I've looked at this a few dozen times. It's truly an amazing effect.
Being in the CGI effects business myself (and actually right in the middle of bidding some interesting atmospheric effects for a movie dogfight) I thought it was fake at first, mostly because I've never seen anything like this before. A spectacular display like this, I would have thought, would have been photographed many times if it was a normal occurrence. Some commenters have said that something similar happened on the Apollo XI launch, I haven't seen film that confirms that.
But no, it's clearly real. Many people saw it, several people filmed it.
What it is, is the shockwave moving through a thin layer of clouds and atmosphere. The shockwave disturbs that layer of clouds in some way (in the case of the sun dog, apparently disturbing the crystals orientation -- shockingly these sun dogs require the hexagonal crystals to be hanging more-or-less flat in the air) There are any number of films of airplanes flying above the speed of sound causing clouds to pop into existence and then disappear as the shockwave passes. Every nuclear bomb sequence has these kind of shock-induced clouds as well.
I suppose that clouds with exactly the characteristics to make this happen for rocket launches are rare, because I've watched film of hundreds of launches and never seen this. It always pays to look up!
Johns Hopkins University had a program called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY). The state of Maryland selected the top.1% of 7th grade kids on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills for further testing, and Johns Hopkins provided the best-scoring 30 or so of us with advanced courses, both at JHU and at local community colleges. Most of us entered college at 15 or 16 (I was 15.)
It was, in the end, a mistake. I think most of the kids in the group weren't ready for college, and a lot of us didn't do as well as we might have with a couple of more years social experience behind us.
JHU stopped doing this 20 years ago.
There are some success stories, and some ok stories, and some really bad stories. I just don't think it's worth it.
The real innovation here is the 3M material, not the TI chips driving the display. The material requires that the image be illuminated alternately fro the right and left edges of the screen, the material deflects that light into the right and left eyes respectively. Unlike lenticular displays, there is only one viewing direction that works, but it won't diminish the spatial resolution of the display (only the temporal one.) It will work great for something like a game-boy or an iPhone. Even something as small as an iPad, though, might have problems because the difference in eye-to-screen angle from one side of the display to the other.
This slide tells you everything you need to know about the 3M film.
The US regularly flies training missions against Russian aircraft. In an unprecedented display, recently, Indian pilots flying the most modern Su-27 variants scored significant victories against US F-15s.
Granted, these confrontations have never happened during wartime, and the F15 has an unblemished combat record (100 planes shot down to 0 lost). Some say that the US took a dive at the Cope India 04 games to encourage funding of the F-22, that seems unlikely to me (the US planes were restricted from using BVR (beyond-visual-range) missles.)
So, comparing 4th generation fighters, an argument can be made that the 1980's Russian ones are comparable to the 1970's US ones.
My aunt was a deputy sheriff. She says that pursuing a car is just like pulling a gun, and it is a an absolute last resort. The chances of injury, especially to uninvolved bystanders, is very high. Setting up roadblocks was their preferred mode of stopping people (of course, in Aspen it's a lot easier, there are very few roads)
Note well that the highest flying prop plane ever, the Aerovironment Helios, flew to 96,000 ft -- far higher than almost any other plane (probably the only one that could sustain that altitude was the SR-71). The Helios was powered completely by solar cells and electric motors.
Greg Brandeau, the new CTO at Disney, is a powerful advocate of open source. He worked very hard (within the bounds of antitrust law) to help various visual effects and animation studios with Linux, addressing common issues to everybody's benefit. It's good to see projects like this, that studios have put huge amounts of effort into, released into the open source community.
Of course, I have to put my money where my mouth is now:)
I am in despair over the newspaper industry. The country and the world has needed news researchers, and over the last half-century that has been the province of big newspapers like the Times, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, and others.
Lately, though, newspapers subscription rates have fallen dramatically, their income has fallen even faster, and they're all cut back on their research budgets.
Here, though, we see a truly interesting tool, one that gives more insight the more one plays with it (as the long articles in newspapers used to do the same as you read through them.) The credit list on this webapp is long, the quality of the presentation is absolutely top-notch, and the bandwidth behind it apparently infinite. That the New York Times would do this is commendable.
Would CNN.com do this? Could Google News do this? Drudgereport? No, those sites are merely aggragators. They are only interested in what happened in the last 24 hours, at best.
