What about 3D rendering? There are lots of people renting time on render farms right now to make deadlines. If I can run PRrenderman on these CPUs, and the price includes storage for my rendered frames, it might be price competitive to buying a lot of processing speed that I'm not going to be using 24/7.
The reason everyone cites this as "the worst movie ever made" is because movie critic (to be generous) Michael Medved has promoted it as such. He and his brother owned a print, and made a lot of money from it's undeserved reputation as such. Anyone who has seen "Manos: The Hands of Fate" knows that "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is "Citizn Kane" by comparison.
Agreed. I used to work for Jupiter's competitor Forrester Research. IMO, a lot of reports are selling the buyers what they want to hear (like Forrester's imfamous "Amazon.toast" report).
Pen computing was NOT a revolution then as it is NOT a revolution now.
All my friend tell me "never respond to Anonymous Cowards". I know I shouldn't, but if nobody does, how will they ever learn?
Anyway, the revolutionary aspect of PenPoint wasn't the pen. If adding a pen was the important part, Pen For Windows wouldn't have sucked. The thing that was revolutionary about PenPoint was how the pen was used. For instance, text editing was via proofreader's marks. Text was deleted by crossing it out; new text was inserted by making an upside-down caret just as a proofreader does; one moved from page to page by "flicking"; etc. Think of Opera's "gestural" interface to get some idea of how many unneeded mouse and menu movements are eliminated.
Anyway, even if the original AC doesn't bother to return to his own feces like a dog, maybe others reading this thread will read this.
Why exactly would I want to go the time, expense and trouble of reading Kaplan's book just to find out whether or not he thinks that his lawsuit is justified?
Because if you did, you would realize just how not just innovative, but actually revolutionary, PenPoint was, and what a dog turd Pen For Windows was, and just what the world lost. I remember PenPoint, and it was as much of a step forward in computer interfaces as Doug Englebart's "Mother of All Demos".
The web is pretty much useless for a lot of information older than ten years. If a technology company existed in the time before Google, and wasn't successful enough to have fans to keep the flame alive (i.e. Amiga), it may as well not exist for those who see Google as the bee-all and end-all of human knowledge.
PenPoint was very important and revolutionary - front of business sections in all the major newspapers, cover stories on all the computer magazines. A Nexus search would yeild very different results.
The main point that nobody seems to have mentioned is that PenPoint was a threat to Microsoft NOT because pen-based computing was seen as a threat. PenPoint was a "threat" because it broke with the "operating system as launcher for applications" paradigm. PenPoint was based on the idea of a blank page and tabs. There were no visible "applications"...different sets of tools launched depending on what the user was trying to do; start printing letters, text editing tools appeared; draw a box, graphing tools appeared. All this was opposed to the MS "use the OS to open an app, then open a file within that app" paradigm. This was a threat to the MS way of life.
PenPoint was the last truly revolutionary operating system and deserves it's day in court. Gate and MS set computing back 20 years.
I had the same thought. I think every year since '98 we've heard reports that e-ink products would be available in two years. Seems there is finally some action on this front, just as Adobe is dropping ebooks.
I saw these at Wired's NextFest and...uh...it looked like shit. Utter shit. Very low res, low contrast, dark gray on lighter gray, nothing like a paper-white display. One can only assume Negroponte had money invested in the product.
It was like a flashback to 1986!
on
NextFest 2005
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I saw everything at NeXTFest, and sadly didn't see too many things I hadn't seen before. One thing in particular that was bizzare was the number of "interactive video displays" that featured:
A video camera.
Processing that camera to derive a one-bit image.
Edge-detecting that one-bit image to interact with graphical elements.
Keying the original video over the graphics.
At the risk of sounding like a crank...we were doing this stuff on Amigas back in the late 80s! There was a program called "Mandela" which was specifically designed to produce interactive video displays. And frankly, some of the demos that shipped with that program were cooler than the ones at NextFest.
