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Anime

Anime Studio, Khara, Is Planning To Use Open-Source Blender Software (neowin.net) 20

Posted by BeauHD from the making-the-switch dept.
The Japanese anime studio, Khara, is moving to Blender, the the open-source 3D creation software. "It'll begin partially using the software for its current development 'EVANGELION:3.0+1.0' but will make the full switch once that project is finished," reports Neowin. "The current project is expected to end in June next year, so after that point, its employees will start using Blender for the majority of their work." From the report: At the moment, Khara uses 3ds Max from Autodesk on a subscription basis; however, the company found that it had to reach out to small and medium-sized businesses for its projects. Due to the limitations of those companies, it's harder for them to afford 3ds Max. By switching to Blender, Khara says it can work better with external firms.

While Blender will be used for the bulk of the work, Khara does have a backup plan if there's anything Blender struggles with; Hiroyasu Kobayashi, General Manager of Digital Dpt. and Director of Board of Khara, said: "There are currently some areas where Blender cannot take care of our needs, but we can solve it with the combination with Unity. Unity is usually enough to cover 3ds Max and Maya as well. Unity can be a bridge among environments."

Comment Re:Not going to happen (Score 1) 288

Can't bribe or influence an AI the way you can humans; so it's a no-go for replacing any existing government.

Yes, you can.
Google "algorithm bias site:slashdot.org".
There are literally a dozen articles here on Slashdot about bias on social-sensitive algorithims. If they can be biased (and they can), their developers can be lobbied or even bribed.

Here, I'll give you not one, but five well-documented examples of AI showing prejudice in their algorithms.

Comment Re:Too indirect (Score 1) 288

Just like the classic game of telephone, bribing a programmer to influence an AI has way too abstract and indirect a result to really matter the same way old fashioned direct human graft has - and even worse, it has a paper trail of actions by the programmer.

You should google "International Obfuscated C Code Contest" and then resume participating in this discussion.

Comment Re:Most games you play online. (Score 1) 109

by Curupira (#58309164) Attached to: Streaming and Cloud Computing Endanger Modding and Game Preservation

Many newer games have an online portion to them, where you play with or against other people. In what you call Modding is what we call cheating.

Thanks for sharing your situation. I, on the other hand, have over 800 games in my Steam account. Guess how many of those I play online? Yeah, none of them. I like to game on PC because of mods. From my perspective, Google Stadia can get bent.

Comment Re:a reason I don't use Chrome (Score 4, Insightful) 154

Dude, Firefox has a good password manager. If you have an Firefox account, you can access your password in your desktop and your mobile device, without having to install extensions. With a good random password generator (Lastpass has one at their website, you're good to go.

Comment Lars Doucet's 4 currencies (Score 2) 111

Defender's Quest programmer Lars Doucet has an excellent series of articles on what is at stake when a customer, or would-be customer, decides to buy or to pirate a computer game. In sum, there are, not one, but four currencies: literal money, time, pain-in-the-butt and integrity.

Pirate sites can make you feel dirty (it costs integrity) and make you fight viruses and false download links (paint-in-the-butt), but usually makes the game available in days or even instantly (low time cost) and cost zero dollars. Legit game stores have to compete with that.

So, if the game's DRM is obnoxiously hard on legit customers (high pain-in-the-butt cost) and is more expensive than the pirate version, it will lose hard to piracy, because the only "currency" in which the legit version costs less is the integrity currency. It's no wonder Steam, GOG.com and other online stores for PC games nowadays try to make buying and playing the game as seamless as possible. (Of course, there are still AAA games that the publishers insist on having obnoxious DRM).

Music streaming services got this really well. Spotify, iTunes, Deezer and Google Play Music are all easy to use, fast to listen and have each of them an exellent and comprehensive library of songs. You don't have to subscribe to multiple services to listen to the music you want.

Now, video streaming services are doing the exact opposite: do you want to see a particular movie (not any movie, or a movie of a particular genre, a particular and specific movie)? Maybe it's on Netflix. Or on Hulu. Or is it on Amazon Prime Video? Perhaps it will be on Disney+. Or you have to "rent" or "buy" it on Google Play Video or something.If it is an anime, maybe it is on Crunchyroll or Funimation. The cash and pain-in-the-butt currencies skyrocket on that system. It's not feasible to subscribe to every video streaming service on the planet. It is no wonder many of us are returning to the torrent sites.
China

Chinese Scientist Says He's First To Create Genetically Modified Babies Using CRISPR (npr.org) 142

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
For the first time, a scientist claims to have used a powerful new gene-editing technique to create genetically modified human babies. From a report: The scientist, He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, says he used human embryos modified with the gene-editing technique CRISPR to create twin girls. "Two beautiful little Chinese girls name Lulu and Nana came crying into the world as healthy as any other babies a few weeks ago." He says in a video posted online. "The babies are home now with their mom Grace and their dad Mark." He says his team performed "gene surgery" on embryos created from their parents' sperm and eggs to protect the children from the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, which causes AIDS. The children' father is HIV-positive. "When Lulu and Nana were just a single cell, this surgery removed a doorway through which HIV enter to infect people," He says in the video, one of several posted online to justify and explain the work. Because the research has not yet been published in a scientific journal or carefully vetted by other scientists, many researchers and bioethicists remain cautious about the claim.

