Having materials that can withstand temperatures of +450C to -196C is all well and good, but in a garment this is of little value unless it can protect and insulate you from these temperatures. One thing about Carbon is that in its pure form it conducts heat very readily, so the extreme cold or heat will pass through to you quite quickly, a bit of a disadvantage even if the garment survives.
Though I'm sure any real product would have an insulating lining.
When working for Wolfram Research many years ago I remember someone working on or with a third party package to generate Holograms from 3 D computer models. It would print out a diffraction pattern, which I believe had to then be photographically reduced and illuminated like any other Hologram. The reduction phase because printers hadn't sufficient resolution (and probably still don't) for small visible wavelengths of light (though if you could "see" in microwaves I guess the original would do just fine).
A little Googling shows this to be something called a Hadamard Transform.
In the Early to Mid '90s, fast computers had to churn away to make fuzzy cubes and other simple objects.
With better computers and better printers the rendering should be faster and the reduction phase not as extreme. Also with larger Holographic plates the results should be less fuzzy.
Does anyone know the state of Computer generated Holograms? Real geeks wouldn't make holograms with old fashion photographic plates, but in the guts of their over-clocked AMD boxen.
On the downside I read a recent Aviation Technology Week that states that the Mach 10 flight is the end of current funding for Hypersonic Flight research. Evidently there are not concrete plans to keep going even if this flight is a success, though it seems unlikely NASA would let the program die completely (like other X projects).
Also stated in the ATW was that there wasn't (or shouldn't) be any animosity between the Scramjet team and the Rocket technology teams, in that affordable scramjet is projected to top out in the 20,000 lbs to LEO range and have a $1,700 per pound price tag vs $2,200 for expendable rocket, but with rocket being able to heft much larger loads. Still, the 20,000 lbs range is projected to meet 80% of future lift needs.
This figures struck me has oddly pessimistic, but they see problems scaling with this technology. They think the real advantage to scramjet will be reliability, with current unmanned failures rates (and manned it would seem also) at one in 50, and scramjet figured at 1 in 4000 or so (assuming a return to Earth on propulsion failure). Of course the Shuttle was projected to have a low failure rate also.
Still I would think a four-tier approach would be near ideal for now.
Maglev assist takeoff to Mach 1 or 2
Jet assist to Mach 3 or 4 (stubby winged, high-speed, jet wouldn't have enough lift for loaded takeoff on it's own)
Scramjet to Mach 8 or 10
Rocket final stage to Mach 22 orbit.
Maybe Congress doesn't want to fund this because they're misreading Scramjet as Scam-Jet.
I started to read the article, but about a third of the way it turned into some boring diatribe about global warming. Both sides have questionable motives in the global warming debate. I for one believe it exists, but the real question is to what degree, and whether the impact of global warming is severe enough to warrant massive intervention. Perhaps the billions that could be spent fighting global warming would be better spent feeding the poor, or have better beneficial impact preventing habitat loss. Having the ideal temperature means little to wildlife if they have no place to exist.
That said I think the Right is often wrong on Science issues and the Left is often wrong on policy issues. Because the Left embraces Science and its provable conclusions, it often feels the power of truth extends to its social agenda or worldview as well. Many is the time I've heard people on the Left say things like "These are the people the believe _blank_", so because they are wrong in one area they must be wrong in all areas.
The Left will keep doing something in a failing way because the goal is noble.
The Right never admits to American shortcomings, and is therefore unable to ever take corrective action.
The Left thinks there is a massive conspiracy to keep the poor down, and that the Rich want a world with only hyper-wealthy (themselves) and dirt-poor slaves.
The Right thinks their views of right, wrong, and morality are absolute, and poor people are in their state from their poor moral upbringing.
I guess a tax on Oxygen would be fair since I use that, but what I object to is the planet wide conspiracy of forcing me to take Nitrogen along with it, inflating air usage taxes by an unfair 400%
Not confusing anything. I'm aware of the Oklo natural reactor, but I speak of a much more recent (and controversial) theory. When first proposed it was dismissed as total bunk, but it has gained support over the last five years. Much more respectable than cold-fusion, but hard to put odds on whether it will prove out or not. It is the inspiration for the movie "The Core"
Here is a link to a Discovery article
Nuclear Planet
Is there a five-mile-wide ball of hellaciously hot uranium seething at the center of the Earth?
