In Bill Bryson's excellent book, "A short history of nearly everything" (ISBN 076790818X) he gives a fascinating account of the lead up to the last erruption at Mt St Helens which killed over 60 people. If it wasn't for the fact that so many unfortunate people died, the appalling errors of judgement and subsequent decisions made at the time would be really funny (in a Dilbert way).
So if you live in the area, I wouldn't trust the "experts". Learn from history.
There's already at least 12 algorithms around for scaling up an image:
http://www.digitalanarchy.com/toolbox/toolbox_re si zer.html
I'm guessing that Sony have simply come up with another one. Regardless of what they claim, you can't "zoom in" on an image with a fixed resolution, you're always going to be using some type of interpolation and this will introduce digital artefacts.
How is it possible that the world has overlooked "Johnny Mnemonic"? I guess many artists and musicians are only truly recognised after they die... perhaps it will take the death of Keanu for Johnny Mnemonic to be truly appreciated.
This reminds me of one of my favourite pieces of Australian TV. I'm sure you are all familiar with steering wheel locks, the most well known in Australia is called a Club Lock. A magazine called "Choice", which reviews and tests products, reviewed all available steering wheel locks and claimed that the Club Lock could be defeated in less than 30 seconds by someone with no experience at car theft. The manufacturer responded by modifying and improving the lock mechanism, but the magazine repeated their claim that it could be defeated easily. This went on for about 4 generations of Club Lock and saw the introduction of a "star shaped" key to making picking the locks "impossible", as well as other developments. But Choice maintained that the Club Lock had not been fixed and anyone could defeat it in under a minute. A local TV current affairs show filmed a carpark showdown between the manufacturer of the Club Lock and a reporter from the magazine, as the manufacturer prepared to release their latest model and the magazine claimed it would be able to defeat it in less than 30 seconds. They were screaming at each other in a car park and honestly looked like they were going to hit each other. The manufacturer claimed (in near hysteria) that it was impossible for someone to pick their locks, and that the magazines claims were wrong. The magazine denied this, and so were challenged to demonstrate their claim on TV. A brand new model Club Lock was placed on a car steering wheel. The magazine reporter got in the car, grabbed it, and gave it a good hard yank, and it came off easily. The manufacturer went very very quiet.
The funny thing about this - and the reason I remember it - was that the people who made Club Locks never asked the magazine HOW they'd been defeating their product. They all assumed that the locks had been picked. Practically all the improvements they made to the product over 4 years were in improving the lock mechanism. They never expected that the piece of metal which hooks around the steering wheel was so weak it could be easily bent. They shouldv'e thought laterally. Anyway it was very funny. Trust me, I still remember it and it was about 15 years ago.
I'm a video editor, and non-linear editing eats up hard drive space.
Our company has on file the original quote we got in June 1995 for 18 gig of hard drive space, for a Media 100 editing system. The cost was $18,000 for 4 x 4 gig 5400rpm Seagate SCSI drives in a RAID array. By the time the company decided to purchase the system, one year later in May 1996, the cost of 18gig of SCSI RAID storage was down to $8,000. Four years after that, in June 2000, we purchased an additional 36gig for $3,600, which bought us 10,000 rpm Seagate cheetahs. And in March 2003 we bought 240 gig of RAID storage for $1,200.
But the more drives we buy, the more we fill them up.
We also used to have hard-drive towers for an old "lightworks" editing system. In about 1992, 30 gig of storage cost over $60,000- an array of 10 3.2 gig drives.
Finland, Finland, Finland. The country where I want to be, Pony trekking or camping, Or just watching TV. Finland, Finland, Finland, It's the country for me. Verse: You're so near to Russia, So far from Japan. Quite a long way from Cairo, Lots of miles from Vietnam.
Chorus: Finland, Finland, Finland. The country where I want to be, Eating breakfast or dinner, Or snack lunch in the hall. Finland, Finland, Finland, Finland has it all.
Verse: You're so sadly neglected, And often ignored, A poor second to Belgium, When going abroad.
Chorus: Finland, Finland, Finland. The country where I quite want to be, Your mountains so lofty, Your treetops so tall. Finland, Finland, Finland, Finland has it all.
