I bought an archos player for $250 that plays xvid movies, mp3s, games, displays photos, can link up to other USB devices, records wav files from line in or built in microphone and has RCA out capability (comes complete with cables). The ipod has hardly any of these features and retails for almost double the price. People buy ipods cuz they are hipsters.
And I bet that archos is really easy to use, right? And it ties in tightly with a really slick music, photo and video jukebox/store? And it automatically keeps in synch with your computer? And it's really small and light? Right?
I think a system like this could work well first in the realm of scientific journals. Heavily interlinked, cross referenced documents, where there's a wealth of well formatted and detailed content. If citations and quotations were live, stable links as described by Nelson, then I think you could build something very useful.
Or, pretty soon, you could cover your roof with PV cells and get all your power needs that way. Then you get:
1. No massive capital outlay - it's small scale and responsive to your needs, not the modelled needs from 5-10 years ago when they started designing the nuclear plant
2. Security (of both types). It's much harder to make a mess with solar cells, plus it's impossible to wipe out an area's power. Massive decentralisation makes the power network secure (sound familiar?)
3. No problem of storing nuclear waste (which is a problem, and not just for us but for our grandkids)
Absolutely. Just think of all the 3d math that goes on behind the scenes of games today. All those lookup tables can be kissed goodbye.
I wonder if this method would actually be faster (even if it were easier to implement) than traditional lookups? Has Carmack read this yet?:-)
Spread is not proportional to angle at all. If you read the pdf summary, he states that.5 is 45deg while.5 and.75 are equal to 30 and 60deg respectively. The relatiosnship is not linear, but would plot as a curve with an inflexion at 45 degrees.
And what's more, the next generation of Intel chips will have Virtualization. How about having a windows/linux machine on one virtual machine and OSX on the other? Fill it with RAM and flip from one to the other.
This was a preview screening in London, with a Q&A session afterwards with Garth and Nick. I'm a long term fan of H2G2, having been brought up on the radio series by my parents and reading the books many times over. I think Douglas was an incredible author and I love all his books. I am not some sort of rabid fanboy, however. If I was this into LOTR, I would have gone into those movies with an open mind and enjoyed them for the fantastic things they were - inconsistencies be damned.
Here's what I though of the Hitchhiker's movie.
Casting:
Martin Freeman is absolutely perfect as Arthur. Yes, he plays it exactly the same way he plays Tim, but Tim is just like Arthur anyway, so it's all good. Mos Def makes a good Ford, just the right mix of deadpan, blasé and hoopiness. Stephen Fry and Alan Rickman are spot on as the voices of the Guide and Marvin. Bill Nighy is very good as Slartibardfast - he has the nervous pride and confusion down just right. However, Sam Rockwell just overdoes Zaphod. I always pictured Zaphod as a rather louche, laid-back who-gives-a-shit yeah-whynot kinda guy, but in the movie, he's some sort of coked-up rock idol, with no subtlety or connection with the other characters. Zooey Deschanel is just a bit of a blank as Trillian. I know the character didn't really have much depth in the first place, but I just didn't connect here. She shouldn't get it on with Arthur either, the whole point is that he never does...
FX:
All good. Obviously lots of money spent in the right places, with some great designs and original effects. Loved the Earth destruction sequence and every time the improbability drive was used, I laughed out loud. The Vogons are fantastic. Really good puppets and great design. Their bureaucratic nature shines (or is that dulls?) through perfectly.
That gets the classifiable stuff out of the way, now how was the actual movie as a whole? In one word: confused. Now, I know that an off-the-wall, episodic radio series does not translate particularly well into the traditional 3-act movie format, but I know how I would have done it. Act one, blow up the earth, bring the characters together. Act two, go on a wild hunt for Magrathea, get split up, find out about the ultimate question. Act three, go find the question, get stranded on prehistoric earth - cue 'What a Wonderful World' and roll credits.
What we get in the movie, however, is a messily edited foamy mess, that never seems to flow or build tension. The characters seem to be shaken about in a pot, randomly bumping into each other, without being given a chance to properly interact or develop. Some of the timing (so critical to good comedy) seems way off, punchlines arriving with a whimper. Some of the incidental music is especially innapropriate, with soaring bombastic orchestra scores getting in the way of the emotions you're supposed to be feeling. It's edited like a music video, never getting a chance to settle. The Humma Kavula character is entirely superfluous, in my opinion. If he'd been cut out, some of the other scenes could have been given a chance to breath.
