Read my post that got modded to +5 to see a several examples of famines caused by war, political action and poor government planning in the 20th Century.
Indeed, if you look at just about every famine in Africa since the colonial powers left in the 1960's, they were all caused by civil wars, tribal wars and deliberate government action. The current famine in Zimbabwe is caused by the deliberate action of Robert Mugabe, who essentially used food production and distribution control to literally starve his political enemies to death.
As the people [of Ireland] were dying/emigrating, the country was still exporting the majority of its food.
This tragedy falls in the category of deliberate government policy worsening the Irish famine of 1845-1850. Remember back then Ireland was definitely under UK rule, and given the fact the British intensely disliked the Irish, this policy of exporting the majority of Ireland's agricultural output when the Irish people were suffering a massive famine is not surprising. What would have happened if the British had allowed the Irish to keep most of their agricultural output inside the country between 1845 and 1850? It's likely that the famine would have been substantially avoided as the Irish would have temporarily eaten other agricultural products in place of the potato until the potato production revived.
It was this exact policy that caused the horrible tragedy in the Ukraine between 1928 and 1933. It was Stalin's deliberate policy to essentially take more than 100% of the agricultural output of the entire Ukraine that resulted in the infamous famine that killed 14,000,000 people.
In the great famines of the 20th Century, just about all of them have been caused NOT by bad climate conditions but by war, political action or poor government decisions.
I can cite the following examples:
The Ukraine (1928-1933). The creation of collective farms by force and Stalin's extreme demands on food production essentially sent all of the agricultural production and then some out of the Ukraine with tragic results. Some 14,000,000 people died from the starvation caused by this policy.
China (1921-1949). The factional fighting of the warlords, the fighting between the Communists and Nationalists, and the Japanese invasion of China resulted in many millions of Chinese starving to death because food could not be grown and distributed under war conditions.
China (1958-1963). The ill-advised Great Leap Forward resulted in poor agricultural policies that led to massive crop failures and near-starvation for much of the country.
World War II (1939-1945). It was only the Marshall Plan that saved Europe from starvation due to the complete loss of means of food production and distribution throughout much of Europe. A similar plan saved Japan from the ravages of the war.
Africa (1960s-today). The departure of the colonial powers resulted in the rise of civil wars, tribal warfare and despotic regimes that often used control of food production and distribution as a weapon. No wonder we had cases of famine on an unbelievable scale all over Africa since the 1960's, with the mass starvation in southern Sudan and in Zimbabwe being the latest examples.
I know I'll be modded way down for this, but in Robert Mugabe's pandering to the European view that genetically-modified foods are not a good idea, Zimbabwe have refused food imports that could have done much to save the country from a very serious famine.
I think this is going to be good for Japanese culture because to really play Go well, you have to have to be very good at sportsmanship and patience, things Japanese culture revere strongly. It's small wonder why a senior member of the Japan Go Association is a technical advisor for both the manga and anime versions of Hikaru no Go.
It's a good game for people who want to think carefully during play.
In fact, there's an article from MSNBC.com in the Newsweek section specifically about the success of Hikaru no Go.
It has single-handedly turned Japan into a nation of Go devotees, something that has really surprised a lot of Japanese because many in Japan recently thought Go was only played by elderly Japanese. It has caused something you'd never thought would happen in Japan: children are putting down videogames and Pokémon cards and taking up Go in a big way.
The MSNBC article can be read here: http://www.msnbc.com/news/780055.asp
Actually, the reason why The Iron Giant failed in theatrical was the fact that many Americans felt the movie had too much of a politically correct tone, which really hurt its chances to be successful among the majority of American viewers. (It should be noted that many reviewers that otherwise liked the movie had this criticism, too.) If the producers had avoided that cliché it probably would have done quite a bit better in terms of box office revenues.
Anime--because it is done on generally much-tighter budgets than American animation--has a look that can be an acquired taste to people used to the fluidity of motion of American animation. That's why it takes about US$800,000 and six months of work just to do one The Simpsons episode.