But, unfortunately for the Times, this remarkable tool is inaccessible in their dead-tree edition. I suppose it is a loss-leader for them, and a worthwhile one, but it does reinforce all the thousand other indicators that traditional newspapers are dying.
My guess is that Apple has an agreement to supply phones to the NYC area. To buy a phone there, you have to go to the Apple store or website. In the areas far from Apple stores (90% of the country at least) AT&T will sell iPhones.
What does it mean that melanoma has 30,000 errors in the DNA? Is it that the one melanoma they looked at had 30,000 differences from the other cells in the patient's body? It appears that, far from finding the needle in the haystack, they've found 30,000 haystacks.
The very first thing that happens when you're brought into Scientology is that they convince you that all that money you're spending on doctors is wasted, that Scientology will fix everything. Some people with actual life-threatening problems don't survive this phase. Doesn't bother Scientology a bit, though.
I do think that we are in the midst of a revolution in computing, where every application, every algorithm, every problem will be examined from the beginning on how it can best take advantage of hundreds if not thousands of 'cores'. In my visual effects industry, it clearly dominates conversation and thought already, and I don't think we're more than a year or two in front of everybody else.
At a recent conference, NVidia showed a very useful almost-real-time global-illumination renderer, that worked best when it was running about 100,000 threads simultaneously. Interestingly, the program didn't do any of the standard tricks to get exceptional perforance -- those tricks are hard, are fragile, have weird corner cases, and are just to be avoided if at all possible. Doing relatively brute-force computation on scaldingly fast computers is a great alternative!
I predict that you will be using massively parallel programs soon. Either you'll write them yourself, or you'll be using your competitors programs:)
As others have noted, NVidia owns the workstation and DCC space -- admittedly a relatively small market. We're always going to pay a lot to get the most solid, highest performance, Linux graphics and that's been NVidia since the collapse of SGI.
But I agree with others that NVidia is pushing very hard to be the GPGPU leader, and working very hard to have that market grow exponentially, to make up for the fact that moderate-performance graphics is going to be integrated onto CPUs within a few years. And moderate-performance in a few years will be pretty darn good.
Fermi, though, looks astonishing. The double precision performance, in particular, should be so could that any high-performance scientific or technical computation almost has to be done there. With the new, widely supported (Intel, ATI, NVidia, and Apple, at least) OpenCL language/framework, you can be pretty sure that the work you do to take advantage of the GPU will be an investment worth making.
So, NVidia's market is changing, but they are busy trying to create a new world where they will not only be not obsolete, they could well dominate. We'll see!
They patented the transmission, exactly. The use of a planetary gearbox to sum the output of the gasoline and electric motors, or to have the gasoline motor drive the generator. I share the antipathy for software patents with most of the Slashdot crowd, but this is a classic hardware patent. Hardware patents have a long and important history, and are almost certainly a good thing.
Curiously, GM's Volt doesn't violate this patent, as it is a so-called "series hybrid", in that the gas motor only drives the generator, and the wheels are only driven by the electric motor. The Ford Fusion and Escape hybrids, and the Nissan Altima hybrid use exactly the same system that Toyota does, licensed from Toyota.
Toyota has made the system useful (in a way that the original patent isn't) by adding a second electric motor which assists in driving the wheels directly. This enables a "low gear", by having the gas motor run fast, driving the first motor/generator backwards to generate power, which drives the second electric motor. That is the decisive conceptual leap in the Synergy drive, and Toyota has of course patented that.
You'd get to control it, if you want, with a patent, for 20 years -- less the time it takes to get the cure approved by the FDA. You'd be rich as you want to be by the end of that time.
If that's what's keeping you from curing cancer, you needn't let that stop you.
I am very curious to see Planck's resolution compared to the W-MAP. Just zoom into a bit of the map, and show them side by side, that's all I ask! They do have some nice zooms of the map on the french-language site, and I suppose if I wasn't so lazy I could find the corresponding sections in the W-MAP output. I know that Planck can detect the polarization of the CMB, I'm just dying to see what that will show us!
I've read several times that while Planck has many times the resolution and sensitivity of the W-MAP probe, there's really no more information to be gained beyond Planck. It will give us almost every bit of information that the cosmic background radiation has for us. It's kind of amazing, really.
