The ruling was 4-3 in favor of the defendant, which is as close as it can get -- and the majority went out of their way to show how narrowly this ruling should be interpreted.
The defendant, Pavlovich, had several things in his favor. The DVD CCA, which brought the suit, claiming that Pavlovich should have known that they would be harmed, didn't even exist when the DeCSS code went up on Pavlovich's web site. The MPAA claims that they sent a 'cease and desist' letter to Pavlovich, but can't find a record of that, so the judges ignored it. And, the CA Supreme court majority recognizes that the DVD CCA could very easily try the case in Texas, so it's no real loss to them to do so.
If any of those three conditions wouldn't have happened, this would likely have been tried in California. It was really really close.
The Delta 4 class of rockets are powered by the only brand-new large rocket engine developed in the US since the Space Shuttle Main Engine -- which was developed during the early 70s. The funny thing is that Rocketdyne (now a division of Boeing) didn't actually have anybody there anymore who knew how to design rocket engines.
So, it ended up just like the movie Space Cowboys. Boeing rounded up all of their retired engineers, and put them to work designing one last engine. My neighbor went shuffling out every morning to work, coming back each evening with stars in his eyes for getting to work on this.
His take on this engine, confirmed by reports in Aviation Week, is that it is a great advance over the previous state of the art. It's remarkably simpler than previous engines, and operates at dramtically lower pressures -- trading a tiny bit of efficiency for dramatically higher reliability and manufacturability.
It's great to see that everything worked as planned. Almost everything in the Delta 4 is new (except the name 'Delta':) ) and any of thousands of things could have gone wrong, but apparently they've got something solid going here.
What will be really impressive is the first launch of the heavy lifter version of the Delta 4. Where the launch yesterday had a core vehicle with two small strap-on solid boosters, the heavy-lift version has three copies of the core side-by-side. It should be an absolutely beautiful launch, with the three RS-68s burning away with clean oxygen/hydrogen flames, and no smoky solids getting in the way. I can't wait.
thad
thad
Re:Dumb Question.
on
Film Gimp
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> If a conventional monitor can't display the colors > at that depth then how does the film editor know > exactly what will end up on film after printing?
Not a dumb question at all -- unless by dumb question you mean one that will start hour-long religious arguments that have no resolution:)
Seriously, one typically sets up one's monitor or display software to show a 'window' into the film's dynamic range. You can choose where you want to clip the bright values based on what part of the scene you're working on.
In the end you can get a good enough idea of what will show up on film that you are rarely too surprised -- and if you are surprised, you make changes based on your experience, and film it out again.
thad
This memo is a position paper from one MS faction
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 2
Unlike the original Vallipolli document, which seemed to address the impact of Linux on MS globally, this document seems clearly to be the work of a narrow faction, trying to convince others at Microsoft to agree with their position. Just as we criticize Mindcraft when they put out an benchmark funded by Microsoft and rigged so that Microsoft wins, this is a summary (and it's only the summary) of a survey crafted to make a particular statement within Microsoft. The survey is unfair and biased, so it's really not that useful either inside MS or to the rest of the world. The survey seems to have been created by a particular group of international market analysts within MS trying to promote their Shared Source initiative as a way of exerting hegemony. A few seconds thought would make it clear that Shared Source is a pretty darn small part of Microsoft's effort -- it seemed almost moribund to me -- and this piece seems like a desparate ploy of the people running Shared Source for continued support.
Nevertheless, it is a fun read. I'd love to see the detailed results, and not just the summaries. I'd love to see the actual questions were asked, too.
We think that this could have something to do with our five-year-old with autism, but it's hard to know. Our son was diagnosed with kidney reflux as a fetus using ultrasound, and at six months he was prescribed a low dose of amoxicillin to be taken every day to prevent bladder infections, which could back up into the kidneys a destroy them. We did this until he was about 22 months old or so.
While this is the kind of rediculous anecdote that shouldn't be given too much credence, it amazed me to find another patient of the same kidney specialist in our autism support group; with the same antibiotic program. Probably just a coincidence, but maybe not. Both syndromes are quite rare (although autism apparently becoming less so), and to find both in two kids is pretty darn unlikely, but of course possible.
Fnkmaster says Keep in mind that we get these vaccines EVERYWHERE in the US, and this problem has been observed in CA. If you read the report (or even the articles), you'll find that California keeps better records and has better programs for autism than the rest of the country. It's not yet clear if California actually is seeing a higher rate of autism than the rest of the country.
Lockheed Martin's "Silent Sentry" system has been trackin airplanes this way for several years, but instead of using relatively weak and short-range cellphone signals, they use the immensely stronger broadcast television and radio signals. A simple demonstration of this technology can be done with any old TV attached to an antenna -- when an airplane flies over, you often get a distortion or echoes in the TV image. As you might imagine, if you explicitly start looking for these distortions, you can detect and track the airplanes remarkably well.
