I'm totally stoked about the possibilities of Digital Cinema, but my one big gripe is that there is no discussion of going to a higher framerate.
Keep in mind that a higher framerate equates into larger files and more processing required which then equates into higher costs. You have to transfer a larger file, have more space to hold it, and have more processing oomph at the theatres to decode it. Hopefully whatever standard they come up with allows them to have variable framerates (as you would expect them to have variable resolutions and compression ratios, ala DVD). So Mr. Lucas can release his stuff at 60fps at 8192x2048 using lossless compression while some indie can do theirs at 24fps at 720x480.
How great was MacOs 1.0 compared to OSX? Not very good at all, but its a starting point, the initial idea is out there, and basically it works. Now its time to expand and make it better.
You're missing the context. System/Finder 1.0 was great for it's time. Sure, yank it out of context and compare to something now and it will suffer, but compare it back to other things that were available in 1984/5 and it was revolutionary. The question is can the Segway be thought of in the same context? People could immediately see the usefulness in the innovations of the first Mac, can the same be said for Segway?
That Class A block that I bought on ebay from the guy from Nigeria who spammed me via SMS isn't legit? I better quickly cancel that wire transfer of money to his cousin, you know, the finance minister until I can check out his story about the president dieing in a plane crash and leaving all that money that he was going to invest in helping Quark get its native OSX version done.
Sounds a lot like the original riff in ARC that lead directly to ZIP in the first place (I know the exact circumstances are different, but the similarities are quite interesting). Yes, I'm that old:)
another alien race that defeated the "lizards" will come to save us. Sort of like an "operation iRaqi Freedom" effort on a planetary scale.
But after they "liberate" the Earth, will they have a hard time finding these so called "weapons of mass water depletion" and "bio-human McNugget processing" equipment that their leaders told the other planets in the federatoin? Will it turn out that the lizard race were simply a bunch of petty power hungry lamers who used their position to simply "live the good life" ignoring the well being of those they oppressed? Will they then speak harshly of the "bird race" that aided the lizard leaders and who themselves are suspected of harboring these water depletion devices?
I'm afraid I'm with the crowd that favors we do something to the electronics in the plane rather than the devices we use. It's just going to get worse, as wireless everything gets cheaper.
Actually I'm in total agreement here. But I was refering to the here and now. If cell phones can have a majorly negative impact on the operation of avionics, then why are they allowed on the plane? If I am forced to check my clippers, why don't they force you to turn off your phone and throw it into my check-ins, or turn them over to the attendant at boarding? People give the attendants a hard time about putting their tray tables up, I can't even imagine the number of people who blow off the request to turn all their electronic goodies off.
A 5 degree heading error puts you about 300 miles off at the end of a cross-country flight
I think that the pilots would notice the guy in the cockpit holding his cell phone 1 ft from the instruments during the cross country flight.
CAN indicates that it is fully within the cellphone's spec to produce that output, and given that cellphones are designed to increase power when they cannot reach a cell, invariably they are FULLY CAPABLE of doing so as soon as the plane reaches a point where the cellphone can't communicate.
No, CAN is an inprecise term. How long did they have to bombard the equipment in order to get these anomolies (they don't say). How long does a cell phone transmit at those signal levels? If a cell phone sends out that max power signal for 1/8th of a second every several seconds, how does that relate to having this signal generating equipment generating a continuous signal a max strength for several seconds? My point it that their testing was either not conducted in a very thourough manner, or their reporting is purposfully leaving out information.
I also suspect that the interference caused by whatever equipment they used is negligible compared to, say, all 80 or so window seat passengers having their cellphones turned on, in their pockets, and all passing out of their cell at the exact same instant, more or less.
