Well, I assume the technique had some problems (Zen Research seems to be down for the count) and would have to be adjusted to work with CD-R, but isn't the idea behind TrueX (which Kenwood used for quite a while) a potential work-around now that noise and safety are becoming issues?
They used a diffraction grating to split the beam and read mutliple points on the disc at the same time. That freed them up to spin the disc slower to reduce noise and jitter. It also meant they could read at a consistent speed across the entire surface of the disc. Not to mention greatly reduced spin-up times.
This wouldn't work as-is for burning CDs because you're turning on and off the laser, which would mean all the "split" beams would have to be writing the same thing. But how hard would it be to put in a second laser, spin the disc at 32X and get 64X burning with less noise and no safety issues? Anyone know why TrueX failed and if / how it could be adapted to CD-R?
Houston has its own traffic tracking system that operates in a similar fashion. When I first realized that they were using the toll-tags to calculate this, I became concerned about the privacy issues (especially given that this use is technically a violation of the license agreement). So I called a friend of mine at the Texas Transportation Institute and asked about it.
And lo and behold, they actually turn out to take the privacy aspect very seriously. When an EZ-Tag (TM) passes under a sensor, it gets assigned an id. When it passes under the next sensor, it calculates the speed, adds it to the database with this generated id (not the toll tag number). And then it assigns it a new ID for the trip to the next sensor. Thus, TTI is incapable of knowing, even under threat of subpoena, the identity of any car passing down the highway or the route of any single vehicle beyond any single highway segment. The entire system is designed to prevent it.
It really seems to me that A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess would be an easy choice here.
I'm also a little startled that William Gibson's books were given a nod, but none of George Alec Effinger's books were mentioned. The Marid Audran series (When Gravity Fails, Fire in the Sun, The Exile Kiss) is a distinctly dystopian future set, unusually, in the middle-east.
Really it's just a matter of expectation-- if the incorrect reviews of the '84 release prompt viewers to go see the film specifically to see the tinting and modernized soundtrack, they'll be sorely (and unfairly) disappointed. It's like taking a swig from a glass of what you assume is beer but turns out to be iced-tea. It may be very fine iced-tea, but you're going to do a spit-take because it wasn't what you were expecting.
You raise valid points, though. Cuts prior to Moroder tended to focus very heavily on the political subplot, which was fairly minor in the original (Berlin) screening. That bias mostly originated in the studio re-cut when it was first brought over to the U.S. Really, there were three major plot-lines and this release will be the first modern cut to resurrect the majority of all three.
I would refer to the image quality of the Moroder release as "variable". Some of the scenes were restored quite nicely, others substantially less so. The incorrect projection speed of the "Maria Dancing" scene was really irritating (and inappropriately humorous).
I will, however, admit to being quite taken with some of the tinting and image effects in the 1984 release. It was the first cut I ever saw of the film and many of the scenes stick in my memory as hauntingly beautiful.
RT Links Reviews of Wrong Version of Metropolis
on
Metropolis Reconstructed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Rotten Tomatoes, one of the two great meta-review sites, doesn't seem to "get" that this release is very different from all previous cuts of the film, especially the recut, tinted, rock-n-roll-soundtracked 1984 Moroder cut. Many of the reviews refer to the "out of place rock-n-roll soundtrack" and "terrible image quality". This is a real problem, because people will be choosing whether or not to see the film based on extremely inaccurate data.
I've emailed them about the problem (and offered to provide them with a list mapping reviews to releases), but they seem to be ignoring me. If we can get enough people to let them know that yes it is worth taking the time to be accurate about this, this release might actually get the respect and attendance it deserves. Please mail them and let them and (as politely as possible) inform them that this is important. Thank you.
I really have no idea how many pages I hit at/. per month. However the stats listed above indicate that/. can or does track that. I wonder if they could provide that info in your user stats so you could calculate how far your subscription dollar would take you.
Ideally, they could show hits on the main page vs the comment pages and provide a calculator to show how long 1000 hits would last you with the specified settings. Plus, I'm just a stats junky and would be curious to see how I'm wasting my time.
