timothy has it wrong. The Leonids are peaking on the night of November 18-19, not on 17-18.
I live in Boston, but by an awesome coincidence, I will be in Australia on that very night. Here's to an awesome meteor shower!
We're still waiting for the Citizen Kane
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Any time a new art form comes along it takes awhile for the public to accept it as legitimate. Take film for example. In the first 30 years of the century, film was a medium for popular entertainment mostly but had yet been embraced by the intelligentsia. The medium was mostly used for entertainment, but here and there were glimpses of art or social messages or what have you.
When Citizen Kane came along, here was a movie that used all of the unique elements that make up film for artistic purposes. It was groundbreaking in that the lighting, photography, music, camera angles, editing and so on all came together to form this wonderful work of art.
I don't think videogames have come this far yet. Now, there are many games that give us glimpses of art and beauty (Zelda games, SNES Final Fantasy games, a glimmer in Black and White, etc.) but no one has yet made the Citizen Kane.
And why not? Well, in the film industry, it took the genius of one man (Orson Welles) and the amazing backing of a studio system (which later destroyed Welles). But the videogame industry is so much harder to work with when art is concerned. Not only are videogames really expensive, but they are looked down upon by those people who could afford to fund game art. The problem here is that a game has to be aesthetically pleasing and interactive, which, if you think about it, is really hard to do. Most people just want to run around and shoot people in realistic environments.
So I put out a challenge to all of you videogame makers out there: try to make the Citizen Kane of video games - it doesn't have to be popular among teens or particularly well-liked by the public, it just has to be good. I've tried thinking of ideas myself, but I've failed so I leave it to the geniuses that I know are out there but who probably don't have financial backing. If you are someone like this, I wish you the best of luck!
"Jordan's Wheel of Time series, now up to 9 novels, has been, IMHO, more definitive of the modern fantasy genre than even Tolkien."
This is true, in the sense that it is overlong, not well designed, written repetitevly and childishly, and seems to have a financial motivation only. So yes, it is definitive of modern fantasy.
Tolkein is definitive of all fantasy, modern or not. Not only did his book define the fantasy genre (a genre heavily influenced by mythology and ancient cultures) it is a ripping good read as well.
Other posters have already mentioned the important writers from the early half of the century. Let's not forget the more recent greats:
Don Delillo (White Noise, Libra, Underworld)
Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow, Crying of Lot 49)
William Gaddis (Recognitions, JR)
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, his essays)
Haruki Murakami (already mentioned)
possibly Jonathan Franzen
Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-5, Mother Night )
John Barth
Philip Roth
In terms of sci-fi, I imagine selections from Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury will be remembered. All those smaller audience books regular/.ers love will be remembered by the people who visit the 22nd century version of/., not by the masses. Of course, Tolkein will always be remembered.
What if the DVD had code in it that randomly generated a coherent, and possibly interesting, movie? You just pop the DVD in and a movie plays, but the bits on the DVD don't explicitly define what you are seeing (of course, we're assuming great advances in technology here). Is this software or a movie?
"Was the world's foremost software designer worried about offending dullards, dunces and dolts? Are there actually people out there who identify themselves that way? Even if so, you wouldn't think they'd represent Microsoft's target demographic."
He made another common error as well. To quote Douglas Anderson, who wrote the 'Note on the Text' published in the 1994 Harper Collins edition of Lord of the Rings:
"The Lord of the Rings is often erroneously called a trilogy, when it is in fact a single novel, consisting of six books plus appendices, sometimes published in three volumes."
This fact is confirmed by Tolkien in his Foreward, where he often refers the tale as one large volume.
It's sad to read that this lawsuit is being filed by a representation of over 50 independent artists and labels. Why aren't they fighting the real battle? mp3.com, while not perfect, has paved the path for independent artists to find success on the internet without signing with a large, corrupt record label.
If these artists found their work being passed around Napster, they should be happy, not angry. I bet more people have now heard their names and maybe even some bought an album or went to a live show. If not, well they're probably not very good.
Well, I posted this yesterday but it got wiped out by the database crash. I'll try again:
I think many people agree that for Linux to become a popular and legitimate gaming platform, there needs to be some sort of breakthrough game that is released exclusively for Linux. If that were to happen, people might come to Linux like people came to CD-ROMs when Myst came out ("If you build it, they will come").
