The difference is VRML sucked. OpenGL doesn't suck.
If you want more detail: VRML was based on a scene graph. Scene graph APIs have proven over time to be the Wrong Way to do real-time graphics. They are complex to implement, inflexible, and slow. The alternative is immediate mode rendering APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D, which are fast, flexible, and relatively simple to implement, and have been very successful. For an analogy to 2D graphics, VRML is like SVG, while OpenGL is like the Canvas element in HTML 5.
The difference in quality you saw was due to the LCD panel, not the backlight. There's a very wide range of quality in LCD panels, and the make of the display does not necessarily indicate the quality. Manufacturers usually buy their panels from third parties, and in some cases even displays with the same model number can have different panels.
Even good LCD panels have nowhere near enough dynamic range to be properly called "HDR", let alone a 5 million to one contrast ratio.
I didn't mean that it would be *actually* as bright as the sun; that would obviously be dangerous:-) There's a big difference between "uncomfortable to stare at" and "as bright as the sun".
Also, though defining HDR solely in terms of contrast ratios is pedantically correct, it isn't actually useful since any emissive display that can turn off completely has an infinite contrast ratio when viewed in darkness. I wouldn't call such a display "HDR" unless its peak brightness level at least matched other common displays.
The whole point of the LED backlights is that different parts of the backlight can be individually turned on and off.
It turns out that this doesn't work because LED-backlit HDTVs use a row of LEDs along one side of the display shining through a diffuser. (On some laptop panels you can actually see alternating dark and light spots along the edge where the LEDs are.) The actual point of LED backlights is that they are more efficient and reliable than CCFL tubes, and can adjust in brightness continuously and instantly.
Now, there are HDR displays that work in exactly the way you describe, but you won't find them at Best Buy yet because they cost $50,000.
The simplest, most trivial web service ever to become virally popular, that any decent web developer could bang out in a week, is being sued for patent infringement. If this doesn't prove the patent system is bullshit, nothing will.
Completely incorrect. A device infringes a patent if it fulfills the claims of that patent, regardless of whether it's been further improved. You can file a separate patent for the improvements, and in that case the device will be covered by *both* patents.
That's "dynamic" (i.e. fake) contrast. A display with dynamic contrast can turn down its backlight when displaying a black screen, which artificially increases the ratio between the brightness of a white screen and a black screen. However, that trick can't be used when displaying an image that's half white and half black, so the "real" contrast ratio you see most of the time is much, much lower.
Backlight brightness adjustment is a good feature but it doesn't compare to real high dynamic range. It's easy to see that the "dynamic" contrast ratio is a meaningless measurement: all you have to do is completely turn off the backlight when displaying a black screen and your dynamic contrast ratio is infinite! A real high dynamic range display could display an image of the sun as seen from space where the sun was so bright you wouldn't want to look directly at it, but space itself would be so dark that in a dark room you wouldn't be able to perceive the edges of the display.
I really don't think the hardware is good enough yet. To run smoothly and efficiently robots will need joint motors that are springy and compliant just like human muscles. All of the robot limbs I've ever seen are far too stiff (with the possible exception of BigDog's legs). Just look at this guy's head and arms shake while he's running; there are huge shock forces being transmitted from the feet directly up to the torso through all those stiff joints. Not only is that likely bad for the robot, it means that tons of energy is being wasted. For example, instead of letting the knee swing forward naturally during a step this robot has to run its servos to force the knee to rotate forward.
The reason BellKor is still first is that the published scores are irrelevant. The scores that matter for the prize are based on an unpublished data set known only to Netflix (to prevent people submitting answers that are optimized for the challenge data and work poorly on everything else). On this secret data set, BellKor's algorithm apparently performs better than The Ensemble's.
Wait, photosynthesis is only 15% efficient? You mean photovoltaic panels are already more efficient than plants? I had always assumed that nature had done much better than that.
Don't worry, DoD will be exempt, along with elected officials (for "security"). We couldn't have mere citizens finding out what their government is doing, now, could we?
