And also Digital TV is just a better picture quality.
Only if they use the high-definition formats. Standard-definition digital TV is a small, incremental improvement over analog TV, rather than the giant leap that HDTV is.
So far, the broadcasters who were given digital TV broadcast licenses are looking at other things to do with the bandwidth. They probably would like to have 4 channels of SDTV rather than 1 channel of HDTV. Unfortunately, in the great bandwidth giveaway, there was no stipulation that high-definition must be used. That, more than anything else, is preventing HDTV from taking off.
I agree that "Cosmos" has held up extremely well. I was a bit disappointed to find that the DVD contains the "updated" version that aired on PBS in 1991. I would much rather have had the original version.
Better yet, it would have been nice if they had used DVD's "seamless branching" features to allow the viewer to choose which version (original or updated) they wanted to watch, as with the DVDs for "The Abyss" and "Terminator 2".
What bothers me most about the updated version are the changes made during some of the sequences when he is flying through space in his "spaceship of the imagination". There are a few places where they have inserted pictures from the Hubble telescope, which is good, but they are not animated, which is bad. In the new footage, instead of being animated, is just made up of simple camera pans across a flat photograph, which looks cheap. It's jarring and incongruous. The original footage was animated with a multiplane camera (not CGI), which produced a nice effect of flying through space. The new stuff looks too simplistic next to that.
There are also some amazing video effects in Cosmos. Watch the part where he is walking through the Great Library of Alexandria. That's a model he's walking through. He's just superimposed. And it's video superimposing, too. Who knew the "chroma-key" technique used in the days of analog video could look so good? I'm still impressed with how good that looks.
Me too! Those cruel bastards! How could they kill Floyd? I was just a kid. Oh well, at least they brought him back at the end.
"Planetfall" was my first Infocom game, and it will always have special meaning for me. The followup, "Stationfall" was pretty good, too, although their descriptions of the cylindrical chamber in the interior of the ship were a bit confusing. It took a while to get a good mental picture of what they were describing. Ah, I miss those games...
Perhaps Mac is putting itself into a very uncomfortable place.
Bingo. The Mac is going downhill, and it's Apple's own fault.
MacOS 8/9 have lots of neat little features which make it a great GUI, still better than anything I've seen on UNIX. However, MacOS X throws out many of these features, apparnetly for no real reason. MacOS X thankfully adds preemptive multitasking and memory protection, which the mac has needed for years, but unnecessarily destroys much of what makes the Mac GUI so great for end users. It's sad really. And according to some people, it doesn't have to be that way.
They just could put a small (very small) sign over the door to the observation area that read, "If you are afraid of heights, please close your eyes while in this room."
Actually, there have been several, including a massive, filmed-in-70mm, 7-hour Russian version made in 1968. Yes, that's not a typo, it really is 7 hours long!
we should do a slashdot article and pick the 10 best abandoned technologies
That's a great idea, but it should be more like the 100 best. There are just too many great techs out there that should be on a list like that.
Airships would actually be cool to have today. They could fit in roughly the same market as luxury cruise ships. Can you imagine having a giant steel-framed helium airship with a gondola contianing state rooms, fine dining, and so on? There could even be an observation deck on the lowest floor with a glass bottom! Who wouldn't pay for a trip like that?
See, you learned the world is bigger then you thought today.
You know, since you said "North America" in your original post, I thought about putting something in my reply about how top/left is the convention, unless "those dirty Canucks do it differently". However, I decided to be nice and leave it out.
Not any more. The "Zombie Island" and other new movies produced by Cartoon Network have made the monsters real. The Skeptical Newsletter had an interesting editorial on it a while back.
Traffic signals aren't uniformly laid out in North America. While many are vertically arranged horizontal is popular too. Of the horizontal ones many use red lights on both ends.
Say what?! I've never seen a traffic light that didn't follow the top/left rule. If it's vertical, red is at the top. If it's horizontal, red is on the left. I'd imagine exceptions are rare indeed. What cities/towns have traffic lights that don't follow that rule?
Re:Nevertheless, it's not too different from ...
on
A Pair of Google Bits
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· Score: 1
Slashdot's own editorial staff is guilty of the hipocrisy FallLine mentioned. You can bet you won't see an article about Google with that fork/knife/spoon "patent pending" logo next to it.
Also note that the "vocal minority" which normally slams software patents stays very silent on stories like this one. Vocal opposition to one instance software patents + tacit, silent approval of another instance = hipocracy.