They had their equipment 1 foot from the instruments. It would be doubtful that the person in first class could have any effect, let alone the people sitting back by the toilets. Now if the pilot and co pilot had their cell phones on in their shirt pockets, then there might be a problem according to this "test". Plus if 80 people are using their cell phones, you don't get 80x the signal strength, so the number is irrelevant (other than for statistical purposes). Oh and how nice of you to consider "negligible" those signals when we're actually discussing the effects of potentially negligible signals on equipment.
Considering that every flight I have taken to Boston has actually succeeded in landing somewhere within Massachusetts (in fact, they all managed to land at Logan, imagine that), I think that it can be safe to say that baseline operation does not involve compass error or navigation system error.
No it just meant that there was either no long term error, or a long term error that could not be compensated for. Do you expect them to say "welcome to Los Angeles, we took a little detour back there by Boise, but we had it figured out by Salt Lake, enjoy your stay".
This reminds me a lot of testing done for carcinogens. They stuff a rat with more material than an average human will consume in a lifetime, they find one cancerous cell, and everyone claims that the material is "cancer causing" and should be avoided.
Again, my gripe is methodology and conclusions. I say their methodology sucks and therefore there conclusions almost meaningless. I'm not saying that cell phones are harmless, I'm just saying that this test doesn't prove otherwise.
Well then the BBC has crap reporting, since they misstated the results.
But since you insist, I DID read the report, and my conclusions are the same. So saw some minor anomolies when they had signal generating equipment (not phones, but signal generating equipment) 1 foot away from the electronics. There is no mention of any other sources of interference (does the signal generating equipement itself produce other signals, generate magnetic fields, etc), no baseline to compare to (where the tests conducted in a shielded room to eliminate other possible sources of interference). Hell, even their reports say "30 volts/metre, a level that can be produced by a cellphone". Not WILL, not IS, but CAN. Looks like a very tenuous conclusion drawn from a very scientifically shoddy test.
It found evidence that calls produced interference levels which could disrupt aircraft systems.
Faults that could be attributed to mobile phones use include...
I see a lot of "coulds" and not a single "did". So what they found was that they have no better information now than they did before. Did they observe a single instance where there was interference? It's seems highly dubious that they couldn't construct a scenerio where they could conclusively show this "error".
And it's been stated before but I think it's worth mentioning again. By god, if cell phones are really capable of such chaos, why on earth do they allow them on the planes to begin with? Just what I need is to have someone bring down my plane because they forgot their phone was on in their briefcase, or 6 members of some terrorist org only need to start sms'ing each other to take down a 747 full of people. There is a severe disconnect between what the FAA is claiming and their actions taken. What, I have 5 people make sure I don't bring finger nail clippers onto the plane, but no one cares that I can bring the entire thing down with my Nokia?
What's so futuristic about a room that uses technology available for the household for at least 10 years (broadband not withstanding). OK the tv is plasma, but it's still just a big tv. Anybody could offer a room like this if they could get away with charging the extra amount it would cost to pay for it.
Now when you can get a room like this at Motel6 for $39.95 at night, then wake me up.
Entergy, the second-largest nuclear energy producer in the U.S., hopes to break ground on its co-generation Freedom Reactor within five years.
OK, we can cut it out with this "Freedom" stuff everywhere now. Tell Entergy that they can go back to calling it their "French" Reactor again, the war is over.
Heck, I thought that they programmed one of their advanced copiers to play chess. Not just simply using it as a hohum input device. I agree it is a cool way to test their glyphs, but not very interesting beyond that. The thought of programming your scanner/copier in python scratches that nerdy itch much nicer.
ok... this is getting ridiculous... why should anyone that found a way to compromise security for a game be prosecuted in real life?!
It's not just a game, it's a service provided by a company to paying customers. The hackers disrupted a service being provided, that is a prosecutable offense right? And if US/W loses money (i.e. customers, downtime, and IT expenses) then they can claim damages right.
Couldn't this be avoided by making the honeypot actually "do something", thereby making it not a "honeypot"? IE, stick some files on there and call it a backup server (unimportant files of course) or whatever. After all, isn't the most effective honey pots those that fool the intruder into thinking that it's a real "site", what better way than to sorta make it real? Nothing illegal about monitoring your own real site right?
