Actually, I believe the eventual plan is to use a tiny mirror on an arm to project the images. I even heard tell that someone was working on a pair of eyeglasses with a fiber-optic feed to a center-mounted mirror... all this is hearsay and press release/vapor ware, but I'm pretty sure the bulky prototype will be refined some.
For more info, BackStage at LaserFX (www.laserfx.com) has tons of information and technical documents on laser safety, and includes a couple whitepapers about this very subject.
Actually, the human eye is very sensitive to low levels of light and can discriminate anywhere from 2-9 quanta (the jury is still out on the exact number); anyways, a very small number of photons is all that is required.
Actually, this isn't such a big problem as you would think. First off, the laser itself is very low power... secondly, the Center for Disease and Radiological Health has guidelines for any lasers that will be accesible to the public when in use, and this includes direct eye-scanning techniques. Just a quick review:
Total power must be no greater than 40 uW (micro-Watts... that's.04 mW, compared to 1-5 mW laser pointers)
The beam must be continuous and not pulsed
The full exposure allowed is some awfully low value, something like.1 mW / cm2
If any of the scanning equipment fails (the tiny mirrors that move the laser beam back and forth across your retina), there must be a safety interlock that shuts the beam off
The safety interlock must be independant of the control software so a bug in the software doesn't result in a problem
The safety interlock must operate within 75% of the mirror settle-time. Once the mirrors stop moving, they take a discrete amount of time to settle on one point. The safety interlock must completely dampen the beam before 75% of this time goes by; if the mirrors settle in 4 picoseconds, the interlock engages in 3
So, all in all, if they have a CDRH variance (and you have to have one to sell laser equipment), they're pretty safe. These values are all very conservative; the same regulations specify that laser pointers are not allowed to be used for commercial applications within 5 miles of an airport, because of the chance of accidently hitting and airplane and distracting the pilot. I've applied for a variance myself as a laser entertainer, and let me tell you; they're fairly complete in checking on everything... that's why most clubs don't have their laser effects anywhere near their audience... too difficult to get the equipment certified for that.
Actually, for the windows crowd, this is equivalent to tarring up a bunch of JPGs... no size improvements, but what you do get is an easily transportable package, like a photo album or some such item...
Actualy, I wouldn't call this a spoiler for the movie at all. Too much got changed in the translation. Ugh. The only worse book-to-movie change I've seen in the last decade was Starship Troopers, which actually changed GENRE's from a coming-of-age to an aciton-adventure/romance.
Most of what you said was true a couple years ago, but it's been changing, mostly due to the entertainment industry (get to that in a second...)
Green DPSS lasers (frequency doubled solid-state, as opposed to dye or ion gas lasers) use a very powerful infra-red (either 800 nm or 1.3 um) laser diode, usually 250 mW or higher... fire that at a Yag crystal or rod. The Yag crystal absorbs the infra-red light and lases at 1048 nm. For those who don't know frequencies, 400 is a deep blue, 550 is green, and 650 is deep red. You can see a powerful enough 750 nm beam, but most of the light is invisible.
Anyways, the Yag crystal lases at 1048 and a KDP crystal in the optic resonator doubles the frequency, giving a wavelength of 524 nm. Though there are some loses in the KDP, this is more then made up for by the efficiency of the resonating cavity itself; one of the mirrors is totally reflective to 1048 nm, but totally transparent to 524 nm... any green light passes straight through it.
Most DPSS solutions these days are made for entertainment. Someone figured out that there was a way to take DPSS and make it Continuous Wave (CW), thereby making it suitable for laser light shows. This was more expensive than ion gas lasers at the time (though that's not true any more), but was still attractive because its a much simpler design, has no moving parts, does not require expensive and difficult to maintain cooling, and can be housed in a much smaller box.
As far as cost... if one looks carefully, one can usually find a 5 mW model for between $100-$200. Watts per dollar goes up sharply, I think hitting a peak at 60 mW somewhere around $400-500.
If anyone reading this wants to know more, or acquire one of these... e-mail me at merlin_jim on hotmail.
