I think the standard is 955x600
I can't comment on putting together a physical portfolio, but last year I made a quick website around a very nice 3rd party viewer called Simple Viewer. Very easy to use, very smart design and quick loading, unlike certain other 3rd party viewers I've seen on the web which seem to take ages to load an image, which can be annoying. Another benefit is that I've only come across one other online folio which uses it, it doesn't seem to be commonly used, unlike Lightbox for instance.
If your web skills are limited (mine are) then I'd have a look at this program because it can quickly cut out a lot of work in presenting images online. There may be others out there which are equally as good.
My current online portfolio is in my sig (as an example) and Simple viewer can be found over here.
PS, good luck!
Last edited by Electrik Kar, .
The way that Avatar was being talked about, including among people in my computer graphics course, you got the impression that the movie was going to change the world or something. I had actually heard or seen little about the actual movie until the first trailer was released, but my imagination had it built up as a film coming very much out of left field, with revolutionary technology and a whole new angle on story telling and aesthetics. When I finally got around to seeing the trailer, I thought that all of the human characters (ie, the whole film) were CG.
It looked really great but didn't quite match up to the enigma I'd built in my imagination. After seeing the movie, I thought that if this was Cameron doing something really different, then I'd hate to see the result of him going over old territory. In short, a very entertaining movie but no revolution. The 3D was great but there are even game cinematics being produced these days which look almost as good. Almost. (i'll concede that maybe as I didn't see the film in the intended stereoscopic 3D I was missing out on something. I've seen a number of recent movies in 3D lately so I'm not sure if I would have experienced much added novelty, but I might go again as a curiosity anyway to see if I'm wrong about that
).edit: I saw Moon the other night. Imo it offered a far more poignant and interesting take on corporate greed/corruption and unhinged morality than either Avatar or District 9.
Last edited by Electrik Kar, .
I'd put this as my best movie of 2009 (IB), not that I actually saw many movies last year, but this was the one which had the most impact on me. I'd mostly ignored Tarantino for too long, and subsequently forgotten how violent his movies tend to be. I wasn't prepared for IB- by the time I'd left the cinema I was all shook up. Shockingly good flick.
I haven't seen Fern Gully, but I hear it's almost a direct lift from there...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koToK3cnUcs
Saw District 9 tonight. Pretty disappointed really.
Micachu & The Shapes - Golden Phone
I saw Avatar in 2D and I still enjoyed it but I think the main reason was because it had all the postively familiar elements of a Cameron movie. There was Sigorney Weaver, aliens, big ships, tough marines, a bioluminescent world... all the things we've loved about his movies in the past. It could have turned out very boring but the technology carried it through (which was of course pretty amazing).
I agree that the creatures were a little too derivative but then they were so well realised that it hardly mattered. This was more of a fantasy setting than a sci-fi setting I guess, with again small tweaks to familiar objects and scenery. Every hippie worth his/her salt has atleast once dreamt of glowing forests! One thing is... I would like to see the technology used in Avatar pushing ahead to describe more thoroughly alien worlds and settings (for example, the ocean creature described in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris or the beings/civilisations of Starmaker). There is a ton of great sci-fi out there with fantastic worlds just waiting to get on to the big screen.
As long as the devs keep working, then there will be people interested in the progress of LFS. It's not unusual these days for games to take the greater part of a decade to develop (think STALKER) - the 'problem' with LFS is that the community has been getting a behind the scenes look at LFS as it's moved very slowly and gradually from S1/S2/alpha/beta stages, with glimpses of S3 on the horizen now... it's pretty much the software equivalent of watching a pot boil.
People still had faith in Stalker, even though they weren't able to get their hands on playable code right up until release. With LFS, we demand tangible progress every six months or so, and when that fails we regard things with great suspicion and the forum goes back to speculating on the downfall of the sim, which never really happens.
It's probable that we'll never go back to the frequent updates that we've mostly enjoyed up until now. Scawen himself seems to be underestimating the time it takes to do things these days, and he has the best clue out of everybody. But if LFS survives the next ten years then I think 'what it will be like' will be different to what we expect of it now. Perhaps bigger updates, but more spread out- say every two years or so, for starters. By then I would also hope that modding would be supported, which would change the game completely in terms of how the problem of content generation is handled. There are lots of possibilities.
