This is turning out to be all stuff and nonsense, and I think I'll just skip HD-DVD and Blu-ray one and wait for the next next generation, when maybe somebody with half a brain is involved. DVD is perfectly good enough for me, thank you very much.
Agree with the sentiment.
It is quite unlikely for there to ever be a next generation, though. The lead time is, oh, ten years or so, and by that time it seems more than likely that using a physical carrier for video is not going to be a mainstream technology anymore. There's going to be physical data carriers, of course, but not aimed at selling video.
What might happen, though, is that these two formats both end up stillborn - laser discs of the 21st century - and pushes the major manufacturers to quickly (as in within a year or two) replace them with a common format that avoids the most egregious mistakes of these two. But that would be replacement, not a generation shift.
It's a shame google maps are subtly broken for Japan, though. The bought map data and just added it without converting them to the same coordinate system they use for geographical data. Try flipping between street data and satellite images to see it.
Not sure how hard that really is, but I'm sure it can't be too out of the question, specially if some con artists wants to pull it off that badly.
Fingerprints are not hard at all; it's been done, and done well already. You can google for detailed instructions.
Basically, you scan the fingerprint by any means you have (it depends on how and where you could lift it). Print it on transparent OH film, then use it to etch a negative print on circuit board - this just requires standard stuff you can get in any electronics store of course. Use that negative as the mold for a latex positive; in the simplest case, just dab a solid layer of latex on your fingertip and press on the mold until the latex hardens.
The beauty, if that's what you want to call it, is that once you have one scanned print, you can trivially duplicate and send it as a black and white image to anybody, anywhere who wants to use your print.
Fingerprints very seriously suck for identification nowadays.
Syncing frames is quite easy. I was however thinking about capture sync - making sure all three cameras grab an image at the same time. With 30fps (PAL, full-frame), a fast-moving object - a hand and elbow doing a punch, say - there will be a fairly noticeable difference in position between the three cameras if they're not capturing in phase.
The solutions are: ignore it, and don't rely on the motion capture alone for fast movement; figure out afterwards approximately what phase the cameras are in and interpolate the data; or use hardware to really keep them in sync.
The first is easiest, and if you're not doing fast stuff, perfectly fine. The second can handle fast movement fairly well without needing extra hardware, but falls down for longer video sequences (since the cameras will tend to drift over time). The third is easiest if you have hardware to support it (and actually most video hardware, even inexpensive stuff, does).
Since you probably don't need to do anything real-time with the capture data, I'd suggest that you use whatever inexpensive cameras you can - and record streams onto video. Ideally, you'd borrow three camcorders and use them. Then you can at your leisure transfer the streams to a machine via firewire and calculate 3d-data to your hearts' content.
The benefit of this setup is that you can get away with very cheap hardware (you can probably borrow needed camcorders from friends and family if it's just a temporary deal), and the image quality - resolution, dynamic range, low-light performance, noise - will be a lot better than with a heavily compressed usb-cam stream.
As for synking the streams, you have that problem with three usb cams as well (can't caprture three usb-streams on the same computer), and with camcorders at least one step up from the bargain bin, you should be able to use sync cabling if you're really concerned about capturing frames at the same instant. I doubt that would be necessary, though, for the kind of precicion you're looking at getting (just do a linear interpolation between captured points to do an approximate soft sync should be fine for any movement you can hope to capture at 25/50 frames/s anyway).
A perfectly normal serial cable, 3 meters long. It was sent by Digital to use with a PDP-11 in the datacenter. The cable was wound a few times to about 60cm diameter and put in an antistatic bag. The bag was put in one of those white, silky paper-like protection bags, wrapped in bubble-wrap and placed in a flat cardboard box, about 70x70x10cm. That box had been placed in the center of a box around 100x100x60cm, surrounded by those plastic impact-resistant "beans".
Leave the pursuit of Truth for philosophy and religion.
Religion has nothing whatsoever to do with truth, capital-T or not. The basis of religion is faith - ie. belief in the abscence of, and indeed in the face of, any evidence or support.
