The Times Square ball is a decorative and symbolic version of a practical time signaling system used at Greenwich Observatory, in which a large ball, visible from a long distance, was dropped rapidly under the force of gravity--not the slow, majestic descent of the Times Square ball. Apparently this system worked well because the ball could be released directly by electricity, and observed visually (no speed-of-sound delay). See the Wikipedia article time ball
LOL! But it has an obvious transcription error. "PC-compatibles?" No, to Pournelle they were always "PCompatibles." He was one of those people who loved merging coincident final and initial letters, TraveLodge style.
Just reviving the name means nothing. And I don't think there's a chance they will revive the spirit of BYTE.
Robert Tinney is the touchstone. BYTE went downhill the day they stopped running Tinney's lovely cover art and suddenly started putting big ad-like photos of computers on the cover.
Originally, Microsoft claimed Windows was portable to just about every significant processor available. Then they shifted direction and, lo and behold, everything but Intel dropped out, one by one. The company I worked for was seriously hurt when Microsoft dropped support for DEC's Alpha, just months after we had made a big marketing push and sold what for us was a large number of Alpha-based systems. Support for Windows on the PowerPC architecture went the same way.
And, of course, remember the ACE initiative, Windows running on a MIPS-based reference architecture? Microsoft sandbagged that, too.
Multiplatform support means very little if you are completely dependent on a vendor's whims (or strategic marketing objectives) as to what platforms are supported.
MOST of the stores I go to have single-line queueing, supermarkets being a conspicuous exception. Usually it's done by setting up rope barriers on stands, with a "line starts here" sign.
TSA security and airline check-in work with a single queue. Walt Disney World has been operating that way literally for decades.
And MOST of the places that don't, almost do: clerks at McDonald's, CVS, etc. are trained to say "I can help whoever's next" as soon as they are free, which has much the same effect.
If Microsoft understands what businesses need they don't need to talk about it, they just need to do it.
_Talk_ by companies about how they understand what businesses need and their competition doesn't is a handy smokescreen to explain away problems with their product or their product line. "Yes, it looks to _you_ like a steaming pile, but you, you understand nothing. _You_ are not part of our target market. You understand nothing about what businesses want. We do, and I can assure you real businesses don't want sugar, they want steaming piles."
If Google is failing, Google is failing. Microsoft doesn't need to talk about it. All they need to do is let Google fail. I care whether Google fails or not, but why should I care what Tom Rizzo thinks? And why should anyone at Microsoft lift a finger to influence perception, if "Google is failing" is the reality?
...but Microsoft kept working on it doggedly and tirelessly, refining it and improving it and never giving up, until today it has become the universally beloved Clippy.
I found Mary Roach's Packing for Mars to be fascinating, informative, and it made me ROFLMAO about every third page.
On page 296 she writes "Beer is a no-fly, because without gravity, carbonation bubbles don't rise to the surface. 'You just get a foamy froth,' says Bourland. He says Coke spent $450,000 developing a zero-gravity dispenser, only to be undone by biology. Since bubbles also don't rise to the top of a stomach, the astronauts had trouble burping. 'Often a burp is accompanied by a liquid spray,' Bourland adds."
So we must assume that Astronauts4Hire have either not read the book, or didn't want to let the facts spoil their publicity ploy.
Mary Roach described herself on NPR as "having the mind of a twelve-year-old boy." The book is indescribably marvelous to those of us who are similarly gifted with youthful imagination.
All the goldbugs keep telling me that gold is money, regardless of what economists say or what governments decree. So if gold is money, why won't these machines work either way?
Your choice, put in fiat money and get a gold bar, or put in a gold bar and get some crisp green U. S. of A. "Cyberbit Certificates" (or whatever it is that backs the currency nowadays).
I'm sure the technical problems could be solved--it only accepts gold bars slabbed in polycarbonate with a barcode on them, or something. Methinks the real reason is that it would exposed the bid/asked spread.
I don't mind that Instant Search might be motivated by Google's self-interest. I don't mind that it may place technological burdens on the browser--you can always turn it off. I don't mind that not everyone will necessarily like it.
