The current generation of LCD displays are terrible for viewing photographs. The square pixels and variable contrast makes for a number of bad artifacts:
1. JPEG compression is terribly magnified on an LCD. look at a typical Yahoo News press photo on an LCD and then on a CRT, especially close ups of people.
2. Contrast is variable from top to bottom while looking dead center: On my recent model VAIO laptop, when looking at the screen from dead center, the top is too dark, the bottom is too bright. (in terms of black level)
3. Colors shift depending on left to right viewing angle, and typically subtle hues of red and blues and purples will not appear as pleasing and natural as they do on a CRT.
4. Overall gamma is poor, with the falloff happening in all the wrong places, which wrecks havok on portraits and figure photography. (which means yes, pr0n!)
So it's interesting to note that on a recent visit to Vertis studios in San Francisco, the people who often do the Macy's catalogs, that each digital photography station consisted of a high end scanning back camera and a macintosh with a 22" LCD monitor! I mentioned this to one of the supervisors and he said "Yea...we're aware of the problems with LCD...we carefully calibrate them and make sure to stare at them dead center, or we get the color shift problem left to right." I figured that someone had sold them on those setups purely for the 'cool' value, and they fell for it hook line and sinker.
He then took me into the finishing room, where, to my pleasure, there were several workstations outfitted with high end CRT monitors with hoods around them. I knew there was no way they were doing catalog work without CRT's, given the pickiness of fashion retailers over the color accuracy in the catalogs.
When I was working at Digital Domain in Hollywood, as well as every other VFX company I've ever worked for, there was nigh an LCD in sight, because you can't do critical adjustment on an LCD.
Despite all this doom and gloom, it IS getting better all the time, and eventually, unless it's replaced by DLP or other "every pixel is a tube" flatscreen technology, then I'll be calibrating my photographs for viewing on LCD, because that's what everyone will have. Until then, I prefer my high end Sony FD trinitron above all else.
was a man way ahead of his time. As mentioned by other slashdotters, he seemed to have only lost a battle with Edison due to Edison's political clout and his desire to make a huge fortune at the expense of the entire human race.
Tesla's experiments into wireless energy transmission would have spelled the end of the energy industry as we know it, as well as the end of conventional radio and television transmission as a limited resource doled out by the FCC, as we have seen all of this become. His Autobiography is very interesting albiet very quirky. It is also interesting to note that over half of his patents and papers remain classified by the U.S. government to this day. Try getting them through the FOIA act, I dare you. It would actually be an interesting experiment. You can read about alleged uses and abuses of Tesla's wireless technology in the book about Project HAARP, entitled Angels Don't Play This haarp: Advances in Tesla Technology which puts forth evidence that Project HAARP's goals aren't as benign as they would like you to think, and that the weather modification aspect of the techology has been tried extensively for less than good purposes. Food for thought and grounds for further research. (http://www.haarp.net/ HAARP book home page.)
In the book Walt Disney, Hollywood's Dark Prince, the origins of Hollywood are discussed as Edison sought to drive out of business the Jewish filmmakers who were making peep shows with his film technology, using brutal mob tactics and violence to raid and threaten the penny arcades out of business. He wanted only his kind of films - dry, boring documentaries - to be made with his new film pipeline. The Jewish filmmaking community responded by physically removing themselves from his presence, and relocating to a sunny desert location in Southern California, where they planted the seeds for a vast empire of filmmaking, out of reach of Edison and his moral imperialism. See also an audio program by Dave Emory entitled Mickey Mauschwitz - The Reactionary Politics of Walt Disney, which excerpts the out of print book at length.
This will be the end of such wonderful music resources like Groove Salad and Digitally Imported. These two stations are largely responsible for me purchasing any CD's at all last year. I don't like any of the ultra-narrowband content being shoved down commercial radio, I don't listen to it. The only music I purchase comes from college radio and netcasts.
Instead of allowing natural forces to broaden everyone's musical horizons, the RIAA is stifling it back to the 20th century model. If they keep being sucessful in court, the only way to fight them will be to turn music into a grass roots listener supported movement. This can only be done by enabling good musicians to run their own businesses to support themselves. This means being internet-savvy and moving away from standard CD-distribution. It means not signing the deal with the devil and trying to make it on your own with live performances and micropayment downloads.
Sites that facilitate this could act much like record lables in the promotional aspect - they would serve only to group together musicians of common genre. Instead of taking most of the artists' revenues away, they can charge a low, flat listing fee for each artist per month, which in quantity could still be quite profitable for the wise entrepreneur.
It comes down to the fact that 90% of everything is STILL crap, and only the top 10% of musicians will make any real money at it. But it will still be 100X more than what the current RIAA model allows. It will be the breadth of availability, not the quantity of each genre, which will improve.
When art combines with money, it can be a bad thing if not done right. When it is done right, it's a pleasure to make a living doing what you love.