A shame too, since it doesn't cost them anything to have quite a few more of their fans playing the beta.
Actually, the cost is quite serious. By having fans play a pre-release beta on a quality-unknown server, they stand to impact their brand quite heavily. In addition, none of the pirate beta testers have signed an NDA, so the only way Blizzard has to limit the risk exposure to their brand is to shut off the BNetD server. I'm sure the wonderful people at Blizzard were as upset at this point as anyone else, but it was something they had to do to protect the Warcraft III brand and ensure that they can actually sell some copies of it next year...
Actually, Microsoft openly admits that they use the term cluster for what you would call a server farm. Quote from this page at Microsoft:
Microsoft supports all the current commonly used clustering strategies. These uses include high availability, load balancing, and high-performance computational clusters
I must now put on the traditional monkey hat of shame, for the naysayers are quite correct. There are TWO microsoft products called clustering. One is used by Windows 2000 Advanced Server to do load balancing, and is, in fact, split into two parts, the first called Clustering, the second Network Load Balancing... see this page, which includes the statement "Both [of the Windows 2000 Advanced Server] Clustering technologies are backwards compatible with their Windows NT Server 4.0 predecessors". The other is High Performance Clustering (HPC), in its current form called Computational Clustering Technical Preview (CCTP), which I am certain has nothing to do with the previous Clustering technology... I doubt it was available for Windows NT 4.0, among other things (thus the Technical Preview status).
Notes for any and all interested in this; it's a technical preview, which any other company would call a pre-Beta or an Alpha release. The only way anyone sane would use this in a production system would be as an Early Adoption Partner...
We run a MS cluster here. VERY big app... so big, I am loathe to name figures, because that would identify to MS just who is talking here...
But, we use MS clustering for our web app. Our setup is that we have a database server with 4 procs, and a growing array of web servers with 1 proc each, all of which use disk space on a SAN. W2K clustering manages the load balancing as well as allocating disk space out of the SAN to virtual partitions as needed. The original poster is correct; MS clustering is for load balancing, not computation. I have seen many times Microsoft sales reps don't have a clue of what they're trying to sell; they're just told from on high to replace Linux with Microsoft wherever they can. I think this is clearly a case of that.
My advice? Ask the sales rep to demonstrate how MS clustering will solve a common comp-sci problem with more MIPS than each box alone has. Point out that you're not running a web server or any such service on these boxes, but that they're for raw computation. Even better, see if he'll let you talk to a technician on how W2K clustering can meet your 'unique' (at least to MS) needs.
Now, for everyone else... Don't get me wrong. W2K clustering is a great technology for building highly performant, highly reliable, highly scalable applications quickly and easily. But it scales in the direction of millions of users, not millions of computations.
Seems pretty simple to me... 20 years is a long enough time that noone can profit immediately from a copyright holder's death. If it were 20 seconds, or say, 6 months, then we'd have a black industry start to appear, whose business model would be:
Knock off author of famous and profitable work
Print up 1M+ copies of work and store in warehouse for 6 months
Undersell current publisher and make tidy profit on the side.
Well, I was going to compliment Katz on actually writing a meaningful article without totally devolving into marketing speak while doing it.
Then when I went to check it out, no-wrap was on so I couldn't read it!
Oh well, Katz, keep it up. If the rest of the story is anything like the intro paragraph, congratulations. You've made at least one/.er decide to keep you on the homepage.
I already saw one reply on this, but thought I'd add my own two cents;
Potatos are emphatically not toxic raw. Neither are tomatos, either. Yeah, I know, everyone eats tomatos raw. But that wasn't true at the early parts of last millenium.
However, there are vegatables which are incredibly dangerous uncooked... red kidney beans can be fatal in small quantities uncooked, for instance.
I couldn't find a comprehensive guide online; anyone else have a good link?
For instance, even if we develop a consistent theory of Quantum Gravity you'd never use it to explain how the orbit of Mercury differs from the predictions of Newtonian
celestial mechanics, GR does this with as much precision as we'll ever be able to measure.