What I mind is that it is basically tasteless. It's mostly bling, and Google used to be so tasteful.
And what I mind even more is the "negative option" feature of it. For years, Google has been introducing new features on an opt-in basis, e.g. by showing them first in Google Labs. Gmail was originally invitation only!--and people have been opting in willlingly because the new features were obviously valuable. This is the first time they pushed something on me without my prior consent. That's bad.
And come to think of it, they introduced it with an extremely intrusive animated thingy--the Google "balls"--which were presented without any explanation. That's also a new departure, and a bad precedent.
My idea of efficiency is getting 100 results per page. I often need to look at more than the first ten results to find what I'm looking for, and if I'm really researching something I make go through several pages of 100 results each.
I wanted to give it Google Instant a fair try, but gave up when I found that there seems to be no way to keep my preference for 100 results per page while using Google Instant. Merely turning on Google Instant cuts the number of results down to ten. Worse yet, if you then turn it on, your results per page remains at ten for regular searches.
Needing to click five, ten, fifteen times is a dealbreaker for me.
I view this with alarm. Google, which used to be so clean, chaste, and functional, is going all glitzy. I can't stand their new image search, in which it is difficult to scroll through results because mousing over any thumbnail, even accidentally, cause it to zoom out... into some poorly-defined Java-jived windoid in which right-clicking "Copy image" does not work reliably.
Just like books destroyed our ability to memorize, slide rules destroyed our ability to calculate, and that newfangled mechanical music technology--what are is it called? yeah, harpsichords--destroyed our ability to sing.
Circa 1990 Gartner published numerical graphs showing exactly how OS/2 would become the predominant PC operating system within, IIRC, three or four years.
People will pay money for anyone claiming to make predictions, and the miracle is that no number of bad past predictions ever seems to affect the credibility of the fortunetellers.
It is so characteristic of Microsoft to think it is more important that the iPhone fail than that Microsoft succeed. And a mock-funeral is such a sad example of sympathetic magic, and reminiscent of efforts to think away the Great Depression.
During the Great Depression, people were constantly suggesting that the U.S. think its way out of the depression simply by adopting an optimistic attitude. People put up billboards saying "Wasn't the Depression terrible?" on the assumption that if people got in the habit of thinking of it in the past tense, it would go away. Radio stations literally and deliberately programmed only optimistic songs, which the songwriters churned out as their contribution to the economy.
Conspicuous among these efforts were funerals for Old Man Depression, literal funeral processions conducted in major cities. Here's an account of one, from the The New York Times, Sep. 12, 1930, p. 19:
VIRGINIANS DROWN TRADE SLUMP TRIO EFFIGIES WALK THE PLANK...In bidding them begone, Governor Pollard said: "Old Man Depression, Old Lady Pessimism, and your unhappy daughter Miss Fortune, the United States is no place for you. You never had any real justification to be here anyhow. You were wraiths, unsubstantial. You lived upon mass timidity. You were created by unjustified fears and uncertainty........the depths of pessimism to which the country sunk were by no means justified by the facts. You were the products of a mood, but American economic history shows that the mood of depression is very rarely of long duration. Your time has come. I consign you to a watery grave. Your doom is sealed. Old Man Hard Work, Lady Optimism, Little Johnny Payroll, and Miss Good Fortune are here to take your place....you put over a bit of bad psychology on the American people But you couldn't make it stick."
I expect Microsoft's funerals for the iPhone to be every bit as effective.
I wish them luck, but it is certainly not the first time it's been tried. In fact, Wikipedia originated as Nupedia, "an English-language Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content." After three years, perhaps 100 articles were close to completion. Wikipedia was originally conceived as a source of draft articles to be reworked into Nupedia.
The assignment of credit for Wikipedia between Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger is a matter of dispute. The two, sometimes described as co-founders, have squabbled publicly. Sanger is probably responsible for some of the cultural foundations of Wikipedia that have led to the surprisingly high degree of accuracy it has.
