Don't forget that elevators are very energy efficient. Properly counterweighted, the energy required to lift your car (or, conversely, the counterweight -- dependent upon whether you're moving the car up or down) would be considerably less. My physics is quite rusty, but I'm fairly certain the costs are closer to the work to lift the weight-different and the work to overcome friction. And make no mistake, these suckers will be counterweighted to match the weight of your Bentley -- costing the building owners less in maintenance and energy costs, assuming you don't pay those. Without taking friction into account, energy usage would be closer to:
Work required to lift 70 kg (let's call that the average weight of your tycoon, minus gold bars) 50 meters: W = 70 * 9.8 * 50 = 34.3kJ Work required to lift your car every day for a year: 12.556 MJ.
But all this is moot anyway -- it'd be very close to exactly the same as that same tycoon just taking the elevator.
Really, each step in the creation of the nail is incremental, as in the twist, the rings, the larger head, the better metal, but putting them all together in a package that works -- by using science, experimentation against a given set of conditions -- is the innovation.
Some people here are complaining about using better construction techniques to achieve the same effect, but face it: Most home construction is as CHEAP as possible. Contractors are EXPENSIVE. Hiring better contractors would cost more than $15. Using screws would cost more than $15 (in time spent). If you can work in the cheapest way possible, and spend only $15 more to stamp "Hurricane/Earthquake Resistant" on the flyer for potential home buyers, it's win-win.
Eh, I don't think it'd be a big deal. If the Mac is a home machine, big whoop. Most of the time, the one doing the syncing and roaming profiles will be someone who needs it, who is likely the person who purchased the computer anyway. If it's a work computer, you'll be the only one using it (almost all of the time), and if you're going between home and work, to do work at home, you'll probably have the same applications installed there anyway. Besides, applications aren't THAT large unless they're games. Perhaps there could also be a feature to copy certain global applications; a local "cache" of certain software that your system has. Why not?
My only real concern would be software that requires system components installed for serial verification, ala activation, with data that wouldn't be explicitly stored with the user account, but in a system folder instead.
This is not an example of creativity and ingenuity. This is an example of being an untrustworthy jerk who really isn't in touch with the ramifications of his actions. One's sexual leanings has very little to do with how they'll operate within a workplace. One's social interactions has much to do with how they'll operate in a workplace. This guy has shown that he is immature and cannot empathize with people, is willing to do pretty much anything to impress his social group (lolz, lulz, roflcopter, et. al.), and does not fully think through his actions. Not only did he harm strangers (stupid strangers though they may be), but he simultaneously put the companies that employ him at risk of community backlash. He is therefore a liability.
If you like being whipped, gagged and forcefully dominated, it might reflect on your personality, but not nearly in the same way of the actions HE committed.
Registrant: RFJason 726 Kirkland Cir Apt C203 Kirkland, WA 98033 United States of America
Registrar: DomainPeople Inc.
Domain Name: rfjason.com Created on.............Wed Oct 18 23:23:23 2000 Expires on.............Thu Oct 19 02:45:15 2006 Record last updated on.Sun Jun 26 16:38:53 2005
Administrative Contact: RFJason Jason Fortuny 726 Kirkland Cir Apt C203 Kirkland, WA 98033, US (425)5765417 (425)5765417 RFJason@Hotmail.com
Technical Contact: RFJason Jason Fortuny 726 Kirkland Cir Apt C203 Kirkland, WA 98033, US (425)5765417 (425)5765417 RFJason@Hotmail.com
That's not precisely private information, and additionally, I second the other response to your post. Fuck this guy. Additionally, for the copy-cat, cosmicjohn, who lives in Portland (my home town), and whom I will personally spit on if I ever see him walking down the street, this is his livejournal:
Back when I was in fourth grade, '95 or maybe '94, I made a website about my two least favorite teachers. Mr. Gilbertson and Mrs. Mitchell. The website implied that they were actually the product of incestuous relations, and brothers/sisters separated at birth, with photographic evidence of this. The site sported photos of each, with alternately his beard on her face, and her hair on his head.
My parents were somewhat concerned about this, though they were both actual legitmate dickheads and deserved such lampooning. So I linked "secretly" to the site from my main (ala "The Net" w/ Sandra Bullock) and laughed gleefully as I showed my friends.
You're pretty much correct, but there's more to it than that.
The RIAA and their ilk are stuck in a somewhat out-moded business model. They aim for the hits, and take massive risks on untested individuals/bands. The problem is, as society allows us to become more selective in our tastes, become more individualistic (by way of technology that enables obscurity), the less their business model works. They've created a pop culture, because it worked at the time, but we are enabled now to move away from that, and that doesn't work for them.
