The Sony Mavicas are wonderful digital cameras. I bought a few of them for my company and the biggest selling point is the fact that they store their images on plain floppies as normal JPEGs.
No cables, smart card adapters or funny file formats. All you need is a laptop with a box of floppies and a box of disks. They even capture short MPEG video clips with sound.
And the battery life isn't too bad either (2-4 hours).
The MPAA is interested in having their movies freely distributed around the world, as long as it is *on their terms*. That's what the region coding is for.
I would love a Slashdot-style interview with this guy, there were so many questions that I wanted to see asked.
Like: "Is there a solution (acceptable to the MPAA) to the current css-auth/DeCSS situation short of a court battle?"
A good example of multiple camera angles (that I've come across) is Sarah McLachlan's "Mirrorball" on DVD. You can switch angles at any time during playback, of course I'm using PC software decoding, hardware DVD players may be more limited in this respect.
Three of the songs offer multiple camera angles (4 I think). The switch only takes about 2 seconds on my PC, the delay may be due to the format of the DVD data but I suspect that it depends on the decoder as well.
Using the multiple-angle feature to skip specific scenes may be technically unfeasible. The easiest way that I can think of is to simply include multiple versions of the entire movie on a double-sided or double-layer disk.
A few suggestions here (for the web designers and the people doing the searching):
1) The previously mentioned two-level web sites: enough static pages (with meta-tags etc.) to capture the search engine's interest. Backed up with dynamically generated pages for the bulk of the content.
2) A huge collection of static pages refreshed from database-hosted source material. The static pages are updated whenever a change is made to the source. I'm sure a lot of web sites use this already in cases; it probably performs better when the number of updates isn't to high anyway.
3) Using "well known" sites for your searching: I remember attending a web-design conference where one speaker talked about search engines actually increasing the search time when compared to users clicking through links (on a properly designed site). Sites such as the IMDB, the big web bookstores, about.com, slashdot and the major news sites provide so much useful information in one place there often isn't any need to check anywhere else.
I tend to locate a site or two that excels at providing a PARTICULAR type of content and go straight there instead of a search engine. All of the companies working on these general-purpose "web portals" (ick) should give up. Locate a niche and work on providing the BEST content and comprehensive links that you can on ONE TOPIC (or at least use some common sense).
4) Smarter search engines? I've switched to using Google almost exclusively; it often displays the site I'm looking for in the top 5. However, I've clicked through 5 pages of results, given up in disgust and found the perfect site at a later date by sheer coincidence. I suspect that the perfect search algorithms are going to elude us for some time yet, and the WWW is getting too big to allow human-aided searching to make much of a dent.
I haven't read the book... so this is just a guess.
If the inhabitants have lost all tech and are building back up from scratch they wouldn't know about EMP or satellites or anything else that we take for granted.
All they would know is that soon after they build something using this "electricity", it fizzles out and stops working. They may attribute it to evil spirits or assume that they built it wrong in the first place. They probably have never thought about satellites programmed to keep them in a low-tech state. Therefore, no way to know how to prevent it (unless they stumble upon it by accident).
[obvious plug] Reminds me of the setup for David Weber's "Heirs of Empire". Nothing better than a "super-advanced world loses all tech" story. I got the first of his books just a few months ago and now I have 11. Go figure. [end obvious plug]
Slashdot Mirror
Aaaah. But if you just went out, bought a 650Mhz Celeron and took pictures of it, you couldn't get a story posted on Slashdot about it, could you? :-)
No cables, smart card adapters or funny file formats. All you need is a laptop with a box of floppies and a box of disks. They even capture short MPEG video clips with sound.
And the battery life isn't too bad either (2-4 hours).
http://www.sel.sony.com/SEL/consumer /dimaging/
For a great introduction to the GPS system (and technologies such as differential GPS) check out the Trimble web site:
The MPAA is interested in having their movies freely distributed around the world, as long as it is *on their terms*. That's what the region coding is for.
I would love a Slashdot-style interview with this guy, there were so many questions that I wanted to see asked.
Like: "Is there a solution (acceptable to the MPAA) to the current css-auth/DeCSS situation short of a court battle?"
A good example of multiple camera angles (that I've come across) is Sarah McLachlan's "Mirrorball" on DVD. You can switch angles at any time during playback, of course I'm using PC software decoding, hardware DVD players may be more limited in this respect.
Three of the songs offer multiple camera angles (4 I think). The switch only takes about 2 seconds on my PC, the delay may be due to the format of the DVD data but I suspect that it depends on the decoder as well.
Using the multiple-angle feature to skip specific scenes may be technically unfeasible. The easiest way that I can think of is to simply include multiple versions of the entire movie on a double-sided or double-layer disk.
A few suggestions here (for the web designers and the people doing the searching):
1) The previously mentioned two-level web sites: enough static pages (with meta-tags etc.) to capture the search engine's interest. Backed up with dynamically generated pages for the bulk of the content.
2) A huge collection of static pages refreshed from database-hosted source material. The static pages are updated whenever a change is made to the source. I'm sure a lot of web sites use this already in cases; it probably performs better when the number of updates isn't to high anyway.
3) Using "well known" sites for your searching: I remember attending a web-design conference where one speaker talked about search engines actually increasing the search time when compared to users clicking through links (on a properly designed site). Sites such as the IMDB, the big web bookstores, about.com, slashdot and the major news sites provide so much useful information in one place there often isn't any need to check anywhere else.
I tend to locate a site or two that excels at providing a PARTICULAR type of content and go straight there instead of a search engine. All of the companies working on these general-purpose "web portals" (ick) should give up. Locate a niche and work on providing the BEST content and comprehensive links that you can on ONE TOPIC (or at least use some common sense).
4) Smarter search engines? I've switched to using Google almost exclusively; it often displays the site I'm looking for in the top 5. However, I've clicked through 5 pages of results, given up in disgust and found the perfect site at a later date by sheer coincidence. I suspect that the perfect search algorithms are going to elude us for some time yet, and the WWW is getting too big to allow human-aided searching to make much of a dent.
I haven't read the book... so this is just a guess.
If the inhabitants have lost all tech and are building back up from scratch they wouldn't know about EMP or satellites or anything else that we take for granted.
All they would know is that soon after they build something using this "electricity", it fizzles out and stops working. They may attribute it to evil spirits or assume that they built it wrong in the first place. They probably have never thought about satellites programmed to keep them in a low-tech state. Therefore, no way to know how to prevent it (unless they stumble upon it by accident).
[obvious plug]
Reminds me of the setup for David Weber's "Heirs of Empire". Nothing better than a "super-advanced world loses all tech" story. I got the first of his books just a few months ago and now I have 11. Go figure.
[end obvious plug]