Lockheed's first installation had used regular Radio-Shack TV antennas, but they were replaced pretty quickly by simple T-shaped antennas, along the wall of their building near Baltimore-Washington International airport. They claimed to be able to track targets more than 100 miles away. One spectacular advantage of this kind of 'radar' is that it has no emissions of its own, so the pilots have no inkling that their plane is being tracked. Apparently these systems required substantial computing horsepower, but of course the price of that has plummeted recently. I'm sure that one could build one of these systems now for a shockingly small amount of money.
Given the work that has been done using the long-wavelength TV signals, I'm sure that it will not be long at all before the equivalent cell tower based system can be deployed. It will be interesting to see what it is used for. Theoretically, these systems could have tremendous positive value; for example, things like smart cruise-control that knows where all the cars around you might be. Still, at least in the beginning, you can be sure that it will be exploited by the military and police forces first.
Lockheed Martin's "Silent Sentry" system has been trackin airplanes this way for several years, but instead of using relatively weak and short-range cellphone signals, they use the immensely stronger broadcast television and radio signals. A simple demonstration of this technology can be done with any old TV attached to an antenna -- when an airplane flies over, you often get a distortion or echoes in the TV image. As you might imagine, if you explicitly start looking for these distortions, you can detect and track the airplanes remarkably well.
Lockheed's first installation had used regular Radio-Shack TV antennas, but they were replaced pretty quickly by simple T-shaped antennas, along the wall of their building near Baltimore-Washington International airport. They claimed to be able to track targets more than 100 miles away. One spectacular advantage of this kind of 'radar' is that it has no emissions of its own, so the pilots have no inkling that their plane is being tracked. Apparently these systems required substantial computing horsepower, but of course the price of that has plummeted recently. I'm sure that one could build one of these systems now for a shockingly small amount of money.
Given the work that has been done using the long-wavelength TV signals, I'm sure that it will not be long at all before the equivalent cell tower based system can be deployed. It will be interesting to see what it is used for. Theoretically, these systems could have tremendous positive value; for example, things like smart cruise-control that knows where all the cars around you might be. Still, at least in the beginning, you can be sure that it will be exploited by the military and police forces first.
I was working on a movie, trying to do procedural animation in Alias Power Animator (the rediculously inferior predecessor to Maya) and decided that I could write my own animation system faster than I could get the animation done in PA. So I did.
The z animation system is designed for a particular class of animation common to visual effects, animation where a procedural description (that is, a script or a program) is the best way to do describe the animation. This is distinctly different from "character animation", but we are an FX house and not an animation house.
I chose to use a real programming language as the scripting language. I think that this is extremely important; for a number of reasons -- but the most important two in my experience is that every animation-language I've used has been terrible (slow, buggy, limiting, hard to debug, and slow); and standard languages have great IDEs, debuggers, compilers, and are instantly portable to a wide class of machines. I used C, and have been extremely happy with that choice.
Now, one might complain that C is a programming language and not a scripting language; and that it's hard to learn. I don't feel that there is a difference between scripting and programming -- and C is really quite an easy language to learn, there are great books, good courses, and a tremendous amount of code out there to learn from.
We use Pixar's RenderMan as our offline renderer, and use OpenGL as the real-time interactive renderer. These are really pretty similar in many ways, and with the combination of the C language, RenderMan, and OpenGL, the animation system is just glue holding these together; along with some spreadsheet and curve-editing libraries I already had lying around.
We've been moderately successful. About 1/3 of the FX you saw in X-Men were done in z, as were the FX you didn't see in Blue Crush (you didn't see them because our animators did such a good job.) We've worked on some 40 other movies over the last five years, and while we have Maya we haven't felt the need to use it except in some very character-animation-like instances.
One nice thing about the system that you are talking about is that you can do some core functionality pretty quickly, I would think, and then you can just add stuff as time goes on. Get polygons and spline surfaces working, then do subdivision surfaces down the road. Add sound when you need it. Texturing is free with current graphics boards, so that can go in at the beginning.
I believe that we are on the brink of a true revolution in graphics technology; and that we will leave pure software renderers behind in the next couple of years; so having a system that evolves with the upcoming graphics hardware could be a very useful and unique thing.
I also believe that Maya will probably be the last of the all-singing/all-dancing commercial animation systems. If you want to do everything that it does, you'll have to invest the 500 or so man-years that they put into it. To do that in a commercial system, with the frighteningly small size of the visual effects/animation market, is folly. I don't think it will be done again.
I find what CleanFlicks doing is clearly illegal -- they are making copies of copywrited videos. You can't say that they are editing copies that people have purchased, they have to make a new tape (unless they just want to record-over objectional scenes, hard to do with VHS.)
VHS is dead, though. What is more interesting is that the way that the way movies will be edited is by instructing your DVD player to skip or mute certain scenes. I can find no problem with this. You are still buying or renting the original DVD, and you just have a player that skips on occasion. Many of CleanFlicks competitors are already doing this.
I can't think of anything wrong will selling an edit-list to a movie.