OK, generally I'm not one of those "everything should be open source" voices, but I do think that this is one case where this type of software should be required by law to be open source. The ramifications of any type of fraud is way to high. But more importantly, I think that a separate agency should be involved in the archiving/building of the source. After all, just because someone says "download our source code X" doesn't mean that X is what is actually running. The source should be baselined and backed up on releases, as well as checksums produced and verified for the resulting binaries.
Isn't this SOP for the entire video card industry? Every few years someone gets caught targeting some aspect of performance to the prevailing benchmarks. I guess that's what happens when people wax on about "my video card does 45300 fps in quake and yours only does 45292, your card sucks, my experience is soooo much better". For a while now it's been the ultimate hype driven market wrt hardware.
I understand that a while ago there was some competition between IBM and Motorola about whose chip would be the G5. Was Motorola ever a serious contender, and if so, has Apple decided on IBM? I haven't heard much about Motorola for some time.
Mot actually had a G5 on the roadmap. They apparently got all the way to samples, but then ditched the effort. There never was a competition per se wrt the G5 name. There was a bit of friction over AltiVec, as IBM wanted to focus on clock speed and didn't think AV was worth the complexity (and hence why Mot came out with the G4 while IBM stuck with the G3). Motorola hasn't been serious about the mainstream cpu market for a while as they've been losing money on it. They'd rather focus on things like embedded proccies and cell phones (and related chips).
I don't know which came first, Mot ditching G5 so Apple pleads with IBM to come out with 970. Or Mot gets whiff of 970, so sees a way out of doing G5. Perhaps others more "in the know" can chime in?
Re:What the heck is 'Altivec' anyway?
on
Inside the PowerPC 970
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· Score: 5, Informative
Floating point ops, optimized for graphics processing and things like compression (jpeg, mpeg, mp3). If you read the Ars article he waxes on about it's superiority over MMX/SSE/SSE2.
This is just a last ditch effort by a company that will be talked about in the past tense a few years from now. They are obviously angling to have someone buy them or pay them to shut them up. They're hoping IBM will think "hell, we could buy them and their patents for less than all this legal crap will cost". Going after customers (and how much you want to bet that the customers they go after will coincidentially be customers of a certain large computer corp, is just a way to enlist the customers into pushing said computer corp into resolving the issue quickly.
Personally I think AT&T/Lucent/Avaya should form a company and bring the Unix rights back home.
Amazon doesn't care if the patent can be canceled due to prior art. They'll strong arm other companies and many are bound to not put up a fight. If someone does, and the patent is later invalidated, then the max they'd lose would be to have to pay the original licensee back, I don't believe they'd have to pay any type of penalty on any fees collected. So they basically end up with a interest free loan, IF the thing gets invalidated. Not a bad downside. The way that the current patent system is setup, your much better off trying to patent everything, as even if a large number get punted, you'll probably make good money off the ones that don't (kinda like VC in the boom).
who exactly didn't expect something like this? Intel has a history of this sort of thing
Of course when it happens to Intel, then EVERYBODY knows about it. My question is, how prevelant is this sort of thing throughout the cpu industry? Anyone know of other "mistakes" by the other major players? It's hard to imagine that only Intel makes these kinds of goofs, esp. with the complexity of todays chips. As an example, wouldn't Mot's failure to scale up the G4 PPC chips be considered an "error"? They just caught it early enough to not to ship any chips and say "oh, we're sorry, our G4's won't go as fast as we originally stated, wait another year and a half or so and we'll get it all sorted out". Didn't they also do a similar thing with the 68040?
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I'm totally stoked about the possibilities of Digital Cinema, but my one big gripe is that there is no discussion of going to a higher framerate.
