Indeed, the softscissors tool looks completely amazing. There is a tool called Knockout that did something like what softscissors does, but they have taken it quite a ways beyond what Knockout has done. Of course, Knockout is a "product" where softscissors is a "research program", and it will be interesting to see if there are problems with the softscissors technology that will show up if they do productize it.
Basically, what these tools do is semi-automatic matte generation. Most people are familiar with the bluescreen process, where an actor stands in front of a constant-color blue screen, and the algorithm (either embodied in software or hardware) can determine which pixels, and which fraction of the edge pixels, belong to the actor, so that it can be smoothly composited over a different background. This technology was pioneered by Vlahos quite some time ago, and embedded in the Ultimatte keying machine -- the math is remarkably (sickeningly, really) simple.
These new techniques are for still-frames only at this point, and require the artist to draw a fat line around the edge of the foreground object. The inside edge of the line is all pixels guaranteed to be part of the foreground, and the outside edge of the line are all pixels guaranteed to be part of the background. The program then analyzes these two pixel-sets and generates statistics to determine which of the pixels (and what percentage of the pixels) belongs to the foreground. This works because there are at least some characteristics of the foreground that are different from the background -- and the program can find them.
They generate truly remarkable mattes of people and animals with long, flowing, edging-toward-transparent hair, that just have to be seen to be believed. They get quality similar to those of bluescreen techniques but without requiring any special background.
I'm impressed. It's a lot of work, but the results are worth it.
Thanks -- I had thought that the entire article was completely bogus (as LEDs really can only emit one frequency of light) but your description of varying the pulse-rate makes perfect sense, and it's exactly what LEDs do best.
The authors of the free NTFS claim that they've found and worked around a number of bugs in Microsoft's NTFS implementation, bugs that Microsoft has later acknowledged and still later fixed.
All experience I have had, and have heard of, shows it to be robust and bug-free.
Parent of TFA says, too, that one-molecule-thick layers of water persist in the paper even after drying. Still, the promise of the material, if borne out, are amazing. Cheap, strong, and easy-to-manufacture sheets would revolutionize many industries.
My condolences as well. I know that Rutan has done everything he could think of in the design to prevent any kind of explosion, and the purposely doesn't light the rocket until they're 10 miles away from almost everybody, just in case something unexpected does happen.
Among the safety innovations of this rocket is that a single fiber optic cable is wound around and around the tank, so that if it ruptures anyplace it will cut the cable, and the rocket will be shut down immediately.
That said, in a cold-flow test, there shouldn't be anything burning.
I am sure that Burt and Richard Branson are terribly distressed by this. My deepest sympathies go out to the families of the killed and injured.
I agree that this is a real problem, and that the author of the article deserves none of the ridicule that he is getting.
I run a small visual effects studio, with most of the machines running Linux, and we are constantly having this issue with proprietary codecs. Just yesterday, we were trying to re-encode some movies using a Sorenson codec, and it's just not possible under Linux. Even if it was possible, it certainly wouldn't be possible legally, as (from what I can understand) Apple and Sorenson are in a race condition -- neither one will allow the other to release the codec legally. After all, my company is in the movie business, the only thing that makes the movie business a "business" and not a "hobby" is copyright -- it is absolutely hypocritcal of me to violate this very thing that puts bread on my family's table. A recognize that I am a hypocrite -- it bothers me quite a bit.
At this point, it's a combination of annoyance and bad-tummy feeling. When I download a bag of codecs, I know I'm doing something illegal, but I also recognize that the chance of getting caught is vanishingly small. The only viable alternative at this point is to get a Mac mini to sit on my desk for doing Quicktime.
But the interesting question is what happens in the future. It's only a matter of time before codecs start to phone home to verify license compliance. Microsoft and other companies in the license business (they're not really in the software business) will find a way to pollute the world with extremely tight DRM. At some point this uneasy detente we have will fail.
I do believe that the only way to for the forces of good to prevail in the future is to be as pure as possible now, to develop, sponsor, and use as free as possible systems going forward.
