Microsoft. Basically, when Elop took over, Nokia became an MS Vassal. That's when they dumped the world's most popular phone OS and their internal modern OS development projects for Windows Phone, and why Windows Phone ads use Nokia phones. It's basically the same play they ran when they got SGI to start building NT workstations. And, not that far off from the investments in SCO to enable the fight against Linux. Note that the MS Vassal is actively using their patent portfolio specifically to fight one of Google's strategic plays, despite the fact that a phone vendor that has given up on OS development would probably do much better if they added Android to their phone portfolio.
Just for the record, no creative professionals use dedicated and expensive tools to visualize color spaces. If they use an expensive tool like Maya for it, it's because they happen to have it handy for more sensible purposes. Visualizing color spaces is really just a novelty for most people. Anybody who needs to do it regularly isn't so much a "creative" professional, as a color scientist.
Still, sort of a neat demo of the Blender Python API.
Is the device "smart"? I was imagining that a device like this would contain accelerometers to help control the flow of plastic out the tip - the faster/slower you move the tip through the air, the faster/slower the plastic is spit out. That would make the flow more "natural" and reduce the risk of the plastic globbing up or being stretched too thin, which is what happens with glue guns.
Nope, not smart in that sense. As far as I know, the design has no accelerometers. It's a super neat thing, but you basically have to be quite deliberate in the speed that you draw things with it. It's unlikely that what you suggest would work as well as you'd like because changing the feed rate would change the time spent on the hot element being melted, so moving slowly would be harder to cool effectively, and moving fast would mean semi-melted plastic. You can obviously change the wattage applied to the heating element, but actually changing the heat in something with enough mass to be useful for the application, quickly enough to work the way that you want, would be very hard.
Surely this goes totally against the main advantage of 3D printing - create a complex shape in CAD and click print - no crafting knowledge/skill necessary! You get accuracy and get to go do other stuff while your creation is being printed.
Obviously, if you want to make a dozen matching wallplates for light switches, you would want to use a "real" 3D printer instead of something like this. But, if you just want to doodle something for fun, then that main advantage of 3D printing doesn't really apply. Just making copies of stuff that other people have designed isn't really the only possible application of the technology behind 3D printers. Besides, if simplicity is the main selling point, not needing a computer, CAD software, fiddly motors to keep calibrated, firmware updates, or any of the other complications of a full 3D printer, is pretty neat. At very least, you have to admit that a lot of people are clearly interesting in it, considering how far they have blown past the original Kickstarter goal. (And, if you look at how small the original Kickstarter goal was compared to where they are at, you can see that they really weren't expecting quite this much attention!)
Disclaimer - I haven't actually had a chance to play with one of these things, but I am friends with some of the people involved in launching the kickstarter, so I have been following it for a while.
Well they're selling them for $50, that's not bad. And a hot glue gun doesn't have the same level of finesse/control, from what I can see online..
I haven't actually gotten to play with one personally, but I am friends with the guys involved in this. Basically, yes, there is an analogy to be made with a hot glue gun. But, have you ever tried to "draw" a cube with a hot glue gun? Good luck with that. With the 3Doodler, you are working with a much finer 3D printing style plastic filament. It's essentially the printing head of a 3D printer that you can use to draw freehand with. The plastic coming out of the head cools very quickly, and is relatively strong compared to something like glue, so you can make all sorts of interesting shapes. They may post some additional videos to help clarify how easy it is to draw with.
I read this as "Do the work for HR/Recruiters, they're not intelligent enough to do it themselves".
That's a bit unfair. There are occasional HR people who are quite intelligent. (They may be rare, but it's not an ansolute given that all HR are stupid.)
But, even the intelligent ones aren't going to do a bunch of extra work for no reason. Yes, you should always try to make it as easy as possible to hire you. HR people may have to hire candidates for 20 wildly different specialties by Thursday. They may have to hire an accountant, a DBA, a sales person, and a nurse all at the same time. If an HR person had a deep interest or understanding about IT, they would probably just be an IT person instead of HR. Somebody hands them a big list of topic-specific jargon. They try to get some sense of what sort of person they need, but the distinctions between writing SQL, Java, and ASM are almost certainly going to be mostly lost on the HR person.
Then, once the HR person gets some understanding of who they need to find, cheat sheet of keywords in hand, they get about 1500 resumes dumped on their desk. Half of them are from short order cooks who heard that "Computers" is a good business to get into. Half the remainder are from college grads and tech support weenies who have decided to fluff up their resume far beyond their abilities with huge, blatant lies. Then they still have a pile of things to sort through of people who probably could do the job. They may simply not have enough time to do more than give a cursory skimming of most of the resumes. So, if a resume has all the words they've been told to look for, it'll tend to get quickly to the top of the pile. If a resume has none of them, it'll tend to wind up at the bottom.