It seems to me that it's a movie born out of conflict. It wants to be a quirky comedy and a spectacular fantasy at the same time. It kind of trips over it's shoelaces while trying to do both. The lady sitting next to me didn't know anything about H2G2 and her opinion was 'it's alright'. My girlfriend's opinion as a rabid foaming fan of H2G2 was 'they've raped my childhood!', but then she's analogous to the 'Balrogs do too have wings!' school of LOTR fandom. When the movie ended, it got polite applause (and only because the creators were in the room, I feel. I know we Brits aren't famous for making noise in the cinema, but this particular theatre has a reputation for rowdiness; people hollering at Neo to 'smack that guy!' etc.) Garth and Nick came on and answered some generic Qs at the end. They seemed really nice guys and they obviously love the source material. I just don't think
Think of the sort of people you know who play games. There will be exceptions, but most conform to a rather narrow demographic. Mostly male. Mostly young.
Compared to a popular mass medium - let's say movies - there is no wide range of appeal. The infant will love Disney, the Child will love Spy Kids 3D, the adolescent will love Bad Boys II, the youth will love The Matrix, The young couples will love My Fat Greek Wedding, the parents will love The Pianist.
Only one half of one of these groups is catered for by video games.
The real stepping stone will be a product that you or I (typical slashdot readers) would not classify as a 'video game'. It will be for a totally different demographic, and we will not recognise it. It will be 'interactive' and 'rewarding' and 'fun', but will be as far away from today's video games as film is from cave paintings.
>Oh, cry me a river. First of all, Nike's not employing
>gangs of thugs to murder ten-year-olds. Secondly, the
>people who go to work in Nike's factories aren't doing
>so at gunpoint, they're doing it because working in a
>sweatshop is a step up from subsistence farming.
One : it would be a step up if the pay for working in a
sweatshop allowed a similar standard of life as subsistence farming. It is not. I could quote the figures from "No Logo" but my copy's on loan right now. Working 24 hour shifts, not being allowed to talk, not having any time at all to socialise or form unions (which are illegal anyway). etc.
Two : The standard argument for sweatshops are that they are the first step towards a functioning capitalist economy. Whilst this may well have been true in the 19th century, it is not true today. The sweatshop in the 3rd world is built with western money, the workers are payed less than they need to live, and the country recieves no benefit (economic enterprise zones for tax-free investmnent are occupied until the tax-free period runs out. Then the operation is moved elsewhere.) The exchange is totally one way. I could go on, but I'd ramble.
I'm an Architecture Student at Bath , UK, and our civil engineering department is pretty well renowned so we had a lecture from the engineers of the Eden Project. Fascinating stuff. A few of the interesting things that they did:
A satellite survey of the site allowed them to make a 3D model of the clay pit, they could then reshape the landscape without having to bring fill to/from the site. They had special software that calculated volume of soil, so they just spread the existing material around.
GPS surveying. The base of each bubble comes down on to a concrete foundation. First, using the same 3D model, the intersection of bubble and ground is plotted, then on site a man with a gps reciever plots the centerline of the foundation all over the very irregular ground. The fact that the bubbles are based on spheres meant that as the ground conditions changed (the mine was still being worked during the design phase) only the edge of the bubbles had to be redesigned to adapt to the site.
The frame for the bubbles is based on the familiar "buckyball" arrangement like C-60 or a soccer (bleh) ball, only the pentagons are very small, and are surrounded by a large grid of hexagons. There is a fair amount of repition in the design (each fith of each dome is essentially symmetrical, the pentagon at the apex of each dome is openable for venting), but there are so many different pieces involved that humans could never make the pieces right. Instead, data from the 3d model was sent to the steelworkers, where a machine simply churned out thousands of individually numbered struts and nodes. These were then assembled in order on site.
The World's Largest Scaffolding was created inside each dome during construction. We saw some slides of this and it really was amazing. Imagine the shape of one of these domes, but filled with a regular 3D grid.
The ETFE foil that the envelope is made of is ridiculously thin. I forget the exact number, but it's measured in microns. There are three layers, giving two pockets in each segment. These can be inflated/deflated to take the weight of snow for instance. The largest segment is about 6 meters accross IIRC.
All the climate control is automatic. Vents open and close, humidifiers spray and heaters heat all day and night to keep the climate regular inside.
I went to visit Eden in November, and it was absolutely amazing. I won't repeat what's been said, but you should definately include it in your plans if you're coming to the UK. The education is so well done and so genuine that you can't help but learn. There's absolutely no cooporate sponsership or advertising on site. All the food is organic and all the staff have a genuine passion for plants. The only trouble is that it is too popular. There were no queues as such, but it was definately crowded. Brilliant day out though.