Keep in mind that a higher framerate equates into larger files and more processing required which then equates into higher costs. You have to transfer a larger file, have more space to hold it, and have more processing oomph at the theatres to decode it. Hopefully whatever standard they come up with allows them to have variable framerates (as you would expect them to have variable resolutions and compression ratios, ala DVD). So Mr. Lucas can release his stuff at 60fps at 8192x2048 using lossless compression while some indie can do theirs at 24fps at 720x480.
How great was MacOs 1.0 compared to OSX? Not very good at all, but its a starting point, the initial idea is out there, and basically it works. Now its time to expand and make it better.
You're missing the context. System/Finder 1.0 was great for it's time. Sure, yank it out of context and compare to something now and it will suffer, but compare it back to other things that were available in 1984/5 and it was revolutionary. The question is can the Segway be thought of in the same context? People could immediately see the usefulness in the innovations of the first Mac, can the same be said for Segway?
That Class A block that I bought on ebay from the guy from Nigeria who spammed me via SMS isn't legit? I better quickly cancel that wire transfer of money to his cousin, you know, the finance minister until I can check out his story about the president dieing in a plane crash and leaving all that money that he was going to invest in helping Quark get its native OSX version done.
Sounds a lot like the original riff in ARC that lead directly to ZIP in the first place (I know the exact circumstances are different, but the similarities are quite interesting). Yes, I'm that old :)
And Hanibal Lector can be made the head chef to the lizard queen (or even shown to be a lizard dude himself!)
another alien race that defeated the "lizards" will come to save us. Sort of like an "operation iRaqi Freedom" effort on a planetary scale.
But after they "liberate" the Earth, will they have a hard time finding these so called "weapons of mass water depletion" and "bio-human McNugget processing" equipment that their leaders told the other planets in the federatoin? Will it turn out that the lizard race were simply a bunch of petty power hungry lamers who used their position to simply "live the good life" ignoring the well being of those they oppressed? Will they then speak harshly of the "bird race" that aided the lizard leaders and who themselves are suspected of harboring these water depletion devices?
Can't wait to find out (or not).
I'm afraid I'm with the crowd that favors we do something to the electronics in the plane rather than the devices we use. It's just going to get worse, as wireless everything gets cheaper.
Actually I'm in total agreement here. But I was refering to the here and now. If cell phones can have a majorly negative impact on the operation of avionics, then why are they allowed on the plane? If I am forced to check my clippers, why don't they force you to turn off your phone and throw it into my check-ins, or turn them over to the attendant at boarding? People give the attendants a hard time about putting their tray tables up, I can't even imagine the number of people who blow off the request to turn all their electronic goodies off.
A 5 degree heading error puts you about 300 miles off at the end of a cross-country flight
I think that the pilots would notice the guy in the cockpit holding his cell phone 1 ft from the instruments during the cross country flight.
CAN indicates that it is fully within the cellphone's spec to produce that output, and given that cellphones are designed to increase power when they cannot reach a cell, invariably they are FULLY CAPABLE of doing so as soon as the plane reaches a point where the cellphone can't communicate.
No, CAN is an inprecise term. How long did they have to bombard the equipment in order to get these anomolies (they don't say). How long does a cell phone transmit at those signal levels? If a cell phone sends out that max power signal for 1/8th of a second every several seconds, how does that relate to having this signal generating equipment generating a continuous signal a max strength for several seconds? My point it that their testing was either not conducted in a very thourough manner, or their reporting is purposfully leaving out information.
I also suspect that the interference caused by whatever equipment they used is negligible compared to, say, all 80 or so window seat passengers having their cellphones turned on, in their pockets, and all passing out of their cell at the exact same instant, more or less.
They had their equipment 1 foot from the instruments. It would be doubtful that the person in first class could have any effect, let alone the people sitting back by the toilets. Now if the pilot and co pilot had their cell phones on in their shirt pockets, then there might be a problem according to this "test". Plus if 80 people are using their cell phones, you don't get 80x the signal strength, so the number is irrelevant (other than for statistical purposes). Oh and how nice of you to consider "negligible" those signals when we're actually discussing the effects of potentially negligible signals on equipment.
