Sorry, but how the hell can this be the target of a C&D letter?
Because anything can be the target of a "Cease and Desist" letter. They are just something a lawyer produces saying "stop doing what you're doing - we don't like it". It has no actual legal standing, other than notifying you that, if you don't stop, they will sue.
It's a damn shame that the "Dysfuncional Family Circus" case never went to trial. For those who are unfamiliar, the guy who ran the site would scan and post the picture of that sappy cartoon, then visitor would submit alternative captions, which would be sorted by a panel of moderators (all of whom had consistantly submitted funny captions before). In almost every case, the new captions were a lot more funny than Bil Keene's lame original.
What isn't protected is charging people $10 to see the movie and then talking over the whole thing.
No, neither you, nor Lucasfilm, can prove that catagorically. As far as I know, it has never gone to the Supreme Court. The DFC had a lot of fans, and some of those fans were lawyers offering to take the case - pro bono - all the way to the top to establish the right to parody by using the original visuals with a new "soundtrack".
The Court's rulings have left the definition of "how much is too much" very open. Rose-Acuff vs. 2 Live Crew dealt with the the group using the original melody and most of the original lyrics of Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman". 2 Live crew won - even though they arguablly used more than 90% of the original song in their "parody". I'd argue that taking the visuals of a movie and creating new audio is taking only 50%, maybe less, of the original experience. Listening to the movie with no picture is more enjoyable than watching the movie with no sound.
Personally, I'd say the Lucasfilm lawyers are claiming a right they do not in fact have. If the theater is paying the rental on the print, I believe they have a right to show it as they see fit. This can only be answered by a lawsuit. But Lucas has a lot more lawyers than any theater, so, like so much in American law, the people with the deepest pockets will win - not because they are right, but because the other guy can't afford to fight.
Just out of curiousity, what is the Grateful Dead's enlightened position and attitude to the recording and distribution of their live performances?
Taping was allowed, and even encouraged, but they prefered that you do so in the "Taper's Section" right near the sound board. The most experienced tapers would have thousands of dollars tied up in their rigs, using Neumann microphones, custom microphone pre-amps, etc. The last I read about them, they were using DAT machines, but I have no doubt they are now using some sort of 24-bit recording system, like a Layla card on a laptop.
There are other bands that explicitly allow taping: Phish, Dave Matthews Band are a couple of the more famous. None of the bands are in favor of anyone selling audience tapes, and most people who tape are opposed to people selling audience tapes either. Someone who tapes a show will give copies to a fellow fan, usually trading disc for disc. If there is nothing to trade, they'll usually do a 2 blanks for one recorded disc swap.
BitTorrent has really revolutionized the taping world. One taper can make a file available (usually in the lossless SHN or FLAC formats) and can get it to hundreds of people in the same time they could get it to one. Besides concerts they have taped themselves, people frequently post "liberated bootlegs" under the theory that, if the artist isn't getting the money, nobody should.
If you take the display off, it'll probably stay cooler, though it's more likely to have something bang into the keyboard. If that's not a problem, you're probably better taking it off. Also, if it's cooler, it's more likely not to run the fan.
True. Of course, with the way I'm using it with a KVM switch, I could take the keyboard off as well. Right now I have it sitting flat on a shelf, with another shelf above it, so there's no possibility of anything hitting the keys.
Laptops with broken displays are even better. I have an old P3 laptop I use as a server, and I got it free. Sony charges $600 for ANY display repair, so it's literally not worth fixing. But the VGA output works fine, and I have it set up through a KVM switch. Viola! A 75 watt server. Tiny hard drive, but if it becomes a problem, I can just do externals.
I'm thinking of taking the whole display off, thus making sure the lamps never come on, thereby reducing power drain even more.
Yeah, I love that story! Here's Google's cache of it...Art Bell's web site no longer has it (apparently the gray aliens told him to take it down).
Since it's so hard to find, I might as well post the entire thing here. It's not that long:
Learning to Fly, Strip, and Vomit on a 727
Penn Jillette
Since I was a kid, I've wanted to be weightless. I really wanted to go to space, but part of going to space was being weightless. Just to hold something up in front of me, and have it stay right there is the idea of magic. As I got older, I battled gravity. My start in showbiz was as a juggler. Jugglers fight gravity. The hack jugglers cover a drop with a "standard" (meaning it's been stolen so much, those who didn't write it conveniently consider it to be public domain) 'cover' (it doesn't really cover very much, they know the prop is on the floor and they know you're chasing it, bent over like you're chasing a duck) line, "Sudden gust of gravity."
