I think you missed the point, soldack, which is not that there aren't ad targeting systems. What the author says is needed is the customization of the content of ads based on targeting criteria. Ideally, you'd like to adjust the content of an ad based on any number of factors, including, say, past purchase history. Traditional ad network targeting systems can't do that because they don't have access to user transaction histories (at least not legally). Sites could do it if they wanted to modify their own ad server by writing hoary code to do those kinds of lookups. Of course, you'd need to use some sort of "rich media" presentation system to deliver the customized ads which presents an entirely different set of issues. (I used to be the tech director of an interactive sales and marketing firm so I know whereof I speak.)
While the inclusion of DVD is minorly interesting, what confuses me totally is why the digital camera industry is stuck in the 1880s -- which is when the innovation that led to the 4:3 aspect ratio of the TV screen was introduced. (Early television developers needed a source of content for their new medium [sound familiar?], so they looked to movies, and adopted their 4:3 aspect ratio to make transfer easier.) What would make me pay attention is a full-resolution digital camera with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Video would be recorded at the equivalent of widescreen D1 (768x482.5, component YPrPb, with a progressive scan option or line doubling on the output). Stills at the highest resolution possible but at least 1920x1080. I used to work for an HDTV production company and I can vouch for the impact and versatility of images sourced in this format.
Actually, that is not how Google works at all -- it's the way DirectHit works. What Google did (at the beginning, anyway) was to look at links between sites and pages. "Important" pages are ones that are linked to from a lot of other pages. "Really important" pages are ones that are linked to from a lot of "Important" pages. The real contribution Google makes is to understand that relevance (or popularity) is not a one-dimensional space. If you can establish a number of dimensions/vectors to relevance, then you can return better results. This is combining DirectHit with Google.
Actually, there are a lot of reasons why a search engine might want to know what links visitors click on -- and that have nothing to do with invading privacy or trying to sell you something. Among them is to add another "dimension vector" to the relevance space that could be used for, among other things, scheduling the spider (i.e., "popular" sites (in the google sense) that a lot of people visit from search results pages get spidered more often than others). If you think about it, this is just an expansion of the basic operating procedure of the google engine (at least as I understand it).
Seems to me that the seems to bein the article quote is important, here.
There is a tendency to be 'net centric in this day and age, which, in this case, may blind us to the observation that there are many LBE (location based entertainment) applications (for example) for a device like this. Regular visitors to SIGGRAPH may remember the popularity of "The Cave" and other immersive environments including Egghead Shred, an interactive game involving 3500+ players in real time.
What this may really be about is the continued trend of commoditization of hardware. If this were just 16 PS2s, then I could buy them for about $6500. Assuming a 2.5x multiple (because this is not a consumer device), we're still talking about $20k. Compare this against SGI Onyxs and similar workstations. This has been a trend since 1984, when I was with the company that introduced the first 24-bit paint system on an MS-DOS-based PC at SIGGRAPH. It was a fraction of the cost of competing proprietary systems.
While software is very important, it may be that extensions of game development systems and not more traditional 3d modeling/ rendering/animation systems are what's needed. I don't think that weather rendering for broadcast graphics is the best application (though at the price it might be cheaper than existing alternatives and my guess is we'll see something like this at NAB next year), but the SciVi (Scientific Visualization) camp will really love this tool -- and that's where I'd expect to see the GSCube shine at next year's SIGGRAPH, in addition to LBE uses.
FWIW. The 32-bit (RGBA) limit is not all that distressing (to me). The real need for more than 8-bits/pixel comes in when doing many layers of compositing -- to compensate for rounding errors in calculations. With not enough bit depth you get artifacts, eventually. If everything is being rendered in "real time" w/sub-pixel accuracy, then bit-depth issues associated w/compositing go away. Also remember that this is motion, not still imagery, and that the eye is very forgiving in trade-offs between temporal bandwidth and physical/color resolution (bandwidth).