Submission + - New iPad Pro single-core benchmarks getting close to Macbooks (appleinsider.com)

Submitted by Curupira
Curupira writes: From AppleInsider: "Geekbench compares both single- and multi-core speeds using a series of benchmarking tests and then creating a figure to summarize the results. According to first results on the Geekbench website, the iPad Pro gets a single-core speed of 5030. The same tests run on a mid-2018 15 inch MacBook Pro got that machine a single-core figure of 5419. (...)

What it also shows is that the relative performance between the Intel processors which power the MacBook Pro and the ARM processor in the iPad Pro. The startlingly close figures give weight to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo's claim that Apple will move to ARM for its Macs no later than 2021."

Submission + - Patent troll goes Bankrupt! - value $2 (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: "In September 2018, Shipping & Transit LLC (formerly known as ArrivalStar) filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy—voluntary liquidation—but no one seems to have noticed until the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed it out on October 31.

The company claimed that it held the patent on vehicle tracking and related alerts. But about 15 months ago, judges began to rule against Shipping & Transit for the first time. That seems to have put a damper on its entire business model."

Submission + - Iran hit by computer virus more violent than Stuxnet (timesofisrael.com)

Submitted by TTL0
TTL0 writes: Israel’s Hadashot news is reporting that Iranian infrastructure and strategic networks have come under attack in the last few days by a computer virus similar to Stuxnet but more violent, more advanced and more sophisticated.

"Remember Stuxnet, the virus that penetrated the computers of the Iranian nuclear industry?” the report on Israel’s Hadashot news asked. Iran “has admitted in the past few days that it is again facing a similar attack, from a more violent, more advanced and more sophisticated virus than before, that has hit infrastructure and strategic networks.”

The Iranians, the TV report went on, are “not admitting, of course, how much damage has been caused.”

Submission + - Surgery students 'losing dexterity to stitch patients' (bbc.com) 3

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College, London, says young people have so little experience of craft skills that they struggle with anything practical.

“It is important and an increasingly urgent issue,” says Prof Kneebone, who warns medical students might have high academic grades but cannot cut or sew.

“It is a concern of mine and my scientific colleagues that whereas in the past you could make the assumption that students would leave school able to do certain practical things – cutting things out, making things – that is no longer the case,” says Prof Kneebone.
Movies

The Shutting Down of FilmStruck and the False Promise of Streaming Classics (newyorker.com) 125

Posted by msmash from the looking-back dept.
The FilmStruck indie, arthouse and classic film subscription-streaming service will shut down next month, Turner and Warner Bros. Digital Networks announced this week. The New Yorker's film critic Richard Brody writes: The site isn't accepting any new subscribers, and it's a good bet that it won't be adding films, either. In the year and a half that I've been offering recommendations here of movies to stream, FilmStruck titles have featured prominently. One could keep busy, happy, and cinematically sustained for a long time on the sole basis of FilmStruck movies, and all the more so with the inclusion of movies from Turner Classic Movies. (The movie diet wouldn't be an entirely balanced one: the site does poorly with such domains as American independent filmmaking, African cinema, and the past forty years of film history. Its over-all flaw is its reliance on recognized classics: the programming of the site is more responsive than it is proactive, and it might have been improved by more personalized, idiosyncratic selections that would have made it more like a permanent online film festival.)

The site instead offered various modes of promotional outreach. Some, such as essays, and some home-produced videos, were significant works in themselves, but the site over all diluted its offerings with a home page of diversions and distractions that felt like a tawdry sampling of multiplex ballyhoo raising an unwelcome racket amid the art-house tranquillity. That conspicuously commercial waiting room to the classic-cinema library suggests the culture clash at the heart of the enterprise, the one that arises from its odd original fusion of Criterion with TCM, which was then a part of Time Warner -- and which foreshadowed its doom. That air of doom arises from more than the inherent conflicts of the high-culture outpost and the mass-market colossus. Slate's arts and culture critic Joanna Scutts writes: FilmStruck did not care who you were: It set out to teach you something new, not just to feed you more helpings of what you already know you like. It employed a team of smart women and brought in directors like Barry Jenkins to record short, passionate introductions to films they loved. Its personality shone through tightly curated collections, from a timely gathering of all the previous incarnations of A Star Is Born, to a larger batch of Japanese horror titles, to deep dives into a particular director or cinematographer. It offered up inventive double-feature pairings and led you through its extensive archives in ways that were creative, cheeky, thought-provoking, and unpretentious. It made it clear that a passion for art-house and classic film was not exclusive to old white men. That kind of personality, that kind of discoverability, that kind of curation, can't be replicated by an algorithm. It takes time, money, and effort. It takes thought and education. It takes human beings.

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