When we have functional nanobots it will be possible for them to reproduce anything we can imagine for no cost at all. What will happen to society when the actual cost of manufacturing everything we have to buy today is essentially free?
It won't change. Robotics has reduced the cost of building products, but we haven't often seen those reduced costs passed along to the public. No, instead it goes to increased corporate profits and executive bonuses. Nanaotechnology will mean that things will cost the same, but with 24 year old corporate vice presidents getting billion dollar bonuses. And the creation of an underclass of unemployables who used to work machines to build things.
More like taking money from the currently-rich ploughshare venture capitalists and using it to fund the next cycle's sword research.
I'm not sure how this communication system benefits future military work. Raytheon is involved because they want to sell a whole bunch of electronics packages. I can't blame them for wanting to do so.
The real problem with AngelHalo is that it's a glorified cellphone system for coverage over the USA's enormous road network. It's a great system, where it covers, but it's targeted at where the traffic is, not a truly global system.
Neither is the existing cellphone system. I like it because it's a phone system that operates at 1.5 to 45 megabits, is available where the largest number of users are, and is a very clever use of solid technology.
Iridium works everywhere, even when the local technology doesn't extend beyond the cow-dung fire and the AK47. I only know a few Iridium users, all aid workers in the absolute arse-ends of the world (Northern Afghanistan right this minute). They'd have a lot of trouble without their Iridia (sp?), as there just isn't an alternative, other than the military's comsat networks.
Possibly the UN should buy the Iridium network if it has that much impact on world peace. Or George Soros. But scattered aid workers are not a big enough market to make it viable as a business. The cost of sending up replacement sats and maintaining the entire system is not worth it to the aid agencies. I'd imagine they'd rather spend that kind of money on people, food and equipment. So it remains a white elephant. I'm sorry for your friends, but it makes more sense to use the comsat system until either one of the other LEO systems comes on-line (which will then fail for the exact same reasons) or one of the other flying communication systems happens.
Looks almost like they're beating swords into plowshares.
Generally a good thing, IMO.
The RPV is called the "Egret" and was a piece part for a highly sophisticated signal intelligence system that was being developed for NATO during the last part of the Cold War by E-Systems (Now, Raytheon, go figure...) Greenville Division. Since much of that is bust, I could see where they'd like to attempt the use of the non-classified pieces (namely the RPV and the massive wireless communications infrastructure that went with it...) to civillian usages so they can see some of the R&D funds out of the thing.
Well, it's nice to know we got something from all that other than a legacy of fear.
Only drawback to this system that I see is that you'd have to have a fleet of the planes for a given area that are cycling in and out along with several backups.
The plane has flown already, and flew from the US to the Paris Air Show (an 11 hour flight). The idea is that a set of 3 planes can service a metropoliton area in shifts. They fly far above the commercial flight paths, and have enough range that they can use smaller airports on the outskirts of a city. In that, it helps that this plane has been designed by Burt Rutan, the man who designed the first non-stop around the world plane...he knows a few things about saving fuel.
I don't see how practical this would be compared to Iridium or it's competitors- while it'd be cheaper, it's not without it's problems itself.
Well, compared to the expense and hassles of a huge number of rocket launches, sending up one airplane at a time above a major US city is hardly difficult or expensive.
The main advantages of this system compared to LEO:
10 to 1000 times closer to the user - less lag.
Massive amounts of electricity generated by the jet engines allowing very strong signal strength.
The planes land every 10 to 12 hours, allowing easy repairs and upgrades.
Service does not require completion of the entire system in order to be useful.
The principle advantage of LEO sats over Angel Halo have not proven to be all that valuable - global coverage. Global in this case means "the 30 or so most heavily populated cities". That is enough for anyone who needs to pop open a laptop and get 2.5 megabit internet access. Because they are most likely to do so in some airport lounge or in an office in some large city.
Iridium failed because some doofus forgot to look at a globe and notice that the Earth is mostly covered with water, and most of the land is empty. Humans are generally huddled in small areas, and fish and penguins don't really need phone service.
