but I think the VTL (Virtual tape library) is the winner for backup right now.
That's what we thought too, but there were issues with certain features in Backup Exec not working on tape. In the end we just presented the VTL's storage as a single iSCSI disk and formatted it. Backup to disk is so much simpler than tape that our offsite storage is disk too.
I think what you missed is context. I was responding specifically to the Great Depression (if you look up the thread a bit), and that attempted solutions to economic problems often have results that are difficult to foresee and understand.
No, I mean economists, as in people that have been schooled specifically in economics. In a depression the government doesn't have any money either, so they print more money to give to people, which causes inflation. Creating a non-essential job to give people the money you just printed is a little better than just giving them the money, but not much. (I do enjoy the parks and such that were built during the Great Depression.) And if those people are just turning around and giving the money back to the large corporations (such as Walmart) to survive, then you're in the same situation.
I think things might be a little more complex than you would initially think. There can be a thousand little byproducts and unexpected consequences when actions are taken to fix an economy.
I also doubt that the contractor just forgot to send the bill. Most contractors I know don't do that either.
I think you might be surprised just how disorganized contractors can be. I had a friend that got his first IT job working for a construction outfit. He set up a small Access database to keep track of bills to clients, to replace their paper filing method. The company instantly increased their profit by hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. There were that many bills being misplaced, lost, and forgotten about.
Of course, a $250K bill might be a different matter.
Massive infrastructure projects helped pull a lot of countries out of the Great Depression in the 30's
I know this idea has been heavily contested in the US. Many economists feel that all of the spending on public works projects actually lengthened the Great Depression here. Really no one knows for sure because of all of the potential factors, and it is difficult to experiment with. I've known several economists that readily admit that their various models are constantly failing to accurately predict the future, so it's a guess at best. (I'm not an economist, and really don't know about it. It's voodoo to me.)
FTTH seems to me much more expensive than FTTN without much benefit: FTTN + high speed SDSL seems "good enough" to me.
I'll take a stab at this. AT&T U-verse is doing this on a broad scale, so it should be a good comparison. I don't have it myself, but I do know others that do have it, and have witnessed it first hand. The total available bandwidth is planned at 20-25 Mbps down and 1-3 Mbps up. They are using ADSL technology as it provides higher download speeds than SDSL, and SDSL equipment was never standardized so incompatibilities exist between vendors making large scale rollouts troublesome.
Most of that bandwidth is devoted to a switched IPTV system that can transfer/record up to four SD channels at once. I think some people can record up to two HD channels at once. As far as quality goes, the SD channels look normal on a smallish cheap TV, relative to a cable or antenna signal. However, on a larger HD TV the HD channels have obviously been compressed to crap to keep the bandwidth low. They use H.264 for the video, so it is realistically as good as it's going to get for quite some time.
The current maximum internet speed sold by AT&T is 18 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up. Naturally while recording these shows, available bandwidth for internet is decreased significantly, I don't know if there is a specific lower limit as the video is sent priority.
Compare this to FTTH where your minimum starting bandwidth is 100 Mbps, and upgrading to 1 Gbps basically requires replacing the transceivers on either end of the fiber. HD channels would have much more available space to reduce artifacts, and record more shows simultaneously. Internet access speeds could be sold at 50 Mbps with ease, and uploads speeds could easily be synchronous. And you end up with a network that may handle the load of future applications that haven't been considered yet, as opposed to a network that is already strained for capacity. The primary issues are money and the general difficulty with dealing with cut fibers.
Of course, one could meet somewhere in the middle and run to a node within 100 meters of homes and run inexpensive gigabit Ethernet capable Cat 6 above ground to each home replacing existing phone pairs. You would need a lot more nodes, but would save a ton of money on getting to the premises. And the technology would be much cheaper. The primary issue with this would be dealing with grounding issues.
The US does indeed have the technology to recover all sorts of things that fell out of the air. The problem is trying to do it so that no one can prove that you're doing it and ask for their stuff back. Even if you technically have the right to get it, you want to avoid making a "scene".
I think he was referring to the alternate reality where Rimmer is a space fighter hero, super-jock, and ladies man. Rimmerworld was a world populated entirely by genetic clones of Rimmer, both male and female.
