Good DRM is when a company can stream or upload you a file over the net - much like a video rental - allow you to watch it, and not worry that you'll dump the thing into a file and stick it on KaZaa right away.
Bad DRM is when you've bought a disk or an "unlimited use" file (download), but can't watch it on another machine, burn it to CD, etc.
DRM as a method for hindering illegal activity is good. It's when it hinders legal activity as well that it's bad. In the first example I really can't see anything being hindered at all, since the file download is a "rental" you have no more rights to copy/dump the file than you would a Blockbuster rental. In the latter it's a pain in the ass because you should be able to use your "purchase" as you see fit (withing your own domain of ownership)
I can download a few hours worth of programming in DivX format in a relatively low time-frame. When monthly bandwidth usage becomes less of a concern, why not offer a package wherein for $30/mo I can set my 'puter up to pick shows I want from TV-guide, download them, and watch them when I get home from work. Not much different from what's happening already anyhow
The main issue is probably commercial revenue. If you *really* want me to see a few commercials, drop the price a bit for packages with mandatory commercials, or perhaps throw them in during the loading process as a quick clip.
a) From anyone with experience, how does the seemingly narrower width affect turning, cornering, and handling in winds?
b) Many people have mentioned that the passenger cabin is strongly re-inforced, but the rest of the body is mainly crumple-zone. How does the car handle in low-speed impact (e.g. does something that would normally crumple a fender on a bigger car cause severe damage to the Smart?)
I notice that the specs sheet says "automatic or manual mode selectable," and not "available in manual or automatic."
This makes it sound like there's a button to change "modes" and go from manual to automatic? This would be rather sweet, being able to switch from one to another depending on traffic and other circumstances.
This misses the point though, because you cannot print it on a full page without grain.
Think of it this way... have a big light in one room, open the door to another and - without flash - take a picture (in the room without a light on).
Now, in the same scenario, close the door so it's only 1/4 of the way open. Take another picture.
The first picture things will probably look decent, on the second you're losing detail and probably getting static.
Why, because not enough light is entering the room to produce a good picture. A 4MP camera with good light adjustment is going to have a picture just as good as a 7MP, because the 7MP is just giving you higher-resolution static. Light is your photo, as it's really a refraction of light that you're capturing. Less light=crappier picture.
Now think along the same lines but with the barrel/lense of the camera. You're getting the same amount of light, but trying to divide it among a great space. Result, the picture looks just as craptacular at 7MP, and as far as printing it's not really any different than resizing up a 4MP picture.
Ex-act-ly. While characters in movies change, environmental factors and physics are often fairly consistent. Realtime in-game graphics (with recent video card models) are fast approaching where CGI movies were several years ago.
Game cinematics (the little cut-scenes, etc) I would actually consider to be on-par with some of the best in some cases.
Look at the world-of-Warcraft trailer... my first thought was "Screw the game! When are they going to make a movie?" Of course, that's not what things look like in-game, but it could be in the future...
And the best part is, as you mention these things can build up libraries. Especially with open-source. Once somebody gets a realistic swaying bridge, another person can import "bridge_sway.c" into their project as well. Once walls start showing realistic nicks and cuts, we can have "wall_damage.c"
In fact, to some extent many of these effects aren't very difficult to reproduce. It's when you collaberate them all together that you get a bridge-swaying, wall pummeling masterpiece of automagic.
Which also makes me greatful for DVD burners, and larger media coming out. Because with more realism also tends to come a lot more overheard:-)
The problem is that in games like Doom 3 for example, the creation of cinematics is scripted heavily and designed into the levels
I don't really think that these are mutually independant however. Movies themselves are "scripted," so you don't really need a truly dynamic environment.
Effects like the hellish voices and the moving/glowing/changing walls could be very useful in a horror movie...
The end result really would be a combination of good modelling, good model scripting (many realistic actions and other things).
I haven't played with HL2 much (seen it, going to LAN party to play this weekend, but haven't played it), so I'll stick with doom3 engines as an example.
The first thing we're going to need is a better physics engine. Sure you can bump some things around, but I want to be able to blow chunks in a wall - not sure have a burned texture from weapons hits. I want more realistic explosions. I want more realistic character motion. Blood should drip and create little pools which then flow downhill.
I want bridges that sway, metal that warps realistically, and objects that are more interactive in general.
Beyond that, other things are really good. Ambient sound in games is doing very well. You can hear demons coming towards you, fires crackling around the corner, and the change in your footsteps as you walk on different terrain.