Look at the way performance has changed over the years:
Early: Selection was limited to local music or traveling bands. No recordings. Next: Recordings become more wide-spread. However, musical genre's are pretty standardized and recordings are closer to localized. We begin to see the separation of the wheat from the chaff in terms of hits versus non-hits. Next: Media hits its next big plateau, with TV, radio, CDs, etc, as distribution mediums. Cross-advertisements, constant struggle for listener time, the hits have to be that much "hittier" in order to sustain a business. Now: The Internet has come into full swing, accessibility (even in terms of media samples, not even full-blown downloads) has increased to the point where people can seek out new music much easier. As a consequence, people's tastes have diverged. Now they are empowered to spend more money on a more diverse musical collection.
We're hitting a critical mass. The advertising meccas, the product placement and the consolidation of mass-media is slowly disintegrating as the social structure, especially around media, is becoming less monolithic. Choice choice choice. Hundreds of cable channels, foreign movies and back-catalogs, thousands of small no-name bands. Anyone with a 4-track DAT can put out a decent demo. Recording tech has gone down in price, indies have sprung up and are now becoming "mainstream" in-as-much as people are more willing to buy. It's no longer just for people in the "know". The line between the snobs and the slobs is slowly vanishing.
Unfortunately, all of this means less attention and less money for the hit-makers. They simply aren't as valuable anymore. Music has become an easily produced, recorded, and even advertised commodity (the internet, MySpace for one, global-spreading word-of-mouth for another). This is distressing for an industry that thrives on controlling first: what's commonly cool, and second: what's released, and then re-absorbed. Things are becoming, for lack of better researched terms, either more communistic or more anarchistic, all of which has been enabled by recent strides in technology.
The fact is, it's not that hard to do all-of-the-above (your list). Any large city that a band would be attracted to has the social networks in place to get you going where you need to go without signing a sell-your-soul contract. Being social, working the scene, making yourself heard, and working your fricking ass off to do so is part of being a musician.
So now I feel conflicted. At first I thought I was sticking up for the little guy, but now I find not only the RIAA outdated and outmoded, but I find the bands that want to sign-up for such a tour outdated and outmoded as well. I guess I dislike both.
Sorry about the rant, now to more firmly address a few things you said:
-- Most struggling musicians know people. If you're so much of a loner that you can't make friends in the industry in which you've chosen to work, there's very little likelihood of lage RTI for a major record label. You'll probably flake out. -- Reaching the full potential of your profession has changed. See above. Mega hit-makers are slowly not as mega. If you're making music to get rich, re-evaluate your perceptions and priorities. (If you're making music for beer-money, drugs, and groupies, you're probably still in luck.) -- Copyright extensions are still stupid. Even though they certainly have benefited some individual rightsholders, t
NASA also helped pioneer a very useful method of increasing the detail of an image. This is called "super-resolution" and results from essentially overlaying many different stills of the same scene. Due to small vibrations in the lens, and to the rover, the images taken are always very slightly off from eachother. Once the images are combined, the resultant detail -- hence resolution -- is far better than would be obtainable from a single shot.
Couple that with # of filters, and you're probably looking at even more than 3.9 effective mega-pixels.
Google for it, there's some side-by-side comparisons of some rover shots in original and super-resolution form.
Although you do have a point, I think you're mostly wrong. Any argument comes down to shared understanding between the participants. It has been my experience that arguments always stem from differing points of views on the terms that are in use. And just as easy as it is to disagree on misaligned terms, it is simply as easy to falsely agree based on this.
I'm just writing this for my own catharsis, so I won't cite much, but I do seem to recall a scientist who was studying how people interpret different cliched phrases, such as "tow (toe?) the line", or "on the up and up". He discovered that his wife of many years, despite the latter phrase being used in their conversations, had a completely different understanding of what "on the up and up" means. He interpreted it to mean "on the level", as in, legitimate as opposed to shady. She interpreted it to mean "of increasing quality", nothing to do with the moral and legal implications the term held for him.
This influences our feelings of a situation and thus where a conversation can go from our point of view. Try it next time you're in an argument; ask people to define their terms, and I gaurantee you that the deeper you push, the more divergent their interpretation of a word and yours will become.
Semantics are of the utmost importance for having a concise conversation. That doesn't mean we can forego looking at the whole -- this is a fallacy, of course -- but the overall "feeling" and interpretation of a situation is greatly influenced by the individual words and the contexts in which they are used, not to mention one's mood or the phase of the moon. In any discussion that really seeks to divulge the nature of a problem and its solution, you can never be too precise.
Yes, you can have textures, and the positioning system is fairly decent. It does have its issues.
It is primarily a mass-modeler, though, and you'd be foolish to use it for anything else (organic, truly twisted, etc included). It does not have a "renderer" per se, so you couldn't even do lighting anyway.
This is a troll if there ever was one. According to this logic, the free/trial versions of Maya, Softimage, 3ds (does that have a free version?), or just about any other feature limited "demo" (for that's more or less what this is), that can only export to objects that even the FULL versions can't read are "as bad as Microsoft".