Seriously, I'm not an Amiga crank...I have some of the old machines, but haven't fired them up in several years. I just am annoyed that there has been little to no evolution in this area in nearly 20 frickin YEARS!
Lots of comments already about how MS isn't innovating.
Anyone who says that has never been to SIGGRAPH. Microsoft's Graphics Research Group has some of the finest minds of CG in one place. Not sure who's there now, but at one time they had Alvy Ray Smith, Jim Blinn, Andrew Glassner, and a host of other top minds. They routinely produce as many or more papers on basic research as any commercial entity, SGI included. If I recall correctly, they hired Alvy by buying Altamira, which had a program that was doing amazing things with the alpha channel when Photoshop was pretty much useless for compositing.
Since the market for graphics programs is filled already, MS needs to make this at least as good as Gimp and Photoshop for it to be successful. Since this is only a beta, only time will tell if they've done that.
As good as? This assumes that one thinks Photoshop and it's open-source clone are all that good in the first place. As far as I'm concerned, Photoshop's popularity has stalled development in the image editing field. People think that the way things are done in Photoshop are the only way things should be done. The Gimp? It's nice to have a "free Photoshop", but like too many open source projects, it doesn't actually innovate, just immitate (yeah, go ahead...mod me down...you know it's true).
I've been observing paint systems since the Quantel Paintbox and AT&T TIPS, and quite honestly, the rate of innovation in image editing and painting has been in a steady decline since the very first programs produced a flowering of innovations. It's taken new platforms like the Macintosh and the Amiga to produce change, and frankly we've not seen one of those since BeOS.
I'm happy to see MS try something new. Somebody has to.
"Bad dialogue as usual: 'To say that George Lucas cannot write a love scene is an understatement; greeting cards have expressed more passion.'"
Hello? He's a GEEK!
The two slams against Lucas is that he can't write deep characters and can't write love scenes. Watch "American Grafitti", OK? It's a film about a single night in the lives of a bunch of teenagers, and their relationships -
Geek "Terry the Toad" (Charlie Martin Smith) actually hitting it off with "cool chick" Candy Clark
Ron Howard & Cindy Williams as long-time boyfriend and girlfriend dealing with breaking up to go to college
Richard Dreyfuss' unrequited infatuation with the mysterious blonde in the white t-bird
It's a film about relationships, and a love letter to his own teenage years. The writing and relationships in the Star Wars films are weak because they are supposed to be that way because the source material, the serials of the 1940s were like that. Agree or disagree if that is a good idea, but don't damn the man's skills without having seen his entire body of work.
There's a large virus risk! Especially when you've got anti-virus software to sell.....
I sometimes suspect that there are some people who spend their days writing anti-virus software...and their evenings ensuring job security by creating new virus variants.
It's not a balloon! You stupid little thick-headed Saxon git! It's not a balloon! Balloons is for kiddy-winkies. If you want to play with balloons, get outside!
The real problem with the metallic glasses for the last few decades has been to cool things down quickly enough.
They seem to have discovered an alloy formula that is workable, as they are producing parts in quantity, like tennis rackets and golf club heads.
Also, die casting has been around for a long time.
Die-casting doesn't have anywhere near the same flexibility as injection molding. From what I've read, this stuff can be molded as easily as most plastics.
Took some serious hitting with a sledge hammer and a vice to put any kind of a bend in the metal. Impressive stuff.
Want to see something really cool? Check out "Liquidmetal". It's an alloy of titanium and other metals and has some really amazing properties. For one, it can be cast and does not form crystals like titanium, has a low melting tempature compared to it's component metals - it can actually be injection-molded. It's twice as strong as titanium by weight and much more flexible. There's a bounce-test video on their web site that it a hoot.
Right now it's being used for the hinges in that new Motorola Razor phone, various sporting goods and military applications. Cool stuff.