I think what the common person envisions is a rather small device to produce a lot of energy out of little fuel, ala Mr. Fusion. This type of device would be ideally suited to something like a car that needs to be detached from any centralized energy supply for extended periods of time. Granted, I don't see such a device ever being small/cheap enough to be practical in this regard, but that is what people envision.
Taking a creative work. Ripping it or recording it and distributing it to others without the permission of the creator is.
Wow, not even close. You've seriously bought into the redefining of words by the **AA. From the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary:
: the act or practice of robbing ; specifically : a larceny from the person or immediate presence of another by violence or threat of violence
You are free to your opinion that it is possible to place "copyright infringement" as compatible with some of the definitions of "theft" or "stealing", but "robbery" isn't even close to appropriate.
Knowing several people from Africa, or currently living there, I'm going to hazard to say that the "US groupthink" isn't all that far from the truth. I would love to spend some time there, but as a whole it's not a particularly safe place right now.
The quarter-pixel precision of H.264 motion vectors is specifically to help with LOW BITRATE and LOW RESOLUTION videos. Ditto for the smaller macroblock sizes.
Motion Estimation makes a HUGE difference at low bitrates.
It makes a minuscule difference at high bitrates, however.
We obviously have rather different opinions about what constitutes a high, normal, and low bitrate video. And QPEL was not the only difference between MPEG-2 and H.264. There are many differences that help to keep a good quality at a significantly lower bitrate.
Hardware MPEG-2 encoders are lousy.
Why would you think that Blu-Ray authoring systems use hardware MPEG-2 encoders? It is possible, but wouldn't make much sense as they are all new and using different settings than broadcast MPEG-2. 1080p vs 1080i, 7.1 channel audio versus 5.1, Java menus, etc. Besides, software encoders on modern CPUs are all faster than existing MPEG-2 hardware encoders, not that render times matter that much.
For very high quality encoding, you really can't even theoretically do much better than MPEG-2 already has. All newer codecs can really do, that old ones couldn't, is to do a better job of masking digital artifacts, when using bitrates so low that they can't be avoided (1.5MBps should be high enough not to require it).
This is simply not true for any practical application. If you pump up the bitrate high enough, MPEG-2 and h.264 will both produce just I-frames encoded pretty similarly. But at those bitrates people will be using something like MJPEG, or a lossless codec.
H.264 has a significantly better motion vector system at practical bitrates that will produce a far superior image than MPEG-2. When Blu-Ray was first came out, all of it's movies were in MPEG-2 for some reason, while HD-DVD was in H.264, and the HD-DVD movies had significantly higher quality. It wasn't until Blu-Ray producers switched to using H.264 that they were able to make movies with excellent quality. (This despite more than a decade of development on MPEG-2 codecs.)
WMV3 (aka WMV9, VC-1, etc.) suffers from the fact that practically nobody but Microsoft chooses to make an encoder for the format, and Microsoft isn't interested in the endless testing a tweaking that it takes to really squeeze the maximum quality out of it.
VC-1 actually has pretty good quality. (I have no idea if further development could improve it much though.) VC-1 is almost as good as H.264 for quality at a given bitrate. Where it shines though is that it takes significantly less CPU power to decode. It's not uncommon for a PC to be able to decode a VC-1 1080p stream, but not an H.264 one.
Still, Netflix is the only major system that I know of that uses VC-1 heavily. Blu-Ray CAN use it, but most producers seem to use H.264 instead. I suppose they figure that they might as well get the extra quality as they know hardware players will be able to play either back fine.
Removing a running drive is (on the data storage side) essentially the same as cutting power the the PC while it is running. Maybe you'll get data corruption, but you'll probably be fine.
The SATA specification calls for drives to be hot pluggable, so the drive shouldn't experience any hardware failures. But the controller may not be designed to handle hot plugging a drive, so you risk damaging the system with such a move.
My kingdom for mod points. Seriously, why are people so hell bent on PDF forms that are so much trouble to edit that it's almost as easy to just make a new one from scratch?
We have several Windows Mobile devices at work, and my iPhone has far less sync issues with Exchange than any of them. Honestly I'm pretty baffled by it.
