In 1/60th of a second, can you tell if 'Thresh' is turning towards you or away from you?
Given _good_ motion blur (i.e. absolutely minimal) this is going to mean an additional type of motion cue. You're talking about FPSes (apart from Motorhead, evidently) and FPSes are the one place where you most care whether the gun barrel is swinging toward you or moving parallel to you. You don't want to take too many frames to figure this out. Motion blur is an additional movement cue that accentuates the perception of motion visually- for instance that gun barrel- moving parallel to you it's going to have a tiny softening. If it suddenly turns toward you, it foreshortens and key details stop moving relative to you and will become clearer. These are subliminal details but perfectly legitimate- except that the sort of 'motion blur' you're seeing currently is miserably inadequate at rendering any such cues because it's 10X too diffuse and wastes way too much framerate.
Yes, I do think nVidia will sit on it. Call it fiduciary duty- why spend the money to implement this properly when you can just sue anybody to stop them from using it to compete with you?
Actually, I _would_ suppose that the government would use our tax dollars with anywhere near the efficiency that publicly held corporations would.
I wouldn't say public sector research would necessarily be _more_ efficient and effective than private sector, but I think it is incredibly stupid to count on the private sector for that. All private sector means in practice is that millions die, but we have Viagra- and Prozac. Maybe I'd rather they never developed Viagra and Prozac, but did manage to put some effort towards the most deadly diseases of the world.
The effect is _still_ being demoed at _ten_ times the time duration it should be, just to make it obvious. If they don't get a clue they'll never figure out how to make it worth a damn- though frankly we're not likely ever to see this in the market now that nVidia controls the technology- I think they are going to suppress it and sue anyone else who tries to compete with them using the idea.
All they needed to do was use the T-Buffer in line with the way they use FSAA, and keep the last rendered frame to average with the current one. It'd only look (worse than) those awful screenshots at rotten framerates like 9fps, but as you went above 30fps it would start looking just like unblurred rendering _except_ that fast-moving detailed textures would be _softened_ dynamically. Combining that with 2X FSAA would be a fantastic effect with a great deal of 'you are thereness', but NOOOOO... can't these people check with other professionals other than just computer programmers? Ask any cinematographer if that's a normal cinematic level of photographic motion blur:P they'll look at you like you are _insane_. Almost nothing moves through the frame enough to produce _that_ much blur.
I'm afraid you're not going to get it. Even given that 3dfx have been demoing wildly overblown versions of this effect to make it more obvious (a _good_ motion blur would be maybe three very faintly overlaid images- no big streaky effects but _textures_ and _edges_ would soften in the direction of motion, which would not require anywhere near that much performance hit), why should nVidia ever let this see daylight when they can simply sue anyone else in the industry who ever attempts to bring it to the market? You're not going to get it. It's more profitable for nVidia to keep anyone else from getting it and not bother to come out with it themselves. Software patents at work for you again.
This is the upsetting thing, to me. I am of the opinion that if you are setting up websites and trying to do business or even just be a _public_ person rather than some sort of sneaking conspirator, you should be able to have a public address. Particularly in terms of running a business, it's unjustifiable to me to be completely dependent on some other firm for the contact information you make available. That said, the reason I like hotmail is that they do kill accounts on my sayso- they seem to actively whack their spammer clients. However, if I was trying to maintain legitimate contact information that's the last thing I'd want- what if I hired some idiot who spammed? I'd fire them obviously but would my contact information be permanently screwed up, would I have to go replace God knows how much distributed media like business cards and brochures?
I suggest doing whatever necessary (assuming you're serious enough to be using your own domains for these websites) to do whatever necessary to associate the email with the domains- knowing that you'll get very heavy spam from this, including mis-addressed domain email and dictionary attacks. I do. But I can't reasonably be expected to give up my use of normal contact information (I'm chrisj@airwindows.com if you are in Vermont and need to do some studio recording or digital/mp3 mastering- yes that's not a misnomer, I'm using a special hack of LAME that allows me to set ambience levels dynamically, not currently available from the normal sources. Yes I will share- if asked. It's easy- pass in ATH masking level as an arg)
See, there's another reason why I might want normal contact information- some of the people working on LAME might stumble across this someday and want to know what I was doing. If I'm giving contact information that goes with my domain it will follow me if I have to change hosting. If I'm giving out some third party address it is always at risk of being rendered permanently useless. That's too high a cost- and if it's over spammers, the fault is not mine! I refuse to give up and assume there will never be at least _some_ way of dealing with spammers. Wait until Senators and Congressmen and Judges are getting so buried in spam that they cannot use their emails, wait until _they_ do the calculations and figure out that they will end up spending a year of their life just dealing with email spam by the time they die. _Then_ maybe we'll see it treated as the crime it is, akin to junk faxing.
Well, to some extent I'm talking about a particular situation that I'm not totally comfortable dragging out into Slashdot to be analyzed- anyone who's really seriously trying to be taken as a member of a community in order to cause disruption will have a pretty good cover. The example I'm thinking of is someone who is known to be a false identity, claims it is because his real identity is so unpopular that he wouldn't get a fair shake, and is posting in a situation where other people have made 'sock-puppets' before.
On a less personal level, the existence of disruptive people on Usenet who intentionally try to mess with newsgroups (communities) for fun is obvious- look up Empire Of Meow. I would... request that you not rush about insisting that you be shown the evidence of the work of Meow. You'd probably get it- even on Slashdot, though it is (a) not a newsgroup and (b) more challenging to reduce to a Smoking Crater (tm). However, Meow could reduce even Slashdot to said crater, because it is just easier to post drivel for fun and flood than it is to make reasoned argument- there aren't enough moderators or CmdrTacos to keep up with what a Meow offensive would be. Best to show at least a token respect, and (in the same spirit) avoid taking oneself too seriously, no?
Limp Bizkit (and Kid Rock) do have great sound, but Britney has appalling sound:) mind you, that's not Digidesign's fault, it's because Britney Spears music is _appallingly_ overproduced and overcompressed. Peak levels are like half a db over main levels... it's quite horrible but by God is it ever loud. Compare it to Bizkit or Kid Rock and the rockers' main levels are more like 3-6db down from peak.
