"Developer should use OpenCL". Fine. AMD do you want to be the one who writes the actual physics code implemented in a multi-threaded OpenCL app? That's what I thought.
Nvidia offers a product which is relatively easy to implement.
Which forces the developer to remove the DRM from the game so that their paying customers can use the product.
If this is a DDoS attack it's essentially a ransom. It's like creating the world's most secure data network only to have the CEO's daughter kidnapped and getting a ransom letter for the password.
Instead of attacking the DRM you attack the human interests of those who have the keys.
Or like myself they've taken a number of typing tests and know how fast they can type. (90-130wpm)
Then again you would never know my typing speed from watching me write letter. Writing a letter requires my brain to craft sentences from scratch. Which is why I find typing speed somewhat useless except in an IM context where it practically becomes spoken word. IM is however where I learned to type, so my speed is the 'self-taught' result of necessity. When you're chatting it's frustrating to have your fingers be the limiting factor. 10 bazillion IM chat sessions later and my brain is now the bottleneck in pretty much any typing context.
I tried Dvorak once to see if I could improve my speed. It sort of did. When I was comfortable with it, it was much faster. But the inconvenience isn't worth a theoretical increased speed that rarely gets used. 140wpm+ isn't really useful unless you're dictating a conversation between two people.
I don't know that it would make any difference. I'm extremely supportive of Gay rights and advocate Gay Marriage. But I don't see a problem with the position of "who cares which way you are one way or another."
If Microsoft banned the ability to post my age, gender, race, sexual orientation, preference in cars, operating systems, hair color, eye color or anything about myself I wouldn't care. Mostly because I don't view XBox Live as a community where sharing any personal information is relevant.
Then again I'm completely hypocritical in this regard since my gender IS in my Slashdot username.:D
I question though what data it could collect that wouldn't be more easily gathered by satellite which could 'cover' thousands of miles in a day at extremely high resolution.
Private schools are not the answer. I went to public and private schools. The only reason private schools perform better imo was because the students in private schools were handpicked, low risk students who came from supporting homes.
Take your average Public school class and dump them into a private school and you can kiss your academic achievements goodbye. The quality of teaching was pretty comparable in both schools.
Just a nice bureaucracy and politics-free workplace
This is why teacher evaluations will always be extremely difficult to determine.
Both my parents are teachers. One university and one middle and grade-school. I don't know that either have taught at any school that wasn't rife with bureaucracy and politics. "Well that's what you get with government." No. One of them teaches at a private school. Every school I've attended both public and private has been full of politics and bureaucracy. Teachers driven out because an administrator wanted to hire one of their friends. The most difficult part of this process would be finding a way that those politics don't just get empowered by the ability to easily fire teachers.
I have a theory as to why this is the case. It's because nobody is well payed. When you don't get monetary compensation all you're left with is power.
Even then I don't see what good any of it will do. I went to a private school for almost every single year except the first half of Kindergarten. In that time I had great teachers and I had terrible teachers. The administration had total power over hiring and firing. I can't think of a single instance in my entire life where a poor teacher was actually fired. I can think of numerous instances where teachers who I thought were amazing were driven to quit.
So how do we find the good teachers? Do we ask the students? Maybe in college. But students are always split. My favorite teachers actually required the students to think. This usually resulted in a large subset of students hating them. One of my favorite teachers would throw chalk erasers at students who weren't paying attention. His argument being if they were paying attention to class they would see it coming! I got hit a bunch of times but still thought it was hilarious. Some of the teachers I despised who simply forced 18th century rote memorization of useless facts were hugely popular with the students who didn't care about relevance and would spend all night memorizing lists of things.
Do we ask the other teachers? In which case you're back to the teacher cliques and politics.
DO we look at test scores? Do we want all the teachers just competing to get the best test scores? Can we fully compensate for the students' natural talents and quality and home life? My high-school always was in the top 5 percentile for test scores. We achieved that imo largely through our expulsion policy. Get caught smoking off campus. Expelled. Get caught drinking off campus. Expelled. Get arrested for vandalism off campus. Expelled. Get pregnant. Expelled. Through a stringent expulsion policy we managed to expel anyone and everyone who statistically would be a poor student.
The AI code doesn't have to be run remotely. You could just have it spawn weapons, healthpacks and enemies in the correct places using an encrypted positioning system. Then the crackers would have to meticulously play through the game itemizing every single xyz position for every spawn.
