Im still trying to get connected to them here, but I can tell you that the original website was on-demand, not like you suggested. It was surprisingly stable too! I got a constant 500k connection and no interruptions.:)
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you should upgrade to 2K simply for browsing. Since I switched to 2k, I reboot once a week at the most. I do a lot of gaming and Lightwave stuff, I beat up my computer pretty hard and it still has an impressive uptime. I also have a home-brew PVR running 2K. I reboot it maybe once a month or two.
For me, the stability difference between 2K and 98 means I can leave programs running longer. This is of particular use to me since programs like Photoshop have a wonderful undo capability, though sadly they don't save it with the file.
If that type of up-time is worth $200 for you, then great. But if it's not, and the upgrade'd only be for improving IE use, then yeah it'd be silly to buy it.:) I simply wanted to share my experience with getting 2K. I was surprised at the difference it made in my production life.
Yah I can understand your problems. All I can do is tell you that my entire office uses Win2k, and I'm the guy who has to fix the machines when they break. I personally have 3 machines I use actively to do things like use the web and I don't have the problems you describe.
I understand I can't change your mind, and that's cool. I thought I'd at least share with you what my experience is so you understand I'm not just throwing around MS marketing lines.:)
"Speak for yourself. I can't stand browser crashes which take down the shell..."
Try using Windows 2000. I use IE on it all the time and crashes are extremely seldom. When crashes do happen, they don't wipe out the OS and cause a reboot.
Okay, I can give you an old example, however it appears to have been fixed recently: When viewing Bestbuy.com using Opera, the 'store locator' button was gone. I was specifically looking for this button to figure out where a store was located, but I had to switch to IE in order to use it.
Slashdot has a minor bug in it, but it's not the type of thing where you'd say 'ARGH I HATE OPERA!!'. When it says 'This page was generated by a cadre of ninja squirrels for NanoGator', the name 'NanoGator' overlaps the sentence a little bit.
I've had other sites that weren't rendered very well, causing me to go to IE. Unfortunately, I haven't used Opera in the last couple of months due to a computer meltdown, so I don't have a list on hand.
Usually the problem was with using DHTML I believe. It wouldn't get interpreted correctly so things like fancy little menus that come down when you hover over them would either not work, or be drawn in the wrong place. Sites that don't use these features have no problem. Is it a problem with Opera? I'm not 100% sure of that. I recently translated my companies website from ASP to PHP, and it uses CSS a lot. They had special cases for rendering it in IE and in Netscape, which was a pain the butt to port, heh. They did a good job, though, because Opera rendered it perfectly. So I'm not 100% sure that the browser is at fault, obviously code can be written that does it's job. (Glad I tested it in Opera, though. I really would like more people to use it.)
If you use Opera, you'll notice that some of your favorite sites will have little glitches here and there. However, that doesn't stop me from using it. But it does force me to keep my IE button ready on the Quick Launch Bar.
Well, I agree with what you're saying, but it doesn't quite fit what I was saying. I can't control whether or not sites 'miss the point'. Why? Because no matter what browser I use, IE is always on my machine.
I have no love of IE, but telling me 'Dont use it!' is like saying 'Insurance is expensive, so dont drive to work.'
Heh, that was funny. It kind of reminds me of Arnold Rimmer (from the book Red Dwarf) using a '0 time stasis field' to spend his free time 'not existing'. The idea was that in 5 years, he'd age only 4! That way, when his bunkmate Dave Lister was 80 years old, Rimmer'd only be 71. Not bad, eh?
(I may have misquoted bits of the story, but you get the idea...)
Wow, these guys are working really hard to make sure that I don't buy a digital TV. I'm curious what economics class they took that said:
"Don't listen to your customer's needs. Instead, assume they are a thief, and prevent your product from being miused at all costs! Only that way will you be able to maintain an ancient business model."
It's real simple: I'm not buying a Digitial Video Recorder if it only lets me 'copy once'. They better hope that somebody hacks it if they want my money.
You know, a couple of years ago I used to really love TV and Movies. Now I feel like we're fighting a war. It's amazing how much less value TV has when you're stressed about stuff you can't do with it.
The phrase '24 expanded to 60' isn't wrong. It doesn't take two scans to make one frame, it takes two scans to make two frames. The first and second scan are not indentical. The motion may be held for 2 scans, but the data being scanned is definitely different.
And what am I still wrong about? I never said anything in my original post about expanding 24fps to 60fps, and in my second post I said it could be done through spatial interpolation. Did nobody read what I wrote?
