When I first read the article title, I interperted it as some company had invented a roller coaster that was designed to keep the sum of the forces to zero, i.e. so you could ride it with a beer mug and no beer would fall out!
-Chris
I second that: LONG LIVE THE DRAFTHOUSE. Last summer I had a good friend who was interning down in Austin and she told me about this great movie theater where they bring reall food right to your seat. Sounded to good to be true.
Lucky for me this summer I'm down in Austin and last Friday I got to experience all the greasy goodness of the Drafthouse while watching the new Star Wars. Not only did the food turn out to be halfway decent, but the beer was cold and to top it all off, the company I'm working for picked up the tab for everyone at the end of the night!
It would be almost physically impossible to split the movie between two reels.
Fist off, the 70mm Imax film zipps along at 5.5 feet per second. That means a 120 minute long film uses 40,080 feet of film. All wound up it sits on a 5 foot platter that has a couple of hundred pounds of film on it.
The reason you wouldn't be able to split the film on 2 rolls is more of a logistics problem. First off, you would need 2 projectors (which most Imax theaters don't have, except for the 3D ones). Even in these few theaters, the projectors are designed to run at the exact same speed (in order to keep the frames in sync) and although these systems have a mode to allow you to run with only 1 projector for showing a regular Imax features there isn't a way to run both projectors not synced.
Sound would also be a large problem because there is no time code/sound tracks recorded on the film itself. The projector just sends out a pluse for every frame that rolls by, and an external decoder counts these pulses and turns them into a SMPTE track (therefore at the beginning of the show the first "Start" frame must be loaded in the exact first frame opening for everything to be synchronized). This SMPTE track is then feed into a computer which locks to it and plays the audio according. With two projectors, you would have a very difficult time getting the sound to transition over smoothly, since the time it takes to rev up a projector (remember it has to speed up to 334 feet pre minute!) could vary widely. Even if you could somehow get it to within a reasonable tolerance, the SMPTE counter would have to know when exactly to roll over to the new source.
One year when I took the SAT I accidentally bubbled in my name incorrectly by filling in a "D" instead of a "C". I didn't realize this until I got my results back.
The interesting part is the College Board (the guys who run the SATs) sell student's addresses to colleges so the colleges can send the students brochures, pamphlets, etc. It was fun to "track" where my address had been sold to due to the misspelling of my name "Dhris" on a lot of the material I received.
I work at the University of Colorado and we have a research lab of Itanium machines that are used to study "Compilation Issues on Itanium Architecture". They are currently doing research on how to get different programs to compile under the new architecture. The current problem is they can't even get the gcc compiler to work correctly, so don't hold your breath waiting for an Intel 64 bit solution.
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When I first read the article title, I interperted it as some company had invented a roller coaster that was designed to keep the sum of the forces to zero, i.e. so you could ride it with a beer mug and no beer would fall out! -Chris
Lucky for me this summer I'm down in Austin and last Friday I got to experience all the greasy goodness of the Drafthouse while watching the new Star Wars. Not only did the food turn out to be halfway decent, but the beer was cold and to top it all off, the company I'm working for picked up the tab for everyone at the end of the night!
It would be almost physically impossible to split the movie between two reels.
Fist off, the 70mm Imax film zipps along at 5.5 feet per second. That means a 120 minute long film uses 40,080 feet of film. All wound up it sits on a 5 foot platter that has a couple of hundred pounds of film on it.
The reason you wouldn't be able to split the film on 2 rolls is more of a logistics problem. First off, you would need 2 projectors (which most Imax theaters don't have, except for the 3D ones). Even in these few theaters, the projectors are designed to run at the exact same speed (in order to keep the frames in sync) and although these systems have a mode to allow you to run with only 1 projector for showing a regular Imax features there isn't a way to run both projectors not synced.
Sound would also be a large problem because there is no time code/sound tracks recorded on the film itself. The projector just sends out a pluse for every frame that rolls by, and an external decoder counts these pulses and turns them into a SMPTE track (therefore at the beginning of the show the first "Start" frame must be loaded in the exact first frame opening for everything to be synchronized). This SMPTE track is then feed into a computer which locks to it and plays the audio according. With two projectors, you would have a very difficult time getting the sound to transition over smoothly, since the time it takes to rev up a projector (remember it has to speed up to 334 feet pre minute!) could vary widely. Even if you could somehow get it to within a reasonable tolerance, the SMPTE counter would have to know when exactly to roll over to the new source.
One year when I took the SAT I accidentally bubbled in my name incorrectly by filling in a "D" instead of a "C". I didn't realize this until I got my results back.
The interesting part is the College Board (the guys who run the SATs) sell student's addresses to colleges so the colleges can send the students brochures, pamphlets, etc. It was fun to "track" where my address had been sold to due to the misspelling of my name "Dhris" on a lot of the material I received.
I don't know about anybody else out there, but I'm much rather hire an ex-hacker that hasn't yet been caught.
Did you guys ever consider challenging teams to build a server that would withstand the slashdot effect? (Yes, welding torches may be required)
I work at the University of Colorado and we have a research lab of Itanium machines that are used to study "Compilation Issues on Itanium Architecture". They are currently doing research on how to get different programs to compile under the new architecture. The current problem is they can't even get the gcc compiler to work correctly, so don't hold your breath waiting for an Intel 64 bit solution.
I would beleive the speed of light is slowing down. Ever since I've been reading slashdot, it just keeps on taking longer and longer to load...