I went the DSL self-install route with Southwestern Bell (SBC owned). They lost and recreated my order 3 times, sent the modem and materials to the wrong address, failed to include necessary parts in the order, then refused to activate my line for almost a month for purely bureaucratic reasons.
Then the "install guy" shows up and I have to argue with him over the fact that I was classified as a self-install and didn't want his help.
The "24-hour" tech support consists of warm bodies with no technical knowledge answering the phones outside of business hours to create "trouble tickets" for the real tech-support people during the day. My average hold time was about 45-minutes.
The entire process took 3 months, despite the fact that it consisted of sending me a box full of stuff and flipping a switch in the main computer to set my line as "active."
Okay, I looked it up. It was an Altair 8800 at the Homebrew at the Peninsula School. The whine was picked up as radio interferance, and the first song done this way was "Fool On the Hill" by the Beatles. It was also predated by a "music" program for the PDP-1, but this was the first one for a "home" computer.
This is all out of Steven Levy's excellent book "Hackers: Heroes of The Computer Revolution." Most of it is available online here.
This reminds me of the "disk drive music" tricks for the Commodore64. (Reference Here).
But the history of this very cool idea goes all the way back to one of the old kit-computers where you toggled in the entire program using switches and got results from a couple of LEDs. It produced a different frequency whine depending on how hard the processor was working. Somebody got it to play "Mary Had A Little Lamb" at a meeting of an early Homebrew Computer Club. I can't remember which computer or club specifically, though.
I'm not sure about Juice's security model. It's been a few years since I messed with Juice, and then only because I was doing research on Oberon.
However, everything associated with Juice is open-source, and the API is documented. If you're curious, you can check it out here.
It's all a bit rough, but I think all it would take to turn this (or at the very least, the model on which it is based) into something really useful and promising is to get an active group of people maintaining and improving it. It's certainly interesting as a cross-platform development tool, completely outside the browser. Anyone interested?
The sketchy details on C#'s model for platform independence make me wonder if it's going to be another Java knockoff or do something really different and interesting like Juice did.
Juice is a derivative of the moderately cool language Oberon, which is a very cool derivative of Modula-2. But that's not the neat part about it.
What's really neat about Juice is that while it IS platform independent, it doesn't do this by compiling out to the "native bytecode" of a Juice Virtual Machine. It compiles out to intermediate object code which can be downloaded by a client machine and is then compiled to the real machine's native bytecode with the Juice Just-In-Time Compiler.
The object code is reasonably compact and platform independent, while the resulting compiled code has the speed advantage of a native program. The standard distribution of the browser plug-in includes a set of standard libraries for common functions and graphic controls which a Juice program can use to reduce its download size greatly if it's doing standard sorts of things.
If it shares as much as I think it does with standard Oberon, executables can share modules in memory similarly to the way windows apps use DLLs, reducing the memory footprint for running multiple Oberon apps.
Anyway, I've always felt that Java was a subpar solution because of the speed issue. Juice solves that. I'm curious to see more details on C# to see if it's going to JIT compile to native bytecode or just re# the Java model of running interpreted code on an emulator for a Virtual Machine.
WOW did I wander off from where I was headed with that post. Data Havens
Will InterNic grant you a domain if you've renounced citizenship from all countries? If so, a boat on international waters with a satellite uplink would make a mighty fine (if mighty laggy) place to store politically-iffy data. Like the source-code for DeCSS. Or plans for making a nuclear warhead. Or the minutes of the StoneCutters' meeting with the Pentavarit to plan all of next year's Disney movies.
Seriously, though... how far off is this in terms of need, financial viability, and technical feasibility?
Well, this is certainly one of the most blatant bits of foreshadowing of international data havens. Funny that the "safe" country they moved it to was the U.S.! Never thought I'd see that day.
But this does sort of bring us back to the issue of truth-in-advertising for domain names. Frankly, I think this points to the need for content-based top-level-domains. What use is a country-code in an global network where the geographical location of the information is unimportant? They should create a.XXX domain and tell all sites that are openly pornographic in nature to that top level domain. Then ISPs could choose to block it or make it available. Choose your ISP accordingly.
Sure, it still leaves some gray areas. There will be highly sexual art that may or may not be pornography, etc, etc. But it will at least cull out most of the openly pornographic sites and set it up so I don't get "Nuns Blowing Goats" the next time I search for "freeware FTP clients" in a search engine.