But the Japanese compensate by flat-out great storytelling and well-developed characters.
For anime available in subtitled form I recommend you see these titles to prove my point of view:
1. Akira. Now available in a newly-remastered DVD, it's a movie that has breathtaking visuals and really makes you think, to say the least.
2. Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise. Flat-out GREAT storytelling, and has an excellent musical score by former Yellow Magic Orchestra member Ryuichi Sakamoto.
3. The three Slayers TV series. Really nice storylines, and it's just so cute and fun to listen to voice actress Megumi Hayashibara lose her temper in almost every episode. =) Slayers Try, the third season, is probably the best of the three.
4. The Vision of Escaflowne TV series. Nice storytelling, and amazingly good animation.
5. Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series. If you can watch the whole series straight through, you know why it was simultaneously loved AND reviled at the same time.
6. Sailor Moon S TV series. Easily the best of the five seasons of that TV series, with great storytelling in almost every episode.:-) This is where the Pioneer uncut DVD comes in real handy. =)
7. Excel Saga TV series. The first episodes are just out on DVD, and if you want something just as wacky and zany as what the late Chuck Jones did during his zenith at Warner Brothers in the 1950's, this is probably it.
There are many more I could mention, but it's a good starting point.
I for one would love to see every Studio Ghibli movie done since 1983 released in the USA in a combined sub/dub edition that was done with the quality of the Princess Mononoke DVD.
Disney should seriously do a DVD of Kiki's Delivery Service that is done this way; this movie is far more indicative of the type of movie Studio Ghibli does.:-)
By the way, I disagree with your assessments of the Princess Mononoke dub; the dub was written by well-known comic book writer and science fiction author Neil Gaiman, and he does an excellent job in the dub explaining the cultural context behind the movie.
Having seen the DVD (thanks to my brother's copy of the movie I bought him for Christmas present =) ), I think Gaiman's iuterpretation actually works quite well. It does much to understand the cultural context in what is probably the best anime feature film of the 1990's.
The big problem is that if you buy a Dell printer where are you going to get replacement consumables? You can complain about the high price of Canon, Epson, HP and Lexmark ink cartridges but at least you can get them from multiple sources. This may not be true for Dell's new line of printers.
I think Forgent better be very careful about trying to enforce its so-called patents on the JPEG compression standard.
They run the risk of running afoul of US antitrust laws. In the famous US v. United Shoe Manufacturing Company case (1941), the courts ruled that patents cannot be used to stifle competition--of which the Forgent patent may just do. This is the same issue that resulted in Rambus running afoul of the law because Rambus was using its patents on DDR-SDRAM to stifle DDR-SDRAM in favor of RDRAM technology.
In my personal opinion, I blame this whole mess on Bill Clinton himself (even though I know I'm going to be seriously modded way down for this =) ).
Given what we know about both Bill and Hillary Clinton's frequently shady dealings (the Whitewater fiasco, the Rose Law Firm record shredding, the mysterious deaths of close Clinton cronies Vince Foster and Ron Brown, and so on), plus the fact many people on Wall Street loved the Clintons, no wonder why much Wall Street followed the Clintons' example and started doing a lot of shady dealings themselves. It's only after the Clintons left the White House the whole mess has come home to roost.:-(
I really want to find out just kind of shady dealings the likes of George Soros and the Goldman Sachs group (both have close links with the Clintons) have done between 1993 and 2000.
A little tidbit about keeping cool in summer: before the widespread use of air conditioners, in many parts of the Mojave Desert in California they built special buildings nicknamed submarines to keep people cool.
This is how author John R. Signor described the original submarine building design in his book Beaumont Hill (Copyright 1990 Golden West Books, ISBN 0-87095-105-X):
This unusual contraption was roughly man-sized. It had a hood of galvanized steel that rolled back over a bed, similar to a rolltop desk. It contained a built-in trough that held 20 gallons of water with a blanket covering the hood. A sleeper would get inside and pull the hood down over the bed. Then he opened a valve that allowed water to drop from perforated pipes, which would saturate the blanket. The evaporation cooled the steel hood and the inside of the chamber. The outside temperature might register 130 degrees, but inside [Bob] Richardson's bed, the air was a comfortable 70 degrees.
