Survival is about taking care of #1. We're not all one big happy family. I'm going to make sure that I survive and my family survives regardless of the cost to anyone or anything else.
Back shortly - I'm sneaking off next door to get dinner from my neighbour's fridge.
I think the more they rely on 'green screens' and CGI, the poorer the quality of the movie, specifically the story.
I was about to take exception to this (being in the visual FX industry), but then I realised I'd read it as the more they use, rather than rely. But I agree with what you really said, mostly.
VFX are a tool to convey the story like any other, they just happen to be a popular and easy-to-overuse tool. Like building a house using only a hammer, just because it's such a cool thing to hammer with, & because everyone likes watching you use it. You might be able to charge admission while you're building, but nobody's going to want to live in the result.
Hollywood simply realised that people apparently were prepared to pay good money for a couple of hours of eye candy, without being necessarily burdened by a story, and that this was easy to provide on a regular basis. This is fine, the problem is only that you just need to know in advance whether to expect a story or not.
In the absence of more helpful movie labelling laws, read the reviews first so that you know which movie is which. For those that want story and flash, they do come by occasionally, just don't set your expectations too high for everything you see or you'll just be disappointed...
I have seen TV ads which I enjoyed more than the show they interrupted (not to mention popular shows with almost nothing but advertising). I don't rush out and buy the product just because the ad was superior, however.
You could think of Michelangelo's David or Pietà as merely advertising for the Christian religion, but that would be rather missing the point. Just because creative art is inspired by (or even funded by) a group with an interest in winning you over to their way of thinking does not invalidate the art itself, or the act of its creation.
As early as 1895, a Russian scientist named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky suggested a fanciful "Celestial Castle" in geosynchronous Earth orbit attached to a tower on the ground, not unlike Paris's Eiffel tower. Another Russian, a Leningrad engineer by the name of Yuri Artsutanov, wrote some of the first modern ideas about space elevators in 1960. Published as a non-technical story in Pravda, his story never caught the attention of the West. Science magazine ran a short article in 1966 by John Isaacs, an American oceanographer, about a pair of whisker-thin wires extending to a geostationary satellite. The article ran basically unnoticed. The concept finally came to the attention of the space flight engineering community through a technical paper written in 1975 by Jerome Pearson of the Air Force Research Laboratory. This paper was the inspiration for Clarke's novel.
Indeed, it's impressive engineering.
At least there's a CF-based 4-in-1 adapter that would take your memory sticks, though you'd lose some of the formfactor appeal.
Try to find a host OS with a TCP/IP stack that can properly utilize 1 gigabit ethernet, let alone 10 gigabits. Hint: It ain't Linux...
Define "properly". If you mean efficiency, that's desirable but not critical. If an Intel/Linux server is 75% the efficiency of a Sun server, yet costs 30% the price, you can install two or three for the same bucks. That's efficiency of a sort too, yes?
Try to find a storage solution that can read or write that fast.
Well, in terms of raw sustained bandwidth, this doesn't seem all that difficult. A single Ultra320 SCSI HBA manages about 2.5 Gb/s, and 4-6 of those should meet requirements. Modern drives can sustain 400-650 Mb/s easily enough, 32 or even 24 of them would give plenty of headroom. 4 per HBA would be ideal. Even consumer 4-way SATA RAIDs would likely do the trick - being point-to-point they have more headroom than a shared SCSI bus (though less transfer efficiency).
Try to get all of the above, along with a 133 mhz. 64-bit PCI-X bus
Thanks, I'd rather use PCI Express. A 4x PCIe slot easily matches PCI-X, but it's point-to-point rather than shared, so I get that much bandwidth for each HBA. Motherboards are in production now with 4x, 8x and 16x slots, chipsets with 32 available PCIe lanes - that's around 80 Gb/s total bandwidth. A dual Opteron system today also has around 80 Gb/s memory bandwidth, and quad- and 8-way systems have much more.
Sun systems have traditionally been right up there with sgi for high-bandwidth servers while humble x86 consumer systems haven't held a candle to them. But that ole' world, it just keeps on changing...