Very good point. But there are three differences that they are counting on:
1. With smaller/lighter vehicles and newer building techniques, the rails would be thinner and quieter.
2. Switching a small vehicle between tracks is easier, so there would be less tracks needed to cover an area.
3. These pods would not be using iron wheels on iron tracks, which is the source of the iron dust that darkens everything around traditional train tracks.
I don't know if it would make enough of a difference, but it is worth investigating.
I prefer the similar system Skyweb Express (Taxi 2000). It uses a 3 person car, which is the minimum that with any sized group of people >1 no one would have to travel alone.
It should be trivial to use a small webcam to record video of trips. Then if someone reported damage to the vehicle, you check the video of the past user to see if they caused the damage, and automatically charge their account.
The idea that I've seen put forth is that the tracks can be much smaller than a regular train as the pod is very light (only need sitting room for 3 people). This means you can easily and cheaply (relatively) build elevated tracks above sidewalks or roads, so you can put a train stop just about anywhere. Because of decreased expense, you get more tracks and more stops, increasing their usefulness.
Normal trains require quite a bit of space and expense to build a track.
Seriously mate, I don't know if you're missing the point on purpose or not, but at this point you're in a train station in Paris waiting on a train that's already on its way from Munich to Rome.
First, try not to be such a prick and people will like you better. Second, I was showing how your original argument was flawed. Your original argument was
If you have requirements X and Y, and no other features matter, and options A and B both meet requirements X and Y, then is there any advantage of A or B over the other?
Of course there is no advantage, but that is an unrealistic oversimplification of reality. There is a lot more to surfing the internet than "display the webpages they want" to the average user. If there weren't, why would anyone with an iPhone bother to surf the internet on something larger if the iPhone displays the webpages they want?
Better interface. Almost every user I met complained about the IE7 interface.
Well, thanks for your anecdote. But it doesn't mean anything.
I do not think that word means what you think it means. I was providing an example of something that might matter to a user as I had met other users that it mattered to. I didn't say that it mattered to all users, or even a majority of users I've met.
snip some nonsense
FF also crashes less.
Thanks for this comment from 1999. Since FF never crashes, I guess they wasted their time saving state so that it could get back the pages you were viewing at the time of the non-existent crash.
Seriously, cut out the goofy straw man arguments. I obviously wasn't claiming that FF doesn't ever crash. I said "crashes less". How could that be confused? All software crashes, be it due to software bugs or hardware glitches. There is a reason that NASA uses redundant pieces of software and hardware to perform tasks, because they know there will be crashes.
My undocumented assertion was that FF crashes less than IE, and I provided no personal anecdotes for it. Although, given that all software crashes, and both FF and IE are software, a feature that allows a program to recover from said crash with possibly no data loss would be something a user might want.
It also takes less time to display webpages. And if you show the average user what can be done with extensions they find interesting, they are totally sold on FF (I had one user switch just for the Colorful Tabs add-on).
Sorry, did you read my post? And again with your anecdotes. I like how your argument hinges on something as trivial as Colorful tabs. I doubt most people would care enough about that add-on (or add-ons in general) to switch.. especially when IE supports add-ons as well.
Saying that FF takes less time to display a webpage is not an anecdote. It is easily demonstrative, and there is so much information on the internet about it, that I find it unnecessary to provide links.
And saying that "if you show someone a feature they would be interested in, they will favor that product if all other things are equal" is hardly a far fetched statement. I haven't seen any studies about it, but I'm just going to risk life and limb here and assume it to be generally true. The experience with ColorfulTabs was simply a simple experience demonstrating a time with the assertion was true. There were others, but it didn't seem important enough to go into detail with. I could provide others if you really care that much. I doubt most users think about add-ons at all, which is why you have to show them.
And yes, IE supports add-ons. But, to use a car analogy, the Ford Pinto supports all sorts of modifications to the body and engine. But you're just not going to find the range, usefulness or selection as you would for something like the Honda Civic.
Please try thinking rationally about my post... and realize your straw man arguments are just that.
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Elliptical orbits could intersect geo, but are there that many practical applications for elliptical orbits?