Repeat: Finland, Finland, Finland. The country where I quite want to be, Your mountains so lofty, Your treetops so tall. Finland, Finland, Finland, Finland has it all.
And it's 10 times the price of my couch, which is where such a device would get lost down the back of.
For $700 I'd want a couch with a remote control built into the arms.
Please, please, please let this be a joke. The thought of you being serious is just plain scary.
Apple are shipping 2.5ghz water cooled G5s as standard and you're excited about an 800mhz G3?
I owe my career to what I learned on my Amiga while at high school, but I moved on.
OTOH, if this is a joke, then ha! You had me laughing.
I think you can store about 1.6 TB on a single tape or similar, but check them out. Tape drives have come a long way from old SCSI DATs transferring 20meg a minute. And they're fully automated and although there's an outlay cost for the tape drive, over time the cost per gigabyte for storage will be lower than hard drives. If you have a security company do patrols of your office you can get them to take the tape offsite with them after nightly backups for added security... etc etc.
As a professional After Effects designer, I'll just remind you that a 2D compositing program such as AE will have different demands to a 3D raytracer such as Maya. AE will render in seconds per frame, so the overall render times will come down to network bandwidth and storage efficiency. There are some specific, unique situations where After Effects will render faster on a single machine than on a network, because the transfer time for all the render assets may be longer than the render itself. Depending on the complexity of your renders and the age of your machines, I'd say it would be unusual for AE to spend for than about 10 seconds on any single frame, and some simple compositions will render at about 1 second per frame or faster. So a network set up specifically for AE will rely heavily on throughput. Maya renders will be much slower, several minutes to several hours per frame, so network traffic is not going to have an immediate effect on render speeds in the same way. But the assets required by Maya can be much bigger - you might end up with several hundred meg. of texture files. Again, it's possible with highly detailed renders that it can take more time to send data over the network than it does to render it. Pixar have had this problem and had to recode the parts of their software dealing with cacheing etc etc.
Personally I'd go for the Mac solution, their stuff just works.
An old article on OLED's in Scientific American made me a huge fan years ago... the potential for these things is amazing. Because the base is a polymer, which can be transparent, all sorts of sci-fi style possibilities open up, laptop screens that can be rolled up are just the beginning... HUDs in cars could become standard offering by sticking an OLED screen on the windscreen... office windows coated with an OLED screen would look like normal windows but could double as a TV or computer screen at the flick of a switch.... same for home TVs.
Because pixels can be transparent, the RGB layers of a display can be sandwiched on top of each other, meaning that an OLED display will have individual pixels which have their own unique colour- as opposed to current technologies where RGB pixels are arrayed next to each other and rely on the eye to merge separate red, green and blue dots into a "colour". For this reason, OLED displays should be significantly sharper.
Yes, a window that doubles as a TV is a long way off but the articles show that the technology isn't just science fiction... it's getting closer every day. One day we'll have windows with DVI inputs:)
These articles shit me. The thing is, Apple is a fashionable company. They make fashionable computers and fashionable products and this puts them in a different league to Microsoft et al. Geeks do not, by their very nature, understand fashion. Microsoft's competing product may be cheaper, Sony's may have more features etc etc. That will mean nothing to a kid who wants an iPod. I doubt that Ferrari were worried when Kia/ Daewoo/ Hyundai popped onto the car scene; I don't think Armani is worried that you can buy shirts for $20 at Kmart, and so on.
The Apple iPod is a fashion accessory. Paris Hilton ( or insert vacuous celebrity here) won't be caught dead using a cheap Microsoft rip off and millions of teenagers will feel the same way. Apple could double the price of their iPod range and they'd still sell them. Apples are desirable. They're cool. Microsoft has never been cool and never will be no matter what they do. Can you really imagine a company owned and run by Bill Gates producing something that teenagers everywhere go nuts for? Compare their interface designs to Apple's.... Sony are too sensibly Japanese to be cool. There is no iPod killer. When cool people start saying "Levis are dead - I can buy jeans for 1/5 the price at Target" then maybe, just maybe, Apple should start to worry.....
