Right, because adding arctic fleece to bathing suits means that both eskimos and surfers are going to be happy with the product. A 3d movie isn't just a plain movie with 3d sprinkled on top, and will look like a plain movie if the 3d is removed again. The 3dness changes the whole way the cinematic choices are made to develop the story, and without the 3d viewing, the vertigo-inducing cinematic choices look extremely hokey and strange and amateurish.
What this announcement means to me is that the home movie market is not particularly important to the artistic vision of the upcoming Pixar stories. Very disheartening.
Home viewers don't have the 3D hardware, and even if they did, the displays are already horribly low-fidelity compared to the professional projection equipment. Encoding stereoscopic information into the already limited datastream just reduces the image quality even more, either in frame rate or color fidelity. Or the home copy of the movie just doesn't encode any stereoscopic view and you lose out on all the uses of 3D that they wove into the artistic cinematic choices throughout.
An example of this phenomenon is the Christmas movie, "Polar Express." The movie is crafted as a classic 3D experience: nearly every scene uses extensive use of depth, foreshortening and glistening reflective surfaces that really come alive in stereoscopic view. By contrast, watching the monoscopic view on the DVD is like covering one eye with a Dixie cup at the doctor's office.
And given my esteem for artistic attention to detail in past Pixar movies, this is a real problem in my book. The "depth" of Polar Express is nothing compared to even a Pixar short.
Absolutely agreed. You can't legislate the non-existence of abortion. You can legislate funding to improve the education and lives of people to reduce their risk and their dependence on risky procedures. Show leadership, not censorship. Some Things Won't Go Away
Frankly, I could care less about the top 40 or flavor of the week singles as that is not something I'd ever want to listen to. But I could see how someone like Britney Spears would feel the punch of fans just getting "Oops, I Did It Again" and not being forced to pay for the filler crap that barely passes as music on the rest of the album.
Not that I'm a Britney fan, but let's build on this logic. I'll simplify the numbers for the discussion.
The price is $12 for album B. If they make it available separately, the price is $2 for the mega-hit cut three or B3, and the price is also $2 for the lame stinkers B1, B2, B4, B5... B8. In aggregate, buying B is cheaper than buying B1...B8 a la carte. However, if buying B is the only way to get B3, and nobody wants the other cuts, then the value proposition is too low. The labels decry this sort of fate: they fear that each B buyer will be converted to a B3 buyer, and revenue will drop horribly because almost nobody likes the seven filler cuts.
What is overlooked is the expanded market for B3 buyers. For any popular cut, there should be WAY more B3 buyers at $2 than there ever were B buyers at $12. First, the price point is more impulse-friendly to a wider marketplace which now includes little kids. Second, the price point appears to be a good value proposition: no filler. In fact, I would expect that buyers(B3)*$2 > buyers(B)*$12, by a long shot. Any earnings from the less-popular B6 cut would be gravy on top, if the label even decides to fully produce it all the way to market.
See, the whole thing is just a misunderstanding of the phrase, "No warrant shall issue but upon probable cause." It doesn't mean they can't search, it means they don't need a warrant. How silly is that?
I intended this as a joke, but upon reflection... *sigh*
First, it's just a silly non-scientific reply to a silly non-scientific reply on a science thread. You know, jokes. Lighten up. Second, I would have to say after a thorough re-reading of that page, that ancient Indian mythologies and even the western Thoreau kinda predate your favorite twentieth century pop-sci-fi author, an author who (by the way) highly values silly non-scientific philosophy. You know, jokes. Lighten up.
But then again, just because Google is making faster progress doesn't mean much.
I enjoy watching Google beat the snot out of the previous 900lb gorilla as much as the next guy, but this was an understatement. All too often, Google has done the interesting 80% of the functionality and leaves the boring 20% of the cleanup, followthrough, polish and finish languishing in "beta" stage for months, years, forever. That's the 80/20 rule: the boring 20% is actually 80% of the sweat and toil to make a solid product/service.
A number of people refer to raytracing as an "embarrassingly parallel" process. The implication in the term being that there's no need for communication between each core or thread or process: they each just get handed a rectangular portion of the offscreen screen memory, and they do their job alone, and when they're all done, then the screen can be flipped to show the results.
