This work illustrates this perfectly. No need for debates, look at the images and learn. Well done and kudos for an awesome and simple piece of work.
Huh? I disagree completely. When combined with antialiasing, hinting improves the sharpness of characters (at the expense of precise shape). On a blurry monitor where you couldn't see the sharpness in the first place there's no point in hinting, but on an LCD the hinted font looks much better. The imprecision in the shape isn't so bad, because, at a given size, all characters will tend to be distored in the same way - keeping them consistent.
I get a little queasy staring at fonts where, for example, the left side of a lower case 'n' is a black line a single pixel wide and the right side is a 50% gray line, two pixels wide (etc. etc.). Sure the lines are equivalent if you have very bad eyes or a very blurry monitor, but they should look the same.
With hinting on both sides of the 'n' do look exactly the same. Another win here is that the previously mentioned double wide-50% gray line can ONLY look somewhat like the single wide black line if the gamma on your monitor is correct or you're looking at your LCD from exactly the right angle and if the program took gamma into account in the first place. The hinted font doesn't have that problem - both side of the 'n' will look perfectly the same from any angle, with any gamma etc. There's a real advantage there.
The original use of hinting, to make fonts look better at low resolutions works for antialiased fonts as well as for non-antialiased ones.
The before column looked much better than the after column on my laptop. I didn't read the article, but I can tell that he's lessened the effects of the hinting (that makes lines center on pixels). The results of that sort of thing is text who's shape may be more accurate but who's sharpness is lacking.
It's a matter of taste I guess, but I find reading text with uncentered lines annoying on lcds where the pixels a so sharp. I suppose there might be a gamma issue too. The gamma matters more with uncentered lines than with centered ones, but, on a laptop the gamma changes with angle - and the angle with the best gamma might not be the one with the best contrast (blacks might be grey etc.).
My mom tried to sign up for winfire's 'free' service and found out that you could only sign up by buying a $50 adsl modem for $200 or something. I had an old adsl modem she could have used, but winfire wouldn't give her 'free' service without soaking her on the modem.
Notice that the Linux kernel build on two threads went slower with "hyperthreading" on than without it. And compiling is as eclectic a task as possible. I can imagine that highly optimized loops in graphics programs already max out some chip resource (like the float alus) so that multithreading them in this scheme does no good, but when compiling fails to parallelize, you know that intel must have screwed the implementation up, big time.
Multiple processors sharing the same cache on a single chip ought to be a big win, whether they share alus or not. In some cases a set up like this should signicantly out-perform regular multi-processors (when both processors are dirtying each other's caches). Intel must have screwed something up.
The benchmarks show that the current implementation of "hyperthreading" is basically useless. The idea could work very well though.
Rocky J. Squirrel
The cynic has got it!
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
If I were a suspicious type, and I am, I would say that humans simply don't want to recognize intelligence in other species, much less animals, because it threatens us enormously. Our pride in ourselves, our domination of the planet, and our cruelty towards other species are all shaken if the animal looking back at us in the treetops is actually a thinking being, tho a bit furry.
Religion has more than a little to do with it as well.
Down to my definition of intelligent life:
If it fights back, and wins, it is intelligent. All other players are dead meat.
Yep, just like politics, offically sanctioned ethics is just recognizing the "right" of the winners to disregard the losers. Remember, God must be an American.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Re:Brain Emulation no longer a hardware challenge.
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 1
Any analog system, to be simulated perfectly, requires an infinite amount of memory on a digital computer.
There's no point perfectly simulating an analog system if that system contains noise or other factors that limit the amount of information in an information theoretical sense.
Rocky J Squirrel
Re:I'm doubtful (what about solved problems)
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 1
I tend to agree. I'd like to see something using AI play in a poker game. Can AI ever simulate bluffing? Or analyze the expressions on the other player's faces to determine if perhaps that they are bluffing, and call the bluff? Human intelligence can do thiss, but I'm not sure if something this complex exists now, or ever will.
Chess is one thing. It follows a certain set of rules. Even conversation does, but it also invloves human expression like the bluffing example. But to to play out a scenario given a unique situation, machines are not up to the task yet.
