I see no value in this product whatsoever. Keep your RAM where it belongs (not at the other end of a SATA cable), and use RAID if you want a faster disk...
"This can easily saturate busses. A hardware solution allows the computer to communicate only the "real" data between itself and the hardware device."
Well, that really depends. For sufficiently large io, that should end up being only a small amount of additional data for parity.
The fundamental problem with hardware raid ends up being the fact that your bandwidth to disk is bottlenecked at the raid controller (or host bus iface, if you're using an external raid box). If you have the opportunity to spread your raid out over multiple busses (say, a simple add-on PCI-ATA controller, an onboard ATA controller, an onboard RAID controller), that may be a better option. In most modern chipsets, these disk controllers are on independent busses off of the much higher bandwidth interconnect to cpu/memory.
Well, I'm unlikely to avoid a mfr just "because the ACX driver guys said so". I'm not 100% certain what sort of sin they are accused of, but it appears to be a small squabble over a specific TI chip in one of their wireless cards that Dlink is unable/unwilling to provide driver authors with details on. I sympathize, but given that it's a localized issue with a viable reverse-engineering effort, it seems a bit petty to boycott the rest of Dlink's perfectly adequate products.
If I've overlooked something more serious, by all means expalin yourself. In the absence of more damning material, however, I'll continue to use Dlink equipment. What's my alternative, Linksys and Netgear? (See recent hubbub over router insecurities and the totally inappropriate responses of both those companies).
FWIW, I think we have a better chance of seeing truly open media platforms comming from networking equipment manufacturers than from AV equipment manufacturers...
Dlink appears to have several products that may be of interest here, has anyone used these?
Specifically, they have two "wireless audio adapters": http://www.dlink.com/products/category .asp?cid=7#c id_70...as well as a product that looks like the bee's knees - the "Wireless Media Player" supporting wired & wireless, and video formats including xvid! And, it looks like it's only $200. http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=318
On that same note, pay careful attention to what bus the disk controller is hanging off of. This is not an issue if you're using a hardware RAID implementation, but it will make or break software RAID performance (which can, in most cases, beat the pants off of PCI card solutions if done correctly).
If you have several cheap-ass ATA adapters hanging off of the same PCI bus, that PCI bus can quickly become your bottleneck (regardless of how many drives-per-channel). Sometimes splitting a group of RAID disks among PCI-attached adapters and mobo-integrated IDE channels (particularly in cases where an additional pair of IDE channels has been added for on-board RAID) can render this moot. Not all on-board IDE & RAID solutions are attached in the same manner, so do your homework first; but it's worth checking out if you have RAID units incorporating more than a couple drives.
With this in mind, a software RAID5 setup can perform quite well, and adding drives will only improve the cost-effectiveness and performance...
Exactly. And there's no reason why the guts of the average modern linux distro, minus the desktop stuff, shouldn't be able to run beautifully on my old PII.
I suppose I could stick to older distros, or jump through hoops to slim down Fedora Core 2, but I suspect that there are plenty of users out there who would be well-served by an install-time "lightweight desktop" option in their distro of choice. (I mean, you can already chose the "minimal" option when selecting packages in RH/FC, why not offer the ability to chose a non-gnome/kde desktop as well, and make life a bit easier for those of us with 20th century hardware?)
Glad you feel, um, passionately about this subject.
So, his example was probably not the most illustrative, but I want to get back to his original point - any discrete sampling is going to throw a monkey wrench into the Nyquist Thm (which assumes infinite precision sampling). Thus, of course it's "lossy", in the sense that you can't reproduce the orginal signal correctly. (See Oppenheim & Schafer, "Discrete-Time Signal Processing" for background, btw).
The point I think you're trying to make is that the information lost is outside perceptual bounds, and thus does not matter. My understanding is that this is not universally true, although I think we could agree that there is a point of diminishing returns w.r.t. sample precision and rate. As far as I'm concerned, however, current audio tech has left the CD behind this curve and the time has come for consumer-grade electronics to take a step up. It is presently a very cheap step to take, as the mass-market mfrs are realizing.
