I don't like seeing all these "What's the point? It won't be as exciting as the Leonid" posts.
I went out for the Leonids last month and didn't quite see the cosmic fireworks that I'd prepared to expect, but it was still something that I'm entirely pleased I did.
I live in downtown Minneapolis, so stargazing is not a common pasttime in these parts. But I went out and sat down on my porch in my bathrobe and boxers at two-thirty in the morning, and just looked up for a half hour or so. I was lucky enough to not be blocked by clouds and I could situate myself so that no street-lights would kill my night vision.
It was magnificent. I saw five falling stars that night. It reminded me of standing in the middle of a field when I was younger in the northern Wisconsin woods-- at a certain point you stop thinking about the science of astronomy or really anything else, and you're just amazed at the vast dark-blue sky.
Is there much of anything out there that can give you that feeling, even now, when you're all grown up? I wish there was more.
If reading a post about a shower once a month on Slashdot will help me know when I can go sit on my porch again and get that feeling, I'm willing to put up with the repetition.
...assuming they abandoned the plans for the underground parking lot.
In this day and age it wouldn't surprise me if a company was more irritated at a find like this than anything else, as it presents more rubble for them to clear out, and possibly more media attention that they want.
I was a kid who grew up on Nintendo-- unfortunately, like most 6-year-olds I knew, my meager allowance couldn't cover the fifty bucks or so to buy each of the cool games we played at friends' houses. And if you remember the huge library of NES games, you know there was plenty to want.
Anyways, a couple years ago I got my girlfriend at the time an NES console, as hers had broken some years earlier, and about five games from Funcoland. The whole package set me back about thirty-five dollars, and I even included another gift certificate to round it up to an even fifty so she could buy a few I didn't think of.
I spent a whole day devoted to playing Super Mario Bros. 3 straight through, no warping. It was as much fun as I remembered.
And how about the original hockey game, just called "Ice Hockey?" Where there were three different player models: the skinny fast guy, the medium guy, and the fat slow guy?
Excitebike-- Need I say more?
Of course, this is all only applicable if you've got a relative or significant other cool enough to appreciate something other than the shiny graphics of an Xbox or PS2.
But it's fun. Cheap. Never goes out of style. Gotta love it.
"Futurama" is the best animated show on television today.
Tough to swallow, I know. And this is coming from a guy with over a dozen Simpsons tapes. And I don't think anybody could argue against the fact that The Simpsons is probably the best animated show to ever hit the airwaves-- but even the die-hard fans realize deep down that the show today is a pale imitation of what it once was.
Most of the key creative minds behind the best seasons of The Simpsons-- seasons three to five or six, or so-- have moved on. I've read that even Matt Groening devotes most of his energy these days to Futurama, only keeping a vague guiding hand over his original creation and sitting in on script readings.
Futurama is marvelous. It's clever, consistently fresh, and it's got the spark and bite that The Simpsons has lost. The fact that there was a censored Christmas episode demonstrates a lot-- not that the show is any better for having material worthy of being censored, but simply that the writers are obviously trying to do something different from the norm.
Fox effectively screwed the show when they dumped it to the Sundays-at-7pm slot a few years ago. Most everybody I know who liked the show stopped watching, because it's just an inconvenient time. The ratings are probably abysmal, and Fox probably keeps the show on just to keep Groening happy-- but as long as it's out there somewhere, I'm happy, too. The DVDs should be marvelous.
Let's just hope they don't fall prey to the temptation to overuse celebrity guests like The Simpsons has; at least the Futurama writers tend to use their guests in ways that kinda sorta fit into the story, instead of bland and obvious ass-kissing. With the list that Cohen supplied, at least they're keeping some variety, but it's something worth a little bit of concern.
We all know how reflexive Simpsons fans are, because anybody reading Slashdot either is one or at least knows one. I'm hoping this isn't going to start any sort of flame-war or be seen as pissing on hallowed ground. I'll admit I'm wrong if anybody can describe a Simpsons show from the past three years to me that made them laugh half as hard as the classic, say, Homer Goes to College episode.
Forgive me if this doesn't seem to have much direction, but this is something I've thought a bit about. I'm a student at a private fine arts college, and I'm one of the few there with interests in video games, programming, etc.