The sad part is that, by spending so much money on a stupid idea, inventor money is no longer available for actual good ideas. Iridium was based on how corporate executives see themselves, rather than on the reality of life as a corporate executive:
Ah yes! I'm a Master of the Universe! I have to be contacted anywhere on the planet because I'm so powerful and important! In the middle of the oceans! In Siberia! Everywhere!
...the sad truth being that corporate executives spend virtually all their time in offices, airports, in airplanes or at other people's offices. All of which are serviced just fine by cel phones.
But since Iridium peed in the water, nobody will want to swim. And actual good ideas, like Angel Halo have a much harder time of it.
It looks like the biggest pseudo-legal movement since the moonshiners of Prohibition... Sure does say a lot about how fast things move in this day and age.
Very apt. The head of Universal, Edgar Bronfman's grandfather made the family fortune by being the biggest bootlegger. Yeah, the son and grandson of a bootlegger is a just who I want to call me a pirate.
you have to keep in mind that napster users were split across several servers, and the servers didn't communicate between each other (unless they changed it in the past 3-4 months since I've used it).
Virtually all of the servers were split, except for a test group that my wife discovered last week. They had been planning to link all the servers before all this nonsense happened.
For those who are curious, the linked servers were:
If napster stays shut down for long enough it would be interesting to see the impact on CD sales - or CD sales around universities, or whatever exactly it was all of those damning studies proved.
Napster's current message:
We're getting a lot of questions about what people can do to help.
Here are three things you can do right away.
Write the heads of the major record companies and tell them you are their best customers - loyal and active music fans -- and that you don't want them to kill Napster. Here's a link to their emails: http://www.napster.com/labels.html.
Show the companies your power. We're calling for a two-day "buy-cott" this weekend. Support the artists (found here: http://www.napster.com/buycott.html) who support Napster by going out and buying their CDs. Be sure to let the record store know you came from Napster.
Keep coming back. We'll keep you informed as time goes on.
Of course given how subjective the studies were before it would be hard for an apparent further decrease in sales to "prove" that Napster was good for the recording industry.
It's going to be impossible to prove anything either way. Up, down or sideways. This is about bullying and potential cooption. One of the major record labels will likely own Napster within the year.
But as it's been noted countless times before there are at least half a dozen alternatives to Napster, including Gnutella, CuteMX, Freenet, OpenNAP, IRC #mp3z and #mp3s, etc. The RIAA won't touch many of those. They're just getting bad press, that's all.
Sadly, CuteMX (great software, stupid name) lockedd their users out yesterday. They have central servers and are could be sued. Besides, they had a lot of people trading movies. Well, corrrection: they had a lot of people talking about trading movies; the vast majority had connections too slow to succeed in actually getting any movies.
In spite of my respect for Justin Frankel, Gnutella is more interesting politically than as an actual program. None of the clients seemed to be easy to use, or very effective at searching. Also, Gnutella lacks chat and the ability to browse other users lists. The whole idea is to see what people with tastes similar to your taste like.
BTW, a nice looking Napster client will be released today: Naphoria's audioGnome. It has resumeing, the ability to view multiple servers at once, the ability to search across multiple servers. Joe Bob says check it out. No, no Linux client yet.
A great deal of programs have been announced for RedHat Linux, and I think it's great that this company is not saying that you have to run it on a specific distribution.
Realisticlly, given that Toonz costs so much, any shop that decided to deploy it on Linux boxen is going to essentually make their own custom distribution.
This is a product that will be deployed to animation shops in the Far East. They will have cheap, fast machines built and put their custom distribution (loads of stuff stripped out, loads of custom stuff put in) on dozens of them. There will be a few individuals buying a single copy and installing it on out-of-the-box Red Hat, but that will not represent the majority of installations.
Remember: This is the market that supported a product (Cambridge Animation Works) on the NeXT. People bought NeXT boxes specifically to get that software.
Could mean a lot of fun support jobs out there. And away from the Bay area and Silicon Valley. Animators work all over the world. Cool.
A real world example. I was involved with a film festival. We wanted to honor a director. The studio didn't get us a photograph in time. They called me needing an image. I had a vDVD that had an interview with the director. I grabbed still frames from the DVD, made TIFFs and gave them to the art director and they wound up in the festival program.
