I just got back from seeing The Hobbit in 3D IMAX today (unfortunately in 24 fps, which made for some ugly, blurry pans of the countryside). I can confirm that I have zero enthusiasm for this "trend." I would pay premium prices for a 70mm class, true THX theatre experience, but stereoscopy adds little to my experience, and creates too many problems. Going from silent to talkies it ain't.
The only thing I ever saw that really worked was the Tron sequel. A bad movie, but it had some very nice computer generated 3D sequences. But not while you can see the actors. That's the real problem. For me, people as stereoscopic subjects enter that uncanny valley where something tiny isn't right, all the time, and it activates a sense of revulsion, distraction, and displeasure. Multiple people create problems because if you turn your head even slightly during the scene, the fact that you are watching stereoscopy and not a true 3D scene becomes immediately apparent. It gets worse rather than better on the bigger screens, because you're more likely to need head movement. I understand fully CG animation does very well, but that's for my kids, not me. It makes sense, as animated characters are a major discrepancy from real images, not the tiny and unsettling sort.
The motorized Lazy-boy seats my local theatre just put in add more to the experience than stereoscopy ever has. So I am a dissatisfied customer, and I won't pay a thin dime more for any "3D," and am now actively seeking 2D presentations.
My open mind is now closed for business on the subject. It's been a disappointment. If I were to suggest a good place for a new trend to make theatres worth the trip, it would be wiring all the seats with a speaker array and using that to generate truly spatial and also asymmetrical (crowd noise, ambient) sound effects.
Will it end "high-end graphics?" No more than CAFE standards ended the auto industry. If it's the standard, I have no doubt that innovative solutions will be designed to allow us to live within it, or close enough to it that no regulatory actions need be taken. We're just redefining what "high-end" means, and given the power profile of an Nvidia 480 vs. a 680, it's high time for that kind of high-end progress.
Ah, like the first scroll I write with my blessed magic marker is a blessed scroll of charging. Then another for the Wand of Wishing (0:3), so I can wish for another magic marker, and write another scroll of charging for that one. LOL.
No wishing for more wishes. You also can't wish someone dead. You can probably print love, though, in a sense.
But don't forget that the other side was crying "fascists." Then, when that didn't stick, it was "crypto-fascists" and we were expected to believe that everyone in the right secretly wore a Hitler moustache beneath their Klan robes, while they kept up a clean cut facade for the cameras.
And that back and forth, between cries of "Commie!" and cries of "Fascist!," came directly from Joe Stalin's CCCP and the Nazis, when Hitler and he fell out. We just took it into our own politics with very little consideration of the results in Europe.
The problem with all of these labels, my friend, is that our entire political dialogue is based on war propaganda. We live in a world dominated by the propaganda methods of Joseph Goebbels. For better, but usually for worse, he was extremely successful to the point that everyone in modern U.S. politics uses some form of his methods of media and public control. We use a variety of labels, instinctively at this point, to cause people to stop considering the opposition as human beings, and consider them instead as "the other," brutal in their methods and deserving of whatever aggression we can dream up. When we go too far and become brutal ourselves, our defense is that "their means justify our means," and that the other gets what they deserve.
All can be mended if we open our ears and our minds though. Not from a point of weakness, we don't have to accept everything in some misconstrued overture of "tolerance," but simply by listening and thinking from a position of strength, and not of despair.
The CIA consists of human beings trying to make the world a better place, generally for the American people first, then everyone else if possible. They, for the most part, don't wipe their butts without congressional authority, a Congress whom we in the U.S. elect. If we reject these methods and stop electing war propagandeers on both the right and the left to Congress (War on Poverty or War on Drugs, it doesn't matter, War isn't the way), their actions will better reflect the values of a peacetime society, and we won't be inexorably marched to yet another actual war.
I have but a tiny little hope that may happen someday.
You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to slide to unlock, tap open and app out. You will not be able to lose yourself in birds and pigs, iTune in and swill beer during the keynote, Because the revolution will not be an app.
The revolution will be... um, Live... oh hell, that's a Microsoft product.
So, they changed the fairly decent previous Windows 7 desktop to something designed around products I don't want to see and a UI navigation mechanism I don't want to use. For the vast majority of users out there who just want to use a desktop computer to play a game or watch a movie, it's a major step backwards in usability.
