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Don't dismiss this parent. Yes, the problem really is RoHS.
Everyone is shifting to lead-free solder because of the European RoHS requirements, and the lead-free solder is crap. It cracks easier when the device is dropped (hand held devices, not your PS3). There are imperfections in all RoHS solder connections that don't occur with the leaded ones.
The melting point of tin/lead (183) solder is about 35 degrees Celcius lower than tin/silver/copper (217) solder, so I don't understand the solder melting issue.
More info: RoHS in military

Possibly, but we won't know unless we find.. omg.. a citation for your statement.

Not quite a citation for the statement, but NIH's budget is ~30.5billion/year while the DOD expects to spend $78.94 billion in research in 2010

Is there $100 billion dollars of private research dollars floating around out there? I doubt it, but please do try to prove me wrong

We are building them:
Shaw, Westinghouse get full OK for nuclear EPC

9 April 2009 â" The Shaw Group's nuclear unit and Westinghouse Electric Co. received full notice to proceed from Southern Nuclear, a unit of Southern Co., on its engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for two Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear power units and related facilities.

The contract was announced in April 2008. On March 17, 2009, Georgia regulators certified Southern Co. unit Georgia Power Co. to build Units 3 and 4 at the existing Vogtle Electric Generating Plant. Oglethorpe Power, Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia and Dalton Utilities also own the plant. The notice to proceed authorizes Shaw to begin EPC services for the plant.

At least 14 new AP1000 units â" including the units at Vogtle â" are planned by U.S. electric utilities, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Westinghouse/Shaw Consortium have six of those contracts.

http://pepei.pennnet.com/display_article/358844/6/ARTCL/none/none/1/Shaw,-Westinghouse-get-full-OK-for-nuclear-EPC/

Yes- I believe in a world where people strip houses of wiring and pirates attack ships, that the large commercial windmills that contain very large copper cores

Those would have to be some brave freaking looters who really know what the heck they're doing if they don't want to, you know, die.

Alternate view: http://cim.pennnet.com/display_article/347089/27/ARTCL/none/none/1/A-powerful-debate:-AC-vs-DC-distribution/

Or, to summarize - if you take a high-efficiency AC system and convert it to 480 volts, downstep to only 240 volts (and all todays' boxes can run either 110 or 220-240), you can get to within 1% of the DC system.

Add to that the savings in materials (1.5" copper wiring? Booster cables for diesels aren't anywhere near that thickness) and there's no real reason to change.

In fact, the biggest saving would probably be if we went from 120v to 240v for everything. One less down-conversion, etc.

When Nuclear Power generation finally switches to Pebble bed Modular Reactors [first invented in the US and blocked by the Atomic Energy Commission (1944) for it's lack of military options] using Liquid Cooled Helium then I'm sure someone would rather adapt a small-scale solution, using a material medium other than water, for motherboards to do this than just using a giant water sink to account for the data center, as a whole.

ME Magazine: Pebbles making Waves, ME Magazine

PBMR Corporation

US Westinghouse takes stake in PBMR

Actually they are doing superconductor power in Manhattan right now. Check it out:

http://uaelp.pennnet.com/display_article/341375/22/ARTCL/none/none/1/AMSC-ships-superconductor-wire-for-project-hydra-prototype-power-cable/

(sorry about the link, was the first to come up on google)

True, and after the Yorktown was such a disaster, the programme was scrapped.

However, it looks like you're right - the Yorktown sank any chance of getting Windows on any warship, the COTS concept of making advanced software cheap enough to be ubiquitous on all warships turned out to be a poor idea. (though, maybe it was the contractor selling it at fault)

The navy still wants (and perhaps needs?) a better technology in their ships, so maybe they'll get it, but I think that it won't be running Windows after all.

This report says Potential candidates for the basis of an eventual common open-architecture combat
system for Navy surface ships include (but are not necessarily limited to) a modularized
version of Lockheed's Aegis system, Raytheon's Total Ship Computing Environment
Infrastructure, or TSCEI (the core of the combat system being developed for the DDG-
1000 destroyers), and the Core Mission System developed by General Dynamics and
Northrop for the General Dynamics version of the LCS.

Note: the Raytheon system runs Red Hat and a 'custom' real-time Linux, General Dynamics system runs Concurrent Corp.'s RedHawk Linux. source

True, and after the Yorktown was such a disaster, the programme was scrapped.

