Well I do own an hd-dvd player, and I like watching hd-dvds, but I AM pleased to see the war end. I want to see mass hd adoption everywhere. I want to see tons of blu-ray titles in every video store, I want to see compressed cable channels replaced with high bandwidth hd channels. Ending the format war wins a battle in a greater war-- hd adoption.
That was a stupid call, they should have just made it two discs for the main feature. That reminds me of the early dvd release of Titanic (and it's not alone in receiving this disservice)-- instead of splitting the main feature onto two discs the studio decides to use a non-anamorphic transfer to save space. Oh for shame!
The bit rate cap is NOT the last word on pq. The wonderful about hd was going past the old, tired and poor mpeg2 to wonderful, newer codecs like VC-1 that shine really well with relatively low bitrates, and do not see much improvement if you use really high bitrates. I'm surprised that this bogus argument about bigger being better are still mentioned to this day when nobody has seen any discernable difference between identical releases of a movie between bd and hd. Both formats supported bit rates that were high enough for what they were doing, the rest is just the law of diminishing returns.
And who cares if hd-dvds were cheaper to manufacture? The prices on retail are determined more by the supply-demand curve than they are by the initial production cost.
That was the reason I used for purchasing my tv! I'm glad that someone else thinks like me. I wanted it to be big enough that I could enjoy the benefits of hd, but small enough that I could sit up close in my smallish living room and still enjoy sd. Being a geek I positioned my chair at exactly the average of the distances to have a perfectly balanced appreciate for either 720p or 480p based on visual acuity. I wouldn't think about a large hdtv until hd becomes the norm and I can do nearly all of my watching in 1080p, which should be several years down the road.
Actually, the truth is pretty much the opposite of this statement. Because Blu-ray had 50% more bandwidth, it could be compressed less, and since it supported exactly the same video codecs as HD DVD that's all that really matters. Although some of the audio codecs are optional on Blu-ray that are mandatory on HD DVD, when present Blu-ray requires greater bandwidth for those, too, leading to better fidelity. In theory but not in practice. The encodings whether it be VC-1 or AVC for dual releases on hd-dvd or blu-ray always look the same. And whether they use uncompressed audio or LOSSLESS dolby or dts hd the result is the same. The quality between LOSSLESS and uncompressed audio is the same because IT'S LOSSLESS! WHAT PART OF LOSSLESS DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?
If you say that blu-ray looks and sounds better than hd-dvd you are both wrong and stupid. If you say that hd-dvd looks and sounds better than blu-ray you are both wrong and stupid. Excepting some bad bd releases in the beginning, they LOOK AND SOUND THE SAME.
I call bs on parent. I have a Panasonic bd30 Blu-Ray player and it boots faster and loads discs faster than my Toshiba hd-dvd player. That Panasonic player boots only marginally slower than a dedicated dvd player. This fanboy ps3 is the only good bd player crap needs to stop now, it's completely untrue.
720 lines isn't that much of an improvement over 480 or 576 (for PAL). Just do the Math. 480p = 720 x 480 progressive
720p = 1280 x 720 progressive
Doing the ratio you find that 720p is approximately 2.7 times higher resolution than 480p. There I did your math for you. Nearly tripling the resolution is "not much of an improvement"?? Excuse me!? If 720p and 480p look pretty close to each other in your eyes, than 1080p would be completely wasted on you anyway (because you're blind).
Please, New Scientist is not a credible source for news on physical science. I wish people would stop posting New Scientist articles.
If you want to find out what's hot in physics the Physical Review Focus is a great accessible source of real science stories that are important, and unlike the PRL they are free to read.
http://focus.aps.org/
Agreed (on cable being a waste of time). I'm about ready to cancel cable. What I don't like about it--
(a) commercials
(b) sd channels are far too compressed
(c) not enough hd channels
(d) all of the cable channels put together still don't offer enough new and interesting content
(e) price is too high for what they're offering
I prefer renting movies and tv shows. Netflix, blockbuster and hollywood all offer reasonable plans that are cheaper than cable and provide better picture and audio quality and no commercials.