People still had faith in Stalker, even though they weren't able to get their hands on playable code right up until release. With LFS, we demand tangible progress every six months or so, and when that fails we regard things with great suspicion and the forum goes back to speculating on the downfall of the sim, which never really happens.
It's probable that we'll never go back to the frequent updates that we've mostly enjoyed up until now. Scawen himself seems to be underestimating the time it takes to do things these days, and he has the best clue out of everybody. But if LFS survives the next ten years then I think 'what it will be like' will be different to what we expect of it now. Perhaps bigger updates, but more spread out- say every two years or so, for starters. By then I would also hope that modding would be supported, which would change the game completely in terms of how the problem of content generation is handled. There are lots of possibilities.
Sonic Youth - Schizophrenia
The Twilight Sad - Here, it never snowed. Afterwards it did
Hard to make predictions, especially about the future...
http://www.independent.co.uk/e ... g-of-the-past-724017.html
Snowing heavily in the US right now, many records for snowfall are being set.
http://www.independent.co.uk/e ... g-of-the-past-724017.html
Snowing heavily in the US right now, many records for snowfall are being set.
The people currently playing LFS now are having a different experience to you though, so you can't speak for the enjoyment of these new people- I dare say they wouldn't be playing unless they were enjoying themselves. It's sad that some of the olides aren't getting out of LFS what they used to but you can't really expect time to stand still and community values to stay constant, especially if you and your friends have already for the most part abandoned the game. LFS has changed, the community has changed, but people are still having fun so I don't really see a problem. You could always try downloading an eariler version and rallying your mates to join a server, and live out the old days of glory. It's certainly possible to do that- but would you really want to?
The amount of paper that passes into and out of our hands daily is insane.
I actually was optimistic enough to think that Bill Gates' 'paperless office' would finally do away with paper altogether, but that just didn't happen. Emails may have replaced a lot of the normal mail we used to send to each other but overall the 'de-materialistation' of paper culture hasn't really progressed to the point where it's having any real impact.
I do like the fact that I can read papers online though, and most subjects covered by magazines have online equivalents which tend just as good or better than the printed stuff. There's talk of charging for online newspapers here, which I'm fine with. In fact newsagents should probably be going obsolete soon, as well as video libraries and other stores which sell consumerable media. A lot of people still don't like to buy immaterial products but I think that's more of a generational thing. I certainly don't care if I buy a game or piece of software as a download and not in a box- in fact I prefer it. All this stuff just ends up as junk. As much as I still cling to my CD collection, I think that we'll naturally move towards downloads for all digital media in time. Hey, you'll be thankful for it when you move house next!
Problems-
Paper is still very durable and you can't erase something once its printed. Electronic media is easily editable, so the importance of preserving historical records needs looking at.
Technology moves quickly. I read something a while back how NASA were having great trouble trying to retrieve old data of photos of Earth from space because there were no computers around to read the data anymore. In time we need to standardise proper formats for archive purposes, but I have no clue if this would be a simple or difficult matter.
E-media requires electricity.
Books are still cool.
E-waste.
I guess there are many other things as well...
I actually was optimistic enough to think that Bill Gates' 'paperless office' would finally do away with paper altogether, but that just didn't happen. Emails may have replaced a lot of the normal mail we used to send to each other but overall the 'de-materialistation' of paper culture hasn't really progressed to the point where it's having any real impact.
I do like the fact that I can read papers online though, and most subjects covered by magazines have online equivalents which tend just as good or better than the printed stuff. There's talk of charging for online newspapers here, which I'm fine with. In fact newsagents should probably be going obsolete soon, as well as video libraries and other stores which sell consumerable media. A lot of people still don't like to buy immaterial products but I think that's more of a generational thing. I certainly don't care if I buy a game or piece of software as a download and not in a box- in fact I prefer it. All this stuff just ends up as junk. As much as I still cling to my CD collection, I think that we'll naturally move towards downloads for all digital media in time. Hey, you'll be thankful for it when you move house next!
Problems-
Paper is still very durable and you can't erase something once its printed. Electronic media is easily editable, so the importance of preserving historical records needs looking at.