Now, I would never buy one whose purpose was to remove 'objectionable' scenes, but I will defend the rights of other people to do so. What possible reason could you have to object to how your neighbor plays the film that he rented?
There will be humorous or interesting alternative edits made. What is the harm in those? Who could it possibly harm?
The advantage of this will be that more flexible DVD players, either hardware or software, will be made. This is a good thing.
I recently installed Linux-XFS on one of my computers here, as I was having problems with the kjournald process under ext3 taking extremely unreasonable amounts of time -- and I had had wonderful experiences with XFS on our SGIs -- it's always been solid and fast. Various reviewers of ext3 had complained about the existence of kjournald -- disputing the need for a user-code daemon.
Several places it is mentioned, though, that the kernel image of XFS is very large, so much that you can't really fit it onto a floppy (although people over-format their floppies to get 1.8 MB or so onto them, and then the kernel might just barely fit.)
I can't understand why any filesystem should be so big -- it seems that the code to run the filesystem is almost as big as the rest of Linux put together. How can this be? Is it really all code? What could that code possibly be doing?
I studied XFS fairly extensively after I had to repair a disk that had 1 of its 23 heads fail. From the remaining 22/23rd of the disk I managed to recover almost every file and directory, by writing my own XFS filesystem interpretation code. The on-disk organization of the filesystem is fairly simple and straightforward, I can't imagine where the hundreds of K of code is going.
I won't be shocked if the answer does lie in that kjournald daemon -- that XFS is bigger than ext3 because ext3 puts most of the bloat into a user-mode daemon instead of the kernel.
These people will go to the lowest depths," said Cowles, of Bowling Green, Ohio. "I have some phone clips that would make you sick."
> Ahem...
> You want to talk about going to the 'lowest depths'?
I would have to say that Cowles is one of the worlds leading authorities on how low people can go. You have to respect his opinion on something like that. I wouldn't trust just any scumbag for a definition of 'lowest depths', I'd go to a professional spammer.
1) "I feel that the difference between 'scripting' and 'programming' is nonexistent" -- mhm, ASP coders say that too;
If this is a religious argument about different languages, then there is no point in commenting. Otherwise, though, I truly don't see a difference between a 40,000 line shader used in A Bug's Life and any other program. I don't see a difference between a 20,000 line set of MEL scripts used in Dinosaur to control and animate the beasts and any other program. These are complex, rich, hard to write, difficult to debug, state-of-the-art systems written by toolbuilders and used by artists.
2) "A consistent request from filmmakers is for 'something nobody has seen before'" -- you are in a maze of Hollywood films, all alike...
That was a joke. We speak of an imaginary box full of things that nobody has seen before, so whenever the director asks for that we can just pull one out of the box.
3) "It's a new, high-lvel (sic) language for writing shaders." -- I think someone needs a new high level spellchecker;
Guilty as charged.
4) "The job of a movie director is to harness the skills of hundreds of talented, unique, possibly difficult people to create his vision and tell his story." -- no;
Sorry, but this is correct. I've worked on dozens of movies with an equal number of directors, and that's the job. The studios (typically) hire the director for his vision, and he implements that vision by getting the most out of his assembled cast and crew. What can you think the job of the director is?
4) "There are almost no rational reasons to choose CG visual effects as a career." -- especially when someone as incompetent as this might be displaced by your application;
I assume that this is just a personal attack. Well, whatever.
5) "Our first film was 'Showgirls', and I defy anybody to find the dozen shots we did in that movie -- they are not in-your-face effects. Two of our more recent films, 'The Fast and The Furious', and 'For Love of The Game'" -- see subject line; * "although I admit that 'Millenium' (sic), based on the book-length version of his short story"...
That's [sic], not (sic). Actually, I got my start by helping invent the field of digital visual effects, first at NYIT starting in '78 and then with PDI's film effects group starting in '89 with Solar Crisis and 70-odd other films. Hammerhead's first movie was . And I wish that Showgirls was porn, but about the least erotic film I've every seen.
No, it was Showgirls. We added some water to a fountain in the infamous pool scene, for example. The real fountain just spurted out little droplets; but they wanted it to be more of a flowing sheet of water, for continuity with later shots. We did some pretty fancy rig-removal (usually you can hide the flying-rig under clothes -- but not in this movie.) We also added some steam to some of the stage shows, and removed some blood (must have been the only time blood was removed from a Verhoven movie:)) from the fight scene. About 20 shots or so, in the end -- it was the show that got the company started.
One of my partners at work has an electic RAV4. It's totally electric, and has a range of about 100 miles, and a top speed of 80 MPH. It's every bit a 'real car', it's exactly a RAV4 with the engine ripped out and an electric motor squeezed in, and with somewhat lower rolling-resistance (but still full sized) tires.
I love this car. It's big enough for four full-sized people, it's peppy, and it's wonderfully silent.
Of course it's only available in California; I didn't know if that's where you were from (GM's EVs were mostly in CA.) California also lets you drive this car in carpool lanes with one person, and lets you park at any parking meter for free, as incentives.
