"Why do you need to know the month first everytime you look at the date. Isn't the day of the month the most important thing you look at first, so it's written to the left first. Just seems logical, the day / month / then the year."
We say the date out loud like this: August Second, Two Thousand and Six. Month, Day, Year. (In Spanish, for example, they Two of August, 2006.) Some places go for numerical logic, some places go by how it's actually said out loud. Logic in this case is a matter of perspective. Do we favor computer logic or intuitive logic? Depends on the situation, which probably explains why some countries are different from others.
"Question is: How many Girlfriends can One Geek Man (TM) handle with his Linux expertise?"
Heh. I went on a date with a chick and we had a nice long interesting chat about a bunch of different things. Suddenly she made a comment that I was a lot more interesting than the last guy. "Why?" "He spent the entire date talking about Linux." True story!*
* Both me having a date and the dude talking entirely about Linux.
In our case, seduce means we get a few days of considering whether or not to ask her out, but then decide she's no good when some low-brow jerk beats us to the punch. But we'll keep her dangling on the line anyway by being her personal technical support agent for the next 5 years, waiting for that glorious opportunity.
Erm, I tried to put a funny spin on that but I ended up making myself sad.
" If your mobile phone can read barcodes, we could print them anywhere - in papers, on billboards, TV adverts - and all you'd need to do is take a photo and your phone automatically loads the webpage in its built-in browser."
I don't think I'd mind that. I already use the camera in my phone to take photos of price tags + model numbers of things I see when I go shopping. When I get home I look up reviews etc. My next phone's going to be a Treo. I'm digging the idea of getting the reviews right there at the store. (Has anybody done this? Is it practical, or am I still going to prefer just going home and using my full-sized browser?)
"Suspect that someone is a terrorist, but have no evidence at all to support your allegations. - No problem, just whip up a photo-realistic animation of them attending a local bomb-making class. Lather, rinse, repeat."
Yeah yeah, we all saw Wag the Dog. So... do you remember how that movie ended? There'll always be somebody who wants to talk. Now you're involving a team of people who spend a great deal of time on the net.
"Realistic animations are already possible, has been for ages, it's called motion capture."
Motion capture doesn't work for the face. You could be thinking about performance capture, which does capture the face, but there's debate about how effective that really is. In any event, no, it has NOT been here for ages. If one actor really can drive the actions of another, this is a Big Deal TM. You would not believe the amount of work that is done to deal with facial movements on a character. Check out the extras DVDs on King Kong or I, Robot if you're really curious about it.
"I only see the use of this technology for movie to game adaptions were they can quickly copy a real life actor to 3D. For the rest, why would you want to hire multiple actors to do the same thing what a couple of voice actors, motion capture actors and animators can do."
Funny, the article had a couple of interesting ideas in that department. The character aging in reverse gag, for example, is a rather interesting one. As for the latter half of your question, the answer is time. The end result is a moving character. It's time consuming to hand-key animation, not to mention the potential for lack of subtlety. If you can just throw one talented actor into a scanner and get the performance you need with minimal clean-up, you're in a better place.
"Besides, how would you use this technology in a non-realistic game."
Have you played San Andreas?
I realize a lot of people in this thread don't see the point. Just remember that the human body is the hardest thing to get right when it comes to CG. Remember all those complaints in the Star Wars prequels and the Matrix Trilogy about the digital doubles not looking right? Contour may or may not drag us from that rut, I couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is that it's still a problem today and it's a Good Thing if they can find a solution that allows the talents of actors to drive the performance of a CG character. The possibilities are a lot broader than a lot of you can imagine. Go read an issue or two of Cinefex. You'll be surprised at what technologies are already making a huge difference in modern movies, even though you probably never have noticed.
"Cars kill more people than bombs do but a sensor to detect bombs is a good thing but speed cameras are evil. Guess which potentially saves more lives?"
Ever wonder why they call it terrorism instead of mass-murder? 9-11 did a lot more damage than car crashes. The gubment's handling of terrorism is questionable, but the prioritization of it over car crashes is not nearly as black and white. Anti-terrorism (The intent, I mean, not 'The War Against Terror'...) is about more than just the saving of lives. Think about what the first week after 9-11 was like, then think about the year that followed. The fear, paranoia, and hardships that followed were incalcuable. There's a reason it's not swept under the rug until car crashes are dealt with. Think about it.
