Check these out. Full six-axis IMUs for just a very few hundred dollars.
I about wet my pants when I saw these. The last time I had checked, a few years ago, solid-state gyros (from Systron Donner, maker of the GyroChip line) were $1000 apiece.
What's interesting about both of these papers is that previously-believed myths are shown to be, in fact, myths.
The Google paper shows that relatively high temperatures and high usage rates don't affect disk life. The current paper shows that interface (SCSI, FC vs ATA) had no effect either. The Google paper shows a significant infant mortality that the CMU paper didn't, and the Google paper shows some years of flat reliability where the current paper shows decreasing reliability from year one.
The both show that the failure rate is far higher than the manufacturers specify, which shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody with a few hundred disks.
I'm particularly pleased to see a stake driven through the heart of "SCSI disks are more reliable." Manufacturers have been pushing that principle for years, saying that "oh, we bin-out the SCSI disks after testing" or some other horseshit, but it's not true and it's never been true. The disks are sometimes faster, but they're not "better".
On the other hand, there is a certain well-known actress, somewhat getting on in years it's true, who has her own personal digital retouch artist. Any movie she is in, she hires this guy to retouch all of her scenes. He knows her face intimately, knows just what to highlight, what the diminish, what to blur, what to sharpen.
I do visual effects for a living, I've never met anybody with any qualms whatsoever about making a shot better. It's what we do!
Do cinematographers object to putting softening filters in front of camera lenses when shooting the female talent, because it's "not real?" No.
My friend Lance Williams said it best when accepting his Sci-Tech award -- "It doesn't matter if it's real, it matters if it's true."
The Economist had an article about barely-critical nuclear bomb testing, where the designers implode small pieces of plutonium for research, not intending to get any kind of explosion. They said that sometimes they got a little more than they expected, and this is called a "whoops". And -- sometimes it's bigger than that, and they call that and "uh-oh"
There will be mostly-software players -- players that require some bit of computation being done in a tamper-proof bit of hardware. Microsoft will ensure that that hardware is built into all Windows-Certified motherboards.
There are two parts of an AI -- there's the information, and then there's the building relationships and queries to that information.
The Web is the information. Pretty soon, a majority of the information in the world will be within reach of Google's spiders. That's not a surprise.
But, the building the relationships between those data is the hard part. That's the cool part of Google -- they have millions of people doing that work, for free.
Google is using the queries and query patterns of their users to build that half of the AI. Say you want to know, oh, how to build re-entry vehicles. You can search the web, and find lots of information about re-entry vehicles - but how to do separate out the good from bad information? Maybe you can wait until people start *searching* for information about re-entry vehicles, and watch what they do. Watch which sites they click-thru to. Watch how long they spend at each site. Watch the referrer tags of people that come to Google, to see where they were before. Watch how they modify their search terms to refind their search. Watch when they are apparently satisfied in their searches.
Americans may not know this, but one of the big satellite stations in Europe had a large, well-funded, successful project to build and release hacks for the competing satellite service.
DVD-Jon, you may or may not recall, didn't actually do the DVD reverse-engineering himself, he served as the conduit for the information from (still) anonymous German hackers. Might these have been well-funded professionals, too?
The BluRay/HD-DVD format war will inevitably have people with significant money (we're talking tens of billions of dollars) who strongly want the other sides systems to be cracked. Will some money leak into the hands of the people who can do the work? I think it's inevitable.
cei says: Well, there's always the argument that could be made that an edit list is a derivative work, but such an argument is on much more shaky ground
IANAL, but I don't think that it would be shaky ground at all, actually. It wouldn't surprise me if they make that argument somewhere in their pleadings. Without the ability to search the filings, though (they are just screen-grab PDFs) I can't tell if they did.
From Wikipedia's definition of "derivative work", it seems that the principle may well apply.
At the end of this feedback summary, the Clearplay solution is mooted.
The studios purport to be every bit as unhappy with Clearplay as the re-recording service providers that were the subject of this lawsuit. They are currently suing Clearplay in the case Huntsman v. Soderbergh/a? which is pending.
You can read all about it at the linked EFF site.