Seal up the environment, boil chlorine into the air, and let it sit for a few days. Isn't that what the CDC does?
but I think the VTL (Virtual tape library) is the winner for backup right now.
That's what we thought too, but there were issues with certain features in Backup Exec not working on tape. In the end we just presented the VTL's storage as a single iSCSI disk and formatted it. Backup to disk is so much simpler than tape that our offsite storage is disk too.
I think what you missed is context. I was responding specifically to the Great Depression (if you look up the thread a bit), and that attempted solutions to economic problems often have results that are difficult to foresee and understand.
No, I mean economists, as in people that have been schooled specifically in economics. In a depression the government doesn't have any money either, so they print more money to give to people, which causes inflation. Creating a non-essential job to give people the money you just printed is a little better than just giving them the money, but not much. (I do enjoy the parks and such that were built during the Great Depression.) And if those people are just turning around and giving the money back to the large corporations (such as Walmart) to survive, then you're in the same situation.
I think things might be a little more complex than you would initially think. There can be a thousand little byproducts and unexpected consequences when actions are taken to fix an economy.
I also doubt that the contractor just forgot to send the bill. Most contractors I know don't do that either.
I think you might be surprised just how disorganized contractors can be. I had a friend that got his first IT job working for a construction outfit. He set up a small Access database to keep track of bills to clients, to replace their paper filing method. The company instantly increased their profit by hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. There were that many bills being misplaced, lost, and forgotten about.
Of course, a $250K bill might be a different matter.
Massive infrastructure projects helped pull a lot of countries out of the Great Depression in the 30's
I know this idea has been heavily contested in the US. Many economists feel that all of the spending on public works projects actually lengthened the Great Depression here. Really no one knows for sure because of all of the potential factors, and it is difficult to experiment with. I've known several economists that readily admit that their various models are constantly failing to accurately predict the future, so it's a guess at best. (I'm not an economist, and really don't know about it. It's voodoo to me.)
FTTH seems to me much more expensive than FTTN without much benefit: FTTN + high speed SDSL seems "good enough" to me.
I'll take a stab at this. AT&T U-verse is doing this on a broad scale, so it should be a good comparison. I don't have it myself, but I do know others that do have it, and have witnessed it first hand. The total available bandwidth is planned at 20-25 Mbps down and 1-3 Mbps up. They are using ADSL technology as it provides higher download speeds than SDSL, and SDSL equipment was never standardized so incompatibilities exist between vendors making large scale rollouts troublesome.
Most of that bandwidth is devoted to a switched IPTV system that can transfer/record up to four SD channels at once. I think some people can record up to two HD channels at once. As far as quality goes, the SD channels look normal on a smallish cheap TV, relative to a cable or antenna signal. However, on a larger HD TV the HD channels have obviously been compressed to crap to keep the bandwidth low. They use H.264 for the video, so it is realistically as good as it's going to get for quite some time.
The current maximum internet speed sold by AT&T is 18 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up. Naturally while recording these shows, available bandwidth for internet is decreased significantly, I don't know if there is a specific lower limit as the video is sent priority.
Compare this to FTTH where your minimum starting bandwidth is 100 Mbps, and upgrading to 1 Gbps basically requires replacing the transceivers on either end of the fiber. HD channels would have much more available space to reduce artifacts, and record more shows simultaneously. Internet access speeds could be sold at 50 Mbps with ease, and uploads speeds could easily be synchronous. And you end up with a network that may handle the load of future applications that haven't been considered yet, as opposed to a network that is already strained for capacity. The primary issues are money and the general difficulty with dealing with cut fibers.
Of course, one could meet somewhere in the middle and run to a node within 100 meters of homes and run inexpensive gigabit Ethernet capable Cat 6 above ground to each home replacing existing phone pairs. You would need a lot more nodes, but would save a ton of money on getting to the premises. And the technology would be much cheaper. The primary issue with this would be dealing with grounding issues.
The US does indeed have the technology to recover all sorts of things that fell out of the air. The problem is trying to do it so that no one can prove that you're doing it and ask for their stuff back. Even if you technically have the right to get it, you want to avoid making a "scene".
It's a real pain in the butt.
I think he was referring to the alternate reality where Rimmer is a space fighter hero, super-jock, and ladies man. Rimmerworld was a world populated entirely by genetic clones of Rimmer, both male and female.
