Napster CEO: "but they're being restricted from buying anything other than downloads from Apple"
Funny that seeing as (1) a large proportion of commercially available music can be downloaded from Apple and (2) iPods will play mp3 format files from any vendor or ripped from CDs. This guy is simply lying. It's interesting that someone can get away with such a bald-faced lie.
Does one need to prove the sky is blue? The fact is, anyone who denies it either doesn't speak the language, is blind, or is a moron.
Simple economics shows this is completely implausible. The cost of building a simulation good enough to fool people is way too high to be worth the risk that one of the "contestants" discovers it's all fake blowing the investment.
You're living proof that there are people stupid enough to fall for a hoax like this whereas hoaxing a bunch of individuals "close up" over an extended period of time is a very hard and expensive task. Given that hoaxing the audience and hoaxing the "contestants" cost a widely differing amount of money but both would net the same audience why go for the more expensive option?
So I'm wondering, how easily could we get green cards for highly talented British individuals with astronaut training and TV experience?
It's trivially obvious that we acquire our...
on
Videogame Mythbusting
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...values from the culture around us. That includes sources like our parents, our peers and what is presented on TV. I see no reason at all why video games are different and why kids wouldn't acquire values from them. Given the number of kids who seem to be brought up on GTA it seems highly likely that there are many people around whose values have been informed by this game.
Would we somehow be better off if Wikipedia didn't exist at all?
Despite some inaccuracies the Wikipedia is a veritable goldmine of useful information. What do the people who complain about it expect? An editor to peer review every single article? Wikipedia is probably the best model for a free encyclopedia that anyone has come up with and it's an amazing use of technology almost undreamt of a couple of decades ago. As long as we bear in mind how the entries are created (and it's not exactly a tough concept to grasp) how can it not be providing great benefit for people? The nay-sayers would put us back into the dark ages where we have to pay money for out-of-date information when there are people out there with the up-do-date facts who want to share them now for nothing. By all means don't keep the innacuracies a secret (because, among other things, that'll help to get them fixed), but there's no need for moral lectures unless you have a better alternative to propose. So I think your question is the right one to ask.
As you move into modern times, all the special effects are done the same way.
Years ago in the UK (and maybe it's still going) there was a TV series called Tomorrow's World which was basically a science and technology program. They'd show the latest technological developments developments in things ranging from fridge or oven design to agriculture and TV cameras. But over the years it started getting boring as more and more stories went "and this feeds into a microprocessor" (these were the days when microprocessor was pronounced in a slower heavier voice as the notion still had some mystique). The microprocessor was just this black box that could do anything and for which no further explanation was required. Movies have almost reached this stage. But not quite - Star Wars III still used some green screen and motion capture whereas Pixar productions never do.
Pseudo-technical articles about visual effects are 95% BS. Companies lie about what they did for all sorts of reasons including trying to look clever. My own company partly lies about what software it uses because telling the truth would upset some strategic deals with vendors they have made, and also because it makes the software developers look good. I've worked on shots that are considered (by people in the business) to be seminal applications of revolutionary methods that didn't use those methods at all - not even the slightest bit. Often supervisors have no idea what the artists really do. They'll claim method X was automatic when in fact every time the output of X was used it was hand-tweaked without their knowing. Sometimes a problem can be solved in an embarassingly simple way but you don't want to reveal that to your competitors. Many VFX articles (Cinefex is the worst here) are not about how the movie was made at all. They're simply lists of the artists who were involved with filler text between. And worst of all, my second last company claimed it worked on a couple of large blockbuster movies over several years, even making a press releases talking about their progress - all with the complicity of the studio - without doing any work on them. (Because these lies were agreed upon as part of a legal settlement.)
each blade of grass blowing in the wind in a slightly different way!
Come on! This is trivial stuff. A few layers of noise does a nice job here. Of course if we're talking about blades of grass it's a good opportunity to make up some BS about alife research. The VFX business keeps up a mystique about using methods far more sophisticated than are actually used. (And when sophisticated methods really are used they tend to be boring and technical and don't get reported much.)
What you're seeing here isn't cynical ignorance. It's pure cynicism.
The software itself simulates performing agents...
Ie. there are subroutines...
by executing brains
...ie. blocks of code given a stupid name to gain some cachet from alife reserach
which are bits of code that use fuzzy-logic
Ie. a bunch of numbers are added up based on which...
to select from a series of pre-generated actions.
...a conditional branch is made.
A motion-tree is a set of these actions for a given character. You can imagine a motion-tree as a set of actions that start from a rest-pose. Each branch is the set of actions that can proceed from that rest-pose like a swing or a block
Blah, blah, blah. More conditional branches, the details of which we choose not to report but we'll try to blind you with science so you think we've said something interesting.
In the making of $MOVIE they used $COMPUTER_BRAND computers to render the images. They used $HDD_BRAND hard drives to store the data. They used a network to connect the computers together. They use some off the shelf software ($SOFTWARE1 and $SOFTWARE2) for some of it and they used some proprietary software for other parts. Simulation techniques devised by $RESEARCHER were used for $EXCITING_SCENE. And $INTERESTING_DETAILS amazing facts that you couldn't actually guess were revealed in the article where INTERESTING_DETAILS<1.
