Yes. I understand that they have built these arrays of so-called microantennas. I believe that they are props, fakes, shiny objects to distract from what is really happening.
Those antennae are tiny, too small to pick up the relatively long wavelengths of current transmissions. The are packed together so tightly that they would be shielding one another from the signals. Running analog signals from those antennae to tens of thousands of separate tuners? Come on, really?
Does anybody really think that there is actually one antenna per customer? And that that antenna is hooked up to a particular DVR? And that that antenna and DVR are connected to just one customer?
I just can't and don't believe it. The 'antenna array' is surely a prop, and the DVR has to be a rack of shared servers.
I did visual effects for the first four Fast and Furious movies. We did a lot of the car photography on a green-screen stage, and comped in backgrounds shot driving down streets. We used arrays of film cameras, usually Arri 435s (on Fast 2 we also used VistaVision cameras.)
These would be much simpler, cheaper, and more rugged.
There are similar cameras from Point Grey [ptgrey.com]. These have been out for quite some time. The Point Grey cameras are an order of magnitude more expensive than these vaporware cameras, though.
Curiously, in my youth in the 60's, we referred to Luna-9 as a "hard landing", and the first "soft landing" was Surveyor 1 three months later. Now, it's clear that the Luna 9 lander really was a soft landing (similar to the landings of the Mars Pathfinder and Spirit/Opportunity rovers) and we were just ragging on the Soviets.
I don't think any of the designs will get up to mach 10 in the atmosphere, there's little point. Staging out of the atmosphere is a lot easier. And once you're in space, it's probably easier to kick yourself along (a boosted skip-glide) around the world to get back to the launch point.
With fiber optics...I don't think it's very easy. Especially with the new doped fibers that do their own recharging.
It used to be that there had to be transceivers every so often along the fiber, to turn the optical signals back into electronic signals, then generate new laser pulses. The new cables basically build lasers into the fiber, allow it to refresh the signal without going through that process.
Among the many problems with hyperloop is elevation changes. If you're going even 1000 miles per hour, the minimum turning radius to stay less than half a g is 25 miles. There are 4000 ft mountains between LA and SF, and either you have to build a 80 mile long tunnel through them (pretty expensive) or build a viaduct that is 2000 ft high and 100 miles long. Going around the mountains might make more sense, but you're going to end up way out to sea.
The difference between a rocket engine and an explosive shell is almost nil. People have been using explosive shells in cannons with similar g forces for 100 years.
If the mountain is a 2km away the reflection from the mirror is going to be very broad indeed. The sun is a half-degree across, and half-degree times 2km means that the edges of the mirror beam will be about 20 meters wide, nice soft edges and not the harsh ellipse shown. The ends of the ellipse will have edges more like 100 meters wide.
There are thousands of visual effects artists who are, or soon will be, out of work -- who would be happy to model anything for you. Schools today are training thousands more every year.
I think the biggest problem is that people don't want something unique -- they wants something everybody else has.
Think about it -- say you could print your own phone; and it would be unique; custom fit to your hand (say), and really the best possible phone for you. How many would want that, vs. the phone that everybody else has?
Back when it was thought that neutrinos were massless, it was impossible to believe that there were huge masses of neutrinos surrounding galaxies, as they would have to travel at the speed of light. But now that we know that neutrinos have mass, maybe they could travel a lot more slowly, slow enough to be captured by a galaxy.
Think about it; there are a huge amount of neutrinos created every microsecond in every star in every galaxy, and they hardly interact with anything. They've been accumulating since the big bang.
What happened to the early photons? Those created as the universe first became transparent initially were very high energy indeed, but as the universe has expanded they've lost energy, to the point that they correspond to a temperature of just 3 degrees kelvin. What happens to neutrinos of a similar vintage?
Ammonia is terribly useful in its own right. The amount of energy used making ammonia for fertilizer is huge, and is growing. You can stop right there, and have a very useful process -- even if it only runs on sunny days.
I was working at SGI at the time, late 1991. The cheapest way to buy expansion memory was to buy Indigo's and throw out the rest of the computer. SGI was just feeling the first tickles of the commoditization of computer hardware, and was looking for ways to make their components unique (and keep them expensive.)
The Pixel Qi LCD screen does exactly this to get high-efficiency color; splitting the RGB colors from the LED backlight to direct it to individual LCD cells. The idea of applying the same ideas to cameras are not new.
A big challenge with this idea, and many others, is that for cameras with variable focal lengths, the light hitting the edge of the sensor might come from almost straight in front (for a long lens); or from an extreme angle (for a wide-angle lens) causing significant issues with this kind of optics-in-front-of-the-sensor camera. For a fixed-focus lens as on a cellphone (like 90% of cameras built today) it's not an issue.