Clear-cut case of fair use, right? Non-profit organization. But in order to do this, I had to use a hack to turn off the stupid DVD "feature" that prevented my computer DVD player from grabbing a frame. I had to technically violate a law.
Yes, but what about the creditors? Suppose GO had placed their intellectual property in the public domain when they realized they had to fold, wouldn't that have been a form of fraud from the creditor's point of view? I mean, they were taking the intellectual property they had created over the years, and had suddenly made it impossible to charge for, effectively destroying it for purposes of resale and recovery of debt.
An interesting question. Penpoint is currently locked up in limbo for exactly that reason. The creditors are going to want all their money back with interest if anyone wants to revive it, or at least a reasonable dollar value. But as nobody will give them their $75 million dollars back, they have nothing.
Perhaps the investors already got their money back in the form of a tax write-off? And if an effort like this is allowed as a write-off, the copyright would be voided and the work would be allowed to enter the public domain?
Can't people step back and realize that Open isn't always good? Would you write your novel Open Source? Would you make your washing machine Open Source? No, so why would you make your Telco solution Open Source?
The idea of copyright being of a limited term (originally 14 years plus an option for another 14 - recently perverted into life of the author plus 70 years at the behest of Disney) was that every creative effort would eventually enter into the public domain. And, "Public Domain" can be read as "Open SOurce" if you like.
The works of Shakespeare are in the public domain - i.e. you can publish them, put them on web sites, use them as the basis of new creative works, print them on tolet paper, whatever - and no one can stop you.
So, yeah...eventually everything (barring further evil efforts of the Mouse) will be in the public domain, thus "open source".
Arguably, the intention of the Framers of the US Constitution was to maximize the amount of material freely available to the public. A case could be made that if a creative copyrighted work has been abandoned by it's creator and if no further effort is going to be made to make it available to the public, then it should automatically revert to the public domain.
Copyright is a good thing, but I don't believe that it should be used to keep creative effort away from the public. Case in point: GO's Pen Point. This was the last real innovation in GUI interface (you may disagree, but check it out and really consider the implications of it's design before you judge). But still, long after Bill FUDded it to death with the idiotic "Pen for Windows" it's unavailable. If GO had placed it into the public domain, or it if had reverted to it by no longer being available, we would all benefit.
Since the end of the series pretty strongly implied that Cooper had been taken over, wouldn't that require the *evil* Cooper to show up in the XFiles?
Sure, but it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Of course, he might try to kill Scully, but she can defend herself. Laura and Maddy and Ronette were nowhere near as heavily armed or well trained as Scully. Remember, that the other person "Bob" inhabited managed to continue doing his job for quite a while, nobody the wiser.
The most innovative casting, IMO, would be to bring the FBI's next-most-wacky Special Agent in...Dale Cooper from "Twin Peaks". Think about it. Kyle MacLachlan has plenty of experience with delivering strange dialog - even backwards. "Twin Peaks" has a devoted group of viewers with experience in keeping track of a convoluted plot lasting a season or more. There is already a lot of overlap between the two audiences.
It makes sense. The agency allowed Cooper near complete autonomy, and he would follow his instincts no matter where they lead, even if they lead into a shadow world. There's nothing in the X-Files world that could phase Cooper.
They used to do all sorts of cross-overs of characters from one show onto another back in the 1960s. Combine the mythos of the two shows.
Not true. The best way to promote Indy bands is to monitor your "uploads" of particular artists. If a person get band "X", send them an instant message and suggest that they might also like band "Y".
You search for a band because you already know about it, meaning a)the marketing matrix has you, Neo b)word of mouth c)saw a story about the band somewhere d)band is local to your area (modified a && b). If you don't know about the band, you can't search for it.
True enough as far as it goes, but once you've been Napstering on a fast connection for a few weeks, you probably have most of the commercial stuff you are already interested in. Then you start looking for more obscure stuff. You start searching for artists just to find folks with neat collections and see what else they have.
