The fall out from this type of ruling is going to be felt quite heavily in coming years.
We are currently taxed for driving, flying, building a home, playing with toys, eating anything non-essential and much more. Data is harder to tax, and so for the greater part we are NOT taxed for exchanging data.
Governments tax for two reasons. 1: To pay for the 'stuff' of governing and providing public facilities to the country 2: As a penalty for anti social / environmental behaviours.
As a greater proportion of our wealth is spent 'virtually' a greater portion of our 'real' expenditure will have to be taxed to ensure the books balance.
Personally, I'd rather see fair taxes. Rich people exchange data (in the main) more than poor people. So tax us. Unpopular on/. I think, but if you think about it - would you rather be charged an extra couple of percent for your bandwidth or have propoerty taxes rise AGAIN!??
I find it pretty sad (as in dead hamster) that we're all pretty much excited about this. Where are the new games???
It's like the music industry - you know your getting old when your more interested in a new best of, or an album from a 15 year old band than something fresh.
Either that, or all the new stuff is just dross. Are we all getting old, and reliving our youths through Quake and the B52s? or are all new games just dross?
Nintendo are pretty cool, but they have a pretty dodgy history of anti-competitive attitudes, and over pricing on some of their games stuff. I have to say though that this is less obvious this past while - rampant during SNES era though!
I'll bet if the games shops had 'dark' GBAs and 'lit' ones, even if the lit ones ate batteries twice as fast and cost 25% more the majority would go for the lit one. Nintendo should listen to this. I think they will. But first they will grind on with the dark GBA until it reckons everyone that REALLY wants one HAS one.
Then it will release the GBA 'lit' in a bunch of funky new colours, with no increased battery drain and sell a new GBA to a good %age of those who already have a 'dark' GBA. They will also release another Mario Kart at the same time. Just like Star Wars DVDs and collectors comics. Whenever you have a smallish market - just try to sell the same dumb ass the same thing more than once.
This just shows, I think, what we all thought when we bought the Sims. That cities are much more entertaining. The reasons for this are straightforward: I have friends, relatives, even some enemies! I DON'T have my own city.
I'd love my own city. It'd be great fun! Why emulate something we can all do more effectively anyway. Just walk out the door and meet people and you'll have WAY more fun than the Sims can ever provide. But if your in the mood for a bit of planning, zoning, police budget squeezing and tax raising play Sim City.
Well done Maxis - get back to the Cities. Lets see some new ideas, lets network Sim City, lets have REAL neighbours to compete and negotiate with, that'd be enough to get me spending another £40 on Sim City 5Million - nothing else - just other Mayors to clash with. Oh - and Nukes;-)
"The games in the arcades have not kept pace in a lot of the things, and they have gotten too complex for a lot of casual players and casual interaction. "
Yep - I'd agree with that. Go into any arcade attached to a family fun park and you'll find that everyone over 16 is playing either driving games or that one with the flying bike going through hoops.
Immediacy is what its about for a massive portion of the public. I, as someone unable to get to the arcades too often, and damn reluctant to put £2 into a game for about a minute of fun because I get my arse kicked immediately because I dont know the controls yet.
Gimme a gan, and something funny to shoot at. Or a car and a track to race round with brake assist on, or a bunch of little jars and a ping pong ball and a cutie to pass the balls back to me when I miss - "aww gee! another on the floor!"
You certainly shouldn't bother trying to communicate with them. Start being nice to the clients, let them have your direct line, tell them you care! Then mailshot them that your starting up and nick 'em.
Start making MORE money than you are now, do better work. Winner all round. But look out for the ulcer!
The reason for this is simple - usage of anything is environmentally damaging to some degree. By reducing waste we reduce environmental damage. Once these big gains run out, and we are faced with the hard decisions about cutting usage, not just wasteful usage, it will actually start costing money to be more environmentally protective.
Its a bit like the UK record on CO2 emmissions - by closing all the coal fired power stations we cut billions of tonnes of CO2 emmissions. But our energy usage continues to rise - to cut further we need to cut usage - MUCH harder than simply switching fuels. Sending the HP toner carts back is one thing - using less of them quite another.
The world is not saved because a few corps stop throwing out all the half full cans of solvent at the end of each day. We're dooomed! we're all dooomed.
My new desk is about as low tech as it gets. As with the rest, I had 3 machines, 4 monitors and preferably a space for my laptop to fit into a reasonably big room - but be pretty snug and 'presentable' when not in use.