Now, that I'm 45 years old and I weight 280 pounds, gravity is a less sporting and more real enemy. I'm 6'6" tall and I still remember Leslie Fiedler writing in "Freaks, Myths of our Secret Selves" that "gravity is not kind to those who grow too large." As we get older, it seems the jockey build is healthier.
No one knows what gravity is. I mean we just don't know. There is no good theory. A good theory in science is one that we're damn sure is true: The Earth goes around the Sun. Evolution is how we got here. No one seriously doubts those. But, gravity, well, we just don't know.
So, right now, the only way you can feel weightless for more than a couple rollercoaster seconds is by getting far enough away from Earth, or taking the Vomit Comet. The Vomit Comet is how NASA trains astronauts (the Russians must do it too, right?). They take a big old airplane and they go up and down really fast. When they go up, you weight 1.8 times your weight, and when they go down, you weigh around 0.
The FAA has always given NASA a monopoly on losing all your pounds of ugly fat (along with muscle, bone, and everything else). Astronauts get to ride it, some scientists get to ride it, and that's about it. Ron Howard made some backroom deal (it MUST have included sexual favors) to be able to shoot "Apollo 13," on the NASA Vomit Comet and they talked about it a bit, but it was soon quieted down. You're not REALLY supposed to use a government-funded program to make movies. Not really. I mean, I'm glad Tom, Gary, and Kevin got to fly, but if everyone really thought about it, why can't we all ride?
A couple free-market nuts at NASA decided they LOVED Zero G, and it was time to get off the socialist tit, and buy their own Vomit Comet and start selling rides on it. Everything the Vomit Comet does in within the specs of planes, and why can't we do what Ron and Tom got to do? That was the idea.
When they first got this harebrained scheme, I heard about it. It seems that when anyone gets a harebrained scheme, I'm CC'd on the memo. I loved nuts, I'm for nuts, I am nuts. They all get in touch with me. I told them I thought it was a great idea (and you know how much that means), and I wrote them email, gave them tickets to our show, and went to dinner with them a couple times.
They were going to get approval to fly a 727 very fast right straight down very soon. It was going to be a matter of months. That was 6 years ago. But, I kept talking to them, and whenever they gave me a date, I said I would be there, until it fell through again. Us free-market guys are always fighting the man.
Well, they finally fought the law and kinda sorta won. They at least won enough for me to fly. I finally did it. After 6 years of grueling cheerleading, I got be be weightless. Only about
I'm a big a fan of Mark Cuban as anyone, but the truth is more important. HD-Net is not the first channel to broadcast exclusively in HD, and Mark isn't even the first to broadcast more than one channel of HD at the same time.
Unity Motion was the first, a dedicated HD-only satellite system featuring three 24 hour, 1080i channels. In 1998. Dead by 1999. But I still have one of the receivers.
You still need a good Faraday cage to block everything.
Electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos (formerly Walter) enclosed her Greenwich Village studio in a Faraday cage. In an article in Keyboard magazine, she described the dramatically lower noise level of all her analog equipment, including her custom built mixing board.
I'm suprised more audiophiles aren't building Faraday cages for their analog electronics, or at least making sure they have a decent grounding system. Enclosing the turntable and pre-amp in a Faraday cage and using a balanced AC system should yeild dramatic reductions in low-level noise. Far more than any amount of tweeky cables.
I agree with a post above - businesses will offer wifi just as they offer bathrooms and air conditioning to their customers.
Very true. I just set up a free wifi system for a sports bar & grill that I work for. I used a Linksys access point, a 1 gigahz junk PC, a couple of random ethernet cards and the ZoneCD from the PublicIP project. Set it up and got everything configured in an evening. Works great, no hard disk needed, the access is personalized with the bar's logo.
It would cost them more than they could expect to make to try to set up a commercial access point. But by letting a handful of customers piggyback on the DSL connection, they are able to keep people there for a little bit longer, eating and drinking. They asked me about it when a group of eight people came in and asked if they had internet access a couple of weeks back. Few things pain a resturaunt owner more than telling someone "no" and having them walk out the door looking for another place. That one group's business could have covered the entire cost of the system.
