Except the suit from Aliens didn't actually work, it was just a big fiberglass structure suspended from a crane, with the body suspended the rest was light enough that it could be moved around just with muscle power.
Either way the current camera isn't a still cam but a motion camera and has outputs and software for the formats and software tools that are used in digital film editing. And besides, complaining that there's no free software for a camera setup that's around $30,000 for a basic moderately featured setup is kinda silly. I have no doubt the new still capable cameras will support writing standard.jpg,.png,.raw, etc. onto CF cards when running in still mode.
Read the article before you comment. The 261 mpixel model is a large format back which will use custom large format lenses, not plain 35MM SLR lenses. It's also 186mm x 56mm, RED has a nice comparison shot of the various sensor sizes at http://red.cachefly.net/13/page12.jpg
They already provide freely downloadable tools for processing the encoded RAW footage into more common formats (http://www.red.com/support REDCine works on Intel Mac or Windows) and can export to TIFF, JPEG, and OpenEXR (and possibly more, those were just the ones I saw mentioned in the latest release notes). They're also putting out a SDK for the format so it can be integrated into more software. It's not exactly locked down.
Well, they haven't announced anything about storage for the new systems other than a CF adapter for the lower-res units so I can't judge it yet. The Red One however's been out for awhile and has a couple of storage systems. They've got a CF adapter built in with 8GB and soon 16GB high speed cards available. The 8GB cards provide about 4-5 minutes at 4k which is about the same recording time as a 400' film canister (though much, much smaller obviously). Unlike film you can shoot a scene, swap cards and walk that card over to your on-set laptop and dump the footage onto it and a couple of external drives for backup and start editing together a rough cut while the next scene's being shot and then go reuse the card for another shot. They also offer a hard drive option that uses a pair of 160GB 2.5" SATA drives in RAID-0 and can record 3 hours of footage at 4k (4096x2304). Compact storage is pretty advanced these days, and RED has a very effective codec that wavelet compresses the RAW footage instead of the processed RGB data. The current camera has 2 encoding modes that work out to approximately 28 or 36 MB/sec at 4k. The top end of the new models is about 35x the resolution of current camera though so even accounting for codec efficiencies they're still going to need quite a bit of bandwidth to actually record that much video data. Then again given the size of this unit, especialyl once you add lenses, it's pretty much going to be tripod or dolly mounted for any motion shots, not a big deal to have a storage pack on the trolley built into a carrying case. A couple hundred terabytes of RAID configured for speed and hooked up via cable wouldn't be out of line for a setup like that.
Except as much as the Star Wars prequels were devastatingly bad as far as writing and execution, their design fits in the timeline perfectly. The prequels start during the pinnacle of Republic that's become bloated and stagnant, parts of the Universe are filthy rich and sparkle with incredibly ornate bespoke engineering (Naboo represents this side) on the other hand you have the ghetto where everything has a dirty cobbled together look (Tatooine). As the prequels go on and the Republic starts to fall apart you get a much greater sense of function over form as the Republic gears up for war.
The Energia rocket flew once more, carrying the Polyus battle station. Yes, battle station. It would have formed the nucleus of a Mir 2, but with anti-satellite weapons, and (so rumour has it) an arsenal of nuclear mines... but it seems some crucial navigational component was installed upside-down, and the last great secret weapon of the Cold War ended its brief career at the bottom of the sea.
Did you actually watch the video? They demonstrate the fabric at one point and it's more like a rubber sheet than a cheap cotton t-shirt. Just because the cheap common clothing fabrics you deal with every day behave a certain way doesn't mean all fabrics do.
Difference being once you've seen an actual HD signal from a reasonable viewing distance you can generalyl pick out a non-HD source pretty quickly from then on. Even my wife, who has to wear her glasses to watch anything with subtitles, can spot the difference when we watch Heroes in SD or HD.
