5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
Now, not being a lawyer, I don't know if their conduct counts as "not accepting" in the narrow legal sense, but there it is.
Because we help Egypt, too, and Egypt is not particularly nice to dissidents and Islamists. Being unable to topple the Egyptian government due to its draconian law enforcement practices, he turns his anger on the source of the money that makes those practices possible. Keep up.
I still don't see how black and white is going to do any better than analogue audio.
You mean the way a lot of musicians still insist on using vacuum tube amps? Or the way entire genres of music have sprung up around the act of mixing vinyl records on turntables? Sounds about right, actually.
But that invasion that's thrown up as the alternative never would have happened, especially after the first bomb. Nagasaki was about ending the war before the Soviets could get involved, to avoid in Tokyo what was happening in Berlin. Something the citizens of Nagasaki really couldn't be less involved in.
I'll take a VHS with tracking issues over a DVD with scratches any day. At least the VHS doesn't fast-forward 5 minutes if it decides the tracking is too bad. And what genius decided that cutting out the audio when the buffer runs low due to errors was a good idea - it's way more jarring than losing image for a moment.
Well, radiosity is really a particular implementation of the concept of global illumination, with photon mapping, ambient occlusion, and other techniques being more in vogue these days.
However, saying that raytracing is old news isn't really accurate as a blanket statement - most of those GI techniques involve tracing rays, and no newer tech for rendering reflections and refractions has come along. Mental Ray is a raytracer, for example.
Global illumination also isn't a panacea - having light behave in "real" (ahem) ways still means you need good lighting skills and software workarounds, and often the same effects can be achieved with much shorter render times by a skilled artist.
I find blurry reflection and refraction to be much more important for selling a scene than automatic bounced lighting - those of us who predate desktop GI with reasonable render times tend not to rely on it as much. Still, ILM used GI for the digital baby shots in Lemony Snicket, and it looked fantastic, so maybe that's where the tech is going all-out in a generation or two.
All the metal should be acting as a light source...
No need to go that deep - look at the stuff on the fridge. Besides, there's not enough slight bends, dings, unevenness or wear on any of the surfaces. For a rendering of a sleek new kitchen you can get away with that, but look at how the vent hood, tile grout, and table have never seen a speck of food, water, or abrasion.
That having been said, it's damn impressive for the constraints POVRay users labor under. But photoreal? No way. Hardly anything that hasn't seen a lot of 2D post work is, regardless of the package, renderer, or artist.
How about antibiotics? Should government be able to regulate the sale and use of antibiotics thorugh keeping them prescription-only with the aim of preventing resistant strains?
Indeed. Photoshop dominated from version 1.0. Why? Because it was better, both technically and from a usability perspective. It was developed as an in-house tool for ILM, ferchrissakes (the first Photoshop image seen in public was a matte painting in the second Indiana Jones movie). Its color correction and channel manipulation tools were unmatched for a long, long time.
The mis-steps came later, after version 3 until 6, 7, 8, or 9, depending on your particular market segment. Although the app is ridiculously bloated now, its usability and power is back on track for most workflows using one of those 4 versions.
So what would you recommend for a 1-man shop (no POS, just invoices and finance charges)?
Re:First of a Flood
on
Pac-Man Turns 25
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· Score: 5, Insightful
If the game design of Pac Man was so good, then why do I become bored with it in 5 minutes?
Because on an emulator you haven't paid $0.25 to play it. There aren't people around to shoulder-surf you when you reach an insane level. Because there's no anonymous competition with the guy you trade highscores with on the same machine, week after week.
Pac-Man and other arcade classics don't hold up as emulated games because a lot of what made them fun were specific to their context. As arcades died out, and gaming moved to the PC and the console, things like 'points' and 'lives' became less important as gameplay elements, in favor of persistent games with longer-term goals like 'items' and 'unlockables' (and got a hell of a lot more complicated - Half-Life's Hazard Course was an acknowledgement of, and brilliant solution to, that phenomenon).
A typical game review today includes a note about how many hours long the game is. For an old arcade game, that's so irrelevant as to be meaningless - how 'long' is Pac-Man? Average game length? Time it takes to get to the 'key' levels for an expert player? Time it takes to learn all the patterns? Or 'as long as you wanna hang out and spend quarters'?
Did the same, first with a III, now with a 4MV (11x17, baby!) that I got for the price of a luggage cart to get it home on the subway when an office moved and left it behind.
If you are keeping one of these old things alive, Moe, at fixyourownprinter is an invaluable resource, not just for the kits for common repairs that include video CDs of the installation that he sells, but for the straightforward advice he gives out in the forums even if he never sees a dime. I'm not affiliated with them, just a very happy customer of their repair kits.
Can't get over the $500 office chairs my city hall has.
Have you priced real office furniture lately?