I'm really not clear on why folks insist on arguing about this. Sure, CDs are great, I love 'em. And I'm not giving them up until the replacement is dirt cheap. But technology marches on, yo. ("256K of RAM is more than enough! I mean, we can always swap to disk. This doesn't change the underlying model of computation, and I can prove it, look!"...)
Dude, he was making a perfectly valid point, which you missed in your haste to grandstand.
We're talking about perceived audio quality here, so the ultimate goal is a system that allows listeners to correlate experiences.
Obviously there are metrics more palatable to someone with an engineering background, but the posters point was that _some_ of what you dismiss as "audiophile bullshit lingo" has a degree of rigor. At least, it can potentially fulfill the above purpose, particularly in cases where measurement data is incompletely specified or misleading.
Of _course_ there are physical phenomena that confound the language of laymen. On the other hand, all the measurement data in the world cannot describe a listening experience until we (imperfectly) map it to the language of our own perception.
> People who don't understand numbers are not competent to make scientific (including audio equipment) decisions.
But they are perfectly competent to enjoy music, and judge the quality of that experience. Some people buy audio equipment for listening to, not so they can measure it and bask in the glow of an RTA displaying a perfectly flat frequency-response.
> My qualifications? [insert name-dropping] >... Now I do vector calculus for fun.
I don't care if you've touched Bob Rock's wang and use a slide-rule. This is elitism alongside the worst audiophile offenders, you might as well arm-wrestle him to decide who has the better taste in music...
There is a prissy, "language must remain static" camp that refuses to acknowledge the validity of "irregardless". However, it is commonly understood to connote a more emphatic version of "regardless".
Well, yes, you can use a specialty cooking surface and that thin spatula-knife-widget-thing, but that would have to be a more recent invetion. You don't need to spend 300 bux at williams-sonoma on some special "crepe pan" device, just learn how to flip them. It's not hard.
FWIW, Jacques Peppin's "La Technique" gives a recipie that contains enough butter to obviate the need for greasing the pan and also suggests banging the pan on the counter (w/ potholder to buffer!) thus loosening the pancake prior to The Flip.
> the atkins diet, and other low-carb diets, > address the exact problem of overeating.
Yes, that's probably the largest factor in their reported success as well. (Despite the Atkins hocus-pocus talk about ketones, and other barely-relevent bullcock).
What bothers me is that the popular press, rather than pick up on this and start promoting full, balanced diets, has instead started chanting this mantra of "carbs == bad". The danger is that diets will just continue to follow media trends and the overriding message that gets absorbed is ultimately one of extremism ("Carbs are bad, stop eating carbs". or "Protien is great stuff, you need to eat 5x your weight in cottage cheese every day. Or you'll get cancer.. or something"). Extremism is not a good nutritional patern.
As an athlete I pay fairly close attention to my diet, and I probably would tend to generally cut out a lot of carbs if I were planning on spending 3 weeks sitting on my ass. But this attentiveness to matching nutritional needs to diet is not something I see the average Joe having the motivation to exercise (no pun intended).
Now, if this trend catches on to the point where it changes the current refined-sugar/wonderbread landscape of the American prepared-foods industry, that wouldn't be entirely bad..?
So let's cut to the chase here: the "problem of the moment" here is obesity.
Sure, some amount of debate remains regarding how to best control this epidemic by controlling *what* we eat. But the bottom line is *how much* we eat.
It's a fundamental mismatch between super-sized overconsumption and generally sedentary lifestyles.
And while there may be a few interesting detours on this road along the lines of fad diets (ie, Atkins), they utterly fail to address the root cause in a sustainable fashion...
In order to accomplish a task or master a skill that is important to me, I am willing to invest a reasonable amount of time in reading a manual. If a "user" in the above scenarios were to chuck the manual, as it were, the only remaining route to success is a lot of trial-and-error experience. (ie, failed souffles and unsatisfied sex partners).