Scott McCloud of "Understanding Comics" fame once wrote that art is anything not springing directly from man's need to survive or procreate. In that sense, well, playing video games could be considered an art, but making them stems from a creator's need to earn money, so he can eat, so he can survive-- not art. But there are other, easier ways to make money; the video game creator chooses to make games because he or she is good at it and (hopefully) has an interest in the field. He or she puts personal touches into their work and it's different from what anybody else could do-- art.
It's a tough call, this. Because since Marcel Duchamp put a bicycle wheel upside down on a pedestal almost a hundred years ago and declared that it was art because he said it was, a sort of Pandora's Box has been open: we've got the most liberated sense of art there ever has been (an artist can do anything he wants and try to sell it, really) but we've also got cretins that feel art is simplistic and easy, because they don't understand the thought behind found objects or abstract expressionism or anything else to come along in the twentieth century.
I tried telling a friend while we were in a Renaissance history class about how it seemed to me that the development of 3D engines like Carmack's Quake and Sweeney's Unreal had some interesting parallels to the development of rendering techniques in Italian painting of the 15th century onward. The Italian painters started off with flat images, little depth, and distance was conveyed by placing objects higher on a picture plane-- it was the Wolfenstein era, you could say. But then artists like Giotto (if memory serves) came along, and started figuring out better ways to shade, to manipulate color, and to make objects seem rounded-- to actually occupy a space. The Renaissance of painting started, and it was like the first Quake. And so on and so forth.
Where are we now? Well, the technical craft has all but been mastered in video games; it's not photoreal, so games are somewhere around the middle-18th century, I'd wager. I can't wait until the technical aspect becomes so perfected that it becomes boring to the artists making video games; then the modernist era of videogames begins, and we can see just what kind of creativity these guys really have.
(A note on the above: I'm no expert in the history of painting or the history of games, so the paragraphs above are mostly meant to illustrate the similarities in the goals of the painters and the programmers. Anybody's free to correct me if I'm wrong.)
But then there's the commercial aspects of the video game industry. A lot of games are made for money. It's much like the film industry, I think, where you've got some works that are obviously done to make a buck (the latest Schwarzenegger flick) and then some that are done for the passion of the craft (Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, to name a few of the better of the younger generation, and so on). But it'd be impossible to say that there is no art in the film industry, just because it's driven by money. It applies the same way to video games: Miyamoto's "Pikmin" is art, the new "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" probably is not.
So where am I ending up with all of this? I don't know, I suppose it's all just food for thought. My personal feeling is that video games certainly are art, and it's nothing but snobbery from the elitist old guard that says they're not. You've gotta get with the times.
It wouldn't work. Would IBM really trust a bunch of guys that just did this to them, anyways?
If the hackers were just out to get money from IBM in the first place, it'd probably be considered some form of espionage. Or blackmail. Or whatever you want to call it. Regardless, I'm sure Big Blue can afford the lawyers to kick the hell out of Bond and Clayton if they so choose and if there's any possible legal justification for doing so.
Anybody know if this is going to turn into a DMCA issue?
I can't say I agree with the thought that the new show should be only as good as its original material-- has anybody ever actually read the comics? They just didn't have the spark that the cartoon did.
Of course, the cartoon was probably what Taco meant, in which case-- oh hell yeah. In no particular order, the new show is going to need a few things to match up with Fox's Saturday-morning masterpiece:
1. A running gag along the lines of the "CHA" written on the moon, popping up in episodes that have nothing to do with it anyways.
2. A rehash of "The Tick vs. The Tick" episode-- in which the Tick goes to a superhero bar (complete with Sidekicks' Lounge) and finds that there's another, more psychotic hero that already uses his name.
3. The Human Bullet: whenever things went wrong in The City, he'd be fired from a cannon in his backyard, only to somehow spend so much time in the air as to always show up late. ("Fire me, boy!"
It's nice to know that the legal problems aren't completely robbing the show of its charm-- I remember reading something about problems with Die Fledermaus, for example, so it looks like they've replaced him with "Batmanuel." And I think we can all agree that Patrick Warburton is the best choice for the job, judging from his "Seinfeld" work.
When the show aired, I was young enough to enjoy the cartoon show for what it was, and old enough to still get most of the grown-up jokes. Let's hope the live-action version maintains that delicate balance between smarmy irony and childish charm.