It turns out that bluffing and every aspect of games like poker (other than facial expressions) are mathematically analyzable. As far as I know, no game theorist has added facial expressions into his or her theory but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. Anyway, what you actually bet (and how often, and in what situations) is plenty of information and certainly enough information to allow an opponent to play a good game against you, even without ever looking at your face.
You can use game theory to prove that bluffing (and other forms of misrepresentation, such as what's called "slow-playing" in poker) are necessary elements to good play in games of imperfect information. I use the vague term "good play", because there are two important and incompatible definitions of "good play" in game theory. There's 'optimal play' and 'maximal play'. An optimal strategy is an equilibrium point that specifies your best possible strategy given the assumption that your opponents use their best possible strategy. A maximal strategy is the (harder to define) best strategy that takes your opponents' history (and possible weaknesses in ability) into account.
Not only is it possible to prove these things, but there are simple (if sometimes computationally infeasible) algorithms for finding the optimal strategy of a game and, no doubt, given a specific mathematical model of an opponent's play it should be possible to solve for some form of a maximal strategy. Baysian statistics supplies a good framework for estimating an opponent's play from his behavior in a game of imperfect information.
The insight involved in analyzing such games is the same one that motivates human play. Your behavior gives your opponent some information. If you always press an advantage for instance, you give your opponents too much information. In that case when you bet an opponent can almost always deduce when it's best to fold. However, if you always misrepresent your hand, you'll most definitely lose as well. Finding the equalibrium point mathematically involves enumerating all possible situations and doing some linear algebra. Obviously for a game like poker finding all of the situations would be infeasible, but it should still be possible to group similar situations together and come up with a useful solution.
There are still some mysteries in game theory. I've never found an adequite analysis of collusion in multiplayer games and I suspect in any game of more than two people such an analysis is necessary. But the fact that so much of poker (or at least games like poker) is directly tractible with mathematics brings up the question of the relationship between AI and mathematics.
If a problem can be completely solved mathematically, is AI really invovled? How about a situation (like chess) where a complete mathematical solution is trivial to express but not computationally feasible. When are aproximations to a mathematical solution AI?
Planesdragon's got the spirit. Science isn't supposed to be dogmatic, if you don't question assumptions then you don't get it.
I'll bet half the people complaining still believe lots of old, obsolete theories (laws!)such as the one that says mass is conserved (hint a sealed battery is heavier at full capacity than it is discharged and a spinning top is heavier than a stationary one.)
The only way the scaling example makes sense is if the smaller picture was made from non-uniform samples.
My first thought was that this was a cheat because every pixel has more data than just it's value, it also has it's (non-uniform) x and y coordinate. More information in = more information out.
Then I remembered that non-uniform sampling doesn't have to be at random intervals, it just needs to have a pattern that doesn't coorelate with the source data. So, if you always use the same pattern, you don't have to store the x and y info.
Anyway I remember the stuff in "numerical recipies" about making a maximum entropy estimatimation of a spectrum from non-uniform samples.
Does anyone know if that relates to this guy's method?
I work on multiprocessor projects... There's a significant performance hit when one processor tries to change memory that's dirty in another processor's cache, and on some processors, such as SPARC, it's fatally slow. I have a vague memory that on SPARC, the processors can stop for hundreds of microseconds as memory gets shipped around, as impossible as that sounds.
I.T.R.A.R.K. wrote:
Re:It's not just boy bands anymore (Score:-1)
by I.T.R.A.R.K. on Friday January 04, @07:32PM (#2788643)
(User #533627 Info | http://povo-hat.besmella-quake.com/test/)
Write fan mail to the band and tell them why you can't listen to their music anymore. It may not accomplish much beyond pissing off the band, but at least your voice will be heard. It's bands like that who care about every last fan, because they don't have many to begin with.
If your/our complaints reach the right people, we might have an uprising one of these days. You never know. But you'll never know unless you take the time to complain to someone. It's your right. Use it.
"Adequacy.org: Where congenital stupidity is not an option, but a requirement."
Which brings me to another question -- I wonder if anyone has looked into designing an image format which contained extra data to allow sub-pixel display layout of the image? Or whether there are any image display programs that take advantage of sub-pixel layout when scaling.
