I hope most of your post was facetious, but, if not, the "aesthetics" issues can be solved by mining only on the side of the moon that always faces away from the earth.
I was tired of "chasing the dragon", by which I mean the constant upgrading of the PC to play the next generation of games.
Boy, are you gonna be upset when the PS4 (or whatever they will call it) comes out and you need to upgrade to play the next generation of games, just like on the PC.
But, the real killer will be that the PS4 won't play PS3 games (based on the PS3 not playing PS2 games), which doesn't seem to be a problem with PCs.
I run my PS3 off a Mediatomb server over standard wireless-G across the house, and it works damn near flawlessly.
What bitrates are your encodes? I have some that run 30Mbps for over a minute, so wireless is pretty much useless. Basically, if you're watching high-quality HD, you either have a really good wireless-N or wired.
Which is why Apple won't offer BD-ROM drives. Apple doesn't want to have to make deep changes to Mac OS X to meet the robustness rules of BDA, AACSLA, and other BD stakeholders.
Selling a BD-ROM drive doesn't require any changes to the OS...only a movie player application (which would do the decryption) has to follow the spec. As far as I know, Microsoft has not applied any "robustness" to XP x64, yet it plays back Blu-Ray movies just fine, as long as you have an application that meets the spec.
What if he gives but does not announce it. Just gives anonymously?
Although it is possible to give hundreds of millions of dollars to charity with little fanfare, the charities would likely announce the large anonymous donor, and eventually the truth would come out.
OTOH, if he's donating anonymously at levels that aren't newsworthy, then he would need to be donating to pretty much every charity on the planet to be anywhere near the percentage of net worth as other noted philanthropists seem to be.
Those days aren't gone, they merely got a whole lot more expensive.
I don't think a few hundred dollars for a 48-port switch is "a whole lot more expensive". Although they are around $500 each in general, I bought a pair of brand new Netgear GS748T switches on sale for $500 total. There is also a 24-port version for less than $300.
They fall into the class of "smart switch", although they are closer to being "managed" in their feature set. One of the features is being able to set up a port to receive to all traffic on other ports. The best part is that it's fairly configurable, so that the "sniffer port" (their term) can listen to traffic on one or more other ports.
The HTC Thunderbolt 4G from Verizon is a 4G handset and uses a sim card.
Many Verizon phones have SIM cards, but none are used for the Verizon phone, 1xRTT or 3G data networks. For those, the information is hardwired.
The Thunderbolt uses the SIM card for the LTE network, and global phones (like my wife's Blackberry Storm) use the SIM for places without CDMA, since the Verizon global phones have global GSM radios.
The new thunderbolt (?) did. My Bride updated her phone to the latest 4g android phone last weekend, and it had a sim chip. Did not expect that on a CDMA phone.
The HTC Thunderbolt has a SIM card for the LTE network...the phone and other data networks are CDMA
But, the SIM does act like a regular one, in that you can store contacts and other information on it, even if that information is going to be used on a CDMA network.
I was looking for a use of Blu-ray discs that is both 1. substantial and 2. lawful in Apple's home country.
There is nothing unlawful in the US about ripping a Blu-Ray for personal use. Apple couldn't provide software/hardware that bypasses the encryption, because it's illegal to traffic in/distribute/etc. circumvention devices, but it's not illegal for the user to use such hardware/software.
Since much of Apple's business is based on consuming media in non-original formats on alternate devices, it would seem sensible to help their users do what they want.
As for "substantial", I suspect the only reason more people don't personally rip their own Blu-Ray discs is because torrents are easier and cheaper. Unlike DVD DRM removers, there are no good free Blu-Ray DRM removers. To consistently handle AACS, BD+, region-coding, Java region coding, BDLive, etc., requires you to pay for a product.
If my phone is prepaid and the phone company has no clue whatsoever who the phone belongs to, then the towers knowing the location of that phone means nothing.
...as long as you throw the phone away before some government employee retrieves all the data from it.
But, seriously, this really is one of those rare cases of "done nothing wrong...nothing to fear", as it's much more likely that location data from the carrier would be used before the location data from the phone. For example, if phone calls from kidnappers had come in at certain times from certain towers, then any phone ID that was using those towers at all those times would be something to help lead to a suspect. It would be harder to track down an individual if they use a prepaid phone, but if they already had a suspect, then it wouldn't really matter if the data was on the phone, because the carrier would also have the data.
Personally, the features that location data gives me is worth the very small hit at my privacy.
So is working an extra hour each day for the same salary, which is what company lunches are essentially doing.