In bad cases, that's because the HR drone can't line up "Oracle and MS SQL Server Admin" on a resume with "Database Manager" on a request. It seems dumb, but to a person not in the specific field, the jargon can seem very opaque. So, you have to try to make it as easy as possible for somebody to hire you. I almost always tweak my resume to only mention relevant experiences whenever I apply for a job I'm actually interested in. It means I have a better signal:noise ratio for that position, and I'm more likely to sounds like what they've been told to find. It's a little more work. But, boo hoo. They probably want somebody who thinks working hard to make other people's lives easier is a good thing.
Meh. I want to do less things to get where I'm going, not more. If I have to fiddle with docking my phoen every time I get in my car, that's really not a useability win. Plus, I have a bunch of strictly automotive apps installed on my phone that I don't need when I am away from the car. I think there is a good place for an open car computer system, running car specific apps.
For example, I think it would be a good idea to keep track of my mileage and how much I spend on gas. An in-car app can detect whenever I have put gas in the tank, and pop up a little dialog asking how much I just spent. I think that app should be able to sync with my phone or whatever, but It isn't something I would sensibly have any use for on my phone when I am away from the car.
Of course, I also think we should have autostereoscopic screens in the dash, and stereo backup cameras in the rear. So, my tolerance for built in gadgetry may be higher than others'.
Would you happen to know why they filmed the Hobbit at 5K when most theaters are 2K (are they still?), and (more to the point) the better theaters project 4K? It seems like 5K dowscaled to 4K would be worse quality than just shooting 4K in the first place.
Several reasons. First off, the camera they used, a Red Epic, has a 5k sensor. You can shoot at lower resolutions if you want, but then you are only using part of the sensor. You would shoot at a lower resolution on this type of camera if you needed to shoot at a very high frame rate (The sensor can basically spit out X pixels per second maximum. That can be 48 high res frames per second or 120 lower res frames per second, etc.) Shooting with just a center cut of the sensor instead of the whole sensor has an impact on the depth of field, and the amount of total light the sensor is usefully gathering. It also effectively "zooms in" the image. Obviously, they could have shot with a different type of camera that shoots at a lower resolution natively, but chose not to. (Alexa is a very popular high and camera in a similar price bracket, with a similar sized sensor, and it generally shoots normal 1080p, for example.)
Past the details of the particular camera, downscaled 5k generally looks better than "native" 4k. When red advertises "5k" pixels, they are playing a bit fast and loose with the definition of a pixel. There are 5000+ "sensels" or sensor element sites in a line of the picture, but each sensel is any one of red, green, or blue, but not all three. OTOH, a 4k display generally means that you have 4000+ pixels, each with red, green, *and* blue together making the pixel. So, you have to do some resampling on the image, and footage is always a bit soft at the "advertsing" resolution on something like a 5k Epic. The smallest details that you can confidently resolve are actually a few pixels across, rather than pixel-perfect.
What's more, shooting at the highest resolution available gives you a bit of room for fucking up. You can shoot at 5k, realise the damn sound guy is visible at the edge of frame, holding a microphone, and zoom in the image a bit to crop him out without things getting too terribly soft. IOW, the director has "Artistic reframing options in post production."
We've seen massive consolidation of operating systems since the 80's. IT at this point is relatively stable and mature. Famous last words. Surely you must be joking.
I'll put a few caveats on what I was saying in the long term. If Strong AI happens, it will potentially be a fundamental shift in computing. But, I don't think we are really all that close to true strong AI. 20 Years is far enough out that I have no idea what the world will look like. But, I'd be really surprised if things are shockingly different in 2013 vs 2023. 2033 Will be the same distance in the future that 2013 is from 1993, and I'm much more willing to be surprised in that time frame.
Aside from Strong AI, one of the really disruptive technologies that I see moving forward will be AR. That's potentially a huge social game changer, but not really a technological one. Fully seamless, always-on, mature augmented reality will change the way people see the world around them. That will basically be a "new" software platform, and there will be a period of change that mimics recent history in mobile devices, or the 1980's in home computers. Some of the basic bits like OpenGL will probably be used off the shelf, but nobody has yet created a good AR programming environment, so I think some of the stuff like OpenGL won't be used directly, and we may potentially see brand new stacks. Sort of like when Apple created CocoaTouch and offered the first popular multitouch API. It was built on a lot of existing technology, but it still offered some interesting new capabilities. Android likewise created a new API for dealing with mulyitouch UI's which leveraged quite a bit of existing code (Linux kernel and such) but was clearly a new environment and platform to deal with. AR will provide a disruptive new space for developers to make new things, but from a pure technology standpoint, it won't be anything as significant as the social implications.
Whatever happens, in the near term after they are introduced, AR goggles and AI systems will still reference information services that live in 19" racks, with some sort of UNIX and TCP/IP involved. The data will be stored in hierarchical filesystems. It'll be secured with passwords and crypto keys. (And, cue the old story about how shuttle SRB's are the size that they are because they needed to fit on trains running on legacy rail infrastructure which is ultimately the same size as a Roman road because infrastructure never gets swept away in one go. It tends to hang around forever, so change is never as rapid as creation.)
