For all the fear-mongering I see in the replies to this thread, nobody has brought up the most obvious and valuable potential patient, Hawking. He has managed to survive ALS for an amazingly long time, but where would we be if those two fingers that he types all his work were to finally give out?
With this system, it's quite possible that he could be more productive...or at least be able to spend more of his time thinking, and less time typing out books and papers. Given a choice between fear of a "Frankenstein" scenerio and a potential Grand Unified theory, I'd choose the latter.
Babelfish yields some really funny stuff when English creeps into other lauguages. For instance, the English word "teenager" has crept into German; Babelfish translates it as "tea rodent". Reading this in a movie review, a room full my friends nearly died laughing.
Do you mean Phillip K. Dick's novel "Galactic Pot-Healer"? (Stupid title, I know). In it, bored office workers sending a book title or folk saying through multiple translator machines, and challenging their friends to guess the original title.
Tape?! Bleagh! More importantly, it's on the "A Bug's Life" DVD. If you want to see the most amazing image ever to appear in a non-HD format, you need to check out the DVD, played through a progressive-scan device, like a Hollywood+ or a MPACT2 or the new Toshiba player. Pixar apparently re-rendered the film directly to DVD res and did the MPEG2 encoding directly from the digital files. The end result is the most astonishing display of animation ever to appear on a TV screen.
Re:cutting edge 3d....done on Linux of course
on
Review:Toy Story 2
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· Score: 1
See the cover story at Computer Graphics World for the full story. They use Alias for modeling, their own software for animation on SGIs and prMan for rendering on a giant pile of Suns.
Even cooler is the appearence of Larry Gritz in the credits. Larry wrote Blue Moon Rendering Tools, a freely distributable RenderMan compatible ray-tracer. Learn more about it here. Linux, SGI, Alpha and Windows binaries available here.
Phil Befreys, to my knowledge the only other person to make a commercial-quality RenderMan compatible renderer (Digital Arts DGS), is now working at Pixar as well.
Pixar uses Alias|Wavefront's (Toronto) Alias Studio for modeling, Interactive Effects' (Irvine, CA) Amazon Paint for painting, and a host of custom software for such tasks as modeling, animation, and compositing-all running on SGI machines. For rendering, the studio used its own RenderMan software running on Sun machines.
...and:
Pixar's renderfarm has now grown to 1400 processors and even so, Toy Story 2 pushed the studio's rendering capabilities to the limit. There are 122,699 frames in the movie, according to Thomas Jordan, render technical director (TD), who, with a team of 10 "render wranglers," herded final frames through the render pipeline. According to Jordan, the time it took to render each frame ranged from 10 minutes to three days, with frame sizes as large as 4gb. The fastest output was 930 feet of film, or 14,880 frames, in one week.
Loads more, and they talk with all the principles of the film, John Lasseter, Ed Catmull and the rest. Not too many spoilers, and the detail is great...for instance, the dust on the shelf Wheezy was on was NOT a particle system; it was actually discrete geometry. And the hairs on Al's arm were modeled as well.
The right to videotape a television show, my main use for a recordable DVD, is not a moral issue at all. It is a privacy right re-affirmed by the US Supreme Court in the Universal & Disney vs. Sony case. To remind everyone, these very short-sighted studios sued Sony to keep the VCR off the market as they could only see it as an "insturment of copyright violation". The Supremes sided with Sony, that the right to do what one wished in one's own home was far more important than the rights of the copyright holder. Thus, the entire home video market appeared and provides the majority of the money flowing into Hollywood these days. Idiots.
Copyright is a limited right granted to encourage creatitivy. It is not in involate right, unlimited or, in any way, a moral issue.
Copying a movie is not theft any more than zeroxing a newspaper article. "Theft" is taking something away from someone and depriving them of it. If I stole the negative of a film, and they were not able to make any prints that would be theft. When I videotape a movie, how I am depriving them of it? They still have it, they can sell as many copies as they wish. Only by re-defining "theft" as "...well, we might have sold you one" is nonsense. Only that the entire force of Hollywood has been applied to selling this idea that taking an intangible, that doing something that deprives no one of anything, is somehow "theft". You've been sold.
Not even that, the high end animation shops are no longer buying SGI workstations, prefering instead to build multi-processor NT boxes with powerful OpenGL cards. Shops like Digital Domain use software like Maya on NT and find that the NT box is faster than an equivilant SGI box.