And, even if the company paid for the meal, it's likely they'd come out ahead, as lunch for most professionals doesn't cost as much as they would get paid for that same amount of time (especially with a "no alcohol" policy, which wouldn't be unreasonable on the company dime).
I looked at Verizon's prepaid plans, and some of them were more expensive than contract plans.
You cannot get an unlimited data plan with any of Verizon's "pay for what you use" prepaid plans. Since you must have a unlimited data plan for any smart phone (if you want data at all), you effectively can't have a smart phone on a true prepaid plan on Verizon.
The "prepay for a month of up to X minutes" plans are really just like the contract plans without the contract, so you can get unlimited data with those. Even if they are less money, you'd have to pay about $350 more for the smart phone without a contract, so they'd better save you at least $15/month over a contract.
What we're talking about is in-market blackouts on the "premium" sports packages (NFL Sunday Ticket, MLB Extra Innings, etc.).
These blackouts only happen if a local channel is also carrying the game, and it is entirely because of local commercials (since the "premium" channels are just copies of the source feed with some or all commercials replaced by cable/satellite commercials). This also happens if a national channel (ESPN, Fox, TBS, TNT, etc.) is showing the local team game...if it is also available on a local channel, then the national network is blacked out in the local market.
Blackouts of games in the "local area" due to lack of sellouts only ever happened for the NFL. Nearly every MLB, NBA, and NHL game (both home and away) is now televised to the areas of the teams involved on some local channel (although that channel may not be OTA).
Hell, AT&T foots $400-$500 on the cost of a new top-of-the-line phone for me every 18 months, and in return I pay them for $700 for service during that time.
Which means AT&T comes out $600 or more ahead, since their actual cost for the phone is almost certainly less than $100 more than you paid for it.
Type APPLICATION and click "OK" (or press "Enter")
This works for every application that is on the path or has a correct install where it puts information in the registry so that Explorer can find the EXE file. It does, however, require that you do some work up front as a sysadmin and use Group Policy to set the Start Menu to be faster to navigate (i.e., "Classic" mode).
Let's try more like $100-200 million to design a new engine, amortised over a million units
You won't get a million of these engines sold, as it won't be the "every car engine"...it will be in a few select vehicles with total sales much less than that.
$5000 is far more than the entire powertrain typically costs the manufacturer.
True, but for the first release of this, you're likely to see that kind of bump on the end-user price (which is the important number). Take a look at the $2-20K MSRP for engine upgrades, and tell me that a $5K bump is "unreasonable" for brand new technology that should reduce fuel usage.
And, if you pull out the argument that "engine upgrades cost so much because they sell fewer of those engines and have to amortize over fewer units", then you'll just be agreeing with me.
Which would be why they want to talk to auto manufacturers about designing engines that can take advantage of the specific capabilities of this new tech.
So, if it takes a couple million dollars to design a new engine, and that engine costs more to build, how much better mileage does the engine have to get to offset the extra $5,000 in the vehicle price?
Answer: a lot more than you think, especially if you are replacing a moderately efficient engine. With gas at $5.00/gallon, you'd need to save 1000 gallons. You'd have to turn a 30MPG engine into 60MPG to get payback in 60,000 miles. Now, you'd only have to jump to 36MPG if you use a 180,000 mile payback, but for most people, that's way more than the entire life of their car.
The good news is that gas guzzling SUVs, supercars, and overpowered luxury cars at 18MPG need to only jump to 25MPG to get 60,000 mile payback.
But but the file size isn't the same. It is the largest file size for a movie that I have ever heard of. Not to mention that they could well be using a variable bit rate.
You misunderstand.
For any given filesize (even the 100GB or so for this movie), the higher the average bit rate, the less you have to spare for scenes that require really high bit rates. That's because you have only 100GB total (in this case), and the bits have to come from somewhere.
In addition, all Blu-Ray uses variable bit rate, but many have such high average bitrates that the variance is low. As an example, The Incredibles has a average bit rate on Blu-Ray of 24Mbps, with a peak of around 38Mbps, and minimum around 12Mbps. My rip has an average bitrate of 8Mbps, with peaks of over 45Mbps (because those scenes really needed that much), and minimum around 2Mbps. So, it's 1/3 the size, but is over 99% identical to the original (based on the values of PSNR and SSIM when comparing the original to the rip).
So, a better original encode would have been an average bitrate of around 16Mbps, with peaks to 48Mbps or so, as that would have saved disc space and given great quality, but even the same 24Mbps average as they used would end up better with minimum around 4Mbps and peaks near 48Mbps.