Lighting is also good, and combined with better graphics cards lighting and texture, and shadow play a big part in making an environment realistic.
So once we beat the physics, then what? Well, we already have actors attached to machines which read body movement (Gollum in LOTR, etc)... how about more interactive environments. Strap the actor with body sensors and a VR suit. Maybe throw some semi-random AI into the zombies just to may the thing a bit more realistic (really surprise the actors). Have them see their own interaction with the characters of a fantasy world, and perhaps with the above such a world may become "real" on film...
Mainly the problem is that users don't often want to *learn* a new piece of software, but they do want to use it. They want advanced features, but they don't want to figure them out.
That being so, in designing your interfaces (and backend) you have to do a lot of hand-holding. You have to make the basic features obvious, and the complex features easy enough to use for the average user. Often this might mean anticipating how the user expects to use a program, or by filling different controls etc etc based on default behaviors.
If I tell them I bought my PC from an auction or buy-and-sell, etc - but wasn't given the original media. Nobody trackable to turn in, can I still go for a free legal CD-key?
There's nothing wrong with violence, sexuality, etc etc - it's all about placement. Teach your kids that stress relief by acting out frustrations on your opponents is different than whacking around another kid in a playground. Hunting in the wilds is different than blowing people away with a shotgun, etc etc.
Personally I'm still more afraid of the influence upon children of today that post 9-11 is giving (hey, let's go blow up some countries because they might harbour terrorists, and it's ok to lock up a few innocents and torture information out of them because we need to catch the real bad guys).
Can't Tesla coils be a bit dangerous? I work in schools and while I could see older High School students using these, even some of them aren't mature enough. 12-year-olds would be more dangerous, though there are possibilities:
Today students, we will demonstrate this giant Tesla coil which was built during the previous semester...
Now for everybody who got an "F" in effort in the previous semester, please place these metal chains around your neck and stand near the coil here...
I really do hope that you aren't planning on letting them bring these home then. I have enough problems when the younger family members get noisy presents from their grandparents and insist on playing with them for the next 10 hours. Use in the halls is guaranteed to drive teachers nuts too
Noisy projects may be more interesting to the kids, but they can sure as heck be annoying to everyone esle.
Is that your phone is considered a consumable. Useful for a limited time, then you should fork over more cash and buy a new one.
No seriously, as with many other electronic products the return/exchange rates on phones are very high. Many of the things are really quite fragile and over time will severely degrade in performance, battery life, etc.
Even the newer Nokias cause some interference. When my gf's went off it used to make the alarm clock pop and stutter. The alarm would actually start buzzing before the phone rang.
Not sure if it's harmful though, as it could just be your standard interference. Given the proximity of the phone to one's crotch though, the thought of radiation isn't such a good thing.
I don't know about you, but I generally don't hold my PSU up to my face when I'm using my PC. Of course laptops are also a risk, but for those that have died it's usually just a lack of power-on and no fancy sparks or fire.
A laptop goes off on one's lap could be a danger, but chances are the desktop isn't so much so. I've had plenty of PSU's go, some smoking nicely - usually a blown cap and never anything that was much of a risk to anything outside the box.
The ads are an exemption (since you can fast-forward), but I've always found the annoyance of tape is in the delay. Insert tape... "damn it's at the end"... rewind tape... rewinding... still rewinding... stiiiillll rewinding......
You could cheat on this. Have a nice big ramdrive, preload the videos, start 3 Xine instances - each pointing at a video file but not set to play - then once all three have started, tell them to start playing.
Since the files are on ramdisk delay should be negligable between the 3 instances as far as startup...
Also, it may crash if you happen to have two different flash plugins in the plugins folder (notably on 'nix if you have the OS one and the one that grabs the "official" flash from macromedia).
Similar issues may happen with invalid, mixed, or mislinked java plugins.
So are the tabloids, and they get away with tons somehow. I've often wondered how.
I mean, look at their coverage of "normal people" who have become famous due to a tragic event (kidnapping or whatever). How do they get away with plastering the paper with articles about it.
Personally, I find a Kennedy re-enactment a lot less offensive that a bunch of JB Ramsey or other headlines staring me in the face at the supermarket (not that it makes either right).
Depending on how small they can make the cells, why not just do what I do with old camera batteries... have one in the camera until it gets drained, and another topped off ready to replace it. Drain one, stick the replacement in and put the other in a charger. Rinse, lather, repeat.
After all, I'd imagine that over time they could make the batteries fairly compact in size - I'm not talking AAA but perhaps big flashlight-battery sized of perhaps at least managable.
