CountBrass is right. The RIAA helps makes the music and image of the musicians "cool", but this does absolutely nothing for the image of the RIAA.
This is similar to the state that Microsoft is already in. Take, for example, the PDA market: Ipaq's are "cool", accessible to a relatively small segment of society with disposable income, and their presence and popularity is has been facilitated in-large-part by Microsoft (via the PocketPC push). But Microsoft itself, is not connected with this "coolness factor". No one says, "Sweet! You're running PocketPC 2003".
It depends on what is being done. Trying to reproduce humans is incredibly difficult. Just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean that it can't.
This point is very important. Disregarding static issues like skin and hair modeling and rendering. Human perception has evolved and is tuned for communication, primarily with other humans. Therefore we are very sensitive to minute incongruencies with our expectation of how a face shoud move, both by itself, and in the context of the surrounding environment. This is why completely hand animated human faces are almost always very poor...they strive to be real, but cannot account for the complexity. In contrast, cartooned faces are far enough from reality, that "unrealistic" facial action is accepted...as we are not expecting reality.
It is (I'll be bold and say impossible) for an animator to get the motions perfect for anything more than relatively simple facial actuation. There are just too many, often subconscious factors that go into facial action...but all of these are important to achieve a realistic result.
Motion capture has been used to solve this problem, taking the burden away from the animator, but the mapping problem is still difficult, we have a sparse sampling of skin motion from a human that has different facial characteristics from the model being animated. How do you handle the skin in between the motion capture points? Some sort of interpolation scheme is usually used, but this is a gross oversimplification of skin physics...not to mention, that it doesn't account for secondary motion of the skin such as wrinkling.
Anyway, in short, its a hard problem. BUT, I have no doubt that the problem will be solved...
There are several differences between the immigrants of old, and the current situation.
In the past, immigrants followed legal channels to get into this country. These immigrants were coming here to BE Americans. Not to USE America. If you were illegal in this country, you would get no benefits afforded to Americans.
Unfortunately, this is not the case nowadays. In california this is is largely due to our two-faced government using laws affecting immigration as bargaining points both with foreign governments (Mexico) and corporations.
We have a big problem here (southern california) with illegal mexican immigration coming accross the southern border. The problem is not just that people are coming here, but that they are not contributing anything. At the very least, I believe that immigrants must learn english. This is the only way one can even hope to become a productive member of this country. I love America as a "melting pot" and I love the different cultures and languages I hear daily as I walk the streets of Los Angeles. But I HATE it when I go to Koreatown and walk into a restaurant where no one speaks english at all. Well, I don't hate it, but it saddens me to see that the US supports people that have no desire to become Americans and whose loyalty resides with their country of origin. Come to the U.S. and embrace America: bring your traditions, your ideas, your culture, your language, your history, your art, and SHARE them with us. But we speak english here, so you have to learn english first.
This may be particular to Los Angeles, but we have many large pockets that are effectively self contained countries. Where very few people speak english. It is not like New York, where in Little Italy, people speak italian, but also english, or likewise in China Town.
All of this said, I have no disdain for immigrants. They are doing what is best for themselves. My anger is towards the government for acting selfishly with disregard for its citizens. Out of one corner of their mouth they say we must stop illegal immigration, and out of the other they are inhaling cash in return for legislation protecting it.
Are you kidding? I will definitely agree that the libretto (I owned an s1100 for a while) is a nice smaller alternative to a laptop, but (IMHO) there is no way you can comfortably carry one in your pocket on a regular basis. But then again, you never claimed "comfort".:)
I think the size of the sl-c700 is close to perfect. It appears to be the same form factor as the older zaurus zr5000 which I could carry around in my pants pocket comfortably. Even if they COULD make it smaller, the keyboard size would become too small for comfortable "3 finger typing". What they need is a tiny butterfly keyboard like one of the old IBM thinkpads.:)
I am a computer scientist and have worked with and done some collaborative pieces with several different artists so I'll try to give my perspective on this:
Many of the artists I have worked with start out with an idea that they think is "cool", or is "aesthetically pleasing", or reflects some sort of social phenomenon, etc. The beginning of the piece is usually very shallow. After longer thought, more and more philosphical justification is caked onto the original idea until it finally carries some weight in the mind of the artist(s).
The problem is that most of us "laypeople" see the end result and only understand the same shallow meaning (or lack thereof) that originally instigated the piece, and quickly write it off as stupid. In my opinion, however, it is the artists RESPONSIBILITY to make the piece compelling enough to be necessarily thought provoking. Like others have mentioned, most people are going to look at (listen to) the broadcast and just go: "duh, that is really lame." There may be a tiny circle of pretentious art critics that will bother to crack the surface of the piece and get to what the artists intended, but then the effect of the piece is totally lost.
But that brings me to another (and somewhat annoying) element of pieces like this. If I am going to spend my time thinking about the meaning behind the piece I want to KNOW that the artists did the same. And that there is some conclusion to be drawn (or at least an interesting journey in the exploration of the meaning). The idea that an artist shouldn't "explain" their work is ludicrous. I have seen so many times that this is an excuse to protect the weak meaning and feeble thought behind the work. (I am not implying that all art/artists are so, as there are many who spend great effort to express well thought out and profound ideas in interesting ways. But the opposite is also true.)
So I guess my statement is this: I would like to see a summary of the ideas that the artists are addressing in this broadcast...at the very least. I don't think it is a waste of time unless there is no meaning...but at the same time, even if there is meaning, I presume it will be lost on the majority of viewers because of poor execution (lack of necessary connections to the meaning) and will therefore still be a waste of time.