Basically, the arguments are almost all exactly the same -- except that the copyright issue is obviously different as there is no copy being sold. With Clearplay, you buy or rent the regular disk, and the Clearplay-supplied DVD player and service skips the naughty bits. The directors filing the lawsuit complain that their names and trademarks are applied to a "created" movie that is not their original movie -- and they are attempting to use trademark as well as copyright law to fight Clearplay.
From the pace that this case has been proceeding through the courts, it's going to be a very long time before it is resolved.
What we heard from Apple is that "As long as there is something called 'Shake' there will be a Linux version." It sounds as if there may not be something called 'Shake' pretty soon.
It's a great package -- we just happily spent $20K to get a bunch of licenses to finish up Fast and Furious 3.
I had seen their previous RC models -- which really didn't look too much like the glider from the movie -- and thought "OK, that's pretty cool".
This is lightyears beyond cool.
They are fighting a lot of aerodynamic issues to make a human-carrying glider that now looks remarkably like the one in the movie. The challenge in flying wings is to fight the tendency of most wings to pitch down. In addition to this natural tendency, this wing has two things going against it.
1) The "jet" causes drag below the CG 2) The person raises the CG so high that there is a tendency to be unstable
Add to this the fact that the design allows very little sweepback (a typical way to get pitch stability in flying wings (see B2 and Northrop)) then you are really in a bind.
They must have a fabulously high positive pitching-moment airfoil. It is possible to make reasonably efficient airfoils with some positive pitch moment, but unless they've invented something truly revolutionary -- the demands on this airfoil for stability might mean that the glide ratio would not be very good.
Unfortunately, a few minutes thought shows that it's far easier to kill off a planet than it is just to kill off the people you don't like on a planet. For the race to be secure you'd have to do more than just colonize Mars -- you'd have to have people on ships moving away in all directions as fast as possible.
That would mean that the BSA would be by far the richest organization on the planet if they would just step up their auditing a few orders of magnitude.
If 20% of the software is pirated, and they can extort probably double the price of that software from these companies, then they should be hiring every person available to go make raids -- I mean, audits.
Seriously, ASCAP does this for songs. If you are playing music in your bistro and not paying them -- they will find out and shut you down. They have armies of people visiting all possible music-playing establishments -- and it works.
So -- the possibilities are
1) That the software piracy in the US is not actually all that rampant or 2) BSA and Microsoft decided that they really don't want the money that would come from enforcement.
...is that Centrino was a unbelievable success. It was a similar bundle-of-stuff, but unlike Viiv, it actually made some sense.
Intel thought that they could make another bundle, put a name on it, and make gigabucks again. *sigh* I think that they were just lucky the first time.
There is a very interesting aspect of delay, that is working to Microsoft's favor in this case.
In another field, note the most recently finished highway project in your local area. You might (if you were paying attention) remember the years of political turmoil before it started, the endless planning meetings, the politician promises. Then, you saw the signs go up, saying things like "This exit will be closed from Nov 11 2003 to Jun 1 2005" or something, and it seemed like forever. A date that far in the future is just a hell of a long time away.
But, note how you feel about the project today? The inconvenience of waiting are just completely gone. You've got a nice new freeway, and you get from here to there without much problem. In a couple of months it seems like it has always been there. All the hair-pulling and outrage that you felt when the finish date was first posted just seems so trivial now.
Anyway, that's the way it works for me.
Vista will be the same in a lot of ways. Microsoft, for better or for worse (mostly worse) is just as much of a monopoly as the Department of Public Works. They'll finish the goddamn highway on their own schedule, and they'll do an adequate job of it, and people will just live with it. And the very sad thing is, they'll like it.
In recent years, Aviation Week has become somewhat more conservative about its coverage -- it's a little disappointing in some ways, as now they are often the last place to publish something -- but they are very rarely mistaken about a scoop like this.
They often publish photographs of planes, too, and leave the interpretation up to the reader. For example, they published the first photos of Rutan's White Knight, the carrier for SpaceshipOne. The White Knight/SpaceshipOne system flies a profile very similar to the one described by this current article, although with much lower performance.
