Back around 94 I had a friend who ordered a motherboard and a Pentium 100mhz processor when they had just come out. We were all very impressed--a hundred mhz! On Monday morning at school, we were all waiting anxiously to hear how the setup went over the weekend, and to see if Linux installed smoothly -- I think Red Hat had just come out, and we were anxious to compare it to AIX running on our two mini-fridge-sized RS6000's.
He walks in, looking rather sheepish. We ask him what happened, and he says it was a dud motherboard. Tough luck. Later, he and I go off-campus for lunch, and he reveals the truth.
"I hooked everything up, and booted it up. It was humming perfectly. I was standing there, staring at it with the case off -- one hundred megahertz! And then... (he pauses a while here)... I drooled on it. Right onto the Pentium. Motherboard and P100 both totally fried."
It was so sad, and yet so freakin funny. He replaced the parts, and his computer was the envy of us all for about 6 months until my friend Paul got Linux running on a 486 laptop. But I'll never forget my friend who straight dr00led all over his radical P100.:)
During WWII, the Japanese sent many hydrogen-filled "fire balloons" across the Pacific on the jet stream. Some of them actually hit targets believe it or not, and one was the cause of the only civilian casualty on American soil during WWII.
There are several examples of alternative treatment centers which keep use of medication to an absolute minimum. One such example is the Soteria Project, which has the same success rate as conventional medicine, but none of the terrible side-effects of heavy medication such as Tardive Dyskinesia. (The US uses the world's largest dosages for treatment of schizophrenia; amounts that are up to twice as much as the accepted dosage in Europe.)
Furthermore, it's not yet fully understood how or why the antipsychotic drugs work. They think it has something to do with dopamine receptors, but it's all speculation at this point. There's been some intimation that chronic schizophrenics have different brain chemistry or morphology than "normal" folks, but they have yet to show whether these conditions exist before the onset of the disease, or whether conditions in the brain or heavy medications cause these changes.
Personally, if I start slipping into psychosis, I'm going to scrape together my money and buy a plane ticket for Bern, Switzerland where the current Soteria House is...
Sure! I developed dvmatte pro, which is a comprehensive After Effects and Final Cut Pro plug-in for doing blue and greenscreen removals with DV (and other high-compression-ratio formats). We have a demo on the site -- although I've been doing bug-fixing the past few days, so the demo is not rock solid. We had sporadic reports of crashes that were impossible to repeat on my end, but after combing through the code line-by-line and inlining a few functions of questionable threadsafety, everything seems to be working for the testers...
Also, I'm also involved with a group called criticalartware, and we have a variety of interests -- among them, drawing parallels between the early video and computer art moment and the current moment in artware. People tend to think that since new media and artware is "new," we need all-new discussions and theories. In fact, these discussions were going on in the 60s and 70s, just with slightly different terminology.
Anyway, as part of our goal to facilitate connections, we designed (and I wrote) "liken," which is our discussion platform and site architecture. It autogenerates two-way "paths" between posts ('nodes') based on word frequency, and the text of a node is automagically linked to other nodes whose name appears in the text. Like a wiki, but you don't have to specify links -- they just appear. So if the word "liken" appears in your post, it'll link to the "liken" node. But more interesting, if the phrase "liken interface" appears, it turns into a popup menu, with the choices "liken, liken interface, interface," each leading you to a node. Also, the more popular these links are, the better they're ranked in an Everything2-like sidebar.
Also, we export an XML description of all the pathways and linkages in the site, so that people can create entirely alternate/critical interfaces and interpretations of liken. One such interpretation is the nodemap, which is a clickable "overhead" view of every node and path. But what we're really looking forward to is someone doing a 3D interface where you're riding a dolphin through the site.
Hopefully because this is an old thread, our poor EV1Servers.net SCO-approved Linux box won't get slashdotted...:)
I'm an artist who codes, and I hate it when people assume people like me don't exist. (Or that we're not "real coders" or "real artists.") It's extremely depressing, especially given the fact that back in the 60s and 70s, any artist working with technology (such as early computers and video systems) was practically assumed to be a hacker. In those days, if you wanted a unique image, you had to either break out the punch cards or the soldering iron.
Now we have software that fills most people's needs. But sadly, these days people don't realize how influenced and constrained they are by their tools. Just look at Flash, and how it coerces you into an aesthetic. And when people run into limitations, it just never occurs to them to create their own tools or plugins.