There will probably be those who will cry censorship, but let's face it... if you're LOOKING for porn, it will make it EASIER to find. XXX sites with no pretensions of being anything else should appreciate that. And if you're not looking for porn, maybe it will make it easier to find some real content.
And maybe Little Johnny at the terminal in the library can get out of the middle of a political controversy that doesn't really apply to him and get back to looking for something healthier... like warez.
Yes, but on that mission it was used as a cushion to make it bounce on impact, not to slow the impact. Part of what a heat shield does (abeit collaterally) is slow impact (usually greatly added by drag chutes, etc at a certain point).
If it can be used for both, great. And in a thick atmosphere, hey... it would be easy to engineer it to get more bang for your buck. I was just saying that Mars wasn't a good candidate for this, and Mars is our next probably target.
The atmosphere of Mars is about 6 millibars (about 150x less than Earth). An inflatable heat shield might save space and reduce mass, but it would have to inflate out into something really large to slow down descent through increased drag.
Inflatable tech would work well as cushions to soften impact, and could save a lot of cash by reducing the weight of the probe, but this won't work well to slow impact, will it?
Sure, Mars only has 1/3 the gravity of earth, but that still makes (with the cheesy math of 1/3 of 150x thinner) a 50x hit in efficiency in drag vs tests on earth. Plus, the probe will probably still have some of its momentum left from the trip to get there.
Still, at a fraction of the cost, and super-compact, storage, it certainly couldn't hurt to pack along a few dozen cool inflatable extras on a probe. Go-Go-Gadget-Hand-Glider!
"If the Carnegie Mellon group finds a meteorite this year, that would be an achievement," said Ralph Harvey, a geologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He heads the human team sponsored by NASA that has looked for meteorites in Antarctica for more than 20 years. "The robot is still having a hard time figuring which way is up." - From a Post-Gazette article at http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/19981012 nomad2.asp It found, what... 3 so far? Not bad for a first run.
There's a fair amount of information about an earlier expedition with the Nomad robot in the Atacama Desert (including archives of some images from and of it) at http://img.arc.nasa.gov/Nomad/nomad.html
Does anyone else remember a NOVA special on this robot? Or was it about one of the many previous robots from Carnegie Mellon?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I assume the technique had some problems (Zen Research seems to be down for the count) and would have to be adjusted to work with CD-R, but isn't the idea behind TrueX (which Kenwood used for quite a while) a potential work-around now that noise and safety are becoming issues?
They used a diffraction grating to split the beam and read mutliple points on the disc at the same time. That freed them up to spin the disc slower to reduce noise and jitter. It also meant they could read at a consistent speed across the entire surface of the disc. Not to mention greatly reduced spin-up times.
This wouldn't work as-is for burning CDs because you're turning on and off the laser, which would mean all the "split" beams would have to be writing the same thing. But how hard would it be to put in a second laser, spin the disc at 32X and get 64X burning with less noise and no safety issues? Anyone know why TrueX failed and if / how it could be adapted to CD-R?
Houston has its own traffic tracking system that operates in a similar fashion. When I first realized that they were using the toll-tags to calculate this, I became concerned about the privacy issues (especially given that this use is technically a violation of the license agreement). So I called a friend of mine at the Texas Transportation Institute and asked about it.
And lo and behold, they actually turn out to take the privacy aspect very seriously. When an EZ-Tag (TM) passes under a sensor, it gets assigned an id. When it passes under the next sensor, it calculates the speed, adds it to the database with this generated id (not the toll tag number). And then it assigns it a new ID for the trip to the next sensor. Thus, TTI is incapable of knowing, even under threat of subpoena, the identity of any car passing down the highway or the route of any single vehicle beyond any single highway segment. The entire system is designed to prevent it.
It really seems to me that A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess would be an easy choice here. I'm also a little startled that William Gibson's books were given a nod, but none of George Alec Effinger's books were mentioned. The Marid Audran series (When Gravity Fails, Fire in the Sun, The Exile Kiss) is a distinctly dystopian future set, unusually, in the middle-east.