There is a big difference between regulating an industry and taking over an industry. Take the health care debate, for example. It would cost exactly $0 to pass laws that says "Insurance companies cannot deny you for a preexisting condition". But that doesn't give the government control over the industry, instead they want to spend $800 billion to be an insurance company.
Regulation is fine. Involvement is not.
Ladies and Gentlemen I provide you the average intellectual honesty of a Tea-Partier or Republican as Exhibit A.
Yes. Let's simply mandate pre-existing conditions. In that case I'm dropping my insurance. I'll pay for a check-up every few years but I have no subscription drug expenses so I have no reason to buy it. Or if I do need prescriptions I'll just sign up the day before for a drug rebate only plan. If I get really sick or hospitalized I'll just sign up when I get to the hospital. Hopefully they won't perform any tests before I fill out the paperwork.
Outcome: Increased prices to the point where it's no longer insurance, it's just a bureaucratic and expensive collection agency. or Insurance companies will extend their application time so that the paperwork just happens to take 1 year to work its way through the process. At which point Congress will mandate acceptance rates due to the obvious exploitation of the law and we'll go back to the skyrocketing prices by 100%s of percent.
Ok. So we'll mandate some form of coverage. But we won't define what that coverage is. A bunch of $10 a month insurance companies pop up in Alabama or some other lightly regulated state and sell it nationwide. It counts as "Insurance" and anyone gets really sick will just switch to a real plan with real-coverage.
Outcome: Increased prices to the point where it's no longer insurance, it's just a bureaucratic and expensive collection agency.
Ok. So we'll mandate that there has to be minimum coverage to be considered "Healthcare Insurance".
GOP/TeaBagger description of plan: "Socialist Goverment take-over of healthcare". Outcome: People who couldn't afford healthcare before still can't afford healthcare now also face huge government fines for not buying it. Small Businesses which previous provided crappy healthcare which no longer meets the minimum standards drop their insurance.
Ok. So we'll offer tax credits and subsidies for those who really can't afford health insurance and small businesses to make up the difference.
GOP/Teabagger description of plan: "Communist Goverment redistributing wealth and stealing to give to the poor. Also too expensive." Outcome: $80B a year in subsidies and administration. (Even though the GAO finds that it'll be a net savings to the federal government.)
Which is a long way of saying. Sure the conservatives SAY that they are for these healthcare reforms. But if you actually think about the proposals for a few seconds you can easily see that in order to actually enact them they'll reject them as expensive pink-commie plots.
----
Sidebar. The same can be said for "Cutting government spending."
The vast majority of Government spending goes into 4 things: Social Security. Defense. Medicare. FICA. Those 4 make up 70% of our budget. SS is presently underfunded if it isn't going to go into the red in 2038. If you want to cut government spending then you have to end those programs. But that's not what they propose. They want to somehow cut government spending and the size of government while simultaneously protecting these programs. And they want to protect them for good reason: people like them and want them! So one side of their mouth says they want smaller government. The other side says they're going to protect the vast majority of what constitutes a "large government". It's outright hypocrisy. It's nothing more than ideological populism wrapped in patriotism without any sound policy to actually enact.
Putting the conspiracy nut jobs aside for a second there is a reason why they don't want open WiFi. It's so that they can send a bill if someone pirates something on your internet connection.
You would be perfectly free to give away Wi-Fi but if someone downloaded a movie and you were sued you couldn't use the defense "oh well I have an open wifi connection so it must have been someone else.
It's a no-win scenario. If they simply try to sue the owner of the internet connection then you are facing an uphill battle because you have to prove they were actually the human being who committed the violation. Getting a conviction would be all but impossible. If they pass a law saying that the coffee shop is responsible for all traffic then they have to also include ISPs in that definition. You can't apply a law to an ISP but not a coffee shop since they're fundamentally the same. ISPs would rightfully point out that it is impossible to police their networks, nor is it their responsibility. So the policy makers jumped of the first and stupid solution they saw which is to say that ISPs aren't responsible for what happens on their networks but they must be able to identify all their customers in the event of a lawsuit. And the only way for a micro-isp such as a coffee shop to comply with that is to close down open access in order to identify all users.
Orrrrr... it's an illuminati plot by a communists to silence you before putting you in an H1N1 internment camp.
This is why Tea Baggers drive me crazy. They keep telling me that they want smaller government. They tell me they want the constitution to be respected. What they fail to acknowledge though is that if the government shrinks it'll do nothing to reduce corporate influence and power. In fact we'll no longer even have a rudimentary organization to oversee them. Furthermore unlike corporations at least the government is actually bound to the constitution.