You've got to wonder how far this is going to get without commercial support. If the thing remains pure, then that's great-- but there's only so far it can go.
The internet didn't really pick up until businesses got the idea that they could rape it for all it's worth. Of course, this is what left the researchers feeling like they needed something new in 1996, but it's also probably the reason that it's as widespread as it is today. You can't have a revolution these days if somebody's not coughing up the cash.
Not that using this thing to get a nonexistant ping in Quake 3 isn't a bit of a shame. But it's a bit optimistic to think that the future for Internet2 is as rosy as the article implies, I think.
At the very least, getting some corporations involved in something other than a research capacity would allow them to supply some advertising muscle-- I mean, you'd think somebody in the past five years would have been able to come up with a snappier title than "Internet2."
Yeah, but you know the power consumption would be a hell of a lot higher on the chip that everybody would really want anyways: the Text-to-Barry-White-Speech chip.
Bill Joy, cofounder and chief technologiest of Sun Microsystems, wrote an article for Wired awhile back called "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us."
He said there were three looming dangers to humanity's future: genetics, robotics, and nanotechnologies, largely because they were so accessible to those with less money than it'd take to, say, develop a nuclear weapon.
The article is one of the most well-reasoned examinations of the issue of nanotech and the dangers in the future of technology I've ever read, and it's given extra weight simply by the position and history of the author himself. Check it out at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html. It's long, but it's certainly worth the read.
I know that Moore's Law talks about the increase of transistors on a chip, not necessarily performance and so on. If you look at my original post, I referred to it as "the widely-misunderstood Moore's Law" for a reason.
I know this. You know this. Just about everybody reading on Slashdot, I'll bet, knows this. But it seems that the general populace that reads about Moore's Law out of Parade Magazine or USA Today probably doesn't know anything about transistors, let alone the way a processor is built, and so when some half-assed journalist writes about doubling transistors-- if he or she gets it correct even then-- John Q. Public at home is going to think "Double the transistors? Well, that must mean it's twice as fast."
I didn't mean that the P4 should be twice as fast in 18 months. I meant that the general perception out there, thanks to the aforementioned uninformed-but-meaning-well journalists, is that it probably should be. So that's where we'd hear the complaining. (If there is any. Note, again, my original post, when I said "Correct me if I'm wrong...")
C'mon, we all read Slashdot. I thought it was just a given that we think we're smarter than everybody else out there that doesn't.
Somebody correct me if I'm getting my dates wrong here, but...
It strikes me that the 3Ghz should be out sooner than the end of next year. It's been a couple months since the 2GHz was out, and so the total time in between there would be somewhere around a year, a year and three months.
The leap from 1Ghz to 2Ghz took considerably less time than that. I know we're all sick of hearing about the widely-misunderstood Moore's Law, but shouldn't somebody out there be screaming bloody murder at this, that it should be out much sooner, that Intel is going to cave in, etc.?
When AMD and Intel first hit the Ghz mark, they both announced that they were going to slow down their schedules, so they weren't left with a bunch of 600Mhz chips laying around while everybody wanted a shiny new 1.xGhz in their box. But there's shortages everywhere right now, so we know that Intel probably doesn't have a warehouse full of unsold P4s somewhere.
Just pointing it out. Maybe we're all getting a bit too spoiled when it comes to speed. Anybody know what's up here?
I'm a student at an art school, and I'm in an early-level history of mass communications class. And I'd argue with West if she showed up at my school, and I don't think I'd have too difficult of a time doing it.
It doesn't make too terribly much sense to be blaming the medium for a problem that is the fault of the photographers. Not having enough memory onhand to keep enough images is no different from not bringing along enough film-- and the ability to delete images instantly is actually a benefit, because the photographer can free up space for new shots if something he decides is more important comes along. It sounds obvious, but it's a key difference she glosses over: film can only be used once.
There's always going to be a sort of intrinsic flaw in believing that a camera tells the truth (and at least she acknowledges this fact, when she refers to framing, focus, etc.), because it's a human that's deciding just what's important to shoot. It's possible, I suppose, that it's a problem that photographers are arbitrarily eliminating more work that may prove valuable than they are with traditional techniques, even though I've never read anything that would back it up, and West doesn't seem too interested in providing hard facts to support the claim.