You're failing to understand rights and film options, Dreamworks only has the rights to produce a live action film, this does not replace or remove the existing rights that Production I.G. has in japan that's let them produce the TV series, it also won't affect any rights that Oshii still has for producing more animated films. Likewise Battle Angel produced all the episodes it was ever going to have long before anyone in the US picked up the license for it (and it's James Cameron that's working on it, not Bay, thank god). Battle Angel may still be ongoing as a manga though, I know it switched publishers, and name at one point but I haven't looked recently to see if it's completed it's run or if it's still being serialized.
Actually he has been active, just doing standalone art (he does a lot of stuff for prepaid phone cards and the like) and more recently he's been developing the story concepts for shows instead of directly developing his own work. Ghost Hound last season and Real Drive which is currently airing in Japan are both based on story concepts by Shirow.
Actually there's one very large technical difference between the formats that does come into play when you start getting discs with one or more uncompressed audio tracks on board (which is a good thing by the way since most standalones have independent analog outs and PS3 will transcode on the fly to whatever your sound system supports). Blu-ray has a significantly higher maximum bitrate cap, 48Mbit/s for blu-ray versus only 30.24 for HD-DVD (those are complete audio+video+subtitle streamrates, the video itself is limited to 40mbit on blu-ray and 29.4 on HD-DVD). The biggest reason these are important isn't for higher overall movie bitrates, it's so the overhead's there to allow more bits to be thrown at more complicated scenes or audio segments. Scenes with large amounts of random motion (explosions for both of you Michael Bay fans out there or any of you fans of the matrix lobby shootout) get a definite advantage from being able to throw more bits at the video when needed, as does audio (VBR MP3 is popular for a reason afterall and the lossless codecs supported on the HD formats are true VBR codecs).
Actually the blu-ray region codes do have some method to their madness, they're basically broken down: region a = NTSC countries (the americas, japan, hong kong, and some other pacific rim countries) region b = PAL countries (europe, africa, and australia) and region c = the piracy belt (mainland china, india, and russia)
Basically region a and b are seperated technically (both support 720p and 1080i/p but they do so at different framerates plus legacy SD content on the newer discs (such as many extras, especially on older films) is still in standard PAL and NTSC formats. Region c on the other hand is seperated economically, by splitting off those regions they allow the studios to release extremely low-priced titles to combat piracy without worrying about the cut-rate discs being imported back into the other regions in large numbers (there's always the small percentage of people who will pick up a cut-rate player and discs while they're traveling overseas who don't mind unreadable menus and cantonese subtitles)
I'm as fundamentally against region codes as any other sane slashdotter but at least there is some reasoning behind the regions and it's not as arbitrary as the DVD region codes were (japan and europe both being region 2? they don't even use the same formats).
Not to mention Sony doesn't have you by the balls for hard drive expansion like MS does. The PS3 uses bone standard 2.5" laptop SATA drives and even includes instructions in the manual on how to replace the hard drive with a larger one (or a replacement if the included one fails at some point). They've also got standard memory card support, allowing you to use compact flash, SD cards, and memory sticks on the higher end models, or any storage device that you can attach via USB (although as far as I know MS does that as well, at least for storing media, don't think MS will let you toss a 200GB drive in your 360 though).
More importantly, 50GB blu-ray's are here and now make up a bit over 50% of all blu-ray discs. There aren't any actual production 3-layer HD-DVD discs and noone's sure if they'll actually work on current players anyways. Even if the 3-layer HD-DVD discs do come out, giving them a tiny edge in space, HD-DVD will still be limited by it's lower maximum bitrate. Blu-ray has 48Mb/s transfer speeds compared to a mere 30 for HD-DVD (which is one of the reasons a lot of BD discs have full 5.1 uncompressed PCM audio and HD-DVD doesn't, BD has the bandwidth, and space to burn for higher quality), for comparison, DVD is 10Mb/s so HD-DVD is a simple 3x DVD transfer whereas blu-ray is nearly 5x.
That would be 14 months ago, look at the year. 2 months ago would be the nice large 160gb Classic (very nice for those of us with large collections), the new Nano (or iPod hobbit as my wife referred to it until she saw one in person), and the Touch (which was christened "16gigs? wtf is that shit" by aformentioned outspoken iPod loving wife, who ended up with the first 80 gig classic to show up at our local apple shop to replace her old 20gig 3rd gen)
Simple enough, ground-side cache servers, a couple seconds latency isn't a dealbreaker for most web pages, especially with a datacenter the size and capacity of Dahak^H^H^H^H^H the moon.
