Posts by Francis Vaughan218 posts • joined Saturday 28th April 2007 14:36 GMT
A humble request.
Any chance of making a really high res version of the poster available? This one is so good it deserves more than just a fleeting exposure in el Reg's article.
Curiously the Helium we get from the wells is has not been produced by stellar processes. It is the result of radioactive decay in the rocks. In most places this will slowly make it way to the surface and eventually vanish into space. But where you have a natural impervious barrier that traps any gas, you the Helium is retained. These natural barriers are the same barriers that trap natural gas (aka Methane) and is why all natural gas wells produce Helium along with the methane. Some wells have a higher proportion of Helium than others, and those wells near the US Helium store were quite high. Any natural gas facility that creates liquefied natural gas can also produce Helium with only small additional effort. Qatar and Australian LNG plants will. But if you don't extract the Helium, it simply goes up the flue when the natural gas is burnt. Whenever you put the kettle on you probably waste as much if not more Helium as a child's balloon holds. The vast majority of Helium is lost this way. Simply because it was never recovered in the first place. The limits to the accessible Helium are simple. When we run out of natural gas, we run out of cheap Helium. Forever.
Lewis' analysis is spot on. Space ports are just plain silly, and of themselves provide little to no value. Sealaunch simply use a converted oil platform. Building a sodding huge runway with no technology on the horizon to use it is "rain following the plough" in the extreme.
A nick pick however. Not all launches are to geosynchronous orbit. A great many are to polar orbits (the majority of Earth observation craft) and these require the exact opposite of an equatorial launch location. They benefit from a launch from as high a latitude as possible.
The temperature varies with altitude quite nicely, and it actually starts to increase again above about 80,000 feet. Around here you get about 1 C every thousand feet, which isn't difficult to track with a simple semiconductor thermometer.
Clearly there are variations, but this altitude is above pretty much all of the weather, and you should see a stable relationship with temperature to altitude as good as you see with pressure.
What you might want to look at is the NRL empirical model that can give you a prediction of the temperature versus altitude taking into account current conditions and location. Wikepedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLMSISE-00 and in particular check out the links at the bottom of the page.
If you thought that marketing triumphing over the engineers was bad enough, this exercise would appear to be gearing up to be a triumph of lawyers over marketing. The amount of publicity this has garnered in Oz (all the major news conduits covered it prominently) is enough that no-one is going to be fooled by a lawyer driven victory over a technical loophole. The damage is done, and anyone in marketing with any sense understands the first rule of holes. Stop digging, and work out a way to spin a backdown into some form of positive light. But if you continue digging, it never gets better. A victory will not be perceived as Apple acting in a manner they imagine they are viewed in the marketplace, but rather something much more squalid. It takes a long time to build a reputation, but a very short time to damage it.
With a pedigree like that, I'm sure William Blake was probably wondering just how he ended up at MS, and has been looking for a suitable time to jump ship. Given he never actually asked to be at MS I don't think he can be tarred with the same brush as some other exports from Redmond. There is a certain irony in getting someone from MS, given that they stole Burton Smith from Cray. Burton was arguably one of the last real technical visionaries of supercomputing. Sadly he was probably just looking for a sinecure and has been happy to quietly ossify.
And to close the gap: http://www.fernsehmuseum.info/fese-bm-40.html
2" Video recorder. Bosch Quadruplex.
I assume the 4 parametric equalisers were one per flying head. Compressed used for the tape guides.
Hmm, trying to guess there. Meter is calibrated in % and db. % is almost certainly modulation depth. There is a switch for audio, tv & audio, tv. There are a heap of devices that look like parametric equalisers. Given the clues this looks like part of a very early satellite ground station. Given it is in Germany it is possible it was even used for the first Telstar, which would make it a very significant bit of history. Then again the above comment about the Olympic games might mean it was used for Syncom 3, and receiving the 1964 summer Olympics. It could of course have been used for both.