Thos religious people trying so desperately to find evidence for their belief, to show that some contrary idea must be wrong no matter what, do not, in all probability actually have faith. Whether they came to their religion unthinkingly, via their parents, or converted from a desire to belong, to find answers, or just because all their neighbours did, they did not really have the unthinking, against-all-evidence accepting faith that is required (or if they had it, they lost it again after the first heady rush).
They have, somewhere, a small voice insisting that their religion doesn't match reality, and that it doesn't seem supported by any evidence - that indeed the more we learned about the world, the less it seems to fit with what's being told in the pulpit. This seditious thinking horrifies them, and so they become loud, vocal and argumentative, tryign at every turn to discredit and distort anything and anybody perceived to threaten that which they wish oh so desperately to be true, but that they can't just accept on faith. These people are not trying to convince the rest of us; they are just trying to convince themselves.
And yet, truth would destroy religion. If we got real, solid, uneqivocal proof of the reality of, say christianity, being correct, it would be destroyed. With a god as a matter of fact in the heavens, and with Jesus sitting in the branch office in Rome taking petitions and holding press conferences it'd cease to be a thing of wonder or comfort. We'd just have another repressive dictatorship, but a supernatural one this time. It would not longer be a religion since there is no longer anything there to believe in - you do not need to believe in something which is manifestly there, after all. It's be just another power messing up our lives, but this time something powerful enough that we can (and will) lay the responsibility for every messed up thing in the world at their feet. I'd give it all of six months before approval ratings of the most benevolent Jesus to zoom past Bush on the way down into the basement.
And meanwhile, every attempt at connecting religion with science in the way these people are doing ends up weakening religion, just as the connection of religion to conservative politics does. Every time religion is pitted against science and ends up being wrong, that is one small blow against its credibility. Each time one of thosevocal religious people get caught dissembling or spouting hate it's another indication that the talk about religion inducing honesty and respect is just talk with no meaning. And the tighter religion is tied to any particular cause or political stance, the less all the people not espousing that stance feel welcome in that religion.
Me, I welcome it. Tie religion hard enough to a specific, far-right set of politics, and the societal ubiquity of religion in the US may well take a body-blow when those policies crumble (and all political movements falter and wilt - or self-destruct more spectacularily - eventually).
My first reaction was, I guess if you've lost the trust of your customers you have nothing to lose.
But thinking about it, we aren't RIAA:s customers. Nothing any of us do or say will affect RIAA directly. Their customers as it were are the copyright holders, and their business is to maximize return to these people. The copyright holders (usually the recording companies) don't have us as customers either; their customers are radio and television stations and other broadcasters, and retail outlets from Amazon and Wal-Mart to record stores to gasoline stations.
They provide content produced by artists - and it's the artists we are customers for. We don't go to Amazon to buy the latest Sony Music album, we go to buy AC/DC (or Jessica Simpson, or Luis Armstrong, whatever your taste is).
It's this disconnect that keeps RIAA in business. We don't connect their actions with our favourite artists. The artists, in turn, have little incentive, and a huge downside, to raising their voice (most are, after all, not big enough to actually influence their company). The recording companies have no incentive to change RIAA's actions from their customers (Amazon et al) since those customers don't feel any backlash from us either.
The solution? I don't see one. In my case it has gradually soured me on music altogether. I haven't bought a CD in years - but neither have I downloaded anything either. Most people will never make any emotional connection between music and this legal harassment, however, and so RIAA will never have a reason to change.
As gander666 points out, I was referring to the panel size, which is conventionally given in inches. If you want to think of it as an 107cm panel you're free to do so, of course.
All of which ignores one somewhat inconvenient fact: the visual difference isn't very big in practice.
There was a demo set up at a major retailer here in Osaka recently. Two HD televisions, one playing some clip on a modern DVD player, one playing HD content. If I got close - as in one meter kind of close - sure, there was more small detail and the shadowy areas were more "lively" (though that could have been noise, to be frank). But back up to a more normal viewing distance for the screens (42"), and I saw no discernible difference at all, even when I was looking at and comparing the same spots I knew I had seen a difference close up.
For all intents and purposes, the experience I got was identical. And that was with two good HD screens, set up by people who know what they're doing, in a semi-darkened area with black drapes to get rid of incidental light. At home, with an inexpertly tuned screen amd non-optimal lighting (to be kind to myself and to the vast majority of all tv owners) I'm willing to bet that even up close those deficiencies are enough to mask any perceivable improvement.