Developed by Southern Pacific railroad engineer Bob Richardson 1906, submarines became an extremely popular way to keep cool in the summer, especially in the Mojave Desert. Richardson in 1922 developed a larger version that could hold larger beds and a even a small desk or nightstand.
Submarines, however, had one big downside: they didn't work well in high humidity environments. That mean these structures weren't so useful during the later summer when rains coming from the Pacific Ocean southwest of the Mojave Desert were common (usually the remanants of hurricanes that spawn off the Pacific coast of Mexico).
The development of modern air conditioning essentially ended the age of submarines, mostly because air conditioners continued to cool even in higher humidity conditions of later summer desert monsoon rains that occurred in the Mojave Desert.
If it weren't for air conditioning, you can forget about living in the US Southwest.
Can you imagine large scale cities in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and the interior of California without air conditioning? I didn't think so. Especially in the summer these parts of the US can zoom well over 40 degrees C. easily.
Actually, you're forgetting that many houses built since the 1980's have R-38 level insulation all the way around the house and thermopane windows to minimize the effects of outside temperatures.
As a result, this puts a lot less strain on air conditioners since they don't have to be run so often.
Also, careful placement of circulating fans around the house really helps things, too.:-)
However, modern air conditioning has made it possible to do two things:
1. Live in desert environments. You wouldn't want to live in Phoenix, AZ without air conditioning, especially with temperatures in the daytime hitting 45 degrees C. and higher during the summer.
2. Live in warm, high-humidity environments. Try living in the southeastern USA with temperatures in the high 30's C. and 75-plus percent humidity during the summer without air conditioning.
A big benefit of air conditioning is a huge boon to museums. Works of art and historical items are much more easily preserved in temperature/humidity controlled environments that air conditioning systems provide.
As for the full 48 fps Maxivison, "event" films (i.e. summer blockbusters and the studios' oscar hopefuls) would get that treatment. At the scale of investment that goes into those films (paying 20 million for a single actor, for example), the additional cost of using 48fps Maxivision would be "neglible".
Given the fact at 48 fps in Maxivision you'll be using something like 50% MORE film on a per minute basis, that right there will make the bean counters at the Hollywood studios blanch. Instead of six 20-minute 24 fps reels of 35 mm film for a two-hour movie, we may end up 10 or more reels in Maxivision48 format for that same movie. Multiply that by a couple of thousand copies and the overhead adds up real fast.
Besides, has Maxivision manage to convince the likes of Panavision, Arriflex, Kodak, Fuji Film and the projector makers of the idea? I don't think so. It will not be cheap for Panavision and Arriflex to build cameras that can operate at 48 fps for long periods of time (this isn't like what's done in special effects work where high fps operation is done for a very short period of time).
The only thing it requires is modern equipment and a booth operator who cares about what they are doing.
That's the big problem with many theaters nowadays. I don't know of many theater chains that maintains a well-trained projectionist full-time at the theater complex to keep those projectors running properly.
The Maxivision48 projector feeding film at 48 frames per second is going to make some serious demands for competent projectionists that can maintain these machines. 48 frames per second running 12-14 hours per day is going to put a lot of stress on all the moving parts, that's to be sure. And you wonder why 60 fps Showscan was never adopted....
Regular photography is great but then you have to consider the enormous costs of darkrooms to process film.
The costs for a do-it-yourself darkroom that can do Kodak C-41 color print processing borders on silly, to say the least. Such processes may be worth it if you're doing medium-format (6 x 4.5 cm or 6 x 7 cm) film negatives or 8" x 10" view camera photograhic plates, but for the vast majority of amateur photographers it's not worth the trouble. Especially now with 4 megapixel and higher resolution digital cameras that can produce prints on home printers that closely rival and often exceed what you get from a commercial photo-processing lab.
