Same with the dust that was in the movie... The Lion King? (I don't remember which movie it was, could have been Alladin was well) that spelled out "SEX" if you played it in slow motion
Actually it spells SFX - the name of the company that did many of the digital effects in The Lion King. This has been confirmed by them - don't have a url to hand but IMDB is probably a good start.
I'm dubious about the idea that knowing the history of computer science helps you be a better programmer. I've known several excellent programmers whose knowledge of computer science was limited to the tools of their trade and the underlying theory. My own knowledge of the history of my profession hasn't made learning OOP any easier.
I am of the opposite opinion - that you can't know too much about the history of computing and computer science if you want to be a better programmer. Want to know why adding programmers to a late software project makes it later? Read Brooks. Are there some problems which are not solvable by computer? Study Turing. How does entropy and communications work? Shannon tells all. How and why does LISP do what it does so well? Check out the history of AI research. Does Babbage's engine really work? Hell yes - there's a working model at the Science Museum in London. Seeing it in action was practically a religious experience for me. Why does Unix use pipes? Check out the history of it at Bell Labs online.
You could say that all of these examples could just as well be studied theoretically. But then you'd miss the fun parts - like the story behind IBM's development of OS/360 and how some companies still haven't learned those lessons.
History is full of these amazing guys (and gals - hello Grace) that met and solved all kinds of problems, often in surprising and non-intuitive ways. Many of the anecdotes and broader perspectives do help you with programming if only to teach you something from history. Your Babbage example is a good one.
Some of the past results would have made great slashdot stories, how about: Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for
inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower."
Far from being a whacky burglar alarm, the device you mention was originally actually an anti-hijack device. Johannesburg is the carjacking capital of the world. I have been resident here for over ten years and I can truthfully say that if you yourself haven't been hijacked then a member of your family or a friend has if you live in this town. I personally have had two attacks in my own driveway, my wife was the victim of an attempt and my father was hijacked and then kidnapped for over four hours.
Most carjack attempts happen at traffic lights or outside your home. The robbers' modus operandi is to walk up to your car door brandishing a weapon - normally a 9mm or an AK-47. Sometimes they just shoot first, drag your body out the way and dump it before driving off. It's impractical to reach for a weapon yourself in these situations since a) you're sitting down and b) your seatbelt is often in the way.
Solution: press a button (the original method of activation) and your would-be murderers get themselves horribly crisped by a sheet of burning hydrocarbons. Sounds damn good to me.
Thus, the "license breaker" could not be
forced to release their own source code.
His remedy is better though - go to redistributors and customers and say "why are you paying for this stolen code when you could get it for free?"
From the article: ``Why would you want to pay serious money,'' we have asked, ``for software that infringes our license and will bog you down in complex legal problems, when you can have the real thing for free?'' Customers have never failed to see the pertinence of the question. The stealing of free software is one place where, indeed, crime doesn't pay.
Now that all of the knee jerkers are ready to flame me - NOTHING that our government has done, should result in a tragedy like this. Regardless of the US foreign policy, innocent civilians DO NOT deserve to die.
There's quite a few things about US policy itself that display these characteristics. It's OK for US foreign policy to:
deliberately starve millions in Iraq and Afghanistan when the Federal Government's loyalty changes towards former favourites.
prop up corrupt leaders in Africa and Central America just because the political and military opponents are communist.
blatantly ignore treaties whenever it suits them.
ignore the UN when possible
support Israel's ignoring of UN resolutions as much as possible.
These points are not the mindless ravings of a Muslim fanatic (whatever that means - all the Muslim guys I've ever known are really cool). I'm a white journalist who has lived through 15 years of terrorist war in Southern Africa and then fought against it in Northern Ireland - and I'm not just mindlessly sounding off. (I've also travelled widely in the US). All of my points are facts which can can be independently verified. But don't take my word for it - check them out. Don't rely on your own mainstream media which can't even bring itself to talk about how Bin Laden was funded by the CIA and the Taliban are a bastard creation of a US-sponsored agency in Pakistan. Go and find out just why these political problems in other parts of the world are the fault - in whole or in part - of the self interest of the United States of America.
Mantras seem to be the order of the day so here's mine:
In the eyes of some, US citizens are fair game as long as they continue to ignore their own government's foreign policy
Having correctly pointed out that US foreign policy has caused misery, suffering and death to millions elsewhere in the world, you seem horrified that a couple of those people are ready to give as good as they get.