DVD was a big hit because it overcame some truly glaring deficiencies with VHS tape. You'd had to be blind not to appreciate the difference (or rather, even if blind the sound quality difference is night and day on even a cracked bargain-basement integrated mono speaker on the set). The image quality just didn't compare, unlike a tape the disk never wears down, and you can skip around with abandon instead of tedious winding of the tape.
HD format discs are, I suspect, more like some high-end audio equipment. If you get some serious audio kit your listening experience will indeed improve a lot. But only if you do set it up correctly, only if you then play source material of good enough fidelity to take advantage of that difference and only if you as a listener actually care enough to look for and appreciate the difference. And most people don't. They'll set up the stuff to fit in their living room not fit the audio characteristics; they'll listen to popular music that usually has little fine detail to listen for (since most will listen on low-end equipment it's mixed to make the most of that); they'll sometimes, and increasingly, listen to it encoded on 128bit mp3. A high-end amplifier and serious speakers become mostly a waste of money. Meaning they become low-volume sellers, which means the prices stay high.
For HD players, you have the added headache that the media is different - your normal DVDs will look not one bit better than with a normal, good quality DVD player. Only if you buy the special content (Deutche Gramofon's pressings of classical music anyone?) do you actually get any benefit; that content will however not play in the car for your kids, or at grandma's or, well anywhere since most people have not bought the expensive higher-end equipment you need.
Had they got together on one format they'd have pulled it off; people would have gotten the new equipment on sheer momentum even if they don't get any actual benefits from it. But now that you have to choose from two incompatible formats I think the chances of either becoming mass-market is not that great. I'd not be surprised if one or both stay niche formats, with all movies out on DVD in the foreseeable future, and with only a subset deemed interesting for the niche consumers available on HD. The window for any new physical format is closing and I don't expect either of them to be able to squeeze through in time.
I'm sure lots of people will correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Linux kernel - and thus Torvald's views - rather unimportant here?
The entire kernel, and all contributions from hundreds or thousands of people, are explicitly licensed as GPL version 2. Even if the kernel people were rabidly enthusiastic about GPL v3, they'd have a very, very difficult time changing the license in any case; as a practical matter it'd probably be impossible. So what Torvalds, in the guise of kernel maintainer, thiks of the license is not really relevant since the licence, no matter what it looks like, would never be used by the kernel in any case.
Torvalds views as an OSS developer are of course relevant - but as one voice among the hundreds of other leading developers in various projects. And as has been pointed out, if he really wanted to be constructive he'd have joined in the debate itself, rather than just sniping at it via the media.
I don't want a disc. I want something small we're able to use in smaller portable devices, something where the medium doesn't need to move.
I want a cube. I want a cube about 1cm^3 in size. If that's too thick, a 2x1x0.5cm sliver is OK. Preferably translucent moss green, but other colors are of course also acceptable as long as they've appeared for futuristic storage in at least one reputable sci-fi movie.
To be slightly serious, there's non-aesthetic reasons for this as well. With optical storage it's much faster to move the beam around than the media, and with rotating media your seek and read times alike are limited by the rotation speed.
But mostly I just want a translucent green block because it's cool. Bonus points if there's a small LED inside making it glow.
However, I wonder whether this idea may have some re-interest. If your mobile phone can read barcodes, we could print them anywhere - in papers, on billboards, TV adverts - and all you'd need to do is take a photo and your phone automatically loads the webpage in its built-in browser.
Exactly this has been available and used everywhere in Japan for a few years already.
But how much would it cost to coat your car in this stuff? And would it give extra protection?
Nope, not if it's your safety you're worried about, rather than the cars. You want the car to deform, so your decelleration slows down. Just like a helmet, you want it to break so you don't.
As long as they run for a whole day (16 hours plus) when running Ubuntu or FreeBSD they will be fine.