My question is, and I wish I had asked Sam, would it be harmful for Linux to develop this game on SDL? My reasoning is that if this great game was released for Linux and written in SDL, the cross-platform nature of SDL would guarantee that the game would be out for Windows and Macs in no time at all. Then there would be no reason to switch to Linux...
So then is it a good idea to develop Linux games for SDL? Should we worry about releasing games solely for Linux?
This is not so much an overview of the current state of AI as it is a general description of the different fields of AI. However, it's a pretty good description and could be a useful introduction to someone who knows nil about the field and is wary about buying their first expensive textbook.
However, I would hope that most of the Slashdot crowd already knows that the field of AI, while successful, isn't really about conciousness right now (though to many it is a distant goal).
The best way to really get an Artificial Intelligence overview is to first know the basics, and then flip through all of the major AI journals in the past five years.
Kurt Vonnegut is right in the article. The world won't accept e-books because they just aren't as comforting and nice as real paper.
That's why I think e-books will have to wait until digital paper becomes cheap and easy to use to become popular.
Imagine plugging in a book made with digital paper (that looks and feels like your favorite physical books) and downloading any book in the Library of Congress to read in the comfort of your reading chair, or the beach, etc. Until this happens, e-books will be nothing more than a lark, a curiosity.
Hmmm, it seems to me that Katz is talking about a subset of 15 year olds, albeit a substantial one - that is, white, middle-class 15 year olds who own computers.
This leads me to say that I find it somewhat unenlightening to read attempts such as these to sum up a generation in just a few paragraphs (spread among a few articles). This has been happening forever, I know, (just look at all that has been written about the baby boomers) but I think that these writings tend to focus on shallow issues.
There are some interesting observations to be made about a generation where the middle-class and wealthy are raised via the Internet, but I think this sort of thing needs to be approached carefully and with much thought and research, which doesn't seem to be apparent here.
It's a generational thing, admittedly, of no importance to anybody under 30, who can go see the movie with less baggage.
This is plain wrong, Katz. I am 22 years old and Planet of the Apes is one of my favorite sci fi films. I certainly had said baggage when watching Burton's film and I know many of my peers (and younger) carried the very same. The original is a classic that everyone should see.
Spielberg was closer... (link fixed)
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 1
Re:But did Kubrick write the meta-science?
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 1
Then if she had her memories, why wasn't she freaked out at the whole prospect at what was happening? (And I mean more than a small look of horror when David tells his story - i.e. recaps the movie A.I. in child drawings). Why wasn't she wondering where her husband was, where Martin was, where humanity was?
But did Kubrick write the meta-science?
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 3
This is true (about Kubrick devising the 2000 years later bit), but let's be honest, he would have done it differently and more enigmatically.
I think one of the worst moments in the film is when David answers the door in the fake house, lets in the advanced AI, and we cut to them sitting on a bed, legs crossed, discussing this awful new-agey science crap that reminded me a little too much of metachloreans. What's with that garbage about space/time, not being able to clone for more than one day, etc. hooey? Couldn't they clone her every day? It's not like they had her memories anyway.
I didn't mind the concept of the ending so much as the execution. Kubrick wouldn't have had that awful conversation. Kubrick was known for his scientific accuracy (just watch 2001), and as a computer scientist, I was plainly ashamed at the pseudo-science that Spielberg was spinning.
Anybody with the tiniest bit of common sense would not program a robot that could harm, that would eat spinach, that would even have an esophagus whose sole purpose is apparently to deliver damaging edibles into its most valuable circuitry.
David was poorly designed.
And I'd like to think that Kubrick wouldn't have made the same mistakes.
If Kubrick had made this movie, people would still be angry at the film (like Eyes Wide Shut, which I think is an excellent movie with some flaws possibly due to his untimely death), but twenty years from now it would be greatly respected. Now, except for the visual effects, it will mostly be mocked.
I did a statistics project this semester where I took a simple random sample of all the nationally distributed movies between 1990 and 1997 (mainstream and independent). I found the sample mean for film running time to be about 108 minutes and estimated the real mean to be between 104 and 109 minutes by constructing a 95% confidence interval.