How, exactly, do you know that to be true if we aren't currently able to measure that accurately? Not that I'm disagreeing, but as one who obviously considers himself to be a scientist, I would think you would be a little more wary of making unproven statements like that... one must keep an open mind if progress is to continue
The "quantum gravity" that Mssrs. Hawking, Thorne, etc. are looking for (and is likely to revolutionize both science and technology in many fundamental ways) is not this. What they're looking for is large-scale manifestation of real quantum gravity particles... in the form of gravity waves.
What this experiment measured was the small-scale effect of VIRTUAL quantum gravity particles. The particles themselves were still not detectable.
Why all the hub-bub? Because now that virtual quantum gravity particles are being characterized, it might be easier to build dectectors for real particles.
Or to find out *some* data about real particles from this data. I doubt we'll see a full characterization, however.
I wouldn't have such a big beef if that's what they said they were going after, but they never explicitly say that's a problem. They probably don't want to admit that 802.11 and other wireless technologies tend to be very easy to hack, otherwise this wouldn't be a problem at all. As a result, they only mention piracy within the home. I looked for direct quotes, the closest I could get was:
At stake here, said Leon Husson, executive vice president of consumer businesses at Philips Semiconductors, is the "free-floating" copyrighted content that will soon be "redistributed" or "rebroadcast" to different TV sets throughout a home by consumers using wireless networking technologies like IEEE802.11.
I wonder how close the above paraphrase is to what he actually said... if he used the phrase throughout a home I would be VERY concerned with what this means for fair use, as I mentioned in my original post...
This is a huge problem. You know, I have friends who are all the time buying 802.11 gear ($200+), and content encoders/decoders ($100/each and requires a PC to run) just so they can broadcast cable from the living room to the bedroom.
Oh wait, no that was a dream world. Sorry, I'm just not seeing how wireless piracy is a big problem, especially since, by focusing on wireless piracy WITHIN the home, there's an implicit assumption that the transmitter of the content has the rights to view it in the first place... otherwise, the focus wouldn't be in-home transmission, but rather how the content got to the home in the first place...
Re:Actor hopes to do DVD commentary track
on
Star Trek TNG DVDs
·
· Score: 3
That is where you are wrong my friend! The actor seeks work joke will never be old!!!
Ummm... just because MS is bad in some people's eyes doesn't mean you can't do serious work on it. WTF do you mean I'm not an ecomm consultant just because I selected a MS environment as being best fit for some of my clients? Though I can't reveal individual clients that I worked on that use this sort of configuration, many big e-commerce sites are based on exactly this kind of environment, for example radioshack.com, dell.com, and starbucks.com.
As far as AD being not LDAP v 3 compliant, I believe I already mentioned that. Also, it is a misnomer to say that AD is based on Access. Microsoft axed the Access data engine a few years ago, maybe you've heard? It is far more accurate to say that Access is based on SQL Server and that AD is also based on SQL Server.
I'm an e-commerce consultant, and I've been surprised in the last 2 years or so the vast number of LDAP-based installations I've seen in all sorts of e-business.
Though not heavily deployed in the enterprise, ESPECIALLY *nix, basically due to the very issues you mention (few admin tools, high complexity), it is heavily used on the web and in Microsoft-centric environments. Active Directory almost follows the LDAPv3 protocols (two non-standard areas are both related to schema implementation. The variations are well documented and do not drastically effect applications)
My admin tool of choice? Sad to say, it is the AD administrator. Second admin tool of choice? Microsoft Site Server 3.0, Commerce Edition's Membership Directory Manager MMC snap-in. Both are Microsoft Management Console snap-ins, but if you can get around that they work alright. The MSS3CE version is even fully LDAPv3 compliant, so you can use it with other directories, too. It also comes with a web interface you can use.
As far as non-MS tools? Haven't seen a one worth it's salt, though a couple of my co-workers recommend talking to the NetIQ folks if that's your bend...