Not being tooled up, I went down to B&Q and bought a drill, jigsaw, sander, saw, and one of those 'every tool you'll ever need' boxes for about £60. I then drove over to my mates work and took about 6 of the cleanest pallets I could find in their warehouse.
Two weekends of sanding, cutting, hammering and the like later I have a spanky 'slightly rustic' desk for absolutely free! Apart from having to buy the tools. which will last.
The timber would have cost about £100 - so even then its a HUGE desk about 14 feet long, and between 3 and 5 feet deep, with shelving beneath and some neat monitor stands for under 160 quids!
Surely for the restaging next year we should get BBC Radio 1,2,4 and 5 to simulcast Gabby Roslin or Chris Moyles introducing a classic Status Quo number which everyone is to pogo about and air guitar to for a minute.
Get everyone in time with the radio and I'm sure the effect will be much better. This attempt musn't have been significantly different from that found every day at 3:30 when the schools kick out!
Get everyone Rocking All Over The World (although I'd prefer Down Down myself!) and I'll bet we could cause a tsunami!
For the high enders with cycle guzzling applications this is important. But for us lowly users this is baaad. I don't want to see a superior Linux on a more expensive chip that locks me into another Intel style relationship with a vendor. I want freedom to choose chips, mice, screens, OS, the lot. I want it all. I have it all! (almost) so don't lets go giving it away slipping down the platform dependant route - that way lies hell and OS taunting such has never before been seen!!!!
kennygeek "im mugh minmbe mex" {I use poorUX}
cartmangeek "Awww - cant the little poor boy afford Intel??"
Why are we being pointed at this? This is essentially a cheesy sunday suppliment article with a few screenshots and a bit of badly (if at all-) researched commentary on the bleedin (obvious) edge of 3D gfx.
I'd be genuinely interested to read something NEW on this subject, some new insights, some well researched comparisons of TS, TS2 and FF in terms of polygons/second on screen etc... That would be interesting, I'd regurgitate that in the pub, but this!
Anyone got some decent articles to point us at??
50% is pretty low. Think about TV or Radio - in any given region for the top 4 networks to have only 50% of the audience leaves a hell of a lot for the others to pick up.
Most people don't surf small sites because most people don't have the need - people are sheep - small sites that satisfy the sheep become big sites and get bought by the big 4. That doesn't mean that the other small sites that just satisfy the few don't still exist - its just that they'll never figure in this kind of article individually.
In publishing some of the most successful and profitable magazines are tiny circulation niche journals run by a couple of people for a few thousand or tens of thousand readers. As these move online, if peope continue to PAY to see them, you'll get more and more of them as costs drop. They may pick up a few readers, but they are niche interest and so have a limited audience - doesn't stop them being profitable - true democracy! MARKET democracy!
I seriously think that we all over estimate the importance of launch date of a new console. Just look at the PS2- only now, with the ads for GT3 saturating the evening TV am I inclined to part with £300 for one - it's been around for AGES, theres a couple of spanky new machines just around the corner, but ONE GOOD GAME and I'm most likely going to get one this weekend.
Which was launched first? The Saturn, PS, N64??? dunno! but the few decent games for the Saturn just weren't as good as those for the PS or N64 - so it was dooooomed.
I can't help thinking that too many languages spoils the broth. Focus should be on ease and speed of development, error handling, development tools that enable the 'simple' problems to be auto detected as far as possible, that assist in testing loops, that FORCE you to document, and produce readable documentation on the fly. Get all that working WELL and I'll write in bloody VB if I have to.
Fundamentalism is for church or TV shows - lets just all agree to compromise - stick to C++ and develop better TOOLS for C++. Yeah it sucks in areas, yeah we all have things we hate about it - but NO we aren't going to be rid of it any time soon - so lets make life with C++ easier.
I've said it before, but let me repeat! NO ONE HAS TO BUY THIS STUFF.
We might WANT to buy this stuff, but if the thought of an MS OS, or and AOL desktop pisses you off enough you WONT. If they piss off enough people they GO BUST.
Its that simple. How many times in the past have some corp been on the brink of all out monopoly when someone just stands up and says "you know - enough people are pissed off that I might just be able to take them on".
If enough are - they will.
Now if you'll all just keep buying the linux, stop buying those damn DVDs you already have on video, and get your caffeine direct from the growers the world will be a better place! We can bring this stuff to a turn - never a stop, Linux will be evil one day, but at least a pause and a change of direction.
I doubt I'm alone in being led down the coders path by the desire to write better games than I could buy at the time.