Other people have suggested potentially more practical electostatic interferometric displays, like this one. The advantages of this technology, like the classic electrostatic e-paper with the microscopic dual-color beads in oil, is that it doesn't require any power to maintain the display.
Even so, this technology has been around for ten years, and is still in the very early research stages.
We had a user who insisted on abusing the "nice" command, to run his jobs at a higher priority. Pleading and cajoling didn't work, so we decided to get creative.
We changed nice so that whenever this particular user ran it, it lowered his priority by exactly as much as he was attempting to raise it.
He stopped coming to work soon after that. I suppose he had the last laugh though -- NYIT continued to pay him for another six months.
I can understand that there would be a difference between chips designed for multiprocessing, but if I wanted to have a single-chip workstation, would there be any difference between the Barcelona and the Phenom?
I'm interested in building new workstations for my company, and the Phenom chips look great except that they don't exist, and won't, for at least six months. Why not build Barcelona workstations, though?
PeterBrett says: Although I can't comment on the safety point, I'd be interested in seeing some numbers that support the claim that electric air conditioning is more efficient that the thermodynamic cycle currently used for aircraft air con.
I can't put my finger on the article in question, but Aviation Week covered this a few years ago. It was not a dramatic increase in efficiency, and the question was hotly debated (by, say, Airbus) there was some added efficiency. I believe that a big part of it was that tapping the bleed air of the engine just isn't an efficient way of generating power, even if the AC packs themselves were very efficient.
Part of it, too, was the advantage in not having to run hot high-pressure air lines through the plane, which were heavy and failure-prone.
Here's a press release from the manufacturer claiming dramatic efficiency gains -- more than I recall reading from the AvWeek article. Airbus, indeed, continues to claim that electric AC is not worth it. Given all the significant effort that has gone into this, though, I trust Boeing when they say that it is. The changes required to the engines to generate that much electricity were significant.
I defer to your knowledge as a Boeing employee -- but rolling one out every three days isn't the same thing as doing the assembly in three days. I believe the plan for the 787 is for the plane to only spend three days on the assembly line.
It's a shame that the rollout is being delayed -- as of yesterday, newspapers were still saying 7/8/7 here and here Apparently the plane has been fully assembled and has been already been rolled from the assembly hangar to the paint hangar.
The fact that the 787 is a "plastic airplane" will get a lot of play, and having wings that bend, potentially to the point that they will tough, is just the most obvious and mediagenic manifestation of that. But it is just the tip of the iceberg of the innovations.
1) Yes, it's almost completely carbon fiber. This means that the plane can (and is) lighter, so it will be more fuel efficient. Also, it's easy to make complex curved shapes, so the wings and fuselage are slightly more aerodynamic. Because carbon fiber structures are so strong, the windows can be larger, and the plane can be pressurized to a lower altitude (it will be pressurized to 6000' instead of the typical 8000' of today's fleet). There is no corrosion, and little worry about fatigue in composites.
2) The plane is not built in Seattle, although that's where the final assembly takes place. All of the building takes place in multiple facilities around the globe, each producing parts to Boeing's plans. These parts will "snap together" in the Everett plant. The first 787 is being assembled right now, and will roll out on 7/8/7 (just over a week from now.) Apparently the left wing was off by 2 thousands of an inch or so, the right wing was absolutely perfect. Boeing converted three 747's to be gigantic cargo transporters to move all the parts from around the world to Everett.
3) The plane has almost completely electric, without the high-pressure pneumatic systems that older planes had. In particular, the AC systems are electric. This will be somewhat more efficient, and safer.
4) The plan for certification of the plane is borderline insane. The final assembly started a couple of weeks ago, and the plane will be rolled out in a week, the first flight will be in a couple of months, and the first delivery will be in Q2 2008. This is a tiny fraction of the time this process required on previous airplanes -- maybe 1/4 the time of the 777 and even less than that of the latest Airbus. This would be remarkable, even if the plane wasn't revolutionary in every other way, too!
