I used to work at Forrester (developed a web site for them and served as the token geek). The unofficial company motto is: "We only have to be right more than 50% of the time".
You know, the first thing I think about when hearing "knob box" would be this - it should be easily available from your favourite music gear store, has 16 rotary encoders and a universally used interface that'll work on Windows, MAC and Linux alike: MIDI.
That's essentially it, although the SGI one was meant to stand vertically, the knobs had wide bases, it was serial...and the rip-off artists of SGI charged $1500 US for the thing!
The mass-market data gloves are not here because the technology is still patented. The main patents were granted from 1975 through 1977, so those suckers should be expiring any moment now. Check out:
Kuipers, J., "Object tracking and orientation determination means, system and process". US patent 3 868 565 February 25, 1975.
Kuipers, J., "Tracking and determination orientation of object using co-ordinate transformation means, system and process."
US patent 3 983 474 September 26, 1976.
Kuipers, J., "Apparatus for generating a nutating electromagnetic field".
US patent 4 107 858 April 12, 1977.
There are two companies in the field, Ascension and Polhemus (one uses AC, the other DC) and they appear to have some sort of unspoken agreement to avoid charging less than $5000 a channel for their 3D tracking devices. As soon as the gravy train stops running for these people, we'll see $100 3D input devices. Of course the other part is the system to get finger motion, but it shouldn't be too hard to work up an alternative technique.
The TDI Explore system (the 3D software that was purchased by Wavefront, merged with Alias and became Maya) was based on the SGI "knob box".
This was a set of 8 rotary encoders, and virtually every function used the knobs. For instance, X and Y movement would be handled by the mouse, and Z with a knob. Z, Y and Z scaling would be three more knobs. Z, Y and Z rotation would be another three.
The knob functions would change based on what object you were manipulating. So the camera would have "Field of View" as one knob, and while the mouse handled U and V translation around the target, a knob would handle "trucking" (movement towards the target).
This was everywhere in the program, and I found it to be the fastest 3D interface I've ever worked in. The whole idea of "one hand on the mouse, one on the keyboard" is actually a canard - most people actually type with both hands, and have to bring their main hand into play to type anything of any length.
Of course the system had keyboard shortcuts. But most keyboard shortcuts are used to switch the mouse's functions. With the knob box, we had 8 adjustable parameters, plus the mouse. There are few items on a 3D world that have more than 8 parameters to change at a time.
Yeah, "fileswapping pirates" are the cornerstone of global creativity. What will our society do without their invaluable contribution?
Because the heyday of file-swaping, when Napster was in full swing, was the single best time in the history of recorded music sales. I'm serious...look it up.
My wife and I had more than 13,000 MP3s available for download. Most of these are things that are not available for purchase new. Most artists release a single album. If that "flops" (i.e. doesn't sell more than 100,000 copies) they'll get dropped from the label, and the album gets deleted. Or sometimes, the label gets bought by a bigger label and the new label gets rid of artists because "...we already have someone like you". Or the label head gets fired and the new boss "cleans house" and gets rid of all his predecessor's pet artists (if they succeed, the previous guy get the credit, if they fail the new guy will get the blame - easier to just get rid of them).
The brilliant part of Napster was being able to look through people's collections (the RIAA got rid of that) and chat with them (the IM spammers ruined that). Most of the stuff in our collection was from our LP and CD collection - we really didn't do much downloading at all after a while. The most fun bit was watching what people were getting, especially the more obscure things, and then messaging them. Then we could suggest things that they might like based on their downloads and collection.
The industry crackdown resulted in lower sales. But, worse from the perspective of music as art, the stuff traded on Kazaa tends to be the dreck the industry is pushing the hardest.
Let's see...first you're comparing something that I can only presume you haven't seen (true HD) to what you are familiar with (SD DTT). I was talking exclusively about US broadcasters stealing bits from the HD stream. I can assure you, 19.2 is not "great" for HD. It's barely enough for HD in MPEG-2. I've been in the position of being able to compare the same network signal on a single display delivered via cable in QAM-256, 19.2 megabit via ATSC OTA and 34.5 megabit via ATSC C-band.
