I didn't prove your point at all. You don't know that the animator's "design and tweak" approach is inferior to an actor's approach. There's no possible way that you can know that. You just think it's unlikely that there will ever be animators skilled enough to be a real actor's equal. I say, "Why the hell not?" I suspect you don't have a good answer.
Also, why would tweaking an animated character's facial expressions be mechanical? It's no more mechanical than creating any drawing, or sculpture, or 3d model.
You didn't ask for one, nor did you explain your position in detail. You still haven't, but I'll explain myself anyway.
Just as there are very gifted actors in this world, there are very gifted artists. It seems a little premature to decide what their limits are when CG people still haven't moved out of the Uncanny Valley. At one time (pre-Renaissance, I suppose) people might have said that it wasn't possible to paint a realistic person. Obviously they were wrong. For that matter, heavier-than-air flight was once deemed impossible. Unless you've got a crystal ball sitting there in front of you (that would be a hell of a trump card), then you probably can't predict the future any better than the naysayers of the past could.
Real actors emote all the time, so they have an advantage because they can apply their natural skills and don't have to micromanage all the muscles in thier faces. Animators have an advantage because they can see what they're producing from the outside, and they can tweak it without doing another take, and they *can* control facial muscles as precisely as they want to. I don't know which approach will produce better results in the long run, but neither do you. Like I said, it all depends on how good the animators are. I don't feel qualified to decide how skilled future animators will be, but if you do, then I'm sure they'll be glad to get your input.
X needs to have a core keyboard and a core pointer, which are its main keyboard and pointing device. If you want more devices to move the pointer, then they need to send core events as well, and that's what the option does.
I fail to see how it would be better for him to boot from a live CD. He wouldn't be able to fiddle with the drivers and other settings, which he'll probably have to do, and he'd have to carry the CD around to use his laptop. Where's the benefit?
For starters, you could look in your X11 configuration file to see whether X is set to use a specific pointing device as its core pointer (likely your touchpad), in which case it would ignore any others. If that's the case, adding another InputDevice section for your USB mouse and setting SendCoreEvents (Option "SendCoreEvents" "on") in it should do the trick, I think.
The Synaptics touchpad driver can detect the number of fingers you tap with and assign different buttons to different numbers of fingers (in addition to using a specified corner as a button, as someone mentioned above) if your hardware supports it.
Yes, it looks like I was a little wrong about what it is. The "job" that whites had to do was the burden, not the attitudes we've inherited. Still, I don't think grandparent's point was that whites are worse than anyone else because of it. He was just using it as one example of an "us and them" mentality, but not the only one.
The important thing that I see here is the blatant use of stereotypes. In the end, I think which races are the evil ones is less important than that all the races are expressing stereotypes. Resorting to stereotypes is just laziness, and it's harmful to both the group being stereotyped and to the group being misled. When you use a stereotype you're neglecting to accurately portray the culture you're using as inspiration and you're also neglecting to make up your own ideas. You're spreading misconceptions that cause misunderstanding. It doesn't make it okay if it's something that "everyone knows anyway." Why would that make it all right to reinforce it? It's all like minstrels performing in blackface. To quote South Park, "Either it's all okay, or none of it is."
Is it a problem if people have huge misconceptions about those cultures? I think so. I can't think of any way that cultural misunderstanding is beneficial (unless you're trying to start a war). It's not about whether the trolls are just like Jamaicans. It's about whether people have any idea what Jamaicans are like. I'm not an expert on Jamaica, but I suspect that when we see a troll and think it's "just like" a Jamaican, we're pretty damn wrong. We're seeing something that's just like our distorted concept of a Jamaican, and every time we see that stereotype expressed, it's reinforced.
Another thought: You mention "borrowing ideas from a culture." That's not really what they're doing. The devs are using their own (frequently misguided) ideas about another culture as a base for their game. Better than that would be to do the culture justice by including an accurate portrayal of it, if they like it enough to use it. They're not just basing aspects of the game on other cultures: they're putting caricatures of other cultures in their game. Everything we know about the rest of the world, save the parts we've personally visited, comes to us through the media (including games). If media producers don't portray people and cultures as honestly as they can, then they're actively contributing to cultural misunderstanding. If you want artistic license, make it all up. While you may not have any malicious intent, any stereotypes you use affect real people. If you want to use a real culture, then you owe it to the people who inspired you to show them as they are, rather than as you imagine them to be.
To me, the issue isn't with what they're saying about the cultures, but that they're reinforceing stereotypes about them. Every time a player sees the troll and associates it with a Jamaican (sorry if I matched those up wrong, I've only played a little Warcraft), the stereotype is being reinforced. I don't think anyone will take things specific to the trolls and believe that they must apply to Jamaicans as well. What does happen is that each time the player thinks, "Oh, that's Jamaican," the stereotype already in their head is reinforced as it's brought to mind.