In 2006, Sanger, unhappy with Wikipedia's undervaluing of expertise, launched Citizendium, an expert-approved wiki-based encyclopedia, which is said to currently have "We currently have 14,722 articles at different stages of collaborative development, of which 148 are expert-approved."
I am not saying Stanford's experiment can't succeed. I'm not saying Citizendium has failed. But I know where I got for answers, and it's not Citizendium. (And it's not Knol, either). The traditional encyclopedia--Encyclopedia Britannica--was able to pay contributors, using money it earned by selling print volumes. The social ecology of free web encyclopedias is tricky. There is probably more to success than saying "We'll be just like Wikipedia, but we'll restrict participation to experts." Experts usually want to be paid in something more than ego-boosting.
I phrased that imprecisely. Within the constraints of stereoscopic 3D seen projected on a screen, I don't think it can be solved economically.
A living room probably doesn't have room for a big enough screen, and it's probably not affordable. A theatre that only had seating in the sweet spot would probably need to charge a higher premium than most people would pay. What you can't get around is that for whatever criterion you set as "good enough," a 3D movie will have a much smaller "good enough" seating area than a 2D movie.
Putting projectors, or tiny LED screens, on the glasses themselves has its own set of problems which may or may not get solved. One is weight. Another is resolution--one of the reasons why IMAX (or, for the oldsters, Cinerama) is a compelling experience is that the screen is so far way that you can't see the screen texture. And of course a third is cost. Giving four people four sets of polarizing glasses is dirt cheap. Giving them four sets of LCD-shutter glasses isn't as cheap. Giving four people eight iPod "retina display" screens is starting to get expensive.
It's not impossible to imagine solutions to the problems. What baffles me is that the current crop of 3D technologies doesn't seem to have solved them or to be trying to solve them--the industry just seems to be ignoring them. I wonder whether James Cameron has ever personally tried sitting in the rightmost seat of the front row of a showing of Avatar at his local cineplex?
The "sweet spot" problem and the "edge" problem
on
The Joke Known As 3D TV
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· Score: 5, Informative
Stereoscopic 3D has two very serious problems that have never been solved. The first is the "sweet spot" problem. Imagine a person standing so that they are lined up exactly with a flagpole. In real life, if you move to one side or the other, the relationship changes and you can now see the flagpole... and you no longer see the person exactly in full-face, but slightly in profile. In a stereoscope 3D presentation, the relationship between the screen elements cannot change. You will see the person exactly lined up with the flagpole no matter where you sit. This sounds trivial, but if you work out the consequences, it means that if a person is standing on a square-tiled floor, the tiles must become skewed into rhombuses if you move to the side. And the depth relationships change, too. The picture becomes squashed or flattened if you sit too close to the screen, elongated with exaggerated depth if you set too far away.
This means that a 3D picture only looks right when viewed from one, specific seating location, the sweet spot. And, worse yet, it only looks right if the cinematographer eschews the use of wide-angle or long lenses, but films the entire movie only with lenses of the single correct focal length, which means throwing away a century of film grammar.
The valid appeal of 3D is to add the realism of depth. But unless you are sitting exactly in the sweet spot and the cinematographer has used only one focal length for the whole film, you do not get realistic depth, you get warped geometrical distortion--and worse yet distortion that changes from one shot to the next.
Have you ever watched a movie from the extreme left seat in the front row? Unpleasant, isn't it? Well, 3D has the same problem, but greatly amplified.
You may not notice it consciously, but your brain has to work overtime to prevent you from noticing it, and it is fatiguing.
The second problem involves any object whose 3D placement is in front of the screen but is near the edges. It is a little hard to explain, but remember that without glasses the object shows up double, as a pair. If it is well in front of the screen, it is a widely separated pair. The glasses make sure your right eye sees only the left image of the pair and vice versa, but the problem is that as the object moves toward the left edge of the screen, one image moves offscreen and disappears before the other does. So, as these objects approach the edge, you see them only with one eye. This actually happens in real life for objects behind a rectangular opening, as in a proscenium theatre stage, so you are used to it and it seems natural. But in real life it never happens for objects that are in front of a rectangular opening, and it is weird, unnatural, and fatiguing. The only way to solve it is to have a screen so huge you don't really see or notice the edges. This probably explains why IMAX 3D is relatively successful--it takes a giant screen to avoid the edge effect.
