I think the 85% may be at least partially due to hype, saturation, and (I suppose to a much smaller degree) technical details.
Avatar was hugely hyped. No other movie since has had so much energy poured into its marketing, particularly focusing on the sweeping majesty of the 3D. I watched in on a crummy screen, in 2D and was so horrified by the film itself that I have no plans to see it... but a kajillion people did. As a science fiction film, it also appealed more to the types of people interested in 3D, and technology. Shrek: Forever After appeals to a lot of people who just don't are about the 3D, or aren't even aware of the option.
Additionally, several of the movies that came out shortly after Avatar were "faked", with 3D added once the film was in the can. As huge fan of 3D, I am not willing to sit through a film stuffed with someone's idea of appropriate parallax. I want accurate parallax, dammit, or I want no parallax at all.
I do. I absolutely can not get enough 3D content. I suffer through Red/Cyan anaglyph just to do my gaming in 3D. I've only seen two movies in 3D, as I'm fairly offended by the price (especially after the article, which I think made Slashdot, about non-sterile glasses, covered in cooties), but I hope to get my hands on a second projector soon, so I can chop up my cootie-encrusted theater glasses and live out my darkest, most polarized fantasies on the nearest reflective surface.
What about combining the accelerometer data with a setting that records low-light images is a series of high-speed, underexposed images, then just using to accelerometer data to merge them?
I've been toodling with it a bit ( http://blott.us/ ). It can save your work to the iPad album ( but can't open it again later ), and it can run and save work completely offline with a sile tweak: store the entire page in a dataUrl, and save the dataUrl as a bookmark.
It isn't an unknown motive and mechanization that makes DNA spread so successfully., it's the same mechanism that makes copyrighted music spread so successfully. Successful organisms "make available" their DNA, and failed organisms don't. Successful music is made available by its host organism, and by a larger and large number of subsequent hosts, depending on how successful it is.
I understand that "information wants to be free" refers to cost, but the first time I read the sentence, I read it the way you would read "water wants to run downhill". It doesn't suggest that information has a motive... it just describes an observed behavior: data only increases in availability after it is first produced, and increases in availability make future replication even easier.
It's entropic... the "absurd conclusion" being that everyone on earth has a copy of every song ever recorded. It doesn't speak to the ethics of situation, although I've known at least one person who spent a good chunk of his time accelerating the heat-death of the music industry.
My 9500 is still hard at work, making midis and um... doing... Photoshop 3.5? The 500Mhz G3 processor upgrade really helps with heavy duty tasks like web browsing. Not to mention all of my mission-critical HyperCard stacks!
Borderlands:
Amazon.com from a shifty third-party seller - $28 ( before shipping )
Steam - $30
Onlive, which charges you $5 per month AND eats your games when you quit, $40, if I recall correctly.
I'm not sure what Blu-ray is currently up to, GB-wise, but during The War, I enlisted with the side that claimed it could store the most data. Capacity was supposed to increase to 250GB at some point, based on things I was reading early on.
Instead, the maximum size a standard Blu-ray player can read is apparently 100GB, and I've never seen one that big. Everything is 50. 200GB discs exist, but rare as unicorns, and I guess unplayable with a special 200GB-Blu-ray drive.
That article doesn't even mention GB of storage. For some reason, I care about the laser's wavelength in nanometers, but I need to have the capacity of the disc described as "number of high quality movies".
Demand is only where it's at because they're waiving the service fee for the first year as a "bonus" to everyone who's willing to give them a chance. The fact that you can't demo the system on their site ( the fact that this is possible is pretty much the strongest point of their operation ) is insane. The fact that your gaming is limited to the library of games they've adapted ( instead of the library of games your rig can support ) is insane. The fact that you can only sign up by raffle is insane. Everything about their site says "we have no idea what we've gotten into. They are absolutely running on vapor.
Who knows if demand is even that high? It's not like I can just sign up, play, and see how many people are around. Their demand, their capabilities, and their long-term support are all articles of faith. They may as well still be a "coming soon" pie-in-the-sky E3 announcement for all the relevance they have.