"Idle frequencies" my ass! This is broadcasters stealing bits from the bandwidth given to them to broadcast High-Definition television. 1080i requires the full 19.2 megabits (720p can get by with 15 megabits). Anything less requires filtering out detail before the encoder. I've seen network feeds at 35 megabit, and I can assure you that getting it down to 19.2 costs a lot of quality. What a lot of these broadcasters (Fox expecially) want to do is broadcast a single 480p wide-screen standard-definition version of what they are currently broadcasting and sell the "excess" to these moronic "over-the-air cable systems".
But the fact is that nobody who has a digital tuner wants more standard definition programming. They can get plenty of that via cable or DSS. This is just wishful thinking by short-sighted bean-counters who do not deserve to be called "broadcasters". This scheme will fail, and they'll try to claim that this proves that the public doesn't want "digital TV".
But this should make some extra-fine wall-paper...real wall-paper I mean. A friend of mine has the Epson 9600 44" wide, 2880 x 1440 dpi archival ink printer. He's driving it with a G5 with 4 gigs of RAM via the FireWire interface, so he should have more than enough system to print it. I sent him the link.
No, Heinlein did not invent these devices any more than Gibson invented the internet (or Stevenson did VR). Scientists and engineers read these books and say to themselves, "Neeto," and then set about to putting in the long hours and frustration to actually make these ideas happen.
Right. But, on the other hand, Aurthur C. Clarke did "invent" the geostationary satellite - by that I mean he came up with the concept and worked out the math. He didn't build any satellites or build the rockets to get them up there.
It's a shame that the third film didn't get a nomination for cinematography (neither did TTT, but FOTR won for it).
It's the nature of the nomination process for cinematography. As all three films were shot at the same time, they were considered one film, and the award for "The Fellowship of the Ring" was for the entire project. It doesn't appear that fair at first glance, but them's the breaks.
I've seen over 100 films in the theater this year, own over one thousand legit DVDs and several thousand legit CDs. But I also had 13,000 mp3s on Napster and Audiogalaxy when they were at their peak, and have a huge library of home-recorded VHS tapes. I'm on both sides of the fence.
But the difference is that Salon (unlike the Wall Street Journal) makes their material available for "free" access to everyone, for the low price of viewing an ad. Add on Salon's positive coverage of open source software, their policy of making all their archive articles available (unlike most newspaper web sites) and other factors - it just seems like a rather shitty thing to do to them. That's really the guiding moral principle here - you don't shit on your friends, especially when they are struggling to make it. They get paid based on how many people see that ad, and posting the full text was a shitty thing to do.
The scripting is bad, the fact that they can't operate outside the script is abhorrant.
You can tell when they're reading off the script. The worst is whn they've been beaten down so throughly (i.e. "well trained") that they are completely unable to depart from the script. Of course that's viewing the situation charitably - the alternative is that they were that way to start with.
I refer to these people as "MeatBots".
New MeatBot TM! It's a robot - made of meat!
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot
on
Orwellian Tech Support
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Same here. I pay for Salon - I find it worthwhile, I read it every day, and it comes with an insane number of additional freebies - like a subscription to Wired. And it's not as if you're locked out of reading for free what I pay for. You just have to pay by watching an ad.
I don't have the mod points I had yesterday, or I'd have modded the parent down. Sorry, but that's just not right. And it makes Slashdot readers look like a mob of freeloaders.
The trouble is, how would you restrict non-US citizens from obtaining the code once it was open sourced? If you want to say that you, as a taxpayer, deserve access to that code, you can't seriously say that non-taxpayers and/or foreigners deserve access to the code developed with US taxpayer dollars.
Sure! These techniques were presented at conferences years ago. We live in a free and open society, and everything is presumed available to everyone in the world except in rare cases where it would risk national security. Currently, NASA's technology is licenced - and most of the licencees are from other countries - and the licencees have exclusive rights to it. By open sourcing this work, Americans would be able to have access to it. It makes a more level playing field for everyone.