I do recommend Digi, though I don't actually use it- I use hardware analog mixing and limiting (heard on my most recent album, the tracks named after airplanes). I do think that with enough skill and dedicated analog gear you can top the quality level Pro Tools will give you (though if I had Pro Tools- I could use _that_ as well and do even better. So even then, Pro Tools is desirable). However, I have to seriously confirm all that Funkwater says here: you don't want a Linux cluster for DSP. Maybe you want Linux support _for_ the hardware DSP you can already get, so you don't have to run a Mac or Windows. But you don't want a Linux cluster, unless you have some sort of non-realtime arrangement that can make use of insanely demanding 128-bit calculations to slowly 'render' a final track far better than even modern DSP allows. However, we're talking audio- that's hard to even imagine, and the DSP _is_ out there and very capable.
One thing he's managed to latch onto is a very real concern, though I don't think he has much idea of the real scope of it. To Jon, a 'flamer' is anyone who too consistently and vocally takes an opposite attitude, _seeming_ to be actively conspiring to attack him. However, there are real 'attackers' out there: indeed, because of the size of the net, any substantial community is likely to have its own dedicated attackers/vandals/terrorists who are literally seeing if they can destroy the community for fun, or because they disagree with it.
That's very different from the usual run of bored Katz flamers on slashdot. Usenet is the easiest place to find this type- it can extend even to carefully putting together identities that fit perfectly into the community _except_ for one core belief that acts to disrupt the community- to 'play' such a 'character' involves acting in every way acceptable and likeable except for the one belief that strikes to the heart of the community (for example, denying the historicity of the Holocaust in a Jewish community), and trying everything you can to both be accepted for the general niceness of your identity while not missing a chance to get in a stab with your community-disrupting issue. I've seen this actually done, and it's extraordinarily disruptive as it plays on people's tendency to accept those who are 'basically nice': construct a fake personality that is totally nice except for one point of hostility that sticks out like a sore thumb, and you make it much more difficult to enforce the community standard. It is social engineering of a very high order, or you could call it social vandalism.
This is what _doesn't_ happen to Jon: it's a pity he doesn't understand that the flames he gets are pure noisy disagreement and not conspiracy. When you start to get into people playing social engineering because they're bored or dislike a given community, that's when you really start to see damage, and online communities will have to learn to defend against this damage, even if it means developing wisdom and wariness. On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a carefully 'played' pretend person, tailored to be as acceptable as possible so you can become a 'mole' and sow the seeds of destruction in a community and get 'em backbiting each other. Furthermore, in that case it's also impossible to tell if you're doing it because you hate the principles of the community you're attacking, or whether you're just bored with way too much time on your hands and an aptitude for meanness. It's far easier to deceive on the Net- all you need is writing ability, not acting ability.
I honestly don't think "affluent, white, liberal Calfornia hippie" really, truly equates to "general". This is a misperception produced by the fact that, although the WELL was catalysed by the Deadhead community, it ended up very much general in _topic_, if not in constituency. This generality of topic is something that I have seen in _every_ _single_ _virtual_ _community_ I've ever encountered, and passes for diversity quite easily. However, the bottom line is that the core community _is_ invariably specialised, and the WELL is far from being an exception. In fact, the Deadhead group that catalysed it is somewhat more homogenous than either of the communities I mentioned.
The WELL was a perfect example of virtual community in every respect, and was certainly one of the first ones out there. It was no different than any other because the underlying social rules and principles that produce this 'specialised general gathering' are emergent from human behavior. The only reason it's hyped as being different is Boomer ego- by comparison, the furry lifestyler community I mentioned tends to respond to the dissolution of its community by distress and a sense that the lost community was a lucky break and the product of hard work that nobody's putting in anymore- nostalgia and self-worship are alien to that particular community, so it's a point of distress that the group lost focus, with essentially no backpatting that it had existed in the first place. The WELL is very subject to the Boomer self-celebratory characteristic, and so in retrospect it is spun as an absolutely unique thing that cannot be recaptured, much as the 60s 'cannot be recaptured': if it could be recaptured, that would make the Boomers less wonderful by contrast, wouldn't it? If just _anybody_ could be spiritual, committed, and activist?
Which of course reads like an indictment, for which I apologize: it is difficult to explain what causes Boomers to insist the WELL was unique, without accepting that Boomers as a class have a great deal invested in the concept that they were a peak of society, and that no succeeding generation have been anything but a disappointment by comparison. Yes, that is an insulting belief, but it is less a tenet of individual faith and more a cultural expectation 'spun' through pop analysis like 'The Greening Of America' (contrast with 'The Closing Of The American Mind'), and is as all-encompassing as Pokemon- and no more inherently honest or plausible.
That is why the WELL takes a special place in virtual communities: not because it is in fact any different, but because the people responsible for it are significantly more likely to place value on it being special, on it being a peak of human achievement that nobody these days is remotely spiritual, enlightened and hip enough to recapture. As a result, this is the spin it's given, and by default everything else is defined as a weak imitation. The WELL was certainly no _less_ than other forms of online community, but it was also no _more_: it's a simple social process that will continue to recur over and over and fall prey to the influences of disruption, uncontrolled growth, and shift in the constituency of the group.
You are mad if you think "The WELL was unique". I hate to be overly dismissive, but what an incredibly self-absorbed, uninsightful Boomer perspective! Do please smarten up. Quick.
The fact is, such communities are constantly being born and dying. I've been a part of a major one easily as big and 'personal' as the WELL was, and am right now involved with another one that hasn't died off yet, that came from still another one that's currently a wasteland.