I will grant that the actual rendering of pixels is indeed independent, but that's not the proposal. Nobody wants the same geometry shot from the same camera angle with the same lights to be rendered at 50Hz. They want motion. The lights move. The camera moves. The geometry moves. Every frame is different. And while the pixel-pushing is embarrassingly parallel, each one of those cores is going to have to be told what to draw each time around. Shared memory throttles the effectiveness of parallel processing. Shared caches, shared pipelines, shared buses, shared anything.
As the core count goes up, so does the cost of fanning out the new geometry updates every frame. I'm not going to say it's a deal-breaker, but it's hardly an "embarrassingly parallel" problem.
My daughter got one of these toy safes with a "laser" security system. You have to teach it a passcode, and it won't open without it. But if you disrupt the little beams across its door, it starts an annoying klaxon and light-show that lasts a long 30 seconds. I cringed at her must-be-secure attitude, locking up her little valuables, especially since she's an ONLY CHILD. I tripped it "accidentally" a couple times just so she would feel like it was doing its job.
However, I'm quite happy with how it backfired. Very valuable security lessons! It has taught her that security is inversely proportional to convenience, that the more complicated a mechanism is the more likely it will fail, that honestly accidental infractions can't be prosecuted like infractions with intent, and when a security system fails she can't access her own stuff. It eats batteries like crazy. It acts stupid when the batteries are low, so she has to recode it every week or two. Also, it blinks red at weird intervals all night to remind her that either she can't trust people around her, or she is being unnecessarily paranoid. I think the safe is now without batteries and empty.
A couple weeks ago, I heard the governor of Montana on NPR, talking about why his state wasn't going along with the federal plan. It was an embarrassing interview, he tried to sound folksy as a rural westerner would, but ended up sounding ornery, obstinate for no real reason, and clueless on the real issues. In my opinion, he missed a real chance to explain real reasons why Real ID doesn't make sense. I very much wish that they would get security experts like Bruce Schneier to talk in layman's terms about the actual shortcomings, or even Constitutional scholars to talk about the states-rights issues that apply here, than to get politicos who just want to explain why they "ain't signin' up today fer a concept of tomarra."
I haven't seen recent episodes of the new BSG, but I can bet that we're not going to have the same lame conclusion that the original BSG had. I mean, really... Dirk Benedict figuring out how to drive an Earth car on two wheels, twenty seconds after learning that the device runs on an "internal combustion" power source, that set the gold standard for lame series finales.
Paul Preuss got the same treatment. I think the series was called Venus Prime or something like it. It had a very early non-gritty proto-cyberpunk feel to it. The gimmick in the series was interesting. Paul took a short story from Arthur C. Clarke's back list, and turned it almost-absolutely verbatim into a chapter of the ongoing serial plotline. He did a reasonable job making it blend in so you couldn't spot the short story without already being familiar with it. There were at least four books, I can't be bothered to search them now, but it was cool to compare the short with the chapter after reading each novella.
And before anyone jumps at me, I know there's the for keyword in Python. It just doesn't work the same - just try to iterate from 0 to 2 billion and see. I expect that you're getting at the likelihood of using range(2000000000) instead of xrange(2000000000). The first will happily consume your RAM to make a list of two billion integers. You encounter this, you learn your way around it and learn more about python in the process. If you missed the i++ step of a C for loop, you'd get similar results for different reasons. It's a learning opportunity and every language has 'em.
Pi Day is internationally celebrated in honor of the mathematical constant "Pi," who's actual value will -- now and forever -- remain unknown.
When can we have grammar day? First, it is "whose," as possessive pronouns never use apostrophes. Second, it is not even "whose" because Pi isn't a person.
I'm expecting plenty of jokes about EA paying the fee, taking Take Two for a "ride," robbing Take Two of all its money and professional services, then firing a cap into the business before driving off.