It was touched on above, but in real HPC systems, the Linpack performance is mostly ignored. (Unless your only workload is linear algebra.) The key concepts are how well the architecture scales, and what the sustained performance is. The cheap laptop gets the best bang for buck simply because it is incapable of scaling. You cannot join a boxload of them together and get much useful sort of speedup. Not in a way which can produce good sustained numbers. Supercomputers have never been about raw flops. They have always been about a critically balanced design, with equal attention paid to cpu speed, memory performance, and I/O performance. There is no value in a high speed CPU if you can't feed it with data fast enough. Caches are often not as useful as you might hope.
The cost of interconnect interfaces and fabrics are always a significant fraction of the cost of the machine. From simple Infiniband, through SGI's NumaLink, IBM's Blue Gene and beyond, you get what you pay for, and depending upon the workload, you have no choice about which fabric to use. Tuning the interconnect topology to the problem is useful too.
Linpack has the disadvantage that it can be tuned so that it is insensitive to the interconnect. Because it does little more than time solving large matrices, the amount of time spent communicating data is related to the length of the edges that divide the matrix into subdivision distributed across the nodes. But the amount of data is related to the area of the subdivisions. The bigger the data size the less communication is needed relative to the work done. The more memory you add to a machine, the larger the test dataset you can configure, and the faster the Linpack result. Simply because the less important the interconnect becomes for the contrived test. This usually does not relate to the machine's actual performance on real world workloads. Hence the need to spend real money on interconnects, even if it doesn't actually appear to improve the simple performance. An old college coined the phrase "Gigaflop harlotry" to describe the focus on simple Linpack number and rank in the Top 500.
It really is nice to see the MTA going somewhere. I saw Burton Smith talking up MTA nearly 20 years ago, and even then everyone considered it to be about the only new idea in computer architecture. In that time not much new has arisen, and for a long time MTA looked pretty moribund with little more than some neat parallel sort results. So this really is rather heartening.
"Doctor Who is a vitally important BBC brand"
There is a deep truth here that will talk louder than any other issue. The BBC makes more money off the Dr Who brand than any other income stream. This a big difference from a decade odd ago, when it was unloved by management, and prone to the idiotic whim of whoever was in charge. Damaging the brand would be what is known as a "career limiting move". The BBC already sells millions of DVDs, toys, and books, has had a number of spinoff shows, and has a continuing core TV series. One that sells for serious money all around the planet. This is the sort of success that makes a Hollywood exec cream themselves just imagining the prospect. Hollywood movies don't make the real money at the box office. It is this second stream where the gravy is. The BBC does not need Hollywood. There is nothing that Hollywood could teach it or provide to it that it does not already have. Not that that would stop various Hollywood executives pitching to the BBC to try to get the rights to do a film. But this should be recognised as the weaker party (Hollywood), bereft of any originality or actual creative talent, attempting to make money off the back of the BBC's brand.
There is no upside for the BBC is getting into bed with Hollywood. The best that can happen is a continuation of the current astounding strong brand, and the money that already rains from the sky from it. Everything else is downhill, with a damaged brand, reduced income, and no doubt any money that is made from the film being syphoned by the Hollywood moguls before the BBC sees a share.
The difference being that the fuel pump on even a 50 year old RL-10 is driven by a turbine that generates 500kw. So just the fuel system has more power than any car you can ever dream of owning. And the entire rocket motor weights 140kg, so less than your car's engine. When things are are crazy as this you don't want complexity. You want every last possible thing that might go wrong removed. The sophistication is in the simplicity.
Whilst 37 x 49mm isn't full frame 645, it isn't as far short as this. 6cm is the full width of the film not the frame width, the frame size of 645 is 41.5 x 56mm. Given the chip yield goes down with about the cube of the size, and given these sensors are already about $10,000 for just the chip, I think they can be forgiven for for the size.
I still shoot 645 film. £35,000 buys one hell of a lot of film, even at the ruinous prices charged now. On the other hand, there is no film around that can achieve the resolution described here. When I win the lottery I will be buying one.