HD-DVD is a completely different animal to Blu-Ray. It won't help you at all for backups, Linux distros, photo collections etc. It's just standard DVD media, nothing more.
HD-DVD is more a standard of (MPEG4-based) compression to let the studios shoehorn a hidef movie into something that's not really quite big enough for it. An HD-DVD player is a standard DVD player with a beefed-up decoder & WM9 support. Yes, you can get 1080i out of it, at the price of
110:1 compression. I prefer my movies without blockiness & filtering artifacts, thank you.
Hollywood might prefer the HD-DVD format because it requires less of an infrastructure upgrade, but they'll change their tune when the flood of pirated HD-DVDs really gets underway. Blu-Ray movies would at least have the defence of being simply too big to swap practically on the internet.
OK, you're saying that it's simply due to stronger chemical bonds. That is of course relevant, but it's a mistake to apply macroscopic analogies to nanoscopic manipulations. There are a completely different set of issues involved - different forces, different approaches to solving them, e.g. twisting individual molecules or catalysing bond changes, instead of just throwing energy at it until it breaks. The site I linked listed some techniques.
And who says you have to detach your metal atoms from tiny ball bearings anyway? It may well be easier to provide a supply of atoms as a metallic salt, or even unrefined ore, discarding the unwanted material.
Self-assembly is a completely different approach, very suited to certain materials but quite unsuited to building an engine. It's entirely appropriate for today's technology, and may still have its uses in the future too. But since a putative nano-assembler factory could make the same materials albeit perhaps at lower efficiency, because it can potentially make the rest of the machine too & bypass the whole construction & assembly phases to deliver a finished product assembled atom by atom, it might well be a better option for many things.
Anyhow, time will tell. If there is disagreement on how hard it is, well, I remain optimistic:-)
Have you ever tried to move metal? It takes so much force that it literally glows red hot. How are metal atoms going to self assemble?
Move metal? I picked up an entire metal fork quite easily just the other day, and it didn't even get warm. I imagine a single molecule requires even less force. And self-assembly is not required; nano-manipulators do the movement and bonding of atoms/molecules via currently-existing techniques (see that site I linked for more info).
If you meant moving metal atoms takes far more force than other kinds of atoms, perhaps you could point me at some info at why this might be.
Thing is, a lot of very smart people think it's quite possible. No offence, but I tend to believe their credentials more than yours.
But, how are those little atoms going to machine a precision piston bore in a sleeved cast iron block? Better still, how the heck are those atoms supposed to press that sleeve into the block? Anyone? Anyone?
Molecular assembly. Don't think of it as machining a cylinder, or jamming a sleeve into a hunk of iron. Think of it as being assembled like Lego, each raw molecule bonded to another by millions of nano-scale assemblers. The final product is built as one piece, from the appropriate molecules, with no wastage.
Well, duh. If they already have a PC, then they don't want this. Perhaps you missed the words, "alternative to a standalone XBox Next console", however.
Try and think of it from the shoes of a person who doesn't have a PC, wants games and the ability for some light computing tasks (email, web, basic office stuff etc). This would be cheaper AND smaller than a console, TV, PC and monitor - just the thing for a college kid who can afford a PC, yes?
The problem is that the API is currently on version 1.5 and the useful functions are all in extension (GL_vertex_buffer_object, GL_shader_objects) that aren't covered at all by the main API.
I'm with you here. I get better reference material on the net.
DirectX has an incredibly streamlined API...
Man, I so totally disagree (this is COM we're talking about), but perhaps that's just me:-)
...runs identically on all cards
Uh uh, it most certainly does not. DirectX runs very differently on a 9800XT vs a TNT2. Obviously.
OpenGL's ARB and vendor extensions are good and bad - good because you get the very latest hardware features immediately and you don't have to wait a year or two for the (admittedly slow) ARB to decide whether they like them or not. Bad because the vendor extensions at least aren't standardized, and if you want to use them, chances are you'll need multiple code paths for different vendor hardware. ARB extensions are standard, but of course not all hardware supports them (or indeed, older hardware may not support the newer versions of OpenGL).