Hmm. With substitutions in place, I'm detecting a disturbance in the force...
But all said and done, for me it would go a long way towards reparations if Mr. Octopus showed up and started bitch slapping Jonny Moseley with a live squid. Bread and circuses, baby.
I think the funniest part is watching the two commentators ignore each others teleprompted crap, wait for their cue, then say "That's right," and plow right on with a complete non sequitur. Disturbingly often.
Our group of viewers dreamed up this example:
Moseley: Well Matt, I think Hitler had some pretty good ideas in 1936, and that really shows on the Warped Wall today.
Iseman: That's RIGHT! and vanilla paste makes an excellent... wait. WHAT?
Too true. I can still use SHFT+del for cut, SHFT+ins for paste, and CTRL+ins for copy. That's from, like, Windows 1.0 and it's still with us in Win 7. IIRC, CTRL+X, C, V was added in Windows 3.1, and yet the old keys are still there. There is no reason for Microsoft to not make the Metro Start Screen 100% optional, give desktop users a way to bypass it straight to a Vista/7 style desktop (automatically), and leave it up to users what they want to use. It should also be possible to give users a choice about the function of the "start" key, and not have it disrupt everything they are doing by filling the entire screen with blocks. Like "requiring" IE as part of explorer in Windows 98, this is all about marketing strategy, not usability. It only makes sense on a touch screen device, yet for marketing everyone else is being forced into a consistent "look and feel" on devices on which it makes no sense.
As with the ribbon, it seems like a patented "look and feel" is more important to Microsoft than user choice these days. That "look and feel" involves oversize controls that Microsoft can use as ad space (a huge billboard) to promote their preferred "features."
I strongly suspect that no animal on earth is sufficiently intelligent to "understand" the results of what we are doing. From the vast complexities of a global climate, to the complexities of, say, garnering temperature/climate measurements from tree rings with no way to check if your assumptions are actually good save inventing a time machine, to the incredible litany of unintended consequences strewn throughout history, after every single technological or social advance. Climate modeling is one such technological advance, beholden to the computer.
The only thing that is clear to me is that a person _can_ study it, fail to comprehend much, but make an educated guess at some really obvious low-hanging fruit.
And I'll go with the best guesses of reasonably vetted climatologists any day on what is happening, right here and now.
But understand? I think not.
And good luck on any being in the universe (up to and including any extended superhuman consciousness of your choice) being intelligent enough to "understand" how to change a political system with such vested economic interests, and established institutions, in climate affecting technologies. Seriously, what we're talking about here is not simply us overgrazing until there is a collapse, but literally causing a similar level of collapse to prevent a bigger one, and that is why "end of the world" talk comes up so often (and, unfortunately, in such overreaching fashion that it makes opposition arguments more compelling. Check "Cassandra syndrome" if you aren't familiar with the concept.)
Because if we really make enough changes to affect even the conservative climatology claims, not many people will survive the war (and probably famines) that would ensue after a James Hansen style technology draw down. Either that, or the elites mandating that change wouldn't survive 10 years before the revolution executed them all and started burning fossil fuels again. Hell, they'd probably hoard gasoline and run them all down with their cars, in arenas. "Cap and trade" will not cut it if fossil fuels are this much of a danger, and every plan I've ever seen just seeks to replace the current entrenched corrupt oligarchy with a new, hoping-to-become-entrenched corrupt oligarchy, which in the end will be insufficient to any task but wealth transference. The scientists involved are naive when it comes to that political reality. It's not that the climate data isn't convincing people, or even denial, it's the lack of an alternative, and the size, breadth, and influence of the entrenched power structure climate fixers would need to topple.
And it has made some of them, not going to name names here, sound very paranoid indeed, because they really are fighting against a vast, incorporated hit squad. It's not really paranoia, they really are out to get them.
So I think we'll probably muddle along, and if 90% of the planet's surface becomes uninhabitable (for humans) from the results of our muddling, then I look forward to becoming an Inuit or dying very early on from bird flu. I think talk of population collapse and resource exhaustion is probably counterproductive. I don't think it's mistaken, though. Population collapse is, at this point, probably unavoidable if the worst of published projections prove true. We haven't crossed the "soylent green" point-of-no-return, but I can only hope that our habitat and our ingenuity can see us through our mistakes.