All I know is that I could build a nice business and employ a lot of Americans if I had access to the VISOR software.
Local police departments can't afford the damn software.
Something this useful, that can save lives and catch criminals, should be freely available given that tax dollars were spent developing it. The idea that Intergraph has an exclusive on it is as offensive as Westlaw's exclusive right to print most states' law books.
"Commercialized by Intergraph"? Where's my check from Intergraph then? If it was developed with tax dollars, it should be open sourced so it can be commercialized (or not) by everyone. That will have the most salutary effect on the economy - not one, but dozens of companies improving the quality of video.
A friend of mine was a mechanic for a Datsun dealership at the time. As this was long before affordable digital samplers (confined to machines like the Fairlight CMI at the time), the voice was supplied by (believe it or not) a very rugged form of record player. It was made out of a hard plastic and had (I believe) a sapphire needle.
My friend tired of the English voice, and managed to get replacement "records" for his car. His favorite was the Japanese woman, but he also had a male German voice telling him "Achtung! Die Tur ist angelehnt!"
I was in Kansas City working for an Amiga dealer, and I remember when Tim Jennison came to demo the DigiView. At the time, it was astonishing. Mac users were buying Amigas just as a way to get frame captures and higher color scans.
The name Video Toaster was the end result of humorous false rumors spread by NewTek. They leaked that they were working on a "laser toaster" to toast graphics onto white bread for hotels and resturaunts. Then they said that they had expanded their project to include a "JellyJet printer" that could spray mint, rasberry and blueberry jelly onto the bread for color output. The next month they announced that they had expanded it to the Amiga's 4096 color "Hold and Modify" mode for "HAM on Toast". This went on until the actual product was announced. At which point it became vaporware for a very long period of time.
The Toaster was broadcast quality by the only standard that mattered - would a broadcaster broadcast it? They did. The video output was comparable to the quality of a 1" C-format machine, and the CG letters were comparable to Dubner or Chyron systems of the time. What people fed into the Toaster was another matter. VHS in is going to look like VHS coming out. But I put the Toaster directly on air several times, and the engineers looked closely at it's bars on their waveform monitors and vectorscopes and were happy.
I have doubts how worthwhile this code is going to be for anyone. The Video Toaster development team had a reputation for bizzare hacks, making the Amiga chipset do things that they were never meant to do. Woz would have been proud of their kind of hackery. But I doubt if any of it is going to be transferrable to any other platform - maybe the CG code.
The two examples I always pull out are the Grateful Dead and x-rated material. Both had 100% "piracy rates" and both made a lot of money. By the logic of the MPAA and RIAA, both should have been decimated. But that was not the case.
So, you are advocating making screwing up on a computer lethal?
Probably not a good idea, as even the most savvy of us occasionally screw up. But I agree with the idea that stupidity should cause actual pain. Most of us could probably afford to have a splitting headache whenever we do something really bone-headed. At the very least it would have the Pavlovian effect of helping us avoid doing the same stupid thing several times in a row.
What's the point? 480P is converted to either 540P or 1080i in most HDTVs anyway.
Good question. In my case, it's because neither of those resolutions are a perfect match for my display. I have a Sony 8" CRT projector, and the optimum resolution for it (i.e. the point at which the gap between scan lines disappears, but does not overlap) is 600 lines. So I run at a resolution of 1066 x 600. I use a Radeon card, and I believe the scaler in that is better than the Genesis scaling chips in commercial stand-alone DVD players.
I can't say I'm impressed by the computer knowledge of the FBI in general. A friend of mine consults with them and I do his support. I've been urging him to use encryption on his e-mail for years, and I thought this FBI job would get him to start. Nope. The agents he was dealing with were not set up to handle it, and their IT department wouldn't support it on their end. So all this sensitive information is traveling in the clear. Not very reassuring.
Nice to see a company making a bio weapon that helps people instead of making them die horribly and slowly.
