The antenna array is a beautiful piece of marketing by Aereo. Who could object to renting an antenna?

And, in fact, if the output of that antenna -- that is, the radio-frequency signal -- was transmitted to the home (as CableVision was doing back in the day) I think that Aereo would have an slam dunk. But that's not what they are doing.

They are converting the microwatt signal coming out of these antennas a few times. First, they are separating out just the channel that the user wants to watch, then they are digitizing that signal and encoding it onto the internet. That's what I don't think they are allowed to do, and that's why I believe they'll be shut down.

For still photography, focus isn't a terribly hard problem to solve. Autofocus works, and DSLRs let you compose, focus, and shoot manually as well. Easy peasy.

On the other hand, for movies shot using large-format sensors, focus is a huge issue. The amount of work spent following focus on a movie is significant, and it fails more often than you might think. Modern lenses are incredibly sharp, but they have such a tiny range that is in perfect focus that they are hard to use. Admittedly, the people who use these cameras and lenses are professionals with years or decades of experience, and they do well... ...But -- if we could focus our shots after the fact, it would be a true game changer for movie making. We could chose just what part of the scene should be in focus, and change that throughout the shot easily. Yes, this moves yet another part of the movie making process into post, but that's not a bad thing. As other people have suggested at other fora, editing/coloring/framing and visual effects are all done in post, and it helps make better movies. This would help too. Having the depth maps automatically generated would make visual effects easier and better as well.

I recognize that the amount of processing that goes on to make these images makes a motion picture camera a challenge, and the number of high-end motion picture cameras is probably a tenth of a percent of the DSLRs that are made, at most. Still, we could just capture the 40 MRays and do the processing later; storage and networks are getting faster and larger all the time.

Come on, Lytro! Make it happen!

At the time, one of the most popular magazines was "Reader's Digest", which edited long articles into short three-page summaries. They did a pretty good job of it. They would often have a "condensed book" as well.

After reading the Reader's Digest versions of articles, though, it was difficult to go back to long-form reading. There's really nothing new here!

It would be cool if we could track the trackers, and post their location on maps in real time; showing where they troll for cars, where they park at night, what donut stores they frequent. After all, the license plate trackers are plainly visible, anybody could see them and remember where and and when they did.

So, I checked slashdot on my phone today over lunch, and I saw the big "We hear you!" post discussing beta. Then, I got home tonight and was redirected to the new beta interface. So, clearly, slashdot the corporate group doesn't hear what slashdot the community is saying. If people are still being involuntarily redirected to something that has put the community at the edge of open rebellion, slashdot is clearly plunging in relevance even faster than a post Gox bitcoin. It's been a good run. I had over a decade of fun here on slashdot. I had excellent karma. But, clearly it's time for me to walk away. It's a shame that that ./ is so hell bent on shooting themselves in the face with this redesign. If they don't completely abandon it, this will probably the last post from this account. Weird. If you want to improve ./, add utf8 support and math rendering. Stuff people are actually asking for. Trying to refine the redesign is the wrong path. It's the wrong direction. Trying to dial in the details of shooting yourself in the face doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter if you trade the shotgun for a pistol, or whether you aim for the nose or the roof of your mouth. That's all "Beta isn't ready" means. It's a shame when a good community dissolves, but good night.

I count that as wise. If you put a real IP address, it would likely get a lot of traffic.

Which is why I've always been confused by the fact that they use fictituous IP's, rather than a production company website with trailers for upcoming projects...

It is a lot of work to raise your arm and point at an exact location on the screen (and slow too). After a short time you will be feeling the fatigue building up in your arm, which starts feeling very heavy. Then you will hate your touch screen and go back to using a mouse, touchpad, or keyboard, none of which require you to make large arm movements, or hold up the weight of your arm in front of you.

Why is touch on the desktop always assumed to be something that would have to replace using other inputs? I mean, if touch added $5 to my monitor, and I used it once every few weeks, I'd consider that a win. And, if it were widely deployed, economies of scale would mean that it really would be very cheap to add. (Like audio on the motherboard.) Having things like pinch to zoom could be handy on the desktop.