16 hours isn't quite there yet, but I do get 6-8 hours with my current laptop, a 1-year old battery and Ubuntu (the higher number when I'm offline (no wifi) and basically just read text). Add another hour with a brand-new battery. If I put it to sleep whenever I don't use it, it easily stretches to a 10-hour workday. And with a spare battery (which itself is a small unit for this laptop) I can go a whole waking day - or the Osaka-Frankfurt-Stockholm route, which amounts to the same thing.
For me it doesn't matter if a sequel - or a remake, or a filmatization of a tv-series - sucks or not. A sequel can be fully as good as the original and I'll still not go see it anymore.
My problem is, sequels are dedicated to give me "more of the same" - which I don't want anymore. I saw the original already, I liked it - but why would I want to spend my limited time and money seeing the same stuff again? It's like going to a restaurant and always ordering the same thing. Some people like that. I prefer getting something different.
Frankly, I'm tired of the form that is a feature movie. Maybe it's me getting old or whatever, but I'm unable to build any enthusiasm even for movies I should really like. I think it started with Lord of The Rings, actually, which I saw and enjoyed - they're everything a movie should be for me - but to my own surprise I never felt I actually cared about it. I saw the first two, then really just forgot about seeing the third. I finally did see it on DVD, but out of a sense of duty, of finishing off something I started, more than anything else. It was great, it was absorbing, it was magnificient - and I would not have missed it at all had I simply skipped the whole thing.
We've had the 2-hour feature for a century or so; perhaps it's time for the form to reinvent itself?
Slashdot Mirror
This is turning out to be all stuff and nonsense, and I think I'll just skip HD-DVD and Blu-ray one and wait for the next next generation, when maybe somebody with half a brain is involved. DVD is perfectly good enough for me, thank you very much.
Agree with the sentiment.
It is quite unlikely for there to ever be a next generation, though. The lead time is, oh, ten years or so, and by that time it seems more than likely that using a physical carrier for video is not going to be a mainstream technology anymore. There's going to be physical data carriers, of course, but not aimed at selling video.
What might happen, though, is that these two formats both end up stillborn - laser discs of the 21st century - and pushes the major manufacturers to quickly (as in within a year or two) replace them with a common format that avoids the most egregious mistakes of these two. But that would be replacement, not a generation shift.
Hey, you're right! And they've updated the satellite imagery too - my house is there now. Must have happened in the past month or so.
It's a shame google maps are subtly broken for Japan, though. The bought map data and just added it without converting them to the same coordinate system they use for geographical data. Try flipping between street data and satellite images to see it.
Here's a term that dwarfs even sex (how's that for popularity?): It's Ultitrend!
Try this search, just to put that into perspective.
The Nokia 770 looks really, really promising. It runs Linux and has a pretty active developer community.
If or when it starts supporting Japanese input I'm getting one myself.
Not sure how hard that really is, but I'm sure it can't be too out of the question, specially if some con artists wants to pull it off that badly.
Fingerprints are not hard at all; it's been done, and done well already. You can google for detailed instructions.
Basically, you scan the fingerprint by any means you have (it depends on how and where you could lift it). Print it on transparent OH film, then use it to etch a negative print on circuit board - this just requires standard stuff you can get in any electronics store of course. Use that negative as the mold for a latex positive; in the simplest case, just dab a solid layer of latex on your fingertip and press on the mold until the latex hardens.
The beauty, if that's what you want to call it, is that once you have one scanned print, you can trivially duplicate and send it as a black and white image to anybody, anywhere who wants to use your print.
Fingerprints very seriously suck for identification nowadays.
Brown Dwarf? That's "colored star of alternaive height" to you, mister!
Syncing frames is quite easy. I was however thinking about capture sync - making sure all three cameras grab an image at the same time. With 30fps (PAL, full-frame), a fast-moving object - a hand and elbow doing a punch, say - there will be a fairly noticeable difference in position between the three cameras if they're not capturing in phase.
The solutions are: ignore it, and don't rely on the motion capture alone for fast movement; figure out afterwards approximately what phase the cameras are in and interpolate the data; or use hardware to really keep them in sync.
The first is easiest, and if you're not doing fast stuff, perfectly fine. The second can handle fast movement fairly well without needing extra hardware, but falls down for longer video sequences (since the cameras will tend to drift over time). The third is easiest if you have hardware to support it (and actually most video hardware, even inexpensive stuff, does).