You might want to look at QFX. It's at version 8, but it's actually been around far longer than Photoshop. I first used it as a DOS program on AT&T Targa and Vista cards. Back then it was a collection of independent program to manipulate 32-bit files. I was compositing 2k images using this program back in the 80s for output to 35mm film using DOS batch files.
Anyway, it's written by a small company and technical support is excellent. It costs less than photoshop, there is a free version to check out it's interface, it combines powerful vector and raster tools into one program (my main peeve about Photoshop - which will remain until Adobe integrates Illustrator into Photoshop), it's been multi-threaded since Windows version 1.
For your specific problem, I could do that on a Targa board with the original version of QFX. I could get the alpha channel from any image or sequence and use that in any compositing operation.
Re:You don't need to modify the DVHS deck
on
DVHS on a Budget
·
· Score: 1
Thanks, I was going to post this. I have a Panasonic D-VHS deck, and have been recording on S-VHS tapes for years with no need for any mod. This is without a doubt the most out of date item I've ever seen on Slashdot.
If this is a sub-BTX 1.5ish MHz PPC $600 machine w. FireWire that is utterly silent there is nothing, repeat nothing on the market that can compete with this. I'm getting five.
Small...quiet...cool. Five? I'd like to get 1024 of the and create the world's most efficient Beowulf cluster.
All this talk about the various telephone, satellite and cable companies coming out with "Tivo-killers" is just talk. Anyone who actually owns a TiVo knows that it's not the hardware, it's the software. They can make all the boxes they want, but without the TiVo software, and the concepts behind it, they'll never reach the same level of functionality. I use a TiVo at home and a ReplayTV when visiting my brother's house. Each has features I desire in the other, but in general, the TiVo has a usability that the Replay can't touch. The Replay has better playback features (like the wonderful commercial skip), but the TiVo blows it away in terms of actually getting the programs in the first place (wishlists, etc).
As the TiVo and ReplayTV were introduced at the same time, at the same Consumer Electronics Show, they've had a lot of time to place catch-up with each other and to come up with a lot of great ideas. I have yet to read about one of these new boxes from one of the giant media companies that had features that got users raving about them. It's possible, but unlikely at this point, that some new box is going to be anything other than a "me-too". They all seem like wishful thinking from entities that wish nothing more than for TiVo and Replay to have never been invented...that they will somehow be able to drive both of them out of business and then to start limiting features more and more to help "maintain control of copyright".
Slashdot Mirror
What about 3D rendering? There are lots of people renting time on render farms right now to make deadlines. If I can run PRrenderman on these CPUs, and the price includes storage for my rendered frames, it might be price competitive to buying a lot of processing speed that I'm not going to be using 24/7.
The reason everyone cites this as "the worst movie ever made" is because movie critic (to be generous) Michael Medved has promoted it as such. He and his brother owned a print, and made a lot of money from it's undeserved reputation as such. Anyone who has seen "Manos: The Hands of Fate" knows that "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is "Citizn Kane" by comparison.
Agreed. I used to work for Jupiter's competitor Forrester Research. IMO, a lot of reports are selling the buyers what they want to hear (like Forrester's imfamous "Amazon.toast" report).
All my friend tell me "never respond to Anonymous Cowards". I know I shouldn't, but if nobody does, how will they ever learn?
Anyway, the revolutionary aspect of PenPoint wasn't the pen. If adding a pen was the important part, Pen For Windows wouldn't have sucked. The thing that was revolutionary about PenPoint was how the pen was used. For instance, text editing was via proofreader's marks. Text was deleted by crossing it out; new text was inserted by making an upside-down caret just as a proofreader does; one moved from page to page by "flicking"; etc. Think of Opera's "gestural" interface to get some idea of how many unneeded mouse and menu movements are eliminated.
Anyway, even if the original AC doesn't bother to return to his own feces like a dog, maybe others reading this thread will read this.