But there are so many benefits to doing it digitally anyways-- the incredibly fast turn-around, for one. And in news, well, that's important. She may as well be making the argument that we shouldn't use television for news, because the networks don't have enough time to digest an issue, like a newspaper would.
What confuses me is that the huge issue that I was expecting to find in the article is glossed over entirely: that a digital image can be so easily manipulated. And I'm not really educated in this department enough to make some Slashdot-worthy arguments, but it strikes me as common sense. If we're worried about a perfect record of the past, that's what we should be discussing. Somebody do me a favor and back me up.
And now, back to my own dissertation, "Why Computers Are Worse Than Typewriters: There's Just No Clacking Noise." This oughta prove to be gangbusters.
I remember the same thing-- that opening weekend grosses were boosted by quite a bit because the Episode 1 trailer was attached. (For the record, though, in my area at least, it wasn't attached to Meet Joe Black-- a minor tragedy, because anticipation for the trailer was the reason I agreed to take my girlfriend to MJB in the first place).
I doubt it'll be quite such a noticable effect this time around, though, for a few reasons:
1. Star Wars fever has cooled considerably. We're not waiting here after a 16-year buildup-- it's only been a couple since Episode 1.
2. Considering the general feeling of disappointment left over from Episode 1 among the hard-core fans-- who are the ones that would pay for another movie just to see the new trailer-- it probably won't be such an event.
3. Monsters, Inc. and Harry Potter are going to do some big fat business in the first place. Any boost they get from the new teaser is probably just another drop in the bucket. I know I'm more excited to see 90 minutes of Pixar than two minutes of Lucasfilm, and I doubt you'd be able to find a kid in America that would disagree.
Of course, all of this is rambling based on knowledge gained from my Entertainment Weekly subscription, so it's all up for debate.
I went to the Minneapolis CubeClub with ticket in hand, which a friend had printed out for us from Nintendo's website or whatnot.
Didn't need it. At all. We just walked right in. I doubt Nintendo is all that concerned about limiting the number of people that get to see the Cube at this point-- they're probably only saying that admission's not guaranteed in case they need to limit for fire codes or something (it was a pretty small space). But, again, are they really going to turn people away?
Anybody that's heading out for any of the other cities, don't go out of your way to track down an admission ticket. Even if they cared, the people at the event were amazingly friendly and polite. You could chat your way in, if things get really dirty.
I played a few of the games at the Mall of America on Friday night, and on the whole, it was impressive, if not mind-blowing.
Luigi's Mansion, the new Smash Bros. game, and Pikmin looked pretty decent, but far and away the most impressive game showing was Rogue Squadron. (There were a few games missing-- Zelda and Metroid aren't due out for awhile, so don't expect them in any of the other cities if you go.)
Unfortunately, even the ones there weren't marvelous. There's nothing on deck that I saw that would make me want to buy a GameCube come November 18th, even though it's a hundred bucks cheaper than Xbox or PS2. There's no flagship title yet-- it's missing a Metal Gear Solid 2 or a Halo.
Of course, Nintendo had everything running under the best possible conditions-- you have to wonder what the games will look like on regular televisions, instead of the HDTV screen they had up. The remarkable detail crammed into Rogue Squadron could easily get lost.
The controller was a bit less awkward than that of the N64, but it's not the kind of thing you'll get used to right away.
My affection for Nintendo left over from the original NES will probably lead me to pick up a Cube after the holidays. But even after an hour's worth of hands-on I'm not exactly dying to do so.
Tom's Hardware hasn't always been completely objective... they usually lean towards AMD's side.
Tom has always been outspoken on the whole Intel/Rambus shenanigans, and he was the one who found whatever flaw it was that gave the original P3 1.1Ghz chip to falter.
I think it's safe to say that he wouldn't be badmouthing AMD's product if he hasn't found a decent reason for doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't like seeing all these "What's the point? It won't be as exciting as the Leonid" posts.
I went out for the Leonids last month and didn't quite see the cosmic fireworks that I'd prepared to expect, but it was still something that I'm entirely pleased I did.
I live in downtown Minneapolis, so stargazing is not a common pasttime in these parts. But I went out and sat down on my porch in my bathrobe and boxers at two-thirty in the morning, and just looked up for a half hour or so. I was lucky enough to not be blocked by clouds and I could situate myself so that no street-lights would kill my night vision.