Maybe that person will be on-line, and you start talking about the tastes you both share, and what you might also like, but haven't been able to hear. I don't know about the rest of you, but for the wife and me, Napster is all about introducing people to new music. And, all the musicians we know and have discussed this with agree with what we are doing. One even suggested that the RIAA should be paying us for our promotional activity. (BTW, the major labels do not send short, crappy sounding snippets of songs to radio stations and magazines. No, they send full CDs, bought and paid for out of the artists share of the royalties. Who is ripping who off?)
Admittedly, lots of people are using Napster to get the same damn songs that they hear on the radio (stations programmed by the same couple of radio networks). But Sturgeon's Law: "...but then 90% of anything is crap!" applies. People who want the Brittny Spears single that they can already hear 200 times a day on the radio deserve to get a recording of barking seals or whatever. But somehow, I doubt that I, or many people, will ever hear a single bark.
Downs, the colors are a bit off (black specifically, which has to do with the projection, not the capture, and of course is easy enough to fix digitally) at the moment, and film can probably do better resolution with less effort (but who knows, what are the specs on the CCDs used in these cameras)?
The projection is using TI's newer Digital Cinema technology. It features blacker blacks, better handling of over-bright scenes (knee level), gamma that matches film, and colormetry that matches film. It was designed with the cooperation of many film-makers.
The resolution is 1080 x 1920 progressive. While film make have a higher resolution if you shoot a single frame of a Kodak resolution chart, by the time that resolution passes through multiple internegative, interpositive, printing negative and final print stages, and projected via the crappy projector at your local megaplex with it's dreadful weave problems...
Trust me. The end result will look better than using traditional film. Lucas would not have chosen to go digital otherwise.
That is the intention. With the SONY HD video camera used, they will be able to shoot as if they are using film, but the results will be immediately available. No lab processing. "Dailies" can be seen the same day, rather than the next day. The shot footage will be transfered via the net to the special-effects houses as soon a a take is chosen. No need to wait for a telecine (film scanning) session...the 1080p/24 videotape is the the final image.
There are enough areas where the laborious process of filmmaking will be speed up that, even if the cameras blew up every other day, it will still be faster. Besides, Sony will have their top technicians on-site available to fix anything that can go wrong (hey, who's going to say "no, I don't want to hang with Goerge Lucas"?)
Ewoks were irritatingly cute. Jar-Jar was just irritating. Give me Ewoks any day.
Yes, but as annoying as Jar-Jar was, he didn't have to sing a big, stupid John Williams attempt at a "happy natives" song. That was, without a doubt, the most cring-inducing moment in the whole Star Wars canon, and the best deletion from the "Special Editions".
I used to use a 386 with an array of 16 T800 transputers to render. Each board of 4 transputers had 4 megs of RAM, as well as one meg for each transputer as cache. They communicated along a dedicated back bus.
This was used for RenderMan rendering with the old Digital Arts DGS system. The main processor would split the job into 16 x 16 pixel "buckets" and send the pre-clipped scene data (geometry, lighting, surface information) as well as the a portion of the textures used in the scene. As each transputer finished the contents of it's bucket, it would dump it back along the ISA bus to the Targa framebuffer.
Thats the sort of process these are useful for. Not SMP, but assisted special-purpose processing.
What happens when the RIAA gets some tech ignorant judge to rule that major ISP's have to use this kind of thing, in order to protect the recording industries intellectual property.
There was a big article about this in a recent issue of "The New Yorker", the whole Celera vs. HGP spat. According to rumor reported in the magazine, Celera's DNA is supposed to be J. Craig Venter's. It was neither confirmed nor denied.
Venter has some valid reasons to be pissed at the HGP. The people in charge told him that his fast methods wouldn't work. Of course, as soon as he started Celera using the methods, HGP switched to them as well. But, the whole idea of being able to patent gene sequences is so deeply offensive that it should be outlawed.
NewTek was from Topeka. As crude as it looks now, the Video Toaster was cutting edge when it came out. I was in the Kansas City Amiga User's Group and worked at a store selling Amigas when Tim Jenison brought by the first DigiView prototype and the first "HAM" (hold and modify) format pictures. Later, the store (Brandsmart) installed some big-ass car stereos for various NewTek employees in some very expensive autos.
