The killing, the maiming, the friends dying or losing limbs. See a man holding his intestines in his hands, thoughtlessly trying to put them back in, or another cradling his just blown off leg..
Cause when you reach over and put your hand into a pile of goo that was your best friend's face, you'll know what to do. Forget it, Marge, it's Chinatown.
I sort of figure if someone voluntarily goes off to a shooting war and comes back with PTSS or more serious injuries they'll be able to handle a snide comment or two on slashdot. If not, then those of you joining up need to prepare yourselves not only for possible death or bodily or psychological damage, but also for impersonal verbal jabs from strangers on the internet.
I'm a disabled veteran and have struggled to come to terms with what I've been through during two deployments. I expect an apology from you and Slashdot in general for posting such a demeaning thing about those who've tried to protect their countries.
If it were a national evening news anchor or some major politician (say the president) making light of those suffering because of a war or disaster then I would agree with you. This is the internet, and slashdot for christ's sake- there's a faceless slashdot editor with a made up name (and you're just an unknown slashdot user with a made up name), and you want an apology from the editor and 'slashdot in general'?? It's one thing avoid making a joke about say a terminal illness when someone in the room has it, but on the internet there's no point in trying to accommodate the feelings of every conceivable reader.
Good job trying to patronize treatment that could help people whom selflessly risked their lives (even if you agree with it or not) to help protect your country and you.
It was supposed to be non-sequitur, or humorous. I think it's okay to make fun of anything, even diseases and events that are killing thousands of people or causing untold suffering right now- humor and snide remarks are a good outlet when you have no power over a thing. On the other hand, if you are the very person that caused the suffering or death to happen then making fun of it is really contemptible.
political discourse in the United States has sunk to such a morass, devoid of any real substance.
When was the above-the-morass golden age of political discourse you imply existed at some point? For me, this was either any period that occured before I paid any attention to politics or for which I am yet to read any history books about.
Re:Can Google Solve the LJ_Abuse Problem?
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Google Reacts to Splogs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If you don't like LJ's policies, take your business elsewhere.
This sort of comment comes up repeatedly- "don't warn other people about a bad service, just shut up and find some other service"- how is that supposed to work?
Capitalism works by consumers having necessary information about a product or service before they buy it or invest time in it, not after. The way to have reliable information about a product is to hear from people who did actually use it and are satisfied or unsatisfied- so publicly declaring on slashdot that a service is bad is a good way for others to make informed decisions.
You're right that the typical slashdot user has little use for LJ or the people who use it, but the grandparent poster does raise the important issue of censorship which is relevant to all blog servers, forums, page hosts, etc. on the internet.
That's really interesting stuff, but it doesn't make it not a sequel. Its origins are unconventional, it may be a break from form compared to the rest of series, it may not be the same game as SMB2 in Japan- but by god it's still called SMB2 and it does in fact feature the Mario Brothers and it was approved by Nintendo. This discussion is funny because it's usually the games that use the same engine, graphics, gameplay, etc. as the original that are deemed more expansion packs than sequels (Doom 2 for instance).
Movies sometimes have slightly analogous life-cycles to SMB2, where a script starts out as a generic buddy action movie but then gets turned into Lethal Weapon 6 or something.
it's all just an "us versus them" battle, and they'll all join together under the "us" banner regardless of belief, ideology or conviction. Pretty shallow if you ask me.
This is a pretty standard tactic, probably going back thousands years: enemy of my enemy is my friend, uniting to defeat a common foe, ragtag band overcoming personal faults and differences to accomplish mission impossible, et cetera. It's like a Campbellian mythical archetype embedded in every culture, but in your highly refined value system any compromise, cooperation, or adaption or change of mind as a result of changing circumstances is shallow.
Blogs, independent review sites, aggregators (Rotten Tomatoe), and other sources are giving moviegoers more information up front about what movies are really worth seeing, and which ones are over-hyped and over-priced.