It's certainly a pain in the ass to put on a stage play, but I did say "a key part of the reason" rather than "the only reason." If people really found 'true' 3D to be that compelling compared to what cinemas can offer, they would pay to see more plays. Or, people would put on more animatronic robot plays. But, many more people watch movies than watch plays. Part of that is because cinematography offers a really compelling set of storytelling tools, and the carefully controlled visuals can make for a very entertaining or moving experience.
Yes, one of the few areas where pretty much everybody agrees that Cameron got stereo cinematography wrong in Avatar was when he used shots with shallow depth of field. There were some cases where there were some floating, out of focus motes of dust passing near the camera, and basically everybody got distracted and tried to swat away the dust. Your eyes were saying "hey this is closest thing to your face that you can see. You should pay attention to this," but it was impossible to focus on it. So, while in 2D you can separate the content and the foreground/background using shallow depth of field, you need different techniques in 3D. You can't have a 'foreground' in most cases. You need deep focus. And, because you can't just blur the background, it can't be 'busy' and distracting. In that sense, you need to be actively thinking like a graphic designer when you frame your shots in stereo. You need to work with the art department to make different sets for stereo, and light things differently. It's analogous to how in old black and white film noir, you had really intense rimlight behind every actor. If you didn't, the actors would be grey on grey, and blend into the background. The rimlight gives the actors an outline or highlight, to help keep your attention. With deep focus in stereo, you need to rely on that sort of mindset for drawing the eye where you want it. Just blurring the stuff that is unimportant is painful to much of the audience, and if you punish the audience for not looking in the right spot, they won't enjoy watching the film.
It's not clear that software is heating up as much as you propose. Most systems depend on vast foundation libraries, and commercial viability frequently depends on vast developer ecosystems. It is getting harder and harder over time to launch novel software stacks. As new computer programs depend on ever larger and more stable platforms, inertia naturally means that the rate of "real" change is less now than it was earlier in the evolution of computer programs.
I think it's perfectly fair to say that the computer revolution is slowing down. Even as people remain hard at work, and some metrics continue to climb as fast as ever, the different between a 16 KB home computer and a 16 MB home computer is extraordinary. The difference between a 16 MB system and a 16 GB system is really much smaller, even though the systems are separated by a factor of 1000x (for the sake of a simple argument, assume compute performance and storage capacity scale at a rate roughly equal to main memory.) A 16 MB 686 running Windows 95 has windows, icons, color graphics, a mouse. A 16 GB Sandy Bridge running Windows 7 has windows, icons, color graphics, a mouse. A user teleported some years in the future would have no problem accepting the faster system. A 16 KB system has a keyboard, text mode, built in BASIC, incredibly primitive graphics with limited colors. Moving from that to the 16 MB one would be a revelation.
We've seen massive consolidation of operating systems since the 80's. IT at this point is relatively stable and mature. Though, I don't agree that there were several completely distinct revolutions. I would argue that Facebook is part of the same revolution as the telegraph and radio. Likewise, computers are largely a technology of reliable small scale finely detailed manufacturing which started quite some time ago.
Now, stereoscopic filmmaking may be over, but that's hardly 3D except in the eyes of the bewildered.
That's a very common opinion, but it's wrong. I've done everything from good old 2D 24 FPS through interactive live theater. Live theater is a close analog to what you are talking about, where you can move around and see shifts in perspective. The experience changes depending on what you do. It'll be an interesting tech demo when we get holoprojectors and holocameras. And, certainly there will be some people who use it to great effect.
But, a key part of the reason that film is so much more popular of a medium than live theater is the fact that the director and cinematographer can ove the camera and make you look at exactly whatever they want you to see. It's an incredibly powerful storytelling tool to be able to show your audience a very specific image. If you look at the original "A Few Good Men" and the movie version, you will see that the writing had to change quite a lot. I think it's a particularly good example of how storytelling changes for the cinema. You didin't need as many expositional monologs in the movie version because the camera could just show you something. That "show" vs. "tell" distinction is fundamental to why just taking a play and shooting it doesn't make a good movie. And, that distinction is why taking away the Director's ability to show you very specific images doesn't improve storytelling, even if it is more 'natural' and more technologically sophisticated.
Stereo cinematography isn't what it could be, but don't assume that it's just a technical problem. It's largely a business problem because doing a great 3D picture, where the cinematography isn't interesting in 2D simply isn't a good business plan. You need to be able to sell tickets in 2D theaters, and you need to be able to sell DVD's in order to make a profit. So, the 2D version has to have primacy, and that means that 3D cinematography takes a back seat. You won't see big studios really interested in 'artistic' stereo until stereo displays are ubiquitous enough that selling a 3D picture is a given.