How is this possible? It's very simple: virtual online communities are formed by collections of people who share interests that are not necessarily interests you'll find a community for in your _physical_ neighborhood. The first example I gave was alt.lifestyle.furry, perhaps a weird group but one dedicated to 'spiritual therianthropy'- quick precis is, I personally have always been a 'cat person' in a pretty deep sense, and turns out there are loads of people all over the world who similarly identify that closely with some form of nonhuman creature. A community sprang up and thrived for quite a while until increasing popularity effectively dissolved it. The second example is a music bulletin board, "MusikaBoard" that's a haven for a bunch of electronic musicians. In this one I'm more of an outsider (sure I do music but my latest album has lots of loud guitars on it which makes me an outsider to the electronic crowd in a sense) but it's plain to see the community there, and so far it hasn't succumbed to disinterest, overpopularity or some other condition that would break up the community. It originally came from a community at mp3.com that was disrupted by a social behavior- at mp3.com people were paid by the download (in theory) so all social behavior became conditioned by this and all social interaction became the outright demand to be downloaded, and trust based schemes for exchanging downloads. This killed the community by lowering signal-to-noise ratio so dramatically that nobody who was left were behaving socially- "give me" is not inherently a community behavior.
There are some interesting lessons in this- assuming you can give up the notion that "The WELL was a unique situation in human history!". Really now- get a grip, it was not special. That situation happens all the time, and it would be good to consider ways to preserve it when it happens, because it's both valuable and fragile.
Gee, it looks to me as though not only does this work as a threat to kill _all_ funding for the library, but also the government will sue the library if it does not go along. I disagree with your analysis...
I accept if I get a moderation for this, but I just need to say: Jon, your article was bracketed by two other articles- in an era where corporate and government control are trying to suppress community radio, and where government is attempting to mandate Internet censoring for public libraries, you are claiming that commercial video games are a defining cultural moment.
Is it possible that you are mistaken? If you are not mistaken, if neither community media access or mandated government censorship are so significant to a generation as communal game tweaks and shared game experiences- is this not a pretty scathing indictment?
If so, what do you propose to do about it, and where do you wish to try and draw people's attention in your capacity as a journalist?
that said software product be capable of blocking access to a site
that said software product be impossible to turn off except for 'specific research uses'.
None of this requires or expects that the software be magically able to determine what is 'obscene', and in fact if you look at what CIPA _says_ you can plainly see that it doesn't require any centralised list be kept, much less specify who keeps the list. I would support this bill because of these extremely big loopholes: again, nothing in it _specifies_ that librarians have to give a rat's ass what _other_ librarians think: if people want censorware that expresses collective opinion they can get a commercial censorware product. CIPA doesn't specify a commercial product. It just specifies, "The _process_ has to be there, no matter what". That is not a totally unreasonable position, so long as one option is, "Our community feels that our library should only block this one particular image on goatse.cx. Anything else, we will just ask the person to not keep browsing those sites in the library. We're a New England library and a small fairly progressive town and it's nobody's business to tell us what we can or can't connect to, so our compulsory blocking filter just blocks a couple images that we all agreed were extremely nasty..."
That is what public libraries _are_. They are a public service. Of all the things the government could be doing with the money it gets, I think I like libraries _best_...
Is it necessary for a censor list to be _centralised_ in this way? Community standards vary a great deal. I've read the CIPA and see absolutely NO requirement for centralised control- ALL that is being mandated is that a process exist. Technically, you could have a filter that is installed, unremovable and blocks _one_ picture somewhere on the internet- that is a 'protection measure' and operational. _Practically_, you would also need to have a process in place allowing people to ask that stuff be blocked- that seems reasonable. The point is, you _cannot_ technically block the things they want blocked. For God's sake, if I wanted to 'evade' the filters to prove it can be done, I would take a porno picture and invert it so the naked people were _green_, and then upload it somewhere as "Accounts_Receivable.jpg".
This is about _process_, not technology. There is NO REASON to assume a centralised control is neccessary- that is really not our business, if a library in Utah badly wants to block all fleshtone pictures we don't have a right to insist they block only what the Slashdot Filter agrees is 'really porn'.
Again- CIPA does not mandate a centralised list. It mandates that a filtering process be in place on all such computers. It does _not_ say who provides the list, and I suggest that is the business of the library or school, and nobody else's business. It should be possible to ask a library, "please block goatse.cx" because a library is a public service. That, too, is a process that can be seen as being responsive to the community. I see no reason to jump to the conclusion that MY community needs to block things based on what some community in Utah thinks. Keep it local. Keep the block lists locally controlled. Sell the libraries on a federally-compliant censorware system that's _entirely_ locally controlled with no central censor- that's open source so they can trust that the control remains theirs at all times (good selling point- "Nobody can LET THROUGH content that you have decided you don't want to allow! Your blocks can't be overruled!" Think devious;) ) and we'd better come up with this software, because the commercial suppliers are _not_ going to be selling a decentralised system. They're in the central-control business.
And again, thank goodness CIPA does not mandate use of a commercial centralised censor- it simply mandates that _some_ process be actively in place for _all_ computers of this nature. I think it will be a pretty easy sell, to persuade the hapless libraries and idiot legislators that communities must set their own standards. The thing specifies that libraries and schools can censor as much more as they want- the point to insist on is that libraries and schools must also be allowed to define what _they_ want to censor in line with their own community standards, even if that's "just playboy.com and goatse.cx".
This is one hell of a good idea. What does the legislation technically require? Seems like there is no reason we couldn't write our own censorware that puts control of the filtering more directly into the library's or school's hands. I see no reason a library or school shouldn't be _able_ to filter its own access- the question is, do they have access to an option that places the decisions in their hands, or is it compelling them legally to give over control of their Internet content to third parties?
We need a 'U-Filter-It' type censorware to push on libraries- one that fits the legal requirements- and we need it quick. My local library in Brattleboro puts up signs extolling the ability to read 'dangerous banned books' like, oh, 'Huckleberry Finn' and (not surprising for library people) is _very_ _much_ in favor of freedom of information. They have got to be hitting the roof around about now, and they are not necessarily tech savvy enough to come up with the technical answer to a mandate for censorware. Let's get together a local control censorware package that satisfies the legal requirements, and then go local and start talking to our local libraries and schools, and make sure they know they have that option. I flat guarantee that my local library would rather have that (and, for instance, an opt-in policy like 'If you see someone getting inappropriate material on the library computers, you can fill out this form asking us to block that page, or ask a library staffer to speak to the person for you').