Yes the core is mostly Iron, but it's not pure iron. I mentioned iron as a core material in my post.
I no geologist or seismologist, but they believe the core is mostly iron of a taffy like consistency. The heat to keep it so comes from 2 sources: 1. The original condensation of the planet (miles of mantel and crust are good insulators keeping the heat in for billions of years). 2. The decay of heavy elements like uranium, which would offset the slow cooling process, mentioned in one.
Recent speculation is that the very center has a high ratio of Uranium, enough so that the pressure actually creates a self-sustaining natural nuclear reactor. When it gets too hot it diffuses and shuts down, only to coalesce and restart again (never a big boom). This starting and stopping of the nuclear processes at the Earth's core may be responsible for our planets large magnetic field, and occasional shut downs and reversals of the magnetic field as this nuclear process fluctuates.
You're right that the center would be weightless, but under more pressure than we can possible create in the lab with the best diamond anvils. It only takes a few miles of crust to crush carbon to diamonds, and here we are talking 8,000 miles of rock pressing down. Though the rock (iron) at the center isn't adding any additional pressure, it has thousands of miles of rock above it that is. Quite the hellish place.
BTW, I don't know how I typed Biq in my rirst post
when I meant to type Big (no one seems to have noticed)
While The Incredibles is indeed incredible, I was much less impressed with the Jackalope lead in, which I'm guessing was more for the kids as an offset to the more adult story line of The Incredibles itself. Unlike previous Pixar previews, Cars left me cold. I suspect The Incredibles will be the Apex of Pixar and Disney's union. Here's to hoping Pixar going alone will continue to amaze and innovate.
Ironically, Disney's solo "Chicken Little" looks to be pretty good (previewed at The Incredibles also).
Beyond a certain size, gravity pulls things into a spherical shape. The immense pressure makes the insides molten and irregular structures eventually sink down in. Mars has Mons Olympus, the tallest volcano in the solar system, this is because Mars is smaller and has less gravity than Earth. The larger the planet the more regular it has to be. Asteroids can be highly irregular because they haven't the size and gravity to collapse them into spheres.
The mountains on Earth may appear huge to us insects on the surface, but from a distance the earth appears as smooth as a billiard ball.
Ironically this event was so big, that unlike latter smaller hits, all evidence in the way of dents will be gone as the entire globe virtually liquefied and coalesced again. Though I wouldn't rule out some exotic mass distributions that might lend evidence of it.
Early adopters are techno-savy and will determine the winner. Unlike Beta, Blu-Ray is inviting everyone in.
VHS was able to unseat the BETA early adopters only because:
1. The Tapes where 6 hr vs 4.5 (3 on early BETA) in EP mode.
2. VHS players were priced about 100 dollars cheaper than BETA players when low-end players cost 500-600 dollars.
BETA still managed to hang on for over a 2 decades because 1. It was slightly higher quality (very slight) and had HI-FI Stereo about 2-3 years earlier.
In this case no huge player cost difference I predict. Picture Quality will be identical (same codecs). Blu-Ray way ahead on storage (recording length).
You could name this format SHIT-DISC and it would still beat HD-DVD
Over the air HDTV is just not robust enough, and in this area only one Station has any anyway. This is the future of not just TV but Movies as well. A good HDTV program on a good projection system is often a better view experience than the vast majority of crappy multiplexes, most of whom can't seem to get the focus right.
Broadcast is dying, I think this year is the tipping point (at least it is for me). With the exception of live events like Sports and News why would you need simultaneous broadcast over the air? Storage is large and cheap and getting more so. Download your favorite programs and watch them at leisure on a portable player.
I had thought this was at least 10 years away, but inevitable. Perhaps it is now only 4 or 5 years away.
Cable, Satellite, and even Over-the-Air transmission should be force to list the quality of the signals they are providing. In the pre-digital NTCS world there were differences in quality, but they where hard to quantify. If you had a clean signal, it could theoretically be 330x480 max in resolution. Once Cable started going digital this all went down hill very quickly. They claim DIGITAL quality, but the Sci-Fi channel I get is compressed down to something like Quarter VGA and looks like crap on a big screen. The various digital channels obviously have different bandwidths and compression used on them, and these numbers should be stated explicitly for posting in viewers guides like Yahoo TV or TV-Guide.