I work at a big multinational, and sometimes getting our people to pay bills on time can be a major pain. The company is like a cat playing with its food when it deals with smaller companies. It always prefers to leave money sitting in a bank account collecting interest for as long as possible if it can avoid paying bills on time. I think on big contracts, the delay tactics may actually earn enough people to fully pay for the people doing the delay tactics. So, what works? The company won't easily agree to contracts with useful penalty terms for late payments if it can avoid it. Their legal department is large, and yours is less so. So, they can give you all sorts of reasons to leave that sort of thing out. Apparently, you don't have solid penalty terms in your current contracts either, so you may be facing a similar issue. first, always make sure you contracts have clear due dates and penalty terms, to the extent that you can still get the work. If your terms are that one second late means the price goes up from $1000 to $10 billion, nobody will sighn your contracts, but you do have a lot of room to add teeth. When the big company pushes back in negotiation, you may need to add some flexibility, or reduce the penalties. Try to keep them in some form if you cans till get the work.
But, what happens when you desperately need the work, and they have convinced you that penalty terms in the contract are simply unacceptable? When you send the invoice, add the magic terms "X% discount if paid by date Y." Negotiate all your contracts high enough that you can afford a discount later on. Don't negotiate the discount. Leave it out of the contract. Just add it when you send the invoice. That discount is the fiscal flanking maneuver. It's their opportunity to get free money if they follow your rules, and it throws the delaying strategies out the window. The freelancers who use this strategy with the big company I work for apparently have their invoices rise to the top of thepile, and consistently get paid more quickly.
You can't unilaterally add penalties. You can't be sure that legal action will work in your favor, or that t will happen quickly enough. But you can always unilaterally add the discount for speed.
It's not an unreasonable assumption that something available for download is less than fully encumbered.
It's incredibly unreasonable. If I put a TV in my shop window, you may be able to watch it, but that doesn't mean you have permission to change the channel, or take it home with you. Likewise, if somebody puts code on the Internet, then you can read it. The way the law works in the majority of the world, if you don't have an explicit grant of permission to copy something, or a specific reason to think it has been released from copyright, then it would be illegal do copy it. It doesn't matter if it is code, and it doesn't matter if it is on github. It's not that complicated.
That aside, isn't parsing the least interesting and demanding part of compilers? I always found it fairly easy to "get".
Well, previously solved problems are always the easiest because there is an existing example to learn from, and see how easy it is. That said, I am terrible at parsers. I can handle lots of "hard stuff" in 3D rendering and image processing that guys who consider parsers to be trivial. I think different people just find certain problems fit in their brains better than others. Some problems aren't harder or easier in absolute terms, just easier for you.
Then you need to steal launch infrastructure which would be even less practical than stealing teh space shuttle. Indeed, if you can steal that, then you can probably just build your own space ships.
That said, I live in LA. Ahat's the return policy on heavy lift helicopters? Can I get them from Amazon?
The other thing I forgot to mention is the fact that there is a massive volume of work. The sheer number of shots is huge for an untested pipeline. It's not unheard of for a highly trained crew of Hollywood professionals with a completely established set of tools to work for months of a highly polished 30 second commercial. Seriously. high end VFX involves massive amounts of work. If I had been the one picking the next project for the Blender Institute, I would have shot anybody who brought me a ten minute scripts for an experimental demo. I wouldn't have greenlit anything longer than four minutes for this sort of thing. Kudos to the team that worked on it for getting anything out the door, let alone anything looking half this good.
As a filmmaker and a graphics artist these days, I like Blender and its idea behind it, I really do. This is a copy of what I wrote on my blog about all that: The CGI on this movie still looks like VFX animation and not realistic. It looks fake. Camera tracking is good, modelling seems ok, but lighting and animation arenâ(TM)t. There are no shadows to talk about, everything itâ(TM)s too HDR-ish. If thatâ(TM)s what Blender can do in 2012, then color me unimpressed. Thatâ(TM)s no Hollywood-worthy CGI. And letâ(TM)s not forget that this movie was produced by the Blender guys themselves, with hand-picked Blender artists.
Weirdly, I think a few conversations I had with Ton a few years back during SIGGRAPH in LA may have contributed to the idea of this project. It's neat to see it in finished form. At the time, there was quite a lot being said about how the compositing nodes in Blender meant that you could use it as a full VFX package, and comp your CG right in Blender. I had been completely failing at doing exactly that, so when I happened to be sitting with Ton, I starting asking about how I could use shapes in Blender to do rotoscoping. I figured, who better to ask than the author. He whipped out his laptop.and proceeded to start showing me how. He fiddled and faddled for a few minutes. And ultimately realised that some of the work I was talking about doing was simply stuff that he had never tried to do. The compositing system basically worked great on paper from a technology standpoint, but it wasn't actually useful for doing many types of VFX shots in practice. The point of this project wasn't just to show off what Blender can do, but also to try and make it do things that it was frankly bad at. By putting some of the devs through a different kind of project from what they had been basing their use cases on, they were able to see where some of the conceptual flaws in the app were in practice.
To date, blender has been all about CG, and not at all about compositing. (Despite having a nodal compositor built into it for years.) Looking forward, the results of this project will start to shift that balance. Eventually, it will be a competent compositing app, and a really good comper will get ahold of it, and Blender will be used for all sorts of perfectly invisible visual effects. In the mean time, you are looking at the work of CG guys and Devs. That isn't quite going to be on the same level as finish work from Flame and Nuke compers who see comping as an art instead of a minor technical problem to be handled after the important CG is rendered.