A nitpick, but of a very common misconception.
Dithering does not mask the quantisation artefacts with random noise. That would imply that the amplitude of the noise added needs to be of an amplitude high enough to drown out the quantisation. In fact the amplitude of the dither is one half of the least significant bit. It does not mask the quantisation artefacts, it actually removes them totally. In its simplest form the use of AIWN (additive independent white noise) will totally decorrelate quantisation artefacts. (It is the fact that the errors in quantisation are correlated with one another that leads them to contain objectionable audible sound.) However my noting that the ear has vastly greater sensitivity in some frequencies, and much less in others - especially in the top octave - it is possible to craft the dither in such a way that increased noise in those parts of the audible spectrum we are less sensitive to can be traded for higher resolution in those areas we have greater sensitivity to. Thus it is possible to get a genuine 18 bits of resolution in the mid bands of a 16 bit digital recording. Most recording systems provide the engineer with a range of dither options, with different profiles being suited to different recordings.
As above. Nothing fancy needed at all. An aspirator pump will get down to the pressure you need. A good quality one will get down to 20mmHg, which is 80,000 feet altitude.
It is rather hard to see how this prize is really going to work. It is clearly modelled directly on the Nobel. The rules allow for one to three recipients, and the criteria include: "a groundbreaking advance in engineering which has created significant benefit to humanity".
But the nature of engineering isn't like science. Whittling down an engineering contribution to three prime people is going to be a huge problem. The nature of engineering is building on what has gone before, and delivering results in a timely, safe, and risk free manner. And it involves teams.
Take an example from computing. How about we nominate Ken Thomson, Denis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan? Whilst the creation of Unix was important, the face of computing as we know it would probably be almost the same if it had not been written. The most common desktop OS isn't a Unix variant. Perhaps any prize should include Dave Cutler. But then, the true operating system innovations were long before any of these guys. The PDP-7 Unix was written on already had an operating system. There are so so so many people that contributed that makes no sense at all to go looking for "the three". Try to nominate the three giants of engineering the Apollo programme.
The danger is that it might simply become a surrogate science prize for areas of science that don't fit into the Nobel categories.
(On the other hand we all probably have favourites. Personally, if he were still alive, I would be nominating Tommy Flowers for the prize.)
It would be interesting to have some example nominations.
Sort of an interesting idea. However what could be a really good idea is to talk to a real actuary, and see what they think. Actuaries certainly work in risk, but they are to a large extent statisticians. Without a statistical basis for risk assessment it becomes a different problem.
This is the issue with quantifying internet security. There isn't the equivalent of the underwriters laboratory that certifies materials and components, and there aren't standards bodies that build standards built upon centuries of experience. Worse, there is no way of quantifying the effects of a security breach ahead of time. There are no easy risk/cost curves. There are huge discontinuities in the problem. This isn't likely to be a place where actuaries play. But a professional actuary might well differ with me. Hearing from one would be interesting.
I really don't think the specifics of this case are the real game.
Pundits arguing the minor details of the individual patents and the usual fanboi versus ant-fanboi are just not what the game is. We have a couple of the largest companies on the planet facing off, with the lingering threat of unleashing the oft mentioned global patent wars. In the end I imagine the outcome won't be something that is all that satisfactory. I will assume that eventually we will see an even more messy and complex global cross licensing system that is owned by the very very big players, to the even greater exclusion of the smaller players. Te only alternative we can hope for is that global patent Armageddon really is unleashed. Out of cahos comes opportunity. Maybe, we an hope, will come some sanity. Maybe.
Which of course brings us back to the key exchange problem - and essentially full circle. Perhaps back to the good old days of a courier with a briefcase handcuffed to his arm.
Given the much wider and serious threat of a global patent Armageddon, these spats seems puzzling. Neither Samsung or Apple are stupid. They both know that allowing patent litigation to escalate will hurt both of them, as it has the potential to draw many other players in, in an uncontrolled and ultimately destructive manner. Success in any patent litigation also encourages the patent trolls, something no major player wants to see.