I understand. Actually, I'm not in that different of space. I'm a 3D artist. I have lots of uncompressed image sequences around. I chew through the gigs, too. That said, I'm still not fighting for space like I was only 5 years ago.
"Turn off more shit by default. Don't just enable everything. Seriously, who the fuck needs Remote Registry, Portable Media Serial Number, TCP/IP NetBios, and all that other useless shit? Sure, you might need one or two things, but do you need 55 services starting on a default install?"
Classic "damned if they do, damned if they don't" situation. Modern computers have the resources. The number of people using them is in the tens of millions. Guess how literate the vast majority of these users are. I'll give you a hint: Well worded dialogs haven't done enough to prevent these problems before.
"Every disk gets full after about 1-1.5 month. It's an unbreachable law, true for every disk that sees some use."
That isn't true in my experience. Every hard drive I purchase gets harder and harder to fill up. Remember back in the DOS days? I do. My first HD was 40 megs. I was ALWAYS backing up to floppies. Not out of fear the drive would die, but because I was always having to move things on and off the HD to because of the limited space. That problem has been less and less severe over the years. HDs, for me, are rising in size faster than I can change my data downloading habits to keep them full. That may or may not always be true, but I'm drawing from over 10 years of computing here.
Re:Massive damage = walkout?
on
The End of E3?
·
· Score: 1
" I must have missed it. It sort of seems like you were trying to say something about Sony, but it's not clear what that might have been. They're expensive? That would seem to deserve a -1 redundant, right there..."
The point was simple. This last E3 was a PR fiasco for Sony, so maybe they're pulling out. I had no problem extracting this point from his post, not sure where your failure was.
Anyway, I don't personally follow this line of logic. Afterall, it wasn't E3's fault that they fumbled the ball, tripped over it, cartwheeled into rose bushes, and used poison ivy for toilet paper. But maybe I just need to think about this a little more. I can imagine after this little fiasco that Sony would consider dropping E3 and hosting their own show like Spaceworld. The advantage there is that they could give themselves an extra month or two to polish up their act after the competition has thrown down its cards. It'd certainly be a better use for the millions they spend on these events, but that would also be bad news for E3.
"I don't know about you, but I would not go out of my way to subject a laptop to sudden motion intentionally while the hard drive is running, no matter how well the hard drives are built. If I spend $2,000 on a laptop, I'd want the thing to last."
Funny you should mention that. My Toshiba M-200 TabletPC has an acellerometer in it. It comes with a little app to do things when it detects a sudden movement. I set up my laptop to make the "waaaah!" sound from Quantum Leap whenever Al slapped the handlink. The point of that wasn't to be cute, it was to minimize how many times I heard that sound for exactly the reason you mentioned.
"I suppose Hollywood makes rehashes because no one in the organizations wants to stick their neck out and take a chance. So then, they figure, why not make a remake - it's better than even a proven forumula where you would have to put some thought into reinventing it."
In all fairness, mass-audiences are fickle. Different can often mean easy-to-lose-lots-of-people. I imagine if you put your mind to it, you could call up a good-sized list of movies you liked that lots of people didn't. Think even harder, and you may even remember some of the reasons why. "I just didn't get the whole robots thing." Hollywood's out to make money, but the big money is in making movies that tens of millions of people want to go see. I personally don't attribute the rehashes to Hollywood stupidity, but rather to having a really tough problem.
What's funny is while movie viewing is going down, TV viewing is going way up. Ever noticed that most popular shows in recent years are seeing lots of high-end visual effects? Thanks to the low cost of entry and DVRs, one can afford to take bigger risks on a show. Lost and BSG come to mind. I cannot imagine these shows being that successful in the 80's. Not because of the content, but because of the dependence on seeing the previous episodes to watch the current one. It's easier to stay home and catch these shows than it is to plunk down $10 a piece and catch a movie you don't know shit about. (I call it the open-your-mouth-and-close-your-eyes business model.)
