I think the only problem for Wikinews could be the simple lack of contributors. They are not paying enough to have fulltime writers/editors, so they need many times more contributors than a newspaper or even a news agency.
The knowledge, the bias, these are all non-issues. It's hard to do worse than the mainstream media does. Nobody does factchecking and original research anyway, it's either from the wire or just printing a press release almost verbatime. There are of course some interviews, editorials and in depth coverage, but for 90% of the content you don't need any skill, talent or contacts.
And the biggest problem of all news outlets, the studpidity and ignorance, can be easily fixed the Wiki way.
From Machinima.com: "Machinima uses graphical techniques originally developed for computer games to generate its visuals". From Wikipedia: "rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) with ordinary PCs and the 3D engines of video games".
Indeed, machinima is nothing more than "just using a game engine for rendering an animation". As it's currently defined, the term is broad enough to include "The Project" by Crytek. Whether the film is acted or animated is irrelevant. You may think that some types of machinima are less worthy/fun than others, but they are still machinima.
You are saying that it's no different than a cutscene and you are right. The only difference is in purpose - machinima exists outside of the game itself, to create a film, while cutscenes exist to support the game. Other than that, these are the same.
There is not very much about Pixar or Dreamworks films that can't be rendered using CryEngine, Source or Doom 3 engine if you drop the real-time requirement and add more depth of field and motion blur effects (which are extremely easy to do, just too taxing for current hardware). Other important differences are better models, larger textures and better lighting. It makes perfect sense to start experimenting with deeper integration now.
However, looking at Pixar is misleading. Have you seen the popular "Reboot" series (CGI TV series, 1994) or the "2Funky4You" film (first CGI porn film by Private, 2002?)? The fact is that you don't need Pixar (or Square) quality to make a compelling product. It is possible to take Doom 3 and make machinima TV series that would be popular and incredibly cheap to make. To make RvB you don't need anything besides an Xbox and a VCR. To make a CGI series you need a few millions, tens of people, lots of equipment, etc. But a Doom 3 knock-off series have requirements that are in the middle. You can't just write a lame script and act it in few hours. It requires creating custom art, animation, editing, etc., so you would need slightly more resources, but still many times less than with traditional CGI. It's just that noone is trying.
The only reason why RvB authors can get away with their methods is that the characters lack any expressive capabilities. It's easy to ACT in real time in the game's world when the only thing you can do is repeatedly look up or down to simulate talking. It's not as easy when you need to use hands, the rest of the body, the face, etc. to express the feelings of the character. You simply can't do it in real time. So the solution for MACHINIMA would be to use more scripts instead of relying 100% on human acting.
In regards to the final product, I don't really see much difference between rendering it as AVI and splicing it together or saving the demo files and rendering them on the engine in real time. Crytek could have made an AVI (in fact, they did make an AVI that can be downloaded), but their partner ATI was interested in showcasing the capabilities of the X850, so a real-time demo was essential.
Apparently the nominations are sent by Wired readers. There is obviously a significant number of them, who were unsuccessfully trying to buy an X800 for the past 6 months. The fact that some people managed this feat doesn't mean it's not vapour to all customers, who fail.
I'd love to punch in the fact the retard who had this idea of a landgrab first. WTF? Haven't we realised like a half-century ago that this Earth is round, small and we all live together on it? What's that with expanding? It's the 21st century and time to put an end to this medieval thinking. I truly believe that Danes act like retards in this, but hope that some common sense and human decency might still emerge in them.
This is obviously false. If there was any tangible benefit in slower development of processors, the market would cause this slowdown. If MS could write better office suit by concentrating on optimising software instead of using more processing power, it would. If Crytek could write better games by optimising code instead of using faster CPU, they would. The fact that everyone seems happy with increasing CPU speeds suggests that this is a better way. We will save the optimisation for 2015. Or 2020. May be AI will do it for us.
Fortunately, you are wrong. The amount of research done was doubling every decade for more than a century and much more reliably than the number of transistors on silicon. There is a huge amount of fundamental science being done all over the world. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that it would make perfect sense to increase funding for fundamental science 5 times starting from next year, but sadly this is not a real option. Still, science budgets do grow and short-term thinking doesn't really harm science as much as it helps society utilize the results more efficiently and improve networking between science and industry.
There is some truth in what you are saying. United States was spending more generously on science during Cold War. Soviet Union was spending the unheard of 4 percents of GDP on science (more than USA, Japan or any other country). And it might have looked better because both the USSR and the USA were interested in explaining in no uncertain terms why it kicked major ass in science. Today science has to relay on sensationalist press-releases aimed at morons with ADD to attract at least some attention. But, fortunately, overall, science has managed to survive and flourish.