Well there you go! I was way off.... and my flatmate used to have a pair of Kangaroo mice as pets.
BTW - the last line should read -... are really INTO fugu...
I saw Robert Winston, best known as the presenter of the BBC series "The Human Body", briefly touch on this issue on some TV talk show. In terms of biology, He felt that scientists in the USA had focussed on the Human Genome project for many years and neglected other areas of biology, such as stem cell research... It is possible that American scientists have excelled in some areas of science due to a National focus while other fields have lost prominence, giving the impression that the USA is falling behind...
Perhaps "competition" isn't such a good thing if it means that many scientists are either duplicating each other's work, or not sharing knowledge and breakthroughs freely when their efforts could be more effectivly spread over a range of projects. ANyway, that was his opinion about biology/ medical science in the USA, may not be true for other disciplines such as physics / chemistry etc etc. I can't think of an aspect of chemistry which has received as much press or public attention as the Human Genome project had for biologists.....
Koalas are the only animal that doesn't drink water. Their diet consists entirely of Eucalyptus leaves, and they will only eat leaves from a small area around which they were born (hence Koalas cannot be relocated, 'cause they starve). Their bodies have evolved to cope with a diet of toxic leaves by becoming slower. Their brains are shrinking so they consume less energy, and can devote more of their metabolism to coping with the Eucalyptus content of their diet.
So I'm guessing that Koala meat, even if it isn't toxic, would taste disgusting. Eucalyptus flavoured meat that will probably kill you? No thanks.
But then again... those Japanese are really Fugu...
I discovered this in high school... we were growing cultures on petri dishes and were given 2 dishes each, we had to open them for 1 minute in a location of our choosing... I exposed 1 in our toilet and 1 in the middle of the cricket oval. The petri dish exposed in the toilet didn't grow a single bloody thing, the one from the oval looked like a terrarium after 2 days. Our teacher told us that because toilets are cleaned regularly with hardcore chemicals not much grows in them. But I've stopped licking the phone after reading the article, and I don't spit-clean my mouse ball anymore.
My own recommended solution is to go down to the hardware shop, buy a can of poly-urethane foam in a can, stick the nozzle inside your case, and pull the trigger until it is completely filled up with foam.
Works for thieves who need to silence alarm sirens....
CCDs capture a much higher resolution image than they output - nyquists theorum applies to video as well as audio. If a CCD was an array of 680 x 480 pixels then the image would alias horribly and be mostly useless. In professional broadcast cameras, the price varies on the size of the CCD and the number of pixels on the chip. A low end professional camera may have 3 x 1/4" CCDs, a high end camera will have 3 x 2/3" or even 3 x 1" CCDs. However regardless of the size of the CCD and the number of pixels on the CCD, the images are resampled down to the broadcast resolutions of 720 x 576 (PAL) or 720 x 486 (NTSC). Broadcast professionals will talk about "high frequency" noise and low-pass filters... it's a lot like audio.
Also, when manufactures quote "lines" of resolution, for some reason they mean horizontal resolution, or the number of discernable verticle lines.
Seriously, the production of a film is usually totally separate from the distribution. It isn't normal for the Director of a film to receive any royalties or a percentage of the box office. Peter Jackson isn't funding the production of the movies, he is being paid to do his job by a different company fronting hundreds of millions of dollars. They want their money back, and it's possible that the Distribution contract will give the production company a percentage of the box office returns, and maybe DVD sales, but it certainly isn't the norm.
It may be an urban legend, but apparently the guys who made "Blair Witch Project" sold it to a Distributor for roughly $100,000. It reportedly cost them about $60,000 to make, so they probably thought they'd made a great deal. When the film went on to make hundreds of millions at the box office, do you think the guys who made it saw any of the money? Nup, not a cent. They'd sold the film for $100,000 and that's what they made.
Production and Distribution are separate entities.