Whups, you're right. It's even worse than I first stated. I should have dug up that link before posting.
Yep, putting 72 pounds of plutonium on top of a rocket that blew up twice out of 25 launches is not my idea of a smart move. Not that most slashdotters were very sympathetic to such concerns.
And yep, it is worrisome that there is so much plutonium still in orbit. I don't what else to say about that, except that it sucks.
Actually, I think we can thank NASA on this one. By keeping the report secret until after the DoD buyout happened, they kept the urgency down and thus the price low. As other posters have pointed out, the DoD only paid $72 million for the satellites, which is less than 1% of the total cost of building them in the first place. The only people who really got shafted in the whole Iridium debacle were the investors and venture capitalists who put up the money in the first place. And well, who gives a shit about them? They've got money to burn anyway, so let 'em burn it!
"The prospects of a casualty from the now-averted mass 'de-orbiting' of the system known as Iridium were spelled out in a previously secret study by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration."
Hello? Doesn't anybody find it strange that the study detailing the dangers was kept secret until after the danger had passed? As far as I'm concerned, this is the end of NASA's credibility and trustworthiness regarding saftey issues. Why the hell were they hiding this report?
Kind of makes those predictions of doom regarding the Cassini probe seem a little less overblown after all. Personally, I was never that comfortable with the idea of putting 27 pounds of plutonium on top of a rocket design that has been known to explode on two separate occasions (once before the Cassini launch and once after). But hey, I guess I'm just a technophobe!
Yes, I understand that thermite just burns extra hot rather than exploding. And that's exactly how the movie protrayed it. They got it right. I was praising them for their accuracy.
Whistler was the blind guy. He was white. If you're thinking of Sidney Poitier's character, sure, he was black, and worked with computer geeks, but he never actually did anything with computers. He was the ex-CIA guy.
It isn't often that a movie takes the time to get real science down correctly.
I agree. The "The 6th Day" was far, far better than most sci-fi flicks these days. I especially like the little touches, such as how the interactive holographic girlfriend required a special mechanized chair to, um, "get it on". They actually understood that holograms are just light and can't be touched! Amazing!
It was also cool when Arnie and his clone whipped up a batch of thermite. They even named one of the ingredients (aluminum), and lit it by using a magnesium ribbon as a fuse (lighting the magnesium with a pocket propane torch), just like in real life! And instead of a big explosion, it just burned really hot. Wow. "MacGuyver" this ain't.
Eh? The guy sacrificed his life to save the world!! Which "T2" did you watch, huh? Besides, that character was pretty good as far as black characters go. Other than "Theo", the guy with glasses in the original "Die Hard", he's the only example of a black computer whiz I can think of in a Hollywood movie.
The interesting thing about "The 6th Day" is that the filmmakers clearly understood what cloning is and is not. They actually provided explanations in the storyline as to how one creates an exact, fully-grown copy of someone with all their memories intact, as opposed to a newborn infant who happens to be someone's identical twin. What goes on in "The 6th Day" is more akin to Dr. Who's "regeneration" than actual cloning, but the movie actually acknoledges this. I was pretty impressed by that.
Why did we bother with all that expensive, heavy, dangerous CRT stuff in between, eh? All that mucking about with thick glass, phosphorescent chemicals, and stupendously high voltages?:-)
Not that I didn't notice your smiley, but I thought I'd point out that CRTs do have the advantage of having no moving parts. The only reason we're able to go back to moving part design now is because of miniturization. Microscopic moving structures like the GLV and DLP technologies don't need to be oiled or maintianed as much as macroscopic machines.
But I'm sure you knew that already, based on your:-)
The telecommunications act was passed under rhetoric of "increasing competition", which was a total lie, but unfortunately, it's what companies say about pretty much any legislation they are trying to get passed these days.
Just look at what happened in San Francisco. AT&T actually said that not allowing open access to their cable lines would increase competition, while allowing it would decrease competition. That's completely backwards, and they knew it, too! But that didn't matter, the local government listened to them, and ruled against open-access, allowing SF cable telecommunications to become an AT&T-owned monopoly.
The word "competition" has been hijacked by lobbyists, and is now used to refer to situations where the exact opposite of a competitive market exists. Too bad most of the public hasn't caught on yet. They still believe it when corporate lackeys tell them passing a law that allows a single company to buy up every radio station in sight will somehow "increase competition". Ugh.