Anyway, look at the MiniDV digital format camcorders. The picture quality is good enough that they are just about indistinguishable from Betacam professional recorders used by many news organizations--and MiniDV is definitely way cheaper than Betacam.
There are two issues that mitigate against wide adoption of Maxivision48:
1. It requires 50% MORE film to show a Maxivision48 movie. Currently, a 24 fps 35 mm print weighs about 35 pounds per 20-minute reel; a Maxivision48 format print would only last roughly 11-12 minutes for the one reel that holds 20 minutes of 35 mm 24 fps film. That would make a two-hour movie on a per print basis head somewhere way up into the stratosphere in terms of duplicating and shipping costs.
2. Maxivision48 projection still does not address the issues of outright physical wear on film (scratches, film breakage, etc.).
With the development of very high-density optical disc storage technology (like that mentioned on/. just recently), we could have a complete digital copy of a theatre-projection quality movie on a single 300 mm disc very soon. It's a lot cheaper to duplicate and ship a 300 mm optical disc than to make film prints of a movie, especially a Maxivision48 print.
See? I don't think movie companies want to pay for processing 52.5 pound 20 minute reels of 35 mm film. And you need six of them for a two-hour movie.
That plus the cost of 48 fps projectors that can run 14-16 hours per day reliably kind of mitigates against adoption of Maxivision48.
Re:It'll be MORE interesting by end of the year
on
ATI R300 and R250V
·
· Score: 2
There are a number of fabs that could probably go to 0.13 micron process fairly quickly--SGS-Thomson, IBM Microelectronics, or excess capacity from AMD.
Given the fact that the 0.13 micron R300 variant isn't going to need huge production capacity, I think there is fab capacity around that could make the chip.
Slashdot Mirror
Read my post that got modded to +5 to see a several examples of famines caused by war, political action and poor government planning in the 20th Century.
Indeed, if you look at just about every famine in Africa since the colonial powers left in the 1960's, they were all caused by civil wars, tribal wars and deliberate government action. The current famine in Zimbabwe is caused by the deliberate action of Robert Mugabe, who essentially used food production and distribution control to literally starve his political enemies to death.
As the people [of Ireland] were dying/emigrating, the country was still exporting the majority of its food.
This tragedy falls in the category of deliberate government policy worsening the Irish famine of 1845-1850. Remember back then Ireland was definitely under UK rule, and given the fact the British intensely disliked the Irish, this policy of exporting the majority of Ireland's agricultural output when the Irish people were suffering a massive famine is not surprising. What would have happened if the British had allowed the Irish to keep most of their agricultural output inside the country between 1845 and 1850? It's likely that the famine would have been substantially avoided as the Irish would have temporarily eaten other agricultural products in place of the potato until the potato production revived.
It was this exact policy that caused the horrible tragedy in the Ukraine between 1928 and 1933. It was Stalin's deliberate policy to essentially take more than 100% of the agricultural output of the entire Ukraine that resulted in the infamous famine that killed 14,000,000 people.
AMEN!!
In the great famines of the 20th Century, just about all of them have been caused NOT by bad climate conditions but by war, political action or poor government decisions.
I can cite the following examples:
The Ukraine (1928-1933). The creation of collective farms by force and Stalin's extreme demands on food production essentially sent all of the agricultural production and then some out of the Ukraine with tragic results. Some 14,000,000 people died from the starvation caused by this policy.
China (1921-1949). The factional fighting of the warlords, the fighting between the Communists and Nationalists, and the Japanese invasion of China resulted in many millions of Chinese starving to death because food could not be grown and distributed under war conditions.
China (1958-1963). The ill-advised Great Leap Forward resulted in poor agricultural policies that led to massive crop failures and near-starvation for much of the country.
World War II (1939-1945). It was only the Marshall Plan that saved Europe from starvation due to the complete loss of means of food production and distribution throughout much of Europe. A similar plan saved Japan from the ravages of the war.