Yes, but usually it's a correlation between economics and feasibility or risk. If a company can make $$$ with low risk, and/or have somebody else do the work, why the hell not? Basically it's saving them the trouble of writing a true port at this time, and the only risk is that Transgaming would release the game beta to the public (which would end up in them getting their asses sued off, so is unlikely).
I do agree that Transgaming is getting better at supporting new games. They should be, seeing as though the directX system only changes so much, and in reality they're not supporting the game itself so much as they're supporting DirectX, certain new win32 system calls, and perhaps every so often a new method of copy-protection.
While Wine is quite compatible with newer games on certain hardware, it's still a far ways from 100% compatible with the majority of windows software or even games. It seems that the Wine devels are much more interested in supporting newest game X than some of the older uncompatible-but-still-popular games. This is understandable since new games are where the most $$$ is anyways.
However, as Wine does approach greater compatibility for new games, there is always a moving target. A new DirectX/GL spec would probably cause quite a lot of new work, and there's a lot of other stuff to take care of.
The truth is, even windows is not near 100% with windows software. That is, XP croaks on much older software, and of course other software only works on XP. The only way to run all is perhaps by dual-boot, but even then sometimes older stuff won't like your new hardware (or your hardware doesn't work on an older OS).
Wine could be a solution to these problems, as it can be more configurable than an entire OS. Set options to best emulate win9x VS XP on a per-game basic, and other flags (many exist already), and in the future perhaps it will support all the old stuff that newer Windows OS's don't.
It's like DOS support in XP, pretty much minimal. Some of the newer laptops here at work don't have 98 drivers, and XP won't run the old DOS apps that don't have win32 replacements. Linux on the other hand runs them fine with dosbox, so perhaps Wine can also offer the same backwards-compatibility for old Win32 apps.
The speed at which Wine is supporting new games seems to indicate a certain amount of support from the game manufacturers. At the very least they're probably getting their hands on pre-releases in order to prepare for compatibility once the true game comes out.
This isn't as good as having an actual native port for Linux, but at least it indicates that there is an awareness that Linux and cross-compatability are a consideration.
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Good DRM is when a company can stream or upload you a file over the net - much like a video rental - allow you to watch it, and not worry that you'll dump the thing into a file and stick it on KaZaa right away.
Bad DRM is when you've bought a disk or an "unlimited use" file (download), but can't watch it on another machine, burn it to CD, etc.
DRM as a method for hindering illegal activity is good. It's when it hinders legal activity as well that it's bad. In the first example I really can't see anything being hindered at all, since the file download is a "rental" you have no more rights to copy/dump the file than you would a Blockbuster rental. In the latter it's a pain in the ass because you should be able to use your "purchase" as you see fit (withing your own domain of ownership)
I can download a few hours worth of programming in DivX format in a relatively low time-frame. When monthly bandwidth usage becomes less of a concern, why not offer a package wherein for $30/mo I can set my 'puter up to pick shows I want from TV-guide, download them, and watch them when I get home from work. Not much different from what's happening already anyhow
The main issue is probably commercial revenue. If you *really* want me to see a few commercials, drop the price a bit for packages with mandatory commercials, or perhaps throw them in during the loading process as a quick clip.
a) From anyone with experience, how does the seemingly narrower width affect turning, cornering, and handling in winds?
b) Many people have mentioned that the passenger cabin is strongly re-inforced, but the rest of the body is mainly crumple-zone. How does the car handle in low-speed impact (e.g. does something that would normally crumple a fender on a bigger car cause severe damage to the Smart?)
I notice that the specs sheet says "automatic or manual mode selectable," and not "available in manual or automatic."
This makes it sound like there's a button to change "modes" and go from manual to automatic? This would be rather sweet, being able to switch from one to another depending on traffic and other circumstances.
This misses the point though, because you cannot print it on a full page without grain.
Think of it this way... have a big light in one room, open the door to another and - without flash - take a picture (in the room without a light on).
Now, in the same scenario, close the door so it's only 1/4 of the way open. Take another picture.
The first picture things will probably look decent, on the second you're losing detail and probably getting static.
Why, because not enough light is entering the room to produce a good picture. A 4MP camera with good light adjustment is going to have a picture just as good as a 7MP, because the 7MP is just giving you higher-resolution static. Light is your photo, as it's really a refraction of light that you're capturing. Less light=crappier picture.
Now think along the same lines but with the barrel/lense of the camera. You're getting the same amount of light, but trying to divide it among a great space. Result, the picture looks just as craptacular at 7MP, and as far as printing it's not really any different than resizing up a 4MP picture.
