First off, the computer that beat Kasparov was called "Deep Blue", not "Deep Thought". Secondly, it was able to beat him because basically, they cheated.
They fed the program Kasparov's entire game history while keeping its game history secret from Kasparov. Normally in competitive chess you are allowed to study your opponents past games in order to learn what tactics they are likely to use. In this case, Kasparov wasn't allowed to do that. The fact that he went ahead with the game anyway was probably due to overconfidence on his part.
The folks at IBM seemed to realize that they won merely because of the setup, and thus when challenged for a rematch by Kasparov, they said they weren't interested, because they had "done everything they set out to do". (Personally, I think they were scared they would loose in a fair match.)
Kasparov has stated publicly that if the "Deep Blue" team actually abided by the rules of competitive chess, he will "tear [Deep Blue] to pieces". They have so far declined.
That said, even if the machine were able to beat the best human player in a fair match, it still would not be that remarkable, because computer chess programs are still limited to the "brute force" approach, where they pick their next move by simply searching as big an area of the total possible game tree as possible. The human mind does it differently, only examining at most a dozen or so possible moves before deciding. Ho the brain can pick such strategic moves without searching a significant portion of the total possible game tree is still one of the great mysteries of cognitive science.
Any bets the newly elected reps will be excluded after the first few meetings?
That's almost a certainty. Hell, I wonder if they might even be excluded before the first few meetings! Given the current boards behavior, I wouldn't put it past them. If they're unhappy with the results of the elections, they might just change or ignore their bylaws and simply say "Sorry, even though people voted for you, you don't fit in with our 'consensus', we can't allow you to come in a mess things up. Goodbye."
Of course, instead of kicking them out, they could just cut troublemakers like Karl and Andy out of the loop by pushing more and more activities off onto "the staff". The non-elected, pro-business, pro-trademark corporate lackeys would have access to "the staff", while the elected board members would not. They've already made steps in this direction, with many of their decisions lately being attributed to the recommendations of "the staff". It all smacks of Al Gore's "no controlling legal authority". Ugh.
Yep, if the elected board members become to much of an annoyance, they will simply kick them out, probably claiming (with a completely straight face) that they were interefering with the "consensus" that the board represents.
I've seen quite a few buttons saying "It's the Supreme Court, Stupid."
Yeah, yeah. The spectre of Supreme Court nominations is raised in every election. We'll never get away from it. The fact that the Democrats bring it up so often in an effort to scare people into voting for them is just another indicator that they have nothing of substance to bring to the election. Gore will say anything, anything to get elected. He's got no real message or direction. And the Democrats know it. That's why they're resorting to these fear tactics.
Besides, you don't really believe that the President can get away with just appointing whomever he wants, do you? Look at the way the nominations have gone in the last few decades. The confirmation process has become a total Kangaroo court! There is no way someone with a clear agenda can get past it! The only hope a president has is to try and nominate a moderate or a "stealth" candidate who has an agenda, but doesn't display it out in the open. But even that rarely works. The idea that Bush or Gore will be able to just walk in and dump their favorite conservative or liberal in the court is nonsense.
Very few women seem to have joined the Nader campaign. Maybe because they are more practical...
The average citizen, both male and female, responds to pandering. GWB and Gore have done a lot of pandering to women in their campaigns. Nader has done very little. It may be a nice bit of fashionable PCness to assert that women are somehow smarter or better than men, but it isn't true.
Calling it a "supercomputer " is more a description of the specialized functionality of the processor, rather than the total speed. It used to be that vector processing was reserved only for the "big iron" machines from Cray & others. The introduction of AltiVec in PowerPC chips meant it was possible to get vector functions on a desktop machine for the first time. It really was a big step, and not just marketing blow.
The trouble with Apple switching to IBM's Power chips is that they would have to drop support for AltiVec, which is actually a very cool technology. 128-bit vectors that allow all sorts of nifty SIMD operations. They aren't kidding when the call it a "supercomputer". I would hate for Apple to have to give up on AltiVec.
That said, I don't what Motorola's plans for a G5 are, if any. It may turn out that Apple has no choice but to go with IBM's chips after a while.
Shouldn't the 12 Angry Men screenshot have been in grayscale? It was a black and white movie...
I thought about that, too. But then again, there was that color made-for-TV version in 1997 with Jack Lemmon, and I'll bet there have been a few stage productions of it as well.