I think your cooking analogy is great. If someone wants to cook a meal, you give them a recipie and maybe some other documentation (pictures, "gas stoves for dummies", and a few examples to work from). If they chose to ignore it, they get to order pizza; but, if they invest even the smallest amount of effort, chances are they'll do fine. If they'd rather watch Emeril prance around a studio kitchen for hours, and expect to be able to walk into their own kitchen and cook merely by pronouncing "BAM!", there's not much that _can_ save them...
Is UI design, in many cases, similar? I think so. The point is whether or not a "willingness to learn" is a reasonable prerequisite to computer literacy. While there *are* business opportunities in helping the helpless perform ever-more-powerfull tasks, in the long run it's just a bad idea (not to mention more frustration than it's worth). I believe in natural selection, and abominations like MS Office's "Clippy" only delay the eventual extinction of the learning-hostile user.
Please be precise and avoid using vague terms like "speed". Ask yourself what you are trying to describe, is it the speed at which the drive spins, the rate of data transfer, etc.
This article is NOT a scsi vs ata comparison. For the purposes of the author, some otherwise crucial performance metrics were not relevant. For intance, the inferior seek time of available ATA drives had minimal impact on his application, and thus were not weighed.
SCSI and ATA each have their place in different environments, and as long as the drive mfrs continue existing trends it is utterly useless to bicker about the relative merits of drive technology divorced from the context of specific applications.
Um, SCSI is still invaluable as a protocol for addressing block storage. I realize the lower-end user doesn't care as long as the drive will format with NTFS and store his MP3s, but we who use Fibre Channel still talk to drives using SCSI semantics.
"GFS on the drive"? Dude, we're talking about the drives here, put whatever embedded widget in front of them that you want, but at some point the block-addressed device will exist behind it.
BTW, When we're talking SCSI, we're talking about aggregating storage devices here, and that goes _behind_ the filesystem (at least, given today's meaning of the word)....
Re:and how is the program going to get my DNA?
on
Protein Music
·
· Score: 1
What are you talking about??
As for how you are going to come up with input to this program, let me help you out:
Rip all the keys off of your keyboard except for A, T, G, and C. Now start typing. It's not that complicated...
There are strong arguments to be made for excepting the type of trading conducted over Napster as "Fair Use". Do you just fail to understand what that means? I'm confused, because you use loaded words like "illegal".
Regarding this insipid propaganda about music-sharing hurting artists, I think you (and your Nashville pal) should think about this more carefully... Do you just fail to understand how the music industry currently works? I refer you to Courtney Love's comments on the subject (transcript of a speach, print this out and read it. If you don't understand the implications and subtleties, read it again. It's the most coherent thing I've heard pass her lips, she clearly gets it..):
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/lov e/ print.html
1) Watermarking is one of the primitives on which larger content-control systems are/willbe built. Fundamentally, consumer devices that are crippled so as to play only entertainment-cartel-licensed content will use watermarking to determine what is and is not valid content. Anyone who cares about the future of fair use and open access to media technology should be fighting this stuff NOW.
2) (A personal bother, exists today) So, my TV is cheap and only has RF inputs. I must run the output of my DVD player through the VCR in order to view the output on my TV. Macrovision prevents me from even viewing (!!) DVDs encoded with such. Note that this problem also affects owners of large homes with complex video distribution systems. (I know there are devices that overcome this, but I don't believe we should have to go to such lengths to make legit use of the products we PAY for...)
Worst idea to hit video since NTSC?
on
Surround Lights
·
· Score: 3
In the ideal/reference film viewing environment, the image projected is intended to consume enough of the audience's field of vision that peripheral sight is engaged.
Given this, it should be obvious that ambient lighting _CANNOT_ add anything to this experience that would not already be addressed by the display technology. Ambient lighting does nothing but pollute the original image content...
As for, specifically, the home market: now that we've finally brought high quality video within the grasp of the general public, and have mature standards for color reproduction in editing and viewing environments, you want to hose all that by introducing ambient lighting???
This is bogus.