It's funny, because as much as I support the principal of spreading information about a product to the consumer (the success of capitalism per se depending on that, etc.), I never read a review of a movie I'm already pretty sure I'm going to watch eventually. Most of the time the preview is enough to go on, and I keep expectations low anyhow. I really enjoy reading reviews afterwards to see if the other people felt the same as me, but if I had read them earlier I wouldn't be able to tell if that was me being biased by reading it or not. I don't like spoilers either, even of events only a few minutes into the movie.
socialistic-corporate view of profits as a God-given right
This is exactly the sort of language we need to expand upon. Take all the right-wing anti-socialism diatribes from the '90s and earlier and insert corporations where welfare mamas used to be- and it paints a perfect picture of where some special interests are taking this country. Start phoning that shit into AM radio and whatnot, get the masses riled up.
It's only a matter of time before economist majors are getting their degrees with papers on the results of massive 'state' intervention in virtual economies.
Nintendo took a game called Doki Doki Panic, which had a completely separate cast of characters, and its own story, redrew all the characters to be from the mario world, and released it in the US as Super Mario Brothers 2.
Good for them. Take an unknown game and make it hugely commercially viable. This is only bad if they take a good franchise and stick the name on a crappy product, but SMB2 was fun (can't remember ever beating it though...).
I mean, can we really call this a sequel when its just a completely different game with a Super Mario name tag slapped on it?
Yes.
But you just said that they also changed the art in addition to the name tag slapping, which makes it even more true to the original. And, the other game wasn't completely different: SMB is a 2D side scrolling run and jump game, and so is SMB2, so they didn't do anything radical.
1. Accept that space exploration is risky, people will die, they knew the risk when they signed on, taking reasonable steps to ensure safety - great, stoping an entire program because of a small chance of something going wrong - not so great
Risk is acceptable when the reward is acceptable. Risking your life to just to get to orbit to prove that the shuttle is worth keeping around for a few more years is stupid. Risk is also acceptable when there aren't less risky ways of accomplishing the same thing (like paying the Russians for a ride on a Soyuz).
2. Congress needs to think about what is in the best interests of the American people as a whole, not just thier constituents, even better they would think about the best interests of the world.
The only way to have a government to represent the interests of the entire world is a world government- that's not going to happen any time soon, and probably wouldn't be a good thing if it did.
3. Congress needs to realize that most great discoveries are not predicted, funding a strong space program could provide unimagined rewards.
I've heard this argument a million times in support of space, and I've heard it many more times for any vaguely technical endeavour. Since as you say great discoveries are unpredictable, funding anything at all might provide unimaginable rewards.
Focus on the concrete- space technology demands improvements in high temperature and strong lightweight materials, precision engineering, project management, robust hardened electronics, error-free software, and some other things. And remember that advances created are not always usable in a profitable way by other industries- if space industry invents techniques and technologies way far beyond and so much more expensive than other industries, those other industries will probably just ignore them (it can happen even within the same company).
There also needs to be a real goal in mind. Planting a flag and foot print on Mars might give you a warm fuzzy feeling but it's not good enough- I think the number one goal of the space program is to get a good situational awareness of our planet, sun, solar system, and rest of the galaxy and universe. I want to know where every sizable asteroid is, a complete inventory of the Kuiper belt, what's under the ice in Europa, in the atmospheres of the gas giants- and are there any earth-like planets in within a 100 ly- and what's going on in the galactic core behind all that dust? I don't want a trickle of probes every couple of years, I want a fucking convoy, a never ending stream of sensor platforms spreading out to nearby planets and deeper space, and huge arrays of orbital telescopes, sending information back so that whatever is going on out there we're on top of it.
And more importantly, with millions of posts, what percentage of them have any real value, and how do busy people find that.001%?
Unless you're talking about value in terms of dollars earned per web page/blog post, value is completely subjective.
The most objectively valuable blogs are ones that link to other sites and blogs in meaningful ways, which increases the ability of google searches to find what I'm looking for. The value of the internet is raised by making searching better for me.
I don't really understand the anti-blog sentiment on slashdot. Most of the internet was already irrelevant to me before blogging came around, but google made it easier to not get bogged down in it.
The thing that makes blogs different and harder for google to track is the speed at which they are updated. If something happened yesterday I don't want to wait weeks for google to spider all the new posts, I want to find sites talking about it right now- technorati and other sites do a decent job of that, but it's annoying to have to go to two places to try to find the same thing.