Slashdot Mirror
In Bill Bryson's excellent book, "A short history of nearly everything" (ISBN 076790818X) he gives a fascinating account of the lead up to the last erruption at Mt St Helens which killed over 60 people. If it wasn't for the fact that so many unfortunate people died, the appalling errors of judgement and subsequent decisions made at the time would be really funny (in a Dilbert way). So if you live in the area, I wouldn't trust the "experts". Learn from history.
oops, stupid space bar. Correct link is: http://www.digitalanarchy.com/toolbox/toolbox_resi zer.html
There's already at least 12 algorithms around for scaling up an image:
e si zer.html
http://www.digitalanarchy.com/toolbox/toolbox_r
I'm guessing that Sony have simply come up with another one. Regardless of what they claim, you can't "zoom in" on an image with a fixed resolution, you're always going to be using some type of interpolation and this will introduce digital artefacts.
How is it possible that the world has overlooked "Johnny Mnemonic"?
I guess many artists and musicians are only truly recognised after they die... perhaps it will take the death of Keanu for Johnny Mnemonic to be truly appreciated.
So should we have a mass debate over a rocky ring to make a clear issue?
This reminds me of one of my favourite pieces of Australian TV.
I'm sure you are all familiar with steering wheel locks, the most well known in Australia is called a Club Lock.
A magazine called "Choice", which reviews and tests products, reviewed all available steering wheel locks and claimed that the Club Lock could be defeated in less than 30 seconds by someone with no experience at car theft.
The manufacturer responded by modifying and improving the lock mechanism, but the magazine repeated their claim that it could be defeated easily.
This went on for about 4 generations of Club Lock and saw the introduction of a "star shaped" key to making picking the locks "impossible", as well as other developments. But Choice maintained that the Club Lock had not been fixed and anyone could defeat it in under a minute.
A local TV current affairs show filmed a carpark showdown between the manufacturer of the Club Lock and a reporter from the magazine, as the manufacturer prepared to release their latest model and the magazine claimed it would be able to defeat it in less than 30 seconds.
They were screaming at each other in a car park and honestly looked like they were going to hit each other. The manufacturer claimed (in near hysteria) that it was impossible for someone to pick their locks, and that the magazines claims were wrong. The magazine denied this, and so were challenged to demonstrate their claim on TV.
A brand new model Club Lock was placed on a car steering wheel.
The magazine reporter got in the car, grabbed it, and gave it a good hard yank, and it came off easily.
The manufacturer went very very quiet.
The funny thing about this - and the reason I remember it - was that the people who made Club Locks never asked the magazine HOW they'd been defeating their product. They all assumed that the locks had been picked. Practically all the improvements they made to the product over 4 years were in improving the lock mechanism. They never expected that the piece of metal which hooks around the steering wheel was so weak it could be easily bent. They shouldv'e thought laterally.
Anyway it was very funny. Trust me, I still remember it and it was about 15 years ago.
I'm a video editor, and non-linear editing eats up hard drive space. Our company has on file the original quote we got in June 1995 for 18 gig of hard drive space, for a Media 100 editing system. The cost was $18,000 for 4 x 4 gig 5400rpm Seagate SCSI drives in a RAID array. By the time the company decided to purchase the system, one year later in May 1996, the cost of 18gig of SCSI RAID storage was down to $8,000. Four years after that, in June 2000, we purchased an additional 36gig for $3,600, which bought us 10,000 rpm Seagate cheetahs. And in March 2003 we bought 240 gig of RAID storage for $1,200. But the more drives we buy, the more we fill them up. We also used to have hard-drive towers for an old "lightworks" editing system. In about 1992, 30 gig of storage cost over $60,000- an array of 10 3.2 gig drives.
Finland.
Finland, Finland, Finland.
The country where I want to be,
Pony trekking or camping,
Or just watching TV.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
It's the country for me.
Verse: You're so near to Russia,
So far from Japan.
Quite a long way from Cairo,
Lots of miles from Vietnam.
Chorus: Finland, Finland, Finland.
The country where I want to be,
Eating breakfast or dinner,
Or snack lunch in the hall.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
Finland has it all.
Verse: You're so sadly neglected,
And often ignored,
A poor second to Belgium,
When going abroad.
Chorus: Finland, Finland, Finland.
The country where I quite want to be,
Your mountains so lofty,
Your treetops so tall.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
Finland has it all.
Repeat: Finland, Finland, Finland.