Africa (1960s-today). The departure of the colonial powers resulted in the rise of civil wars, tribal warfare and despotic regimes that often used control of food production and distribution as a weapon. No wonder we had cases of famine on an unbelievable scale all over Africa since the 1960's, with the mass starvation in southern Sudan and in Zimbabwe being the latest examples.
You are correct in your assessments.
I know I'll be modded way down for this, but in Robert Mugabe's pandering to the European view that genetically-modified foods are not a good idea, Zimbabwe have refused food imports that could have done much to save the country from a very serious famine.
It is a classic Catch-22 with tragic results.
I think this is going to be good for Japanese culture because to really play Go well, you have to have to be very good at sportsmanship and patience, things Japanese culture revere strongly. It's small wonder why a senior member of the Japan Go Association is a technical advisor for both the manga and anime versions of Hikaru no Go.
It's a good game for people who want to think carefully during play.
In fact, there's an article from MSNBC.com in the Newsweek section specifically about the success of Hikaru no Go.
It has single-handedly turned Japan into a nation of Go devotees, something that has really surprised a lot of Japanese because many in Japan recently thought Go was only played by elderly Japanese. It has caused something you'd never thought would happen in Japan: children are putting down videogames and Pokémon cards and taking up Go in a big way.
The MSNBC article can be read here: http://www.msnbc.com/news/780055.asp
Whoops--the message header should say Pest OFFense. (blush)
I have to wonder does this program to turn a computer into pest repellant work like this device shown on this web page:
5 46 3330&PID=1060337
http://www.youcansave.com/pestoffense.html?AID=
Mind you, the way Pest OFFense works looks to be different than what that program does to your computer. (shrug)
Actually, the reason why The Iron Giant failed in theatrical was the fact that many Americans felt the movie had too much of a politically correct tone, which really hurt its chances to be successful among the majority of American viewers. (It should be noted that many reviewers that otherwise liked the movie had this criticism, too.) If the producers had avoided that cliché it probably would have done quite a bit better in terms of box office revenues.
Anime--because it is done on generally much-tighter budgets than American animation--has a look that can be an acquired taste to people used to the fluidity of motion of American animation. That's why it takes about US$800,000 and six months of work just to do one The Simpsons episode.
:-) This is where the Pioneer uncut DVD comes in real handy. =)
But the Japanese compensate by flat-out great storytelling and well-developed characters.
For anime available in subtitled form I recommend you see these titles to prove my point of view:
1. Akira. Now available in a newly-remastered DVD, it's a movie that has breathtaking visuals and really makes you think, to say the least.
2. Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise. Flat-out GREAT storytelling, and has an excellent musical score by former Yellow Magic Orchestra member Ryuichi Sakamoto.
3. The three Slayers TV series. Really nice storylines, and it's just so cute and fun to listen to voice actress Megumi Hayashibara lose her temper in almost every episode. =) Slayers Try, the third season, is probably the best of the three.
4. The Vision of Escaflowne TV series. Nice storytelling, and amazingly good animation.
5. Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series. If you can watch the whole series straight through, you know why it was simultaneously loved AND reviled at the same time.
6. Sailor Moon S TV series. Easily the best of the five seasons of that TV series, with great storytelling in almost every episode.
7. Excel Saga TV series. The first episodes are just out on DVD, and if you want something just as wacky and zany as what the late Chuck Jones did during his zenith at Warner Brothers in the 1950's, this is probably it.
There are many more I could mention, but it's a good starting point.
I for one would love to see every Studio Ghibli movie done since 1983 released in the USA in a combined sub/dub edition that was done with the quality of the Princess Mononoke DVD.
:-)
Disney should seriously do a DVD of Kiki's Delivery Service that is done this way; this movie is far more indicative of the type of movie Studio Ghibli does.
By the way, I disagree with your assessments of the Princess Mononoke dub; the dub was written by well-known comic book writer and science fiction author Neil Gaiman, and he does an excellent job in the dub explaining the cultural context behind the movie.