Because if you did, you would realize just how not just innovative, but actually revolutionary, PenPoint was, and what a dog turd Pen For Windows was, and just what the world lost. I remember PenPoint, and it was as much of a step forward in computer interfaces as Doug Englebart's "Mother of All Demos".
If I had my way, you'd get Karma points for acknowleding your error. Classy move.
The web is pretty much useless for a lot of information older than ten years. If a technology company existed in the time before Google, and wasn't successful enough to have fans to keep the flame alive (i.e. Amiga), it may as well not exist for those who see Google as the bee-all and end-all of human knowledge.
PenPoint was very important and revolutionary - front of business sections in all the major newspapers, cover stories on all the computer magazines. A Nexus search would yeild very different results.
Excellent post.
The main point that nobody seems to have mentioned is that PenPoint was a threat to Microsoft NOT because pen-based computing was seen as a threat. PenPoint was a "threat" because it broke with the "operating system as launcher for applications" paradigm. PenPoint was based on the idea of a blank page and tabs. There were no visible "applications"...different sets of tools launched depending on what the user was trying to do; start printing letters, text editing tools appeared; draw a box, graphing tools appeared. All this was opposed to the MS "use the OS to open an app, then open a file within that app" paradigm. This was a threat to the MS way of life.
PenPoint was the last truly revolutionary operating system and deserves it's day in court. Gate and MS set computing back 20 years.
I saw these at Wired's NextFest and...uh...it looked like shit. Utter shit. Very low res, low contrast, dark gray on lighter gray, nothing like a paper-white display. One can only assume Negroponte had money invested in the product.
I saw everything at NeXTFest, and sadly didn't see too many things I hadn't seen before. One thing in particular that was bizzare was the number of "interactive video displays" that featured:
A video camera.
Processing that camera to derive a one-bit image.
Edge-detecting that one-bit image to interact with graphical elements.
Keying the original video over the graphics.
At the risk of sounding like a crank...we were doing this stuff on Amigas back in the late 80s! There was a program called "Mandela" which was specifically designed to produce interactive video displays. And frankly, some of the demos that shipped with that program were cooler than the ones at NextFest.
Seriously, I'm not an Amiga crank...I have some of the old machines, but haven't fired them up in several years. I just am annoyed that there has been little to no evolution in this area in nearly 20 frickin YEARS!
Finally! Negroponte has been blithering about this technology for what seems like decades, and it's never appeared as anything other than vapor.
Anyone who says that has never been to SIGGRAPH. Microsoft's Graphics Research Group has some of the finest minds of CG in one place. Not sure who's there now, but at one time they had Alvy Ray Smith, Jim Blinn, Andrew Glassner, and a host of other top minds. They routinely produce as many or more papers on basic research as any commercial entity, SGI included. If I recall correctly, they hired Alvy by buying Altamira, which had a program that was doing amazing things with the alpha channel when Photoshop was pretty much useless for compositing.
As good as? This assumes that one thinks Photoshop and it's open-source clone are all that good in the first place. As far as I'm concerned, Photoshop's popularity has stalled development in the image editing field. People think that the way things are done in Photoshop are the only way things should be done. The Gimp? It's nice to have a "free Photoshop", but like too many open source projects, it doesn't actually innovate, just immitate (yeah, go ahead...mod me down...you know it's true).
I've been observing paint systems since the Quantel Paintbox and AT&T TIPS, and quite honestly, the rate of innovation in image editing and painting has been in a steady decline since the very first programs produced a flowering of innovations. It's taken new platforms like the Macintosh and the Amiga to produce change, and frankly we've not seen one of those since BeOS.
I'm happy to see MS try something new. Somebody has to.