The logic of legislators is different. They are not saying P2P is evil (like viruses), so they should be banned. They are saying P2P can be a great technology, but used predominantly for illegal activities and this harms the economy, so it makes sense to protect the economy by banning P2P.
Viruses, spam and heroin are things that are clearly bad and so there is no reason for them to remain legal. You can ban them even if you are sure the ban will be wholly ineffective. Even if it stops 5% of cases it's still worth it. But to ban something, which is not inherently bad, you need some proof that the ban would actually help. To ban smoking, violent games or P2P you need very clear "bulletproof" proof that it would provide significant benefits. And if we can show that banning P2P would not help get rid of P2P programs, the benefits of the ban are no longer obvious.
The pirates don't need to crack it. Since professional pirate groups spend lots of money on equipment anyway, setting up a contraption to record video stream and save it in unencumbered format somehow would not be too difficult. The only way to make it difficult (necessary, but not sufficient) is to ensure 100% DRM in all devices that are involved in the playback. This hasn't been done yet (and it probably and hopefully can't be done), so a determined pirate (and pirates are determined) will be able to convert such movie to DVD or DivX without cracking the DRM.
Been there, done that. I used Sequoia to look at my disk space and everything big that I won't need has long been deleted. Now every large file that I have on the disk is something valuable. Furthermore, burning stuff to CDs is not a solution - cost per Gb is almost as high as for HDDs and it's terribly inconvinient (a DVD would be slightly better, but still bad).
Sure I can free may be 10 Gb by going through all small files, checking them and deleting useless stuff, but it would take too much of my time and won't really matter.
Heat from a car? You must be joking... I was riding a minibus with a DVD player and a large flat screen a few months ago in Finland. The heater was turned on and this led to playback problems on two DVDs. We had to switch the heater off in order to be able to watch anything.
I don't know you personally, of course, but I suspect that a lot of what you think about communist Poland today is not based on reality (because you were just a child), but on what you were told afterwards (via TV, by your parents, etc.). I am well aware that Poles didn't like Soviet system, partly because they didn't like Russians much (especially after the Warsaw rebellion), partly because they were deeply bourgeois by then. But I have a strong suspicion that Poland was not poorer than the Soviet Union (and may be a little bit richer). And in Soviet Union the rationing was only introduced in the last years of the 1980s. And there definitely was chocolate in Soviet Union, lots of it (although there was lots of ersatz too). And toilet paper, well, it's not like you can't manage without it.:)
So I don't believe that you are correct when you paint communist Poland as a butter-less wasteland. And, if you think about it, you don't really need more than 250 grams of butter per month. According to this document, the butter consumption record in the United States in the last few decades was 180 grams per month per capita. 250 grams per month sounds entirely reasonable to me. BTW, that's exactly what I meant when I said consumption dropped through the floor. I am not sure about figures for Poland, but in Russia it did decrease several times for many essential products.
There were many inefficiencies, such as lack of toilet paper, but this was to be expected. It was by design that the society accepted some inefficiencies in order to have a better consumption overall.
As for personal experiences, I lived in Soviet Union. And I remember that even the proletarians could afford caviar from time to time. And everyone could buy cheap quality food, enough for a healthy diet. And don't forget free education, healthcare and other bonuses. And the rent was law, and the air was clean and the Sun didn't set over the Soviet Union. Oh, those were the times...
Seriously, I can accept that because of lazy carpenters the system didn't work as well as it could have with better people. But it was still extremely effective. And eventually we would have industrial robots and we would have enough tables. Sadly, the good things never last.:(
Modern filesharing systems are relatively inefficient. But an efficient P2P network can distribute a file to all interested peers in approximately the same time it takes the uploader to upload 1 (ONE) copy of the file onto the network. So if the uploader has a 1Mbps connection, it could take 24 hours to distribute a dual-layer 9Gb DVD. If the uploader had a 10Mbps connection, it would take 2 hours. If he had a 100Mbps connection, it could be done essentially in 15-20 minutes. Now please tell me, why clicking once on a "Download it!" link is difficult for the average user? What part of "Download it!" would be difficult to understand?:)
With professional pirate groups and fast Internet content can be distributed extremely efficiently. At the moment the evil **AA and their friends don't seem to know a way to stop this.