Note that except for the average, all the numbers I am quoting are for a single second of video.
Do you have a handy guide available? The stuff on doom9 often seems like it's out of date. Huge bonus points if this works under Linux. I have WinXP and Windows 7 VMs under VirtualBox, but I don't know if the ripping will work properly under a VM, even if the VM is given direct access to the drive.
If given direct access to the drive, then AnyDVD HD (payware) should work fine in any Windows VM with XP or newer to handle all the decryption. This will also allow you to just strip off all the encryption, Blu-Ray live, etc., and create an ISO that will play with something like VLC or Media Player Classic.
Otherwise, to convert, start by using "eac3to R:\" (where R: is your Blu-Ray drive) to see what is on the disc, and "eac3to R:\ 1)" (where "1" is the title number from the first eac3to command) to see exactly what is in that title. After that, it's one more run of eac3to grab the video, audio, and subtitles that you want. The eac3to web page has plenty of examples.
Then, DGAVCIndex (for H.264) or ffmsindex (for VC-1) will index the frames and allow you to create an AVISynth script. x264 can use that script directly as input for encoding. After encoding, it's packaging up in a container (like MKV), which is also easy using the GUIs provided.
Personally, I find the hardest thing is learning AVISynth and deciding which filters you want to use. If you want a straight encode with no frills (including no resolution change), then the AVISynth script is a one-liner.
It really is that easy, unless you want to do things like change sound formats, tweak colors, edit the movie (like when I cut the new Jabba scene from the SE of Star Wars), or assemble components from various sources (I have Blu-Ray rips with commentary from the laserdisc because it isn't available anywhere else).
The spark plug has nothing to do with engine efficiency?
Now that's just wrong.
Not really, assuming you are using the correct plugs and they are installed correctly.
If you do something wrong, it will almost certainly reduce fuel efficiency for that vehicle, but I can't imagine any system that would replace a spark plug that could ignite the same fuel in the same engine and give you significantly higher efficiency.
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I hope most of your post was facetious, but, if not, the "aesthetics" issues can be solved by mining only on the side of the moon that always faces away from the earth.
There are quite a few that do this.
But, I believe KeePass is the only Android password manager that both open source and no cost.
I was tired of "chasing the dragon", by which I mean the constant upgrading of the PC to play the next generation of games.
Boy, are you gonna be upset when the PS4 (or whatever they will call it) comes out and you need to upgrade to play the next generation of games, just like on the PC.
But, the real killer will be that the PS4 won't play PS3 games (based on the PS3 not playing PS2 games), which doesn't seem to be a problem with PCs.
I run my PS3 off a Mediatomb server over standard wireless-G across the house, and it works damn near flawlessly.
What bitrates are your encodes? I have some that run 30Mbps for over a minute, so wireless is pretty much useless. Basically, if you're watching high-quality HD, you either have a really good wireless-N or wired.
$90 is too expensive, because it would probably add at least $200 to the MSRP.
Since $90 is the street price for a Blu-Ray burner, that's pretty much the MSRP for an OEM who buys them in 10,000-unit lots.
Which is why Apple won't offer BD-ROM drives. Apple doesn't want to have to make deep changes to Mac OS X to meet the robustness rules of BDA, AACSLA, and other BD stakeholders.
Selling a BD-ROM drive doesn't require any changes to the OS...only a movie player application (which would do the decryption) has to follow the spec. As far as I know, Microsoft has not applied any "robustness" to XP x64, yet it plays back Blu-Ray movies just fine, as long as you have an application that meets the spec.
NIMBY probably isn't a factor in getting a mine on the moon, although Gidney and Cloyd might have something to say about it..
What if he gives but does not announce it. Just gives anonymously?
Although it is possible to give hundreds of millions of dollars to charity with little fanfare, the charities would likely announce the large anonymous donor, and eventually the truth would come out.
OTOH, if he's donating anonymously at levels that aren't newsworthy, then he would need to be donating to pretty much every charity on the planet to be anywhere near the percentage of net worth as other noted philanthropists seem to be.
Those days aren't gone, they merely got a whole lot more expensive.
I don't think a few hundred dollars for a 48-port switch is "a whole lot more expensive". Although they are around $500 each in general, I bought a pair of brand new Netgear GS748T switches on sale for $500 total. There is also a 24-port version for less than $300.
They fall into the class of "smart switch", although they are closer to being "managed" in their feature set. One of the features is being able to set up a port to receive to all traffic on other ports. The best part is that it's fairly configurable, so that the "sniffer port" (their term) can listen to traffic on one or more other ports.