By sharing your connection with neighbors via 802.11, you are most likely violating your terms of agreement with your home DSL/Cable provider. As a second prong, you are also causing the cable company to lose potential customers by giving them an alternative. This is what they are more worried about. Those two items are obvious, but:
Community wireless networks have the ability to fight back by not using service that's licensed for one home. Depending on the size of the community network, splitting the cost of a T1 or faster line will be worth the payoff because of the increased outgoing line speed. Most DSL and Cable caps off at 128kbits outgoing, which makes for very frustrated webmasters and people like me who create high bandwidth content (video) and need to upload frequently to co-location facilities.
Also, commercial lines are usually much more reliable than DSL modem pools, especially if said DSL service is using PPPoe. (yech)
By sharing your home DSL connection overtly, you are setting a bad example and giving the DSL and cable providers a legal excuse to pick a fight.
If you're going to give a few neighbors access to your DSL/Cable line, don't advertise it and don't pick people who are going to be high bandwidth consumers. The best people to share it with are people who would otherwise not be interested in paying for internet access, but would stand to benefit from having access to information if so taught. (the elderly and disabled)
Of course, the broadband infrastructure over there seems to be in much better shape than the borderline monopolies we have here. -affordable- commercial high speed access in most American states still seems to be elusive. The power is in the numbers.
Is there any problem with making the tubing longer and extending the radiator and pump out into a closet or other room? (as long as the air in said place is cool)
There's no point in overclocking these days except for the fun of it, and I haven't got time for that. But liquid cooling for purposes of making a silent system...now that's where it's at.
Imagine no CPU fan, no case fans, a quiet power supply fan and Segate's new silent 7200RPM HD's. Mmmm....
About a year ago, I stopped shooting film when I purchased a Canon D30 digital SLR body. Since then I have shot close to 20,000 images. I have -ALL- of them, and I have *NEVER* deleted an image off my IBM Microdrive, even when on the road for weeks at a time. This person probably does not own or work with the latest storage and camera technologies.
Here's how it works:
When I bought the D30 I also bought the IBM 1GB Microdrive. At Fine quality JPEG setting, the microdrive will hold about 800 photos, or more if they have large areas of undetailed sky or backdrop. I went to Japan and England this year. In both places, I shot between 200 and 400 images PER DAY. When I got back to the hotel/motel each night, I pulled out my laptop and dumped all the days' images onto the laptop and erased them off the Microdrive. After I got home I transferred them to my personal computer, where they now live. If I need more room I buy a new hard drive. We all know how cheap they are. Backups are also performed on removable hard drives and stored offsite. I don't use most of those images, but I am always coming back to them and finding more things. 20 years from now I will be laughing at the old cars and bad 90's fashion and will find interesting details in the most mundane of photos. Or perhaps many of the places I have shot will be destroyed by a world war. Who knows?
Lets say you are doing images for large blow-ups or profiled printing and you need to make sure you have no artifacts and a full color gamut. So you shoot in RAW or TIFF format. The microdrive will hold 1/3 of the photos than in JPEG format. Solution? Buy one or two more microdrives, and you still have enough to shoot like a madman in the course of a day. I am not sure what this person is trying to get at. Any lack of space can only be due to not being able to afford flashcards or microdrives.
Also, many other people have already covered the fact that digital photos, when transfered properly across mediums to ensure readability, don't degrade over time, unlike film, and are infinitely more accessable and searchable. I agree with some others here that it is a very luddite opinion to have. There are definitely precautions that must be taken with digital files to be sure they will last (backups, etc) and in the end they will long outlast film.
---Mike
(see my Britain travelogue and photos here.)
I can't believe they used that scene from Independence Day as an example. It's the worst, most banal attempt at science fiction that hollywood has ever made. How much did apple pay to have their laptop in it? The idea of Jeff Goldblum as a '133+ h4x0r with a magic powerbook is worse than "This is a unix system, I know this!" from Jurassic Park.
The BEST thing that will be missed is making polarioid transfers with the old style multi-part film that is used for the hasselblad backs. I hope to god that if they stop making the film that someone else will make the same self-developing film packages, so I can take a picture, open the film prematurely and slap it down on a piece of wood or paper and get that fantastic edgy eroded look with pastel greens and browns.
Erf, forgot to mention - I ALSO reccomend, especially for the non-book-reading types, Al Reinert's "For All Mankind", a documentary film made entirely of NASA footage and astronaut home movies, and the astronauts own words exclusively. The DVD is GREAT.
In addition to Ben Bova's piece, I also highly reccomend "The Overview Effect" by Frank White, which explains the transformation that happens in a person when they see the Earth from orbit or from on the way to the moon, as told in the astronaut's own words. It completely changes your life, your perspective on how you see the world. Seeing the earth as a single object creates incredible clarity of thought and foresight.
This is a very HIGHLY under-discussed side-effect of space exploration. Dennis Tito was the latest person to be profoundly amazed at this perspective.
I reccomend checking Amazon Z-shops (click 'buy it used') because the street price is astronomical (pun intended.) It's published by an institute that normally does high priced scientific journals, and they haven't gotten the idea yet that even the common man need to read this book.