Stage and "party" lighting is the only remotely usefull application of this product, but it's worth noting that existing lighting-control standards are quite flexible, and would die laughing if they caught wind of this "surround light" hype...
You _do_ realize that not every segment of society can afford cellphones, don't you?
Public phones are a vital resource in some cities/neighborhoods. Just 'cause your perfectly mowed suburban yuppie enclave doesn't have much use for them doesn't mean they are useless.
Get outside for once, dude...
Privacy has been recognized in diverse legal systems for millenia.
For instance, while you not might be tempted to equate the somewhat overbearing enforced "modesty" of conservative, theologically-minded cultures with privacy, on further study the origin becomes quite clear. Jeffry Rosen gives this brief treatment in his book "The Unwanted Gaze", taking the title from an ancient Hebrew law designed to minimize the opportunity for (even "accidental") undesired observation. Specifically, I believe it applied to such things as "a window overlooking a neighbor's yard", or some such.
But the salient point here is that, even if no direct harm is intended, even if observation is not necessailly guaranteed, the mere _possibility_ changes our behavior. In a surveillance society, the effect on human behavior goes FAR behond encouraging the observed to conform to standards of law.
Said Hebrew law notes the difficulty in measuring the damage caused by such invasion, and thus recognizes the grave importance of preserving private spaces.
Also consider the power imbalances inherent in all modern systems of government/societal organization. This only works if every participant is able & _willing_ to consistently play the part of voyeurs...
To suggest that a completely "transparent society" would be pleasant thing to live in is shortsighted. Strike that, it's absolutely ludicrous!
In answer to the/. editor's question, check out Jeff Rosen's book "The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America". Apparently, there was a time when common practice was _not_ to allow personal papers, diaries, etc as evidence. Rosen traces the errosion of this standard and extrapolates the current, invasive environment to the way email is handled in the courts.
Started reading this book recently, from what I've gotten through so far I'd recommend it...
Slashdot Mirror
I see no value in this product whatsoever.
Keep your RAM where it belongs (not at the other end of a SATA cable), and use RAID if you want a faster disk...
"This can easily saturate busses. A hardware solution allows the computer to communicate only the "real" data between itself and the hardware device."
Well, that really depends. For sufficiently large io, that should end up being only a small amount of additional data for parity.
The fundamental problem with hardware raid ends up being the fact that your bandwidth to disk is bottlenecked at the raid controller (or host bus iface, if you're using an external raid box). If you have the opportunity to spread your raid out over multiple busses (say, a simple add-on PCI-ATA controller, an onboard ATA controller, an onboard RAID controller), that may be a better option. In most modern chipsets, these disk controllers are on independent busses off of the much higher bandwidth interconnect to cpu/memory.
Well, I'm unlikely to avoid a mfr just "because the ACX driver guys said so". I'm not 100% certain what sort of sin they are accused of, but it appears to be a small squabble over a specific TI chip in one of their wireless cards that Dlink is unable/unwilling to provide driver authors with details on. I sympathize, but given that it's a localized issue with a viable reverse-engineering effort, it seems a bit petty to boycott the rest of Dlink's perfectly adequate products.
If I've overlooked something more serious, by all means expalin yourself. In the absence of more damning material, however, I'll continue to use Dlink equipment. What's my alternative, Linksys and Netgear? (See recent hubbub over router insecurities and the totally inappropriate responses of both those companies).
FWIW, I think we have a better chance of seeing truly open media platforms comming from networking equipment manufacturers than from AV equipment manufacturers...
Dlink appears to have several products that may be of interest here, has anyone used these?
y .asp?cid=7#c id_70 ...as well as a product that looks like the bee's knees - the "Wireless Media Player" supporting wired & wireless, and video formats including xvid! And, it looks like it's only $200.
Specifically, they have two "wireless audio adapters":
http://www.dlink.com/products/categor
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=318
On that same note, pay careful attention to what bus the disk controller is hanging off of.
This is not an issue if you're using a hardware RAID implementation, but it will make or break software RAID performance (which can, in most cases, beat the pants off of PCI card solutions if done correctly).