Together, these two problems mean that 3D cannot just make a scene look realistic and more natural--not unless you project it on a giant IMAX screen and sit exactly at the sweet spot. Under any other conditions, it looks goofy, unnatural, and distracting.
There's no way to fix it. Four people sitting in a four difference seats in a live theatre have eight eyes and views the scene from 8 slightly different points of view. Showing the person in the left seat of the fifth row the pair of images that would be seen by a person sitting in the center seat of the twentieth row isn't going to work. If there are four people sitting in your living room in four different chairs, they need to have four different pairs of image shown to them, a different one for each seating position.
In Siberia, reputedly, there were tribes in which the religious shamans ate fly agaric, a psychedelic mushroom, to attain a religious experience, and his followers would then drink his urine, which contained the psychedelic substance, in order to share in the experience.
The "world's fastest laser printer" prints about 60 ppm. At one page a second, 10,000 digits per page, it would take 500 million seconds or fifteen years to print it out. So one might hope to live to see all the known digits of pi printed out... unless those pesky computer scientists calculate more of them. But, really, 5 trillion digits ought to be enough for anybody.
And it would only require a million reams of paper.
Get hired for the skills you currently have, in a company that's small enough that it doesn't have a huge number of software engineers, and one that's a good company to work for and therefore doesn't have too much turnover.
Do good work and collaborate well with your colleagues. Be constantly on the lookout for any vaguely software-related task that turns up that's sort of a nuisance for them, that nobody has specific expertise in, but is too small to justify a full-time hire.. Don't worry if it's a marketable skill as long as it's a _new_ skill. Companies prefer the devil they know to the devil they don't know, and once they have confidence that you can do the tasks you say you can do, when you say "let me take care of it for you," they'll let you take care of it for them. If you keep acquiring new skills, sooner or later some of those new skills will be marketable skills.
When you're trying to get a job, it's very hard to get away with saying "Well, I don't know C++ but I'm sure I can pick it up because I know Smalltalk, which is another object-oriented language." When you're inside the company and they trust you, it is much easier to get assignments for which you can make the case that you may not be a perfect fit, but you're close enough.
So, you know who the perpetrators stole it from. What good does that do?
Even if you could find the dozen or hundred people who did it and "bring them to justice," as a President vowed we would do to Osama bin Laden--even if you could subject them to capital punishment... how would that compensate for what they had done, or deter others from doing it?
H. G. Wells wrote in 1914, in a novel called "The World Set Free," "Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands... the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city...."
"We broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution..." Darn straight. I sure wish more company management understood that.
You can document a little, you can document a lot, but you can't ever document everything. Every company relies on stuff in peoples' heads. Reading other peoples' code and then being able to ask them about it. Solving problems at the time they occur by talking to the right person for five minutes in the hallway, instead of writing thirty-page memos and scheduling a series of weekly hour-long meetings, which eight people attend so that two of them can talk.
The guy who says "Well, it worked well when we did it thus-and-such way on the Dash-Twenty-Twos."
Even more important, the guy who says, "Well, the reason we're doing it that way now is because of concerns X, Y, and Z that we had on the Dash Twenty-Twos, but those reasons don't apply any more.
No, the most important idea in the Scientific Revolution was NOT "the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics."
The important idea was to get off your butt and do stuff. As it says in the library of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, "Study nature, not books." Point telescopes at Jupiter. Dissect sea urchins. Scrap off the crud between filthy teeth and put it under a microscope. Test your theories against nature, not against scholastic debates with other scholars.
If the secret codes don't show that Plato was out there making observations and doing experiments, than I don't care a bit what brand of rhetorical claptrap he was spouting, no more than I care about the differences between homoousios and homoiousios.