Technology moves quickly. I read something a while back how NASA were having great trouble trying to retrieve old data of photos of Earth from space because there were no computers around to read the data anymore. In time we need to standardise proper formats for archive purposes, but I have no clue if this would be a simple or difficult matter.
E-media requires electricity.
Books are still cool.
E-waste.
I guess there are many other things as well...
Last edited by Electrik Kar, .
Funny
Reminds me of the old Gi-Joe stuff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ... p;feature=player_embedded
Reminds me of the old Gi-Joe stuff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ... p;feature=player_embedded
Really good, but perhaps the more knowledgeable will be able to find things to pick on. I've been playing the full game a bit and physics wise I'm very happy, everything feels pretty natural as far as I can tell.
My G25 ingame settings...
Steer deadzone - 0
Steering saturation - 100
Steering linearity - 1
Throttle deadzone - 0
Throttle saturation - 100
Brake deadzone - 0
Brake Saturation - 100
Feedback..
Enviro effects - 10
Feedback strength - 40
Wheel weight - 50
In the logitech profiler I've set the wheel to 450 degrees rotation which mimics the onscreen rotation and feels good too.
So far I'd give the game about a 9 out of 10. I do find the menus a little clunky and I'm not really a fan of the heavy American flavour and silly ingame dialogue (although you can turn that off) but none of this really detracts from the racing itself which is extremely rewarding in terms of the visceral nature of spashing through puddles, sliding around corners and burning through small, twisting villages... it's a hell of a lot of fun.
The tracks are the big stars here.PS, I think there's only one cockpit view, but could be wrong.
Last edited by Electrik Kar, .
That's where the 'settled science' claim really gets me. There are still so many unknown or unquantifiable relationships in climate. Climatology is actually a fairly young science, even though the basic physics of the greenhouse theory were set out a hundred years or so ago. But by procliaming that CO2 is the main driver of climate because we don't know what else it could be just sounds completely weird to me. It's a certainty based on ignorance, atleast that is the way it is popularly being presented to the public.
edit: the table is from the latest IPCC (2007) report
Last edited by Electrik Kar, .
No I hadn't read his letter. I was aware that he quit the IPCC over political concerns. There are a lot more like him around these days, too. I agree about the term 'denier'. Instant Godwin.
One thing I don't really understand is the divide being drawn up in Copenhagen between the 'rich' and 'poor' countries. How can the U.S., which is up to its eyeballs in debt, still be considered a rich country? Isn't China richer than the US these days?
Anyway, apparently a deal was just made (source may be dodgy), and you Americans are going to be 100 billion dollars less rich than you are already- if China and India get on board.
I guess it will remain to be seen whether Copenhagen will be any more or just as effective as Kyoto was.
Sometimes it's hard to know whether to cry or laugh...
Last edited by Electrik Kar, .
You could see this very clearly being played out in the MIT forum, with Emanuel firstly stating 'I'm a scientist' and then carrying on about tobacco and the Big Oil disinformation 'machine' the whole time. I've got my own version of Godwin's law now which applies to the climate thing which is that any time someone brings up the tobacco/big oil argument they've lost the debate.
(Emanuel is also apparently not much of an AGWer in private, but ever since his work linking hurricanes and AGW first garnered him a lot of attention by the worlds media he's been happy to go along with the flow, although he has currently backed down on the hurricane/agw link. He is apparently a good scientist but he's also plainly an opportunist).
Yes. Really, the climategate thing couldn't have happened at a worse time. With Copenhagen looming, there was a mad rush to either destroy or protect scientists. The way that Nature and popular magazines such as New Scientist have handled this episode (to say nothing of the popular press) shows that they've drawn a very political line in the sand which has nothing whatsoever to do with good science. This has been going on for a while but the immediate fallout from climategate worsened it. I think the barriers will lessen again as the dust settles and people have had more time to sift through everything in order to absorb what this all means (edit: and especially what it means for science in general). Sweeping the issue under the rug has simply raised more eyebrows... due diligence is nessesary.
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Going on the list.. looks fun
Last edited by Electrik Kar, .
You're going to be hallucinating trumpets and trombones tonight
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG