Most important thing for me is that it does not use a Microsoft codec such as WMV 9 that has been discussed so far.
I believe the computer industry is going to decide this time in BluRay's favor, if it can deploy equipment fast enough.
The extra storage space does not matter to movies. HD-DVD can store up to four hours of HDTV content already in really good quality. I am talking of a bitrate significantly higher than current HDTV broadcasts.
One thing that bugs me with current DVD:s is that major movies are released in both letterbox and pan&scan. Why not have one format, with movie stored on disc in full resolution cinemascope, 24 frames per second, progressive like the movie was shot and let a smarter player downconvert it to whatever equipment the user has!
If I watch a movie shot in cinemascope (2.35:1) on a 16:9 TV set the choices I have are having black borders on top and bottom or black borders on the left and right - I want the movie to fill the screen! I also don't want to see any 3:2 pulldown artifacts or the movie 4% faster than in the theatres. Please please make it right!
Yes, I have had that problem a couple of times. The campus workstation and network was overloaded with work and all my apps were really slow... during scheduled lab hours even. It annoyed me so much that I got up and got home to do the work there.
I have worked a little bit with Haptics back in 1999. The hardware was Phantom from SensAble and the software was from Reach In.
My job at the time was to find new useful applications for Haptics, that were not in the medical field.
Apart from games and widgets (buttons, sliders etc), we built a wind surfing simulator which could teach the user about how wind drag works.
We also investigated 3D (marking) menus with "magnetic" grid-lines and industrial and artistic/craft applications (jewelery, dentistry) where you could first work with tools on an object and then let the machine mimic your actions afterwards, possibly in another scale.
We also sketched on a paint program where you could feel the viscosity in the oil paint and the texture on the canvas.
We were very limited by software. The hardware drivers required realtime performance, and the graphics was running 100% in another thread, which made things problematic under Windows NT which wasn't really a realtime OS.
We would also have liked to have a finite element simulation framework for simulating flexible materials.
(btw. the job sucked, but the technology was so cool so I stayed on for longer than I should have... )
If an application takes more than a few seconds to start, the simple fact is that many, many users will click on the icon again, starting two instances of the program
This would not happen if app launchers were coded right. They should test if the app is still running. Windows does this, as far as I know. If the app is already running, it is sent a message to open a new window.
You don't even need to dump the complete RAM.
The OS could save most of the main memory to swap space in the background. Then it would have to dump only a megabyte or two at power failure, which could be done very quickly.
There have been operating systems that take this problem seriously for at least 20 years, but they are rare and have usually stayed in a research environment. An example is Eros, which is able to boot up to a [i]consistent state[/i] after a power failure. The system guarantees that when you reboot after the power failure, what you get is a state which the system was in a second or two just before the failure.
Luxeon Star/O produces 180 cd with color temperature 5500 K.
I don't know much about optics, but I found a formula:
lumens = cd * 4pi.
So, 180 cd * 4pi ~= 2262 lumens.
So, with four of these would yield 9048 lumens where as a typical projector bulb would produce 10'000 lumens.
I don't know if this is correct. Someone with more knowledge of optics should correct me!
The four LEDs would cost close to $100 + driver circuitry but they should last for at least five years.
A problem, as mentioned before is that common projectors are based on a single light source. We would need additional lenses or diffusers or we could get a splotchy picture.
I regularly have 20 Opera windows open. By choice.
And no, of course they are not maximized. I organize them by using the windowshading and the windows-menu features of my window manager. This is of course under Linux. ---
I thrive when I have responsability and when I have to do important things during short periods of time. What I can not stand is when there are many things that have to be done during a longer period of time, and where there is no fixed time schedule for doing them. What stresses me up then is that I have several things in the back of my mind that I feel that I need to do. In such situations in the past, I have usually slacked off as a way of calming myself down.. but besides from being a bad side effects (nothing done), the intended effect has often been missing.
I want a screen that can be readable in sunlight. Something like this, but in color and with backlighting for nighttime use.
I'd like to have the mp3/ogg player integrated into a cell phone than have a separate player and phone, because a
phone can pause the mp3 automatically on incoming calls. I wouldn't mind to have PDA functions in the phone either.
I want 3G - UMTS with IPv6, GPS locator and the ability to hack the software on the phone/PDA in any way that would not infringe with the phone company subscription.
Style is important. I want something sleek and stylish that does not attract attention. No triangular buttons everywhere or translucent plastic, please!
I like the style of Palm and Sonys recent machines. Most WinCE and Nokia machines are horrible, though.
---
The improvements you mention are still quite esoteric. They are hard to design and implement and hard for a newbie programmer to the OS to grasp. 1) and 3) are solved by Java. If you want a Java OS, then you can contribute to it. 2) is somewhat solved by Eros, except that it is not distributed. A problem with persistent systems is that corruption is much worse than if files were used. You need a safe language to be safe from them.
The concept of segmented memory is not that bad if you do it right. Look at Multics. They got segmentation right, but it could of course be better. Intel did not combine segmentation with paging in the right way when they added paged memory. Besides, seg. has hardly been used on the PC for a decade anyway...