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It won't change. Robotics has reduced the cost of building products, but we haven't often seen those reduced costs passed along to the public. No, instead it goes to increased corporate profits and executive bonuses. Nanaotechnology will mean that things will cost the same, but with 24 year old corporate vice presidents getting billion dollar bonuses. And the creation of an underclass of unemployables who used to work machines to build things.
Imagine Flint, Michigan...everywhere.
...who, in a completely unexpected return to topic, is gennerally considered father of nanotechnology.
Har har!
I'm not sure how this communication system benefits future military work. Raytheon is involved because they want to sell a whole bunch of electronics packages. I can't blame them for wanting to do so.
Neither is the existing cellphone system. I like it because it's a phone system that operates at 1.5 to 45 megabits, is available where the largest number of users are, and is a very clever use of solid technology.
Possibly the UN should buy the Iridium network if it has that much impact on world peace. Or George Soros. But scattered aid workers are not a big enough market to make it viable as a business. The cost of sending up replacement sats and maintaining the entire system is not worth it to the aid agencies. I'd imagine they'd rather spend that kind of money on people, food and equipment. So it remains a white elephant. I'm sorry for your friends, but it makes more sense to use the comsat system until either one of the other LEO systems comes on-line (which will then fail for the exact same reasons) or one of the other flying communication systems happens.
Generally a good thing, IMO.
Well, it's nice to know we got something from all that other than a legacy of fear.
The plane has flown already, and flew from the US to the Paris Air Show (an 11 hour flight). The idea is that a set of 3 planes can service a metropoliton area in shifts. They fly far above the commercial flight paths, and have enough range that they can use smaller airports on the outskirts of a city. In that, it helps that this plane has been designed by Burt Rutan, the man who designed the first non-stop around the world plane...he knows a few things about saving fuel.
Well, compared to the expense and hassles of a huge number of rocket launches, sending up one airplane at a time above a major US city is hardly difficult or expensive.
The main advantages of this system compared to LEO:
The principle advantage of LEO sats over Angel Halo have not proven to be all that valuable - global coverage. Global in this case means "the 30 or so most heavily populated cities". That is enough for anyone who needs to pop open a laptop and get 2.5 megabit internet access. Because they are most likely to do so in some airport lounge or in an office in some large city.
Iridium failed because some doofus forgot to look at a globe and notice that the Earth is mostly covered with water, and most of the land is empty. Humans are generally huddled in small areas, and fish and penguins don't really need phone service.
The sad part is that, by spending so much money on a stupid idea, inventor money is no longer available for actual good ideas. Iridium was based on how corporate executives see themselves, rather than on the reality of life as a corporate executive:
...the sad truth being that corporate executives spend virtually all their time in offices, airports, in airplanes or at other people's offices. All of which are serviced just fine by cel phones.
But since Iridium peed in the water, nobody will want to swim. And actual good ideas, like Angel Halo have a much harder time of it.
Very apt. The head of Universal, Edgar Bronfman's grandfather made the family fortune by being the biggest bootlegger. Yeah, the son and grandson of a bootlegger is a just who I want to call me a pirate.
Virtually all of the servers were split, except for a test group that my wife discovered last week. They had been planning to link all the servers before all this nonsense happened.
For those who are curious, the linked servers were:
Napster's current message:
We're getting a lot of questions about what people can do to help.
Here are three things you can do right away.
It's going to be impossible to prove anything either way. Up, down or sideways. This is about bullying and potential cooption. One of the major record labels will likely own Napster within the year.
Sadly, CuteMX (great software, stupid name) lockedd their users out yesterday. They have central servers and are could be sued. Besides, they had a lot of people trading movies. Well, corrrection: they had a lot of people talking about trading movies; the vast majority had connections too slow to succeed in actually getting any movies.
In spite of my respect for Justin Frankel, Gnutella is more interesting politically than as an actual program. None of the clients seemed to be easy to use, or very effective at searching. Also, Gnutella lacks chat and the ability to browse other users lists. The whole idea is to see what people with tastes similar to your taste like.
