Ohhh golden! *fires up BBC iPlayer*

Wow, I haven't thought of rotten.com or ratemypoo.com in years. I keep some stuff that would be embarrassing if someone found, but nothing that needs to be protected with a hidden TrueCrypt volume with AES-Twofish-Serpent encryption. I generally don't let anyone use my computer, especially to browse the internet. In the rare instances where I had to let a family member use my computer, I fired up IE for them. Since I use Firefox, there is nothing in the IE history or bookmarks for them to find.

>> ^rychan:

>> ^westy:
Windows live photogalery , for people to thick to download "thegimp" or get photo shop,
of course if wlphotogalery is good then thats cool , but if its annything like windows movi maker then its an epic fail, windows movi maker has just got progresavely worse .

Microsoft has good automatic panorama construction tools, because they have some of the best minds in computer vision and computer graphics in their interactive visual media research group:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/interactivevisualmedia/
Panorama stitching is only trivial if
1) The scene is completely static.
2) The optical center of the camera doesn't translate.
3) The intrinsic camera parameters (focal length, exposure time, flash) don't change
4) The scene has sufficient texture to recover the relative transformations between the images.
5) The camera has no vignetting or barrel distortion.
6) There are no gaps between the captures images.
Typically (and in this scenario) few of these constraints are satisfied so you actually end up with a computer-vision-hard problem. You could have duplicate objects that have shifted position between image captures. You could have the sun come out from behind a cloud between the first and last photograph. You could have the camera translate (as it always will when being hand held, unless you're shooting something really far away in which the translation won't matter, but even in this case it might matter for the foreground).
But sure, go ahead and fire up gimp and show me how it handles all of this automatically.



as i said if its good fair enoughf , but bassing things on , other windows free programs its likely to be shit.

>> ^westy:

Windows live photogalery , for people to thick to download "thegimp" or get photo shop,
of course if wlphotogalery is good then thats cool , but if its annything like windows movi maker then its an epic fail, windows movi maker has just got progresavely worse .


Microsoft has good automatic panorama construction tools, because they have some of the best minds in computer vision and computer graphics in their interactive visual media research group:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/interactivevisualmedia/

Panorama stitching is only trivial if
1) The scene is completely static.
2) The optical center of the camera doesn't translate.
3) The intrinsic camera parameters (focal length, exposure time, flash) don't change
4) The scene has sufficient texture to recover the relative transformations between the images.
5) The camera has no vignetting or barrel distortion.
6) There are no gaps between the captured images.

Typically (and in this scenario) few of these constraints are satisfied so you actually end up with a computer-vision-hard problem. You could have duplicate objects that have shifted position between image captures. You could have the sun come out from behind a cloud between the first and last photograph. You could have the camera translate (as it always will when being hand held, unless you're shooting something really far away in which the translation won't matter, but even in this case it might matter for the foreground).

But sure, go ahead and fire up gimp and show me how it handles all of this automatically.

Violently? Sheesh...

Most atmospheric games ever? Hardly. Yeah, it's different than Deus Ex. And I don't think every FPS has to be like Deus Ex to be good. But if I have to understand Russian to fully enjoy the game, as you say, then all I can do is take your word for it that it makes the game better. My experience was that it was boring. While THQ claimed the PC was the lead platform for the game, the XBox version was nearly identical. There is just no way to develop a FPS for both XBox and PC without dumbing down or limiting the PC version. I've been a PC gamer and PC game fan since I first fired up Space Warp on my TRS-80. But they ain't what they used to be. And it is because of consoles. I am so "extremely and violently" sick of this shit that I refuse to buy Diablo III when it comes out for the teeny-tiny reason that they made health potions an instant power-up when you walk over them instead of a carry-able item (yeah, I got "issues"), and THEN tried to explain it away as making gameplay more seamless for PC gamers. Read: "we had to make fewer things that console players needed a button for". That's right, they took one of the simplest PC games with one of the simplest control schemes ever and they STILL had to dumb it down for console gamers. Fuuuuuck you, Blizzard!

Anyway, you liked Metro 2033? Fine. I didn't. We disagree. I just used it as an example of my bigger bitch.

In the spirit of staying somewhat on-topic here, the video was of a cut-scene, not the fucking game. Yeah, it looked cool. But, gameplay-wise, I'll take Jedi Knight or Dark Forces over this dreck any day.

>> ^Fletch:

More third-person, over-the-shoulder, consolized crap. I tried playing Metro 2033 recently. OMFG... terrible. Sixty seconds of fighting, and then ten minutes of cutscenes and searching for ammo around your "base". Repeat ad nauseum. Loved the old Star Wars PC games Ant referred to, but it seems nowadays PC ports are an afterthought, designed and dumbed-down for consoles and their idiotic controllers. Decent PC games (FPS) are few and far between. Oh well, guess I'll just go fire up Deus Ex, again.

i extremely and violently disagree with you regarding metro2033.
while that game might not have the most refined and advanced gameplay, if you haven't played this game to the end, you are missing out on one of the most atmospheric games ever!
and fuck console versions! this game was created on and for PCs! furthermore, to fully enjoy the game you gotta play it w/ Russian voices(obviously if you can understand it).
it is a completely different game from duesex. comparing those 2 will be doing a disservice to both!

More third-person, over-the-shoulder, consolized crap. I tried playing Metro 2033 recently. OMFG... terrible. Sixty seconds of fighting, and then ten minutes of cutscenes and searching for ammo around your "base". Repeat ad nauseum. Loved the old Star Wars PC games Ant referred to, but it seems nowadays PC ports are an afterthought, designed and dumbed-down for consoles and their idiotic controllers. Decent PC games (FPS) are few and far between. Oh well, guess I'll just go fire up Deus Ex, again.

you were supposed to fire up. WE BOTH FIRED UP.