This has nothing to do with Microsoft. This has nothing to do with DRM. This has nothing to do with "restricting a user's rights". This has to do with offering a free version of a $500 piece of software, with relatively few limitations. One of those is that you cannot interoperate with other 3d software, meaning that it cannot be abused as a commercial copy.
If you REALLY want it, write a Ruby script to export to.OBJ. That capability is still there. Don't spread FUD.
You can export out of Sketchup in.obj format and import into AOI. AOI has a very generous and quality renderer, with some interesting features.
Also, there is a very complete Sketchup to POVRAY exporter. It isn't my cup of tea, so I don't use it, but it's huge and rather comprehensive. It is, however, something of a hack. I believe you can find a link to it through the Sketchup Ruby Library: http://amazone.crai.archi.fr//Ruby/RUBY_Library_De pot.htm
Sketchup also has import-export ties to a lot of drafting programs and other 3d programs. It is becoming something of a standard for architectural mock-ups.
Even though I use Sketchup a lot, and I think it's a great program, it does have its issues:
A) The automatic welding can be a pain B) The layering system leaves some to be desired -- I have written scripts to remedy this (SKP has a Ruby interface that is well done). Specifically, you can have lines and faces in a "group" that are on one layer, but the group object itself is on another -- this can be very confusing, and become very difficult to organize your layers properly. I have a script that will "layer segregate" a group to the group's containing layer. C) Can't extrude curved faces, even if it's only in 2-d (a cuve on a plane). Though you can get around this by selecting the curved edge, offseting, and then extruding upwards. C2) No true curves -- it's all line segments, hence polygonal, hence you can't retain detail C3) There is, however, a way to make parametric objects -- I've toyed with the idea of creating a parametric library, maybe even attempting to implement a deformation stack, but it would be quite a colossal kludge, even if cool. D) Lighting sucks -- give us a "camera spotlight" or at least one positionable light. E) Shadows occasionally have inversion issues (lighting gets "inverted".. very odd)
All things told, though, Sketchup is well worth these rather minor limits, and with scripting, is quite extensible. AND cross platform! Great stuff.
Actually, I haven't, though I will investigate it.
My main concern with java is the interface -- establishing a constant look and feel with snappy response (java apps always seem to have redraw problems for me?) -- seems difficult. The problem is that they seem to lie between OS-native and Javaland-native. Some IDEs, such as Eclipse, which is well integrated with SWG, in my understanding, help to mitigate this issue.
Secondly is performance issues -- mainly in relation to UI. Java has never performed like native for me. I wish it did. Not that, say, a PHP backend is really all that fast, but the stateless nature of HTTP request/response, with all intermediate processing performed by a native-only browser, creates the illusion of "snappiness", which most end users care about.
Perhaps then the best solution would be a native Java JIT running the backend, because that can be quite fast, and leave all interface issues to the browser. Relegate, then, Java interfaces only for when you need native-like speed in a specialized application, with specialized GUI needs that are difficult to implement in JS + HTML. And skip on embedding the applet in the browser -- I've never seen that turn out well.
What I find humorous is that you could probably get away with quasi-slow response in a web-browser because people are used to it. In a native app, people will expect very quick response times. It seems foolish to attempt bridging the two.
He's the little black sheep that keeps parading around ridiculous ideas so that we must continue to disprove them. He trains our critical thinking, our rhetoric, and our ability to flame.
If it weren't for published hacks like him, the computer world might be downright boring. People certainly don't seem to become this worked up over anyone else's crackpot theories.
The -- what was it? -- 60% code rewrite for Vista was all IE. After all, being so firmly entrenched in the underlying OS code like it is...
Wouldn't that be a laugh, though? If IE became (even more) the core technology of Vista, but they were just too scared to say it. Little do we know, but everything is rendered in IE! It's not "Microsoft Windows" any more, it's "Microsoft Internet Windows Explorer". Guess that means with Aero, we have transparent PNGs finally, though...
God, the concept makes me want to vomit all over the place, and then continue using OS X.:P
The real benefit of web applications will be seen once they hit the desktop in a true way.
More so than the decentralized nature of web apps, the core benefit is cross-platform usability. HTML, Javascript, and hence AJAX are pretty well standardized. This makes them an easy platform to develop on, with widgets supplied by the OS, and most underlying message passing supplied by the HTTP/REST protocol and basic AJAX implementations. This mode of development is quickly bridging the development hurdles and benefits of lower-level application programming (even as far as hand-coding customized interfaces -- and let's face it, drawing contexts and pens and the like are not fun) with the benefits of a fairly simplistic markup language and programming interface.
The problem, of course, becomes the inherent client/server nature of web-apps. This needs to change. There are two paths for resolution.
First, an application like "thinkfree" would be a great asset to an Intranet. Their selling point should be centralized document management on a controlled server. No, transmitting potentially confidential data over insecure lines to a non-trusted server is not the goal. The goal is to create such an office suite that can be purchased/licensed to corporations as a centralized solution. No longer do you have to keep clients updated with patches and workarounds. So long as the browser works, so can the user. This is to great benefit of corporations.