A few years ago I was looking at offloading the transform stage of decoding digital video to a GPU. The inverse wavelet transform consists basically of filtering a picture to twice its size and adding the differences from the original. This type of operation is perfect for a GPU. The type of GPU that was needed then is considered old by gamers these days.:)
I live in Europe. I was planning a trip to the US next year, for Star Wars Celebration III - a huge official convention held in Indianapolis. I would of course want to go in costume, and carry a prop.
I have heard horror-stories about people not being able to take with them non-functioning replicas of fantasy weapons that have no real-world counterparts (read: lightsabers), on US domestic flights. All right.. UPS might still work, but at an additional cost.
But then.. am I going to be insulted and treated like a criminal on entry!? That decides it. If the US does not alter their policies, I will of course not go.
I always open links in new windows (middle-click) and almost never use the "back" button. To avoid clutter, I "shade" windows to show only the title bar. I consider shaded windows as having all the benefits of tabbed browsing with none of its drawbacks. Here's why:
Title bars are wider than tabs and show the full title of the page instead of just the first/last n letters. The shortness of the tab label is a nuisance when you have multiple pages open from the same site, where the site has its name in the title of each one of its pages. In these situations you would have multiple identical tab labels.
When I open or close a window, the other title bars don't move around on the screen, making them easier to locate later on.
Title bars can be moved around and arranged into groups (in two dimensions) while tabs often can not. This is very useful when reading articles spanning multiple pages.
Windows can be resized independently.
Windows can be moved between workspaces.
I use Opera, which (like Netscape) remembers my chosen window size and does not try to impose a "default" window size on me, like some browsers do. The only problem is sites that assume a larger window size than the one you are using. I also wish Opera would let the child window inherit the parent window's history, just in case I would have closed it.
I got a black keyboard with white letters painted on instead of burned on as on the white keyboards. I removed the Windows logos with nailpolish remover (from the hardware store!) and painted on diamond symbols. ("") Mapped to Meta.
Hiding a file on a website by using a randomized subpath and not linking to it from any publicly accessible web page is a valid technique. It is a variation of a technique that has been known since the early seventies as "capability-based security", and has been used successfully on the web for many years to secure content. Knowing the URL gives you authority - that's it. For as long as you don't publish the URL and the browser, server or channel does not have any security hole, then the file will be secure. Linking to it is the same as giving others permission to the file.
It does not apply to this case, because 1) the path was not random, 2) it was available through the site's local search engine - any would indicate that the file was meant to be publically available in the first place.
People in the field use an objective quality measurement called Peak Signal To Noise Ratio to compare algorithms. PSNR = 10 * log10 ( 255 / MSE ) where MSE = the mean of (each pixel difference). Here I assume that pixel values are between 0 and 255.
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I believe the computer industry is going to decide this time in BluRay's favor, if it can deploy equipment fast enough.
The extra storage space does not matter to movies. HD-DVD can store up to four hours of HDTV content already in really good quality. I am talking of a bitrate significantly higher than current HDTV broadcasts.
One thing that bugs me with current DVD:s is that major movies are released in both letterbox and pan&scan. Why not have one format, with movie stored on disc in full resolution cinemascope, 24 frames per second, progressive like the movie was shot and let a smarter player downconvert it to whatever equipment the user has!
If I watch a movie shot in cinemascope (2.35:1) on a 16:9 TV set the choices I have are having black borders on top and bottom or black borders on the left and right - I want the movie to fill the screen! I also don't want to see any 3:2 pulldown artifacts or the movie 4% faster than in the theatres. Please please make it right!
Do you think that spam about penis enlargement and weight loss pills will cause a measurable increase in weight and depression?
I think such a kind of study would be much more interesting.
Yes, I have had that problem a couple of times. The campus workstation and network was overloaded with work and all my apps were really slow ... during scheduled lab hours even.
It annoyed me so much that I got up and got home to do the work there.
Although it would pronounce well in scandinavian languages, it would still sound very strange.
... ;)
Man-driva means "heap of men".
Someone wrote before me that "mandriver" was NY slang for gay porn... Well
And so does the Amiga 1000 computer. (the first Amiga, another piece of obsolete technology)
He hired a "dialogue coach" this time around. I guess it could make the acting appear less "wooden"..
Interesting, but how do you enforce the property of paralellism without restricting the language that is available within the loop?
My job at the time was to find new useful applications for Haptics, that were not in the medical field.
Apart from games and widgets (buttons, sliders etc), we built a wind surfing simulator which could teach the user about how wind drag works.
We also investigated 3D (marking) menus with "magnetic" grid-lines and industrial and artistic/craft applications (jewelery, dentistry) where you could first work with tools on an object and then let the machine mimic your actions afterwards, possibly in another scale. We also sketched on a paint program where you could feel the viscosity in the oil paint and the texture on the canvas.
We were very limited by software. The hardware drivers required realtime performance, and the graphics was running 100% in another thread, which made things problematic under Windows NT which wasn't really a realtime OS. We would also have liked to have a finite element simulation framework for simulating flexible materials.