Anyway, AvWeek published the White Knight photos with no description of the plane's mission, but any informed reader would immediately recognize it as a spaceplane first stage. Once Rutan announced the program, they covered it completely, but until they knew for sure they didn't say anything. For them to describe this Blackstar system in this explicit detail, I am certain that all their ducks are in a row -- and barcoded.
I'm a big fan of Musk, too, and of private space enterprise in general.
My biggest problem with Musk is the lack of information at his website. If you want to generate a political movement (and that's what he's trying to do -- vying for Air Force contracts is the very definition of politics) you need to have much better publicity.
And his website sucks. While it's kind of pretty, there's almost no content. The news, in particular, is weak --three sentences and movie that won't play on Linux about the most recent static firing.
He has no excuse. He built PayPal! He knows the 'net! He has seen the kind of virtuous circle that can be built up through good communication. I cannot for the life of me understand why SpaceX fails so spectacularly in the communication mission.
And don't say that they are trying to keep their proprietary details secret -- if he's really interested in promoting inexpensive space travel, he'd *want* those secrets out there!
I contrast this with Carmack's spectacular Armadillo Aerospace site. All of his successes, failures, dead ends, oopses -- all presented in more detail than any sane person could ever want. With Carmack, you really feel like you can understand the process as much as you can without picking up a welding torch.
Anyway, I really can't complain. I'm sitting around making movies instead of spaceships -- please treat this rant as constructive criticism.
Well, that would be interesting. Basically you would be doing the exact equivalent of a phased-array radar, but with light.
The way that those filters-over-laser-pointers work is exactly holography -- you compute (or photograph) an image that diffracts the light of a particular frequency into the pattern you want.
What they may be doing here (and it's really quite cool if they are) is using a very small LCD array to build a rapidly-changing hologram. The LCD elements would have to really quite small, though, somewhat less than the wavelength of light -- but the whole array could be pretty small too -- perhaps on the order of 1mm by 1mm.
I'd be surprised, though, if you could really calculate a whole hologram of a display in that amount of time. Note that the little filters-over-laser-pointer images are quite simple; the ones that I've seen are just arrays of hundreds of dots. These are computationally tractable. The image of the Slashdot page right in front of your eyes now has a million or so dots, it would not be computational feasable to compute a hologram to create that -- at least not in 1/60th of a second.
What they might be doing is computing a hologram that would display a scanline. The hologram would do two things -- it would modulate the intensity of the points on the scanline, and it would bend the light to point in the right direction. For this to work, you'd have to scan the image quickly; and your light modulator array would have to run at some 60 KHz -- way beyond what LCDs can do. There are other technologies that could work though. Fortunately, you probably can get away with binary modulators, either ON or OFF cells.
This would be awesomely cool if it really does work this way!
I can find little information on the companies website. They claim that it has "no moving parts", and that it uses "Computer Generated Holograms" and that it uses some kind of micropixel display.
They say that because they can focus the laser so well, the computer generated hologram can be very small.
They say that the system works by "steering light" instead of blocking it (an LCD array blocks light to modulate it).
Anyway, none of this tells me very much. Are they using a piezoelectric mirror to scan a laser across a hologram, that bends the light to scan the image? Are they using a 1D mirror or LED array and then scanning that with a piezoelectric mirror/hologram? I assume that a piezoelectric mirror moves so little and so robustly that it's not considered a "moving part".
What is the particular brand of magic that these people are using?
This was rolled out years ago, and plotzed with a mighty thud when it happened, due in no small part to the http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/faq.html">wor k of Felten and his grad students at Princeton.
Basically, the Powers That Be came up with a very good watermarking system, but even the best system can be defeated by a very determined adversary -- especially since the watermarks can't be updated once the CDs are shipped.
Another problem that I've always had with these systems is the proof issue. If the RIAA tries to prosecute you for having watermarked files, they have to demonstrate the watermark. I can't imagine how they could show that without revealing exactly how the watermark is detected -- and once they do that, you should be off to the races.
Anyway -- this has been tried, and it has failed. The SDMI system was really quite sophisticated, and it failed almost immediately.