If I want to play games on one of my crappy computers for some reason, I'll fire up the free, blurry, low-res ( and blessedly low-latency ) version of streammygame.com. Sure, they've failed to produce an iPhone client for two solid years running, but Onlive has failed to allow me to join for the same length of time.
My friend and I used to sit on opposite sides of another friend and sing a falsetto "oooooo" at slightly different frequencies. Her annoyance was entertaining at the time, but now I can't help but worry what kind of life we got her into. She's probably dead in a gutter somewhere, in a pair of studio headphones.
This story also reminds me of the women who recently spent three days walking around in pink shirts to raise awareness of breast cancer. They blocked traffic extremely frequently, often appointing themselves crossing guards in areas that already had lights, giving each other permission to walk in front of cars while people tried to get to and from work.
I certainly sympathize with them. I know a lot of them have lost friends and family, and they want to do something for the cause... but honestly, we're all aware of breast cancer. All of that pink shirt money, time-off-of-work money, organizational money, etc could have gone toward research. Or it could have just not gotten in my way for three days, and I think we would have all been better off. If one person had been carrying a donation bucket for research, I would have felt a hundred times better about it.
So they're building an island and making a symbolic effort at cleaning? Fantastic, I never drive through the Pacific ocean on the way to work. But they aren't making a dent in the problem, everyone with a pulse already knows about pollution, and they're misrepresenting the one problem they're even engaging in.
Actually solving actual problems usually takes a lot of money, a lot of cooperation, and and a lot of work. It isn't showy, and chicks won't think you're hot for doing it. Not everybody involved in it gets to be a manager, or collect a paycheck from their non-profit employer, or be interviewed by the local news while they hold a sign that gives heart disease a severe textual talking-to.
And I know a lot of people are doing that kind of work somewhere, but the campaigns that make the news are always awareness, or people who want to -feel- like they're fighting the good fight.
If the particles were chemically neutral, and harmless to see life it wouldn't be a problem at all, but I gather that the creatures in the area are greatly affected. The problem I have with most "Garbage Patch" reporting is more that they feel the need to "sex it up". The serious people of the world are capable of have care for and concern over environmental disasters that are invisible to the naked eye, but stories about the patch always seem directed at the same people who keep trying to pass 5-cent plastic bag taxes. It's become a mythical beast, a chimera whose dread legend is spread in whispers by folks who would probably be comfortable banning cars, but want no part of pebble-bed reactors.
I think (and I'm trying to clarify my own thoughts here, as well, instead of ranting ad-hominem, as I have been) that a lot of people see the mind's-eye seascape of bags and bottles of consumer and commercial excess, and the horrors of a throwaway culture.
The reality, as always, is more nuanced. Plastic bags and styrofoam cups a) go a long way toward reducing many other types of waste in our society, and b) will never go away, because they're so damn useful. Instead of railing against the very human behaviors that have created the problem or the very useful products that improved our lives tremendously for the last 60 years, we should probably focus on creating materials that break down more safely after they wind up in the ocean, or focus on our garbage gathering techniques, or hell, a couple thousand extremely expensive machines that sit in the Pacific and try to clean as much water as possible. Even that scenario is more likely than the societal changes that would be required to alleviate the patch.
The first story I read about the patch made it sound like it was bordering on becoming an island on its own... an area the size of texas made of milk bottles and grocery bags, all rustling against each other in the waves. No other article I've seen has been that bad, but all of them making it sound much worse than it actually is.
I'm certainly not going to defend a vast region of polluted ocean and poisonous chemicals, but here's what Wikipedia has to say:
"the patch is not visible from satellite photography since it primarily consists of suspended particulates in the upper water column. Since plastics break down to ever smaller polymers, concentrations of submerged particles are not visible from space, nor do they appear as a continuous debris field. Instead, the patch is defined as an area in which the mass of plastic debris in the upper water column is significantly higher than average."
