Actually that's wrong. The 2D bar codes can hold more data, and is not so susceptible to damage due to redundancy. The reason they went with 1D barcodes was because they are much easier to scan, and the equipment is cheaper.
If they have a 1000 machine rendering farm and each machine takes 3000 minutes to render a frame, then it takes 3 minutes to render each frame. Why don't you just tell me that each machine is equivalent to a million abacuses, and it really takes 50,000,000 hours to render a frame...
You're right, but it's shit like that that makes everyone hate the US and Americans. The US kills people by accident and then their brothers come and kill US citizens on purpose. You can try to explain it away all you want by saying "well, that's war," but it doesn't do anything to mitigate the situation.
Whether they state it or not, what you said is misleading. You were disagreeing with the idea that a frame takes only minutes to render. And if there were any frames that took 80 hours, then there must've been many frames that were *less* than 3 minutes, on average.
That's because the Xbox doesn't have a high enough fillrate to do HD resolutions without a major hit. All the games for Xbox support 480p, but DOA3 and Halo don't offer higher resolutions, 480p isn't really HD resolution....
Jaggies *do* away (at least they're too small to see) with higher resolutions. Halo and Rallisport challenge DO NOT have higher resolutions. Ever play a PC game at 1600x1200 resolutions? You can barely see jaggies, you hardly even need anti-aliasing. By DEFINITION higher resolutions have smaller jaggies.
An HDTV decoder costs a lot of money, yes, but you don't need one for game consoles. The decoder is for decoding TV signals, but the console is directly generating the video signal...no need for decoding.
Gamecube and Xbox both have still too many jaggies for my taste. Ironically, a lot of games for N64 and Dreamcast actually had less jaggies than GC and Xbox. I don't really know what a comb filter is, but I can tell you that if GC has one, it isn't effective.
Umm, sorry, but 80 hours per frame is a RIDICULOUS figure.
Ok, you said "up to" 80 hours. So let's assume on average 24 hours per frame, which is much lower than you stated, but lets assume that anyway. Let's also assume they're rendering at 30 fps (they render at higher frames per second than the film itself) which is probably lower than the truth. 60 seconds per minute. 90 minutes in the film (also a conservative estimate).
(30fps) * (60s/min) * (90min) = 162,000 frames rendered to make the film.
AND that's using the amount 24 hours per frame. You said it was 80 hours per frame. If it were 80 hours per frame, that would be
1,479 years, 165 days.
Now, lets say they want to render it in a year. (which is probably longer than they take to render it, since a lot of the time they spend doing the work before the rendering).
So it seems, according to these figures, that a frame should take about 3 minutes 15 seconds, give or take, depending how you alter my assumptions. But 80 HOURS per frame is so absurd!
P.S. Everything else you said makes sense, it's true, most animated movies are not made through ray-tracing (an exception is Ice Age).
Yeah, but if they supersampled it, there would be a lot less jaggies. You know, it's interesting, whenever I watch TV, even though there are only 480 lines of detail, I never see ANY jaggies! Amazing! And I seriously doubt your claim that the next generation consoles will not support HDTV.
Re:It's called the "interlingua" approach...
on
Speaking in Tongues
·
· Score: 1
That's really cool! I don't have any formal background in that stuff, but I've always said that would be the best way to translate stuff (create an interlingua translation every 100 years, so they can read our stuff 1000 years from now). I didn't realize that they're actually doing this. Thanks for making my day. Where are you studying?
Re:Fictional character from the movie 'Hackers'
on
Speaking in Tongues
·
· Score: 1
Hackers (1995)
Synopsis: Zero Cool--real name Dade Murphy--is a legend among his peers. In 1988, he single-handedly crashed 1,507 computers on Wall Street, creating worldwide financial chaos. Eleven years old, Dade Murphy had a record with the F.B.I.--forbidden to finger the keys of so much as a touchtone phone until his 18th birthday. It's been seven years without a byte... and he's hungry. Kate Libby, handle Acid Burn, has a souped-up laptop that can do 0 to 60 on the infobahn in a nanosecond. When Zero Cool collides with Acid Burn, the battle of the sexes goes into hard drive. But all bets are off when they must pool their resources to battle The Plague, a master hacker employed by a corporate giant and using his considerable talents to worm his way into millions. Worse yet, he has hidden his own scheme by framing Dade, Kate and their friends in a diabolical industrial conspiracy. The young band of renegade hackers sets out to recruit the best of the cybernet underground to clear their names.