The seems to be something about this particular round as being born of spite, after a breakdown in the previously cordial relationship between Apple and Samsung, but no large player can allow such things to direct their operations. Or certainly should never do so.
However, Apple have been on the outside of the global patent cross licensing club for phones, and these rounds of litigation may turn out to be part of a longer game, aimed at securing a permanent place at the table. What is reasonably certain, the public face of these little arguments are little to do with the real game being played.
"inability to perfectly measure velocity and direction at the same time"
Almost. Inability to perfectly measure both momentum and position is probably the version you meant. Direction is already a component of velocity, so the original sentence isn't so much wrong as actually makes no sense. Needless to say it is more complex than this, there are more pairs of measures beyond momentum and position, but that is the one people tend to hear about most.
As a resident of Oz, seriously dismayed by the cargo cult mentality of the NBN, I am really cheered by this. Turnbull is a lot of people's pick for our next PM. Not just by preference, but the betting will be flowing his way no matter what one's political leaning. So maybe, just maybe, sanity will prevail for real.
Indeed. I would suggest that any reasonable review of in-ear phones needs to include the Etymotic ER-4S simply as this was pretty much the original and remains a favoured benchmark unit. It is used in a large number of professional applications and is the standard unit used for many psycho-acoustic research. It may (or many not) have been bettered over the years, but it remains both very good, is still available, and is the gold standard to beat.
I rather wish I had thought of this for PARIS. But the possibility remains.
How about including a little science payload? In this case, a stack of photographic film to detect cosmic ray shower particles? Within the allowable payload, this might mean only limited amount is possible, but the possibilities of reproducing some old school science is very cool. With a modern twist it should be possible to build a stack of film to form a cube. Once retrieved and developed it could simply be scanned on a reasonable film scanner, and then massaged into a 3D volume. The longer and higher it gets on the flight the better. Sorting out the design, testing and validating of the experiment might take some effort, but it would be really nice to see.
For a very British tie in, you can't do much better than this:
http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=60134
The sensor size can be reasonably well derived as follows.
The origin of the size metric is vacuum tube television sensors. The listed size is the diameter of the tube. This isn't the size of the sensor. The sensitive spot on the tube is about two thirds of the tube diameter. You inscribe your rectangular sensor in a circle of this diameter.
So, 1/2.3 inch, is 0.4.48 inches, is 11mm, times 2/3 equals about 7.3 mm diagonal. So, about 5.9 mm by 4.4 mm is my calculation for a 3:2 format sensor. That is pretty tiny. The original 110 film format was 13 x 17mm.
35mm was the width of the film, sprocket holes an all. The format was developed for the movie industry, not still cameras. The actual still camera picture format was 24mm x 36 mm.
The writing is a bit worse than this. The term "unstart" does not refer the the engine running, but to the positioning of the shockwave in the inlet. If the position of the shockwave is correct the inlet is "started," if the shockwave is ejected or fails to fall in the right position the inlet "unstarts". The attempt to change attitude of the craft was an attempt to make the shockwave sit correctly and thus "restart." This would then allow the engine to ignite the supersonic stream. Ignition has "starting" as a precondition, rather than a consequence. The writing is actually perfectly good, just written at the the wrong level and allowed to escape from captivity in a manner that makes it essentially incomprehensible.
Lets see how down voted I can get.
Given that syncing over WiFi has been one of the most clearly missing features from iOS, and its lack has been the subject of a lot of complaint over time, it is hardly reasonable to suggest that either the idea is somehow original to this guy, or that Apple didn't have it in the feature roadmap from day one, along with things like cut and paste. Indeed, if a few years ago some guy had come out with an app for "cut and paste" for iOS, and had had it rejected by Apple, would we be baying for Apple's blood because they later added a feature called "cut and paste" which, surprise surprise, did cut and paste? Hardly.