For that matter, if the chairs really extravagent and you're lowballing the number, perhaps they pay for themselves with lower healthcare costs/employee downtime. Ergonomic work environments are good.
I'd follow bigger money trails out of city hall to find waste if I were you. Prominent local real estate developers tend to be a good place to start.
The equivilent to a user opening a "free pr0n" email attachment in a car would be driving your car straight at a tree.
No, it's like taking your through a drive-thru in a part of town you don't know and ending up with a feces-hurling monkey chained to your back seat.
The day I switched to Firefox and never looked back was the day I got reamed with 3 different spywares and a porn dialer by fat-fingering a URL and ending up at some horrible typosquatting cesspool.
I don't think the industry is doomed, but I do think that it's stale.
Try Darwinia (and Uplink, too, for that matter). Or Gate 88. Or Cave Story. Or any of the 2004 Interactive Fiction entries. Or the 2004 IGA competition entries. Or Insaniquarium. Or Tumuki Fighters. Gish. Alien Hominid. Pikmin. etc...
And even if you hate all those games, and maintain that the industry is stale, screw 'em. why do your gaming experiences have to be new games, anyway? Hundreds and hundreds of games from the past are worth playing, and you can't have played them all at the time. When you go to the video store, do you only look at what came out in the last 9 months? I just worked through the Lucasarts adventures, for example, because I was playing other games when they were released. Never got a chance to play Thief 2, or System Shock, so maybe those are next. Considering picking up a Saturn with copies of NiGHTS and Ecco on ebay for the price of a new budget game as well.
To take the Hollywood analogy further, remember watching movies before the advent of home video. There's a bunch of theaters in town mostly showing crap (with prominent exceptions), and a little hole in the wall showing lesser-known, and generally (but certainly not assuredly) more interesting fare, as well as revivals of classics.
Nobody does shiny flythroughs in AutoCAD, no matter the version, and no matter if they call it VIZ Render. It's in-house quality only.
You're right that CAD drafting is pretty good right now, though, and the need for upgrades in the absence of extortionate threats like ADSK pulled with 2005 is questionable.
That's why they're pushing so hard on Revit and the Building Information Model approach - they want to make 2D CAD itself obsolete. Revit isn't much of a rendering tool - they want to convince people that a 3D model will somehow be useful on site. I don't fully understand it since I only do renderings, but it seems fairly pointless and fragile - apparently extracting traditional drawings from a BIM takes loads and loads of computer time.
I also think Microsoft would stay away because Autodesk is not only the world's 3rd or 4th largest software company last I checked, but they are Microsoft's absolute puppy dog when it comes to embracing the Windows technologies designed for platform lock-in in their products. Add to that the fact that they don't really have any compteing products, and Microsoft is happy to have an independent entity pushing Windows lock-in in a whole industry.
Slashdot Mirror
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
Now, not being a lawyer, I don't know if their conduct counts as "not accepting" in the narrow legal sense, but there it is.
Because we help Egypt, too, and Egypt is not particularly nice to dissidents and Islamists. Being unable to topple the Egyptian government due to its draconian law enforcement practices, he turns his anger on the source of the money that makes those practices possible. Keep up.
a)Live performances. Humans have analog ears.
b)Timbre. Concert Pianists don't use digital pianos for their digital recordings either.
You mean the way a lot of musicians still insist on using vacuum tube amps? Or the way entire genres of music have sprung up around the act of mixing vinyl records on turntables? Sounds about right, actually.
But that invasion that's thrown up as the alternative never would have happened, especially after the first bomb. Nagasaki was about ending the war before the Soviets could get involved, to avoid in Tokyo what was happening in Berlin. Something the citizens of Nagasaki really couldn't be less involved in.
I've never heard of anyone doing that to a cat.
I'll take a VHS with tracking issues over a DVD with scratches any day. At least the VHS doesn't fast-forward 5 minutes if it decides the tracking is too bad. And what genius decided that cutting out the audio when the buffer runs low due to errors was a good idea - it's way more jarring than losing image for a moment.
On the other hand, a game called Doctor Fuckstain would probably warrant a second look.
That's exactly like a lottery.
However, saying that raytracing is old news isn't really accurate as a blanket statement - most of those GI techniques involve tracing rays, and no newer tech for rendering reflections and refractions has come along. Mental Ray is a raytracer, for example.
Global illumination also isn't a panacea - having light behave in "real" (ahem) ways still means you need good lighting skills and software workarounds, and often the same effects can be achieved with much shorter render times by a skilled artist.
I find blurry reflection and refraction to be much more important for selling a scene than automatic bounced lighting - those of us who predate desktop GI with reasonable render times tend not to rely on it as much. Still, ILM used GI for the digital baby shots in Lemony Snicket, and it looked fantastic, so maybe that's where the tech is going all-out in a generation or two.