The Natal tech isn't a simple infrared camera viewing a projected grid, it's actually even cooler than that. Natal uses an infrared laser that fires a picosecond-long pulse once per frame. The camera includes infrared-sensing pixels alongside the normal RGB pixels, but the infrared ones are different: instead of measuring the intensity of the infrared light, they measure how long it takes the infrared light from the laser to reflect off of the scene and arrive at the camera, to a precision of tens of picoseconds. Since we know the speed of light we can calculate the distance from the camera to each object in the scene from this time measurement, to about 1cm accuracy.
The whole thing is similar to radar; in fact one name for this technology is LIDAR. Laser rangefinders work like this too; Natal basically has a laser rangefinder for each pixel of its camera. The coolest part of the whole thing is that none of this tech is expensive. Natal and devices like it shouldn't be any more expensive than your bog-standard webcam once they are manufactured in volume.
This technology is going to change the world in a few years. Not only will it enable cool games and Minority Report-style human-computer interfaces, but it will finally solve the computer vision problems of robotics, enabling autonomous pathfinding robots to navigate the real world successfully for the first time.
Unfortunately this will probably be the post-cable model for video. Your ISP will sign contracts with video providers and the price will be implicitly included in your bill with no ability to opt-out or choose your own video providers "a la carte" without switching ISPs. This "guaranteed revenue" model is just too profitable for the ISPs or the media companies to give up.
If the ISPs had any sense they'd implement their own open payment system where third parties could charge consumers via the ISP and have the charges appear on the consumer's bill, bypassing the Visa/MasterCard payment service cartel. That way the ISPs could still get their cut (it would be a gold mine for them), but consumers would actually have choice in their service providers.
This is much more than an ordinary lithium battery, and the headline is quite appropriate. Internal combustion engines are in a very real sense "fueled by air", as are our own bodies, and using the same principle to extend the life of batteries without increasing weight or volume is a very good idea. It's not totally unprecedented, either, as zinc-air batteries do this; the innovation is making them rechargeable.
Personally, I knew JJ Abrams was no Michael Bay when the orbital drill, after being destroyed, fell into San Francisco Bay *right next* to the Golden Gate bridge, but somehow missed subjecting us to a gratuitous and cliched effects sequence of the destruction of San Francisco's most famous landmark, preferring instead to get on with the story.
When I said robot cars would be more efficient I meant in total energy use of the system. The peak carrying capacity of a train is obviously going to be higher, but the train can only run at full capacity a small fraction of the time, on a small fraction of the total track length of the system. Outside of a city's downtown area, and even in downtown areas during non-peak times, light rail trains run at far below peak capacity which drags down the efficiency of the whole system. If you try to increase efficiency by reducing service then you make the system less useful and ridership goes down.
Due to these realities of rail service, battery powered cars with regenerative braking will use less energy overall to transport the same people. As for gridlock problems, robot cars should be at least somewhat better at handling them than human-driven cars. They will respond more quickly allowing them to pack more closely together. Packs of them will accelerate/decelerate as a unit almost like a train. They won't commit minor traffic violations and they will get in fewer accidents than human drivers. They will have perfect knowledge of traffic conditions via wireless Internet, and so will be able to route around disruptions and collaboratively load-balance different routes. They will be able to travel on their own to find parking, so cities will remove street parking in favor of centralized garages and use the space for more lanes. Lanes may also be made narrower.
When you start thinking about all the consequences self-driving robotic cars could have, it becomes apparent that as soon as they are available they are going to displace nearly all other forms of transporation.
The dinosaur is not the automobile, it's the internal combustion engine. Battery-powered cars are the future. Furthermore, within 20 years we'll have the technology to make self-driving robotic electric cars, which will be both more convenient and more efficient than mass transit for short to medium length trips. Existing mass transit systems will become obsolete.
I certainly do agree that Kirk's practically instant ascent to Captain was ridiculous, but Pike was plenty old, First Officer Spock was older than the rest and I think it's plausible that the other bridge positions (navigator, helmsman, communications officer) would be filled by younger officers.
The kobayashi maru scene was too over the top. Why advertise that you're cheating?
This story was Trek canon already, it's just being retold.