You can rent these at some Thrifty locations, if you want to try before you buy.
I can't say enough good things about this car. It's just wonderful. The only downside is the cost, which is an eye-watering $41,000. What makes that somewhat more tolerable is that you get a whopping $9,000 rebate back from the IRS, and something like $3,000 back from the state Franchise Tax Board. The cost of electricity ends up being about 1 cent per mile, far less than gasoline would be.
And, since there is no gas tank under the back seats, they put the spare tire there, instead of hanging it off the back.
I was surprised to read in the article that one of the most important reasons that DVDs do so well compared to CDs is that so many extra features are included with DVDs. It makes sense, you can't see this extra stuff any other way -- it's not in the theaters. On the movies that I work on, the compilation of extras for the DVD has gone from being an afterthought to an integral part of the production. As DVD sales become a larger part of the 'box-office' for films, it wouldn't surprise me if the extras became as big a job as the original effects (we're an FX company, and so far the extras have focused on FX).
For some albums, there could be wonderful extras. The VH1 Behind the Music show on the making of the Graceland album, for instance, was absolutely wonderful. It had Paul Simon going through the various elements of each song on the original 24-track tape, describing what each element was, where it came from, and what it was meant to convey. He also talked about the lyrics, in a wonderfully honest and reflective way. I'd be happy (ecstatic, even) to pay $20 for a CD if it came with that kind of stuff.
Unfortunately, much of the pop music today probably doesn't stand up to that kind of in-depth analysis. But these 'extras' might really help distinguish high-quality well-thought-out music from the pap. Well, one can hope.
That you have to survive the landing for 48 hours, something that Fosset has thus far not demonstrated.
There was joke going around during the construction of Rutan's Voyager round-the-world-nonstop-nonrefueled plane, back in the mid 80's. Nothing was spared to reduce weight on that project, because every pound of additional structure required six or seven pounds of additional fuel, requiring more structure, and so on. Unfortunately, that philosophy turned the cockpit into a bit of a hellhole. The saying was, though, that any more than 48 hours of survival was excess design capacity; unneeded for the record attempt.
How would real-time animation be different than puppetry? Modern puppets often have more than one person controlling them, and the controls are arcane to say the least (each finger might control a different part of a face, say.) In my experience with puppeteers and animators, I have found that you can teach any competent visual artist animation -- some will be better than others, no doubt -- but puppetry is a much more rare talent.
Real-time rendering of CG puppets has been done by Brad de Graf, now at Dotcomix and several other people over the years; but it's never been easy or particularly successful.
Real-time capture of data for later non-real-time rendering is much more common. Graham Walters and I did the Waldo puppet for The Jim Henson Hour back in 1988. One might also consider the motion-capture technology now widely used in visual effects production as a type of whole-body puppetry -- the robots in the latest Star Wars movies are animated by having people perform the parts, and then capturing that motion.
There may be a future in multi-track puppetry; where you can lay down a track at a time, each pass recording a few more paramters until you get the whole sequence done. This would be of course analogous to multi-track audio recording. But recording a whole complex character in real time would mimic puppetry with all of its limitations and flaws, but more expensively.
The only reason to be in space is microgravity; so there'd be no point in rotating the whole space station. As far as rotating just the habitat portion of the station, it's difficult to imagine how you could do that -- what kind of seal you could make between the two compartments that would hold air perfectly but have very little friction. Perhaps more importantly, it's hard to see how you could rotate a part of the station at a few RPM and not transmit vibration back to the the other part, this vibration destroying the very microgravity that is the only reason for being there.
For long duration space flights to somewhere, it makes perfect sense to rotate the ship; I can't imagine not doing that. But for a LEO space station I don't think it will happen, unless that space station is used for something other than microgravity research (tourism, maybe?)
We did the zero-g fire in Red Planet We did some research into what it would really do; and ordered the NASA videos of their tests with zero-g fire. Unfortunately, the real thing is somewhat boring, in the best case you get an undulating spherical blob. In most cases, though, the fire goes out on its own pretty fast due to the lack of convection (unless the thing burning has its own oxygen supply, as was the case on MIR when one of the oxygen-generating 'candles' caught on fire.)
We tried to do our best to make it interesting and not stray too far from reality. We were vindicated when the LA Times got the Physics department at CalTech to review the movie. They said that everything in the movie was completely wrong, except for the zero-g fire which they thought was pretty cool.
The guy who invented the blue laser diode used one of the very first ones he had built as a laser pointer during his talk to the Japanese physicists where he introduced the theory behind it. Up to that point, nobody had ever seen one before; and it got the audiences attention in a big way.
Slashdot Mirror
The ruling was 4-3 in favor of the defendant, which is as close as it can get -- and the majority went out of their way to show how narrowly this ruling should be interpreted.
The defendant, Pavlovich, had several things in his favor. The DVD CCA, which brought the suit, claiming that Pavlovich should have known that they would be harmed, didn't even exist when the DeCSS code went up on Pavlovich's web site. The MPAA claims that they sent a 'cease and desist' letter to Pavlovich, but can't find a record of that, so the judges ignored it. And, the CA Supreme court majority recognizes that the DVD CCA could very easily try the case in Texas, so it's no real loss to them to do so.