One of the authors spends a considerable amount of the article hyping his company "QuakeFinders", which is attempting to secure funding to build hundreds of sensors to blanket California. He says that this will cost tens of millions of dollars, which I'm sure he would see a significant percentage of personally.
The sensor that he descibes, though, sounds trivially simple to build. I could well believe that a system to hook these detectors into an actual warning system could be expensive, but building a bunch of detectors and deploying them around likely faults should be exteremly cheap indeed. Unfortunately, the "detectors" that have been built and deployed so far have yet to detect any earthquakes -- apparently because sufficiently large earthquakes have not been sufficiently close. Or maybe they just don't work, because the science is flawed.
People (like me!) complained for years that Photoshop only existed on the Mac and PC, and so, finally, Adobe ported version 3.0 (at apparently great expense) to the SGI. Unfortunately, it was a monumental failure -- Adobe sold perhaps hundreds of copies.
The sad thing about this is that now there is almost no way that Adobe would consider doing anything like that again, with Linux. They've been burned before.
It's a shame. I'm sure that they'd sell many more than a few hundred copies to the Linux market. Maybe even a thousand.
Hardware is so cheap these days, though, that you might as well have a Mac or Windows PC around to run Photoshop when you need it. After all, the software is going to cost you $1,000 or so, you can spring for another kilobuck on some hardware -- or you can dual-boot your Linux box under Windows.
As much as I'd like Photoshop to run under Linux for my visual effects company, in the end I would prefer that Adobe just make better versions that run under the toy operating systems. My painters will be happier that way, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Check these out. Full six-axis IMUs for just a very few hundred dollars.
I about wet my pants when I saw these. The last time I had checked, a few years ago, solid-state gyros (from Systron Donner, maker of the GyroChip line) were $1000 apiece.
Thad Beier
What's interesting about both of these papers is that previously-believed myths are shown to be, in fact, myths.
The Google paper shows that relatively high temperatures and high usage rates don't affect disk life.
The current paper shows that interface (SCSI, FC vs ATA) had no effect either. The Google paper shows
a significant infant mortality that the CMU paper didn't, and the Google paper shows some years of flat
reliability where the current paper shows decreasing reliability from year one.
The both show that the failure rate is far higher than the manufacturers specify, which shouldn't come
as a surprise to anybody with a few hundred disks.
I'm particularly pleased to see a stake driven through the heart of "SCSI disks are more reliable."
Manufacturers have been pushing that principle for years, saying that "oh, we bin-out the SCSI disks
after testing" or some other horseshit, but it's not true and it's never been true. The disks are
sometimes faster, but they're not "better".
Thad
On the other hand, there is a certain well-known actress, somewhat getting on in years it's true, who has her own personal digital retouch artist. Any movie she is in, she hires this guy to retouch all of her scenes. He knows her face intimately, knows just what to highlight, what the diminish, what to blur, what to sharpen.
I do visual effects for a living, I've never met anybody with any qualms whatsoever about making a shot better. It's what we do!
Do cinematographers object to putting softening filters in front of camera lenses when shooting the female talent, because it's "not real?" No.
My friend Lance Williams said it best when accepting his Sci-Tech award -- "It doesn't matter if it's real, it matters if it's true."
Thad
that's actually the most common treatment, more or less. Look up Lovaas. That's what we do for our boy.
Thad
The Economist had an article about barely-critical nuclear bomb testing, where the designers implode small pieces of plutonium for research, not intending to get any kind of explosion. They said that sometimes they got a little more than they expected, and this is called a "whoops". And -- sometimes it's bigger than that, and they call that and "uh-oh"
Thad
There will be mostly-software players -- players that require some bit of computation being done in a tamper-proof bit of hardware. Microsoft will ensure that that hardware is built into all Windows-Certified motherboards.
Thad
He is noted for his legal extortion. Few of his lawsuits go to trial, but it's often cheaper to pay him off than to fight the suit.
Think about it.
There are two parts of an AI -- there's the information, and then there's the building relationships and queries to that information.
The Web is the information. Pretty soon, a majority of the information in the world will be within reach of Google's spiders. That's not a surprise.