During a week in 2008, three undersea cables were cut off of Egypt. At the time (and still) the cuts were attributed to ships dragging anchors -- although the fact that there were three cuts so close in time was, and remains, hard to believe.
So, now we see people intentionally cutting a cable. Hmm.
During the second world war, there were teams of saboteurs who were tasked with cutting telephone cables across France, in preference to almost any other target, because it was much easier for the British to intercept radio messages than telephone messages. I can't imagine any other reason for this.
One of the big issues with LCD displays is that they block most of the light going through them; so they are inherently inefficient. The first polarizer blocks 50% right of the bat, and by the time you are done, a color LCD screen showing its brightest white is still blocking probably 85% of the light from the backlight. Electrowetting displays promise to let some 80% of the light through for b/w, and quite a bit more than LCDs for color. For example, 3D shutter glasses currently use LCD displays and they block 60% of the light, electrowetting displays would be far better.
About 15 years ago, Grumman made a similar proposal; to build F-14s for half the cost of the F/A-18s. In that case, like this one, the F-14 was a faster, more capable platform than the F/A-18. The DOD response was to order Grumman to destroy all the F-14 jigs, so that they could never possibly build another one. I suspect the same will happen now.
I was hoping to use exactly something like this years ago, when I had to transfer tens of GB to and from Korea every day when I was working at Hammerhead Productions. Using rsync was painfully slow, because TCP/IP required acknowledgement of each packet -- and even though our bandwidth was high, our latency was very long, and we were getting less than 1 Mbps rather than the 10 Mbps we should have been getting.
Using something like BitTorrent, which uses UDP and does the error checking itself asynchronously would have been a huge help. We had multiple cable modems on both ends, and BitTorrent would have been perfect.
In the end, I wrote a simple tool which copied files using scp, but ran 10 threads with 10 separate scp calls and got almost 10 Mbps from each cable modem.
Apple does attend CES -- last year they had 250 or so people attending. No, they don't have a booth, but they felt the need to spend a couple of million dollars to have people go to stay in touch with the consumer zeitgeist.
And that's the whole reason for trade shows. I would never go to a trade show to find information on a particular product -- if I know what I'm interested in, there are a number of better ways to find out about it online. What is unique and vital about trade shows is the serendipity. I see one product here, one presentation there, talk to an old buddy at lunch, and all of a sudden I can put those things together into something new and revolutionary.
Of course, nobody mentions that the Gemini missions used storable propellants not unlike what the North Koreans are using. Now, it's true that Gemini was launched with Titan rockets, and Titans were originally designed as ICBMs, but they were used for civilian purposes as well.
The more interesting part is that we recovered the missile parts. According to everything I read, the exact timing of the launch was somewhat of a surprise (maybe this isn't true) but nevertheless we managed to track the debris and fish it out of the ocean immediately. This tells the North Koreans that not only do they have no secrets, they never will have any.
To me, the North Korean rocket looks a lot more like a satellite launcher than an ICBM. The first nuclear weapons that North Korea will deploy will be very heavy, and this rocket (as tapered as it is, and with such a small, low-powered third stage) just will not carry it. ICBMs are also designed to burn quickly, as they are vulnerable as long as they are in the atmosphere and burning. This rocket burns for many minutes, as satellite launchers do.
RealD would supply the 3D systems, for example, for free -- splitting the 3D upcharge cost with the theater 50:50.
Among the ironies of this is that Hollywood was ecstatic about the increased dollar volume that 3D brought in, but almost none of that actually went to the studios.
I was the stereo supervisor on 30% of Transformers 3, and did a lot of research into stereo as part of that project.
It's obvious once you think about it that stereo 3D is most useful and appropriate at arm's length -- that's what our stereo perception has evolved to do for us. We want to be able to bash that wolf with a club, or pick up a glass of water, or shake somebody's hand -- all things that happen within 5 or 8 feet.
I believe you were being facetious, but My Dinner with Andre would be perfect for 3D. You would be absolutely in the world of that tabletop; many more of the natural depth cues would work synergistically. Give me 6 or 10 million dollars, and I'll prove it:)
Porn is another obvious example that would work for the same reasons. According to people in the market, though, the viewer typically wants to be at some distance from the performers -- they want that wall to be there.
And for the last 40 years Lockheed has been the world leader in jacking up costs once their "low bid" has been accepted. Now don't get me wrong, their work on the P-38, U2, SR-71 and F117 is the best of the best, but the F22 and F35 debacles are the biggest financial crimes against america ever.
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Yes. I understand that they have built these arrays of so-called microantennas. I believe that they are props, fakes, shiny objects to distract from what is really happening.