A friend of mine who worked at Google at the time had clearly been involved in this project (although he didn't tell me...exactly) We were discussing alternative, sustainable power, and I've always been a fan of solar thermal -- he described in way more detail and depth than I thought possible the resource limits we'd run into if we tried to power America by solar thermal -- in particular the current mirrors in the prototype plants use a huge amount of aluminum, and scaling those plants up to make more than a rounding-error of our energy needs would take way more aluminum than we could forsee having. Plus, of course, it takes a ridiculous amount of electricity to refine the aluminum in the first place.
I was rather surprised, and checked his math...which was pretty accurate. I do think that other alternatives to aluminum are practical, and Google's going there.
Apparently the power level was only sustained for a second or so...it's going to have to run for a month or so to be useful, but this is probably a good start.
I think that this is a wretched idea -- but the whole point of making it GPS is that it will track exactly where you are driving. You will not be charged for driving in Mexico and Canada, and you will be charged differently in Massachussettes and New Hampshire if they have different state taxes. GPS is certainly capable of detecting position to those levels of accuracy, and the maps will fit in a few MB of ROM.
Personally, I like the idea of a higher gas tax, because it incentivizes all good things -- electric cars, hybrids, higher efficiency, lighter cars, less pollution, less oil imports. That is of course exactly the reason that these GPS proposals are being made -- for the internal combustion, low efficiency, large car, highly polluting, oil lobbies.
A big problem I have with colonizing Mars is that, unfortunately, it's really rather easy to kill everybody on a planet. What's kept people from doing that in the recent past is that we all [well, all but six people right now] live here...killing everybody doesn't do anybody any good.
But any kind of interplanetary war would be swift and devastating. At least, that's how it appears to me.
The moon, or the asteroids, might actually be more defensible.
Slashdot Mirror
I've looked at this a few dozen times. It's truly an amazing effect.
Being in the CGI effects business myself (and actually right in the middle of bidding some interesting atmospheric effects for a movie dogfight) I thought it was fake at first, mostly because I've never seen anything like this before. A spectacular display like this, I would have thought, would have been photographed many times if it was a normal occurrence. Some commenters have said that something similar happened on the Apollo XI launch, I haven't seen film that confirms that.
But no, it's clearly real. Many people saw it, several people filmed it.
What it is, is the shockwave moving through a thin layer of clouds and atmosphere. The shockwave disturbs that layer of clouds in some way (in the case of the sun dog, apparently disturbing the crystals orientation -- shockingly these sun dogs require the hexagonal crystals to be hanging more-or-less flat in the air) There are any number of films of airplanes flying above the speed of sound causing clouds to pop into existence and then disappear as the shockwave passes. Every nuclear bomb sequence has these kind of shock-induced clouds as well.
I suppose that clouds with exactly the characteristics to make this happen for rocket launches are rare, because I've watched film of hundreds of launches and never seen this. It always pays to look up!
Johns Hopkins University had a program called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY). The state of Maryland selected the top .1% of 7th grade kids on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills for further testing, and Johns Hopkins provided the best-scoring 30 or so of us with advanced courses, both at JHU and at local community colleges. Most of us entered college at 15 or 16 (I was 15.)
It was, in the end, a mistake. I think most of the kids in the group weren't ready for college, and a lot of us didn't do as well as we might have with a couple of more years social experience behind us.
JHU stopped doing this 20 years ago.
There are some success stories, and some ok stories, and some really bad stories. I just don't think it's worth it.
Thad
It's not a typical lenticular display, exactly.
The real innovation here is the 3M material, not the TI chips driving the display. The material requires that the image be illuminated alternately fro the right and left edges of the screen, the material deflects that light into the right and left eyes respectively. Unlike lenticular displays, there is only one viewing direction that works, but it won't diminish the spatial resolution of the display (only the temporal one.) It will work great for something like a game-boy or an iPhone. Even something as small as an iPad, though, might have problems because the difference in eye-to-screen angle from one side of the display to the other.
This slide tells you everything you need to know about the 3M film.
The US regularly flies training missions against Russian aircraft. In an unprecedented display, recently, Indian pilots flying the most modern Su-27 variants scored significant victories against US F-15s.