The second problem cited is that of offline use. I take my laptop on a flight, per se, and want to bust out the latest and greatest TPS report. With no connectivity, I'm left with an old office suite or, god forbid, notepad/textedit/vi/emacs/LaTex/etc. Whatever. Not exactly user friendly, not exactly professional, and exactly NOT the type of thing that will happen in a corporate environment. The solution here is to have the ability to supply client/server "packages". I download "thinkfree.webapp", execute it, and instantly my computer boots up, looks for a remote server, can't find it, and starts a local server of the software, and my browser connects.
Updates could be automatic upon reconnection to the Intranet. Documents could be stored in a local "draft" folder, much like writing e-mails over a flight, and saved to the remote server when reconnected to the proper network. Source code for the application backend could be compiled down to machine code for the appropriate architecture, or even a lightweight javabeans implementation. At worst, if the application wasn't completely robust, it would be a few hours before I am capable to VPN back into work and have a functioning interface.
This is basically returning to the terminal server days, but with some key differences. We have pretty graphics, usable interfaces, a standardized method for markup that has built in security and robustness. We have very well researched and realized load-balancing schemes, a built in capability to shift processing load between the server and the client, or amongst different servers. Document management (read: tracking, revision control), collaboration. All built in to the software.
This CAN work. This WILL work. It simply will not work in an Internet-only form. We need Intranet deployable, and imminently client-deployable duplicates of the same package. This is the future of web-apps.
P.s., just for the flaming, XAML might be another way to go, but I don't know much of anything about that.
I know you're being witty, but, to modify the saying: causation != amplification, and thus your argument (however intended to be humourous) is falacious.
I didn't RTFA, but from the summary, I'd assume that the effects measured were mainly on the psychological side, rather than the physiological side. That is to say, I'm not sure whether or not the nerve endings were hyper-sensitive due to dehydration, or a change in the chemicals in the brain (which I'm terming here as psychological) affected the pain amplification.
If it's physiological, it's a relatively easy leap to make to assume that pleasure would be amplified as well. If it's psychological, it's slightly tougher, but the case could still be made.
It makes sense in the grand scheme of things, what with the experiences people have when fasting.
You're welcome to do as you choose. Expecting Blizzard to set-up a guild on this fact is foolish. It will cause too many problems for them and the players.
RL issues such as orientation are simply too hot of topics to introduce into a game. This is a topic where people will take a deep and personal stance. I wouldn't expect them to set up a guild based on RL political belief for the same reasons.
Dealing with the negative elements of the game means dealing with the individuals themselves, either by changing their minds or booting them off the server. The first is hard going on impossible, and the second hurts Blizzard's revenue. Prevention, then, is the best policy.
The problem is when you allow RL prejudices to enter into the game. I cannot see sexual orientation adding very much to gameplay, but I can see it as becoming a detriment. This is a see no evil, allow no evil sort of situation. It's true that the GLBT guild wouldn't be intentionally stirring up anything, but it's also true that it might raise eyebrows of those who would want to stir up something. Best to stop it here rather than having to deal with much larger problems down the line.
As for the RL/game boundary, I'd argue that any sort of RL grouping is, in general to be avoided. Basis for a guild on non-game, potentially inflammatory elements (such as the RL color of one's skin, sexual organs, sexual preference, class) is a good thing to avoid. Basis on in-game elements (as prescribed by Blizzard) should be fine: fantasy race, fantasy gender (not associated to preference), fantasy class (as in job). Additionally, grouping on non-inflammatory RL topics should be fine (locality, age).
The problem is that people with real-life prejudice will introduce those prejudices into the game. By providing a defined outlet to their hate, you're raising the chance for ignorance to gain hold in a game world, and people will take sides. And then you have a much bigger mess on your hands.
If you want to RP a GLB character, that's fine. Just don't expect Blizzard to start adding a "sexual orientation" check-box to character creation, or support the creation of guilds based on this fact. Individual run-ins can be dealt with. On a larger scale, as in Blizzard sanctioned guild listings, it's a problem, both for large groups of individuals and Blizzard itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that elevators are very energy efficient. Properly counterweighted, the energy required to lift your car (or, conversely, the counterweight -- dependent upon whether you're moving the car up or down) would be considerably less. My physics is quite rusty, but I'm fairly certain the costs are closer to the work to lift the weight-different and the work to overcome friction. And make no mistake, these suckers will be counterweighted to match the weight of your Bentley -- costing the building owners less in maintenance and energy costs, assuming you don't pay those. Without taking friction into account, energy usage would be closer to:
Work required to lift 70 kg (let's call that the average weight of your tycoon, minus gold bars) 50 meters: W = 70 * 9.8 * 50 = 34.3kJ
Work required to lift your car every day for a year: 12.556 MJ.