Really it's just a matter of expectation-- if the incorrect reviews of the '84 release prompt viewers to go see the film specifically to see the tinting and modernized soundtrack, they'll be sorely (and unfairly) disappointed. It's like taking a swig from a glass of what you assume is beer but turns out to be iced-tea. It may be very fine iced-tea, but you're going to do a spit-take because it wasn't what you were expecting.
You raise valid points, though. Cuts prior to Moroder tended to focus very heavily on the political subplot, which was fairly minor in the original (Berlin) screening. That bias mostly originated in the studio re-cut when it was first brought over to the U.S. Really, there were three major plot-lines and this release will be the first modern cut to resurrect the majority of all three.
I would refer to the image quality of the Moroder release as "variable". Some of the scenes were restored quite nicely, others substantially less so. The incorrect projection speed of the "Maria Dancing" scene was really irritating (and inappropriately humorous).
I will, however, admit to being quite taken with some of the tinting and image effects in the 1984 release. It was the first cut I ever saw of the film and many of the scenes stick in my memory as hauntingly beautiful.
Rotten Tomatoes, one of the two great meta-review sites, doesn't seem to "get" that this release is very different from all previous cuts of the film, especially the recut, tinted, rock-n-roll-soundtracked 1984 Moroder cut. Many of the reviews refer to the "out of place rock-n-roll soundtrack" and "terrible image quality". This is a real problem, because people will be choosing whether or not to see the film based on extremely inaccurate data.
I've emailed them about the problem (and offered to provide them with a list mapping reviews to releases), but they seem to be ignoring me. If we can get enough people to let them know that yes it is worth taking the time to be accurate about this, this release might actually get the respect and attendance it deserves. Please mail them and let them and (as politely as possible) inform them that this is important.
Thank you.
But I'm at a loss to think of other activities. Suggestions?
I really have no idea how many pages I hit at /. per month. However the stats listed above indicate that /. can or does track that. I wonder if they could provide that info in your user stats so you could calculate how far your subscription dollar would take you.
Ideally, they could show hits on the main page vs the comment pages and provide a calculator to show how long 1000 hits would last you with the specified settings. Plus, I'm just a stats junky and would be curious to see how I'm wasting my time.
It looks like the site in question has been slashdotted.
Please refer to the archival mirror here.
Then the "install guy" shows up and I have to argue with him over the fact that I was classified as a self-install and didn't want his help.
The "24-hour" tech support consists of warm bodies with no technical knowledge answering the phones outside of business hours to create "trouble tickets" for the real tech-support people during the day. My average hold time was about 45-minutes.
The entire process took 3 months, despite the fact that it consisted of sending me a box full of stuff and flipping a switch in the main computer to set my line as "active."
This is all out of Steven Levy's excellent book "Hackers: Heroes of The Computer Revolution." Most of it is available online here.
But the history of this very cool idea goes all the way back to one of the old kit-computers where you toggled in the entire program using switches and got results from a couple of LEDs. It produced a different frequency whine depending on how hard the processor was working. Somebody got it to play "Mary Had A Little Lamb" at a meeting of an early Homebrew Computer Club. I can't remember which computer or club specifically, though.
However, everything associated with Juice is open-source, and the API is documented. If you're curious, you can check it out here.
It's all a bit rough, but I think all it would take to turn this (or at the very least, the model on which it is based) into something really useful and promising is to get an active group of people maintaining and improving it. It's certainly interesting as a cross-platform development tool, completely outside the browser. Anyone interested?
Juice is a derivative of the moderately cool language Oberon, which is a very cool derivative of Modula-2. But that's not the neat part about it.
What's really neat about Juice is that while it IS platform independent, it doesn't do this by compiling out to the "native bytecode" of a Juice Virtual Machine. It compiles out to intermediate object code which can be downloaded by a client machine and is then compiled to the real machine's native bytecode with the Juice Just-In-Time Compiler.
The object code is reasonably compact and platform independent, while the resulting compiled code has the speed advantage of a native program. The standard distribution of the browser plug-in includes a set of standard libraries for common functions and graphic controls which a Juice program can use to reduce its download size greatly if it's doing standard sorts of things.