Having seen the DVD (thanks to my brother's copy of the movie I bought him for Christmas present =) ), I think Gaiman's iuterpretation actually works quite well. It does much to understand the cultural context in what is probably the best anime feature film of the 1990's.
I agree with what you said.
The big problem is that if you buy a Dell printer where are you going to get replacement consumables? You can complain about the high price of Canon, Epson, HP and Lexmark ink cartridges but at least you can get them from multiple sources. This may not be true for Dell's new line of printers.
I think Forgent better be very careful about trying to enforce its so-called patents on the JPEG compression standard.
They run the risk of running afoul of US antitrust laws. In the famous US v. United Shoe Manufacturing Company case (1941), the courts ruled that patents cannot be used to stifle competition--of which the Forgent patent may just do. This is the same issue that resulted in Rambus running afoul of the law because Rambus was using its patents on DDR-SDRAM to stifle DDR-SDRAM in favor of RDRAM technology.
In my personal opinion, I blame this whole mess on Bill Clinton himself (even though I know I'm going to be seriously modded way down for this =) ).
:-(
Given what we know about both Bill and Hillary Clinton's frequently shady dealings (the Whitewater fiasco, the Rose Law Firm record shredding, the mysterious deaths of close Clinton cronies Vince Foster and Ron Brown, and so on), plus the fact many people on Wall Street loved the Clintons, no wonder why much Wall Street followed the Clintons' example and started doing a lot of shady dealings themselves. It's only after the Clintons left the White House the whole mess has come home to roost.
I really want to find out just kind of shady dealings the likes of George Soros and the Goldman Sachs group (both have close links with the Clintons) have done between 1993 and 2000.
A little tidbit about keeping cool in summer: before the widespread use of air conditioners, in many parts of the Mojave Desert in California they built special buildings nicknamed submarines to keep people cool.
This is how author John R. Signor described the original submarine building design in his book Beaumont Hill (Copyright 1990 Golden West Books, ISBN 0-87095-105-X):
This unusual contraption was roughly man-sized. It had a hood of galvanized steel that rolled back over a bed, similar to a rolltop desk. It contained a built-in trough that held 20 gallons of water with a blanket covering the hood. A sleeper would get inside and pull the hood down over the bed. Then he opened a valve that allowed water to drop from perforated pipes, which would saturate the blanket. The evaporation cooled the steel hood and the inside of the chamber. The outside temperature might register 130 degrees, but inside [Bob] Richardson's bed, the air was a comfortable 70 degrees.
Developed by Southern Pacific railroad engineer Bob Richardson 1906, submarines became an extremely popular way to keep cool in the summer, especially in the Mojave Desert. Richardson in 1922 developed a larger version that could hold larger beds and a even a small desk or nightstand.
Submarines, however, had one big downside: they didn't work well in high humidity environments. That mean these structures weren't so useful during the later summer when rains coming from the Pacific Ocean southwest of the Mojave Desert were common (usually the remanants of hurricanes that spawn off the Pacific coast of Mexico).
The development of modern air conditioning essentially ended the age of submarines, mostly because air conditioners continued to cool even in higher humidity conditions of later summer desert monsoon rains that occurred in the Mojave Desert.
If it weren't for air conditioning, you can forget about living in the US Southwest.
Can you imagine large scale cities in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and the interior of California without air conditioning? I didn't think so. Especially in the summer these parts of the US can zoom well over 40 degrees C. easily.
Actually, you're forgetting that many houses built since the 1980's have R-38 level insulation all the way around the house and thermopane windows to minimize the effects of outside temperatures.
:-)
As a result, this puts a lot less strain on air conditioners since they don't have to be run so often.
Also, careful placement of circulating fans around the house really helps things, too.
Bastian,
However, modern air conditioning has made it possible to do two things:
1. Live in desert environments. You wouldn't want to live in Phoenix, AZ without air conditioning, especially with temperatures in the daytime hitting 45 degrees C. and higher during the summer.