In the end, SGI did it to themselves. They thought what was special about their product was Irix and the closed system. But what everyone wanted was their graphics subsystem. If their management had a lick of sense, SGI would have used the opportunity offered by the sale of a couple of millions MIPS 4000s to Nintendo to enter the PC graphics chip market. If they had done it at the time, they would have owned it, and all these upstart chip manufacturers would have never had a chance, as well as insuring that all game designers would have bought SGI workstations for game design.
This man by himself is responsible for the outcry of violence in todays youth.
Read some history - up until a hundred or so years ago, one of the most popular forms of public entertainment was executions. Hanging, pressing to death with stones, eviseration, beheading, burning - can you imagine the sound of someone being burned at the stake? The smell?
According to your logic, all of the kids who saw this - and it was considered a family outing - should have grown up and turned into serial killers or worse.
The truth of course is this: violent crimes in the US have declined. The worst school killing was not Columbine, but in the 1930s in Minnesota...what video games did that guy play? What has changed is the reporting. 24-hour news sources have to keep the pipe full, so things that might have not made the national press before now remain in the public eye for weeks.
(PS: my corporate nanny firewalls their site and tunneling out and lynxing from elsewhere gives me "Eeek, No frames support. Please upgrade your web browser" --- don't do that).
Actually, it's good advice...more recent versions of Lynx list the links inside of the frame, as well as the idiotic message the too-lazy-to-write-HTML-4 webmaster put there instead of doing the right thing. Not that it applies in this case, as http://www.idsoftware.com/ doesn't have any frames on it, and it perfectly navigable with Lynx. Of course, the webmaster should have put in alt=" " on all the non-linked gifs. But for the most part, the Id team seems to understand the value of not turning anyone away...or at least that some people are going to get Quake for a new platform even before they get a web browser. I mean, there have priorities.
Somewhat ironically, a lot of the shoulders upon which Carmack stand currently work for Microsoft's R&D.
So very true. Bill apparently gave Nathan a blank check to hire the best people in a number of different fields. Whatever his other sins, Billy did manage to nearly re-assemble the graphics group of NYIT. He has Alvy Ray Smith, Jim Blinn and Andrew Glassner (if you don't know these names, you don't know CG) all in one department. Interestingly, the rest of the CG pioneers seem to be working for Paul Allan's Interval Research - Dick Shoup (who wrote the first paint program with Alvy) and Alias' Gavin Miller.
Very cool. I always thought that VRML was invented by people who assumed a world of fat pipes and weak clients (and supported in that assumption by SGI). Quake was made for the real world of thin pipes and ever more powerful clients. VRML's very broken method of handling Levels of Detail is a great example of that: send all the models in one big file - real bright.
I've been raving about this for a while. Doom and Quake have been the best possible proving ground for system that could be adopted to nearly any situation. If Carmak makes a commercial interactive system that requires one large initial download for the "browser", but has small, easily downloadable enviorments (automatically, so the user is unaware of it even happening) he stands a very good chance of creating the Next Big Thing. Remember, before Jeff Hawkins came up with the Pilot, everyone said that the PDA was dead and that the Newton had buried it. I'm sure one compelling product can undo the years of bad ideas by other people.
John, please consider B-Rep geometry with streamed branching and primarily procedural textures with few bitmaps. And a global "real estate" system, so all of the worlds can link together. This could finally be the successor to the web.
Yep, I can see that this movie would be tough to extend into a trilogy. Actually, the only part of the movie I disliked was Neo flying off at the end. It was just silly.
But Morpheus and Trinity were practically flying early in the film with superhuman leaps. They weren't able to fly because they, like Neo until the end, were still invested in the mindset of the Matrix. Neo had finally learned that he could hack the system, that it's rules didn't apply.
Please give the Wachowski brothers credit. They have been talking about this being a Trilogy from the word go. I believe they have a plot already worked out for the sequels will blow each and every one of us away. They've directed two films, both of them four stars in my book (Bound was the other one) and I see no reason to doubt that they'll be able to pull it off.
I suppose that there is potential for interesting stories or characters in Zion, but I'm doubtful. I think it will be very easy for this movie to go from geek/cult (and amazingly mainstream... I was surprised) to lame/formula (and stay mainstream popular, but lose the geek/cult appeal).