Agreed. How ungrateful can you be to be affronted by free ebooks that you can either enjoy or not bother with to no cost to you. How spoiled and conceited does one have to be to rant against free ebooks?
I don't watch a television device anymore, haven't for five years. I thought I'd seen you in the news before: obligatory Onion post http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694
It's a bad idea anyway, regardless of your future data needs. I've already received a handful of.docx files in my job and have had to email the person back, asking them to save as an alternate format. And inevitably the response is "Oh right, I always forget that not everyone can open these files."
Microsoft's done a crappy job introducing a crappy format, and only people on the latest office (or the ability to install the Windows-oriented Windows-installer for old Office for Windows) can even work with the files. Not only that but the odd compatibility problems with the older format are inexcusable. I have many documents in the old format with blacked out images just because '07 doesn't know how to handle them.
And since most can't handle the new crappy format, I just save everything I'm going to email or post on the web as pdf, that way no matter what people are using they should be able to read it. It's funny that I have far fewer compatibility issues with open office, which is FREE, unlike the expensive office suite that can't open files from it's predecessor correctly.
And how many installs are on new machines, where the buyer had no choice? How many of those forced installs have been wiped out by now and replaced by XP, 2K or Linux? Probably actually not that many. I could believe a large fraction of people buying a new computer with XP preinstalled, since you can still find those, but I don't see that many people buying a computer and immediately installing a new OS on it. For that matter, since when does the average joe decide to install an operating system? I know many people that don't even tweak their startups! I'm not even talking about services, I'm talking about the fact that they allow junk software that they don't need to run on startup even when they end up practically crippling their pc with all of the stuff they don't need running. And that is because most people just don't think about these things! The consumer mentality is that the computer should just work right out of the box.
It has the fewest flaws found because it has the fewest amount of people looking for them. Then how do you explain the fact that Vista has fewer vulnerabilities as compared to Red Hat and Ubuntu? I very much doubt that poor adoption of Vista can explain that because whether you like it or not, there are still far more users using Vista as compared to Linux.
Yes, but the PS3 isn't cheap. The XBox 360 is, comparatively. Sometimes you get what you pay for, and there are a lot of people on, say, Slashdot, who'll go for cheap and sort of works over expensive but quality build. Well I disagree. I bought my 360 for $350 and it's the 20 GB model. The 40 GB ps3 is just $50 more for the same features plus a few more, I'd hardly call that cheap versus expensive.
I thought the ps3 was expensive too and lacking in games several months ago, but I think the ps3 is viable now for gaming-- the price has way dropped, and there are a ton of games for it now. I think that the usual arguments for why the ps3 can't compete are no longer valid.
The standards were created so that we didn't have to do that for every site that gets built, and by and large they apply--except for IE 6 and IE 7 (IE 7's so much better than IE 6, though; it's a breeze in comparison). That's pretty funny way of putting it, you make it sound as if IE was just one of several popular browsers. Internet Explorer is by far the most popular browser out there, to the point where your vaunted standards don't have any meaning if IE doesn't bother with them. The fact that all web developers have to devote so much time to writing mangled code just to be IE compliant shows who is really in control here... and it's MS. Blame them, don't blame the IE 6 end user.
I'm not sure what you're describing is as much to do with the availability of information in the digital age as it is to do with laziness in certain students. Agreed, this is really not new. Before the days of the internet lazy students did essentially the same thing by copying the encyclopedia. And it really is the same thing-- instant access to a broad, superficial treatment of a subject.
Back then you could use the library the wrong way by simply finding and reading the encylopedia entry when you were supposed to do research, and you can use it the right way by finding the books and journal articles that you need.
Now you can use the internet the wrong way by finding wiki entries when you're supposed to do research, or you can use it the right way by finding and reading journal articles. That article does not pose a valid criticism of internet searching imo.
...but they do make good upconverting DVD players, and at that price can be bought as "An upconverting player that also happens to have a fairly good selection of real HD content for it."
Well that was actually good enough for me. The picture quality playing back dvds on my Toshiba hd-dvd player is better than the upscaling players that I've tried, and that includes a $150 Sony player. Since I do most of my tv watching from netflix, I just set in my preferences to replace dvds with hd-dvds whenever it can.