Read the article, those were January 2007 prices, they specifically mention it'd already cost about half what they spent due to plummeting AMD cpu prices.
I work in a corporate helpdesk environment for a mid-sized retail chain. We use IBM Netvista SFF boxes for our cash registers and they have a tendency to occasionally stop recognizing the network. Reconnecting network cables doesn't work and neither does rebooting or power cycling the machines. Oddly the only thing that seems to fix them is to power them off and cycle the power button several times with the power cord unplugged. Seems to be some sort of residual charge that clears when the system's cycled without power. It works consistently enough that it's in our internal troubleshooting documentation too.
Seems a rather roundabout way of doing it. The easy answer is to simply have a number of small partitions on each disk and use multiple partitions to split thing evenly. Say you've got a 80GB drive, 2 120GB drives, and a 200GB drive. Let's say we want to make 4 RAID volumes and then group them all into a single LVM volume. Dividing by 4 tells us each partition needs 20GB on the first drive, 30GB on the second and third drive, and 50GB on the fourth drive. 10 multiplies evenly into all of those drives so we simply create 10GB partitions on all the drives and then create each RAID volume from 2 partitions on drive A, 3 each on B and C, and 5 partitions on drive D. Only downside is you might have thrashing issues when the RAID is trying to read from multiple location on each drive. The alternative is to have several different sized RAID volumes all chained into the LVM, have 2 40GB/drive volumes that span all 4 discs, another 40GB/drive across all but the first disc, and a spare 80GB sitting on the final drive, not quite as space efficient but probably better for thouroughput.
Slashdot Mirror
Except the suit from Aliens didn't actually work, it was just a big fiberglass structure suspended from a crane, with the body suspended the rest was light enough that it could be moved around just with muscle power.
Either way the current camera isn't a still cam but a motion camera and has outputs and software for the formats and software tools that are used in digital film editing. And besides, complaining that there's no free software for a camera setup that's around $30,000 for a basic moderately featured setup is kinda silly. .jpg, .png, .raw, etc. onto CF cards when running in still mode.
I have no doubt the new still capable cameras will support writing standard
Read the article before you comment. The 261 mpixel model is a large format back which will use custom large format lenses, not plain 35MM SLR lenses. It's also 186mm x 56mm, RED has a nice comparison shot of the various sensor sizes at http://red.cachefly.net/13/page12.jpg
They already provide freely downloadable tools for processing the encoded RAW footage into more common formats (http://www.red.com/support REDCine works on Intel Mac or Windows) and can export to TIFF, JPEG, and OpenEXR (and possibly more, those were just the ones I saw mentioned in the latest release notes). They're also putting out a SDK for the format so it can be integrated into more software. It's not exactly locked down.
Well, they haven't announced anything about storage for the new systems other than a CF adapter for the lower-res units so I can't judge it yet. The Red One however's been out for awhile and has a couple of storage systems. They've got a CF adapter built in with 8GB and soon 16GB high speed cards available. The 8GB cards provide about 4-5 minutes at 4k which is about the same recording time as a 400' film canister (though much, much smaller obviously). Unlike film you can shoot a scene, swap cards and walk that card over to your on-set laptop and dump the footage onto it and a couple of external drives for backup and start editing together a rough cut while the next scene's being shot and then go reuse the card for another shot.
They also offer a hard drive option that uses a pair of 160GB 2.5" SATA drives in RAID-0 and can record 3 hours of footage at 4k (4096x2304).
Compact storage is pretty advanced these days, and RED has a very effective codec that wavelet compresses the RAW footage instead of the processed RGB data. The current camera has 2 encoding modes that work out to approximately 28 or 36 MB/sec at 4k. The top end of the new models is about 35x the resolution of current camera though so even accounting for codec efficiencies they're still going to need quite a bit of bandwidth to actually record that much video data.
