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Comment: Re:Why? (Score 1) 599

by llin (#42367607) Attached to: Why <em>The Hobbit's</em> 48fps Is a Good Thing

One of the biggest benefits of HFR (48FPS) is specifically for 3D. 3D project is actually "triple flashed" at 144FPS (72FPS/eye). This accentuates the (camera and subject) motion issues w/ 24FPS, so HFR is a way of trying to get around that - and having just seen the Hobbit in 3D HFR today, it seems to do a pretty good job at it. Fast motion is crystal clear - it's really astounding.

That being said, I agree about the aesthetic adjustment. The intro scene in the Shire/Bag End in particular... just looks bad. Similarly the way the set/makeup/lighting looks. IMO, the most CG parts of the movie looked best because at least it didn't have that "live theatre" look. I think most films won't adopt HFR because it may just be too hard/expensive to make things look good.

Another part of it seems to be the DOF choice - it's just incredibly deep/clear which IMO is *not* realistic at all - when you look at something in real life, that's just not how your foveal/peripheral vision works, at least for me. Sure the clarity is nice for spectacle, but not so much for immersion.

And lastly, of course people (especially people that watch lots of films) have an expectation of what a film should look like and HFR totally breaks that.

Still, I'm sure that people had this sort of discussion w/ the switch from B&W to Color or w/ Talkies, soI guess time will tell.

Comment: Re:Why? (Score 1) 599

by llin (#42367565) Attached to: Why <em>The Hobbit's</em> 48fps Is a Good Thing

Actually, the "standard" shutter speed for 24fps film is typically 1/48s (180 degree shutter angle in film-speak). Cinematographers choose different shutter speeds based on a number of considerations, mostly related to how motion (camera (pan judder) and subject (strobing)) will look w/ specific lenses and lighting. Depth of Field also plays into that choice of course. Common shutter angles range anywhere from 270 degrees (1/24s) all the way down to 45 degrees (1/192s). FYI: 360 degrees is now possible w/ digital cameras, but was *not* possible with mechanical cameras! (practically every feature length film shot until the last decade or so).

You can easily find samples online, as you can imagine, they give extremely different looks for motion.

Comment: Re:Software Suggestion, Pointers (Score 1) 161

by llin (#42137517) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Web Platform For a Small Municipality?

Yeah, they're currently Knight Foundation funded (a Knight News Challenge winner) and a big part of CfA Brigade's current Race for Reuse project encouraging community deployments - there's are bunch of communities adopting LocalWiki, which is awesome. Also, I met Philip, the lead dev recently and he's very sharp.

That being said, for a volunteer project for a small town without any support or resources, a Google Site w/ Google Docs links that an AC suggested probably is the best way to go - it's not sexy, but I bet that realistically, it'd be the lowest maintenance and longest lasting/most effective way to get the basic info up there (and kept up to date).

Comment: Software Suggestion, Pointers (Score 5, Insightful) 161

by llin (#42134003) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Web Platform For a Small Municipality?

For the type of things you're looking for, I'd recommend LocalWiki. While so far it's been used mostly by communities vs municipalities, it includes robust permissions, is under active development, and is built w/ some nice geo-extensions for where that's applicable. It's very easy to get up and running and you could run a micro EC2 instance to test out for (practically) free.

I'd also suggest that you try to connect w/ others that are doing similar things. There's a large community of civic hackers. For those working directly w/ municipal govt, check out the Code for America Brigade, a community that's all about that and can provide help/support for exactly this sort of thing. You may want to check out their deployable app list, and maybe also check out CfA's github repository which has a lot of projects that may be useful, and their Civic Commons project which gathers the sw/infrastructure that cities are using.

Comment: Re:Why do people ask questions like these? (Score 3, Informative) 530

by llin (#39913471) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Language Should a Former Coder Dig Into?

If you're looking to learn something new and general purpose, Python has a combination of decent docs (you can start with http://www.python.org/doc/ , http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_python/ , and http://www.lightbird.net/py-by-example/ ), good libraries (see http://pypi.python.org/pypi and https://github.com/languages/Python/most_watched ) and all-around flexibility (all the regular system stuff, lots of microframeworks for web, scientific computing tools, 2d+3d graphics).

You may want to take a look at IPython ( http://ipython.org/ ), Reinteract ( http://fishsoup.net/software/reinteract/ ), and DreamPie ( http://dreampie.sourceforge.net/ ) for some interactive shells/interpreters to play around with. I use vim for programming, but there are a number of IDEs. Of the ones I've tried, I thought IEP offered the most interesting tools: http://code.google.com/p/iep/

Probably the fastest/easiest way to learn (and learn if you like) Python is to go through Zed Shaw's book/exercises: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/
There's a lot of other stuff on the Python wiki: http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Programmers

Slashdot definitely isn't what it used to be. For programming questions you may want to look at Stack Overflow or Quora. For general nerdly news, I find Hacker News, Techmeme, and The Verge tends to cover my bases better these days.