This guy got given an amazing opportunity by Apple being ridiculous and not having WiFi ability from day one. The idea is obvious, the name obvious, and the logo obvious. (Put ten people in a room and ask them to design the WiFi Sync logo, the majority will come up with the same one. The point of the logo design is not that it be some creative triumph, but that it be obvious what it means. This leads to pretty well only one possible design.)
So, the gravy train is over. Half a million in sales is a gift that most of us could only dream of. Be grateful, move on.
"created a depleted uranium molecule, one with its radio-active element removed, built from two uranium atoms with a bridging atom of toluene"
This is one of those sentences where it is hard to start listing all the mistakes. Could someone with some vague scientific background proofread these pieces sometime? All well and good to criticise "boffins obviously know diddly squat", if only the writer had a clue.
Hint, there is no such thing as a depleted uranium molecule, or a depleted uranium atom even. "one with its radio-active element removed" is almost meaningless in context. Nor is there any such thing as a toluene atom. One suspects that some of the blame might come down to ham fisted attempts by the researchers to defuse any fear about the use of a radioactive element. But it would be nice if el Reg could QC this stuff before spouting off about things they don't understand. The video was actually remarkably well done for a bunch of academics trying to explain something, and vastly better than the article.
"Unless the paper's costly full text in Nature Chemistry discusses it" so we assume that el Reg's budget doesn't run to the the $32 needed to actually read the article and find out the answer. Or maybe just email one of the researchers. Maybe this sets some sort of metric to the value placed on finding out information for publication here.
To complete the answer from the above excellent points. There is a fundamental difference between reaching the edge of space and going into a useful orbit. The energy required to get to the needed altitude it trivial. However the orbit that you are in has a rather unfortunate geometry. Whilst you will technically be in orbit about the centre of the earth's mass, the orbit's path also intersects the surface of the Earth remarkably close to the point where you took off. In order to get your orbit round enough that you get back to your starting point in space without embarrassing terrestrial intersections you need to put a heck of a lot of energy into circularising the orbit. Once you want to come back this same amount of energy has to be dissipated. Whilst you can get rid of some orbital energy slowly (aerobraking has been used for such things as orbital circularisation into Mars orbit from the much faster approach speed from Earth) you are going to find that there will always be a point where you are orbiting inside a thick enough layer of the atmosphere that you have no remaining choice about the rate at which the energy must be got rid off. The answer being: very very quickly.
Thunderbolt isn't essentailly just Displayport. What Thunderbolt has is a backward compatibility mode where chips will drop back to Displayport mode if the only thing they see is a display. What Thunderbolt is, is encapsulated PCIe. In a sentence, you take all the good ideas from Firewire: hot plug, dynamic reconfiguration, peer to peer communication, isocronous transport, and use it to wrap around a PCIe lane or two as payload. Pretty much exactly the best of all worlds.
This means some pretty interesting things can happen. One of the neat tricks is that Thunderbolt is not difficult to port a peripheral to. A PCIe lane pops out at each end, and all the work done on previous device drivers should be trivially ported. Amongst other things it neatly subsumes the role that Express slot had. But better.
The article seems to take a very odd position on the reasons behind the patent activity, and Apple's various actions. And yet the article contains the critical point, but ignores it.
"Ownership of patents is vital to being a real power player in wireless, where licensing of IPR still relies primarily on bilateral tit-for-tat agreements rather than pools or the "reasonable and non-discriminatory" principles of other standards. "
Apple are not part of the club, and have been banging on the door for ages demanding entry into the cross licensing club. All of the current spat can be trivially explained as an ongoing part of this. It is very unlikely that Apple is trying to gain market advantage through patent actions. Indeed the manifest lack of gaining any by stopping imports might be a clue. What they are trying to do is demonstrate that their exiting patent portfolio is big and important enough to be invited in. They are making life difficult enough for the other layers that we will probably eventually see a sudden dropping of all actions involving Apple, and an announcement of mutually satisfactory cross licensing.