> I find it hard to believe that they where ever aerodynamically stable.
> There is no way you could have every gotten me to sit in one. And the same goes for any new replica.
I don't know the source of this quote from our page, but I've seen videos which describe similar reactions from German pilots:
Pilots reported the Komet to be "Superb! No other word can express the pleasurable sensation as I shot ever upwards into the sky" and "one of the most maneuverable airplanes ever built."
The tail-less design was incredibly revolutionary, and as it turns out, extremely versatile. I guess we'll just have to make one and find out for ourselves!:)
The ME163.:) XCOR wants to make replica planes of the ME163 AND the Bell X-1, using our modern (and SAFE) rocket engines. The problems with the ME163 were numerous, all of which are solved with the modern technology. See www.xcor.com and click on the ME163 and X1 links on the left navbar.
The ME163 page explains the original shortcomings and our proposed solutions. Primarily, the original plane used hypergolic propellants. Even a tiny amount combining accidentally in the open air would be incredibly volitile, usually causing a chain reaction and resulting in horrific explosions, killing ground crew and pilots. Most of the ME163 casualties happened on the ground during refueling. The planes were constantly being doused with water while fueling, to dillute any fuel elements which might splash out and cause an explosion.
XCOR's engines on the other hand, are completely non-toxic and require external ignition to burn.
We currently use LOX and and isopropyl alcohol.
The other issue with the ME163 was the landing gear. rubber technology was not so advanced, and they used big heavy tires which were dropped after takeoff due to weight. The plane landed on it's belly, on a skid. Ours would have retractable landing gear.
Please see this page here for the Japanese DVD release schedule. These discs are all Japanese region, but so far all have English subtitles with excellent translations. You can view them on any region-hacked DVD player, of which plenty are still available. You can get a DVD player such as the Apex AD-703 and flash it with a CDR containing a new rom...presto! no region coding or macrovision. I do not have the primiere mail order place for these discs handy, perhaps someone else can chime in with the URL.
The Disney translations have generally poor voice acting (even by name celebreties) and have every silent gap filled up with music because "That's what American audiences are used to." Baloney.
The Castle of Cagliostoro disc is a good buy however, it is released by Manga Entertainment, not Disney. (it's a pre-Ghibli Miyazake film)
The Japanese Miayzake DVD's are becoming the definitive item to have for the Miyazake collector. Original everything, plus English DVD captioning.
Also, if you're a huge fan of Laputa: Castle in the Sky like I am, you can get the (surprisingly good!) Streamline Pictures dub on the analog tracks of the Laputa laserdisc in the Miyazake box set. That being said, I now have two pristine fan-subtitled versions as well as the old dub in my hands, so I'm happy for the time being. (please don't email for copies) Streamline was run by Jerry Beck (famed animation historian) and Carl Macek (of Harmony Gold/Robotech fame) which is why you will hear robotech voice actors in their Laputa dub, including none other than the voice actress known as Reba West (English Minmei in Robotech) as the voice of Sheeta. Laputa enjoyed a small art house run in America during the early 90's. Most people don't remember this, but I have all my flyers and and newspaper articles saved.:) Aside from the occasional horrible one-liners, it's a good view. ("We can go all the way...")
Regarding Miyazake's reluctance for video release, yes, old-time anime fans will remember the horribly slaughtered New World Video release of Nausicaa, a.k.a. Warriors of the WInd, with none other than June Foray (the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirell) as Nausicaa. I don't think she did a bad job, it's just that New World cut 1/2 hour out of the film, removing all the important bits about the overall plot and theme. It's a travesty.
Cheers, and happy Miyazake-ing,
--Mike
Cool things seen at SIGGRAPH
on
SIGGRAPH 2001
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The coolest thing I saw at SIGGRAPH was WETA's demonstration of AI controlled crowds for the huge battlescenes and marching armies in the upcoming Lord of the Rings trilogy. Sure, this has been done before in games, but WETA put some refinements on their system that really makes it shine.
This is also of interest to computer game players, as the techniques they have developed here will apply to NPC's nicely now that computer firepower is catching up to our ideas. WETA has been working on this software for 2+ years now, ever since they began work on LOTR.
Basically, each character on the battlefield has a node-based brain full of IF/THEN/OR type junctions. They began by showing a single human character wandering around a maze of walls and blocks. In one corner was a view of what the character was 'seeing' through it's eyes, head-bob, swaying and all. When the character got near a wall, it would stop, look around, turn and walk in another direction. All this was being done by seamlessly morphing between different sets of motion capture data. This in itself was a very nice thing, as it's usually very hard to do that completely automatically and have it look perfect.
The next step was collision detection. They put multiple characters in the maze, and they would all avoid each other, smoothly, not abruptly. After that, they put a guy on hilly terrain, and he seamlessly morphed between uphill walking and downhill walking as the terrain called for it. (heavy slow stepping uphill, shifting weight backwards downhill...)