Those antennae are tiny, too small to pick up the relatively long wavelengths of current transmissions. The are packed together so tightly that they would be shielding one another from the signals. Running analog signals from those antennae to tens of thousands of separate tuners? Come on, really?
Thad
Does anybody really think that there is actually one antenna per customer? And that that antenna is hooked up to a particular DVR? And that that antenna and DVR are connected to just one customer?
I just can't and don't believe it. The 'antenna array' is surely a prop, and the DVR has to be a rack of shared servers.
I did visual effects for the first four Fast and Furious movies. We did a lot of the car photography on a green-screen stage, and comped in backgrounds shot driving down streets. We used arrays of film cameras, usually Arri 435s (on Fast 2 we also used VistaVision cameras.)
These would be much simpler, cheaper, and more rugged.
There are similar cameras from Point Grey [ptgrey.com]. These have been out for quite some time. The Point Grey cameras are an order of magnitude more expensive than these vaporware cameras, though.
Thad
Curiously, in my youth in the 60's, we referred to Luna-9 as a "hard landing", and the first "soft landing" was Surveyor 1 three months later. Now, it's clear that the Luna 9 lander really was a soft landing (similar to the landings of the Mars Pathfinder and Spirit/Opportunity rovers) and we were just ragging on the Soviets.
Sending a neutrino beam through the earth will be faster than taking the great-circle route across the surface of the earth.
Of course, one would have to send a ridiculously large number of neutrinos to be sure to have them detected, but that's just an engineering problem.
I don't think any of the designs will get up to mach 10 in the atmosphere, there's little point. Staging out of the atmosphere is a lot easier. And once you're in space, it's probably easier to kick yourself along (a boosted skip-glide) around the world to get back to the launch point.
With fiber optics...I don't think it's very easy. Especially with the new doped fibers that do their own recharging.
It used to be that there had to be transceivers every so often along the fiber, to turn the optical signals back into electronic signals, then generate new laser pulses. The new cables basically build lasers into the fiber, allow it to refresh the signal without going through that process.
Among the many problems with hyperloop is elevation changes. If you're going even 1000 miles per hour, the minimum turning radius to stay less than half a g is 25 miles. There are 4000 ft mountains between LA and SF, and either you have to build a 80 mile long tunnel through them (pretty expensive) or build a viaduct that is 2000 ft high and 100 miles long. Going around the mountains might make more sense, but you're going to end up way out to sea.
The difference between a rocket engine and an explosive shell is almost nil. People have been using explosive shells in cannons with similar g forces for 100 years.
If the mountain is a 2km away the reflection from the mirror is going to be very broad indeed. The sun is a half-degree across, and half-degree times 2km means that the edges of the mirror beam will be about 20 meters wide, nice soft edges and not the harsh ellipse shown. The ends of the ellipse will have edges more like 100 meters wide.
There are thousands of visual effects artists who are, or soon will be, out of work -- who would be happy to model anything for you. Schools today are training thousands more every year.
I think the biggest problem is that people don't want something unique -- they wants something everybody else has.
Think about it -- say you could print your own phone; and it would be unique; custom fit to your hand (say), and really the best possible phone for you. How many would want that, vs. the phone that everybody else has?
Back when it was thought that neutrinos were massless, it was impossible to believe that there were huge masses of neutrinos surrounding galaxies, as they would have to travel at the speed of light. But now that we know that neutrinos have mass, maybe they could travel a lot more slowly, slow enough to be captured by a galaxy.
Think about it; there are a huge amount of neutrinos created every microsecond in every star in every galaxy, and they hardly interact with anything. They've been accumulating since the big bang.
What happened to the early photons? Those created as the universe first became transparent initially were very high energy indeed, but as the universe has expanded they've lost energy, to the point that they correspond to a temperature of just 3 degrees kelvin. What happens to neutrinos of a similar vintage?
Ammonia is terribly useful in its own right. The amount of energy used making ammonia for fertilizer is huge, and is growing. You can stop right there, and have a very useful process -- even if it only runs on sunny days.
I was working at SGI at the time, late 1991. The cheapest way to buy expansion memory was to buy Indigo's and throw out the rest of the computer. SGI was just feeling the first tickles of the commoditization of computer hardware, and was looking for ways to make their components unique (and keep them expensive.)
The Pixel Qi LCD screen does exactly this to get high-efficiency color; splitting the RGB colors from the LED backlight to direct it to individual LCD cells. The idea of applying the same ideas to cameras are not new.
A big challenge with this idea, and many others, is that for cameras with variable focal lengths, the light hitting the edge of the sensor might come from almost straight in front (for a long lens); or from an extreme angle (for a wide-angle lens) causing significant issues with this kind of optics-in-front-of-the-sensor camera. For a fixed-focus lens as on a cellphone (like 90% of cameras built today) it's not an issue.