Don't worry, there are plenty of other companies willing to work in the "die horribly and slowly" area. The image this effort brings to my mind is the fields of flowers on the former battlefields of World War I. Mustard gas was arguably one of the first "bio-weapons", and caused a agonizing and horrble death, the victim drowning in his own blood. The human toll of mines may be equally awful, as children and women are often the ones sent into fields to look for mines.
...in addition to all the above, then he'd be in the running. In my circle of friends, we don't consider you a real AV Geek unless you have more then five 1/2" video formats, a pre-CRT mechanical TV set, and a turntable capable of playing at every speed and backwards for those transcription disks and stampers.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work at Forrester (developed a web site for them and served as the token geek). The unofficial company motto is: "We only have to be right more than 50% of the time".
That's essentially it, although the SGI one was meant to stand vertically, the knobs had wide bases, it was serial...and the rip-off artists of SGI charged $1500 US for the thing!
The mass-market data gloves are not here because the technology is still patented. The main patents were granted from 1975 through 1977, so those suckers should be expiring any moment now. Check out:
There are two companies in the field, Ascension and Polhemus (one uses AC, the other DC) and they appear to have some sort of unspoken agreement to avoid charging less than $5000 a channel for their 3D tracking devices. As soon as the gravy train stops running for these people, we'll see $100 3D input devices. Of course the other part is the system to get finger motion, but it shouldn't be too hard to work up an alternative technique.
The TDI Explore system (the 3D software that was purchased by Wavefront, merged with Alias and became Maya) was based on the SGI "knob box".
This was a set of 8 rotary encoders, and virtually every function used the knobs. For instance, X and Y movement would be handled by the mouse, and Z with a knob. Z, Y and Z scaling would be three more knobs. Z, Y and Z rotation would be another three.
The knob functions would change based on what object you were manipulating. So the camera would have "Field of View" as one knob, and while the mouse handled U and V translation around the target, a knob would handle "trucking" (movement towards the target).
This was everywhere in the program, and I found it to be the fastest 3D interface I've ever worked in. The whole idea of "one hand on the mouse, one on the keyboard" is actually a canard - most people actually type with both hands, and have to bring their main hand into play to type anything of any length.
Of course the system had keyboard shortcuts. But most keyboard shortcuts are used to switch the mouse's functions. With the knob box, we had 8 adjustable parameters, plus the mouse. There are few items on a 3D world that have more than 8 parameters to change at a time.
I miss it.
Because the heyday of file-swaping, when Napster was in full swing, was the single best time in the history of recorded music sales. I'm serious...look it up.
My wife and I had more than 13,000 MP3s available for download. Most of these are things that are not available for purchase new. Most artists release a single album. If that "flops" (i.e. doesn't sell more than 100,000 copies) they'll get dropped from the label, and the album gets deleted. Or sometimes, the label gets bought by a bigger label and the new label gets rid of artists because "...we already have someone like you". Or the label head gets fired and the new boss "cleans house" and gets rid of all his predecessor's pet artists (if they succeed, the previous guy get the credit, if they fail the new guy will get the blame - easier to just get rid of them).
The brilliant part of Napster was being able to look through people's collections (the RIAA got rid of that) and chat with them (the IM spammers ruined that). Most of the stuff in our collection was from our LP and CD collection - we really didn't do much downloading at all after a while. The most fun bit was watching what people were getting, especially the more obscure things, and then messaging them. Then we could suggest things that they might like based on their downloads and collection.
The industry crackdown resulted in lower sales. But, worse from the perspective of music as art, the stuff traded on Kazaa tends to be the dreck the industry is pushing the hardest.
Let's see...first you're comparing something that I can only presume you haven't seen (true HD) to what you are familiar with (SD DTT). I was talking exclusively about US broadcasters stealing bits from the HD stream. I can assure you, 19.2 is not "great" for HD. It's barely enough for HD in MPEG-2. I've been in the position of being able to compare the same network signal on a single display delivered via cable in QAM-256, 19.2 megabit via ATSC OTA and 34.5 megabit via ATSC C-band.