Thanks for the explanation... personally, I'm with you. I strongly feel that if you want to give software away free, well that's your business. It's part of a capatalist economy that you should be able to do whatever you want; if your competitors want to charge money for their product, then they can innovate. Unless the product just isn't worth paying money for, in which case they're doomed anyways...
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm... someone who uses lasers in the entertainment field. The application of which commonly being known as "Laser Light Shows"
Actually, I believe the eventual plan is to use a tiny mirror on an arm to project the images. I even heard tell that someone was working on a pair of eyeglasses with a fiber-optic feed to a center-mounted mirror... all this is hearsay and press release/vapor ware, but I'm pretty sure the bulky prototype will be refined some.
The CDRH (Center of Diseases and Radiological Health) has guidelines on what is perfectly safe for this kind of thing; see my previous post at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=29714&cid=3189 593
For more info, BackStage at LaserFX (www.laserfx.com) has tons of information and technical documents on laser safety, and includes a couple whitepapers about this very subject.
Actually, the human eye is very sensitive to low levels of light and can discriminate anywhere from 2-9 quanta (the jury is still out on the exact number); anyways, a very small number of photons is all that is required.
9 593
The CDRH (Center of Diseases and Radiological Health) has guidelines on what is perfectly safe for this kind of thing; see my previous post at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=29714&cid=318
So, all in all, if they have a CDRH variance (and you have to have one to sell laser equipment), they're pretty safe. These values are all very conservative; the same regulations specify that laser pointers are not allowed to be used for commercial applications within 5 miles of an airport, because of the chance of accidently hitting and airplane and distracting the pilot. I've applied for a variance myself as a laser entertainer, and let me tell you; they're fairly complete in checking on everything... that's why most clubs don't have their laser effects anywhere near their audience... too difficult to get the equipment certified for that.
Yeah... I realized that after the site un-slashdotted. :)
I just can't believe someone modded my comment as informative!!!
Actually, for the windows crowd, this is equivalent to tarring up a bunch of JPGs... no size improvements, but what you do get is an easily transportable package, like a photo album or some such item...
Actualy, I wouldn't call this a spoiler for the movie at all. Too much got changed in the translation. Ugh. The only worse book-to-movie change I've seen in the last decade was Starship Troopers, which actually changed GENRE's from a coming-of-age to an aciton-adventure/romance.
Quick corrections (I'm a laser specialist)...
Most of what you said was true a couple years ago, but it's been changing, mostly due to the entertainment industry (get to that in a second...)
Green DPSS lasers (frequency doubled solid-state, as opposed to dye or ion gas lasers) use a very powerful infra-red (either 800 nm or 1.3 um) laser diode, usually 250 mW or higher... fire that at a Yag crystal or rod. The Yag crystal absorbs the infra-red light and lases at 1048 nm. For those who don't know frequencies, 400 is a deep blue, 550 is green, and 650 is deep red. You can see a powerful enough 750 nm beam, but most of the light is invisible.
Anyways, the Yag crystal lases at 1048 and a KDP crystal in the optic resonator doubles the frequency, giving a wavelength of 524 nm. Though there are some loses in the KDP, this is more then made up for by the efficiency of the resonating cavity itself; one of the mirrors is totally reflective to 1048 nm, but totally transparent to 524 nm... any green light passes straight through it.
Most DPSS solutions these days are made for entertainment. Someone figured out that there was a way to take DPSS and make it Continuous Wave (CW), thereby making it suitable for laser light shows. This was more expensive than ion gas lasers at the time (though that's not true any more), but was still attractive because its a much simpler design, has no moving parts, does not require expensive and difficult to maintain cooling, and can be housed in a much smaller box.
As far as cost... if one looks carefully, one can usually find a 5 mW model for between $100-$200. Watts per dollar goes up sharply, I think hitting a peak at 60 mW somewhere around $400-500.
If anyone reading this wants to know more, or acquire one of these... e-mail me at merlin_jim on hotmail.
A shame too, since it doesn't cost them anything to have quite a few more of their fans playing the beta.