But all this is moot anyway -- it'd be very close to exactly the same as that same tycoon just taking the elevator.
+1 for the best post I've seen on Slashdot for a long time. Way to put it in perspective.
Thanks for the well balanced comment-o-sanity.
Really, each step in the creation of the nail is incremental, as in the twist, the rings, the larger head, the better metal, but putting them all together in a package that works -- by using science, experimentation against a given set of conditions -- is the innovation.
Some people here are complaining about using better construction techniques to achieve the same effect, but face it: Most home construction is as CHEAP as possible. Contractors are EXPENSIVE. Hiring better contractors would cost more than $15. Using screws would cost more than $15 (in time spent). If you can work in the cheapest way possible, and spend only $15 more to stamp "Hurricane/Earthquake Resistant" on the flyer for potential home buyers, it's win-win.
Eh, I don't think it'd be a big deal. If the Mac is a home machine, big whoop. Most of the time, the one doing the syncing and roaming profiles will be someone who needs it, who is likely the person who purchased the computer anyway. If it's a work computer, you'll be the only one using it (almost all of the time), and if you're going between home and work, to do work at home, you'll probably have the same applications installed there anyway. Besides, applications aren't THAT large unless they're games. Perhaps there could also be a feature to copy certain global applications; a local "cache" of certain software that your system has. Why not?
My only real concern would be software that requires system components installed for serial verification, ala activation, with data that wouldn't be explicitly stored with the user account, but in a system folder instead.
God, I hope you're a troll.
This is not an example of creativity and ingenuity. This is an example of being an untrustworthy jerk who really isn't in touch with the ramifications of his actions. One's sexual leanings has very little to do with how they'll operate within a workplace. One's social interactions has much to do with how they'll operate in a workplace. This guy has shown that he is immature and cannot empathize with people, is willing to do pretty much anything to impress his social group (lolz, lulz, roflcopter, et. al.), and does not fully think through his actions. Not only did he harm strangers (stupid strangers though they may be), but he simultaneously put the companies that employ him at risk of community backlash. He is therefore a liability.
If you like being whipped, gagged and forcefully dominated, it might reflect on your personality, but not nearly in the same way of the actions HE committed.
Might I add:
.............Wed Oct 18 23:23:23 2000 .............Thu Oct 19 02:45:15 2006 .Sun Jun 26 16:38:53 2005
whois rfjason.com:
Registrant:
RFJason
726 Kirkland Cir
Apt C203
Kirkland, WA 98033
United States of America
Registrar: DomainPeople Inc.
Domain Name: rfjason.com
Created on
Expires on
Record last updated on
Administrative Contact:
RFJason
Jason Fortuny
726 Kirkland Cir
Apt C203
Kirkland, WA
98033, US
(425)5765417
(425)5765417
RFJason@Hotmail.com
Technical Contact:
RFJason
Jason Fortuny
726 Kirkland Cir
Apt C203
Kirkland, WA
98033, US
(425)5765417
(425)5765417
RFJason@Hotmail.com
That's not precisely private information, and additionally, I second the other response to your post. Fuck this guy. Additionally, for the copy-cat, cosmicjohn, who lives in Portland (my home town), and whom I will personally spit on if I ever see him walking down the street, this is his livejournal:
http://cosmicjohn.livejournal.com/
Very sparse information on this piece of human feces, but he's also a Wikipedia editor, though it doesn't look like he does much:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jogabbeyjr
Fuck both of these guys.
Alright Confucius.
On the flip side, I find these sorts of jokes inappropriate. We should crack down on this type of cracking up.
Come on. Seriously.
Children don't care about commentary.
Back when I was in fourth grade, '95 or maybe '94, I made a website about my two least favorite teachers. Mr. Gilbertson and Mrs. Mitchell. The website implied that they were actually the product of incestuous relations, and brothers/sisters separated at birth, with photographic evidence of this. The site sported photos of each, with alternately his beard on her face, and her hair on his head.
My parents were somewhat concerned about this, though they were both actual legitmate dickheads and deserved such lampooning. So I linked "secretly" to the site from my main (ala "The Net" w/ Sandra Bullock) and laughed gleefully as I showed my friends.
I wonder if that could've been libel.
Oh, well they do. It's called "RIAA extortion lawsuits."
We'd all do well to remember: Nobody expects the RIAA inquisistion!
What's the RIxx group over the big pond?
You're pretty much correct, but there's more to it than that.
The RIAA and their ilk are stuck in a somewhat out-moded business model. They aim for the hits, and take massive risks on untested individuals/bands. The problem is, as society allows us to become more selective in our tastes, become more individualistic (by way of technology that enables obscurity), the less their business model works. They've created a pop culture, because it worked at the time, but we are enabled now to move away from that, and that doesn't work for them.
Look at the way performance has changed over the years:
Early: Selection was limited to local music or traveling bands. No recordings.