Watch a TV interview with the directors. They are geeks, through and through. They was not Hollywood hacks who managed to luck onto a decent script and avoid screwing it up. They wrote, directed and produced "The Matrix"...it is their vision. They managed to create the most exciting SF film in years (real SF, not some other genre with SF trappings) because they are, first and foremost, fans.
I'm sure they'd rather quit making films than sell out. Because they made "Bound" for next to nothing, and got a great stylish film with a following (not as large as "The Matrix" but just as fervent) and that gave them the freedom and budget to make "The Matrix" and produced that for very surprisingly little. The success of "The Matrix" has given them the power to make virtually any project they want, for whatever they want to spend. If they thought they had told all the story they wanted to about that world and wanted to do something different, but were being pressured to do sequels, I'd be worried. They aren't, this is their idea and that is exciting.
The "immorality" of copying DVDs is right up there with the "immorality" of copying a magazine article. The truth is that the invention of the Xerox machine did not destroy the publishing business. Even though is is possible to copy all the interesting articles in a magazine for less than the cost of an issue, the magazine business is rolling along better than ever. Why? Is it possible that the people running the movie studios are insanely greedy?
The entire home video industry is gravy for the movie industry. Worst case, they'll have to go back to making their money off the the theatrical showing of their films instead of counting making as much again off the home video rights.
In all seriousness, I have no problem with copy-protecting DVD's. All the new-age zealotry regarding IP aside, as it stands moviemakers and DVD producers have the right to profit from their efforts. If they stop profiting, they stop making movies, and poof! no more "Matrix"-quality films.
Not true. Movie studios have always profited from making films, and have always spent whatever they felt necessary to do so.
I think we can all agree that home video has been the best thing to ever happen to the movie industry. What you might not remember is that they fought home video tooth and nail. Various movie studio executives insisted that their films would never be released to home video. Disney and Universal sued Sony for inventing the home VCR! They claimed that the very existence of home taping would destroy their studios and empty theaters. You might think this is an exageration, but just ask anyone who was involved in home video in the very early 1980s.
In spite of their best idiotic efforts, the consumer electronics industry won out and practically forced huge piles of money into the hands of the studio bosses. These idiots, had they had their way, would have smothered home video in it's cradle.
Most/. readers are too young to remember the bad old days, when seeing anything other than a current release meant waiting for it on regular TV or maybe talking an art house into showing it on the next schedule. Trust me, it sucked.
But one thing about Hollywood...once they start making money (even when they are forced to do so) they get insanely greedy. They start to expect it, and they want to make sure they squeeze every penny possible out of the suckers (us). That's how idiotic plans like DIVX get launched...and why they keep pushing Pay-Per-View. Trust me, they're not going to rest until they can get back to the original model - people paying every time they watch a movie (and, if they can pull that off, every time they listen to a song).
...and the media conglomerates are exerting all the pressure they can to make consumers believe this seems reasonable. The Supreme Court in the Sony case ruled that home taping was a privacy issue, that what a person did in the privacy of their own home with a VCR was their own business. Hollywood has been buying legislators off to get things like the Digital Millinium Copyright Act passed to pull an end-run around the Court. The act makes hacking out so-called "copy protection" a felony.
Look at the iToaster, a BeOS based machine, intended for the very non-tech market. Be has demonstrated a version of their OS for the floppy and embedded markets. It's easily customizable, and don't forget, Gasse promised to provide free copies to any PC manufacter willing to pre-install Be.
If I was looking to build one of these, Be is the place I'd go for the OS. The file system and boot speed are both reasons enough to choose Be over most any *NIX variant. Open source is not really a factor in this equation...stability is, the ability to survive a power cycle is, and speed of booting is.
These days, VHS dubs are mastered from an uncompressed D1 videotape. The process of translating the film to digital videotape is pretty much the same, with only the additional step of compressing and creating the interactive interface.
In the larger scheme of marketing the film, that expense is miniscule. Case in point, all the porno DVDs. They release hundreds of videos every month, and cannot be selling anywhere near as many as a popular Hollywood film.
I have a DXR2 in the bedroom. I loath Creatives awful interface. I replaced it with a Hollywood+, which has a wonderful interface...anyone thinking of getting the DXR3 because it's "just the same", don't. It has the same awful Creative Labs interface as the DRX2.