I'm not ready to predict the death of Hollywood yet, but I do think we'll see a trend of lower budget films (~10 million) in the coming years intended to reach a narrower audience. The idea here is that you go after a smaller group of people so you can make films that appeal to them. Remove the "well we gotta make sure 80 year olds as well as 10 year olds will love the movie" requirement, and you'll have the more interesting content.
"They're one of the biggest offenders with the constant rehashes of mario, zelda, donkey kong, and metroid."
Actually, they're one of the biggest 'offenders' at making worthwhile sequels. Nintendo fanboy behaviour isn't hyporitical, they're just more informed than you are.
"Because I'm sick of liking a keyboard and mouse more than any controller available. Does anyone else here feel the same?"
100% of the time? No. When playing FPS games or games like GTA, then yes, I agree, no argument or even a footnote. But I also play platformers like Mario or the Brain games on my DS. With those games, I MUCH prefer the console controller. (or the touch screen...) I have high hopes that the WiiMote will be a happy medium.
"I'll repeat: you felt you needed to legitimize the use of something that was high-end and expensive, most notably in hopes of distancing yourself from a stereotype you think you're better than. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192306&cid=157 91269"
Yep, that's the bit you're wrong about. It's funny how this comment has betrayed your motives. Heh.
"...wait, what point?"
So... you admit you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. That's cute. Thanks for the waste of time there, bud.
Feel free to come find me when you're interested in discussing instead of arguing. I don't have the time to explain things that you could easily work out for yourself if you weren't so intent on trying to 'win'.
Slashdot Mirror
"Also I'm sure you Americans say "the Fourth of July" don't you?"
Um, yeah, we call one major US holiday the Fourth of July. We also say July 5th. I've got 363 more examples, if you're curious.
"Why do you need to know the month first everytime you look at the date. Isn't the day of the month the most important thing you look at first, so it's written to the left first. Just seems logical, the day / month / then the year."
We say the date out loud like this: August Second, Two Thousand and Six. Month, Day, Year. (In Spanish, for example, they Two of August, 2006.) Some places go for numerical logic, some places go by how it's actually said out loud. Logic in this case is a matter of perspective. Do we favor computer logic or intuitive logic? Depends on the situation, which probably explains why some countries are different from others.
"Question is: How many Girlfriends can One Geek Man (TM) handle with his Linux expertise?"
Heh. I went on a date with a chick and we had a nice long interesting chat about a bunch of different things. Suddenly she made a comment that I was a lot more interesting than the last guy. "Why?" "He spent the entire date talking about Linux." True story!*
* Both me having a date and the dude talking entirely about Linux.
"Seduce you say? ...Which university was this?"
In our case, seduce means we get a few days of considering whether or not to ask her out, but then decide she's no good when some low-brow jerk beats us to the punch. But we'll keep her dangling on the line anyway by being her personal technical support agent for the next 5 years, waiting for that glorious opportunity.
Erm, I tried to put a funny spin on that but I ended up making myself sad.
" If your mobile phone can read barcodes, we could print them anywhere - in papers, on billboards, TV adverts - and all you'd need to do is take a photo and your phone automatically loads the webpage in its built-in browser."
I don't think I'd mind that. I already use the camera in my phone to take photos of price tags + model numbers of things I see when I go shopping. When I get home I look up reviews etc. My next phone's going to be a Treo. I'm digging the idea of getting the reviews right there at the store. (Has anybody done this? Is it practical, or am I still going to prefer just going home and using my full-sized browser?)
"Suspect that someone is a terrorist, but have no evidence at all to support your allegations. - No problem, just whip up a photo-realistic animation of them attending a local bomb-making class. Lather, rinse, repeat."
Yeah yeah, we all saw Wag the Dog. So... do you remember how that movie ended? There'll always be somebody who wants to talk. Now you're involving a team of people who spend a great deal of time on the net.
"Realistic animations are already possible, has been for ages, it's called motion capture."
Motion capture doesn't work for the face. You could be thinking about performance capture, which does capture the face, but there's debate about how effective that really is. In any event, no, it has NOT been here for ages. If one actor really can drive the actions of another, this is a Big Deal TM. You would not believe the amount of work that is done to deal with facial movements on a character. Check out the extras DVDs on King Kong or I, Robot if you're really curious about it.