Movies like "Charlie's Angels" are loud enough to overpower audience noise, but "Unbreakable" has a lot of quiet parts in it. I think that's why there were so many complaints from people who saw this particular movie.
Personally I'm surprised they chose to implement a column rather than a row, but whatever...
Actually, that makes sense. Pretty much every display format in existence has an aspect ratio greater than 1 (wider than it is tall). If you're going to have a device that's bounded in one direction but not the other, it's better to make the short direction be the bounded one, and the long direction be the unbounded one.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if they use the high-definition formats. Standard-definition digital TV is a small, incremental improvement over analog TV, rather than the giant leap that HDTV is.
So far, the broadcasters who were given digital TV broadcast licenses are looking at other things to do with the bandwidth. They probably would like to have 4 channels of SDTV rather than 1 channel of HDTV. Unfortunately, in the great bandwidth giveaway, there was no stipulation that high-definition must be used. That, more than anything else, is preventing HDTV from taking off.
Better yet, it would have been nice if they had used DVD's "seamless branching" features to allow the viewer to choose which version (original or updated) they wanted to watch, as with the DVDs for "The Abyss" and "Terminator 2".
What bothers me most about the updated version are the changes made during some of the sequences when he is flying through space in his "spaceship of the imagination". There are a few places where they have inserted pictures from the Hubble telescope, which is good, but they are not animated, which is bad. In the new footage, instead of being animated, is just made up of simple camera pans across a flat photograph, which looks cheap. It's jarring and incongruous. The original footage was animated with a multiplane camera (not CGI), which produced a nice effect of flying through space. The new stuff looks too simplistic next to that.
There are also some amazing video effects in Cosmos. Watch the part where he is walking through the Great Library of Alexandria. That's a model he's walking through. He's just superimposed. And it's video superimposing, too. Who knew the "chroma-key" technique used in the days of analog video could look so good? I'm still impressed with how good that looks.
Me too! Those cruel bastards! How could they kill Floyd? I was just a kid. Oh well, at least they brought him back at the end.
"Planetfall" was my first Infocom game, and it will always have special meaning for me. The followup, "Stationfall" was pretty good, too, although their descriptions of the cylindrical chamber in the interior of the ship were a bit confusing. It took a while to get a good mental picture of what they were describing. Ah, I miss those games...
Speaking of science, how do astronomers feel about having to put up with continued flares now that Iridium has been "rescued"?
Bingo. The Mac is going downhill, and it's Apple's own fault.
MacOS 8/9 have lots of neat little features which make it a great GUI, still better than anything I've seen on UNIX. However, MacOS X throws out many of these features, apparnetly for no real reason. MacOS X thankfully adds preemptive multitasking and memory protection, which the mac has needed for years, but unnecessarily destroys much of what makes the Mac GUI so great for end users. It's sad really. And according to some people, it doesn't have to be that way.
They just could put a small (very small) sign over the door to the observation area that read, "If you are afraid of heights, please close your eyes while in this room."
Actually, there have been several, including a massive, filmed-in-70mm, 7-hour Russian version made in 1968. Yes, that's not a typo, it really is 7 hours long!
That's a great idea, but it should be more like the 100 best. There are just too many great techs out there that should be on a list like that.
Airships would actually be cool to have today. They could fit in roughly the same market as luxury cruise ships. Can you imagine having a giant steel-framed helium airship with a gondola contianing state rooms, fine dining, and so on? There could even be an observation deck on the lowest floor with a glass bottom! Who wouldn't pay for a trip like that?
You know, since you said "North America" in your original post, I thought about putting something in my reply about how top/left is the convention, unless "those dirty Canucks do it differently". However, I decided to be nice and leave it out.
Now I wish I'd left it in..:-P
Not any more. The "Zombie Island" and other new movies produced by Cartoon Network have made the monsters real. The Skeptical Newsletter had an interesting editorial on it a while back.
Say what?! I've never seen a traffic light that didn't follow the top/left rule. If it's vertical, red is at the top. If it's horizontal, red is on the left. I'd imagine exceptions are rare indeed. What cities/towns have traffic lights that don't follow that rule?
Also note that the "vocal minority" which normally slams software patents stays very silent on stories like this one. Vocal opposition to one instance software patents + tacit, silent approval of another instance = hipocracy.
Whups, you're right. It's even worse than I first stated. I should have dug up that link before posting.