Then again given the size of this unit, especialyl once you add lenses, it's pretty much going to be tripod or dolly mounted for any motion shots, not a big deal to have a storage pack on the trolley built into a carrying case. A couple hundred terabytes of RAID configured for speed and hooked up via cable wouldn't be out of line for a setup like that.
Except as much as the Star Wars prequels were devastatingly bad as far as writing and execution, their design fits in the timeline perfectly. The prequels start during the pinnacle of Republic that's become bloated and stagnant, parts of the Universe are filthy rich and sparkle with incredibly ornate bespoke engineering (Naboo represents this side) on the other hand you have the ghetto where everything has a dirty cobbled together look (Tatooine). As the prequels go on and the Republic starts to fall apart you get a much greater sense of function over form as the Republic gears up for war.
The Energia rocket flew once more, carrying the Polyus battle station. Yes, battle station. It would have formed the nucleus of a Mir 2, but with anti-satellite weapons, and (so rumour has it) an arsenal of nuclear mines... but it seems some crucial navigational component was installed upside-down, and the last great secret weapon of the Cold War ended its brief career at the bottom of the sea.
[Citation Needed]
Or as my wife like to succinctly put it "OMG WTF Jesus Lion"
Did you actually watch the video? They demonstrate the fabric at one point and it's more like a rubber sheet than a cheap cotton t-shirt. Just because the cheap common clothing fabrics you deal with every day behave a certain way doesn't mean all fabrics do.
Difference being once you've seen an actual HD signal from a reasonable viewing distance you can generalyl pick out a non-HD source pretty quickly from then on. Even my wife, who has to wear her glasses to watch anything with subtitles, can spot the difference when we watch Heroes in SD or HD.
You're failing to understand rights and film options, Dreamworks only has the rights to produce a live action film, this does not replace or remove the existing rights that Production I.G. has in japan that's let them produce the TV series, it also won't affect any rights that Oshii still has for producing more animated films. Likewise Battle Angel produced all the episodes it was ever going to have long before anyone in the US picked up the license for it (and it's James Cameron that's working on it, not Bay, thank god). Battle Angel may still be ongoing as a manga though, I know it switched publishers, and name at one point but I haven't looked recently to see if it's completed it's run or if it's still being serialized.
Actually he has been active, just doing standalone art (he does a lot of stuff for prepaid phone cards and the like) and more recently he's been developing the story concepts for shows instead of directly developing his own work. Ghost Hound last season and Real Drive which is currently airing in Japan are both based on story concepts by Shirow.
Actually there's one very large technical difference between the formats that does come into play when you start getting discs with one or more uncompressed audio tracks on board (which is a good thing by the way since most standalones have independent analog outs and PS3 will transcode on the fly to whatever your sound system supports). Blu-ray has a significantly higher maximum bitrate cap, 48Mbit/s for blu-ray versus only 30.24 for HD-DVD (those are complete audio+video+subtitle streamrates, the video itself is limited to 40mbit on blu-ray and 29.4 on HD-DVD). The biggest reason these are important isn't for higher overall movie bitrates, it's so the overhead's there to allow more bits to be thrown at more complicated scenes or audio segments. Scenes with large amounts of random motion (explosions for both of you Michael Bay fans out there or any of you fans of the matrix lobby shootout) get a definite advantage from being able to throw more bits at the video when needed, as does audio (VBR MP3 is popular for a reason afterall and the lossless codecs supported on the HD formats are true VBR codecs).
Actually the blu-ray region codes do have some method to their madness, they're basically broken down:
region a = NTSC countries (the americas, japan, hong kong, and some other pacific rim countries)
region b = PAL countries (europe, africa, and australia)
and region c = the piracy belt (mainland china, india, and russia)
Basically region a and b are seperated technically (both support 720p and 1080i/p but they do so at different framerates plus legacy SD content on the newer discs (such as many extras, especially on older films) is still in standard PAL and NTSC formats. Region c on the other hand is seperated economically, by splitting off those regions they allow the studios to release extremely low-priced titles to combat piracy without worrying about the cut-rate discs being imported back into the other regions in large numbers (there's always the small percentage of people who will pick up a cut-rate player and discs while they're traveling overseas who don't mind unreadable menus and cantonese subtitles)
I'm as fundamentally against region codes as any other sane slashdotter but at least there is some reasoning behind the regions and it's not as arbitrary as the DVD region codes were (japan and europe both being region 2? they don't even use the same formats).