During a week in 2008, three undersea cables were cut off of Egypt. At the time (and still) the cuts were attributed to ships dragging anchors -- although the fact that there were three cuts so close in time was, and remains, hard to believe.
So, now we see people intentionally cutting a cable. Hmm.
During the second world war, there were teams of saboteurs who were tasked with cutting telephone cables across France, in preference to almost any other target, because it was much easier for the British to intercept radio messages than telephone messages. I can't imagine any other reason for this.
One of the big issues with LCD displays is that they block most of the light going through them; so they are inherently inefficient. The first polarizer blocks 50% right of the bat, and by the time you are done, a color LCD screen showing its brightest white is still blocking probably 85% of the light from the backlight. Electrowetting displays promise to let some 80% of the light through for b/w, and quite a bit more than LCDs for color. For example, 3D shutter glasses currently use LCD displays and they block 60% of the light, electrowetting displays would be far better.
You know, if they existed.
About 15 years ago, Grumman made a similar proposal; to build F-14s for half the cost of the F/A-18s. In that case, like this one, the F-14 was a faster, more capable platform than the F/A-18. The DOD response was to order Grumman to destroy all the F-14 jigs, so that they could never possibly build another one. I suspect the same will happen now.
I was hoping to use exactly something like this years ago, when I had to transfer tens of GB to and from Korea every day when I was working at Hammerhead Productions. Using rsync was painfully slow, because TCP/IP required acknowledgement of each packet -- and even though our bandwidth was high, our latency was very long, and we were getting less than 1 Mbps rather than the 10 Mbps we should have been getting.
Using something like BitTorrent, which uses UDP and does the error checking itself asynchronously would have been a huge help. We had multiple cable modems on both ends, and BitTorrent would have been perfect.
In the end, I wrote a simple tool which copied files using scp, but ran 10 threads with 10 separate scp calls and got almost 10 Mbps from each cable modem.
Aspera does similar things at insane prices.
Apple does attend CES -- last year they had 250 or so people attending . No, they don't have a booth, but they felt the need to spend a couple of million dollars to have people go to stay in touch with the consumer zeitgeist.
And that's the whole reason for trade shows. I would never go to a trade show to find information on a particular product -- if I know what I'm interested in, there are a number of better ways to find out about it online. What is unique and vital about trade shows is the serendipity. I see one product here, one presentation there, talk to an old buddy at lunch, and all of a sudden I can put those things together into something new and revolutionary.
I'll be there!
Of course, nobody mentions that the Gemini missions used storable propellants not unlike what the North Koreans are using. Now, it's true that Gemini was launched with Titan rockets, and Titans were originally designed as ICBMs, but they were used for civilian purposes as well.
The more interesting part is that we recovered the missile parts. According to everything I read, the exact timing of the launch was somewhat of a surprise (maybe this isn't true) but nevertheless we managed to track the debris and fish it out of the ocean immediately. This tells the North Koreans that not only do they have no secrets, they never will have any.
To me, the North Korean rocket looks a lot more like a satellite launcher than an ICBM. The first nuclear weapons that North Korea will deploy will be very heavy, and this rocket (as tapered as it is, and with such a small, low-powered third stage) just will not carry it. ICBMs are also designed to burn quickly, as they are vulnerable as long as they are in the atmosphere and burning. This rocket burns for many minutes, as satellite launchers do.
RealD would supply the 3D systems, for example, for free -- splitting the 3D upcharge cost with the theater 50:50.
Among the ironies of this is that Hollywood was ecstatic about the increased dollar volume that 3D brought in, but almost none of that actually went to the studios.
I was the stereo supervisor on 30% of Transformers 3, and did a lot of research into stereo as part of that project.
It's obvious once you think about it that stereo 3D is most useful and appropriate at arm's length -- that's what our stereo perception has evolved to do for us. We want to be able to bash that wolf with a club, or pick up a glass of water, or shake somebody's hand -- all things that happen within 5 or 8 feet.
I believe you were being facetious, but My Dinner with Andre would be perfect for 3D. You would be absolutely in the world of that tabletop; many more of the natural depth cues would work synergistically. Give me 6 or 10 million dollars, and I'll prove it :)
Porn is another obvious example that would work for the same reasons. According to people in the market, though, the viewer typically wants to be at some distance from the performers -- they want that wall to be there.
And for the last 40 years Lockheed has been the world leader in jacking up costs once their "low bid" has been accepted. Now don't get me wrong, their work on the P-38, U2, SR-71 and F117 is the best of the best, but the F22 and F35 debacles are the biggest financial crimes against america ever.
Really? A gun you can purchase for $500 is worth $1,000 on the black market? That sounds like a great opportunity for exploiting regulatory arbitrage!