Yep, putting 72 pounds of plutonium on top of a rocket that blew up twice out of 25 launches is not my idea of a smart move. Not that most slashdotters were very sympathetic to such concerns.
And yep, it is worrisome that there is so much plutonium still in orbit. I don't what else to say about that, except that it sucks.
Actually, I think we can thank NASA on this one. By keeping the report secret until after the DoD buyout happened, they kept the urgency down and thus the price low. As other posters have pointed out, the DoD only paid $72 million for the satellites, which is less than 1% of the total cost of building them in the first place. The only people who really got shafted in the whole Iridium debacle were the investors and venture capitalists who put up the money in the first place. And well, who gives a shit about them? They've got money to burn anyway, so let 'em burn it!
Hello? Doesn't anybody find it strange that the study detailing the dangers was kept secret until after the danger had passed? As far as I'm concerned, this is the end of NASA's credibility and trustworthiness regarding saftey issues. Why the hell were they hiding this report?
Kind of makes those predictions of doom regarding the Cassini probe seem a little less overblown after all. Personally, I was never that comfortable with the idea of putting 27 pounds of plutonium on top of a rocket design that has been known to explode on two separate occasions (once before the Cassini launch and once after). But hey, I guess I'm just a technophobe!
Yes, I understand that thermite just burns extra hot rather than exploding. And that's exactly how the movie protrayed it. They got it right. I was praising them for their accuracy.
Well, I don't remember any black people in it at all, except as extras in the background, or bit parts with one or two lines.
However, I do distinctly remember that chick with the purple makeup is, shall we say, nice to look at. Does that count as "people of color"?
Whistler was the blind guy. He was white. If you're thinking of Sidney Poitier's character, sure, he was black, and worked with computer geeks, but he never actually did anything with computers. He was the ex-CIA guy.
I agree. The "The 6th Day" was far, far better than most sci-fi flicks these days. I especially like the little touches, such as how the interactive holographic girlfriend required a special mechanized chair to, um, "get it on". They actually understood that holograms are just light and can't be touched! Amazing!
It was also cool when Arnie and his clone whipped up a batch of thermite. They even named one of the ingredients (aluminum), and lit it by using a magnesium ribbon as a fuse (lighting the magnesium with a pocket propane torch), just like in real life! And instead of a big explosion, it just burned really hot. Wow. "MacGuyver" this ain't.
Eh? The guy sacrificed his life to save the world!! Which "T2" did you watch, huh? Besides, that character was pretty good as far as black characters go. Other than "Theo", the guy with glasses in the original "Die Hard", he's the only example of a black computer whiz I can think of in a Hollywood movie.
The interesting thing about "The 6th Day" is that the filmmakers clearly understood what cloning is and is not. They actually provided explanations in the storyline as to how one creates an exact, fully-grown copy of someone with all their memories intact, as opposed to a newborn infant who happens to be someone's identical twin. What goes on in "The 6th Day" is more akin to Dr. Who's "regeneration" than actual cloning, but the movie actually acknoledges this. I was pretty impressed by that.
Not that I didn't notice your smiley, but I thought I'd point out that CRTs do have the advantage of having no moving parts. The only reason we're able to go back to moving part design now is because of miniturization. Microscopic moving structures like the GLV and DLP technologies don't need to be oiled or maintianed as much as macroscopic machines.
But I'm sure you knew that already, based on your :-)
Just look at what happened in San Francisco. AT&T actually said that not allowing open access to their cable lines would increase competition, while allowing it would decrease competition. That's completely backwards, and they knew it, too! But that didn't matter, the local government listened to them, and ruled against open-access, allowing SF cable telecommunications to become an AT&T-owned monopoly.
The word "competition" has been hijacked by lobbyists, and is now used to refer to situations where the exact opposite of a competitive market exists. Too bad most of the public hasn't caught on yet. They still believe it when corporate lackeys tell them passing a law that allows a single company to buy up every radio station in sight will somehow "increase competition". Ugh.
Movies like "Charlie's Angels" are loud enough to overpower audience noise, but "Unbreakable" has a lot of quiet parts in it. I think that's why there were so many complaints from people who saw this particular movie.
Actually, that makes sense. Pretty much every display format in existence has an aspect ratio greater than 1 (wider than it is tall). If you're going to have a device that's bounded in one direction but not the other, it's better to make the short direction be the bounded one, and the long direction be the unbounded one.