Hard disks are a perfect combination of price and reliability. Nobody would buy completely fail-safe drives, because it's much cheaper to get a 99.9% reliable drive instead. So the manufacturers are taking the risks (forcing us to take the risks), because that's what the customer wants. How much extra are you willing to pay for a failsafe HDD? Not much, probably. So backup your data and use RAID if you need reliability.
I really need three of these babies ASAP! I have 3 disks now (440 Gb total) and let me tell you, it really sucks not having free space.:( The only thing that saves me is that I regularly manage to fuck up one or two partitions accidentally - I lose some files, but at least I get more free space after I fix it.:)
Seriously, in the Internet Age a 200 Gb drive fills in what,3 months? And that's not even trying.
What I especially like is that instead of disabling functionality, blocking the users, C&Ding, DMCAing or plain old sueing the hackers, EA applauds their creativity, admits that EA didn't foresee the potential problem and works to fix it to everyone's satisfaction.
Nice corporate behaviour, folks. May be I will even buy one of the expansion packs eventually to compliment my pirated copy of Sims 2.
It's a fricking plane. It flies fast. Good luck hitting the cockpit (let alone pilot's eye) for more than a split second. Yes, it can distract the pilot, but so can a stupid bird.
Please, estimate the risks of this stupid stunt leading to a pilot losing the control. Multiply it by estimated probability of a fatal crash. Multiply the result by the expected number of dead passengers. How much is your result? Now you are obvisiouly going to get a different estimate than I, but if it's significantly less than 0.33, please consider the fact that the prosecution thinks taking 25 years off that man's life is justified. I happen to disagree with them.
But perhaps there is a right to a punishment that fits the crime? There would be no complains if he was facing 6 month sentence or a year, and a $10000 fine. But 25 years and half a million dollars is perhaps a bit stiff.
Draco was the first lawgiver of ancient Athens, Greece. His laws, written in 621 BC when he was archon eponymous, were particularly harsh, as the death penalty was the punishment for even minor offenses. Hence expressions such as "draconian punishment" or "draconian laws", and more generally, "draconian measures" (far-reaching). (from Wikipedia)
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I think the only problem for Wikinews could be the simple lack of contributors. They are not paying enough to have fulltime writers/editors, so they need many times more contributors than a newspaper or even a news agency.
The knowledge, the bias, these are all non-issues. It's hard to do worse than the mainstream media does. Nobody does factchecking and original research anyway, it's either from the wire or just printing a press release almost verbatime. There are of course some interviews, editorials and in depth coverage, but for 90% of the content you don't need any skill, talent or contacts.
And the biggest problem of all news outlets, the studpidity and ignorance, can be easily fixed the Wiki way.
Their MSN Toolbar Desktop Search is also good, better than Google desktop according to most reviews (but probably not better than Copernic).
I am sure this is some kind of mistake. It must be some different Microsoft.
From Machinima.com: "Machinima uses graphical techniques originally developed for computer games to generate its visuals". From Wikipedia: "rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) with ordinary PCs and the 3D engines of video games".
Indeed, machinima is nothing more than "just using a game engine for rendering an animation". As it's currently defined, the term is broad enough to include "The Project" by Crytek. Whether the film is acted or animated is irrelevant. You may think that some types of machinima are less worthy/fun than others, but they are still machinima.
You are saying that it's no different than a cutscene and you are right. The only difference is in purpose - machinima exists outside of the game itself, to create a film, while cutscenes exist to support the game. Other than that, these are the same.
There is not very much about Pixar or Dreamworks films that can't be rendered using CryEngine, Source or Doom 3 engine if you drop the real-time requirement and add more depth of field and motion blur effects (which are extremely easy to do, just too taxing for current hardware). Other important differences are better models, larger textures and better lighting. It makes perfect sense to start experimenting with deeper integration now.
However, looking at Pixar is misleading. Have you seen the popular "Reboot" series (CGI TV series, 1994) or the "2Funky4You" film (first CGI porn film by Private, 2002?)? The fact is that you don't need Pixar (or Square) quality to make a compelling product. It is possible to take Doom 3 and make machinima TV series that would be popular and incredibly cheap to make. To make RvB you don't need anything besides an Xbox and a VCR. To make a CGI series you need a few millions, tens of people, lots of equipment, etc. But a Doom 3 knock-off series have requirements that are in the middle. You can't just write a lame script and act it in few hours. It requires creating custom art, animation, editing, etc., so you would need slightly more resources, but still many times less than with traditional CGI. It's just that noone is trying.