I must have bought a dozen 'write games in..' books and found every one of them to be too light on detail, too thinly spread, and too badly written to be of use - so ended up buying a couple of 'proper' programming books and just working out the game bits later.
Personally, I think for the many folk that gave up before going to the proper books, there SHOULD be books with 'write games' in the title that start at about 'hello world' move on through 'pong' and end up somewhere about 'quake'. They'd have to do it over a few volumes, but if they were well written (like the OLD animal books) and not £80 a pop I reckon they'd be onto a winner.
Re:Uses for this machine - SAVE THE WORLD!!
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 1
This is another example of shipping generics over specifics being VASTLY more environmentally friendly.
It is not your motorcar, your transatlantic flights, star wars, or the French that are going to kill the planet. Its the vast efforts and energy consumption used in transporting infinite variations of crap around the globe.
One of these babies in every bookshop in the world and you just have paper, toner, and staple trucks roaming the globe - not a truck each for every damn publishing house. Kinda like digital movies! stop shipping the atoms - ship the bits!
If only they follow it up with the all-in-one-plastic-crapolajet we can stop all transport of junk! Thus saving all that CO2 that kyoto gets wound up about (whoever the hell HE is!)
>Stop buying stale coffee at stores and ``gourmet'' shops.
This does a disservice to at least one shop near me where the good people running them always have at least 3 options on the 'roasted this morning' board - they even do them as whole bean, rough or fine grind. They'll even grind it for you as you wait if you ask nicely and if your lucky and go in the day when its quieter you might even get a cup.
So give these places a chance, you gotta buy your beans somewhere and if they can save you some bother with roasting and grinding why the hell not!
*$s does taste like vomit though! and you do need a decent machine...
This is why we need W's star wars system up there looking for anything that enters our space-space (like air-space...) - so we can be told when there is enough crap heading our way to be worth going out to look at.
I've spent too many nights looking for leonids, bootids, taurids, you-nameit-ids on the advice of New Scientist, Sky at Night and/. without seeing more than a few shooting stars and some bats to have bothered with this one.
Now don't get me wrong - bats are cool - but when you've been promised the best free firework display in the history of the earth they don't really cut it.
Roll on the ultimate spook machine! and guarantee we see something worthwhile. And if there are no natural ones to see this month - it could just shoot down some commie satelites to give us something to see!
One question on the Open vs Closed debate I rarely see addressed is how small companies without massive VC backing can make it through years 1 and 2 without being able to protect their work and sell it.
Sun can afford to give stuff away because the majority of its business is still profitable and closed. The same is true for almost all of the big corporates openning stuff up.
Oddly, it's exactly this fact that will make the bigger corps STRONGER over time as Open Source grows, as they have the market penetration already and the cash buffers to lose on individual products for YEARS.
In the debates on/. it often boils down to open=good, closed=bad. Which puts many corps in the good ring, and most smaller companies that are doing more innovative, exciting work in the bad set. That's wrong... Or am I missing the point here? Can startups go Open without massive risk?
There is a bit of a backlash at the moment against the damien hirst method of developing art. He has an idea, and brings in a team of technical experts to bring it about - be it cutting a cow in half or producing 20,000 fake pills that won't turn to mush in a couple of months.
The same deal will, I think, ultimatly decide computer arts fate. If your simply playing around with photos in photoshop you'll have to be particularly talented at composition to stand out. If your developing some semi-organic generation algorithm code as part of your art you'll need to be good at that AND have the ideas to make it sparkle. Just like even the best scripts need good lighting and actors and stuff.
Personally, I'm unsure if it counts to have a team developing your software within which you just 'dump some ideas', but I suppose it depends on the ideas.
Good old 'llama' Minter was doing some fine computer art on the old ST back in the day - that and Mr Potato Head from Toy Story are the only 2 examples of computer art I can think of.
Spot on. The biggest problems with modern PCs are Noise, Size and Ugliness. I only bought a notebook so I would be allowed to use it in the lounge while my lady watches ER.
A 'proper' machine is too big, noisy, ugly and hard to hide. A notebook can be tucked away on the bookshelf when not in use and doesn't need stacks of space to operate.
And in our small 4 man office where we have 5 machines running the noise is a real problem. I've swapped 2 machines to notebooks to reduce the noise - but having something this quiet as server would be great!
Anyone found any other machines that are quiet, small, and able to operate 24hrs?
Slashdot Mirror
The fall out from this type of ruling is going to be felt quite heavily in coming years.
/. I think, but if you think about it - would you rather be charged an extra couple of percent for your bandwidth or have propoerty taxes rise AGAIN!??