Damn, somebody mod that post up. That has got to be the most lucid dissection of Congressional politics I've seen in a while. My friend, you are right on the money!
The sad thing is virtually every piece of legislation in the U.S. Congress is done that way nowadays. It's just unbelivable. And the reasons for it are thus:
Congressional procedures allow bills to easily have unrelated "riders" attached to them designed to either kill the bill entirely or create a "catch-22" as in this case.
The de-facto two party system reduces every political interaction to an "us vs. them" contest, which encourages petty, underhanded tactics, like those described in reason #1.
Now, don't ask me for a solution, because I don't have one, except perhaps to vote for more independents. And I don't mean so-called "third party" candidates either, I mean true independents who have no party affiliation, and thus are less prone to item #2 listed above.
Wow, those pictures of the Quartz reference platform look awesome indeed. After looking at those, I'd love to have a combination cellphone/PDA running EPOC.
You should definitely print a response to Mr. Chiariglione's comments referring to your story as slander.
As other posters have pointed out, all you did was report the news. If Chiariglione has a problem with that, too bad. He should take it up with the people who leaked the story, not the people who printed it.
It's finally out now. I saw a review recently (sorry, can't find the link) of the first DVD-A player. It "only" costs about US$3,000. Not to worry, though. Within a year or two, DVD-A decoding will be one of those "me-too" features that comes on every DVD player. And the sheer number of DVD players being sold will all but guarantee its sucess.
The cool thing about DVD-A is that it has two modes, 5.1 (24 bit, 96 kHz) and 2-channel (24 bit, 192 kHz). In the review I read the author stated that he was worried he wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and regular CDs, but he was stunned at the increase in quality. I can't wait to hear it myself.
I agree with you that the "free market" is the best thing for everyone involved. However, when it comes to the H1-B visa issue, all this talk of the "free market" is crap.
An H1-B visa is a way of bypassing the free market, and getting a worker who does not have the ability to bargain for proper compensation. They can't easily switch jobs, especially if they are applying for a green card. Thus, they do not get to participate in the "free market". That's why companies love it so much. It's why they keep pushing so hard for increases in H1-B visas. Next year they'll be asking for more. The rhetoric about the alleged "tech worker shortage" will have heated up considerably, and meanwhile, salaries will be lower and it will be more difficult for someone to actually find a job on this "free market" you are talking about.
By steadily increasing the H1-B visa cap, employers are creating a separate, non-free market where they have the upper hand and prospective employees have reduced bargaining power.
Over a year ago, I signed up for the "Investors Forecast" web site and promptly fogot about it. I had my preferences set to "don't send me any mail", and they didn't, so it was no big deal.
Recently, the "Investors Forecast" web site was bought by another company (don't have the name in front of me right now). I started getting spam. I got 6 messages within 4 days of the buyout. I was pissed.
After checking to make sure that my preferences were still set to "don't send me any mail", I wrote them a nasty letter telling them they better delete my account information pronto or I would take them to court (don't ask me on what grounds, I didn't really have anything in mind, I just wanted to sound serious). The CEO of the company phoned me personally to apologize and assure me that my info had been deleted from their machines, so I wouldn't be getting any more spam from them.
Wow. If only every company showed that much class.
Well, let's see. Accoring to the ICANN at large membership website:
With over 76,000 activated members, ICANN achieved its goal of a large, globally diverse membership.
I don't know about "globally diverse", since there weren't too many people from Africa who signed up, but in any case, there are "over" 76,000 members, but let's round it down to an even 76,000 for the sake of argument (also for the sake of not knowing how many "over" means!) Here's how many people voted in each jurisdiction:
17745 - Asia / Australia / Pacific
11309 - Europe
3449 - North America
1402 - Latin America and Caribbean
130 - Africa
34035 - Total
Therefore, voter turnout was about 45%, or just shy of half. Not too bad.
I'd like to see a breakdown of membership numbers by region, since the voting results lead me to believe that people in North America are under-voting. Either that or they under-registered. Either way, it's pretty typical of Americans, but kinda surprising that the rest of North America didn't do more to make up for it.
As you mentioned, the Slashdot endorsements reflected the results fairly closely, but for what it's worth, I'll mention that I voted the way I did because I did my research and concluded that member-nominated candidates Simmons and Auerbach were much better choices than any of the board-nominated candidates (basically a bunch of corporate lackeys, except for Lessig).