Some HBO channels (Standard Resolution) are near DVD Quality, while others are terrible like the afore mentioned Sci-Fi channel. BTW I do have to pay extra for Sci-Fi so I find it's poor picture quality especially galling.
Now that I have HDTV on some channels, I just about want to retch when I tune in other channels over the same cable. Just to be clear, the 50 or so channels offered in uncompressed analog NTSC are all far superior in quality to the Standard Definition digital channels, cable propaganda aside, with the exception of a couple of Subscription Movie Channels, where I assume the paying public won't pay a subscription for something worse than Over the Air.
It shouldn't be hard to post the 3 relevant pieces of info: Resolution, Bandwidth, and Compression Scheme.
This should be mandated under some truth-in-labeling law
ROM capacity of 27-Gig Single, 50-Gig Double layer,
with prototype re-writeable of 8 layer 200-GIG
HD-Movies at upto 36 Mbit. Almost double the head room of over the air HDTV. With MPEG 4 encoding this should be a bump up in quality over standard HDTV. Assuming they don't just try to fill it up with unnecessary DVD extras (yes I know some people really like the extra stuff).
I've mentioned this before in other threads, but Movie makers need to up the frame rate on filming to 60fps (instead of the standard 24). We have enough spatial resolution now, but fast pans still look like crap because of the low frame rates of standard film. Blu-Ray would have more than enough capacity for 60fps 3-4 hours in MPEG 4.
Quite some time ago I posted an Ask Slashdot about pursuing HDTV with a NEC 135LC projection monitor (Making the HDTV Vision Quest? . Now years later the quest is not quite complete, though I am watching some HDTV. First off, the Over the Air Transmission in this area is almost totally lacking. Only NBC and ABC have any HDTV signal. NBC only just kicked off during the 2004 Olympics and even then isn't at full power, so can be spotty. ABC I can't pull in at all. ABC is about 30 miles away. I have a Channel Master Antenna, but not up on a large pole. A year after purchasing a My-HD cable card I finally started getting some HDTV. ER looks nice in HDTV, real nice, but having waited almost 3 years, and sunk $5,000 plus into this project with projector, computer, and HD card, I am not satisfied, and feel betrayed by the Broadcaster Community in this area.
Cable started offering HDTV about 6 month ago, but I assumed it wasn't compatible being component only, I then discovered Component to RGB converters. So I finally got a Motorola (9800? DVR) cable box about a month ago, and an Xblaster Component to RGB converter. Almost got the job done, but not quite. Probably would work fine for Xboxes, but not true HDTV. A had something viewable, but full 16:9 pictures often had dimmed horizontal streaked areas thru them that I assumed was from not having some kind of proper blanking interval on the left side of the screen. Another similar converter later with a horizontal-trim adjustment and I'm in business.
Cable does not carry the two local HDTV feeds (there outta be a law, and I'm sure will be soon). HD-Discovery Looks glorious, but doesn't really carry all that much hard science and is more of a travelogue. HD-Net has some really crappy original programming, but almost worth watching just because the picture is so good. HDNet-Movies has an occasional thing worth watching, but not much. I shelled out for HBO-HD, but it too is slim in the kind of big box office offerings I was expecting. Hopefully they will repeat the last Season of Sopranos and Six Feet Under in HD before the next season commences. For Music lovers, especially Jazz and Blues, Bravo plays a lot of music, and the picture is about the best of all the Channels. I don't watch much Sports, just as well, since 90% of the ESPN-HD is up-converted standard definition (granted at about DVD quality level).
Two things have happened since I started by HD project. One: Broadcast TV has just about died for me. Every year they offer less that I would want to watch. Two: Getting some HD content has made me unsatisfied with what regular content I would watch, so I watch even less of it.
Ironically this is probably not a bad thing. The cost of Cable with 6 HD channels and HBO included has not that much higher and with a DVR thrown in to boot. So now I DVR only what I want to watch, and go on with my life. I plan on getting an external firewire hard-drive, and will archive some "must-keep" movies past the 10 hours of HD my box can store locally. When Blu-Ray comes out, I think I will finally be happy. I have lots of DVDs, but now I want my collection in HD.
