Maybe not additive 3D printers (FMD, SLS and the like*), but a CNC converted mini-mill can already easily make most of the parts needed for a pretty advanced firearm, and the few parts it can't (e.g. springs, rifled barrel) can either be bought as generic parts or created by simple hand-tooling. This has been the case with hand-operated mills for a good few decades, so the ability to create a gun from raw materials in your own home is nothing new.
* Though you could use these to form wax parts for rough casting in order to cut down on milling time.
Not quite the ultimate limit. Latency between sites could be reduced by laying cables along the shortest path between remote sites: rather than over the surface of the earth, lay them straight through the core of the planet!
Not really. You would then rate an image with massive colour inversion along any high contrast borders as 'higher quality' than an image that has a low level of colour offset through out the image. The latter will look far, far better to the human eye, but the former would score higher.
Neither is SSIM: the unfortunate truth is that all the current objective and quantifiable measures of encoding quality have only a vague relation to the subjective visual quality. There is no reliable metric for comparing the quality of output between two encoded files other than a large sample size double-blind test. All those 'quality' graphs you see in encoder comparisons aren't very useful except in the most stark cases.
And more importantly, use them to create self-assembling flat packed furniture. No more will people be confused by blindingly simply diagrammatic instructions in their attempts to assemble a shelf!
That's why I mentioned the two concerts that specifically used flat-plane projection and the company that provided it, rather than the original Peppers Ghost that used actors. If they'd used actors in costumes for the concerts, they could simply have put them on stage.
I love cg but tell me why do 99% of 'photo-realistic' models have the 1000 mile stare?
Because good CG is VERY HARD. 'Average', 'good enough' CG is something that you can learn by reading online tutorials and playing with blender. Good CG is very hard, and requires a lot of work both on the creation and animation of CG models, but on all aspects of cinematography. It's no good spending weeks on a high-poly model of a robot, building a motion capture rig and compensating for the increased inertia by lowering the speed, and developing a new particle rendering system for realistic smoke and dust deposition, if after all that you run a shakeycam over the thing so fast nobody can actually see any of it in the blur of greebles.
Because good stop motion and bad stop motion cost almost exactly the same: it's nearly entirely skill based (a good stop motion artist might even work faster than a bad one). Bad CG, however, is a lot cheaper than good CG, because a lot of steps are skipped or slimmed down. More tweening (fewer keyframes), simpler lower resolution textures, no normal maps, specular maps, bump maps, SSS maps, etc, simpler lighting to shorten render time, and so on and so forth.
Both this concert, and the Gorillaz concerts, were 2D. While the Peppers Ghost illusion (provided by Musion if you want to look into it) makes it appear as if the characters were walking onstage, the 'floating' image is a two dimensional flat plane. It only has the illusion of depth due to to the apparent interaction with on-stage objects (i.e. the only reference you have is 3D If the background were projected too, with no physical stage, it would look very obviously two dimensional). There is no stereo projection, or even flat plane projection onto a shaped screen to provide depth (moving the focal plane would necessitate multiple projectors).
Despite the summary, the hologram thing is of little importance. The real interesting thing is the Vocaloid software itself: The actual singing is computer generated. Admittedly, it uses an initial sample bank from a human singer for the seed phonemes (think an incredibly over the top application of autotune), but it's still pretty impressive that what is essentially a computer generated singer has actually had hit singles in the charts. It's only a matter of time until someone links one of the numerous music-generation algorithms up to Vocaloid, adds a vocal writing algorithm (there are automated scientific paper generators, and 99.9% of lyrics are total nonsensical garbage anyway), and uses some artificial phoneme seed samples (from, say, a fluid dynamic simulation of a model of the human vocal cords), and you'd have songs written and sung pretty much entirely without human intervention.
As an aside, if you're interested in trying this out, and don't want to pay for Vocaloid and one of Crypton's soundbanks (Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin/Len, Megurine Luka, etc), there's a freeware version called Utau, which not only has a large bank of soundfonts for your to download, but allows you to create your own by singing the seed phonemes into a microphone.
I've seen stickers in buildings 'armed' with this stuff since the early 90s (my old primary school used it, it came in little bottles with a felt applicator, and the stuff dried out almost instantly so opening one resulted in a mad rush to tag everything). Generally, the idea was not to tag burglars, but instead to stick a dab onto valuable equipment. Because vanishingly few burglars would bother to go over stolen goods with a UV lamp looking for a little glowing patch, and even fewer would then go and acquire the solvents required to remove all traces of the stuff, it generally sticks around better than a simple unpeelable sticker or sand-able etched number. If it got stolen and subsequently recovered, it could then be definitively traced back to a crime. Makes prosecution easier, and helps with insurance (and even getting your stuff back if you can definitively prove it's yours).
"Gas turbine" is the usual term for a turbine that drives via its shaft rather than by its exhaust.