Let's make this happen- forget 'guaranteeing not to censor protected speech', let's talk 'guarantees to put control of the filtering entirely in the hands of the library or school'. This will be particularly appealing to libraries because they can _individually_ approve any filtered item (like maybe a popular hard porn site) and be certain that they have the control and that nothing will be censored without their personal involvement and assent.
All that will happen is that the government is _forcing_ people to be aware of the underground- for whatever values of 'underground' it creates.
If it was just down to censoring dirty pictures, or wares trading, it would be creating a shabby little underground basically about trading dirty pictures and warez.
Because it is suppressing access to information and (see the low power radio article) communities' ability to broadcast their own media to themselves, it is creating an underground centered on becoming an information network and community resource- an underground that is so much better for its communities than corporate schlock that even Joe Average has to look at it and go,
"But this is _cool_. I _like_ hearing about these stories that don't make the news in the USA. Hell, a guy read a BBC report over the air about stuff in _my_ country that the TV is just not telling me! What's up with that? Plus my cousin plays guitar and he can't afford to get a record contract- but they played him anyway, how cool is that? Oh, and I went to the library to see his web site and the library computer wouldn't let me see it- so I did a web search on the page they gave me instead, and got a whole bunch of pages that told me how to get the library computer to go to my cousin's page anyway. I love this country goddammit! I'm so proud:)"
And he should be- because those of us who are keeping access to information open, those of us who are supporting community media, we are this country (not our increasingly f**ked up government), WE are Joe's countrymen. And it's both our obligation and our privilege to live up to that.
(OK, end of stirring speech;) seriously though, I mean it. I donate work, expertise and gear to local community radio. Do you? I don't directly support 'hacking around censorware' because that's not an area where I have expertise. I hope other people take up the slack.)
"The revolution will not be televised" -Gil Scott-Heron (and sure enough- it's being not-televised even as we speak:) )
"would have been"? Surely you don't think low power radio is waiting for corporate radio's permission?;) ask around, you might have a pirate radio station in _your_ community. You maybe wouldn't have heard of it because it would be broadcasting at maybe a watt or less, not interfering with the commercial stations, and would be publicised through word of mouth. *g* you won't hear advertisements for it on the commercial stations- or on TV- if you expect to check out real community media you have to go _find_ it as Big Media certainly will not tell you about it.
I'd love to see a/. Radio. I always liked 'Geeks In Space', plus I'm a serious musician and audio techie who is a longtime slashdotter and has plenty of unusual music to offer (besonic.com/chrisj) and just finished recording and mixing a new album just for the love of doing the art. I am getting interest from internet radio 'streamcasters' and my answer is always 'go to it my friend! with my blessing!' It's not even about being 'discovered': that makes it sound like the point is to win the fight to be noticed by the BIG media. To me, doing the art and allowing it to flow out in natural ways like individuals doing streams of the stuff they like- that IS the point, that IS the whole purpose of the exercise. When one person listens to music I did and finds something they really like, that's what I'm doing it for...
Yeah, but listen to you- three kilowatts? That's not micro radio. What you're talking about is a highpowered station that can cover an area measured in _states_ (like our own corporate KVT 'the Tri-State Rocker'). It makes no sense to even talk in terms of community radio if you're blasting away to three freaking states and another country. Micro radio is about broadcasting a watt, or a tenth of a watt for instance, and covering maybe most of a _town_, not even a city. If you were in New York, micro radio would be just enough to cover a borough, not even the whole city- same with any large or sprawling population center.
I think it makes perfect sense to regulate kilowatt stations. Those are _broadcasting_ with coverage way beyond a neighborhood. This low power radio setback is basically saying, "Broadcast even to your own community and you go to hell! you go to hell and you die!". To which the proper response (warning, contains word you're not allowed to broadcast even to your own neighborhood) is "fuck you". A community has to be able to set its own standards- if the community wants to border your kilowatt signal with a micro signal that's its business.
Absolutely. It takes a great deal of organization to come up with a genuine local pirate radio station- loads of DJs, technical people etc. Doing a rebroadcast of a Internet stream requires only a transmitter and (one hopes) a good broadband connection so you're not forced to rebroadcast RealAudio;P the dedicated local station is going to end up sounding a lot better, playing actual CDs and records and the like, but you could have four different people rebroadcasting a Web stream to all parts of a building. Basically, if you can avoid the necessity to broadcast to a whole town (like, a watt or so) then micropower FM becomes totally unstoppable- anyone with a playlist and the equipment could broadcast to just their apartment building, or their block, or their street, and presto- the radio equivalent of a mp3 server for your house, accessible to any cheap transistor radio or walkman or car radio. You gotta love it:)
My take on the whole matter is that it is relative. Let me put it this way- KVT is a big corporate rock station in my area. I think KVT has every right to protest someone setting up a kilowatt transformer one channel away and screwing up their reception all across the state. However, KVT does not have the right to guaranteed uninterfered reception in my house. If I want to set up a 0.000001 watt transmitter, tune it to a half-channel away from KVT, and disrupt KVT's ability to broadcast in my house then that is up to me. As the range increases, it becomes a community issue- if the people on my block are agreed that they want a local micro station one channel away from KVT it is _their_ business. And so on- at the point where you are broadcasting to a town, that's where you start butting heads with corporate FM. My town's local pirate station has a lot of community support, actually- Vermont has a large progressive/radical population and is into co-operatives in general, so the radio station fits right in and there are donation boxes in some of the major stores in the area. To Vermonters, it's on the level of supporting an animal shelter- you don't have to support it but you might just want to! And arguments that it is Bad And Wrong because it might interfere with KVT (if it wasn't 27 bands away and well-run) don't impress people around here.
