"That is exactly why it is about freedom of speech and censorship. Your idea of what constitutes" decency" is not absolute. Decency is not a measurable thing, but a concept. It is a judgement that is entirely qualitative in nature. What, objectively, is indecent about Janet Jackson's breast?"
The fact that she showed it on a network that has regulations saying "no you can't show it."
Showing her breast in this scenario isn't free speech.
"Using point sources on obviously diffuse light sources may give crisp, clear shadows, and a faster render speed, but it makes the raytrace less realistic and less impressive than the original."
Give them a break. As it is, it took them 20 cpus to make this work. Area lighting (you were calling it Diffuse lighting, area lighting is the cg term usually...) requires an array of point lights to make the soft shadows you want. Yep, they're more realistic, but they are an order of mangitude harder to compute.
"If they wanted to show off their real-time raytracing using point-sorces they should have designed some levels that matched the ray tracing to the visible lightsource. "
I'd love to hear of what you'd think would be a good example of a level that utilizes lights that have a physical size of 0 by 0 meters. This is not an "f-u!" challenge, but a genuine curiosity. As a 3d artist, I've yet to make something that wouldn't benefit from area lighting.
"Is it just me, or did that look much worse than standard Q3?"
Yes. The reason why is they turned off one of the texturing passes. Q3 uses an extra drawing pass with B&W textures to make 'shadows' on the walls. Why'd they do this? I imagine because of the lighting effects in the game. If a flash goes off, you don't want the shadowed area staying dark. Just don't draw that shadow texture, and you get nice brightly lit wall caused by a rocket. (I apologize if that doesn't make sense. For a clearer idea, go into your video options and set the lighting effects from shadow maps to vertex only. You'll get similar looking visuals to what's in the video.)
So, to summarize, because they turned that feature off, the rooms don't look so dramatic. As a 3D artist, I can tell you that from a technical point of view, what they did is damn cool. However, this is a technical achievement, not an artistic one. So it is not surprising that they weren't able to make up for what they turned off.
"Why exactly anyone would decide that exposing a mammary gland is half time entertainment, and why anyone would actually care afterwards, is still a mystery to both myself and my daughter."
Err, are you male? Mammary glands cause underwear tents. That's the problem.
In any event, I do agree, it was way over-sensationalized. If there was any real damage caused by that half-time show, then the media in general should foot the bill for making sure we got to see it over and over again for an entire week. I'm not mad at Janet or the network that ran the Superbowl, but CNN, shame on you.
"I am pretty certain that we don't need a governing body telling us what is decent and what isn't."
In the context of the Janet Jackson media sensation, I agree. In the context of the FCC demanding so many hours of educational programming, I disagree.
I'm not quite sold on the idea of abolishing the FCC. There are reasons to be annoyed by them, but there are reasons to appreciate why they're there. This will become rather apparent in a couple of years when it's difficult to get wireless networking going because there are no real restrictions on setting up hotspots.
They're hosting screengrabs and a big video file, and the site's still holding up? Well now we all know what they did with all those machines they used for the demo!
"He couldn't play/didn't appreciate the original Zelda? IMO he shouldn't be allowed within the same building as a team that's working on a new one."
That's a bit of an overreaction if you ask me. His complaints are more or less legitimate. That game doesn't really have the sense of style that the SNES game he did like had. The sense of direction in that game, at least from initial viewing, is virtually non-existent. Remember the SNES game whose title escapes me at the moment? It immediately immerses you into a story.
Anyhoo, I don't want to spend too long going over that. There's a difference between saying "I didn't like it" and "I hated every single thing about it." He didn't say the latter, but his comment is being interpreted that way.
Nevermind! After a few hours of studying the page, I tried my Maniac Mansion technique of randomly clicking in places. Figured out how to enter! Now if I only I could find a Spanish dictionary...
"I don't see the differentiation, I guess, between an "XBox" game and a "PC" game. Aren't they using the same API's, the same fundamental OS, the same principles of development?"
APIs and OS's are not the dividing factor between a PC game and an XBOX game.
"Why the differentiation, really, when under the covers, XBox == Microsofts Gaming PC?"
Why isn't this blindingly obvious? You're comparing a general purpose computing device to a focused game machine. No KB and mouse for the XBOX. No common game pad for PC. PC games need to be installed. XBOX games have a fixed resolution. PC games need to be made to run on a variety of hardware. XBOX games need to be made for only one type of hardware. Etc.