We are currently taxed for driving, flying, building a home, playing with toys, eating anything non-essential and much more. Data is harder to tax, and so for the greater part we are NOT taxed for exchanging data.
Governments tax for two reasons. 1: To pay for the 'stuff' of governing and providing public facilities to the country 2: As a penalty for anti social / environmental behaviours.
As a greater proportion of our wealth is spent 'virtually' a greater portion of our 'real' expenditure will have to be taxed to ensure the books balance.
Personally, I'd rather see fair taxes. Rich people exchange data (in the main) more than poor people. So tax us. Unpopular on
I find it pretty sad (as in dead hamster) that we're all pretty much excited about this. Where are the new games???
It's like the music industry - you know your getting old when your more interested in a new best of, or an album from a 15 year old band than something fresh.
Either that, or all the new stuff is just dross. Are we all getting old, and reliving our youths through Quake and the B52s? or are all new games just dross?
What with my aged fragile maind I cannot decide!
I'd LOVE to take all the pics of the 'great and good' on our companies website and hide 'john is a twat' or 'if its sunday call me jane' in there!
Nintendo are pretty cool, but they have a pretty dodgy history of anti-competitive attitudes, and over pricing on some of their games stuff. I have to say though that this is less obvious this past while - rampant during SNES era though!
I'll bet if the games shops had 'dark' GBAs and 'lit' ones, even if the lit ones ate batteries twice as fast and cost 25% more the majority would go for the lit one. Nintendo should listen to this. I think they will. But first they will grind on with the dark GBA until it reckons everyone that REALLY wants one HAS one.
Then it will release the GBA 'lit' in a bunch of funky new colours, with no increased battery drain and sell a new GBA to a good %age of those who already have a 'dark' GBA. They will also release another Mario Kart at the same time. Just like Star Wars DVDs and collectors comics. Whenever you have a smallish market - just try to sell the same dumb ass the same thing more than once.
These guys are smart!
This just shows, I think, what we all thought when we bought the Sims. That cities are much more entertaining. The reasons for this are straightforward: I have friends, relatives, even some enemies! I DON'T have my own city.
;-)
I'd love my own city. It'd be great fun! Why emulate something we can all do more effectively anyway. Just walk out the door and meet people and you'll have WAY more fun than the Sims can ever provide. But if your in the mood for a bit of planning, zoning, police budget squeezing and tax raising play Sim City.
Well done Maxis - get back to the Cities. Lets see some new ideas, lets network Sim City, lets have REAL neighbours to compete and negotiate with, that'd be enough to get me spending another £40 on Sim City 5Million - nothing else - just other Mayors to clash with. Oh - and Nukes
"The games in the arcades have not kept pace in a lot of the things, and they have gotten too complex for a lot of casual players and casual interaction. "
Yep - I'd agree with that. Go into any arcade attached to a family fun park and you'll find that everyone over 16 is playing either driving games or that one with the flying bike going through hoops.
Immediacy is what its about for a massive portion of the public. I, as someone unable to get to the arcades too often, and damn reluctant to put £2 into a game for about a minute of fun because I get my arse kicked immediately because I dont know the controls yet.
Gimme a gan, and something funny to shoot at. Or a car and a track to race round with brake assist on, or a bunch of little jars and a ping pong ball and a cutie to pass the balls back to me when I miss - "aww gee! another on the floor!"
You certainly shouldn't bother trying to communicate with them. Start being nice to the clients, let them have your direct line, tell them you care! Then mailshot them that your starting up and nick 'em.
Start making MORE money than you are now, do better work. Winner all round. But look out for the ulcer!
The reason for this is simple - usage of anything is environmentally damaging to some degree. By reducing waste we reduce environmental damage. Once these big gains run out, and we are faced with the hard decisions about cutting usage, not just wasteful usage, it will actually start costing money to be more environmentally protective.
Its a bit like the UK record on CO2 emmissions - by closing all the coal fired power stations we cut billions of tonnes of CO2 emmissions. But our energy usage continues to rise - to cut further we need to cut usage - MUCH harder than simply switching fuels. Sending the HP toner carts back is one thing - using less of them quite another.
The world is not saved because a few corps stop throwing out all the half full cans of solvent at the end of each day. We're dooomed! we're all dooomed.
My new desk is about as low tech as it gets. As with the rest, I had 3 machines, 4 monitors and preferably a space for my laptop to fit into a reasonably big room - but be pretty snug and 'presentable' when not in use.