When HDTV is Good, it is VERY GOOD. I prefer my picture to the local Cineplex, and it is far better than any of the consumer HDTV offerings at BestBuy. But the consistency of Quality is spotty, and there is damn little to choose from.
Rail if you will at Google's decision to stay in China by playing by China's rules, but there is probably a way to turn this into a minor plus (if Google has the guts to do it).
Since their searches must work in conjunction with a list of banned sites in some way, they could add search options in free zones that highlight sites banned in other countries or provide entire lists of banned sights. Also to be included would be sites filtered or altered though a country's internet firewall.
Clever Chinese hackers probably have ways around the firewall (does anyone have info on this?). By listing banned sites in free zones it should be trivial for dissidents and political dissenters to get printed versions out to the masses, even if these items had to be smuggled in. One thing that should be in constant circulation would be the list of sites banned.
One could get a small or partial list of banned sites without Google. With Google it should be possible to uncover the extent of China's censorship. I guarantee such a service would be used by Chinese students and Chinese visitors to America.
For a mere $6,000
You can get a 22-inch WQUXGA 3840x2400
Viewsonic VP2290b
The reason for 1920 x 1200 (or even multiples thereof) is it will do full HDTV with no resizing or interpolation (best viewing) assuming you set it for proper letterboxing to 1920 x 1080 in HDTV mode.
I assume in the not too distant future WQUXGA will be sub $1000 and common. Fonts are hard to read already at WUXGA. Above this (for now) this stuff is more for digital photography and medical imaging.
No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.
Damn, I still get goose bumps thinking about Jeff Wayne's 1976 musical version of "War of the Worlds" with narration and acting by Richard Burtons. If you have never heard this version, get it!
Anyone that thinks DVD is "good enough" is terribly short sighted.
I would estimate DVD quality to be about 3x VHS (about 2x more pixels, and a much better color space).
HDTV has 6x as many pixels as DVD, at 2 Mega pixels.
From my experience with a 10-foot wide projection system (NEC LX135 QXGA) I have at home, anything below DVD is almost unwatchable. DVD looks glorious until you pump a true HDTV signal into the system and then what you have is in many ways better than going to the theater (at least the crappy cineplexes in this town).
Now you might carp who the hell has 10' wide projection systems to really enjoy this kind of experience. The percentage is small today, but I predict that DLP will cause hi-res projection prices to plummet in the next 2-3 years. Mostly because DLP will experience the same kind of Moore's law improvement as any other type of chip type process, while other methods rely more on bulk size improvements.
In fact while it has been long to make it out of the Labs, Hi-Res displays will probably be common and affordable in Ultra-HD resolutions in 5 to 10 years time. (over 8 mega pixels) in large sizes.
I suspect U-HD will be overkill for home, and in most ways exceeds 35mm film quality when you factor in film speed (grainer for faster) and editing and reprocessing (loosing quality at each step). Sure, theoretically 35mm film has 16 Meg pixel, but in practice it is more like 3-6 (not much more than HD). And that's only if you can find a theater that knows how to keep a critical focus, and whose machines don't jitter uncontrollably because they are trying to squeeze the last penny out the damn things before going digital, which they desperately want to avoid as long a possible because first generation equipment is expensive and will suck compared to equipment available in 2-3 years time.
Even without 10' screens, in 2 or 3 years, WUXGA screens (1920-1200) will be common and affordable in laptops with Blu-Ray and/or HD-DVD built in. The near photographic look will motivate people to upgrade their home viewing experience. One of the biggest reasons for HDTV slow acceptance has been the failure of early systems to actually display the full quality that the standard supports (most systems today advertised as HDTV still don't). That and of course the lack of actual HDTV content to be viewed.
I suspect I will be one of the ones to say HD is good enough once we really get there. My father has trouble seeing the detail of DVD. So many people don't have the visually acuity to really appreciate the difference. Beyond HD I suspect the majority of people won't really be able to see much of a difference. I'm speaking of REAL HD. 1080p at 60 frames a second is really sweet, but over the air stops just short of this with p at only 24 and 30 fps. My prediction is that eventually 1080p at 60fps will become a standard, one that holds for a couple of decades or more, but we could get stuck at 1080i or 720p, which is a shame because the difference is quite noticeable up to this. Digital photography might still motivate people to buy U-HD projection systems for displaying stills.
