"Okay cool, next time I'm hiking someplace and get bitten by a snake or hit by falling rocks, or if I'm out sailing and the boat starts taking on water, I'll just reach for that handy landline."
Wouldn't you have to leave the house or something in order to do any of that?
"I know that was a joke, but I bet many slashdot users (like me) are still more than likely just fans of the idea of linux, than the actually software."
I can't say that's all that surprising. All you have to do is talk about how great and free and open Linux is and suddenly your comment is marked with a nice pretty word like "Insightful". If you're talking about Microsoft and you use words like "monopolist", the same thing happens to your post.
Fortunately, things are more balanced than they used to be. But man, years ago, you always got a +5 Insightful by raising the question of whether or not a new type of computer could run Linux or not. (Hence the "But does it run Linux?" jokes that come along from time to time.)
A lot of people play Slashdot like it's a popularity game. That's why this joke is pretty funny.
Erm. I used to have one of the original. It was okay, but I don't miss it. I liked its simplicity and its battery life. Heck, I even liked all the 3rd party apps out there. But my big beef with it was in giving it something uesful to do. Eventually I settled on AvantGo and Dope Wars. That was kinda neat... but.. meh.
Okay, this is just me, but I really didn't find a use for PDAs until they started coming with wifi built in and support for ginormous memory cards. Heck, I played with a Palm the other day that had a camera built in. How handy is that?
I don't miss the old Palm Pilots, but I do like modern PDAs. They don't feel like a solution in search of a problem.
"We're not keeping the place tidy enough already, and the plants that will survive us are probably slavering at the chance to feed on our rotting corpses. What lovely mulch we'll make."
Mmmm hmmm. So... are the plants going to spontaneously turn carniverous or something?
"Can't an actor put on a highly contrasty suit and act on stage in real time, where video cameras and/or other sensors feed the performance into the computer and turn it into a motion sequence?"
There is software being worked on to do just that. But it's expensive (for now) and it's still not ideal. For one thing, parts of the actor are obscured during a take. The software attempts to work out what was going on from the previous and following frames, but it still requires cleanup. Sometimes it's faster just to rebuild the animation manually.
"Inherently? Why would it take any more than "several minutes" once the character is modeled, textured, and articulated? "
This is a little tough to explain without showing you on screen what actually goes into the animation process. The first thing to remember is that the human body has a LOT of articulated points. Not just in the extremities, but in the face, too. There are a lot of things to move around. Then there's the task of getting them to move the right way. If you pull the character's waist around, do you want the feet to stay affixed to the ground or are you moving him to a new position? Then there's the matter of getting the motion of the character just right. This is the most intensive part. A lot of time is spent going over the animation again and again and again testing it. There is no 'got it in one take!' with character animation. Everything you do creates ripples elsewhere in the animation, and it all has to be tidied up.
I don't know if I'm explaining this very clearly or not, apologies if I missed the mark. But, I can tell you as an animator, it is inherently labor intensive work. Humans are very complex creatures. Capturing their likeness in an animation requires a LOT of attention to detail. Compound that with the fact that there are heirarchical and physics problems to boot. No easy chore. Pixar animators, for example, crank out a whopping 6 seconds of footage a week. That's not much, but by the time they've gone there, they've roughed it out, tweaked it, gotten it approved, and from there they've worked on the final animation. In that case, though, they're not just creating animation, they're inventing it like an actor would.
When asked why it took this long to discover the nature of the strange space phenomenon, Mark Lacy of the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology replied:
"Well, the thing about a Black Hole, its main distinguishing feature, is it's black. And the thing about space, your basic space color, is black. So how are you supposed to see them?"
"I was going to reply to this with, "Well, I can tunnel my connections via SSH to add instant magic security powder," but then I realized - the server I'd be doing the tunneling *to* is on a cable modem, and it'll have all the same backdoors."
Seems to me this problem exists whether gov't interferes or not. Sure, it'll be worse, no doubt about that. But if you ask me, you should be taking steps to a.) Limit the amount of sensitive info going through an b.) Minimizing the risk of somebody having that info. I'll use purchases with a credit card as an example: Limit how much you spend that way. Use a credit card provider that has anti-fraud protection. Don't use a cc limit higher than you really need.
"JVC recently announced a new HDD-based digital camcorder, with storage of 20 or 30GB that is good for over 10 hours of video."