If you have several cheap-ass ATA adapters hanging off of the same PCI bus, that PCI bus can quickly become your bottleneck (regardless of how many drives-per-channel). Sometimes splitting a group of RAID disks among PCI-attached adapters and mobo-integrated IDE channels (particularly in cases where an additional pair of IDE channels has been added for on-board RAID) can render this moot. Not all on-board IDE & RAID solutions are attached in the same manner, so do your homework first; but it's worth checking out if you have RAID units incorporating more than a couple drives.
With this in mind, a software RAID5 setup can perform quite well, and adding drives will only improve the cost-effectiveness and performance...
Exactly. And there's no reason why the guts of the average modern linux distro, minus the desktop stuff, shouldn't be able to run beautifully on my old PII.
I suppose I could stick to older distros, or jump through hoops to slim down Fedora Core 2, but I suspect that there are plenty of users out there who would be well-served by an install-time "lightweight desktop" option in their distro of choice. (I mean, you can already chose the "minimal" option when selecting packages in RH/FC, why not offer the ability to chose a non-gnome/kde desktop as well, and make life a bit easier for those of us with 20th century hardware?)
> Must... restrain... fist of death...
Glad you feel, um, passionately about this subject.
So, his example was probably not the most illustrative, but I want to get back to his original point - any discrete sampling is going to throw a monkey wrench into the Nyquist Thm (which assumes infinite precision sampling). Thus, of course it's "lossy", in the sense that you can't reproduce the orginal signal correctly. (See Oppenheim & Schafer, "Discrete-Time Signal Processing" for background, btw).
The point I think you're trying to make is that the information lost is outside perceptual bounds, and thus does not matter. My understanding is that this is not universally true, although I think we could agree that there is a point of diminishing returns w.r.t. sample precision and rate. As far as I'm concerned, however, current audio tech has left the CD behind this curve and the time has come for consumer-grade electronics to take a step up. It is presently a very cheap step to take, as the mass-market mfrs are realizing.
I'm really not clear on why folks insist on arguing about this. Sure, CDs are great, I love 'em. And I'm not giving them up until the replacement is dirt cheap. But technology marches on, yo. ("256K of RAM is more than enough! I mean, we can always swap to disk. This doesn't change the underlying model of computation, and I can prove it, look!"...)
Dude, he was making a perfectly valid point, which you missed in your haste to grandstand.
... Now I do vector calculus for fun.
We're talking about perceived audio quality here, so the ultimate goal is a system that allows listeners to correlate experiences.
Obviously there are metrics more palatable to someone with an engineering background, but the posters point was that _some_ of what you dismiss as "audiophile bullshit lingo" has a degree of rigor. At least, it can potentially fulfill the above purpose, particularly in cases where measurement data is incompletely specified or misleading.
Of _course_ there are physical phenomena that confound the language of laymen. On the other hand, all the measurement data in the world cannot describe a listening experience until we (imperfectly) map it to the language of our own perception.
> People who don't understand numbers are not competent to make scientific (including audio equipment) decisions.
But they are perfectly competent to enjoy music, and judge the quality of that experience.
Some people buy audio equipment for listening to, not so they can measure it and bask in the glow of an RTA displaying a perfectly flat frequency-response.
> My qualifications? [insert name-dropping]
>
I don't care if you've touched Bob Rock's wang and use a slide-rule.
This is elitism alongside the worst audiophile offenders, you might as well arm-wrestle him to decide who has the better taste in music...
As a lawyer friend of mine pointed out, your right to do so rests principaly on your inadequacy as a singer..
Look it up, dude...
There is a prissy, "language must remain static" camp that refuses to acknowledge the validity of "irregardless". However, it is commonly understood to connote a more emphatic version of "regardless".
Well, yes, you can use a specialty cooking surface and that thin spatula-knife-widget-thing, but that would have to be a more recent invetion. You don't need to spend 300 bux at williams-sonoma on some special "crepe pan" device, just learn how to flip them. It's not hard.
