I think the point (and some replies below allude to this) is that Matrix 1 looked so good because the people were real even when the environment wasn't. The human eye/brain can spot VERY subtle FX issues with the human form and face. It is much more tolerant of imperfections in the environment.
Basically we are hard wired to see human flaws. It helps us decide where to comingle our DNA.
In the scene where Agent Smith jumps from car to car he looks CG. What if they used a real Agent Smith and a CGI environment. Even if they needed to resort to some CG tricks to make it all match up it would look much better (I would think) than doing a fully CGI person. That avoids the physical issues of performing the stunts.
The worry is that the Wakowskis stare at a computer for so long they start to miss the CGI imperfections.
One of the very special things about bullet time (a side-effect of the technique) is that you get natural motion blur from the actors movements but no additional blur from the movement of the camera. That gives you a moving picture with a touch of motion blur. I think that contributes to the feeling of realism, control and precision when viewing those scenes.
Buzz Word fishing. That state of matter has only been demonstrated at very low temperatures and pressures. Room temps and pressures sounds very unlikely.
Also he mentions some semiconductor physics but misses the most obvious tip off to what is happening. Metal - semiconductor junctions are very special and on the nanometer scale electrons can "tunnel" through the junction with NO resistance. The problem is that you could never extend the tunneling very far ie you can't make a wire that way. Isn't that what is most likely happening?
I think this guy should read up on MOS devices in an undergrad EE textbook before declaring he has found the engineer's holy grail.
America's Army is a free FPS using authentic US army gear and scenarios. Whether attack or defense your team is ALWAYS the US and the oppoonent is ALWAYS (a) eastern european ski-mask wearing terrorists or (b) turbin headed middle eastern terrorists. Most of the scenarios focus on CQB... ie exactly the kindof combat that Ender's Game focused on in the tournaments and exactly the kind the US army has found/will find itself in. Think Somalia, Gulf war, etc.
Great post... I would only disagree with the 1 minute between reloads arguement....
Consider that the system uses a rotating mirror which can target based on any number of lasing systems is the same plane of rotation as the laser. Also consider that the storage requirements are not massive compared to established methods, ie flywheel driven dynos and ultra capacitors. Checimal reagents are even more easily replaced as the they can be liquid for transport before phase changed for reaction.
If you read the article you would notice that they propose bootstrapping the transport of a majority of the counterweight from an initally smaller counterweight.
Whether at 60 or 30 we will all find current technology escaping us when we cease to keep up with the pace.
If you choose to "bow out" of the race why be sad about it? Be happy that others are forging ahead in your absence and that you can now enjoy the technological "magic" along with the rest of the civilians.
PS Quantum doesn't need to be very complicated. Superposition seems complicated when they throw the math at you but its really just this:
The universe hasn't yet decided the outcome of certain quantum events so all possibilities exist at time zero. A quantum calculation involves forcing the universe to resolve the uncertainty at time one. Programming a quantum calculation involves setting things up so that the universe will select or sort for the outcome you are looking for given a range of inputs.
My wife was born in Taiwan so you can take the racist crap and shove it up your ass.
Plenty of viruses come for the US and China, yes. The ones coming from China are often tagged with nationalistic themes. It's those messages from Chinese hackers that initiated the "us" (USA) versus them (China) mentality.
What would the government say if Ford started selling a new luxury car for $4000 but it could only run on special $4 a gallon gas (with Ford licensing the technology for $2 a gallon). Then someone comes out with a cheap additive that let you use normal gas. Is that a violation? Do they go to jail? What if its so simple that a lay person could make the additive from instructions posted on the web. Do you take the web-site off the net?
Plasma has the worst burn-in of any of the display technolgies. Considering how much it costs you wouldn't want to view any static images in part or whole.
That is the reason why many states have laws against possessing buglary tools... because intent is so hard to prove until the crime has been committed.
Buglarly tools aren't a bad analogy for SOME of this technology.
What you are missing is that more transistors can allow for more pipeline stages. More pipelining means shorter stages for more MHz at the same level of manufacturing process.
Now we all know that doesn't necessarily mean more computational power, but it could.
Also you are forgetting differences in die size. Perhaps the AMD chip has fewer transistors but greater DENSITY and that is what Moore was talking about.
That sounds really interesting. Those DV cartridges are pretty cheap too and should be manufactured to last a while.
Most of those DV camcorders use firewire as well. Firewire seems to have some legs on it at a standard... that solves a big part of the problem - the data may be readable but you also need a "bridge" to current technolgy.
Technically hydrinos don't violate the 2nd law of thermo. The hydrino can't be reused... fortunately hydrogen isn't hard to find. Even better enough energy (supposedly) is released to harvest hydrogen from water. So the process does use a fuel.