This particular character had about 500 nodes in his 'brain'. The characters used in the movie have around 5,000 nodes. Why? Here's what else they do:
The characters can be programmed to charge at each other, and when two characters from opposing armies see each other close by, they run at each other and break out into motion capture sword fights! The sword fights are choreographed so that the mocap from one character matches the mocap from the other, so when one guy swings, the other blocks and it all works! And all of it blends together pretty damn smoothly, from one swing to another. Furthermore, each army has different mocap data. One army tends to fight with Eastern combat techniques, and another uses more European style swordplay, and they make all this work together, automatically.
On top of that, they have a randomizer. The characters will vary in size and attributes, with low and high limits being set, or in the case of shields and accesories, an on-off randomness that will determine if each instance wil have that configuration. Short characters walk faster to keep up with the taller ones, and there are several different walking datasets for more randomness. They showed an 'adventure party' of 6 Orc type characters, first without the randomizer and after with.
When I was working at Digital Domain, someone came up with a Who generator for The Grinch that made random Whoville citizens with different hats and shirts and sizes and whatnot. This is like the Who generator times 100. Really elegant stuff for in-house software. Also, it's very fast, and I believe at the show it was running under Linux. They had many characters each with a complex brain all running around at once, in realtime. Lots of characters morphing between mocap data, walking up and down hilly terrain and attacking each other, all automatically. And of course each character can be customized or scripted to do specific things to get more control in the foreground.
This demo was given at the SGI booth, the big one just as you come in. They had lots of demos from different companies throughout the day.
The second coolest thing was some new tracking, panorama and cleanup software from a company called (I think) 2d3 or some such thing. I'll mention it to the general crowd here because it has usefulness outside of my rarified industry. They had one piece of software that would take a recording of a video camera being panned around in a circle on a tripod, and turn that into a 360 panorama. Furthermore, you could tilt up and down and it would just get whatever you shot, by continuously tracking your motion to see where you're moving. on top of that, it would use many frames of video to assemble each section, so it would have an interpolative effect and you'd get a lot more resolution out of each section of the pano than you normally would have gotten in the camera, because it's assembling multiple samples of the same thing, grabbing detail that had fallen between the pixels in one frame from other frame while you were panning across the same area. Stuff that we've all dreamed about, but never thought anyone could actually pull off. Just set your shutter speed way up to avoid motion blur and have at.
Other than that, there were way too many crappy mocap booths and 3D printers. At least the 3D printing/rapid prototyping thing is becoming cheap(er) and more common. Soon I'll be able to print out props for costumes at reasonable cost, and then airbrush paint them.
On a semi-related note, if you were at the BLUR studios party, you can check out my pictures of the firedancers here: http://www.mikemassee.com/firedance/
And why does that post have a 'funny' rating on it? Do you not think that is a perfectly plausible theory? Give me one good reason why that couldn't happen...you can't. It would be very easy for even a single corporation or government entity to perform something as easy as a massive DDoS, using even just a few people instead of one kid in his bedroom.
As the original poster mentioned, there are MANY entities which feel they are losing out by the information and wArEz being passed around IRC. It would be nothing for a company to post two or three people on a rotating 24 hour shift to blast the hell out of some servers continuously until they finally give in, or are badly damaged.
But, as the followup poster mentioned, it could also just as likely be one idiot on a warpath. The thing that gets me is that people are even using the phrase "IRC Warrior" and other such things. The truth is all of this stuff is completely meaningless...IRC is a means to an end (chatting and exchanging information) not an end unto itself, which is how the kids see it. (pre-occupied with 0pz, channels, etc)
90% of the userbase of EFNet is a sad joke. Even 10 years ago it had it's lamer elements, but they have grown to almost completely overtake the network. It's so bad that it's funny. And humor is all we have left.
"A joke is the epigram on the death of a feeling."
--Edith Warton
I just got back from Japan, visiting a friend who's lived and worked in Tokyo for 4 or so years now.
The average Japanese salaryman in tokyo works 6 days a week, 10 hours a day. He does get two weeks off a year for vacation typically, but his sense of loyalty will reduce this to about 4 days. After work each day he is ususally obliged to go out for a drink with his co-workers, and then take a one hour (or more) train ride home, long after his kids have gone to bed. He sees them on Sunday - if he can stay awake.
While that sounds pretty bleak, it is slowly changing during the current depression cycle in Japan. Newer, smaller companies are instituting 5-day work weeks and sane hours. Similar to the paradigm shift in the US, men and women are changing jobs to better their positions, rather than stick with one company their whole life.
Fortunately, my friend works for a foreign company which has a western job environment. That's the best way to work in Japan - for a foreign company, then you can partake of the amazing wonders of Tokyo and not have to work like a dog.:)
--Mike
Mike Massee
Re:The only problem is...
on
The Social Web
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· Score: 1
Once you start making one of these, it never ends until it includes almost every living person in the entire world.
I once set out to create a chart in Visio of all the people from several local BBS circles who had slept with each other, just to see how 'inbred' we really were. It was really funny and really sad at the same time, and I also realized that I could just keep going and going and going, and it would never stop. I had to set limits like only including people who had slept with more than one person that we all knew, so they wouldn't be a dead end branch, everyone would connect back to each other like a spider web.