The problem with a gas turbine is that they have rather poor efficiency. They have an excellent power-to-weight ratio (which is why they're used in aircraft, and why gas turbines are used in helicopters), but their fuel economy, even when used in an electric drive system and always running at the peak efficiency RPM, will never reach that of an average petrol engine, let alone diesel. Add that a diesel engine can run on most (if not all, when correctly filtered and if the engine is tuned for it) of the range of fuels a gas turbine can, it's the better choice for a vehicle that doesn't need to lift it's own weight except when on a gradual incline.
That's a hardware implementation issue, nothing to do with the encoding or transmission standard. Your Panasonic TV remote won't control your Sony TV, and vice versa. Yes, it sucks that there isn't a single standardised IR or RF protocol for synchronising shutterglasses. I'm sure it won't be long before universal glasses are sold similar to universal remotes.
There is no vibration. Both images are loaded into the buffer and displayed at the frame rate. There is no alteration to how the video is compressed other than encoding at twice the freamrate (no new encoding software, you just need extra flags when muxing). For example: you have 24fps 1080p 3D video. It is stored at 48 full frames per second, and played back at 24 stereo frames per second (i.e. 24 pairs of full frames), with one full frame per eye.
As far as I know, there are only two methods of encoding 3D that are actually in use for consumer products (ignoring proprietary and bespoke systems, For That Way Madness Lies): page-flipped, and side-by-side. Page flipped is basically stored at twice the normal framerate, with one eye image then the other. Uses double the bandwidth/bitrate, but as it's storing two full frames there is no loss in quality. Side-by-side encodes the images side-by-side anamorphically in a regular frame. Easy to broadcase because it uses exactly the same bandwidth (and same broadcast equipment) as a 2D signal would, but with half the horizontal resolution (not too noticeable with stereo). You can probably guess that page-flipped is used for Blu-Ray,and side-by-side for broadcast.
Displaying 3D is not standardised (horizontal or circular polarisation, active shutter, funky-multi-layer-dichroic-anaglyph, etc), but this makes no difference whatsoever. There are multiple methods of displaying a HD image (LCD, plasma, CRT, DLP projection, etc), but thatdoesn;t mean HD isn't standardised.
Maybe you're reading too many tabloids (i.e. reading any tabloids at all)? I've never heard any stories abut foxes attacking people, and this is the first I've heard about badgers causing trouble either, apart from one story about how culling may speed up the spread of TB among livestock.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not additive 3D printers (FMD, SLS and the like*), but a CNC converted mini-mill can already easily make most of the parts needed for a pretty advanced firearm, and the few parts it can't (e.g. springs, rifled barrel) can either be bought as generic parts or created by simple hand-tooling. This has been the case with hand-operated mills for a good few decades, so the ability to create a gun from raw materials in your own home is nothing new.
* Though you could use these to form wax parts for rough casting in order to cut down on milling time.
Not quite the ultimate limit. Latency between sites could be reduced by laying cables along the shortest path between remote sites: rather than over the surface of the earth, lay them straight through the core of the planet!
Not really. You would then rate an image with massive colour inversion along any high contrast borders as 'higher quality' than an image that has a low level of colour offset through out the image. The latter will look far, far better to the human eye, but the former would score higher.
MKV and mp4 are containers, not CODECs (and neither are they encoders or decoders).
Neither is SSIM: the unfortunate truth is that all the current objective and quantifiable measures of encoding quality have only a vague relation to the subjective visual quality. There is no reliable metric for comparing the quality of output between two encoded files other than a large sample size double-blind test. All those 'quality' graphs you see in encoder comparisons aren't very useful except in the most stark cases.
Shouldn't that be thumb sideways?
Going wired won't help you with that. You must learn to interact with your computer purely through morse blinking of the capslock LED!
A '-1 Misquote' moderation may be necessary.
Then there are things like CED (essentially a vinyl record storing video), which manage to skip right from 'futuristic' to 'antique'.
Maybe their method.is applicaple to a wider variety of problems.
From TFA, that's exactly what this is.
And more importantly, use them to create self-assembling flat packed furniture. No more will people be confused by blindingly simply diagrammatic instructions in their attempts to assemble a shelf!
That's why I mentioned the two concerts that specifically used flat-plane projection and the company that provided it, rather than the original Peppers Ghost that used actors. If they'd used actors in costumes for the concerts, they could simply have put them on stage.
I love cg but tell me why do 99% of 'photo-realistic' models have the 1000 mile stare?
Because good CG is VERY HARD. 'Average', 'good enough' CG is something that you can learn by reading online tutorials and playing with blender. Good CG is very hard, and requires a lot of work both on the creation and animation of CG models, but on all aspects of cinematography.
It's no good spending weeks on a high-poly model of a robot, building a motion capture rig and compensating for the increased inertia by lowering the speed, and developing a new particle rendering system for realistic smoke and dust deposition, if after all that you run a shakeycam over the thing so fast nobody can actually see any of it in the blur of greebles.
Because good stop motion and bad stop motion cost almost exactly the same: it's nearly entirely skill based (a good stop motion artist might even work faster than a bad one). Bad CG, however, is a lot cheaper than good CG, because a lot of steps are skipped or slimmed down. More tweening (fewer keyframes), simpler lower resolution textures, no normal maps, specular maps, bump maps, SSS maps, etc, simpler lighting to shorten render time, and so on and so forth.