But the office there where I support them. It's a nightmare. W95 machines still in use! Old 14" monitors that are dark and almost yellow now running on Pentium 133 processors. They refuse to spend the money to upgrade because "these work, why replace it?" Sounds legitimate to me, except perhaps the ergonomics of a dim yellowed screen. What is there, in the Real Estate business, that needs the latest Intel Duo Quad Duo Core Duo Octaplex II Duo processor? They look at MLS websites, they type a few fields with new data, and then they hop in the car to be away from the office for a couple hours. Everything they need to archive is on paper. Lots of folks hated XP when it was forced on them, simply because it's different and it takes time to learn the differences. Just because YOU are a fan of the latest, doesn't mean it makes sense for them.
Say you're an electronics company and you sell components. These components are used in the displays, keyboards, mice, storage and power areas of a single product, say, a laptop. If a laptop maker uses your displays, keyboards and power units, but decides they can make the storage and mice themselves, that's their right. You still want to sell those displays, keyboards and power units. If they use your patented methods to make those storage and mice, though, does that sound legitimate under patent law?
I find it kind of irritating that so many people today find books like the Silmarillion to be so difficult they won't finish it. While I'm not accusing you of being a lightweight, I do see more and more "literature" catering to the simpler tastes instead of challenging the reader.
Few students bother reading Shakespeare in high school anymore. I did, and I enjoyed it, and I am glad I tried it. I got the jokes, I saw the ways that various scenes were metaphors for the human condition, I felt like I was in another time and it wasn't strange. That led me to read the Silmarillion. And re-read those legends from other points of view through the Lost Tales. Tale of Two Cities wasn't a problem. Moby Dick was light reading. E A Poe and H P Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany were all macabre buddies. Imagine the world of Beowulf before Hollywood does it for you. I haven't read War and Peace but this year I picked up an English translation of the 900 AD story, the Tale of Genji, considered by some to be the oldest novel in the world. The Epic of Gilgamesh is older still, and any Humanities course will compare and contrast Gilgamesh with similar parts of Genesis.
If you enjoy reading, even if it's Harry Potter or something from Dean Koontz, keep trying deeper and deeper works, stretching your vocabulary and attention span. Your mind will thank you for it.
The problem with this is that we are moving more and more towards interactive environments where everything from the ground to the flowerpots are breakable, bendable or movable. It doesn't sound like this new system will play very nice with physics intensive or highly interactive environments. Now, i could be completely wrong. He doesn't address the point directly. But it is still a point for concern. I agree completely. When Carmack can implement even a low-polygon all-things-dynamic wonder like Katamari Damashii using his quartile duplex hectotree algorithm, I'll be impressed. The time of precompiling 99% of the game into a static optimized traversal graph is over. Now you've got a bag of loose models (many of which morph), the sum of which fills the screen.
I didn't see anything on the first page linked that mentioned "March of Ides" but the traditional phrase is "the Ides of March." As in, "Beware the Ides of March," the infamous and probably apocryphal advice to Julius Caesar before his assassination. The Ides is the midpoint of a month, so the 15th of March is the Ides of March.
Slashdot Mirror
Lex turns to the clueless paleontologists, "This is Pogo! I know this!"
Right, because adding arctic fleece to bathing suits means that both eskimos and surfers are going to be happy with the product. A 3d movie isn't just a plain movie with 3d sprinkled on top, and will look like a plain movie if the 3d is removed again. The 3dness changes the whole way the cinematic choices are made to develop the story, and without the 3d viewing, the vertigo-inducing cinematic choices look extremely hokey and strange and amateurish.
What this announcement means to me is that the home movie market is not particularly important to the artistic vision of the upcoming Pixar stories. Very disheartening.
Home viewers don't have the 3D hardware, and even if they did, the displays are already horribly low-fidelity compared to the professional projection equipment. Encoding stereoscopic information into the already limited datastream just reduces the image quality even more, either in frame rate or color fidelity. Or the home copy of the movie just doesn't encode any stereoscopic view and you lose out on all the uses of 3D that they wove into the artistic cinematic choices throughout.
An example of this phenomenon is the Christmas movie, "Polar Express." The movie is crafted as a classic 3D experience: nearly every scene uses extensive use of depth, foreshortening and glistening reflective surfaces that really come alive in stereoscopic view. By contrast, watching the monoscopic view on the DVD is like covering one eye with a Dixie cup at the doctor's office.
