing through the "tournament" takes a LOT longer than that.
What are you talking about? Are you suggesting that UT had a single-player mode? Blasphemy!
Next you'll probably be claiming that BF1942 had a campaign mode!
Their books weren't overpriced but their cd's / dvd's / blu-ray's were obscene. When you see Border's charging $40 for a new movie and you can walk into Best Buy down the street and buy the same exact thing for $20, there's no reason to buy non-book items from Border's.
Their stance on cd's/dvd's was/is really strange. They charge obscene prices for them, as you say, so the only times I ever bought these items from them were when they were on clearance (very rare) or when I got some especially good deal mailed to me - like the time they sent out a coupon for 60% off any boxed set (which I used to buy Flying Circus on DVD). I don't know anyone who regularly bought movies or music from them. And yet, a couple of years ago they went through and completely redid the interior of the store and actually significantly increased the space devoted to music and movies while reducing the selection of books. Instead of having the best selection in town for most genres of books, they went to having basically the same selection as the much smaller book stores around. Which, of course, means that the last five or six times I've been in there looking for a specific book they haven't had it - leading me to Amazon, and not even bothering to check in the future (note to brick-and-mortar stores: don't even bother offering to order something for me; if it isn't in your store, Amazon will get it to me faster and cheaper than you will).
It really seems like they sacrificed the thing they were good at, selling books, for something they really sucked at - selling digital media. They were astonishingly bad with blu-rays; for some reason they charged literally 3-4 times as much as other retailers, and kept them in locked cases so you couldn't even really browse them (I asked why they did this once, and was told that it was because lots of people were stealing them because they were so valuable; apparently the only people who thought Borders' prices were realistic were thieves). When you are offering something for $45 that I can get down the street for $25 or online for $15, you are just wasting valuable (expensive) retail space.
A white roof would raise my heating costs in the winter. What I really need is a white roof in the summer and a black roof in the winter!
It would seem that, energy costs for cooling and heating being equal, it would be of net benefit to have a white roof. During the summer days are longer than during the winter, so the period each day when energy is absorbed from the sun by the roof is longer. Additionally, at latitudes away from the equator (high or low) the sun is more directly overhead during the summer, resulting in more intense heating during those longer hours of sunlight. Though it may depend on where you live, in most places you also likely experience far more days of overcast/rain/snow during the winter than during the summer, which would further reduce any benefit from heat absorbed by a dark roof during winter.
While I don't have the numbers necessary to calculate it (or the time), and it would vary somewhat depending on your latitude and local climate, I think it is pretty clear that a roof that reflects energy away would be of positive net benefit unless heating is significantly more expensive than cooling. Where I live, heating (per btu, using natural gas) is actually significantly cheaper than cooling (electrical central air), which further skews the balance in favor of a reflective roof.
Whilst I love toys like Lego and Minecraft, they are are not the same thing as games. Would Tetris be better if you got to choose the blocks, would a film be better if you had to write it yourself (okay maybe most would)?
No, but you can use them to make games. My brother and I used to play Destruction Derby with our Legos - each build a vehicle, then repeatedly run them into each other at high speeds and see who wins, with rules regarding what was required for a vehicle to be considered "intact" (as I recall, it had to contain a complete Lego dude and at least one set of wheels). Great fun, I highly recommend it.
You can do the same sort of thing with Minecraft. It is a set of building blocks with some associated rules; all you have to do to turn it into a game is come up with a goal and a way of competing. Like who can make the coolest house, or who can kill the other person by secretly channeling creepers into their supposedly "safe" areas.
So no, maybe (at this point) Minecraft isn't a game. But you can certainly play games with it.
Get some rabbit ears and get your live sports in HD for free
90% of the sports I watch aren't available over the air, and I don't watch that many.
Unless ESPN is broadcasting over the air these days, you wouldn't be able to watch the World Cup games going on right now, for example (though, admittedly, I think they are available on espn3.com or whatever the hell it is this week).
See figure 6 in the linked document which shows that the 25Mbps to 100Mbps plans have *increased* 25% from 2007 to 2009.
The parent wasn't referring to the price we as consumers pay, but to the prices that our corporate overlords pay - which by every account I have seen has been dropping steadily since time immemorial. The most recent number I heard was something like $0.02 per gigabyte transported - which means that with the new caps implemented by AT&T you can't actually cost them more than $3 per month in raw transport cost ($5 if you are on u-verse).
All the parent was saying was that the cost to Netflix to stream a given movie (in terms of data, not licensing) has decreased significantly since they first started and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, while costs associated with mailing physical disks will only rise.