If any of those three conditions wouldn't have happened, this would likely have been tried in California. It was really really close.
thad
The Delta 4 class of rockets are powered by the only brand-new large rocket engine developed in the US since the Space Shuttle Main Engine -- which was developed during the early 70s. The funny thing is that Rocketdyne (now a division of Boeing) didn't actually have anybody there anymore who knew how to design rocket engines.
:) ) and any of thousands of things could have gone wrong, but apparently they've got something solid going here.
So, it ended up just like the movie Space Cowboys. Boeing rounded up all of their retired engineers, and put them to work designing one last engine. My neighbor went shuffling out every morning to work, coming back each evening with stars in his eyes for getting to work on this.
His take on this engine, confirmed by reports in Aviation Week, is that it is a great advance over the previous state of the art. It's remarkably simpler than previous engines, and operates at dramtically lower pressures -- trading a tiny bit of efficiency for dramatically higher reliability and manufacturability.
It's great to see that everything worked as planned. Almost everything in the Delta 4 is new (except the name 'Delta'
What will be really impressive is the first launch of the heavy lifter version of the Delta 4. Where the launch yesterday had a core vehicle with two small strap-on solid boosters, the heavy-lift version has three copies of the core side-by-side. It should be an absolutely beautiful launch, with the three RS-68s burning away with clean oxygen/hydrogen flames, and no smoky solids getting in the way. I can't wait.
thad
thad
> If a conventional monitor can't display the colors
:)
> at that depth then how does the film editor know
> exactly what will end up on film after printing?
Not a dumb question at all -- unless by dumb question you mean one that will start hour-long religious arguments that have no resolution
Seriously, one typically sets up one's monitor or display software to show a 'window' into the film's dynamic range. You can choose where you want to clip the bright values based on what part of the scene you're working on.
In the end you can get a good enough idea of what will show up on film that you are rarely too surprised -- and if you are surprised, you make changes based on your experience, and film it out again.
thad
Unlike the original Vallipolli document, which seemed to address the impact of Linux on MS globally, this document seems clearly to be the work of a narrow faction, trying to convince others at Microsoft to agree with their position. Just as we criticize Mindcraft when they put out an benchmark funded by Microsoft and rigged so that Microsoft wins, this is a summary (and it's only the summary) of a survey crafted to make a particular statement within Microsoft. The survey is unfair and biased, so it's really not that useful either inside MS or to the rest of the world. The survey seems to have been created by a particular group of international market analysts within MS trying to promote their Shared Source initiative as a way of exerting hegemony. A few seconds thought would make it clear that Shared Source is a pretty darn small part of Microsoft's effort -- it seemed almost moribund to me -- and this piece seems like a desparate ploy of the people running Shared Source for continued support.
Nevertheless, it is a fun read. I'd love to see the detailed results, and not just the summaries. I'd love to see the actual questions were asked, too.
thad
We think that this could have something to do with our five-year-old with autism, but it's hard to know. Our son was diagnosed with kidney reflux as a fetus using ultrasound, and at six months he was prescribed a low dose of amoxicillin to be taken every day to prevent bladder infections, which could back up into the kidneys a destroy them. We did this until he was about 22 months old or so.
While this is the kind of rediculous anecdote that shouldn't be given too much credence, it amazed me to find another patient of the same kidney specialist in our autism support group; with the same antibiotic program. Probably just a coincidence, but maybe not. Both syndromes are quite rare (although autism apparently becoming less so), and to find both in two kids is pretty darn unlikely, but of course possible.
thad
Fnkmaster says Keep in mind that we get these vaccines EVERYWHERE in the US, and this problem has been observed in CA. If you read the report (or even the articles), you'll find that California keeps better records and has better programs for autism than the rest of the country. It's not yet clear if California actually is seeing a higher rate of autism than the rest of the country.
[disclaimer: my son has autism]
thad
Lockheed Martin's "Silent Sentry" system has been trackin airplanes this way for several years, but instead of using relatively weak and short-range cellphone signals, they use the immensely stronger broadcast television and radio signals. A simple demonstration of this technology can be done with any old TV attached to an antenna -- when an airplane flies over, you often get a distortion or echoes in the TV image. As you might imagine, if you explicitly start looking for these distortions, you can detect and track the airplanes remarkably well.
Lockheed's first installation had used regular Radio-Shack TV antennas, but they were replaced pretty quickly by simple T-shaped antennas, along the wall of their building near Baltimore-Washington International airport. They claimed to be able to track targets more than 100 miles away. One spectacular advantage of this kind of 'radar' is that it has no emissions of its own, so the pilots have no inkling that their plane is being tracked. Apparently these systems required substantial computing horsepower, but of course the price of that has plummeted recently. I'm sure that one could build one of these systems now for a shockingly small amount of money.