On a more serious note, MS has a long history of pretending they have a product when it's actually just on the drawing boards. It used to make markets seize up in waiting for the MS product. I can't see how that tactic is going to help them against Apple's shipping and very popular products. It's like they're drawing their marketing tactics from the nineties. They don't have any weight in this market to cause it to seize up.
Win 8 tablets are going to have to be damned impressive for them to make any dent in this market segment at all.
I'm going to nitpick here. Shouldn't an HTTP error be coming from the web server (a la 404, not found)? Therefore if you can't reach the server, because it is blocked, then you can't get an HTTP error, right? Unless they're redirecting to their own web server, it just doesn't make sense (and I suppose it could confuse people into contacting the webmaster, too, but really who does that?).
For the ISP, it's probably more appropriate to redirect the user to a free DNS service page for any DNS errors (even legit typo errors). That's probably the best way to give the powers that be the finger.
Or, more to the point, that people with more education are better at rationalizing their political choices, and will use their education to that end, because that's the purpose that the liberal arts tradition of education serves. A high level of education serves to give us reason for our choices, but evidence does not help us reach consensus, because it is our choices that divide us and the evidence serves our choices.
To be super-brief: Educated people use their knowledge and methods to help support their team, but the teams are the driving force, not the facts.
Not the least of which is the _three_ creation myths in the Bible, which contradict one another in at least chronology. Yup. I've watched literalists do the mental backflips on that one, and it's enough to make you lose faith in reasoning altogether. They literally reason their way into nonsense, like it's Caroll's jolly caucus race.
We'll never get dry. In fact, we're all wet. Every single one of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Ive been telling people for years that I dont do windows. Works like a charm.
Charms(TM) are a registered patent of Microsoft, Inc. Choose your words carefully.
I just got back from seeing The Hobbit in 3D IMAX today (unfortunately in 24 fps, which made for some ugly, blurry pans of the countryside). I can confirm that I have zero enthusiasm for this "trend." I would pay premium prices for a 70mm class, true THX theatre experience, but stereoscopy adds little to my experience, and creates too many problems. Going from silent to talkies it ain't.
The only thing I ever saw that really worked was the Tron sequel. A bad movie, but it had some very nice computer generated 3D sequences. But not while you can see the actors. That's the real problem. For me, people as stereoscopic subjects enter that uncanny valley where something tiny isn't right, all the time, and it activates a sense of revulsion, distraction, and displeasure. Multiple people create problems because if you turn your head even slightly during the scene, the fact that you are watching stereoscopy and not a true 3D scene becomes immediately apparent. It gets worse rather than better on the bigger screens, because you're more likely to need head movement. I understand fully CG animation does very well, but that's for my kids, not me. It makes sense, as animated characters are a major discrepancy from real images, not the tiny and unsettling sort.
The motorized Lazy-boy seats my local theatre just put in add more to the experience than stereoscopy ever has. So I am a dissatisfied customer, and I won't pay a thin dime more for any "3D," and am now actively seeking 2D presentations.
My open mind is now closed for business on the subject. It's been a disappointment. If I were to suggest a good place for a new trend to make theatres worth the trip, it would be wiring all the seats with a speaker array and using that to generate truly spatial and also asymmetrical (crowd noise, ambient) sound effects.
Yup. It appears that we are at this step:
3. ???
Here's the only way I will accept them coming back: They come back as weeping angels.
Now Jo, I want you to pull that lever.
Will it end "high-end graphics?" No more than CAFE standards ended the auto industry. If it's the standard, I have no doubt that innovative solutions will be designed to allow us to live within it, or close enough to it that no regulatory actions need be taken. We're just redefining what "high-end" means, and given the power profile of an Nvidia 480 vs. a 680, it's high time for that kind of high-end progress.
Ah, like the first scroll I write with my blessed magic marker is a blessed scroll of charging. Then another for the Wand of Wishing (0:3), so I can wish for another magic marker, and write another scroll of charging for that one. LOL.
No wishing for more wishes. You also can't wish someone dead. You can probably print love, though, in a sense.
But don't forget that the other side was crying "fascists." Then, when that didn't stick, it was "crypto-fascists" and we were expected to believe that everyone in the right secretly wore a Hitler moustache beneath their Klan robes, while they kept up a clean cut facade for the cameras.