Instead, DirectX uses capability bits to differentiate between hardware. If you want a new feature, you have to wait until MS gets around to supporting it (e.g. PS 3.0, even though that's already been defined, cannot be used until you get DX9.0c). MS do update DX more regularly than the ARB (they have to, without vendor extensions), but you could still be waiting a while. You still need multiple codepaths to cope with different hardware caps - no difference there, and you may still have to deal with cards that don't have drivers for the latest DX at all.
OpenGL is saddled with backward compatibility
OpenGL 2.0 reinvents the API to cope with programmable hardware, and mitigates that effect fairly well.
Microsoft is already releasing information about DirectX NEXT
Yeah, like what? Nothing exactly useful. You won't see much from MS for quite a while.
the only reason I put up with OpenGL is that it runs on Linux and Mac. Portability is ceasing to be a compelling argument when the common.NET runtime across all versions of windows (embedded, CE, Xbox, desktop, server)
That's hardly much portability - it doesn't run on Linux and Mac. OpenGL is available on many more platforms than.NET, let alone DirectX.
...and new features of DirectX NEXT are available.
That could still be some time. I don't think.NET is going to solve portability problems anytime soon, especially for games, professional apps etc, any more than Java did (and probably somewhat less).
I can't imagine holding an iBook in one hand on a crowded bus.
The advantage of a PDA is its small and convenient size - smaller than a paperback. You're reading mostly linearly anyway, so you don't need a large screen (paperbacks are much smaller than iBooks). All you need is crisp text, a backlight, decent battery life and an easy way to turn pages (I prefer a thumbwheel myself).
PS 3.0 is a non-issue for today's gamers. They aren't going to make any signficant image or speed differences in anything you'll see soon. Those who buy these cards today might care more in a year or two, unless they can afford to spend that much every 6-12 months (not me).
However, for production-quality rendering - which uses the GPU more as a highly parallel array of FPUs rather than a traditional scanline renderer - PS 3.0's far greater flexibility is a godsend, and so is true 32 bit float accuracy.
My gaming machine (where I want good-looking games and minimal fan noise) has a DX9 Radeon chip, and will likely get upgraded to another one, for the same reasons. My workstation (which demands float accuracy and shader flexibility far more than speed) currently runs a GeForce FX, and will also be sticking with nVidia for the forseeable future.
In some countries (e.g. here in Australia), "sole distribution rights" does not make parallel importation by the consumer illegal - and if the "sole distributor" tries to tell you it is illegal, that's considered Restriction of Trade (which is illegal:-)
I believe this has been tested in court over here, and it's still legal to "grey-market" CDs and other products.
Slashdot Mirror
Back shortly - I'm sneaking off next door to get dinner from my neighbour's fridge.
I was about to take exception to this (being in the visual FX industry), but then I realised I'd read it as the more they use , rather than rely. But I agree with what you really said, mostly.
VFX are a tool to convey the story like any other, they just happen to be a popular and easy-to-overuse tool. Like building a house using only a hammer, just because it's such a cool thing to hammer with, & because everyone likes watching you use it. You might be able to charge admission while you're building, but nobody's going to want to live in the result.
Hollywood simply realised that people apparently were prepared to pay good money for a couple of hours of eye candy, without being necessarily burdened by a story, and that this was easy to provide on a regular basis. This is fine, the problem is only that you just need to know in advance whether to expect a story or not.
In the absence of more helpful movie labelling laws, read the reviews first so that you know which movie is which. For those that want story and flash, they do come by occasionally, just don't set your expectations too high for everything you see or you'll just be disappointed...
Exactly my point. Thank you for explaining it for me.
That would appear to be the reason for the cancellation, but it would be nice to know more than the article tells us, I agree.
the company had decided to improve picture quality before introducing the product.
And probably the rest of the world. Only the US thinks this is new, sorry.
I have seen TV ads which I enjoyed more than the show they interrupted (not to mention popular shows with almost nothing but advertising). I don't rush out and buy the product just because the ad was superior, however. You could think of Michelangelo's David or Pietà as merely advertising for the Christian religion, but that would be rather missing the point. Just because creative art is inspired by (or even funded by) a group with an interest in winning you over to their way of thinking does not invalidate the art itself, or the act of its creation.