The results didn't match Slashdot's recommendations that closely, though. Note that Simmons and Lessig are much further down the list than they were listed in the/. endorsements. I also think Auerbach won simply because he was clearly the best choice by far. Just have a look at his website. The guy has some good ideas (even if those annoying and stupid-looking javascript popup windows are one of them!)
Not only does he have a good grasp of the technical issues, but he is also a lawyer, and very knowledgable about intellectual property, too. So, when he starts talking about curbing corporate interests and cutting back on trademark holder rights, the other board members won't be able to just dismiss him as a crank who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Yes! The man I rated number 1 is the winner. Karl was the only candidate who seemed to actually understand how DNS works. At one point he actually said, "there's no technical reason why we couldn't have millions of TLDs". Note that he didn't say we should have millions of TLDs, he was just pointing out that it was possible. No other candidate seemed to understand that.
I think this ought to be interesting. Auerbach has been very critical of the ICANN since it's inception. He has some good ideas about how to make the domain system more democratic (like having one or more TLD where trademark holders do not get first pick). It will be good to have someone on the board who represents something besides the corporate interest.
Not only that, but Karl was one of only three member-nominated candidates on the North American ballot. The other four candidates were nominated by the existing memebers of the ICANN board. I'm glad that people decided to thumb their noses at the board's attempt to stack the election with people friendly to their agendas. It ought to send them at least a small message (not that they will care).
Speaking of the U.S. elections (which the article mentioned, please don't mod me down for being off-topic), here is a recent article at policy.com that discusses getting rid of the Electoral College and replacing it with a direct popular vote. It discusses historical reasons for the creation of the current system, and provides some interesting links at the bottom.
That would not help. Current analog video standards like NTSC have some gamma correction already. And still, things recorded with film and video look different. Think about the way the evening news or things recorded with a home video camera look compared to things recorded on film (like movies or large-budget prime-time shows). The differences you see are due to the logarithmic vs. linear scale. The way video systems are currently designed, they clip values to maximum brightness at much lower intensities than film, effectively throwing away data at the top end of the brightness scale. There is no way to recover that data after the fact.
You could, theoretically, build a video camera with a very large linear range and then post-process the data to simulate being captured on a logarithmic-response sensor, but so far, no one has built a device like that. It wouldn't be too hard, though. It could even be done in-camera. Have the CCD sensor output data in a 32-bit-per-color-component linear scale, and then before recording it to tape, have a DSP or other chip convert that data into a 10-bit-per-component logarithmic scale. There are even existing file formats, such as Kodak's "Cineon", that would do nicely. A system like that, if it also had comparable resolution to film, say 4000x3000 pixels (see this resolution chart for more info about film resolution) might actually serve as a replacement for film.
The thing is, nobody's even talking about those things I just mentioned! Some people are actually ready to settle for plain-old HDTV, which is nowhere near as good as film, both in terms of brightness range and resolution.
Speaking of resolution, let's talk about that for a second. As I mentioned earlier, 35mm film has scannable info on it all the way up to about 4000x3000. On the other hand HDTV, which is what Lucas is using to shoot the next Star Wars movie, is only 1920x1080. Worse yet, those Texas Instruments DLP projectors that have been put into some theaters have so far been limited to 1280x1024 resolution. That's pathetic! Imagine if they installed one of those in the Mann's Chinese theater in L.A. -- one pixel on a screen that size would be as big as my head! Yet some people are so enamored with the word "digital" that they have been running around proclaiming that digital cinema has "arrived"! Ugh.
OS X doesn't offer a command line unless you buy server or developer versions for a lot more money.
That's not true. The terminal app comes standard with MacOS X, regardless of whether or not you get the optional developer package.
The pricing on the developer software has not been fixed, and the decision may even end up being to include the developer CD along with the standard system CD for free. Beats me what they'll actually end up doing, though. You just never know with Steve...
One thing the news story does not mention is if the debate moderator thought it was a real bill or simply mentioned it as a test for the candidates. If it's the former, the moderator should be fired for not fact-checking before asking questions. If it's the latter, she should be commended for creating such a hilarious moment.
