Video games from movies have historically sucked. The classic problem was that they turned into what game designers call a "track ride", a game where you're forced to follow the script through scene after scene. (Sometimes with puzzles thrown in.) Worse, the movie studio typically insisted on artistic control to protect their "franchise", which made the lock-in even worse.
The other direction has a better history. Yes, "Super Mario Brothers", the movie, was disappointing. ("Must have been a non-union job.")
"Tomb Raider", though, was a big success, and turned the entire genre around. Although the movie had plot problems, the production values were high. The temple scenes were filmed in Cambodia. The arctic scenes were filmed in Iceland. Angelina Jolie put in enough time on the firing range, with real weapons, to look convincing. CG was used with restraint. The visual reality made it work. (Kirk Petruccelli was the production designer.)
Hint: if you have to fly someone on wires for a fight scene, you're doing it wrong. ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" suffered from that. Michelle Yeoh is an excellent martial artist, and they made her look fake by flying her around.)
Plots and dialogue remain a problem, but that's someone else's department.
Drudge's page is mostly a directory of links with the occasional thumbnail picture. Google already won a case in which it was decided that thumbnail images in connection with a directory of links was a transformative use, and thus was considered fair use. Drudge is driving traffic to the newspaper that published the image, just as Google does.
Drudge is going to win this, if Righthaven even litigates it, which is unlikely.
it's because SEO have figured out how to game your results
Yes. What hasn't penetrated to Google yet is that it's much easier to game "local" results than organic results. Until Google merged "local" results into web search, few in the SEO world bothered paying attention to "local". Few users even realized that Google Maps was a "local" search engine. On October 27, 2010, Google merged the "local" results from the Maps search engine into web search, and put the "local" results above the organic results. This put Google's local search squarely in the sights of the black-hat SEO community.
Google's approach to "local" has two fundamental problems. First, they're relying too much on what companies say about themselves to find the companies. That's why it's so easy to inject phony business locations into Google. Google has tried phone verification, email verification, and postcard verification. All have been defeated by spammers, much as they were in Craiglist spamming.
Second, recommendations in "local" are easy to fake, because local businesses don't have very many recommendations each. Link spamming required hundreds or thousands of links; recommendation spamming requires only tens of recommendations. There are programs and services for doing this in bulk.
To check this out, try looking up "Locksmith", "Carpet cleaning", "Plumber", or "Divorce attorney", preceded by the name of a major US city.
Bing is even worse. Bing seems to be totally undefended against bogus business locations. Search Bing for "New York locksmith". All 5 "places" results are from the same business, which doesn't really have all those locations.
Yes. NASA's claimed purpose for this launch was to "test NASA's ability to deploy a massive but fragile spacecraft from an extremely compact structure." It wasn't capable of sailing anywhere; it was placed into such a low orbit that atmospheric drag would bring it down in about four months. Now they have to do the whole project again (or give up) without having learned much from this failure.
While there's a weight, power, and data storage penalty for having a camera, it's far cheaper to add one than to launch again.
The iPhone is made by the Foxconn division of Hon Hai Precision Industry Company Ltd, in Shenzen, China. Apple is just the design and sales firm. That's not a reliable source for secure DoD communications.
There are still some non-China cell phone manufacturing facilities. DoD needs to look hard at sourcing.
this is bad advertisement. And timothy ought not have posted it.
Right. It's 3D from stereoscopy, not a depth camera. The baseline between imagers is small, so it won't have much depth
resolution for distant objects. Note that while the video shows outdoor scenes, it doesn't show depth information
for them.
Now
the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR is a real time of flight depth camera, a 128 x 128 pixel LIDAR. With a real time of flight device, depth resolution stays constant with distance, as with radar. This device tends to be equipped for a narrow field of view and long range, because it's sold to the military. But that's not inherent in the technology. A similar device, but with mechanical scanning, is the Velodyne laser scanner, which almost everybody in the 2006 Grand Challenge used.
I've met the people behind both systems. The ASC device is potentially mass-produceable at moderate cost, but the company is focused on DoD applications and hasn't pursued that. It requires custom IC fabrication, which is cheap when you make millions and extremely expensive when you make hundreds. The Velodyne thing is a better version of the impressive but fragile Team Dad laser scanner from the 2005 Grand Challenge. It's a spinning array of little LIDAR units. Both cost around $100,000, due to the tiny market.
