Your first mistake is labeling games for girls as "pink" games. What the hell is that? Is Barbie all anyone can think of for girls? By making a label such as that you are limiting what gaming can be for any sex. Just like not all video games are for little boys, not all video games should be for little girls. Idiots here on Slashdot are making references to playing with dolls and things along that nature. What about grown up WOMEN? After dealing with people like some of the malefolk here on Slashdot some of us would like to kick some ass. The most useful posts here were from the married guys. Make a good game and we play it. If there is a difference between male and female gamers it is the female lack of tolerance for crap. And there is a lot of it.
I am always some version of The Mighty Squid.
Every nickname, every username, every character every time. Online or off.
Don't ask why but I like the consistency of it.
Does anyone else use the same username/nickname/handle for everything?
I visit the Lord of the Rings fan site TheOneRing.Net on a daily basis. They have "TORNed" sites within 10 minutes of posting. They also post links to any LOTR related polls on other sites such as "favorite movie". LOTR wins every time after being linked.
I am sure other "geeky" fan sites have the same effect.
I bought the Theatrical Edition of FOTR I bought the Special Gift Pack Extended Edition of FOTR I will buy the Theatrical Edition of TTT I will buy the Special Gift Pack Extended Edition of TTT I will buy the Theatrical Edition of ROTK I will buy the Special Gift Pack Extended Edition of ROTK I will buy the Complete Theatrical Special Edition I will buy the Special Gift Pack Extended Complete Edition
I will sign all future paychecks to New Line and Peter Jackson
Not only a fellow female slashdot member but another female who used to work in a comic book store? Your on my friend list, sister! You sold me. I guess I'll have to read this book.
I fell in love with my husband with a two hour conversation on nano-tech and Max Headroom playing in the background in the control room of our college TV station.
I am interested in computers, Star Trek, Sci Fi, science, ect. I am pretty good looking too.
We're out there. Be your self. But mostly just get off the computer once in awhile!
Your site wasn't all that navigable so I wasn't able to get more info. So I will post without knowing the facts.
With all the crap we already have in space let's not let kids screw it up even more for a science project. Or else when they grow up they will look up at where the stars used to be and know they can never go because 20,000 kids added to the already 1,000s of small and large pieces of junk orbiting our planet and hindering our progress.
When I was in college (SUNY Oswego) I worked in the Distence Learning Dept. There were some net based classes but some of our classes were via cable TV and PicTel(Sort of Video Conferencing).
The Cable TV classes were in a small studio, the professor would have powerpoint like slides, an ELMO (Kind of like a video overhead projector, he could write on tranparent plastic with a marker like a blackboard) and a phone hybrid for call in questions. I was the tech for this (Switch between sources, audio, video, make sure the cable company had us, ect.) This seemed to work well and we had students throughout upstate NY. They still had that interactive student-teacher relationship.
The other sort was PicTel (Video Conference). There would be a traditional class but would have students particapating from other sites. There were cameras, monitors, and mikes at all sites. The coolest thing was that the teacher would wear a infrared device and the camera would follow her around the room as she talked. She also had an ELMO so all sites could see what she wrote clearly. They also were able to ask questions in real-time.
I got payed for being the tech support for these classes, a good gig for a student at the time ('96 -'98). I think the students got more out of this kind of arrangement than any of the Net based courses. It was more expensive and sometimes buggy (Video COnference hung up on sites sometimes) but I think it was worth it.
I don't know if they still do it but I did interview at a company that was doing something similar with more corporate classes.
Are Holograms Finally for Real? By: David H. Freedman Issue: July 2002
This staple of sci-fi is starting to live up to its billing, and its potential in the workplace is anything but an illusion.
In the months leading up to the debut of the new Ford Thunderbird last fall, the car's four-person design crew was asked to show its most recent tweaks to company executives. So it did what any auto-design team does: It hauled its latest prototype out to the center of a conference room for a group "walkaround." There, managers cooed over the slick coupe's rakish lines from every imaginable angle.
But "prototype," in this case, might be the biggest understatement in automotive history. What the designers and executives were in fact viewing was a computer-generated hologram -- hovering slightly off the floor -- that not only rendered the T-bird in perfect 3-D but also provided different views as observers moved around it, as if it were really there.
