Besides the fact that in March's NewType USA, an interview with Koichi Mashimo (MADLAX's director and the head of Bee Train) let on that MADLAX is the second part of "a trilogy of works featuring pistol-packing babes", there's some more immediate comparisons you can make. Noir tends to be very serious, but Madlax makes up for it by being more fun. Noir is the long sunset roadtrip speeding across the beautiful countryside, Madlax is the wild loopy rollercoaster ride that you keep taking until your head spins -- in a good way.
But I've come up with what I think is the best summary of them all:
Madlax is Noir's mischevious Evil Antimatter Twin, but without the goatees.
This comes up on AVSForum all the time. In a nutshell: the HDTV you get over-the-air, that gets beamed to your satellite box, or zapped to your cable box is a compressed transport stream that fits in the same bandwidth as an old-fashioned analog signal.
The satellite/cable box then decodes that stream to produce the full HDTV-resolution signal, that gets delivered to your monitor (either via analog component or digital DVI/HDMI).
That full-resolution bandwidth required to re-digitize/re-encode the full bandwidth signal to a recordable transport stream is currently beyond the capabilities of any pc-based solution under that $2000 price-point.
There are only two close-to-usable solutions so far: IEEE-1394 keeps it's delivery from device to device as the compressed transport stream. The problem being that most transport streams from these devices are encrypted. Some aren't. You might get lucky. The other is to find a tuner tuner card that can decode the QAM signals that cable companies use. The problem being again, that most cable companies encrypt those signals (at least those you can't get over-the-air anyhow).
Once upon a time in the 90's there was a multimedia authoring tool called Icon Author. An editor to drag 'n drop objects to build the logic "engine", and an editor drag 'n drop interface objects that the engine interacts with.
Though it was geared for training/CBT, it was really quite powerful; we were able to build all sorts of flexible simulations and easily reusable engines that we could just replace the interface and content at will. And it made it possible that non-programmers could do the customizations, and concentrate on the creativity and the content.
When you get "visual programming" confused with the current MS "Visual" whatever environments, it's easy to scoff. But after experiencing Icon Author, it's easier for me to make the visualization of the potential behind what Gates is saying. And since I approach tasks more visually than algorithmically, I'd be a lot more productive, I'd bet.
> I'm much more interested in channels like > SciFi, BBC America, IFC, and those wacky > independent channels like Worldlink TV.
I'm with ya on the "wacky independent channel" notion (Newsworld Int'l and all 3 CSpans are my tops), but therin lies the problem. These "fringe" channels are likely only on your system as part of a "bundle". They're likely not truly independent. An Adam Sandler movie fan would likely say "Screw IFC, I want FXMC."
And there's a lot more Adam Sandler fans than IFC fans...:)
Xerox was forced to abandon their SOHO products a little while back. The "razor-blade" model didn't work on a class of products where you could just chuck the machine and get a replacement with mo' "dpi" on sale at Office Max for the same price as a new cartridge.
And since you can't get free human support for those products anymore at their call centers, Xerox probably isn't concerned about the cost of supporting "unofficial" uses. Yeah, there's probably still a trickle of "razor-blade" revenue still coming in, but compared to the cost of buying rights to that Blue Koala painting they plastered everywhere to sell the things, they've probably written all that off long ago.
you could be a great computer animator and be handicapped by the abilities of your computer
A great computer animator can achieve fantastic results on an M-5 Anti-aircraft Gun Director if they want to. All animation is creating the illusion of motion over a series of stills. Great animators take that further by introducing suspension of belief, making you forget the methods or the technology behind the illusion and be drawn into what the illusion creates in your mind.
For character animators, that means you react deep down and emotionally to the illusion as if it were actually alive, and forget for the moment that there are a bunch of pixels that took 20 minutes to render flitting by at 1/24th seconds.
How accurately light reflects off of a variety surfaces is only important if your attempt to suspend disbelief depends on it. If you're depending on it, and you don't do it right, then yeah, it interferes with the illusion and sticks out like a sore thumb. But the proverbial "great animator" will work within, and even exploit, the limitations of their technology; they won't be handicapped by it.