At what point can a person no longer identify a letter placed in a single erroneous frame. (as an example you see a movie, one frame of which has been replaced by a large letter H, at what frame rate can you no longer identify the H). For most people the H goes away somewhere between 60 and 120 fps.
Did you graph this? I'm genuinely curious to see. My gut feeling is that the distribution is clustered on the 60 fps side rather than more evenly distributed.
Another experiment shows people 2 animations. One is at X fps and the other is at X+10 fps. They are asked which is faster. At the point where people can truly no longer distinguish which is better, they should be wrong 50% of the time. People choose the correct display quite reliably up to at least 100fps. X and X+50% is differentiable for a good percentage of the population up to 150 fps.
I'd be careful to assure that there were no differences in brightness when the framerate was changed. In my experience, people respond more positively to brightness than to faster motion (this is why every TV set sold come from the factory set far too bright for an accurate picture).
As to the TI DLP's I have no doubt you're correct. However, having everyone happy is not the same as impossible to improve upon. The real question is when do you reach the point where no one can tell the difference anymore.
I agree. But the gamer's fetishistic obsession on frame rate detracts from improving the experience in more important ways. A perfectly smooth scene with Phong shading at 200 fps is not going to look more "real" than one rendered with radiosity at 100 fps. In the case of DLP displays, the fact that the entire image is being lit, rather than scanned like a CRT, may have more of an impact than any other factor.
Regarding high def TV, try comparing 720 @ 60 fps vs 720 @ 30 fps and see which people think has better quality. You'll need an exceptional source and display for this experiment though, make sure your display doesn't downgrade 720@60 to 30 internally (most do).
Tragically, most HD is not even at 30 fps. Cinematographers and directors working on TV usually wish they were doing movies instead. So they insist that they shoot on 35mm film at 24 fps, or on HD, but also at 24 fps. They erroronously insist that this "makes it look like film". No, this makes it look like "film on TV", 24 fps with 3:2 pull-down conversion to 30 fps and it looks like crap. So now we have to live with 24 fps with 6 frames of repetition judder. If you're talking about film on TV, that may be what you're seeing.
There aren't even any monitors you can buy that will hit human perception limits, which is around 200fps.
I'd be genuinely interested in seeing some data that shows that humans are able to preceive 200 frames per second. How did they test it? One different frame out of two hundred in a second? Somehow I doubt the numbers actually exist...that 200 fps has become an article of faith among gamers to justify higher frame-rates.
I can give you a real-world example. The first generation of TI's DLP video projection systems operated at 30 composite frames per second - that is, 30 sequences of red, green and blue per second. 90% of the population had no problem integrating 3 differetly colored frames into a single, solid color image. Only 10% of the viewers, and only under some conditions (fast moving, high-contrast objects on the edge of the visual field) could see "rainbows", or color trails. When they doubled the rate to 60 composite frames, everyone was happy.
That is the worst possible case, having completely differnt colors on individual frames. Normal animation has a very small amount of difference between frames. And the higher the frame-rate, the smaller the delta.
Remember, animation _begins_ to be perceived at 15fps, is fluid for 90% of the population at 24 fps, but animation rates differing by 10fps can be differentiated by 90% of the population all the way up to 120fps. 200fps is roughly the input frequency of your eyes to your brain.
Where did you pull this one from? Classic Disney and Warner Brothers animation is a 12 FPS ("on the twos"). To my knowledge the only 24 fps animation was "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", and that was only done that way in order to match the original 35mm footage.
All 35mm films are 24 fps (shown with a split shutter at 48 fps) except Douglas Trumbell's ShowScan system at 60 fps and UltraVision at 48 fps. The two popular high-definition television systems are 1080 lines at 60 interlaced fields/sec or 720 lines at 30
progressive frames per second. And the tests I've done with it, the vast majority cannot tell a difference (I prefer 720P because I notice interlacing artifacts).
Yeah, the gamers will be able to go from a frame-rate four times the level of human perception to five times the level of human perception! What a breakthrough!
Face it, it's the hot-rodding impulse. They may as well bolt Thrush pipes and a Hurst shifter to the top of their cases as increase their clock speed any further.
The lack of features is a selling point. The Earnie Ball company was hit by a SPA lawsui and decided to rid themselves of all Microsoft software. Not only are they saving a huge amount of money, but they were able to offer a limited set of features to workers who didn't need particular features. The example given was "why give someone doing data entry a web browser". It doesn't sound like it would be as much fun to work there, but it is their computer and they are not playing you to check your E-Bay auctions.