Google does work if people make posts like "I'm going to go to this event next week, and I'll put pictures up, here are links to other people that are also going" and then proceed to do so, then the google will get you to the old post and you can move forward to the more recent post that actually talks about the event.
I think some of the life you mention can be captured with a more candid shooting style (perhaps combined with a decent telephoto lens)- you can get very wonderful non-posed pictures. This is a little more sneaky than video (but less annoying in the long run), where you gain the candidness by breaking down defenses- they aren't going to stop taping so I'll can't be "on" all the time so I give up and will be natural.
It also says something about most of the moments you describe being very personal- you can put up with the deficiencies of video for something very special. I'm thinking more casual, along the lines of having something interesting enough so people might pause to look through a gallery or even link to it from their blog or whatever. Since I can't take video and still pictures at the same time, and the signal-to-noise with pictures is so much higher (despite, as you describe, getting a real gem now and then), I'm going to stick with still photography for the indefinite future.
I used to be more into video, and may get back into it when HD cameras are a little cheaper and when distribution over the internet is easier- but currently I find taking still pictures much more rewarding.
The first thing wrong with video is that it has a default and sometimes fixed playback speed. Some players have fast forward and so forth but it is usually clunky to use, and some compression formats make scanning the video difficult. The result is most videos are very boring. With a bunch of pictures, it's very easy to move forward and backward at whatever speed I want, since most viewers understand that's what the user wants to do (although some shitty sites out there force a slideshow playback).
It's much lower quality than a picture from a similarly priced device. I'd rather look at a high res series of photographs capturing a few frames of something in motion rather than a smooth but thumbnail-sized video of equivalent size.
It presumes too much of what the viewer wants to see. A large photograph allows my eyes to scan to parts of interest at my leisure, a video typically reflects exactly what the person recording was interested in, flicking from thing to thing or over concentrated on something uninteresting to me personally.
It requires much more skill to capture well. You have to hold the camera steady through out the entire video, not just for a fraction of a second to take a still picture. A poor photographer who shoots a lot of pictures will probably end up with a few that could pass off as nearly professional, but a crappily taken video stays crappy no matter what.
Unless you set up a camera on a tripod, video taping something really removes you from the event because it requires constant attention on the tiny lcd screen rather than experiencing everything normally. To everyone else you don't even have a face, you're just a video camera. Taking a picture is a discrete event, inbetween you put the camera in your pocket or bag and are just experiencing everything normally again.
It is more annoying to have your video taken than have your picture taken. There's something more respectable about someone taking pictures than taking video. Video will capture little annoying things about you that you dislike, the way you said something or some mannerism, but a picture is just a tiny slice.
It's difficult and very time consuming to edit. And of course any editing is presumptuous of what the viewer would like to get out of the video. Editing with pictures is natural- just don't upload the pictures that turned out bad (and like I mentioned before, it's easy to skip over uninteresting pictures quickly).
The file sizes are huge, unless quality and length is compromised. This makes video hard to share and distribute, over the internet or even in person. Everyone you know will probably hate you if you force them to sit through 30 minutes of vacation video, but if you let them flip through a book of pictures they're going to like it much more. Someone on the internet may invest very little time to look at some of my pictures, but it's doubtful anyone is going to download a video for ten minutes without a good reason (like the promise of female nudity, say, or the recommendation of a trustworthy blog).
Perhaps many of these problems will be addressed eventually, sites like youtube may lead to some solutions (the flash playback seems awful- how do I save the video and send it to someone, burn it on a dvd, edit it into my own remix of various found videos?).
This seems such a reasonable model for making money out of software, but still keeping in touch with open source.
What I'd like to see is companies promise this sort of thing up front- promise to open the code in some amount of time, or after so many copies have been sold, or similar. They could even place a copy of the code with a third party bound by contract to automatically release the code when the conditions are met.
Maybe when a few more major companies to do this on high-profile games it will feel like a prerequisite for every company to do, and maybe even create competition that will reduce the time to release the code after the game is released.
It's unfortunate that this model only allows a one-way transaction: Id will never be able to make use of or add to existing GPL projects out there, just spawn a bunch of new ones based their game each time they release code.
At this rate, by 2156 there will be a sphere of MMOPRG players expanding into the universe from the surface of the earth at the speed of light.