Since you probably don't need to do anything real-time with the capture data, I'd suggest that you use whatever inexpensive cameras you can - and record streams onto video. Ideally, you'd borrow three camcorders and use them. Then you can at your leisure transfer the streams to a machine via firewire and calculate 3d-data to your hearts' content.
The benefit of this setup is that you can get away with very cheap hardware (you can probably borrow needed camcorders from friends and family if it's just a temporary deal), and the image quality - resolution, dynamic range, low-light performance, noise - will be a lot better than with a heavily compressed usb-cam stream.
As for synking the streams, you have that problem with three usb cams as well (can't caprture three usb-streams on the same computer), and with camcorders at least one step up from the bargain bin, you should be able to use sync cabling if you're really concerned about capturing frames at the same instant. I doubt that would be necessary, though, for the kind of precicion you're looking at getting (just do a linear interpolation between captured points to do an approximate soft sync should be fine for any movement you can hope to capture at 25/50 frames/s anyway).
That is if the Sony battery doesn't burst in to flames at random moments.
"And it comes with an integrated hand warmer too!"
A perfectly normal serial cable, 3 meters long. It was sent by Digital to use with a PDP-11 in the datacenter. The cable was wound a few times to about 60cm diameter and put in an antistatic bag. The bag was put in one of those white, silky paper-like protection bags, wrapped in bubble-wrap and placed in a flat cardboard box, about 70x70x10cm. That box had been placed in the center of a box around 100x100x60cm, surrounded by those plastic impact-resistant "beans".
No wonder that company went under.
Leave the pursuit of Truth for philosophy and religion.
Religion has nothing whatsoever to do with truth, capital-T or not. The basis of religion is faith - ie. belief in the abscence of, and indeed in the face of, any evidence or support.
Thos religious people trying so desperately to find evidence for their belief, to show that some contrary idea must be wrong no matter what, do not, in all probability actually have faith. Whether they came to their religion unthinkingly, via their parents, or converted from a desire to belong, to find answers, or just because all their neighbours did, they did not really have the unthinking, against-all-evidence accepting faith that is required (or if they had it, they lost it again after the first heady rush).
They have, somewhere, a small voice insisting that their religion doesn't match reality, and that it doesn't seem supported by any evidence - that indeed the more we learned about the world, the less it seems to fit with what's being told in the pulpit. This seditious thinking horrifies them, and so they become loud, vocal and argumentative, tryign at every turn to discredit and distort anything and anybody perceived to threaten that which they wish oh so desperately to be true, but that they can't just accept on faith. These people are not trying to convince the rest of us; they are just trying to convince themselves.
And yet, truth would destroy religion. If we got real, solid, uneqivocal proof of the reality of, say christianity, being correct, it would be destroyed. With a god as a matter of fact in the heavens, and with Jesus sitting in the branch office in Rome taking petitions and holding press conferences it'd cease to be a thing of wonder or comfort. We'd just have another repressive dictatorship, but a supernatural one this time. It would not longer be a religion since there is no longer anything there to believe in - you do not need to believe in something which is manifestly there, after all. It's be just another power messing up our lives, but this time something powerful enough that we can (and will) lay the responsibility for every messed up thing in the world at their feet. I'd give it all of six months before approval ratings of the most benevolent Jesus to zoom past Bush on the way down into the basement.
And meanwhile, every attempt at connecting religion with science in the way these people are doing ends up weakening religion, just as the connection of religion to conservative politics does. Every time religion is pitted against science and ends up being wrong, that is one small blow against its credibility. Each time one of thosevocal religious people get caught dissembling or spouting hate it's another indication that the talk about religion inducing honesty and respect is just talk with no meaning. And the tighter religion is tied to any particular cause or political stance, the less all the people not espousing that stance feel welcome in that religion.
Me, I welcome it. Tie religion hard enough to a specific, far-right set of politics, and the societal ubiquity of religion in the US may well take a body-blow when those policies crumble (and all political movements falter and wilt - or self-destruct more spectacularily - eventually).
My first reaction was, I guess if you've lost the trust of your customers you have nothing to lose.