Moore's claim of having discovered a large, visible debris field is, however, a mischaracterization of the polluted region overall, since it primarily consists of particles that are generally invisible to the naked eye."
"A similar patch of floating plastic debris is found in the Atlantic Ocean."
It really doesnt sound terribly island-able. I'm sure you can scoop up enough solid material to build something, but you may have to drag a net for a couple of thousand zig-zagging miles to do it.
This article made it onto digg with the same asinine headline, and even diggers complained about it. I had hoped Slashdot wouldn't even post the damn thing. The headline is the only aspect anyone finds interesting, and it has nothing to do with the actual story.
I've upped my standards for scientific reporting, Slashdot. Up yours.
Flash has been standing still for years. They're supposedly going to blow us away with the addition of 3D this year or next. They should have done it ten years ago. I don't even know why the version number keeps going up, apart from their continuing quest to make the IDE stupider and stupider, and the player's ever-expanding ability to crash on demand.
My nVidia requires identical resolutions on both monitors when set to Horizontal Span or Vertical Span. I assume that's what we're talking about, since other settings can't be used for multi-monitor gaming.
I just tried a couple seconds at 1080p, and a couple of seconds at 4k on a 1080p screen, and found the difference to be quite noticeable in the details. The downside was that my 8800GT can't actually play 4k video faster than 4fps. How about instead of a 4k option almost no one will use, we try a 1080p option that doesn't have massive blocks, fringes, and blurring.
My $50 eyeClops projector seems to have hexagonal pixels. It seems to be incredibly bad for fonts... but the projector itself is so bad at everything it does that it's hard to tell which of its many failings is most to blame.
Blurry, hexagonal pixels are also not optimal for structured light experiments.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the 85% may be at least partially due to hype, saturation, and (I suppose to a much smaller degree) technical details.
Avatar was hugely hyped. No other movie since has had so much energy poured into its marketing, particularly focusing on the sweeping majesty of the 3D. I watched in on a crummy screen, in 2D and was so horrified by the film itself that I have no plans to see it... but a kajillion people did. As a science fiction film, it also appealed more to the types of people interested in 3D, and technology. Shrek: Forever After appeals to a lot of people who just don't are about the 3D, or aren't even aware of the option.
Additionally, several of the movies that came out shortly after Avatar were "faked", with 3D added once the film was in the can. As huge fan of 3D, I am not willing to sit through a film stuffed with someone's idea of appropriate parallax. I want accurate parallax, dammit, or I want no parallax at all.
I do. I absolutely can not get enough 3D content. I suffer through Red/Cyan anaglyph just to do my gaming in 3D. I've only seen two movies in 3D, as I'm fairly offended by the price (especially after the article, which I think made Slashdot, about non-sterile glasses, covered in cooties), but I hope to get my hands on a second projector soon, so I can chop up my cootie-encrusted theater glasses and live out my darkest, most polarized fantasies on the nearest reflective surface.
Processing.org is a pet-project producing machine, great for easing one into OOP as gently as possible.
What about combining the accelerometer data with a setting that records low-light images is a series of high-speed, underexposed images, then just using to accelerometer data to merge them?
I've been toodling with it a bit ( http://blott.us/ ). It can save your work to the iPad album ( but can't open it again later ), and it can run and save work completely offline with a sile tweak: store the entire page in a dataUrl, and save the dataUrl as a bookmark.
It isn't an unknown motive and mechanization that makes DNA spread so successfully., it's the same mechanism that makes copyrighted music spread so successfully. Successful organisms "make available" their DNA, and failed organisms don't. Successful music is made available by its host organism, and by a larger and large number of subsequent hosts, depending on how successful it is.
I understand that "information wants to be free" refers to cost, but the first time I read the sentence, I read it the way you would read "water wants to run downhill". It doesn't suggest that information has a motive... it just describes an observed behavior: data only increases in availability after it is first produced, and increases in availability make future replication even easier.