And given my esteem for artistic attention to detail in past Pixar movies, this is a real problem in my book. The "depth" of Polar Express is nothing compared to even a Pixar short.
Why am I imagining Steve Jobs pulling a large ornate tassle, and a tall guy walking up asking in an impossibly deep baritone voice, "You rang?"
Absolutely agreed. You can't legislate the non-existence of abortion. You can legislate funding to improve the education and lives of people to reduce their risk and their dependence on risky procedures. Show leadership, not censorship. Some Things Won't Go Away
Not that I'm a Britney fan, but let's build on this logic. I'll simplify the numbers for the discussion.
The price is $12 for album B. If they make it available separately, the price is $2 for the mega-hit cut three or B3, and the price is also $2 for the lame stinkers B1, B2, B4, B5... B8. In aggregate, buying B is cheaper than buying B1...B8 a la carte. However, if buying B is the only way to get B3, and nobody wants the other cuts, then the value proposition is too low. The labels decry this sort of fate: they fear that each B buyer will be converted to a B3 buyer, and revenue will drop horribly because almost nobody likes the seven filler cuts.
What is overlooked is the expanded market for B3 buyers. For any popular cut, there should be WAY more B3 buyers at $2 than there ever were B buyers at $12. First, the price point is more impulse-friendly to a wider marketplace which now includes little kids. Second, the price point appears to be a good value proposition: no filler. In fact, I would expect that buyers(B3)*$2 > buyers(B)*$12, by a long shot. Any earnings from the less-popular B6 cut would be gravy on top, if the label even decides to fully produce it all the way to market.
See, the whole thing is just a misunderstanding of the phrase, "No warrant shall issue but upon probable cause." It doesn't mean they can't search, it means they don't need a warrant. How silly is that?
I intended this as a joke, but upon reflection... *sigh*
First, it's just a silly non-scientific reply to a silly non-scientific reply on a science thread. You know, jokes. Lighten up. Second, I would have to say after a thorough re-reading of that page, that ancient Indian mythologies and even the western Thoreau kinda predate your favorite twentieth century pop-sci-fi author, an author who (by the way) highly values silly non-scientific philosophy. You know, jokes. Lighten up.
No, it's turtles all the way down.
I enjoy watching Google beat the snot out of the previous 900lb gorilla as much as the next guy, but this was an understatement. All too often, Google has done the interesting 80% of the functionality and leaves the boring 20% of the cleanup, followthrough, polish and finish languishing in "beta" stage for months, years, forever. That's the 80/20 rule: the boring 20% is actually 80% of the sweat and toil to make a solid product/service.
Reminds me of the old saw,
Q: How many MIT Engineers does it take to screw up a light-bulb joke?
A: That's not funny!
A number of people refer to raytracing as an "embarrassingly parallel" process. The implication in the term being that there's no need for communication between each core or thread or process: they each just get handed a rectangular portion of the offscreen screen memory, and they do their job alone, and when they're all done, then the screen can be flipped to show the results.
I will grant that the actual rendering of pixels is indeed independent, but that's not the proposal. Nobody wants the same geometry shot from the same camera angle with the same lights to be rendered at 50Hz. They want motion. The lights move. The camera moves. The geometry moves. Every frame is different. And while the pixel-pushing is embarrassingly parallel, each one of those cores is going to have to be told what to draw each time around. Shared memory throttles the effectiveness of parallel processing. Shared caches, shared pipelines, shared buses, shared anything.
As the core count goes up, so does the cost of fanning out the new geometry updates every frame. I'm not going to say it's a deal-breaker, but it's hardly an "embarrassingly parallel" problem.
My daughter got one of these toy safes with a "laser" security system. You have to teach it a passcode, and it won't open without it. But if you disrupt the little beams across its door, it starts an annoying klaxon and light-show that lasts a long 30 seconds. I cringed at her must-be-secure attitude, locking up her little valuables, especially since she's an ONLY CHILD. I tripped it "accidentally" a couple times just so she would feel like it was doing its job.