In 2e8 the local supercluster will begin to collapse under the gravitational influence of the MMORPG player complex.
In 2e21 the MMORPG player transcendancy, living among dead galaxies burnt to red cinders, pitted by ravenous black holes, and awash in the slow rain of proton decay, will sense that history should not have played out the way it did. The energy of a million suns will be consumed by an enormous project, the final project, to reach back through the terayears...
Thomas Malcolm stops playing Worlds of Warcraft momentarily- stepping outside, he looks above: a mind-shattering slab of impossibility has appeared overhead. Reality beats a hasty retreat from the edges of the slab and then snaps back, reverberating. A door opens.
It's a big pain to make a cut when the frame you're cutting in on depends on information located in the preceding frames.
I guess if you were used to editing dv files by cleaving a video file manually and catting clips together, things are going to go badly with HDV. Fortunately it's a known and well understood problem and there is software out there that can do such things as decode and re-encode MPEG2 with minimal loss of quality. As long as you have the raw video around, you're only going to ever suffer one unnoticeable 'generation' loss (I'm pretty sure the loss will only occur near the edit points, because MPEG2 restarts the differential encoding process periodically so those blocks without cuts in them can be copied bit for bit)- and of course it still looks orders of magnitude better than SD.
Those camcorders will never be good for anyone who wants to do anything with their video except watch and archive it in raw, recorded form.
Even two generation losses in HDV is going to look way better than SD and is probably unnoticeable.
Once the young are old, and the old are dead, games will be regarded as just another medium and the debate will have moved on.
You can't count on this happening forever, life-extension technology may be around the corner. Technological and societal progress may come to a standstill because the ideology of the generation that embraces immortality will be frozen forever- they won't have many kids and they be too entrenched to let the new generation change things. The new generations will have to move to far off colonies outside of the grasp of the hyper-conservatives.
windows vista (I preferred longhorn!) is intended by microsoft to be as big an upgrade as win95 was over win3.1, but every time I read news about it, I simply make up my mind more not to buy it
I suspect the majority of people aren't going to be at the store looking at boxed copies of XP and Vista, and make a decision on which to buy. They just take what is installed on the computer they buy.
Longhorn is a better name, it certainly has better googleability- there's a huge number of companies and products that have 'vista' in their titles.
So in the next few decades, will the younger crowd accept Slashdot... or will the average age of/. readers just continue to increase?
Yes to both.
Young readers will read slashdot, and aging readers will continue to read slashdot, so the average age will go up and therefore also the standard deviation from the average will go up. It won't be (and already isn't) as cool and as trendy for young readers as new or yet to be created sites out there, but Slashdot will probably always be a core site for pro-OSS discussion and news.
the 60's flower children who turned into the 80's "Me generation,"... the "old people" we're talking about being conservative used to march in peace rallys, throw rocks at cops, burn bras, etc. Now they fight the first amendment.
This is sort of mistake is made all the time when generalizations are made about large groups of people: that one group is very vocal and prominent at one point in time and another group at another point in time does not mean that the individuals in the first group change their minds and transformed into the second group.
The HDV format used in a JVC and two new Sony prosumer cameras is also 13 GB/hour- it uses mpeg2 to achieve the same bit rate as regular DV. It looks superb in motion compared to SD, but if you freeze a frame and zoom in you can see compression artifacts- I haven't inspected broadcast HD closely, it has a similar bit rate to HDV (~20 mbps).
What is it with MS doing all this half-assed stuff with the 360? It maybe is going to support HD discs through unspecified means, eventually, it is sort going to play old games. There's a vague cloud of non-gaming features they have as well (and Sony has promoting the PS3's non-gaming aspects also). This is just going to create confusion, which will cause people to either avoid the system or purchase it and then get upset and create a backlash when it turns out the feature advertised earlier isn't fully supported.
It sort of seems like they don't know what to do with the system or why people are going to buy it, so they have all these parallel development efforts, and they'll throw out announcements for them now and gauge the reaction to see how they should allocate resources to make one feature happen at the cost of another. I suppose closer to launch there will be a cohesive promotion strategy, and they'll pretend the stuff being talked about now either never really existed or always was an integral part of the system.