It was magnificent. I saw five falling stars that night. It reminded me of standing in the middle of a field when I was younger in the northern Wisconsin woods-- at a certain point you stop thinking about the science of astronomy or really anything else, and you're just amazed at the vast dark-blue sky.
Is there much of anything out there that can give you that feeling, even now, when you're all grown up? I wish there was more.
If reading a post about a shower once a month on Slashdot will help me know when I can go sit on my porch again and get that feeling, I'm willing to put up with the repetition.
...Do you know how much money I'd pay to get my own fully-functional Death Star? He's about to make a mint.
(Of course, I'd want the first one, as we all know the second one is not yet fully operational.)
...assuming they abandoned the plans for the underground parking lot.
In this day and age it wouldn't surprise me if a company was more irritated at a find like this than anything else, as it presents more rubble for them to clear out, and possibly more media attention that they want.
Where's the profit in archaeology, anyways?
Looking for something on the cheap?
I was a kid who grew up on Nintendo-- unfortunately, like most 6-year-olds I knew, my meager allowance couldn't cover the fifty bucks or so to buy each of the cool games we played at friends' houses. And if you remember the huge library of NES games, you know there was plenty to want.
Anyways, a couple years ago I got my girlfriend at the time an NES console, as hers had broken some years earlier, and about five games from Funcoland. The whole package set me back about thirty-five dollars, and I even included another gift certificate to round it up to an even fifty so she could buy a few I didn't think of.
I spent a whole day devoted to playing Super Mario Bros. 3 straight through, no warping. It was as much fun as I remembered.
And how about the original hockey game, just called "Ice Hockey?" Where there were three different player models: the skinny fast guy, the medium guy, and the fat slow guy?
Excitebike-- Need I say more?
Of course, this is all only applicable if you've got a relative or significant other cool enough to appreciate something other than the shiny graphics of an Xbox or PS2.
But it's fun. Cheap. Never goes out of style. Gotta love it.
Anybody care to imagine the B.O. that's gotta be emanating from this place?
No? Me neither.
On the plus side, there can't be any shortage of munchies lying about this place.
"Futurama" is the best animated show on television today.
Tough to swallow, I know. And this is coming from a guy with over a dozen Simpsons tapes. And I don't think anybody could argue against the fact that The Simpsons is probably the best animated show to ever hit the airwaves-- but even the die-hard fans realize deep down that the show today is a pale imitation of what it once was.
Most of the key creative minds behind the best seasons of The Simpsons-- seasons three to five or six, or so-- have moved on. I've read that even Matt Groening devotes most of his energy these days to Futurama, only keeping a vague guiding hand over his original creation and sitting in on script readings.
Futurama is marvelous. It's clever, consistently fresh, and it's got the spark and bite that The Simpsons has lost. The fact that there was a censored Christmas episode demonstrates a lot-- not that the show is any better for having material worthy of being censored, but simply that the writers are obviously trying to do something different from the norm.
Fox effectively screwed the show when they dumped it to the Sundays-at-7pm slot a few years ago. Most everybody I know who liked the show stopped watching, because it's just an inconvenient time. The ratings are probably abysmal, and Fox probably keeps the show on just to keep Groening happy-- but as long as it's out there somewhere, I'm happy, too. The DVDs should be marvelous.
Let's just hope they don't fall prey to the temptation to overuse celebrity guests like The Simpsons has; at least the Futurama writers tend to use their guests in ways that kinda sorta fit into the story, instead of bland and obvious ass-kissing. With the list that Cohen supplied, at least they're keeping some variety, but it's something worth a little bit of concern.
We all know how reflexive Simpsons fans are, because anybody reading Slashdot either is one or at least knows one. I'm hoping this isn't going to start any sort of flame-war or be seen as pissing on hallowed ground. I'll admit I'm wrong if anybody can describe a Simpsons show from the past three years to me that made them laugh half as hard as the classic, say, Homer Goes to College episode.
Forgive me if this doesn't seem to have much direction, but this is something I've thought a bit about. I'm a student at a private fine arts college, and I'm one of the few there with interests in video games, programming, etc.
Scott McCloud of "Understanding Comics" fame once wrote that art is anything not springing directly from man's need to survive or procreate. In that sense, well, playing video games could be considered an art, but making them stems from a creator's need to earn money, so he can eat, so he can survive-- not art. But there are other, easier ways to make money; the video game creator chooses to make games because he or she is good at it and (hopefully) has an interest in the field. He or she puts personal touches into their work and it's different from what anybody else could do-- art.