5) Aviation Week and Space Technology visited the final assembly line recently, and were surprised to find that it was almost an empty building. That's not because they weren't ready -- that's because there are almost no tools needed to assemble the plane. They snap together the pieces, install the landing gear, and roll it down the building on its gear installing the various subassemblies. Boeing intends to assemble a plane every three days once they get going, a remarkable and unprecedented schedule.
Anyway -- there are so many revolutions in this airplane that I would have thought it was a scam if it was any other company than Boeing. It remains to be seen if they can meet their goals, but so far things are going remarkably according to the plan they laid out a few years ago.
I know it's been done before -- my favorite FX movie of all time, Mary Poppins, was done that way, too. It was a good idea then, a better one now. Back then they used two cameras ganged together (old Technicolor cameras) to record the color in one and the sodium light in the other. Wacky!
What Fuji has also made is a SuperCCD with two different sized photosensors, with the large normal-sensitivity ones interspersed with small low-sensitivity cells. This is designed to allow one to get much greater dynamic range, with real detail in the highlights that would be blown-out in normal cameras. You can see some examples of this here at the incomparable dpreview.com site. Fuji sells a camera today with a similar sensor with 12 Megapixels, 6 low-sensitivity and 6 hi.
Sadly, this appears to be another true advance in technology that hasn't caught on with the general public.
While I like Kodak's idea quite a bit, here are a couple of other ideas.
1) Sony was building cameras for a while with four color channels. There was the normal green, but also a different green they called "emerald" for one of the four Bayer pattern locations. Unfortunately, this was a solution in search of a problem, it never really caught on because there just wasn't any perceived benefit.
2) I do visual effects for films. For the last 50 years or so, people have been using bluescreen and greenscreen effects. The idea is to put a constant color background, and process the image so that any pixels of that color become transparent. Over the years, more and more lipstick has been applied to this pig -- so that you can now often extract shadows that fall on the greenscreen, pull transparent smoke from the greenscreen plate -- these things have become even more possible through digital processing.
Still, it sucks. Greenscreen photography forces so many compromises that I often recommend shooting without it and laboriously hand-rotoscoping the shots.
But -- say you had a fourth color filter, with a very narrow spectral band. Perhaps the yellow sodium color -- commercial lights that put out very narrow-band yellow are sometimes used for street lighting. If you had a very narrow-band sodium filter over 1/4 of the pixels, you could pull perfect mattes without 99% of the artifacts of traditional greenscreen and bluescreen photography. Finally (and this is killer!) you could make glasses that the director of photography and other lighting crew could wear that block just that frequency, so they could see the set as it really is -- without the sodium light pollution.
Still, Kudos to Kodak for thinking outside the box.
Is that there's always some leakage in the circular-polarized images from one eye to the other, but it's always the same amount of leakage. So, you see a ghost of the right eye's view in the left eye, and vice versa.
So, they just subtract that percentage of the right-eye's view from the left-eye image, and voila! No ghosts.
That said, peope I know who have reviewed this technology in depth find that while it's not as headache-inducing as some of the other 3D formats, there's still something that feels wrong about it -- their feeling was more epilepsy than migraine.
disclaimer: Haven't seen it myself yet, and that's a breach of my duty to my visual effects company.
There is a long tradition of this in physics. My favorite was "The Ultraviolet Catastrophe", which forecast that all energy would be increasing in frequency.
The point of this kind of tounge-in-cheek hyperbole is to get people thinking about problems in a more creative, out-of-the-box way, and lead them toward solutions. The Ultraviolet Catastrophe led directly to Planck's quantum hypothesis -- which I don't think he even took as a serious solution at the time. But, it took that kind of wacky idea to get people over the hump of classical theory.
I think that the Solar Oxygen Crisis people are trying to do something similar.
What somebody needs to do is write a program to do thermonuclear detonation simulations, that would be easily run on millions of computers, sort of an "Armaggedon at home" project. One of the criminal gangs will then lease their botnet to some group that starts using the simulator to do some cutting-edge bomb research.