Not being tooled up, I went down to B&Q and bought a drill, jigsaw, sander, saw, and one of those 'every tool you'll ever need' boxes for about £60. I then drove over to my mates work and took about 6 of the cleanest pallets I could find in their warehouse.
Two weekends of sanding, cutting, hammering and the like later I have a spanky 'slightly rustic' desk for absolutely free! Apart from having to buy the tools. which will last.
The timber would have cost about £100 - so even then its a HUGE desk about 14 feet long, and between 3 and 5 feet deep, with shelving beneath and some neat monitor stands for under 160 quids!
Surely for the restaging next year we should get BBC Radio 1,2,4 and 5 to simulcast Gabby Roslin or Chris Moyles introducing a classic Status Quo number which everyone is to pogo about and air guitar to for a minute.
Get everyone in time with the radio and I'm sure the effect will be much better. This attempt musn't have been significantly different from that found every day at 3:30 when the schools kick out!
Get everyone Rocking All Over The World (although I'd prefer Down Down myself!) and I'll bet we could cause a tsunami!
For the high enders with cycle guzzling applications this is important. But for us lowly users this is baaad. I don't want to see a superior Linux on a more expensive chip that locks me into another Intel style relationship with a vendor. I want freedom to choose chips, mice, screens, OS, the lot. I want it all. I have it all! (almost) so don't lets go giving it away slipping down the platform dependant route - that way lies hell and OS taunting such has never before been seen!!!!
kennygeek "im mugh minmbe mex" {I use poorUX}
cartmangeek "Awww - cant the little poor boy afford Intel??"
Why are we being pointed at this? This is essentially a cheesy sunday suppliment article with a few screenshots and a bit of badly (if at all-) researched commentary on the bleedin (obvious) edge of 3D gfx.
I'd be genuinely interested to read something NEW on this subject, some new insights, some well researched comparisons of TS, TS2 and FF in terms of polygons/second on screen etc... That would be interesting, I'd regurgitate that in the pub, but this!
Anyone got some decent articles to point us at??
50% is pretty low. Think about TV or Radio - in any given region for the top 4 networks to have only 50% of the audience leaves a hell of a lot for the others to pick up.
Most people don't surf small sites because most people don't have the need - people are sheep - small sites that satisfy the sheep become big sites and get bought by the big 4. That doesn't mean that the other small sites that just satisfy the few don't still exist - its just that they'll never figure in this kind of article individually.
In publishing some of the most successful and profitable magazines are tiny circulation niche journals run by a couple of people for a few thousand or tens of thousand readers. As these move online, if peope continue to PAY to see them, you'll get more and more of them as costs drop. They may pick up a few readers, but they are niche interest and so have a limited audience - doesn't stop them being profitable - true democracy! MARKET democracy!
This is great - forget those stupid little rotor blades! 10K G from a small metal tube on his head - lets see Hobbes bounce him NOW!!!
I seriously think that we all over estimate the importance of launch date of a new console. Just look at the PS2- only now, with the ads for GT3 saturating the evening TV am I inclined to part with £300 for one - it's been around for AGES, theres a couple of spanky new machines just around the corner, but ONE GOOD GAME and I'm most likely going to get one this weekend.
Which was launched first? The Saturn, PS, N64??? dunno! but the few decent games for the Saturn just weren't as good as those for the PS or N64 - so it was dooooomed.
Its all about the games!
I can't help thinking that too many languages spoils the broth. Focus should be on ease and speed of development, error handling, development tools that enable the 'simple' problems to be auto detected as far as possible, that assist in testing loops, that FORCE you to document, and produce readable documentation on the fly. Get all that working WELL and I'll write in bloody VB if I have to.
Fundamentalism is for church or TV shows - lets just all agree to compromise - stick to C++ and develop better TOOLS for C++. Yeah it sucks in areas, yeah we all have things we hate about it - but NO we aren't going to be rid of it any time soon - so lets make life with C++ easier.
I've said it before, but let me repeat! NO ONE HAS TO BUY THIS STUFF.
We might WANT to buy this stuff, but if the thought of an MS OS, or and AOL desktop pisses you off enough you WONT. If they piss off enough people they GO BUST.
Its that simple. How many times in the past have some corp been on the brink of all out monopoly when someone just stands up and says "you know - enough people are pissed off that I might just be able to take them on".
If enough are - they will.
Now if you'll all just keep buying the linux, stop buying those damn DVDs you already have on video, and get your caffeine direct from the growers the world will be a better place! We can bring this stuff to a turn - never a stop, Linux will be evil one day, but at least a pause and a change of direction.
