Comment Re:Unexplained Achievement "The Maker"? (Score 1) 1582
The Contradictor -- !tag a story
The Contradictor -- !tag a story
You're doing something seriously wrong if you're doing mocap for a month.
Also, there already is a 3D model market, see TurboSquid for example. However, you're assuming that a game is only a patchwork of random disparate elements. It's not. It would pretty much break the fourth wall if you started to notice that you saw that particular soldier in another game, so you'd need people to retouch the models and assets anyway. Besides, you probably want all the models to have the same visual style, so it's probably less effort to just create the models from scratch instead of having to tweak something you bought.
Also, you failed to see that asset production is pretty much a pipelined process: a modeler makes a model, which is then sent to a texturer and an animator to complete. Also, a lot of the costs related to assets are mostly related to client demands. If someone at Disney or Warner doesn't like the look of character X from their license, well, you have to rework it, then send it for their approval again, hear them whine again, etc. Having asset libraries in that case doesn't help.
I don't doubt that this could work fine in the casual market, but I don't see how this could be cost-effective for the latest games, and I don't see how they would be able to convince the hardcore gamers to switch.
I doubt they're targeting the hardcore gamers. It would be a pretty suicidal move, since they're the ones likely to say that the service sucks because they don't get every single pixel in their game without compression and hog the service for hours on end.
If you use Outlook and Exchange, there is a message recall feature. Of course, for those who don't, we just get an annoying two line email saying "Foo would like to recall message blah". Even funnier is that in French, the word they use for recall can mean either of recall or highlight/remind.
It took me a while to understand why some senders always wanted to remind me of some silly email.
You know, I'm starting to take issue with comments that protest the use of the M$, Micro$oft etc. memes. I know how something can get on your tits - articles that identify companies by their stock symbols is a particular irritant of mine.
But being annoying to a given reader does not cause a comment to lose all credibility. I mean, you can judge a comment by any criteria you choose, even moderate that way if you like. But you and I can't have a conversation either, if at any time you might write off everything I've said because I violated some arbitrary boundary you have. It's like people who dismiss an otherwise intelligent comment because it was posted AC. Again, it's their prerogative, but it makes it hard for the rest of us to talk to them.
And I am not suggesting the comment you replied to was "otherwise intelligent." The comment you replied to was obviously a troll, and should be dismissed for that reason. I would agree that a user who says something like "Winblows" isn't making any kind of lucid point with that act, but he may just be really frustrated for a good reason. Let him vent - he "paid" for that right - then see if he has an actual point.
In defense of the use of M$ etc, I see it as sort of a short hand, like Garry Trudeau would do with politicians. A feather for Dan Qualye, a bomb for Newt Gingrich
In two characters, the anonymous poster - who is probably Twitter - told us all we need to know about his opinion of Microsoft. I don't think an anti-Microsoft - or anti-Google/Linux/Apple bias for that matter - invalidates anyone's opinion. If it does, good grief we're all doomed.
BTW, I agree with you about the suicide remark.
I beg to differ. If you're so puerile to have the need to use "M$ Winbloze" or "open sores software" in a rational discussion, it seems as if you're trying to sidestep the issue with colorful language. Call things by their name and focus on arguments rather than taking trite potshots.
As for identifying corporations by their stock ticker symbols, it allows to easily differentiate between corporations who would have otherwise similar names(for example, an article talking about the Royal Bank could refer to both RY and RBS) and to look them up quickly and unambiguously.
How about filenames other than peculiar serial numbers like dsc-12345.jpg? How about an option to use the timestamp as a filename? How about a datestamp and serial number?
the #1 feature needed in DSLR cameras. LET ME CHOOSE THOSE first 3 LETTERS!!!!
when I have a shooting team covering an event I would LOVE to have each camera they use set to their initials for the filename. Or set the event ID, etc....
Honestly the firmware in all cameras, just sucks. they really could add features that pro photographers would kill for and others would find incredibly useful.