Upscaling is not something you actually need anyway, hdtvs do the upscaling themselves, you just need a quality player. Toshiba's line of hd players are well built, and if they have to liquidate them the consumer win, even if they are never used to play hd-dvds on them. Even if hd-dvd is dead within a year, I still wouldn't regret my purchase.
Haha, I'm sure $100 seems like a lot of money when you are living on frozen pizzas in your mom's basement, but it really is a pittance to someone with a decent job. I usually spend that about once a week at a nice restaurant. Somebody with a decent job would understand the value of money enough to not so casually burn it. After you go through tax, insurance, rent/mortgage, bills, food, gas, and savings there is usually little left for fun money and it has to be spent intelligently. Of course if you are not financially independent and live in your mom's basement and spend all of your money on entertainment, then yeah I guess you would consider a $100 a pittance.
your wife is one of the culprits responsible for fostering thoughts on god and religion. Oh no the thought police!! I guess fostering intellectual discussion on an important topic such as science vs. religion is somehow bad?? Look-- children already have opinions (most of them misguided) about this topic from their parents. Burying your head in the sand is not the correct solution. The sad truth is that many people have this terrible misconception that science is a cabal of militant atheists out to prove religion wrong. A brief lecture and essay questions at the beginning of any science class goes along way to make people more open minded and tolerant towards science. In the beginning of the class I taught, I assigned homework on the topic and discovered that nearly all of my students thought that science is in opposition to religion, many claiming that scientists try to prove that religion is wrong! This is an issue that won't go away if you ignore it.
The problem is that there are around 9 million PS3s in consumer hands, and this number is growing at a much faster rate than HD-DVD player sales are. That doesn't include standalone players, either. Except only a small fraction of PS3 owners are buying bluray discs. The PS3 doesn't actually have much of a role in the format war. The large majority of PS3 owners only use their PS3s for gaming. And as a matter of fact, the HD-DVD players sell more than the Blu-Ray players. Blu-Ray has the edge not because of the player adoption, it has the edge because it sells more discs.
I agree that there is no point in buying fiction books, since you will inevitably run out of space, no matter how large a library you have. I donate my used books to library book sales, and when I don't do that I sell them for credit at used bookstores.
Easy: I buy reference books, not fiction. That's not really sensible. If you have access to a university library you are saving yourself a tremendous amount of money by using it. Textbooks are outrageously expensive, why would you want to buy everything and never check anything out?? I miss having access to a university library where you get six month or even one year check outs.
I understand having a small number of indispensable references, what I don't understand is never using the library.
Turns out Newton's laws *are* wrong. They just aren't wrong *enough* for it to make much of a difference to us when you're talking about for example, day-to-day human activities, most of which involve speeds much lower than the speed of light. For calculating speeds of airplanes and automobiles, Newton's laws are reasonable approximations -- but they are indeed wrong according to the world of relativity. That's true of every scientific theory. Theory provides a description that's only approximately valid within a certain regime. To say that Newton's laws of motion are flat out wrong suggests confusion between a mathematician's concept of truth and a scientist's concept of truth.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry but why should I be impressed with 33Mb video when Blu-Ray's max bitrate is higher? Blu-Ray's max is 40Mb. http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/
Well I do own an hd-dvd player, and I like watching hd-dvds, but I AM pleased to see the war end. I want to see mass hd adoption everywhere. I want to see tons of blu-ray titles in every video store, I want to see compressed cable channels replaced with high bandwidth hd channels. Ending the format war wins a battle in a greater war-- hd adoption.
That was a stupid call, they should have just made it two discs for the main feature. That reminds me of the early dvd release of Titanic (and it's not alone in receiving this disservice)-- instead of splitting the main feature onto two discs the studio decides to use a non-anamorphic transfer to save space. Oh for shame!
The bit rate cap is NOT the last word on pq. The wonderful about hd was going past the old, tired and poor mpeg2 to wonderful, newer codecs like VC-1 that shine really well with relatively low bitrates, and do not see much improvement if you use really high bitrates. I'm surprised that this bogus argument about bigger being better are still mentioned to this day when nobody has seen any discernable difference between identical releases of a movie between bd and hd. Both formats supported bit rates that were high enough for what they were doing, the rest is just the law of diminishing returns.