Heh - the worst is when two packages you use daily have keyboard shortcuts that perform the exact opposite of the other.
I refer to Gimp and Blender: Ctrl-W in Gimp is Close, while it's Save in Blender. Many a time I've pressed it in one or the other without thinking and got the opposite effect.
In other words, how long before they trample copyrights on software in the name of "the good of the people". Brazil has already shown (so has South Africa) that if your company doesn't agree to their terms they will just label you greedy and uncaring and use it as justification to take what they want.
Have I missed something here? South Africa taking what it wants? Are you talking about the AIDS protests here? If so then I'd like to see some reliable sources that back up your claim. On the software side, South Africa has a very active BSA office with all the usual members (since they nearly all have offices in this country).
FYI, we in South Africa have a serious problem with HIV and not just the disease. Our president went on the record as saying HIV doesn't cause AIDS three months before his own press secretary succumbed to the syndrome. Last year the government gave out free condoms to those who needed them and - get this - stapled the instructions to the condom. When the deputy minister of health appeared on a radio chat show and was ridiculed by the host for her views, the ruling party demanded that he be sacked.
When you have a clueless bunch in charge doing nothing about an infection rate of 1 in 8 over the whole population of 45m people, certain things take priority - and drug company patents are near the bottom.
If you get the source distribution of Maelstrom, the/Doc subdirectory contains a bunch of docs written by Sam on the porting process.
This includes how he dealt with using the native Mac resources, X video issues, timing and network synchronisation. All are entertaining and highly informative and answer your questions:)
(or did he? In the end that guy in III turned out to be an android as well - remember the ear).
I've looked closely and the Bishop at the end bleeds red blood when tolchocked. Add to that his reaction to Ripley's impending suicide and the conclusion is pretty clear - he's a human working for the company.
The reason this is so long is because my friend swears by Blender, almost entirely because some of it is GPLed, and I have a difficult time convincing him that right now there is no Free equivelent to high end commercial 3D graphics, not by a longshot.
OK. Slight misunderstanding by your friend. None of Blender is GPLed - it's free as in beer only. Perhaps he was confused about the fact that NaN have released the code for some of the tools they use back into the community as GPLed software.
On to your other points...
I have never heard anything of the sort and I HIGHLY doubt it.
It's true - almost. Blender was originally written to provide 3d graphics for games and TV commercials in Europe. AFAIK it hasn't been used for any kind of SFX rendering on film - yet.
1. Poor rendering. Blender doesn't have the quality or features neccesary in its own rendering engine and does not have renderman scene output.
I think Blender compares very favourably with 3DS Max rendering output. And Blender's Renderman plugin works just fine - through a Python script. It's not complete but that won't take too long. Combine it with BMRT (which I do regularly) and you have a winner.
The 'Magic Four' described above have many animation features that can aid in about every area of animation. What separates Softimage and Maya from Lightwave and 3DS is for the most part very powerful animation tools.
Agreed.
3. Blender's interface is wretched. It is beyond reproach and it pains me to say it, but I cannot think of how it could be any worse. It seems that features were just tacked on an buttons were thrown into the panel. It is not elegant in any way. I have used a lot of different 3d packages so anyone who replies and says 'its great when you get used to it' doesn't understand.
No doubt about it, it's written by engineers for engineers - not by artists for artists. And yet, once I learnt how everything fits together in the Blender interface, I found it easy to use - which is I think different from "intuitive." Maya is a good example of intuitive - give it to an artist and away they go.
When stuff needs to be done, and done well, the people under the gun reach for the best tool and Blender isn't it. Maya unlimited costs $16,000 per license. Blender is a low-end program, and could be a good one at that.... Maybe if it stays around as long as the other programs mentioned here it will aproach the same functionality.
Agreed - but consider the fact that there are 250 000 users of Blender out there. Not bad for a program less than five years old. Blender is a staggeringly popular tool at graphic design shops and colleges worldwide - because it's free and produces amazing results in a short time. The high-end competition will both benefit and - paradoxically - hurt because of this. They'll benefit from the hordes of students who've been introduced to the basic principles of rendering through Blender and want to go on to the high-end, and they'll hurt because of the momentum of people writing scripts, giving feedback and pushing Blender to its limits, thus improving the program.
I agree with your main tenet, but it sounds very similar to the arguments that Microsoft used to trot out about Linux a couple of years ago. Unless the high-end boys keep orders of magnitude ahead in terms of fuctionality and start making their prices a little more affordable for students and beginners, they could well be eaten alive by Blender.