"Idle frequencies" my ass! This is broadcasters stealing bits from the bandwidth given to them to broadcast High-Definition television. 1080i requires the full 19.2 megabits (720p can get by with 15 megabits). Anything less requires filtering out detail before the encoder. I've seen network feeds at 35 megabit, and I can assure you that getting it down to 19.2 costs a lot of quality. What a lot of these broadcasters (Fox expecially) want to do is broadcast a single 480p wide-screen standard-definition version of what they are currently broadcasting and sell the "excess" to these moronic "over-the-air cable systems".
But the fact is that nobody who has a digital tuner wants more standard definition programming. They can get plenty of that via cable or DSS. This is just wishful thinking by short-sighted bean-counters who do not deserve to be called "broadcasters". This scheme will fail, and they'll try to claim that this proves that the public doesn't want "digital TV".
But this should make some extra-fine wall-paper...real wall-paper I mean. A friend of mine has the Epson 9600 44" wide, 2880 x 1440 dpi archival ink printer. He's driving it with a G5 with 4 gigs of RAM via the FireWire interface, so he should have more than enough system to print it. I sent him the link.
Right. But, on the other hand, Aurthur C. Clarke did "invent" the geostationary satellite - by that I mean he came up with the concept and worked out the math. He didn't build any satellites or build the rockets to get them up there.
It's the nature of the nomination process for cinematography. As all three films were shot at the same time, they were considered one film, and the award for "The Fellowship of the Ring" was for the entire project. It doesn't appear that fair at first glance, but them's the breaks.
I've seen over 100 films in the theater this year, own over one thousand legit DVDs and several thousand legit CDs. But I also had 13,000 mp3s on Napster and Audiogalaxy when they were at their peak, and have a huge library of home-recorded VHS tapes. I'm on both sides of the fence.
But the difference is that Salon (unlike the Wall Street Journal) makes their material available for "free" access to everyone, for the low price of viewing an ad. Add on Salon's positive coverage of open source software, their policy of making all their archive articles available (unlike most newspaper web sites) and other factors - it just seems like a rather shitty thing to do to them. That's really the guiding moral principle here - you don't shit on your friends, especially when they are struggling to make it. They get paid based on how many people see that ad, and posting the full text was a shitty thing to do.
You can tell when they're reading off the script. The worst is whn they've been beaten down so throughly (i.e. "well trained") that they are completely unable to depart from the script. Of course that's viewing the situation charitably - the alternative is that they were that way to start with.
I refer to these people as "MeatBots".
New MeatBot TM ! It's a robot - made of meat!
Same here. I pay for Salon - I find it worthwhile, I read it every day, and it comes with an insane number of additional freebies - like a subscription to Wired. And it's not as if you're locked out of reading for free what I pay for. You just have to pay by watching an ad.
I don't have the mod points I had yesterday, or I'd have modded the parent down. Sorry, but that's just not right. And it makes Slashdot readers look like a mob of freeloaders.
Sure! These techniques were presented at conferences years ago. We live in a free and open society, and everything is presumed available to everyone in the world except in rare cases where it would risk national security. Currently, NASA's technology is licenced - and most of the licencees are from other countries - and the licencees have exclusive rights to it. By open sourcing this work, Americans would be able to have access to it. It makes a more level playing field for everyone.
All I know is that I could build a nice business and employ a lot of Americans if I had access to the VISOR software.
Something this useful, that can save lives and catch criminals, should be freely available given that tax dollars were spent developing it. The idea that Intergraph has an exclusive on it is as offensive as Westlaw's exclusive right to print most states' law books.
Personally, I really, really really want and need the famed VISAR (Video Image Stabilization and Registration) software. This was used recently by to improve the quality in the security camera video in the recent abduction and murder of Carlie Brucia.
"Commercialized by Intergraph"? Where's my check from Intergraph then? If it was developed with tax dollars, it should be open sourced so it can be commercialized (or not) by everyone. That will have the most salutary effect on the economy - not one, but dozens of companies improving the quality of video.