What would that leave you? Nothing at all?
As early as 1895, a Russian scientist named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky suggested a fanciful "Celestial Castle" in geosynchronous Earth orbit attached to a tower on the ground, not unlike Paris's Eiffel tower. Another Russian, a Leningrad engineer by the name of Yuri Artsutanov, wrote some of the first modern ideas about space elevators in 1960. Published as a non-technical story in Pravda, his story never caught the attention of the West. Science magazine ran a short article in 1966 by John Isaacs, an American oceanographer, about a pair of whisker-thin wires extending to a geostationary satellite. The article ran basically unnoticed. The concept finally came to the attention of the space flight engineering community through a technical paper written in 1975 by Jerome Pearson of the Air Force Research Laboratory. This paper was the inspiration for Clarke's novel.
Indeed, it's impressive engineering. At least there's a CF-based 4-in-1 adapter that would take your memory sticks, though you'd lose some of the formfactor appeal.
Does your digital stills camera use CompactFlash cards? If so, then yes, you have a winner.
Define "properly". If you mean efficiency, that's desirable but not critical. If an Intel/Linux server is 75% the efficiency of a Sun server, yet costs 30% the price, you can install two or three for the same bucks. That's efficiency of a sort too, yes?
Try to find a storage solution that can read or write that fast.
Well, in terms of raw sustained bandwidth, this doesn't seem all that difficult. A single Ultra320 SCSI HBA manages about 2.5 Gb/s, and 4-6 of those should meet requirements. Modern drives can sustain 400-650 Mb/s easily enough, 32 or even 24 of them would give plenty of headroom. 4 per HBA would be ideal. Even consumer 4-way SATA RAIDs would likely do the trick - being point-to-point they have more headroom than a shared SCSI bus (though less transfer efficiency).
Try to get all of the above, along with a 133 mhz. 64-bit PCI-X bus
Thanks, I'd rather use PCI Express. A 4x PCIe slot easily matches PCI-X, but it's point-to-point rather than shared, so I get that much bandwidth for each HBA. Motherboards are in production now with 4x, 8x and 16x slots, chipsets with 32 available PCIe lanes - that's around 80 Gb/s total bandwidth. A dual Opteron system today also has around 80 Gb/s memory bandwidth, and quad- and 8-way systems have much more.
Sun systems have traditionally been right up there with sgi for high-bandwidth servers while humble x86 consumer systems haven't held a candle to them. But that ole' world, it just keeps on changing...
The counter is visible under IE however.
HD-DVD is more a standard of (MPEG4-based) compression to let the studios shoehorn a hidef movie into something that's not really quite big enough for it. An HD-DVD player is a standard DVD player with a beefed-up decoder & WM9 support. Yes, you can get 1080i out of it, at the price of 110:1 compression. I prefer my movies without blockiness & filtering artifacts, thank you.
Hollywood might prefer the HD-DVD format because it requires less of an infrastructure upgrade, but they'll change their tune when the flood of pirated HD-DVDs really gets underway. Blu-Ray movies would at least have the defence of being simply too big to swap practically on the internet.
And who says you have to detach your metal atoms from tiny ball bearings anyway? It may well be easier to provide a supply of atoms as a metallic salt, or even unrefined ore, discarding the unwanted material.
Self-assembly is a completely different approach, very suited to certain materials but quite unsuited to building an engine. It's entirely appropriate for today's technology, and may still have its uses in the future too. But since a putative nano-assembler factory could make the same materials albeit perhaps at lower efficiency, because it can potentially make the rest of the machine too & bypass the whole construction & assembly phases to deliver a finished product assembled atom by atom, it might well be a better option for many things.
Anyhow, time will tell. If there is disagreement on how hard it is, well, I remain optimistic :-)
Move metal? I picked up an entire metal fork quite easily just the other day, and it didn't even get warm. I imagine a single molecule requires even less force. And self-assembly is not required; nano-manipulators do the movement and bonding of atoms/molecules via currently-existing techniques (see that site I linked for more info).