Apple's lack of ability to sync iPads via a cloud or other Internet service is hardly a technological limitation that they need to catch up from. IOS is built from the same code base as OSX. Any features that the iPad lacks are lacking due to an explicit decision by Apple to remove them, not through lagging development. It isn't that Apple are behind on the cloud, it is that Apple don't want the users to have the capability. Yet. Apple will have their own timetable and own reasons. The pace with which they unveil new features is the clue as to how pressured they feel by the competition. That will be interesting.
Talking rather the opposite tack to Tom 38 above. Why on earth did the review not also listen to some lossless encoded music. Indeed while would anyone bother to listen to lossy encoding on high quality device. You can use an iPod classic, or stream from iTunes on a Mac or PC, and rip everything lossless. I get 500 CDs on my Classic lossless. It is essentially impossible to buy a disk small enough to justify lossy compression. The only justification is a device with flash memory, and these are either toy music players (i.e. a Nano) or multipurpose device intended to be used upon one's person (i.e. iPhone.) Spending £500 on speakers one would hope might involve thinking about the source enough to use a lossless format. The review could have been better, and more useful for addressing this.
One thing that most of the conspiracy theorists supporting the idea that it is an engineered scarcity forget is that there is a clear lead time need to build up stocks. The factories do not have infinite capacity - Apple can't simply order an additional 500,000 to be delivered Friday. The factory production lines will be sized for an estimated average production need, too big and you waste money on unneeded capability. For a product release Apple have to balance the time of beginning of production, which is largely determined by the product readiness, the desired time of release, and the number of units Apple want on have on hand at the time of release. There were persistent rumors of production delays due to last minute redesign, which if you believe them would alone account for a significant shortfall of stock at launch time. Apple really like their release cycles and it would not be at all surprising to find that the decision to release on the date was given precedence over lead time to build stock.
Many years ago there was a lovely supercomputer company called Thinking Machines. Sadly, along with most of the other supercomputer startups of the time, they didn't survive. But as they failed their assets were sold off. Sun got most of the hardware expertise, plus the compilers, some of which surfaced in a limited manner. The service division was sold off, and the last functioning component, which was the data mining software operation, still called Thinking Machines, was bought by Oracle. So curiously Oracle now owns essentially all of the old Thinking Machines.
Thinking Machines had domain names, tmc.com, thinkingmachines.com, and think.com. Oracle kept the last of these. It is now their K-12 education site. Nary a trace of the once glorious supercomputer company that made arguably the sexiest machines on the planet.
This is really sad. Here we have a device designed with a multi-touch gesture based ui, capable of reasonably high performance graphics, and a million odd pixels of display. And all they can do is draw pictures of the same buttons you would get on a physical remote control. So you get none of the advantages of a physical button - no tactile feedback - and all the disadvantages. Stupid meaningless icons, contrived rectangular layout, all the same size (hint, you can actually made important functions take up more screen space relative to unimportant ones). It is 2011, and they are programming one of the most advanced consumer devices currently made, and all they can do is try to make it look like a cheap piece of crap unchanged in over 30 years?
It would be fine of the old device had a highly familiar, perfectly understood, and evolved UI, but of any device on the planet that you would want to avoid emulating, the morass of tiny buttons that is a cheap consumer device remote control would rate number one. They look they way they do because they are made as cheap as technology allows. £200 to emulate that UI motif is a mixture of lazy and stupid.
I will confess to being pretty impressed. For years we kept hearing about how the really good design elements were being delayed for IA64. But it seems Intel did keep the faith as it was, and what looks like a range of significant design streams have all come in at once.
Seriously, if an x86 chip was announced with this amount of progress from Intel we would be utterly gobsmacked, and AMD would crawl away to die. But it is the IA64, and sadly no one cares. At least for now.