If you assume that my data gathering methods were sound (trust me, they were, but ask me if you want to know more) then your statement seems to be way off mark.
This reminds me of a (joke) project I thought of a few months ago. I was at a lecture for a technology that would classify the gender of a person in a facial photograph, using a bunch of pre-classified pictures for training data and then some sort of learning algorithm to classify never-before-seen pictures. The lecturer presented some fairly successful results, and I sarcastically mused, "We should try this on criminals!"
Imagine: we present the system thousands of pictures of criminals from their mug shots and the program learns to classify criminals. Then, the government gathers pictures of the accused, or just suspects, or maybe even the plain innocent and classifies them as criminals. Those unfortunate souls classified as a criminal must then be subject to the most rigorous of investigations.
I know, it sounds horrifying, but it could happen. It sort of sounds like Spielberg's Minority Report, which he'll make after AI, I think. In that, an innocent man who has been classified as a criminal (before he commits the crime) is on the run from a cop. I'm not sure how he's classified, though. Psychics, maybe. In any case, I'd be curious to see what Spielberg could present on the issue.
This issue is interesting as it addresses some potential "exceptions" to freedom of speech.
Child pornography has always been rightfully illegal as an inherent part of it is sexually abusing a child. So the question then becomes: with modern technology, if child pornography can be produced artificially (that is, without the abuse of children), then what is the harm? Well, apparently, the major argument is that it whets the appetite of child porn users (or observers), and hence puts children in potentially harm's way.
But then why is this issue more important than other harmful crimes? Not to lessen the tragedy of sexual abuse of children, but realistic movies and stills of violence could also then, using the same argument, cause murders and rapes. And so why not ban those as well? Of course, then the snowball rolls and suddenly fiction about hacking is illegal.
This may be an exaggeration, but the issue isn't as one-sided as many people think. But I understand the popular hesitation - it is hard to defend freedom of speech as sometimes one is defending the child pornographer next door.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, my mistake. He's wrong from the Pacific perspective, but correct for the North American one.
timothy has it wrong. The Leonids are peaking on the night of November 18-19, not on 17-18.
I live in Boston, but by an awesome coincidence, I will be in Australia on that very night. Here's to an awesome meteor shower!
Any time a new art form comes along it takes awhile for the public to accept it as legitimate. Take film for example. In the first 30 years of the century, film was a medium for popular entertainment mostly but had yet been embraced by the intelligentsia. The medium was mostly used for entertainment, but here and there were glimpses of art or social messages or what have you.
When Citizen Kane came along, here was a movie that used all of the unique elements that make up film for artistic purposes. It was groundbreaking in that the lighting, photography, music, camera angles, editing and so on all came together to form this wonderful work of art.
I don't think videogames have come this far yet. Now, there are many games that give us glimpses of art and beauty (Zelda games, SNES Final Fantasy games, a glimmer in Black and White, etc.) but no one has yet made the Citizen Kane.
And why not? Well, in the film industry, it took the genius of one man (Orson Welles) and the amazing backing of a studio system (which later destroyed Welles). But the videogame industry is so much harder to work with when art is concerned. Not only are videogames really expensive, but they are looked down upon by those people who could afford to fund game art. The problem here is that a game has to be aesthetically pleasing and interactive, which, if you think about it, is really hard to do. Most people just want to run around and shoot people in realistic environments.
So I put out a challenge to all of you videogame makers out there: try to make the Citizen Kane of video games - it doesn't have to be popular among teens or particularly well-liked by the public, it just has to be good. I've tried thinking of ideas myself, but I've failed so I leave it to the geniuses that I know are out there but who probably don't have financial backing. If you are someone like this, I wish you the best of luck!
"Jordan's Wheel of Time series, now up to 9 novels, has been, IMHO, more definitive of the modern fantasy genre than even Tolkien."
This is true, in the sense that it is overlong, not well designed, written repetitevly and childishly, and seems to have a financial motivation only. So yes, it is definitive of modern fantasy.
Tolkein is definitive of all fantasy, modern or not. Not only did his book define the fantasy genre (a genre heavily influenced by mythology and ancient cultures) it is a ripping good read as well.