When I'm on private property I kiss most of my constitutional rights goodbye.
Really? Does that even sound like a vaguely logical argument to you?
For someone who has a flaky network connection, turning stuff that should work offline into online only stuff is bullshit. This should be completely obvious.
WOW sales are greater than every other PC game combined.
I'm just saying that as a developer I hear you whining about DRM which requires an internet connection, I look at my competition which is outselling me and requires an internet connection and think to myself "Well it would seem it doesn't hurt sales".
You're on Slashdot. You can't use Slashdot unless you have an internet connection. I've never heard anyone bitch about that fact. Almost everything I use now a days requires an internet connection to work. Not out of some arbitrary draconian system, just out of necessity. I don't give it two thoughts. I've long since resigned myself to being dependent on the internet. ONE MORE PIECE OF SOFTWARE which requires a net connection isn't going to be a big deal to me.
I think Blizzard's sales figures based on an ONLINE ONLY game called World of Warcraft is proof that the average customer is fine with being tied to a server.
What are the chances that the once per day will be during your gaming session? That sounds inconvenient regardless if you have a game with DRM.
Do you hate HULU and Netflix Instant View because of this as well?
It seems very selective to pick out something which doesn't normally require an internet connection as the only thing that annoys you going out.
I ran a samsung flip-phone once through the washer while on. Never skipped a beat. The inside of the screen got kind of foggy but that was mostly it. I also forgot it in my pocket wakeboarding. Same thing. Worked like a charm, just was cleaner.
I dropped the same phone from a bridge 12' onto concrete and it continued to work.
I had an apartment with a loft. I would toss my phone up onto my bed to charge. Over the year that I had my phone in that apartment I underpowered the toss and the thing fell at least 20 times from about 10 feet onto effectively a hardwood floor.
I dropped that thing more times than I could count. I kicked it on accident a few times while dropping it. That thing was invincible.
When I switched to AT&T I got an LG POS which in less than 6 months stopped working with barely any abuse. And then the next 3 replacement phones in 2 months also bricked. This one seems to be a survivor but after about a year its battery hinge broke and now has to be held together with a rubber band. Half the buttons only half work. It's worthless.
Maybe it's just me but I would happily purchase anything samsung and will forever avoid LG.
Learned that one the hard way. I spent 2 hours searching for a ski that popped off in powder. A SKI! It was lost in about 40 square feet. Took 2 hours to find. Learned my lesson and after that always rolled a neon streamer up my snow pants. In the event of losing a ski you get a bright trail to where it went. Might be able to do that to a cell phone.:D
Yeahhhhhh.... that's not actually the case in any state I've ever lived in. It's your space. Your landlord can enter if they have reasonable belief that the property is in immediate danger (leaking pipe, smoke etc...) but otherwise they have to give you notice in advance.
No, right now I don't think it's more efficient. But in 10 years if you want an Ikea mug on a table you'll be able to scan the sucker in a second. Like you said we've got the maquette scanning process down pretty well. I think our shader capture tech is going to catch up. There are already a couple companies that are doing an amazing job capturing entire surfaces not just infinitely small points.
In 10 years it might not be completely practical but I'm relatively confident someone will try it. If only for the sake of the workflow.
Within 20 years I would safely bet any film that doesn't rely on volunteer labor and donated materials/equipment will be less expensive to shoot with performance capture.
Do you know how laborious that is when you could just, oh, i don't know, adjust the model you already have and rerender those frames?
Every day.:D
Sending something back to the farm means another render. The real work though often isn't fixing something that's wrong it's just giving it that last 10%. Especially with live action integration where the lighting is often close but it's up to the lighting TDs and compositors to finesse the details.
It's not at all complicated. Many applications do properly handle it. Nuke, Shake and other compositing apps have no problem.
Pixel^(GAMMA) -> Scale -> Pixel^(1/GAMMA) I wouldn't call that a terribly complicated process.
Or even better. On open convert it to linear. Then on save convert it back. Maybe then Photoshop and company would actually handle alpha channels correctly *grumble* *grumble*...
Slashdot Mirror
The original assertion is BS imo.
"Developer should use OpenCL". Fine. AMD do you want to be the one who writes the actual physics code implemented in a multi-threaded OpenCL app? That's what I thought.