"I only see the use of this technology for movie to game adaptions were they can quickly copy a real life actor to 3D. For the rest, why would you want to hire multiple actors to do the same thing what a couple of voice actors, motion capture actors and animators can do."
Funny, the article had a couple of interesting ideas in that department. The character aging in reverse gag, for example, is a rather interesting one. As for the latter half of your question, the answer is time. The end result is a moving character. It's time consuming to hand-key animation, not to mention the potential for lack of subtlety. If you can just throw one talented actor into a scanner and get the performance you need with minimal clean-up, you're in a better place.
"Besides, how would you use this technology in a non-realistic game."
Have you played San Andreas?
I realize a lot of people in this thread don't see the point. Just remember that the human body is the hardest thing to get right when it comes to CG. Remember all those complaints in the Star Wars prequels and the Matrix Trilogy about the digital doubles not looking right? Contour may or may not drag us from that rut, I couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is that it's still a problem today and it's a Good Thing if they can find a solution that allows the talents of actors to drive the performance of a CG character. The possibilities are a lot broader than a lot of you can imagine. Go read an issue or two of Cinefex. You'll be surprised at what technologies are already making a huge difference in modern movies, even though you probably never have noticed.
"Cars kill more people than bombs do but a sensor to detect bombs is a good thing but speed cameras are evil. Guess which potentially saves more lives?"
Ever wonder why they call it terrorism instead of mass-murder? 9-11 did a lot more damage than car crashes. The gubment's handling of terrorism is questionable, but the prioritization of it over car crashes is not nearly as black and white. Anti-terrorism (The intent, I mean, not 'The War Against Terror'...) is about more than just the saving of lives. Think about what the first week after 9-11 was like, then think about the year that followed. The fear, paranoia, and hardships that followed were incalcuable. There's a reason it's not swept under the rug until car crashes are dealt with. Think about it.
"I can't wait to see our leaders appear on TV to tell us we can calm down."
Um, yeah, well.. anyway... I'm all for better bomb-detecting sensors.
I understand. Actually, I'm not in that different of space. I'm a 3D artist. I have lots of uncompressed image sequences around. I chew through the gigs, too. That said, I'm still not fighting for space like I was only 5 years ago.
Your mileage may vary, etc.
"You guys **really** don't like MS do you?"
Try imagining Slashdot's response to Apple announcing this feature. The one guy who claims 'privacy concern' gets modded down as Troll. Heh.
"Turn off more shit by default. Don't just enable everything. Seriously, who the fuck needs Remote Registry, Portable Media Serial Number, TCP/IP NetBios, and all that other useless shit? Sure, you might need one or two things, but do you need 55 services starting on a default install?"
Classic "damned if they do, damned if they don't" situation. Modern computers have the resources. The number of people using them is in the tens of millions. Guess how literate the vast majority of these users are. I'll give you a hint: Well worded dialogs haven't done enough to prevent these problems before.
" It was storing important files that you had reasonable expectation of needing again - possibly soon - to floppies. "
Heh. Not when I was a kid. I wasn't even a porn surfer, yet.
"Every disk gets full after about 1-1.5 month. It's an unbreachable law, true for every disk that sees some use."
That isn't true in my experience. Every hard drive I purchase gets harder and harder to fill up. Remember back in the DOS days? I do. My first HD was 40 megs. I was ALWAYS backing up to floppies. Not out of fear the drive would die, but because I was always having to move things on and off the HD to because of the limited space. That problem has been less and less severe over the years. HDs, for me, are rising in size faster than I can change my data downloading habits to keep them full. That may or may not always be true, but I'm drawing from over 10 years of computing here.
" I must have missed it. It sort of seems like you were trying to say something about Sony, but it's not clear what that might have been. They're expensive? That would seem to deserve a -1 redundant, right there..."
The point was simple. This last E3 was a PR fiasco for Sony, so maybe they're pulling out. I had no problem extracting this point from his post, not sure where your failure was.
Anyway, I don't personally follow this line of logic. Afterall, it wasn't E3's fault that they fumbled the ball, tripped over it, cartwheeled into rose bushes, and used poison ivy for toilet paper. But maybe I just need to think about this a little more. I can imagine after this little fiasco that Sony would consider dropping E3 and hosting their own show like Spaceworld. The advantage there is that they could give themselves an extra month or two to polish up their act after the competition has thrown down its cards. It'd certainly be a better use for the millions they spend on these events, but that would also be bad news for E3.