Actually, the cost is quite serious. By having fans play a pre-release beta on a quality-unknown server, they stand to impact their brand quite heavily. In addition, none of the pirate beta testers have signed an NDA, so the only way Blizzard has to limit the risk exposure to their brand is to shut off the BNetD server. I'm sure the wonderful people at Blizzard were as upset at this point as anyone else, but it was something they had to do to protect the Warcraft III brand and ensure that they can actually sell some copies of it next year...
Actually, Microsoft openly admits that they use the term cluster for what you would call a server farm. Quote from this page at Microsoft:
Microsoft supports all the current commonly used clustering strategies. These uses include high availability, load balancing, and high-performance computational clusters
I must now put on the traditional monkey hat of shame, for the naysayers are quite correct. There are TWO microsoft products called clustering. One is used by Windows 2000 Advanced Server to do load balancing, and is, in fact, split into two parts, the first called Clustering, the second Network Load Balancing... see this page, which includes the statement "Both [of the Windows 2000 Advanced Server] Clustering technologies are backwards compatible with their Windows NT Server 4.0 predecessors". The other is High Performance Clustering (HPC), in its current form called Computational Clustering Technical Preview (CCTP), which I am certain has nothing to do with the previous Clustering technology... I doubt it was available for Windows NT 4.0, among other things (thus the Technical Preview status).
Notes for any and all interested in this; it's a technical preview, which any other company would call a pre-Beta or an Alpha release. The only way anyone sane would use this in a production system would be as an Early Adoption Partner...
Hello,
We run a MS cluster here. VERY big app... so big, I am loathe to name figures, because that would identify to MS just who is talking here...
But, we use MS clustering for our web app. Our setup is that we have a database server with 4 procs, and a growing array of web servers with 1 proc each, all of which use disk space on a SAN. W2K clustering manages the load balancing as well as allocating disk space out of the SAN to virtual partitions as needed. The original poster is correct; MS clustering is for load balancing, not computation. I have seen many times Microsoft sales reps don't have a clue of what they're trying to sell; they're just told from on high to replace Linux with Microsoft wherever they can. I think this is clearly a case of that.
My advice? Ask the sales rep to demonstrate how MS clustering will solve a common comp-sci problem with more MIPS than each box alone has. Point out that you're not running a web server or any such service on these boxes, but that they're for raw computation. Even better, see if he'll let you talk to a technician on how W2K clustering can meet your 'unique' (at least to MS) needs.
Now, for everyone else... Don't get me wrong. W2K clustering is a great technology for building highly performant, highly reliable, highly scalable applications quickly and easily. But it scales in the direction of millions of users, not millions of computations.
Well, I was going to compliment Katz on actually writing a meaningful article without totally devolving into marketing speak while doing it.
/.er decide to keep you on the homepage.
Then when I went to check it out, no-wrap was on so I couldn't read it!
Oh well, Katz, keep it up. If the rest of the story is anything like the intro paragraph, congratulations. You've made at least one
Guys, congratulations. As I always say to my buddies, any girl that helps you build a MAME cab is a keeper. :)
Best of wishes. Good job on the sappily romantic... Dork, you made me cry... hope that one day, my girlfriend responds in about the same way.
So, last question... webcast the wedding for all of us here at slashdot???
I already saw one reply on this, but thought I'd add my own two cents;
Potatos are emphatically not toxic raw. Neither are tomatos, either. Yeah, I know, everyone eats tomatos raw. But that wasn't true at the early parts of last millenium.
However, there are vegatables which are incredibly dangerous uncooked... red kidney beans can be fatal in small quantities uncooked, for instance.
I couldn't find a comprehensive guide online; anyone else have a good link?
Not to be a troll, but...
For instance, even if we develop a consistent theory of Quantum Gravity you'd never use it to explain how the orbit of Mercury differs from the predictions of Newtonian
celestial mechanics, GR does this with as much precision as we'll ever be able to measure.