Comment: Re:You're late (Score 1) 112

by llin (#39070925) Attached to: Double Fine Raises $700,000 In 24 Hours With Crowdfunding

FYI in case anyone is following along, yesterday's update announced support for Mac, Linux, iOS, and some Android devices. Also, it will be available DRM free. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TFKwplDBmgg

As of the current posting, the project is at over $1.9M w/ >56K supporters.

Comment: Re:Day Of The Tentacle (Score 1) 480

by llin (#36359354) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Adventure Game To Start With?

DOTT or Sam n' Max would both be great for kids. That being said, I wouldn't rule out MI2 (my alltime fav as well). With the Special Edition (for PC and iOS), there's a built in hint system for when the going gets too tough (or weird, really). Also, being able to switch instantly between the classic and updated art is just super sweet.

Comment: Re:Reminds me of broadband internet in the beginni (Score 1) 479

by llin (#31411592) Attached to: Gas Wants To Kill the Wind

Why not use real numbers? Another post pointed to the a Wikipedia article on the economics for new nuclear power plants.. This includes a section that includes capital cost estimates of $3,000-5,000/kW. These projects new projects are all in the $10B ballpark. These numbers are sourced from a January 2010 report by the World Nuclear Association, a nuclear power trade group, so this is probably as optimistic as you'll get.

For wind power, we can turn to the US government reports a quick search turned up the DoE's NREL annual report on wind power (May, 2008) show an installed cost of "$1,240/kW to $2,600/kW, with an average cost of $1,710/kW." Even accounting for the capacity factor difference, Wind is looking pretty competitive vs nuclear. (Also, from the NREL report, you can see the average turbine size is 1.65MW - using a 3KW turbine to calculate costs is just mind-boggingly silly.)

The other salient point is that while thousands of megawatts of new wind generation is being added annually (according to NREL, 35% of new generation capacity was wind), 0% is nuclear (the last plant that went online in the US was in 1996. The $8.3B loan backed by the Obama administration for the $14B A.W. Votgle plants aren't scheduled to come online until 2016 and 2017).

All this is a long way of saying that I'm quite surprised that your comment could possibly be rated informative. It's a rant based on a hare-brained back of the envelope calculation (although I do admit there's some humor in the fact that the $14B price tag that you're aghast about is the actual cost of a new 2200MW nuclear plant) that seems to have managed to make many claims and conclusions without having done some pretty basic research.

Comment: Thecus N5200 Pro & N7700 (Score 1) 517

by llin (#26143039) Attached to: SoHo NAS With Good Network Throughput?

To answer the poster's question, I have a Thecus N5200 Pro that performs pretty well - RAID0 should break 40MB/s - not amazing, but better than any other SOHO NAS's around, barring the new N7700, which looks like it'll hit Gig-E limits (finally a cheapish NAS that approaches 100MB/s for reads/writes). That said, you're gonna pay for the performance - the N5200 is about $700 and the N7700 is $1100 (enclosure's only). eAegis sells them w/ burned in drives as well - that's where I got my N5200. The hot-swap and automatic RAID rebuilding works as well and it has built in FTP, SMB, AFP, and NFS and is pretty good for a plug and play system.

That being said, you're definitely paying a premium, and you could easily throw together a multi-terabyte system that would max out your GigE for about the same price as what you'd pay for the N5200 enclosure. My only big recommendation there is that you get a hotswap rack w/ that - makes things much more pleasant when replacing drives.

One other thing to consider is power consumption. My N5200 Pro idles at 80W - if you built a low-power mini-ITX system you could probably get something pretty close to that, but a regular PC would probably be closer to 150-200W. Depending on your electric billing, you could be talking about a $100-200/yr difference there.

The Almighty Buck

+ - Richest 2% own 'half the wealth'

Submitted by
gollum123 writes "BBC reports The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of all household wealth, according to a new study by a United Nations research institute ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6211250.stm ). The report, from the World Institute for Development Economics Research at the UN University, says that the poorer half of the world's population own barely 1% of global wealth. It deals with all countries in the world — either actual data or estimates based on statistical analysis — and it deals with wealth, where most previous research has looked at income. What they mean by wealth in this study is what people own, less what they owe — their debts. The assets include land, buildings, animals and financial assets. The study also finds that inequality is sharper in wealth than in annual income. In less developed nations, land and farm assets are more important, reflecting the greater importance of agriculture in those economies. In contrast, some citizens of the rich countries have more debt than assets — making them, the report says, among the poorest in the world in terms of household wealth."
The Almighty Buck

+ - Richest 2% own half the world

Submitted by
The survey is based on data for the year 2000. The authors say a more recent year would have involved more gaps in the data. As it is, many figures — especially for developing countries — have had to be estimated.