What people tend to miss is that the expected topping out of the value of the x86 architecture that prompted the initial work on IA64 as a replacement has pretty much come as expected. However the question that may be more important is whether anyone cares either. Nobody really cares that desktop performance is moribund. The action is elsewhere. In a decade we might live in an environment where ARM and Itanium are most important architectures, and where their use essentially doesn't overlap. Clouds and portables might be the reality. In the high performance area it would actually be nice to see Itanium get a second chance. SGI might still be smarting from the disaster that came with their first foray with it, but a next generation UV with these would be something to see. The Altix 4700 series were a very nice machine. A 12 wide instruction path should allow for some stunning speed on many numerical codes. Couple that with a ccNUMA machine with a few thousand cores and you get some serious grunt.
Since, as has been pointed out, the prize is for iTunes content, rather than just apps, (funny how everyone soon forgets the original purpose of the iTunes store) she is very likely the only person on the planet who will fill her iPod with legally downloaded music. Well, nearly. Apple claim 40,000 songs on an iPod classic. So one quarter filled with legally downloaded content.
"also its low density means that any hydrogen-fuelled vehicle has to be mostly fuel tank"
It is worse than that. The SR71 was already mostly fuel tank. So much so that it was unable to take off with a full fuel load. The shuttle vehicle has no tank at all - the hydrogen fuel is so bulky that you need the huge orange thing bolted to the side of the vehicle. A huge orange thing that is many times the size of the actual vehicle. There was a plan to place small cryogenic fuel tanks in the shuttle to allow some powered flight after separation from the ET, but they were dropped late in the design. So the only fuel the shuttle contains is for the reaction control system thrusters. None for the main engines.
A shielded mains cable actually makes sense in some circumstances, and they are available and fit for purpose. They cost a small margin more than conventional mains cables. That is, for a few pounds.
In addition to the sin of selling grossly overpriced snake oil (hardly a new new thing in audio) these guys commit an even greater sin. They clearly have so little actual understanding of what they are doing or selling that they were unable to construct a test that would have shown a difference. It isn't all that hard. (That is, they could have shown that shielding is helpful, not that a thousand quid of shielding helps any more than a few tens of pence.) But they have clearly demonstrated an almost total lack of understanding of physics with what amounts to an own goal. Priceless.
"because Apple have shown themselves not open to the idea of patent sharing, what with the lawsuit of & from Nokia."
Actually it is the opposite. Apple are demanding entry into the mobile patent sharing club, but are considered latecomers by Nokia and irs mates. The price of entry to any patent sharing club is more useful patents. So Apple are trying to prove to Nokia that they have important and useful patents to share. You prove this in court. If Apple's legal action goes their way, expect to see the action dropped after Apple is given membership to Nokia's club.
Well, I beg to differ on the effectiveness, and innovativeness of this idea. I suspect that it can be made to work and with not too great a leap in both compute power and projection technology.
Years ago I set up a single wall VR system. SGI Onyx, Crystal Eyes shutter glasses, Ascension Flock of Birds motion tracker. We ran a mix of open source and proprietory software on it, and it provided a very nice semi-immersive 3D environment. It suffered from all the defects that are well, known, not the least of which is the problem that there is no depth of field. That problem is common to every 3D system in existence, including all the movies.
But, looking at this patent, and looking at what we had to work with, what we could achieve with the then available technology, versus what is needed here, I don't think the jump isn't nearly as large as people think. Probably the most expensive thing to make will be the screen, and that is simply a matrix of thousands of shiny hemispheres.
The issues of tracking the subjects and locating their eyes is pretty much a solved problem. The Old Flock of Birds did it very well, but needed a sensor mounted on the shutter glasses. There are modern multi-camera systems that can identify and track humans to enough resolution. The projection systems could be addressed with little more than a stack of modern LCD or DLP projectors. As a rough approximation you need one projector worth of illumination per eye observing the screen. Considering what we used in old VR systems, this is dirt cheap. The compute power needed to convolve the image isn't actually all that much. It is simple geometry - all you need to do is determine where the eye is - cast a ray back to each hemishphere, calculate the bounce, and find which pixel in the reflected screen you pick up. There will be conflicts, and some image degradation, but it may be manageable. Once you know the mapping from hemishphere to projected pixel you just scramble the projected images with the map. A couple of FPGAs would be coasting, Not likely doable with a home gaming PC, but certainly doable with a more high end processing setup.