Slashdot Mirror
The Times Square ball is a decorative and symbolic version of a practical time signaling system used at Greenwich Observatory, in which a large ball, visible from a long distance, was dropped rapidly under the force of gravity--not the slow, majestic descent of the Times Square ball. Apparently this system worked well because the ball could be released directly by electricity, and observed visually (no speed-of-sound delay). See the Wikipedia article time ball
LOL! But it has an obvious transcription error. "PC-compatibles?" No, to Pournelle they were always "PCompatibles." He was one of those people who loved merging coincident final and initial letters, TraveLodge style.
Just reviving the name means nothing. And I don't think there's a chance they will revive the spirit of BYTE.
Robert Tinney is the touchstone. BYTE went downhill the day they stopped running Tinney's lovely cover art and suddenly started putting big ad-like photos of computers on the cover.
Originally, Microsoft claimed Windows was portable to just about every significant processor available. Then they shifted direction and, lo and behold, everything but Intel dropped out, one by one. The company I worked for was seriously hurt when Microsoft dropped support for DEC's Alpha, just months after we had made a big marketing push and sold what for us was a large number of Alpha-based systems. Support for Windows on the PowerPC architecture went the same way.
And, of course, remember the ACE initiative, Windows running on a MIPS-based reference architecture? Microsoft sandbagged that, too.
Multiplatform support means very little if you are completely dependent on a vendor's whims (or strategic marketing objectives) as to what platforms are supported.
MOST of the stores I go to have single-line queueing, supermarkets being a conspicuous exception. Usually it's done by setting up rope barriers on stands, with a "line starts here" sign.
TSA security and airline check-in work with a single queue. Walt Disney World has been operating that way literally for decades.
And MOST of the places that don't, almost do: clerks at McDonald's, CVS, etc. are trained to say "I can help whoever's next" as soon as they are free, which has much the same effect.
If Microsoft understands what businesses need they don't need to talk about it, they just need to do it.
_Talk_ by companies about how they understand what businesses need and their competition doesn't is a handy smokescreen to explain away problems with their product or their product line. "Yes, it looks to _you_ like a steaming pile, but you, you understand nothing. _You_ are not part of our target market. You understand nothing about what businesses want. We do, and I can assure you real businesses don't want sugar, they want steaming piles."
If Google is failing, Google is failing. Microsoft doesn't need to talk about it. All they need to do is let Google fail. I care whether Google fails or not, but why should I care what Tom Rizzo thinks? And why should anyone at Microsoft lift a finger to influence perception, if "Google is failing" is the reality?
...but Microsoft kept working on it doggedly and tirelessly, refining it and improving it and never giving up, until today it has become the universally beloved Clippy.
I found Mary Roach's Packing for Mars to be fascinating, informative, and it made me ROFLMAO about every third page.
On page 296 she writes "Beer is a no-fly, because without gravity, carbonation bubbles don't rise to the surface. 'You just get a foamy froth,' says Bourland. He says Coke spent $450,000 developing a zero-gravity dispenser, only to be undone by biology. Since bubbles also don't rise to the top of a stomach, the astronauts had trouble burping. 'Often a burp is accompanied by a liquid spray,' Bourland adds."
So we must assume that Astronauts4Hire have either not read the book, or didn't want to let the facts spoil their publicity ploy.
Mary Roach described herself on NPR as "having the mind of a twelve-year-old boy." The book is indescribably marvelous to those of us who are similarly gifted with youthful imagination.
...I'm not interested.
All the goldbugs keep telling me that gold is money, regardless of what economists say or what governments decree. So if gold is money, why won't these machines work either way?
Your choice, put in fiat money and get a gold bar, or put in a gold bar and get some crisp green U. S. of A. "Cyberbit Certificates" (or whatever it is that backs the currency nowadays).
I'm sure the technical problems could be solved--it only accepts gold bars slabbed in polycarbonate with a barcode on them, or something. Methinks the real reason is that it would exposed the bid/asked spread.