The shady sentiment mentioned in the article is probably confused with Microsoft Corp. "donating" software to schools out of goodwill or as a result of various antitrust trials. Donating $1 Billion of software is a misnomer when the cost of donation is a tiny fraction of the retail value of the items. Air would probably cost more to donate and deliver than a stack of license keys and CDs.
I developed a web site for the National PTA (Parents & Teacher's Association), and they had a bunch of "donated" Microsoft products. I noticed that the versions were out of date, and asked about upgrading. I was informed that the donation was limited to the original software package. The non-profit had to pay for support and all upgrades. This was not philanthropy. This was a cynical business move to try to keep non-profits from moving to Free software.
No way partner. You are out of your mind. That's not the way it works. Only a sucker makes a deal out of guilt in a competitve market. That might make you sad and bitter, but welcome to America.
When the government subsidizes my big screen TV then I will be glad as hell to play the loyal friend. But if it's dog eat dog, then it's the customers duty to treat salespeople as the enemy. That's the way it is.
I think it sucks too and we should all work for change. But you can't have it both ways and asking consumers to buy things out of guilt in a winner-take-all economy is ridiculous.
Not "guilt". The simple fact is that the average consumer does not, and shouldn't have to, know the entire market for consumer electronics in order to make a purchase. There are hundreds of models out there, and someone who deals with them on a daily basis stands a far better chance of being able to offer worthwhile advice. Aquiring that knowledge and offering it to the public costs money. That cost is passed on the consumer with a slightly higher price (usually 1% to 5% above the "warehouse club" price).
Go buy a plasma TV at CostCo if you want. But ask the useless drones there all your questions, and enjoy the experience of their responses ranging from "That's not my department" to cow-like expressions to (the "helpful" ones) reading the outside of the box to you. Do NOT waste the time and resources of a quality retailer because you wanted to save a few bucks and wound up buying something that will not fit your needs. All they sell is "SKU"s (Stock Keeping Units). Plasma TVs or gallon jars of mayonnaise, it's all the same to them.
Fair enough, but you won't find a projector and/or screen for cheaper anywhere else though.
You could try the places where I have bought every projector I've ever owned - rental houses. I purchased a HD Sony industrial CRT projector for $1000 that originally cost $28,000. It had only 600 hours on the unit. They dumped it so cheap because they had moved entirely over to LCD and DLP units, and no suit wanted to rent a big, heavy (165 lbs!) CRT. The longer a unit sits on the shelf, not renting, the more it costs them on their taxes. It's worth it for them to dump it.
If a bar in your area gets shut down see if they have an auction or find out what liquidation place they use to sell off the old equipment.
Bad idea. Monumentally bad idea.
Used equipment is a good idea, but anything that has been mounted on the ceiling of a smoky, greasy bar will have it's useful life significantly shortened. Digital projectors have to move a lot of air through them, and Marlboro and fry grease flavored air is harsh on electronics and optics.
I know this well, as I install and maintain video projectors in bars. When these places are done with something, the only correct place for it to go is a dumpster. The screens have it even worse than the projectors!
Oh, and try to find a shop where you can see two projectors in action side-by-side, for comparison.
...and if you do, buy it there! Don't be an asshole and waste the time and resources of a dealership that cares enough to have several competitive models, properly set up, and enough floor space to do a side-by-side demo. I've seen so many people who will use up hours of a dealer's time, then buy it on-line.
The six store local chain I used to work for just went bankrupt and closed...so I'm a little bitter. I'm sure this post will be followed-up by posters rationalizing doing this, citing bad experiences with dealers. I'm not talking about bad dealers. If the dealer wasn't competent, these people wouldn't be wasting their time in the first place.
Will extramarital sex with robots of various levels of sentience be considered "cheating"?
Given that a huge number of women consider their husband or boyfriend watching porn and masturbating by himself "cheating", I think we can safely assume the answer is "yes". Sue Johansen's show "Talk Sex With Sue" deals with that "issue" nearly every week - some woman calls in freaked by finding her boyfriend/husband's secret porn stash. Humanform sexual robots would definitely be considered cheating. I'd venture to guess that they'd be even more freaked out, because a well designed robot could have a level of physical perfection and skill that no human woman could possibly match. The true Turing test would be, not mearly whether a human can communicate with an AI, but whether a human could fall in love with one.