However, it looks like you're right - the Yorktown sank any chance of getting Windows on any warship, the COTS concept of making advanced software cheap enough to be ubiquitous on all warships turned out to be a poor idea. (though, maybe it was the contractor selling it at fault)

The navy still wants (and perhaps needs?) a better technology in their ships, so maybe they'll get it, but I think that it won't be running Windows after all.

This report says Potential candidates for the basis of an eventual common open-architecture combat
system for Navy surface ships include (but are not necessarily limited to) a modularized
version of Lockheed's Aegis system, Raytheon's Total Ship Computing Environment
Infrastructure, or TSCEI (the core of the combat system being developed for the DDG-
1000 destroyers), and the Core Mission System developed by General Dynamics and
Northrop for the General Dynamics version of the LCS.

Note: the Raytheon system runs Red Hat and a 'custom' real-time Linux, General Dynamics system runs Concurrent Corp.'s RedHawk Linux. source

http://images.pennnet.com/articles/lfe/thm/th_162485.jpg http://www.gaw.ru/im/_publ/ineltek/pb-free/fig4.jpg

Cool, now which one of these renewables or fission reactors is actually in a state where we can start replacing coal plants on a large scale tomorrow?

Photovoltatics and wind are here now. Better energy efficiency is here now.

New fission plants, as TFA mentions, are years away.

I'd rather not sit on coal reactors for another 20 years waiting for some breakthrough instead of utilizing the pretty good solution in nuclear plants that we have right now.

Sure, use the ones we have now, might as well get the best use out of them. I'm against building new ones, I'm not arguing for shutting down the ones we have. (Of course, I do want very strict safety practices in the existing ones.)

The reason that Prof. Moller made it to the news again is this: Moller International wins Department of Defense development service contract DAVIS, Calif., 2 August 2007. Moller International has been identified as the primary vendor for a Department of Defense development service contract which will utilize the company's propulsion and airframe designs. The effort is being lead by a nationally recognized educational institution and was issued by a branch of the U.S. military. Disclosure of additional information is limited per the security directives of the contract. Moller International's experience with ducted fans, manned and unmanned vertical take off and landing aircraft designs, and high power-to-weight rotary engines motivated the prime contractor to include the company in the proposed work. http://mae.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cf m?Section=ONART&PUBLICATION_ID=32&ARTICLE_ID=30226 5&C=ONEWS

This is another traffic-building blog spam. It's from another blog. None of these "articles" have a link to anything that looks like a real source, or a picture. No Cisco press release mentions this. But all these blogs have plenty of ads.

I think this is a garbled description of one of the academic "swarming robot" projects, many of which have WiFi gear on board. Those have been around for a while, and there was an article about them in IEEE Trans. on Automation and Robotics this month. It's not a Cisco product, and it's probably not even a Cisco research effort.

Incorrect. Nuclear power is actually quite cheap, and produces no CO2.

http://images.pennnet.com/articles/pe/cap/cap_0702 pe_technology01.gif

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_controv ersy#Economics

The technology is a solved problem, and building safe reactors is no longer a technological challenge.

I used to work for TransGas and they operate 901 million cubic meters of gas storage facilities. I toured the cavern facility at Regina, SK Canada a few years ago, it's a few miles from my house.

I sleep like a baby on a -20C winter night knowing there is 3 or 4 Penta Joules of gas tucked away there. :)

Other grid energy storage

Pumped storage could be adapted to wind.
Compressed air storage is another idea. The gas turbine generators have clutches in the compressor section and stored compressed air that is compressed in off-peak hours is used rather than the turbine powered compressor. The existing systems use the gas turbines in off-peak hours to compress air, but I would think that using wind powered compressors in a compressed air storage gas turbine plant would be a simple retrofit.

I only asked about a few watts, not a military grade, anti-tank weapon. :)

FIRST PROBLEM: I think you'd need more than 3w to provide a serious weapon for the battlefield. I mean, HIGH SPEED PLASTIC WELDERS use lasers with over 100W output...I would expect nothing less of a weapon intended to cut through skin as fast as a bullet would. Higher power requirements mean big, bulky batteries.

Sure, you can burn things with a measly 3w laser, but only if the enemy stands still.

Let's just say you need the minimum power (100w) laser welder I linked to get the skin-cutting performance you want (still pretty low, considering industrial cutters get up to the 10KW range). That's a lot of battery to lug around.

SECOND PROBLEM: it's not just the power SOURCE that's a problem, it's the power dissapation that's at issue.

