If such foods were labelled clearly, would people stop buying them? Doubtful.
Hmm, you must be from the US.
In Europe, we are very anti GM food. There have been many protests against the GM trials that are going on, including the ripping up of crops. In the UK, a number of supermarkets have made statements that their own products will NOT contain any GM contents. GM is not wanted here.
Besides, what is the difference between direct genetic manipulation and indirect cross breeding and active mate selection?
When was the last time you managed to cross a plant with a jellyfish? GM allows completely unrelated species to swap genes. Is this sensible? Some say yes, some say no. I'm still out on this one, so I will stay clear of GM food until a lot more research has been done.
The only remaining question is should the shiny side be up or down? I think it depends on whether I want to keep cold liquids cold or hot liquids hot. The light reflected by the shiny side would help keep the hot liquids hot.
You want to put the shiny side down as there is a danger that the paint will come off and mark the table. Even better, take two CD's and stick them together to give you a shinny surface on both sides. This way you don't damage your table OR your bottle of pop.
It's interesting to see that the books/authors listed so far, fairly well cover my entire book collection. I guess geeks have similar tastes.
The author nobody has mentioned so far it Terry Pratchett. His books (in the main) are very much comic fantisy rather than SF but seem to appeal to the geek crowd.
Start with the diskworld novels (23 of them at the last count) with The Colour of Magic[1]. Be warned however that once you have started one book you are likely to go on to read all the rest. Be also warned that his books will make you laugh out loud which can be rather embarrasing if your on the train at the time.
Diskworld is a flat pizza shaped world that flies through space balanced on the back of 4 elephants which are in turn on the back of a rather large turtle. It gets weirder from then on. (For the nerds, there is a computer called hex that is powered by ants. To give it more power, the local Wizards have been trying to get More bugs into it!)
[1] Note the spelling of Colour.[2] He is an English author.
[2] Terry Pratchett[3] likes to put notes at the bottom of his pages.
Then why do new films in the UK always look like they are covered in crud. I had always assumed that this was because it had been shown many times in some US cinema before.
How long does a film last anyway before it needs to be replaced?
Yeah sure, a cheap'o'nasty ide system is not going to be suitable but $75000 seems way OTT.
As for 4:1 compression being barely acceptable, this surprises me a lot. A quick calculation on the compression used on my Clear and Present Danger CDi disk shows a compression of 45:1. If you freeze frame, then you can see artifacts but I would certainly call it acceptable.
Also, my CDi disk produces 25fps at 352x288 for an hour (effectively 1x CD speed or 150kbytes per sec). Now my CD drive is actually a x40 machine so its peak output is 6Mbyte per sec (claimed, I can't say I have every seen this) which should be good enough for 1760x1152 at 50fps. I don't have a figure for the output of hard drives but I am sure it is a lot better than 6Mbyte per sec.
* The TI systems in the demo theaters bear no relationship to the real world. They're custom installations that do not address the problem of how a real film would get to a real theater. The source of their signal is an array of 20 prerecorded 18-gigabyte hard drives, trucked to each theater. This array costs an additional $75,000, apart from the cost of trucking and installation.
18 Gig is about $300 (at least here in the UK) giving a total cost of $6000 for 360 Gig. These prices are also falling continuely.
If you wanted to change the film once a week then you would need a 5Mbit/s connection to do it. Fast, but not that fast.
* Even so, a movie is so memory-intensive that these arrays must compress the digital signal by a ratio of 4-1. At a recent seminar at the Directors' Guild in Los Angeles, digital projection spokesmen said that in the real world, satellite downlinked movies would require 40-1 data compression. This level of compression in movie delivery has never been demonstrated publicly, by TI or anyone else.
Mpeg2 should be able to get close to this if you allow lossy compression. (I think, I'm not an expert).
* The picture on the screen would not be as good as the HDTV television sets now on sale in consumer electronics outlets! TI's MDD chip has specs of 1280 by 1024, while HDTV clocks at 1920 by 1080. For the first time in history, consumers could see a better picture at home than in a movie theater. A higher-quality digital picture would involve even more cost, compression and transmission challenges.
Now this is just plain stupid. If HDTV can be delivered at high resolution on the fly by cable, satellite or ariel, then why can't digital films? Distribution is just not a problem. If the figure of 360 Gig is correct then this is just a pack of DVD disks, total cost 100$?
1280x1024 sounds like its a bit too low resolution but this figure will be improved on. 2000x1000 or 4000x2000 maybe required but I doubt this is too far into the future. Look how far LCD displays have come (and come down in price).
* One advantage of a film print is that the director and cinematographer can "time" the print to be sure the colors and visual elements are right. In a digital theater, the projectionist would be free to adjust the color, tint and contrast according to his whims. Since many projectionists do not even know how to properly frame a picture or set the correct lamp brightness, this is a frightening prospect.
One disadvantage of film is that you can't adjust color, tint, contrast etc. Sure, projectionists may not be the correct people to make these adjustments but if the adjustments were made when the projector was installed and then locked into the machine, what is the problem?