The reason why files in cameras are in the DCIM\DSC?????.JPG format is documented in JEITA standards JEIDA-49-1998 and JEIDA-49-2-1998, but it essentially allows creating a camera-agnostic system that can read images from cameras. (fun fact:DSC stands for Digital Still Camera)
As for labeling the pictures with a shooting team, can't they each use their own media or change the sequence number used to mark the pictures as their own?
It's not just bands now, either. Modern film scores use a click track. Some of my friends play film scores as freelancers (they are professional, classically trained musicians) - and they've all reported having to use a click track.
The "conductor" is mostly used to notify them which section to play... as most of the music doesn't merit actual rehearsal time. The conductor does get to watch the film during the session, however.
It's pure torture for the musicians... to make it worse, the "conductors" will sometimes say, "Wow! I wish you guys could have seen that scene!"
Is the usage of the click track torture or the lack of rehearsal time? And how is it torture? (Not trolling, just curious since I'm not a musician)
You could check their official website though. It's not as if Wikipedia contains everything.
The question being... how could you use a monopoly on advertising to keep other advertising companies from effectively advertising?
If you have a monopoly on advertising, it means that you control a majority of where ads are displayed. Since some kinds of advertising are dependent on impression volume, if Google controls a majority of "eyeballs" for your particular market, you can't avoid using their service unless you want to have a much lower impression volume.
This kind of imbalance isn't as pronounced in other medias. If you want to reach 20-25 year old single males, you could put your ads on Fox, ESPN or some other channel and it wouldn't matter too much if one doesn't want to carry your ad or charges too much, since there's some competition between all the players. On the other hand, if most national TV stations were controlled by a single player with regards to advertising, then that might prove problematic. Sure, you could advertise on local community stations, but would you get an ad campaign that's as effective?
Been there, done that: At least on our email servers. In addition, I have blocked every country other than the US with an iptables deny rule ("they" can't even ping the mailserver). Before you start complaining, please be aware that I work for a small (approx 60 email accounts) US-based management company that only deals with other US companies. In the past 6-7 months that my iptables rules have been in place on the mail server, incoming spam has dropped 80-90%. In addition to blocking everything but the US IP space, we are running postfix/amavis/spamassassin/clamav/postgrey and have configured a few RBLs. Very little spam gets through these days.
How much legitimate mail is dropped and how do you plan on handling the case where one of the companies with which you do business outsources their email to a Canadian or European company?
This has nothing to do (really) with copyright law. These chaps are not being charged with copyright infringement. They are being charged with helpings others do it - which is an interesting pickle indeed. In effect, it's like going after a photocopier manufacturer when the users start to mainly photocopy books illegally... Oh.. wait.
Note however that the photocopier manufacturers don't advertise and sell based on the fact that you can copy books, they advertise the fact that your business will be more productive with a photocopier, whereas the pirate bay's website is titled "Download music, movies, games, software!"
On the bright side, anyone with a subscription to Mad will find that it now lasts longer.
I've heard that the difference between an Xbox game and a PC game, using DirectX in visual studio, is a checkbox at compile time.
It's not. The Xbox does not have the same API, although both are similar.
The day someone comes out with a competing cross platform, fast API that is supported in all major coding suites and is easy to develop for, will be the day that linux/mac gaming starts for real.
There already is such a thing. It's called middleware and it allows using the same game on various platforms with only minor changes.
they used java 1.6.0_10 on linux and 1.6.0_07 on windows. Hate to give the benefit of the doubt to ballmer & co but in spite of the minor version number, a lot of work in performance has been done on Java recently. The result is pretty meaningless.
Indeed, this is a fairly lame benchmark. Java 6 update 10 is when they switched to the "consumer JRE" (also known as update "N"), which included a lot of changes to lower the footprint of the JRE, improve startup time, etc.
Where there's a will, there's a relative.