The two slams against Lucas is that he can't write deep characters and can't write love scenes. Watch "American Grafitti", OK? It's a film about a single night in the lives of a bunch of teenagers, and their relationships -
Geek "Terry the Toad" (Charlie Martin Smith) actually hitting it off with "cool chick" Candy Clark
Ron Howard & Cindy Williams as long-time boyfriend and girlfriend dealing with breaking up to go to college
Richard Dreyfuss' unrequited infatuation with the mysterious blonde in the white t-bird
It's a film about relationships, and a love letter to his own teenage years. The writing and relationships in the Star Wars films are weak because they are supposed to be that way because the source material, the serials of the 1940s were like that. Agree or disagree if that is a good idea, but don't damn the man's skills without having seen his entire body of work.
I thought the Presidio was supposed to be for non-profit organizations, like the Internet Archive.
I sometimes suspect that there are some people who spend their days writing anti-virus software...and their evenings ensuring job security by creating new virus variants.
It's not a balloon! You stupid little thick-headed Saxon git! It's not a balloon! Balloons is for kiddy-winkies. If you want to play with balloons, get outside!
- - Ferdinand von Zeppelin "The Golden Age of Balooning"
They seem to have discovered an alloy formula that is workable, as they are producing parts in quantity, like tennis rackets and golf club heads.
Die-casting doesn't have anywhere near the same flexibility as injection molding. From what I've read, this stuff can be molded as easily as most plastics.
Want to see something really cool? Check out "Liquidmetal". It's an alloy of titanium and other metals and has some really amazing properties. For one, it can be cast and does not form crystals like titanium, has a low melting tempature compared to it's component metals - it can actually be injection-molded. It's twice as strong as titanium by weight and much more flexible. There's a bounce-test video on their web site that it a hoot.
Right now it's being used for the hinges in that new Motorola Razor phone, various sporting goods and military applications. Cool stuff.
I forgot to include a link to the program - QFX
You might want to look at QFX. It's at version 8, but it's actually been around far longer than Photoshop. I first used it as a DOS program on AT&T Targa and Vista cards. Back then it was a collection of independent program to manipulate 32-bit files. I was compositing 2k images using this program back in the 80s for output to 35mm film using DOS batch files. Anyway, it's written by a small company and technical support is excellent. It costs less than photoshop, there is a free version to check out it's interface, it combines powerful vector and raster tools into one program (my main peeve about Photoshop - which will remain until Adobe integrates Illustrator into Photoshop), it's been multi-threaded since Windows version 1. For your specific problem, I could do that on a Targa board with the original version of QFX. I could get the alpha channel from any image or sequence and use that in any compositing operation.
Thanks, I was going to post this. I have a Panasonic D-VHS deck, and have been recording on S-VHS tapes for years with no need for any mod. This is without a doubt the most out of date item I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Yeah, every single person downloading the entire file from a single server? Bleagh! Cross this with Bittorrent, and you'll have something worthwhile.
He knows it's true, because Hattori Hanzo said so!
All this talk about the various telephone, satellite and cable companies coming out with "Tivo-killers" is just talk. Anyone who actually owns a TiVo knows that it's not the hardware, it's the software. They can make all the boxes they want, but without the TiVo software, and the concepts behind it, they'll never reach the same level of functionality. I use a TiVo at home and a ReplayTV when visiting my brother's house. Each has features I desire in the other, but in general, the TiVo has a usability that the Replay can't touch. The Replay has better playback features (like the wonderful commercial skip), but the TiVo blows it away in terms of actually getting the programs in the first place (wishlists, etc).
As the TiVo and ReplayTV were introduced at the same time, at the same Consumer Electronics Show, they've had a lot of time to place catch-up with each other and to come up with a lot of great ideas. I have yet to read about one of these new boxes from one of the giant media companies that had features that got users raving about them. It's possible, but unlikely at this point, that some new box is going to be anything other than a "me-too". They all seem like wishful thinking from entities that wish nothing more than for TiVo and Replay to have never been invented...that they will somehow be able to drive both of them out of business and then to start limiting features more and more to help "maintain control of copyright".