Yes. Blender has been used by FX companies in Europe to do 3D graphics for TV commercials and studios for a number of years now. This is originally how Blender got started - NaN developed the product in house (on SGI) to do their own work, and then decided to release it for free to the public.
Not airline pilots (someone please correct me if this is true for anything other than Air Zambia) but I know a number of private pilots - both powered and glider - that use them. No batteries, no hard-to-read displays, gives the right answer nice and quickly too:)
There are no purely mathematical systems which guarantee you stay ahead of the house at roulette. None at all. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. This is not to say that there aren't systems - there are good ones to maximise winnings, control losses and give you a slight edge - but the ones which rely on probability fail mainly because roulette is not a game of probability:)
One thing I have always wondered about, is the notion (reality?) of "card counters" - I mean, what exactly are they, and why are they bad?
They are people who have learned a system to get themselves an edge on card games - normally but not necessarily blackjack. They are bad from a casino's point of view in that they can convert an 8-10% edge in the casino's favour to a 2-6% edge in their favour depending on the conditions - how many decks, the size of your bankroll and the rules of the game in question.
From what I understand (and I am not a gambler - and I don't really like cards, outside of the mechanics of the games, etc - so I may be wrong) - is that a "card counter" is exactly that - someone who can keep track of, in their heads, of what cards may be "where" (ie, in what players) - and what the dealer may have left - through knowing what they have, as well as how many hands they have lost or won - etc.
Almost. Very few people on this planet can keep track of several shuffled decks in their heads, especially when those decks are reshuffled every few minutes. Card "counters" just tally up the values of the cards dealt according to one of several systems. Once you're through a deck far enough then if you have a high running total - you bet high, low running total - bet low. There are plenty of links - try searching Google for "Blackjack Basic Strategy".
What I can't understand is why this is illegal - ie, why is it illegal to have the skill to remember cards and positions, etc - in order to make the odds more favorable - making such an ability illegal punishes those who have the brain "capacity" or "ability", and rewards (or at least protects) those with "lesser" (or nonexistant) skills in the area.
It's not illegal - casinos just don't like like you to win. If they suspect you have a system, then they'll use the catch-all Right of Admission Reserved and kick you out. Trust me - I know:)
He's dead right. The Christmas letter of 1996 from Carmack explaining why he wasn't going to "waste his time" porting Quake to Direct3D was one of the most influential documents on the future of OpenGL and gaming. It sparked a fierce debate on the merits of Direct3D vs OpenGL and ensured that hardware-accelerated cards supported OpenGL (since Quake was selling so well).
Slashdot Mirror
Same with the dust that was in the movie... The Lion King? (I don't remember which movie it was, could have been Alladin was well) that spelled out "SEX" if you played it in slow motion
Actually it spells SFX - the name of the company that did many of the digital effects in The Lion King. This has been confirmed by them - don't have a url to hand but IMDB is probably a good start.
...
"Looks like I'm going to need more RAM," observed Tom deflatedly. "This new Windows XP certainly does have a heavy footprint."
...
I am of the opposite opinion - that you can't know too much about the history of computing and computer science if you want to be a better programmer. Want to know why adding programmers to a late software project makes it later? Read Brooks. Are there some problems which are not solvable by computer? Study Turing. How does entropy and communications work? Shannon tells all. How and why does LISP do what it does so well? Check out the history of AI research. Does Babbage's engine really work? Hell yes - there's a working model at the Science Museum in London. Seeing it in action was practically a religious experience for me. Why does Unix use pipes? Check out the history of it at Bell Labs online.
You could say that all of these examples could just as well be studied theoretically. But then you'd miss the fun parts - like the story behind IBM's development of OS/360 and how some companies still haven't learned those lessons.
History is full of these amazing guys (and gals - hello Grace) that met and solved all kinds of problems, often in surprising and non-intuitive ways. Many of the anecdotes and broader perspectives do help you with programming if only to teach you something from history. Your Babbage example is a good one.
No - it was Wolverhampton Wanders who beat Leicester 3-1 :)
Some of the past results would have made great slashdot stories, how about: Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for
inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower."
Far from being a whacky burglar alarm, the device you mention was originally actually an anti-hijack device. Johannesburg is the carjacking capital of the world. I have been resident here for over ten years and I can truthfully say that if you yourself haven't been hijacked then a member of your family or a friend has if you live in this town. I personally have had two attacks in my own driveway, my wife was the victim of an attempt and my father was hijacked and then kidnapped for over four hours.