Of course, aside from compositing, doing live action also means that acting is extremely important. I don't know that Blender Institute will ever be known for that.
The latency problem i can understand, but that will be a problem regardless of compression or not. Encoding and decoding will not add that much cost compared to the network. Compressing/uncompressing only destroys the pic if its lossy. There are numerous lossless codecs that should do the trick and save tons of money in the process.
I know it isn't cool to read the headline anymore, but this is about production not watching. Yes, a frame of latency makes a big difference when you are *inside* the studio, and need to keep things sync'd to within less than a frame so that you can do live switching without flickers or delays. If you try to do live switching to take between two cameras, and you have a few frames of latency in the encoder of the sources, and the decoder in the switcher and the buffer in the switcher the sync the frames, etc., you can make the process of doing live Television appreciably worse than it is today, which isn't something anybody would spend money on. You can only sell new gear to people if the new system isn't worse than the old.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft. Basically, when Elop took over, Nokia became an MS Vassal. That's when they dumped the world's most popular phone OS and their internal modern OS development projects for Windows Phone, and why Windows Phone ads use Nokia phones. It's basically the same play they ran when they got SGI to start building NT workstations. And, not that far off from the investments in SCO to enable the fight against Linux. Note that the MS Vassal is actively using their patent portfolio specifically to fight one of Google's strategic plays, despite the fact that a phone vendor that has given up on OS development would probably do much better if they added Android to their phone portfolio.
Just for the record, no creative professionals use dedicated and expensive tools to visualize color spaces. If they use an expensive tool like Maya for it, it's because they happen to have it handy for more sensible purposes. Visualizing color spaces is really just a novelty for most people. Anybody who needs to do it regularly isn't so much a "creative" professional, as a color scientist.
Still, sort of a neat demo of the Blender Python API.
Nope, not smart in that sense. As far as I know, the design has no accelerometers. It's a super neat thing, but you basically have to be quite deliberate in the speed that you draw things with it. It's unlikely that what you suggest would work as well as you'd like because changing the feed rate would change the time spent on the hot element being melted, so moving slowly would be harder to cool effectively, and moving fast would mean semi-melted plastic. You can obviously change the wattage applied to the heating element, but actually changing the heat in something with enough mass to be useful for the application, quickly enough to work the way that you want, would be very hard.
Obviously, if you want to make a dozen matching wallplates for light switches, you would want to use a "real" 3D printer instead of something like this. But, if you just want to doodle something for fun, then that main advantage of 3D printing doesn't really apply. Just making copies of stuff that other people have designed isn't really the only possible application of the technology behind 3D printers. Besides, if simplicity is the main selling point, not needing a computer, CAD software, fiddly motors to keep calibrated, firmware updates, or any of the other complications of a full 3D printer, is pretty neat. At very least, you have to admit that a lot of people are clearly interesting in it, considering how far they have blown past the original Kickstarter goal. (And, if you look at how small the original Kickstarter goal was compared to where they are at, you can see that they really weren't expecting quite this much attention!)
Disclaimer - I haven't actually had a chance to play with one of these things, but I am friends with some of the people involved in launching the kickstarter, so I have been following it for a while.
I haven't actually gotten to play with one personally, but I am friends with the guys involved in this. Basically, yes, there is an analogy to be made with a hot glue gun. But, have you ever tried to "draw" a cube with a hot glue gun? Good luck with that. With the 3Doodler, you are working with a much finer 3D printing style plastic filament. It's essentially the printing head of a 3D printer that you can use to draw freehand with. The plastic coming out of the head cools very quickly, and is relatively strong compared to something like glue, so you can make all sorts of interesting shapes. They may post some additional videos to help clarify how easy it is to draw with.
That's a bit unfair. There are occasional HR people who are quite intelligent. (They may be rare, but it's not an ansolute given that all HR are stupid.)
But, even the intelligent ones aren't going to do a bunch of extra work for no reason. Yes, you should always try to make it as easy as possible to hire you. HR people may have to hire candidates for 20 wildly different specialties by Thursday. They may have to hire an accountant, a DBA, a sales person, and a nurse all at the same time. If an HR person had a deep interest or understanding about IT, they would probably just be an IT person instead of HR. Somebody hands them a big list of topic-specific jargon. They try to get some sense of what sort of person they need, but the distinctions between writing SQL, Java, and ASM are almost certainly going to be mostly lost on the HR person.
Then, once the HR person gets some understanding of who they need to find, cheat sheet of keywords in hand, they get about 1500 resumes dumped on their desk. Half of them are from short order cooks who heard that "Computers" is a good business to get into. Half the remainder are from college grads and tech support weenies who have decided to fluff up their resume far beyond their abilities with huge, blatant lies. Then they still have a pile of things to sort through of people who probably could do the job. They may simply not have enough time to do more than give a cursory skimming of most of the resumes. So, if a resume has all the words they've been told to look for, it'll tend to get quickly to the top of the pile. If a resume has none of them, it'll tend to wind up at the bottom.