From a sampling theory point of view, you don't need any extra information in a picture format to take advantage of LCD screens' usual side by side subpixel layout. You have three pixels next to each other on an LCD display and three channels worth of information in the file. So if you do a band-limited resample two of the channels with the appropriate offset, you'd do a good job of taking advantage of the subpixel layout.
You get the best results for that sort of thing if you do resample with the same sort of algorithm you'd use for sound. That way you preserve the high frequency content. But you use a much more compact filter, both because you can make the program much faster and because sharp filters that ring a lot look bad in graphics.
I might buy one (and I already have a PS2). The main reason is that I like harmless, cute games. All the glorified violence of the so-called grown up games makes me uncomfortable.
Microsoft has a bullshit patent on sub pixel rendering of text on LCD screens. I'll bet going to another pixel layout circumvents it and lets other companies write sub pixel rendering drivers without getting sued by big evil.
God, those patents are dumb. Of course you could find prior art, like the way every Apple II programmer drew fonts. I played with sub pixel rendering on my first color laptop just because it was such an obvious thing to try and it used to be my job to play with graphics...
Oh well enough whining. I'm a hypocrite, anyway. If my company puts my name on any software patents I won't complain about it, I'll be too busy wondering if that means that I'm getting a raise.
I haven't seen "Tenchi Muyo" but uhm, of couse it make sense to say "they don't understand the meaning of the dialogue."
There's more to a show than the words in the dialog. The original characters in a film have attitudes toward life, toward each other etc. Films have subtext too, meaning that's implied rather than explicitly stated. I've seen so many films where the American dubbers completely ruined the show by missing everything and trying to depict their characters with shallow American TV/movie stereotypes that had nothing to do with the original show. You know I don't think I've ever seen Anime well dubbed except in the case where the original show was a shallow kids show, so the shallowness of the translation fit the original.
You missed my point. When I said "Even when the script they're given is good, the actors do everything wrong" and "American voice actors just read the script placed in front of the them and never, never, never bother to understand the meaning that script" I thought I was making it clear that my problem isn't with the what is said but with the way it's said.
By picking the wrong intonation, an actor can completely miss a character's motivation and misrepresent the meaning of what's being said. I'll say it again, the American actors just read what's in front of them and don't understand the meaning of the dialog.
I highly recommend "Ghost in the shell". It's disturbing and thought provoking like a good Philip K. Dick novel. For those of you who don't know Philip K, think "Blade Runner", that movie started out as one of his novels, although it wasn't quite as strange or as distubing as most of Philip's writing.
I realize that anything I say about "Ghost in the shell" will ruin something. The first 15 minutes hold some mind-fucking surprises that have scarred me for life:)
Anyway, don't show this movie to anyone who doesn't have a philisophical bent. I've read reviews by people who just didn't get this one.
If you like having your mind blown or have a taste for existencial tragedy, you'll love this one.
I don't have to add that young children won't get this, right?
Always watch Anime in Japanese with subtitles instead of listening to dubs into English. This isn't snobbery, it's just that the American voice actors just read the script placed in front of the them and never, never, never bother to understand the meaning that script. Even when the script they're given is good, the actors do everything wrong.
Part of the problem is that Japan, like much of the world, has years of experience dubing English shows into Japanese and so they have wonderful voice actors, while we, in our English-only isolation, have no need for good voice actors. Another problem is that the dubbing is usually done by very small companies on the cheap. They just shovel stuff onto a DVD and release it.
I've also noticed that learning a little bit of a language can add a lot to watching a foriegn movie, because there are lots of words that don't really translate at all. If you enjoy Anime it's worth while getting a Japanese dictionary.
I'd like to second the recomendations of "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and "Princes Mononoke" and add one more to the list.
Sazan Eyes (or 3x3 Eyes): There were two series made, the first one "Imortals" is wonderful, though it looks like the producers ran out of money after four episodes and stopped the series right before the climax. The second series "Legend of the Divine Demon" isn't very good. I have a double DVD set with both series.