But that really isn't the issue, is it? Unreal Tournament 04 is a lot more fun on a PC, whereas Soul Calibur is a game that would work a lot better on the XBOX.
Yes, PCs and consoles are very different machines. Having similar internal organs doesn't mean they're alike either on the development side or on the player's side.
The point is that there's nothing wrong with the "If it works..." model.
Bashing MS for 'lack of innovation' is rather tired these days. They have their moments. They have their blunders. So does every other industry leading company out there. Nobody spews innovation from every pore, especailly the Open Source Community. (Note: That's a reference to the previous post, not some blind cheap shot.)
Frankly, innovation can be just as much about implementation as it is about concept. Yeah, the Newton was cool. But does that really take the wind out of Palm Pilot's sails? It's easy to oversimplify and say there was nothing innovative about the product, but you have to overlook that Palm single-handedly created a new market measured in the millions in order to dismiss them so readily. Like or hate Microsoft, Office is pretty damn cool. Spreadsheets have been done before. Todo/Task lists have been done before. Word processing has been done before. Etc. But I can copy/paste from a Spreadsheet into a Task item, and then modify the numbers inside of it. My PocketPC will connect to my tasklisk and synchronize with it. If I copy/paste from Word in to Frontpage, it keeps all the formatting etc. Each of those features may not have been invented by MS, but collectively, it is very unique. Hence the reason why Office is so popular comes sharply into focus.
Getting back onto the main topic that we're discussing here, I do agree with the idea lack of innovation is going to hurt MS. Truth be told, I use Office 2000 still. Though I do play with some of the nicer features of it, there's nothing new that's come along that would make me want to get the latest version, short of security fixes that is. (ouch.) They either need to diversify into a new product line, or come up with something really really unique and interesting. Unfortunately, I'm having a VERY difficult time imagining what MS could do to make the latest version of Office a must-have. I dunno... maybe make PocketPC synchronization better. Ugh. (Hmm actually the PocketPC, given another generation or two, could breath renewed life into office.... but that's a rather theoretical discussion..)
"Star Trek vs Star Wars is like cat shit versus dog shit. "
No no, you don't understand. I don't mean 'which is better' I mean 'who would win if the Federation and the Empire got into a fight'. It's more like Milhouse vs. PPaul Pfiefier.
"I've got it the ultimate virus aquisition prevention system...
Whenever news of a worm is reported on Slashdot, the computer is locked down with the network connection halted, the disk drives unpowered, all processing stopped, and the video output suspsended. A nice side effect is that power consumption of the system is near zero when in this mode. "
I'd really like to have a few words with the guy who modded this 'Interesting'. His computer is probably off now, though.
"How do they think, that this will improve the situation? Look at what TODAY's Gimp, Photoshop, and others can do... All I would need to do is stick with a current version and not upgrade, if I really wanted to counterfeit money on my own. And if you would integrate this into the printers, then I'll just print the banknote in two or three passes (always just print another part of the banknote so that the printer will never get to see the whole thing in one go)."
Doom and gloom, doom and gloom. You're missing the point entirely. This isn't about stopping the serious counterfitters, it's about putting a roadblock in the way of people who buy their new fancy Epson printer and think "Ooh neat, I can print money!" If it doesn't work the first time, it stands to reason that it could turn a lot of people away from it.
Consider this: Millions and millions of inkjet printers out there, and they're only gonna get better.
" How did this man grow two extra thumbs to key in those 80,000 messages?;) "
Heh. He probably just hooked up his phone to his laptop and sent the messages through it. The first time I hooked up my T68i to my laptop and got all the software installed, my instant messages appeared in Outlook. It'd be REAL easy to keep sending messages over and over again that way.
" I've always thought of/. as a very pro-linux community...l"
Who cares what the community jizzes in their shorts about? It's about target audience, and quite a few people read Slashdot. You guys nee those ads for this site to stay alive. If there's concern over MS putting money into spreading 'FUD' (I'll shorten that term to 'marketing') then maybe the community should put some money into a big pot to run some OSS commercials.
Instead of boycotting Linuxtoday, pay to get an anti-MS ad up there. Right battle, wrong battle plan.
"I don't want a camera phone with a bad camera interface, crappy resolution, limited features, tiny memory and nonexistant output choices."
I'm so sick of hearing this. "I'm too good for a camera phone!"