Dude! Don't get me wrong, I loved the TRS-80, too! Calling it the "Trash-80" was just what everbody did, especially those who liked it. A joking sign of affection. (Did I just mention "affection" for a computer? Ugh.)
Yep, I wrote my first BASIC program on a TRS-80, too. Remeber those giant floppy disks that were 10 1/2 inches? Man, those things gave a whole new meaning to the word "floppy". Maybe I'm remembering wrong, and it was only 8 1/2 inches, but whatever it was, they sure were big.
I am not talking about the way the image is stored, I am talking about the way it is captured!
I mean that in order to get twice as much signal strength out of the light-sensing elements -- before it is quantized -- it needs to be a logarithmic scale.
With film or other photo-chemical light sensors (such as the human eye), in order to get twice as much chemical exposure, you need four times as much light.
With CCDs or other photo-electric light sensors (such as older, tube-style video cameras), in order to get twice as much signal strength, you only need two times as much light.
THAT is the reason why film and video look so different. It's because their brightness response curves are so completely different. And film, not video, is a closer match for how the human eye responds to light.
It's not "bunk". Film caputres light on a logarithmic (it takes four times as much light get twice the recorded brightness) scale, which is similar to the way the retina sees light. Video cameras, on the other hand, see light on a linear scale (twice as much light gives twice as much recorded brightness). That's what gives video its tell-tale look. Film really is closer to the way we see.
I've never actually heard anyone say video looks "too real". I've just heard proponents of digital video claim they've heard people say that. I've yet to actually meet someone who said it first-hand.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, I meant "how" not "ho".
They fed the program Kasparov's entire game history while keeping its game history secret from Kasparov. Normally in competitive chess you are allowed to study your opponents past games in order to learn what tactics they are likely to use. In this case, Kasparov wasn't allowed to do that. The fact that he went ahead with the game anyway was probably due to overconfidence on his part.
The folks at IBM seemed to realize that they won merely because of the setup, and thus when challenged for a rematch by Kasparov, they said they weren't interested, because they had "done everything they set out to do". (Personally, I think they were scared they would loose in a fair match.)
Kasparov has stated publicly that if the "Deep Blue" team actually abided by the rules of competitive chess, he will "tear [Deep Blue] to pieces". They have so far declined.
That said, even if the machine were able to beat the best human player in a fair match, it still would not be that remarkable, because computer chess programs are still limited to the "brute force" approach, where they pick their next move by simply searching as big an area of the total possible game tree as possible. The human mind does it differently, only examining at most a dozen or so possible moves before deciding. Ho the brain can pick such strategic moves without searching a significant portion of the total possible game tree is still one of the great mysteries of cognitive science.
That's almost a certainty. Hell, I wonder if they might even be excluded before the first few meetings! Given the current boards behavior, I wouldn't put it past them. If they're unhappy with the results of the elections, they might just change or ignore their bylaws and simply say "Sorry, even though people voted for you, you don't fit in with our 'consensus', we can't allow you to come in a mess things up. Goodbye."
Of course, instead of kicking them out, they could just cut troublemakers like Karl and Andy out of the loop by pushing more and more activities off onto "the staff". The non-elected, pro-business, pro-trademark corporate lackeys would have access to "the staff", while the elected board members would not. They've already made steps in this direction, with many of their decisions lately being attributed to the recommendations of "the staff". It all smacks of Al Gore's "no controlling legal authority". Ugh.
Yep, if the elected board members become to much of an annoyance, they will simply kick them out, probably claiming (with a completely straight face) that they were interefering with the "consensus" that the board represents.
Yeah, yeah. The spectre of Supreme Court nominations is raised in every election. We'll never get away from it. The fact that the Democrats bring it up so often in an effort to scare people into voting for them is just another indicator that they have nothing of substance to bring to the election. Gore will say anything, anything to get elected. He's got no real message or direction. And the Democrats know it. That's why they're resorting to these fear tactics.
Besides, you don't really believe that the President can get away with just appointing whomever he wants, do you? Look at the way the nominations have gone in the last few decades. The confirmation process has become a total Kangaroo court! There is no way someone with a clear agenda can get past it! The only hope a president has is to try and nominate a moderate or a "stealth" candidate who has an agenda, but doesn't display it out in the open. But even that rarely works. The idea that Bush or Gore will be able to just walk in and dump their favorite conservative or liberal in the court is nonsense.