Ex-act-ly. While characters in movies change, environmental factors and physics are often fairly consistent. Realtime in-game graphics (with recent video card models) are fast approaching where CGI movies were several years ago.
:-)
Game cinematics (the little cut-scenes, etc) I would actually consider to be on-par with some of the best in some cases.
Look at the world-of-Warcraft trailer... my first thought was "Screw the game! When are they going to make a movie?" Of course, that's not what things look like in-game, but it could be in the future...
And the best part is, as you mention these things can build up libraries. Especially with open-source. Once somebody gets a realistic swaying bridge, another person can import "bridge_sway.c" into their project as well. Once walls start showing realistic nicks and cuts, we can have "wall_damage.c"
In fact, to some extent many of these effects aren't very difficult to reproduce. It's when you collaberate them all together that you get a bridge-swaying, wall pummeling masterpiece of automagic.
Which also makes me greatful for DVD burners, and larger media coming out. Because with more realism also tends to come a lot more overheard
The problem is that in games like Doom 3 for example, the creation of cinematics is scripted heavily and designed into the levels
I don't really think that these are mutually independant however. Movies themselves are "scripted," so you don't really need a truly dynamic environment.
Effects like the hellish voices and the moving/glowing/changing walls could be very useful in a horror movie...
The end result really would be a combination of good modelling, good model scripting (many realistic actions and other things).
I haven't played with HL2 much (seen it, going to LAN party to play this weekend, but haven't played it), so I'll stick with doom3 engines as an example.
The first thing we're going to need is a better physics engine. Sure you can bump some things around, but I want to be able to blow chunks in a wall - not sure have a burned texture from weapons hits. I want more realistic explosions. I want more realistic character motion. Blood should drip and create little pools which then flow downhill.
I want bridges that sway, metal that warps realistically, and objects that are more interactive in general.
Beyond that, other things are really good. Ambient sound in games is doing very well. You can hear demons coming towards you, fires crackling around the corner, and the change in your footsteps as you walk on different terrain.
Lighting is also good, and combined with better graphics cards lighting and texture, and shadow play a big part in making an environment realistic.
So once we beat the physics, then what? Well, we already have actors attached to machines which read body movement (Gollum in LOTR, etc)... how about more interactive environments. Strap the actor with body sensors and a VR suit. Maybe throw some semi-random AI into the zombies just to may the thing a bit more realistic (really surprise the actors). Have them see their own interaction with the characters of a fantasy world, and perhaps with the above such a world may become "real" on film...
Mainly the problem is that users don't often want to *learn* a new piece of software, but they do want to use it. They want advanced features, but they don't want to figure them out.
That being so, in designing your interfaces (and backend) you have to do a lot of hand-holding. You have to make the basic features obvious, and the complex features easy enough to use for the average user. Often this might mean anticipating how the user expects to use a program, or by filling different controls etc etc based on default behaviors.
If I tell them I bought my PC from an auction or buy-and-sell, etc - but wasn't given the original media. Nobody trackable to turn in, can I still go for a free legal CD-key?
There's nothing wrong with violence, sexuality, etc etc - it's all about placement. Teach your kids that stress relief by acting out frustrations on your opponents is different than whacking around another kid in a playground. Hunting in the wilds is different than blowing people away with a shotgun, etc etc.
Personally I'm still more afraid of the influence upon children of today that post 9-11 is giving (hey, let's go blow up some countries because they might harbour terrorists, and it's ok to lock up a few innocents and torture information out of them because we need to catch the real bad guys).
Can't Tesla coils be a bit dangerous? I work in schools and while I could see older High School students using these, even some of them aren't mature enough. 12-year-olds would be more dangerous, though there are possibilities:
Today students, we will demonstrate this giant Tesla coil which was built during the previous semester...
Now for everybody who got an "F" in effort in the previous semester, please place these metal chains around your neck and stand near the coil here...
I really do hope that you aren't planning on letting them bring these home then. I have enough problems when the younger family members get noisy presents from their grandparents and insist on playing with them for the next 10 hours. Use in the halls is guaranteed to drive teachers nuts too
Noisy projects may be more interesting to the kids, but they can sure as heck be annoying to everyone esle.
Is that your phone is considered a consumable. Useful for a limited time, then you should fork over more cash and buy a new one.
No seriously, as with many other electronic products the return/exchange rates on phones are very high. Many of the things are really quite fragile and over time will severely degrade in performance, battery life, etc.