There is little question that the computer that deserves to be at the top of the Top 500 list is a botnet. It's only a matter of time before that computer power gets used for truly nefarious purposes, and my guess is that it's a matter of not much time at all.
The question is what the response will be -- will the insecure computer problem be fixed or will the internet just be destroyed?
I'm running the Linux version of googleearth, 4.0.2091 (beta) and the image from New Orleans are clearly pre-Katrina, and are in fact the same images used by maps.google.com (the cars are all in the same places on the roads, for instance.)
I don't feel that computer designers should really have to think about some peripheral device sucking 50 watts out of a connection on the motherboard. If you want power, get a cord. If you want portable power, bring a battery. Just having one fewer cable on a desk is not a problem worth solving this way.
Laptops, for instance, are designed around very limited power budgets. If you plug a 1000 watt USB hair dryer into it, how long are the batteries going to last?
A solution I would be in favor of is building lower power peripherals. Building 500 GB flash hard-drive replacements than run on half-a-watt should be possible in a couple of years. Building very low power OLED displays should be possible. Building low-power devices is something that is a win in every possible way, and should be encouraged -- the USB power limitation is a great way to stimulate this!
That said, I'm really sorry I passed up the USB-powered heated typing gloves I saw in Shinjuku last fall...
A company called AC Propulsion has already made a solar powered plane that has flown for longer than two days. The plane uses regular solar cells and batteries, using the solar cells to charge the batteries so that it can fly on the stored power during the night.
During the day, the plane used thermals to try to maintain altitude on as little power as possible. Thermals are, of course, derived from solar power as well.
As battery and solar cell technology continues to improve, this challenge has gone from being impossible to hard to doable, and it will soon become easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out this press release.
AC Propulsion said that they could do it indefinitely, but their pilots got worn out.
Thad Beier
Really, a superb article. I particularly like the part where chemists say that the LiIon batteries are so simple, they are "physicist's batteries"
Thad Beier
cost $100M to make.
If there was a way to make 'em cheaper, we'd be doing it.
Thad
Indeed, the softscissors tool looks completely amazing. There is a tool called Knockout that did something like what softscissors does, but they have taken it quite a ways beyond what Knockout has done. Of course, Knockout is a "product" where softscissors is a "research program", and it will be interesting to see if there are problems with the softscissors technology that will show up if they do productize it.
Basically, what these tools do is semi-automatic matte generation. Most people are familiar with the bluescreen process, where an actor stands in front of a constant-color blue screen, and the algorithm (either embodied in software or hardware) can determine which pixels, and which fraction of the edge pixels, belong to the actor, so that it can be smoothly composited over a different background. This technology was pioneered by Vlahos quite some time ago, and embedded in the Ultimatte keying machine -- the math is remarkably (sickeningly, really) simple.
These new techniques are for still-frames only at this point, and require the artist to draw a fat line around the edge of the foreground object. The inside edge of the line is all pixels guaranteed to be part of the foreground, and the outside edge of the line are all pixels guaranteed to be part of the background. The program then analyzes these two pixel-sets and generates statistics to determine which of the pixels (and what percentage of the pixels) belongs to the foreground. This works because there are at least some characteristics of the foreground that are different from the background -- and the program can find them.
They generate truly remarkable mattes of people and animals with long, flowing, edging-toward-transparent hair, that just have to be seen to be believed. They get quality similar to those of bluescreen techniques but without requiring any special background.
I'm impressed. It's a lot of work, but the results are worth it.
Thad Beier
Thanks -- I had thought that the entire article was completely bogus (as LEDs really can only emit one frequency of light) but your description of varying the pulse-rate makes perfect sense, and it's exactly what LEDs do best.
What a lovely device.
Thad
The authors of the free NTFS claim that they've found and worked around a number of bugs in Microsoft's NTFS implementation, bugs that Microsoft has later acknowledged and still later fixed.
All experience I have had, and have heard of, shows it to be robust and bug-free.
Thad
Parent of TFA says, too, that one-molecule-thick layers of water persist in the paper even after drying. Still, the promise of the material, if borne out, are amazing. Cheap, strong, and easy-to-manufacture sheets would revolutionize many industries.