Here's a little CNC milling machine kit for only $210. All metal, and strong enough to mill 3/8" aluminum. Motors not included. Motor sets of varying power are available. Motors start at $18 on eBay, and for about $250, you can get a complete set with a controller.
There are a lot of home-made CNC mill videos on YouTube.
Look again. The gantry (bridge) IS cross-braced and there is a metal base version offered.
The verticals which support the bridge are just flat sheets of wood, forming a parallelogram. If they bolted some angle irons on the side, that might help.
A possible future metal based version is vaguely talked about in their FAQ, and there's a rendering of it, which is basically the wood version with different shading and a base made from square tube stock.
Small CNC mills still cost too much, though. Decent desktop manual mills start around $500. CNC ought to add $200 to that. But servomotors are expensive, and controllers are worse. I was talking to a Maxon Motor rep at a trade show, when they'd introduced some motor controllers. He said they got into controllers because the motor and the controller cost about the same to make, but the controllers were selling for far more. Encoders are also overpriced, especially considering that older desktop mice have two of them.
Despite all the noise about 3D prototyping, what really works well is making stuff out of flat sheet stock. Milling is slow. Stereolithography is slow. But laser cutting, plasma cutting, and water-jet cutting are really fast ways to make shapes from sheets of material. So there are getting to be lots of projects that involve flat pieces cut from plastic or wood. It's also really easy to create patterns for cutting machines - it's just line art.
At TechShop, the stereolithography machine isn't used much, a small number of people use the CNC milling machines, and the 3 laser cutters are constantly busy. Most of the laser cutter files come from Corel Draw.
It's easy enough to build a crap CNC mill, but not very useful. This one is made of wood, and the bridge isn't even
cross-braced. It's not going to be stiff enough to do decent work. Just because the cutting tool is a Dremel tool doesn't mean you can
skip on rigidity. Dremel used to make a drill-press rig for their tools, and it wobbled so much it was useless. And that was just
drilling. In milling, you have side loads.
Little CNC mills have been around for years. Roland makes a nice little one. The usual little mill is a Sherline, and those can be equipped for CNC, although it's a retrofit. A Sherline can mill aluminum and mild steel. The MicroLux, at $499, is about as low as it gets in milling machines that can cut metal. That's not a CNC machine, but retrofits are possible.
These guys aren't the first to propose building a toy CNC mill. The Art Institute of Chicago has a little wooden CNC mill. And unlike these guys, who are peddling vaporware, the Art Institute machine exists. The Art Institute machine can be made from flat stock with a laser cutter. It can't mill hard materials, but if you're just making models of designs to look at, you can use various easy-to-mill foams, plastics, and waxes. A slightly bigger wood CNC machine is at Build Your CNC. Those are all proven designs.
Hype about CNC milling seems to be highest among people who've never used a milling machine. CNC mills are great devices, but they're not magic. The smaller machines don't cut very fast, the cutting tools are expensive, the process is messy (if you're cutting metal, you're constantly pouring coolant on the cutter, and in high-speed machines, the coolant flow is garden-hose sized), and for complex objects, clamping the work out of the way of the cutter is a hassle.
If you want to play with CNC on line, download the demo version of VCarve, which is a CAD/CAM design tool for 3-axis milling machines. VCarve will give you a sense of what you can and can't do with a 3-axis mill. VCarve can simulate the cutting process in 3D and show you what the finished part will look like. There's a really impressive solid modeling engine inside that program. VCarve (the pay version) will output the files to drive a CNC mill to make the part.
At the high end of CNC, there are 5-axis machines with tool changers, and software that can use all those features to full advantage. Watch this demo of Hypermill driving a Daishin 5-axis mill. The software package alone for that costs $20,000. The software figures out which tools to use in what order, and how much clearance is required to get the cutting head near the work. That's approaching the "replicator" level of CNC.