Next: Recordings become more wide-spread. However, musical genre's are pretty standardized and recordings are closer to localized. We begin to see the separation of the wheat from the chaff in terms of hits versus non-hits.
Next: Media hits its next big plateau, with TV, radio, CDs, etc, as distribution mediums. Cross-advertisements, constant struggle for listener time, the hits have to be that much "hittier" in order to sustain a business.
Now: The Internet has come into full swing, accessibility (even in terms of media samples, not even full-blown downloads) has increased to the point where people can seek out new music much easier. As a consequence, people's tastes have diverged. Now they are empowered to spend more money on a more diverse musical collection.
We're hitting a critical mass. The advertising meccas, the product placement and the consolidation of mass-media is slowly disintegrating as the social structure, especially around media, is becoming less monolithic. Choice choice choice. Hundreds of cable channels, foreign movies and back-catalogs, thousands of small no-name bands. Anyone with a 4-track DAT can put out a decent demo. Recording tech has gone down in price, indies have sprung up and are now becoming "mainstream" in-as-much as people are more willing to buy. It's no longer just for people in the "know". The line between the snobs and the slobs is slowly vanishing.
Unfortunately, all of this means less attention and less money for the hit-makers. They simply aren't as valuable anymore. Music has become an easily produced, recorded, and even advertised commodity (the internet, MySpace for one, global-spreading word-of-mouth for another). This is distressing for an industry that thrives on controlling first: what's commonly cool, and second: what's released, and then re-absorbed. Things are becoming, for lack of better researched terms, either more communistic or more anarchistic, all of which has been enabled by recent strides in technology.
The fact is, it's not that hard to do all-of-the-above (your list). Any large city that a band would be attracted to has the social networks in place to get you going where you need to go without signing a sell-your-soul contract. Being social, working the scene, making yourself heard, and working your fricking ass off to do so is part of being a musician.
So now I feel conflicted. At first I thought I was sticking up for the little guy, but now I find not only the RIAA outdated and outmoded, but I find the bands that want to sign-up for such a tour outdated and outmoded as well. I guess I dislike both.
Sorry about the rant, now to more firmly address a few things you said:
-- Most struggling musicians know people. If you're so much of a loner that you can't make friends in the industry in which you've chosen to work, there's very little likelihood of lage RTI for a major record label. You'll probably flake out.
-- Reaching the full potential of your profession has changed. See above. Mega hit-makers are slowly not as mega. If you're making music to get rich, re-evaluate your perceptions and priorities. (If you're making music for beer-money, drugs, and groupies, you're probably still in luck.)
-- Copyright extensions are still stupid. Even though they certainly have benefited some individual rightsholders, t
NASA also helped pioneer a very useful method of increasing the detail of an image. This is called "super-resolution" and results from essentially overlaying many different stills of the same scene. Due to small vibrations in the lens, and to the rover, the images taken are always very slightly off from eachother. Once the images are combined, the resultant detail -- hence resolution -- is far better than would be obtainable from a single shot.
Couple that with # of filters, and you're probably looking at even more than 3.9 effective mega-pixels.
Google for it, there's some side-by-side comparisons of some rover shots in original and super-resolution form.
So, in our little gamer community, Nintendo is the super-ego, Sony is the ego, and Microsoft is the id. Thanks, Freud.
My only question is, what does that make Sega and Atari, let alone 3DO?
Although you do have a point, I think you're mostly wrong. Any argument comes down to shared understanding between the participants. It has been my experience that arguments always stem from differing points of views on the terms that are in use. And just as easy as it is to disagree on misaligned terms, it is simply as easy to falsely agree based on this.
I'm just writing this for my own catharsis, so I won't cite much, but I do seem to recall a scientist who was studying how people interpret different cliched phrases, such as "tow (toe?) the line", or "on the up and up". He discovered that his wife of many years, despite the latter phrase being used in their conversations, had a completely different understanding of what "on the up and up" means. He interpreted it to mean "on the level", as in, legitimate as opposed to shady. She interpreted it to mean "of increasing quality", nothing to do with the moral and legal implications the term held for him.
This influences our feelings of a situation and thus where a conversation can go from our point of view. Try it next time you're in an argument; ask people to define their terms, and I gaurantee you that the deeper you push, the more divergent their interpretation of a word and yours will become.
Semantics are of the utmost importance for having a concise conversation. That doesn't mean we can forego looking at the whole -- this is a fallacy, of course -- but the overall "feeling" and interpretation of a situation is greatly influenced by the individual words and the contexts in which they are used, not to mention one's mood or the phase of the moon. In any discussion that really seeks to divulge the nature of a problem and its solution, you can never be too precise.
Yes, you can have textures, and the positioning system is fairly decent. It does have its issues.
It is primarily a mass-modeler, though, and you'd be foolish to use it for anything else (organic, truly twisted, etc included). It does not have a "renderer" per se, so you couldn't even do lighting anyway.