Slashdot Mirror
The killing, the maiming, the friends dying or losing limbs. See a man holding his intestines in his hands, thoughtlessly trying to put them back in, or another cradling his just blown off leg..
Cause when you reach over and put your hand into a pile of goo that was your
best friend's face, you'll know what to do. Forget it, Marge, it's Chinatown.
Scuttlemonkey should be ashamed.
I sort of figure if someone voluntarily goes off to a shooting war and comes back with PTSS or more serious injuries they'll be able to handle a snide comment or two on slashdot. If not, then those of you joining up need to prepare yourselves not only for possible death or bodily or psychological damage, but also for impersonal verbal jabs from strangers on the internet.
I'm a disabled veteran and have struggled to come to terms with what I've been through during two deployments. I expect an apology from you and Slashdot in general for posting such a demeaning thing about those who've tried to protect their countries.
If it were a national evening news anchor or some major politician (say the president) making light of those suffering because of a war or disaster then I would agree with you. This is the internet, and slashdot for christ's sake- there's a faceless slashdot editor with a made up name (and you're just an unknown slashdot user with a made up name), and you want an apology from the editor and 'slashdot in general'?? It's one thing avoid making a joke about say a terminal illness when someone in the room has it, but on the internet there's no point in trying to accommodate the feelings of every conceivable reader.
Good job trying to patronize treatment that could help people whom selflessly risked their lives (even if you agree with it or not) to help protect your country and you.
It was supposed to be non-sequitur, or humorous. I think it's okay to make fun of anything, even diseases and events that are killing thousands of people or causing untold suffering right now- humor and snide remarks are a good outlet when you have no power over a thing. On the other hand, if you are the very person that caused the suffering or death to happen then making fun of it is really contemptible.
political discourse in the United States has sunk to such a morass, devoid of any real substance.
When was the above-the-morass golden age of political discourse you imply existed at some point? For me, this was either any period that occured before I paid any attention to politics or for which I am yet to read any history books about.
If you don't like LJ's policies, take your business elsewhere.
This sort of comment comes up repeatedly- "don't warn other people about a bad service, just shut up and find some other service"- how is that supposed to work?
Capitalism works by consumers having necessary information about a product or service before they buy it or invest time in it, not after. The way to have reliable information about a product is to hear from people who did actually use it and are satisfied or unsatisfied- so publicly declaring on slashdot that a service is bad is a good way for others to make informed decisions.
You're right that the typical slashdot user has little use for LJ or the people who use it, but the grandparent poster does raise the important issue of censorship which is relevant to all blog servers, forums, page hosts, etc. on the internet.
That's really interesting stuff, but it doesn't make it not a sequel. Its origins are unconventional, it may be a break from form compared to the rest of series, it may not be the same game as SMB2 in Japan- but by god it's still called SMB2 and it does in fact feature the Mario Brothers and it was approved by Nintendo. This discussion is funny because it's usually the games that use the same engine, graphics, gameplay, etc. as the original that are deemed more expansion packs than sequels (Doom 2 for instance).
Movies sometimes have slightly analogous life-cycles to SMB2, where a script starts out as a generic buddy action movie but then gets turned into Lethal Weapon 6 or something.
it's all just an "us versus them" battle, and they'll all join together under the "us" banner regardless of belief, ideology or conviction. Pretty shallow if you ask me.
This is a pretty standard tactic, probably going back thousands years: enemy of my enemy is my friend, uniting to defeat a common foe, ragtag band overcoming personal faults and differences to accomplish mission impossible, et cetera. It's like a Campbellian mythical archetype embedded in every culture, but in your highly refined value system any compromise, cooperation, or adaption or change of mind as a result of changing circumstances is shallow.
Blogs, independent review sites, aggregators (Rotten Tomatoe), and other sources are giving moviegoers more information up front about what movies are really worth seeing, and which ones are over-hyped and over-priced.