Now what would be interesting is to put a Dremel tool on a multi-axis robot arm, with force feedback from servomotors and Hypermill-like smarts. That would allow real 3D work, not just top-down 3-axis work. Most of the dumb 3-axis machines use steppers, so they don't know how much load is on the structure, and can't compensate for deflections under load. With servomotors, the software could compensate for some lack of rigidity.
Since the big October 27, 2010 change to Google search, in which "places" results appeared at the top of web search, reviews have become much more important. Google's web search was mostly based on links, but Google Places is heavily driven by reviews. For a local business, there typically are few reviewers, so spamming reviews is far more effective than creating link farms.
Over on Bing, it's even worse. Search Bing for "New York City Locksmith". All 5 of the Bing locations listed are the same company, and they don't really have all those locations.
Some of the cables shed light on why closing down Guantanamo is so hard. The US has some captured Kuwaitis, and Kuwait doesn't want them back. Kuwaiti Minister of Interior Shaykh Jaber al-Khalid Al Sabah: "If
they are rotten, they are rotten and the best thing to do is
get rid of them. You picked them up in Afghanistan; you
should drop them off in Afghanistan, in the middle of the war
zone." About a group of Iranian drug smugglers the US had captured after their boat foundered, he said "God meant to punish them with death and you
saved them. Why?"
Assange is going to come out of this a hero. The "rape charge" is already falling apart. The press is now mostly supporting Assange. Give it a week, and there will be calls for resignations of some Government officials.
Some of his opponents are already in trouble.
One of the "commentators" calling for calling for Assange to be killed is now the subject of a complaint that he was inciting to commit murder.
Meanwhile, Wikileaks remains online, and response times are good.
This solves the wrong problem. Understand South Korea's basic defensive problem: Seoul is only 40Km from North Korea. Some suburbs are much closer. North Korea has artillery with at least a 60Km range, plus missiles and nuclear weapons.
No fixed obstacle has ever stopped a serious armored assault force. See Maginot Line, Ardennes Forest, Siegfried Line, Normandy Invasion, Kuwait.
It's a crippled version of the 580 at a lower price point. Nothing to see here. The high-end version will probably drop in price after Xmas anyway, as dealers dump unsold inventory.
Look up "post-penetration rape", which is what Assuage is accused of. This is a relatively new legal concept. In the US, a few states consider that illegal. Most don't. Does Sweden?
I don't have time for a full writeup, but read for some reasonable info. This is intended for areas where the user density is very low, so low that the users are at significantly different angles from the base station, and multiple steered beams can be sent to different users at the same time. They can get about a 6x gain in capacity that way.
The "reuse of analog" simply means that existing VHF antennas at the user end will work. This is useful, because in remote areas, people already have big towers with fixed antennas pointing in the right direction. The base station antennas change drastically, the modulation scheme changes, the user interface boxes are new. Only the user end antennas remain. But that's the item that's a pain to replace in the field.
The guy behind this is a serious RF guy, worth listening to. He can probably make this work.
Right. The experts have looked at this and decided there's no safe way to clean up the mess. It's too much of a mess for robot work, and not worth risking lives to deal with by hand. So the neighborhood has been evacuated, a 16-foot metal framed wall has been constructed between the "bomb house" and the nearest neighboring house, and there will be a controlled burn, hopefully without a big bang. Then the mess will be cleaned up.
The next step will be when Apple insists on replacing the magazine ads with their own. After all, Apple has the demographic information, and the publisher doesn't. So doing that will increase ad value. Of course, they'll have to share some of that revenue with the publisher. Some of it.
Of course, I can't read them, because they're behind a paywall. The rights to the paper are owned by the American Diabetes Association, which supports something called the "Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science". This is a lobbying group against free access to scientific publications. They've been fighting open publication since 1994. Here's their latest output, opposition to the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would force all Government-funded research papers onto public servers.
Slashdot Mirror
Video games from movies have historically sucked. The classic problem was that they turned into what game designers call a "track ride", a game where you're forced to follow the script through scene after scene. (Sometimes with puzzles thrown in.) Worse, the movie studio typically insisted on artistic control to protect their "franchise", which made the lock-in even worse.