And who cares if hd-dvds were cheaper to manufacture? The prices on retail are determined more by the supply-demand curve than they are by the initial production cost.
That was the reason I used for purchasing my tv! I'm glad that someone else thinks like me. I wanted it to be big enough that I could enjoy the benefits of hd, but small enough that I could sit up close in my smallish living room and still enjoy sd. Being a geek I positioned my chair at exactly the average of the distances to have a perfectly balanced appreciate for either 720p or 480p based on visual acuity. I wouldn't think about a large hdtv until hd becomes the norm and I can do nearly all of my watching in 1080p, which should be several years down the road.
If you say that blu-ray looks and sounds better than hd-dvd you are both wrong and stupid. If you say that hd-dvd looks and sounds better than blu-ray you are both wrong and stupid. Excepting some bad bd releases in the beginning, they LOOK AND SOUND THE SAME.
I call bs on parent. I have a Panasonic bd30 Blu-Ray player and it boots faster and loads discs faster than my Toshiba hd-dvd player. That Panasonic player boots only marginally slower than a dedicated dvd player. This fanboy ps3 is the only good bd player crap needs to stop now, it's completely untrue.
720p = 1280 x 720 progressive
Doing the ratio you find that 720p is approximately 2.7 times higher resolution than 480p. There I did your math for you. Nearly tripling the resolution is "not much of an improvement"?? Excuse me!? If 720p and 480p look pretty close to each other in your eyes, than 1080p would be completely wasted on you anyway (because you're blind).
Please, New Scientist is not a credible source for news on physical science. I wish people would stop posting New Scientist articles. If you want to find out what's hot in physics the Physical Review Focus is a great accessible source of real science stories that are important, and unlike the PRL they are free to read. http://focus.aps.org/
Agreed (on cable being a waste of time). I'm about ready to cancel cable. What I don't like about it-- (a) commercials (b) sd channels are far too compressed (c) not enough hd channels (d) all of the cable channels put together still don't offer enough new and interesting content (e) price is too high for what they're offering I prefer renting movies and tv shows. Netflix, blockbuster and hollywood all offer reasonable plans that are cheaper than cable and provide better picture and audio quality and no commercials.
Agreed. How ungrateful can you be to be affronted by free ebooks that you can either enjoy or not bother with to no cost to you. How spoiled and conceited does one have to be to rant against free ebooks?
And since most can't handle the new crappy format, I just save everything I'm going to email or post on the web as pdf, that way no matter what people are using they should be able to read it. It's funny that I have far fewer compatibility issues with open office, which is FREE, unlike the expensive office suite that can't open files from it's predecessor correctly.
I thought the ps3 was expensive too and lacking in games several months ago, but I think the ps3 is viable now for gaming-- the price has way dropped, and there are a ton of games for it now. I think that the usual arguments for why the ps3 can't compete are no longer valid.
Back then you could use the library the wrong way by simply finding and reading the encylopedia entry when you were supposed to do research, and you can use it the right way by finding the books and journal articles that you need.
Now you can use the internet the wrong way by finding wiki entries when you're supposed to do research, or you can use it the right way by finding and reading journal articles. That article does not pose a valid criticism of internet searching imo.
...but they do make good upconverting DVD players, and at that price can be bought as "An upconverting player that also happens to have a fairly good selection of real HD content for it."Well that was actually good enough for me. The picture quality playing back dvds on my Toshiba hd-dvd player is better than the upscaling players that I've tried, and that includes a $150 Sony player. Since I do most of my tv watching from netflix, I just set in my preferences to replace dvds with hd-dvds whenever it can.
Upscaling is not something you actually need anyway, hdtvs do the upscaling themselves, you just need a quality player. Toshiba's line of hd players are well built, and if they have to liquidate them the consumer win, even if they are never used to play hd-dvds on them. Even if hd-dvd is dead within a year, I still wouldn't regret my purchase.