It's funny, because as much as I support the principal of spreading information about a product to the consumer (the success of capitalism per se depending on that, etc.), I never read a review of a movie I'm already pretty sure I'm going to watch eventually. Most of the time the preview is enough to go on, and I keep expectations low anyhow. I really enjoy reading reviews afterwards to see if the other people felt the same as me, but if I had read them earlier I wouldn't be able to tell if that was me being biased by reading it or not. I don't like spoilers either, even of events only a few minutes into the movie.
socialistic-corporate view of profits as a God-given right
This is exactly the sort of language we need to expand upon. Take all the right-wing anti-socialism diatribes from the '90s and earlier and insert corporations where welfare mamas used to be- and it paints a perfect picture of where some special interests are taking this country. Start phoning that shit into AM radio and whatnot, get the masses riled up.
It's only a matter of time before economist majors are getting their degrees with papers on the results of massive 'state' intervention in virtual economies.
Nintendo took a game called Doki Doki Panic, which had a completely separate cast of characters, and its own story, redrew all the characters to be from the mario world, and released it in the US as Super Mario Brothers 2.
Good for them. Take an unknown game and make it hugely commercially viable. This is only bad if they take a good franchise and stick the name on a crappy product, but SMB2 was fun (can't remember ever beating it though...).
I mean, can we really call this a sequel when its just a completely different game with a Super Mario name tag slapped on it?
Yes.
But you just said that they also changed the art in addition to the name tag slapping, which makes it even more true to the original. And, the other game wasn't completely different: SMB is a 2D side scrolling run and jump game, and so is SMB2, so they didn't do anything radical.
1. Accept that space exploration is risky, people will die, they knew the risk when they signed on, taking reasonable steps to ensure safety - great, stoping an entire program because of a small chance of something going wrong - not so great
Risk is acceptable when the reward is acceptable. Risking your life to just to get to orbit to prove that the shuttle is worth keeping around for a few more years is stupid. Risk is also acceptable when there aren't less risky ways of accomplishing the same thing (like paying the Russians for a ride on a Soyuz).
2. Congress needs to think about what is in the best interests of the American people as a whole, not just thier constituents, even better they would think about the best interests of the world.
The only way to have a government to represent the interests of the entire world is a world government- that's not going to happen any time soon, and probably wouldn't be a good thing if it did.
3. Congress needs to realize that most great discoveries are not predicted, funding a strong space program could provide unimagined rewards.
I've heard this argument a million times in support of space, and I've heard it many more times for any vaguely technical endeavour. Since as you say great discoveries are unpredictable, funding anything at all might provide unimaginable rewards.
Focus on the concrete- space technology demands improvements in high temperature and strong lightweight materials, precision engineering, project management, robust hardened electronics, error-free software, and some other things. And remember that advances created are not always usable in a profitable way by other industries- if space industry invents techniques and technologies way far beyond and so much more expensive than other industries, those other industries will probably just ignore them (it can happen even within the same company).
There also needs to be a real goal in mind. Planting a flag and foot print on Mars might give you a warm fuzzy feeling but it's not good enough- I think the number one goal of the space program is to get a good situational awareness of our planet, sun, solar system, and rest of the galaxy and universe. I want to know where every sizable asteroid is, a complete inventory of the Kuiper belt, what's under the ice in Europa, in the atmospheres of the gas giants- and are there any earth-like planets in within a 100 ly- and what's going on in the galactic core behind all that dust? I don't want a trickle of probes every couple of years, I want a fucking convoy, a never ending stream of sensor platforms spreading out to nearby planets and deeper space, and huge arrays of orbital telescopes, sending information back so that whatever is going on out there we're on top of it.
And more importantly, with millions of posts, what percentage of them have any real value, and how do busy people find that .001%?
Unless you're talking about value in terms of dollars earned per web page/blog post, value is completely subjective.
The most objectively valuable blogs are ones that link to other sites and blogs in meaningful ways, which increases the ability of google searches to find what I'm looking for. The value of the internet is raised by making searching better for me.
I don't really understand the anti-blog sentiment on slashdot. Most of the internet was already irrelevant to me before blogging came around, but google made it easier to not get bogged down in it.
The thing that makes blogs different and harder for google to track is the speed at which they are updated. If something happened yesterday I don't want to wait weeks for google to spider all the new posts, I want to find sites talking about it right now- technorati and other sites do a decent job of that, but it's annoying to have to go to two places to try to find the same thing.