Very few women seem to have joined the Nader campaign. Maybe because they are more practical...
The average citizen, both male and female, responds to pandering. GWB and Gore have done a lot of pandering to women in their campaigns. Nader has done very little. It may be a nice bit of fashionable PCness to assert that women are somehow smarter or better than men, but it isn't true.
Calling it a "supercomputer " is more a description of the specialized functionality of the processor, rather than the total speed. It used to be that vector processing was reserved only for the "big iron" machines from Cray & others. The introduction of AltiVec in PowerPC chips meant it was possible to get vector functions on a desktop machine for the first time. It really was a big step, and not just marketing blow.
That said, I don't what Motorola's plans for a G5 are, if any. It may turn out that Apple has no choice but to go with IBM's chips after a while.
I thought about that, too. But then again, there was that color made-for-TV version in 1997 with Jack Lemmon, and I'll bet there have been a few stage productions of it as well.
The sad thing is virtually every piece of legislation in the U.S. Congress is done that way nowadays. It's just unbelivable. And the reasons for it are thus:
Now, don't ask me for a solution, because I don't have one, except perhaps to vote for more independents. And I don't mean so-called "third party" candidates either, I mean true independents who have no party affiliation, and thus are less prone to item #2 listed above.
Wow, those pictures of the Quartz reference platform look awesome indeed. After looking at those, I'd love to have a combination cellphone/PDA running EPOC.
As other posters have pointed out, all you did was report the news. If Chiariglione has a problem with that, too bad. He should take it up with the people who leaked the story, not the people who printed it.
The cool thing about DVD-A is that it has two modes, 5.1 (24 bit, 96 kHz) and 2-channel (24 bit, 192 kHz). In the review I read the author stated that he was worried he wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and regular CDs, but he was stunned at the increase in quality. I can't wait to hear it myself.
Sure wish I could find that link...
An H1-B visa is a way of bypassing the free market, and getting a worker who does not have the ability to bargain for proper compensation. They can't easily switch jobs, especially if they are applying for a green card. Thus, they do not get to participate in the "free market". That's why companies love it so much. It's why they keep pushing so hard for increases in H1-B visas. Next year they'll be asking for more. The rhetoric about the alleged "tech worker shortage" will have heated up considerably, and meanwhile, salaries will be lower and it will be more difficult for someone to actually find a job on this "free market" you are talking about.
By steadily increasing the H1-B visa cap, employers are creating a separate, non-free market where they have the upper hand and prospective employees have reduced bargaining power.
Reminds me of a guy I knew in college. He was a hunt-n-peck typist, too.
When describing his typing techniques, he started out by holding up the index finger of his right hand.
"First year of computer science."
Then he held up the index finger of his left hand.
"Second year of computer science."
Poor guy had to get a Ph.D. just to able to use all ten digits.
Over a year ago, I signed up for the "Investors Forecast" web site and promptly fogot about it. I had my preferences set to "don't send me any mail", and they didn't, so it was no big deal.
Recently, the "Investors Forecast" web site was bought by another company (don't have the name in front of me right now). I started getting spam. I got 6 messages within 4 days of the buyout. I was pissed.
After checking to make sure that my preferences were still set to "don't send me any mail", I wrote them a nasty letter telling them they better delete my account information pronto or I would take them to court (don't ask me on what grounds, I didn't really have anything in mind, I just wanted to sound serious). The CEO of the company phoned me personally to apologize and assure me that my info had been deleted from their machines, so I wouldn't be getting any more spam from them.
Wow. If only every company showed that much class.
34035 - Total
Therefore, voter turnout was about 45%, or just shy of half. Not too bad.
I'd like to see a breakdown of membership numbers by region, since the voting results lead me to believe that people in North America are under-voting. Either that or they under-registered. Either way, it's pretty typical of Americans, but kinda surprising that the rest of North America didn't do more to make up for it.
As you mentioned, the Slashdot endorsements reflected the results fairly closely, but for what it's worth, I'll mention that I voted the way I did because I did my research and concluded that member-nominated candidates Simmons and Auerbach were much better choices than any of the board-nominated candidates (basically a bunch of corporate lackeys, except for Lessig).