But, the building the relationships between those data is the hard part. That's the cool part of Google -- they have millions of people doing that work, for free.
Google is using the queries and query patterns of their users to build that half of the AI. Say you want to know, oh, how to build re-entry vehicles. You can search the web, and find lots of information about re-entry vehicles - but how to do separate out the good from bad information? Maybe you can wait until people start *searching* for information about re-entry vehicles, and watch what they do. Watch which sites they click-thru to. Watch how long they spend at each site. Watch the referrer tags of people that come to Google, to see where they were before. Watch how they modify their search terms to refind their search. Watch when they are apparently satisfied in their searches.
Now, do this with a billion people a day.
It's gonna be interesting.
Thad
Americans may not know this, but one of the big satellite stations in Europe had a large, well-funded, successful project to build and release hacks for the competing satellite service.
DVD-Jon, you may or may not recall, didn't actually do the DVD reverse-engineering himself, he served as the conduit for the information from (still) anonymous German hackers. Might these have been well-funded professionals, too?
The BluRay/HD-DVD format war will inevitably have people with significant money (we're talking tens of billions of dollars) who strongly want the other sides systems to be cracked. Will some money leak into the hands of the people who can do the work? I think it's inevitable.
Thad Beier
This network of some 73,000 machines has to rank as one of, if not the, leading supercomputer in the world. Why aren't they ranked in the Top500 list?
Thad
cei says: Well, there's always the argument that could be made that an edit list is a derivative work, but such an argument is on much more shaky ground
IANAL, but I don't think that it would be shaky ground at all, actually. It wouldn't surprise me if they make that argument somewhere in their pleadings. Without the ability to search the filings, though (they are just screen-grab PDFs) I can't tell if they did.
From Wikipedia's definition of "derivative work", it seems that the principle may well apply.
Thad Beier
[disclaimer: IANAL, but I am a filmmaker]
At the end of this feedback summary, the Clearplay solution is mooted.
The studios purport to be every bit as unhappy with Clearplay as the re-recording service providers that were the subject of this lawsuit. They are currently suing Clearplay in the case Huntsman v. Soderbergh/a? which is pending.
You can read all about it at the linked EFF site.
Basically, the arguments are almost all exactly the same -- except that the copyright issue is obviously different as there is no copy being sold. With Clearplay, you buy or rent the regular disk, and the Clearplay-supplied DVD player and service skips the naughty bits. The directors filing the lawsuit complain that their names and trademarks are applied to a "created" movie that is not their original movie -- and they are attempting to use trademark as well as copyright law to fight Clearplay.
From the pace that this case has been proceeding through the courts, it's going to be a very long time before it is resolved.
Thad Beier
What we heard from Apple is that "As long as there is something called 'Shake' there will be a Linux version." It sounds as if there may not be something called 'Shake' pretty soon.
It's a great package -- we just happily spent $20K to get a bunch of licenses to finish up Fast and Furious 3.
Thad Beier
I had seen their previous RC models -- which really didn't look too much like the glider from the movie -- and thought "OK, that's pretty cool".
This is lightyears beyond cool.
They are fighting a lot of aerodynamic issues to make a human-carrying glider that now looks remarkably like the one in the movie. The challenge in flying wings is to fight the tendency of most wings to pitch down. In addition to this natural tendency, this wing has two things going against it.
1) The "jet" causes drag below the CG
2) The person raises the CG so high that there is a tendency to be unstable
Add to this the fact that the design allows very little sweepback (a typical way to get pitch stability in flying wings (see B2 and Northrop)) then you are really in a bind.
They must have a fabulously high positive pitching-moment airfoil. It is possible to make reasonably efficient airfoils with some positive pitch moment, but unless they've invented something truly revolutionary -- the demands on this airfoil for stability might mean that the glide ratio would not be very good.
Still -- unbelivably impressive. Way to go!
Thad Beier
Unfortunately, a few minutes thought shows that it's far easier to kill off a planet than it is just to kill off the people you don't like on a planet. For the race to be secure you'd have to do more than just colonize Mars -- you'd have to have people on ships moving away in all directions as fast as possible.