As for me -- GIVE ME BLU-RAY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!!
(while the CRTs hold out on my current system)
Ummm, I think we can rule this out as a model for a Mars sample return mission.
I've said repeatedly the ISS should be billed as sample returns first destination. Gives it a mission, makes the public feel fuzzy warm about containment safety (justified or not).
Again, I will state that this is likely not ET, but I find it odd that the CNN article is up for less than 6 hours before being taken down (though still in their archive). But an article about "Super Earth" (non ET related) has been up since Aug 26th.
Did they just decide this wasn't really a story that fast? I would be less suspicious if they put the rebuttal up in its place. But no, nothing... Strange.
Most likely not ET.
But even if it's not, the real question is whether the Government is swooping in to take over management of detecting and decoding of the Signal ala "Contact"
The denials mean little in themselves, but if the next day includes evidence of some Science oversight committee on flight to SETI@Home and various other radio observatories, and if a suspiciously high percentage of radio dishes start pointing in the same direction in the sky - well then interesting days may be ahead.
HD-DVD thinks pressing cost (a few cents difference now) will be what wins the war, and cites the VHS/BETA wars as precedent.
But it wasn't blank tape costs that killed BETA, what killed BETA (in the home market), it was 3 HR record time (extended to 4 ½) versus 6 for VHS on standard tapes.
Consumers will make the same decision here. Blu-Ray now supports all the HD-DVD formats on 25 gig single layer vs HD-DVD 15 gig. Not only this, but HD-DVD is 2 layers max (per side), while Blu-Ray is planning on going anywhere from 4 to 8. Exactly how many hasn't quite been worked out yet, but at least 4 are almost a certainty and 100 Gig on one side as a result (can you say one full season in HD on one side?).
HD-DVD's only advantage (and it is a slim one) is the DVD name. But Blu-Ray is a good name too, and one I think the general public will pick up quickly, and assume better because it's using that newer Blue Laser don't you know (even though HD-DVD will be using Blue Lasers also).
The new Holographic storage is nice too at 200 Gig, but it may be too late to the party to be a video standard storage, it still has a year or two of basic development left. Better to keep working on this one and release it in 2010+ at 1T plus to support Ultra-HDTV. By 2020 I predict Movie Theaters will be an anachronistic oddity like Drive-Ins now. Of course we may not be using Disks at all by then, and downloading U-HD straight off of the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Though I'm sure any real product would have an insulating lining.
A little Googling shows this to be something called a Hadamard Transform.
In the Early to Mid '90s, fast computers had to churn away to make fuzzy cubes and other simple objects.
With better computers and better printers the rendering should be faster and the reduction phase not as extreme. Also with larger Holographic plates the results should be less fuzzy.
Does anyone know the state of Computer generated Holograms? Real geeks wouldn't make holograms with old fashion photographic plates, but in the guts of their over-clocked AMD boxen.
Also stated in the ATW was that there wasn't (or shouldn't) be any animosity between the Scramjet team and the Rocket technology teams, in that affordable scramjet is projected to top out in the 20,000 lbs to LEO range and have a $1,700 per pound price tag vs $2,200 for expendable rocket, but with rocket being able to heft much larger loads. Still, the 20,000 lbs range is projected to meet 80% of future lift needs.
This figures struck me has oddly pessimistic, but they see problems scaling with this technology. They think the real advantage to scramjet will be reliability, with current unmanned failures rates (and manned it would seem also) at one in 50, and scramjet figured at 1 in 4000 or so (assuming a return to Earth on propulsion failure). Of course the Shuttle was projected to have a low failure rate also.
Still I would think a four-tier approach would be near ideal for now.
Maglev assist takeoff to Mach 1 or 2
Jet assist to Mach 3 or 4 (stubby winged, high-speed, jet wouldn't have enough lift for loaded takeoff on it's own)
Scramjet to Mach 8 or 10
Rocket final stage to Mach 22 orbit.
Maybe Congress doesn't want to fund this because they're misreading Scramjet as Scam-Jet.
That said I think the Right is often wrong on Science issues and the Left is often wrong on policy issues. Because the Left embraces Science and its provable conclusions, it often feels the power of truth extends to its social agenda or worldview as well. Many is the time I've heard people on the Left say things like "These are the people the believe _blank_", so because they are wrong in one area they must be wrong in all areas.