The real question is why all the hydrogen isn't in its ground state - ie a hydrino. I guess the UV light from the sun put 100% of the H atoms we come across into the Bohr ground state.
Anyway... I was thinking that if we start generating enough hydrinos we won't have to worry about sunscreen. The hydrinos will be busy absorbing UV in the upper atmosphere to get back to "normal".
Take all this with a huge grain of salt. He is a fraud and I have already given him more of my time then he deserves.
I have read his work and brought it to the attention of my chemistry professor - a cautious optimist in the cold fusion search. He had also read Mills' book and declared it UTTER bunk. What I failed to catch as an undergrad was that his mathematics were totally flawed. I wasn't really reading it critically.
He showed me errors which I could confirm from undergrad level physics, calc, chemistry. Remember Mills is a freaking MD not a PhD. His results may not be a fraud but he hasn't put together a cogent theory.
The biggest problem wasn't actually with the math errors per say but that the math was totally mis-applied. The results were meaningless. Before you say I was just following along with the "establishment" I can tell you it wasn't a close call.
At best he is an alchemist. At worst he is a fraud.
It would be great if he comes up with a way of extracting energy from water (he claims to generate enough energy from hydrogen to extract it from water).
Wanting something to be true though does not make it any more likely to be true, however.
I only read the last paragraph of movie reviews for films I'm interested in. The last paragraph rarely gives away major plot elements and never has the details but summarizes the Yea or Nae view view of the reviewer.
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I think the point (and some replies below allude to this) is that Matrix 1 looked so good because the people were real even when the environment wasn't. The human eye/brain can spot VERY subtle FX issues with the human form and face. It is much more tolerant of imperfections in the environment.
Basically we are hard wired to see human flaws. It helps us decide where to comingle our DNA.
In the scene where Agent Smith jumps from car to car he looks CG. What if they used a real Agent Smith and a CGI environment. Even if they needed to resort to some CG tricks to make it all match up it would look much better (I would think) than doing a fully CGI person. That avoids the physical issues of performing the stunts.
The worry is that the Wakowskis stare at a computer for so long they start to miss the CGI imperfections.
One of the very special things about bullet time (a side-effect of the technique) is that you get natural motion blur from the actors movements but no additional blur from the movement of the camera. That gives you a moving picture with a touch of motion blur. I think that contributes to the feeling of realism, control and precision when viewing those scenes.
Actually the off-die FPU was a full fledged 486DX CPU (ie with FPU unit) and installing it totally disabled the SX CPU.
Buzz Word fishing. That state of matter has only been demonstrated at very low temperatures and pressures. Room temps and pressures sounds very unlikely.
Also he mentions some semiconductor physics but misses the most obvious tip off to what is happening. Metal - semiconductor junctions are very special and on the nanometer scale electrons can "tunnel" through the junction with NO resistance. The problem is that you could never extend the tunneling very far ie you can't make a wire that way. Isn't that what is most likely happening?
I think this guy should read up on MOS devices in an undergrad EE textbook before declaring he has found the engineer's holy grail.
Ender's Game?
America's Army is a free FPS using authentic US army gear and scenarios. Whether attack or defense your team is ALWAYS the US and the oppoonent is ALWAYS (a) eastern european ski-mask wearing terrorists or (b) turbin headed middle eastern terrorists. Most of the scenarios focus on CQB... ie exactly the kindof combat that Ender's Game focused on in the tournaments and exactly the kind the US army has found/will find itself in. Think Somalia, Gulf war, etc.
Great post... I would only disagree with the 1 minute between reloads arguement....
Consider that the system uses a rotating mirror which can target based on any number of lasing systems is the same plane of rotation as the laser. Also consider that the storage requirements are not massive compared to established methods, ie flywheel driven dynos and ultra capacitors. Checimal reagents are even more easily replaced as the they can be liquid for transport before phase changed for reaction.
Methanol is very cheap. You could probably buy a liter for ~ $5 and have a thousand hours of computer time.
The real issue isn't the fuel but the lifespan of the fuel container and DMCA style restrictions on refilling it.
If you read the article you would notice that they propose bootstrapping the transport of a majority of the counterweight from an initally smaller counterweight.
I have owned a 9700 pro for over five months.
You can always live/work in France... they have a maximum 35 hour work week. Its not too hard to fit 35 hours of work into 3 days.
Whether at 60 or 30 we will all find current technology escaping us when we cease to keep up with the pace.
If you choose to "bow out" of the race why be sad about it? Be happy that others are forging ahead in your absence and that you can now enjoy the technological "magic" along with the rest of the civilians.