We really need to work out our problems here.
Thad Beier
That would mean that the BSA would be by far the richest organization on the planet if they would just step up their auditing a few orders of magnitude.
If 20% of the software is pirated, and they can extort probably double the price of that software from these companies, then they should be hiring every person available to go make raids -- I mean, audits.
Seriously, ASCAP does this for songs. If you are playing music in your bistro and not paying them -- they will find out and shut you down. They have armies of people visiting all possible music-playing establishments -- and it works.
So -- the possibilities are
1) That the software piracy in the US is not actually all that rampant
or
2) BSA and Microsoft decided that they really don't want the money that would come from enforcement.
Draw your own conclusions.
Thad Beier
...is that Centrino was a unbelievable success. It was a similar bundle-of-stuff, but unlike Viiv, it actually made some sense.
Intel thought that they could make another bundle, put a name on it, and make gigabucks again. *sigh* I think that they were just lucky the first time.
Thad Beier
There is a very interesting aspect of delay, that is working to Microsoft's favor in this case.
In another field, note the most recently finished highway project in your local area. You might (if you were paying attention) remember the years of political turmoil before it started, the endless planning meetings, the politician promises. Then, you saw the signs go up, saying things like "This exit will be closed from Nov 11 2003 to Jun 1 2005" or something, and it seemed like forever. A date that far in the future is just a hell of a long time away.
But, note how you feel about the project today? The inconvenience of waiting are just completely gone. You've got a nice new freeway, and you get from here to there without much problem. In a couple of months it seems like it has always been there. All the hair-pulling and outrage that you felt when the finish date was first posted just seems so trivial now.
Anyway, that's the way it works for me.
Vista will be the same in a lot of ways. Microsoft, for better or for worse (mostly worse) is just as much of a monopoly as the Department of Public Works. They'll finish the goddamn highway on their own schedule, and they'll do an adequate job of it, and people will just live with it. And the very sad thing is, they'll like it.
Thad Beier
In recent years, Aviation Week has become somewhat more conservative about its coverage -- it's a little disappointing in some ways, as now they are often the last place to publish something -- but they are very rarely mistaken about a scoop like this.
They often publish photographs of planes, too, and leave the interpretation up to the reader. For example, they published the first photos of Rutan's White Knight, the carrier for SpaceshipOne. The White Knight/SpaceshipOne system flies a profile very similar to the one described by this current article, although with much lower performance.
Anyway, AvWeek published the White Knight photos with no description of the plane's mission, but any informed reader would immediately recognize it as a spaceplane first stage. Once Rutan announced the program, they covered it completely, but until they knew for sure they didn't say anything. For them to describe this Blackstar system in this explicit detail, I am certain that all their ducks are in a row -- and barcoded.
Thad Beier
I'm a big fan of Musk, too, and of private space enterprise in general.
My biggest problem with Musk is the lack of information at his website. If you want to generate a political movement (and that's what he's trying to do -- vying for Air Force contracts is the very definition of politics) you need to have much better publicity.
And his website sucks. While it's kind of pretty, there's almost no content. The news, in particular, is weak --three sentences and movie that won't play on Linux about the most recent static firing.
He has no excuse. He built PayPal! He knows the 'net! He has seen the kind of virtuous circle that can be built up through good communication. I cannot for the life of me understand why SpaceX fails so spectacularly in the communication mission.
And don't say that they are trying to keep their proprietary details secret -- if he's really interested in promoting inexpensive space travel, he'd *want* those secrets out there!
I contrast this with Carmack's spectacular Armadillo Aerospace site. All of his successes, failures, dead ends, oopses -- all presented in more detail than any sane person could ever want. With Carmack, you really feel like you can understand the process as much as you can without picking up a welding torch.
Anyway, I really can't complain. I'm sitting around making movies instead of spaceships -- please treat this rant as constructive criticism.
Thad Beier
Well, that would be interesting. Basically you would be doing the exact equivalent of a phased-array radar, but with light.
The way that those filters-over-laser-pointers work is exactly holography -- you compute (or photograph) an image that diffracts the light of a particular frequency into the pattern you want.
