I seem to recall reading an article like this on Slashdot back in '42. Xerox patented this technology called "dry printing" (xeros graphos in Greek) that didn't use ink, but a material known as "toner".
(Yes, I do hate it when people refer to toner and ink interchangeably as "ink"; why do you ask?)
OK, and I'm saying that "worse" is less desireable than "better".
Even with real subjects, the artistry is what instills those visceral reactions.
Not for me it isn't. Not that alone. Listen, dude: just because you find fantasy just as compelling as reality, that doesn't mean we all do. Things that are real (or since you don't believe in such concepts, "more real") hold a different meaning for me, from things that are not (or "less real"). My reaction to "An Inconvenient Truth" was more compelling than my reaction to "Deep Impact", even though the visuals in the latter were better. Because it was real. And if you think that a CGI documentary about nature would be aesthetically equivalent to one featuring images actually taken from nature... that's just... sad. Enjoy your next world tour in Orlando.
You're missing a fundamental distinction by trying to dismiss everything as fiction.
When I look at a photograph by (e.g.) Ansel Adams, I know that image of Half Dome or Hernandez NM is a real place, and I am touched by the beauty of it. I think, "I want to go there!" When I see a digital image fabricated using CGI, I can be impressed with the artistry of it, but I know it's not real, and the most visceral reaction I'm going to have is, "Hmmm. Nice job." Exactly the same thing applies to moving pictures. Would the movie "Winged Migration" have anywhere near the impact if you knew (or even suspected) that the shots were all digitally generated, or the birds were composited into those landscapes? Of course not.
I think the increasing "fakeness" of movies reduces their impact. I remember seeing a spectacular mountainscape in a movie several years ago, suddenly realizing that it was computer-generated, and... it was no longer impressive. Now even when I see a shot of scenery that's real, there's the thought in the back of my head that maybe it isn't. And if I start thinking the same thing about the performances - that the person I'm watching isn't really a show salesman... and he's not really crying... and he may not even be real - the movie's lost me. Yeah, we still have our willing suspension of disbelief to help us get into a story, but the more things we have working against that (such as the knowledge that any of it could be 100% fake), the less effective it is.
This version brings powerful new features within reach of every person. These features include sculpt modeling, retopologing tools, render passes, render baking, support for multi-uvs, enhanced fluid simulator with particles, new rigid body engine, numerous new compositing nodes including defocus (DOF) node and much more.
Now if only "every person" who now has these features "within reach" had any idea what all this stuff meant.:)
This is true! The graphics card on my PowerMac went out last year, and it hasn't affected my Photoshop work. In fact, my series of digital paintings for the blind is coming along faster than ever!
Trolling? Hardly. Just pointing out that the ideas of people who've never had to take full responsibility for themselves or their actions deserve a little more skepticism and second-guessing than the ideas of people with more life experience and personal responsibility under their belts. And that this case is a good example of that.
I was surprised to learn from this article summary that the virus that causes AIDS was discovered "sometime in the 1970s", even though the syndrome hadn't even been observed by physicians until the early 1980s. I guess neither Gallo nor Montagnier should get credit for discovering LAV/HTLV/HIV, since they didn't isolate it and identify it as the probable cause of AIDS until around 1983.
The 1970s and 1980s were very different decades. The 1970s were the decade in which gay people came out of the closet and onto the public dance floor, grooving to disco and Crisco. The 1980s brought us AIDS, Reagan, and the Moral Majority, sending us into the hospital wards as patients and caregivers, and into the streets to protest. It shouldn't be that difficult to keep the two decades straight (so to speak).
Cuba is part of the North American continental plate, in much the same way that Great Britain and Ireland are in Europe, Japan is in Asia, Madagascar is in Africa, and the Falklinds are in South America. (In case you're wondering, the Caribbean plate lies immediately south of Cuba.)
Think about it: When was the last time a high school student came up with a brilliant idea that was also a Good Idea? There's a reason we don't let them vote, drink, join the army, buy on credit, or get married.
what if the students are not in lesson, during break times or at lunch? They are allowed to chat to each other about whatever they want there in person, so why not do it online as well?
Schools don't block frivolous uses of their equipment because they don't want kids to have fun; they do it because they want to make sure these tools are available for the purpose they were intended for: as educational resources. If the computer lab is full of kids surfing MyFace and chatting on AIMSN during lunch and breaks, then that lab isn't available to students who want to do some online research, type a paper, etc.
DC and Marvel filed a joint trademark registration (#73222079) on "super heroes" back in 1979, when a toy manufacturer produced a line of licensed action figures featuring both of their characters. DC has a registration for "Legion of Super Heroes" (their long-running team series), and Marvel has registered "Marvel Super Heroes". One or the other publisher periodically issues a cease-and-desist to people who they feel are infringing on one of these trademarks, and this is why (for example) Malibu Comics instead called their specially-powered characters "ultras".
As far as I know, the trademark has never been challenged/defended in court. If it were, it's hard to say whether it's become generic enough to go public-domain like "refrigerator" and "aspirin", or if it'd cling to proprietarity like "Xerox"® and "Band-Aid"®. But it is on the books.