That auto playing vid wears on people I'm sure. Like if you're looking thru past comments it will fire up.

My biggest complaint about Bioshock is that the splicers just won't shut the fuck up. Aside from big daddys, every single enemey you fight in the game spends the entire encounter spouting insane gibberish. Even when they're on fire they just continue with the gibberish, it doesn't even phase them.

Repetitive voice in games is my current pet peeve with just about every game I play. Whenever I fire up BF2 after not playing it for a while, the constant radio chatter that is louder than anything else in the game drives me nuts (don't tell me to go into the setting and turn it down, no shit I tried that in 2006).

beck appeals to the inherent paranoia of those who are un-educated or ill-educated.
i posted a few months ago how rhetoric kills.
beck appeals to those who are angry,scared and dont understand the why's or what's and what beck offers is not news,nor any form of journalism.he does not offer context and repeatedly has been caught blatanly lying and making things up all for the specific purpose to incite his viewers,who are already angry and upset.
lest we forget the man who consumed almost exclusively neo-con and right wing propaganda i.e:beck,hannity and linbaugh and walked into a unitarian church and opened fore on innocents.

in the political spectrum conservative ideology has its place just as progressive ideology does.both are needed for a myriad of reasons but what we get in beck and hannity, and limbaugh for that matter, has little or nothing to do with a "conservative" ideology but far more to do with pushing a narrative to further a political party.
it is almost verbatim the very definition of propaganda.
hugh hewitt reveals himself to be a tool in just such a propaganda machine as he tries...poorly..to explain away beck and his rhetoric.if anybody actually took the time to pay attention to what has been going on you would find that both parties have abandoned their core principles in order to serve their corporate masters.
while the democrats give lip service to their progressive netroots base while enacting policy that serves the corporate elite.the republicans use inflammatory language to incite anger and distrust and use such banal terms such as :family values,fiscal conservative,christian nation.all terms used to fire up the base but when you take a look at their own policies you see a very different narrative.

in my opinion.the people who are becoming angry and frustrated.progressive and teabagger alike are ill-served by the likes of glenn beck.for while they have reason to be angry and frustrated they are no more closer to understanding WHY pr WHAT they are angry about,because the corporate media has utterly failed to inform properly its own viewers which has left these people vulnerable to the predatory antics of such douchebags as beck,hannity and even mr perfect hair hugh hewitt.
they should not be making million dollar contracts but be ran out of town in a cloud of shame.

They may be nice demos... BUT, it's all about penetration (oooh er), and at the moment Flash rules the roost there. This fancy dancy video HTML5 stuff is working ONLY in Chrome and the latest Safari (having a chrome plugin to IE doesn't count)... so your market there is miniscule. So doing work for any company and saying that your market reach is about 1% at present vs 99% is not going to happen... until all major browsers support ALL portions of it and most people have upgraded... then we're at a point where doing any major site in it is a little problematic...

It takes a long time to move people to new browsers, not that long to fire up a prompt to update their flash player that they already have installed and leave their browser as is.

So, while it might be nice to dream of HTML5 replacing all plugins, and I hope it does... we have a ways to go.

OH

Except

Every browser will probably render things a little bit different so as a web coder (which I am, using OpenLaszlo which outputs to Flash and DHTML) it'll make my life HELL. I used to do work for a dot com company here in Australia, we moved to the states and were doing a project with AT&T... Our tech intercepted the html between the origin and the final browser and tried to insert a banner onto the top of each page. If all browsers actually conformed to the standards we'd have had no issue... but that's not the case by a looooong shot.

The thing I like about coding to Flash is that I get it right once, and then 'It Just Works' in every supported browser. Ahhhhhhh.

Until HTML5 becomes like that I'll curse it.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:< br />I don't get why people say Obama is a great speaker. He isn't. A great speaker is someone who makes a speech that everybody can appreciate and who can make the audience feel like he understands or at least empathizes with them. Obama doesn't do that. Obama's speeches are halting, staccato, and bland. Every time he tries to sound 'fired up' he comes across as cringe-worthily unconvincing. The speeches are filled with catch phrases, nothing-isms, and vapidity. He isn't a 'great orator' at all. He is - in fact - flat, uninspiring, and weak. I was no fan of Bill Clinton, but Clinton was 10X the 'orator' that Obama is. If I was to make a rhetorical comparison, I would say that Obama is more like George Bush (I) than anyone else. Can we please stop with the 'great speech' and 'what a speaker' crap? I've heard great speakers, and Obummer is no great speaker.


Who do you consider a great speaker?

The Sham-wow boy?

I don't get why people say Obama is a great speaker. He isn't. A great speaker is someone who makes a speech that everybody can appreciate and who can make the audience feel like he understands or at least empathizes with them. Obama doesn't do that. Obama's speeches are halting, staccato, and bland. Every time he tries to sound 'fired up' he comes across as cringe-worthily unconvincing. The speeches are filled with catch phrases, nothing-isms, and vapidity. He isn't a 'great orator' at all. He is - in fact - flat, uninspiring, and weak. I was no fan of Bill Clinton, but Clinton was 10X the 'orator' that Obama is. If I was to make a rhetorical comparison, I would say that Obama is more like George Bush (I) than anyone else. Can we please stop with the 'great speech' and 'what a speaker' crap? I've heard great speakers, and Obummer is no great speaker.

White Americans enjoy getting themselves fired up over anything remotely resembling racism because they want to use every opportunity to scream, "I'M NOT RACIST! SEE?!" They're constantly apologizing for their ancestors' actions.
>> ^Raaagh:

It's disappointing to see the Americans fire up, because it seems isolationist and self-centered to pressume this certain strain of cultural poison that is endemic in their own country, must be endemic everywhere else.