My current problem is that the Visio chart isn't auto-arranging. I need some software that will just let me type in all the names and then figure out the best arrangement for me so I don't have to keep dragging the people around to clean up the chart and make more room. Suggestions?
Slashdot Mirror
1. JPEG compression is terribly magnified on an LCD. look at a typical Yahoo News press photo on an LCD and then on a CRT, especially close ups of people.
2. Contrast is variable from top to bottom while looking dead center: On my recent model VAIO laptop, when looking at the screen from dead center, the top is too dark, the bottom is too bright. (in terms of black level)
3. Colors shift depending on left to right viewing angle, and typically subtle hues of red and blues and purples will not appear as pleasing and natural as they do on a CRT.
4. Overall gamma is poor, with the falloff happening in all the wrong places, which wrecks havok on portraits and figure photography. (which means yes, pr0n!)
So it's interesting to note that on a recent visit to Vertis studios in San Francisco, the people who often do the Macy's catalogs, that each digital photography station consisted of a high end scanning back camera and a macintosh with a 22" LCD monitor! I mentioned this to one of the supervisors and he said "Yea...we're aware of the problems with LCD...we carefully calibrate them and make sure to stare at them dead center, or we get the color shift problem left to right." I figured that someone had sold them on those setups purely for the 'cool' value, and they fell for it hook line and sinker.
He then took me into the finishing room, where, to my pleasure, there were several workstations outfitted with high end CRT monitors with hoods around them. I knew there was no way they were doing catalog work without CRT's, given the pickiness of fashion retailers over the color accuracy in the catalogs.
When I was working at Digital Domain in Hollywood, as well as every other VFX company I've ever worked for, there was nigh an LCD in sight, because you can't do critical adjustment on an LCD.
Despite all this doom and gloom, it IS getting better all the time, and eventually, unless it's replaced by DLP or other "every pixel is a tube" flatscreen technology, then I'll be calibrating my photographs for viewing on LCD, because that's what everyone will have. Until then, I prefer my high end Sony FD trinitron above all else.
--Mike
Tesla's experiments into wireless energy transmission would have spelled the end of the energy industry as we know it, as well as the end of conventional radio and television transmission as a limited resource doled out by the FCC, as we have seen all of this become. His Autobiography is very interesting albiet very quirky. It is also interesting to note that over half of his patents and papers remain classified by the U.S. government to this day. Try getting them through the FOIA act, I dare you. It would actually be an interesting experiment. You can read about alleged uses and abuses of Tesla's wireless technology in the book about Project HAARP, entitled Angels Don't Play This haarp: Advances in Tesla Technology which puts forth evidence that Project HAARP's goals aren't as benign as they would like you to think, and that the weather modification aspect of the techology has been tried extensively for less than good purposes. Food for thought and grounds for further research. (http://www.haarp.net/ HAARP book home page.)
This will be the end of such wonderful music resources like Groove Salad and Digitally Imported. These two stations are largely responsible for me purchasing any CD's at all last year. I don't like any of the ultra-narrowband content being shoved down commercial radio, I don't listen to it. The only music I purchase comes from college radio and netcasts.
Instead of allowing natural forces to broaden everyone's musical horizons, the RIAA is stifling it back to the 20th century model. If they keep being sucessful in court, the only way to fight them will be to turn music into a grass roots listener supported movement. This can only be done by enabling good musicians to run their own businesses to support themselves. This means being internet-savvy and moving away from standard CD-distribution. It means not signing the deal with the devil and trying to make it on your own with live performances and micropayment downloads.
Sites that facilitate this could act much like record lables in the promotional aspect - they would serve only to group together musicians of common genre. Instead of taking most of the artists' revenues away, they can charge a low, flat listing fee for each artist per month, which in quantity could still be quite profitable for the wise entrepreneur.
It comes down to the fact that 90% of everything is STILL crap, and only the top 10% of musicians will make any real money at it. But it will still be 100X more than what the current RIAA model allows. It will be the breadth of availability, not the quantity of each genre, which will improve.
When art combines with money, it can be a bad thing if not done right. When it is done right, it's a pleasure to make a living doing what you love.
--Mike
Community wireless networks have the ability to fight back by not using service that's licensed for one home. Depending on the size of the community network, splitting the cost of a T1 or faster line will be worth the payoff because of the increased outgoing line speed. Most DSL and Cable caps off at 128kbits outgoing, which makes for very frustrated webmasters and people like me who create high bandwidth content (video) and need to upload frequently to co-location facilities.
Also, commercial lines are usually much more reliable than DSL modem pools, especially if said DSL service is using PPPoe. (yech)
By sharing your home DSL connection overtly, you are setting a bad example and giving the DSL and cable providers a legal excuse to pick a fight.