The other direction has a better history. Yes, "Super Mario Brothers", the movie, was disappointing. ("Must have been a non-union job.") "Tomb Raider", though, was a big success, and turned the entire genre around. Although the movie had plot problems, the production values were high. The temple scenes were filmed in Cambodia. The arctic scenes were filmed in Iceland. Angelina Jolie put in enough time on the firing range, with real weapons, to look convincing. CG was used with restraint. The visual reality made it work. (Kirk Petruccelli was the production designer.)
Hint: if you have to fly someone on wires for a fight scene, you're doing it wrong. ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" suffered from that. Michelle Yeoh is an excellent martial artist, and they made her look fake by flying her around.)
Plots and dialogue remain a problem, but that's someone else's department.
Having a successful Hollywood producer with a track record of successfully embarrassing big companies and governments as a supporter can't hurt.
What I'd like to see is a LEO network with satellites as cheap as possible that provide store and forward text/data messages only.
That's what the Iridum pager does.
Drudge's page is mostly a directory of links with the occasional thumbnail picture. Google already won a case in which it was decided that thumbnail images in connection with a directory of links was a transformative use, and thus was considered fair use. Drudge is driving traffic to the newspaper that published the image, just as Google does.
Drudge is going to win this, if Righthaven even litigates it, which is unlikely.
it's because SEO have figured out how to game your results
Yes. What hasn't penetrated to Google yet is that it's much easier to game "local" results than organic results. Until Google merged "local" results into web search, few in the SEO world bothered paying attention to "local". Few users even realized that Google Maps was a "local" search engine. On October 27, 2010, Google merged the "local" results from the Maps search engine into web search, and put the "local" results above the organic results. This put Google's local search squarely in the sights of the black-hat SEO community.
Within a month, the black hats had pwned Google. They even boast about it. See "Dominating Google Maps - The Most Effective Spam Ever And What You Can Learn From It", which is about how to put phony entries into Google's "local" search and dominate the local search results.
Google's approach to "local" has two fundamental problems. First, they're relying too much on what companies say about themselves to find the companies. That's why it's so easy to inject phony business locations into Google. Google has tried phone verification, email verification, and postcard verification. All have been defeated by spammers, much as they were in Craiglist spamming.
Second, recommendations in "local" are easy to fake, because local businesses don't have very many recommendations each. Link spamming required hundreds or thousands of links; recommendation spamming requires only tens of recommendations. There are programs and services for doing this in bulk.
To check this out, try looking up "Locksmith", "Carpet cleaning", "Plumber", or "Divorce attorney", preceded by the name of a major US city.
Bing is even worse. Bing seems to be totally undefended against bogus business locations. Search Bing for "New York locksmith". All 5 "places" results are from the same business, which doesn't really have all those locations.
This is a strong argument for blocking DoubleClick and MSN's ad server at the corporate firewall.
Yes. NASA's claimed purpose for this launch was to "test NASA's ability to deploy a massive but fragile spacecraft from an extremely compact structure." It wasn't capable of sailing anywhere; it was placed into such a low orbit that atmospheric drag would bring it down in about four months. Now they have to do the whole project again (or give up) without having learned much from this failure. While there's a weight, power, and data storage penalty for having a camera, it's far cheaper to add one than to launch again.
The iPhone is made by the Foxconn division of Hon Hai Precision Industry Company Ltd, in Shenzen, China. Apple is just the design and sales firm. That's not a reliable source for secure DoD communications.
There are still some non-China cell phone manufacturing facilities. DoD needs to look hard at sourcing.
this is bad advertisement. And timothy ought not have posted it.
Right. It's 3D from stereoscopy, not a depth camera. The baseline between imagers is small, so it won't have much depth resolution for distant objects. Note that while the video shows outdoor scenes, it doesn't show depth information for them.
Now the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR is a real time of flight depth camera, a 128 x 128 pixel LIDAR. With a real time of flight device, depth resolution stays constant with distance, as with radar. This device tends to be equipped for a narrow field of view and long range, because it's sold to the military. But that's not inherent in the technology. A similar device, but with mechanical scanning, is the Velodyne laser scanner, which almost everybody in the 2006 Grand Challenge used.