Granted, these confrontations have never happened during wartime, and the F15 has an unblemished combat record (100 planes shot down to 0 lost). Some say that the US took a dive at the Cope India 04 games to encourage funding of the F-22, that seems unlikely to me (the US planes were restricted from using BVR (beyond-visual-range) missles.)
So, comparing 4th generation fighters, an argument can be made that the 1980's Russian ones are comparable to the 1970's US ones.
My aunt was a deputy sheriff. She says that pursuing a car is just like pulling a gun, and it is a an absolute last resort. The chances of injury, especially to uninvolved bystanders, is very high. Setting up roadblocks was their preferred mode of stopping people (of course, in Aspen it's a lot easier, there are very few roads)
Note well that the highest flying prop plane ever, the Aerovironment Helios, flew to 96,000 ft -- far higher than almost any other plane (probably the only one that could sustain that altitude was the SR-71). The Helios was powered completely by solar cells and electric motors.
Greg Brandeau, the new CTO at Disney, is a powerful advocate of open source. He worked very hard (within the bounds of antitrust law) to help various visual effects and animation studios with Linux, addressing common issues to everybody's benefit. It's good to see projects like this, that studios have put huge amounts of effort into, released into the open source community.
Of course, I have to put my money where my mouth is now :)
I am in despair over the newspaper industry. The country and the world has needed news researchers, and over the last half-century that has been the province of big newspapers like the Times, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, and others.
Lately, though, newspapers subscription rates have fallen dramatically, their income has fallen even faster, and they're all cut back on their research budgets.
Here, though, we see a truly interesting tool, one that gives more insight the more one plays with it (as the long articles in newspapers used to do the same as you read through them.) The credit list on this webapp is long, the quality of the presentation is absolutely top-notch, and the bandwidth behind it apparently infinite. That the New York Times would do this is commendable.
Would CNN.com do this? Could Google News do this? Drudgereport? No, those sites are merely aggragators. They are only interested in what happened in the last 24 hours, at best.
But, unfortunately for the Times, this remarkable tool is inaccessible in their dead-tree edition. I suppose it is a loss-leader for them, and a worthwhile one, but it does reinforce all the thousand other indicators that traditional newspapers are dying.
My guess is that Apple has an agreement to supply phones to the NYC area. To buy a phone there, you have to go to the Apple store or website. In the areas far from Apple stores (90% of the country at least) AT&T will sell iPhones.
AT&T doesn't sell iPhones in Los Angeles, either.
What does it mean that melanoma has 30,000 errors in the DNA? Is it that the one melanoma they looked at had 30,000 differences from the other cells in the patient's body? It appears that, far from finding the needle in the haystack, they've found 30,000 haystacks.
They're really that terrible. Sorry.
The very first thing that happens when you're brought into Scientology is that they convince you that all that money you're spending on doctors is wasted, that Scientology will fix everything. Some people with actual life-threatening problems don't survive this phase. Doesn't bother Scientology a bit, though.
I do think that we are in the midst of a revolution in computing, where every application, every algorithm, every problem will be examined from the beginning on how it can best take advantage of hundreds if not thousands of 'cores'. In my visual effects industry, it clearly dominates conversation and thought already, and I don't think we're more than a year or two in front of everybody else.
At a recent conference, NVidia showed a very useful almost-real-time global-illumination renderer, that worked best when it was running about 100,000 threads simultaneously. Interestingly, the program didn't do any of the standard tricks to get exceptional perforance -- those tricks are hard, are fragile, have weird corner cases, and are just to be avoided if at all possible. Doing relatively brute-force computation on scaldingly fast computers is a great alternative!
I predict that you will be using massively parallel programs soon. Either you'll write them yourself, or you'll be using your competitors programs :)
Well the 'or' is that pirates download a fuck of a lot more games than people who pay for them. And I am dead certain that that is true.
And you know, he's not saying that he's being burned for 400% of his sales. You're projecting. Read the article again.
As others have noted, NVidia owns the workstation and DCC space -- admittedly a relatively small market. We're always going to pay a lot to get the most solid, highest performance, Linux graphics and that's been NVidia since the collapse of SGI.
But I agree with others that NVidia is pushing very hard to be the GPGPU leader, and working very hard to have that market grow exponentially, to make up for the fact that moderate-performance graphics is going to be integrated onto CPUs within a few years. And moderate-performance in a few years will be pretty darn good.