Nvidia offers a product which is relatively easy to implement.
It didn't break the DRM, it broke the game.
Which forces the developer to remove the DRM from the game so that their paying customers can use the product.
If this is a DDoS attack it's essentially a ransom. It's like creating the world's most secure data network only to have the CEO's daughter kidnapped and getting a ransom letter for the password.
Instead of attacking the DRM you attack the human interests of those who have the keys.
Too soon!
And that's not even mentioning the history of accusations against Zuckerberg for questionably ethical behavior:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/21129674/the_battle_for_facebook
Or like myself they've taken a number of typing tests and know how fast they can type. (90-130wpm)
Then again you would never know my typing speed from watching me write letter. Writing a letter requires my brain to craft sentences from scratch. Which is why I find typing speed somewhat useless except in an IM context where it practically becomes spoken word. IM is however where I learned to type, so my speed is the 'self-taught' result of necessity. When you're chatting it's frustrating to have your fingers be the limiting factor. 10 bazillion IM chat sessions later and my brain is now the bottleneck in pretty much any typing context.
I tried Dvorak once to see if I could improve my speed. It sort of did. When I was comfortable with it, it was much faster. But the inconvenience isn't worth a theoretical increased speed that rarely gets used. 140wpm+ isn't really useful unless you're dictating a conversation between two people.
I don't know that it would make any difference. I'm extremely supportive of Gay rights and advocate Gay Marriage. But I don't see a problem with the position of "who cares which way you are one way or another."
If Microsoft banned the ability to post my age, gender, race, sexual orientation, preference in cars, operating systems, hair color, eye color or anything about myself I wouldn't care. Mostly because I don't view XBox Live as a community where sharing any personal information is relevant.
Then again I'm completely hypocritical in this regard since my gender IS in my Slashdot username. :D
I question though what data it could collect that wouldn't be more easily gathered by satellite which could 'cover' thousands of miles in a day at extremely high resolution.
Private schools are not the answer. I went to public and private schools. The only reason private schools perform better imo was because the students in private schools were handpicked, low risk students who came from supporting homes.
Take your average Public school class and dump them into a private school and you can kiss your academic achievements goodbye. The quality of teaching was pretty comparable in both schools.
Just a nice bureaucracy and politics-free workplace
This is why teacher evaluations will always be extremely difficult to determine.
Both my parents are teachers. One university and one middle and grade-school. I don't know that either have taught at any school that wasn't rife with bureaucracy and politics. "Well that's what you get with government." No. One of them teaches at a private school. Every school I've attended both public and private has been full of politics and bureaucracy. Teachers driven out because an administrator wanted to hire one of their friends. The most difficult part of this process would be finding a way that those politics don't just get empowered by the ability to easily fire teachers.
I have a theory as to why this is the case. It's because nobody is well payed. When you don't get monetary compensation all you're left with is power.
Even then I don't see what good any of it will do. I went to a private school for almost every single year except the first half of Kindergarten. In that time I had great teachers and I had terrible teachers. The administration had total power over hiring and firing. I can't think of a single instance in my entire life where a poor teacher was actually fired. I can think of numerous instances where teachers who I thought were amazing were driven to quit.
So how do we find the good teachers?
Do we ask the students? Maybe in college. But students are always split. My favorite teachers actually required the students to think. This usually resulted in a large subset of students hating them. One of my favorite teachers would throw chalk erasers at students who weren't paying attention. His argument being if they were paying attention to class they would see it coming! I got hit a bunch of times but still thought it was hilarious. Some of the teachers I despised who simply forced 18th century rote memorization of useless facts were hugely popular with the students who didn't care about relevance and would spend all night memorizing lists of things.
Do we ask the other teachers? In which case you're back to the teacher cliques and politics.
DO we look at test scores? Do we want all the teachers just competing to get the best test scores? Can we fully compensate for the students' natural talents and quality and home life? My high-school always was in the top 5 percentile for test scores. We achieved that imo largely through our expulsion policy. Get caught smoking off campus. Expelled. Get caught drinking off campus. Expelled. Get arrested for vandalism off campus. Expelled. Get pregnant. Expelled. Through a stringent expulsion policy we managed to expel anyone and everyone who statistically would be a poor student.
Sounds like what you want is a laptop. You should buy one of those instead.
The AI code doesn't have to be run remotely. You could just have it spawn weapons, healthpacks and enemies in the correct places using an encrypted positioning system. Then the crackers would have to meticulously play through the game itemizing every single xyz position for every spawn.