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I think you missed the point, soldack, which is not that there aren't ad targeting systems. What the author says is needed is the customization of the content of ads based on targeting criteria. Ideally, you'd like to adjust the content of an ad based on any number of factors, including, say, past purchase history. Traditional ad network targeting systems can't do that because they don't have access to user transaction histories (at least not legally). Sites could do it if they wanted to modify their own ad server by writing hoary code to do those kinds of lookups. Of course, you'd need to use some sort of "rich media" presentation system to deliver the customized ads which presents an entirely different set of issues. (I used to be the tech director of an interactive sales and marketing firm so I know whereof I speak.)
While the inclusion of DVD is minorly interesting, what confuses me totally is why the digital camera industry is stuck in the 1880s -- which is when the innovation that led to the 4:3 aspect ratio of the TV screen was introduced. (Early television developers needed a source of content for their new medium [sound familiar?], so they looked to movies, and adopted their 4:3 aspect ratio to make transfer easier.) What would make me pay attention is a full-resolution digital camera with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Video would be recorded at the equivalent of widescreen D1 (768x482.5, component YPrPb, with a progressive scan option or line doubling on the output). Stills at the highest resolution possible but at least 1920x1080. I used to work for an HDTV production company and I can vouch for the impact and versatility of images sourced in this format.
Actually, that is not how Google works at all -- it's the way DirectHit works. What Google did (at the beginning, anyway) was to look at links between sites and pages. "Important" pages are ones that are linked to from a lot of other pages. "Really important" pages are ones that are linked to from a lot of "Important" pages. The real contribution Google makes is to understand that relevance (or popularity) is not a one-dimensional space. If you can establish a number of dimensions/vectors to relevance, then you can return better results. This is combining DirectHit with Google.
Actually, there are a lot of reasons why a search engine might want to know what links visitors click on -- and that have nothing to do with invading privacy or trying to sell you something. Among them is to add another "dimension vector" to the relevance space that could be used for, among other things, scheduling the spider (i.e., "popular" sites (in the google sense) that a lot of people visit from search results pages get spidered more often than others). If you think about it, this is just an expansion of the basic operating procedure of the google engine (at least as I understand it).
Seems to me that the seems to bein the article quote is important, here.
There is a tendency to be 'net centric in this day and age, which, in this case, may blind us to the observation that there are many LBE (location based entertainment) applications (for example) for a device like this. Regular visitors to SIGGRAPH may remember the popularity of "The Cave" and other immersive environments including Egghead Shred, an interactive game involving 3500+ players in real time.
What this may really be about is the continued trend of commoditization of hardware. If this were just 16 PS2s, then I could buy them for about $6500. Assuming a 2.5x multiple (because this is not a consumer device), we're still talking about $20k. Compare this against SGI Onyxs and similar workstations. This has been a trend since 1984, when I was with the company that introduced the first 24-bit paint system on an MS-DOS-based PC at SIGGRAPH. It was a fraction of the cost of competing proprietary systems.
While software is very important, it may be that extensions of game development systems and not more traditional 3d modeling/ rendering/animation systems are what's needed. I don't think that weather rendering for broadcast graphics is the best application (though at the price it might be cheaper than existing alternatives and my guess is we'll see something like this at NAB next year), but the SciVi (Scientific Visualization) camp will really love this tool -- and that's where I'd expect to see the GSCube shine at next year's SIGGRAPH, in addition to LBE uses.
FWIW. The 32-bit (RGBA) limit is not all that distressing (to me). The real need for more than 8-bits/pixel comes in when doing many layers of compositing -- to compensate for rounding errors in calculations. With not enough bit depth you get artifacts, eventually. If everything is being rendered in "real time" w/sub-pixel accuracy, then bit-depth issues associated w/compositing go away. Also remember that this is motion, not still imagery, and that the eye is very forgiving in trade-offs between temporal bandwidth and physical/color resolution (bandwidth).