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Comment Re:Real Reason: sony botched the launch (Score 1) 1162

Thank-you. I hate it when clueless people don't understand that Betacam (normal/SP/Digital) and Betamax have very little in common between them. You might as well list U-Matic as a Sony success for all the difference it makes in the consumer market. And I'll bet most television stations still have a U-Matic device hiding somewhere in a closet.

Comment Re:Why not post intel's response? (Score 1) 235

Ah, but the rumour is that Poulson is *IT* for Itanium. There will be process shrinks with more cache and perhaps the odd feature bolted onto it, but the word on the street is that this is the last microarchitecture for the Itanium line. That will last Intel out through any existing government contracts and whatever agreement they have with HP. It will probably allow HP to get to the end of all their VMS contracts, too. (Pity, because porting VMS from Alpha to IA64 was a bitch, but they *had* to do it)

Comment Re:Is Hollywood leaving money on the table? (Score 1) 381

Bourne Supremacy was the first film where I really noticed it. It annoyed me at the time, but as everyone has been moving towards using it, Supremacy looks like a fairly tame implementation.

But yeah, late 90s cop shows on TV are where I first saw the modern use of it for action sequences. I found it really, really irritating back then.

Comment Re:Let's face it (Score 1) 381

Even DVDs, when they first came out, were supposed to be revolutionary because they allowed directors to include multiple angles for the same scene. How many movies have that? I haven't seen any.

Multiple angle DVDs were created for the porn industry. And I'm pretty sure they're the only ones that ever used it. Even in that niche, it's not used very often any more.

First Person Shooters (Games)

Quake 3 For Android 137

An anonymous reader writes "Over the last two months I ported Quake 3 to Android as a hobby project. It only took a few days to get the game working. More time was spent on tweaking the game experience. Right now the game runs at 25fps on a Motorola Milestone/Droid. 'Normally when you compile C/C++ code using the Android NDK, the compiler targets a generic ARMv5 CPU which uses software floating-point. Without any optimizations and audio Quake 3 runs at 22fps. Since Quake 3 uses a lot of floating-point calculations, I tried a better C-compiler (GCC 4.4.0 from Android GIT) which supports modern CPUs and Neon SIMD instructions. Quake 3 optimized for Cortex-A8 with Neon is about 15% faster without audio and 35% with audio compared to the generic ARMv5 build. Most likely the performance improvement compared to the ARMv5 build is not that big because the system libraries of the Milestone have been compiled with FPU support, so sin/cos/log/.. take advantage of the FPU.''
Games

Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs? 480

eldavojohn writes "I have a slightly older friend who played through the glory days of Ultima Online. Yes, their servers are still up and running, but he often waxes nostalgic about certain gameplay functions of UO that he misses. I must say that these aspects make me smile and wonder what it would be like to play in such a world — things like housing, thieving and looting that you don't see in the most popular massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft. So, I've followed him through a few games, including Darkfall and now Mortal Online. And these (seemingly European developed) games are constantly fading into obscurity and never catching hold. We constantly move from one to the next. Does anyone know of a popular three-dimensional game that has UO-like rules and gameplay? Perhaps one that UO players gravitated to after leaving UO? If you think that the very things that have been removed (housing and thieving would be two good topics) caused WoW to become the most popular MMO, why is that? Do UO rules not translate well to a true 3D environment? Are people incapable of planning for corpse looting? Are players really that inept that developers don't want to leave us in control of risk analysis? I'm familiar with the Bartle Test but if anyone could point me to more resources as to why Killer-oriented games have faded out of popularity, I'd be interested."

Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 906

You need a support contract for patch bundles. Individual patches are free, but incredibly inconvenient to bundle yourself.
Patents

Submission + - Amazon Patents Use of Humans to Assist Computers

theodp writes: "Amazon's latest patent, the Hybrid Machine/Human Computing Arrangement, reads like scary Sci-Fi, with claims covering the use of humans 'of college educated, at most high school educated, at most elementary school educated, and not formally educated' to perform subtasks dispatched by a computer. From the patent: 'For examples, the task on hand requires French speaking humans, and Task Server has requested that each subtask be performed by at least 10 humans with a past accuracy record of at least 90%.' Yikes."

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