Other posters have already mentioned the important writers from the early half of the century. Let's not forget the more recent greats:
/.ers love will be remembered by the people who visit the 22nd century version of /., not by the masses. Of course, Tolkein will always be remembered.
Don Delillo (White Noise, Libra, Underworld)
Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow, Crying of Lot 49)
William Gaddis (Recognitions, JR)
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, his essays)
Haruki Murakami (already mentioned)
possibly Jonathan Franzen
Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-5, Mother Night )
John Barth
Philip Roth
In terms of sci-fi, I imagine selections from Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury will be remembered. All those smaller audience books regular
What if the DVD had code in it that randomly generated a coherent, and possibly interesting, movie? You just pop the DVD in and a movie plays, but the bits on the DVD don't explicitly define what you are seeing (of course, we're assuming great advances in technology here). Is this software or a movie?
"Was the world's foremost software designer worried about offending dullards, dunces and dolts? Are there actually people out there who identify themselves that way? Even if so, you wouldn't think they'd represent Microsoft's target demographic."
You wouldn't?
He made another common error as well. To quote Douglas Anderson, who wrote the 'Note on the Text' published in the 1994 Harper Collins edition of Lord of the Rings:
"The Lord of the Rings is often erroneously called a trilogy, when it is in fact a single novel, consisting of six books plus appendices, sometimes published in three volumes."
This fact is confirmed by Tolkien in his Foreward, where he often refers the tale as one large volume.
It's sad to read that this lawsuit is being filed by a representation of over 50 independent artists and labels. Why aren't they fighting the real battle? mp3.com, while not perfect, has paved the path for independent artists to find success on the internet without signing with a large, corrupt record label.
If these artists found their work being passed around Napster, they should be happy, not angry. I bet more people have now heard their names and maybe even some bought an album or went to a live show. If not, well they're probably not very good.
Well, I posted this yesterday but it got wiped out by the database crash. I'll try again:
I think many people agree that for Linux to become a popular and legitimate gaming platform, there needs to be some sort of breakthrough game that is released exclusively for Linux. If that were to happen, people might come to Linux like people came to CD-ROMs when Myst came out ("If you build it, they will come").
My question is, and I wish I had asked Sam, would it be harmful for Linux to develop this game on SDL? My reasoning is that if this great game was released for Linux and written in SDL, the cross-platform nature of SDL would guarantee that the game would be out for Windows and Macs in no time at all. Then there would be no reason to switch to Linux...
So then is it a good idea to develop Linux games for SDL? Should we worry about releasing games solely for Linux?
This is not so much an overview of the current state of AI as it is a general description of the different fields of AI. However, it's a pretty good description and could be a useful introduction to someone who knows nil about the field and is wary about buying their first expensive textbook.
However, I would hope that most of the Slashdot crowd already knows that the field of AI, while successful, isn't really about conciousness right now (though to many it is a distant goal).
The best way to really get an Artificial Intelligence overview is to first know the basics, and then flip through all of the major AI journals in the past five years.
Kurt Vonnegut is right in the article. The world won't accept e-books because they just aren't as comforting and nice as real paper.
That's why I think e-books will have to wait until digital paper becomes cheap and easy to use to become popular.
Imagine plugging in a book made with digital paper (that looks and feels like your favorite physical books) and downloading any book in the Library of Congress to read in the comfort of your reading chair, or the beach, etc. Until this happens, e-books will be nothing more than a lark, a curiosity.
Hmmm, it seems to me that Katz is talking about a subset of 15 year olds, albeit a substantial one - that is, white, middle-class 15 year olds who own computers.
This leads me to say that I find it somewhat unenlightening to read attempts such as these to sum up a generation in just a few paragraphs (spread among a few articles). This has been happening forever, I know, (just look at all that has been written about the baby boomers) but I think that these writings tend to focus on shallow issues.
There are some interesting observations to be made about a generation where the middle-class and wealthy are raised via the Internet, but I think this sort of thing needs to be approached carefully and with much thought and research, which doesn't seem to be apparent here.
It's a generational thing, admittedly, of no importance to anybody under 30, who can go see the movie with less baggage.