The efficiency of lasers is pretty low to begin with - numbers I've seen are in the %30-40 range, best case, and less than %1, worst case.

So, let's take our 100w laser rifle, and give it a pretty high efficiency (%40): to generate 100w output continuous fire requires an input of 250w!! That means you have to dissapate a massive 150w while continuously firing the device.

This leads to the THIRD PROBLEM: laser efficiency decreases significantly with the increase in laser temperature, making cooling an even more important problem. If you don't control the temperature with active cooling, your laser spirals out of control in a feedback loop. Thus, you MUST have a bulky cooling solution.

Until they make power virtually free and tiny, man-portable laser weapons are a pipe dream. The good news is, there are DARPA-funded research programs to produce more efficienct lasers, and they've already reached levels of %65. Their eventual goal is %80 peak efficiency. Now all you have to do is solve the energy problem :D

I only asked about a few watts, not a military grade, anti-tank weapon. :)

FIRST PROBLEM: I think you'd need more than 3w to provide a serious weapon for the battlefield. I mean, HIGH SPEED PLASTIC WELDERS use lasers with over 100W output...I would expect nothing less of a weapon intended to cut through skin as fast as a bullet would. Higher power requirements mean big, bulky batteries.

Sure, you can burn things with a measly 3w laser, but only if the enemy stands still.

Let's just say you need the minimum power (100w) laser welder I linked to get the skin-cutting performance you want (still pretty low, considering industrial cutters get up to the 10KW range). That's a lot of battery to lug around.

SECOND PROBLEM: it's not just the power SOURCE that's a problem, it's the power dissapation that's at issue.

The efficiency of lasers is pretty low to begin with - numbers I've seen are in the %30-40 range, best case, and less than %1, worst case.

So, let's take our 100w laser rifle, and give it a pretty high efficiency (%40): to generate 100w output continuous fire requires an input of 250w!! That means you have to dissapate a massive 150w while continuously firing the device.

This leads to the THIRD PROBLEM: laser efficiency decreases significantly with the increase in laser temperature, making cooling an even more important problem. If you don't control the temperature with active cooling, your laser spirals out of control in a feedback loop. Thus, you MUST have a bulky cooling solution.

Until they make power virtually free and tiny, man-portable laser weapons are a pipe dream. The good news is, there are DARPA-funded research programs to produce more efficienct lasers, and they've already reached levels of %65. Their eventual goal is %80 peak efficiency. Now all you have to do is solve the energy problem :D

> turkey offal to fuel

Sounds like the perfect solution for those giant lakes of pig crap. Wonder what's keeping them from looking into this technology.

For an interesting and informative article on the process, see PHOTONIC CRYSTALS: Demultiplexers harness photonic-crystal dispersion properties in Laser Focus World.

GPON, like other PON fibre to the premises (FTTP) technologies, uses a single fibre at the central office (telephone exchange), which splits again and again on its way to homes. A single fibre does deliver about 2.5 Gbps, but it is split up to 32, 64 or 128 times (depending on how many subscribers have signed up, and how the telco has deployed the fibre. So the real bandwidth you get is something like 20 Mbps (1:128 split) to 80 Mbps (1:32 split). Good, but not quite gigabits...

GPON is the ITU (international) standard, while EPON, aka GEPON is from the US's IEEE - GPON is used more in Europe and US, while GEPON is bigger in AsiaPac, where NTT and others are investing huge amounts in fibre (DSL is already on decline in Japan and Korea). See http://lw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm ?ARTICLE_ID=231662&p=13 for details of the various standards.

The other FTTP architecture of interest is Active Ethernet, in which you have a fibre per home/business, and plain old powered Ethernet kit driving the fibres. It gives you 100 Mbps bidirectionally, and possibly more depending on the kit (just upgrade the switches as technology becomes available). So it's more future-proof, but generally costs more to deploy initially, though in some cases it's a better bet according to some (in rural areas or densely populated cities, where it becomes fibre to the basement with VDSL in-building over pre-installed copper, 100 Meg end to end).

[...] a kerosene fire could reach well past steel annealing temperatures and get to steel melting temperatures, depending on the specifics of fuel and air flow in the fire.

Sure, like in a blast furnace maybe?

As you could guess, the steel of an extreme building as the WTC is strained to the limit.

No way. All numbers below are estimates as I remember reading from the literatore, do the research for the exact figures, etc, but to put it simply, this building was soundly designed, a fire alone simply would not have collapsed the building. Period.