And that back and forth, between cries of "Commie!" and cries of "Fascist!," came directly from Joe Stalin's CCCP and the Nazis, when Hitler and he fell out. We just took it into our own politics with very little consideration of the results in Europe.
The problem with all of these labels, my friend, is that our entire political dialogue is based on war propaganda. We live in a world dominated by the propaganda methods of Joseph Goebbels. For better, but usually for worse, he was extremely successful to the point that everyone in modern U.S. politics uses some form of his methods of media and public control. We use a variety of labels, instinctively at this point, to cause people to stop considering the opposition as human beings, and consider them instead as "the other," brutal in their methods and deserving of whatever aggression we can dream up. When we go too far and become brutal ourselves, our defense is that "their means justify our means," and that the other gets what they deserve.
All can be mended if we open our ears and our minds though. Not from a point of weakness, we don't have to accept everything in some misconstrued overture of "tolerance," but simply by listening and thinking from a position of strength, and not of despair.
The CIA consists of human beings trying to make the world a better place, generally for the American people first, then everyone else if possible. They, for the most part, don't wipe their butts without congressional authority, a Congress whom we in the U.S. elect. If we reject these methods and stop electing war propagandeers on both the right and the left to Congress (War on Poverty or War on Drugs, it doesn't matter, War isn't the way), their actions will better reflect the values of a peacetime society, and we won't be inexorably marched to yet another actual war.
I have but a tiny little hope that may happen someday.
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to slide to unlock, tap open and app out.
You will not be able to lose yourself in birds and pigs,
iTune in and swill beer during the keynote,
Because the revolution will not be an app.
The revolution will be... um, Live... oh hell, that's a Microsoft product.
Of course, their mistake was that rock and roll will never die, unlike Armstrong. RIP.
So, they changed the fairly decent previous Windows 7 desktop to something designed around products I don't want to see and a UI navigation mechanism I don't want to use. For the vast majority of users out there who just want to use a desktop computer to play a game or watch a movie, it's a major step backwards in usability.
Hmm. With substitutions in place, I'm detecting a disturbance in the force...
But all said and done, for me it would go a long way towards reparations if Mr. Octopus showed up and started bitch slapping Jonny Moseley with a live squid. Bread and circuses, baby.
I think the funniest part is watching the two commentators ignore each others teleprompted crap, wait for their cue, then say "That's right," and plow right on with a complete non sequitur. Disturbingly often.
Our group of viewers dreamed up this example:
Moseley: Well Matt, I think Hitler had some pretty good ideas in 1936, and that really shows on the Warped Wall today.
Iseman: That's RIGHT! and vanilla paste makes an excellent... wait. WHAT?
Has SNL hit this turkey yet?
A "fuck it" button, so we know where to draw a line.
Too true. I can still use SHFT+del for cut, SHFT+ins for paste, and CTRL+ins for copy. That's from, like, Windows 1.0 and it's still with us in Win 7. IIRC, CTRL+X, C, V was added in Windows 3.1, and yet the old keys are still there. There is no reason for Microsoft to not make the Metro Start Screen 100% optional, give desktop users a way to bypass it straight to a Vista/7 style desktop (automatically), and leave it up to users what they want to use. It should also be possible to give users a choice about the function of the "start" key, and not have it disrupt everything they are doing by filling the entire screen with blocks. Like "requiring" IE as part of explorer in Windows 98, this is all about marketing strategy, not usability. It only makes sense on a touch screen device, yet for marketing everyone else is being forced into a consistent "look and feel" on devices on which it makes no sense.
As with the ribbon, it seems like a patented "look and feel" is more important to Microsoft than user choice these days. That "look and feel" involves oversize controls that Microsoft can use as ad space (a huge billboard) to promote their preferred "features."
Double middle click, you mean.
It's also the game Joshua played that caused it to infer that the only winning strategy in geopolitical diplomacy is not to play.
I strongly suspect that no animal on earth is sufficiently intelligent to "understand" the results of what we are doing. From the vast complexities of a global climate, to the complexities of, say, garnering temperature/climate measurements from tree rings with no way to check if your assumptions are actually good save inventing a time machine, to the incredible litany of unintended consequences strewn throughout history, after every single technological or social advance. Climate modeling is one such technological advance, beholden to the computer.
