Video games are there today -- computers and mocap rigs all the way down. Still they are approaching hollywood movies in terms of budget. Tangled and Avatar are some of the most expensive movies of all time.
There are no shortcuts to that level of polish. Doesn't matter how advanced your rendering is, you still need an army of 3D artists. Makeup isn't going to be much cheaper just because you do it in Maya.
Avatar and Tangled were both pioneers of new technology of course they were expensive, but there are amateur fan effects better than those from multi-million dollar movies and TV shows 15-20 years ago. And the games of 10-15 years ago can be made a couple of people on a shoestring budget. I expect that trend to continue.
>Makeup isn't going to be much cheaper just because you do it in Maya.
They won't use Maya. Technology progresses, and tools become easier to use. At some point in the future you'll be able to select an actor, click makeup and adjust some sliders.
>you still need an army of 3D artists
For original creations you do need artists (the tools will continue to improve and make each artist more efficient), but there will come a time when all you'll need to do is take a few photos of tree, or a building to make an ultra high quality 3d model of it.
But to take that photo you still need to find the perfect tree or building, then drag some cameras out and take pictures of it. Then once it's uploaded, set up light and do some manual adjusting because that branch is just a few degrees off. And that's just one tree or building, you need thousands for a movie.
Indie movies will upload their back yard or buy stock trees, and it will show. That's what separates big budget from small budget - perfectionism and meticulous attention to the tiniest details. Computers doesn't understand beauty or emotion, so you need fine grained human control every step of the way.
It's the composition that is expensive and not the ability to perfectly reproduce reality.
Entirely agree, if you watch any artist or musician work, the amount of attention paid to detail is astonishing.
It's the same as when a programmer will constantly re-factor their code to provide better abstractions or improve efficiency. Or when a designer spends hours deciding on how to a lay an interface out.
The tools to create generic copy-paste movies and music are already out there in the same way you can build a website by buying something from template monster and copy pasting a bunch of Javascript and PHP that you found on google around.
Of course tools will get better and make efficiency better but all that will do is raise the bar. People want to see movies that will wow them , either with better special effects than they have seen before or with clever/funny dialogue etc.
The people who have the skills to do this best will want to work for the big media companies because these are the ones who will open their wallets and pay them a good salary to do what they love all day with the best tools available.
>Computers doesn't understand beauty or emotion, so you need fine grained human control every step of the way.
That's were your wrong. Computers don't understand beauty, but given enough processing power, and sample data they can recreate it.
There's already a program that can listen to Beethoven and reproduce something that even experts can't tell he didn't write.
A movie example: In your movie creator you set up a scene with 2 people talking in a room. The computer has been trained with thousands of such scenes, so it automatically selects the best camera angles and allows the operator some manual control. That will happen at some point.
They were uploading movies to megavideo and streaming them through divx using a plugin.
Difference between Ninjavideo and most other streaming sites is they didn't even try to hide behind safe harbor. Only people who could post links were staff and a handful of trusted uploaders. They plastered banners all over the front page advertising new movies (like "new dvd rip out today woot!"). Talked constantly about how they were pirates.
Even Piratebay comes of as timid and diplomatic. It was just a matter of time before something really bad was going to happen.
EDIT: They weren't just linking to videos, but admitting to uploading them.
Thanks for the info, I really was in the dark about what they were doing and it had me a little scared as I was initially under the impression that it was a site where users were just posting links to content and I couldn't fathom how that would lead to jail sentences for the founders.
After spending some time exploring different functional languages, if FP does make it at all - my money would be on Haskell. There is something to be said for focused languages that does one thing but does it really well, and the feeling of security when a certain style is enforced over a codebase.
I probably wouldn't use it for anything today, but in another couple years maybe. The ecosystem seems like it's reaching critical mass.
Iranians ARE youthful, energetic, entrepreneurial and liberal. That's why they're constantly trying to revolt against the ass-backwards represive government they're stuck with. It's a country of huge constrasts.
There is definitely some kind of propaganda war going on to, but that doesn't mean Iran's government isn't horrible.
Change must come from within though. You can bet your bottom dollar that those youthful, liberal Iranians will be the first to join the resistance movement in the event of an invasion just like I'm sure many HN users and other young Americans would swell to defend their homeland if they were attacked by an equally imperialistic and foreign entity, say China or
Yeah, I'm absolutely not advocating an invasion. Best thing that can happen is a successful revolution. It seems to have been close last time so there's still hope.
I think a revolution is unlikely. I've spoken to many Iranians and had an Iranian girlfriend for a few years.
One thing I realized is that they are completely brainwashed to believe that a revolution is the worst thing ever. They all take the attitude that it's better to stagnate forever with rape victims being regularly stoned than to risk a few deaths trying to change things. I think it's because they perceive the revolution and Iraq war during their childhood as horrible in a not normal way, whereas the stuff that happens currently is horrible in a normal way.