Considering that every flight I have taken to Boston has actually succeeded in landing somewhere within Massachusetts (in fact, they all managed to land at Logan, imagine that), I think that it can be safe to say that baseline operation does not involve compass error or navigation system error.
No it just meant that there was either no long term error, or a long term error that could not be compensated for. Do you expect them to say "welcome to Los Angeles, we took a little detour back there by Boise, but we had it figured out by Salt Lake, enjoy your stay".
This reminds me a lot of testing done for carcinogens. They stuff a rat with more material than an average human will consume in a lifetime, they find one cancerous cell, and everyone claims that the material is "cancer causing" and should be avoided.
Again, my gripe is methodology and conclusions. I say their methodology sucks and therefore there conclusions almost meaningless. I'm not saying that cell phones are harmless, I'm just saying that this test doesn't prove otherwise.
Well then the BBC has crap reporting, since they misstated the results.
But since you insist, I DID read the report, and my conclusions are the same. So saw some minor anomolies when they had signal generating equipment (not phones, but signal generating equipment) 1 foot away from the electronics. There is no mention of any other sources of interference (does the signal generating equipement itself produce other signals, generate magnetic fields, etc), no baseline to compare to (where the tests conducted in a shielded room to eliminate other possible sources of interference). Hell, even their reports say "30 volts/metre, a level that can be produced by a cellphone". Not WILL, not IS, but CAN. Looks like a very tenuous conclusion drawn from a very scientifically shoddy test.
at least according to the bbc article.
...
It found evidence that calls produced interference levels which could disrupt aircraft systems. Faults that could be attributed to mobile phones use include
I see a lot of "coulds" and not a single "did". So what they found was that they have no better information now than they did before. Did they observe a single instance where there was interference? It's seems highly dubious that they couldn't construct a scenerio where they could conclusively show this "error".
And it's been stated before but I think it's worth mentioning again. By god, if cell phones are really capable of such chaos, why on earth do they allow them on the planes to begin with? Just what I need is to have someone bring down my plane because they forgot their phone was on in their briefcase, or 6 members of some terrorist org only need to start sms'ing each other to take down a 747 full of people. There is a severe disconnect between what the FAA is claiming and their actions taken. What, I have 5 people make sure I don't bring finger nail clippers onto the plane, but no one cares that I can bring the entire thing down with my Nokia?
What's so futuristic about a room that uses technology available for the household for at least 10 years (broadband not withstanding). OK the tv is plasma, but it's still just a big tv. Anybody could offer a room like this if they could get away with charging the extra amount it would cost to pay for it.
Now when you can get a room like this at Motel6 for $39.95 at night, then wake me up.
Entergy, the second-largest nuclear energy producer in the U.S., hopes to break ground on its co-generation Freedom Reactor within five years.
OK, we can cut it out with this "Freedom" stuff everywhere now. Tell Entergy that they can go back to calling it their "French" Reactor again, the war is over.
Heck, I thought that they programmed one of their advanced copiers to play chess. Not just simply using it as a hohum input device. I agree it is a cool way to test their glyphs, but not very interesting beyond that. The thought of programming your scanner/copier in python scratches that nerdy itch much nicer.
ok... this is getting ridiculous... why should anyone that found a way to compromise security for a game be prosecuted in real life?!
It's not just a game, it's a service provided by a company to paying customers. The hackers disrupted a service being provided, that is a prosecutable offense right? And if US/W loses money (i.e. customers, downtime, and IT expenses) then they can claim damages right.
Couldn't this be avoided by making the honeypot actually "do something", thereby making it not a "honeypot"? IE, stick some files on there and call it a backup server (unimportant files of course) or whatever. After all, isn't the most effective honey pots those that fool the intruder into thinking that it's a real "site", what better way than to sorta make it real? Nothing illegal about monitoring your own real site right?