Such startlingly lifelike projections are so compelling a technology -- as we saw when R2-D2 emitted his "Help me, Obi-Wan" hologram of Princess Leia 25 years ago in the original Star Wars -- that it's difficult to imagine a future in which they're not ubiquitous. It's the present that's the problem. Until now, holograms have been little more than second-rate gimmicks, thanks to the fact that holographically creating anything more than small, washed-out images has proved exceedingly expensive and time-consuming. But that's about to change. Zebra Imaging, a six-year-old startup in Austin that created the Thunderbird holograms (as well as another for the P2000, one of Ford's experimental hydrogen-powered vehicles), is but one of several companies refining new techniques for producing life-size holograms on the fly, using both real and computer-generated images.
In conventional holography, whose uses to date have been limited to things like novelty art and anticounterfeit decals on CD jewel cases, a laser beam is split in two, with one section shining directly at a large sheet of film and the other bouncing off the object in question before being rejoined with the first. On the film, the overlapping beams etch patterns that contain enough information to render the entire image as seen from different angles. When you look at the developed film, each of your eyes sees a slightly different view of the image, providing the flawless 3-D illusion, and walking or moving your head to the side offers a side view, exactly as it would if the object were real.
Zebra's new technique is similar but uses a digital image in place of the physical object. Its computers convert a standard graphics file into a pattern displayed on a large, translucent LCD screen. A laser then fires three different-colored beams through the screen. When the beams converge and hit a special film that can be quickly developed with ultraviolet light and heat, the image emerges in startlingly realistic 3-D detail.
Such breakthroughs portend a wide array of new business applications, at least if Zebra's ever-expanding client roster is any indication. Customers include Boeing (BA), Exxon (XOM), and Ford (F), not to mention the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston, Jamaica, which recently bought a life-size hologram of the legendary reggae king. Mark Holzbach, the company's co-founder and chief technical officer, ticks off a handful of projects already in the works: holograms for product design (à la the Thunderbird), oil and gas exploration (modeling rock layers and fissures a mile below ground), jetliner navigation (making mountains visible through clouds), and even advertising (festooning brochures, billboards, and store windows with eye-popping 3-D imagery).
Alton Parrish, an analyst at technology consulting firm Business Communications in Norwalk, Conn., predicts that design applications alone will create a $100 million market for the sort of holograms Zebra can now produce, and that the overall market for high-quality holography will eventually approach $1 billion. "If the manufacturing design industry can get access to high-quality, fast holographic imaging," he says, "it's likely to adopt the technology." That's not as big an understatement as calling Zebra's T-bird a prototype, perhaps, but it's an understatement nonetheless.
At the extremely large multinational financial firm I work for forces us to change passwords once a month with a min amount of 6 characters. Also after 3 unsuccessfull password entries the profile is locked and only a sysadmin can unlock it. Also you can never use the same password twice. So in theory it seems like we have a halfway decent security situation. In practice, however, changing a pasword so often makes life hard for an employee. We are not suppost to write down the passwords and after working here for 2 years or so you rapidly run out of easy to remember, hard to guess passwords. So people use stupid easily hacked ones such as spouses, hometowns, pets names ect. When I first started I used good passwords with number combos and different case combos but after the seeing the sysadmins face after locking up my profile for the 24th time I have since gone to the stupid easy stuff.
So it just goes to show that even somewhat high level well thought out security can be easily foiled by the non-technical.
This is the best review I ever read. I was concerned about it spoiling the movie for me since I havn't seen it yet but then I remembered that I didn't care.
Anyone from NYC or have visited and seen the guys on the side of the road with a bunch of VHSs on a blanket? Most if not all are movies that either have not come out yet or are in theaters currently. My friend bought one and the quality wasn't bad.
This isn't a new thing and has nothing to do with the internet.
If these people would work with the technology and not agaist it they would lead more relaxing lives.
Tivo (Not sure about any others, don't have 'em) can track what you watch and each button press. Remember the Super Bowl? Tivo was quick to disclose the most rewound commercials. Isn't that a useful technology? Want a better idea about what shows we like? Thumb up or down. This is extremely usefull and accurate information. Much better than Neilson (sp?).
I'm not sure if the other Tivo users remember this but a many months ago I got a message in Tivo about a new contest. Watch these 3 car commercials either in Tivo Showcase or during these shows. Then go to the web site answer a few simple questions about the commercial and maybe win the car. Did I do it? Yes. To support Tivo. . . and maybe win a car.
There are numerous other ways Tivo can be an advertisers best friend and keep the viewer happy. I think they are trying a lot of cool things in the second generation Tivo.
So fellow Tivo geeks. Turn on your tracking. It's a small price to pay. And maybe the Networks and others will stop whining.