I think the grand-parent has a valid point. You can't call a set of still images a movie just because they can be put together and made into a movie. Intention of creation plays an important role
It's an interesting point - is it the person who originally had te idea, or the person who first successfully made it work. For instance, John Logie Baird actually made the very first video recordings, decades before anyone else managed it. But he wasn't able to play them back because he didn't have a way to syncronize the recorded signal to his display device. Is half of an invention enough?
I saw a documentary about Garrett Brown, and it showed his various prototype stages. The original one looked exactly like this - a length of pipe. The second one was more like a pantograph to try to keep the camera level. Then he added the seperate handle connected to the upright portion wih a gimbal. The rest of the development was on the counter-balance arm and the vest. All of this was necessary because Brown was building these for 35mm film cameras.
If you're looking to improve this design, the things I'd look at are: a gimbal, so allow the operator to hold the unit more comfortably and lightly, and avoid transferring hand motion to the camera; a sliding mount at the top, to allow the camera's balance to be shifted forward and back to tilt up or down.
The Steadycam JR Lite is a great one to look at. It was designed by the great Frogdesign studio (the NeXT cube). The camera sits on top of a slide, and right on top of the gimbal and handle. The arm is divided into two parts at a 90 degree angle, connected to the slide at 45 degrees. And the whole thing folds up. It's a wonderfully slick design - and obscenely overpriced.
Slashdot Mirror
Because anything can be the target of a "Cease and Desist" letter. They are just something a lawyer produces saying "stop doing what you're doing - we don't like it". It has no actual legal standing, other than notifying you that, if you don't stop, they will sue.
It's a damn shame that the "Dysfuncional Family Circus" case never went to trial. For those who are unfamiliar, the guy who ran the site would scan and post the picture of that sappy cartoon, then visitor would submit alternative captions, which would be sorted by a panel of moderators (all of whom had consistantly submitted funny captions before). In almost every case, the new captions were a lot more funny than Bil Keene's lame original.
No, neither you, nor Lucasfilm, can prove that catagorically. As far as I know, it has never gone to the Supreme Court. The DFC had a lot of fans, and some of those fans were lawyers offering to take the case - pro bono - all the way to the top to establish the right to parody by using the original visuals with a new "soundtrack".
The Court's rulings have left the definition of "how much is too much" very open. Rose-Acuff vs. 2 Live Crew dealt with the the group using the original melody and most of the original lyrics of Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman". 2 Live crew won - even though they arguablly used more than 90% of the original song in their "parody". I'd argue that taking the visuals of a movie and creating new audio is taking only 50%, maybe less, of the original experience. Listening to the movie with no picture is more enjoyable than watching the movie with no sound.
Personally, I'd say the Lucasfilm lawyers are claiming a right they do not in fact have. If the theater is paying the rental on the print, I believe they have a right to show it as they see fit. This can only be answered by a lawsuit. But Lucas has a lot more lawyers than any theater, so, like so much in American law, the people with the deepest pockets will win - not because they are right, but because the other guy can't afford to fight.
Taping was allowed, and even encouraged, but they prefered that you do so in the "Taper's Section" right near the sound board. The most experienced tapers would have thousands of dollars tied up in their rigs, using Neumann microphones, custom microphone pre-amps, etc. The last I read about them, they were using DAT machines, but I have no doubt they are now using some sort of 24-bit recording system, like a Layla card on a laptop.
There are other bands that explicitly allow taping: Phish, Dave Matthews Band are a couple of the more famous. None of the bands are in favor of anyone selling audience tapes, and most people who tape are opposed to people selling audience tapes either. Someone who tapes a show will give copies to a fellow fan, usually trading disc for disc. If there is nothing to trade, they'll usually do a 2 blanks for one recorded disc swap.
BitTorrent has really revolutionized the taping world. One taper can make a file available (usually in the lossless SHN or FLAC formats) and can get it to hundreds of people in the same time they could get it to one. Besides concerts they have taped themselves, people frequently post "liberated bootlegs" under the theory that, if the artist isn't getting the money, nobody should.
True. Of course, with the way I'm using it with a KVM switch, I could take the keyboard off as well. Right now I have it sitting flat on a shelf, with another shelf above it, so there's no possibility of anything hitting the keys.