Given the work that has been done using the long-wavelength TV signals, I'm sure that it will not be long at all before the equivalent cell tower based system can be deployed. It will be interesting to see what it is used for. Theoretically, these systems could have tremendous positive value; for example, things like smart cruise-control that knows where all the cars around you might be. Still, at least in the beginning, you can be sure that it will be exploited by the military and police forces first.
thad
Lockheed Martin's "Silent Sentry" system has been trackin airplanes this way for several years, but instead of using relatively weak and short-range cellphone signals, they use the immensely stronger broadcast television and radio signals. A simple demonstration of this technology can be done with any old TV attached to an antenna -- when an airplane flies over, you often get a distortion or echoes in the TV image. As you might imagine, if you explicitly start looking for these distortions, you can detect and track the airplanes remarkably well.
Lockheed's first installation had used regular Radio-Shack TV antennas, but they were replaced pretty quickly by simple T-shaped antennas, along the wall of their building near Baltimore-Washington International airport. They claimed to be able to track targets more than 100 miles away. One spectacular advantage of this kind of 'radar' is that it has no emissions of its own, so the pilots have no inkling that their plane is being tracked. Apparently these systems required substantial computing horsepower, but of course the price of that has plummeted recently. I'm sure that one could build one of these systems now for a shockingly small amount of money.
Given the work that has been done using the long-wavelength TV signals, I'm sure that it will not be long at all before the equivalent cell tower based system can be deployed. It will be interesting to see what it is used for. Theoretically, these systems could have tremendous positive value; for example, things like smart cruise-control that knows where all the cars around you might be. Still, at least in the beginning, you can be sure that it will be exploited by the military and police forces first.
thad
I was working on a movie, trying to do procedural animation in Alias Power Animator (the rediculously inferior predecessor to Maya) and decided that I could write my own animation system faster than I could get the animation done in PA. So I did.
The z animation system is designed for a particular class of animation common to visual effects, animation where a procedural description (that is, a script or a program) is the best way to do describe the animation. This is distinctly different from "character animation", but we are an FX house and not an animation house.
I chose to use a real programming language as the scripting language. I think that this is extremely important; for a number of reasons -- but the most important two in my experience is that every animation-language I've used has been terrible (slow, buggy, limiting, hard to debug, and slow); and standard languages have great IDEs, debuggers, compilers, and are instantly portable to a wide class of machines. I used C, and have been extremely happy with that choice.
Now, one might complain that C is a programming language and not a scripting language; and that it's hard to learn. I don't feel that there is a difference between scripting and programming -- and C is really quite an easy language to learn, there are great books, good courses, and a tremendous amount of code out there to learn from.
We use Pixar's RenderMan as our offline renderer, and use OpenGL as the real-time interactive renderer. These are really pretty similar in many ways, and with the combination of the C language, RenderMan, and OpenGL, the animation system is just glue holding these together; along with some spreadsheet and curve-editing libraries I already had lying around.
We've been moderately successful. About 1/3 of the FX you saw in X-Men were done in z, as were the FX you didn't see in Blue Crush (you didn't see them because our animators did such a good job.) We've worked on some 40 other movies over the last five years, and while we have Maya we haven't felt the need to use it except in some very character-animation-like instances.
One nice thing about the system that you are talking about is that you can do some core functionality pretty quickly, I would think, and then you can just add stuff as time goes on. Get polygons and spline surfaces working, then do subdivision surfaces down the road. Add sound when you need it. Texturing is free with current graphics boards, so that can go in at the beginning.
I believe that we are on the brink of a true revolution in graphics technology; and that we will leave pure software renderers behind in the next couple of years; so having a system that evolves with the upcoming graphics hardware could be a very useful and unique thing.
I also believe that Maya will probably be the last of the all-singing/all-dancing commercial animation systems. If you want to do everything that it does, you'll have to invest the 500 or so man-years that they put into it. To do that in a commercial system, with the frighteningly small size of the visual effects/animation market, is folly. I don't think it will be done again.
thad
I find what CleanFlicks doing is clearly illegal -- they are making copies of copywrited videos. You can't say that they are editing copies that people have purchased, they have to make a new tape (unless they just want to record-over objectional scenes, hard to do with VHS.)
VHS is dead, though. What is more interesting is that the way that the way movies will be edited is by instructing your DVD player to skip or mute certain scenes. I can find no problem with this. You are still buying or renting the original DVD, and you just have a player that skips on occasion. Many of CleanFlicks competitors are already doing this.
I can't think of anything wrong will selling an edit-list to a movie.
Now, I would never buy one whose purpose was to remove 'objectionable' scenes, but I will defend the rights of other people to do so. What possible reason could you have to object to how your neighbor plays the film that he rented?
There will be humorous or interesting alternative edits made. What is the harm in those? Who could it possibly harm?