Even the newer Nokias cause some interference. When my gf's went off it used to make the alarm clock pop and stutter. The alarm would actually start buzzing before the phone rang.
Not sure if it's harmful though, as it could just be your standard interference. Given the proximity of the phone to one's crotch though, the thought of radiation isn't such a good thing.
I don't know about you, but I generally don't hold my PSU up to my face when I'm using my PC. Of course laptops are also a risk, but for those that have died it's usually just a lack of power-on and no fancy sparks or fire.
A laptop goes off on one's lap could be a danger, but chances are the desktop isn't so much so. I've had plenty of PSU's go, some smoking nicely - usually a blown cap and never anything that was much of a risk to anything outside the box.
The ads are an exemption (since you can fast-forward), but I've always found the annoyance of tape is in the delay. Insert tape... "damn it's at the end" ... rewind tape... rewinding ... still rewinding ... stiiiillll rewinding ......
Canada: Local calling is free (exempting the monthly line cost but you currently need that for DSL anyhow).
Not sure about other countries listed, but I doubt that the accessiblity of dialup is such a huge factor over DSL.
You could cheat on this. Have a nice big ramdrive, preload the videos, start 3 Xine instances - each pointing at a video file but not set to play - then once all three have started, tell them to start playing.
Since the files are on ramdisk delay should be negligable between the 3 instances as far as startup...
Perhaps GTK just needed to be updated then.
If the old GTK is outdated and crufty, being that it is the "GIMP toolkit," perhaps then demand for a better UI will lead to a better GTK?
Also, it may crash if you happen to have two different flash plugins in the plugins folder (notably on 'nix if you have the OS one and the one that grabs the "official" flash from macromedia).
Similar issues may happen with invalid, mixed, or mislinked java plugins.
So are the tabloids, and they get away with tons somehow. I've often wondered how.
I mean, look at their coverage of "normal people" who have become famous due to a tragic event (kidnapping or whatever). How do they get away with plastering the paper with articles about it.
Personally, I find a Kennedy re-enactment a lot less offensive that a bunch of JB Ramsey or other headlines staring me in the face at the supermarket (not that it makes either right).
Depending on how small they can make the cells, why not just do what I do with old camera batteries... have one in the camera until it gets drained, and another topped off ready to replace it. Drain one, stick the replacement in and put the other in a charger. Rinse, lather, repeat.
After all, I'd imagine that over time they could make the batteries fairly compact in size - I'm not talking AAA but perhaps big flashlight-battery sized of perhaps at least managable.
Yes, but usually it's a correlation between economics and feasibility or risk. If a company can make $$$ with low risk, and/or have somebody else do the work, why the hell not? Basically it's saving them the trouble of writing a true port at this time, and the only risk is that Transgaming would release the game beta to the public (which would end up in them getting their asses sued off, so is unlikely).
I do agree that Transgaming is getting better at supporting new games. They should be, seeing as though the directX system only changes so much, and in reality they're not supporting the game itself so much as they're supporting DirectX, certain new win32 system calls, and perhaps every so often a new method of copy-protection.
While Wine is quite compatible with newer games on certain hardware, it's still a far ways from 100% compatible with the majority of windows software or even games. It seems that the Wine devels are much more interested in supporting newest game X than some of the older uncompatible-but-still-popular games. This is understandable since new games are where the most $$$ is anyways.
However, as Wine does approach greater compatibility for new games, there is always a moving target. A new DirectX/GL spec would probably cause quite a lot of new work, and there's a lot of other stuff to take care of.
The truth is, even windows is not near 100% with windows software. That is, XP croaks on much older software, and of course other software only works on XP. The only way to run all is perhaps by dual-boot, but even then sometimes older stuff won't like your new hardware (or your hardware doesn't work on an older OS).
Wine could be a solution to these problems, as it can be more configurable than an entire OS. Set options to best emulate win9x VS XP on a per-game basic, and other flags (many exist already), and in the future perhaps it will support all the old stuff that newer Windows OS's don't.
It's like DOS support in XP, pretty much minimal. Some of the newer laptops here at work don't have 98 drivers, and XP won't run the old DOS apps that don't have win32 replacements. Linux on the other hand runs them fine with dosbox, so perhaps Wine can also offer the same backwards-compatibility for old Win32 apps.
The speed at which Wine is supporting new games seems to indicate a certain amount of support from the game manufacturers. At the very least they're probably getting their hands on pre-releases in order to prepare for compatibility once the true game comes out.
This isn't as good as having an actual native port for Linux, but at least it indicates that there is an awareness that Linux and cross-compatability are a consideration.