This has already been brought up, but I thought I'd go into a little more detail: The video is too compressed. For somebody capturing a home movie, it's fine. But for actually producing something that'll need to be edited and post processed, it's not a great option. The reason for that is that the footage will be degraded when it comes in. When they go to the process of putting it back to a DV tape, or to DVD etc, they'll need to compress it again. Unfortunately, that'll make the video look crummy. Worse, they would basically lose the ability to do any form of green/blue screen compositing because the compression scheme will jaggedize the edges of the matte. As it is, it's barely possible to get a decent bluescreen shot with DV. Compressing it further will basically destroy this capability.
What would be nice is if they made an HDD camera like you described, only it holds 80 or so gigs. Then make it easy to swap out the drives. If they can get enough throughput on the drives, they could capture at higher quality and bring a bunch of hot-swappable drives along. If they need longevity, they could lower the quality and get longer recording times. Flexibility is key.
We're just on the brink of some really cool advances in this arena. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if in the next five years a hard-drive equipped camera was the norm. I'm not exactly a visionary for predicting that, though. At this point, it's a no-brainer.
"...but surely research into plants that can take extremes is of more short-term utility in creating species which can suck up and withhold pollutants as part of a clean-up operation for Earth"
Who's to say the research won't find its way in that direction? It's not NASA's job to rid the world of pollution. Funny thing about research is that the more diverse it gets, the bigger toolbox this civilization has to fix other problems.
"They can do whatever they want to, include not certifying drivers that don't conform to the new "MSOpenGL Standard" or simply making it a real big pain in the ass to use anything but DirectX."
They've been trying. It isn't working. You mention that you can 'do anything' in software. You're almost right. You can do anything but prevent somebody else from doing anything. Ask the *AA or any game company trying to enable copy restriction.
MS can't prevent OGL from running on their OS's even if they put a serious attempt at stopping it.
"They'll do this, effectively crushing OpenGL on Windows."
Uh, yeah, just like they crushed OpenGL in the last two rounds. OpenGL support comes from the drivers for your card, not Microsoft. They can't kill OGL that easily.
"I've been reading through these posts and I haven't seen anything that none of us hasn't seen before. But what do we do about it?"
Wait for it to pass, then set up copyright land-mines. Once a well placed politician finds himself in court, the issue will be revisited. The neat thing about copyrights is that they can be assigned to something as simple as an image of a cute little kitten posed a like a ninja.
" I was going to go out and get a 360 at launch, but now I'm going to wait for HD-DVD, as I suspect many other people are."
I think you over-estimate how many people are ready to start watching HD-DVD movies. I think you also underestimate how many people MUST HAVE NEW SYSTEM AT LAUNCH. *Grunt grunt* I think a lot of people are overestimating the importance of the HD-DVD. They've never actually said it was intended for games. Worse, it's unlikely that most publishers would publish to a lesser-installed format. The 360, however, is a media machine, hence the reason why MS would want it to play HD-DVDs once the format is settled on.
"I do think, however, that the aging PS2 hardware is nearing the end of it's lifecycle. Consumers are ready for something new...."
Which is exactly why the XBOX 360 stands a decent chance at having a good launch. Though I found it inexplicable (the games don't look that much better than what we have now...), there is a lot of hype over in Microsoft's camp. If Sony's not there, then guess where the money goes.
My point? There is no 'of course' about the 360's launch being a flop or not. I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows. What we do know is that the XBOX has a decent sized installed base. We also know that people are interested in the next generation of hardware. On top of all that, it's well known that MS has quite the marketing budget. It could flop, but it doesn't seem all that likely. The real question is whether or not the existing user base is happy enough with the XBOX to want to upgrade. Sadly, I've only heard from both pro and anti MS zealots on the topic.
"You're not thinkingly like a marketing department. You're thinking "this is a bad reason to delay release", when you should be thinking "this is an excuse for a release that's going to be delayed because the product is not ready"."
It's also worth mentioning that the longer the PS3 waits, the cheaper the components get. From a business point of view, there's some reason to be had, here.
Besides, the closer the PS3 launches to the 360, the more directly the two will compete. It's a lot easier to spend $400 on a PS3 when it's a year after spending $300 on a 360, as opposed to only being 6 months later.
Personally, I think it'd be a good move for Sony. It gives people a little time to get sick of the 360 and want something 'new'. I don't think it's a big deal, though. The PS2 still has some life to it.
Nope. The article you linked to alludes to this, but that dude's journal is a little more telling. His references to Doom were illustrations of how he wanted them to play out. It wasn't an attempt to recreate something he found glorious in the game.
Keeping Doom out of his hands would not have averted that tragedy. Nor would it have helped with the pyschological and social problems he was already having.
" If my truck gets stolen, and they find out it's some GTA-psycho... I'm not blaming rockstar, I'm blaming the kid (or his parents).. I'm NOT going to go after Rockstar.. I'm going after the person (or the kids parents)... Just my 2 cents.. Go ahead and attack me for speaking my mind, it's your right to do so... arn't you glad you have freedom to choose?"
I wouldn't go after Rockstar, either. I have a different reason, though: There are more than 30 million copies of various incarnations of GTA out there. You'd think with numbers like that, crime would have gone up. Nope. Didn't happen with GTA. Didn't happen with Doom. Didn't happen with Mortal Kombat. Then I have to think about my own experience. I played all these games to death. Despite that, I still shudder at sites like Rotten.com. Desensitized... right.
I really don't come from a position where I can blame Rockstar or Acclaim or any other game company for wrongs that have happened to me. I am quite comfortable, however, blaming the asshole that thought it'd be fun to break into my car.
"Is this because people's needs are growing faster than industry's ability to provide them?"
This has ALWAYS been the case. The internet didn't cause it to happen. Once people understand how any given thing works, they find creative ways of taking advantage of it's nature. Sometimes immediate needs cause this sort of 'hack' to be found. Sometimes it's born out of a question like "What if we used it in this unusual way...?"
At best, the internet made these finds a lot more accessible. I'll happily agree with that. However, I can't help but think about Super Mario Bros. on the original NES. Long before the internet, people found inventive ways of gaining an advantage in that game. Heck, think about the Game Genie. Etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the number of smilies in my post (HINT), everybody missed the point of my post. Oh well, guess I can't blame anybody but me for that.
"And no, they don't care about Linux users since it's the office of copyRIGHT, not copyLEFT.. that office is located at creativecommons.org."
Heh, yeah, I'm sure the group working on the copyright website is all about the politics right now.
"I'm new at trying to boost my karma, how did I do?"
;)
Well, you shot yourself in the foot by bringing up that your wife is also your sister.....
"...am I going to see a cost reduction in my next phone? And if not, why not?"
No. Supply & Demand.
"Okay cool, next time I'm hiking someplace and get bitten by a snake or hit by falling rocks, or if I'm out sailing and the boat starts taking on water, I'll just reach for that handy landline."
Wouldn't you have to leave the house or something in order to do any of that?
":) this will be good for some of us who just use cell phones as phones nothing else."
:) :) :)
Why not use a land line, then?
"I know that was a joke, but I bet many slashdot users (like me) are still more than likely just fans of the idea of linux, than the actually software."
I can't say that's all that surprising. All you have to do is talk about how great and free and open Linux is and suddenly your comment is marked with a nice pretty word like "Insightful". If you're talking about Microsoft and you use words like "monopolist", the same thing happens to your post.
Fortunately, things are more balanced than they used to be. But man, years ago, you always got a +5 Insightful by raising the question of whether or not a new type of computer could run Linux or not. (Hence the "But does it run Linux?" jokes that come along from time to time.)
A lot of people play Slashdot like it's a popularity game. That's why this joke is pretty funny.
"Oh wait, you mean they are just demanding and doing nothing? Who cares what they demand then?"
"Free as in beer, but only if you work on it."
Ass.
Erm. I used to have one of the original. It was okay, but I don't miss it. I liked its simplicity and its battery life. Heck, I even liked all the 3rd party apps out there. But my big beef with it was in giving it something uesful to do. Eventually I settled on AvantGo and Dope Wars. That was kinda neat... but .. meh.
Okay, this is just me, but I really didn't find a use for PDAs until they started coming with wifi built in and support for ginormous memory cards. Heck, I played with a Palm the other day that had a camera built in. How handy is that?
I don't miss the old Palm Pilots, but I do like modern PDAs. They don't feel like a solution in search of a problem.
"(I usually fall back to Gord and interviews with Nintendo regarding what I wrote..."
Gord doesn't actually provide any 'proof' either. He mentions an out of context blurb he caught on a Sony quarterly stock report.
"We're not keeping the place tidy enough already, and the plants that will survive us are probably slavering at the chance to feed on our rotting corpses. What lovely mulch we'll make."
Mmmm hmmm. So... are the plants going to spontaneously turn carniverous or something?
"Can't an actor put on a highly contrasty suit and act on stage in real time, where video cameras and/or other sensors feed the performance into the computer and turn it into a motion sequence?"
There is software being worked on to do just that. But it's expensive (for now) and it's still not ideal. For one thing, parts of the actor are obscured during a take. The software attempts to work out what was going on from the previous and following frames, but it still requires cleanup. Sometimes it's faster just to rebuild the animation manually.
"Inherently? Why would it take any more than "several minutes" once the character is modeled, textured, and articulated? "
This is a little tough to explain without showing you on screen what actually goes into the animation process. The first thing to remember is that the human body has a LOT of articulated points. Not just in the extremities, but in the face, too. There are a lot of things to move around. Then there's the task of getting them to move the right way. If you pull the character's waist around, do you want the feet to stay affixed to the ground or are you moving him to a new position? Then there's the matter of getting the motion of the character just right. This is the most intensive part. A lot of time is spent going over the animation again and again and again testing it. There is no 'got it in one take!' with character animation. Everything you do creates ripples elsewhere in the animation, and it all has to be tidied up.
I don't know if I'm explaining this very clearly or not, apologies if I missed the mark. But, I can tell you as an animator, it is inherently labor intensive work. Humans are very complex creatures. Capturing their likeness in an animation requires a LOT of attention to detail. Compound that with the fact that there are heirarchical and physics problems to boot. No easy chore. Pixar animators, for example, crank out a whopping 6 seconds of footage a week. That's not much, but by the time they've gone there, they've roughed it out, tweaked it, gotten it approved, and from there they've worked on the final animation. In that case, though, they're not just creating animation, they're inventing it like an actor would.
When asked why it took this long to discover the nature of the strange space phenomenon, Mark Lacy of the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology replied:
"Well, the thing about a Black Hole, its main distinguishing feature, is it's black. And the thing about space, your basic space color, is black. So how are you supposed to see them?"
"I was going to reply to this with, "Well, I can tunnel my connections via SSH to add instant magic security powder," but then I realized - the server I'd be doing the tunneling *to* is on a cable modem, and it'll have all the same backdoors."
Seems to me this problem exists whether gov't interferes or not. Sure, it'll be worse, no doubt about that. But if you ask me, you should be taking steps to a.) Limit the amount of sensitive info going through an b.) Minimizing the risk of somebody having that info. I'll use purchases with a credit card as an example: Limit how much you spend that way. Use a credit card provider that has anti-fraud protection. Don't use a cc limit higher than you really need.
"JVC recently announced a new HDD-based digital camcorder, with storage of 20 or 30GB that is good for over 10 hours of video."
This has already been brought up, but I thought I'd go into a little more detail: The video is too compressed. For somebody capturing a home movie, it's fine. But for actually producing something that'll need to be edited and post processed, it's not a great option. The reason for that is that the footage will be degraded when it comes in. When they go to the process of putting it back to a DV tape, or to DVD etc, they'll need to compress it again. Unfortunately, that'll make the video look crummy. Worse, they would basically lose the ability to do any form of green/blue screen compositing because the compression scheme will jaggedize the edges of the matte. As it is, it's barely possible to get a decent bluescreen shot with DV. Compressing it further will basically destroy this capability.
What would be nice is if they made an HDD camera like you described, only it holds 80 or so gigs. Then make it easy to swap out the drives. If they can get enough throughput on the drives, they could capture at higher quality and bring a bunch of hot-swappable drives along. If they need longevity, they could lower the quality and get longer recording times. Flexibility is key.
We're just on the brink of some really cool advances in this arena. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if in the next five years a hard-drive equipped camera was the norm. I'm not exactly a visionary for predicting that, though. At this point, it's a no-brainer.
"...but surely research into plants that can take extremes is of more short-term utility in creating species which can suck up and withhold pollutants as part of a clean-up operation for Earth"
Who's to say the research won't find its way in that direction? It's not NASA's job to rid the world of pollution. Funny thing about research is that the more diverse it gets, the bigger toolbox this civilization has to fix other problems.
"They can do whatever they want to, include not certifying drivers that don't conform to the new "MSOpenGL Standard" or simply making it a real big pain in the ass to use anything but DirectX."
They've been trying. It isn't working. You mention that you can 'do anything' in software. You're almost right. You can do anything but prevent somebody else from doing anything. Ask the *AA or any game company trying to enable copy restriction.
MS can't prevent OGL from running on their OS's even if they put a serious attempt at stopping it.
"They'll do this, effectively crushing OpenGL on Windows."