Slashdot Mirror
No, one quarter the key surface area. (ok, 0.2197265625 the area to be exact)
I bought an archos player for $250 that plays xvid movies, mp3s, games, displays photos, can link up to other USB devices, records wav files from line in or built in microphone and has RCA out capability (comes complete with cables). The ipod has hardly any of these features and retails for almost double the price. People buy ipods cuz they are hipsters.
And I bet that archos is really easy to use, right? And it ties in tightly with a really slick music, photo and video jukebox/store? And it automatically keeps in synch with your computer? And it's really small and light? Right?
I think a system like this could work well first in the realm of scientific journals. Heavily interlinked, cross referenced documents, where there's a wealth of well formatted and detailed content. If citations and quotations were live, stable links as described by Nelson, then I think you could build something very useful.
Or, pretty soon, you could cover your roof with PV cells and get all your power needs that way. Then you get:
1. No massive capital outlay - it's small scale and responsive to your needs, not the modelled needs from 5-10 years ago when they started designing the nuclear plant
2. Security (of both types). It's much harder to make a mess with solar cells, plus it's impossible to wipe out an area's power. Massive decentralisation makes the power network secure (sound familiar?)
3. No problem of storing nuclear waste (which is a problem, and not just for us but for our grandkids)
Absolutely. Just think of all the 3d math that goes on behind the scenes of games today. All those lookup tables can be kissed goodbye. :-)
I wonder if this method would actually be faster (even if it were easier to implement) than traditional lookups? Has Carmack read this yet?
Spread is not proportional to angle at all. If you read the pdf summary, he states that .5 is 45deg while .5 and .75 are equal to 30 and 60deg respectively. The relatiosnship is not linear, but would plot as a curve with an inflexion at 45 degrees.
And what's more, the next generation of Intel chips will have Virtualization. How about having a windows/linux machine on one virtual machine and OSX on the other? Fill it with RAM and flip from one to the other.
This was a preview screening in London, with a Q&A session afterwards with Garth and Nick. I'm a long term fan of H2G2, having been brought up on the radio series by my parents and reading the books many times over. I think Douglas was an incredible author and I love all his books. I am not some sort of rabid fanboy, however. If I was this into LOTR, I would have gone into those movies with an open mind and enjoyed them for the fantastic things they were - inconsistencies be damned.
Here's what I though of the Hitchhiker's movie.
Casting:
Martin Freeman is absolutely perfect as Arthur. Yes, he plays it exactly the same way he plays Tim, but Tim is just like Arthur anyway, so it's all good. Mos Def makes a good Ford, just the right mix of deadpan, blasé and hoopiness. Stephen Fry and Alan Rickman are spot on as the voices of the Guide and Marvin. Bill Nighy is very good as Slartibardfast - he has the nervous pride and confusion down just right. However, Sam Rockwell just overdoes Zaphod. I always pictured Zaphod as a rather louche, laid-back who-gives-a-shit yeah-whynot kinda guy, but in the movie, he's some sort of coked-up rock idol, with no subtlety or connection with the other characters. Zooey Deschanel is just a bit of a blank as Trillian. I know the character didn't really have much depth in the first place, but I just didn't connect here. She shouldn't get it on with Arthur either, the whole point is that he never does...
FX:
All good. Obviously lots of money spent in the right places, with some great designs and original effects. Loved the Earth destruction sequence and every time the improbability drive was used, I laughed out loud. The Vogons are fantastic. Really good puppets and great design. Their bureaucratic nature shines (or is that dulls?) through perfectly.
That gets the classifiable stuff out of the way, now how was the actual movie as a whole? In one word: confused. Now, I know that an off-the-wall, episodic radio series does not translate particularly well into the traditional 3-act movie format, but I know how I would have done it. Act one, blow up the earth, bring the characters together. Act two, go on a wild hunt for Magrathea, get split up, find out about the ultimate question. Act three, go find the question, get stranded on prehistoric earth - cue 'What a Wonderful World' and roll credits.
What we get in the movie, however, is a messily edited foamy mess, that never seems to flow or build tension. The characters seem to be shaken about in a pot, randomly bumping into each other, without being given a chance to properly interact or develop. Some of the timing (so critical to good comedy) seems way off, punchlines arriving with a whimper. Some of the incidental music is especially innapropriate, with soaring bombastic orchestra scores getting in the way of the emotions you're supposed to be feeling. It's edited like a music video, never getting a chance to settle. The Humma Kavula character is entirely superfluous, in my opinion. If he'd been cut out, some of the other scenes could have been given a chance to breath.