The Left will keep doing something in a failing way because the goal is noble.
The Right never admits to American shortcomings, and is therefore unable to ever take corrective action.
The Left thinks there is a massive conspiracy to keep the poor down, and that the Rich want a world with only hyper-wealthy (themselves) and dirt-poor slaves.
The Right thinks their views of right, wrong, and morality are absolute, and poor people are in their state from their poor moral upbringing.
Jokers to Left of me, clowns to the Right of me.
I guess a tax on Oxygen would be fair since I use that, but what I object to is the planet wide conspiracy of forcing me to take Nitrogen along with it, inflating air usage taxes by an unfair 400%
Here is a link to a Discovery article
Nuclear Planet
Is there a five-mile-wide ball of hellaciously hot uranium seething at the center of the Earth?
Yes the core is mostly Iron, but it's not pure iron. I mentioned iron as a core material in my post.
Gotta learn to use that preview button.
Sheesh, this is almost recursive.
Recent speculation is that the very center has a high ratio of Uranium, enough so that the pressure actually creates a self-sustaining natural nuclear reactor. When it gets too hot it diffuses and shuts down, only to coalesce and restart again (never a big boom). This starting and stopping of the nuclear processes at the Earth's core may be responsible for our planets large magnetic field, and occasional shut downs and reversals of the magnetic field as this nuclear process fluctuates.
You're right that the center would be weightless, but under more pressure than we can possible create in the lab with the best diamond anvils. It only takes a few miles of crust to crush carbon to diamonds, and here we are talking 8,000 miles of rock pressing down. Though the rock (iron) at the center isn't adding any additional pressure, it has thousands of miles of rock above it that is. Quite the hellish place.
BTW, I don't know how I typed Biq in my rirst post when I meant to type Big (no one seems to have noticed)
Burrowing Owls
Ironically, Disney's solo "Chicken Little" looks to be pretty good (previewed at The Incredibles also).
The mountains on Earth may appear huge to us insects on the surface, but from a distance the earth appears as smooth as a billiard ball.
Ironically this event was so big, that unlike latter smaller hits, all evidence in the way of dents will be gone as the entire globe virtually liquefied and coalesced again. Though I wouldn't rule out some exotic mass distributions that might lend evidence of it.
VHS was able to unseat the BETA early adopters only because:
1. The Tapes where 6 hr vs 4.5 (3 on early BETA) in EP mode.
2. VHS players were priced about 100 dollars cheaper than BETA players when low-end players cost 500-600 dollars.
BETA still managed to hang on for over a 2 decades because 1. It was slightly higher quality (very slight) and had HI-FI Stereo about 2-3 years earlier.
In this case no huge player cost difference I predict. Picture Quality will be identical (same codecs). Blu-Ray way ahead on storage (recording length).
You could name this format SHIT-DISC and it would still beat HD-DVD
Broadcast is dying, I think this year is the tipping point (at least it is for me). With the exception of live events like Sports and News why would you need simultaneous broadcast over the air? Storage is large and cheap and getting more so. Download your favorite programs and watch them at leisure on a portable player.
I had thought this was at least 10 years away, but inevitable. Perhaps it is now only 4 or 5 years away.
Some HBO channels (Standard Resolution) are near DVD Quality, while others are terrible like the afore mentioned Sci-Fi channel. BTW I do have to pay extra for Sci-Fi so I find it's poor picture quality especially galling.
Now that I have HDTV on some channels, I just about want to retch when I tune in other channels over the same cable. Just to be clear, the 50 or so channels offered in uncompressed analog NTSC are all far superior in quality to the Standard Definition digital channels, cable propaganda aside, with the exception of a couple of Subscription Movie Channels, where I assume the paying public won't pay a subscription for something worse than Over the Air.
It shouldn't be hard to post the 3 relevant pieces of info: Resolution, Bandwidth, and Compression Scheme.
This should be mandated under some truth-in-labeling law
LOTS of stuff
ROM capacity of 27-Gig Single, 50-Gig Double layer, with prototype re-writeable of 8 layer 200-GIG
HD-Movies at upto 36 Mbit. Almost double the head room of over the air HDTV. With MPEG 4 encoding this should be a bump up in quality over standard HDTV. Assuming they don't just try to fill it up with unnecessary DVD extras (yes I know some people really like the extra stuff).