This is a troll if there ever was one. According to this logic, the free/trial versions of Maya, Softimage, 3ds (does that have a free version?), or just about any other feature limited "demo" (for that's more or less what this is), that can only export to objects that even the FULL versions can't read are "as bad as Microsoft".
.OBJ. That capability is still there. Don't spread FUD.
This has nothing to do with Microsoft. This has nothing to do with DRM. This has nothing to do with "restricting a user's rights". This has to do with offering a free version of a $500 piece of software, with relatively few limitations. One of those is that you cannot interoperate with other 3d software, meaning that it cannot be abused as a commercial copy.
If you REALLY want it, write a Ruby script to export to
Want a renderer?
.obj format and import into AOI. AOI has a very generous and quality renderer, with some interesting features.
e pot.htm
A free renderer?
Try Art of Illusion. (I think it's http://aoi.sourceforge.net/ but I may be wrong, and too lazy to google).
You can export out of Sketchup in
Also, there is a very complete Sketchup to POVRAY exporter. It isn't my cup of tea, so I don't use it, but it's huge and rather comprehensive. It is, however, something of a hack. I believe you can find a link to it through the Sketchup Ruby Library: http://amazone.crai.archi.fr//Ruby/RUBY_Library_D
Sketchup also has import-export ties to a lot of drafting programs and other 3d programs. It is becoming something of a standard for architectural mock-ups.
Even though I use Sketchup a lot, and I think it's a great program, it does have its issues:
A) The automatic welding can be a pain
B) The layering system leaves some to be desired -- I have written scripts to remedy this (SKP has a Ruby interface that is well done). Specifically, you can have lines and faces in a "group" that are on one layer, but the group object itself is on another -- this can be very confusing, and become very difficult to organize your layers properly. I have a script that will "layer segregate" a group to the group's containing layer.
C) Can't extrude curved faces, even if it's only in 2-d (a cuve on a plane). Though you can get around this by selecting the curved edge, offseting, and then extruding upwards.
C2) No true curves -- it's all line segments, hence polygonal, hence you can't retain detail
C3) There is, however, a way to make parametric objects -- I've toyed with the idea of creating a parametric library, maybe even attempting to implement a deformation stack, but it would be quite a colossal kludge, even if cool.
D) Lighting sucks -- give us a "camera spotlight" or at least one positionable light.
E) Shadows occasionally have inversion issues (lighting gets "inverted".. very odd)
All things told, though, Sketchup is well worth these rather minor limits, and with scripting, is quite extensible. AND cross platform! Great stuff.
Actually, I haven't, though I will investigate it.
My main concern with java is the interface -- establishing a constant look and feel with snappy response (java apps always seem to have redraw problems for me?) -- seems difficult. The problem is that they seem to lie between OS-native and Javaland-native. Some IDEs, such as Eclipse, which is well integrated with SWG, in my understanding, help to mitigate this issue.
Secondly is performance issues -- mainly in relation to UI. Java has never performed like native for me. I wish it did. Not that, say, a PHP backend is really all that fast, but the stateless nature of HTTP request/response, with all intermediate processing performed by a native-only browser, creates the illusion of "snappiness", which most end users care about.
Perhaps then the best solution would be a native Java JIT running the backend, because that can be quite fast, and leave all interface issues to the browser. Relegate, then, Java interfaces only for when you need native-like speed in a specialized application, with specialized GUI needs that are difficult to implement in JS + HTML. And skip on embedding the applet in the browser -- I've never seen that turn out well.
What I find humorous is that you could probably get away with quasi-slow response in a web-browser because people are used to it. In a native app, people will expect very quick response times. It seems foolish to attempt bridging the two.
I see Dvorak as a visionary.
He's the little black sheep that keeps parading around ridiculous ideas so that we must continue to disprove them. He trains our critical thinking, our rhetoric, and our ability to flame.
If it weren't for published hacks like him, the computer world might be downright boring. People certainly don't seem to become this worked up over anyone else's crackpot theories.
Dvorak... he unites us in incredulity.
Ahh. I get it now.
:P
The -- what was it? -- 60% code rewrite for Vista was all IE. After all, being so firmly entrenched in the underlying OS code like it is...
Wouldn't that be a laugh, though? If IE became (even more) the core technology of Vista, but they were just too scared to say it. Little do we know, but everything is rendered in IE! It's not "Microsoft Windows" any more, it's "Microsoft Internet Windows Explorer". Guess that means with Aero, we have transparent PNGs finally, though...
God, the concept makes me want to vomit all over the place, and then continue using OS X.
The real benefit of web applications will be seen once they hit the desktop in a true way.
More so than the decentralized nature of web apps, the core benefit is cross-platform usability. HTML, Javascript, and hence AJAX are pretty well standardized. This makes them an easy platform to develop on, with widgets supplied by the OS, and most underlying message passing supplied by the HTTP/REST protocol and basic AJAX implementations. This mode of development is quickly bridging the development hurdles and benefits of lower-level application programming (even as far as hand-coding customized interfaces -- and let's face it, drawing contexts and pens and the like are not fun) with the benefits of a fairly simplistic markup language and programming interface.