Resolution: 640 by 480 is a perfectly acceptable resolution for checking out cool stuff on the web, but it's not good enough for you as a camera that you take with you all the time. Yeah, you're not going to take family portraits with it, but I know for a fact you do not have a $500 camera in your pocket while you're reading my post here. The resolution is just fine for grabbing those candid moments. I have a bunch of photos of my nephew on my phone right now captured while he was being silly at a restaraunt.
Camera interface: My cell phone has a 'camera' button, and I press the enter button to take a photo. My digital camera has to be turned on and the little lens thing opened to start. Can't speak for every camera, but I can actually get to photos more quickly and easily with my phone.
Limited features: Legitimate complaint. To be fair, though, camera phones are far more compact than digital cameras with the bells and whistles you want. You're getting portable with this, and you're getting always got it.
Non-existent output choices: What? The images are saved via JPEG. You can 1.) Take your memory card out and put it in your reader, 2.) use the IR port to beam the photos, 3.) use bluetooth to get the images off, 4.) some phones have a sync cable. Non-existent output choices? You'd be hard pressed just to find a dc with wireless options. Whatever.
Nobody's selling these camera phones as a replacement for your digital camera. They do what they're designed to do just fine. The best thing is, it doesn't add to the size of the phone. Can you honestly tell me that a fellow geek wouldn't be able to find a use for this?
"Hmmm, let's see, about 600 calories in a Big Mac, an average of 12 songs on a CD, so that's about 7200 calories you will need to consume in order to get an album's worth of music (and I'm not including the calories from the fries and softdrink). Does this offer also include a free gym membership?"
You do not have to consume the food in order to get the free song. Therefore, your math is completely wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
It really is hard to call it censorship when we all know what is under her clothes. Compare that to the great firewall of china, and well...
"That is exactly why it is about freedom of speech and censorship. Your idea of what constitutes" decency" is not absolute. Decency is not a measurable thing, but a concept. It is a judgement that is entirely qualitative in nature. What, objectively, is indecent about Janet Jackson's breast?"
The fact that she showed it on a network that has regulations saying "no you can't show it."
Showing her breast in this scenario isn't free speech.
"Using point sources on obviously diffuse light sources may give crisp, clear shadows, and a faster render speed, but it makes the raytrace less realistic and less impressive than the original."
Give them a break. As it is, it took them 20 cpus to make this work. Area lighting (you were calling it Diffuse lighting, area lighting is the cg term usually...) requires an array of point lights to make the soft shadows you want. Yep, they're more realistic, but they are an order of mangitude harder to compute.
"If they wanted to show off their real-time raytracing using point-sorces they should have designed some levels that matched the ray tracing to the visible lightsource. "
I'd love to hear of what you'd think would be a good example of a level that utilizes lights that have a physical size of 0 by 0 meters. This is not an "f-u!" challenge, but a genuine curiosity. As a 3d artist, I've yet to make something that wouldn't benefit from area lighting.
"Is it just me, or did that look much worse than standard Q3?"
Yes. The reason why is they turned off one of the texturing passes. Q3 uses an extra drawing pass with B&W textures to make 'shadows' on the walls. Why'd they do this? I imagine because of the lighting effects in the game. If a flash goes off, you don't want the shadowed area staying dark. Just don't draw that shadow texture, and you get nice brightly lit wall caused by a rocket. (I apologize if that doesn't make sense. For a clearer idea, go into your video options and set the lighting effects from shadow maps to vertex only. You'll get similar looking visuals to what's in the video.)
So, to summarize, because they turned that feature off, the rooms don't look so dramatic. As a 3D artist, I can tell you that from a technical point of view, what they did is damn cool. However, this is a technical achievement, not an artistic one. So it is not surprising that they weren't able to make up for what they turned off.
That's the problem with tech demos, sorry.
"Why exactly anyone would decide that exposing a mammary gland is half time entertainment, and why anyone would actually care afterwards, is still a mystery to both myself and my daughter."
Err, are you male? Mammary glands cause underwear tents. That's the problem.
In any event, I do agree, it was way over-sensationalized. If there was any real damage caused by that half-time show, then the media in general should foot the bill for making sure we got to see it over and over again for an entire week. I'm not mad at Janet or the network that ran the Superbowl, but CNN, shame on you.
"I am pretty certain that we don't need a governing body telling us what is decent and what isn't."
In the context of the Janet Jackson media sensation, I agree. In the context of the FCC demanding so many hours of educational programming, I disagree.