Couple things:

• Yes, the fire could've weakened the steel. But this was high grade steel, certified to 3000C. A conservative estimate, is that the fire could get to 1200C. And this is ideal conditions, like in a blast furnace. Probably it was closer to 600C, judging from the smoke for example. Still that would not explain that the steel was *evaporated* in some places, nor the *molten* steel at the base of the towers.
• Even at high temperatures, 800-1200C the steel could still support 2-3 times the load - that was the design.
• these buildings were designed to withstand a hit from *multiple* 707s - faster, but smaller than 757s. Did the engineers simply forget about the fuel, or was that taken into consideration?
• Even if the steel weakened, such that the floors collapsed, there are a couple other problems: (1) How did the building collapse in under 10s? This would only be possible if the floors underneath were *gone*, i.e. there was no friction, other than air friction (2) the WTC bldgs had a central core of 47 steel columns and concrete. This is entirely left out from some of the "theories" trotted out by the experts.

• There's an article in Fire Engineering magazine that calls the investigation a "half baked farce". Pretty good assessment.

Specifically related to the issues I mentioned: If you are interested in some of the challenges around flatness, you can learn more about dummy fill that must be added to metal layers, by looking at the layman's version or a technical description.

With regard to reflection, you can check out a rather old background article or how anti-reflection layers must be used in modern semiconductor manufacturing to reduce problems.

More specific articles on 3D fabrication can probably be found in recent journals (most likely not available online), or if you're not concerned about reading patents, by reading patents from the USPTO (for reasons of US law which you're probably familiar with, I'm not going to search that and provide you any links). There may also be more by searching for Matrix Semiconductor (which I didn't realize at the time of my first posting has been acquired by SanDisk).

Having said that, there is also 3D packaging, which takes various forms. Semiconductor Cubing (as it's apparently called) can stack lots of semiconductor devices, but note that these are originally fabricated as single layer chips and then they are bonded together to form a larger block.

More recently (and in real production), 3D packaging is being performed through a System in Package (SiP) methodology (you may also see this referred to as a 'chip stack' technology). This is distinct from a multi-chip module (MCM), where the chips are aligned horizontally on the packaging substrate. Today, a SiP is generally a memory module bonded upside down onto a non-memory device (though it can also be used to bond an RF device onto a non-RF device). This form of packaging is receiving attention from SEMATECH as well. Further information from SEMI is also available if you Google for "SEMI Forum: Mapping progress in 3D IC integration".

Beyond that, it's again hard, due to the password protected nature of conference materials and journals... but hopefully that's a good set of links to explore.

That has to be 170TB of online. Avid is so Toast at NAB unless they have something that no one has ever heard of. Oh can you say online editing of cineons and DPX in a certain other editor that AVID probably really hates for like 1/10th the cost of a nitris. ah just read the story. That is ONLINE storage and it does not say in what configuration that storage is in. http://cgw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cf m?Section=ARTCL&ARTICLE_ID=250488&VERSION_NUM=2&p= 18 and that story makes me want to try this temporal solution even more. I did not say implement. I said test try, give it a whurl if it works.

"SCTP and Infiniband focus on different areas. IB is largely a high performance HPC / cluster network architecture for LAN applications, where SCTP is a transport protocol designed to operate efficiently under WAN conditions (significant packet loss, high RTTs)."

Ok, that makes more sense. IB and other hardware based reliability systems all have problems with long distances. There are folks working on IB WAN though including the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Check out Obsidian Research.

"The interrupt issue has largely been solved - on Linux NAPI dynamically switches between interrupt and polled mode to reduce this overhead to negligible levels. Message signalled interrupts also help considerably."

Cool. I was not aware of NAPI...been too long since I have been in linux kernel land. I agree about MSI helping out. It would be interesting see how this effects HPC performance. HPC has appliations that can include both large transfers and latency sensitive messages. By the way, I am pretty sure intel nics had a similar control as an option on their linux drivers for some time.

"What would be much more helpful (and economical) for iSCSI, SCTP, and RDDP is NIC CRC32C checksum generation. CRC generation is quite expensive in software but trivial in hardware."

Yep. I guess its a matter of finding the right balance between what should be offloaded and for what cost.

"One advantage of SCTP over TCP is that on a per stream basis, SCTP connection establishment overhead is much lower than TCP - basically O(1) instead of O(N) in the number of streams."