I'd rather not ruin anything by trying to descibe the plot, so I'll just say that the program was produced for 15 and up and is a lot of fun.
The second series changed the main character completely, she acts like a completely different person, eh I mean demon, and seemed to be too consciously aimed at girls (girl's animation, yuck) and at dirty old men.
Actually, the problem with the ending of Evangelion (as I heard it from some _serious_ anime buffs in the UK) is as follows.
Throughout the making of Evangelion they would often finish episodes within a day of the transmission on TV Tokyo (the company that funded it). This was all well and good till an episode _fairly_ near the end that was just a little bit gory (and it was shown unseen by the TV Tokyo staff at 6pm).
After that they insisted on proof watching all the episodes before transmission. The final episodes were rejected and they only had a day or so to make a replacement (so had to use a lot of canned footage), hence an episode that turned out to be a major anti-climax. I've still got to see "End of Eva", the alternate/simultanious ending movie they made at a later date and is _meant_ to be much more what they had in mind...
(If my facts are wrong, I appologise, but this is what I was told after watching the series at an anime society I attend).
Hmm. You may be right though I have my doubts.
I loved the ending of the TV series myself, and didn't like the movie at all. I suppose the translation might have something to do with it, though. I don't speak much Japanese and the only version of the movie I've seen is a Hong Kong pirate DVD with the worst translation you can imagine.
But still the TV series ended with ideas that were much deeper and more interesting to me than anything I think you could express within the limitations of the sort of action you expect from a cartoon. I thought the effect was wonderful. You had 24 episodes to get to really know and care about some very complicated characters and then two episodes to use their lives to explore the problems that deep exist under the surface of peoples lives (and a bit of a solution as well).
Hideaki Anno, the writer and director of Evangelion said "Evangelion is my life and I have put everything I know into this work. This is my entire life. My life itself."
Here's a quote from an article about an Anime expo in California in 1996:
A few people asked Anno about why he did the final two episodes the way he did, while noting that they felt the ending was confusing. Anno replied, via his translator, that he did not think there was anything wrong with the last two episodes at all and that if we didn't like the ending of Eva, that was our problem -- at which point he picked up the microphone and, speaking in English, said "Too bad."
The end of the tv series does suffer from a lack of animation which suggests that there was some sort of problem, but the idea and script is incredible. I don't know if the ending of the TV series is what the author orginally imagined doing, but it's much deeper and so much more interesting than something action based could have been. Perhaps being forced to finish the series without the time (or perhaps the money) to animate it, freed Anno from the constraint of making something that LOOKS like a cartoon and let him express the ideas that really mattered to him better than a cartoon could have.
The story I heard was that Anno got pretty angry at the reception that the ending got among the fans (Evangelion was a very popular series so there was a big fan base). He shaved his head, made a public apology (I assume his apology was sarcastic, but perhaps secretly sarcastic) and went off to make his movie. The movie, on the other hand was violent where the TV series had been reflective and nilisting where the TV series had been hopeful. I got the impression that Anno was diliberately punishing his audience for not appreciating his original work of art. In any case, I think TV series was a masterpiece and that the movie falls very flat.
Ah. Commenting in this forum undid my moderation. Just what I wanted. You'all don't need to undo my moderation.
Oh and by the way I agree, it's not possible that playing an out-of-region DVD or game is illegal. Can you imagine being arrested for that? After your cell mate tells you he's in prison for murder, you can say you're there for playing Senmue II.
Rocky J.
Rocky J.
Moderator's mouse slipped (sorry)
on
Sony vs Modchips
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· Score: 1
Oops, my mouse slipped (it's the scroll wheel that did it I think) and I modded "HEY!!! If I BUY something it's MINE!!!!!" down by mistake. The user interface doesn't allow me to undo or mod back up, unfortunately.
Slashdot Mirror
This work illustrates this perfectly. No need for debates, look at the images and learn. Well done and kudos for an awesome and simple piece of work.
Huh? I disagree completely. When combined with antialiasing, hinting improves the sharpness of characters (at the expense of precise shape). On a blurry monitor where you couldn't see the sharpness in the first place there's no point in hinting, but on an LCD the hinted font looks much better. The imprecision in the shape isn't so bad, because, at a given size, all characters will tend to be distored in the same way - keeping them consistent.