Laptops with broken displays are even better. I have an old P3 laptop I use as a server, and I got it free. Sony charges $600 for ANY display repair, so it's literally not worth fixing. But the VGA output works fine, and I have it set up through a KVM switch. Viola! A 75 watt server. Tiny hard drive, but if it becomes a problem, I can just do externals.
I'm thinking of taking the whole display off, thus making sure the lamps never come on, thereby reducing power drain even more.
Yeah, I love that story! Here's Google's cache of it...Art Bell's web site no longer has it (apparently the gray aliens told him to take it down).
Since it's so hard to find, I might as well post the entire thing here. It's not that long:
Learning to Fly, Strip, and Vomit on a 727
Penn Jillette
Since I was a kid, I've wanted to be weightless. I really wanted to go to space, but part of going to space was being weightless. Just to hold something up in front of me, and have it stay right there is the idea of magic. As I got older, I battled gravity. My start in showbiz was as a juggler. Jugglers fight gravity. The hack jugglers cover a drop with a "standard" (meaning it's been stolen so much, those who didn't write it conveniently consider it to be public domain) 'cover' (it doesn't really cover very much, they know the prop is on the floor and they know you're chasing it, bent over like you're chasing a duck) line, "Sudden gust of gravity."
Now, that I'm 45 years old and I weight 280 pounds, gravity is a less sporting and more real enemy. I'm 6'6" tall and I still remember Leslie Fiedler writing in "Freaks, Myths of our Secret Selves" that "gravity is not kind to those who grow too large." As we get older, it seems the jockey build is healthier.
No one knows what gravity is. I mean we just don't know. There is no good theory. A good theory in science is one that we're damn sure is true: The Earth goes around the Sun. Evolution is how we got here. No one seriously doubts those. But, gravity, well, we just don't know.
So, right now, the only way you can feel weightless for more than a couple rollercoaster seconds is by getting far enough away from Earth, or taking the Vomit Comet. The Vomit Comet is how NASA trains astronauts (the Russians must do it too, right?). They take a big old airplane and they go up and down really fast. When they go up, you weight 1.8 times your weight, and when they go down, you weigh around 0.
The FAA has always given NASA a monopoly on losing all your pounds of ugly fat (along with muscle, bone, and everything else). Astronauts get to ride it, some scientists get to ride it, and that's about it. Ron Howard made some backroom deal (it MUST have included sexual favors) to be able to shoot "Apollo 13," on the NASA Vomit Comet and they talked about it a bit, but it was soon quieted down. You're not REALLY supposed to use a government-funded program to make movies. Not really. I mean, I'm glad Tom, Gary, and Kevin got to fly, but if everyone really thought about it, why can't we all ride?
A couple free-market nuts at NASA decided they LOVED Zero G, and it was time to get off the socialist tit, and buy their own Vomit Comet and start selling rides on it. Everything the Vomit Comet does in within the specs of planes, and why can't we do what Ron and Tom got to do? That was the idea.
When they first got this harebrained scheme, I heard about it. It seems that when anyone gets a harebrained scheme, I'm CC'd on the memo. I loved nuts, I'm for nuts, I am nuts. They all get in touch with me. I told them I thought it was a great idea (and you know how much that means), and I wrote them email, gave them tickets to our show, and went to dinner with them a couple times.
They were going to get approval to fly a 727 very fast right straight down very soon. It was going to be a matter of months. That was 6 years ago. But, I kept talking to them, and whenever they gave me a date, I said I would be there, until it fell through again. Us free-market guys are always fighting the man.
Well, they finally fought the law and kinda sorta won. They at least won enough for me to fly. I finally did it. After 6 years of grueling cheerleading, I got be be weightless. Only about
Of course, but MUSE was never broadcast in the US, and was never 24 hours in Japan. HD-Net was three channels of 1080i, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I'm a big a fan of Mark Cuban as anyone, but the truth is more important. HD-Net is not the first channel to broadcast exclusively in HD, and Mark isn't even the first to broadcast more than one channel of HD at the same time.
Unity Motion was the first, a dedicated HD-only satellite system featuring three 24 hour, 1080i channels. In 1998. Dead by 1999. But I still have one of the receivers.
Google needs to start using this technology.
Electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos (formerly Walter) enclosed her Greenwich Village studio in a Faraday cage. In an article in Keyboard magazine, she described the dramatically lower noise level of all her analog equipment, including her custom built mixing board.