Most carjack attempts happen at traffic lights or outside your home. The robbers' modus operandi is to walk up to your car door brandishing a weapon - normally a 9mm or an AK-47. Sometimes they just shoot first, drag your body out the way and dump it before driving off. It's impractical to reach for a weapon yourself in these situations since a) you're sitting down and b) your seatbelt is often in the way.
Solution: press a button (the original method of activation) and your would-be murderers get themselves horribly crisped by a sheet of burning hydrocarbons. Sounds damn good to me.
I really doubt /., for instance, could make a living of selling nifty t-shirts.
You mean they have other sources of income??
it could make time run backwards as you suggest :)
Thus, the "license breaker" could not be
forced to release their own source code.
His remedy is better though - go to redistributors and customers and say "why are you paying for this stolen code when you could get it for free?"
From the article:
``Why would you want to pay serious money,'' we have asked, ``for software that infringes our license and will bog you down in complex legal problems, when you can have the real thing for free?'' Customers have never failed to see the pertinence of the question. The stealing of free software is one place where, indeed, crime doesn't pay.
Now that all of the knee jerkers are ready to flame me - NOTHING that our government has done, should result in a tragedy like this. Regardless of the US foreign policy, innocent civilians DO NOT deserve to die.
There's quite a few things about US policy itself that display these characteristics. It's OK for US foreign policy to:
These points are not the mindless ravings of a Muslim fanatic (whatever that means - all the Muslim guys I've ever known are really cool). I'm a white journalist who has lived through 15 years of terrorist war in Southern Africa and then fought against it in Northern Ireland - and I'm not just mindlessly sounding off. (I've also travelled widely in the US). All of my points are facts which can can be independently verified. But don't take my word for it - check them out. Don't rely on your own mainstream media which can't even bring itself to talk about how Bin Laden was funded by the CIA and the Taliban are a bastard creation of a US-sponsored agency in Pakistan. Go and find out just why these political problems in other parts of the world are the fault - in whole or in part - of the self interest of the United States of America.
Mantras seem to be the order of the day so here's mine:
In the eyes of some, US citizens are fair game as long as they continue to ignore their own government's foreign policy
Having correctly pointed out that US foreign policy has caused misery, suffering and death to millions elsewhere in the world, you seem horrified that a couple of those people are ready to give as good as they get.
What goes: click, click, click - "did I get it?" click, click, click - "did I get it?"
Stevie Wonder trying to solve a cube.
I refer to Gimp and Blender: Ctrl-W in Gimp is Close, while it's Save in Blender. Many a time I've pressed it in one or the other without thinking and got the opposite effect.
Have I missed something here? South Africa taking what it wants? Are you talking about the AIDS protests here? If so then I'd like to see some reliable sources that back up your claim. On the software side, South Africa has a very active BSA office with all the usual members (since they nearly all have offices in this country).
FYI, we in South Africa have a serious problem with HIV and not just the disease. Our president went on the record as saying HIV doesn't cause AIDS three months before his own press secretary succumbed to the syndrome. Last year the government gave out free condoms to those who needed them and - get this - stapled the instructions to the condom. When the deputy minister of health appeared on a radio chat show and was ridiculed by the host for her views, the ruling party demanded that he be sacked.
When you have a clueless bunch in charge doing nothing about an infection rate of 1 in 8 over the whole population of 45m people, certain things take priority - and drug company patents are near the bottom.
Quite possibly the funniest song parody I've ever read on /. - where are my mod points when I need them!
If you look carefully, the rocket launcher is on top of a pillar in the background to the left.
Looxury...
It's probably an automated reply from someone who's been receiving your private files courtesy of SirCam :)
This includes how he dealt with using the native Mac resources, X video issues, timing and network synchronisation. All are entertaining and highly informative and answer your questions :)
I've looked closely and the Bishop at the end bleeds red blood when tolchocked. Add to that his reaction to Ripley's impending suicide and the conclusion is pretty clear - he's a human working for the company.
OK. Slight misunderstanding by your friend. None of Blender is GPLed - it's free as in beer only. Perhaps he was confused about the fact that NaN have released the code for some of the tools they use back into the community as GPLed software. On to your other points...
I have never heard anything of the sort and I HIGHLY doubt it.
It's true - almost. Blender was originally written to provide 3d graphics for games and TV commercials in Europe. AFAIK it hasn't been used for any kind of SFX rendering on film - yet.
1. Poor rendering. Blender doesn't have the quality or features neccesary in its own rendering engine and does not have renderman scene output.