But thinking about it, we aren't RIAA:s customers. Nothing any of us do or say will affect RIAA directly. Their customers as it were are the copyright holders, and their business is to maximize return to these people. The copyright holders (usually the recording companies) don't have us as customers either; their customers are radio and television stations and other broadcasters, and retail outlets from Amazon and Wal-Mart to record stores to gasoline stations.
They provide content produced by artists - and it's the artists we are customers for. We don't go to Amazon to buy the latest Sony Music album, we go to buy AC/DC (or Jessica Simpson, or Luis Armstrong, whatever your taste is).
It's this disconnect that keeps RIAA in business. We don't connect their actions with our favourite artists. The artists, in turn, have little incentive, and a huge downside, to raising their voice (most are, after all, not big enough to actually influence their company). The recording companies have no incentive to change RIAA's actions from their customers (Amazon et al) since those customers don't feel any backlash from us either.
The solution? I don't see one. In my case it has gradually soured me on music altogether. I haven't bought a CD in years - but neither have I downloaded anything either. Most people will never make any emotional connection between music and this legal harassment, however, and so RIAA will never have a reason to change.
As gander666 points out, I was referring to the panel size, which is conventionally given in inches. If you want to think of it as an 107cm panel you're free to do so, of course.
All of which ignores one somewhat inconvenient fact: the visual difference isn't very big in practice.
There was a demo set up at a major retailer here in Osaka recently. Two HD televisions, one playing some clip on a modern DVD player, one playing HD content. If I got close - as in one meter kind of close - sure, there was more small detail and the shadowy areas were more "lively" (though that could have been noise, to be frank). But back up to a more normal viewing distance for the screens (42"), and I saw no discernible difference at all, even when I was looking at and comparing the same spots I knew I had seen a difference close up.
For all intents and purposes, the experience I got was identical. And that was with two good HD screens, set up by people who know what they're doing, in a semi-darkened area with black drapes to get rid of incidental light. At home, with an inexpertly tuned screen amd non-optimal lighting (to be kind to myself and to the vast majority of all tv owners) I'm willing to bet that even up close those deficiencies are enough to mask any perceivable improvement.
DVD was a big hit because it overcame some truly glaring deficiencies with VHS tape. You'd had to be blind not to appreciate the difference (or rather, even if blind the sound quality difference is night and day on even a cracked bargain-basement integrated mono speaker on the set). The image quality just didn't compare, unlike a tape the disk never wears down, and you can skip around with abandon instead of tedious winding of the tape.
HD format discs are, I suspect, more like some high-end audio equipment. If you get some serious audio kit your listening experience will indeed improve a lot. But only if you do set it up correctly, only if you then play source material of good enough fidelity to take advantage of that difference and only if you as a listener actually care enough to look for and appreciate the difference. And most people don't. They'll set up the stuff to fit in their living room not fit the audio characteristics; they'll listen to popular music that usually has little fine detail to listen for (since most will listen on low-end equipment it's mixed to make the most of that); they'll sometimes, and increasingly, listen to it encoded on 128bit mp3. A high-end amplifier and serious speakers become mostly a waste of money. Meaning they become low-volume sellers, which means the prices stay high.
For HD players, you have the added headache that the media is different - your normal DVDs will look not one bit better than with a normal, good quality DVD player. Only if you buy the special content (Deutche Gramofon's pressings of classical music anyone?) do you actually get any benefit; that content will however not play in the car for your kids, or at grandma's or, well anywhere since most people have not bought the expensive higher-end equipment you need.
Had they got together on one format they'd have pulled it off; people would have gotten the new equipment on sheer momentum even if they don't get any actual benefits from it. But now that you have to choose from two incompatible formats I think the chances of either becoming mass-market is not that great. I'd not be surprised if one or both stay niche formats, with all movies out on DVD in the foreseeable future, and with only a subset deemed interesting for the niche consumers available on HD. The window for any new physical format is closing and I don't expect either of them to be able to squeeze through in time.
I'm sure lots of people will correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Linux kernel - and thus Torvald's views - rather unimportant here?