Not to mention Sony doesn't have you by the balls for hard drive expansion like MS does. The PS3 uses bone standard 2.5" laptop SATA drives and even includes instructions in the manual on how to replace the hard drive with a larger one (or a replacement if the included one fails at some point). They've also got standard memory card support, allowing you to use compact flash, SD cards, and memory sticks on the higher end models, or any storage device that you can attach via USB (although as far as I know MS does that as well, at least for storing media, don't think MS will let you toss a 200GB drive in your 360 though).
More importantly, 50GB blu-ray's are here and now make up a bit over 50% of all blu-ray discs. There aren't any actual production 3-layer HD-DVD discs and noone's sure if they'll actually work on current players anyways. Even if the 3-layer HD-DVD discs do come out, giving them a tiny edge in space, HD-DVD will still be limited by it's lower maximum bitrate. Blu-ray has 48Mb/s transfer speeds compared to a mere 30 for HD-DVD (which is one of the reasons a lot of BD discs have full 5.1 uncompressed PCM audio and HD-DVD doesn't, BD has the bandwidth, and space to burn for higher quality), for comparison, DVD is 10Mb/s so HD-DVD is a simple 3x DVD transfer whereas blu-ray is nearly 5x.
That would be 14 months ago, look at the year. 2 months ago would be the nice large 160gb Classic (very nice for those of us with large collections), the new Nano (or iPod hobbit as my wife referred to it until she saw one in person), and the Touch (which was christened "16gigs? wtf is that shit" by aformentioned outspoken iPod loving wife, who ended up with the first 80 gig classic to show up at our local apple shop to replace her old 20gig 3rd gen)
Google the Nuremberg trials, Principle 3 I believe covers it, "I was just following orders" hasn't been an excuse for a long time now.
Simple enough, ground-side cache servers, a couple seconds latency isn't a dealbreaker for most web pages, especially with a datacenter the size and capacity of Dahak^H^H^H^H^H the moon.
Read the article, those were January 2007 prices, they specifically mention it'd already cost about half what they spent due to plummeting AMD cpu prices.
Then someone needs to take it away from them and give them a cheap point and shoot. They're some of the worst photos I've ever seen.
You forgot to fill it full of Natalie Portman covered in hot grits first.
Six series actually, one has just been excised from the canon leaving five.
TOS
TAS
TNG
DS9
Voyager
Enterprise
I work in a corporate helpdesk environment for a mid-sized retail chain. We use IBM Netvista SFF boxes for our cash registers and they have a tendency to occasionally stop recognizing the network. Reconnecting network cables doesn't work and neither does rebooting or power cycling the machines. Oddly the only thing that seems to fix them is to power them off and cycle the power button several times with the power cord unplugged. Seems to be some sort of residual charge that clears when the system's cycled without power. It works consistently enough that it's in our internal troubleshooting documentation too.
Seems a rather roundabout way of doing it. The easy answer is to simply have a number of small partitions on each disk and use multiple partitions to split thing evenly. Say you've got a 80GB drive, 2 120GB drives, and a 200GB drive. Let's say we want to make 4 RAID volumes and then group them all into a single LVM volume. Dividing by 4 tells us each partition needs 20GB on the first drive, 30GB on the second and third drive, and 50GB on the fourth drive. 10 multiplies evenly into all of those drives so we simply create 10GB partitions on all the drives and then create each RAID volume from 2 partitions on drive A, 3 each on B and C, and 5 partitions on drive D. Only downside is you might have thrashing issues when the RAID is trying to read from multiple location on each drive. The alternative is to have several different sized RAID volumes all chained into the LVM, have 2 40GB/drive volumes that span all 4 discs, another 40GB/drive across all but the first disc, and a spare 80GB sitting on the final drive, not quite as space efficient but probably better for thouroughput.