"A truly good product design would have the act of pulling the cartridge out of the game machine turn it off before any damage could be done"
I totally agree with what you're saying (which probably explains why the N64 didn't have this 'feature'), but I never said that the switch idea was the best one ever. I just used that as an example.:)
My company developed a techonology for viewing video on the web. (No, you've never heard of it, but it was a pretty cool deal. Too bad we don't do it anymore or I'd brag about it.) Since I'm the multimedia guy, they wanted me to write the section on how to improve video quality while making the file size smaller. At one point, I was describing how sometimes you're better off lowering the resolution of a video instead of increasing the compression ratio.
I used a picture of George Bush in mid-speech to illustrate my point. When using the lower resolution, the picture was pretty clear. But when I used a higher compression setting (at the higher res) to achieve the same data rate, his mouth became two big pixels, resembling Bender a little bit.
I drew an arrow to his mouth, drawing attention to the loss of detail, with the caption "See how the mouth loses definition?"
Too bad my manager caught that before it went out, heh.
"If you are too lazy to ReadTFM, where do you get off calling vendors lazy for how they WroteTFM? Either way is fine by me, as it's your life, just apply the same rule in both cases."
Probably because the product should work easily to begin with, the manual should only be for advanced features. I know how to use Lightwave very well, for example, but occasionally I run across a feature I need specific info on. I started using LW before reading the manual, but that doesn't mean I never pick it up.
I believe the focus of the article above was in getting people to read the manual before they use the product. People simply won't do that. But if there's some secret feature that they've partially uncovered, most people have no problem reading about that.
"Of course Nintendo doesn't document everything correctly."
Speaking of not documenting stuff correctly, the SNES manual says one must 'flip off the power switch' in order to turn off the SNES. Seems a bit rude, doesn't it?:)
About the Rumble Pak: Unfortunately, it was probably concieved after the release of the N64. Notably, the screen will tell you exactly when you can remove the mem card. It's giving you special case permission to do so.
Good question. The answer is "yes and no". HDTV content producers have the same problem looming over the horizon. Yes, there'll be more to do, hence it'll cost more money. No because technology will improve and costs will go back down.
You are absolutley right. There are shows on TV that are filmed at 24 fps, X-Files for example. It's a stylistic choice that makes it look more dramatic.
Sitcoms, though, run at 60fps. I guess this is because 60fps looks more comical when somebody's tumbling about. I noticed when watching a documentary on That 70's Show, the replayed the conversation that Donna had with Eric that resulted in their breakup. Weird, though, because they downsampled the resolution to 24 fps, and it looked far more dramatic than when it originally aired at 60.
"We have noticed that if a manual said, 'Do not ever do this,' we would then get many calls from people who had broken their machines by doing just that," Esposito said. "They read the documentation and took offense to its tone so they had an argument with the product."
I found this to be an amusing story. However, the best way to deal with the whole manual issue is to design your product better. You know how you're not supposed to remove a game cartridge while you're playing? If you look at the SNES and the GameBoy, you are physically prevented from removing the cartridge because the power switch moves a piece that blocks the exit of the cartridge.
I realize this won't work in every situation, but the solution of 'we need to get people to read the manuals!' isn't going to go very far.
Getting back to the SNES example, I read the manual before playing the machine. Heck, I'm an expert on it! I used to sell them! Despite my detailed knowledge of how the machine works and the consequences of pulling the cartridge out while it's on, I'm still aware of the power switch blocking exit of the cartridge. Why? One day, a friend of mine came over with a new game I had been waiting for for ages. In a rush to pop this game in, I gave the cartridge in the machine a pretty good tug. Fortunately, it didn't give though. The safety feature of the SNES prevented me from making a 'wandering mind' mistake.
In cases like that, you could know the product inside out and still make bone-headed mistakes like that. Fortunately for me, Nintendo was smart enough to anticipate that I might make a mistake like that and design it so it's not easy to do.
Heh, there's a feature in Lightwave where you can make a model of a hand, then apply bones to it so you can manipulate the fingers. In the illustration, they showed how you could take all the bones in the fingers (except the forefinger) and rotate them simultaneously, causing the hand to point.
There was a tiny caption under it that said "this isn't the finger that was raised when they showed this to me."
Wow, normally people assume I'm a moron, but this response really takes the cake!