Slashdot Mirror
CountBrass is right. The RIAA helps makes the music and image of the musicians "cool", but this does absolutely nothing for the image of the RIAA.
This is similar to the state that Microsoft is already in. Take, for example, the PDA market: Ipaq's are "cool", accessible to a relatively small segment of society with disposable income, and their presence and popularity is has been facilitated in-large-part by Microsoft (via the PocketPC push). But Microsoft itself, is not connected with this "coolness factor". No one says, "Sweet! You're running PocketPC 2003".
This point is very important. Disregarding static issues like skin and hair modeling and rendering. Human perception has evolved and is tuned for communication, primarily with other humans. Therefore we are very sensitive to minute incongruencies with our expectation of how a face shoud move, both by itself, and in the context of the surrounding environment. This is why completely hand animated human faces are almost always very poor...they strive to be real, but cannot account for the complexity. In contrast, cartooned faces are far enough from reality, that "unrealistic" facial action is accepted...as we are not expecting reality.
It is (I'll be bold and say impossible) for an animator to get the motions perfect for anything more than relatively simple facial actuation. There are just too many, often subconscious factors that go into facial action...but all of these are important to achieve a realistic result.
Motion capture has been used to solve this problem, taking the burden away from the animator, but the mapping problem is still difficult, we have a sparse sampling of skin motion from a human that has different facial characteristics from the model being animated. How do you handle the skin in between the motion capture points? Some sort of interpolation scheme is usually used, but this is a gross oversimplification of skin physics...not to mention, that it doesn't account for secondary motion of the skin such as wrinkling.
Anyway, in short, its a hard problem. BUT, I have no doubt that the problem will be solved...
rant over
There are several differences between the immigrants of old, and the current situation.
In the past, immigrants followed legal channels to get into this country. These immigrants were coming here to BE Americans. Not to USE America. If you were illegal in this country, you would get no benefits afforded to Americans.
Unfortunately, this is not the case nowadays. In california this is is largely due to our two-faced government using laws affecting immigration as bargaining points both with foreign governments (Mexico) and corporations.
We have a big problem here (southern california) with illegal mexican immigration coming accross the southern border. The problem is not just that people are coming here, but that they are not contributing anything. At the very least, I believe that immigrants must learn english. This is the only way one can even hope to become a productive member of this country. I love America as a "melting pot" and I love the different cultures and languages I hear daily as I walk the streets of Los Angeles. But I HATE it when I go to Koreatown and walk into a restaurant where no one speaks english at all. Well, I don't hate it, but it saddens me to see that the US supports people that have no desire to become Americans and whose loyalty resides with their country of origin. Come to the U.S. and embrace America: bring your traditions, your ideas, your culture, your language, your history, your art, and SHARE them with us. But we speak english here, so you have to learn english first.
This may be particular to Los Angeles, but we have many large pockets that are effectively self contained countries. Where very few people speak english. It is not like New York, where in Little Italy, people speak italian, but also english, or likewise in China Town.
All of this said, I have no disdain for immigrants. They are doing what is best for themselves. My anger is towards the government for acting selfishly with disregard for its citizens. Out of one corner of their mouth they say we must stop illegal immigration, and out of the other they are inhaling cash in return for legislation protecting it.
Anyway...just my thoughts.
and fits in your pocket...
:)
:)
Are you kidding? I will definitely agree that the libretto (I owned an s1100 for a while) is a nice smaller alternative to a laptop, but (IMHO) there is no way you can comfortably carry one in your pocket on a regular basis. But then again, you never claimed "comfort".
I think the size of the sl-c700 is close to perfect. It appears to be the same form factor as the older zaurus zr5000 which I could carry around in my pants pocket comfortably. Even if they COULD make it smaller, the keyboard size would become too small for comfortable "3 finger typing". What they need is a tiny butterfly keyboard like one of the old IBM thinkpads.
I am a computer scientist and have worked with and done some collaborative pieces with several different artists so I'll try to give my perspective on this:
Many of the artists I have worked with start out with an idea that they think is "cool", or is "aesthetically pleasing", or reflects some sort of social phenomenon, etc. The beginning of the piece is usually very shallow. After longer thought, more and more philosphical justification is caked onto the original idea until it finally carries some weight in the mind of the artist(s).
The problem is that most of us "laypeople" see the end result and only understand the same shallow meaning (or lack thereof) that originally instigated the piece, and quickly write it off as stupid. In my opinion, however, it is the artists RESPONSIBILITY to make the piece compelling enough to be necessarily thought provoking. Like others have mentioned, most people are going to look at (listen to) the broadcast and just go: "duh, that is really lame." There may be a tiny circle of pretentious art critics that will bother to crack the surface of the piece and get to what the artists intended, but then the effect of the piece is totally lost.
But that brings me to another (and somewhat annoying) element of pieces like this. If I am going to spend my time thinking about the meaning behind the piece I want to KNOW that the artists did the same. And that there is some conclusion to be drawn (or at least an interesting journey in the exploration of the meaning). The idea that an artist shouldn't "explain" their work is ludicrous. I have seen so many times that this is an excuse to protect the weak meaning and feeble thought behind the work. (I am not implying that all art/artists are so, as there are many who spend great effort to express well thought out and profound ideas in interesting ways. But the opposite is also true.)
So I guess my statement is this: I would like to see a summary of the ideas that the artists are addressing in this broadcast...at the very least. I don't think it is a waste of time unless there is no meaning...but at the same time, even if there is meaning, I presume it will be lost on the majority of viewers because of poor execution (lack of necessary connections to the meaning) and will therefore still be a waste of time.
But we'll see...