BTW, a nice looking Napster client will be released today: Naphoria's audioGnome. It has resumeing, the ability to view multiple servers at once, the ability to search across multiple servers. Joe Bob says check it out. No, no Linux client yet.Realisticlly, given that Toonz costs so much, any shop that decided to deploy it on Linux boxen is going to essentually make their own custom distribution.
This is a product that will be deployed to animation shops in the Far East. They will have cheap, fast machines built and put their custom distribution (loads of stuff stripped out, loads of custom stuff put in) on dozens of them. There will be a few individuals buying a single copy and installing it on out-of-the-box Red Hat, but that will not represent the majority of installations.
Remember: This is the market that supported a product (Cambridge Animation Works) on the NeXT. People bought NeXT boxes specifically to get that software.
Could mean a lot of fun support jobs out there. And away from the Bay area and Silicon Valley. Animators work all over the world. Cool.
A portion of Titanic was rendered in Mental Ray, but the vast majority was rendered using Pixar's prMan (Photorealistic Renderman).
SHould be possible. I remember a ray-tracer written to run inside an Apple Laserwriter. At the time it was the fastest processor many people had.
A real world example. I was involved with a film festival. We wanted to honor a director. The studio didn't get us a photograph in time. They called me needing an image. I had a vDVD that had an interview with the director. I grabbed still frames from the DVD, made TIFFs and gave them to the art director and they wound up in the festival program.
Clear-cut case of fair use, right? Non-profit organization. But in order to do this, I had to use a hack to turn off the stupid DVD "feature" that prevented my computer DVD player from grabbing a frame. I had to technically violate a law.
An interesting question. Penpoint is currently locked up in limbo for exactly that reason. The creditors are going to want all their money back with interest if anyone wants to revive it, or at least a reasonable dollar value. But as nobody will give them their $75 million dollars back, they have nothing.
Perhaps the investors already got their money back in the form of a tax write-off? And if an effort like this is allowed as a write-off, the copyright would be voided and the work would be allowed to enter the public domain?
The idea of copyright being of a limited term (originally 14 years plus an option for another 14 - recently perverted into life of the author plus 70 years at the behest of Disney) was that every creative effort would eventually enter into the public domain. And, "Public Domain" can be read as "Open SOurce" if you like.
The works of Shakespeare are in the public domain - i.e. you can publish them, put them on web sites, use them as the basis of new creative works, print them on tolet paper, whatever - and no one can stop you.
So, yeah...eventually everything (barring further evil efforts of the Mouse) will be in the public domain, thus "open source".
Arguably, the intention of the Framers of the US Constitution was to maximize the amount of material freely available to the public. A case could be made that if a creative copyrighted work has been abandoned by it's creator and if no further effort is going to be made to make it available to the public, then it should automatically revert to the public domain.
Copyright is a good thing, but I don't believe that it should be used to keep creative effort away from the public. Case in point: GO's Pen Point. This was the last real innovation in GUI interface (you may disagree, but check it out and really consider the implications of it's design before you judge). But still, long after Bill FUDded it to death with the idiotic "Pen for Windows" it's unavailable. If GO had placed it into the public domain, or it if had reverted to it by no longer being available, we would all benefit.
Sure, but it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Of course, he might try to kill Scully, but she can defend herself. Laura and Maddy and Ronette were nowhere near as heavily armed or well trained as Scully. Remember, that the other person "Bob" inhabited managed to continue doing his job for quite a while, nobody the wiser.
The most innovative casting, IMO, would be to bring the FBI's next-most-wacky Special Agent in...Dale Cooper from "Twin Peaks". Think about it. Kyle MacLachlan has plenty of experience with delivering strange dialog - even backwards. "Twin Peaks" has a devoted group of viewers with experience in keeping track of a convoluted plot lasting a season or more. There is already a lot of overlap between the two audiences.
It makes sense. The agency allowed Cooper near complete autonomy, and he would follow his instincts no matter where they lead, even if they lead into a shadow world. There's nothing in the X-Files world that could phase Cooper.
They used to do all sorts of cross-overs of characters from one show onto another back in the 1960s. Combine the mythos of the two shows.
Not true. The best way to promote Indy bands is to monitor your "uploads" of particular artists. If a person get band "X", send them an instant message and suggest that they might also like band "Y".