My condolences as well. I know that Rutan has done everything he could think of in the design to prevent any kind of explosion, and the purposely doesn't light the rocket until they're 10 miles away from almost everybody, just in case something unexpected does happen.
Among the safety innovations of this rocket is that a single fiber optic cable is wound around and around the tank, so that if it ruptures anyplace it will cut the cable, and the rocket will be shut down immediately.
That said, in a cold-flow test, there shouldn't be anything burning.
I am sure that Burt and Richard Branson are terribly distressed by this. My deepest sympathies go out to the families of the killed and injured.
Thad Beier
I agree that this is a real problem, and that the author of the article deserves none of the ridicule that he is getting.
I run a small visual effects studio, with most of the machines running Linux, and we are constantly having this issue with proprietary codecs. Just yesterday, we were trying to re-encode some movies using a Sorenson codec, and it's just not possible under Linux. Even if it was possible, it certainly wouldn't be possible legally, as (from what I can understand) Apple and Sorenson are in a race condition -- neither one will allow the other to release the codec legally. After all, my company is in the movie business, the only thing that makes the movie business a "business" and not a "hobby" is copyright -- it is absolutely hypocritcal of me to violate this very thing that puts bread on my family's table. A recognize that I am a hypocrite -- it bothers me quite a bit.
At this point, it's a combination of annoyance and bad-tummy feeling. When I download a bag of codecs, I know I'm doing something illegal, but I also recognize that the chance of getting caught is vanishingly small. The only viable alternative at this point is to get a Mac mini to sit on my desk for doing Quicktime.
But the interesting question is what happens in the future. It's only a matter of time before codecs start to phone home to verify license compliance. Microsoft and other companies in the license business (they're not really in the software business) will find a way to pollute the world with extremely tight DRM. At some point this uneasy detente we have will fail.
I do believe that the only way to for the forces of good to prevail in the future is to be as pure as possible now, to develop, sponsor, and use as free as possible systems going forward.
Thad Beier
Other people have suggested potentially more practical electostatic interferometric displays, like this one. The advantages of this technology, like the classic electrostatic e-paper with the microscopic dual-color beads in oil, is that it doesn't require any power to maintain the display.
Even so, this technology has been around for ten years, and is still in the very early research stages.
Thad Beier
We had a user who insisted on abusing the "nice" command, to run his jobs at a higher priority. Pleading and cajoling didn't work, so we decided to get creative.
We changed nice so that whenever this particular user ran it, it lowered his priority by exactly as much as he was attempting to raise it.
He stopped coming to work soon after that. I suppose he had the last laugh though -- NYIT continued to pay him for another six months.
Thad
Needless to say, the plane did roll out on time. Painted.
And the reception was held in the nearly empty 787 production line.
Thad
I can understand that there would be a difference between chips designed for multiprocessing, but if I wanted to have a single-chip workstation, would there be any difference between the Barcelona and the Phenom?
I'm interested in building new workstations for my company, and the Phenom chips look great except that they don't exist, and won't, for at least six months. Why not build Barcelona workstations, though?
Thad Beier
PeterBrett says: Although I can't comment on the safety point, I'd be interested in seeing some numbers that support the claim that electric air conditioning is more efficient that the thermodynamic cycle currently used for aircraft air con.
I can't put my finger on the article in question, but Aviation Week covered this a few years ago. It was not a dramatic increase in efficiency, and the question was hotly debated (by, say, Airbus) there was some added efficiency. I believe that a big part of it was that tapping the bleed air of the engine just isn't an efficient way of generating power, even if the AC packs themselves were very efficient.
Part of it, too, was the advantage in not having to run hot high-pressure air lines through the plane, which were heavy and failure-prone.
Here's a press release from the manufacturer claiming dramatic efficiency gains -- more than I recall reading from the AvWeek article. Airbus, indeed, continues to claim that electric AC is not worth it. Given all the significant effort that has gone into this, though, I trust Boeing when they say that it is. The changes required to the engines to generate that much electricity were significant.