"I don't know about you, but I would not go out of my way to subject a laptop to sudden motion intentionally while the hard drive is running, no matter how well the hard drives are built. If I spend $2,000 on a laptop, I'd want the thing to last."
Funny you should mention that. My Toshiba M-200 TabletPC has an acellerometer in it. It comes with a little app to do things when it detects a sudden movement. I set up my laptop to make the "waaaah!" sound from Quantum Leap whenever Al slapped the handlink. The point of that wasn't to be cute, it was to minimize how many times I heard that sound for exactly the reason you mentioned.
"in soviet russia, female avatars play games as you"
I bet Microsoft is behind this, some ploy to sell more XBOXes.
"I suppose Hollywood makes rehashes because no one in the organizations wants to stick their neck out and take a chance. So then, they figure, why not make a remake - it's better than even a proven forumula where you would have to put some thought into reinventing it."
In all fairness, mass-audiences are fickle. Different can often mean easy-to-lose-lots-of-people. I imagine if you put your mind to it, you could call up a good-sized list of movies you liked that lots of people didn't. Think even harder, and you may even remember some of the reasons why. "I just didn't get the whole robots thing." Hollywood's out to make money, but the big money is in making movies that tens of millions of people want to go see. I personally don't attribute the rehashes to Hollywood stupidity, but rather to having a really tough problem.
What's funny is while movie viewing is going down, TV viewing is going way up. Ever noticed that most popular shows in recent years are seeing lots of high-end visual effects? Thanks to the low cost of entry and DVRs, one can afford to take bigger risks on a show. Lost and BSG come to mind. I cannot imagine these shows being that successful in the 80's. Not because of the content, but because of the dependence on seeing the previous episodes to watch the current one. It's easier to stay home and catch these shows than it is to plunk down $10 a piece and catch a movie you don't know shit about. (I call it the open-your-mouth-and-close-your-eyes business model.)
I'm not ready to predict the death of Hollywood yet, but I do think we'll see a trend of lower budget films (~10 million) in the coming years intended to reach a narrower audience. The idea here is that you go after a smaller group of people so you can make films that appeal to them. Remove the "well we gotta make sure 80 year olds as well as 10 year olds will love the movie" requirement, and you'll have the more interesting content.
The ideas aren't gone, just too hard to adapt.
"s/baited/bated"
To those of you just tuning in, most of us here have mastered that word.
"They're one of the biggest offenders with the constant rehashes of mario, zelda, donkey kong, and metroid."
Actually, they're one of the biggest 'offenders' at making worthwhile sequels. Nintendo fanboy behaviour isn't hyporitical, they're just more informed than you are.
"He just told you didnt he. Were you first in line for reading comprehension class?"
Heh. That's funny on at LEAST a couple of levels.
Cheers.
"I'd rather pay 500 bucks for games I want than 250 bucks for a gimmick."
You'd rather pay twice as much for game sequals with pretty graphical upgrades? Were you first in line at the Star Wars prequels?
"Because I'm sick of liking a keyboard and mouse more than any controller available. Does anyone else here feel the same?"
100% of the time? No. When playing FPS games or games like GTA, then yes, I agree, no argument or even a footnote. But I also play platformers like Mario or the Brain games on my DS. With those games, I MUCH prefer the console controller. (or the touch screen...) I have high hopes that the WiiMote will be a happy medium.
"Nothing's as good as a FAP every now and then."
After I wash my hands, I'll drink to that!
"I'll repeat: you felt you needed to legitimize the use of something that was high-end and expensive, most notably in hopes of distancing yourself from a stereotype you think you're better than. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192306&cid=157 91269"
Yep, that's the bit you're wrong about. It's funny how this comment has betrayed your motives. Heh.
"...wait, what point?"
So... you admit you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. That's cute. Thanks for the waste of time there, bud.
Feel free to come find me when you're interested in discussing instead of arguing. I don't have the time to explain things that you could easily work out for yourself if you weren't so intent on trying to 'win'.