The country where I quite want to be,
Your mountains so lofty,
Your treetops so tall.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
Finland has it all.
Fade: Finland has it all...
And it's 10 times the price of my couch, which is where such a device would get lost down the back of. For $700 I'd want a couch with a remote control built into the arms.
Please, please, please let this be a joke. The thought of you being serious is just plain scary. Apple are shipping 2.5ghz water cooled G5s as standard and you're excited about an 800mhz G3? I owe my career to what I learned on my Amiga while at high school, but I moved on. OTOH, if this is a joke, then ha! You had me laughing.
Try Exabyte - for hardcore tape storage.
http://www.exabyte.com/products/prodviews.cfm
I think you can store about 1.6 TB on a single tape or similar, but check them out. Tape drives have come a long way from old SCSI DATs transferring 20meg a minute. And they're fully automated and although there's an outlay cost for the tape drive, over time the cost per gigabyte for storage will be lower than hard drives.
If you have a security company do patrols of your office you can get them to take the tape offsite with them after nightly backups for added security... etc etc.
I volunteer to demonstrate this new technology by shoving a taser up Bill Gate's arse.
As a professional After Effects designer, I'll just remind you that a 2D compositing program such as AE will have different demands to a 3D raytracer such as Maya. AE will render in seconds per frame, so the overall render times will come down to network bandwidth and storage efficiency. There are some specific, unique situations where After Effects will render faster on a single machine than on a network, because the transfer time for all the render assets may be longer than the render itself. Depending on the complexity of your renders and the age of your machines, I'd say it would be unusual for AE to spend for than about 10 seconds on any single frame, and some simple compositions will render at about 1 second per frame or faster. So a network set up specifically for AE will rely heavily on throughput. Maya renders will be much slower, several minutes to several hours per frame, so network traffic is not going to have an immediate effect on render speeds in the same way. But the assets required by Maya can be much bigger - you might end up with several hundred meg. of texture files. Again, it's possible with highly detailed renders that it can take more time to send data over the network than it does to render it. Pixar have had this problem and had to recode the parts of their software dealing with cacheing etc etc. Personally I'd go for the Mac solution, their stuff just works.
Definitely the Amiga... it was launched in 1986 I think, and I'm sure the Atari STs used double-clocks too. If only this was a joke.
An old article on OLED's in Scientific American made me a huge fan years ago... the potential for these things is amazing. Because the base is a polymer, which can be transparent, all sorts of sci-fi style possibilities open up, laptop screens that can be rolled up are just the beginning... HUDs in cars could become standard offering by sticking an OLED screen on the windscreen... office windows coated with an OLED screen would look like normal windows but could double as a TV or computer screen at the flick of a switch.... same for home TVs. Because pixels can be transparent, the RGB layers of a display can be sandwiched on top of each other, meaning that an OLED display will have individual pixels which have their own unique colour- as opposed to current technologies where RGB pixels are arrayed next to each other and rely on the eye to merge separate red, green and blue dots into a "colour". For this reason, OLED displays should be significantly sharper. Yes, a window that doubles as a TV is a long way off but the articles show that the technology isn't just science fiction... it's getting closer every day. One day we'll have windows with DVI inputs :)
These articles shit me. The thing is, Apple is a fashionable company. They make fashionable computers and fashionable products and this puts them in a different league to Microsoft et al. Geeks do not, by their very nature, understand fashion. Microsoft's competing product may be cheaper, Sony's may have more features etc etc. That will mean nothing to a kid who wants an iPod. I doubt that Ferrari were worried when Kia/ Daewoo/ Hyundai popped onto the car scene; I don't think Armani is worried that you can buy shirts for $20 at Kmart, and so on. The Apple iPod is a fashion accessory. Paris Hilton ( or insert vacuous celebrity here) won't be caught dead using a cheap Microsoft rip off and millions of teenagers will feel the same way. Apple could double the price of their iPod range and they'd still sell them. Apples are desirable. They're cool. Microsoft has never been cool and never will be no matter what they do. Can you really imagine a company owned and run by Bill Gates producing something that teenagers everywhere go nuts for? Compare their interface designs to Apple's.... Sony are too sensibly Japanese to be cool. There is no iPod killer. When cool people start saying "Levis are dead - I can buy jeans for 1/5 the price at Target" then maybe, just maybe, Apple should start to worry.....