Thad Beier
I defer to your knowledge as a Boeing employee -- but rolling one out every three days isn't the same thing as doing the assembly in three days. I believe the plan for the 787 is for the plane to only spend three days on the assembly line.
It's a shame that the rollout is being delayed -- as of yesterday, newspapers were still saying 7/8/7 here and here Apparently the plane has been fully assembled and has been already been rolled from the assembly hangar to the paint hangar.
Thad Beier
The fact that the 787 is a "plastic airplane" will get a lot of play, and having wings that bend, potentially to the point that they will tough, is just the most obvious and mediagenic manifestation of that. But it is just the tip of the iceberg of the innovations.
1) Yes, it's almost completely carbon fiber. This means that the plane can (and is) lighter, so it will be more fuel efficient. Also, it's easy to make complex curved shapes, so the wings and fuselage are slightly more aerodynamic. Because carbon fiber structures are so strong, the windows can be larger, and the plane can be pressurized to a lower altitude (it will be pressurized to 6000' instead of the typical 8000' of today's fleet). There is no corrosion, and little worry about fatigue in composites.
2) The plane is not built in Seattle, although that's where the final assembly takes place. All of the building takes place in multiple facilities around the globe, each producing parts to Boeing's plans. These parts will "snap together" in the Everett plant. The first 787 is being assembled right now, and will roll out on 7/8/7 (just over a week from now.) Apparently the left wing was off by 2 thousands of an inch or so, the right wing was absolutely perfect. Boeing converted three 747's to be gigantic cargo transporters to move all the parts from around the world to Everett.
3) The plane has almost completely electric, without the high-pressure pneumatic systems that older planes had. In particular, the AC systems are electric. This will be somewhat more efficient, and safer.
4) The plan for certification of the plane is borderline insane. The final assembly started a couple of weeks ago, and the plane will be rolled out in a week, the first flight will be in a couple of months, and the first delivery will be in Q2 2008. This is a tiny fraction of the time this process required on previous airplanes -- maybe 1/4 the time of the 777 and even less than that of the latest Airbus. This would be remarkable, even if the plane wasn't revolutionary in every other way, too!
5) Aviation Week and Space Technology visited the final assembly line recently, and were surprised to find that it was almost an empty building. That's not because they weren't ready -- that's because there are almost no tools needed to assemble the plane. They snap together the pieces, install the landing gear, and roll it down the building on its gear installing the various subassemblies. Boeing intends to assemble a plane every three days once they get going, a remarkable and unprecedented schedule.
Anyway -- there are so many revolutions in this airplane that I would have thought it was a scam if it was any other company than Boeing. It remains to be seen if they can meet their goals, but so far things are going remarkably according to the plan they laid out a few years ago.
Thad
I know it's been done before -- my favorite FX movie of all time, Mary Poppins, was done that way, too. It was a good idea then, a better one now. Back then they used two cameras ganged together (old Technicolor cameras) to record the color in one and the sodium light in the other. Wacky!
Thad
What Fuji has also made is a SuperCCD with two different sized photosensors, with the large normal-sensitivity ones interspersed with small low-sensitivity cells. This is designed to allow one to get much greater dynamic range, with real detail in the highlights that would be blown-out in normal cameras. You can see some examples of this here at the incomparable dpreview.com site. Fuji sells a camera today with a similar sensor with 12 Megapixels, 6 low-sensitivity and 6 hi.
Sadly, this appears to be another true advance in technology that hasn't caught on with the general public.
Thad Beier
While I like Kodak's idea quite a bit, here are a couple of other ideas.
1) Sony was building cameras for a while with four color channels. There was the normal green, but also a different green they called "emerald" for one of the four Bayer pattern locations. Unfortunately, this was a solution in search of a problem, it never really caught on because there just wasn't any perceived benefit.