A friend of mine was a mechanic for a Datsun dealership at the time. As this was long before affordable digital samplers (confined to machines like the Fairlight CMI at the time), the voice was supplied by (believe it or not) a very rugged form of record player. It was made out of a hard plastic and had (I believe) a sapphire needle.
My friend tired of the English voice, and managed to get replacement "records" for his car. His favorite was the Japanese woman, but he also had a male German voice telling him "Achtung! Die Tur ist angelehnt!"
I was in Kansas City working for an Amiga dealer, and I remember when Tim Jennison came to demo the DigiView. At the time, it was astonishing. Mac users were buying Amigas just as a way to get frame captures and higher color scans.
The name Video Toaster was the end result of humorous false rumors spread by NewTek. They leaked that they were working on a "laser toaster" to toast graphics onto white bread for hotels and resturaunts. Then they said that they had expanded their project to include a "JellyJet printer" that could spray mint, rasberry and blueberry jelly onto the bread for color output. The next month they announced that they had expanded it to the Amiga's 4096 color "Hold and Modify" mode for "HAM on Toast". This went on until the actual product was announced. At which point it became vaporware for a very long period of time.
The Toaster was broadcast quality by the only standard that mattered - would a broadcaster broadcast it? They did. The video output was comparable to the quality of a 1" C-format machine, and the CG letters were comparable to Dubner or Chyron systems of the time. What people fed into the Toaster was another matter. VHS in is going to look like VHS coming out. But I put the Toaster directly on air several times, and the engineers looked closely at it's bars on their waveform monitors and vectorscopes and were happy.
I have doubts how worthwhile this code is going to be for anyone. The Video Toaster development team had a reputation for bizzare hacks, making the Amiga chipset do things that they were never meant to do. Woz would have been proud of their kind of hackery. But I doubt if any of it is going to be transferrable to any other platform - maybe the CG code.
The two examples I always pull out are the Grateful Dead and x-rated material. Both had 100% "piracy rates" and both made a lot of money. By the logic of the MPAA and RIAA, both should have been decimated. But that was not the case.
Probably not a good idea, as even the most savvy of us occasionally screw up. But I agree with the idea that stupidity should cause actual pain. Most of us could probably afford to have a splitting headache whenever we do something really bone-headed. At the very least it would have the Pavlovian effect of helping us avoid doing the same stupid thing several times in a row.
It's rated "funny" but it's actually true. There are porn companies now offering 720P, high-definition porn in Windows Media format. The only way to watch this stuff is via a HTPC.
Good question. In my case, it's because neither of those resolutions are a perfect match for my display. I have a Sony 8" CRT projector, and the optimum resolution for it (i.e. the point at which the gap between scan lines disappears, but does not overlap) is 600 lines. So I run at a resolution of 1066 x 600. I use a Radeon card, and I believe the scaler in that is better than the Genesis scaling chips in commercial stand-alone DVD players.
I can't say I'm impressed by the computer knowledge of the FBI in general. A friend of mine consults with them and I do his support. I've been urging him to use encryption on his e-mail for years, and I thought this FBI job would get him to start. Nope. The agents he was dealing with were not set up to handle it, and their IT department wouldn't support it on their end. So all this sensitive information is traveling in the clear. Not very reassuring.
Don't worry, there are plenty of other companies willing to work in the "die horribly and slowly" area. The image this effort brings to my mind is the fields of flowers on the former battlefields of World War I. Mustard gas was arguably one of the first "bio-weapons", and caused a agonizing and horrble death, the victim drowning in his own blood. The human toll of mines may be equally awful, as children and women are often the ones sent into fields to look for mines.
He's a piker. Now if he had all that, plus:
...in addition to all the above, then he'd be in the running. In my circle of friends, we don't consider you a real AV Geek unless you have more then five 1/2" video formats, a pre-CRT mechanical TV set, and a turntable capable of playing at every speed and backwards for those transcription disks and stampers.