I'd say it is a combination of cash grab (moving people towards the service that costs less to provide) and preparing for expected increases in licensing costs.
Until recently they had no competition. Did you mean Blockbuster? Please. A traditional video rental store is no competition for Netflix, at least not anymore than the yellow pages are competition for Google.
They are only now facing real competition, from Hulu, amazon, google, and on-demand services offered by cable companies.
I'm not happy about the price increase, but I am hopeful that it allows them to work out better content deals.
Actually, I greatly preferred Blockbuster's rent by mail system. For basically the same price as Netflix (plus or minus a dollar or two) you got the same unlimited rentals, blu-ray was the same price as DVD, and instead of mailing a movie back you could take it to the nearest store and exchange it for something else right there for no charge. It was pretty awesome when we lived down the street from a Blockbuster.
Eventually we dropped Blockbuster and switched to Netflix because 1) we moved to a place where it was not convenient to get to a Blockbuster location (there used to be 2 in town; now there are none), and 2) no streaming (at the time). The availability of entire series for streaming was a big part of the reason we switched, as it was always a pain in the rear to watch a TV series by mail.
That said, I wasn't all that upset about Blockbuster going into bankruptcy - aside from their rent-by-mail system they implemented in response to the immense pressure from Netflix, they were always WAY overpriced.
So expensive that they were able to build a huge company on it but now, suddenly, it's not profitable. Wake up and smell the cash grab.
No kidding.
What really irritates me about it is that while I mostly use streaming, there are a hell of a lot of movies that aren't available. I've got the 1 DVD (well, blu-ray even though the bastards charge an extra $2 a month for it; in Blockbuster's mail rental system they cost the same) at a time option, which we use for the occasional movie that we really want to watch that isn't available streaming (or for foreign movies since they seem to be incapable of offering subtitles, or movies that I want to watch with decent audio, or things I want to watch in actual HD, etc.). We might go through one or two discs a month, and there have been months at a time when we don't go through any. So no, I'm not willing to pay $8 a month for one or two movies - but I'd be happy to pay $1-$2 per if they offered such an option (they don't). Sadly I don't seem to have an alternative any more - the only local rental options are Redbox with their extremely limited selection, or a couple of small independent video stores that are barely hanging on and only have a slightly better selection than Redbox. The rate we've been watching movies lately it probably makes more sense just to buy one that I want to watch every other month.
By my count it looks like there is a total capacity of about 30 Tbps between the U.S. west coast and Japan, and only about 20 Tbps between the east coast of NA and all of Europe. Seems strange given the relative distances.
Interesting where it shows cables making landfall. In the Los Angeles area, it shows Diablo Canyon nuclear plant and Hermosa Beach. I was pretty sure the cable coming in south of LAX made landfall through ShitPipe, 4 miles north.
The locations for those cables are schematic and not necessarily accurate. Don't know about the LA-area ones, but I believe the cable landings in the San Luis Obispo area are in the Morro Bay area and Grover/Shell/Pismo Beach area. At any rate, I remember that there is a major interconnect in the Los Osos area near Morro Bay where a couple of major undersea cables are hooked together.
Someone else already posted it, but Neal Stephenson wrote a great article on just that subject a few years back (okay, over a decade ago - but still very good and interesting). You can find it here.
US landlines aren't a simple billing exercise. First you need a local carrier, this is say $30/month for "free local calls". Then you need a national carriers (could be the same company), this requires a monthly subscription too. Then you need, yes, you guessed it, an international carrier. There's a default to pick up the national and internationals, but the rates can be very high. Miss dial and that unconnected call can cost $4. Once you navigate this setup you get banged with umpteen levels of taxes and fees, which never seem to be the same month to month.
Things may have improved over the last few years, we gave up with land lines and use vonage's $25/month service (uses internet for connections but acts as as real phone system). This settled our national and international costs (free) for a while, but then the patent mess started and the FCC decided to stick its oar in. We now pay about $34/month for the $25/month service thanks to taxes and fees. Which is a hell of a lot better than regular phone companies (for us).
Doesn't sound familiar... prices have been steadily going up, but I currently pay $18 for local calling, and of course all local calls are free. Two years ago it was under $14, but AT&T really seems to be pushing people to switch over to their U-verse offering, where limited local calling starts at $25 per month (why do I want to pay more for less service?). On top of that is long distance, which includes international calling - not sure why you think you need separate long distance and international calling plans. Of course, I rarely use long distance on the land line since my cell phone has free nationwide calling, so we pay something like $4 a month for a plan with moderate long-distance rates, and on the rare occasion we make an international call we just pick up a calling card.