This is plain wrong, Katz. I am 22 years old and Planet of the Apes is one of my favorite sci fi films. I certainly had said baggage when watching Burton's film and I know many of my peers (and younger) carried the very same. The original is a classic that everyone should see.
Article about Kubrick's original ideas.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/071899kubrick- ai.html
Then if she had her memories, why wasn't she freaked out at the whole prospect at what was happening? (And I mean more than a small look of horror when David tells his story - i.e. recaps the movie A.I. in child drawings). Why wasn't she wondering where her husband was, where Martin was, where humanity was?
This is true (about Kubrick devising the 2000 years later bit), but let's be honest, he would have done it differently and more enigmatically.
I think one of the worst moments in the film is when David answers the door in the fake house, lets in the advanced AI, and we cut to them sitting on a bed, legs crossed, discussing this awful new-agey science crap that reminded me a little too much of metachloreans. What's with that garbage about space/time, not being able to clone for more than one day, etc. hooey? Couldn't they clone her every day? It's not like they had her memories anyway.
I didn't mind the concept of the ending so much as the execution. Kubrick wouldn't have had that awful conversation. Kubrick was known for his scientific accuracy (just watch 2001), and as a computer scientist, I was plainly ashamed at the pseudo-science that Spielberg was spinning.
Anybody with the tiniest bit of common sense would not program a robot that could harm, that would eat spinach, that would even have an esophagus whose sole purpose is apparently to deliver damaging edibles into its most valuable circuitry.
David was poorly designed.
And I'd like to think that Kubrick wouldn't have made the same mistakes.
If Kubrick had made this movie, people would still be angry at the film (like Eyes Wide Shut, which I think is an excellent movie with some flaws possibly due to his untimely death), but twenty years from now it would be greatly respected. Now, except for the visual effects, it will mostly be mocked.
We had to get all the data by hand and this was just for a class - hence the sample.
The sample median was 105 minutes.
I did a statistics project this semester where I took a simple random sample of all the nationally distributed movies between 1990 and 1997 (mainstream and independent). I found the sample mean for film running time to be about 108 minutes and estimated the real mean to be between 104 and 109 minutes by constructing a 95% confidence interval.
If you assume that my data gathering methods were sound (trust me, they were, but ask me if you want to know more) then your statement seems to be way off mark.
You would think that Slashdot readers would be better people than to spread around urban legends.
But then, after all, this is an AC post.
Wooooooooooooooooooh!
987654321!
WoooooooooooooooooH!
This reminds me of a (joke) project I thought of a few months ago. I was at a lecture for a technology that would classify the gender of a person in a facial photograph, using a bunch of pre-classified pictures for training data and then some sort of learning algorithm to classify never-before-seen pictures. The lecturer presented some fairly successful results, and I sarcastically mused, "We should try this on criminals!"
Imagine: we present the system thousands of pictures of criminals from their mug shots and the program learns to classify criminals. Then, the government gathers pictures of the accused, or just suspects, or maybe even the plain innocent and classifies them as criminals. Those unfortunate souls classified as a criminal must then be subject to the most rigorous of investigations.
I know, it sounds horrifying, but it could happen. It sort of sounds like Spielberg's Minority Report, which he'll make after AI, I think. In that, an innocent man who has been classified as a criminal (before he commits the crime) is on the run from a cop. I'm not sure how he's classified, though. Psychics, maybe. In any case, I'd be curious to see what Spielberg could present on the issue.
This issue is interesting as it addresses some potential "exceptions" to freedom of speech.
Child pornography has always been rightfully illegal as an inherent part of it is sexually abusing a child. So the question then becomes: with modern technology, if child pornography can be produced artificially (that is, without the abuse of children), then what is the harm? Well, apparently, the major argument is that it whets the appetite of child porn users (or observers), and hence puts children in potentially harm's way.
But then why is this issue more important than other harmful crimes? Not to lessen the tragedy of sexual abuse of children, but realistic movies and stills of violence could also then, using the same argument, cause murders and rapes. And so why not ban those as well? Of course, then the snowball rolls and suddenly fiction about hacking is illegal.
This may be an exaggeration, but the issue isn't as one-sided as many people think. But I understand the popular hesitation - it is hard to defend freedom of speech as sometimes one is defending the child pornographer next door.