Do you really think I thought 24fps movie could be expanded to 60? Didn't it occur to you that I meant that using digital technology movies could be captured at 60fps like they are with both HDTV and even NTSC? I mean seriously, why would you think that I meant converting old movies from 24 fps to 60? Didn't the fact that I mentioned a specific # of FPS to begin with clue you in to the idea that I might already know that about movies? Failing that, everybody knows that old movies wouldn't be reshown in theaters. At best I could catch these magically expanded movies on TV, negating the need to go find a digital theater to see them on. I think this is the stupidest that anybody has ever assumed that I am. heh.
There are products on the market today designed for interpolating the in-between frames of video for smoothing out slow motion sequences. Frankly, it'd be easy to use this to increase the frame rate of a video like you suggested I meant. It wouldn't be as accurate as simply filming at 60 fps, but it would certainly look smoother.
"Why shoot things at 60fps when you're going to either more than double your film costs or have something that has to be downsampled for everyone else?"
Becuse there is no film? With digital techonlogy, it's simply a matter of capacity. I don't know if you've heard about it or not, but HDTV is going to support the resolution of 1920 by 1090 (or some resolution like that) @ 60fps. Seeing as how this resolution exceeds what's being shown digitally today it's a safe bet that the technology is there to make full length movies at 60fps.
As for the benefit of it: Ebert had an opportunity to sample footage shot on a camera running at 48fps. He was extremely pleased with how much smoother the video was. The example he used was a moving truck drove by. In the 24 FPS version, he couldn't read the name on the side of the truck. At 48 it became clear.
It's not a question of if, rather a question of when. One day movies will be captured and shown at 60fps.
Though I have no doubt that prices for replacement parts will be inflated in the beginning, Digital Projectors should have fewer moving parts than a normal 35 MM projector. It seems to me that they'd be more longer lasting.
Personally, I wish the MPAA would spend more time making movies fun than tring to optimize scre... i mean profits.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a pity that Film88.com's going to get my money instead of the MPAA.
Im still trying to get connected to them here, but I can tell you that the original website was on-demand, not like you suggested. It was surprisingly stable too! I got a constant 500k connection and no interruptions. :)
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you should upgrade to 2K simply for browsing. Since I switched to 2k, I reboot once a week at the most. I do a lot of gaming and Lightwave stuff, I beat up my computer pretty hard and it still has an impressive uptime. I also have a home-brew PVR running 2K. I reboot it maybe once a month or two.
For me, the stability difference between 2K and 98 means I can leave programs running longer. This is of particular use to me since programs like Photoshop have a wonderful undo capability, though sadly they don't save it with the file.
If that type of up-time is worth $200 for you, then great. But if it's not, and the upgrade'd only be for improving IE use, then yeah it'd be silly to buy it.
Yah I can understand your problems. All I can do is tell you that my entire office uses Win2k, and I'm the guy who has to fix the machines when they break. I personally have 3 machines I use actively to do things like use the web and I don't have the problems you describe.
:)
I understand I can't change your mind, and that's cool. I thought I'd at least share with you what my experience is so you understand I'm not just throwing around MS marketing lines.
"Speak for yourself. I can't stand browser crashes which take down the shell..."
Try using Windows 2000. I use IE on it all the time and crashes are extremely seldom. When crashes do happen, they don't wipe out the OS and cause a reboot.
Okay, I can give you an old example, however it appears to have been fixed recently: When viewing Bestbuy.com using Opera, the 'store locator' button was gone. I was specifically looking for this button to figure out where a store was located, but I had to switch to IE in order to use it.
Slashdot has a minor bug in it, but it's not the type of thing where you'd say 'ARGH I HATE OPERA!!'. When it says 'This page was generated by a cadre of ninja squirrels for NanoGator', the name 'NanoGator' overlaps the sentence a little bit.
I've had other sites that weren't rendered very well, causing me to go to IE. Unfortunately, I haven't used Opera in the last couple of months due to a computer meltdown, so I don't have a list on hand.
Usually the problem was with using DHTML I believe. It wouldn't get interpreted correctly so things like fancy little menus that come down when you hover over them would either not work, or be drawn in the wrong place. Sites that don't use these features have no problem. Is it a problem with Opera? I'm not 100% sure of that. I recently translated my companies website from ASP to PHP, and it uses CSS a lot. They had special cases for rendering it in IE and in Netscape, which was a pain the butt to port, heh. They did a good job, though, because Opera rendered it perfectly. So I'm not 100% sure that the browser is at fault, obviously code can be written that does it's job. (Glad I tested it in Opera, though. I really would like more people to use it.)