Interesting. Oracle and SilverStorm pushed out Reliable Datagram Sockets for IB (could work over iWarp) to handle the issue of lots of connections to the same host. Oracle saw massive scaling issues on pretty much any hardware or software for their clustering. RDS solved it by multiplexing all threads' traffic that goes to the same host down one reliable pipe. I wonder how SCTP would handle this?

And I suppose the users of FOSS image editing tools in this article let their families starve.

So to recap: you come on as an anonymous coward to flame somebody for writing tutorials so the person who wants to learn *can* learn. Whose time is worthless, again?

You mean like the serious image editors in the screen shots in this article? Or are movie studios not "serious"?

No, I could care less about your karma. It's clear, for whatever reasons, that you're committed to screaming down all FOSS no matter what. Dime a dozen...

replying to my own post, but just noticed this article. This is an example of what I mean here, "more power" that is automatically made during peak times;

http://pepei.pennnet.com/news/display_news_story.c fm?Section=WIREN&Category=HOME&NewsID=129717

I was right with you until you mentioned Java, thanks for the laugh.

http://mae.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cf m?Section=Articles&ARTICLE_ID=234337&VERSION_NUM=2 &p=32

"Aonix engineers have demonstrated hard-real-time Java that reaches the run-time efficiency of C, which makes it able to meet the needs of command-and-control applications such as network-centric warfare, Future Combat Systems, and low-level telecommunications control-plane software, Aonix officials say."

"The Navy Open Architecture guidelines also state that all new development will be done in Java and C++, he adds. "

Laughing now? Or perhaps feeling a little foolish?

as a film maker i agree that the available apps arent as available as one would wish.

that linux list?

thats muscley studios flexing. showing the horrible vertical proprietary solution providors of old that they are sick and tired. im lookingh at you, you AVID assholes.

you conventiently omit AVID from your list. final cut pro will never beat AVID - some of the expensive apps you mention in combination are adequate replacements with the massive amounts of financial muscle and high end in house bespoke IT support the studios wield.

what you are doing? comparing apples to the causes of the franco-prussian wars.

as a programmer and free software advocate i take exception to your whining about software because i get the feeling you should know better.
which lone programmer writes a FC Pro beater on linux to scratch his "need an editing soloution itch"?
your sentiment however does represent multimedia creator users' needs.
i am irked by the fact that the big companies havent open sourced any of their general puprose tools like ILM promised to.
http://cgw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cf m?Section=Articles&Subsection=Display&ARTICLE_ID=1 18664

however if the market is there a smart guy may hire a team of great programmers to come up with an AVID beater.

also the mac OSX intel move may change thigs around for these products which were mac/win only.

bugger - I've lost the link dual obviously, having violated the cardinal rule of never posting the same link twice! I meant to post this (regarding lost rigs): http://ogj.pennnet.com/articles/article_display.cf m?Section=ONART&C=GenIn&ARTICLE_ID=235816&p=7

More precisely it used in the digital matte department. Funnily a lot of that work was done on what was called the Rebel Mac Unit. Now it's called the Rebel Unit and is mostly PC based.

Painting the Town

Yes, if only the military had heard of this technology sooner. They would never think of something as complex as helmet mounted displays on their own.

http://www.ascension-tech.com/applications/militar y.php
http://mae.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cf m?ARTICLE_ID=231330&p=32

And really, building this display unit and launching the "bird" is the only hard part. Integrating 3D satellite imagery with the flight control and display system in combat situations and high RF jamming environments is childs play, so these low-res consumer grade glasses are the missing piece that the military has been waiting for!

Let's send a few of these glasses over to the boys in Afghanistan to prevent any further crashes!

I've read stuff about that sort of thing before. I can't find the exact article but I did find this which is along the same thread. If I recall correctly, the one I had read basically said the main problem with tapping the cables is making sense of the HUGE amount of data you get.

Infostor did an article in February about how healthcare and financial services companies are now required to keep a lot of stuff, and how they are handling it.

- Ken Beyer (ILM production engineering manager): "Six hundred Linux desktops will be used for Star Wars: Episode III to be released summer 2005."
Sequence supervisor Robert Weaver noticed a tremendous performance boost upgrading from RISC (Sun/SGI) workstations to Linux PCs during Star Wars, Episode II:

AMD64 used for Episode III
Alias/wave Maya used for Episode II, Lord of the Rings, and Spiderman

Xp64 used on episode III. Don't know how much though.
Episode 1 hardware and software. Yes,Pixar's Renderman and Alias|Wavefront`s Maya . SGI computers.