What they may be doing here (and it's really quite cool if they are) is using a very small LCD array to build a rapidly-changing hologram. The LCD elements would have to really quite small, though, somewhat less than the wavelength of light -- but the whole array could be pretty small too -- perhaps on the order of 1mm by 1mm.
I'd be surprised, though, if you could really calculate a whole hologram of a display in that amount of time. Note that the little filters-over-laser-pointer images are quite simple; the ones that I've seen are just arrays of hundreds of dots. These are computationally tractable. The image of the Slashdot page right in front of your eyes now has a million or so dots, it would not be computational feasable to compute a hologram to create that -- at least not in 1/60th of a second.
What they might be doing is computing a hologram that would display a scanline. The hologram would do two things -- it would modulate the intensity of the points on the scanline, and it would bend the light to point in the right direction. For this to work, you'd have to scan the image quickly; and your light modulator array would have to run at some 60 KHz -- way beyond what LCDs can do. There are other technologies that could work though. Fortunately, you probably can get away with binary modulators, either ON or OFF cells.
This would be awesomely cool if it really does work this way!
Thad Beier
I can find little information on the companies website. They claim that it has "no moving parts", and that it uses "Computer Generated Holograms" and that it uses some kind of micropixel display.
They say that because they can focus the laser so well, the computer generated hologram can be very small.
They say that the system works by "steering light" instead of blocking it (an LCD array blocks light to modulate it).
Anyway, none of this tells me very much. Are they using a piezoelectric mirror to scan a laser across a hologram, that bends the light to scan the image? Are they using a 1D mirror or LED array and then scanning that with a piezoelectric mirror/hologram? I assume that a piezoelectric mirror moves so little and so robustly that it's not considered a "moving part".
What is the particular brand of magic that these people are using?
Thad Beier
This was rolled out years ago, and plotzed with a mighty thud when it happened, due in no small part to the http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/faq.html">wor k of Felten and his grad students at Princeton.
Basically, the Powers That Be came up with a very good watermarking system, but even the best system can be defeated by a very determined adversary -- especially since the watermarks can't be updated once the CDs are shipped.
Another problem that I've always had with these systems is the proof issue. If the RIAA tries to prosecute you for having watermarked files, they have to demonstrate the watermark. I can't imagine how they could show that without revealing exactly how the watermark is detected -- and once they do that, you should be off to the races.
Anyway -- this has been tried, and it has failed. The SDMI system was really quite sophisticated, and it failed almost immediately.
Thad Beier
One of the authors spends a considerable amount of the article hyping his company "QuakeFinders", which is attempting to secure funding to build hundreds of sensors to blanket California. He says that this will cost tens of millions of dollars, which I'm sure he would see a significant percentage of personally.
The sensor that he descibes, though, sounds trivially simple to build. I could well believe that a system to hook these detectors into an actual warning system could be expensive, but building a bunch of detectors and deploying them around likely faults should be exteremly cheap indeed. Unfortunately, the "detectors" that have been built and deployed so far have yet to detect any earthquakes -- apparently because sufficiently large earthquakes have not been sufficiently close. Or maybe they just don't work, because the science is flawed.
Thad Beier
People (like me!) complained for years that Photoshop only existed on the Mac and PC, and so, finally, Adobe ported version 3.0 (at apparently great expense) to the SGI. Unfortunately, it was a monumental failure -- Adobe sold perhaps hundreds of copies.
The sad thing about this is that now there is almost no way that Adobe would consider doing anything like that again, with Linux. They've been burned before.
It's a shame. I'm sure that they'd sell many more than a few hundred copies to the Linux market. Maybe even a thousand.
Hardware is so cheap these days, though, that you might as well have a Mac or Windows PC around to run Photoshop when you need it. After all, the software is going to cost you $1,000 or so, you can spring for another kilobuck on some hardware -- or you can dual-boot your Linux box under Windows.
As much as I'd like Photoshop to run under Linux for my visual effects company, in the end I would prefer that Adobe just make better versions that run under the toy operating systems. My painters will be happier that way, anyway.
Thad Beier