I don't mind that Instant Search might be motivated by Google's self-interest. I don't mind that it may place technological burdens on the browser--you can always turn it off. I don't mind that not everyone will necessarily like it.
What I mind is that it is basically tasteless. It's mostly bling, and Google used to be so tasteful.
And what I mind even more is the "negative option" feature of it. For years, Google has been introducing new features on an opt-in basis, e.g. by showing them first in Google Labs. Gmail was originally invitation only!--and people have been opting in willlingly because the new features were obviously valuable. This is the first time they pushed something on me without my prior consent. That's bad.
And come to think of it, they introduced it with an extremely intrusive animated thingy--the Google "balls"--which were presented without any explanation. That's also a new departure, and a bad precedent.
My idea of efficiency is getting 100 results per page. I often need to look at more than the first ten results to find what I'm looking for, and if I'm really researching something I make go through several pages of 100 results each.
I wanted to give it Google Instant a fair try, but gave up when I found that there seems to be no way to keep my preference for 100 results per page while using Google Instant. Merely turning on Google Instant cuts the number of results down to ten. Worse yet, if you then turn it on, your results per page remains at ten for regular searches.
Needing to click five, ten, fifteen times is a dealbreaker for me.
I view this with alarm. Google, which used to be so clean, chaste, and functional, is going all glitzy. I can't stand their new image search, in which it is difficult to scroll through results because mousing over any thumbnail, even accidentally, cause it to zoom out... into some poorly-defined Java-jived windoid in which right-clicking "Copy image" does not work reliably.
Just like books destroyed our ability to memorize, slide rules destroyed our ability to calculate, and that newfangled mechanical music technology--what are is it called? yeah, harpsichords--destroyed our ability to sing.
Circa 1990 Gartner published numerical graphs showing exactly how OS/2 would become the predominant PC operating system within, IIRC, three or four years.
People will pay money for anyone claiming to make predictions, and the miracle is that no number of bad past predictions ever seems to affect the credibility of the fortunetellers.
It is so characteristic of Microsoft to think it is more important that the iPhone fail than that Microsoft succeed. And a mock-funeral is such a sad example of sympathetic magic, and reminiscent of efforts to think away the Great Depression.
During the Great Depression, people were constantly suggesting that the U.S. think its way out of the depression simply by adopting an optimistic attitude. People put up billboards saying "Wasn't the Depression terrible?" on the assumption that if people got in the habit of thinking of it in the past tense, it would go away. Radio stations literally and deliberately programmed only optimistic songs, which the songwriters churned out as their contribution to the economy.
Conspicuous among these efforts were funerals for Old Man Depression, literal funeral processions conducted in major cities. Here's an account of one, from the The New York Times, Sep. 12, 1930, p. 19:
VIRGINIANS DROWN TRADE SLUMP TRIO ...In bidding them begone, Governor Pollard said: "Old Man Depression, Old Lady Pessimism, and your unhappy daughter Miss Fortune, the United States is no place for you. You never had any real justification to be here anyhow. You were wraiths, unsubstantial. You lived upon mass timidity. You were created by unjustified fears and uncertainty.... ....the depths of pessimism to which the country sunk were by no means justified by the facts. You were the products of a mood, but American economic history shows that the mood of depression is very rarely of long duration. Your time has come. I consign you to a watery grave. Your doom is sealed. Old Man Hard Work, Lady Optimism, Little Johnny Payroll, and Miss Good Fortune are here to take your place. ...you put over a bit of bad psychology on the American people But you couldn't make it stick."
EFFIGIES WALK THE PLANK
I expect Microsoft's funerals for the iPhone to be every bit as effective.
1) Oops.
2) Mod parent up.
I wish them luck, but it is certainly not the first time it's been tried. In fact, Wikipedia originated as Nupedia, "an English-language Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content." After three years, perhaps 100 articles were close to completion. Wikipedia was originally conceived as a source of draft articles to be reworked into Nupedia.
The assignment of credit for Wikipedia between Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger is a matter of dispute. The two, sometimes described as co-founders, have squabbled publicly. Sanger is probably responsible for some of the cultural foundations of Wikipedia that have led to the surprisingly high degree of accuracy it has.