Don't know about Skype or Vonage, but the VoIP offerings from AT&T and Comcast seem to be designed to charge more for less service unless you are making a lot of long-distance calls.
Slashdot Mirror
Watched the new Harry Potter last night in 3D at the behest of my housemate. It was a good story told well but 3D added nothing to it. The depth of view effect was nice but having to accommodate 3D filming means they rely overly on slow panning shots and the like a lot of the film's shot selection seemed to be based on trying to shoehorn the direction into the format. Also due to the limitations on frame rates many of the action shots simply became a blurry jaggedy mess.
They didn't accommodate 3D filming. Like most "3D" films these days, it was shot in 2D and digitally processed into faux-3D. Which I find just stupid. As Sony said (in interest of having some decent content produced to better show off their expensive new 3D TVs, no doubt), if you are going to do 3D then do it right. That means actually filming in 3D instead of just adding the effect in post production.
Actually, don't. That would probably just end up making the 2D version look worse.
Mind you, I've only seen the 3D portions of Gran Turismo 5 and Sly 3, but each of those games only seemed to have a divergence of about 5 horizontal pixels onscreen between the 2 views even at the farthest Z-buffer depth. The actual 3D effect was incredibly understated and pointless. Sure as a graphics geek, I'm all for having superfluous 3D just for random kicks once in a while, but even from that end of things it did not deliver.
Interesting, I'd heard that the 3D in GT5 actually worked pretty well, making it easier to judge braking points and hit apexes. I had heard that it was pretty understated, but that's how 3D should be IMO. That's the only game I've really had any interest in seeing in 3D up to this point.
Or can somebody tell me if the cooling of the HDs is ok if they are stacked like in the picture?
According to their blog post about it, they see a variation of ~5 degrees within unit (middle drives to outside drives) and about 2 degrees from the lowest unit in a rack to the highest. They also indicate that the drives stay within the spec operating temperature range with only two of the six fans in each chassis running.
Keep in mind these are 5400 RPM drives, not the 10K+ drives you would expect in an application where performance is critical. These are designed for one thing - lots of storage, cheap. No real worries about access times, IOPS, or a lot of the other performance measures that a more flexible storage solution would need to be concerned with. These are for backup only - nice large chunks of data written and (hopefully) never looked at again.
for both internet security and privacy: each of us can now store his own local copy of the internet and surf offline!
Of course, with my 150GB/month bandwidth cap it is going to take ~70 years to fill it up...
True, I love it every time a sheikh does something extravagant like this because jealousy at the wealth of non-American oil barons is the only thing that motivates US right-wingers into supporting alternative energy.
FTFY
Obviously the disgust is for the fact that the oil barons are non-American, not for what they choose to do with their money.
Unreal Tournament: length of a single "game" is less than ten minutes
A round may be less than 10 minuites (though IIRC other than assault all the rounds in the "tournament" are limited by score not time) playing through the "tournament" takes a LOT longer than that.
What are you talking about? Are you suggesting that UT had a single-player mode? Blasphemy!
Next you'll probably be claiming that BF1942 had a campaign mode!
Anti Aircraft Artillery?
American Automobile Association
LR03 1.5v batteries ?
Amateur Athletics Association ?
Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm ?
and so on.
I remember playing games based on the first of those (Ack Ack gunner) about 30 years ago
Beach Head? It's only 28 years old...
There are hackers in New Jersey?
I've been to New Jersey and, improbable as it seems, there are actually several computers there.
Duh. Did you think that a manual tanning bed could achieve that precise, even orange glow?
Swartz was fired from Reddit.
Well, there's one positive on his resume.
Their books weren't overpriced but their cd's / dvd's / blu-ray's were obscene. When you see Border's charging $40 for a new movie and you can walk into Best Buy down the street and buy the same exact thing for $20, there's no reason to buy non-book items from Border's.
Their stance on cd's/dvd's was/is really strange. They charge obscene prices for them, as you say, so the only times I ever bought these items from them were when they were on clearance (very rare) or when I got some especially good deal mailed to me - like the time they sent out a coupon for 60% off any boxed set (which I used to buy Flying Circus on DVD). I don't know anyone who regularly bought movies or music from them. And yet, a couple of years ago they went through and completely redid the interior of the store and actually significantly increased the space devoted to music and movies while reducing the selection of books. Instead of having the best selection in town for most genres of books, they went to having basically the same selection as the much smaller book stores around. Which, of course, means that the last five or six times I've been in there looking for a specific book they haven't had it - leading me to Amazon, and not even bothering to check in the future (note to brick-and-mortar stores: don't even bother offering to order something for me; if it isn't in your store, Amazon will get it to me faster and cheaper than you will).