I get a little queasy staring at fonts where, for example, the left side of a lower case 'n' is a black line a single pixel wide and the right side is a 50% gray line, two pixels wide (etc. etc.). Sure the lines are equivalent if you have very bad eyes or a very blurry monitor, but they should look the same.
With hinting on both sides of the 'n' do look exactly the same. Another win here is that the previously mentioned double wide-50% gray line can ONLY look somewhat like the single wide black line if the gamma on your monitor is correct or you're looking at your LCD from exactly the right angle and if the program took gamma into account in the first place. The hinted font doesn't have that problem - both side of the 'n' will look perfectly the same from any angle, with any gamma etc. There's a real advantage there.
The original use of hinting, to make fonts look better at low resolutions works for antialiased fonts as well as for non-antialiased ones.
Rocky J. Squirrel
The before column looked much better than the after column on my laptop. I didn't read the article, but I can tell that he's lessened the effects of the hinting (that makes lines center on pixels). The results of that sort of thing is text who's shape may be more accurate but who's sharpness is lacking.
It's a matter of taste I guess, but I find reading text with uncentered lines annoying on lcds where the pixels a so sharp. I suppose there might be a gamma issue too. The gamma matters more with uncentered lines than with centered ones, but, on a laptop the gamma changes with angle - and the angle with the best gamma might not be the one with the best contrast (blacks might be grey etc.).
Rocky J. Squirrel
My mom tried to sign up for winfire's 'free' service and found out that you could only sign up by buying a $50 adsl modem for $200 or something. I had an old adsl modem she could have used, but winfire wouldn't give her 'free' service without soaking her on the modem.
Rocky J Squirrel
Notice that the Linux kernel build on two threads went slower with "hyperthreading" on than without it. And compiling is as eclectic a task as possible. I can imagine that highly optimized loops in graphics programs already max out some chip resource (like the float alus) so that multithreading them in this scheme does no good, but when compiling fails to parallelize, you know that intel must have screwed the implementation up, big time.
Multiple processors sharing the same cache on a single chip ought to be a big win, whether they share alus or not. In some cases a set up like this should signicantly out-perform regular multi-processors (when both processors are dirtying each other's caches). Intel must have screwed something up.
The benchmarks show that the current implementation of "hyperthreading" is basically useless. The idea could work very well though.
Rocky J. Squirrel
If I were a suspicious type, and I am, I would say that humans simply don't want to recognize intelligence in other species, much less animals, because it threatens us enormously. Our pride in ourselves, our domination of the planet, and our cruelty towards other species are all shaken if the animal looking back at us in the treetops is actually a thinking being, tho a bit furry.
Religion has more than a little to do with it as well.
Down to my definition of intelligent life:
If it fights back, and wins, it is intelligent. All other players are dead meat.
Yep, just like politics, offically sanctioned ethics is just recognizing the "right" of the winners to disregard the losers. Remember, God must be an American.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Any analog system, to be simulated perfectly, requires an infinite amount of memory on a digital computer.
There's no point perfectly simulating an analog system if that system contains noise or other factors that limit the amount of information in an information theoretical sense.
Rocky J Squirrel
I tend to agree. I'd like to see something using AI play in a poker game. Can AI ever simulate bluffing? Or analyze the expressions on the other player's faces to determine if perhaps that they are bluffing, and call the bluff? Human intelligence can do thiss, but I'm not sure if something this complex exists now, or ever will.
a .h tml
Chess is one thing. It follows a certain set of rules. Even conversation does, but it also invloves human expression like the bluffing example. But to to play out a scenario given a unique situation, machines are not up to the task yet.
http://robotics.stanford.edu/~koller/papers/gal
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/
It turns out that bluffing and every aspect of games like poker (other than facial expressions) are mathematically analyzable. As far as I know, no game theorist has added facial expressions into his or her theory but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. Anyway, what you actually bet (and how often, and in what situations) is plenty of information and certainly enough information to allow an opponent to play a good game against you, even without ever looking at your face.