You're missing the point completely. The White Man's Burden is the perspective that we've inherited. No one is saying that any "race" is better than another. He's saying that throughout history, the European perspective was that they were the only civilised ones, and everyone else was a savage, and that we're still living with the effects of that perspective today. If you don't believe me, take a look at the stereotypes in your culture about blacks, or asians, or arabs. That's what we (meaning most white people) have inherited.
This isn't really a direct answer to your question. I don't think they way I do it would really be your style, but I think it's interesting that for me, anyway, the simplest approach is best.
My music management doesn't get much more complicated than folders. When I got a new laptop I ran Windows on it for a little while and used WMP (mainly because the buttons on my laptop could control it). While it was kind of neat being able to fire up an app and browse to the music I wanted, now that I'm back in the Linux world (with a decent shell) just using Mplayer from the command line and putting my music in a decent folder heirarchy (artist/album/songs) works just fine.
For burning, using cdrdao (a powerful disk-at-once burning tool) from the command line is easy as pie.
I don't really listen to CDs on my computer. I just rip them. If I did, I'd probably use something like dcd, a command line CD player.
I was inquiring specifically about its CPU and memory usage. The original poster mentioned those, and his claims were miles away from what I've seen under Linux. I thought maybe it was a Windows thing.
I don't run Windows. When I saw the original comment I fired it up under Linux, and all I saw was reasonable memory usage and near-zero CPU usage, so I decided to ask if it was much different under Windows.
Presumably this is just a troll, but on the off-chance that it's not, can anyone who isn't named MSFanBoi tell me if MPlayer sucks that badly under Windows?
Yes. Although they're not fixed yet, things aren't going downhill so fast that no one has a chance to do anything. It would be nice if there weren't powerful entities screwing things up though. I'm not saying it couldn't be better.
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I didn't prove your point at all. You don't know that the animator's "design and tweak" approach is inferior to an actor's approach. There's no possible way that you can know that. You just think it's unlikely that there will ever be animators skilled enough to be a real actor's equal. I say, "Why the hell not?" I suspect you don't have a good answer.
Also, why would tweaking an animated character's facial expressions be mechanical? It's no more mechanical than creating any drawing, or sculpture, or 3d model.
You didn't ask for one, nor did you explain your position in detail. You still haven't, but I'll explain myself anyway.
Just as there are very gifted actors in this world, there are very gifted artists. It seems a little premature to decide what their limits are when CG people still haven't moved out of the Uncanny Valley. At one time (pre-Renaissance, I suppose) people might have said that it wasn't possible to paint a realistic person. Obviously they were wrong. For that matter, heavier-than-air flight was once deemed impossible. Unless you've got a crystal ball sitting there in front of you (that would be a hell of a trump card), then you probably can't predict the future any better than the naysayers of the past could.
Real actors emote all the time, so they have an advantage because they can apply their natural skills and don't have to micromanage all the muscles in thier faces. Animators have an advantage because they can see what they're producing from the outside, and they can tweak it without doing another take, and they *can* control facial muscles as precisely as they want to. I don't know which approach will produce better results in the long run, but neither do you. Like I said, it all depends on how good the animators are. I don't feel qualified to decide how skilled future animators will be, but if you do, then I'm sure they'll be glad to get your input.
X needs to have a core keyboard and a core pointer, which are its main keyboard and pointing device. If you want more devices to move the pointer, then they need to send core events as well, and that's what the option does.
Sure.
I disagree. It all comes down to the talent of the animators. I've been very impressed by all the Pixar movies I've seen.
No problem. Was that the trouble, or have you not tried it yet?
I fail to see how it would be better for him to boot from a live CD. He wouldn't be able to fiddle with the drivers and other settings, which he'll probably have to do, and he'd have to carry the CD around to use his laptop. Where's the benefit?
For starters, you could look in your X11 configuration file to see whether X is set to use a specific pointing device as its core pointer (likely your touchpad), in which case it would ignore any others. If that's the case, adding another InputDevice section for your USB mouse and setting SendCoreEvents (Option "SendCoreEvents" "on") in it should do the trick, I think.
That's the first thing that comes to mind.
The Synaptics touchpad driver can detect the number of fingers you tap with and assign different buttons to different numbers of fingers (in addition to using a specified corner as a button, as someone mentioned above) if your hardware supports it.