As a die-hard Mac user, I started writing After Effects plugins seven or eight years ago, and since then I've created fast-selling commercial tools, proprietary tools and several artware projects. As someone who went to one of the country's top art schools, I consider myself equal parts artist and coder.
And I'm not alone. Artists involved with the high-end of the computer graphics world (that is, people in visual effects) love OSX and Linux. Most of the big FX houses have switched to a pipeline that relies heavily on Linux, and the largest firms have tons of proprietary technology. On the other end of the spectrum, software-as-art (or "artware") is an exploding field, and tons of very visually-minded people are exploring software as an expressive venue. Here in Chicago we have the Version festival (Version04) which celebrates NewMedia and artware, and similar events, groups and artists exist worldwide.
As someone who runs primarily OSX (along with Linux and *ugg* XP for professional reasons), I find Gimp2 to be interesting but still too half-baked. On the other hand, Cinepaint, which began as a hacked version of the Gimp, is a good reason for an artist to dip into the X11 side of things. With support for 16bit integer, 16bit float and 32bit float, you can work with film, deep photos, HDR -- and navigate image sequences really easily.
Now, all of that said, there is NO excuse for a bad UI. But don't assume that all artists are good GUI designers -- user interface is more of a cognitive science problem than an artistic problem. And the Gimp could use some concentrated work in that area...
That's utter nonsense; if the object had moved, we'd see color fringing around it, not a different shape! Furthermore, the object is not clipping in any color channel in the final image, so none of the RGB/iRGB component images could have captured it as blown-out white. If I had to guess, I'd say the "original" that you link to is not even part of the color panorama (although I could be wrong). Does anyone know what filter #7 is?
I totally agree. Digital cable and satellite look terrible in my opinion. Compression artifacts galore. I can only imagine what super-compressed HD will look like once it's available. Analog cable is smooth and crisp -- and cheap! The only thing I miss is the occasional decompression error, rendering someone's face as a moving mass of DCT garbage. But then, I still get that sometimes when a station's Digibeta deck hits a glitch, so it's all good...
Slashdot Mirror
Back around 94 I had a friend who ordered a motherboard and a Pentium 100mhz processor when they had just come out. We were all very impressed--a hundred mhz! On Monday morning at school, we were all waiting anxiously to hear how the setup went over the weekend, and to see if Linux installed smoothly -- I think Red Hat had just come out, and we were anxious to compare it to AIX running on our two mini-fridge-sized RS6000's.
He walks in, looking rather sheepish. We ask him what happened, and he says it was a dud motherboard. Tough luck. Later, he and I go off-campus for lunch, and he reveals the truth.
"I hooked everything up, and booted it up. It was humming perfectly. I was standing there, staring at it with the case off -- one hundred megahertz! And then... (he pauses a while here)... I drooled on it. Right onto the Pentium. Motherboard and P100 both totally fried."
It was so sad, and yet so freakin funny. He replaced the parts, and his computer was the envy of us all for about 6 months until my friend Paul got Linux running on a 486 laptop. But I'll never forget my friend who straight dr00led all over his radical P100. :)
- benDuring WWII, the Japanese sent many hydrogen-filled "fire balloons" across the Pacific on the jet stream. Some of them actually hit targets believe it or not, and one was the cause of the only civilian casualty on American soil during WWII.
There are several examples of alternative treatment centers which keep use of medication to an absolute minimum. One such example is the Soteria Project, which has the same success rate as conventional medicine, but none of the terrible side-effects of heavy medication such as Tardive Dyskinesia. (The US uses the world's largest dosages for treatment of schizophrenia; amounts that are up to twice as much as the accepted dosage in Europe.)
Furthermore, it's not yet fully understood how or why the antipsychotic drugs work. They think it has something to do with dopamine receptors, but it's all speculation at this point. There's been some intimation that chronic schizophrenics have different brain chemistry or morphology than "normal" folks, but they have yet to show whether these conditions exist before the onset of the disease, or whether conditions in the brain or heavy medications cause these changes.
Personally, if I start slipping into psychosis, I'm going to scrape together my money and buy a plane ticket for Bern, Switzerland where the current Soteria House is...