Combine this with a huge amount of nationalism, and you also realize they won't work with those who should be natural allies. For example, Iran's long oppressed Kurds/Balochs might join in a revolution if they get independence, but the Persian nationalists (read: those freedom-seeking youths you see in the media) would never consider this.
That's the saddest part about the dictatorships, and it's actually the reason they work in the first place. They make people believe that the benefits of that system is a lot better than the alternatives, and any dissent would be terrible for the society. Hitler did this, too. Rise of Evil is a good movie about it, showing how people actually started believing in his "ideals" and they were very passionate about it.
Ultimately, all types of dictatorships are done by promoting the idea of "collectivism". That "group rights" are more important than individual rights, which can also be read that you can discount individual rights, as long as it's "for the greater good". It's also when some group rights become more important than other group rights, and lead to racism, anti-semitism, and so on, "because our group is better!".
It's no coincidence that USA, which is probably the most individualistic country ever, has also been the freest country, and with the most liberties. But I fear collectivism influences are starting to creep in there, too. Even most of the Republican party wants it now. It's only that their idea of collectivism is a little different than that of Democrats. For example, they want to "unite" people behind another war. But they both want Big Government and more Government intervention and control over people, even if some still pay lip service to the idea of "limited government", but only for minor issues, so they can keep appearances and pretend they offer real choice and alternative. And this is why a third of the country is Independent now, because they don't buy it anymore.
The hypocrisy of republicans (and some democrats) amazes, they boast about freedom but they hate liberalism. They want everyone to believe in the same religion and are happy to use authoritarian tactics to achieve it.
Republicans don't hate liberalism, they hate democrats and "liberals" is just another word for democrats in American politics. It's just a case of factionalism and the democrats can be just as bad.
I agree that democrats can be just as bad but regarding hate for "liberalism", sometimes you have to take people at their word when they say they hate something. Saying the words "I don't necessarily hate all liberalism" would sink any of the Republican presidential candidates. It's gotten so bad with the Republican party that all you have to do is call an idea they support "liberal" and they'll do a 180 and hate it.
If it were a completely rational "here's what happened last time", they would extrapolate "last time", compare it to the current situation extended for 50 years, and see which is worse.
I've never spoken with a single Iranian who actually did that. It's all just talk of vague negative childhood memories.
Well, I'm just spitballing here, you probably know more Iranians than I do, but there might be something to the immediacy factor. Another revolution probably holds more immediate danger for their family than the current situation extended for 50 years, which is just another 50 years of relatively low risk. It's hard to take the long-term average outcome viewpoint when you're talking about family members' lives, and there's no guarantee a replacement government would be substantially better (the mullahs were talking about freedom from the shah when they started off).
You need to learn enough Java to get around, and how to interact with it through Clojure. Java libraries are very comprehensive and well documented, but if you're fresh to both languages the learning curve is steep.
It's sorta possible to get around with pure Clojure, but not very practical.
Leiningen is the de-facto package manager so use that for everything. Clojars and Maven are the two repositories.
Freemium is the dominant model among online games for a reason. Dropbox is another example. Anything addictive that has the potential of hooking a customer long term. Noone is going to shelve out until they've put x amount of hours into it.
Christmas cards is the worst product imaginable. It's a one-off thing with no addictive potential and lots of free alternatives.
A decade ago - ALL my friends were using direct connect. Few of them were nerds, most were barely computer literate. But free movies made them motivated enough to learn. Some even ran their own hubs even though they had no interest in computers otherwise.
Things like this spread fast, especially among young people. The reason people stick with streams today is because they have no motivation to learn anything else.
mooki - If you do a survey, you'll find that maybe 1 in a hundred people have even heard of direct connect. It may be the case that all of your friends were using it - but in the scale of 250 million americans, I would be shocked to discover that more than 2.5 million of them indicated they had used Direct Connect to share a movie.
The RIAA/MPA and friends are concerned about the 247.5 million people - less concerned about the 2.5 million people.
It's why Usenet basically contains every single media property of interest - the decent search engines for it are pretty much buried in the blacknet, and will stay there, out of sight of the 99%.
This goes both ways. If it becomes commonplace, there will be a business in SEO'ing your social media profile. I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of facebook will consist of networks with good credit scores all friending eachother and blogging about savings tips.
It's hardly a language that will give you any new revalations in itself (if you already know the ones you mentioned). On the other hand, CL does have some grreeat books. Peter Norvig's and PG's books in particular are fantastic and will make you a better clojure/scheme programmer.
Where AI has consistently failed is creating a real thinking machine that can reason and adapt. That's not what we're building today though.
The problem is to many peoples jobs are to easy and highly specialized. They don't require strong AI - just good enough "dumb" algorithms, and we're getting really good at those. Doing paperwork by strict specifications. Driving a truck from point A to B. Assemble a circuitboard from a blueprint. As long as you keep a handful of humans in the loop incase something unexpected happens, this is all stuff robots can do today.
There are no shortcuts to that level of polish. Doesn't matter how advanced your rendering is, you still need an army of 3D artists. Makeup isn't going to be much cheaper just because you do it in Maya.