In bad cases, that's because the HR drone can't line up "Oracle and MS SQL Server Admin" on a resume with "Database Manager" on a request. It seems dumb, but to a person not in the specific field, the jargon can seem very opaque. So, you have to try to make it as easy as possible for somebody to hire you. I almost always tweak my resume to only mention relevant experiences whenever I apply for a job I'm actually interested in. It means I have a better signal:noise ratio for that position, and I'm more likely to sounds like what they've been told to find. It's a little more work. But, boo hoo. They probably want somebody who thinks working hard to make other people's lives easier is a good thing.
Meh. I want to do less things to get where I'm going, not more. If I have to fiddle with docking my phoen every time I get in my car, that's really not a useability win. Plus, I have a bunch of strictly automotive apps installed on my phone that I don't need when I am away from the car. I think there is a good place for an open car computer system, running car specific apps.
For example, I think it would be a good idea to keep track of my mileage and how much I spend on gas. An in-car app can detect whenever I have put gas in the tank, and pop up a little dialog asking how much I just spent. I think that app should be able to sync with my phone or whatever, but It isn't something I would sensibly have any use for on my phone when I am away from the car.
Of course, I also think we should have autostereoscopic screens in the dash, and stereo backup cameras in the rear. So, my tolerance for built in gadgetry may be higher than others'.
Several reasons. First off, the camera they used, a Red Epic, has a 5k sensor. You can shoot at lower resolutions if you want, but then you are only using part of the sensor. You would shoot at a lower resolution on this type of camera if you needed to shoot at a very high frame rate (The sensor can basically spit out X pixels per second maximum. That can be 48 high res frames per second or 120 lower res frames per second, etc.) Shooting with just a center cut of the sensor instead of the whole sensor has an impact on the depth of field, and the amount of total light the sensor is usefully gathering. It also effectively "zooms in" the image. Obviously, they could have shot with a different type of camera that shoots at a lower resolution natively, but chose not to. (Alexa is a very popular high and camera in a similar price bracket, with a similar sized sensor, and it generally shoots normal 1080p, for example.)
Past the details of the particular camera, downscaled 5k generally looks better than "native" 4k. When red advertises "5k" pixels, they are playing a bit fast and loose with the definition of a pixel. There are 5000+ "sensels" or sensor element sites in a line of the picture, but each sensel is any one of red, green, or blue, but not all three. OTOH, a 4k display generally means that you have 4000+ pixels, each with red, green, *and* blue together making the pixel. So, you have to do some resampling on the image, and footage is always a bit soft at the "advertsing" resolution on something like a 5k Epic. The smallest details that you can confidently resolve are actually a few pixels across, rather than pixel-perfect.
What's more, shooting at the highest resolution available gives you a bit of room for fucking up. You can shoot at 5k, realise the damn sound guy is visible at the edge of frame, holding a microphone, and zoom in the image a bit to crop him out without things getting too terribly soft. IOW, the director has "Artistic reframing options in post production."
I'll put a few caveats on what I was saying in the long term. If Strong AI happens, it will potentially be a fundamental shift in computing. But, I don't think we are really all that close to true strong AI. 20 Years is far enough out that I have no idea what the world will look like. But, I'd be really surprised if things are shockingly different in 2013 vs 2023. 2033 Will be the same distance in the future that 2013 is from 1993, and I'm much more willing to be surprised in that time frame.
Aside from Strong AI, one of the really disruptive technologies that I see moving forward will be AR. That's potentially a huge social game changer, but not really a technological one. Fully seamless, always-on, mature augmented reality will change the way people see the world around them. That will basically be a "new" software platform, and there will be a period of change that mimics recent history in mobile devices, or the 1980's in home computers. Some of the basic bits like OpenGL will probably be used off the shelf, but nobody has yet created a good AR programming environment, so I think some of the stuff like OpenGL won't be used directly, and we may potentially see brand new stacks. Sort of like when Apple created CocoaTouch and offered the first popular multitouch API. It was built on a lot of existing technology, but it still offered some interesting new capabilities. Android likewise created a new API for dealing with mulyitouch UI's which leveraged quite a bit of existing code (Linux kernel and such) but was clearly a new environment and platform to deal with. AR will provide a disruptive new space for developers to make new things, but from a pure technology standpoint, it won't be anything as significant as the social implications.
Whatever happens, in the near term after they are introduced, AR goggles and AI systems will still reference information services that live in 19" racks, with some sort of UNIX and TCP/IP involved. The data will be stored in hierarchical filesystems. It'll be secured with passwords and crypto keys. (And, cue the old story about how shuttle SRB's are the size that they are because they needed to fit on trains running on legacy rail infrastructure which is ultimately the same size as a Roman road because infrastructure never gets swept away in one go. It tends to hang around forever, so change is never as rapid as creation.)
It's certainly a pain in the ass to put on a stage play, but I did say "a key part of the reason" rather than "the only reason." If people really found 'true' 3D to be that compelling compared to what cinemas can offer, they would pay to see more plays. Or, people would put on more animatronic robot plays. But, many more people watch movies than watch plays. Part of that is because cinematography offers a really compelling set of storytelling tools, and the carefully controlled visuals can make for a very entertaining or moving experience.