It's a tough call, this. Because since Marcel Duchamp put a bicycle wheel upside down on a pedestal almost a hundred years ago and declared that it was art because he said it was, a sort of Pandora's Box has been open: we've got the most liberated sense of art there ever has been (an artist can do anything he wants and try to sell it, really) but we've also got cretins that feel art is simplistic and easy, because they don't understand the thought behind found objects or abstract expressionism or anything else to come along in the twentieth century.
I tried telling a friend while we were in a Renaissance history class about how it seemed to me that the development of 3D engines like Carmack's Quake and Sweeney's Unreal had some interesting parallels to the development of rendering techniques in Italian painting of the 15th century onward. The Italian painters started off with flat images, little depth, and distance was conveyed by placing objects higher on a picture plane-- it was the Wolfenstein era, you could say. But then artists like Giotto (if memory serves) came along, and started figuring out better ways to shade, to manipulate color, and to make objects seem rounded-- to actually occupy a space. The Renaissance of painting started, and it was like the first Quake. And so on and so forth.
Where are we now? Well, the technical craft has all but been mastered in video games; it's not photoreal, so games are somewhere around the middle-18th century, I'd wager. I can't wait until the technical aspect becomes so perfected that it becomes boring to the artists making video games; then the modernist era of videogames begins, and we can see just what kind of creativity these guys really have.
(A note on the above: I'm no expert in the history of painting or the history of games, so the paragraphs above are mostly meant to illustrate the similarities in the goals of the painters and the programmers. Anybody's free to correct me if I'm wrong.)
But then there's the commercial aspects of the video game industry. A lot of games are made for money. It's much like the film industry, I think, where you've got some works that are obviously done to make a buck (the latest Schwarzenegger flick) and then some that are done for the passion of the craft (Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, to name a few of the better of the younger generation, and so on). But it'd be impossible to say that there is no art in the film industry, just because it's driven by money. It applies the same way to video games: Miyamoto's "Pikmin" is art, the new "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" probably is not.
So where am I ending up with all of this? I don't know, I suppose it's all just food for thought. My personal feeling is that video games certainly are art, and it's nothing but snobbery from the elitist old guard that says they're not. You've gotta get with the times.
Code is the paint. Video games are the art.
"Silence can't be bought, only rented."
It wouldn't work. Would IBM really trust a bunch of guys that just did this to them, anyways?
If the hackers were just out to get money from IBM in the first place, it'd probably be considered some form of espionage. Or blackmail. Or whatever you want to call it. Regardless, I'm sure Big Blue can afford the lawyers to kick the hell out of Bond and Clayton if they so choose and if there's any possible legal justification for doing so.
Anybody know if this is going to turn into a DMCA issue?
I can't say I agree with the thought that the new show should be only as good as its original material-- has anybody ever actually read the comics? They just didn't have the spark that the cartoon did.
Of course, the cartoon was probably what Taco meant, in which case-- oh hell yeah. In no particular order, the new show is going to need a few things to match up with Fox's Saturday-morning masterpiece:
1. A running gag along the lines of the "CHA" written on the moon, popping up in episodes that have nothing to do with it anyways.
2. A rehash of "The Tick vs. The Tick" episode-- in which the Tick goes to a superhero bar (complete with Sidekicks' Lounge) and finds that there's another, more psychotic hero that already uses his name.
3. The Human Bullet: whenever things went wrong in The City, he'd be fired from a cannon in his backyard, only to somehow spend so much time in the air as to always show up late. ("Fire me, boy!"
It's nice to know that the legal problems aren't completely robbing the show of its charm-- I remember reading something about problems with Die Fledermaus, for example, so it looks like they've replaced him with "Batmanuel." And I think we can all agree that Patrick Warburton is the best choice for the job, judging from his "Seinfeld" work.
When the show aired, I was young enough to enjoy the cartoon show for what it was, and old enough to still get most of the grown-up jokes. Let's hope the live-action version maintains that delicate balance between smarmy irony and childish charm.
You've got to wonder how far this is going to get without commercial support. If the thing remains pure, then that's great-- but there's only so far it can go.