Way easier to toss a condom than to clean a sex bot. Just sayin'.

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

instead, they ran rampant and now we have a bullshit system which even on my system, sometimes fails...chrome doesnt play audio, firefox does...no idea why...although getting my HDMI tv to play sound on fedora was interesting, the eventual solution was I had to edit a file in /usr/share and add a :0 to the end of one of the parameters...I have no idea why....in linux mint it was fixed and I never had to do it...but weird shit like this seems to happen all the time...

Despite my best efforts, with Chrome on Ubuntu, Some YouTube videos will play out of one sound card, and some videos will play out of another. I think it's Flash vs. HTML5 being used for different videos. Seriously, it's the most bewildering user experience to have to randomly switch between my USB headphones and my analog headphones. Getting bluetooth audio working reliably is just a lost cause. Skype used to work. I apparently broke it in the course of trying to fix other things. 10 years professional experience as a UNIX admin, and I can't figure out how to make Youtube work without wearing two different headphones. It's sort of fucked.

Slashdot's terrible at interviews. Hopefully somebody much more qualified would interview them, and then amonth later slashdot would post a link to it several times.

Well, if he has identified it as taking up a large amount of the available bandwidth, then it certainly makes sense to consider it a target for reductions. Perhaps more importantly, users tend not to care about updates like that. A user actively downloading a file from some source is probably more important than some automated process the user doesn't care about, and can be deferred until the user gets home without them noticing anything.

That said, I've been saying for a while that there needs to be some sort of bandwidth discovery protocol. My original thought process was driven by apps on mobile phones, but this seems like it would benefit for the same reasons. Wireless oeprators are always concerned about using scarce bandwidth resources so we get plans with low data caps and such. Imagine if there was a completely standardised way for an application (say an email app on a phone) to "ping" bandwidthdiscovery://mail.foo.com with some sort of priority metric. If nothing responded back, it would act normally, so the system would be completely backwards compatible. If something did respond back along the route (for example, the wireless ISP you are connected to, but it could theoretically be something local or distant. The school's DDWRT router in the OP example.) it could reject the session, or encourage a delay. That way an email app set to check every 5 minutes could occasionally get a polite rejection from the ISP asking the app to hold off since circuits are overloaded. The phone would then wait a few minutes before trying again. Eventually the phone would download new email, but at high traffic times, it might wind up going 15 minutes instead of 5, saving the network some trouble. Software updates might defer a download for days or weeks if there is a continual rejection.

My Android phone lets me set software updates and podcast downloads to only happen over wifi, under the assumption that cellular data is expensive, but wifi data is unlimited. But, if I connect to a Mifi access point connected to a cellular connection, my phone currently has no way to discover that it is actually using (limited) cellular data. With a bandwidth discovery protocol, it would get the same rejections from the ISP that it would get if it had directly connected to the cellular data itself. And, local admins could easily set up rejection rules like the OP would be interested in, while still allowing the possibility of user overrides in cases where the school IT guy really wants to manually update the school's computer systems and whatnot. Think of it as a sort of queryable QoS.

And because any intermediate system on the route can let apps know to reduce bandwidth usage, a server being slashdotted can have some queries be rejected, rather than everything being on the link local side near the user. Obviously, none of this helps the admin in the immeadiate term. But, it would seem like that's how it ought to work.

Implicit semicolons. '5' + 3 gives '53' whereas '5' - 3 gives 2. I tried to include the famous Javascript truth table. Look it up. Including it in the post just triggered the junk filter, but it's hilarious. Javascript manages to be chock full of wtf even without the DOM at all. I always wished that Python would show up in the browser at some point. Once apon a time, the idea of genuinely novel scripting languages for web pages actually seemed plausible. (Remember vbscript web pages?) I guess there is so much legacy JS now that it's just the way things work and we'll never be completely rid of it.