2. Live in warm, high-humidity environments. Try living in the southeastern USA with temperatures in the high 30's C. and 75-plus percent humidity during the summer without air conditioning.
A big benefit of air conditioning is a huge boon to museums. Works of art and historical items are much more easily preserved in temperature/humidity controlled environments that air conditioning systems provide.
As for the full 48 fps Maxivison, "event" films (i.e. summer blockbusters and the studios' oscar hopefuls) would get that treatment. At the scale of investment that goes into those films (paying 20 million for a single actor, for example), the additional cost of using 48fps Maxivision would be "neglible".
Given the fact at 48 fps in Maxivision you'll be using something like 50% MORE film on a per minute basis, that right there will make the bean counters at the Hollywood studios blanch. Instead of six 20-minute 24 fps reels of 35 mm film for a two-hour movie, we may end up 10 or more reels in Maxivision48 format for that same movie. Multiply that by a couple of thousand copies and the overhead adds up real fast.
Besides, has Maxivision manage to convince the likes of Panavision, Arriflex, Kodak, Fuji Film and the projector makers of the idea? I don't think so. It will not be cheap for Panavision and Arriflex to build cameras that can operate at 48 fps for long periods of time (this isn't like what's done in special effects work where high fps operation is done for a very short period of time).
The only thing it requires is modern equipment and a booth operator who cares about what they are doing.
That's the big problem with many theaters nowadays. I don't know of many theater chains that maintains a well-trained projectionist full-time at the theater complex to keep those projectors running properly.
The Maxivision48 projector feeding film at 48 frames per second is going to make some serious demands for competent projectionists that can maintain these machines. 48 frames per second running 12-14 hours per day is going to put a lot of stress on all the moving parts, that's to be sure. And you wonder why 60 fps Showscan was never adopted....
Regular photography is great but then you have to consider the enormous costs of darkrooms to process film.
The costs for a do-it-yourself darkroom that can do Kodak C-41 color print processing borders on silly, to say the least. Such processes may be worth it if you're doing medium-format (6 x 4.5 cm or 6 x 7 cm) film negatives or 8" x 10" view camera photograhic plates, but for the vast majority of amateur photographers it's not worth the trouble. Especially now with 4 megapixel and higher resolution digital cameras that can produce prints on home printers that closely rival and often exceed what you get from a commercial photo-processing lab.
Anyway, look at the MiniDV digital format camcorders. The picture quality is good enough that they are just about indistinguishable from Betacam professional recorders used by many news organizations--and MiniDV is definitely way cheaper than Betacam.
There are two issues that mitigate against wide adoption of Maxivision48:
/. just recently), we could have a complete digital copy of a theatre-projection quality movie on a single 300 mm disc very soon. It's a lot cheaper to duplicate and ship a 300 mm optical disc than to make film prints of a movie, especially a Maxivision48 print.
1. It requires 50% MORE film to show a Maxivision48 movie. Currently, a 24 fps 35 mm print weighs about 35 pounds per 20-minute reel; a Maxivision48 format print would only last roughly 11-12 minutes for the one reel that holds 20 minutes of 35 mm 24 fps film. That would make a two-hour movie on a per print basis head somewhere way up into the stratosphere in terms of duplicating and shipping costs.
2. Maxivision48 projection still does not address the issues of outright physical wear on film (scratches, film breakage, etc.).
With the development of very high-density optical disc storage technology (like that mentioned on
See? I don't think movie companies want to pay for processing 52.5 pound 20 minute reels of 35 mm film. And you need six of them for a two-hour movie.
That plus the cost of 48 fps projectors that can run 14-16 hours per day reliably kind of mitigates against adoption of Maxivision48.
There are a number of fabs that could probably go to 0.13 micron process fairly quickly--SGS-Thomson, IBM Microelectronics, or excess capacity from AMD.
Given the fact that the 0.13 micron R300 variant isn't going to need huge production capacity, I think there is fab capacity around that could make the chip.