I think what the common person envisions is a rather small device to produce a lot of energy out of little fuel, ala Mr. Fusion. This type of device would be ideally suited to something like a car that needs to be detached from any centralized energy supply for extended periods of time. Granted, I don't see such a device ever being small/cheap enough to be practical in this regard, but that is what people envision.
I never said file sharing is robbery.
Taking a creative work. Ripping it or recording it and distributing it to others without the permission of the creator is.
Wow, not even close. You've seriously bought into the redefining of words by the **AA. From the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary:
: the act or practice of robbing ; specifically : a larceny from the person or immediate presence of another by violence or threat of violence
You are free to your opinion that it is possible to place "copyright infringement" as compatible with some of the definitions of "theft" or "stealing", but "robbery" isn't even close to appropriate.
Knowing several people from Africa, or currently living there, I'm going to hazard to say that the "US groupthink" isn't all that far from the truth. I would love to spend some time there, but as a whole it's not a particularly safe place right now.
The quarter-pixel precision of H.264 motion vectors is specifically to help with LOW BITRATE and LOW RESOLUTION videos. Ditto for the smaller macroblock sizes.
Motion Estimation makes a HUGE difference at low bitrates. It makes a minuscule difference at high bitrates, however.
We obviously have rather different opinions about what constitutes a high, normal, and low bitrate video. And QPEL was not the only difference between MPEG-2 and H.264. There are many differences that help to keep a good quality at a significantly lower bitrate.
Hardware MPEG-2 encoders are lousy.
Why would you think that Blu-Ray authoring systems use hardware MPEG-2 encoders? It is possible, but wouldn't make much sense as they are all new and using different settings than broadcast MPEG-2. 1080p vs 1080i, 7.1 channel audio versus 5.1, Java menus, etc. Besides, software encoders on modern CPUs are all faster than existing MPEG-2 hardware encoders, not that render times matter that much.
For very high quality encoding, you really can't even theoretically do much better than MPEG-2 already has. All newer codecs can really do, that old ones couldn't, is to do a better job of masking digital artifacts, when using bitrates so low that they can't be avoided (1.5MBps should be high enough not to require it).
This is simply not true for any practical application. If you pump up the bitrate high enough, MPEG-2 and h.264 will both produce just I-frames encoded pretty similarly. But at those bitrates people will be using something like MJPEG, or a lossless codec.
H.264 has a significantly better motion vector system at practical bitrates that will produce a far superior image than MPEG-2. When Blu-Ray was first came out, all of it's movies were in MPEG-2 for some reason, while HD-DVD was in H.264, and the HD-DVD movies had significantly higher quality. It wasn't until Blu-Ray producers switched to using H.264 that they were able to make movies with excellent quality. (This despite more than a decade of development on MPEG-2 codecs.)
WMV3 (aka WMV9, VC-1, etc.) suffers from the fact that practically nobody but Microsoft chooses to make an encoder for the format, and Microsoft isn't interested in the endless testing a tweaking that it takes to really squeeze the maximum quality out of it.
VC-1 actually has pretty good quality. (I have no idea if further development could improve it much though.) VC-1 is almost as good as H.264 for quality at a given bitrate. Where it shines though is that it takes significantly less CPU power to decode. It's not uncommon for a PC to be able to decode a VC-1 1080p stream, but not an H.264 one.
Still, Netflix is the only major system that I know of that uses VC-1 heavily. Blu-Ray CAN use it, but most producers seem to use H.264 instead. I suppose they figure that they might as well get the extra quality as they know hardware players will be able to play either back fine.
An excellent idea. Even better if it changed the drive order in the BIOS.
Removing a running drive is (on the data storage side) essentially the same as cutting power the the PC while it is running. Maybe you'll get data corruption, but you'll probably be fine.
The SATA specification calls for drives to be hot pluggable, so the drive shouldn't experience any hardware failures. But the controller may not be designed to handle hot plugging a drive, so you risk damaging the system with such a move.
My kingdom for mod points. Seriously, why are people so hell bent on PDF forms that are so much trouble to edit that it's almost as easy to just make a new one from scratch?