I really don't think you understand. This has nothing to do with programming, and little to do with "computers," except in abstract theory. What I'm trying to say is, our BRAINS are computers, and even if we never understand it, I believe we can replicate and mimic the human brain. Imagine we create an artificial neuron. It responds to electrical stimulus just like the human neuron. We create all sorts of variations of them, and configure them just like how they're found in the human brain. I believe that if it's done properly, we can have a 'brain' that operates like a human brain. But just imagine that these neurons operate twice as fast as human neurons, and with better memory, and all sorts of improvements.
I'm not trying to suggest we can *program* a computer to think like a human. But I believe we can imitate and then improve upon the structure of the human brain. Unless you believe in something intangible like a "soul," and you also believe that our "soul" is responsible for our consciousness and creativity, then there's no reason not to believe a construct like I'm suggesting would not work like a human brain.
Now, I'm not sure how a brain like this would create art. Maybe these brains will be part of people, artificial people, who are just like humans, but better. I don't know, it's hard to predict. But I think that the human brain, and everything it's capable of is entirely based upon its physicality. So basically, I'm saying, the human brain is just a machine. I highly sophisticated, fickle, and incredible machine, yes, but there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to imitate and improve upon it.
"It is not possible to program an imagination"
You're a programmer, but programming really has *nothing* to do with this. I'd imagine something like this would be developed between people in the fields of electrical engineering, nanotechnology, and biology/neurology. This has nothing to do with programming, and nothing to do with computers as you know them.
There are all sorts of approaches you can take with what I'm describing. Making a better, smarter human. Making a highly creative, highly parallel, but non-autonomous machine without any goals, desires and emotions that make a human an individual or a "person". Sort of like the "bio-neural gelpacks" from star trek voyager.
I'll say it again: this has nothing to do with programming, unless you call sending a child to school and interacting with a child "programming".
So imagine we build incredibly fast, and large 'brains'. Imagine that we architect it from the ground up to easily share and transmit ideas that it learned to other "brains," with great speed and accuracy, unlike the way we humans share ideas. Can you see how incredible this would be? Now imagine that these "machines" are human, that they are just extensions of ourselves. I believe that through this, we can reach an entirely new level of intelligence, like the difference between a chimp and a human.
The first level of intelligence, as a species, is the ability to imitate. Primates are highly imitative, so if an individual learns something useful, it might quickly spread to other primates. What humans have over other primates is language. It takes the idea of imitation to a higher level. It's a way of sharing ideas more efficiently and the ability to share abstract that can't be directly demonstrated or imitated. I think the approach I'm describing using artificial brains will take us to the next level. This is what makes us intelligent as a species. The ability to learn and share ideas is highly important. I hope I'm still around when we make the transition.
We're in the knee of the curve baby. Things are gonna start rushing by faster than you could ever imagine.
Of course, as long as there are humans, they will always have a desire to be creative. That doesn't make what I'm saying any less feasible. You also didn't take into account that those "machines" might very likely be considered human. Imagine I create a "machine" that is like a human in every single way. It's brain is structured just like ours, except for one part. Their nerve cells operate at 2 Hz, instead of 1 Hz, like ours. Do you think they would be just "machines" and would therefore be unable to think and feel and experience?
Ok, imagine we discover some ancient language, and we have to decipher it. It might take our human civilization 100 years. My point is that it is my belief, that eventually, artificial brains will be able to do everything a human can but just faster. Maybe it will be able to do it in 6 months.
Human thought and creativity is often a slow process, and is highly parallel. We rely on sudden inspirations and epiphanies which hit us when our brain suddenly works everything out. Long amounts of time is often a factor in this. But time is not *necessary*, it is only necessary for us. Eventually, artificial humans and artificial intelligence (based on learning machines, like humans, not programmed ones) will be able to do everything we can just faster.
But there's no way to just turn off the switch. Well there is. Thing is, those prices were reached under normal market conditions. Those conditions include strong intellectual property rights which lead to very high revenues (in the movie industry). Since the movie industry pays such high salaries due to their high revenues, and the TV industry is competitive for actors, the TV industry must match those prices.