The advantage of this will be that more flexible DVD players, either hardware or software, will be made. This is a good thing.
thad
I recently installed Linux-XFS on one of my computers here, as I was having problems with the kjournald process under ext3 taking extremely unreasonable amounts of time -- and I had had wonderful experiences with XFS on our SGIs -- it's always been solid and fast. Various reviewers of ext3 had complained about the existence of kjournald -- disputing the need for a user-code daemon.
Several places it is mentioned, though, that the kernel image of XFS is very large, so much that you can't really fit it onto a floppy (although people over-format their floppies to get 1.8 MB or so onto them, and then the kernel might just barely fit.)
I can't understand why any filesystem should be so big -- it seems that the code to run the filesystem is almost as big as the rest of Linux put together. How can this be? Is it really all code? What could that code possibly be doing?
I studied XFS fairly extensively after I had to repair a disk that had 1 of its 23 heads fail. From the remaining 22/23rd of the disk I managed to recover almost every file and directory, by writing my own XFS filesystem interpretation code. The on-disk organization of the filesystem is fairly simple and straightforward, I can't imagine where the hundreds of K of code is going.
I won't be shocked if the answer does lie in that kjournald daemon -- that XFS is bigger than ext3 because ext3 puts most of the bloat into a user-mode daemon instead of the kernel.
thad
> quite simply, VA is preparing to be bought out by IBM.
And at 2:42 EDT, LNUX was up 42% to $1.17
thad
These people will go to the lowest depths," said Cowles, of Bowling Green, Ohio. "I have some phone clips that would make you sick."
> Ahem...
> You want to talk about going to the 'lowest depths'?
I would have to say that Cowles is one of the worlds leading authorities on how low people can go. You have to respect his opinion on something like that. I wouldn't trust just any scumbag for a definition of 'lowest depths', I'd go to a professional spammer.
thad
Responding to your points.
1) "I feel that the difference between 'scripting' and 'programming' is nonexistent" -- mhm, ASP coders say that too;
If this is a religious argument about different languages, then there is no point in commenting. Otherwise, though, I truly don't see a difference between a 40,000 line shader used in A Bug's Life and any other program. I don't see a difference between a 20,000 line set of MEL scripts used in Dinosaur to control and animate the beasts and any other program. These are complex, rich, hard to write, difficult to debug, state-of-the-art systems written by toolbuilders and used by artists.
2) "A consistent request from filmmakers is for 'something nobody has seen before'" -- you are in a maze of Hollywood films, all alike...
That was a joke. We speak of an imaginary box full of things that nobody has seen before, so whenever the director asks for that we can just pull one out of the box.
3) "It's a new, high-lvel (sic) language for writing shaders." -- I think someone needs a new high level spellchecker;
Guilty as charged.
4) "The job of a movie director is to harness the skills of hundreds of talented, unique, possibly difficult people to create his vision and tell his story." -- no;
Sorry, but this is correct. I've worked on dozens of movies with an equal number of directors, and that's the job. The studios (typically) hire the director for his vision, and he implements that vision by getting the most out of his assembled cast and crew. What can you think the job of the director is?
4) "There are almost no rational reasons to choose CG visual effects as a career." -- especially when someone as incompetent as this might be displaced by your application;
I assume that this is just a personal attack. Well, whatever.
5) "Our first film was 'Showgirls', and I defy anybody to find the dozen shots we did in that movie -- they are not in-your-face effects. Two of our more recent films, 'The Fast and The Furious', and 'For Love of The Game'" -- see subject line;
* "although I admit that 'Millenium' (sic), based on the book-length version of his short story"...
That's [sic], not (sic). Actually, I got my start by helping invent the field of digital visual effects, first at NYIT starting in '78 and then with PDI's film effects group starting in '89 with Solar Crisis and 70-odd other films. Hammerhead's first movie was . And I wish that Showgirls was porn, but about the least erotic film I've every seen.
Oh, and that's "Mr. Beier" to you.
thad
I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing that out.
thad
No, it was Showgirls. We added some water to a fountain in the infamous pool scene, for example. The real fountain just spurted out little droplets; but they wanted it to be more of a flowing sheet of water, for continuity with later shots. We did some pretty fancy rig-removal (usually you can hide the flying-rig under clothes -- but not in this movie.) We also added some steam to some of the stage shows, and removed some blood (must have been the only time blood was removed from a Verhoven movie :)) from the fight scene. About 20 shots or so, in the end -- it was the show that got the company started.
thad
One of my partners at work has an electic RAV4. It's totally electric, and has a range of about 100 miles, and a top speed of 80 MPH. It's every bit a 'real car', it's exactly a RAV4 with the engine ripped out and an electric motor squeezed in, and with somewhat lower rolling-resistance (but still full sized) tires.
I love this car. It's big enough for four full-sized people, it's peppy, and it's wonderfully silent.
Of course it's only available in California; I didn't know if that's where you were from (GM's EVs were mostly in CA.) California also lets you drive this car in carpool lanes with one person, and lets you park at any parking meter for free, as incentives.
You can rent these at some Thrifty locations, if you want to try before you buy.