The internet didn't really pick up until businesses got the idea that they could rape it for all it's worth. Of course, this is what left the researchers feeling like they needed something new in 1996, but it's also probably the reason that it's as widespread as it is today. You can't have a revolution these days if somebody's not coughing up the cash.
Not that using this thing to get a nonexistant ping in Quake 3 isn't a bit of a shame. But it's a bit optimistic to think that the future for Internet2 is as rosy as the article implies, I think.
At the very least, getting some corporations involved in something other than a research capacity would allow them to supply some advertising muscle-- I mean, you'd think somebody in the past five years would have been able to come up with a snappier title than "Internet2."
Yeah, but you know the power consumption would be a hell of a lot higher on the chip that everybody would really want anyways: the Text-to-Barry-White-Speech chip.
"You've got mail, baby."
This isn't going to be particularly interesting until somebody figures out how to stick themselves into a game of Leisure Suit Larry...
Walter Cronkite once said something to the effect that a cat stuck in the tree is news-- the thousands of cats down on the ground are not.
Cat bites dog? Now that would really be something.
Bill Joy, cofounder and chief technologiest of Sun Microsystems, wrote an article for Wired awhile back called "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us."
He said there were three looming dangers to humanity's future: genetics, robotics, and nanotechnologies, largely because they were so accessible to those with less money than it'd take to, say, develop a nuclear weapon.
The article is one of the most well-reasoned examinations of the issue of nanotech and the dangers in the future of technology I've ever read, and it's given extra weight simply by the position and history of the author himself. Check it out at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html. It's long, but it's certainly worth the read.
Doesn't having to re-enter the information every time kind of defeat the purpose of Passport in the first place?
Maybe I'm not getting something here. A service that requires you to do everything it claims to, just to remain secure?
Very cute.
For the record...
I know that Moore's Law talks about the increase of transistors on a chip, not necessarily performance and so on. If you look at my original post, I referred to it as "the widely-misunderstood Moore's Law" for a reason.
I know this. You know this. Just about everybody reading on Slashdot, I'll bet, knows this. But it seems that the general populace that reads about Moore's Law out of Parade Magazine or USA Today probably doesn't know anything about transistors, let alone the way a processor is built, and so when some half-assed journalist writes about doubling transistors-- if he or she gets it correct even then-- John Q. Public at home is going to think "Double the transistors? Well, that must mean it's twice as fast."
I didn't mean that the P4 should be twice as fast in 18 months. I meant that the general perception out there, thanks to the aforementioned uninformed-but-meaning-well journalists, is that it probably should be. So that's where we'd hear the complaining. (If there is any. Note, again, my original post, when I said "Correct me if I'm wrong...")
C'mon, we all read Slashdot. I thought it was just a given that we think we're smarter than everybody else out there that doesn't.
Somebody correct me if I'm getting my dates wrong here, but...
It strikes me that the 3Ghz should be out sooner than the end of next year. It's been a couple months since the 2GHz was out, and so the total time in between there would be somewhere around a year, a year and three months.
The leap from 1Ghz to 2Ghz took considerably less time than that. I know we're all sick of hearing about the widely-misunderstood Moore's Law, but shouldn't somebody out there be screaming bloody murder at this, that it should be out much sooner, that Intel is going to cave in, etc.?
When AMD and Intel first hit the Ghz mark, they both announced that they were going to slow down their schedules, so they weren't left with a bunch of 600Mhz chips laying around while everybody wanted a shiny new 1.xGhz in their box. But there's shortages everywhere right now, so we know that Intel probably doesn't have a warehouse full of unsold P4s somewhere.
Just pointing it out. Maybe we're all getting a bit too spoiled when it comes to speed. Anybody know what's up here?
It's a hairy, chubby grown man wearing a leather mask and chains.
Didn't you see "Pulp Fiction?"
I'm a student at an art school, and I'm in an early-level history of mass communications class. And I'd argue with West if she showed up at my school, and I don't think I'd have too difficult of a time doing it.
It doesn't make too terribly much sense to be blaming the medium for a problem that is the fault of the photographers. Not having enough memory onhand to keep enough images is no different from not bringing along enough film-- and the ability to delete images instantly is actually a benefit, because the photographer can free up space for new shots if something he decides is more important comes along. It sounds obvious, but it's a key difference she glosses over: film can only be used once.