As a geek with a BA in Broadcasting I found myself in web streaming and video on CD and DVD. I started out the normal way, PA. I was lucky enouph to be in a non-union shop where I was taught all aspects of TV production. Chyron, switcher, audio, and editing. All that knowledge helped me get ahead of the other guys who come from just a computer background.
My suggestion:
Start in traditional TV. Start low. Learn from others. Ask questions. Get as much hands on experiance you can. Learn about scopes and audion levels. In you spare time learn about codecs and non-linear editing. Adobe Premier is good. Learn other aspects of the web like Flash.
This is just my 2 cents and the way I went. Personally I find it the perfect combo of tradition TV producton and computers.
It seems a lot of people here have a lot of opinions about what should be included with a DVD. Being this is "News for Nerds" it might be a good idea to know how they really work. Not the simple imac stuff. I work in Multimedia for the largest Fiancial services company on the planet. We do a lot of Corporate video and recently we turned from VHS to DVD. Which basically ment I had to figure out how to do it. The company shelled out 5K+ for the just Sub-Hollywood burner and software (Spruce DVD Virtuoso).
DVDs are just like anything else in the computing world. You have to program it. You have to say what happens when you press whatever button at whatever time.
Also something to keep in mind is that video at this resolution is really freakin big. Video is anything from 6 - 9 Mbps. Imagine a 4 hour movie with maybe a half hour of "extra footage" plus menu screens. That's maybe 9 Gigs of Data if encoded at 7 Mbps.
Needless to say I can no longer really enjoy DVDs for the content. I was blown away by the Zoolander DVD. Not because of the movie, extra stuff, or commentary but because of the freakin cool way they programed the DVD.
I would like to say that I use the CDs. I always mean to use them. Never really seam to.
However, whenever I hit a snag I reach for that book. As much as I love technology there is nothing easier than looking in the index of a book and finding (hopefully) what you need quickly and easily.
Slashdot Mirror
There goes my paycheck that month.
All right.
Crap like this really pisses me off.
Begin rant.
Your first mistake is labeling games for girls as "pink" games. What the hell is that? Is Barbie all anyone can think of for girls? By making a label such as that you are limiting what gaming can be for any sex. Just like not all video games are for little boys, not all video games should be for little girls. Idiots here on Slashdot are making references to playing with dolls and things along that nature. What about grown up WOMEN? After dealing with people like some of the malefolk here on Slashdot some of us would like to kick some ass. The most useful posts here were from the married guys. Make a good game and we play it. If there is a difference between male and female gamers it is the female lack of tolerance for crap. And there is a lot of it.
Make a good game and we will play it.
End rant.
Obligatory Pop Culture Reference: "The dog? Your named after the dog?"
I am always some version of The Mighty Squid. Every nickname, every username, every character every time. Online or off. Don't ask why but I like the consistency of it. Does anyone else use the same username/nickname/handle for everything?
I'm getting a lot of press today!
I visit the Lord of the Rings fan site TheOneRing.Net on a daily basis. They have "TORNed" sites within 10 minutes of posting. They also post links to any LOTR related polls on other sites such as "favorite movie". LOTR wins every time after being linked.
I am sure other "geeky" fan sites have the same effect.
I bought the Theatrical Edition of FOTR
.
I bought the Special Gift Pack Extended Edition of FOTR
I will buy the Theatrical Edition of TTT
I will buy the Special Gift Pack Extended Edition of TTT
I will buy the Theatrical Edition of ROTK
I will buy the Special Gift Pack Extended Edition of ROTK
I will buy the Complete Theatrical Special Edition
I will buy the Special Gift Pack Extended Complete Edition
I will sign all future paychecks to New Line and Peter Jackson
My name is The Mighty Squid . .
..... and I am addicted to LOTR.
Pity me.
So, you live in Hoboken too?
Not only a fellow female slashdot member but another female who used to work in a comic book store? Your on my friend list, sister! You sold me. I guess I'll have to read this book.
I fell in love with my husband with a two hour conversation on nano-tech and Max Headroom playing in the background in the control room of our college TV station.
I am interested in computers, Star Trek, Sci Fi, science, ect. I am pretty good looking too.
We're out there. Be your self. But mostly just get off the computer once in awhile!
Alan Dean Foster.
Love all his stuff but the best and most popular is the Humananx Series.
Come on you know you want a Mini-drag!
Besides being part of the Apple ad campaign why does anyone care? Why is this on Slashdot? How is she different than the other change ad people?
If she was a true female geek she wouldn't cook. I am a geek/wife and all I need is a microwave, toaster oven and a husband to use them.