Yes, one of the few areas where pretty much everybody agrees that Cameron got stereo cinematography wrong in Avatar was when he used shots with shallow depth of field. There were some cases where there were some floating, out of focus motes of dust passing near the camera, and basically everybody got distracted and tried to swat away the dust. Your eyes were saying "hey this is closest thing to your face that you can see. You should pay attention to this," but it was impossible to focus on it. So, while in 2D you can separate the content and the foreground/background using shallow depth of field, you need different techniques in 3D. You can't have a 'foreground' in most cases. You need deep focus. And, because you can't just blur the background, it can't be 'busy' and distracting. In that sense, you need to be actively thinking like a graphic designer when you frame your shots in stereo. You need to work with the art department to make different sets for stereo, and light things differently. It's analogous to how in old black and white film noir, you had really intense rimlight behind every actor. If you didn't, the actors would be grey on grey, and blend into the background. The rimlight gives the actors an outline or highlight, to help keep your attention. With deep focus in stereo, you need to rely on that sort of mindset for drawing the eye where you want it. Just blurring the stuff that is unimportant is painful to much of the audience, and if you punish the audience for not looking in the right spot, they won't enjoy watching the film.
It's not clear that software is heating up as much as you propose. Most systems depend on vast foundation libraries, and commercial viability frequently depends on vast developer ecosystems. It is getting harder and harder over time to launch novel software stacks. As new computer programs depend on ever larger and more stable platforms, inertia naturally means that the rate of "real" change is less now than it was earlier in the evolution of computer programs.
I think it's perfectly fair to say that the computer revolution is slowing down. Even as people remain hard at work, and some metrics continue to climb as fast as ever, the different between a 16 KB home computer and a 16 MB home computer is extraordinary. The difference between a 16 MB system and a 16 GB system is really much smaller, even though the systems are separated by a factor of 1000x (for the sake of a simple argument, assume compute performance and storage capacity scale at a rate roughly equal to main memory.) A 16 MB 686 running Windows 95 has windows, icons, color graphics, a mouse. A 16 GB Sandy Bridge running Windows 7 has windows, icons, color graphics, a mouse. A user teleported some years in the future would have no problem accepting the faster system. A 16 KB system has a keyboard, text mode, built in BASIC, incredibly primitive graphics with limited colors. Moving from that to the 16 MB one would be a revelation.
We've seen massive consolidation of operating systems since the 80's. IT at this point is relatively stable and mature. Though, I don't agree that there were several completely distinct revolutions. I would argue that Facebook is part of the same revolution as the telegraph and radio. Likewise, computers are largely a technology of reliable small scale finely detailed manufacturing which started quite some time ago.
That's a very common opinion, but it's wrong. I've done everything from good old 2D 24 FPS through interactive live theater. Live theater is a close analog to what you are talking about, where you can move around and see shifts in perspective. The experience changes depending on what you do. It'll be an interesting tech demo when we get holoprojectors and holocameras. And, certainly there will be some people who use it to great effect.
But, a key part of the reason that film is so much more popular of a medium than live theater is the fact that the director and cinematographer can ove the camera and make you look at exactly whatever they want you to see. It's an incredibly powerful storytelling tool to be able to show your audience a very specific image. If you look at the original "A Few Good Men" and the movie version, you will see that the writing had to change quite a lot. I think it's a particularly good example of how storytelling changes for the cinema. You didin't need as many expositional monologs in the movie version because the camera could just show you something. That "show" vs. "tell" distinction is fundamental to why just taking a play and shooting it doesn't make a good movie. And, that distinction is why taking away the Director's ability to show you very specific images doesn't improve storytelling, even if it is more 'natural' and more technologically sophisticated.
Stereo cinematography isn't what it could be, but don't assume that it's just a technical problem. It's largely a business problem because doing a great 3D picture, where the cinematography isn't interesting in 2D simply isn't a good business plan. You need to be able to sell tickets in 2D theaters, and you need to be able to sell DVD's in order to make a profit. So, the 2D version has to have primacy, and that means that 3D cinematography takes a back seat. You won't see big studios really interested in 'artistic' stereo until stereo displays are ubiquitous enough that selling a 3D picture is a given.
I work at a big multinational, and sometimes getting our people to pay bills on time can be a major pain. The company is like a cat playing with its food when it deals with smaller companies. It always prefers to leave money sitting in a bank account collecting interest for as long as possible if it can avoid paying bills on time. I think on big contracts, the delay tactics may actually earn enough people to fully pay for the people doing the delay tactics. So, what works? The company won't easily agree to contracts with useful penalty terms for late payments if it can avoid it. Their legal department is large, and yours is less so. So, they can give you all sorts of reasons to leave that sort of thing out. Apparently, you don't have solid penalty terms in your current contracts either, so you may be facing a similar issue. first, always make sure you contracts have clear due dates and penalty terms, to the extent that you can still get the work. If your terms are that one second late means the price goes up from $1000 to $10 billion, nobody will sighn your contracts, but you do have a lot of room to add teeth. When the big company pushes back in negotiation, you may need to add some flexibility, or reduce the penalties. Try to keep them in some form if you cans till get the work.