You can use game theory to prove that bluffing (and other forms of misrepresentation, such as what's called "slow-playing" in poker) are necessary elements to good play in games of imperfect information. I use the vague term "good play", because there are two important and incompatible definitions of "good play" in game theory. There's 'optimal play' and 'maximal play'. An optimal strategy is an equilibrium point that specifies your best possible strategy given the assumption that your opponents use their best possible strategy. A maximal strategy is the (harder to define) best strategy that takes your opponents' history (and possible weaknesses in ability) into account.
Not only is it possible to prove these things, but there are simple (if sometimes computationally infeasible) algorithms for finding the optimal strategy of a game and, no doubt, given a specific mathematical model of an opponent's play it should be possible to solve for some form of a maximal strategy. Baysian statistics supplies a good framework for estimating an opponent's play from his behavior in a game of imperfect information.
The insight involved in analyzing such games is the same one that motivates human play. Your behavior gives your opponent some information. If you always press an advantage for instance, you give your opponents too much information. In that case when you bet an opponent can almost always deduce when it's best to fold. However, if you always misrepresent your hand, you'll most definitely lose as well. Finding the equalibrium point mathematically involves enumerating all possible situations and doing some linear algebra. Obviously for a game like poker finding all of the situations would be infeasible, but it should still be possible to group similar situations together and come up with a useful solution.
There are still some mysteries in game theory. I've never found an adequite analysis of collusion in multiplayer games and I suspect in any game of more than two people such an analysis is necessary. But the fact that so much of poker (or at least games like poker) is directly tractible with mathematics brings up the question of the relationship between AI and mathematics.
If a problem can be completely solved mathematically, is AI really invovled? How about a situation (like chess) where a complete mathematical solution is trivial to express but not computationally feasible. When are aproximations to a mathematical solution AI?
Rocky J Squirrel
It would help so much in debugging if you could save the current state of a process so you could try "debugging from here" over and over.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Planesdragon's got the spirit. Science isn't supposed to be dogmatic, if you don't question assumptions then you don't get it.
I'll bet half the people complaining still believe lots of old, obsolete theories (laws!)such as the one that says mass is conserved (hint a sealed battery is heavier at full capacity than it is discharged and a spinning top is heavier than a stationary one.)
Rocky J. Squirrel
The article mentioned algorithms. That's a red flag that someone did some nearly obvious math and applied for a patent.
Or maybe there really IS a good new algorithm there. I doubt it, one of the example's looked awful. I'm sure I could do THAT well.
Rocky J. Squirrel
The only way the scaling example makes sense is if the smaller picture was made from non-uniform samples.
My first thought was that this was a cheat because every pixel has more data than just it's value, it also has it's (non-uniform) x and y coordinate. More information in = more information out.
Then I remembered that non-uniform sampling doesn't have to be at random intervals, it just needs to have a pattern that doesn't coorelate with the source data. So, if you always use the same pattern, you don't have to store the x and y info.
Anyway I remember the stuff in "numerical recipies" about making a maximum entropy estimatimation of a spectrum from non-uniform samples.
Does anyone know if that relates to this guy's method?
Rocky J. Squirrel
I work on multiprocessor projects... There's a significant performance hit when one processor tries to change memory that's dirty in another processor's cache, and on some processors, such as SPARC, it's fatally slow. I have a vague memory that on SPARC, the processors can stop for hundreds of microseconds as memory gets shipped around, as impossible as that sounds.
Rocket J. Squirrel
I.T.R.A.R.K. wrote:
Re:It's not just boy bands anymore (Score:-1)
by I.T.R.A.R.K. on Friday January 04, @07:32PM (#2788643)
(User #533627 Info | http://povo-hat.besmella-quake.com/test/)
Write fan mail to the band and tell them why you can't listen to their music anymore. It may not accomplish much beyond pissing off the band, but at least your voice will be heard. It's bands like that who care about every last fan, because they don't have many to begin with.
If your/our complaints reach the right people, we might have an uprising one of these days. You never know. But you'll never know unless you take the time to complain to someone. It's your right. Use it.
"Adequacy.org: Where congenital stupidity is not an option, but a requirement."