Actors are definitely paid too much, and their salary is an indication of the unhealthy "market" that movies are made in/sold in. Its the extensive intellectual property rights, along with new recent opportunities to sell films (video, dvd) that have created an excess of revenue. Since the movie industry is highly competitive, and having the right actor is the key to success, studios spend as much as they possibly could to get the right actor. So the more revenue they have, they more they have to waste on actors. This is why movie studios' return on investment hasn't gone up, even though they've doubled their revenues many many times over. But you still shouldn't minimize the value of a good actor. I just saw a couple of movies with Jim Carrey: The Truman Show, and Man on the Moon. Those are perfect examples of how great it can be to have a good actor.
Movie studios have always had a slim slim return on investment of about 6-7%. If they all made less money across the board, none of them would really even be hurt. Game theory in action.
Listen, I hear what you're saying, but you're talking about the near future. To say that in FIFTY or at most a HUNDRED years we won't have the technology to fully replace actors is lunacy. I personally believe that advanced hardware that mimics the human brain physically, and therefore in function, will be able to do ANYTHING a human can do but 1,000 or 1,000,000 times faster. I can picture these 'brains' watching movies and all sorts of art to feed them ideas and churning out art at incredible speeds. I think you're foolish to think that actors will NEVER be replaced.
Well, I was thinking you could have other forms of propulsion, and the magnets would just reduce friction (floating on air) and would allow higher speeds. The magnets would NOT have to be gigantic, neodymium magnets are incredibly powerful, I've seen demonstrations which showed that it could lift an entire train car.
I saw this thing on TV that said that you don't even need powered magnets. That since neodymium (or something) magnets are now much cheaper, and very powerful, it would be much more cost effective to use unpowered neodymium magnets to levitate the train.
Well, it all depends on whether or not you actually believe what they are doing should be considered criminal. I, for one, think it is wrong to outlaw that kind of activity, and that they're only doing it because they owe the people who stand to lose money from this copying. Do a google search for "janis ian internet debacle" and read what she has to say. Do you actually believe that trading music is *wrong*?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually that's wrong. The 2D bar codes can hold more data, and is not so susceptible to damage due to redundancy. The reason they went with 1D barcodes was because they are much easier to scan, and the equipment is cheaper.
PRIST FOST f005!
If they have a 1000 machine rendering farm and each machine takes 3000 minutes to render a frame, then it takes 3 minutes to render each frame. Why don't you just tell me that each machine is equivalent to a million abacuses, and it really takes 50,000,000 hours to render a frame...
I bet you didn't find spelling fun though, right? You must get a bunch of syntax errors whenever you try to compile.
You're right, but it's shit like that that makes everyone hate the US and Americans. The US kills people by accident and then their brothers come and kill US citizens on purpose. You can try to explain it away all you want by saying "well, that's war," but it doesn't do anything to mitigate the situation.
By the way, it's spelled "appz".
Whether they state it or not, what you said is misleading. You were disagreeing with the idea that a frame takes only minutes to render. And if there were any frames that took 80 hours, then there must've been many frames that were *less* than 3 minutes, on average.
That's because the Xbox doesn't have a high enough fillrate to do HD resolutions without a major hit. All the games for Xbox support 480p, but DOA3 and Halo don't offer higher resolutions, 480p isn't really HD resolution....
Jaggies *do* away (at least they're too small to see) with higher resolutions. Halo and Rallisport challenge DO NOT have higher resolutions. Ever play a PC game at 1600x1200 resolutions? You can barely see jaggies, you hardly even need anti-aliasing. By DEFINITION higher resolutions have smaller jaggies.
An HDTV decoder costs a lot of money, yes, but you don't need one for game consoles. The decoder is for decoding TV signals, but the console is directly generating the video signal...no need for decoding.
Gamecube and Xbox both have still too many jaggies for my taste. Ironically, a lot of games for N64 and Dreamcast actually had less jaggies than GC and Xbox. I don't really know what a comb filter is, but I can tell you that if GC has one, it isn't effective.
Umm, sorry, but 80 hours per frame is a RIDICULOUS figure.
Ok, you said "up to" 80 hours. So let's assume on average 24 hours per frame, which is much lower than you stated, but lets assume that anyway. Let's also assume they're rendering at 30 fps (they render at higher frames per second than the film itself) which is probably lower than the truth. 60 seconds per minute. 90 minutes in the film (also a conservative estimate).
(30fps) * (60s/min) * (90min) = 162,000 frames rendered to make the film.