If you're going to give a few neighbors access to your DSL/Cable line, don't advertise it and don't pick people who are going to be high bandwidth consumers. The best people to share it with are people who would otherwise not be interested in paying for internet access, but would stand to benefit from having access to information if so taught. (the elderly and disabled)
The best example of a solid, fast community network is featured in the previous /. article about a community fiber network in Sweden.
Of course, the broadband infrastructure over there seems to be in much better shape than the borderline monopolies we have here. -affordable- commercial high speed access in most American states still seems to be elusive. The power is in the numbers.
--Mike
Is there any problem with making the tubing longer and extending the radiator and pump out into a closet or other room? (as long as the air in said place is cool)
There's no point in overclocking these days except for the fun of it, and I haven't got time for that. But liquid cooling for purposes of making a silent system...now that's where it's at.
Imagine no CPU fan, no case fans, a quiet power supply fan and Segate's new silent 7200RPM HD's. Mmmm....
She had a valid opinion 3 years ago, but not now.
About a year ago, I stopped shooting film when I purchased a Canon D30 digital SLR body. Since then I have shot close to 20,000 images. I have -ALL- of them, and I have *NEVER* deleted an image off my IBM Microdrive, even when on the road for weeks at a time. This person probably does not own or work with the latest storage and camera technologies.
Here's how it works:
When I bought the D30 I also bought the IBM 1GB Microdrive. At Fine quality JPEG setting, the microdrive will hold about 800 photos, or more if they have large areas of undetailed sky or backdrop. I went to Japan and England this year. In both places, I shot between 200 and 400 images PER DAY. When I got back to the hotel/motel each night, I pulled out my laptop and dumped all the days' images onto the laptop and erased them off the Microdrive. After I got home I transferred them to my personal computer, where they now live. If I need more room I buy a new hard drive. We all know how cheap they are. Backups are also performed on removable hard drives and stored offsite. I don't use most of those images, but I am always coming back to them and finding more things. 20 years from now I will be laughing at the old cars and bad 90's fashion and will find interesting details in the most mundane of photos. Or perhaps many of the places I have shot will be destroyed by a world war. Who knows?
Lets say you are doing images for large blow-ups or profiled printing and you need to make sure you have no artifacts and a full color gamut. So you shoot in RAW or TIFF format. The microdrive will hold 1/3 of the photos than in JPEG format. Solution? Buy one or two more microdrives, and you still have enough to shoot like a madman in the course of a day. I am not sure what this person is trying to get at. Any lack of space can only be due to not being able to afford flashcards or microdrives.
Also, many other people have already covered the fact that digital photos, when transfered properly across mediums to ensure readability, don't degrade over time, unlike film, and are infinitely more accessable and searchable. I agree with some others here that it is a very luddite opinion to have. There are definitely precautions that must be taken with digital files to be sure they will last (backups, etc) and in the end they will long outlast film.
---Mike
(see my Britain travelogue and photos here.)
"Greetings starfighter! You have been chosen by the Star League to defend the frontier against XUR and the Kodan Armada!"
Yes and this is not offtopic, mod up parent!
For refrence on Walt's anti-semetic, facist past, please see "Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince" out of print, but available used. (see link)
Also, you can hear a Real Audio movie excerpting the book. -Mike
I can't believe they used that scene from Independence Day as an example. It's the worst, most banal attempt at science fiction that hollywood has ever made. How much did apple pay to have their laptop in it? The idea of Jeff Goldblum as a '133+ h4x0r with a magic powerbook is worse than "This is a unix system, I know this!" from Jurassic Park.
The BEST thing that will be missed is making polarioid transfers with the old style multi-part film that is used for the hasselblad backs. I hope to god that if they stop making the film that someone else will make the same self-developing film packages, so I can take a picture, open the film prematurely and slap it down on a piece of wood or paper and get that fantastic edgy eroded look with pastel greens and browns.
For examples, go here: http://www.soulshapes.com/ and click on images on the left navbar. (framed page)
For info and howto stuff about polaroid transfers, try http://www.frii.com/~uliasz/photoart/polaroid/
:)
Mike
" :)
-What is a nice lawn worth compared to Internet access?
-Nothing!
"
Erf, forgot to mention - I ALSO reccomend, especially for the non-book-reading types, Al Reinert's "For All Mankind", a documentary film made entirely of NASA footage and astronaut home movies, and the astronauts own words exclusively. The DVD is GREAT.
--Mike
In addition to Ben Bova's piece, I also highly reccomend "The Overview Effect" by Frank White, which explains the transformation that happens in a person when they see the Earth from orbit or from on the way to the moon, as told in the astronaut's own words. It completely changes your life, your perspective on how you see the world. Seeing the earth as a single object creates incredible clarity of thought and foresight.
This is a very HIGHLY under-discussed side-effect of space exploration. Dennis Tito was the latest person to be profoundly amazed at this perspective.
Here is a link to Amazon's page:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1563472600
I reccomend checking Amazon Z-shops (click 'buy it used') because the street price is astronomical (pun intended.) It's published by an institute that normally does high priced scientific journals, and they haven't gotten the idea yet that even the common man need to read this book.