- ben
Sure! I developed dvmatte pro, which is a comprehensive After Effects and Final Cut Pro plug-in for doing blue and greenscreen removals with DV (and other high-compression-ratio formats). We have a demo on the site -- although I've been doing bug-fixing the past few days, so the demo is not rock solid. We had sporadic reports of crashes that were impossible to repeat on my end, but after combing through the code line-by-line and inlining a few functions of questionable threadsafety, everything seems to be working for the testers...
Also, I'm also involved with a group called criticalartware, and we have a variety of interests -- among them, drawing parallels between the early video and computer art moment and the current moment in artware. People tend to think that since new media and artware is "new," we need all-new discussions and theories. In fact, these discussions were going on in the 60s and 70s, just with slightly different terminology.
Anyway, as part of our goal to facilitate connections, we designed (and I wrote) "liken," which is our discussion platform and site architecture. It autogenerates two-way "paths" between posts ('nodes') based on word frequency, and the text of a node is automagically linked to other nodes whose name appears in the text. Like a wiki, but you don't have to specify links -- they just appear. So if the word "liken" appears in your post, it'll link to the "liken" node. But more interesting, if the phrase "liken interface" appears, it turns into a popup menu, with the choices "liken, liken interface, interface," each leading you to a node. Also, the more popular these links are, the better they're ranked in an Everything2-like sidebar.
Also, we export an XML description of all the pathways and linkages in the site, so that people can create entirely alternate/critical interfaces and interpretations of liken. One such interpretation is the nodemap, which is a clickable "overhead" view of every node and path. But what we're really looking forward to is someone doing a 3D interface where you're riding a dolphin through the site.
Hopefully because this is an old thread, our poor EV1Servers.net SCO-approved Linux box won't get slashdotted... :)
- ben
I'm an artist who codes, and I hate it when people assume people like me don't exist. (Or that we're not "real coders" or "real artists.") It's extremely depressing, especially given the fact that back in the 60s and 70s, any artist working with technology (such as early computers and video systems) was practically assumed to be a hacker. In those days, if you wanted a unique image, you had to either break out the punch cards or the soldering iron.
Now we have software that fills most people's needs. But sadly, these days people don't realize how influenced and constrained they are by their tools. Just look at Flash, and how it coerces you into an aesthetic. And when people run into limitations, it just never occurs to them to create their own tools or plugins.
As a die-hard Mac user, I started writing After Effects plugins seven or eight years ago, and since then I've created fast-selling commercial tools, proprietary tools and several artware projects. As someone who went to one of the country's top art schools, I consider myself equal parts artist and coder.
And I'm not alone. Artists involved with the high-end of the computer graphics world (that is, people in visual effects) love OSX and Linux. Most of the big FX houses have switched to a pipeline that relies heavily on Linux, and the largest firms have tons of proprietary technology. On the other end of the spectrum, software-as-art (or "artware") is an exploding field, and tons of very visually-minded people are exploring software as an expressive venue. Here in Chicago we have the Version festival (Version04) which celebrates NewMedia and artware, and similar events, groups and artists exist worldwide.
As someone who runs primarily OSX (along with Linux and *ugg* XP for professional reasons), I find Gimp2 to be interesting but still too half-baked. On the other hand, Cinepaint, which began as a hacked version of the Gimp, is a good reason for an artist to dip into the X11 side of things. With support for 16bit integer, 16bit float and 32bit float, you can work with film, deep photos, HDR -- and navigate image sequences really easily.
Now, all of that said, there is NO excuse for a bad UI. But don't assume that all artists are good GUI designers -- user interface is more of a cognitive science problem than an artistic problem. And the Gimp could use some concentrated work in that area...
That's utter nonsense; if the object had moved, we'd see color fringing around it, not a different shape! Furthermore, the object is not clipping in any color channel in the final image, so none of the RGB/iRGB component images could have captured it as blown-out white. If I had to guess, I'd say the "original" that you link to is not even part of the color panorama (although I could be wrong). Does anyone know what filter #7 is?
I totally agree. Digital cable and satellite look terrible in my opinion. Compression artifacts galore. I can only imagine what super-compressed HD will look like once it's available. Analog cable is smooth and crisp -- and cheap! The only thing I miss is the occasional decompression error, rendering someone's face as a moving mass of DCT garbage. But then, I still get that sometimes when a station's Digibeta deck hits a glitch, so it's all good...