Slashback: Drivers, Bodycomputing, Farscape 305
Maybe customer service isn't dead. On November 28th, we posted a report that OEM cards using ATI chips had trouble with the official drivers from ATI. Terry Makedon (Senior Product Manager, Software for ATI Technologies) writes "Last week we posted a set of unified Linux drivers. These drivers were only loading up on 'Built by ATI' cards. Through our various feedback mechanisms we have determined that there is a large community of 'Powered by ATI' Linux users that did not benefit from our Linux drivers. At this point we are happy to announce an update to our Linux driver (ver. 2.5.1) which will work on both 'Powered by' and 'Built by.' ATI's driver and software strategy is firmly based on responsiveness and we greatly appreciate the feedback our Linux users have provided. Please use http://apps.ati.com/linuxDfeedback/ for a direct feedback line to ATI.
Thanks again for the feedback."
But what if we put the show into this Interdimensional Fungubulon, and then jumped through this here "wormhole"? xagon7 writes "David Kemper, the producer/writer of Farscape, mentioned that it would be theoretically and legally possible for a group to set up a non-profit organization for fans to donate money to, in order to finance an episode and make Farscape all that much tastier to Sci-Fi for the 5th season. They have done just that. They have $200,000 worth of pledges and only need $800,000 total....I hope this gets Slashdotted. Read the story here and you can pledge here."
You're getting less happy to see me? man_of_mr_e writes "Check out MIThril, the next generation research platform for context aware wearable computing. It's been about 18 months since this was last talked about here on Slashdot, and it's kind of cool to see how far the technology has come since then. For those that aren't aware of what it is, it's essentially a project to prototype human wearable computers, complete with schematics, pictures, and a cvs repository for software. Now you too can be like that guy in the IBM commercials trading stock while feeding the pigeons."
Flattening the slope to entry. Catskul writes "You don't need the libwine hack, mentioned in the previous news entry. Just follow the New QT Howto, download the codecs and start MPlayer."
Don't look at me in that tone of voice! 1010011010 writes "On Nov. 26, you ran a story on SpeechView, 'software that translates the voice on the other side of the line into a three dimensional animated face on the computer.' The North Carolina State University Department of Computer Science's 'Voice IO Group' is also working on that problem. Their software looks like it might be better. Read about it here. Includes quicktime movies of the results."
Victory, or a reprieve? A non moose cow writes "Just noticed that a couple of my favorite "Killed by the RIAA" webcast stations are back... like Soma-FM and Monkey Radio (get the streams at Shoutcast). The saving grace came via the recent passage of HR5469 [PDF] by the US Legislature. Thank you to all that sent letters and/or money to fix this problem. If you have been yearning for the resurrection of your favorite stream, go check, it might be back. If you would like to trace the chronology of this mess, check out the Soma-FM news page."
On the topic of Farscape... (Score:5, Informative)
In case someone's oblivious (Score:3, Informative)
Lip Synching... (Score:3, Informative)
Once a tounge is added to the render, this tech will be sweet for games. Imagine playing someone in UT and seeing their mouth move properly as they talk to you. Cool for sure.
PLF (Score:1, Informative)
The win32 package has the QT codecs.
personal wearable efforts (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: this is one of my projects.
Anthropics (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A word of caution... (Score:2, Informative)
text to face (Score:5, Informative)
You can upload your own picture and make it say anything you want, it will animate your face for you and looks pretty passable if you use a good picture.
The company that makes this technology is Pulse Entertainment and they are located at http://www.pulse3d.com/ in case you wanted to check them out too.
Re:Lip Synching... (Score:1, Informative)
The system is currently decidedly not real-time. We're focusing on getting it *right* before we make it fast.
Jamie Taylor
Re:clarifications (Score:2, Informative)
For example, the cost of the series averages to $1.5M per episode. Sci-Fi was picking up half of that, 750k. That's $16.5M for a 22 episode season. Assuming all the funding that was there still is, that is the only deficit to make up. (As an aside - Sci-Fi is paying up to 3 TIMES that much for "Taken")
Take 1M as the average weekly viewership in the US. If 10% of the people who watch Farscape in the US gave an average of $25 each, the cost per episode could be reduced by over $100k. That could go a long way to helping Henson and Sci-Fi, or any other network for that matter, reach an agreement. Money from all the viewers worldwide only makes the deal better.
Also, the number quoted as already donated is suspect. That ipetitions page is, I think, the original one from when the news first broke. It asked only hypothetically, "what would you give if you could save Farscape?". It needs to be restarted, asking "What WILL you give?", and a more definite payment system instead of "pledges" needs to be established.
They are also looking into direct sales to viewers - perhaps DVD sales, or even pay-per-view. The numbers for this are even more daunting, but not, in my opinion, completely impossible. With advertising getting more and more difficult to sell and the impact of tivo-like devices rendering ads useless, this may be a distribution model considered more often in the future. Instead of paying $50 a month to your cable Co. for a collection networks, in the future you might pay $50 a month only for the shows you want to watch. The cable companies have alot of installed bandwidth and are itching to find more uses for it, like video on demand. Farscape could be offered as a test case to see how well the idea is accepted.
Re:They need fishing poles instead of fish (Score:3, Informative)
My town here in the midwest USA could easily support 5 times the current population, but the town has shrunk in size over the last 100 years. Our main export is corn and beans. Why has the population grown in areas with repeated droughts and repeated need for food aid?
Joe