* How much would the digital projection specialist be paid? The technicians operating the TI demo installations are paid more than the managers of most theaters. Hollywood is happy to save money, but are exhibitors happy to spend it
Digital projector specialists would be paid lots. However, how many would you need? Apart from a fan, there are no moving parts in a digital projector so the maintanance requirements should be far less. Also as you would not need a projectionist, the overall cost to the exibitor should be less.
* What about piracy? Movies will be downloaded just once, then stored in each theater. Thieves could try two approaches. They could grab the signal from the satellite and try to break the encryption (as DVD encryption has just been broken). But there is a more obvious security gap: At some point before it reaches the projector, the encrypted signal has to be decoded. Pirates could bribe a projectionist to let them intercept the decoded signal. Result: a perfect digital copy of the new movie. When the next "Star Wars" movie opens in 4,000 theaters, how many armed guard will 20th Century Fox have to assign to the projection booths?
Piracy would be a problem. I would guess the best way around it would be to put the decode into LCD drivers. This would make it very difficult to tap into, though not imposible.
* Film is harder to pirate than digital video because a physical film print must be stolen and copied. An MV48 print would be even harder to pirate than current films; it would not fit the equipment in any pirate lab. Those fly-by-night operations, which use ancient equipment cannibalized over the decades, would have to find expensive new machines.
This would only occur in the short term whilst MV48 was non standard. Once it became a standard the pirates would be able to get hold of cheap second hand equipment.
The same logic goes for the digital equipement. To start with, pirates would have difficulty in getting hold of projection equipment to hack. Once it became a standard though, this would be a lot easier for them.
However, one of the main advantages of digital is that you do not need multiple (read expensive) copies of the film to distribute. Therefore, the film could be distributed to the whole world in one go rather than the current mess of US first, then Europe, then the rest of the world. This means the current market in Europe for pirated US films would be less as the Europeans would be able to see the film at the same time as the US. They would have no need to wait for the film and it might get rid of the DVD region encoding as well. Sure there might be reasons why Hollywood would not want to distribute the whole world in one go, but at least digital gives them the option.
Thanks for the mirror. Its the only one I can get a sensible download speed from. I hope my 2.5k/s is not loading you too much.......
I have a free phone call ISP in the UK which is great but wow is it painfully slow and unreliable. It has taken two days and 32 sections to get 80% of it from many different sites. I hope my download program can put it all back together correctly.....
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, you must be from the US.
In Europe, we are very anti GM food. There have been many protests against the GM trials that are going on, including the ripping up of crops. In the UK, a number of supermarkets have made statements that their own products will NOT contain any GM contents. GM is not wanted here.
Besides, what is the difference between direct genetic manipulation and indirect cross breeding and active mate selection?
When was the last time you managed to cross a plant with a jellyfish? GM allows completely unrelated species to swap genes. Is this sensible? Some say yes, some say no. I'm still out on this one, so I will stay clear of GM food until a lot more research has been done.
You want to put the shiny side down as there is a danger that the paint will come off and mark the table. Even better, take two CD's and stick them together to give you a shinny surface on both sides. This way you don't damage your table OR your bottle of pop.
It's interesting to see that the books/authors listed so far, fairly well cover my entire book collection. I guess geeks have similar tastes.
The author nobody has mentioned so far it Terry Pratchett. His books (in the main) are very much comic fantisy rather than SF but seem to appeal to the geek crowd.
Start with the diskworld novels (23 of them at the last count) with The Colour of Magic[1]. Be warned however that once you have started one book you are likely to go on to read all the rest. Be also warned that his books will make you laugh out loud which can be rather embarrasing if your on the train at the time.
Diskworld is a flat pizza shaped world that flies through space balanced on the back of 4 elephants which are in turn on the back of a rather large turtle. It gets weirder from then on. (For the nerds, there is a computer called hex that is powered by ants. To give it more power, the local Wizards have been trying to get More bugs into it!)
[1] Note the spelling of Colour.[2] He is an English author.
[2] Terry Pratchett[3] likes to put notes at the bottom of his pages.
[3] His notes are a lot more funny than mine are.
The Pern books are more Fantisy than SF but I do agree that they are good books.
Dragonsdawn and All the Weyrs of Pern has more SF content but I must admit that I like Dragonsong and Dragonsinger as well.
For more SF based Anne McCaffrey then take a look at The Crystal Singer and Killashandra. However, the third book, Crystal Line, was pants.
Easily my favourite as well. Lost count of how many times I have read it.
Can't wait for the film.....
I have seen a few computers with black keyboards. Anybody know where you can get them from in the UK?
Then why do new films in the UK always look like they are covered in crud. I had always assumed that this was because it had been shown many times in some US cinema before.
How long does a film last anyway before it needs to be replaced?
Yeah sure, a cheap'o'nasty ide system is not going to be suitable but $75000 seems way OTT.
As for 4:1 compression being barely acceptable, this surprises me a lot. A quick calculation on the compression used on my Clear and Present Danger CDi disk shows a compression of 45:1. If you freeze frame, then you can see artifacts but I would certainly call it acceptable.