Most (big) companies have a policy that managers can only confirm the employment, start, and termination dates of former employees. The legal issues are thorny* when a not-quite-positive reference is given for a former employee. So the policy is you can't even give -good- reference either.
(* by "thorny" I mean "their lawyers will eat you alive")
So, always make sure, if you're good, to get personal references; there's usually no policy about co-workers. If you think your boss will sing your praises, well, they probably can't.
And the color of the skies in these so-called worlds is....?
Just joshin'. But really what there is would be better described as a race towards the lowest common denominator more than a levelling of the playing field. Because this playing field is like the Grand Tetons...
While most Slashdot readers and other technically-aware folks may feel that their complaints about the intrusiveness of the technology turned them around, that was probably just a drop in the bucket. What most likely happened is that their call-volume spiked with the scads of "normal" mom 'n pop users who got stuck and confused when that technolgy got in the way. Probably spiked such that it cost more in calls than it did even in their most gloomy piracy forecasts.
Universities need a much richer courseware system, one that handles a variety of tools (discussion, quizes, content management, tools that promote good pedigogical practices, etc.), and performs a variety of administrative functions (like authentication / authorization, grouping, reports & statistics, unified UI across tools, grading, etc.).
This sort of thing was supposed to be encompassed (again, in the corporate/military world) by a buzzword acronym from a couple of years ago: "LCMS" - Learning Content Management System, combined with a much more venerable acronym "LMS" - Learning Management System. Of course, lately, companies that offer one claim to also offer the other ("You got your LMS in my LCMS!" "You got your LCMS in my LMS!").
Probably too big to ship the whole thing...:) But I've got almost everything but the ethernet board. i286, clikclock, Win 3.0, a zillion disks, and a bunch of LA50 carts. And other goodies.
If you're willing to drive to the Rochester NY area, you can have everything intact.
I guess another thing lacking in UK Universities is the ability to communicate directly without humour, wit, or sarcasm... we Americans are apparantly are unencumbered by such subtlies.
I dunno, I bet Metropolis got skipped due to its really crummy walk-cycles...:)
Re:The thermostat that controls your house heat. .
on
Immobile Robots
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, but what if your thermostat knew that the reason the temperature was a tad low was because your front door was open while you were lugging in a case or two of beer, and that the temperature would equalize soon enough after you closed it, and no need to waste fuel firing up the furnace just now.
Another oversimplification, sure, but the real thrust behind the article is that most of the functionality we're familiar with is based on a simple "if a then do b" logic, but hasn't involved more complicated heuristics to take into account more complicated, situational issues that fall outside of the initial assumptions on how the system should react to input.
Re:When it's really a war is one thing...
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 1
I hearby revise my remark to say "this country has never _consistently_ done it right...":)
(nothing like jotting off a quick post between conf. calls to not have a chance to properly edit myself!)
IANAH(istorian), but obviously there have been times when war was properly and justly declared and sometimes when it might have been a little dubious (though maybe not at the time). But they were _declared_ wars. But we've had our share of un-declared conflicts since the beginning, so I guess that's what I was driving at.:)
When it's really a war is one thing...
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 1
"War" is a specially provided-for constitutional state that requires a real declaration. Then there's a lot of things that, while frustrating, are a little more reasonable.
Saying the words "we're at war" over and over again doesn't make it a war.
Of course, this country has never really done it right ever since the "undeclared war" against France and the Alien & Sedition Act. And the press has been just as nosy as well (and far more outrageous than some tend to think of the press today).
"Communications officer"?
on
HighWLAN
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· Score: 1
If I ever get to the point where I'd call a roadtrip passenger in my X a "communications officer", you have permission to shoot me. Shoot me dead.
Actually, on a serious note, being a slave to physics isn't the recipe for a good game any more than it is for a good cartoon. It's the "Suspension of Disbelief". Animation has stretch & squash, anticipation, release, & followthrough, all exaggerated not just for comic effect, but a lot of the time when you don't really notice it, because that's the stuff that makes things seem _alive_
Slashdot Mirror
Xerox recently announced a "viral" marketing campaign involving superhero characters that extoll the virtues of solid ink printing. I shit you not.
IncredibleInc
and web surfing is a royal pita on the blackberry having to click twice on every link.
Hint: click-hold substitutes for click-twice.