In 2006, Sanger, unhappy with Wikipedia's undervaluing of expertise, launched Citizendium, an expert-approved wiki-based encyclopedia, which is said to currently have "We currently have 14,722 articles at different stages of collaborative development, of which 148 are expert-approved."
I am not saying Stanford's experiment can't succeed. I'm not saying Citizendium has failed. But I know where I got for answers, and it's not Citizendium. (And it's not Knol, either). The traditional encyclopedia--Encyclopedia Britannica--was able to pay contributors, using money it earned by selling print volumes. The social ecology of free web encyclopedias is tricky. There is probably more to success than saying "We'll be just like Wikipedia, but we'll restrict participation to experts." Experts usually want to be paid in something more than ego-boosting.
I phrased that imprecisely. Within the constraints of stereoscopic 3D seen projected on a screen, I don't think it can be solved economically.
A living room probably doesn't have room for a big enough screen, and it's probably not affordable. A theatre that only had seating in the sweet spot would probably need to charge a higher premium than most people would pay. What you can't get around is that for whatever criterion you set as "good enough," a 3D movie will have a much smaller "good enough" seating area than a 2D movie.
Putting projectors, or tiny LED screens, on the glasses themselves has its own set of problems which may or may not get solved. One is weight. Another is resolution--one of the reasons why IMAX (or, for the oldsters, Cinerama) is a compelling experience is that the screen is so far way that you can't see the screen texture. And of course a third is cost. Giving four people four sets of polarizing glasses is dirt cheap. Giving them four sets of LCD-shutter glasses isn't as cheap. Giving four people eight iPod "retina display" screens is starting to get expensive.
It's not impossible to imagine solutions to the problems. What baffles me is that the current crop of 3D technologies doesn't seem to have solved them or to be trying to solve them--the industry just seems to be ignoring them. I wonder whether James Cameron has ever personally tried sitting in the rightmost seat of the front row of a showing of Avatar at his local cineplex?
Stereoscopic 3D has two very serious problems that have never been solved. The first is the "sweet spot" problem. Imagine a person standing so that they are lined up exactly with a flagpole. In real life, if you move to one side or the other, the relationship changes and you can now see the flagpole... and you no longer see the person exactly in full-face, but slightly in profile. In a stereoscope 3D presentation, the relationship between the screen elements cannot change. You will see the person exactly lined up with the flagpole no matter where you sit. This sounds trivial, but if you work out the consequences, it means that if a person is standing on a square-tiled floor, the tiles must become skewed into rhombuses if you move to the side. And the depth relationships change, too. The picture becomes squashed or flattened if you sit too close to the screen, elongated with exaggerated depth if you set too far away.
This means that a 3D picture only looks right when viewed from one, specific seating location, the sweet spot. And, worse yet, it only looks right if the cinematographer eschews the use of wide-angle or long lenses, but films the entire movie only with lenses of the single correct focal length, which means throwing away a century of film grammar.
The valid appeal of 3D is to add the realism of depth. But unless you are sitting exactly in the sweet spot and the cinematographer has used only one focal length for the whole film, you do not get realistic depth, you get warped geometrical distortion--and worse yet distortion that changes from one shot to the next.
Have you ever watched a movie from the extreme left seat in the front row? Unpleasant, isn't it? Well, 3D has the same problem, but greatly amplified.
You may not notice it consciously, but your brain has to work overtime to prevent you from noticing it, and it is fatiguing.
The second problem involves any object whose 3D placement is in front of the screen but is near the edges. It is a little hard to explain, but remember that without glasses the object shows up double, as a pair. If it is well in front of the screen, it is a widely separated pair. The glasses make sure your right eye sees only the left image of the pair and vice versa, but the problem is that as the object moves toward the left edge of the screen, one image moves offscreen and disappears before the other does. So, as these objects approach the edge, you see them only with one eye. This actually happens in real life for objects behind a rectangular opening, as in a proscenium theatre stage, so you are used to it and it seems natural. But in real life it never happens for objects that are in front of a rectangular opening, and it is weird, unnatural, and fatiguing. The only way to solve it is to have a screen so huge you don't really see or notice the edges. This probably explains why IMAX 3D is relatively successful--it takes a giant screen to avoid the edge effect.