(162,000frames) * (24 hours/frame) = 3,888,000 hours.
(3,888,000 hours) * (1 day/24hours) * (1 year/365 days) = 443 years, 305 days.
AND that's using the amount 24 hours per frame. You said it was 80 hours per frame. If it were 80 hours per frame, that would be
1,479 years, 165 days.
Now, lets say they want to render it in a year. (which is probably longer than they take to render it, since a lot of the time they spend doing the work before the rendering).
Ok, so
(162,000frames)/(365days) = (443.836 frames/day)
(443.836 frames/day) * (1 day/24hours) = (18.49frames/hour)
(18.49frames/hour) * (1 hour/60 minutes) =(0.30822 frames/minute) = (3.244minutes/frame)
So it seems, according to these figures, that a frame should take about 3 minutes 15 seconds, give or take, depending how you alter my assumptions. But 80 HOURS per frame is so absurd!
P.S. Everything else you said makes sense, it's true, most animated movies are not made through ray-tracing (an exception is Ice Age).
Yeah, but if they supersampled it, there would be a lot less jaggies. You know, it's interesting, whenever I watch TV, even though there are only 480 lines of detail, I never see ANY jaggies! Amazing! And I seriously doubt your claim that the next generation consoles will not support HDTV.
That's really cool! I don't have any formal background in that stuff, but I've always said that would be the best way to translate stuff (create an interlingua translation every 100 years, so they can read our stuff 1000 years from now). I didn't realize that they're actually doing this. Thanks for making my day. Where are you studying?
Hackers (1995)
Synopsis:
Zero Cool--real name Dade Murphy--is a legend among his peers. In 1988, he single-handedly crashed 1,507 computers on Wall Street, creating worldwide financial chaos. Eleven years old, Dade Murphy had a record with the F.B.I.--forbidden to finger the keys of so much as a touchtone phone until his 18th birthday. It's been seven years without a byte... and he's hungry. Kate Libby, handle Acid Burn, has a souped-up laptop that can do 0 to 60 on the infobahn in a nanosecond. When Zero Cool collides with Acid Burn, the battle of the sexes goes into hard drive. But all bets are off when they must pool their resources to battle The Plague, a master hacker employed by a corporate giant and using his considerable talents to worm his way into millions. Worse yet, he has hidden his own scheme by framing Dade, Kate and their friends in a diabolical industrial conspiracy. The young band of renegade hackers sets out to recruit the best of the cybernet underground to clear their names.
I really don't think you understand. This has nothing to do with programming, and little to do with "computers," except in abstract theory. What I'm trying to say is, our BRAINS are computers, and even if we never understand it, I believe we can replicate and mimic the human brain. Imagine we create an artificial neuron. It responds to electrical stimulus just like the human neuron. We create all sorts of variations of them, and configure them just like how they're found in the human brain. I believe that if it's done properly, we can have a 'brain' that operates like a human brain. But just imagine that these neurons operate twice as fast as human neurons, and with better memory, and all sorts of improvements.
I'm not trying to suggest we can *program* a computer to think like a human. But I believe we can imitate and then improve upon the structure of the human brain. Unless you believe in something intangible like a "soul," and you also believe that our "soul" is responsible for our consciousness and creativity, then there's no reason not to believe a construct like I'm suggesting would not work like a human brain.
Now, I'm not sure how a brain like this would create art. Maybe these brains will be part of people, artificial people, who are just like humans, but better. I don't know, it's hard to predict. But I think that the human brain, and everything it's capable of is entirely based upon its physicality. So basically, I'm saying, the human brain is just a machine. I highly sophisticated, fickle, and incredible machine, yes, but there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to imitate and improve upon it.
"It is not possible to program an imagination"
You're a programmer, but programming really has *nothing* to do with this. I'd imagine something like this would be developed between people in the fields of electrical engineering, nanotechnology, and biology/neurology. This has nothing to do with programming, and nothing to do with computers as you know them.
There are all sorts of approaches you can take with what I'm describing. Making a better, smarter human. Making a highly creative, highly parallel, but non-autonomous machine without any goals, desires and emotions that make a human an individual or a "person". Sort of like the "bio-neural gelpacks" from star trek voyager.
I'll say it again: this has nothing to do with programming, unless you call sending a child to school and interacting with a child "programming".