The HTC Thunderbolt 4G from Verizon is a 4G handset and uses a sim card.
Many Verizon phones have SIM cards, but none are used for the Verizon phone, 1xRTT or 3G data networks. For those, the information is hardwired.
The Thunderbolt uses the SIM card for the LTE network, and global phones (like my wife's Blackberry Storm) use the SIM for places without CDMA, since the Verizon global phones have global GSM radios.
The new thunderbolt (?) did. My Bride updated her phone to the latest 4g android phone last weekend, and it had a sim chip. Did not expect that on a CDMA phone.
The HTC Thunderbolt has a SIM card for the LTE network...the phone and other data networks are CDMA
But, the SIM does act like a regular one, in that you can store contacts and other information on it, even if that information is going to be used on a CDMA network.
I was looking for a use of Blu-ray discs that is both 1. substantial and 2. lawful in Apple's home country.
There is nothing unlawful in the US about ripping a Blu-Ray for personal use. Apple couldn't provide software/hardware that bypasses the encryption, because it's illegal to traffic in/distribute/etc. circumvention devices, but it's not illegal for the user to use such hardware/software.
Since much of Apple's business is based on consuming media in non-original formats on alternate devices, it would seem sensible to help their users do what they want.
As for "substantial", I suspect the only reason more people don't personally rip their own Blu-Ray discs is because torrents are easier and cheaper. Unlike DVD DRM removers, there are no good free Blu-Ray DRM removers. To consistently handle AACS, BD+, region-coding, Java region coding, BDLive, etc., requires you to pay for a product.
Not to mention WAY too expensive. Just exactly HOW much do you want that MacBookPro to cost?!?
Why is $90 for a Blu-Ray burner "WAY too expensive"?
Blu-Ray is about 9 years behind DVD (general release of 1997 vs. 2006), and 9 years ago, DVD burners were in the $100 range, too.
If my phone is prepaid and the phone company has no clue whatsoever who the phone belongs to, then the towers knowing the location of that phone means nothing.
...as long as you throw the phone away before some government employee retrieves all the data from it.
But, seriously, this really is one of those rare cases of "done nothing wrong...nothing to fear", as it's much more likely that location data from the carrier would be used before the location data from the phone. For example, if phone calls from kidnappers had come in at certain times from certain towers, then any phone ID that was using those towers at all those times would be something to help lead to a suspect. It would be harder to track down an individual if they use a prepaid phone, but if they already had a suspect, then it wouldn't really matter if the data was on the phone, because the carrier would also have the data.
Personally, the features that location data gives me is worth the very small hit at my privacy.
So is working an extra hour each day for the same salary, which is what company lunches are essentially doing.
And, even if the company paid for the meal, it's likely they'd come out ahead, as lunch for most professionals doesn't cost as much as they would get paid for that same amount of time (especially with a "no alcohol" policy, which wouldn't be unreasonable on the company dime).
I looked at Verizon's prepaid plans, and some of them were more expensive than contract plans.
You cannot get an unlimited data plan with any of Verizon's "pay for what you use" prepaid plans. Since you must have a unlimited data plan for any smart phone (if you want data at all), you effectively can't have a smart phone on a true prepaid plan on Verizon.
The "prepay for a month of up to X minutes" plans are really just like the contract plans without the contract, so you can get unlimited data with those. Even if they are less money, you'd have to pay about $350 more for the smart phone without a contract, so they'd better save you at least $15/month over a contract.
What we're talking about is in-market blackouts on the "premium" sports packages (NFL Sunday Ticket, MLB Extra Innings, etc.).
These blackouts only happen if a local channel is also carrying the game, and it is entirely because of local commercials (since the "premium" channels are just copies of the source feed with some or all commercials replaced by cable/satellite commercials). This also happens if a national channel (ESPN, Fox, TBS, TNT, etc.) is showing the local team game...if it is also available on a local channel, then the national network is blacked out in the local market.
Blackouts of games in the "local area" due to lack of sellouts only ever happened for the NFL. Nearly every MLB, NBA, and NHL game (both home and away) is now televised to the areas of the teams involved on some local channel (although that channel may not be OTA).
Hell, AT&T foots $400-$500 on the cost of a new top-of-the-line phone for me every 18 months, and in return I pay them for $700 for service during that time.
Which means AT&T comes out $600 or more ahead, since their actual cost for the phone is almost certainly less than $100 more than you paid for it.
More to the point, why do the leagues have these blackouts in the first pace?
Local commercials.
The slots for local commercials have DirecTV ads on the NFL Sunday Ticket channels.