How could Spock see Vulcan from that Ice planet, but it has no effect on that ice planet at all? What happend to these black holes afterwards?
Well since they would have the same mass as the things they devoured, I imagine they would continue along in their orbits. Black holes don't magically have more gravity than other things of the same mass, it's just more concentrated. Although the radiation released as all the matter fell into the hole would probably destroy all life in the solar system.
Why, if they could beam over to the romulan ship, did they not beam over a few photon torpedoes?
They wanted to save Captain Pike.
But now there is no crew available except a bunch of trainees.
You think a crew of 50-year-olds like the other Trek movies makes more sense? Actual armies and navies are filled with guys in their 20s and even teens; why not Starfleet?
Why didn't the federation use that 25 year gap to attack the Romulans or at least ask WTH after the first ship was destroyed?
Who says they didn't? We didn't see what happened during that time. But the Romulans would be as clueless as the Federation, since they weren't in contact with Nero either.
Why the hell were the black holes actual HOLES anyway? Why would *ambassador* Spock be flying that ship? How could a sun going nova threaten the *galaxy*?
Yeah, those probably don't make sense. But I think the most egregious plot hole was them beaming from the ice planet to the Enterprise which had left the system and traveled quite some distance at warp speed. If they can beam across interstellar distances, why use warp drives at all? Beaming is so much faster.
I did it for over a year, and actually experienced service termination due to a bandwidth cap. Verizon terminated my contract (waiving the early termination fee) after I downloaded over 20GB in one month. I believe 20GB is the *real* cap. However, Verizon was later sued in a class action for false advertising. As a result, I believe they temporarily stopped terminating people.
As for stuff like streaming video, running a server, or using P2P, that's all prohibited by the TOS but not enforced. In real life they will only terminate you for bandwidth use.
This info is all slightly out of date though, it's been a year or so since I used this stuff. Up-to-date info about Verizon and Sprint's actual practices (as opposed to what the TOS says) is available on many web forums like EVDO Forums.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is VRML sucked. OpenGL doesn't suck.
If you want more detail: VRML was based on a scene graph. Scene graph APIs have proven over time to be the Wrong Way to do real-time graphics. They are complex to implement, inflexible, and slow. The alternative is immediate mode rendering APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D, which are fast, flexible, and relatively simple to implement, and have been very successful. For an analogy to 2D graphics, VRML is like SVG, while OpenGL is like the Canvas element in HTML 5.
The difference in quality you saw was due to the LCD panel, not the backlight. There's a very wide range of quality in LCD panels, and the make of the display does not necessarily indicate the quality. Manufacturers usually buy their panels from third parties, and in some cases even displays with the same model number can have different panels.
Even good LCD panels have nowhere near enough dynamic range to be properly called "HDR", let alone a 5 million to one contrast ratio.
No, it's why anyone who made cell phones for the US market had to ask permission from and pay money to Motorola until the patent expired in 1992.
I didn't mean that it would be *actually* as bright as the sun; that would obviously be dangerous :-) There's a big difference between "uncomfortable to stare at" and "as bright as the sun".
Also, though defining HDR solely in terms of contrast ratios is pedantically correct, it isn't actually useful since any emissive display that can turn off completely has an infinite contrast ratio when viewed in darkness. I wouldn't call such a display "HDR" unless its peak brightness level at least matched other common displays.
The whole point of the LED backlights is that different parts of the backlight can be individually turned on and off.
It turns out that this doesn't work because LED-backlit HDTVs use a row of LEDs along one side of the display shining through a diffuser. (On some laptop panels you can actually see alternating dark and light spots along the edge where the LEDs are.) The actual point of LED backlights is that they are more efficient and reliable than CCFL tubes, and can adjust in brightness continuously and instantly.
Now, there are HDR displays that work in exactly the way you describe, but you won't find them at Best Buy yet because they cost $50,000.
The simplest, most trivial web service ever to become virally popular, that any decent web developer could bang out in a week, is being sued for patent infringement. If this doesn't prove the patent system is bullshit, nothing will.
Completely incorrect. A device infringes a patent if it fulfills the claims of that patent, regardless of whether it's been further improved. You can file a separate patent for the improvements, and in that case the device will be covered by *both* patents.