The linux cluster used at Industrial light and magic.

I tried submitting a story on SpaceX a couple of weeks ago, but it was sadly rejected. Here's the text of the submission, along with some other interesting info:

Spaceflight Now has an article on SpaceX, a low-cost space launch company started by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk (he is no longer with PayPal). The article describes SpaceX's small-size Falcon I rocket, scheduled to launch a military imaging satellite on its maiden flight in March, and their medium-size Falcon V rocket, scheduled to lift a prototype Bigelow inflatable space habitat next year. Interestingly, the Falcon V has enough capacity to lift a Gemini-style capsule with 5-6 people to orbit. Both rockets have per-pound launch costs approximately one-fifth that of comparable rockets. Long-term plans call for evolving the basic design to heavy-lift and super-heavy lift rockets, assuming SpaceX survives its legal battles with defense giants like Northrup Grumman. Musk believes that ultimately a launch cost of '$500 per pound or less is very achievable' (compared to $10,000 per pound for the Space Shuttle). Elon Musk is a member of the Mars Society, and started SpaceX after he realized that current launch costs would be a large barrier to his plans for a philanthropic mission to put an experimental greenhouse with food crops on Mars.

This radio interview with Elon Musk from 2001 is pretty neat, and has some information I haven't seen elsewhere.

Yes. It's been done by the Eastman Kodak group.

Researchers at Eastman Kodak (Rochester, NY), for example, have developed a grating electromechnical system (GEMS), a diffractive-MEMS spatial-light modulator for use in printing and display applications. The GEMS modulator contains a linear array of pixels capable of high-speed digital operation, high optical contrast, and good efficiency. According to its developers, when coupled with RGB laser radiation, the GEMS is capable of producing spectacular still and motion images that create a new visual experience. Images are life-like having a smooth continuous quality with no "screen door" effect, high contrast, extended dynamic range, high resolution, and vivid colors. In addition, computer-generated motion images can provide a unique experience by using the expanded available color gamut to produce highly saturated colors.

"The primary advantage of lasers for display applications is color gamut," said Greg Niven, director of marketing, graphic arts and display, at Coherent (Santa Clara, CA), which is supplying high-power solid-state lasers to the display industry for applications such as rear-projection TV and digital cinema. "With lightbulbs and microdisplays, you can achieve 40% of the color your eye can perceive. With lasers (RGB primaries), you can get up to 85% of the colors your eye can see. So there is much wider color gamut, extremely high resolution, greater contrast, longer lifetimes, and a much better viewing experience."

http://lfw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cf m?Section=ARTCL&ARTICLE_ID=216621&VERSION_NUM=2 http://www.insightmedia.info/news/Kodak'sGEMS.htm

I think we're all in agreement here about the hilarious idiocy of aforementioned legislation. However as long as we're here I cannot allow this opportunity to discuss nerdly things go unexploited.

The cell phone LED market is really interesting. You basically have the problem of producing a lot of light very quickly with a very limited amount of power available and an even more limited volume of space to fit your electronics (no room for that big capacitor seen in conventional camera flash drive circuits) to drive the flash since cameras these days are tending ever more toward the positively lilliputian. Many cameras include a simple and cheap Cerium:YAG coated 5mm blue led which can be safely overdriven for a very short amount of time, producing a moderate burst of light. Luxeon, the maker of the current most powerful white LEDs recently entered the market with their much improved version of this method. Certain other companies are trying to miniaturize conventional xenon flash units for use in cell phones. Still other companies are eyeing different methods. The story is, interestingly, somewhat analogous to the development of cell phone electronics themselves, a maximization of efficiency in terms of converting power from the battery to the display, processor and transmitter. Except now it's a game of getting the most photons out of a flash using the fewest electrons to do it.

I don't agree. Nick Foster won an Academy Award for the water in Antz. article I agree with your statement on making it fit the feel of the rest of the movie. Water may be easy to model with FMA, but it'll take a lot of processing power. And I think fire is a lot harder -- we're still working on models for scientific simulation. I've rendered fractal clouds, and, sorry, they don't look too hot. You'd need a weather model, and then you'd need to make it fast.

See this CleanRooms article for more details

This Wonderful Life is a very impressive animated short

This Wonderful Life is a very impressive animated short

Yeah but if they do the electronic self adjusting bolts http://smt.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cf m?Section=Articles&Subsection=Display&ARTICLE_ID=2 07838 will detect a non-OEM device and unscrew the engine from the frame.