Zoom in!
You could currently offer that same service. It would just cost more.
There is a big difference between regulating an industry and taking over an industry. Take the health care debate, for example. It would cost exactly $0 to pass laws that says "Insurance companies cannot deny you for a preexisting condition". But that doesn't give the government control over the industry, instead they want to spend $800 billion to be an insurance company.
Regulation is fine. Involvement is not.
Ladies and Gentlemen I provide you the average intellectual honesty of a Tea-Partier or Republican as Exhibit A.
Yes. Let's simply mandate pre-existing conditions. In that case I'm dropping my insurance. I'll pay for a check-up every few years but I have no subscription drug expenses so I have no reason to buy it. Or if I do need prescriptions I'll just sign up the day before for a drug rebate only plan. If I get really sick or hospitalized I'll just sign up when I get to the hospital. Hopefully they won't perform any tests before I fill out the paperwork.
Outcome: Increased prices to the point where it's no longer insurance, it's just a bureaucratic and expensive collection agency. or Insurance companies will extend their application time so that the paperwork just happens to take 1 year to work its way through the process. At which point Congress will mandate acceptance rates due to the obvious exploitation of the law and we'll go back to the skyrocketing prices by 100%s of percent.
Ok. So we'll mandate some form of coverage. But we won't define what that coverage is. A bunch of $10 a month insurance companies pop up in Alabama or some other lightly regulated state and sell it nationwide. It counts as "Insurance" and anyone gets really sick will just switch to a real plan with real-coverage.
Outcome: Increased prices to the point where it's no longer insurance, it's just a bureaucratic and expensive collection agency.
Ok. So we'll mandate that there has to be minimum coverage to be considered "Healthcare Insurance".
GOP/TeaBagger description of plan: "Socialist Goverment take-over of healthcare".
Outcome: People who couldn't afford healthcare before still can't afford healthcare now also face huge government fines for not buying it. Small Businesses which previous provided crappy healthcare which no longer meets the minimum standards drop their insurance.
Ok. So we'll offer tax credits and subsidies for those who really can't afford health insurance and small businesses to make up the difference.
GOP/Teabagger description of plan: "Communist Goverment redistributing wealth and stealing to give to the poor. Also too expensive."
Outcome: $80B a year in subsidies and administration. (Even though the GAO finds that it'll be a net savings to the federal government.)
Which is a long way of saying. Sure the conservatives SAY that they are for these healthcare reforms. But if you actually think about the proposals for a few seconds you can easily see that in order to actually enact them they'll reject them as expensive pink-commie plots.
----
Sidebar. The same can be said for "Cutting government spending."
The vast majority of Government spending goes into 4 things: Social Security. Defense. Medicare. FICA. Those 4 make up 70% of our budget. SS is presently underfunded if it isn't going to go into the red in 2038. If you want to cut government spending then you have to end those programs. But that's not what they propose. They want to somehow cut government spending and the size of government while simultaneously protecting these programs. And they want to protect them for good reason: people like them and want them! So one side of their mouth says they want smaller government. The other side says they're going to protect the vast majority of what constitutes a "large government". It's outright hypocrisy. It's nothing more than ideological populism wrapped in patriotism without any sound policy to actually enact.
Putting the conspiracy nut jobs aside for a second there is a reason why they don't want open WiFi. It's so that they can send a bill if someone pirates something on your internet connection.
You would be perfectly free to give away Wi-Fi but if someone downloaded a movie and you were sued you couldn't use the defense "oh well I have an open wifi connection so it must have been someone else.
It's a no-win scenario. If they simply try to sue the owner of the internet connection then you are facing an uphill battle because you have to prove they were actually the human being who committed the violation. Getting a conviction would be all but impossible. If they pass a law saying that the coffee shop is responsible for all traffic then they have to also include ISPs in that definition. You can't apply a law to an ISP but not a coffee shop since they're fundamentally the same. ISPs would rightfully point out that it is impossible to police their networks, nor is it their responsibility. So the policy makers jumped of the first and stupid solution they saw which is to say that ISPs aren't responsible for what happens on their networks but they must be able to identify all their customers in the event of a lawsuit. And the only way for a micro-isp such as a coffee shop to comply with that is to close down open access in order to identify all users.
Orrrrr... it's an illuminati plot by a communists to silence you before putting you in an H1N1 internment camp.
This is why Tea Baggers drive me crazy. They keep telling me that they want smaller government. They tell me they want the constitution to be respected. What they fail to acknowledge though is that if the government shrinks it'll do nothing to reduce corporate influence and power. In fact we'll no longer even have a rudimentary organization to oversee them. Furthermore unlike corporations at least the government is actually bound to the constitution.
When I'm on private property I kiss most of my constitutional rights goodbye.
Really? Does that even sound like a vaguely logical argument to you?
For someone who has a flaky network connection, turning stuff that should work offline into online only stuff is bullshit. This should be completely obvious.
WOW sales are greater than every other PC game combined.
I'm just saying that as a developer I hear you whining about DRM which requires an internet connection, I look at my competition which is outselling me and requires an internet connection and think to myself "Well it would seem it doesn't hurt sales".
You're on Slashdot. You can't use Slashdot unless you have an internet connection. I've never heard anyone bitch about that fact. Almost everything I use now a days requires an internet connection to work. Not out of some arbitrary draconian system, just out of necessity. I don't give it two thoughts. I've long since resigned myself to being dependent on the internet. ONE MORE PIECE OF SOFTWARE which requires a net connection isn't going to be a big deal to me.
I think Blizzard's sales figures based on an ONLINE ONLY game called World of Warcraft is proof that the average customer is fine with being tied to a server.
What are the chances that the once per day will be during your gaming session? That sounds inconvenient regardless if you have a game with DRM.
Do you hate HULU and Netflix Instant View because of this as well?
It seems very selective to pick out something which doesn't normally require an internet connection as the only thing that annoys you going out.
I ran a samsung flip-phone once through the washer while on. Never skipped a beat. The inside of the screen got kind of foggy but that was mostly it. I also forgot it in my pocket wakeboarding. Same thing. Worked like a charm, just was cleaner.
I dropped the same phone from a bridge 12' onto concrete and it continued to work.
I had an apartment with a loft. I would toss my phone up onto my bed to charge. Over the year that I had my phone in that apartment I underpowered the toss and the thing fell at least 20 times from about 10 feet onto effectively a hardwood floor.
I dropped that thing more times than I could count. I kicked it on accident a few times while dropping it. That thing was invincible.
When I switched to AT&T I got an LG POS which in less than 6 months stopped working with barely any abuse. And then the next 3 replacement phones in 2 months also bricked. This one seems to be a survivor but after about a year its battery hinge broke and now has to be held together with a rubber band. Half the buttons only half work. It's worthless.
Maybe it's just me but I would happily purchase anything samsung and will forever avoid LG.
Learned that one the hard way. I spent 2 hours searching for a ski that popped off in powder. A SKI! It was lost in about 40 square feet. Took 2 hours to find. Learned my lesson and after that always rolled a neon streamer up my snow pants. In the event of losing a ski you get a bright trail to where it went. Might be able to do that to a cell phone. :D
Yeahhhhhh.... that's not actually the case in any state I've ever lived in. It's your space. Your landlord can enter if they have reasonable belief that the property is in immediate danger (leaking pipe, smoke etc...) but otherwise they have to give you notice in advance.
No but fine detail is common. The 'bug' causes an increase in moire effects.
No, right now I don't think it's more efficient. But in 10 years if you want an Ikea mug on a table you'll be able to scan the sucker in a second. Like you said we've got the maquette scanning process down pretty well. I think our shader capture tech is going to catch up. There are already a couple companies that are doing an amazing job capturing entire surfaces not just infinitely small points.
In 10 years it might not be completely practical but I'm relatively confident someone will try it. If only for the sake of the workflow.
Within 20 years I would safely bet any film that doesn't rely on volunteer labor and donated materials/equipment will be less expensive to shoot with performance capture.
Do you know how laborious that is when you could just, oh, i don't know, adjust the model you already have and rerender those frames?
Every day. :D
Sending something back to the farm means another render. The real work though often isn't fixing something that's wrong it's just giving it that last 10%. Especially with live action integration where the lighting is often close but it's up to the lighting TDs and compositors to finesse the details.
It's not at all complicated. Many applications do properly handle it. Nuke, Shake and other compositing apps have no problem.
Pixel^(GAMMA) -> Scale -> Pixel^(1/GAMMA) I wouldn't call that a terribly complicated process.
Or even better. On open convert it to linear. Then on save convert it back. Maybe then Photoshop and company would actually handle alpha channels correctly *grumble* *grumble*...