I'm not quite sold on the idea of abolishing the FCC. There are reasons to be annoyed by them, but there are reasons to appreciate why they're there. This will become rather apparent in a couple of years when it's difficult to get wireless networking going because there are no real restrictions on setting up hotspots.
They're hosting screengrabs and a big video file, and the site's still holding up? Well now we all know what they did with all those machines they used for the demo!
"He couldn't play/didn't appreciate the original Zelda? IMO he shouldn't be allowed within the same building as a team that's working on a new one."
That's a bit of an overreaction if you ask me. His complaints are more or less legitimate. That game doesn't really have the sense of style that the SNES game he did like had. The sense of direction in that game, at least from initial viewing, is virtually non-existent. Remember the SNES game whose title escapes me at the moment? It immediately immerses you into a story.
Anyhoo, I don't want to spend too long going over that. There's a difference between saying "I didn't like it" and "I hated every single thing about it." He didn't say the latter, but his comment is being interpreted that way.
Nevermind! After a few hours of studying the page, I tried my Maniac Mansion technique of randomly clicking in places. Figured out how to enter! Now if I only I could find a Spanish dictionary...
I can't enter the site. I'm not Spanish, British, or German. :(
"I don't see the differentiation, I guess, between an "XBox" game and a "PC" game. Aren't they using the same API's, the same fundamental OS, the same principles of development?"
APIs and OS's are not the dividing factor between a PC game and an XBOX game.
"Why the differentiation, really, when under the covers, XBox == Microsofts Gaming PC?"
Why isn't this blindingly obvious? You're comparing a general purpose computing device to a focused game machine. No KB and mouse for the XBOX. No common game pad for PC. PC games need to be installed. XBOX games have a fixed resolution. PC games need to be made to run on a variety of hardware. XBOX games need to be made for only one type of hardware. Etc.
But that really isn't the issue, is it? Unreal Tournament 04 is a lot more fun on a PC, whereas Soul Calibur is a game that would work a lot better on the XBOX.
Yes, PCs and consoles are very different machines. Having similar internal organs doesn't mean they're alike either on the development side or on the player's side.
" those are not MS innovations."
The point is that there's nothing wrong with the "If it works..." model.
Bashing MS for 'lack of innovation' is rather tired these days. They have their moments. They have their blunders. So does every other industry leading company out there. Nobody spews innovation from every pore, especailly the Open Source Community. (Note: That's a reference to the previous post, not some blind cheap shot.)
Frankly, innovation can be just as much about implementation as it is about concept. Yeah, the Newton was cool. But does that really take the wind out of Palm Pilot's sails? It's easy to oversimplify and say there was nothing innovative about the product, but you have to overlook that Palm single-handedly created a new market measured in the millions in order to dismiss them so readily. Like or hate Microsoft, Office is pretty damn cool. Spreadsheets have been done before. Todo/Task lists have been done before. Word processing has been done before. Etc. But I can copy/paste from a Spreadsheet into a Task item, and then modify the numbers inside of it. My PocketPC will connect to my tasklisk and synchronize with it. If I copy/paste from Word in to Frontpage, it keeps all the formatting etc. Each of those features may not have been invented by MS, but collectively, it is very unique. Hence the reason why Office is so popular comes sharply into focus.
Getting back onto the main topic that we're discussing here, I do agree with the idea lack of innovation is going to hurt MS. Truth be told, I use Office 2000 still. Though I do play with some of the nicer features of it, there's nothing new that's come along that would make me want to get the latest version, short of security fixes that is. (ouch.) They either need to diversify into a new product line, or come up with something really really unique and interesting. Unfortunately, I'm having a VERY difficult time imagining what MS could do to make the latest version of Office a must-have. I dunno... maybe make PocketPC synchronization better. Ugh. (Hmm actually the PocketPC, given another generation or two, could breath renewed life into office.... but that's a rather theoretical discussion..)
"Star Trek vs Star Wars is like cat shit versus dog shit. "
No no, you don't understand. I don't mean 'which is better' I mean 'who would win if the Federation and the Empire got into a fight'. It's more like Milhouse vs. PPaul Pfiefier.
"I've got it the ultimate virus aquisition prevention system...
Whenever news of a worm is reported on Slashdot, the computer is locked down with the network connection halted, the disk drives unpowered, all processing stopped, and the video output suspsended. A nice side effect is that power consumption of the system is near zero when in this mode. "
I'd really like to have a few words with the guy who modded this 'Interesting'. His computer is probably off now, though.