Your site wasn't all that navigable so I wasn't able to get more info. So I will post without knowing the facts.
With all the crap we already have in space let's not let kids screw it up even more for a science project. Or else when they grow up they will look up at where the stars used to be and know they can never go because 20,000 kids added to the already 1,000s of small and large pieces of junk orbiting our planet and hindering our progress.
When I was in college (SUNY Oswego) I worked in the Distence Learning Dept. There were some net based classes but some of our classes were via cable TV and PicTel(Sort of Video Conferencing).
The Cable TV classes were in a small studio, the professor would have powerpoint like slides, an ELMO (Kind of like a video overhead projector, he could write on tranparent plastic with a marker like a blackboard) and a phone hybrid for call in questions. I was the tech for this (Switch between sources, audio, video, make sure the cable company had us, ect.) This seemed to work well and we had students throughout upstate NY. They still had that interactive student-teacher relationship.
The other sort was PicTel (Video Conference). There would be a traditional class but would have students particapating from other sites. There were cameras, monitors, and mikes at all sites. The coolest thing was that the teacher would wear a infrared device and the camera would follow her around the room as she talked. She also had an ELMO so all sites could see what she wrote clearly. They also were able to ask questions in real-time.
I got payed for being the tech support for these classes, a good gig for a student at the time ('96 -'98). I think the students got more out of this kind of arrangement than any of the Net based courses. It was more expensive and sometimes buggy (Video COnference hung up on sites sometimes) but I think it was worth it.
I don't know if they still do it but I did interview at a company that was doing something similar with more corporate classes.
Are Holograms Finally for Real?
By: David H. Freedman
Issue: July 2002
This staple of sci-fi is starting to live up to its billing, and its potential in the workplace is anything but an illusion.
In the months leading up to the debut of the new Ford Thunderbird last fall, the car's four-person design crew was asked to show its most recent tweaks to company executives. So it did what any auto-design team does: It hauled its latest prototype out to the center of a conference room for a group "walkaround." There, managers cooed over the slick coupe's rakish lines from every imaginable angle.
But "prototype," in this case, might be the biggest understatement in automotive history. What the designers and executives were in fact viewing was a computer-generated hologram -- hovering slightly off the floor -- that not only rendered the T-bird in perfect 3-D but also provided different views as observers moved around it, as if it were really there.
Such startlingly lifelike projections are so compelling a technology -- as we saw when R2-D2 emitted his "Help me, Obi-Wan" hologram of Princess Leia 25 years ago in the original Star Wars -- that it's difficult to imagine a future in which they're not ubiquitous. It's the present that's the problem. Until now, holograms have been little more than second-rate gimmicks, thanks to the fact that holographically creating anything more than small, washed-out images has proved exceedingly expensive and time-consuming. But that's about to change. Zebra Imaging, a six-year-old startup in Austin that created the Thunderbird holograms (as well as another for the P2000, one of Ford's experimental hydrogen-powered vehicles), is but one of several companies refining new techniques for producing life-size holograms on the fly, using both real and computer-generated images.
In conventional holography, whose uses to date have been limited to things like novelty art and anticounterfeit decals on CD jewel cases, a laser beam is split in two, with one section shining directly at a large sheet of film and the other bouncing off the object in question before being rejoined with the first. On the film, the overlapping beams etch patterns that contain enough information to render the entire image as seen from different angles. When you look at the developed film, each of your eyes sees a slightly different view of the image, providing the flawless 3-D illusion, and walking or moving your head to the side offers a side view, exactly as it would if the object were real.
Zebra's new technique is similar but uses a digital image in place of the physical object. Its computers convert a standard graphics file into a pattern displayed on a large, translucent LCD screen. A laser then fires three different-colored beams through the screen. When the beams converge and hit a special film that can be quickly developed with ultraviolet light and heat, the image emerges in startlingly realistic 3-D detail.
Such breakthroughs portend a wide array of new business applications, at least if Zebra's ever-expanding client roster is any indication. Customers include Boeing (BA), Exxon (XOM), and Ford (F), not to mention the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston, Jamaica, which recently bought a life-size hologram of the legendary reggae king. Mark Holzbach, the company's co-founder and chief technical officer, ticks off a handful of projects already in the works: holograms for product design (à la the Thunderbird), oil and gas exploration (modeling rock layers and fissures a mile below ground), jetliner navigation (making mountains visible through clouds), and even advertising (festooning brochures, billboards, and store windows with eye-popping 3-D imagery).