The entire kernel, and all contributions from hundreds or thousands of people, are explicitly licensed as GPL version 2. Even if the kernel people were rabidly enthusiastic about GPL v3, they'd have a very, very difficult time changing the license in any case; as a practical matter it'd probably be impossible. So what Torvalds, in the guise of kernel maintainer, thiks of the license is not really relevant since the licence, no matter what it looks like, would never be used by the kernel in any case.
Torvalds views as an OSS developer are of course relevant - but as one voice among the hundreds of other leading developers in various projects. And as has been pointed out, if he really wanted to be constructive he'd have joined in the debate itself, rather than just sniping at it via the media.
I don't want a disc. I want something small we're able to use in smaller portable devices, something where the medium doesn't need to move.
I want a cube. I want a cube about 1cm^3 in size. If that's too thick, a 2x1x0.5cm sliver is OK. Preferably translucent moss green, but other colors are of course also acceptable as long as they've appeared for futuristic storage in at least one reputable sci-fi movie.
To be slightly serious, there's non-aesthetic reasons for this as well. With optical storage it's much faster to move the beam around than the media, and with rotating media your seek and read times alike are limited by the rotation speed.
But mostly I just want a translucent green block because it's cool. Bonus points if there's a small LED inside making it glow.
* Start DVD copy service
...
* Cash in on DVD copy service for all it's worth while waiting for the inevitable lawsuit
* Use lawyers already on retainer to string out the suit against DVD copy service as long as possible.
* Pay 10% of DVD copy earnings in settlement, promise never to do a DVD copy service ever again.
* Start unrelated DVD duplication service using equipment already conveniently at hand.()
() Remember to trademark "DVD Duplication service", "DVD Backup service", "Disc copy service", "Disc Duplication service", "Disk Kopy DudeZ", "Dupe It Man!"
Science will change in the next 1000 years shattering our notion of the universe, but the Genesis account will never change.
And that, in one sentence, summarizes the fatal flaw in using religion as a means of understanding the world.
Nintendo Bukkake 2006!
So, it's an Udon recipe application then?
You might want to look up the normal meaning of the word before you assume everybody has the same special interests as you do.
However, I wonder whether this idea may have some re-interest. If your mobile phone can read barcodes, we could print them anywhere - in papers, on billboards, TV adverts - and all you'd need to do is take a photo and your phone automatically loads the webpage in its built-in browser.
Exactly this has been available and used everywhere in Japan for a few years already.
But how much would it cost to coat your car in this stuff? And would it give extra protection?
Nope, not if it's your safety you're worried about, rather than the cars. You want the car to deform, so your decelleration slows down. Just like a helmet, you want it to break so you don't.
As long as they run for a whole day (16 hours plus) when running Ubuntu or FreeBSD they will be fine.
16 hours isn't quite there yet, but I do get 6-8 hours with my current laptop, a 1-year old battery and Ubuntu (the higher number when I'm offline (no wifi) and basically just read text). Add another hour with a brand-new battery. If I put it to sleep whenever I don't use it, it easily stretches to a 10-hour workday. And with a spare battery (which itself is a small unit for this laptop) I can go a whole waking day - or the Osaka-Frankfurt-Stockholm route, which amounts to the same thing.
That is why sequels suck and will always suck.
For me it doesn't matter if a sequel - or a remake, or a filmatization of a tv-series - sucks or not. A sequel can be fully as good as the original and I'll still not go see it anymore.
My problem is, sequels are dedicated to give me "more of the same" - which I don't want anymore. I saw the original already, I liked it - but why would I want to spend my limited time and money seeing the same stuff again? It's like going to a restaurant and always ordering the same thing. Some people like that. I prefer getting something different.
Frankly, I'm tired of the form that is a feature movie. Maybe it's me getting old or whatever, but I'm unable to build any enthusiasm even for movies I should really like. I think it started with Lord of The Rings, actually, which I saw and enjoyed - they're everything a movie should be for me - but to my own surprise I never felt I actually cared about it. I saw the first two, then really just forgot about seeing the third. I finally did see it on DVD, but out of a sense of duty, of finishing off something I started, more than anything else. It was great, it was absorbing, it was magnificient - and I would not have missed it at all had I simply skipped the whole thing.
We've had the 2-hour feature for a century or so; perhaps it's time for the form to reinvent itself?