However, I'm quite happy with how it backfired. Very valuable security lessons! It has taught her that security is inversely proportional to convenience, that the more complicated a mechanism is the more likely it will fail, that honestly accidental infractions can't be prosecuted like infractions with intent, and when a security system fails she can't access her own stuff. It eats batteries like crazy. It acts stupid when the batteries are low, so she has to recode it every week or two. Also, it blinks red at weird intervals all night to remind her that either she can't trust people around her, or she is being unnecessarily paranoid. I think the safe is now without batteries and empty.
A couple weeks ago, I heard the governor of Montana on NPR, talking about why his state wasn't going along with the federal plan. It was an embarrassing interview, he tried to sound folksy as a rural westerner would, but ended up sounding ornery, obstinate for no real reason, and clueless on the real issues. In my opinion, he missed a real chance to explain real reasons why Real ID doesn't make sense. I very much wish that they would get security experts like Bruce Schneier to talk in layman's terms about the actual shortcomings, or even Constitutional scholars to talk about the states-rights issues that apply here, than to get politicos who just want to explain why they "ain't signin' up today fer a concept of tomarra."
I haven't seen recent episodes of the new BSG, but I can bet that we're not going to have the same lame conclusion that the original BSG had. I mean, really... Dirk Benedict figuring out how to drive an Earth car on two wheels, twenty seconds after learning that the device runs on an "internal combustion" power source, that set the gold standard for lame series finales.
Paul Preuss got the same treatment. I think the series was called Venus Prime or something like it. It had a very early non-gritty proto-cyberpunk feel to it. The gimmick in the series was interesting. Paul took a short story from Arthur C. Clarke's back list, and turned it almost-absolutely verbatim into a chapter of the ongoing serial plotline. He did a reasonable job making it blend in so you couldn't spot the short story without already being familiar with it. There were at least four books, I can't be bothered to search them now, but it was cool to compare the short with the chapter after reading each novella.
> take funny moderation and no funny moderation
Taken.
When can we have grammar day? First, it is "whose," as possessive pronouns never use apostrophes. Second, it is not even "whose" because Pi isn't a person.
I'm expecting plenty of jokes about EA paying the fee, taking Take Two for a "ride," robbing Take Two of all its money and professional services, then firing a cap into the business before driving off.
Say you're an electronics company and you sell components. These components are used in the displays, keyboards, mice, storage and power areas of a single product, say, a laptop. If a laptop maker uses your displays, keyboards and power units, but decides they can make the storage and mice themselves, that's their right. You still want to sell those displays, keyboards and power units. If they use your patented methods to make those storage and mice, though, does that sound legitimate under patent law?
I find it kind of irritating that so many people today find books like the Silmarillion to be so difficult they won't finish it. While I'm not accusing you of being a lightweight, I do see more and more "literature" catering to the simpler tastes instead of challenging the reader.
Few students bother reading Shakespeare in high school anymore. I did, and I enjoyed it, and I am glad I tried it. I got the jokes, I saw the ways that various scenes were metaphors for the human condition, I felt like I was in another time and it wasn't strange. That led me to read the Silmarillion. And re-read those legends from other points of view through the Lost Tales. Tale of Two Cities wasn't a problem. Moby Dick was light reading. E A Poe and H P Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany were all macabre buddies. Imagine the world of Beowulf before Hollywood does it for you. I haven't read War and Peace but this year I picked up an English translation of the 900 AD story, the Tale of Genji, considered by some to be the oldest novel in the world. The Epic of Gilgamesh is older still, and any Humanities course will compare and contrast Gilgamesh with similar parts of Genesis.
If you enjoy reading, even if it's Harry Potter or something from Dean Koontz, keep trying deeper and deeper works, stretching your vocabulary and attention span. Your mind will thank you for it.
I didn't see anything on the first page linked that mentioned "March of Ides" but the traditional phrase is "the Ides of March." As in, "Beware the Ides of March," the infamous and probably apocryphal advice to Julius Caesar before his assassination. The Ides is the midpoint of a month, so the 15th of March is the Ides of March.