(btw. the job sucked, but the technology was so cool so I stayed on for longer than I should have... )
If an application takes more than a few seconds to start, the simple fact is that many, many users will click on the icon again, starting two instances of the program
This would not happen if app launchers were coded right. They should test if the app is still running.
Windows does this, as far as I know. If the app is already running, it is sent a message to open a new window.
There have been operating systems that take this problem seriously for at least 20 years, but they are rare and have usually stayed in a research environment. An example is Eros, which is able to boot up to a [i]consistent state[/i] after a power failure. The system guarantees that when you reboot after the power failure, what you get is a state which the system was in a second or two just before the failure.
I was wrong. The Luxeon V can only produce 120 lumens. Far from enough.
Luxeon Star/O produces 180 cd with color temperature 5500 K.
I don't know much about optics, but I found a formula: lumens = cd * 4pi.
So, 180 cd * 4pi ~= 2262 lumens.
So, with four of these would yield 9048 lumens where as a typical projector bulb would produce 10'000 lumens. I don't know if this is correct. Someone with more knowledge of optics should correct me!
The four LEDs would cost close to $100 + driver circuitry but they should last for at least five years.
A problem, as mentioned before is that common projectors are based on a single light source. We would need additional lenses or diffusers or we could get a splotchy picture.
I regularly have 20 Opera windows open. By choice.
And no, of course they are not maximized. I organize them by using the windowshading and the windows-menu features of my window manager. This is of course under Linux.
---
I thrive when I have responsability and when I have to do important things during short periods of time. What I can not stand is when there are many things that have to be done during a longer period of time, and where there is no fixed time schedule for doing them. What stresses me up then is that I have several things in the back of my mind that I feel that I need to do. In such situations in the past, I have usually slacked off as a way of calming myself down .. but besides from being a bad side effects (nothing done), the intended effect has often been missing.
I'd like to have the mp3/ogg player integrated into a cell phone than have a separate player and phone, because a phone can pause the mp3 automatically on incoming calls. I wouldn't mind to have PDA functions in the phone either.
I want 3G - UMTS with IPv6, GPS locator and the ability to hack the software on the phone/PDA in any way that would not infringe with the phone company subscription.
Style is important. I want something sleek and stylish that does not attract attention. No triangular buttons everywhere or translucent plastic, please!
I like the style of Palm and Sonys recent machines. Most WinCE and Nokia machines are horrible, though. ---
The improvements you mention are still quite esoteric.
They are hard to design and implement and hard for a newbie programmer to the OS to grasp.
1) and 3) are solved by Java. If you want a Java OS, then you can contribute to it.
2) is somewhat solved by Eros, except that it is not distributed.
A problem with persistent systems is that corruption is much worse than if files were used. You need a safe language to be safe from them.
The concept of segmented memory is not that bad if you do it right. Look at Multics. They got segmentation right, but it could of course be better. ...
Intel did not combine segmentation with paging in the right way when they added paged memory.
Besides, seg. has hardly been used on the PC for a decade anyway
A few years ago I was looking at offloading the transform stage of decoding digital video to a GPU. :)
The inverse wavelet transform consists basically of filtering a picture to twice its size and adding the differences from the original. This type of operation is perfect for a GPU. The type of GPU that was needed then is considered old by gamers these days.
I live in Europe. I was planning a trip to the US next year, for Star Wars Celebration III - a huge official convention held in Indianapolis. I would of course want to go in costume, and carry a prop.
I have heard horror-stories about people not being able to take with them non-functioning replicas of fantasy weapons that have no real-world counterparts (read: lightsabers), on US domestic flights.
All right.. UPS might still work, but at an additional cost.
But then.. am I going to be insulted and treated like a criminal on entry!?
That decides it. If the US does not alter their policies, I will of course not go.
"This is the first time light has ever been generated from a molecule by applying electricity"
Wow. These guys must have been living in the stone age.
Mighty Joe Young from '99 is a remake of another old Gorilla movie, Mighty Joe Young from 1949.
Btw, I heard about this King Kong remake last week, so I doubt that it would be an April Fools joke.
---
To avoid clutter, I "shade" windows to show only the title bar.
I consider shaded windows as having all the benefits of tabbed browsing with none of its drawbacks.
Here's why:
I use Opera, which (like Netscape) remembers my chosen window size and does not try to impose a "default" window size on me, like some browsers do. The only problem is sites that assume a larger window size than the one you are using. I also wish Opera would let the child window inherit the parent window's history, just in case I would have closed it.
I got a black keyboard with white letters painted on instead of burned on as on the white keyboards.
I removed the Windows logos with nailpolish remover (from the hardware store!) and painted on diamond symbols. ("") Mapped to Meta.
Linking to it is the same as giving others permission to the file.
It does not apply to this case, because 1) the path was not random, 2) it was available through the site's local search engine - any would indicate that the file was meant to be publically available in the first place.
People in the field use an objective quality measurement called Peak Signal To Noise Ratio to compare algorithms.
PSNR = 10 * log10 ( 255 / MSE ) where MSE = the mean of (each pixel difference).
Here I assume that pixel values are between 0 and 255.