Just don't get used to click-hold for the back-button; that'll knock you back to the desktop.
Besides the fact that in March's NewType USA, an interview with Koichi Mashimo (MADLAX's director and the head of Bee Train) let on that MADLAX is the second part of "a trilogy of works featuring pistol-packing babes", there's some more immediate comparisons you can make. Noir tends to be very serious, but Madlax makes up for it by being more fun. Noir is the long sunset roadtrip speeding across the beautiful countryside, Madlax is the wild loopy rollercoaster ride that you keep taking until your head spins -- in a good way. But I've come up with what I think is the best summary of them all: Madlax is Noir's mischevious Evil Antimatter Twin, but without the goatees.
Capitalists don't intentionally kill their customers. It's not profitable.
No, they kill their competitors!
(or the competitors of their customers; after all, the customer is always right!)
This comes up on AVSForum all the time. In a nutshell: the HDTV you get over-the-air, that gets beamed to your satellite box, or zapped to your cable box is a compressed transport stream that fits in the same bandwidth as an old-fashioned analog signal.
:)
The satellite/cable box then decodes that stream to produce the full HDTV-resolution signal, that gets delivered to your monitor (either via analog component or digital DVI/HDMI).
That full-resolution bandwidth required to re-digitize/re-encode the full bandwidth signal to a recordable transport stream is currently beyond the capabilities of any pc-based solution under that $2000 price-point.
There are only two close-to-usable solutions so far: IEEE-1394 keeps it's delivery from device to device as the compressed transport stream. The problem being that most transport streams from these devices are encrypted. Some aren't. You might get lucky. The other is to find a tuner tuner card that can decode the QAM signals that cable companies use. The problem being again, that most cable companies encrypt those signals (at least those you can't get over-the-air anyhow).
Check back in about five years.
Once upon a time in the 90's there was a multimedia authoring tool called Icon Author. An editor to drag 'n drop objects to build the logic "engine", and an editor drag 'n drop interface objects that the engine interacts with.
Though it was geared for training/CBT, it was really quite powerful; we were able to build all sorts of flexible simulations and easily reusable engines that we could just replace the interface and content at will. And it made it possible that non-programmers could do the customizations, and concentrate on the creativity and the content.
When you get "visual programming" confused with the current MS "Visual" whatever environments, it's easy to scoff. But after experiencing Icon Author, it's easier for me to make the visualization of the potential behind what Gates is saying. And since I approach tasks more visually than algorithmically, I'd be a lot more productive, I'd bet.
> I'm much more interested in channels like
:)
> SciFi, BBC America, IFC, and those wacky
> independent channels like Worldlink TV.
I'm with ya on the "wacky independent channel" notion (Newsworld Int'l and all 3 CSpans are my tops), but therin lies the problem. These "fringe" channels are likely only on your system as part of a "bundle". They're likely not truly independent. An Adam Sandler movie fan would likely say "Screw IFC, I want FXMC."
And there's a lot more Adam Sandler fans than IFC fans...
Xerox was forced to abandon their SOHO products a little while back. The "razor-blade" model didn't work on a class of products where you could just chuck the machine and get a replacement with mo' "dpi" on sale at Office Max for the same price as a new cartridge.
And since you can't get free human support for those products anymore at their call centers, Xerox probably isn't concerned about the cost of supporting "unofficial" uses. Yeah, there's probably still a trickle of "razor-blade" revenue still coming in, but compared to the cost of buying rights to that Blue Koala painting they plastered everywhere to sell the things, they've probably written all that off long ago.
you could be a great computer animator and be handicapped by the abilities of your computer
A great computer animator can achieve fantastic results on an M-5 Anti-aircraft Gun Director if they want to. All animation is creating the illusion of motion over a series of stills. Great animators take that further by introducing suspension of belief, making you forget the methods or the technology behind the illusion and be drawn into what the illusion creates in your mind.
For character animators, that means you react deep down and emotionally to the illusion as if it were actually alive, and forget for the moment that there are a bunch of pixels that took 20 minutes to render flitting by at 1/24th seconds.
