
All very technical and interesting...
...but this is El Reg so who gives a toss? Does the heroine get her tits out and is the film worth seeing?
Avatar - James Cameron's 3D-enhanced sci-fi CGI space-western movie - is set to be a stunning success, and the storage industry is jumping on the bandwagon carrying its 10 feet tall, blue-skinned aliens. Avatar is being produced by California-based LightStorm Entertainment, which has contracted out much of the CGI (Computer- …
If they have the entire 45Mb/s pipe and their super-low overhea coms then they might be getting 5MB/s.
A flight LAX-NZ is about 9-10hours, so with checkin , say 40,000secs.
So while you are eating Air New Zealand's delicous scones with cream and watching Mr Bean for the 20th time, they can ship 200Gb over the wire
Assuming I can fit 20*1.5Tb drives in my hand baggage - I would say that sneakernet is winning by a factor of 100.
His calculations seem close enough to me: 90% of 45Mb/s is 40.5Mb/s which is 5.0625MB/s. 10 hours is 36000 seconds so 40000 seems a reasonable estimate. 5 megabytes per second * 40 kiloseconds = 200 gigabytes.
Did you miss the significance of the lowercase 'b' in Mb/s standing for bits where the uppercase 'B' in MB/s stands for bytes?
So, some fancy west-coast company starts packaging up and selling UDP bandwidth as the answer to everyone's bulk data transfer problem, and it's all wonderful high-tech happy time. Meanwhile, when BitTorrent starts talking about using UDP instead of TCP it's the end of the Internet as we know it.
please come out with a decent home 3D format? We all know Sony hate their customers and I dread to think what nefarious scheme will be inflicted on people who buy this stuff. I'll buy a new TV for it if I have have to, but I REALLY don't want to have to put a Blu-Ray player in my house.
bashing sony you could read the article? you DONT need a new TV. glasses will be fine. many of us wear glasses anyway so an overlay over them will be fine.
fine, dont get a BR player. who cares? i dont get the impression you are helping the media people too much are you, why so many luddites on a tech site? im sure sony et all are crying themselves to sleep as you wont buy a £100 br player.
that I don't need a new TV for Sony's 3D. I was saying I would be quite willing to buy one if necessary for SOMEONE ELSE'S format, if it meant I didn't have to put a DRM-infested Blu-Ray player in my house.
I'll keep bashing Sony, though, since I'm firmly convinced they hate their customers and would like them all to die. (BTW, that was hyperbole to make a point, in case you didn't recognise it).
I'm happy to buy plenty of media if it's from someone who doesn't try to rootkit my computer or otherwise fuck with my playing hardware, i.e. NOT SONY. The cost doesn't matter at all, the attitude does.
Okay the plot is very Dances with Wolves meets Ferngully. However the plot takes a back seat- It's just a device to hang some of the most immersive, spectacular and realistic visuals ever seen. This is a film that has to be experienced on a massive screen (pref. IMAX) in 3D. I liked one comment I saw online- "This film is for all those people who have ever bought a graphic card to replace the one their computer came with".
Quite an impressive setup.
I can't imagine 3D t.v. taking off in any sort of mainstream way like HD to be honest. The 3D glasses will make sure of that no matter how comfortable they are. There is gimmick value to it for novelty things and it is fantastic if delivered properly ala Avatar, but I doubt it will become a part of the average couch potato's daily arsenal!
Gamers on the other hand may possibly suck 3D glasses up assuming there are outstanding quality games to back it up.
I'm guessing that this is their "FASP technology" (WO2006/071866):
http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=EPODOC&adjacent=true&locale=en_EP&FT=D&date=20060706&CC=WO&NR=2006071866A2&KC=A2
As for "It sounds like Aspera could have a new application ahead of it; transferring data files to the cloud.", try this one (WO2009/091580):
http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=EPODOC&adjacent=true&locale=en_EP&FT=D&date=20090723&CC=WO&NR=2009091580A1&KC=A1
Interesting to read about the engineering obstacles but the data transfer problem is nothing new. TCP works very well as designed but comes with a large overhead.
I've written a distributed content delivery system not a million miles from this that uses a lightweight protocol, can zip files on the fly (if their content type suggests they might benefit from it), automatically adjusts bandwidth based on periodical sampling of lost packets, uses UDP and provides a means of resending lost packets either over TCP or UDP, it also can take advantage of multicast UDP if there are many parties receiving the same data.
As the quote goes however: "never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of tapes". For one off or infrequent transfers delivery by sneaker net would be a lot faster.
I've seen Avatar in 2D and 3D.
There is a noticeable reduction in picture quality, as you might imagine, when conjuring up stereoscopic images with today's technology.
For example, there's a scene near the beginning of the movie where the lead character slurps up a few stray weightless drops of water. It was entirely apparent what he was up to in the 2D version but those drops of water ended up as fuzzy blobs in the 3D version.
Personally, I'd sooner have great picture quality than 3D gimmickry.
Actually, those droplets were his sweat (from the remembering/dream) when he woke up from "cryo-sleep". And the fuzziness was because it was intentionally out of focus so that you would see his face, and then bring your attention to what was in front of him - as he would as he was waking up.
I found the use of focus and perspective to be much better, and natural, tools in the 3D version to quickly bring your attention to the action in the movie. The 2D could only use speed and movement - which was also enhanced in the 3D. The human eye focuses on only one thing or area at a time...
Watching both 2D and 3D versions several times - I prefer the 3D because it seemed crisper; but then I wear glasses normally, and I don't know what kind of optical interaction might have been going on with my perscription, the 3D glasses, and my brain processing the two separately polarized images into a unified whole perspective "image".