I'm suprised more audiophiles aren't building Faraday cages for their analog electronics, or at least making sure they have a decent grounding system. Enclosing the turntable and pre-amp in a Faraday cage and using a balanced AC system should yeild dramatic reductions in low-level noise. Far more than any amount of tweeky cables.
Very true. I just set up a free wifi system for a sports bar & grill that I work for. I used a Linksys access point, a 1 gigahz junk PC, a couple of random ethernet cards and the ZoneCD from the PublicIP project. Set it up and got everything configured in an evening. Works great, no hard disk needed, the access is personalized with the bar's logo.
It would cost them more than they could expect to make to try to set up a commercial access point. But by letting a handful of customers piggyback on the DSL connection, they are able to keep people there for a little bit longer, eating and drinking. They asked me about it when a group of eight people came in and asked if they had internet access a couple of weeks back. Few things pain a resturaunt owner more than telling someone "no" and having them walk out the door looking for another place. That one group's business could have covered the entire cost of the system.
"...a good thing"? Having random, unprotected sex to defeat the AIDS virus? Talk about an understatement.
Did you graph this? I'm genuinely curious to see. My gut feeling is that the distribution is clustered on the 60 fps side rather than more evenly distributed.
I'd be careful to assure that there were no differences in brightness when the framerate was changed. In my experience, people respond more positively to brightness than to faster motion (this is why every TV set sold come from the factory set far too bright for an accurate picture).
I agree. But the gamer's fetishistic obsession on frame rate detracts from improving the experience in more important ways. A perfectly smooth scene with Phong shading at 200 fps is not going to look more "real" than one rendered with radiosity at 100 fps. In the case of DLP displays, the fact that the entire image is being lit, rather than scanned like a CRT, may have more of an impact than any other factor.
Tragically, most HD is not even at 30 fps. Cinematographers and directors working on TV usually wish they were doing movies instead. So they insist that they shoot on 35mm film at 24 fps, or on HD, but also at 24 fps. They erroronously insist that this "makes it look like film". No, this makes it look like "film on TV", 24 fps with 3:2 pull-down conversion to 30 fps and it looks like crap. So now we have to live with 24 fps with 6 frames of repetition judder. If you're talking about film on TV, that may be what you're seeing.
I'd be genuinely interested in seeing some data that shows that humans are able to preceive 200 frames per second. How did they test it? One different frame out of two hundred in a second? Somehow I doubt the numbers actually exist...that 200 fps has become an article of faith among gamers to justify higher frame-rates.
I can give you a real-world example. The first generation of TI's DLP video projection systems operated at 30 composite frames per second - that is, 30 sequences of red, green and blue per second. 90% of the population had no problem integrating 3 differetly colored frames into a single, solid color image. Only 10% of the viewers, and only under some conditions (fast moving, high-contrast objects on the edge of the visual field) could see "rainbows", or color trails. When they doubled the rate to 60 composite frames, everyone was happy.
That is the worst possible case, having completely differnt colors on individual frames. Normal animation has a very small amount of difference between frames. And the higher the frame-rate, the smaller the delta.
Where did you pull this one from? Classic Disney and Warner Brothers animation is a 12 FPS ("on the twos"). To my knowledge the only 24 fps animation was "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", and that was only done that way in order to match the original 35mm footage.
All 35mm films are 24 fps (shown with a split shutter at 48 fps) except Douglas Trumbell's ShowScan system at 60 fps and UltraVision at 48 fps. The two popular high-definition television systems are 1080 lines at 60 interlaced fields/sec or 720 lines at 30 progressive frames per second. And the tests I've done with it, the vast majority cannot tell a difference (I prefer 720P because I notice interlacing artifacts).
Yeah, the gamers will be able to go from a frame-rate four times the level of human perception to five times the level of human perception! What a breakthrough!
Face it, it's the hot-rodding impulse. They may as well bolt Thrush pipes and a Hurst shifter to the top of their cases as increase their clock speed any further.
The lack of features is a selling point. The Earnie Ball company was hit by a SPA lawsui and decided to rid themselves of all Microsoft software. Not only are they saving a huge amount of money, but they were able to offer a limited set of features to workers who didn't need particular features. The example given was "why give someone doing data entry a web browser". It doesn't sound like it would be as much fun to work there, but it is their computer and they are not playing you to check your E-Bay auctions.