The only reason why RvB authors can get away with their methods is that the characters lack any expressive capabilities. It's easy to ACT in real time in the game's world when the only thing you can do is repeatedly look up or down to simulate talking. It's not as easy when you need to use hands, the rest of the body, the face, etc. to express the feelings of the character. You simply can't do it in real time. So the solution for MACHINIMA would be to use more scripts instead of relying 100% on human acting.
In regards to the final product, I don't really see much difference between rendering it as AVI and splicing it together or saving the demo files and rendering them on the engine in real time. Crytek could have made an AVI (in fact, they did make an AVI that can be downloaded), but their partner ATI was interested in showcasing the capabilities of the X850, so a real-time demo was essential.
Apparently the nominations are sent by Wired readers. There is obviously a significant number of them, who were unsuccessfully trying to buy an X800 for the past 6 months. The fact that some people managed this feat doesn't mean it's not vapour to all customers, who fail.
I'd love to punch in the fact the retard who had this idea of a landgrab first. WTF? Haven't we realised like a half-century ago that this Earth is round, small and we all live together on it? What's that with expanding? It's the 21st century and time to put an end to this medieval thinking. I truly believe that Danes act like retards in this, but hope that some common sense and human decency might still emerge in them.
This is obviously false. If there was any tangible benefit in slower development of processors, the market would cause this slowdown. If MS could write better office suit by concentrating on optimising software instead of using more processing power, it would. If Crytek could write better games by optimising code instead of using faster CPU, they would. The fact that everyone seems happy with increasing CPU speeds suggests that this is a better way. We will save the optimisation for 2015. Or 2020. May be AI will do it for us.
Wired had an article on programmable matter some time ago. I don't know if the guy you link to is a quack or not, but it sounds similar in concept.
Fortunately, you are wrong. The amount of research done was doubling every decade for more than a century and much more reliably than the number of transistors on silicon. There is a huge amount of fundamental science being done all over the world. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that it would make perfect sense to increase funding for fundamental science 5 times starting from next year, but sadly this is not a real option. Still, science budgets do grow and short-term thinking doesn't really harm science as much as it helps society utilize the results more efficiently and improve networking between science and industry.
There is some truth in what you are saying. United States was spending more generously on science during Cold War. Soviet Union was spending the unheard of 4 percents of GDP on science (more than USA, Japan or any other country). And it might have looked better because both the USSR and the USA were interested in explaining in no uncertain terms why it kicked major ass in science. Today science has to relay on sensationalist press-releases aimed at morons with ADD to attract at least some attention. But, fortunately, overall, science has managed to survive and flourish.
But think of the tremendous upside that can be realised by proactively implementing the potential synergies (based on this).
The logic of legislators is different. They are not saying P2P is evil (like viruses), so they should be banned. They are saying P2P can be a great technology, but used predominantly for illegal activities and this harms the economy, so it makes sense to protect the economy by banning P2P.
Viruses, spam and heroin are things that are clearly bad and so there is no reason for them to remain legal. You can ban them even if you are sure the ban will be wholly ineffective. Even if it stops 5% of cases it's still worth it. But to ban something, which is not inherently bad, you need some proof that the ban would actually help. To ban smoking, violent games or P2P you need very clear "bulletproof" proof that it would provide significant benefits. And if we can show that banning P2P would not help get rid of P2P programs, the benefits of the ban are no longer obvious.
The pirates don't need to crack it. Since professional pirate groups spend lots of money on equipment anyway, setting up a contraption to record video stream and save it in unencumbered format somehow would not be too difficult. The only way to make it difficult (necessary, but not sufficient) is to ensure 100% DRM in all devices that are involved in the playback. This hasn't been done yet (and it probably and hopefully can't be done), so a determined pirate (and pirates are determined) will be able to convert such movie to DVD or DivX without cracking the DRM.
Been there, done that. I used Sequoia to look at my disk space and everything big that I won't need has long been deleted. Now every large file that I have on the disk is something valuable. Furthermore, burning stuff to CDs is not a solution - cost per Gb is almost as high as for HDDs and it's terribly inconvinient (a DVD would be slightly better, but still bad).
Sure I can free may be 10 Gb by going through all small files, checking them and deleting useless stuff, but it would take too much of my time and won't really matter.
Well, may be it's because he's autistic? :)
Heat from a car? You must be joking... I was riding a minibus with a DVD player and a large flat screen a few months ago in Finland. The heater was turned on and this led to playback problems on two DVDs. We had to switch the heater off in order to be able to watch anything.