> I find it hard to believe that they where ever aerodynamically stable.
:)
> There is no way you could have every gotten me to sit in one. And the same goes for any new replica.
I don't know the source of this quote from our page, but I've seen videos which describe similar reactions from German pilots:
Pilots reported the Komet to be "Superb! No other word can express the pleasurable sensation as I shot ever upwards into the sky" and "one of the most maneuverable airplanes ever built."
The tail-less design was incredibly revolutionary, and as it turns out, extremely versatile. I guess we'll just have to make one and find out for ourselves!
--Mike
(XCOR Webguy)
The ME163. :) XCOR wants to make replica planes of the ME163 AND the Bell X-1, using our modern (and SAFE) rocket engines. The problems with the ME163 were numerous, all of which are solved with the modern technology. See www.xcor.com and click on the ME163 and X1 links on the left navbar.
The ME163 page explains the original shortcomings and our proposed solutions. Primarily, the original plane used hypergolic propellants. Even a tiny amount combining accidentally in the open air would be incredibly volitile, usually causing a chain reaction and resulting in horrific explosions, killing ground crew and pilots. Most of the ME163 casualties happened on the ground during refueling. The planes were constantly being doused with water while fueling, to dillute any fuel elements which might splash out and cause an explosion.
XCOR's engines on the other hand, are completely non-toxic and require external ignition to burn.
We currently use LOX and and isopropyl alcohol.
The other issue with the ME163 was the landing gear. rubber technology was not so advanced, and they used big heavy tires which were dropped after takeoff due to weight. The plane landed on it's belly, on a skid. Ours would have retractable landing gear.
--Mike
(XCOR webguy)
That is just so bizarre. Everyone remember when 3Com was near the top of the pile and linksys hubs were categorized as 'collision generators'?
My how times change.
http://www.ssiamerica.com/products/cj510/
Looks pretty freaking rad, but is it coming out? the website says "Summer 2001"...looks like it needs to be updated one way or another.
Anyone have any insight on this company?
The Disney translations have generally poor voice acting (even by name celebreties) and have every silent gap filled up with music because "That's what American audiences are used to." Baloney.
The Castle of Cagliostoro disc is a good buy however, it is released by Manga Entertainment, not Disney. (it's a pre-Ghibli Miyazake film)
The Japanese Miayzake DVD's are becoming the definitive item to have for the Miyazake collector. Original everything, plus English DVD captioning.
Also, if you're a huge fan of Laputa: Castle in the Sky like I am, you can get the (surprisingly good!) Streamline Pictures dub on the analog tracks of the Laputa laserdisc in the Miyazake box set. That being said, I now have two pristine fan-subtitled versions as well as the old dub in my hands, so I'm happy for the time being. (please don't email for copies) Streamline was run by Jerry Beck (famed animation historian) and Carl Macek (of Harmony Gold/Robotech fame) which is why you will hear robotech voice actors in their Laputa dub, including none other than the voice actress known as Reba West (English Minmei in Robotech) as the voice of Sheeta. Laputa enjoyed a small art house run in America during the early 90's. Most people don't remember this, but I have all my flyers and and newspaper articles saved. :) Aside from the occasional horrible one-liners, it's a good view. ("We can go all the way...")
Regarding Miyazake's reluctance for video release, yes, old-time anime fans will remember the horribly slaughtered New World Video release of Nausicaa, a.k.a. Warriors of the WInd, with none other than June Foray (the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirell) as Nausicaa. I don't think she did a bad job, it's just that New World cut 1/2 hour out of the film, removing all the important bits about the overall plot and theme. It's a travesty.
Cheers, and happy Miyazake-ing,
--Mike
This is also of interest to computer game players, as the techniques they have developed here will apply to NPC's nicely now that computer firepower is catching up to our ideas. WETA has been working on this software for 2+ years now, ever since they began work on LOTR.
Basically, each character on the battlefield has a node-based brain full of IF/THEN/OR type junctions. They began by showing a single human character wandering around a maze of walls and blocks. In one corner was a view of what the character was 'seeing' through it's eyes, head-bob, swaying and all. When the character got near a wall, it would stop, look around, turn and walk in another direction. All this was being done by seamlessly morphing between different sets of motion capture data. This in itself was a very nice thing, as it's usually very hard to do that completely automatically and have it look perfect.
The next step was collision detection. They put multiple characters in the maze, and they would all avoid each other, smoothly, not abruptly. After that, they put a guy on hilly terrain, and he seamlessly morphed between uphill walking and downhill walking as the terrain called for it. (heavy slow stepping uphill, shifting weight backwards downhill...)
This particular character had about 500 nodes in his 'brain'. The characters used in the movie have around 5,000 nodes. Why? Here's what else they do:
The characters can be programmed to charge at each other, and when two characters from opposing armies see each other close by, they run at each other and break out into motion capture sword fights! The sword fights are choreographed so that the mocap from one character matches the mocap from the other, so when one guy swings, the other blocks and it all works! And all of it blends together pretty damn smoothly, from one swing to another. Furthermore, each army has different mocap data. One army tends to fight with Eastern combat techniques, and another uses more European style swordplay, and they make all this work together, automatically.