I developed a web site for the National PTA (Parents & Teacher's Association), and they had a bunch of "donated" Microsoft products. I noticed that the versions were out of date, and asked about upgrading. I was informed that the donation was limited to the original software package. The non-profit had to pay for support and all upgrades. This was not philanthropy. This was a cynical business move to try to keep non-profits from moving to Free software.
Not "guilt". The simple fact is that the average consumer does not, and shouldn't have to, know the entire market for consumer electronics in order to make a purchase. There are hundreds of models out there, and someone who deals with them on a daily basis stands a far better chance of being able to offer worthwhile advice. Aquiring that knowledge and offering it to the public costs money. That cost is passed on the consumer with a slightly higher price (usually 1% to 5% above the "warehouse club" price).
Go buy a plasma TV at CostCo if you want. But ask the useless drones there all your questions, and enjoy the experience of their responses ranging from "That's not my department" to cow-like expressions to (the "helpful" ones) reading the outside of the box to you. Do NOT waste the time and resources of a quality retailer because you wanted to save a few bucks and wound up buying something that will not fit your needs. All they sell is "SKU"s (Stock Keeping Units). Plasma TVs or gallon jars of mayonnaise, it's all the same to them.
You could try the places where I have bought every projector I've ever owned - rental houses. I purchased a HD Sony industrial CRT projector for $1000 that originally cost $28,000. It had only 600 hours on the unit. They dumped it so cheap because they had moved entirely over to LCD and DLP units, and no suit wanted to rent a big, heavy (165 lbs!) CRT. The longer a unit sits on the shelf, not renting, the more it costs them on their taxes. It's worth it for them to dump it.
Bad idea. Monumentally bad idea.
Used equipment is a good idea, but anything that has been mounted on the ceiling of a smoky, greasy bar will have it's useful life significantly shortened. Digital projectors have to move a lot of air through them, and Marlboro and fry grease flavored air is harsh on electronics and optics.
I know this well, as I install and maintain video projectors in bars. When these places are done with something, the only correct place for it to go is a dumpster. The screens have it even worse than the projectors!
...and if you do, buy it there! Don't be an asshole and waste the time and resources of a dealership that cares enough to have several competitive models, properly set up, and enough floor space to do a side-by-side demo. I've seen so many people who will use up hours of a dealer's time, then buy it on-line.
The six store local chain I used to work for just went bankrupt and closed...so I'm a little bitter. I'm sure this post will be followed-up by posters rationalizing doing this, citing bad experiences with dealers. I'm not talking about bad dealers. If the dealer wasn't competent, these people wouldn't be wasting their time in the first place.
Given that a huge number of women consider their husband or boyfriend watching porn and masturbating by himself "cheating", I think we can safely assume the answer is "yes". Sue Johansen's show "Talk Sex With Sue" deals with that "issue" nearly every week - some woman calls in freaked by finding her boyfriend/husband's secret porn stash. Humanform sexual robots would definitely be considered cheating. I'd venture to guess that they'd be even more freaked out, because a well designed robot could have a level of physical perfection and skill that no human woman could possibly match. The true Turing test would be, not mearly whether a human can communicate with an AI, but whether a human could fall in love with one.
As the Supreme Court majority opinion in "2 Live Crew vs. Rose-Acuff Music" said:
It's an interesting point - is it the person who originally had te idea, or the person who first successfully made it work. For instance, John Logie Baird actually made the very first video recordings, decades before anyone else managed it. But he wasn't able to play them back because he didn't have a way to syncronize the recorded signal to his display device. Is half of an invention enough?
I saw a documentary about Garrett Brown, and it showed his various prototype stages. The original one looked exactly like this - a length of pipe. The second one was more like a pantograph to try to keep the camera level. Then he added the seperate handle connected to the upright portion wih a gimbal. The rest of the development was on the counter-balance arm and the vest. All of this was necessary because Brown was building these for 35mm film cameras.
If you're looking to improve this design, the things I'd look at are: a gimbal, so allow the operator to hold the unit more comfortably and lightly, and avoid transferring hand motion to the camera; a sliding mount at the top, to allow the camera's balance to be shifted forward and back to tilt up or down.
The Steadycam JR Lite is a great one to look at. It was designed by the great Frogdesign studio (the NeXT cube). The camera sits on top of a slide, and right on top of the gimbal and handle. The arm is divided into two parts at a 90 degree angle, connected to the slide at 45 degrees. And the whole thing folds up. It's a wonderfully slick design - and obscenely overpriced.