I don't know you personally, of course, but I suspect that a lot of what you think about communist Poland today is not based on reality (because you were just a child), but on what you were told afterwards (via TV, by your parents, etc.). I am well aware that Poles didn't like Soviet system, partly because they didn't like Russians much (especially after the Warsaw rebellion), partly because they were deeply bourgeois by then. But I have a strong suspicion that Poland was not poorer than the Soviet Union (and may be a little bit richer). And in Soviet Union the rationing was only introduced in the last years of the 1980s. And there definitely was chocolate in Soviet Union, lots of it (although there was lots of ersatz too). And toilet paper, well, it's not like you can't manage without it. :)
:(
So I don't believe that you are correct when you paint communist Poland as a butter-less wasteland. And, if you think about it, you don't really need more than 250 grams of butter per month. According to this document, the butter consumption record in the United States in the last few decades was 180 grams per month per capita. 250 grams per month sounds entirely reasonable to me. BTW, that's exactly what I meant when I said consumption dropped through the floor. I am not sure about figures for Poland, but in Russia it did decrease several times for many essential products.
There were many inefficiencies, such as lack of toilet paper, but this was to be expected. It was by design that the society accepted some inefficiencies in order to have a better consumption overall.
As for personal experiences, I lived in Soviet Union. And I remember that even the proletarians could afford caviar from time to time. And everyone could buy cheap quality food, enough for a healthy diet. And don't forget free education, healthcare and other bonuses. And the rent was law, and the air was clean and the Sun didn't set over the Soviet Union. Oh, those were the times...
Seriously, I can accept that because of lazy carpenters the system didn't work as well as it could have with better people. But it was still extremely effective. And eventually we would have industrial robots and we would have enough tables. Sadly, the good things never last.
Modern filesharing systems are relatively inefficient. But an efficient P2P network can distribute a file to all interested peers in approximately the same time it takes the uploader to upload 1 (ONE) copy of the file onto the network. So if the uploader has a 1Mbps connection, it could take 24 hours to distribute a dual-layer 9Gb DVD. If the uploader had a 10Mbps connection, it would take 2 hours. If he had a 100Mbps connection, it could be done essentially in 15-20 minutes. Now please tell me, why clicking once on a "Download it!" link is difficult for the average user? What part of "Download it!" would be difficult to understand? :)
With professional pirate groups and fast Internet content can be distributed extremely efficiently. At the moment the evil **AA and their friends don't seem to know a way to stop this.
Just protecting. You don't want anything to happen with your kids, Mr. Tough Guy? Pay us and we promise that nothing would happen to them.
Protection is just an euphemism for racketeering.
Hard disks are a perfect combination of price and reliability. Nobody would buy completely fail-safe drives, because it's much cheaper to get a 99.9% reliable drive instead. So the manufacturers are taking the risks (forcing us to take the risks), because that's what the customer wants. How much extra are you willing to pay for a failsafe HDD? Not much, probably. So backup your data and use RAID if you need reliability.
I really need three of these babies ASAP! I have 3 disks now (440 Gb total) and let me tell you, it really sucks not having free space. :( The only thing that saves me is that I regularly manage to fuck up one or two partitions accidentally - I lose some files, but at least I get more free space after I fix it. :)
Seriously, in the Internet Age a 200 Gb drive fills in what,3 months? And that's not even trying.
What I especially like is that instead of disabling functionality, blocking the users, C&Ding, DMCAing or plain old sueing the hackers, EA applauds their creativity, admits that EA didn't foresee the potential problem and works to fix it to everyone's satisfaction.
Nice corporate behaviour, folks. May be I will even buy one of the expansion packs eventually to compliment my pirated copy of Sims 2.
It's a fricking plane. It flies fast. Good luck hitting the cockpit (let alone pilot's eye) for more than a split second. Yes, it can distract the pilot, but so can a stupid bird.
Please, estimate the risks of this stupid stunt leading to a pilot losing the control. Multiply it by estimated probability of a fatal crash. Multiply the result by the expected number of dead passengers. How much is your result? Now you are obvisiouly going to get a different estimate than I, but if it's significantly less than 0.33, please consider the fact that the prosecution thinks taking 25 years off that man's life is justified. I happen to disagree with them.
But perhaps there is a right to a punishment that fits the crime? There would be no complains if he was facing 6 month sentence or a year, and a $10000 fine. But 25 years and half a million dollars is perhaps a bit stiff.
Draco was the first lawgiver of ancient Athens, Greece. His laws, written in 621 BC when he was archon eponymous, were particularly harsh, as the death penalty was the punishment for even minor offenses. Hence expressions such as "draconian punishment" or "draconian laws", and more generally, "draconian measures" (far-reaching). (from Wikipedia)