Rocky J. Squirrel
Which brings me to another question -- I wonder if anyone has looked into designing an image format which contained extra data to allow sub-pixel display layout of the image? Or whether there are any image display programs that take advantage of sub-pixel layout when scaling.
From a sampling theory point of view, you don't need any extra information in a picture format to take advantage of LCD screens' usual side by side subpixel layout. You have three pixels next to each other on an LCD display and three channels worth of information in the file. So if you do a band-limited resample two of the channels with the appropriate offset, you'd do a good job of taking advantage of the subpixel layout.
You get the best results for that sort of thing if you do resample with the same sort of algorithm you'd use for sound. That way you preserve the high frequency content. But you use a much more compact filter, both because you can make the program much faster and because sharp filters that ring a lot look bad in graphics.
Rocky J. Squirrel
I might buy one (and I already have a PS2). The main reason is that I like harmless, cute games. All the glorified violence of the so-called grown up games makes me uncomfortable.
Rocky J. Squirrel
A chip that recognizes a tone, wow, what wonders.
</Sarcasm>
If you set the bar low enough, you can claim that any learning method is a magic bullet.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Microsoft has a bullshit patent on sub pixel rendering of text on LCD screens. I'll bet going to another pixel layout circumvents it and lets other companies write sub pixel rendering drivers without getting sued by big evil.
God, those patents are dumb. Of course you could find prior art, like the way every Apple II programmer drew fonts. I played with sub pixel rendering on my first color laptop just because it was such an obvious thing to try and it used to be my job to play with graphics...
Oh well enough whining. I'm a hypocrite, anyway. If my company puts my name on any software patents I won't complain about it, I'll be too busy wondering if that means that I'm getting a raise.
Rocky J. Squirrel
I haven't seen "Tenchi Muyo" but uhm, of couse it make sense to say "they don't understand the meaning of the dialogue."
There's more to a show than the words in the dialog. The original characters in a film have attitudes toward life, toward each other etc. Films have subtext too, meaning that's implied rather than explicitly stated. I've seen so many films where the American dubbers completely ruined the show by missing everything and trying to depict their characters with shallow American TV/movie stereotypes that had nothing to do with the original show. You know I don't think I've ever seen Anime well dubbed except in the case where the original show was a shallow kids show, so the shallowness of the translation fit the original.
Rocky J. Squirrel
You missed my point. When I said "Even when the script they're given is good, the actors do everything wrong" and "American voice actors just read the script placed in front of the them and never, never, never bother to understand the meaning that script" I thought I was making it clear that my problem isn't with the what is said but with the way it's said.
By picking the wrong intonation, an actor can completely miss a character's motivation and misrepresent the meaning of what's being said. I'll say it again, the American actors just read what's in front of them and don't understand the meaning of the dialog.
Rocky J. Squirrel
I highly recommend "Ghost in the shell". It's disturbing and thought provoking like a good Philip K. Dick novel. For those of you who don't know Philip K, think "Blade Runner", that movie started out as one of his novels, although it wasn't quite as strange or as distubing as most of Philip's writing.
I realize that anything I say about "Ghost in the shell" will ruin something. The first 15 minutes hold some mind-fucking surprises that have scarred me for life:)
Anyway, don't show this movie to anyone who doesn't have a philisophical bent. I've read reviews by people who just didn't get this one.
If you like having your mind blown or have a taste for existencial tragedy, you'll love this one.
I don't have to add that young children won't get this, right?
Rocky J. Squirrel
Always watch Anime in Japanese with subtitles instead of listening to dubs into English. This isn't snobbery, it's just that the American voice actors just read the script placed in front of the them and never, never, never bother to understand the meaning that script. Even when the script they're given is good, the actors do everything wrong.
Part of the problem is that Japan, like much of the world, has years of experience dubing English shows into Japanese and so they have wonderful voice actors, while we, in our English-only isolation, have no need for good voice actors. Another problem is that the dubbing is usually done by very small companies on the cheap. They just shovel stuff onto a DVD and release it.
I've also noticed that learning a little bit of a language can add a lot to watching a foriegn movie, because there are lots of words that don't really translate at all. If you enjoy Anime it's worth while getting a Japanese dictionary.