If it shares as much as I think it does with standard Oberon, executables can share modules in memory similarly to the way windows apps use DLLs, reducing the memory footprint for running multiple Oberon apps.
Anyway, I've always felt that Java was a subpar solution because of the speed issue. Juice solves that. I'm curious to see more details on C# to see if it's going to JIT compile to native bytecode or just re# the Java model of running interpreted code on an emulator for a Virtual Machine.
For once, I have to agree with Microsoft. C# is not cool.
WOW did I wander off from where I was headed with that post. Data Havens
Will InterNic grant you a domain if you've renounced citizenship from all countries? If so, a boat on international waters with a satellite uplink would make a mighty fine (if mighty laggy) place to store politically-iffy data. Like the source-code for DeCSS. Or plans for making a nuclear warhead. Or the minutes of the StoneCutters' meeting with the Pentavarit to plan all of next year's Disney movies.
Seriously, though... how far off is this in terms of need, financial viability, and technical feasibility?
Well, this is certainly one of the most blatant bits of foreshadowing of international data havens. Funny that the "safe" country they moved it to was the U.S.! Never thought I'd see that day.
.XXX domain and tell all sites that are openly pornographic in nature to that top level domain. Then ISPs could choose to block it or make it available. Choose your ISP accordingly.
But this does sort of bring us back to the issue of truth-in-advertising for domain names. Frankly, I think this points to the need for content-based top-level-domains. What use is a country-code in an global network where the geographical location of the information is unimportant? They should create a
Sure, it still leaves some gray areas. There will be highly sexual art that may or may not be pornography, etc, etc. But it will at least cull out most of the openly pornographic sites and set it up so I don't get "Nuns Blowing Goats" the next time I search for "freeware FTP clients" in a search engine.
There will probably be those who will cry censorship, but let's face it... if you're LOOKING for porn, it will make it EASIER to find. XXX sites with no pretensions of being anything else should appreciate that. And if you're not looking for porn, maybe it will make it easier to find some real content.
And maybe Little Johnny at the terminal in the library can get out of the middle of a political controversy that doesn't really apply to him and get back to looking for something healthier... like warez.
Yes, but on that mission it was used as a cushion to make it bounce on impact, not to slow the impact. Part of what a heat shield does (abeit collaterally) is slow impact (usually greatly added by drag chutes, etc at a certain point).
If it can be used for both, great. And in a thick atmosphere, hey... it would be easy to engineer it to get more bang for your buck. I was just saying that Mars wasn't a good candidate for this, and Mars is our next probably target.
That was the one. I remember it as being very large, with a hefty computer in each leg. Its center of gravity was also more than a bit high.
Looks like Carnegie Mellon is catching on to the Smaller, Cheaper, Faster bandwagon as well. Good for them.
The atmosphere of Mars is about 6 millibars (about 150x less than Earth). An inflatable heat shield might save space and reduce mass, but it would have to inflate out into something really large to slow down descent through increased drag.
Inflatable tech would work well as cushions to soften impact, and could save a lot of cash by reducing the weight of the probe, but this won't work well to slow impact, will it?
Sure, Mars only has 1/3 the gravity of earth, but that still makes (with the cheesy math of 1/3 of 150x thinner) a 50x hit in efficiency in drag vs tests on earth. Plus, the probe will probably still have some of its momentum left from the trip to get there.
Still, at a fraction of the cost, and super-compact, storage, it certainly couldn't hurt to pack along a few dozen cool inflatable extras on a probe. Go-Go-Gadget-Hand-Glider!
"If the Carnegie Mellon group finds a meteorite this year, that would be an achievement," said Ralph Harvey, a geologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He heads the human team sponsored by NASA that has looked for meteorites in Antarctica for more than 20 years. "The robot is still having a hard time figuring which way is up." - From a Post-Gazette article at http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/19981012 nomad2.asp It found, what... 3 so far? Not bad for a first run.
There's a fair amount of information about an earlier expedition with the Nomad robot in the Atacama Desert (including archives of some images from and of it) at http://img.arc.nasa.gov/Nomad/nomad.html
Does anyone else remember a NOVA special on this robot? Or was it about one of the many previous robots from Carnegie Mellon?