As for the quality, I use the RGB output to drive the projector at 640 x 480. It does a great job of scaling, and the image is brighter as the scan rate is doubled and the phosphors are refreshed twice as often. Also, the Hollywood+ has an AC-3 output, so there is no question of audio quality.
If I was doing it again, I'd probably buy a Digital Connections MPACT2 card. Joe Kane of the Imaging Science Foundation uses one of these for his own DVD viewing, and that is more than good enough for me.
I set the earlier version of this board up on a Sony VHP-D50Q that is also running HD signals, and the 720 x 480 progressive mode playback delivers a picture that will make the pain of waiting for HD quite a bit easier.
Don't let one bad experience with one poorly engineered card turn you off of a whole catagory. Besides, it's far, far easier to remove silliness like "region coding" and "macrovision" on a PC-based player than on a stand-alone. Coupled with the fact that it is, for a little while more at least, the only way to get the true progressive scan image off a DVD
Re:Clarke, Technology, and this Interview
on
Sir Arthur Speaks
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· Score: 1
Sir Authur has been using computers since the days of the Altair and CP/M. He has co-written books with Gentry Lee via e-mail. I've read text chats with Clarke. He has mentioned that he uses the Net quite a bit in other interviews.
The person who invents a method to produce industrial lengths of Buckytubes stands a very good chance of becoming the richest person on the planet. Rest assured, people are working on it.
Not that money is everything...personally, providing an inexpensive route off this planet would be more than reward enough.
It is definitly a solvable problem, and I'd be surprised if it isn't solved within the next five years.
If I want to watch a movie on DVD, I take it to my nice home theater. Computer playback is great for impoverished students, space-challenged homes, and travelers with notebooks. But there's no way a general purpose computer could ever have better picture size and sound quality than a dedicated player can, given the same price.
You're mistaken. A hardware decoder card in even a fairly slow PC does a better job of playing a DVD than even the most expensive stand-alone player.
I have a dedicated home theater with a 10' projector and 5 speakers. I chose to build a PC from spare parts, a cheap DVD-ROM drive and a hardware decoder. This is showing me a progressive scan image that is worlds better than the 3:2 pull-down, interlaced junk that every stand-alone player puts out. I honestly would not have a dedicated player in my theater.
Doesn't change the fact that it's cheaper to buy a new copy of the movie than to make a DVD backup of it.
Which is as it should be. Warner's home video seems to understand this, marketing most of their films fairly cheaply, and selling older titles at a major discount. My local Tower's has a bin full of Warner's titles at $12 US.
The jerks at Disney on the other hand, after trying to pin all their hopes on the DIVX "charge them for every viewing" method are finally selling regular DVDs. But they are trying to keep the prices as high as possible.
When DVDs were first released, virtually every title was discounted to $19 US. The prices have been creeping back up to $24 US, $34 US and even $49 US.
This is insane...VHS has always been more expensive to make. Except in rare instances like the Sony Sprinter, VHS is duplicated at 1:1 speed in a room filled with thousands of professional duplication machines churning out a 2 hour film in 2 hours. Stamping out a DVD has nothing but advantages for the studios...and still their naked avarice is the controlling factor.
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For all the fear-mongering I see in the replies to this thread, nobody has brought up the most obvious and valuable potential patient, Hawking. He has managed to survive ALS for an amazingly long time, but where would we be if those two fingers that he types all his work were to finally give out?
With this system, it's quite possible that he could be more productive...or at least be able to spend more of his time thinking, and less time typing out books and papers. Given a choice between fear of a "Frankenstein" scenerio and a potential Grand Unified theory, I'd choose the latter.
Babelfish yields some really funny stuff when English creeps into other lauguages. For instance, the English word "teenager" has crept into German; Babelfish translates it as "tea rodent". Reading this in a movie review, a room full my friends nearly died laughing.
Do you mean Phillip K. Dick's novel "Galactic Pot-Healer"? (Stupid title, I know). In it, bored office workers sending a book title or folk saying through multiple translator machines, and challenging their friends to guess the original title.
It's just called "The Game" in the book.
Tape?! Bleagh! More importantly, it's on the "A Bug's Life" DVD. If you want to see the most amazing image ever to appear in a non-HD format, you need to check out the DVD, played through a progressive-scan device, like a Hollywood+ or a MPACT2 or the new Toshiba player. Pixar apparently re-rendered the film directly to DVD res and did the MPEG2 encoding directly from the digital files. The end result is the most astonishing display of animation ever to appear on a TV screen.