I think Blender compares very favourably with 3DS Max rendering output. And Blender's Renderman plugin works just fine - through a Python script. It's not complete but that won't take too long. Combine it with BMRT (which I do regularly) and you have a winner.
The 'Magic Four' described above have many animation features that can aid in about every area of animation. What separates Softimage and Maya from Lightwave and 3DS is for the most part very powerful animation tools.
Agreed.
3. Blender's interface is wretched. It is beyond reproach and it pains me to say it, but I cannot think of how it could be any worse. It seems that features were just tacked on an buttons were thrown into the panel. It is not elegant in any way. I have used a lot of different 3d packages so anyone who replies and says 'its great when you get used to it' doesn't understand.
No doubt about it, it's written by engineers for engineers - not by artists for artists. And yet, once I learnt how everything fits together in the Blender interface, I found it easy to use - which is I think different from "intuitive." Maya is a good example of intuitive - give it to an artist and away they go.
When stuff needs to be done, and done well, the people under the gun reach for the best tool and Blender isn't it. Maya unlimited costs $16,000 per license. Blender is a low-end program, and could be a good one at that. ... Maybe if it stays around as long as the other programs mentioned here it will aproach the same functionality.
Agreed - but consider the fact that there are 250 000 users of Blender out there. Not bad for a program less than five years old. Blender is a staggeringly popular tool at graphic design shops and colleges worldwide - because it's free and produces amazing results in a short time. The high-end competition will both benefit and - paradoxically - hurt because of this. They'll benefit from the hordes of students who've been introduced to the basic principles of rendering through Blender and want to go on to the high-end, and they'll hurt because of the momentum of people writing scripts, giving feedback and pushing Blender to its limits, thus improving the program.
I agree with your main tenet, but it sounds very similar to the arguments that Microsoft used to trot out about Linux a couple of years ago. Unless the high-end boys keep orders of magnitude ahead in terms of fuctionality and start making their prices a little more affordable for students and beginners, they could well be eaten alive by Blender.
Yes. Blender has been used by FX companies in Europe to do 3D graphics for TV commercials and studios for a number of years now. This is originally how Blender got started - NaN developed the product in house (on SGI) to do their own work, and then decided to release it for free to the public.
Not airline pilots (someone please correct me if this is true for anything other than Air Zambia) but I know a number of private pilots - both powered and glider - that use them. No batteries, no hard-to-read displays, gives the right answer nice and quickly too :)
There are no purely mathematical systems which guarantee you stay ahead of the house at roulette. None at all. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. This is not to say that there aren't systems - there are good ones to maximise winnings, control losses and give you a slight edge - but the ones which rely on probability fail mainly because roulette is not a game of probability :)
They are people who have learned a system to get themselves an edge on card games - normally but not necessarily blackjack. They are bad from a casino's point of view in that they can convert an 8-10% edge in the casino's favour to a 2-6% edge in their favour depending on the conditions - how many decks, the size of your bankroll and the rules of the game in question.
From what I understand (and I am not a gambler - and I don't really like cards, outside of the mechanics of the games, etc - so I may be wrong) - is that a "card counter" is exactly that - someone who can keep track of, in their heads, of what cards may be "where" (ie, in what players) - and what the dealer may have left - through knowing what they have, as well as how many hands they have lost or won - etc.
Almost. Very few people on this planet can keep track of several shuffled decks in their heads, especially when those decks are reshuffled every few minutes. Card "counters" just tally up the values of the cards dealt according to one of several systems. Once you're through a deck far enough then if you have a high running total - you bet high, low running total - bet low. There are plenty of links - try searching Google for "Blackjack Basic Strategy".
What I can't understand is why this is illegal - ie, why is it illegal to have the skill to remember cards and positions, etc - in order to make the odds more favorable - making such an ability illegal punishes those who have the brain "capacity" or "ability", and rewards (or at least protects) those with "lesser" (or nonexistant) skills in the area.
It's not illegal - casinos just don't like like you to win. If they suspect you have a system, then they'll use the catch-all Right of Admission Reserved and kick you out. Trust me - I know :)
He's dead right. The Christmas letter of 1996 from Carmack explaining why he wasn't going to "waste his time" porting Quake to Direct3D was one of the most influential documents on the future of OpenGL and gaming. It sparked a fierce debate on the merits of Direct3D vs OpenGL and ensured that hardware-accelerated cards supported OpenGL (since Quake was selling so well).