The results didn't match Slashdot's recommendations that closely, though. Note that Simmons and Lessig are much further down the list than they were listed in the /. endorsements. I also think Auerbach won simply because he was clearly the best choice by far. Just have a look at his website. The guy has some good ideas (even if those annoying and stupid-looking javascript popup windows are one of them!)
Not only does he have a good grasp of the technical issues, but he is also a lawyer, and very knowledgable about intellectual property, too. So, when he starts talking about curbing corporate interests and cutting back on trademark holder rights, the other board members won't be able to just dismiss him as a crank who doesn't know what he's talking about.
I think this ought to be interesting. Auerbach has been very critical of the ICANN since it's inception. He has some good ideas about how to make the domain system more democratic (like having one or more TLD where trademark holders do not get first pick). It will be good to have someone on the board who represents something besides the corporate interest.
Not only that, but Karl was one of only three member-nominated candidates on the North American ballot. The other four candidates were nominated by the existing memebers of the ICANN board. I'm glad that people decided to thumb their noses at the board's attempt to stack the election with people friendly to their agendas. It ought to send them at least a small message (not that they will care).
Speaking of the U.S. elections (which the article mentioned, please don't mod me down for being off-topic), here is a recent article at policy.com that discusses getting rid of the Electoral College and replacing it with a direct popular vote. It discusses historical reasons for the creation of the current system, and provides some interesting links at the bottom.
Heh, that's great. I like the bit about the Turing test. "Subject B ate Subject A and went on his way."
You could, theoretically, build a video camera with a very large linear range and then post-process the data to simulate being captured on a logarithmic-response sensor, but so far, no one has built a device like that. It wouldn't be too hard, though. It could even be done in-camera. Have the CCD sensor output data in a 32-bit-per-color-component linear scale, and then before recording it to tape, have a DSP or other chip convert that data into a 10-bit-per-component logarithmic scale. There are even existing file formats, such as Kodak's "Cineon", that would do nicely. A system like that, if it also had comparable resolution to film, say 4000x3000 pixels (see this resolution chart for more info about film resolution) might actually serve as a replacement for film.
The thing is, nobody's even talking about those things I just mentioned! Some people are actually ready to settle for plain-old HDTV, which is nowhere near as good as film, both in terms of brightness range and resolution.
Speaking of resolution, let's talk about that for a second. As I mentioned earlier, 35mm film has scannable info on it all the way up to about 4000x3000. On the other hand HDTV, which is what Lucas is using to shoot the next Star Wars movie, is only 1920x1080. Worse yet, those Texas Instruments DLP projectors that have been put into some theaters have so far been limited to 1280x1024 resolution. That's pathetic! Imagine if they installed one of those in the Mann's Chinese theater in L.A. -- one pixel on a screen that size would be as big as my head! Yet some people are so enamored with the word "digital" that they have been running around proclaiming that digital cinema has "arrived"! Ugh.
That's not true. The terminal app comes standard with MacOS X, regardless of whether or not you get the optional developer package.
The pricing on the developer software has not been fixed, and the decision may even end up being to include the developer CD along with the standard system CD for free. Beats me what they'll actually end up doing, though. You just never know with Steve...
In any case, you're right. The person and/or people who blundered by letting that question through might want to spruce up their resumés tomorrow.
One thing the news story does not mention is if the debate moderator thought it was a real bill or simply mentioned it as a test for the candidates. If it's the former, the moderator should be fired for not fact-checking before asking questions. If it's the latter, she should be commended for creating such a hilarious moment.
Yep, I wrote my first BASIC program on a TRS-80, too. Remeber those giant floppy disks that were 10 1/2 inches? Man, those things gave a whole new meaning to the word "floppy". Maybe I'm remembering wrong, and it was only 8 1/2 inches, but whatever it was, they sure were big.
I mean that in order to get twice as much signal strength out of the light-sensing elements -- before it is quantized -- it needs to be a logarithmic scale.
With film or other photo-chemical light sensors (such as the human eye), in order to get twice as much chemical exposure, you need four times as much light.
With CCDs or other photo-electric light sensors (such as older, tube-style video cameras), in order to get twice as much signal strength, you only need two times as much light.
THAT is the reason why film and video look so different. It's because their brightness response curves are so completely different. And film, not video, is a closer match for how the human eye responds to light.
I've never actually heard anyone say video looks "too real". I've just heard proponents of digital video claim they've heard people say that. I've yet to actually meet someone who said it first-hand.