I've mentioned this before in other threads, but Movie makers need to up the frame rate on filming to 60fps (instead of the standard 24). We have enough spatial resolution now, but fast pans still look like crap because of the low frame rates of standard film. Blu-Ray would have more than enough capacity for 60fps 3-4 hours in MPEG 4.
Cable started offering HDTV about 6 month ago, but I assumed it wasn't compatible being component only, I then discovered Component to RGB converters. So I finally got a Motorola (9800? DVR) cable box about a month ago, and an Xblaster Component to RGB converter. Almost got the job done, but not quite. Probably would work fine for Xboxes, but not true HDTV. A had something viewable, but full 16:9 pictures often had dimmed horizontal streaked areas thru them that I assumed was from not having some kind of proper blanking interval on the left side of the screen. Another similar converter later with a horizontal-trim adjustment and I'm in business.
Cable does not carry the two local HDTV feeds (there outta be a law, and I'm sure will be soon). HD-Discovery Looks glorious, but doesn't really carry all that much hard science and is more of a travelogue. HD-Net has some really crappy original programming, but almost worth watching just because the picture is so good. HDNet-Movies has an occasional thing worth watching, but not much. I shelled out for HBO-HD, but it too is slim in the kind of big box office offerings I was expecting. Hopefully they will repeat the last Season of Sopranos and Six Feet Under in HD before the next season commences. For Music lovers, especially Jazz and Blues, Bravo plays a lot of music, and the picture is about the best of all the Channels. I don't watch much Sports, just as well, since 90% of the ESPN-HD is up-converted standard definition (granted at about DVD quality level).
Two things have happened since I started by HD project. One: Broadcast TV has just about died for me. Every year they offer less that I would want to watch. Two: Getting some HD content has made me unsatisfied with what regular content I would watch, so I watch even less of it.
Ironically this is probably not a bad thing. The cost of Cable with 6 HD channels and HBO included has not that much higher and with a DVR thrown in to boot. So now I DVR only what I want to watch, and go on with my life. I plan on getting an external firewire hard-drive, and will archive some "must-keep" movies past the 10 hours of HD my box can store locally. When Blu-Ray comes out, I think I will finally be happy. I have lots of DVDs, but now I want my collection in HD.
When HDTV is Good, it is VERY GOOD. I prefer my picture to the local Cineplex, and it is far better than any of the consumer HDTV offerings at BestBuy. But the consistency of Quality is spotty, and there is damn little to choose from.
Since their searches must work in conjunction with a list of banned sites in some way, they could add search options in free zones that highlight sites banned in other countries or provide entire lists of banned sights. Also to be included would be sites filtered or altered though a country's internet firewall.
Clever Chinese hackers probably have ways around the firewall (does anyone have info on this?). By listing banned sites in free zones it should be trivial for dissidents and political dissenters to get printed versions out to the masses, even if these items had to be smuggled in. One thing that should be in constant circulation would be the list of sites banned.
One could get a small or partial list of banned sites without Google. With Google it should be possible to uncover the extent of China's censorship. I guarantee such a service would be used by Chinese students and Chinese visitors to America.
The reason for 1920 x 1200 (or even multiples thereof) is it will do full HDTV with no resizing or interpolation (best viewing) assuming you set it for proper letterboxing to 1920 x 1080 in HDTV mode.
I assume in the not too distant future WQUXGA will be sub $1000 and common. Fonts are hard to read already at WUXGA. Above this (for now) this stuff is more for digital photography and medical imaging.
But I still want one.
Damn, I still get goose bumps thinking about Jeff Wayne's 1976 musical version of "War of the Worlds" with narration and acting by Richard Burtons. If you have never heard this version, get it!
I would estimate DVD quality to be about 3x VHS (about 2x more pixels, and a much better color space).
HDTV has 6x as many pixels as DVD, at 2 Mega pixels.
From my experience with a 10-foot wide projection system (NEC LX135 QXGA) I have at home, anything below DVD is almost unwatchable. DVD looks glorious until you pump a true HDTV signal into the system and then what you have is in many ways better than going to the theater (at least the crappy cineplexes in this town).