Yes, it looks like I was a little wrong about what it is. The "job" that whites had to do was the burden, not the attitudes we've inherited. Still, I don't think grandparent's point was that whites are worse than anyone else because of it. He was just using it as one example of an "us and them" mentality, but not the only one.
The important thing that I see here is the blatant use of stereotypes. In the end, I think which races are the evil ones is less important than that all the races are expressing stereotypes. Resorting to stereotypes is just laziness, and it's harmful to both the group being stereotyped and to the group being misled. When you use a stereotype you're neglecting to accurately portray the culture you're using as inspiration and you're also neglecting to make up your own ideas. You're spreading misconceptions that cause misunderstanding. It doesn't make it okay if it's something that "everyone knows anyway." Why would that make it all right to reinforce it? It's all like minstrels performing in blackface. To quote South Park, "Either it's all okay, or none of it is."
Is it a problem if people have huge misconceptions about those cultures? I think so. I can't think of any way that cultural misunderstanding is beneficial (unless you're trying to start a war). It's not about whether the trolls are just like Jamaicans. It's about whether people have any idea what Jamaicans are like. I'm not an expert on Jamaica, but I suspect that when we see a troll and think it's "just like" a Jamaican, we're pretty damn wrong. We're seeing something that's just like our distorted concept of a Jamaican, and every time we see that stereotype expressed, it's reinforced.
I agree completely. The problem isn't whether the stereotypes are being associated with good or evil races, it's that they're being used at all.
Another thought:
You mention "borrowing ideas from a culture." That's not really what they're doing. The devs are using their own (frequently misguided) ideas about another culture as a base for their game. Better than that would be to do the culture justice by including an accurate portrayal of it, if they like it enough to use it. They're not just basing aspects of the game on other cultures: they're putting caricatures of other cultures in their game. Everything we know about the rest of the world, save the parts we've personally visited, comes to us through the media (including games). If media producers don't portray people and cultures as honestly as they can, then they're actively contributing to cultural misunderstanding. If you want artistic license, make it all up. While you may not have any malicious intent, any stereotypes you use affect real people. If you want to use a real culture, then you owe it to the people who inspired you to show them as they are, rather than as you imagine them to be.
To me, the issue isn't with what they're saying about the cultures, but that they're reinforceing stereotypes about them. Every time a player sees the troll and associates it with a Jamaican (sorry if I matched those up wrong, I've only played a little Warcraft), the stereotype is being reinforced. I don't think anyone will take things specific to the trolls and believe that they must apply to Jamaicans as well. What does happen is that each time the player thinks, "Oh, that's Jamaican," the stereotype already in their head is reinforced as it's brought to mind.
You're missing the point completely. The White Man's Burden is the perspective that we've inherited. No one is saying that any "race" is better than another. He's saying that throughout history, the European perspective was that they were the only civilised ones, and everyone else was a savage, and that we're still living with the effects of that perspective today. If you don't believe me, take a look at the stereotypes in your culture about blacks, or asians, or arabs. That's what we (meaning most white people) have inherited.
Well then how about Katamari Damacy and Guitar Hero? Neither have espedially good graphics, but they're both very popular.
This isn't really a direct answer to your question. I don't think they way I do it would really be your style, but I think it's interesting that for me, anyway, the simplest approach is best.
My music management doesn't get much more complicated than folders. When I got a new laptop I ran Windows on it for a little while and used WMP (mainly because the buttons on my laptop could control it). While it was kind of neat being able to fire up an app and browse to the music I wanted, now that I'm back in the Linux world (with a decent shell) just using Mplayer from the command line and putting my music in a decent folder heirarchy (artist/album/songs) works just fine.
For burning, using cdrdao (a powerful disk-at-once burning tool) from the command line is easy as pie.
I don't really listen to CDs on my computer. I just rip them. If I did, I'd probably use something like dcd, a command line CD player.
On the other hand, some of us would consider the lack of a WMP GUI a good thing.
I was inquiring specifically about its CPU and memory usage. The original poster mentioned those, and his claims were miles away from what I've seen under Linux. I thought maybe it was a Windows thing.
I don't run Windows. When I saw the original comment I fired it up under Linux, and all I saw was reasonable memory usage and near-zero CPU usage, so I decided to ask if it was much different under Windows.
Presumably this is just a troll, but on the off-chance that it's not, can anyone who isn't named MSFanBoi tell me if MPlayer sucks that badly under Windows?
Call me greedy, but I'd kind of like the textures and good gameplay.
I wasn't talking about the eye candy statement.
Yes. Although they're not fixed yet, things aren't going downhill so fast that no one has a chance to do anything. It would be nice if there weren't powerful entities screwing things up though. I'm not saying it couldn't be better.