I've met the people behind both systems. The ASC device is potentially mass-produceable at moderate cost, but the company is focused on DoD applications and hasn't pursued that. It requires custom IC fabrication, which is cheap when you make millions and extremely expensive when you make hundreds. The Velodyne thing is a better version of the impressive but fragile Team Dad laser scanner from the 2005 Grand Challenge. It's a spinning array of little LIDAR units. Both cost around $100,000, due to the tiny market.
Here's a little CNC milling machine kit for only $210. All metal, and strong enough to mill 3/8" aluminum. Motors not included. Motor sets of varying power are available. Motors start at $18 on eBay, and for about $250, you can get a complete set with a controller.
There are a lot of home-made CNC mill videos on YouTube.
Look again. The gantry (bridge) IS cross-braced and there is a metal base version offered.
The verticals which support the bridge are just flat sheets of wood, forming a parallelogram. If they bolted some angle irons on the side, that might help.
A possible future metal based version is vaguely talked about in their FAQ, and there's a rendering of it, which is basically the wood version with different shading and a base made from square tube stock.
Small CNC mills still cost too much, though. Decent desktop manual mills start around $500. CNC ought to add $200 to that. But servomotors are expensive, and controllers are worse. I was talking to a Maxon Motor rep at a trade show, when they'd introduced some motor controllers. He said they got into controllers because the motor and the controller cost about the same to make, but the controllers were selling for far more. Encoders are also overpriced, especially considering that older desktop mice have two of them.
Despite all the noise about 3D prototyping, what really works well is making stuff out of flat sheet stock. Milling is slow. Stereolithography is slow. But laser cutting, plasma cutting, and water-jet cutting are really fast ways to make shapes from sheets of material. So there are getting to be lots of projects that involve flat pieces cut from plastic or wood. It's also really easy to create patterns for cutting machines - it's just line art.
At TechShop, the stereolithography machine isn't used much, a small number of people use the CNC milling machines, and the 3 laser cutters are constantly busy. Most of the laser cutter files come from Corel Draw.
It's easy enough to build a crap CNC mill, but not very useful. This one is made of wood, and the bridge isn't even cross-braced. It's not going to be stiff enough to do decent work. Just because the cutting tool is a Dremel tool doesn't mean you can skip on rigidity. Dremel used to make a drill-press rig for their tools, and it wobbled so much it was useless. And that was just drilling. In milling, you have side loads.
Little CNC mills have been around for years. Roland makes a nice little one. The usual little mill is a Sherline, and those can be equipped for CNC, although it's a retrofit. A Sherline can mill aluminum and mild steel. The MicroLux, at $499, is about as low as it gets in milling machines that can cut metal. That's not a CNC machine, but retrofits are possible.
These guys aren't the first to propose building a toy CNC mill. The Art Institute of Chicago has a little wooden CNC mill. And unlike these guys, who are peddling vaporware, the Art Institute machine exists. The Art Institute machine can be made from flat stock with a laser cutter. It can't mill hard materials, but if you're just making models of designs to look at, you can use various easy-to-mill foams, plastics, and waxes. A slightly bigger wood CNC machine is at Build Your CNC. Those are all proven designs.
Hype about CNC milling seems to be highest among people who've never used a milling machine. CNC mills are great devices, but they're not magic. The smaller machines don't cut very fast, the cutting tools are expensive, the process is messy (if you're cutting metal, you're constantly pouring coolant on the cutter, and in high-speed machines, the coolant flow is garden-hose sized), and for complex objects, clamping the work out of the way of the cutter is a hassle.
If you want to play with CNC on line, download the demo version of VCarve, which is a CAD/CAM design tool for 3-axis milling machines. VCarve will give you a sense of what you can and can't do with a 3-axis mill. VCarve can simulate the cutting process in 3D and show you what the finished part will look like. There's a really impressive solid modeling engine inside that program. VCarve (the pay version) will output the files to drive a CNC mill to make the part.
At the high end of CNC, there are 5-axis machines with tool changers, and software that can use all those features to full advantage. Watch this demo of Hypermill driving a Daishin 5-axis mill. The software package alone for that costs $20,000. The software figures out which tools to use in what order, and how much clearance is required to get the cutting head near the work. That's approaching the "replicator" level of CNC.