It seems to me that it's a movie born out of conflict. It wants to be a quirky comedy and a spectacular fantasy at the same time. It kind of trips over it's shoelaces while trying to do both. The lady sitting next to me didn't know anything about H2G2 and her opinion was 'it's alright'. My girlfriend's opinion as a rabid foaming fan of H2G2 was 'they've raped my childhood!', but then she's analogous to the 'Balrogs do too have wings!' school of LOTR fandom. When the movie ended, it got polite applause (and only because the creators were in the room, I feel. I know we Brits aren't famous for making noise in the cinema, but this particular theatre has a reputation for rowdiness; people hollering at Neo to 'smack that guy!' etc.) Garth and Nick came on and answered some generic Qs at the end. They seemed really nice guys and they obviously love the source material. I just don't think
Think of the sort of people you know who play games. There will be exceptions, but most conform to a rather narrow demographic. Mostly male. Mostly young.
Compared to a popular mass medium - let's say movies - there is no wide range of appeal. The infant will love Disney, the Child will love Spy Kids 3D, the adolescent will love Bad Boys II, the youth will love The Matrix, The young couples will love My Fat Greek Wedding, the parents will love The Pianist.
Only one half of one of these groups is catered for by video games.
The real stepping stone will be a product that you or I (typical slashdot readers) would not classify as a 'video game'. It will be for a totally different demographic, and we will not recognise it. It will be 'interactive' and 'rewarding' and 'fun', but will be as far away from today's video games as film is from cave paintings.
>Oh, cry me a river. First of all, Nike's not employing
>gangs of thugs to murder ten-year-olds. Secondly, the
>people who go to work in Nike's factories aren't doing
>so at gunpoint, they're doing it because working in a
>sweatshop is a step up from subsistence farming.
One : it would be a step up if the pay for working in a sweatshop allowed a similar standard of life as subsistence farming. It is not. I could quote the figures from "No Logo" but my copy's on loan right now. Working 24 hour shifts, not being allowed to talk, not having any time at all to socialise or form unions (which are illegal anyway). etc.
Two : The standard argument for sweatshops are that they are the first step towards a functioning capitalist economy. Whilst this may well have been true in the 19th century, it is not true today. The sweatshop in the 3rd world is built with western money, the workers are payed less than they need to live, and the country recieves no benefit (economic enterprise zones for tax-free investmnent are occupied until the tax-free period runs out. Then the operation is moved elsewhere.) The exchange is totally one way. I could go on, but I'd ramble.
I'm an Architecture Student at Bath , UK, and our civil engineering department is pretty well renowned so we had a lecture from the engineers of the Eden Project. Fascinating stuff. A few of the interesting things that they did:
A satellite survey of the site allowed them to make a 3D model of the clay pit, they could then reshape the landscape without having to bring fill to/from the site. They had special software that calculated volume of soil, so they just spread the existing material around.
GPS surveying. The base of each bubble comes down on to a concrete foundation. First, using the same 3D model, the intersection of bubble and ground is plotted, then on site a man with a gps reciever plots the centerline of the foundation all over the very irregular ground. The fact that the bubbles are based on spheres meant that as the ground conditions changed (the mine was still being worked during the design phase) only the edge of the bubbles had to be redesigned to adapt to the site.
The frame for the bubbles is based on the familiar "buckyball" arrangement like C-60 or a soccer (bleh) ball, only the pentagons are very small, and are surrounded by a large grid of hexagons. There is a fair amount of repition in the design (each fith of each dome is essentially symmetrical, the pentagon at the apex of each dome is openable for venting), but there are so many different pieces involved that humans could never make the pieces right. Instead, data from the 3d model was sent to the steelworkers, where a machine simply churned out thousands of individually numbered struts and nodes. These were then assembled in order on site.
The World's Largest Scaffolding was created inside each dome during construction. We saw some slides of this and it really was amazing. Imagine the shape of one of these domes, but filled with a regular 3D grid.
The ETFE foil that the envelope is made of is ridiculously thin. I forget the exact number, but it's measured in microns. There are three layers, giving two pockets in each segment. These can be inflated/deflated to take the weight of snow for instance. The largest segment is about 6 meters accross IIRC.
All the climate control is automatic. Vents open and close, humidifiers spray and heaters heat all day and night to keep the climate regular inside.
I went to visit Eden in November, and it was absolutely amazing. I won't repeat what's been said, but you should definately include it in your plans if you're coming to the UK. The education is so well done and so genuine that you can't help but learn. There's absolutely no cooporate sponsership or advertising on site. All the food is organic and all the staff have a genuine passion for plants. The only trouble is that it is too popular. There were no queues as such, but it was definately crowded. Brilliant day out though.