More of the same old same old - the above comments that is. (Even down the tired old saw that Apple stole the ideas from Xerox.)
It isn't about the individual patents. Never was. It is about membership to the phone club. Apple want to join, Motorola/Nokia etc etc don't want Apple in. Nobody seriously expects these suits to reach a court judgement that results in anyone having to pull products. This is sabre rattling to allow Apple to join the cross licensing club. It has been playing out all year, and this is just another shot across the bows by both sides to see who blinks. Neither side did, and it will go on.
About the only thing we on the sidelines can hope for is that someone will slip up and we might get a taste of software patent armageddon. That is the only thing that will get some sense into the legislators. On the other hand, the spectre of these huge companies slugging it out over these patents might make legislators in countries other then the USA take a bit more notice of the inherent dangers in software patents. It should become manifestly clear that only very very large corporations and patent trolls are advantaged by the system, and that perfectly honest middle sized players can only ever get hurt.
That is the difference to when MS plays patents. They go out to hurt the middle sized and small guys by intent. What we see now is a war, not a mugging. It plays out very differently with different rules and goals.
Bravo for a very well put argument. It depresses me just how often it does just turn into a cheque to build a machine specifically designed to address the gigaflop harlotry of the top 500. Considering the rich history of real innovations that did come from Europe, there is no reason why it can't be got right.
Perhaps the most damning thing about the grant is that it is only for 1 million. A couple of years ago the combined F1 circus would burn though that in less than a morning's work on engine research. Rather than pissing away trivial amounts of money on such hopeless odds, perhaps DARPA would be better served by opening up the technology and convincing the FIA to change the rules to allow it to be used.
The article seems to have the tenet that the new Apple TV and associated business is Apple getting it wrong and thus losing the war. However it goes on to show that the entire market is already essentially flat, and Apple's offering simply a me-too. Which rather suggests that this isn't Apple miss-stepping on its way to a loss, but Apple publicly admitting that it has already capitulated.
The expectation (well perhaps hope is closer) was that Steve, with his inside edge in the business and corporate muscle, could swing a paradigm changing deal on content pricing. The answer is clearly that he couldn't. The movie business had learned from the music experience, and had already closed ranks and set the terms. Apple is merely joining the party, not crashing it.
Hardware wise, the Apple TV is closer to an Airport Express than much else. Indeed for music it is the required device if you stream from iOS.
It really a bit of a travesty that he isn't nearly so well known. There can be little doubt that without him the Collussi would never have existed. A true unsung hero.
So what patents has Google now acquired? Not enough to provide a nuclear option I would imagine, but I doubt there are none. Contributing patents to defend OSS would be a very interesting move.
Also, one wonders how long the MP3 gravy train has to go. The patents should be getting pretty close to their use by date. Even the video codec patents must be half way done by now.
Thinking this is a plant is taking geekdom far too seriously. The iPhone isn't marketed to geeks, and 99.9% of all iPhone buyers woudn't know what Gizmondo was, and woudn't care if you told them. Apple have tens of billions in the bank, and one of the most well oiled publicity machines on the planet, the world's press fall over themselves to report on every word Steve says, - and they resort to losing phones in pubs? Hardly.
This provides a clue as to one way that MS see moving beyond the PC centric market. Not everyone at MS is a total fool, and they realise that the business model of lock in with Windows on x86 isn't taking them anywhere anymore. But a new operating model based upon Sliverlight might. Remember it is Office that makes them the big money. A widely deployed Silverlight is a way of providing a nice ready plaform to continue to push Office out. The biggest threat to MS (and Intel) is probably Linux on ARM. If they get the Silverlight platform (via Moonlight) out onto that, MS may dodge that bullet to some extent. Of couse if it doesn't pan out, or some idiot middle manager decides it is was a bad idea, they can, and would drop support again. But it is a play that may make a lot of sense in the long term.