That's "dynamic" (i.e. fake) contrast. A display with dynamic contrast can turn down its backlight when displaying a black screen, which artificially increases the ratio between the brightness of a white screen and a black screen. However, that trick can't be used when displaying an image that's half white and half black, so the "real" contrast ratio you see most of the time is much, much lower.
Backlight brightness adjustment is a good feature but it doesn't compare to real high dynamic range. It's easy to see that the "dynamic" contrast ratio is a meaningless measurement: all you have to do is completely turn off the backlight when displaying a black screen and your dynamic contrast ratio is infinite! A real high dynamic range display could display an image of the sun as seen from space where the sun was so bright you wouldn't want to look directly at it, but space itself would be so dark that in a dark room you wouldn't be able to perceive the edges of the display.
I really don't think the hardware is good enough yet. To run smoothly and efficiently robots will need joint motors that are springy and compliant just like human muscles. All of the robot limbs I've ever seen are far too stiff (with the possible exception of BigDog's legs). Just look at this guy's head and arms shake while he's running; there are huge shock forces being transmitted from the feet directly up to the torso through all those stiff joints. Not only is that likely bad for the robot, it means that tons of energy is being wasted. For example, instead of letting the knee swing forward naturally during a step this robot has to run its servos to force the knee to rotate forward.
According to the contest rules the winning algorithm will not be exclusive to Netflix but will be published to the public, so we all win.
The reason BellKor is still first is that the published scores are irrelevant. The scores that matter for the prize are based on an unpublished data set known only to Netflix (to prevent people submitting answers that are optimized for the challenge data and work poorly on everything else). On this secret data set, BellKor's algorithm apparently performs better than The Ensemble's.
Wait, photosynthesis is only 15% efficient? You mean photovoltaic panels are already more efficient than plants? I had always assumed that nature had done much better than that.
Don't worry, DoD will be exempt, along with elected officials (for "security"). We couldn't have mere citizens finding out what their government is doing, now, could we?
You would put a diffuser in front of the laser to cover the whole scene. It might also be possible to use an LED. I don't know which Natal is using.
The Natal tech isn't a simple infrared camera viewing a projected grid, it's actually even cooler than that. Natal uses an infrared laser that fires a picosecond-long pulse once per frame. The camera includes infrared-sensing pixels alongside the normal RGB pixels, but the infrared ones are different: instead of measuring the intensity of the infrared light, they measure how long it takes the infrared light from the laser to reflect off of the scene and arrive at the camera, to a precision of tens of picoseconds. Since we know the speed of light we can calculate the distance from the camera to each object in the scene from this time measurement, to about 1cm accuracy.
The whole thing is similar to radar; in fact one name for this technology is LIDAR. Laser rangefinders work like this too; Natal basically has a laser rangefinder for each pixel of its camera. The coolest part of the whole thing is that none of this tech is expensive. Natal and devices like it shouldn't be any more expensive than your bog-standard webcam once they are manufactured in volume.
This technology is going to change the world in a few years. Not only will it enable cool games and Minority Report-style human-computer interfaces, but it will finally solve the computer vision problems of robotics, enabling autonomous pathfinding robots to navigate the real world successfully for the first time.
If the ISPs had any sense they'd implement their own open payment system where third parties could charge consumers via the ISP and have the charges appear on the consumer's bill, bypassing the Visa/MasterCard payment service cartel. That way the ISPs could still get their cut (it would be a gold mine for them), but consumers would actually have choice in their service providers.
This is much more than an ordinary lithium battery, and the headline is quite appropriate. Internal combustion engines are in a very real sense "fueled by air", as are our own bodies, and using the same principle to extend the life of batteries without increasing weight or volume is a very good idea. It's not totally unprecedented, either, as zinc-air batteries do this; the innovation is making them rechargeable.
Personally, I knew JJ Abrams was no Michael Bay when the orbital drill, after being destroyed, fell into San Francisco Bay *right next* to the Golden Gate bridge, but somehow missed subjecting us to a gratuitous and cliched effects sequence of the destruction of San Francisco's most famous landmark, preferring instead to get on with the story.