It really seems like they sacrificed the thing they were good at, selling books, for something they really sucked at - selling digital media. They were astonishingly bad with blu-rays; for some reason they charged literally 3-4 times as much as other retailers, and kept them in locked cases so you couldn't even really browse them (I asked why they did this once, and was told that it was because lots of people were stealing them because they were so valuable; apparently the only people who thought Borders' prices were realistic were thieves). When you are offering something for $45 that I can get down the street for $25 or online for $15, you are just wasting valuable (expensive) retail space.
A white roof would raise my heating costs in the winter. What I really need is a white roof in the summer and a black roof in the winter!
It would seem that, energy costs for cooling and heating being equal, it would be of net benefit to have a white roof. During the summer days are longer than during the winter, so the period each day when energy is absorbed from the sun by the roof is longer. Additionally, at latitudes away from the equator (high or low) the sun is more directly overhead during the summer, resulting in more intense heating during those longer hours of sunlight. Though it may depend on where you live, in most places you also likely experience far more days of overcast/rain/snow during the winter than during the summer, which would further reduce any benefit from heat absorbed by a dark roof during winter.
While I don't have the numbers necessary to calculate it (or the time), and it would vary somewhat depending on your latitude and local climate, I think it is pretty clear that a roof that reflects energy away would be of positive net benefit unless heating is significantly more expensive than cooling. Where I live, heating (per btu, using natural gas) is actually significantly cheaper than cooling (electrical central air), which further skews the balance in favor of a reflective roof.
Jet-A at my local airport is $4.03/gal.
Wow, that's cheaper than diesel.
Anyone know if Jet-A works in a VW?
Now we're going to start seeing tons of minecraft clones, since that works OH SO WELL for FPS games.
Anyone for Call of Minecraft 7?
It's okay, but I only play it for the Zombies.
Whilst I love toys like Lego and Minecraft, they are are not the same thing as games.
Would Tetris be better if you got to choose the blocks, would a film be better if you had to write it yourself (okay maybe most would)?
No, but you can use them to make games. My brother and I used to play Destruction Derby with our Legos - each build a vehicle, then repeatedly run them into each other at high speeds and see who wins, with rules regarding what was required for a vehicle to be considered "intact" (as I recall, it had to contain a complete Lego dude and at least one set of wheels). Great fun, I highly recommend it.
You can do the same sort of thing with Minecraft. It is a set of building blocks with some associated rules; all you have to do to turn it into a game is come up with a goal and a way of competing. Like who can make the coolest house, or who can kill the other person by secretly channeling creepers into their supposedly "safe" areas.
So no, maybe (at this point) Minecraft isn't a game. But you can certainly play games with it.
Woosh.
Get some rabbit ears and get your live sports in HD for free
90% of the sports I watch aren't available over the air, and I don't watch that many.
Unless ESPN is broadcasting over the air these days, you wouldn't be able to watch the World Cup games going on right now, for example (though, admittedly, I think they are available on espn3.com or whatever the hell it is this week).
In the United States, prices have not "decreased dramatically" for consumer broadband. In fact, they have remained largely stable with a mild increase.
http://www.techpolicyinstitute.org/news/show/23252.html
See figure 6 in the linked document which shows that the 25Mbps to 100Mbps plans have *increased* 25% from 2007 to 2009.
The parent wasn't referring to the price we as consumers pay, but to the prices that our corporate overlords pay - which by every account I have seen has been dropping steadily since time immemorial. The most recent number I heard was something like $0.02 per gigabyte transported - which means that with the new caps implemented by AT&T you can't actually cost them more than $3 per month in raw transport cost ($5 if you are on u-verse).
All the parent was saying was that the cost to Netflix to stream a given movie (in terms of data, not licensing) has decreased significantly since they first started and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, while costs associated with mailing physical disks will only rise.
I'd say it is a combination of cash grab (moving people towards the service that costs less to provide) and preparing for expected increases in licensing costs.
Until recently they had no competition. Did you mean Blockbuster? Please. A traditional video rental store is no competition for Netflix, at least not anymore than the yellow pages are competition for Google.
They are only now facing real competition, from Hulu, amazon, google, and on-demand services offered by cable companies.
I'm not happy about the price increase, but I am hopeful that it allows them to work out better content deals.