If you use Opera, you'll notice that some of your favorite sites will have little glitches here and there. However, that doesn't stop me from using it. But it does force me to keep my IE button ready on the Quick Launch Bar.
Well, I agree with what you're saying, but it doesn't quite fit what I was saying. I can't control whether or not sites 'miss the point'. Why? Because no matter what browser I use, IE is always on my machine.
I have no love of IE, but telling me 'Dont use it!' is like saying 'Insurance is expensive, so dont drive to work.'
Heh, that was funny. It kind of reminds me of Arnold Rimmer (from the book Red Dwarf) using a '0 time stasis field' to spend his free time 'not existing'. The idea was that in 5 years, he'd age only 4! That way, when his bunkmate Dave Lister was 80 years old, Rimmer'd only be 71. Not bad, eh?
(I may have misquoted bits of the story, but you get the idea...)
What's worse? Saying "Don't use IE!" as a blatant attempt at karma whoring, or that some idiot moderators modded that up.
Logic check: "Don't use the browser that most websites are designed for!"
Do you really think I'd be using IE right now if Opera was cutting it?
Wow, these guys are working really hard to make sure that I don't buy a digital TV. I'm curious what economics class they took that said:
"Don't listen to your customer's needs. Instead, assume they are a thief, and prevent your product from being miused at all costs! Only that way will you be able to maintain an ancient business model."
It's real simple: I'm not buying a Digitial Video Recorder if it only lets me 'copy once'. They better hope that somebody hacks it if they want my money.
You know, a couple of years ago I used to really love TV and Movies. Now I feel like we're fighting a war. It's amazing how much less value TV has when you're stressed about stuff you can't do with it.
No, the difference is not that big. You get half the vertical resolution.
Check out DScaler (www.dscaler.com), it takes NTSC signal and turns it into progressive scan on your PC.
Heh @ Make-not-suck.p.
There was a tutorial on how to apply bones in LW to a model of a horse, once. It was called 'Boning a Horse'.
The phrase '24 expanded to 60' isn't wrong. It doesn't take two scans to make one frame, it takes two scans to make two frames. The first and second scan are not indentical. The motion may be held for 2 scans, but the data being scanned is definitely different.
And what am I still wrong about? I never said anything in my original post about expanding 24fps to 60fps, and in my second post I said it could be done through spatial interpolation. Did nobody read what I wrote?
"A truly good product design would have the act of pulling the cartridge out of the game machine turn it off before any damage could be done"
:)
I totally agree with what you're saying (which probably explains why the N64 didn't have this 'feature'), but I never said that the switch idea was the best one ever. I just used that as an example.
My company developed a techonology for viewing video on the web. (No, you've never heard of it, but it was a pretty cool deal. Too bad we don't do it anymore or I'd brag about it.) Since I'm the multimedia guy, they wanted me to write the section on how to improve video quality while making the file size smaller. At one point, I was describing how sometimes you're better off lowering the resolution of a video instead of increasing the compression ratio.
I used a picture of George Bush in mid-speech to illustrate my point. When using the lower resolution, the picture was pretty clear. But when I used a higher compression setting (at the higher res) to achieve the same data rate, his mouth became two big pixels, resembling Bender a little bit.
I drew an arrow to his mouth, drawing attention to the loss of detail, with the caption "See how the mouth loses definition?"
Too bad my manager caught that before it went out, heh.
"If you are too lazy to ReadTFM, where do you get off calling vendors lazy for how they WroteTFM? Either way is fine by me, as it's your life, just apply the same rule in both cases."
Probably because the product should work easily to begin with, the manual should only be for advanced features. I know how to use Lightwave very well, for example, but occasionally I run across a feature I need specific info on. I started using LW before reading the manual, but that doesn't mean I never pick it up.
I believe the focus of the article above was in getting people to read the manual before they use the product. People simply won't do that. But if there's some secret feature that they've partially uncovered, most people have no problem reading about that.
"Of course Nintendo doesn't document everything correctly."
:)
Speaking of not documenting stuff correctly, the SNES manual says one must 'flip off the power switch' in order to turn off the SNES. Seems a bit rude, doesn't it?
About the Rumble Pak: Unfortunately, it was probably concieved after the release of the N64. Notably, the screen will tell you exactly when you can remove the mem card. It's giving you special case permission to do so.
Good question. The answer is "yes and no". HDTV content producers have the same problem looming over the horizon. Yes, there'll be more to do, hence it'll cost more money. No because technology will improve and costs will go back down.