Google does work if people make posts like "I'm going to go to this event next week, and I'll put pictures up, here are links to other people that are also going" and then proceed to do so, then the google will get you to the old post and you can move forward to the more recent post that actually talks about the event.
I think some of the life you mention can be captured with a more candid shooting style (perhaps combined with a decent telephoto lens)- you can get very wonderful non-posed pictures. This is a little more sneaky than video (but less annoying in the long run), where you gain the candidness by breaking down defenses- they aren't going to stop taping so I'll can't be "on" all the time so I give up and will be natural.
It also says something about most of the moments you describe being very personal- you can put up with the deficiencies of video for something very special. I'm thinking more casual, along the lines of having something interesting enough so people might pause to look through a gallery or even link to it from their blog or whatever. Since I can't take video and still pictures at the same time, and the signal-to-noise with pictures is so much higher (despite, as you describe, getting a real gem now and then), I'm going to stick with still photography for the indefinite future.
I used to be more into video, and may get back into it when HD cameras are a little cheaper and when distribution over the internet is easier- but currently I find taking still pictures much more rewarding.
The first thing wrong with video is that it has a default and sometimes fixed playback speed. Some players have fast forward and so forth but it is usually clunky to use, and some compression formats make scanning the video difficult. The result is most videos are very boring. With a bunch of pictures, it's very easy to move forward and backward at whatever speed I want, since most viewers understand that's what the user wants to do (although some shitty sites out there force a slideshow playback).
It's much lower quality than a picture from a similarly priced device. I'd rather look at a high res series of photographs capturing a few frames of something in motion rather than a smooth but thumbnail-sized video of equivalent size.
It presumes too much of what the viewer wants to see. A large photograph allows my eyes to scan to parts of interest at my leisure, a video typically reflects exactly what the person recording was interested in, flicking from thing to thing or over concentrated on something uninteresting to me personally.
It requires much more skill to capture well. You have to hold the camera steady through out the entire video, not just for a fraction of a second to take a still picture. A poor photographer who shoots a lot of pictures will probably end up with a few that could pass off as nearly professional, but a crappily taken video stays crappy no matter what.
Unless you set up a camera on a tripod, video taping something really removes you from the event because it requires constant attention on the tiny lcd screen rather than experiencing everything normally. To everyone else you don't even have a face, you're just a video camera. Taking a picture is a discrete event, inbetween you put the camera in your pocket or bag and are just experiencing everything normally again.
It is more annoying to have your video taken than have your picture taken. There's something more respectable about someone taking pictures than taking video. Video will capture little annoying things about you that you dislike, the way you said something or some mannerism, but a picture is just a tiny slice.
It's difficult and very time consuming to edit. And of course any editing is presumptuous of what the viewer would like to get out of the video. Editing with pictures is natural- just don't upload the pictures that turned out bad (and like I mentioned before, it's easy to skip over uninteresting pictures quickly).
The file sizes are huge, unless quality and length is compromised. This makes video hard to share and distribute, over the internet or even in person. Everyone you know will probably hate you if you force them to sit through 30 minutes of vacation video, but if you let them flip through a book of pictures they're going to like it much more. Someone on the internet may invest very little time to look at some of my pictures, but it's doubtful anyone is going to download a video for ten minutes without a good reason (like the promise of female nudity, say, or the recommendation of a trustworthy blog).
Perhaps many of these problems will be addressed eventually, sites like youtube may lead to some solutions (the flash playback seems awful- how do I save the video and send it to someone, burn it on a dvd, edit it into my own remix of various found videos?).
This seems such a reasonable model for making money out of software, but still keeping in touch with open source.
What I'd like to see is companies promise this sort of thing up front- promise to open the code in some amount of time, or after so many copies have been sold, or similar. They could even place a copy of the code with a third party bound by contract to automatically release the code when the conditions are met.
Maybe when a few more major companies to do this on high-profile games it will feel like a prerequisite for every company to do, and maybe even create competition that will reduce the time to release the code after the game is released.
It's unfortunate that this model only allows a one-way transaction: Id will never be able to make use of or add to existing GPL projects out there, just spawn a bunch of new ones based their game each time they release code.
At this rate, by 2156 there will be a sphere of MMOPRG players expanding into the universe from the surface of the earth at the speed of light.