The problem, of course, becomes the inherent client/server nature of web-apps. This needs to change. There are two paths for resolution.
First, an application like "thinkfree" would be a great asset to an Intranet. Their selling point should be centralized document management on a controlled server. No, transmitting potentially confidential data over insecure lines to a non-trusted server is not the goal. The goal is to create such an office suite that can be purchased/licensed to corporations as a centralized solution. No longer do you have to keep clients updated with patches and workarounds. So long as the browser works, so can the user. This is to great benefit of corporations.
The second problem cited is that of offline use. I take my laptop on a flight, per se, and want to bust out the latest and greatest TPS report. With no connectivity, I'm left with an old office suite or, god forbid, notepad/textedit/vi/emacs/LaTex/etc. Whatever. Not exactly user friendly, not exactly professional, and exactly NOT the type of thing that will happen in a corporate environment. The solution here is to have the ability to supply client/server "packages". I download "thinkfree.webapp", execute it, and instantly my computer boots up, looks for a remote server, can't find it, and starts a local server of the software, and my browser connects.
Updates could be automatic upon reconnection to the Intranet. Documents could be stored in a local "draft" folder, much like writing e-mails over a flight, and saved to the remote server when reconnected to the proper network. Source code for the application backend could be compiled down to machine code for the appropriate architecture, or even a lightweight javabeans implementation. At worst, if the application wasn't completely robust, it would be a few hours before I am capable to VPN back into work and have a functioning interface.
This is basically returning to the terminal server days, but with some key differences. We have pretty graphics, usable interfaces, a standardized method for markup that has built in security and robustness. We have very well researched and realized load-balancing schemes, a built in capability to shift processing load between the server and the client, or amongst different servers. Document management (read: tracking, revision control), collaboration. All built in to the software.
This CAN work. This WILL work. It simply will not work in an Internet-only form. We need Intranet deployable, and imminently client-deployable duplicates of the same package. This is the future of web-apps.
P.s., just for the flaming, XAML might be another way to go, but I don't know much of anything about that.
If you don't care one bit about 32-bit benchmarks, does that mean you care 32 bits about 64-bit benchmarks?
I'm confused.
I know you're being witty, but, to modify the saying: causation != amplification, and thus your argument (however intended to be humourous) is falacious.
I didn't RTFA, but from the summary, I'd assume that the effects measured were mainly on the psychological side, rather than the physiological side. That is to say, I'm not sure whether or not the nerve endings were hyper-sensitive due to dehydration, or a change in the chemicals in the brain (which I'm terming here as psychological) affected the pain amplification.
If it's physiological, it's a relatively easy leap to make to assume that pleasure would be amplified as well. If it's psychological, it's slightly tougher, but the case could still be made.
It makes sense in the grand scheme of things, what with the experiences people have when fasting.
See my reply to the other response to my comment:
You're welcome to do as you choose. Expecting Blizzard to set-up a guild on this fact is foolish. It will cause too many problems for them and the players.
RL issues such as orientation are simply too hot of topics to introduce into a game. This is a topic where people will take a deep and personal stance. I wouldn't expect them to set up a guild based on RL political belief for the same reasons.
Dealing with the negative elements of the game means dealing with the individuals themselves, either by changing their minds or booting them off the server. The first is hard going on impossible, and the second hurts Blizzard's revenue. Prevention, then, is the best policy.
The problem is when you allow RL prejudices to enter into the game. I cannot see sexual orientation adding very much to gameplay, but I can see it as becoming a detriment. This is a see no evil, allow no evil sort of situation. It's true that the GLBT guild wouldn't be intentionally stirring up anything, but it's also true that it might raise eyebrows of those who would want to stir up something. Best to stop it here rather than having to deal with much larger problems down the line.
As for the RL/game boundary, I'd argue that any sort of RL grouping is, in general to be avoided. Basis for a guild on non-game, potentially inflammatory elements (such as the RL color of one's skin, sexual organs, sexual preference, class) is a good thing to avoid. Basis on in-game elements (as prescribed by Blizzard) should be fine: fantasy race, fantasy gender (not associated to preference), fantasy class (as in job). Additionally, grouping on non-inflammatory RL topics should be fine (locality, age).
The problem is that people with real-life prejudice will introduce those prejudices into the game. By providing a defined outlet to their hate, you're raising the chance for ignorance to gain hold in a game world, and people will take sides. And then you have a much bigger mess on your hands.
If you want to RP a GLB character, that's fine. Just don't expect Blizzard to start adding a "sexual orientation" check-box to character creation, or support the creation of guilds based on this fact. Individual run-ins can be dealt with. On a larger scale, as in Blizzard sanctioned guild listings, it's a problem, both for large groups of individuals and Blizzard itself.