We have several Windows Mobile devices at work, and my iPhone has far less sync issues with Exchange than any of them. Honestly I'm pretty baffled by it.
Very good point. But there are three differences that they are counting on:
1. With smaller/lighter vehicles and newer building techniques, the rails would be thinner and quieter.
2. Switching a small vehicle between tracks is easier, so there would be less tracks needed to cover an area.
3. These pods would not be using iron wheels on iron tracks, which is the source of the iron dust that darkens everything around traditional train tracks.
I don't know if it would make enough of a difference, but it is worth investigating.
I prefer the similar system Skyweb Express (Taxi 2000). It uses a 3 person car, which is the minimum that with any sized group of people >1 no one would have to travel alone.
http://www.taxi2000.com/
It should be trivial to use a small webcam to record video of trips. Then if someone reported damage to the vehicle, you check the video of the past user to see if they caused the damage, and automatically charge their account.
The idea that I've seen put forth is that the tracks can be much smaller than a regular train as the pod is very light (only need sitting room for 3 people). This means you can easily and cheaply (relatively) build elevated tracks above sidewalks or roads, so you can put a train stop just about anywhere. Because of decreased expense, you get more tracks and more stops, increasing their usefulness.
Normal trains require quite a bit of space and expense to build a track.
Seriously mate, I don't know if you're missing the point on purpose or not, but at this point you're in a train station in Paris waiting on a train that's already on its way from Munich to Rome.
First, try not to be such a prick and people will like you better. Second, I was showing how your original argument was flawed. Your original argument was
If you have requirements X and Y, and no other features matter, and options A and B both meet requirements X and Y, then is there any advantage of A or B over the other?
Of course there is no advantage, but that is an unrealistic oversimplification of reality. There is a lot more to surfing the internet than "display the webpages they want" to the average user. If there weren't, why would anyone with an iPhone bother to surf the internet on something larger if the iPhone displays the webpages they want?
Better interface. Almost every user I met complained about the IE7 interface.
Well, thanks for your anecdote. But it doesn't mean anything.
I do not think that word means what you think it means. I was providing an example of something that might matter to a user as I had met other users that it mattered to. I didn't say that it mattered to all users, or even a majority of users I've met.
snip some nonsense
FF also crashes less.
Thanks for this comment from 1999. Since FF never crashes, I guess they wasted their time saving state so that it could get back the pages you were viewing at the time of the non-existent crash.
Seriously, cut out the goofy straw man arguments. I obviously wasn't claiming that FF doesn't ever crash. I said "crashes less". How could that be confused? All software crashes, be it due to software bugs or hardware glitches. There is a reason that NASA uses redundant pieces of software and hardware to perform tasks, because they know there will be crashes.
My undocumented assertion was that FF crashes less than IE, and I provided no personal anecdotes for it. Although, given that all software crashes, and both FF and IE are software, a feature that allows a program to recover from said crash with possibly no data loss would be something a user might want.
It also takes less time to display webpages. And if you show the average user what can be done with extensions they find interesting, they are totally sold on FF (I had one user switch just for the Colorful Tabs add-on).
Sorry, did you read my post? And again with your anecdotes. I like how your argument hinges on something as trivial as Colorful tabs. I doubt most people would care enough about that add-on (or add-ons in general) to switch.. especially when IE supports add-ons as well.
Saying that FF takes less time to display a webpage is not an anecdote. It is easily demonstrative, and there is so much information on the internet about it, that I find it unnecessary to provide links.
And saying that "if you show someone a feature they would be interested in, they will favor that product if all other things are equal" is hardly a far fetched statement. I haven't seen any studies about it, but I'm just going to risk life and limb here and assume it to be generally true. The experience with ColorfulTabs was simply a simple experience demonstrating a time with the assertion was true. There were others, but it didn't seem important enough to go into detail with. I could provide others if you really care that much. I doubt most users think about add-ons at all, which is why you have to show them.
And yes, IE supports add-ons. But, to use a car analogy, the Ford Pinto supports all sorts of modifications to the body and engine. But you're just not going to find the range, usefulness or selection as you would for something like the Honda Civic.
Please try thinking rationally about my post... and realize your straw man arguments are just that.