Alton Parrish, an analyst at technology consulting firm Business Communications in Norwalk, Conn., predicts that design applications alone will create a $100 million market for the sort of holograms Zebra can now produce, and that the overall market for high-quality holography will eventually approach $1 billion. "If the manufacturing design industry can get access to high-quality, fast holographic imaging," he says, "it's likely to adopt the technology." That's not as big an understatement as calling Zebra's T-bird a prototype, perhaps, but it's an understatement nonetheless.
At the extremely large multinational financial firm I work for forces us to change passwords once a month with a min amount of 6 characters. Also after 3 unsuccessfull password entries the profile is locked and only a sysadmin can unlock it. Also you can never use the same password twice. So in theory it seems like we have a halfway decent security situation. In practice, however, changing a pasword so often makes life hard for an employee. We are not suppost to write down the passwords and after working here for 2 years or so you rapidly run out of easy to remember, hard to guess passwords. So people use stupid easily hacked ones such as spouses, hometowns, pets names ect. When I first started I used good passwords with number combos and different case combos but after the seeing the sysadmins face after locking up my profile for the 24th time I have since gone to the stupid easy stuff.
So it just goes to show that even somewhat high level well thought out security can be easily foiled by the non-technical.
This is the best review I ever read. I was concerned about it spoiling the movie for me since I havn't seen it yet but then I remembered that I didn't care.
Anyone from NYC or have visited and seen the guys on the side of the road with a bunch of VHSs on a blanket? Most if not all are movies that either have not come out yet or are in theaters currently. My friend bought one and the quality wasn't bad.
This isn't a new thing and has nothing to do with the internet.
If these people would work with the technology and not agaist it they would lead more relaxing lives.
Tivo (Not sure about any others, don't have 'em) can track what you watch and each button press. Remember the Super Bowl? Tivo was quick to disclose the most rewound commercials. Isn't that a useful technology? Want a better idea about what shows we like? Thumb up or down. This is extremely usefull and accurate information. Much better than Neilson (sp?).
I'm not sure if the other Tivo users remember this but a many months ago I got a message in Tivo about a new contest. Watch these 3 car commercials either in Tivo Showcase or during these shows. Then go to the web site answer a few simple questions about the commercial and maybe win the car. Did I do it? Yes. To support Tivo. . . and maybe win a car.
There are numerous other ways Tivo can be an advertisers best friend and keep the viewer happy. I think they are trying a lot of cool things in the second generation Tivo.
So fellow Tivo geeks. Turn on your tracking. It's a small price to pay. And maybe the Networks and others will stop whining.
As a geek with a BA in Broadcasting I found myself in web streaming and video on CD and DVD. I started out the normal way, PA. I was lucky enouph to be in a non-union shop where I was taught all aspects of TV production. Chyron, switcher, audio, and editing. All that knowledge helped me get ahead of the other guys who come from just a computer background.
My suggestion:
Start in traditional TV. Start low. Learn from others. Ask questions. Get as much hands on experiance you can. Learn about scopes and audion levels. In you spare time learn about codecs and non-linear editing. Adobe Premier is good. Learn other aspects of the web like Flash.
This is just my 2 cents and the way I went. Personally I find it the perfect combo of tradition TV producton and computers.
Good luck.
It seems a lot of people here have a lot of opinions about what should be included with a DVD. Being this is "News for Nerds" it might be a good idea to know how they really work. Not the simple imac stuff. I work in Multimedia for the largest Fiancial services company on the planet. We do a lot of Corporate video and recently we turned from VHS to DVD. Which basically ment I had to figure out how to do it. The company shelled out 5K+ for the just Sub-Hollywood burner and software (Spruce DVD Virtuoso).
DVDs are just like anything else in the computing world. You have to program it. You have to say what happens when you press whatever button at whatever time.
Also something to keep in mind is that video at this resolution is really freakin big. Video is anything from 6 - 9 Mbps. Imagine a 4 hour movie with maybe a half hour of "extra footage" plus menu screens. That's maybe 9 Gigs of Data if encoded at 7 Mbps.
Needless to say I can no longer really enjoy DVDs for the content. I was blown away by the Zoolander DVD. Not because of the movie, extra stuff, or commentary but because of the freakin cool way they programed the DVD.
. . . By yourself. Have fun.
Is Wil Weaton in this show too?
I would like to say that I use the CDs. I always mean to use them. Never really seam to.
However, whenever I hit a snag I reach for that book. As much as I love technology there is nothing easier than looking in the index of a book and finding (hopefully) what you need quickly and easily.
I've done it 4 times today alone.