"There's also a summary of a developer's panel, in which the important question "When will Wookiees get Mohawks?" is addressed "
Important... question... ? Now I feel A LOT better about participating in that Star Trek vs. Star Wars debate last week.
"I was born using carrier pigeons and I'll die using carrier pigeons. "
Breaking News: Long-time Slashdot frequenter Anonymous Coward died today in his home after being attacked by a swarm of pigeons.
In other Earth Shattering news, Harry Potter The Prisoner of Azkaban unexpectedly became the top grossing movie of this particular weekend...
"How do they think, that this will improve the situation? Look at
what TODAY's Gimp, Photoshop, and others can do... All I would need
to do is stick with a current version and not upgrade, if I really
wanted to counterfeit money on my own. And if you would integrate
this into the printers, then I'll just print the banknote in two or
three passes (always just print another part of the banknote so
that the printer will never get to see the whole thing in one go)."
Doom and gloom, doom and gloom. You're missing the point entirely. This isn't about stopping the serious counterfitters, it's about putting a roadblock in the way of people who buy their new fancy Epson printer and think "Ooh neat, I can print money!" If it doesn't work the first time, it stands to reason that it could turn a lot of people away from it.
Consider this: Millions and millions of inkjet printers out there, and they're only gonna get better.
" How did this man grow two extra thumbs to key in those 80,000 messages? ;) "
Heh. He probably just hooked up his phone to his laptop and sent the messages through it. The first time I hooked up my T68i to my laptop and got all the software installed, my instant messages appeared in Outlook. It'd be REAL easy to keep sending messages over and over again that way.
"They should be fined just out of poor taste."
:(
Everybody in my theater was fined $8.
" I've always thought of /. as a very pro-linux community...l"
Who cares what the community jizzes in their shorts about? It's about target audience, and quite a few people read Slashdot. You guys nee those ads for this site to stay alive. If there's concern over MS putting money into spreading 'FUD' (I'll shorten that term to 'marketing') then maybe the community should put some money into a big pot to run some OSS commercials.
Instead of boycotting Linuxtoday, pay to get an anti-MS ad up there. Right battle, wrong battle plan.
"I don't want a camera phone with a bad camera interface, crappy resolution, limited features, tiny memory and nonexistant output choices."
I'm so sick of hearing this. "I'm too good for a camera phone!"
Resolution: 640 by 480 is a perfectly acceptable resolution for checking out cool stuff on the web, but it's not good enough for you as a camera that you take with you all the time. Yeah, you're not going to take family portraits with it, but I know for a fact you do not have a $500 camera in your pocket while you're reading my post here. The resolution is just fine for grabbing those candid moments. I have a bunch of photos of my nephew on my phone right now captured while he was being silly at a restaraunt.
Camera interface: My cell phone has a 'camera' button, and I press the enter button to take a photo. My digital camera has to be turned on and the little lens thing opened to start. Can't speak for every camera, but I can actually get to photos more quickly and easily with my phone.
Limited features: Legitimate complaint. To be fair, though, camera phones are far more compact than digital cameras with the bells and whistles you want. You're getting portable with this, and you're getting always got it.
Non-existent output choices: What? The images are saved via JPEG. You can 1.) Take your memory card out and put it in your reader, 2.) use the IR port to beam the photos, 3.) use bluetooth to get the images off, 4.) some phones have a sync cable. Non-existent output choices? You'd be hard pressed just to find a dc with wireless options. Whatever.
Nobody's selling these camera phones as a replacement for your digital camera. They do what they're designed to do just fine. The best thing is, it doesn't add to the size of the phone. Can you honestly tell me that a fellow geek wouldn't be able to find a use for this?
"My microwave is a computer, my bedside alarmclock is a computer."
Microprocesor != the collective understanding of what a computer is. In other words, it's sorta like saying a potato is a french fry.
"My... [pant pant]... porn ... won't stop motion blurring.. [pant pant]"
Put the watch on your other hand!
"In that case you might as well just buy the songs and forego the food part all together. "
Maybe. But if you're buying lunch for your friend or something, you don't have to consume it.
In any event, that comment was meant as satirical.
"Hmmm, let's see, about 600 calories in a Big Mac, an average of 12 songs on a CD, so that's about 7200 calories you will need to consume in order to get an album's worth of music (and I'm not including the calories from the fries and softdrink). Does this offer also include a free gym membership?"
You do not have to consume the food in order to get the free song. Therefore, your math is completely wrong.