How accurately light reflects off of a variety surfaces is only important if your attempt to suspend disbelief depends on it. If you're depending on it, and you don't do it right, then yeah, it interferes with the illusion and sticks out like a sore thumb. But the proverbial "great animator" will work within, and even exploit, the limitations of their technology; they won't be handicapped by it.
Most (big) companies have a policy that managers can only confirm the employment, start, and termination dates of former employees. The legal issues are thorny* when a not-quite-positive reference is given for a former employee. So the policy is you can't even give -good- reference either.
(* by "thorny" I mean "their lawyers will eat you alive")
So, always make sure, if you're good, to get personal references; there's usually no policy about co-workers. If you think your boss will sing your praises, well, they probably can't.
And the color of the skies in these so-called worlds is....?
Just joshin'. But really what there is would be better described as a race towards the lowest common denominator more than a levelling of the playing field. Because this playing field is like the Grand Tetons...
(heh, I said "Teton"!)
While most Slashdot readers and other technically-aware folks may feel that their complaints about the intrusiveness of the technology turned them around, that was probably just a drop in the bucket. What most likely happened is that their call-volume spiked with the scads of "normal" mom 'n pop users who got stuck and confused when that technolgy got in the way. Probably spiked such that it cost more in calls than it did even in their most gloomy piracy forecasts.
This sort of thing was supposed to be encompassed (again, in the corporate/military world) by a buzzword acronym from a couple of years ago: "LCMS" - Learning Content Management System, combined with a much more venerable acronym "LMS" - Learning Management System. Of course, lately, companies that offer one claim to also offer the other ("You got your LMS in my LCMS!" "You got your LCMS in my LMS!").
Dude, Where's my Sandworm?!
Also keep in mind that Switzerland is .0043 times the size of the US and its population is .0262 that of the US.
You'll need to put that in units we can all understand over here... How many "Rhode Islands" is that exactly?
Probably too big to ship the whole thing... :) But I've got almost everything but the ethernet board. i286, clikclock, Win 3.0, a zillion disks, and a bunch of LA50 carts. And other goodies.
If you're willing to drive to the Rochester NY area, you can have everything intact.
Send email.
I guess another thing lacking in UK Universities is the ability to communicate directly without humour, wit, or sarcasm... we Americans are apparantly are unencumbered by such subtlies.
:)
I dunno, I bet Metropolis got skipped due to its really crummy walk-cycles... :)
Yeah, but what if your thermostat knew that the reason the temperature was a tad low was because your front door was open while you were lugging in a case or two of beer, and that the temperature would equalize soon enough after you closed it, and no need to waste fuel firing up the furnace just now. Another oversimplification, sure, but the real thrust behind the article is that most of the functionality we're familiar with is based on a simple "if a then do b" logic, but hasn't involved more complicated heuristics to take into account more complicated, situational issues that fall outside of the initial assumptions on how the system should react to input.
But because Photoshop et al are so very memory intensive, they really don't work particuarly well in VM environments.
Dude, Nietzche's getting a Dell! -Steve
I hearby revise my remark to say "this country has never _consistently_ done it right..." :)
(nothing like jotting off a quick post between conf. calls to not have a chance to properly edit myself!)
IANAH(istorian), but obviously there have been times when war was properly and justly declared and sometimes when it might have been a little dubious (though maybe not at the time). But they were _declared_ wars. But we've had our share of un-declared conflicts since the beginning, so I guess that's what I was driving at. :)
"War" is a specially provided-for constitutional state that requires a real declaration. Then there's a lot of things that, while frustrating, are a little more reasonable. Saying the words "we're at war" over and over again doesn't make it a war. Of course, this country has never really done it right ever since the "undeclared war" against France and the Alien & Sedition Act. And the press has been just as nosy as well (and far more outrageous than some tend to think of the press today).
If I ever get to the point where I'd call a roadtrip passenger in my X a "communications officer", you have permission to shoot me. Shoot me dead.
Yeah, well here it is! Timing for Animation
:)
Actually, on a serious note, being a slave to physics isn't the recipe for a good game any more than it is for a good cartoon. It's the "Suspension of Disbelief". Animation has stretch & squash, anticipation, release, & followthrough, all exaggerated not just for comic effect, but a lot of the time when you don't really notice it, because that's the stuff that makes things seem _alive_