Actually, I greatly preferred Blockbuster's rent by mail system. For basically the same price as Netflix (plus or minus a dollar or two) you got the same unlimited rentals, blu-ray was the same price as DVD, and instead of mailing a movie back you could take it to the nearest store and exchange it for something else right there for no charge. It was pretty awesome when we lived down the street from a Blockbuster.
Eventually we dropped Blockbuster and switched to Netflix because 1) we moved to a place where it was not convenient to get to a Blockbuster location (there used to be 2 in town; now there are none), and 2) no streaming (at the time). The availability of entire series for streaming was a big part of the reason we switched, as it was always a pain in the rear to watch a TV series by mail.
That said, I wasn't all that upset about Blockbuster going into bankruptcy - aside from their rent-by-mail system they implemented in response to the immense pressure from Netflix, they were always WAY overpriced.
So expensive that they were able to build a huge company on it but now, suddenly, it's not profitable. Wake up and smell the cash grab.
No kidding.
What really irritates me about it is that while I mostly use streaming, there are a hell of a lot of movies that aren't available. I've got the 1 DVD (well, blu-ray even though the bastards charge an extra $2 a month for it; in Blockbuster's mail rental system they cost the same) at a time option, which we use for the occasional movie that we really want to watch that isn't available streaming (or for foreign movies since they seem to be incapable of offering subtitles, or movies that I want to watch with decent audio, or things I want to watch in actual HD, etc.). We might go through one or two discs a month, and there have been months at a time when we don't go through any. So no, I'm not willing to pay $8 a month for one or two movies - but I'd be happy to pay $1-$2 per if they offered such an option (they don't).
Sadly I don't seem to have an alternative any more - the only local rental options are Redbox with their extremely limited selection, or a couple of small independent video stores that are barely hanging on and only have a slightly better selection than Redbox. The rate we've been watching movies lately it probably makes more sense just to buy one that I want to watch every other month.
Beer doesn't come in cans.
Milk does?
By my count it looks like there is a total capacity of about 30 Tbps between the U.S. west coast and Japan, and only about 20 Tbps between the east coast of NA and all of Europe. Seems strange given the relative distances.
Interesting where it shows cables making landfall. In the Los Angeles area, it shows Diablo Canyon nuclear plant and Hermosa Beach. I was pretty sure the cable coming in south of LAX made landfall through ShitPipe, 4 miles north.
The locations for those cables are schematic and not necessarily accurate. Don't know about the LA-area ones, but I believe the cable landings in the San Luis Obispo area are in the Morro Bay area and Grover/Shell/Pismo Beach area. At any rate, I remember that there is a major interconnect in the Los Osos area near Morro Bay where a couple of major undersea cables are hooked together.
Someone else already posted it, but Neal Stephenson wrote a great article on just that subject a few years back (okay, over a decade ago - but still very good and interesting). You can find it here.
US landlines aren't a simple billing exercise. First you need a local carrier, this is say $30/month for "free local calls". Then you need a national carriers (could be the same company), this requires a monthly subscription too. Then you need, yes, you guessed it, an international carrier. There's a default to pick up the national and internationals, but the rates can be very high. Miss dial and that unconnected call can cost $4. Once you navigate this setup you get banged with umpteen levels of taxes and fees, which never seem to be the same month to month.
Things may have improved over the last few years, we gave up with land lines and use vonage's $25/month service (uses internet for connections but acts as as real phone system). This settled our national and international costs (free) for a while, but then the patent mess started and the FCC decided to stick its oar in. We now pay about $34/month for the $25/month service thanks to taxes and fees. Which is a hell of a lot better than regular phone companies (for us).
Doesn't sound familiar... prices have been steadily going up, but I currently pay $18 for local calling, and of course all local calls are free. Two years ago it was under $14, but AT&T really seems to be pushing people to switch over to their U-verse offering, where limited local calling starts at $25 per month (why do I want to pay more for less service?). On top of that is long distance, which includes international calling - not sure why you think you need separate long distance and international calling plans. Of course, I rarely use long distance on the land line since my cell phone has free nationwide calling, so we pay something like $4 a month for a plan with moderate long-distance rates, and on the rare occasion we make an international call we just pick up a calling card.
Don't know about Skype or Vonage, but the VoIP offerings from AT&T and Comcast seem to be designed to charge more for less service unless you are making a lot of long-distance calls.
Marketing genius? The better move would have been to wait till the very day that Google headlines with "G+ out of Beta. Available to the Masses".
Zuckerberg is young, but not that young. Come on, this is Google; G+ won't be out of beta until our grandkids are in college.