If you meant moving metal atoms takes far more force than other kinds of atoms, perhaps you could point me at some info at why this might be.
Thing is, a lot of very smart people think it's quite possible. No offence, but I tend to believe their credentials more than yours.
Molecular assembly. Don't think of it as machining a cylinder, or jamming a sleeve into a hunk of iron. Think of it as being assembled like Lego, each raw molecule bonded to another by millions of nano-scale assemblers. The final product is built as one piece, from the appropriate molecules, with no wastage.
Escape hatch in the roof?
Try and think of it from the shoes of a person who doesn't have a PC, wants games and the ability for some light computing tasks (email, web, basic office stuff etc). This would be cheaper AND smaller than a console, TV, PC and monitor - just the thing for a college kid who can afford a PC, yes?
M-Systems have said they will be supplying "large" flash mem units to MS, but actually replacing the hard drive is still only speculation....
I'm with you here. I get better reference material on the net.
DirectX has an incredibly streamlined API...
Man, I so totally disagree (this is COM we're talking about), but perhaps that's just me :-)
Uh uh, it most certainly does not. DirectX runs very differently on a 9800XT vs a TNT2. Obviously.
OpenGL's ARB and vendor extensions are good and bad - good because you get the very latest hardware features immediately and you don't have to wait a year or two for the (admittedly slow) ARB to decide whether they like them or not. Bad because the vendor extensions at least aren't standardized, and if you want to use them, chances are you'll need multiple code paths for different vendor hardware. ARB extensions are standard, but of course not all hardware supports them (or indeed, older hardware may not support the newer versions of OpenGL).
Instead, DirectX uses capability bits to differentiate between hardware. If you want a new feature, you have to wait until MS gets around to supporting it (e.g. PS 3.0, even though that's already been defined, cannot be used until you get DX9.0c). MS do update DX more regularly than the ARB (they have to, without vendor extensions), but you could still be waiting a while. You still need multiple codepaths to cope with different hardware caps - no difference there, and you may still have to deal with cards that don't have drivers for the latest DX at all.
OpenGL is saddled with backward compatibility
OpenGL 2.0 reinvents the API to cope with programmable hardware, and mitigates that effect fairly well.
Microsoft is already releasing information about DirectX NEXT
Yeah, like what? Nothing exactly useful. You won't see much from MS for quite a while.
the only reason I put up with OpenGL is that it runs on Linux and Mac. Portability is ceasing to be a compelling argument when the common .NET runtime across all versions of windows (embedded, CE, Xbox, desktop, server)
That's hardly much portability - it doesn't run on Linux and Mac. OpenGL is available on many more platforms than .NET, let alone DirectX.
That could still be some time. I don't think .NET is going to solve portability problems anytime soon, especially for games, professional apps etc, any more than Java did (and probably somewhat less).
The advantage of a PDA is its small and convenient size - smaller than a paperback. You're reading mostly linearly anyway, so you don't need a large screen (paperbacks are much smaller than iBooks). All you need is crisp text, a backlight, decent battery life and an easy way to turn pages (I prefer a thumbwheel myself).
However, for production-quality rendering - which uses the GPU more as a highly parallel array of FPUs rather than a traditional scanline renderer - PS 3.0's far greater flexibility is a godsend, and so is true 32 bit float accuracy.
My gaming machine (where I want good-looking games and minimal fan noise) has a DX9 Radeon chip, and will likely get upgraded to another one, for the same reasons. My workstation (which demands float accuracy and shader flexibility far more than speed) currently runs a GeForce FX, and will also be sticking with nVidia for the forseeable future.
www.razorprices.com
www.msy.com.au
DVDs:
www.jbhifi.com.au (though they don't sell online)
www.ezydvd.com.au
www.devoteddvd.com.au
I've found KMart are often as cheap or cheaper though.
I'd welcome some more additions to these lists...
(ripped from somewhere else)
I believe this has been tested in court over here, and it's still legal to "grey-market" CDs and other products.