There's always going to be a sort of intrinsic flaw in believing that a camera tells the truth (and at least she acknowledges this fact, when she refers to framing, focus, etc.), because it's a human that's deciding just what's important to shoot. It's possible, I suppose, that it's a problem that photographers are arbitrarily eliminating more work that may prove valuable than they are with traditional techniques, even though I've never read anything that would back it up, and West doesn't seem too interested in providing hard facts to support the claim.
But there are so many benefits to doing it digitally anyways-- the incredibly fast turn-around, for one. And in news, well, that's important. She may as well be making the argument that we shouldn't use television for news, because the networks don't have enough time to digest an issue, like a newspaper would.
What confuses me is that the huge issue that I was expecting to find in the article is glossed over entirely: that a digital image can be so easily manipulated. And I'm not really educated in this department enough to make some Slashdot-worthy arguments, but it strikes me as common sense. If we're worried about a perfect record of the past, that's what we should be discussing. Somebody do me a favor and back me up.
And now, back to my own dissertation, "Why Computers Are Worse Than Typewriters: There's Just No Clacking Noise." This oughta prove to be gangbusters.
I remember the same thing-- that opening weekend grosses were boosted by quite a bit because the Episode 1 trailer was attached. (For the record, though, in my area at least, it wasn't attached to Meet Joe Black-- a minor tragedy, because anticipation for the trailer was the reason I agreed to take my girlfriend to MJB in the first place).
I doubt it'll be quite such a noticable effect this time around, though, for a few reasons:
1. Star Wars fever has cooled considerably. We're not waiting here after a 16-year buildup-- it's only been a couple since Episode 1.
2. Considering the general feeling of disappointment left over from Episode 1 among the hard-core fans-- who are the ones that would pay for another movie just to see the new trailer-- it probably won't be such an event.
3. Monsters, Inc. and Harry Potter are going to do some big fat business in the first place. Any boost they get from the new teaser is probably just another drop in the bucket. I know I'm more excited to see 90 minutes of Pixar than two minutes of Lucasfilm, and I doubt you'd be able to find a kid in America that would disagree.
Of course, all of this is rambling based on knowledge gained from my Entertainment Weekly subscription, so it's all up for debate.
I went to the Minneapolis CubeClub with ticket in hand, which a friend had printed out for us from Nintendo's website or whatnot.
Didn't need it. At all. We just walked right in. I doubt Nintendo is all that concerned about limiting the number of people that get to see the Cube at this point-- they're probably only saying that admission's not guaranteed in case they need to limit for fire codes or something (it was a pretty small space). But, again, are they really going to turn people away?
Anybody that's heading out for any of the other cities, don't go out of your way to track down an admission ticket. Even if they cared, the people at the event were amazingly friendly and polite. You could chat your way in, if things get really dirty.
I played a few of the games at the Mall of America on Friday night, and on the whole, it was impressive, if not mind-blowing.
Luigi's Mansion, the new Smash Bros. game, and Pikmin looked pretty decent, but far and away the most impressive game showing was Rogue Squadron. (There were a few games missing-- Zelda and Metroid aren't due out for awhile, so don't expect them in any of the other cities if you go.)
Unfortunately, even the ones there weren't marvelous. There's nothing on deck that I saw that would make me want to buy a GameCube come November 18th, even though it's a hundred bucks cheaper than Xbox or PS2. There's no flagship title yet-- it's missing a Metal Gear Solid 2 or a Halo.
Of course, Nintendo had everything running under the best possible conditions-- you have to wonder what the games will look like on regular televisions, instead of the HDTV screen they had up. The remarkable detail crammed into Rogue Squadron could easily get lost.
The controller was a bit less awkward than that of the N64, but it's not the kind of thing you'll get used to right away.
My affection for Nintendo left over from the original NES will probably lead me to pick up a Cube after the holidays. But even after an hour's worth of hands-on I'm not exactly dying to do so.
Tom's Hardware hasn't always been completely objective... they usually lean towards AMD's side.
Tom has always been outspoken on the whole Intel/Rambus shenanigans, and he was the one who found whatever flaw it was that gave the original P3 1.1Ghz chip to falter.
I think it's safe to say that he wouldn't be badmouthing AMD's product if he hasn't found a decent reason for doing so.