...traders. My rules of thumb are simple. (1) Don't order from companies whose brand names are so poor that they have to use domain names intended to capture random searches like www.wirelesshotspot4u.com or www.lesbianteenelectronics.com, especially if multiple such domains lead to one web site, (2) don't order from companies who can't afford to hire someone competent to design their web site and (3) don't order from New York.
I've stuck to these rules and I've never experienced any trouble.
You won. I've just ordered a 7 port powered hub and I may even have found a USB power connector for my phone. I didn't really expect a useful answer from ask.alashdot.org but it seems my expectations were set too low!
According to a recent press release Google have released a beta of their latest invention: Google Sliced Bread. It's bread that you can buy already presliced. Google developers have figured out how to get the bread sliced even though it's still in the packaging. Google fanboys have been wetting themselves over this one. Admittedly it's only available for residents of Portland but Google Labs has promised a more general release is forthcoming. They even hint that a future version might have slices that are transverse to the length of the loaf. If they can manage that feat then their stock is sure to shoot through the roof.
Smart playlists are seriously underestimated by people who haven't yet tried iTunes. Smart playlists are practically procedural playlists. Want to play all the music you haven't listened to in the last 3 months? Or get iTunes to suggest a random sample of unrated tracks for you to rate? Or simply play the 80s electronic stuff that you haven't yet played today? Or how about your favorites from each genre or even something more sophisticated like getting iTunes to play one song from each year from 1970 to 1990 in order? Smart playlists support all of these (the last one is slightly tricky to figure out, but only slightly).
What's more, on some models of iPod these lists are dynamically generated on the fly in the iPod itself (well, they are on the nano) in response to changes you might make (eg. by playing or rating tracks).
Please! It's 'sucks badly'. 'Bad' might be acceptable in speech but not in journalism. And 'software' is singular and the verb must match.
The part my friend doesn't include is how he guessed a trick was performed and won a necklace from him!
Your friend guessed a trick was performed? Surely you mean 'how it was performed'? And what does that have to do with anything? And where does the necklace come in. This writing reads like something said by Vicky Pollard.
...and really care what they're doing...
Was this really what was said? 'Care what they're doing'?
The ones that have the most bugs, the most items that are supposedly in there but don't work.
Hey! Who needs grammar when you can just string words together in any order you want?
That was the most painful thing I've tried to read for a long time. Typos and minor errors I'll put up with (even though/. apparently has editors). But this reads like it was written by a retard.
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Simple economics shows this is completely implausible. The cost of building a simulation good enough to fool people is way too high to be worth the risk that one of the "contestants" discovers it's all fake blowing the investment.
You're living proof that there are people stupid enough to fall for a hoax like this whereas hoaxing a bunch of individuals "close up" over an extended period of time is a very hard and expensive task. Given that hoaxing the audience and hoaxing the "contestants" cost a widely differing amount of money but both would net the same audience why go for the more expensive option?
So I'm wondering, how easily could we get green cards for highly talented British individuals with astronaut training and TV experience?
...values from the culture around us. That includes sources like our parents, our peers and what is presented on TV. I see no reason at all why video games are different and why kids wouldn't acquire values from them. Given the number of kids who seem to be brought up on GTA it seems highly likely that there are many people around whose values have been informed by this game.
And I suppose C++ became conscious when they added RTTI.
You must be a victim of spell-checker overuse during childhood.
What you're seeing here isn't cynical ignorance. It's pure cynicism.
In the making of $MOVIE they used $COMPUTER_BRAND computers to render the images. They used $HDD_BRAND hard drives to store the data. They used a network to connect the computers together. They use some off the shelf software ($SOFTWARE1 and $SOFTWARE2) for some of it and they used some proprietary software for other parts. Simulation techniques devised by $RESEARCHER were used for $EXCITING_SCENE. And $INTERESTING_DETAILS amazing facts that you couldn't actually guess were revealed in the article where INTERESTING_DETAILS<1.
I've stuck to these rules and I've never experienced any trouble.
Ah! It was just a typo after all.
I am so behind the times.
What do you expect? A degree from a university in Kansas is equivalent to kindergarten in civilized places in the world.
You won. I've just ordered a 7 port powered hub and I may even have found a USB power connector for my phone. I didn't really expect a useful answer from ask.alashdot.org but it seems my expectations were set too low!
I've searched and searched and I can't find it anywhere on my Palm.
According to a recent press release Google have released a beta of their latest invention: Google Sliced Bread. It's bread that you can buy already presliced. Google developers have figured out how to get the bread sliced even though it's still in the packaging. Google fanboys have been wetting themselves over this one. Admittedly it's only available for residents of Portland but Google Labs has promised a more general release is forthcoming. They even hint that a future version might have slices that are transverse to the length of the loaf. If they can manage that feat then their stock is sure to shoot through the roof.
What's more, on some models of iPod these lists are dynamically generated on the fly in the iPod itself (well, they are on the nano) in response to changes you might make (eg. by playing or rating tracks).
That was the most painful thing I've tried to read for a long time. Typos and minor errors I'll put up with (even though /. apparently has editors). But this reads like it was written by a retard.
I'll put money on Canon being near the top. They seem to have a blanket policy of patenting everything no matter how trivial.
Sounds like the name of a Boards of Canada album.
You're allowed to sing in the shower just as long as the neighbors can't hear it - at which point it becomes a public performance.
Thank goodness for that. I simply can't abide experiments that involve cruelty to planes.