See the cover story at Computer Graphics World for the full story. They use Alias for modeling, their own software for animation on SGIs and prMan for rendering on a giant pile of Suns.
Even cooler is the appearence of Larry Gritz in the credits. Larry wrote Blue Moon Rendering Tools, a freely distributable RenderMan compatible ray-tracer. Learn more about it here. Linux, SGI, Alpha and Windows binaries available here.
Phil Befreys, to my knowledge the only other person to make a commercial-quality RenderMan compatible renderer (Digital Arts DGS), is now working at Pixar as well.
Check out the most recent issue of Computer Graphics World and read their cover story.
Here are a few choice quotes:
...and:
Loads more, and they talk with all the principles of the film, John Lasseter, Ed Catmull and the rest. Not too many spoilers, and the detail is great...for instance, the dust on the shelf Wheezy was on was NOT a particle system; it was actually discrete geometry. And the hairs on Al's arm were modeled as well.
The right to videotape a television show, my main use for a recordable DVD, is not a moral issue at all. It is a privacy right re-affirmed by the US Supreme Court in the Universal & Disney vs. Sony case. To remind everyone, these very short-sighted studios sued Sony to keep the VCR off the market as they could only see it as an "insturment of copyright violation". The Supremes sided with Sony, that the right to do what one wished in one's own home was far more important than the rights of the copyright holder. Thus, the entire home video market appeared and provides the majority of the money flowing into Hollywood these days. Idiots.
Copyright is a limited right granted to encourage creatitivy. It is not in involate right, unlimited or, in any way, a moral issue.
Copying a movie is not theft any more than zeroxing a newspaper article. "Theft" is taking something away from someone and depriving them of it. If I stole the negative of a film, and they were not able to make any prints that would be theft. When I videotape a movie, how I am depriving them of it? They still have it, they can sell as many copies as they wish. Only by re-defining "theft" as "...well, we might have sold you one" is nonsense. Only that the entire force of Hollywood has been applied to selling this idea that taking an intangible, that doing something that deprives no one of anything, is somehow "theft". You've been sold.
Not even that, the high end animation shops are no longer buying SGI workstations, prefering instead to build multi-processor NT boxes with powerful OpenGL cards. Shops like Digital Domain use software like Maya on NT and find that the NT box is faster than an equivilant SGI box.
In the end, SGI did it to themselves. They thought what was special about their product was Irix and the closed system. But what everyone wanted was their graphics subsystem. If their management had a lick of sense, SGI would have used the opportunity offered by the sale of a couple of millions MIPS 4000s to Nintendo to enter the PC graphics chip market. If they had done it at the time, they would have owned it, and all these upstart chip manufacturers would have never had a chance, as well as insuring that all game designers would have bought SGI workstations for game design.
Read some history - up until a hundred or so years ago, one of the most popular forms of public entertainment was executions. Hanging, pressing to death with stones, eviseration, beheading, burning - can you imagine the sound of someone being burned at the stake? The smell?
According to your logic, all of the kids who saw this - and it was considered a family outing - should have grown up and turned into serial killers or worse.
The truth of course is this: violent crimes in the US have declined. The worst school killing was not Columbine, but in the 1930s in Minnesota...what video games did that guy play? What has changed is the reporting. 24-hour news sources have to keep the pipe full, so things that might have not made the national press before now remain in the public eye for weeks.
Actually, it's good advice...more recent versions of Lynx list the links inside of the frame, as well as the idiotic message the too-lazy-to-write-HTML-4 webmaster put there instead of doing the right thing. Not that it applies in this case, as http://www.idsoftware.com/ doesn't have any frames on it, and it perfectly navigable with Lynx. Of course, the webmaster should have put in alt=" " on all the non-linked gifs. But for the most part, the Id team seems to understand the value of not turning anyone away...or at least that some people are going to get Quake for a new platform even before they get a web browser. I mean, there have priorities.
Dunno about you, but I'm not gonna be attaching a sensor to my whatnot, no matter how much cheaper it makes things!