Of course some uber-3733t hax0r will reprogram the BIOS and wind up crashing into other flying cars and then it will be raining Honda parts on those poor people who have to drive regular cars on those no longer maintained pavement highways. It's gonna be ugly.

DRM fasteners...

You think you are joking, but...

Although Linux has yet to achieve wide popularity in the computer game world ("Will Linux Be Computer Games' Dark Horse OS?" Computer, Dec. 2001, pp. 161-162), it is making rapid progress toward becoming the dominant operating system in the other major entertainment arena: motion pictures. Name a motion picture from the past year or two that featured stunning animation or dazzling special effects, and chances are the film's producers used Linux-based computers to splash those graphics on the big screen.

"In short, the big news in Hollywood about Linux is it is no longer big news. Linux has won not only renderfarm servers, but the artist desktops of the top studios. It's hard to find a large studio that does not rely upon Linux as its primary animation and special effects OS, and many smaller film studios have adopted Linux, too...

"You hear a lot about Linux not being ready to work on desktops," said HP's Jeff Wood, director of product marketing for personal workstations. "Well, here we have the perfect example of how Linux is more than ready for the desktop -- hundreds of animators successfully used Linux to create a film right from their desktops."

• Linux in Hollywood: A Star Is Born
• Computer and Graphics World
• Sinbad Hears Linux's Siren Song
• TechNewsWorld: Linux in Hollywood

1. NVidia Gelato (available FIRST for Linux - Windows XP coming soon)
2. Maya
3. Tremor
4. Shake
5. Houdini
6. Renderman
7. Cinepaint

1. Pixar (although Steve Jobs is moving them to Macs)
2. ILM
3. Weta Digital
4. Dreamworks

Linux is the pre-eminent renderfarm for Hollywood and is the dominant workstation for artists. But don't trust me - there are plenty of links out there on the web.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

According to an article on the Laser Focus World website MTHEL system is chemical powered, deuterium fluoride to be exact. I don't imagine that deuterium fluoride is too availible. I wonder how much it cost per target destroyed.

This is of course impossible to know as the output of the laser is still classified.

What might that navigation system be?

• I can't make out the logo under the navigation display screen. A wave, followed by "ware"?
• ECDIS-N seems to be the Navy paperless navigation design. Electronic charts (maps) exist for navigation of federal vessels with ECDIS-N.
• Navy is using two navigation systems: USCG COMDAC INS and Litton Marine's (now Sperry Marine) IBS (VMS). The Swift seems to use a new IBS, thus it is using Litton's VMS.
• Sperry Marine makes Navy's ECDIS-N: In a separate effort to extend the open-architecture concept, PEO IWS in late 2003 awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman Sperry Marine in Charlottesville, Va., to act as the Navy's sole supplier of electronic charting, display, and information systems, called ECDIS-N, in a competition that rejected two Navy-developed systems. Confirmed.
• Search for ECDIS-N on Sperry Marine produces only the Military IBS page. Apparently ECDIS-N might be there. Sperry Marine products
• Apparently ECDIS-N systems must follow DII COE for the operating environment. POSIX is also involved.
• LynxOS might be involved in real time situations: LynxOS(R) was selected as the reference RTOS implementation for the DII COE configurable RT kernel.
• Thus there may be Unix influences in those designs for the navigation system.

The phrase Joint Interoperable Mission Planning and Rehearsal System is found by Google only in this document. There is a Joint En-route Mission Planning and Rehearsal System (JEMPRS), but no hints of its platform.

The COMBATSS site doesn't have much info. Another site mentions an HP Unix workstation with COMBATSS. And the COMBATSS Platform Equipment doesn't sound like a description of MS-Windows. Using Mozilla as an interface is mentioned in the original article, which doesn't reduce the possibilities much.

Yes, although the use of Macs has been somehwat dephased. The Rebel Unit was called the Mac rebel Unit, but now a lot of the work is done on PCs with 3D max, Brazil, etc. The matte painting department, closely tied, also used some Macs though I don't know the current status:

Painting the town

Most of the Mac syuff in Episode 1 was actually the Naboo ship and several other shots. The Pod Race was mainly done in Maya plus a whole bunch of propietary software (Viewpaint, the soft body dynamics engine, their terrain generation code, etc.)