Uh, yeah, just like they crushed OpenGL in the last two rounds. OpenGL support comes from the drivers for your card, not Microsoft. They can't kill OGL that easily.
"I've been reading through these posts and I haven't seen anything that none of us hasn't seen before. But what do we do about it?"
Wait for it to pass, then set up copyright land-mines. Once a well placed politician finds himself in court, the issue will be revisited. The neat thing about copyrights is that they can be assigned to something as simple as an image of a cute little kitten posed a like a ninja.
" I was going to go out and get a 360 at launch, but now I'm going to wait for HD-DVD, as I suspect many other people are."
I think you over-estimate how many people are ready to start watching HD-DVD movies. I think you also underestimate how many people MUST HAVE NEW SYSTEM AT LAUNCH. *Grunt grunt* I think a lot of people are overestimating the importance of the HD-DVD. They've never actually said it was intended for games. Worse, it's unlikely that most publishers would publish to a lesser-installed format. The 360, however, is a media machine, hence the reason why MS would want it to play HD-DVDs once the format is settled on.
"I do think, however, that the aging PS2 hardware is nearing the end of it's lifecycle. Consumers are ready for something new...."
Which is exactly why the XBOX 360 stands a decent chance at having a good launch. Though I found it inexplicable (the games don't look that much better than what we have now...), there is a lot of hype over in Microsoft's camp. If Sony's not there, then guess where the money goes.
My point? There is no 'of course' about the 360's launch being a flop or not. I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows. What we do know is that the XBOX has a decent sized installed base. We also know that people are interested in the next generation of hardware. On top of all that, it's well known that MS has quite the marketing budget. It could flop, but it doesn't seem all that likely. The real question is whether or not the existing user base is happy enough with the XBOX to want to upgrade. Sadly, I've only heard from both pro and anti MS zealots on the topic.
"You're not thinkingly like a marketing department. You're thinking "this is a bad reason to delay release", when you should be thinking "this is an excuse for a release that's going to be delayed because the product is not ready"."
It's also worth mentioning that the longer the PS3 waits, the cheaper the components get. From a business point of view, there's some reason to be had, here.
Besides, the closer the PS3 launches to the 360, the more directly the two will compete. It's a lot easier to spend $400 on a PS3 when it's a year after spending $300 on a 360, as opposed to only being 6 months later.
Personally, I think it'd be a good move for Sony. It gives people a little time to get sick of the 360 and want something 'new'. I don't think it's a big deal, though. The PS2 still has some life to it.
Nope. The article you linked to alludes to this, but that dude's journal is a little more telling. His references to Doom were illustrations of how he wanted them to play out. It wasn't an attempt to recreate something he found glorious in the game.
Keeping Doom out of his hands would not have averted that tragedy. Nor would it have helped with the pyschological and social problems he was already having.
" If my truck gets stolen, and they find out it's some GTA-psycho... I'm not blaming rockstar, I'm blaming the kid (or his parents).. I'm NOT going to go after Rockstar.. I'm going after the person (or the kids parents)... Just my 2 cents.. Go ahead and attack me for speaking my mind, it's your right to do so... arn't you glad you have freedom to choose?"
I wouldn't go after Rockstar, either. I have a different reason, though: There are more than 30 million copies of various incarnations of GTA out there. You'd think with numbers like that, crime would have gone up. Nope. Didn't happen with GTA. Didn't happen with Doom. Didn't happen with Mortal Kombat. Then I have to think about my own experience. I played all these games to death. Despite that, I still shudder at sites like Rotten.com. Desensitized... right.
I really don't come from a position where I can blame Rockstar or Acclaim or any other game company for wrongs that have happened to me. I am quite comfortable, however, blaming the asshole that thought it'd be fun to break into my car.
"Is this because people's needs are growing faster than industry's ability to provide them?"
This has ALWAYS been the case. The internet didn't cause it to happen. Once people understand how any given thing works, they find creative ways of taking advantage of it's nature. Sometimes immediate needs cause this sort of 'hack' to be found. Sometimes it's born out of a question like "What if we used it in this unusual way...?"
At best, the internet made these finds a lot more accessible. I'll happily agree with that. However, I can't help but think about Super Mario Bros. on the original NES. Long before the internet, people found inventive ways of gaining an advantage in that game. Heck, think about the Game Genie. Etc.
"If the window does come off, the inanimate carbon rod can always save you as you sing Battle Hymn of the Republic upon reentry."
Sorry to be a dumb ass, but what's the reference?