How, exactly, do you know that to be true if we aren't currently able to measure that accurately? Not that I'm disagreeing, but as one who obviously considers himself to be a scientist, I would think you would be a little more wary of making unproven statements like that... one must keep an open mind if progress is to continue
The "quantum gravity" that Mssrs. Hawking, Thorne, etc. are looking for (and is likely to revolutionize both science and technology in many fundamental ways) is not this. What they're looking for is large-scale manifestation of real quantum gravity particles... in the form of gravity waves.
What this experiment measured was the small-scale effect of VIRTUAL quantum gravity particles. The particles themselves were still not detectable.
Why all the hub-bub? Because now that virtual quantum gravity particles are being characterized, it might be easier to build dectectors for real particles.
Or to find out *some* data about real particles from this data. I doubt we'll see a full characterization, however.
I wouldn't have such a big beef if that's what they said they were going after, but they never explicitly say that's a problem. They probably don't want to admit that 802.11 and other wireless technologies tend to be very easy to hack, otherwise this wouldn't be a problem at all. As a result, they only mention piracy within the home. I looked for direct quotes, the closest I could get was:
At stake here, said Leon Husson, executive vice president of consumer businesses at Philips Semiconductors, is the "free-floating" copyrighted content that will soon be "redistributed" or "rebroadcast" to different TV sets throughout a home by consumers using wireless networking technologies like IEEE802.11.
I wonder how close the above paraphrase is to what he actually said... if he used the phrase throughout a home I would be VERY concerned with what this means for fair use, as I mentioned in my original post...
This is a huge problem. You know, I have friends who are all the time buying 802.11 gear ($200+), and content encoders/decoders ($100/each and requires a PC to run) just so they can broadcast cable from the living room to the bedroom.
Oh wait, no that was a dream world. Sorry, I'm just not seeing how wireless piracy is a big problem, especially since, by focusing on wireless piracy WITHIN the home, there's an implicit assumption that the transmitter of the content has the rights to view it in the first place... otherwise, the focus wouldn't be in-home transmission, but rather how the content got to the home in the first place...
That is where you are wrong my friend! The actor seeks work joke will never be old!!!
Sorry, just had to pipe in real quick.
Ummm... just because MS is bad in some people's eyes doesn't mean you can't do serious work on it. WTF do you mean I'm not an ecomm consultant just because I selected a MS environment as being best fit for some of my clients? Though I can't reveal individual clients that I worked on that use this sort of configuration, many big e-commerce sites are based on exactly this kind of environment, for example radioshack.com, dell.com, and starbucks.com.
As far as AD being not LDAP v 3 compliant, I believe I already mentioned that. Also, it is a misnomer to say that AD is based on Access. Microsoft axed the Access data engine a few years ago, maybe you've heard? It is far more accurate to say that Access is based on SQL Server and that AD is also based on SQL Server.
I'm an e-commerce consultant, and I've been surprised in the last 2 years or so the vast number of LDAP-based installations I've seen in all sorts of e-business.
Though not heavily deployed in the enterprise, ESPECIALLY *nix, basically due to the very issues you mention (few admin tools, high complexity), it is heavily used on the web and in Microsoft-centric environments. Active Directory almost follows the LDAPv3 protocols (two non-standard areas are both related to schema implementation. The variations are well documented and do not drastically effect applications)
My admin tool of choice? Sad to say, it is the AD administrator. Second admin tool of choice? Microsoft Site Server 3.0, Commerce Edition's Membership Directory Manager MMC snap-in. Both are Microsoft Management Console snap-ins, but if you can get around that they work alright. The MSS3CE version is even fully LDAPv3 compliant, so you can use it with other directories, too. It also comes with a web interface you can use.
As far as non-MS tools? Haven't seen a one worth it's salt, though a couple of my co-workers recommend talking to the NetIQ folks if that's your bend...
Thanks for the explanation... personally, I'm with you. I strongly feel that if you want to give software away free, well that's your business. It's part of a capatalist economy that you should be able to do whatever you want; if your competitors want to charge money for their product, then they can innovate. Unless the product just isn't worth paying money for, in which case they're doomed anyways...