So very true. Bill apparently gave Nathan a blank check to hire the best people in a number of different fields. Whatever his other sins, Billy did manage to nearly re-assemble the graphics group of NYIT. He has Alvy Ray Smith, Jim Blinn and Andrew Glassner (if you don't know these names, you don't know CG) all in one department. Interestingly, the rest of the CG pioneers seem to be working for Paul Allan's Interval Research - Dick Shoup (who wrote the first paint program with Alvy) and Alias' Gavin Miller.
Very cool. I always thought that VRML was invented by people who assumed a world of fat pipes and weak clients (and supported in that assumption by SGI). Quake was made for the real world of thin pipes and ever more powerful clients. VRML's very broken method of handling Levels of Detail is a great example of that: send all the models in one big file - real bright.
I've been raving about this for a while. Doom and Quake have been the best possible proving ground for system that could be adopted to nearly any situation. If Carmak makes a commercial interactive system that requires one large initial download for the "browser", but has small, easily downloadable enviorments (automatically, so the user is unaware of it even happening) he stands a very good chance of creating the Next Big Thing. Remember, before Jeff Hawkins came up with the Pilot, everyone said that the PDA was dead and that the Newton had buried it. I'm sure one compelling product can undo the years of bad ideas by other people.
John, please consider B-Rep geometry with streamed branching and primarily procedural textures with few bitmaps. And a global "real estate" system, so all of the worlds can link together. This could finally be the successor to the web.
But Morpheus and Trinity were practically flying early in the film with superhuman leaps. They weren't able to fly because they, like Neo until the end, were still invested in the mindset of the Matrix. Neo had finally learned that he could hack the system, that it's rules didn't apply.
Please give the Wachowski brothers credit. They have been talking about this being a Trilogy from the word go. I believe they have a plot already worked out for the sequels will blow each and every one of us away. They've directed two films, both of them four stars in my book (Bound was the other one) and I see no reason to doubt that they'll be able to pull it off.
Watch a TV interview with the directors. They are geeks, through and through. They was not Hollywood hacks who managed to luck onto a decent script and avoid screwing it up. They wrote, directed and produced "The Matrix"...it is their vision. They managed to create the most exciting SF film in years (real SF, not some other genre with SF trappings) because they are, first and foremost, fans.
I'm sure they'd rather quit making films than sell out. Because they made "Bound" for next to nothing, and got a great stylish film with a following (not as large as "The Matrix" but just as fervent) and that gave them the freedom and budget to make "The Matrix" and produced that for very surprisingly little. The success of "The Matrix" has given them the power to make virtually any project they want, for whatever they want to spend. If they thought they had told all the story they wanted to about that world and wanted to do something different, but were being pressured to do sequels, I'd be worried. They aren't, this is their idea and that is exciting.
The "immorality" of copying DVDs is right up there with the "immorality" of copying a magazine article. The truth is that the invention of the Xerox machine did not destroy the publishing business. Even though is is possible to copy all the interesting articles in a magazine for less than the cost of an issue, the magazine business is rolling along better than ever. Why? Is it possible that the people running the movie studios are insanely greedy?
The entire home video industry is gravy for the movie industry. Worst case, they'll have to go back to making their money off the the theatrical showing of their films instead of counting making as much again off the home video rights.
Not true. Movie studios have always profited from making films, and have always spent whatever they felt necessary to do so.
I think we can all agree that home video has been the best thing to ever happen to the movie industry. What you might not remember is that they fought home video tooth and nail. Various movie studio executives insisted that their films would never be released to home video. Disney and Universal sued Sony for inventing the home VCR! They claimed that the very existence of home taping would destroy their studios and empty theaters. You might think this is an exageration, but just ask anyone who was involved in home video in the very early 1980s.
In spite of their best idiotic efforts, the consumer electronics industry won out and practically forced huge piles of money into the hands of the studio bosses. These idiots, had they had their way, would have smothered home video in it's cradle.
Most /. readers are too young to remember the bad old days, when seeing anything other than a current release meant waiting for it on regular TV or maybe talking an art house into showing it on the next schedule. Trust me, it sucked.
But one thing about Hollywood...once they start making money (even when they are forced to do so) they get insanely greedy. They start to expect it, and they want to make sure they squeeze every penny possible out of the suckers (us). That's how idiotic plans like DIVX get launched...and why they keep pushing Pay-Per-View. Trust me, they're not going to rest until they can get back to the original model - people paying every time they watch a movie (and, if they can pull that off, every time they listen to a song).