Quick, someone put together a super hero to defend the public domain, fair use, and/or call for the outright abolishment of copyright.
I already did.* I called him Captain Copyright. But because I didn't claim any trademark rights and donated the character to the public domain, this outfit was able to use him for their own purposes instead.
*(OK, I didn't really. But it makes for an ironic example of how things would suck without copyrights and trademark rights. They can be used for good as well as for evil.)
Personally, I was hoping we'd see them get sued by DC & Marvel, who claim to own the trademark on the word "superhero", and vanish in a puff of logic.
Given the facts that A) copyrights and trademarks rights are different things, and B) the word "superhero" doesn't appear anywhere in the name "Captain Copyright", I don't think there'd be much chance of that.
Even if their scenario occurred, I fail to see why government intervention would be needed. If large portions of the internet were swamped, that by itself would be sufficient to limit frivolous use of high-bandwidth services. Imagine if the best throughput you could get was dial-up-equivalent: would you even bother trying to play Lonelyfake15 videos on BoobTube or keep your bitpirate swarms going?
But just because they [Google] have representative users
Actually they don't. Their user stats are skewed away from IE users, because IE's default home page (which a surprisingly large number of people leave as their browser's home page) is MSN.com and its default search is Microsoft's; and they're skewed toward Firefox users, which have Google as their default home page and search engine, and slightly skewed toward Safari which uses Apple.com as its default page but Google as its default search engine.
The fact that Anybody At All believed that {LonelyGirl15 was genuine/Taco Bell bought the Liberty Bell/Saddam Hussein had WMDs} demonstrates that people will fall for just about anything.
Deceptive marketing is only good in the sense that chicken pox is good: by exposing people to it and
giving them a chance to develop a resistance to it, their chances are improved of not succumbing whe exposed to even worse stuff (i.e. lying political leaders).
It'd only take me fifteen minutes to figure out. For the countless computer users out there who operate their machines by rote, without understanding any of the whys and wherefores of them, it's going to be hours of confusion and retraining in order to continue performing job tasks that they were able to perform with previous versions. That's "needless".
Part of Metcalfe's problem is that - despite his technical qualifications, and the good fortune of having the right idea at the right time (ethernet) - he's an ideologue. Everything he looks at is filtered through his philosophical dogma, and he uses his columns as a bully pulpit to promote that ideology, rather than as an opportunity to explore and consider new ideas. He's got an agenda that gives him the same sort of tunnel vision and myopia that the worst fawning Apple fanboy, snotty Microsoft apologist, or strident BSD partisan has.
"And, has thou slain the Clippywock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!' He chortled in his joy.
Good heavens, that's almost... almost... enough reason to suggest upgrading to MSOffice 2007. Of course the fact that the rest of the UI is being needlessly changed is enough reason to suggest not upgrading. "You seem to be trying to figure out how to open a document, or where the hell the Tools menu disappeared to. Would you like to take a remedial word processing class to learn how we want you to do it now?"
The biggest idiocy perpetrated in this incident was by the people who didn't think far enough ahead to anticipate that this was going to happen, and to take any steps at all to prevent it. Maybe the squares in Boston's emergency response agencies over-reacted, and without doubt the so-called "news" media over-reacted... but you'd have to have kept your sphincter around your neck for the past 5.5 years to not realize that this was probably going to happen. Glad to know that someone at CN is willing to admit that they are responsible for the easily-anticipated consequences of their actions. Apparently he understands that "adult" doesn't just mean naughty words; it also means owning up to your actions.
Saying that it's expensive to switch from Windows to a Mac running OS X is legitimate, because it means buying a whole new piece of hardware and usually a fair number of apps (since the developers usually won't let you just install the OS X version of apps for which you bought the Windows version and call it even). But if you're already planning to buy a whole new piece of hardware and upgrade a fair number of apps to run properly on Vista, the extra cost of switching to OS X instead isn't nearly as high.
Slashdot Mirror
You can have it. I'm gay, so this analogy sounds all scary and not at all appealing.
I seem to recall reading an article like this on Slashdot back in '42. Xerox patented this technology called "dry printing" (xeros graphos in Greek) that didn't use ink, but a material known as "toner".
(Yes, I do hate it when people refer to toner and ink interchangeably as "ink"; why do you ask?)
You're missing a fundamental distinction by trying to dismiss everything as fiction.
When I look at a photograph by (e.g.) Ansel Adams, I know that image of Half Dome or Hernandez NM is a real place, and I am touched by the beauty of it. I think, "I want to go there!" When I see a digital image fabricated using CGI, I can be impressed with the artistry of it, but I know it's not real, and the most visceral reaction I'm going to have is, "Hmmm. Nice job." Exactly the same thing applies to moving pictures. Would the movie "Winged Migration" have anywhere near the impact if you knew (or even suspected) that the shots were all digitally generated, or the birds were composited into those landscapes? Of course not.