FWIW, Jacques Peppin's "La Technique" gives a recipie that contains enough butter to obviate the need for greasing the pan and also suggests banging the pan on the counter (w/ potholder to buffer!) thus loosening the pancake prior to The Flip.
By following the Golden Rules, you too can achieve top 40 success.
(of course, these are the Rules for the UK. Maybe the US market is different? Possibly the formula is different by a constant somewhere...)
> the atkins diet, and other low-carb diets,
> address the exact problem of overeating.
Yes, that's probably the largest factor in their reported success as well. (Despite the Atkins hocus-pocus talk about ketones, and other barely-relevent bullcock).
What bothers me is that the popular press, rather than pick up on this and start promoting full, balanced diets, has instead started chanting this mantra of "carbs == bad".
The danger is that diets will just continue to follow media trends and the overriding message that gets absorbed is ultimately one of extremism ("Carbs are bad, stop eating carbs". or "Protien is great stuff, you need to eat 5x your weight in cottage cheese every day. Or you'll get cancer.. or something"). Extremism is not a good nutritional patern.
As an athlete I pay fairly close attention to my diet, and I probably would tend to generally cut out a lot of carbs if I were planning on spending 3 weeks sitting on my ass. But this attentiveness to matching nutritional needs to diet is not something I see the average Joe having the motivation to exercise (no pun intended).
Now, if this trend catches on to the point where it changes the current refined-sugar/wonderbread landscape of the American prepared-foods industry, that wouldn't be entirely bad..?
So let's cut to the chase here: the "problem of the moment" here is obesity.
Sure, some amount of debate remains regarding how to best control this epidemic by controlling *what* we eat. But the bottom line is *how much* we eat.
It's a fundamental mismatch between super-sized overconsumption and generally sedentary lifestyles.
And while there may be a few interesting detours on this road along the lines of fad diets (ie, Atkins), they utterly fail to address the root cause in a sustainable fashion...
Um, that's _precisely_ why I RTFM...
In order to accomplish a task or master a skill that is important to me, I am willing to invest a reasonable amount of time in reading a manual.
If a "user" in the above scenarios were to chuck the manual, as it were, the only remaining route to success is a lot of trial-and-error experience. (ie, failed souffles and unsatisfied sex partners).
I think your cooking analogy is great. If someone wants to cook a meal, you give them a recipie and maybe some other documentation (pictures, "gas stoves for dummies", and a few examples to work from). If they chose to ignore it, they get to order pizza; but, if they invest even the smallest amount of effort, chances are they'll do fine. If they'd rather watch Emeril prance around a studio kitchen for hours, and expect to be able to walk into their own kitchen and cook merely by pronouncing "BAM!", there's not much that _can_ save them...
Is UI design, in many cases, similar? I think so.
The point is whether or not a "willingness to learn" is a reasonable prerequisite to computer literacy.
While there *are* business opportunities in helping the helpless perform ever-more-powerfull tasks, in the long run it's just a bad idea (not to mention more frustration than it's worth). I believe in natural selection, and abominations like MS Office's "Clippy" only delay the eventual extinction of the learning-hostile user.
Please be precise and avoid using vague terms like "speed".
Ask yourself what you are trying to describe, is it the speed at which the drive spins, the rate of data transfer, etc.
This article is NOT a scsi vs ata comparison.
For the purposes of the author, some otherwise crucial performance metrics were not relevant. For intance, the inferior seek time of available ATA drives had minimal impact on his application, and thus were not weighed.
SCSI and ATA each have their place in different environments, and as long as the drive mfrs continue existing trends it is utterly useless to bicker about the relative merits of drive technology divorced from the context of specific applications.
I have one word for you: BALANCED line...
Um, SCSI is still invaluable as a protocol for addressing block storage. I realize the lower-end user doesn't care as long as the drive will format with NTFS and store his MP3s, but we who use Fibre Channel still talk to drives using SCSI semantics.
"GFS on the drive"? Dude, we're talking about the drives here, put whatever embedded widget in front of them that you want, but at some point the block-addressed device will exist behind it.