No need to go that deep - look at the stuff on the fridge. Besides, there's not enough slight bends, dings, unevenness or wear on any of the surfaces. For a rendering of a sleek new kitchen you can get away with that, but look at how the vent hood, tile grout, and table have never seen a speck of food, water, or abrasion.
That having been said, it's damn impressive for the constraints POVRay users labor under. But photoreal? No way. Hardly anything that hasn't seen a lot of 2D post work is, regardless of the package, renderer, or artist.
How about antibiotics? Should government be able to regulate the sale and use of antibiotics thorugh keeping them prescription-only with the aim of preventing resistant strains?
Your left hand is busy with the movement keys, and foot pedals are too slow. Check out Belkin's Nostromo n52, though.
The mis-steps came later, after version 3 until 6, 7, 8, or 9, depending on your particular market segment. Although the app is ridiculously bloated now, its usability and power is back on track for most workflows using one of those 4 versions.
So what would you recommend for a 1-man shop (no POS, just invoices and finance charges)?
Because on an emulator you haven't paid $0.25 to play it. There aren't people around to shoulder-surf you when you reach an insane level. Because there's no anonymous competition with the guy you trade highscores with on the same machine, week after week.
Pac-Man and other arcade classics don't hold up as emulated games because a lot of what made them fun were specific to their context. As arcades died out, and gaming moved to the PC and the console, things like 'points' and 'lives' became less important as gameplay elements, in favor of persistent games with longer-term goals like 'items' and 'unlockables' (and got a hell of a lot more complicated - Half-Life's Hazard Course was an acknowledgement of, and brilliant solution to, that phenomenon).
A typical game review today includes a note about how many hours long the game is. For an old arcade game, that's so irrelevant as to be meaningless - how 'long' is Pac-Man? Average game length? Time it takes to get to the 'key' levels for an expert player? Time it takes to learn all the patterns? Or 'as long as you wanna hang out and spend quarters'?
If you are keeping one of these old things alive, Moe, at fixyourownprinter is an invaluable resource, not just for the kits for common repairs that include video CDs of the installation that he sells, but for the straightforward advice he gives out in the forums even if he never sees a dime. I'm not affiliated with them, just a very happy customer of their repair kits.
No, it's because none of the 3 people who bought SACD players is a hacker.
Have you priced real office furniture lately?
For that matter, if the chairs really extravagent and you're lowballing the number, perhaps they pay for themselves with lower healthcare costs/employee downtime. Ergonomic work environments are good.
I'd follow bigger money trails out of city hall to find waste if I were you. Prominent local real estate developers tend to be a good place to start.
No, it's like taking your through a drive-thru in a part of town you don't know and ending up with a feces-hurling monkey chained to your back seat.
The day I switched to Firefox and never looked back was the day I got reamed with 3 different spywares and a porn dialer by fat-fingering a URL and ending up at some horrible typosquatting cesspool.
Or have it drop off a remote camera like they did for the Apollo LEM takeoff footage.
...although that would be awesome.
Try Darwinia (and Uplink, too, for that matter). Or Gate 88. Or Cave Story. Or any of the 2004 Interactive Fiction entries. Or the 2004 IGA competition entries. Or Insaniquarium. Or Tumuki Fighters. Gish. Alien Hominid. Pikmin. etc...
And even if you hate all those games, and maintain that the industry is stale, screw 'em. why do your gaming experiences have to be new games, anyway? Hundreds and hundreds of games from the past are worth playing, and you can't have played them all at the time. When you go to the video store, do you only look at what came out in the last 9 months? I just worked through the Lucasarts adventures, for example, because I was playing other games when they were released. Never got a chance to play Thief 2, or System Shock, so maybe those are next. Considering picking up a Saturn with copies of NiGHTS and Ecco on ebay for the price of a new budget game as well.
To take the Hollywood analogy further, remember watching movies before the advent of home video. There's a bunch of theaters in town mostly showing crap (with prominent exceptions), and a little hole in the wall showing lesser-known, and generally (but certainly not assuredly) more interesting fare, as well as revivals of classics.
You're right that CAD drafting is pretty good right now, though, and the need for upgrades in the absence of extortionate threats like ADSK pulled with 2005 is questionable.
That's why they're pushing so hard on Revit and the Building Information Model approach - they want to make 2D CAD itself obsolete. Revit isn't much of a rendering tool - they want to convince people that a 3D model will somehow be useful on site. I don't fully understand it since I only do renderings, but it seems fairly pointless and fragile - apparently extracting traditional drawings from a BIM takes loads and loads of computer time.
I also think Microsoft would stay away because Autodesk is not only the world's 3rd or 4th largest software company last I checked, but they are Microsoft's absolute puppy dog when it comes to embracing the Windows technologies designed for platform lock-in in their products. Add to that the fact that they don't really have any compteing products, and Microsoft is happy to have an independent entity pushing Windows lock-in in a whole industry.