The only thing that is clear to me is that a person _can_ study it, fail to comprehend much, but make an educated guess at some really obvious low-hanging fruit.
And I'll go with the best guesses of reasonably vetted climatologists any day on what is happening, right here and now.
But understand? I think not.
And good luck on any being in the universe (up to and including any extended superhuman consciousness of your choice) being intelligent enough to "understand" how to change a political system with such vested economic interests, and established institutions, in climate affecting technologies. Seriously, what we're talking about here is not simply us overgrazing until there is a collapse, but literally causing a similar level of collapse to prevent a bigger one, and that is why "end of the world" talk comes up so often (and, unfortunately, in such overreaching fashion that it makes opposition arguments more compelling. Check "Cassandra syndrome" if you aren't familiar with the concept.)
Because if we really make enough changes to affect even the conservative climatology claims, not many people will survive the war (and probably famines) that would ensue after a James Hansen style technology draw down. Either that, or the elites mandating that change wouldn't survive 10 years before the revolution executed them all and started burning fossil fuels again. Hell, they'd probably hoard gasoline and run them all down with their cars, in arenas. "Cap and trade" will not cut it if fossil fuels are this much of a danger, and every plan I've ever seen just seeks to replace the current entrenched corrupt oligarchy with a new, hoping-to-become-entrenched corrupt oligarchy, which in the end will be insufficient to any task but wealth transference. The scientists involved are naive when it comes to that political reality. It's not that the climate data isn't convincing people, or even denial, it's the lack of an alternative, and the size, breadth, and influence of the entrenched power structure climate fixers would need to topple.
And it has made some of them, not going to name names here, sound very paranoid indeed, because they really are fighting against a vast, incorporated hit squad. It's not really paranoia, they really are out to get them.
So I think we'll probably muddle along, and if 90% of the planet's surface becomes uninhabitable (for humans) from the results of our muddling, then I look forward to becoming an Inuit or dying very early on from bird flu. I think talk of population collapse and resource exhaustion is probably counterproductive. I don't think it's mistaken, though. Population collapse is, at this point, probably unavoidable if the worst of published projections prove true. We haven't crossed the "soylent green" point-of-no-return, but I can only hope that our habitat and our ingenuity can see us through our mistakes.
As soon as I'm done weeping, I'll start laughing with you. "THIS is living. That's not a puppy. That's too small to be a real puppy."
(*sob*)
It's a social platform. Everybody already knows.
Didn't "Surface" used to be a big-ass table?
When did it become a vaporware iPad?
On a more serious note, MS has a long history of pretending they have a product when it's actually just on the drawing boards. It used to make markets seize up in waiting for the MS product. I can't see how that tactic is going to help them against Apple's shipping and very popular products. It's like they're drawing their marketing tactics from the nineties. They don't have any weight in this market to cause it to seize up.
Win 8 tablets are going to have to be damned impressive for them to make any dent in this market segment at all.
I'm going to nitpick here. Shouldn't an HTTP error be coming from the web server (a la 404, not found)? Therefore if you can't reach the server, because it is blocked, then you can't get an HTTP error, right? Unless they're redirecting to their own web server, it just doesn't make sense (and I suppose it could confuse people into contacting the webmaster, too, but really who does that?).
For the ISP, it's probably more appropriate to redirect the user to a free DNS service page for any DNS errors (even legit typo errors). That's probably the best way to give the powers that be the finger.
Or, more to the point, that people with more education are better at rationalizing their political choices, and will use their education to that end, because that's the purpose that the liberal arts tradition of education serves. A high level of education serves to give us reason for our choices, but evidence does not help us reach consensus, because it is our choices that divide us and the evidence serves our choices.
To be super-brief: Educated people use their knowledge and methods to help support their team, but the teams are the driving force, not the facts.
Check out: http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903
Not the least of which is the _three_ creation myths in the Bible, which contradict one another in at least chronology. Yup. I've watched literalists do the mental backflips on that one, and it's enough to make you lose faith in reasoning altogether. They literally reason their way into nonsense, like it's Caroll's jolly caucus race.
We'll never get dry. In fact, we're all wet. Every single one of us.
You touch my stuff... I kill you.
Really?