It's entropic... the "absurd conclusion" being that everyone on earth has a copy of every song ever recorded. It doesn't speak to the ethics of situation, although I've known at least one person who spent a good chunk of his time accelerating the heat-death of the music industry.
I can only pronounce it one way.
My 9500 is still hard at work, making midis and um... doing... Photoshop 3.5? The 500Mhz G3 processor upgrade really helps with heavy duty tasks like web browsing. Not to mention all of my mission-critical HyperCard stacks!
What 360 game supports a mouse?
Borderlands:
Amazon.com from a shifty third-party seller - $28 ( before shipping )
Steam - $30
Onlive, which charges you $5 per month AND eats your games when you quit, $40, if I recall correctly.
Mind=Blown
I'm not sure what Blu-ray is currently up to, GB-wise, but during The War, I enlisted with the side that claimed it could store the most data. Capacity was supposed to increase to 250GB at some point, based on things I was reading early on.
Instead, the maximum size a standard Blu-ray player can read is apparently 100GB, and I've never seen one that big. Everything is 50. 200GB discs exist, but rare as unicorns, and I guess unplayable with a special 200GB-Blu-ray drive.
That article doesn't even mention GB of storage. For some reason, I care about the laser's wavelength in nanometers, but I need to have the capacity of the disc described as "number of high quality movies".
The Necessary and Proper clause says the same thing.
If I can be endlessly entertained by only to "guy jumping" sounds, surely my cracking concrete doesn't need to be synthesized in real-time.
... HYUHHH! HYUHHH!
Hooh! HYUHHH! Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!
Wie riecht es?
Demand is only where it's at because they're waiving the service fee for the first year as a "bonus" to everyone who's willing to give them a chance. The fact that you can't demo the system on their site ( the fact that this is possible is pretty much the strongest point of their operation ) is insane. The fact that your gaming is limited to the library of games they've adapted ( instead of the library of games your rig can support ) is insane. The fact that you can only sign up by raffle is insane. Everything about their site says "we have no idea what we've gotten into. They are absolutely running on vapor.
Who knows if demand is even that high? It's not like I can just sign up, play, and see how many people are around. Their demand, their capabilities, and their long-term support are all articles of faith. They may as well still be a "coming soon" pie-in-the-sky E3 announcement for all the relevance they have.
If I want to play games on one of my crappy computers for some reason, I'll fire up the free, blurry, low-res ( and blessedly low-latency ) version of streammygame.com. Sure, they've failed to produce an iPhone client for two solid years running, but Onlive has failed to allow me to join for the same length of time.
My friend and I used to sit on opposite sides of another friend and sing a falsetto "oooooo" at slightly different frequencies. Her annoyance was entertaining at the time, but now I can't help but worry what kind of life we got her into. She's probably dead in a gutter somewhere, in a pair of studio headphones.
Wait, I've got a smidge more raving to do...
This story also reminds me of the women who recently spent three days walking around in pink shirts to raise awareness of breast cancer. They blocked traffic extremely frequently, often appointing themselves crossing guards in areas that already had lights, giving each other permission to walk in front of cars while people tried to get to and from work.
I certainly sympathize with them. I know a lot of them have lost friends and family, and they want to do something for the cause... but honestly, we're all aware of breast cancer. All of that pink shirt money, time-off-of-work money, organizational money, etc could have gone toward research. Or it could have just not gotten in my way for three days, and I think we would have all been better off. If one person had been carrying a donation bucket for research, I would have felt a hundred times better about it.
So they're building an island and making a symbolic effort at cleaning? Fantastic, I never drive through the Pacific ocean on the way to work. But they aren't making a dent in the problem, everyone with a pulse already knows about pollution, and they're misrepresenting the one problem they're even engaging in.
Actually solving actual problems usually takes a lot of money, a lot of cooperation, and and a lot of work. It isn't showy, and chicks won't think you're hot for doing it. Not everybody involved in it gets to be a manager, or collect a paycheck from their non-profit employer, or be interviewed by the local news while they hold a sign that gives heart disease a severe textual talking-to.