The big priority is to get _geek_ _expertise_ behind the pirate stations. It's all very well if 10,000 music freaks get pirate stations on the air, but if they sound like crap and put out messy sidebands and interference they are poor competition to Corporate Radio. It doesn't have to be that way- donate _skills_ to pirate radio. If you know what you're doing with sound engineering work with your local pirate radio station, get them broadcasting with a good tight cleanly compressed (ZERO attack time! make it work as a limiter- no onset transients!) signal, fullrange, perhaps with special custom cabling or gear that you donated.
I do this, and my local pirate radio station now sounds better than almost every corporate rock station in the area- and significantly bigger and better than KVT-FM which is running such a pile of elaborate sonic processing that they sound like crap on good systems:) My local pirate station is running over 40 feet of custom handmade low-capacitance cable I made and donated to them to replace Radio Shack crap.
Audio geeks- work _with_ the low power pirate radio movement. It's great- it's so unlike trying to hype your skills commercially! People really _appreciate_ it when you can make their radio station sound better, and the whole audience notices and even mentions it. Donate gear and skills and your ear and get to work with the low power radio people- it is _so_ worth it:)
It is now nVidia's fiduciary duty to their stockholders to stop wasting money on tech research when it is expensive and unnecessary.
With the combined nVidia and 3Dfx patents, they can sue any potential competitor in the gaming market who even tries to compete with them, so no possible competitor will get funding and no existing competitor will be able to approach current nVidia performance levels.
It's an interesting question whether there is any reason to support Linux or the Mac- with Microsoft shaking and issuing earnings warnings, it's not stupid to hang onto whatever support for alternate platforms you have, so binary-only support for Linux and Mac is likely to continue indefinitely. The current nVidia offerings will make their way to a mostly-working support of Linux and Mac, and they will stay there- because it'll be at least five years before we see any significant improvements. No financial return in wasting money on development, remember? When no other competitor _can_ arise because you have the field locked up with patents and can afford to use them as a weapon, it's payback time.
I'm quite glad that I'm not a serious gamer today. I can play 'X-Plane' quite happily on an old ATI rage128-based card, and don't need to play new games. If I want more flash I can get a PS2. That's the smart bet now- because there's no reason for nVidia to sweat too hard making X-Box that great, even if it does ship. It's PC-based, and the only PC-based 3D vendor of note is nVidia now, so nothing will come along to make X-Box look bad compared to the PC platform. I honestly thought that the PC was going to far outclass X-Box by the time X-Box is supposedly out, but now everything changes because the PC development will stop (fiduciary duty, remember? They can hire some ad-men to go with the lawyers- that'll do. Cheaper than techs) meaning that nVidia can actually cooperate with Microsoft to ensure that PC gaming does _not_ exceed X-Box- assuming of course Microsoft _wants_ X-Box to beat PC gaming, which I guess is up to Microsoft and not you.
So go PPC. 512K cache is _small_ for current PPCs, 1M cache is typical and 2M of cache is possible with the G4s. You don't _have_ to cling to x86 just because an industry is desperately trying to keep it hobbling along. It's possible to not use x86. For that matter, UltraSPARC cache can be up to _four_ megs.
I don't mean to be overcritical, but how would you know what the real marketing plan is? Do you feel that Microsoft doesn't have enough money to put together hardware and string you along before dropping the project? Personally I feel they can't _sensibly_ afford to do this, but then they are not always sensible.
If hardware in your hands == not vapor, I'd be playing games on a Pippin. X-Box is as real as Farenheit.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1/60th of a second, can you tell if 'Thresh' is turning towards you or away from you?
Given _good_ motion blur (i.e. absolutely minimal) this is going to mean an additional type of motion cue. You're talking about FPSes (apart from Motorhead, evidently) and FPSes are the one place where you most care whether the gun barrel is swinging toward you or moving parallel to you. You don't want to take too many frames to figure this out. Motion blur is an additional movement cue that accentuates the perception of motion visually- for instance that gun barrel- moving parallel to you it's going to have a tiny softening. If it suddenly turns toward you, it foreshortens and key details stop moving relative to you and will become clearer. These are subliminal details but perfectly legitimate- except that the sort of 'motion blur' you're seeing currently is miserably inadequate at rendering any such cues because it's 10X too diffuse and wastes way too much framerate.
Yes, I do think nVidia will sit on it. Call it fiduciary duty- why spend the money to implement this properly when you can just sue anybody to stop them from using it to compete with you?
I wouldn't say public sector research would necessarily be _more_ efficient and effective than private sector, but I think it is incredibly stupid to count on the private sector for that. All private sector means in practice is that millions die, but we have Viagra- and Prozac. Maybe I'd rather they never developed Viagra and Prozac, but did manage to put some effort towards the most deadly diseases of the world.
All they needed to do was use the T-Buffer in line with the way they use FSAA, and keep the last rendered frame to average with the current one. It'd only look (worse than) those awful screenshots at rotten framerates like 9fps, but as you went above 30fps it would start looking just like unblurred rendering _except_ that fast-moving detailed textures would be _softened_ dynamically. Combining that with 2X FSAA would be a fantastic effect with a great deal of 'you are thereness', but NOOOOO... can't these people check with other professionals other than just computer programmers? Ask any cinematographer if that's a normal cinematic level of photographic motion blur :P they'll look at you like you are _insane_. Almost nothing moves through the frame enough to produce _that_ much blur.
I'm afraid you're not going to get it. Even given that 3dfx have been demoing wildly overblown versions of this effect to make it more obvious (a _good_ motion blur would be maybe three very faintly overlaid images- no big streaky effects but _textures_ and _edges_ would soften in the direction of motion, which would not require anywhere near that much performance hit), why should nVidia ever let this see daylight when they can simply sue anyone else in the industry who ever attempts to bring it to the market? You're not going to get it. It's more profitable for nVidia to keep anyone else from getting it and not bother to come out with it themselves. Software patents at work for you again.