2) I do visual effects for films. For the last 50 years or so, people have been using bluescreen and greenscreen effects. The idea is to put a constant color background, and process the image so that any pixels of that color become transparent. Over the years, more and more lipstick has been applied to this pig -- so that you can now often extract shadows that fall on the greenscreen, pull transparent smoke from the greenscreen plate -- these things have become even more possible through digital processing.
Still, it sucks. Greenscreen photography forces so many compromises that I often recommend shooting without it and laboriously hand-rotoscoping the shots.
But -- say you had a fourth color filter, with a very narrow spectral band. Perhaps the yellow sodium color -- commercial lights that put out very narrow-band yellow are sometimes used for street lighting. If you had a very narrow-band sodium filter over 1/4 of the pixels, you could pull perfect mattes without 99% of the artifacts of traditional greenscreen and bluescreen photography. Finally (and this is killer!) you could make glasses that the director of photography and other lighting crew could wear that block just that frequency, so they could see the set as it really is -- without the sodium light pollution.
Still, Kudos to Kodak for thinking outside the box.
Thad Beier
Is that there's always some leakage in the circular-polarized images from one eye to the other, but it's always the same amount of leakage. So, you see a ghost of the right eye's view in the left eye, and vice versa.
So, they just subtract that percentage of the right-eye's view from the left-eye image, and voila! No ghosts.
That said, peope I know who have reviewed this technology in depth find that while it's not as headache-inducing as some of the other 3D formats, there's still something that feels wrong about it -- their feeling was more epilepsy than migraine.
disclaimer: Haven't seen it myself yet, and that's a breach of my duty to my visual effects company.
There is a long tradition of this in physics. My favorite was "The Ultraviolet Catastrophe", which forecast that all energy would be increasing in frequency.
The point of this kind of tounge-in-cheek hyperbole is to get people thinking about problems in a more creative, out-of-the-box way, and lead them toward solutions. The Ultraviolet Catastrophe led directly to Planck's quantum hypothesis -- which I don't think he even took as a serious solution at the time. But, it took that kind of wacky idea to get people over the hump of classical theory.
I think that the Solar Oxygen Crisis people are trying to do something similar.
Thad Beier
What somebody needs to do is write a program to do thermonuclear detonation simulations, that would be easily run on millions of computers, sort of an "Armaggedon at home" project. One of the criminal gangs will then lease their botnet to some group that starts using the simulator to do some cutting-edge bomb research.
There is little question that the computer that deserves to be at the top of the Top 500 list is a botnet. It's only a matter of time before that computer power gets used for truly nefarious purposes, and my guess is that it's a matter of not much time at all.
The question is what the response will be -- will the insecure computer problem be fixed or will the internet just be destroyed?
Thad
I'm running the Linux version of googleearth, 4.0.2091 (beta) and the image from New Orleans are clearly pre-Katrina, and are in fact the same images used by maps.google.com (the cars are all in the same places on the roads, for instance.)
Thad
I don't feel that computer designers should really have to think about some peripheral device sucking 50 watts out of a connection on the motherboard. If you want power, get a cord. If you want portable power, bring a battery. Just having one fewer cable on a desk is not a problem worth solving this way.
Laptops, for instance, are designed around very limited power budgets. If you plug a 1000 watt USB hair dryer into it, how long are the batteries going to last?
A solution I would be in favor of is building lower power peripherals. Building 500 GB flash hard-drive replacements than run on half-a-watt should be possible in a couple of years. Building very low power OLED displays should be possible. Building low-power devices is something that is a win in every possible way, and should be encouraged -- the USB power limitation is a great way to stimulate this!
That said, I'm really sorry I passed up the USB-powered heated typing gloves I saw in Shinjuku last fall...
Thad Beier
A company called AC Propulsion has already made a solar powered plane that has flown for longer than two days. The plane uses regular solar cells and batteries, using the solar cells to charge the batteries so that it can fly on the stored power during the night.
During the day, the plane used thermals to try to maintain altitude on as little power as possible. Thermals are, of course, derived from solar power as well.
As battery and solar cell technology continues to improve, this challenge has gone from being impossible to hard to doable, and it will soon become easy.
Thad Beier