I doubt I'm alone in being led down the coders path by the desire to write better games than I could buy at the time.
I must have bought a dozen 'write games in..' books and found every one of them to be too light on detail, too thinly spread, and too badly written to be of use - so ended up buying a couple of 'proper' programming books and just working out the game bits later.
Personally, I think for the many folk that gave up before going to the proper books, there SHOULD be books with 'write games' in the title that start at about 'hello world' move on through 'pong' and end up somewhere about 'quake'. They'd have to do it over a few volumes, but if they were well written (like the OLD animal books) and not £80 a pop I reckon they'd be onto a winner.
This is another example of shipping generics over specifics being VASTLY more environmentally friendly.
It is not your motorcar, your transatlantic flights, star wars, or the French that are going to kill the planet. Its the vast efforts and energy consumption used in transporting infinite variations of crap around the globe.
One of these babies in every bookshop in the world and you just have paper, toner, and staple trucks roaming the globe - not a truck each for every damn publishing house. Kinda like digital movies! stop shipping the atoms - ship the bits!
If only they follow it up with the all-in-one-plastic-crapolajet we can stop all transport of junk! Thus saving all that CO2 that kyoto gets wound up about (whoever the hell HE is!)
>Stop buying stale coffee at stores and ``gourmet'' shops.
This does a disservice to at least one shop near me where the good people running them always have at least 3 options on the 'roasted this morning' board - they even do them as whole bean, rough or fine grind. They'll even grind it for you as you wait if you ask nicely and if your lucky and go in the day when its quieter you might even get a cup.
So give these places a chance, you gotta buy your beans somewhere and if they can save you some bother with roasting and grinding why the hell not!
*$s does taste like vomit though! and you do need a decent machine...
This is why we need W's star wars system up there looking for anything that enters our space-space (like air-space...) - so we can be told when there is enough crap heading our way to be worth going out to look at. /. without seeing more than a few shooting stars and some bats to have bothered with this one.
I've spent too many nights looking for leonids, bootids, taurids, you-nameit-ids on the advice of New Scientist, Sky at Night and
Now don't get me wrong - bats are cool - but when you've been promised the best free firework display in the history of the earth they don't really cut it.
Roll on the ultimate spook machine! and guarantee we see something worthwhile. And if there are no natural ones to see this month - it could just shoot down some commie satelites to give us something to see!
One question on the Open vs Closed debate I rarely see addressed is how small companies without massive VC backing can make it through years 1 and 2 without being able to protect their work and sell it. /. it often boils down to open=good, closed=bad. Which puts many corps in the good ring, and most smaller companies that are doing more innovative, exciting work in the bad set. That's wrong... Or am I missing the point here? Can startups go Open without massive risk?
Sun can afford to give stuff away because the majority of its business is still profitable and closed. The same is true for almost all of the big corporates openning stuff up.
Oddly, it's exactly this fact that will make the bigger corps STRONGER over time as Open Source grows, as they have the market penetration already and the cash buffers to lose on individual products for YEARS.
In the debates on
There is a bit of a backlash at the moment against the damien hirst method of developing art. He has an idea, and brings in a team of technical experts to bring it about - be it cutting a cow in half or producing 20,000 fake pills that won't turn to mush in a couple of months.
The same deal will, I think, ultimatly decide computer arts fate. If your simply playing around with photos in photoshop you'll have to be particularly talented at composition to stand out. If your developing some semi-organic generation algorithm code as part of your art you'll need to be good at that AND have the ideas to make it sparkle. Just like even the best scripts need good lighting and actors and stuff.
Personally, I'm unsure if it counts to have a team developing your software within which you just 'dump some ideas', but I suppose it depends on the ideas.
Good old 'llama' Minter was doing some fine computer art on the old ST back in the day - that and Mr Potato Head from Toy Story are the only 2 examples of computer art I can think of.
Obviously they had a quKite!
Spot on. The biggest problems with modern PCs are Noise, Size and Ugliness. I only bought a notebook so I would be allowed to use it in the lounge while my lady watches ER.
A 'proper' machine is too big, noisy, ugly and hard to hide. A notebook can be tucked away on the bookshelf when not in use and doesn't need stacks of space to operate.
And in our small 4 man office where we have 5 machines running the noise is a real problem. I've swapped 2 machines to notebooks to reduce the noise - but having something this quiet as server would be great!
Anyone found any other machines that are quiet, small, and able to operate 24hrs?