You are absolutley right. There are shows on TV that are filmed at 24 fps, X-Files for example. It's a stylistic choice that makes it look more dramatic.
Sitcoms, though, run at 60fps. I guess this is because 60fps looks more comical when somebody's tumbling about. I noticed when watching a documentary on That 70's Show, the replayed the conversation that Donna had with Eric that resulted in their breakup. Weird, though, because they downsampled the resolution to 24 fps, and it looked far more dramatic than when it originally aired at 60.
Cool, iddnt it?
"We have noticed that if a manual said, 'Do not ever do this,' we would then get many calls from people who had broken their machines by doing just that," Esposito said. "They read the documentation and took offense to its tone so they had an argument with the product."
I found this to be an amusing story. However, the best way to deal with the whole manual issue is to design your product better. You know how you're not supposed to remove a game cartridge while you're playing? If you look at the SNES and the GameBoy, you are physically prevented from removing the cartridge because the power switch moves a piece that blocks the exit of the cartridge.
I realize this won't work in every situation, but the solution of 'we need to get people to read the manuals!' isn't going to go very far.
Getting back to the SNES example, I read the manual before playing the machine. Heck, I'm an expert on it! I used to sell them! Despite my detailed knowledge of how the machine works and the consequences of pulling the cartridge out while it's on, I'm still aware of the power switch blocking exit of the cartridge. Why? One day, a friend of mine came over with a new game I had been waiting for for ages. In a rush to pop this game in, I gave the cartridge in the machine a pretty good tug. Fortunately, it didn't give though. The safety feature of the SNES prevented me from making a 'wandering mind' mistake.
In cases like that, you could know the product inside out and still make bone-headed mistakes like that. Fortunately for me, Nintendo was smart enough to anticipate that I might make a mistake like that and design it so it's not easy to do.
Heh, there's a feature in Lightwave where you can make a model of a hand, then apply bones to it so you can manipulate the fingers. In the illustration, they showed how you could take all the bones in the fingers (except the forefinger) and rotate them simultaneously, causing the hand to point.
There was a tiny caption under it that said "this isn't the finger that was raised when they showed this to me."
Wow, normally people assume I'm a moron, but this response really takes the cake!
Do you really think I thought 24fps movie could be expanded to 60? Didn't it occur to you that I meant that using digital technology movies could be captured at 60fps like they are with both HDTV and even NTSC? I mean seriously, why would you think that I meant converting old movies from 24 fps to 60? Didn't the fact that I mentioned a specific # of FPS to begin with clue you in to the idea that I might already know that about movies? Failing that, everybody knows that old movies wouldn't be reshown in theaters. At best I could catch these magically expanded movies on TV, negating the need to go find a digital theater to see them on. I think this is the stupidest that anybody has ever assumed that I am. heh.
Just so you know, it is possible to expand 24 fps video to 60 fps through interpolation.
There are products on the market today designed for interpolating the in-between frames of video for smoothing out slow motion sequences. Frankly, it'd be easy to use this to increase the frame rate of a video like you suggested I meant. It wouldn't be as accurate as simply filming at 60 fps, but it would certainly look smoother.
"Why shoot things at 60fps when you're going to either more than double your film costs or have something that has to be downsampled for everyone else?"
Becuse there is no film? With digital techonlogy, it's simply a matter of capacity. I don't know if you've heard about it or not, but HDTV is going to support the resolution of 1920 by 1090 (or some resolution like that) @ 60fps. Seeing as how this resolution exceeds what's being shown digitally today it's a safe bet that the technology is there to make full length movies at 60fps.
As for the benefit of it: Ebert had an opportunity to sample footage shot on a camera running at 48fps. He was extremely pleased with how much smoother the video was. The example he used was a moving truck drove by. In the 24 FPS version, he couldn't read the name on the side of the truck. At 48 it became clear.
It's not a question of if, rather a question of when. One day movies will be captured and shown at 60fps.
" books on toilet paper probably wouldn't be readable..."
I can imagine. Black text on a brown background... totally unreadable.
I look forward to watching movies at 60 fps. :)
Heck, they could even do things like have gorier versions of movies at later hours.
Though I have no doubt that prices for replacement parts will be inflated in the beginning, Digital Projectors should have fewer moving parts than a normal 35 MM projector. It seems to me that they'd be more longer lasting.
Personally, I wish the MPAA would spend more time making movies fun than tring to optimize scre... i mean profits.