In 2e8 the local supercluster will begin to collapse under the gravitational influence of the MMORPG player complex.
In 2e21 the MMORPG player transcendancy, living among dead galaxies burnt to red cinders, pitted by ravenous black holes, and awash in the slow rain of proton decay, will sense that history should not have played out the way it did. The energy of a million suns will be consumed by an enormous project, the final project, to reach back through the terayears...
Thomas Malcolm stops playing Worlds of Warcraft momentarily- stepping outside, he looks above: a mind-shattering slab of impossibility has appeared overhead. Reality beats a hasty retreat from the edges of the slab and then snaps back, reverberating. A door opens.
It's a big pain to make a cut when the frame you're cutting in on depends on information located in the preceding frames.
I guess if you were used to editing dv files by cleaving a video file manually and catting clips together, things are going to go badly with HDV. Fortunately it's a known and well understood problem and there is software out there that can do such things as decode and re-encode MPEG2 with minimal loss of quality. As long as you have the raw video around, you're only going to ever suffer one unnoticeable 'generation' loss (I'm pretty sure the loss will only occur near the edit points, because MPEG2 restarts the differential encoding process periodically so those blocks without cuts in them can be copied bit for bit)- and of course it still looks orders of magnitude better than SD.
Those camcorders will never be good for anyone who wants to do anything with their video except watch and archive it in raw, recorded form.
Even two generation losses in HDV is going to look way better than SD and is probably unnoticeable.
Once the young are old, and the old are dead, games will be regarded as just another medium and the debate will have moved on.
You can't count on this happening forever, life-extension technology may be around the corner. Technological and societal progress may come to a standstill because the ideology of the generation that embraces immortality will be frozen forever- they won't have many kids and they be too entrenched to let the new generation change things. The new generations will have to move to far off colonies outside of the grasp of the hyper-conservatives.
windows vista (I preferred longhorn!) is intended by microsoft to be as big an upgrade as win95 was over win3.1, but every time I read news about it, I simply make up my mind more not to buy it
I suspect the majority of people aren't going to be at the store looking at boxed copies of XP and Vista, and make a decision on which to buy. They just take what is installed on the computer they buy.
Longhorn is a better name, it certainly has better googleability- there's a huge number of companies and products that have 'vista' in their titles.
So in the next few decades, will the younger crowd accept Slashdot ... or will the average age of /. readers just continue to increase?
Yes to both.
Young readers will read slashdot, and aging readers will continue to read slashdot, so the average age will go up and therefore also the standard deviation from the average will go up. It won't be (and already isn't) as cool and as trendy for young readers as new or yet to be created sites out there, but Slashdot will probably always be a core site for pro-OSS discussion and news.
the 60's flower children who turned into the 80's "Me generation,"... the "old people" we're talking about being conservative used to march in peace rallys, throw rocks at cops, burn bras, etc. Now they fight the first amendment.
This is sort of mistake is made all the time when generalizations are made about large groups of people: that one group is very vocal and prominent at one point in time and another group at another point in time does not mean that the individuals in the first group change their minds and transformed into the second group.
The HDV format used in a JVC and two new Sony prosumer cameras is also 13 GB/hour- it uses mpeg2 to achieve the same bit rate as regular DV. It looks superb in motion compared to SD, but if you freeze a frame and zoom in you can see compression artifacts- I haven't inspected broadcast HD closely, it has a similar bit rate to HDV (~20 mbps).
What is it with MS doing all this half-assed stuff with the 360? It maybe is going to support HD discs through unspecified means, eventually, it is sort going to play old games. There's a vague cloud of non-gaming features they have as well (and Sony has promoting the PS3's non-gaming aspects also). This is just going to create confusion, which will cause people to either avoid the system or purchase it and then get upset and create a backlash when it turns out the feature advertised earlier isn't fully supported.
It sort of seems like they don't know what to do with the system or why people are going to buy it, so they have all these parallel development efforts, and they'll throw out announcements for them now and gauge the reaction to see how they should allocate resources to make one feature happen at the cost of another. I suppose closer to launch there will be a cohesive promotion strategy, and they'll pretend the stuff being talked about now either never really existed or always was an integral part of the system.