BTW, When we're talking SCSI, we're talking about aggregating storage devices here, and that goes _behind_ the filesystem (at least, given today's meaning of the word)....
What are you talking about??
As for how you are going to come up with input to this program, let me help you out:
Rip all the keys off of your keyboard except for A, T, G, and C. Now start typing. It's not that complicated...
There are strong arguments to be made for excepting the type of trading conducted over Napster as "Fair Use". Do you just fail to understand what that means? I'm confused, because you use loaded words like "illegal".
v e/ print.html
Regarding this insipid propaganda about music-sharing hurting artists, I think you (and your Nashville pal) should think about this more carefully... Do you just fail to understand how the music industry currently works? I refer you to Courtney Love's comments on the subject (transcript of a speach, print this out and read it. If you don't understand the implications and subtleties, read it again. It's the most coherent thing I've heard pass her lips, she clearly gets it..):
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/lo
two related points:
1) Watermarking is one of the primitives on which larger content-control systems are/willbe built. Fundamentally, consumer devices that are crippled so as to play only entertainment-cartel-licensed content will use watermarking to determine what is and is not valid content. Anyone who cares about the future of fair use and open access to media technology should be fighting this stuff NOW.
2) (A personal bother, exists today) So, my TV is cheap and only has RF inputs. I must run the output of my DVD player through the VCR in order to view the output on my TV. Macrovision prevents me from even viewing (!!) DVDs encoded with such. Note that this problem also affects owners of large homes with complex video distribution systems. (I know there are devices that overcome this, but I don't believe we should have to go to such lengths to make legit use of the products we PAY for...)
In the ideal/reference film viewing environment, the image projected is intended to consume enough of the audience's field of vision that peripheral sight is engaged.
Given this, it should be obvious that ambient lighting _CANNOT_ add anything to this experience that would not already be addressed by the display technology. Ambient lighting does nothing but pollute the original image content...
As for, specifically, the home market: now that we've finally brought high quality video within the grasp of the general public, and have mature standards for color reproduction in editing and viewing environments, you want to hose all that by introducing ambient lighting???
This is bogus.
Stage and "party" lighting is the only remotely usefull application of this product, but it's worth noting that existing lighting-control standards are quite flexible, and would die laughing if they caught wind of this "surround light" hype...
You _do_ realize that not every segment of society can afford cellphones, don't you?
Public phones are a vital resource in some cities/neighborhoods. Just 'cause your perfectly mowed suburban yuppie enclave doesn't have much use for them doesn't mean they are useless.
Get outside for once, dude...
You are quite misguided here.
Privacy has been recognized in diverse legal systems for millenia.
For instance, while you not might be tempted to equate the somewhat overbearing enforced "modesty" of conservative, theologically-minded cultures with privacy, on further study the origin becomes quite clear. Jeffry Rosen gives this brief treatment in his book "The Unwanted Gaze", taking the title from an ancient Hebrew law designed to minimize the opportunity for (even "accidental") undesired observation. Specifically, I believe it applied to such things as "a window overlooking a neighbor's yard", or some such.
But the salient point here is that, even if no direct harm is intended, even if observation is not necessailly guaranteed, the mere _possibility_ changes our behavior. In a surveillance society, the effect on human behavior goes FAR behond encouraging the observed to conform to standards of law.
Said Hebrew law notes the difficulty in measuring the damage caused by such invasion, and thus recognizes the grave importance of preserving private spaces.
Also consider the power imbalances inherent in all modern systems of government/societal organization. This only works if every participant is able & _willing_ to consistently play the part of voyeurs...
To suggest that a completely "transparent society" would be pleasant thing to live in is shortsighted. Strike that, it's absolutely ludicrous!
In answer to the /. editor's question, check out Jeff Rosen's book "The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America". Apparently, there was a time when common practice was _not_ to allow personal papers, diaries, etc as evidence. Rosen traces the errosion of this standard and extrapolates the current, invasive environment to the way email is handled in the courts.
Started reading this book recently, from what I've gotten through so far I'd recommend it...