Fermi, though, looks astonishing. The double precision performance, in particular, should be so could that any high-performance scientific or technical computation almost has to be done there. With the new, widely supported (Intel, ATI, NVidia, and Apple, at least) OpenCL language/framework, you can be pretty sure that the work you do to take advantage of the GPU will be an investment worth making.
So, NVidia's market is changing, but they are busy trying to create a new world where they will not only be not obsolete, they could well dominate. We'll see!
The most well known of these was the Copperhead It was a cannon-launched guided warhead, with pop-out fins. Apparently it was used in Desert Storm.
They patented the transmission, exactly. The use of a planetary gearbox to sum the output of the gasoline and electric motors, or to have the gasoline motor drive the generator. I share the antipathy for software patents with most of the Slashdot crowd, but this is a classic hardware patent. Hardware patents have a long and important history, and are almost certainly a good thing.
Curiously, GM's Volt doesn't violate this patent, as it is a so-called "series hybrid", in that the gas motor only drives the generator, and the wheels are only driven by the electric motor. The Ford Fusion and Escape hybrids, and the Nissan Altima hybrid use exactly the same system that Toyota does, licensed from Toyota.
Toyota has made the system useful (in a way that the original patent isn't) by adding a second electric motor which assists in driving the wheels directly. This enables a "low gear", by having the gas motor run fast, driving the first motor/generator backwards to generate power, which drives the second electric motor. That is the decisive conceptual leap in the Synergy drive, and Toyota has of course patented that.
Thad
That's all I want from Adobe. Please please please please please!
You'd get to control it, if you want, with a patent, for 20 years -- less the time it takes to get the cure approved by the FDA. You'd be rich as you want to be by the end of that time.
If that's what's keeping you from curing cancer, you needn't let that stop you.
I am very curious to see Planck's resolution compared to the W-MAP. Just zoom into a bit of the map, and show them side by side, that's all I ask! They do have some nice zooms of the map on the french-language site, and I suppose if I wasn't so lazy I could find the corresponding sections in the W-MAP output. I know that Planck can detect the polarization of the CMB, I'm just dying to see what that will show us!
I've read several times that while Planck has many times the resolution and sensitivity of the W-MAP probe, there's really no more information to be gained beyond Planck. It will give us almost every bit of information that the cosmic background radiation has for us. It's kind of amazing, really.
A friend of mine who worked at Google at the time had clearly been involved in this project (although he didn't tell me...exactly) We were discussing alternative, sustainable power, and I've always been a fan of solar thermal -- he described in way more detail and depth than I thought possible the resource limits we'd run into if we tried to power America by solar thermal -- in particular the current mirrors in the prototype plants use a huge amount of aluminum, and scaling those plants up to make more than a rounding-error of our energy needs would take way more aluminum than we could forsee having. Plus, of course, it takes a ridiculous amount of electricity to refine the aluminum in the first place.
I was rather surprised, and checked his math...which was pretty accurate. I do think that other alternatives to aluminum are practical, and Google's going there.
Thad
I know they bought TrollTech, but Qt != KDE
Is it a newton? More?
Apparently the power level was only sustained for a second or so...it's going to have to run for a month or so to be useful, but this is probably a good start.
I think that this is a wretched idea -- but the whole point of making it GPS is that it will track exactly where you are driving. You will not be charged for driving in Mexico and Canada, and you will be charged differently in Massachussettes and New Hampshire if they have different state taxes. GPS is certainly capable of detecting position to those levels of accuracy, and the maps will fit in a few MB of ROM.
Personally, I like the idea of a higher gas tax, because it incentivizes all good things -- electric cars, hybrids, higher efficiency, lighter cars, less pollution, less oil imports. That is of course exactly the reason that these GPS proposals are being made -- for the internal combustion, low efficiency, large car, highly polluting, oil lobbies.
A big problem I have with colonizing Mars is that, unfortunately, it's really rather easy to kill everybody on a planet. What's kept people from doing that in the recent past is that we all [well, all but six people right now] live here...killing everybody doesn't do anybody any good.
But any kind of interplanetary war would be swift and devastating. At least, that's how it appears to me.
The moon, or the asteroids, might actually be more defensible.
One rarely sees such droll humor here on Slashdot.