I can't say enough good things about this car. It's just wonderful. The only downside is the cost, which is an eye-watering $41,000. What makes that somewhat more tolerable is that you get a whopping $9,000 rebate back from the IRS, and something like $3,000 back from the state Franchise Tax Board. The cost of electricity ends up being about 1 cent per mile, far less than gasoline would be.
And, since there is no gas tank under the back seats, they put the spare tire there, instead of hanging it off the back.
thad
I was surprised to read in the article that one of the most important reasons that DVDs do so well compared to CDs is that so many extra features are included with DVDs. It makes sense, you can't see this extra stuff any other way -- it's not in the theaters. On the movies that I work on, the compilation of extras for the DVD has gone from being an afterthought to an integral part of the production. As DVD sales become a larger part of the 'box-office' for films, it wouldn't surprise me if the extras became as big a job as the original effects (we're an FX company, and so far the extras have focused on FX).
For some albums, there could be wonderful extras. The VH1 Behind the Music show on the making of the Graceland album, for instance, was absolutely wonderful. It had Paul Simon going through the various elements of each song on the original 24-track tape, describing what each element was, where it came from, and what it was meant to convey. He also talked about the lyrics, in a wonderfully honest and reflective way. I'd be happy (ecstatic, even) to pay $20 for a CD if it came with that kind of stuff.
Unfortunately, much of the pop music today probably doesn't stand up to that kind of in-depth analysis. But these 'extras' might really help distinguish high-quality well-thought-out music from the pap. Well, one can hope.
thad
That you have to survive the landing for 48 hours, something that Fosset has thus far not demonstrated.
There was joke going around during the construction of Rutan's Voyager round-the-world-nonstop-nonrefueled plane, back in the mid 80's. Nothing was spared to reduce weight on that project, because every pound of additional structure required six or seven pounds of additional fuel, requiring more structure, and so on. Unfortunately, that philosophy turned the cockpit into a bit of a hellhole. The saying was, though, that any more than 48 hours of survival was excess design capacity; unneeded for the record attempt.
thad
How would real-time animation be different than puppetry? Modern puppets often have more than one person controlling them, and the controls are arcane to say the least (each finger might control a different part of a face, say.) In my experience with puppeteers and animators, I have found that you can teach any competent visual artist animation -- some will be better than others, no doubt -- but puppetry is a much more rare talent.
Real-time rendering of CG puppets has been done by Brad de Graf, now at Dotcomix and several other people over the years; but it's never been easy or particularly successful.
Real-time capture of data for later non-real-time rendering is much more common. Graham Walters and I did the Waldo puppet for The Jim Henson Hour back in 1988. One might also consider the motion-capture technology now widely used in visual effects production as a type of whole-body puppetry -- the robots in the latest Star Wars movies are animated by having people perform the parts, and then capturing that motion.
There may be a future in multi-track puppetry; where you can lay down a track at a time, each pass recording a few more paramters until you get the whole sequence done. This would be of course analogous to multi-track audio recording. But recording a whole complex character in real time would mimic puppetry with all of its limitations and flaws, but more expensively.
thad
The only reason to be in space is microgravity; so there'd be no point in rotating the whole space station. As far as rotating just the habitat portion of the station, it's difficult to imagine how you could do that -- what kind of seal you could make between the two compartments that would hold air perfectly but have very little friction. Perhaps more importantly, it's hard to see how you could rotate a part of the station at a few RPM and not transmit vibration back to the the other part, this vibration destroying the very microgravity that is the only reason for being there.
For long duration space flights to somewhere, it makes perfect sense to rotate the ship; I can't imagine not doing that. But for a LEO space station I don't think it will happen, unless that space station is used for something other than microgravity research (tourism, maybe?)
thad
Check out this paper by Chen and Williams. In this work done back at Apple in '93 they describe how to create intermediate camera angles from multiple static images.
Of course, the capacity to fly around the scene in real time had to wait until computers got a lot faster.
thad
HP leant me one of these machines so that I could write a review of it for Linux Journal. You can read it here.
:)
The gist of the article is that these can be great animatior workstations, with the maturity of Linux and high-end animation applications.
Now how do I get my commissioin
thad
We did the zero-g fire in Red Planet We did some research into what it would really do; and ordered the NASA videos of their tests with zero-g fire. Unfortunately, the real thing is somewhat boring, in the best case you get an undulating spherical blob. In most cases, though, the fire goes out on its own pretty fast due to the lack of convection (unless the thing burning has its own oxygen supply, as was the case on MIR when one of the oxygen-generating 'candles' caught on fire.)
We tried to do our best to make it interesting and not stray too far from reality. We were vindicated when the LA Times got the Physics department at CalTech to review the movie. They said that everything in the movie was completely wrong, except for the zero-g fire which they thought was pretty cool.
thad
> I'm still looking for a blue one :-)
The guy who invented the blue laser diode used one of the very first ones he had built as a laser pointer during his talk to the Japanese physicists where he introduced the theory behind it. Up to that point, nobody had ever seen one before; and it got the audiences attention in a big way.
thad