Now you might carp who the hell has 10' wide projection systems to really enjoy this kind of experience. The percentage is small today, but I predict that DLP will cause hi-res projection prices to plummet in the next 2-3 years. Mostly because DLP will experience the same kind of Moore's law improvement as any other type of chip type process, while other methods rely more on bulk size improvements.
In fact while it has been long to make it out of the Labs, Hi-Res displays will probably be common and affordable in Ultra-HD resolutions in 5 to 10 years time. (over 8 mega pixels) in large sizes.
I suspect U-HD will be overkill for home, and in most ways exceeds 35mm film quality when you factor in film speed (grainer for faster) and editing and reprocessing (loosing quality at each step). Sure, theoretically 35mm film has 16 Meg pixel, but in practice it is more like 3-6 (not much more than HD). And that's only if you can find a theater that knows how to keep a critical focus, and whose machines don't jitter uncontrollably because they are trying to squeeze the last penny out the damn things before going digital, which they desperately want to avoid as long a possible because first generation equipment is expensive and will suck compared to equipment available in 2-3 years time.
Even without 10' screens, in 2 or 3 years, WUXGA screens (1920-1200) will be common and affordable in laptops with Blu-Ray and/or HD-DVD built in. The near photographic look will motivate people to upgrade their home viewing experience. One of the biggest reasons for HDTV slow acceptance has been the failure of early systems to actually display the full quality that the standard supports (most systems today advertised as HDTV still don't). That and of course the lack of actual HDTV content to be viewed.
I suspect I will be one of the ones to say HD is good enough once we really get there. My father has trouble seeing the detail of DVD. So many people don't have the visually acuity to really appreciate the difference. Beyond HD I suspect the majority of people won't really be able to see much of a difference. I'm speaking of REAL HD. 1080p at 60 frames a second is really sweet, but over the air stops just short of this with p at only 24 and 30 fps. My prediction is that eventually 1080p at 60fps will become a standard, one that holds for a couple of decades or more, but we could get stuck at 1080i or 720p, which is a shame because the difference is quite noticeable up to this. Digital photography might still motivate people to buy U-HD projection systems for displaying stills.
As for me -- GIVE ME BLU-RAY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!!
(while the CRTs hold out on my current system)
Sure more expensive.
More likely to engender public interest, allay public fears, garner funds for follow up missions.
I've said repeatedly the ISS should be billed as sample returns first destination. Gives it a mission, makes the public feel fuzzy warm about containment safety (justified or not).
Did they just decide this wasn't really a story that fast? I would be less suspicious if they put the rebuttal up in its place. But no, nothing... Strange.
But even if it's not, the real question is whether the Government is swooping in to take over management of detecting and decoding of the Signal ala "Contact"
The denials mean little in themselves, but if the next day includes evidence of some Science oversight committee on flight to SETI@Home and various other radio observatories, and if a suspiciously high percentage of radio dishes start pointing in the same direction in the sky - well then interesting days may be ahead.
HD-DVD thinks pressing cost (a few cents difference now) will be what wins the war, and cites the VHS/BETA wars as precedent.
But it wasn't blank tape costs that killed BETA, what killed BETA (in the home market), it was 3 HR record time (extended to 4 ½) versus 6 for VHS on standard tapes.
Consumers will make the same decision here. Blu-Ray now supports all the HD-DVD formats on 25 gig single layer vs HD-DVD 15 gig. Not only this, but HD-DVD is 2 layers max (per side), while Blu-Ray is planning on going anywhere from 4 to 8. Exactly how many hasn't quite been worked out yet, but at least 4 are almost a certainty and 100 Gig on one side as a result (can you say one full season in HD on one side?).
HD-DVD's only advantage (and it is a slim one) is the DVD name. But Blu-Ray is a good name too, and one I think the general public will pick up quickly, and assume better because it's using that newer Blue Laser don't you know (even though HD-DVD will be using Blue Lasers also).
The new Holographic storage is nice too at 200 Gig, but it may be too late to the party to be a video standard storage, it still has a year or two of basic development left. Better to keep working on this one and release it in 2010+ at 1T plus to support Ultra-HDTV. By 2020 I predict Movie Theaters will be an anachronistic oddity like Drive-Ins now. Of course we may not be using Disks at all by then, and downloading U-HD straight off of the internet.