I think the increasing "fakeness" of movies reduces their impact. I remember seeing a spectacular mountainscape in a movie several years ago, suddenly realizing that it was computer-generated, and... it was no longer impressive. Now even when I see a shot of scenery that's real, there's the thought in the back of my head that maybe it isn't. And if I start thinking the same thing about the performances - that the person I'm watching isn't really a show salesman... and he's not really crying... and he may not even be real - the movie's lost me. Yeah, we still have our willing suspension of disbelief to help us get into a story, but the more things we have working against that (such as the knowledge that any of it could be 100% fake), the less effective it is.
Trolling? Hardly. Just pointing out that the ideas of people who've never had to take full responsibility for themselves or their actions deserve a little more skepticism and second-guessing than the ideas of people with more life experience and personal responsibility under their belts. And that this case is a good example of that.
I was surprised to learn from this article summary that the virus that causes AIDS was discovered "sometime in the 1970s", even though the syndrome hadn't even been observed by physicians until the early 1980s. I guess neither Gallo nor Montagnier should get credit for discovering LAV/HTLV/HIV, since they didn't isolate it and identify it as the probable cause of AIDS until around 1983.
The 1970s and 1980s were very different decades. The 1970s were the decade in which gay people came out of the closet and onto the public dance floor, grooving to disco and Crisco. The 1980s brought us AIDS, Reagan, and the Moral Majority, sending us into the hospital wards as patients and caregivers, and into the streets to protest. It shouldn't be that difficult to keep the two decades straight (so to speak).
Cuba is part of the North American continental plate, in much the same way that Great Britain and Ireland are in Europe, Japan is in Asia, Madagascar is in Africa, and the Falklinds are in South America. (In case you're wondering, the Caribbean plate lies immediately south of Cuba.)
Think about it: When was the last time a high school student came up with a brilliant idea that was also a Good Idea? There's a reason we don't let them vote, drink, join the army, buy on credit, or get married.
DC and Marvel filed a joint trademark registration (#73222079) on "super heroes" back in 1979, when a toy manufacturer produced a line of licensed action figures featuring both of their characters. DC has a registration for "Legion of Super Heroes" (their long-running team series), and Marvel has registered "Marvel Super Heroes". One or the other publisher periodically issues a cease-and-desist to people who they feel are infringing on one of these trademarks, and this is why (for example) Malibu Comics instead called their specially-powered characters "ultras".
As far as I know, the trademark has never been challenged/defended in court. If it were, it's hard to say whether it's become generic enough to go public-domain like "refrigerator" and "aspirin", or if it'd cling to proprietarity like "Xerox"® and "Band-Aid"®. But it is on the books.
*(OK, I didn't really. But it makes for an ironic example of how things would suck without copyrights and trademark rights. They can be used for good as well as for evil.)
Even if their scenario occurred, I fail to see why government intervention would be needed. If large portions of the internet were swamped, that by itself would be sufficient to limit frivolous use of high-bandwidth services. Imagine if the best throughput you could get was dial-up-equivalent: would you even bother trying to play Lonelyfake15 videos on BoobTube or keep your bitpirate swarms going?
The fact that Anybody At All believed that {LonelyGirl15 was genuine/Taco Bell bought the Liberty Bell/Saddam Hussein had WMDs} demonstrates that people will fall for just about anything.
Deceptive marketing is only good in the sense that chicken pox is good: by exposing people to it and giving them a chance to develop a resistance to it, their chances are improved of not succumbing whe exposed to even worse stuff (i.e. lying political leaders).
It'd only take me fifteen minutes to figure out. For the countless computer users out there who operate their machines by rote, without understanding any of the whys and wherefores of them, it's going to be hours of confusion and retraining in order to continue performing job tasks that they were able to perform with previous versions. That's "needless".
Part of Metcalfe's problem is that - despite his technical qualifications, and the good fortune of having the right idea at the right time (ethernet) - he's an ideologue. Everything he looks at is filtered through his philosophical dogma, and he uses his columns as a bully pulpit to promote that ideology, rather than as an opportunity to explore and consider new ideas. He's got an agenda that gives him the same sort of tunnel vision and myopia that the worst fawning Apple fanboy, snotty Microsoft apologist, or strident BSD partisan has.
Just because not everyone was alarmed by them doesn't mean it was safe to assume that no one would be. That's just short-sighted.
The biggest idiocy perpetrated in this incident was by the people who didn't think far enough ahead to anticipate that this was going to happen, and to take any steps at all to prevent it. Maybe the squares in Boston's emergency response agencies over-reacted, and without doubt the so-called "news" media over-reacted... but you'd have to have kept your sphincter around your neck for the past 5.5 years to not realize that this was probably going to happen. Glad to know that someone at CN is willing to admit that they are responsible for the easily-anticipated consequences of their actions. Apparently he understands that "adult" doesn't just mean naughty words; it also means owning up to your actions.
DC Comics' Crisis on Infinite Earths anyone?
Saying that it's expensive to switch from Windows to a Mac running OS X is legitimate, because it means buying a whole new piece of hardware and usually a fair number of apps (since the developers usually won't let you just install the OS X version of apps for which you bought the Windows version and call it even). But if you're already planning to buy a whole new piece of hardware and upgrade a fair number of apps to run properly on Vista, the extra cost of switching to OS X instead isn't nearly as high.