Together, these two problems mean that 3D cannot just make a scene look realistic and more natural--not unless you project it on a giant IMAX screen and sit exactly at the sweet spot. Under any other conditions, it looks goofy, unnatural, and distracting.
There's no way to fix it. Four people sitting in a four difference seats in a live theatre have eight eyes and views the scene from 8 slightly different points of view. Showing the person in the left seat of the fifth row the pair of images that would be seen by a person sitting in the center seat of the twentieth row isn't going to work. If there are four people sitting in your living room in four different chairs, they need to have four different pairs of image shown to them, a different one for each seating position.
In Siberia, reputedly, there were tribes in which the religious shamans ate fly agaric, a psychedelic mushroom, to attain a religious experience, and his followers would then drink his urine, which contained the psychedelic substance, in order to share in the experience.
Thanks for the information.
The "world's fastest laser printer" prints about 60 ppm. At one page a second, 10,000 digits per page, it would take 500 million seconds or fifteen years to print it out. So one might hope to live to see all the known digits of pi printed out... unless those pesky computer scientists calculate more of them. But, really, 5 trillion digits ought to be enough for anybody.
And it would only require a million reams of paper.
Get hired for the skills you currently have, in a company that's small enough that it doesn't have a huge number of software engineers, and one that's a good company to work for and therefore doesn't have too much turnover.
Do good work and collaborate well with your colleagues. Be constantly on the lookout for any vaguely software-related task that turns up that's sort of a nuisance for them, that nobody has specific expertise in, but is too small to justify a full-time hire.. Don't worry if it's a marketable skill as long as it's a _new_ skill. Companies prefer the devil they know to the devil they don't know, and once they have confidence that you can do the tasks you say you can do, when you say "let me take care of it for you," they'll let you take care of it for them. If you keep acquiring new skills, sooner or later some of those new skills will be marketable skills.
When you're trying to get a job, it's very hard to get away with saying "Well, I don't know C++ but I'm sure I can pick it up because I know Smalltalk, which is another object-oriented language." When you're inside the company and they trust you, it is much easier to get assignments for which you can make the case that you may not be a perfect fit, but you're close enough.
So, you know who the perpetrators stole it from. What good does that do?
Even if you could find the dozen or hundred people who did it and "bring them to justice," as a President vowed we would do to Osama bin Laden--even if you could subject them to capital punishment... how would that compensate for what they had done, or deter others from doing it?
H. G. Wells wrote in 1914, in a novel called "The World Set Free," "Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands... the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city...."
"We broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution..." Darn straight. I sure wish more company management understood that.
You can document a little, you can document a lot, but you can't ever document everything. Every company relies on stuff in peoples' heads. Reading other peoples' code and then being able to ask them about it. Solving problems at the time they occur by talking to the right person for five minutes in the hallway, instead of writing thirty-page memos and scheduling a series of weekly hour-long meetings, which eight people attend so that two of them can talk.
The guy who says "Well, it worked well when we did it thus-and-such way on the Dash-Twenty-Twos."
Even more important, the guy who says, "Well, the reason we're doing it that way now is because of concerns X, Y, and Z that we had on the Dash Twenty-Twos, but those reasons don't apply any more.
No, the most important idea in the Scientific Revolution was NOT "the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics."
The important idea was to get off your butt and do stuff. As it says in the library of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, "Study nature, not books." Point telescopes at Jupiter. Dissect sea urchins. Scrap off the crud between filthy teeth and put it under a microscope. Test your theories against nature, not against scholastic debates with other scholars.
If the secret codes don't show that Plato was out there making observations and doing experiments, than I don't care a bit what brand of rhetorical claptrap he was spouting, no more than I care about the differences between homoousios and homoiousios.