So imagine we build incredibly fast, and large 'brains'. Imagine that we architect it from the ground up to easily share and transmit ideas that it learned to other "brains," with great speed and accuracy, unlike the way we humans share ideas. Can you see how incredible this would be? Now imagine that these "machines" are human, that they are just extensions of ourselves. I believe that through this, we can reach an entirely new level of intelligence, like the difference between a chimp and a human.
The first level of intelligence, as a species, is the ability to imitate. Primates are highly imitative, so if an individual learns something useful, it might quickly spread to other primates. What humans have over other primates is language. It takes the idea of imitation to a higher level. It's a way of sharing ideas more efficiently and the ability to share abstract that can't be directly demonstrated or imitated. I think the approach I'm describing using artificial brains will take us to the next level. This is what makes us intelligent as a species. The ability to learn and share ideas is highly important. I hope I'm still around when we make the transition.
We're in the knee of the curve baby. Things are gonna start rushing by faster than you could ever imagine.
It's whitey!
Of course, as long as there are humans, they will always have a desire to be creative. That doesn't make what I'm saying any less feasible. You also didn't take into account that those "machines" might very likely be considered human. Imagine I create a "machine" that is like a human in every single way. It's brain is structured just like ours, except for one part. Their nerve cells operate at 2 Hz, instead of 1 Hz, like ours. Do you think they would be just "machines" and would therefore be unable to think and feel and experience?
Ok, imagine we discover some ancient language, and we have to decipher it. It might take our human civilization 100 years. My point is that it is my belief, that eventually, artificial brains will be able to do everything a human can but just faster. Maybe it will be able to do it in 6 months.
Human thought and creativity is often a slow process, and is highly parallel. We rely on sudden inspirations and epiphanies which hit us when our brain suddenly works everything out. Long amounts of time is often a factor in this. But time is not *necessary*, it is only necessary for us. Eventually, artificial humans and artificial intelligence (based on learning machines, like humans, not programmed ones) will be able to do everything we can just faster.
Yeah, so what did you get?
But there's no way to just turn off the switch. Well there is. Thing is, those prices were reached under normal market conditions. Those conditions include strong intellectual property rights which lead to very high revenues (in the movie industry). Since the movie industry pays such high salaries due to their high revenues, and the TV industry is competitive for actors, the TV industry must match those prices.
Actors are definitely paid too much, and their salary is an indication of the unhealthy "market" that movies are made in/sold in. Its the extensive intellectual property rights, along with new recent opportunities to sell films (video, dvd) that have created an excess of revenue. Since the movie industry is highly competitive, and having the right actor is the key to success, studios spend as much as they possibly could to get the right actor. So the more revenue they have, they more they have to waste on actors. This is why movie studios' return on investment hasn't gone up, even though they've doubled their revenues many many times over. But you still shouldn't minimize the value of a good actor. I just saw a couple of movies with Jim Carrey: The Truman Show, and Man on the Moon. Those are perfect examples of how great it can be to have a good actor.
Movie studios have always had a slim slim return on investment of about 6-7%. If they all made less money across the board, none of them would really even be hurt. Game theory in action.
Listen, I hear what you're saying, but you're talking about the near future. To say that in FIFTY or at most a HUNDRED years we won't have the technology to fully replace actors is lunacy. I personally believe that advanced hardware that mimics the human brain physically, and therefore in function, will be able to do ANYTHING a human can do but 1,000 or 1,000,000 times faster. I can picture these 'brains' watching movies and all sorts of art to feed them ideas and churning out art at incredible speeds. I think you're foolish to think that actors will NEVER be replaced.
Well, I was thinking you could have other forms of propulsion, and the magnets would just reduce friction (floating on air) and would allow higher speeds. The magnets would NOT have to be gigantic, neodymium magnets are incredibly powerful, I've seen demonstrations which showed that it could lift an entire train car.
I saw this thing on TV that said that you don't even need powered magnets. That since neodymium (or something) magnets are now much cheaper, and very powerful, it would be much more cost effective to use unpowered neodymium magnets to levitate the train.
Then, explain. What are moral rights exactly?
Well, it all depends on whether or not you actually believe what they are doing should be considered criminal. I, for one, think it is wrong to outlaw that kind of activity, and that they're only doing it because they owe the people who stand to lose money from this copying. Do a google search for "janis ian internet debacle" and read what she has to say. Do you actually believe that trading music is *wrong*?
Umm, are you retarded?
see this thread