Also, my CDi disk produces 25fps at 352x288 for an hour (effectively 1x CD speed or 150kbytes per sec). Now my CD drive is actually a x40 machine so its peak output is 6Mbyte per sec (claimed, I can't say I have every seen this) which should be good enough for 1760x1152 at 50fps. I don't have a figure for the output of hard drives but I am sure it is a lot better than 6Mbyte per sec.
* The TI systems in the demo theaters bear no relationship to the real world. They're custom installations that do not address the problem of how a real film would get to a real theater. The source of their signal is an array of 20 prerecorded 18-gigabyte hard drives, trucked to each theater. This array costs an additional $75,000, apart from the cost of trucking and installation.
18 Gig is about $300 (at least here in the UK) giving a total cost of $6000 for 360 Gig. These prices are also falling continuely.
If you wanted to change the film once a week then you would need a 5Mbit/s connection to do it. Fast, but not that fast.
* Even so, a movie is so memory-intensive that these arrays must compress the digital signal by a ratio of 4-1. At a recent seminar at the Directors' Guild in Los Angeles, digital projection spokesmen said that in the real world, satellite downlinked movies would require 40-1 data compression. This level of compression in movie delivery has never been demonstrated publicly, by TI or anyone else.
Mpeg2 should be able to get close to this if you allow lossy compression. (I think, I'm not an expert).
* The picture on the screen would not be as good as the HDTV television sets now on sale in consumer electronics outlets! TI's MDD chip has specs of 1280 by 1024, while HDTV clocks at 1920 by 1080. For the first time in history, consumers could see a better picture at home than in a movie theater. A higher-quality digital picture would involve even more cost, compression and transmission challenges.
Now this is just plain stupid. If HDTV can be delivered at high resolution on the fly by cable, satellite or ariel, then why can't digital films? Distribution is just not a problem. If the figure of 360 Gig is correct then this is just a pack of DVD disks, total cost 100$?
1280x1024 sounds like its a bit too low resolution but this figure will be improved on. 2000x1000 or 4000x2000 maybe required but I doubt this is too far into the future. Look how far LCD displays have come (and come down in price).
* One advantage of a film print is that the director and cinematographer can "time" the print to be sure the colors and visual elements are right. In a digital theater, the projectionist would be free to adjust the color, tint and contrast according to his whims. Since many projectionists do not even know how to properly frame a picture or set the correct lamp brightness, this is a frightening prospect.
One disadvantage of film is that you can't adjust color, tint, contrast etc. Sure, projectionists may not be the correct people to make these adjustments but if the adjustments were made when the projector was installed and then locked into the machine, what is the problem?
* How much would the digital projection specialist be paid? The technicians operating the TI demo installations are paid more than the managers of most theaters. Hollywood is happy to save money, but are exhibitors happy to spend it
Digital projector specialists would be paid lots. However, how many would you need? Apart from a fan, there are no moving parts in a digital projector so the maintanance requirements should be far less. Also as you would not need a projectionist, the overall cost to the exibitor should be less.
* What about piracy? Movies will be downloaded just once, then stored in each theater. Thieves could try two approaches. They could grab the signal from the satellite and try to break the encryption (as DVD encryption has just been broken). But there is a more obvious security gap: At some point before it reaches the projector, the encrypted signal has to be decoded. Pirates could bribe a projectionist to let them intercept the decoded signal. Result: a perfect digital copy of the new movie. When the next "Star Wars" movie opens in 4,000 theaters, how many armed guard will 20th Century Fox have to assign to the projection booths?
Piracy would be a problem. I would guess the best way around it would be to put the decode into LCD drivers. This would make it very difficult to tap into, though not imposible.
* Film is harder to pirate than digital video because a physical film print must be stolen and copied. An MV48 print would be even harder to pirate than current films; it would not fit the equipment in any pirate lab. Those fly-by-night operations, which use ancient equipment cannibalized over the decades, would have to find expensive new machines.
This would only occur in the short term whilst MV48 was non standard. Once it became a standard the pirates would be able to get hold of cheap second hand equipment.
The same logic goes for the digital equipement. To start with, pirates would have difficulty in getting hold of projection equipment to hack. Once it became a standard though, this would be a lot easier for them.
However, one of the main advantages of digital is that you do not need multiple (read expensive) copies of the film to distribute. Therefore, the film could be distributed to the whole world in one go rather than the current mess of US first, then Europe, then the rest of the world. This means the current market in Europe for pirated US films would be less as the Europeans would be able to see the film at the same time as the US. They would have no need to wait for the film and it might get rid of the DVD region encoding as well. Sure there might be reasons why Hollywood would not want to distribute the whole world in one go, but at least digital gives them the option.
Colin
Thanks for the mirror. Its the only one I can get a sensible download speed from. I hope my 2.5k/s is not loading you too much.......
I have a free phone call ISP in the UK which is great but wow is it painfully slow and unreliable. It has taken two days and 32 sections to get 80% of it from many different sites. I hope my download program can put it all back together correctly.....
Thanks again.