I suggest doing whatever necessary (assuming you're serious enough to be using your own domains for these websites) to do whatever necessary to associate the email with the domains- knowing that you'll get very heavy spam from this, including mis-addressed domain email and dictionary attacks. I do. But I can't reasonably be expected to give up my use of normal contact information (I'm chrisj@airwindows.com if you are in Vermont and need to do some studio recording or digital/mp3 mastering- yes that's not a misnomer, I'm using a special hack of LAME that allows me to set ambience levels dynamically, not currently available from the normal sources. Yes I will share- if asked. It's easy- pass in ATH masking level as an arg)
See, there's another reason why I might want normal contact information- some of the people working on LAME might stumble across this someday and want to know what I was doing. If I'm giving contact information that goes with my domain it will follow me if I have to change hosting. If I'm giving out some third party address it is always at risk of being rendered permanently useless. That's too high a cost- and if it's over spammers, the fault is not mine! I refuse to give up and assume there will never be at least _some_ way of dealing with spammers. Wait until Senators and Congressmen and Judges are getting so buried in spam that they cannot use their emails, wait until _they_ do the calculations and figure out that they will end up spending a year of their life just dealing with email spam by the time they die. _Then_ maybe we'll see it treated as the crime it is, akin to junk faxing.
On a less personal level, the existence of disruptive people on Usenet who intentionally try to mess with newsgroups (communities) for fun is obvious- look up Empire Of Meow. I would... request that you not rush about insisting that you be shown the evidence of the work of Meow. You'd probably get it- even on Slashdot, though it is (a) not a newsgroup and (b) more challenging to reduce to a Smoking Crater (tm). However, Meow could reduce even Slashdot to said crater, because it is just easier to post drivel for fun and flood than it is to make reasoned argument- there aren't enough moderators or CmdrTacos to keep up with what a Meow offensive would be. Best to show at least a token respect, and (in the same spirit) avoid taking oneself too seriously, no?
I do recommend Digi, though I don't actually use it- I use hardware analog mixing and limiting (heard on my most recent album, the tracks named after airplanes). I do think that with enough skill and dedicated analog gear you can top the quality level Pro Tools will give you (though if I had Pro Tools- I could use _that_ as well and do even better. So even then, Pro Tools is desirable). However, I have to seriously confirm all that Funkwater says here: you don't want a Linux cluster for DSP. Maybe you want Linux support _for_ the hardware DSP you can already get, so you don't have to run a Mac or Windows. But you don't want a Linux cluster, unless you have some sort of non-realtime arrangement that can make use of insanely demanding 128-bit calculations to slowly 'render' a final track far better than even modern DSP allows. However, we're talking audio- that's hard to even imagine, and the DSP _is_ out there and very capable.
One thing he's managed to latch onto is a very real concern, though I don't think he has much idea of the real scope of it. To Jon, a 'flamer' is anyone who too consistently and vocally takes an opposite attitude, _seeming_ to be actively conspiring to attack him. However, there are real 'attackers' out there: indeed, because of the size of the net, any substantial community is likely to have its own dedicated attackers/vandals/terrorists who are literally seeing if they can destroy the community for fun, or because they disagree with it.
That's very different from the usual run of bored Katz flamers on slashdot. Usenet is the easiest place to find this type- it can extend even to carefully putting together identities that fit perfectly into the community _except_ for one core belief that acts to disrupt the community- to 'play' such a 'character' involves acting in every way acceptable and likeable except for the one belief that strikes to the heart of the community (for example, denying the historicity of the Holocaust in a Jewish community), and trying everything you can to both be accepted for the general niceness of your identity while not missing a chance to get in a stab with your community-disrupting issue. I've seen this actually done, and it's extraordinarily disruptive as it plays on people's tendency to accept those who are 'basically nice': construct a fake personality that is totally nice except for one point of hostility that sticks out like a sore thumb, and you make it much more difficult to enforce the community standard. It is social engineering of a very high order, or you could call it social vandalism.
This is what _doesn't_ happen to Jon: it's a pity he doesn't understand that the flames he gets are pure noisy disagreement and not conspiracy. When you start to get into people playing social engineering because they're bored or dislike a given community, that's when you really start to see damage, and online communities will have to learn to defend against this damage, even if it means developing wisdom and wariness. On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a carefully 'played' pretend person, tailored to be as acceptable as possible so you can become a 'mole' and sow the seeds of destruction in a community and get 'em backbiting each other. Furthermore, in that case it's also impossible to tell if you're doing it because you hate the principles of the community you're attacking, or whether you're just bored with way too much time on your hands and an aptitude for meanness. It's far easier to deceive on the Net- all you need is writing ability, not acting ability.
The WELL was a perfect example of virtual community in every respect, and was certainly one of the first ones out there. It was no different than any other because the underlying social rules and principles that produce this 'specialised general gathering' are emergent from human behavior. The only reason it's hyped as being different is Boomer ego- by comparison, the furry lifestyler community I mentioned tends to respond to the dissolution of its community by distress and a sense that the lost community was a lucky break and the product of hard work that nobody's putting in anymore- nostalgia and self-worship are alien to that particular community, so it's a point of distress that the group lost focus, with essentially no backpatting that it had existed in the first place. The WELL is very subject to the Boomer self-celebratory characteristic, and so in retrospect it is spun as an absolutely unique thing that cannot be recaptured, much as the 60s 'cannot be recaptured': if it could be recaptured, that would make the Boomers less wonderful by contrast, wouldn't it? If just _anybody_ could be spiritual, committed, and activist?
Which of course reads like an indictment, for which I apologize: it is difficult to explain what causes Boomers to insist the WELL was unique, without accepting that Boomers as a class have a great deal invested in the concept that they were a peak of society, and that no succeeding generation have been anything but a disappointment by comparison. Yes, that is an insulting belief, but it is less a tenet of individual faith and more a cultural expectation 'spun' through pop analysis like 'The Greening Of America' (contrast with 'The Closing Of The American Mind'), and is as all-encompassing as Pokemon- and no more inherently honest or plausible.