Google Code search supports regular expressions, so it's possible with a smaller index at least.
When I said robot cars would be more efficient I meant in total energy use of the system. The peak carrying capacity of a train is obviously going to be higher, but the train can only run at full capacity a small fraction of the time, on a small fraction of the total track length of the system. Outside of a city's downtown area, and even in downtown areas during non-peak times, light rail trains run at far below peak capacity which drags down the efficiency of the whole system. If you try to increase efficiency by reducing service then you make the system less useful and ridership goes down.
Due to these realities of rail service, battery powered cars with regenerative braking will use less energy overall to transport the same people. As for gridlock problems, robot cars should be at least somewhat better at handling them than human-driven cars. They will respond more quickly allowing them to pack more closely together. Packs of them will accelerate/decelerate as a unit almost like a train. They won't commit minor traffic violations and they will get in fewer accidents than human drivers. They will have perfect knowledge of traffic conditions via wireless Internet, and so will be able to route around disruptions and collaboratively load-balance different routes. They will be able to travel on their own to find parking, so cities will remove street parking in favor of centralized garages and use the space for more lanes. Lanes may also be made narrower.
When you start thinking about all the consequences self-driving robotic cars could have, it becomes apparent that as soon as they are available they are going to displace nearly all other forms of transporation.
The dinosaur is not the automobile, it's the internal combustion engine. Battery-powered cars are the future. Furthermore, within 20 years we'll have the technology to make self-driving robotic electric cars, which will be both more convenient and more efficient than mass transit for short to medium length trips. Existing mass transit systems will become obsolete.
I certainly do agree that Kirk's practically instant ascent to Captain was ridiculous, but Pike was plenty old, First Officer Spock was older than the rest and I think it's plausible that the other bridge positions (navigator, helmsman, communications officer) would be filled by younger officers.
The kobayashi maru scene was too over the top. Why advertise that you're cheating?
This story was Trek canon already, it's just being retold.
How could Spock see Vulcan from that Ice planet, but it has no effect on that ice planet at all? What happend to these black holes afterwards?
Well since they would have the same mass as the things they devoured, I imagine they would continue along in their orbits. Black holes don't magically have more gravity than other things of the same mass, it's just more concentrated. Although the radiation released as all the matter fell into the hole would probably destroy all life in the solar system.
Why, if they could beam over to the romulan ship, did they not beam over a few photon torpedoes?
They wanted to save Captain Pike.
But now there is no crew available except a bunch of trainees.
You think a crew of 50-year-olds like the other Trek movies makes more sense? Actual armies and navies are filled with guys in their 20s and even teens; why not Starfleet?
Why didn't the federation use that 25 year gap to attack the Romulans or at least ask WTH after the first ship was destroyed?
Who says they didn't? We didn't see what happened during that time. But the Romulans would be as clueless as the Federation, since they weren't in contact with Nero either.
Why the hell were the black holes actual HOLES anyway? Why would *ambassador* Spock be flying that ship? How could a sun going nova threaten the *galaxy*?
Yeah, those probably don't make sense. But I think the most egregious plot hole was them beaming from the ice planet to the Enterprise which had left the system and traveled quite some distance at warp speed. If they can beam across interstellar distances, why use warp drives at all? Beaming is so much faster.
I did it for over a year, and actually experienced service termination due to a bandwidth cap. Verizon terminated my contract (waiving the early termination fee) after I downloaded over 20GB in one month. I believe 20GB is the *real* cap. However, Verizon was later sued in a class action for false advertising. As a result, I believe they temporarily stopped terminating people.
As for stuff like streaming video, running a server, or using P2P, that's all prohibited by the TOS but not enforced. In real life they will only terminate you for bandwidth use.
This info is all slightly out of date though, it's been a year or so since I used this stuff. Up-to-date info about Verizon and Sprint's actual practices (as opposed to what the TOS says) is available on many web forums like EVDO Forums.
The hype was perhaps not large in volume, but it made up for it with extravagance. I think TechCrunch started it off, but it was on Slashdot too.