Well there you go! I was way off.... and my flatmate used to have a pair of Kangaroo mice as pets. BTW - the last line should read - ... are really INTO fugu...
I saw Robert Winston, best known as the presenter of the BBC series "The Human Body", briefly touch on this issue on some TV talk show. In terms of biology, He felt that scientists in the USA had focussed on the Human Genome project for many years and neglected other areas of biology, such as stem cell research... It is possible that American scientists have excelled in some areas of science due to a National focus while other fields have lost prominence, giving the impression that the USA is falling behind... Perhaps "competition" isn't such a good thing if it means that many scientists are either duplicating each other's work, or not sharing knowledge and breakthroughs freely when their efforts could be more effectivly spread over a range of projects. ANyway, that was his opinion about biology/ medical science in the USA, may not be true for other disciplines such as physics / chemistry etc etc. I can't think of an aspect of chemistry which has received as much press or public attention as the Human Genome project had for biologists.....
Koalas are the only animal that doesn't drink water. Their diet consists entirely of Eucalyptus leaves, and they will only eat leaves from a small area around which they were born (hence Koalas cannot be relocated, 'cause they starve). Their bodies have evolved to cope with a diet of toxic leaves by becoming slower. Their brains are shrinking so they consume less energy, and can devote more of their metabolism to coping with the Eucalyptus content of their diet. So I'm guessing that Koala meat, even if it isn't toxic, would taste disgusting. Eucalyptus flavoured meat that will probably kill you? No thanks. But then again... those Japanese are really Fugu...
I discovered this in high school... we were growing cultures on petri dishes and were given 2 dishes each, we had to open them for 1 minute in a location of our choosing... I exposed 1 in our toilet and 1 in the middle of the cricket oval. The petri dish exposed in the toilet didn't grow a single bloody thing, the one from the oval looked like a terrarium after 2 days. Our teacher told us that because toilets are cleaned regularly with hardcore chemicals not much grows in them. But I've stopped licking the phone after reading the article, and I don't spit-clean my mouse ball anymore.
My own recommended solution is to go down to the hardware shop, buy a can of poly-urethane foam in a can, stick the nozzle inside your case, and pull the trigger until it is completely filled up with foam. Works for thieves who need to silence alarm sirens....
True, but if a company abandons an un-economic product they're not going to make the source code and development history freely available.
From Home Improvement: "It's British! They built fighter planes out of wood!"
CCDs capture a much higher resolution image than they output - nyquists theorum applies to video as well as audio. If a CCD was an array of 680 x 480 pixels then the image would alias horribly and be mostly useless. In professional broadcast cameras, the price varies on the size of the CCD and the number of pixels on the chip. A low end professional camera may have 3 x 1/4" CCDs, a high end camera will have 3 x 2/3" or even 3 x 1" CCDs. However regardless of the size of the CCD and the number of pixels on the CCD, the images are resampled down to the broadcast resolutions of 720 x 576 (PAL) or 720 x 486 (NTSC). Broadcast professionals will talk about "high frequency" noise and low-pass filters... it's a lot like audio. Also, when manufactures quote "lines" of resolution, for some reason they mean horizontal resolution, or the number of discernable verticle lines.
Seriously, the production of a film is usually totally separate from the distribution. It isn't normal for the Director of a film to receive any royalties or a percentage of the box office. Peter Jackson isn't funding the production of the movies, he is being paid to do his job by a different company fronting hundreds of millions of dollars. They want their money back, and it's possible that the Distribution contract will give the production company a percentage of the box office returns, and maybe DVD sales, but it certainly isn't the norm. It may be an urban legend, but apparently the guys who made "Blair Witch Project" sold it to a Distributor for roughly $100,000. It reportedly cost them about $60,000 to make, so they probably thought they'd made a great deal. When the film went on to make hundreds of millions at the box office, do you think the guys who made it saw any of the money? Nup, not a cent. They'd sold the film for $100,000 and that's what they made. Production and Distribution are separate entities.