Rocky J. Squirrel
I'd like to second the recomendations of "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and "Princes Mononoke" and add one more to the list.
Sazan Eyes (or 3x3 Eyes): There were two series made, the first one "Imortals" is wonderful, though it looks like the producers ran out of money after four episodes and stopped the series right before the climax. The second series "Legend of the Divine Demon" isn't very good. I have a double DVD set with both series.
I'd rather not ruin anything by trying to descibe the plot, so I'll just say that the program was produced for 15 and up and is a lot of fun.
The second series changed the main character completely, she acts like a completely different person, eh I mean demon, and seemed to be too consciously aimed at girls (girl's animation, yuck) and at dirty old men.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Actually, the problem with the ending of Evangelion (as I heard it from some _serious_ anime buffs in the UK) is as follows.
Throughout the making of Evangelion they would often finish episodes within a day of the transmission on TV Tokyo (the company that funded it). This was all well and good till an episode _fairly_ near the end that was just a little bit gory (and it was shown unseen by the TV Tokyo staff at 6pm).
After that they insisted on proof watching all the episodes before transmission. The final episodes were rejected and they only had a day or so to make a replacement (so had to use a lot of canned footage), hence an episode that turned out to be a major anti-climax. I've still got to see "End of Eva", the alternate/simultanious ending movie they made at a later date and is _meant_ to be much more what they had in mind...
(If my facts are wrong, I appologise, but this is what I was told after watching the series at an anime society I attend).
Hmm. You may be right though I have my doubts.
I loved the ending of the TV series myself, and didn't like the movie at all. I suppose the translation might have something to do with it, though. I don't speak much Japanese and the only version of the movie I've seen is a Hong Kong pirate DVD with the worst translation you can imagine.
But still the TV series ended with ideas that were much deeper and more interesting to me than anything I think you could express within the limitations of the sort of action you expect from a cartoon. I thought the effect was wonderful. You had 24 episodes to get to really know and care about some very complicated characters and then two episodes to use their lives to explore the problems that deep exist under the surface of peoples lives (and a bit of a solution as well).
Hideaki Anno, the writer and director of Evangelion said "Evangelion is my life and I have put everything I know into this work. This is my entire life. My life itself."
Here's a quote from an article about an Anime expo in California in 1996:
A few people asked Anno about why he did the final two episodes the way he did, while noting that they felt the ending was confusing. Anno replied, via his translator, that he did not think there was anything wrong with the last two episodes at all and that if we didn't like the ending of Eva, that was our problem -- at which point he picked up the microphone and, speaking in English, said "Too bad."
The end of the tv series does suffer from a lack of animation which suggests that there was some sort of problem, but the idea and script is incredible. I don't know if the ending of the TV series is what the author orginally imagined doing, but it's much deeper and so much more interesting than something action based could have been. Perhaps being forced to finish the series without the time (or perhaps the money) to animate it, freed Anno from the constraint of making something that LOOKS like a cartoon and let him express the ideas that really mattered to him better than a cartoon could have.
The story I heard was that Anno got pretty angry at the reception that the ending got among the fans (Evangelion was a very popular series so there was a big fan base). He shaved his head, made a public apology (I assume his apology was sarcastic, but perhaps secretly sarcastic) and went off to make his movie. The movie, on the other hand was violent where the TV series had been reflective and nilisting where the TV series had been hopeful. I got the impression that Anno was diliberately punishing his audience for not appreciating his original work of art. In any case, I think TV series was a masterpiece and that the movie falls very flat.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Ah. Commenting in this forum undid my moderation. Just what I wanted. You'all don't need to undo my moderation.
Oh and by the way I agree, it's not possible that playing an out-of-region DVD or game is illegal. Can you imagine being arrested for that? After your cell mate tells you he's in prison for murder, you can say you're there for playing Senmue II.
Rocky J.
Rocky J.
Oops, my mouse slipped (it's the scroll wheel that did it I think) and I modded "HEY!!! If I BUY something it's MINE!!!!!" down by mistake. The user interface doesn't allow me to undo or mod back up, unfortunately.
Rocky J. Squirrel