...and the media conglomerates are exerting all the pressure they can to make consumers believe this seems reasonable. The Supreme Court in the Sony case ruled that home taping was a privacy issue, that what a person did in the privacy of their own home with a VCR was their own business. Hollywood has been buying legislators off to get things like the Digital Millinium Copyright Act passed to pull an end-run around the Court. The act makes hacking out so-called "copy protection" a felony.
Look at the iToaster, a BeOS based machine, intended for the very non-tech market. Be has demonstrated a version of their OS for the floppy and embedded markets. It's easily customizable, and don't forget, Gasse promised to provide free copies to any PC manufacter willing to pre-install Be.
If I was looking to build one of these, Be is the place I'd go for the OS. The file system and boot speed are both reasons enough to choose Be over most any *NIX variant. Open source is not really a factor in this equation...stability is, the ability to survive a power cycle is, and speed of booting is.
These days, VHS dubs are mastered from an uncompressed D1 videotape. The process of translating the film to digital videotape is pretty much the same, with only the additional step of compressing and creating the interactive interface.
In the larger scheme of marketing the film, that expense is miniscule. Case in point, all the porno DVDs. They release hundreds of videos every month, and cannot be selling anywhere near as many as a popular Hollywood film.
I have a DXR2 in the bedroom. I loath Creatives awful interface. I replaced it with a Hollywood+, which has a wonderful interface...anyone thinking of getting the DXR3 because it's "just the same", don't. It has the same awful Creative Labs interface as the DRX2.
As for the quality, I use the RGB output to drive the projector at 640 x 480. It does a great job of scaling, and the image is brighter as the scan rate is doubled and the phosphors are refreshed twice as often. Also, the Hollywood+ has an AC-3 output, so there is no question of audio quality.
If I was doing it again, I'd probably buy a Digital Connections MPACT2 card. Joe Kane of the Imaging Science Foundation uses one of these for his own DVD viewing, and that is more than good enough for me.
I set the earlier version of this board up on a Sony VHP-D50Q that is also running HD signals, and the 720 x 480 progressive mode playback delivers a picture that will make the pain of waiting for HD quite a bit easier.
Don't let one bad experience with one poorly engineered card turn you off of a whole catagory. Besides, it's far, far easier to remove silliness like "region coding" and "macrovision" on a PC-based player than on a stand-alone. Coupled with the fact that it is, for a little while more at least, the only way to get the true progressive scan image off a DVD
Sir Authur has been using computers since the days of the Altair and CP/M. He has co-written books with Gentry Lee via e-mail. I've read text chats with Clarke. He has mentioned that he uses the Net quite a bit in other interviews.
The British sunday tabloids have a level of journalistic integrity that makes the Weekly World News look like the New York Times by comparison.
Anonymous Coward, indeed.
The person who invents a method to produce industrial lengths of Buckytubes stands a very good chance of becoming the richest person on the planet. Rest assured, people are working on it.
Not that money is everything...personally, providing an inexpensive route off this planet would be more than reward enough.
It is definitly a solvable problem, and I'd be surprised if it isn't solved within the next five years.
You're mistaken. A hardware decoder card in even a fairly slow PC does a better job of playing a DVD than even the most expensive stand-alone player.
I have a dedicated home theater with a 10' projector and 5 speakers. I chose to build a PC from spare parts, a cheap DVD-ROM drive and a hardware decoder. This is showing me a progressive scan image that is worlds better than the 3:2 pull-down, interlaced junk that every stand-alone player puts out. I honestly would not have a dedicated player in my theater.
Which is as it should be. Warner's home video seems to understand this, marketing most of their films fairly cheaply, and selling older titles at a major discount. My local Tower's has a bin full of Warner's titles at $12 US.
The jerks at Disney on the other hand, after trying to pin all their hopes on the DIVX "charge them for every viewing" method are finally selling regular DVDs. But they are trying to keep the prices as high as possible.
When DVDs were first released, virtually every title was discounted to $19 US. The prices have been creeping back up to $24 US, $34 US and even $49 US.
This is insane...VHS has always been more expensive to make. Except in rare instances like the Sony Sprinter, VHS is duplicated at 1:1 speed in a room filled with thousands of professional duplication machines churning out a 2 hour film in 2 hours. Stamping out a DVD has nothing but advantages for the studios...and still their naked avarice is the controlling factor.