PS Quantum doesn't need to be very complicated. Superposition seems complicated when they throw the math at you but its really just this:
The universe hasn't yet decided the outcome of certain quantum events so all possibilities exist at time zero. A quantum calculation involves forcing the universe to resolve the uncertainty at time one. Programming a quantum calculation involves setting things up so that the universe will select or sort for the outcome you are looking for given a range of inputs.
My wife was born in Taiwan so you can take the racist crap and shove it up your ass.
Plenty of viruses come for the US and China, yes. The ones coming from China are often tagged with nationalistic themes. It's those messages from Chinese hackers that initiated the "us" (USA) versus them (China) mentality.
Now that China has the source code we can look forward to some really nasty ones.
Heres a non-digital world example of the problem:
What would the government say if Ford started selling a new luxury car for $4000 but it could only run on special $4 a gallon gas (with Ford licensing the technology for $2 a gallon). Then someone comes out with a cheap additive that let you use normal gas. Is that a violation? Do they go to jail? What if its so simple that a lay person could make the additive from instructions posted on the web. Do you take the web-site off the net?
This is really stupid.
Plasma has the worst burn-in of any of the display technolgies. Considering how much it costs you wouldn't want to view any static images in part or whole.
That is the reason why many states have laws against possessing buglary tools... because intent is so hard to prove until the crime has been committed.
Buglarly tools aren't a bad analogy for SOME of this technology.
You don't understand the hardware details that these demos relied on. You just can't emulate the combination of OS, VGA Hardware and timing.
This is a great explanation of why high refresh monitors and high fps gfx cards improve gaming.
I'd mod up but have no points.
What you are missing is that more transistors can allow for more pipeline stages. More pipelining means shorter stages for more MHz at the same level of manufacturing process.
Now we all know that doesn't necessarily mean more computational power, but it could.
Also you are forgetting differences in die size. Perhaps the AMD chip has fewer transistors but greater DENSITY and that is what Moore was talking about.
That sounds really interesting. Those DV cartridges are pretty cheap too and should be manufactured to last a while.
Most of those DV camcorders use firewire as well. Firewire seems to have some legs on it at a standard... that solves a big part of the problem - the data may be readable but you also need a "bridge" to current technolgy.
Technically hydrinos don't violate the 2nd law of thermo. The hydrino can't be reused... fortunately hydrogen isn't hard to find. Even better enough energy (supposedly) is released to harvest hydrogen from water. So the process does use a fuel.
The real question is why all the hydrogen isn't in its ground state - ie a hydrino. I guess the UV light from the sun put 100% of the H atoms we come across into the Bohr ground state.
Anyway... I was thinking that if we start generating enough hydrinos we won't have to worry about sunscreen. The hydrinos will be busy absorbing UV in the upper atmosphere to get back to "normal".
Take all this with a huge grain of salt. He is a fraud and I have already given him more of my time then he deserves.
I have read his work and brought it to the attention of my chemistry professor - a cautious optimist in the cold fusion search. He had also read Mills' book and declared it UTTER bunk. What I failed to catch as an undergrad was that his mathematics were totally flawed. I wasn't really reading it critically.
He showed me errors which I could confirm from undergrad level physics, calc, chemistry. Remember Mills is a freaking MD not a PhD. His results may not be a fraud but he hasn't put together a cogent theory.
The biggest problem wasn't actually with the math errors per say but that the math was totally mis-applied. The results were meaningless. Before you say I was just following along with the "establishment" I can tell you it wasn't a close call.
At best he is an alchemist. At worst he is a fraud.
It would be great if he comes up with a way of extracting energy from water (he claims to generate enough energy from hydrogen to extract it from water).
Wanting something to be true though does not make it any more likely to be true, however.
Thermocouples has very low thermal efficiencies due to heat conductance across the pad and heat generated from the electrical resistance.
When you have a 200 watt power supply driving the thing that isn't a problem. For a laptop it would exhaust the batteries pretty quickly.
I agree. For instance is this camera compatible with blue-tack? If it is not compatible I'll have to totally redo my train set-up with duct tape.
Also I'll need to set-up a Wi-Fi card and base station to transmit the live video to my computer.
I know what everyone is thinking. How will I fit a wi-fi card in my HO scale trains? The exciting conclusion to my story will be posted shortly!
Right and those engineers productivity was so well spent building big rockets. Those engineers could have been working on MUCH more useful things.
Sure parts of NASA research has side benefits but the time would have beenbetter spent on other things IMHO.
I only read the last paragraph of movie reviews for films I'm interested in. The last paragraph rarely gives away major plot elements and never has the details but summarizes the Yea or Nae view view of the reviewer.