But, what happens when you desperately need the work, and they have convinced you that penalty terms in the contract are simply unacceptable? When you send the invoice, add the magic terms "X% discount if paid by date Y." Negotiate all your contracts high enough that you can afford a discount later on. Don't negotiate the discount. Leave it out of the contract. Just add it when you send the invoice. That discount is the fiscal flanking maneuver. It's their opportunity to get free money if they follow your rules, and it throws the delaying strategies out the window. The freelancers who use this strategy with the big company I work for apparently have their invoices rise to the top of thepile, and consistently get paid more quickly.
You can't unilaterally add penalties. You can't be sure that legal action will work in your favor, or that t will happen quickly enough. But you can always unilaterally add the discount for speed.
It's incredibly unreasonable. If I put a TV in my shop window, you may be able to watch it, but that doesn't mean you have permission to change the channel, or take it home with you. Likewise, if somebody puts code on the Internet, then you can read it. The way the law works in the majority of the world, if you don't have an explicit grant of permission to copy something, or a specific reason to think it has been released from copyright, then it would be illegal do copy it. It doesn't matter if it is code, and it doesn't matter if it is on github. It's not that complicated.
Well, whatever happens, I think we can be confident that we won't see anything all that interesting at t the demo.
If it helps, Netcraft has confirmed the death of Netcraft confirmations.
Well, previously solved problems are always the easiest because there is an existing example to learn from, and see how easy it is. That said, I am terrible at parsers. I can handle lots of "hard stuff" in 3D rendering and image processing that guys who consider parsers to be trivial. I think different people just find certain problems fit in their brains better than others. Some problems aren't harder or easier in absolute terms, just easier for you.
Then you need to steal launch infrastructure which would be even less practical than stealing teh space shuttle. Indeed, if you can steal that, then you can probably just build your own space ships.
That said, I live in LA. Ahat's the return policy on heavy lift helicopters? Can I get them from Amazon?
The other thing I forgot to mention is the fact that there is a massive volume of work. The sheer number of shots is huge for an untested pipeline. It's not unheard of for a highly trained crew of Hollywood professionals with a completely established set of tools to work for months of a highly polished 30 second commercial. Seriously. high end VFX involves massive amounts of work. If I had been the one picking the next project for the Blender Institute, I would have shot anybody who brought me a ten minute scripts for an experimental demo. I wouldn't have greenlit anything longer than four minutes for this sort of thing. Kudos to the team that worked on it for getting anything out the door, let alone anything looking half this good.
Weirdly, I think a few conversations I had with Ton a few years back during SIGGRAPH in LA may have contributed to the idea of this project. It's neat to see it in finished form. At the time, there was quite a lot being said about how the compositing nodes in Blender meant that you could use it as a full VFX package, and comp your CG right in Blender. I had been completely failing at doing exactly that, so when I happened to be sitting with Ton, I starting asking about how I could use shapes in Blender to do rotoscoping. I figured, who better to ask than the author. He whipped out his laptop.and proceeded to start showing me how. He fiddled and faddled for a few minutes. And ultimately realised that some of the work I was talking about doing was simply stuff that he had never tried to do. The compositing system basically worked great on paper from a technology standpoint, but it wasn't actually useful for doing many types of VFX shots in practice. The point of this project wasn't just to show off what Blender can do, but also to try and make it do things that it was frankly bad at. By putting some of the devs through a different kind of project from what they had been basing their use cases on, they were able to see where some of the conceptual flaws in the app were in practice.
To date, blender has been all about CG, and not at all about compositing. (Despite having a nodal compositor built into it for years.) Looking forward, the results of this project will start to shift that balance. Eventually, it will be a competent compositing app, and a really good comper will get ahold of it, and Blender will be used for all sorts of perfectly invisible visual effects. In the mean time, you are looking at the work of CG guys and Devs. That isn't quite going to be on the same level as finish work from Flame and Nuke compers who see comping as an art instead of a minor technical problem to be handled after the important CG is rendered.
Of course, aside from compositing, doing live action also means that acting is extremely important. I don't know that Blender Institute will ever be known for that.
Patrick Stewart has been draining their life force. That's why he is still exactly as old as he was in the 80's.
Wouldn't that law run afoul of itself?
I know it isn't cool to read the headline anymore, but this is about production not watching. Yes, a frame of latency makes a big difference when you are *inside* the studio, and need to keep things sync'd to within less than a frame so that you can do live switching without flickers or delays. If you try to do live switching to take between two cameras, and you have a few frames of latency in the encoder of the sources, and the decoder in the switcher and the buffer in the switcher the sync the frames, etc., you can make the process of doing live Television appreciably worse than it is today, which isn't something anybody would spend money on. You can only sell new gear to people if the new system isn't worse than the old.
Several fortnights worth.