That is why the WELL takes a special place in virtual communities: not because it is in fact any different, but because the people responsible for it are significantly more likely to place value on it being special, on it being a peak of human achievement that nobody these days is remotely spiritual, enlightened and hip enough to recapture. As a result, this is the spin it's given, and by default everything else is defined as a weak imitation. The WELL was certainly no _less_ than other forms of online community, but it was also no _more_: it's a simple social process that will continue to recur over and over and fall prey to the influences of disruption, uncontrolled growth, and shift in the constituency of the group.
The fact is, such communities are constantly being born and dying. I've been a part of a major one easily as big and 'personal' as the WELL was, and am right now involved with another one that hasn't died off yet, that came from still another one that's currently a wasteland.
How is this possible? It's very simple: virtual online communities are formed by collections of people who share interests that are not necessarily interests you'll find a community for in your _physical_ neighborhood. The first example I gave was alt.lifestyle.furry, perhaps a weird group but one dedicated to 'spiritual therianthropy'- quick precis is, I personally have always been a 'cat person' in a pretty deep sense, and turns out there are loads of people all over the world who similarly identify that closely with some form of nonhuman creature. A community sprang up and thrived for quite a while until increasing popularity effectively dissolved it. The second example is a music bulletin board, "MusikaBoard" that's a haven for a bunch of electronic musicians. In this one I'm more of an outsider (sure I do music but my latest album has lots of loud guitars on it which makes me an outsider to the electronic crowd in a sense) but it's plain to see the community there, and so far it hasn't succumbed to disinterest, overpopularity or some other condition that would break up the community. It originally came from a community at mp3.com that was disrupted by a social behavior- at mp3.com people were paid by the download (in theory) so all social behavior became conditioned by this and all social interaction became the outright demand to be downloaded, and trust based schemes for exchanging downloads. This killed the community by lowering signal-to-noise ratio so dramatically that nobody who was left were behaving socially- "give me" is not inherently a community behavior.
There are some interesting lessons in this- assuming you can give up the notion that "The WELL was a unique situation in human history!". Really now- get a grip, it was not special. That situation happens all the time, and it would be good to consider ways to preserve it when it happens, because it's both valuable and fragile.
Gee, it looks to me as though not only does this work as a threat to kill _all_ funding for the library, but also the government will sue the library if it does not go along. I disagree with your analysis...
Is it possible that you are mistaken? If you are not mistaken, if neither community media access or mandated government censorship are so significant to a generation as communal game tweaks and shared game experiences- is this not a pretty scathing indictment?
If so, what do you propose to do about it, and where do you wish to try and draw people's attention in your capacity as a journalist?
- that a software product be present at all times
- that said software product be capable of blocking access to a site
- that said software product be impossible to turn off except for 'specific research uses'.
None of this requires or expects that the software be magically able to determine what is 'obscene', and in fact if you look at what CIPA _says_ you can plainly see that it doesn't require any centralised list be kept, much less specify who keeps the list. I would support this bill because of these extremely big loopholes: again, nothing in it _specifies_ that librarians have to give a rat's ass what _other_ librarians think: if people want censorware that expresses collective opinion they can get a commercial censorware product. CIPA doesn't specify a commercial product. It just specifies, "The _process_ has to be there, no matter what". That is not a totally unreasonable position, so long as one option is, "Our community feels that our library should only block this one particular image on goatse.cx. Anything else, we will just ask the person to not keep browsing those sites in the library. We're a New England library and a small fairly progressive town and it's nobody's business to tell us what we can or can't connect to, so our compulsory blocking filter just blocks a couple images that we all agreed were extremely nasty..."That is what public libraries _are_. They are a public service. Of all the things the government could be doing with the money it gets, I think I like libraries _best_...
This is about _process_, not technology. There is NO REASON to assume a centralised control is neccessary- that is really not our business, if a library in Utah badly wants to block all fleshtone pictures we don't have a right to insist they block only what the Slashdot Filter agrees is 'really porn'.
Again- CIPA does not mandate a centralised list. It mandates that a filtering process be in place on all such computers. It does _not_ say who provides the list, and I suggest that is the business of the library or school, and nobody else's business. It should be possible to ask a library, "please block goatse.cx" because a library is a public service. That, too, is a process that can be seen as being responsive to the community. I see no reason to jump to the conclusion that MY community needs to block things based on what some community in Utah thinks. Keep it local. Keep the block lists locally controlled. Sell the libraries on a federally-compliant censorware system that's _entirely_ locally controlled with no central censor- that's open source so they can trust that the control remains theirs at all times (good selling point- "Nobody can LET THROUGH content that you have decided you don't want to allow! Your blocks can't be overruled!" Think devious ;) ) and we'd better come up with this software, because the commercial suppliers are _not_ going to be selling a decentralised system. They're in the central-control business.
And again, thank goodness CIPA does not mandate use of a commercial centralised censor- it simply mandates that _some_ process be actively in place for _all_ computers of this nature. I think it will be a pretty easy sell, to persuade the hapless libraries and idiot legislators that communities must set their own standards. The thing specifies that libraries and schools can censor as much more as they want- the point to insist on is that libraries and schools must also be allowed to define what _they_ want to censor in line with their own community standards, even if that's "just playboy.com and goatse.cx".
We need a 'U-Filter-It' type censorware to push on libraries- one that fits the legal requirements- and we need it quick. My local library in Brattleboro puts up signs extolling the ability to read 'dangerous banned books' like, oh, 'Huckleberry Finn' and (not surprising for library people) is _very_ _much_ in favor of freedom of information. They have got to be hitting the roof around about now, and they are not necessarily tech savvy enough to come up with the technical answer to a mandate for censorware. Let's get together a local control censorware package that satisfies the legal requirements, and then go local and start talking to our local libraries and schools, and make sure they know they have that option. I flat guarantee that my local library would rather have that (and, for instance, an opt-in policy like 'If you see someone getting inappropriate material on the library computers, you can fill out this form asking us to block that page, or ask a library staffer to speak to the person for you'). Let's make this happen- forget 'guaranteeing not to censor protected speech', let's talk 'guarantees to put control of the filtering entirely in the hands of the library or school'. This will be particularly appealing to libraries because they can _individually_ approve any filtered item (like maybe a popular hard porn site) and be certain that they have the control and that nothing will be censored without their personal involvement and assent.