On top of that, they have a randomizer. The characters will vary in size and attributes, with low and high limits being set, or in the case of shields and accesories, an on-off randomness that will determine if each instance wil have that configuration. Short characters walk faster to keep up with the taller ones, and there are several different walking datasets for more randomness. They showed an 'adventure party' of 6 Orc type characters, first without the randomizer and after with.
When I was working at Digital Domain, someone came up with a Who generator for The Grinch that made random Whoville citizens with different hats and shirts and sizes and whatnot. This is like the Who generator times 100. Really elegant stuff for in-house software. Also, it's very fast, and I believe at the show it was running under Linux. They had many characters each with a complex brain all running around at once, in realtime. Lots of characters morphing between mocap data, walking up and down hilly terrain and attacking each other, all automatically. And of course each character can be customized or scripted to do specific things to get more control in the foreground.
This demo was given at the SGI booth, the big one just as you come in. They had lots of demos from different companies throughout the day.
The second coolest thing was some new tracking, panorama and cleanup software from a company called (I think) 2d3 or some such thing. I'll mention it to the general crowd here because it has usefulness outside of my rarified industry. They had one piece of software that would take a recording of a video camera being panned around in a circle on a tripod, and turn that into a 360 panorama. Furthermore, you could tilt up and down and it would just get whatever you shot, by continuously tracking your motion to see where you're moving. on top of that, it would use many frames of video to assemble each section, so it would have an interpolative effect and you'd get a lot more resolution out of each section of the pano than you normally would have gotten in the camera, because it's assembling multiple samples of the same thing, grabbing detail that had fallen between the pixels in one frame from other frame while you were panning across the same area. Stuff that we've all dreamed about, but never thought anyone could actually pull off. Just set your shutter speed way up to avoid motion blur and have at.
Other than that, there were way too many crappy mocap booths and 3D printers. At least the 3D printing/rapid prototyping thing is becoming cheap(er) and more common. Soon I'll be able to print out props for costumes at reasonable cost, and then airbrush paint them.
On a semi-related note, if you were at the BLUR studios party, you can check out my pictures of the firedancers here: http://www.mikemassee.com/firedance/
--Mike
And why does that post have a 'funny' rating on it? Do you not think that is a perfectly plausible theory? Give me one good reason why that couldn't happen...you can't. It would be very easy for even a single corporation or government entity to perform something as easy as a massive DDoS, using even just a few people instead of one kid in his bedroom.
As the original poster mentioned, there are MANY entities which feel they are losing out by the information and wArEz being passed around IRC. It would be nothing for a company to post two or three people on a rotating 24 hour shift to blast the hell out of some servers continuously until they finally give in, or are badly damaged.
But, as the followup poster mentioned, it could also just as likely be one idiot on a warpath. The thing that gets me is that people are even using the phrase "IRC Warrior" and other such things. The truth is all of this stuff is completely meaningless...IRC is a means to an end (chatting and exchanging information) not an end unto itself, which is how the kids see it. (pre-occupied with 0pz, channels, etc)
90% of the userbase of EFNet is a sad joke. Even 10 years ago it had it's lamer elements, but they have grown to almost completely overtake the network. It's so bad that it's funny. And humor is all we have left.
"A joke is the epigram on the death of a feeling."
--Edith Warton
Mike Massee
The average Japanese salaryman in tokyo works 6 days a week, 10 hours a day. He does get two weeks off a year for vacation typically, but his sense of loyalty will reduce this to about 4 days. After work each day he is ususally obliged to go out for a drink with his co-workers, and then take a one hour (or more) train ride home, long after his kids have gone to bed. He sees them on Sunday - if he can stay awake.
While that sounds pretty bleak, it is slowly changing during the current depression cycle in Japan. Newer, smaller companies are instituting 5-day work weeks and sane hours. Similar to the paradigm shift in the US, men and women are changing jobs to better their positions, rather than stick with one company their whole life.
Fortunately, my friend works for a foreign company which has a western job environment. That's the best way to work in Japan - for a foreign company, then you can partake of the amazing wonders of Tokyo and not have to work like a dog. :)
--Mike
Mike Massee
Mike Massee
I once set out to create a chart in Visio of all the people from several local BBS circles who had slept with each other, just to see how 'inbred' we really were. It was really funny and really sad at the same time, and I also realized that I could just keep going and going and going, and it would never stop. I had to set limits like only including people who had slept with more than one person that we all knew, so they wouldn't be a dead end branch, everyone would connect back to each other like a spider web.
My current problem is that the Visio chart isn't auto-arranging. I need some software that will just let me type in all the names and then figure out the best arrangement for me so I don't have to keep dragging the people around to clean up the chart and make more room. Suggestions?
--Mike
Mike Massee
I have only one question: what language do you THINK in?
curious,
--Mike
Mike Massee