And I know a lot of people are doing that kind of work somewhere, but the campaigns that make the news are always awareness, or people who want to -feel- like they're fighting the good fight.
If the particles were chemically neutral, and harmless to see life it wouldn't be a problem at all, but I gather that the creatures in the area are greatly affected. The problem I have with most "Garbage Patch" reporting is more that they feel the need to "sex it up". The serious people of the world are capable of have care for and concern over environmental disasters that are invisible to the naked eye, but stories about the patch always seem directed at the same people who keep trying to pass 5-cent plastic bag taxes. It's become a mythical beast, a chimera whose dread legend is spread in whispers by folks who would probably be comfortable banning cars, but want no part of pebble-bed reactors.
I think (and I'm trying to clarify my own thoughts here, as well, instead of ranting ad-hominem, as I have been) that a lot of people see the mind's-eye seascape of bags and bottles of consumer and commercial excess, and the horrors of a throwaway culture.
The reality, as always, is more nuanced. Plastic bags and styrofoam cups a) go a long way toward reducing many other types of waste in our society, and b) will never go away, because they're so damn useful. Instead of railing against the very human behaviors that have created the problem or the very useful products that improved our lives tremendously for the last 60 years, we should probably focus on creating materials that break down more safely after they wind up in the ocean, or focus on our garbage gathering techniques, or hell, a couple thousand extremely expensive machines that sit in the Pacific and try to clean as much water as possible. Even that scenario is more likely than the societal changes that would be required to alleviate the patch.
End of Lunatic Ravings
The first story I read about the patch made it sound like it was bordering on becoming an island on its own... an area the size of texas made of milk bottles and grocery bags, all rustling against each other in the waves. No other article I've seen has been that bad, but all of them making it sound much worse than it actually is.
I'm certainly not going to defend a vast region of polluted ocean and poisonous chemicals, but here's what Wikipedia has to say:
"the patch is not visible from satellite photography since it primarily consists of suspended particulates in the upper water column. Since plastics break down to ever smaller polymers, concentrations of submerged particles are not visible from space, nor do they appear as a continuous debris field. Instead, the patch is defined as an area in which the mass of plastic debris in the upper water column is significantly higher than average."
Moore's claim of having discovered a large, visible debris field is, however, a mischaracterization of the polluted region overall, since it primarily consists of particles that are generally invisible to the naked eye."
"A similar patch of floating plastic debris is found in the Atlantic Ocean."
It really doesnt sound terribly island-able. I'm sure you can scoop up enough solid material to build something, but you may have to drag a net for a couple of thousand zig-zagging miles to do it.
This article made it onto digg with the same asinine headline, and even diggers complained about it. I had hoped Slashdot wouldn't even post the damn thing. The headline is the only aspect anyone finds interesting, and it has nothing to do with the actual story.
I've upped my standards for scientific reporting, Slashdot. Up yours.
OMG AM I A SPY?
Flash has been standing still for years. They're supposedly going to blow us away with the addition of 3D this year or next. They should have done it ten years ago. I don't even know why the version number keeps going up, apart from their continuing quest to make the IDE stupider and stupider, and the player's ever-expanding ability to crash on demand.
My nVidia requires identical resolutions on both monitors when set to Horizontal Span or Vertical Span. I assume that's what we're talking about, since other settings can't be used for multi-monitor gaming.
I just tried a couple seconds at 1080p, and a couple of seconds at 4k on a 1080p screen, and found the difference to be quite noticeable in the details. The downside was that my 8800GT can't actually play 4k video faster than 4fps. How about instead of a 4k option almost no one will use, we try a 1080p option that doesn't have massive blocks, fringes, and blurring.
My $50 eyeClops projector seems to have hexagonal pixels. It seems to be incredibly bad for fonts... but the projector itself is so bad at everything it does that it's hard to tell which of its many failings is most to blame.
Blurry, hexagonal pixels are also not optimal for structured light experiments.