Hell I'm in it for all the hot chicks ;)
OK, generally I'm not one of those "everything should be open source" voices, but I do think that this is one case where this type of software should be required by law to be open source. The ramifications of any type of fraud is way to high. But more importantly, I think that a separate agency should be involved in the archiving/building of the source. After all, just because someone says "download our source code X" doesn't mean that X is what is actually running. The source should be baselined and backed up on releases, as well as checksums produced and verified for the resulting binaries.
Isn't this SOP for the entire video card industry? Every few years someone gets caught targeting some aspect of performance to the prevailing benchmarks. I guess that's what happens when people wax on about "my video card does 45300 fps in quake and yours only does 45292, your card sucks, my experience is soooo much better". For a while now it's been the ultimate hype driven market wrt hardware.
I understand that a while ago there was some competition between IBM and Motorola about whose chip would be the G5. Was Motorola ever a serious contender, and if so, has Apple decided on IBM? I haven't heard much about Motorola for some time.
Mot actually had a G5 on the roadmap. They apparently got all the way to samples, but then ditched the effort. There never was a competition per se wrt the G5 name. There was a bit of friction over AltiVec, as IBM wanted to focus on clock speed and didn't think AV was worth the complexity (and hence why Mot came out with the G4 while IBM stuck with the G3). Motorola hasn't been serious about the mainstream cpu market for a while as they've been losing money on it. They'd rather focus on things like embedded proccies and cell phones (and related chips).
I don't know which came first, Mot ditching G5 so Apple pleads with IBM to come out with 970. Or Mot gets whiff of 970, so sees a way out of doing G5. Perhaps others more "in the know" can chime in?
Floating point ops, optimized for graphics processing and things like compression (jpeg, mpeg, mp3). If you read the Ars article he waxes on about it's superiority over MMX/SSE/SSE2.
... in The Matrix. That strange feeling of deja vu can only mean one thing! Either that or the /. editors are asleep at the wheel again.
This is just a last ditch effort by a company that will be talked about in the past tense a few years from now. They are obviously angling to have someone buy them or pay them to shut them up. They're hoping IBM will think "hell, we could buy them and their patents for less than all this legal crap will cost". Going after customers (and how much you want to bet that the customers they go after will coincidentially be customers of a certain large computer corp, is just a way to enlist the customers into pushing said computer corp into resolving the issue quickly.
Personally I think AT&T/Lucent/Avaya should form a company and bring the Unix rights back home.
First song that popped into my mind was "Stairway to Heaven", that'd be a cool name for an app (and/or a designer drug).
;)
Another cool one would be "Kashmir" (guess which band I like
Also Ummagumma would be unique and less likely to collide with another product/project.
Amazon doesn't care if the patent can be canceled due to prior art. They'll strong arm other companies and many are bound to not put up a fight. If someone does, and the patent is later invalidated, then the max they'd lose would be to have to pay the original licensee back, I don't believe they'd have to pay any type of penalty on any fees collected. So they basically end up with a interest free loan, IF the thing gets invalidated. Not a bad downside. The way that the current patent system is setup, your much better off trying to patent everything, as even if a large number get punted, you'll probably make good money off the ones that don't (kinda like VC in the boom).
who exactly didn't expect something like this? Intel has a history of this sort of thing
Of course when it happens to Intel, then EVERYBODY knows about it. My question is, how prevelant is this sort of thing throughout the cpu industry? Anyone know of other "mistakes" by the other major players? It's hard to imagine that only Intel makes these kinds of goofs, esp. with the complexity of todays chips. As an example, wouldn't Mot's failure to scale up the G4 PPC chips be considered an "error"? They just caught it early enough to not to ship any chips and say "oh, we're sorry, our G4's won't go as fast as we originally stated, wait another year and a half or so and we'll get it all sorted out". Didn't they also do a similar thing with the 68040?