True enough as far as it goes, but once you've been Napstering on a fast connection for a few weeks, you probably have most of the commercial stuff you are already interested in. Then you start looking for more obscure stuff. You start searching for artists just to find folks with neat collections and see what else they have.
Maybe that person will be on-line, and you start talking about the tastes you both share, and what you might also like, but haven't been able to hear. I don't know about the rest of you, but for the wife and me, Napster is all about introducing people to new music. And, all the musicians we know and have discussed this with agree with what we are doing. One even suggested that the RIAA should be paying us for our promotional activity. (BTW, the major labels do not send short, crappy sounding snippets of songs to radio stations and magazines. No, they send full CDs, bought and paid for out of the artists share of the royalties. Who is ripping who off?)
Admittedly, lots of people are using Napster to get the same damn songs that they hear on the radio (stations programmed by the same couple of radio networks). But Sturgeon's Law: "...but then 90% of anything is crap!" applies. People who want the Brittny Spears single that they can already hear 200 times a day on the radio deserve to get a recording of barking seals or whatever. But somehow, I doubt that I, or many people, will ever hear a single bark.
The projection is using TI's newer Digital Cinema technology. It features blacker blacks, better handling of over-bright scenes (knee level), gamma that matches film, and colormetry that matches film. It was designed with the cooperation of many film-makers.
The resolution is 1080 x 1920 progressive. While film make have a higher resolution if you shoot a single frame of a Kodak resolution chart, by the time that resolution passes through multiple internegative, interpositive, printing negative and final print stages, and projected via the crappy projector at your local megaplex with it's dreadful weave problems...
Trust me. The end result will look better than using traditional film. Lucas would not have chosen to go digital otherwise.
That is the intention. With the SONY HD video camera used, they will be able to shoot as if they are using film, but the results will be immediately available. No lab processing. "Dailies" can be seen the same day, rather than the next day. The shot footage will be transfered via the net to the special-effects houses as soon a a take is chosen. No need to wait for a telecine (film scanning) session...the 1080p/24 videotape is the the final image.
There are enough areas where the laborious process of filmmaking will be speed up that, even if the cameras blew up every other day, it will still be faster. Besides, Sony will have their top technicians on-site available to fix anything that can go wrong (hey, who's going to say "no, I don't want to hang with Goerge Lucas"?)
Yes, but as annoying as Jar-Jar was, he didn't have to sing a big, stupid John Williams attempt at a "happy natives" song. That was, without a doubt, the most cring-inducing moment in the whole Star Wars canon, and the best deletion from the "Special Editions".
I used to use a 386 with an array of 16 T800 transputers to render. Each board of 4 transputers had 4 megs of RAM, as well as one meg for each transputer as cache. They communicated along a dedicated back bus.
This was used for RenderMan rendering with the old Digital Arts DGS system. The main processor would split the job into 16 x 16 pixel "buckets" and send the pre-clipped scene data (geometry, lighting, surface information) as well as the a portion of the textures used in the scene. As each transputer finished the contents of it's bucket, it would dump it back along the ISA bus to the Targa framebuffer.
Thats the sort of process these are useful for. Not SMP, but assisted special-purpose processing.
An old lawyer joke:
Q: What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 80?
A: Your honor.
There was a big article about this in a recent issue of "The New Yorker", the whole Celera vs. HGP spat. According to rumor reported in the magazine, Celera's DNA is supposed to be J. Craig Venter's. It was neither confirmed nor denied.
Venter has some valid reasons to be pissed at the HGP. The people in charge told him that his fast methods wouldn't work. Of course, as soon as he started Celera using the methods, HGP switched to them as well. But, the whole idea of being able to patent gene sequences is so deeply offensive that it should be outlawed.
NewTek was from Topeka. As crude as it looks now, the Video Toaster was cutting edge when it came out. I was in the Kansas City Amiga User's Group and worked at a store selling Amigas when Tim Jenison brought by the first DigiView prototype and the first "HAM" (hold and modify) format pictures. Later, the store (Brandsmart) installed some big-ass car stereos for various NewTek employees in some very expensive autos.
Hi-tech in the Heartland.