Both this concert, and the Gorillaz concerts, were 2D.
While the Peppers Ghost illusion (provided by Musion if you want to look into it) makes it appear as if the characters were walking onstage, the 'floating' image is a two dimensional flat plane. It only has the illusion of depth due to to the apparent interaction with on-stage objects (i.e. the only reference you have is 3D If the background were projected too, with no physical stage, it would look very obviously two dimensional). There is no stereo projection, or even flat plane projection onto a shaped screen to provide depth (moving the focal plane would necessitate multiple projectors).
Despite the summary, the hologram thing is of little importance. The real interesting thing is the Vocaloid software itself: The actual singing is computer generated. Admittedly, it uses an initial sample bank from a human singer for the seed phonemes (think an incredibly over the top application of autotune), but it's still pretty impressive that what is essentially a computer generated singer has actually had hit singles in the charts.
It's only a matter of time until someone links one of the numerous music-generation algorithms up to Vocaloid, adds a vocal writing algorithm (there are automated scientific paper generators, and 99.9% of lyrics are total nonsensical garbage anyway), and uses some artificial phoneme seed samples (from, say, a fluid dynamic simulation of a model of the human vocal cords), and you'd have songs written and sung pretty much entirely without human intervention.
As an aside, if you're interested in trying this out, and don't want to pay for Vocaloid and one of Crypton's soundbanks (Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin/Len, Megurine Luka, etc), there's a freeware version called Utau, which not only has a large bank of soundfonts for your to download, but allows you to create your own by singing the seed phonemes into a microphone.
I've seen stickers in buildings 'armed' with this stuff since the early 90s (my old primary school used it, it came in little bottles with a felt applicator, and the stuff dried out almost instantly so opening one resulted in a mad rush to tag everything). Generally, the idea was not to tag burglars, but instead to stick a dab onto valuable equipment. Because vanishingly few burglars would bother to go over stolen goods with a UV lamp looking for a little glowing patch, and even fewer would then go and acquire the solvents required to remove all traces of the stuff, it generally sticks around better than a simple unpeelable sticker or sand-able etched number. If it got stolen and subsequently recovered, it could then be definitively traced back to a crime. Makes prosecution easier, and helps with insurance (and even getting your stuff back if you can definitively prove it's yours).
In fact they are SO not new, they were used for satellite reception back in the late 80s/early 90s.
"Gas turbine" is the usual term for a turbine that drives via its shaft rather than by its exhaust.
The problem with a gas turbine is that they have rather poor efficiency. They have an excellent power-to-weight ratio (which is why they're used in aircraft, and why gas turbines are used in helicopters), but their fuel economy, even when used in an electric drive system and always running at the peak efficiency RPM, will never reach that of an average petrol engine, let alone diesel. Add that a diesel engine can run on most (if not all, when correctly filtered and if the engine is tuned for it) of the range of fuels a gas turbine can, it's the better choice for a vehicle that doesn't need to lift it's own weight except when on a gradual incline.
That's not true either. After hitting the paywall for may, many interesting papers, I wish they were all available on Arxiv.
It could be an attempt to make the 'it' possessive. I'm regularly caught out by that one.
That's a hardware implementation issue, nothing to do with the encoding or transmission standard. Your Panasonic TV remote won't control your Sony TV, and vice versa. Yes, it sucks that there isn't a single standardised IR or RF protocol for synchronising shutterglasses. I'm sure it won't be long before universal glasses are sold similar to universal remotes.
There is no vibration. Both images are loaded into the buffer and displayed at the frame rate. There is no alteration to how the video is compressed other than encoding at twice the freamrate (no new encoding software, you just need extra flags when muxing). For example: you have 24fps 1080p 3D video. It is stored at 48 full frames per second, and played back at 24 stereo frames per second (i.e. 24 pairs of full frames), with one full frame per eye.
As far as I know, there are only two methods of encoding 3D that are actually in use for consumer products (ignoring proprietary and bespoke systems, For That Way Madness Lies): page-flipped, and side-by-side. Page flipped is basically stored at twice the normal framerate, with one eye image then the other. Uses double the bandwidth/bitrate, but as it's storing two full frames there is no loss in quality. Side-by-side encodes the images side-by-side anamorphically in a regular frame. Easy to broadcase because it uses exactly the same bandwidth (and same broadcast equipment) as a 2D signal would, but with half the horizontal resolution (not too noticeable with stereo). You can probably guess that page-flipped is used for Blu-Ray,and side-by-side for broadcast.
Displaying 3D is not standardised (horizontal or circular polarisation, active shutter, funky-multi-layer-dichroic-anaglyph, etc), but this makes no difference whatsoever. There are multiple methods of displaying a HD image (LCD, plasma, CRT, DLP projection, etc), but thatdoesn;t mean HD isn't standardised.
Maybe you're reading too many tabloids (i.e. reading any tabloids at all)? I've never heard any stories abut foxes attacking people, and this is the first I've heard about badgers causing trouble either, apart from one story about how culling may speed up the spread of TB among livestock.