Now what would be interesting is to put a Dremel tool on a multi-axis robot arm, with force feedback from servomotors and Hypermill-like smarts. That would allow real 3D work, not just top-down 3-axis work. Most of the dumb 3-axis machines use steppers, so they don't know how much load is on the structure, and can't compensate for deflections under load. With servomotors, the software could compensate for some lack of rigidity.
My printer only has capital letters, you insensitive clods.
Since the big October 27, 2010 change to Google search, in which "places" results appeared at the top of web search, reviews have become much more important. Google's web search was mostly based on links, but Google Places is heavily driven by reviews. For a local business, there typically are few reviewers, so spamming reviews is far more effective than creating link farms.
Google is not too good at filtering out phony businesses, either. See "Dominating Google Maps- The Most Effective Spam Ever And What You Can Learn From It", from an aggressive search engine optimization firm. That's an outright scam that fools Google easily.
Over on Bing, it's even worse. Search Bing for "New York City Locksmith". All 5 of the Bing locations listed are the same company, and they don't really have all those locations.
Agreed. This is not good for Wikileaks.
Some of the cables shed light on why closing down Guantanamo is so hard. The US has some captured Kuwaitis, and Kuwait doesn't want them back. Kuwaiti Minister of Interior Shaykh Jaber al-Khalid Al Sabah: "If they are rotten, they are rotten and the best thing to do is get rid of them. You picked them up in Afghanistan; you should drop them off in Afghanistan, in the middle of the war zone." About a group of Iranian drug smugglers the US had captured after their boat foundered, he said "God meant to punish them with death and you saved them. Why?"
Assange is going to come out of this a hero. The "rape charge" is already falling apart. The press is now mostly supporting Assange. Give it a week, and there will be calls for resignations of some Government officials.
Some of his opponents are already in trouble. One of the "commentators" calling for calling for Assange to be killed is now the subject of a complaint that he was inciting to commit murder.
Meanwhile, Wikileaks remains online, and response times are good.
This solves the wrong problem. Understand South Korea's basic defensive problem: Seoul is only 40Km from North Korea. Some suburbs are much closer. North Korea has artillery with at least a 60Km range, plus missiles and nuclear weapons.
No fixed obstacle has ever stopped a serious armored assault force. See Maginot Line, Ardennes Forest, Siegfried Line, Normandy Invasion, Kuwait.
It's a crippled version of the 580 at a lower price point. Nothing to see here. The high-end version will probably drop in price after Xmas anyway, as dealers dump unsold inventory.
Look up "post-penetration rape", which is what Assuage is accused of. This is a relatively new legal concept. In the US, a few states consider that illegal. Most don't. Does Sweden?
I don't have time for a full writeup, but read for some reasonable info. This is intended for areas where the user density is very low, so low that the users are at significantly different angles from the base station, and multiple steered beams can be sent to different users at the same time. They can get about a 6x gain in capacity that way.
The "reuse of analog" simply means that existing VHF antennas at the user end will work. This is useful, because in remote areas, people already have big towers with fixed antennas pointing in the right direction. The base station antennas change drastically, the modulation scheme changes, the user interface boxes are new. Only the user end antennas remain. But that's the item that's a pain to replace in the field.
The guy behind this is a serious RF guy, worth listening to. He can probably make this work.
Right. The experts have looked at this and decided there's no safe way to clean up the mess. It's too much of a mess for robot work, and not worth risking lives to deal with by hand. So the neighborhood has been evacuated, a 16-foot metal framed wall has been constructed between the "bomb house" and the nearest neighboring house, and there will be a controlled burn, hopefully without a big bang. Then the mess will be cleaned up.
The next step will be when Apple insists on replacing the magazine ads with their own. After all, Apple has the demographic information, and the publisher doesn't. So doing that will increase ad value. Of course, they'll have to share some of that revenue with the publisher. Some of it.
About 40 papers supposedly reference this one.
Of course, I can't read them, because they're behind a paywall. The rights to the paper are owned by the American Diabetes Association, which supports something called the "Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science". This is a lobbying group against free access to scientific publications. They've been fighting open publication since 1994. Here's their latest output, opposition to the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would force all Government-funded research papers onto public servers.