If it was just down to censoring dirty pictures, or wares trading, it would be creating a shabby little underground basically about trading dirty pictures and warez.
Because it is suppressing access to information and (see the low power radio article) communities' ability to broadcast their own media to themselves, it is creating an underground centered on becoming an information network and community resource- an underground that is so much better for its communities than corporate schlock that even Joe Average has to look at it and go,
And he should be- because those of us who are keeping access to information open, those of us who are supporting community media, we are this country (not our increasingly f**ked up government), WE are Joe's countrymen. And it's both our obligation and our privilege to live up to that.
(OK, end of stirring speech ;) seriously though, I mean it. I donate work, expertise and gear to local community radio. Do you? I don't directly support 'hacking around censorware' because that's not an area where I have expertise. I hope other people take up the slack.)
"The revolution will not be televised" -Gil Scott-Heron (and sure enough- it's being not-televised even as we speak :) )
I'd love to see a /. Radio. I always liked 'Geeks In Space', plus I'm a serious musician and audio techie who is a longtime slashdotter and has plenty of unusual music to offer (besonic.com/chrisj) and just finished recording and mixing a new album just for the love of doing the art. I am getting interest from internet radio 'streamcasters' and my answer is always 'go to it my friend! with my blessing!' It's not even about being 'discovered': that makes it sound like the point is to win the fight to be noticed by the BIG media. To me, doing the art and allowing it to flow out in natural ways like individuals doing streams of the stuff they like- that IS the point, that IS the whole purpose of the exercise. When one person listens to music I did and finds something they really like, that's what I'm doing it for...
I think it makes perfect sense to regulate kilowatt stations. Those are _broadcasting_ with coverage way beyond a neighborhood. This low power radio setback is basically saying, "Broadcast even to your own community and you go to hell! you go to hell and you die!". To which the proper response (warning, contains word you're not allowed to broadcast even to your own neighborhood) is "fuck you". A community has to be able to set its own standards- if the community wants to border your kilowatt signal with a micro signal that's its business.
My take on the whole matter is that it is relative. Let me put it this way- KVT is a big corporate rock station in my area. I think KVT has every right to protest someone setting up a kilowatt transformer one channel away and screwing up their reception all across the state. However, KVT does not have the right to guaranteed uninterfered reception in my house. If I want to set up a 0.000001 watt transmitter, tune it to a half-channel away from KVT, and disrupt KVT's ability to broadcast in my house then that is up to me. As the range increases, it becomes a community issue- if the people on my block are agreed that they want a local micro station one channel away from KVT it is _their_ business. And so on- at the point where you are broadcasting to a town, that's where you start butting heads with corporate FM. My town's local pirate station has a lot of community support, actually- Vermont has a large progressive/radical population and is into co-operatives in general, so the radio station fits right in and there are donation boxes in some of the major stores in the area. To Vermonters, it's on the level of supporting an animal shelter- you don't have to support it but you might just want to! And arguments that it is Bad And Wrong because it might interfere with KVT (if it wasn't 27 bands away and well-run) don't impress people around here.
I do this, and my local pirate radio station now sounds better than almost every corporate rock station in the area- and significantly bigger and better than KVT-FM which is running such a pile of elaborate sonic processing that they sound like crap on good systems :) My local pirate station is running over 40 feet of custom handmade low-capacitance cable I made and donated to them to replace Radio Shack crap.
Audio geeks- work _with_ the low power pirate radio movement. It's great- it's so unlike trying to hype your skills commercially! People really _appreciate_ it when you can make their radio station sound better, and the whole audience notices and even mentions it. Donate gear and skills and your ear and get to work with the low power radio people- it is _so_ worth it :)
He must have done it, too- Microsoft shares are freefalling after they released a profit warning. The next couple weeks could be verrry interesting...
With the combined nVidia and 3Dfx patents, they can sue any potential competitor in the gaming market who even tries to compete with them, so no possible competitor will get funding and no existing competitor will be able to approach current nVidia performance levels.
It's an interesting question whether there is any reason to support Linux or the Mac- with Microsoft shaking and issuing earnings warnings, it's not stupid to hang onto whatever support for alternate platforms you have, so binary-only support for Linux and Mac is likely to continue indefinitely. The current nVidia offerings will make their way to a mostly-working support of Linux and Mac, and they will stay there- because it'll be at least five years before we see any significant improvements. No financial return in wasting money on development, remember? When no other competitor _can_ arise because you have the field locked up with patents and can afford to use them as a weapon, it's payback time.
I'm quite glad that I'm not a serious gamer today. I can play 'X-Plane' quite happily on an old ATI rage128-based card, and don't need to play new games. If I want more flash I can get a PS2. That's the smart bet now- because there's no reason for nVidia to sweat too hard making X-Box that great, even if it does ship. It's PC-based, and the only PC-based 3D vendor of note is nVidia now, so nothing will come along to make X-Box look bad compared to the PC platform. I honestly thought that the PC was going to far outclass X-Box by the time X-Box is supposedly out, but now everything changes because the PC development will stop (fiduciary duty, remember? They can hire some ad-men to go with the lawyers- that'll do. Cheaper than techs) meaning that nVidia can actually cooperate with Microsoft to ensure that PC gaming does _not_ exceed X-Box- assuming of course Microsoft _wants_ X-Box to beat PC gaming, which I guess is up to Microsoft and not you.
Welcome to the world of the future. Chess anyone?
So go PPC. 512K cache is _small_ for current PPCs, 1M cache is typical and 2M of cache is possible with the G4s. You don't _have_ to cling to x86 just because an industry is desperately trying to keep it hobbling along. It's possible to not use x86. For that matter, UltraSPARC cache can be up to _four_ megs.
If hardware in your hands == not vapor, I'd be playing games on a Pippin. X-Box is as real as Farenheit.