In XP, it's actually:
This works for every application that is on the path or has a correct install where it puts information in the registry so that Explorer can find the EXE file. It does, however, require that you do some work up front as a sysadmin and use Group Policy to set the Start Menu to be faster to navigate (i.e., "Classic" mode).
Let's try more like $100-200 million to design a new engine, amortised over a million units
You won't get a million of these engines sold, as it won't be the "every car engine"...it will be in a few select vehicles with total sales much less than that.
$5000 is far more than the entire powertrain typically costs the manufacturer.
True, but for the first release of this, you're likely to see that kind of bump on the end-user price (which is the important number). Take a look at the $2-20K MSRP for engine upgrades, and tell me that a $5K bump is "unreasonable" for brand new technology that should reduce fuel usage.
And, if you pull out the argument that "engine upgrades cost so much because they sell fewer of those engines and have to amortize over fewer units", then you'll just be agreeing with me.
Which would be why they want to talk to auto manufacturers about designing engines that can take advantage of the specific capabilities of this new tech.
So, if it takes a couple million dollars to design a new engine, and that engine costs more to build, how much better mileage does the engine have to get to offset the extra $5,000 in the vehicle price?
Answer: a lot more than you think, especially if you are replacing a moderately efficient engine. With gas at $5.00/gallon, you'd need to save 1000 gallons. You'd have to turn a 30MPG engine into 60MPG to get payback in 60,000 miles. Now, you'd only have to jump to 36MPG if you use a 180,000 mile payback, but for most people, that's way more than the entire life of their car.
The good news is that gas guzzling SUVs, supercars, and overpowered luxury cars at 18MPG need to only jump to 25MPG to get 60,000 mile payback.
But but the file size isn't the same. It is the largest file size for a movie that I have ever heard of. Not to mention that they could well be using a variable bit rate.
You misunderstand.
For any given filesize (even the 100GB or so for this movie), the higher the average bit rate, the less you have to spare for scenes that require really high bit rates. That's because you have only 100GB total (in this case), and the bits have to come from somewhere.
In addition, all Blu-Ray uses variable bit rate, but many have such high average bitrates that the variance is low. As an example, The Incredibles has a average bit rate on Blu-Ray of 24Mbps, with a peak of around 38Mbps, and minimum around 12Mbps. My rip has an average bitrate of 8Mbps, with peaks of over 45Mbps (because those scenes really needed that much), and minimum around 2Mbps. So, it's 1/3 the size, but is over 99% identical to the original (based on the values of PSNR and SSIM when comparing the original to the rip).
So, a better original encode would have been an average bitrate of around 16Mbps, with peaks to 48Mbps or so, as that would have saved disc space and given great quality, but even the same 24Mbps average as they used would end up better with minimum around 4Mbps and peaks near 48Mbps.
Note that except for the average, all the numbers I am quoting are for a single second of video.
Do you have a handy guide available? The stuff on doom9 often seems like it's out of date. Huge bonus points if this works under Linux. I have WinXP and Windows 7 VMs under VirtualBox, but I don't know if the ripping will work properly under a VM, even if the VM is given direct access to the drive.
If given direct access to the drive, then AnyDVD HD (payware) should work fine in any Windows VM with XP or newer to handle all the decryption. This will also allow you to just strip off all the encryption, Blu-Ray live, etc., and create an ISO that will play with something like VLC or Media Player Classic.
Otherwise, to convert, start by using "eac3to R:\" (where R: is your Blu-Ray drive) to see what is on the disc, and "eac3to R:\ 1)" (where "1" is the title number from the first eac3to command) to see exactly what is in that title. After that, it's one more run of eac3to grab the video, audio, and subtitles that you want. The eac3to web page has plenty of examples.
Then, DGAVCIndex (for H.264) or ffmsindex (for VC-1) will index the frames and allow you to create an AVISynth script. x264 can use that script directly as input for encoding. After encoding, it's packaging up in a container (like MKV), which is also easy using the GUIs provided.
Personally, I find the hardest thing is learning AVISynth and deciding which filters you want to use. If you want a straight encode with no frills (including no resolution change), then the AVISynth script is a one-liner.
It really is that easy, unless you want to do things like change sound formats, tweak colors, edit the movie (like when I cut the new Jabba scene from the SE of Star Wars), or assemble components from various sources (I have Blu-Ray rips with commentary from the laserdisc because it isn't available anywhere else).
The spark plug has nothing to do with engine efficiency?
Now that's just wrong.
Not really, assuming you are using the correct plugs and they are installed correctly.
If you do something wrong, it will almost certainly reduce fuel efficiency for that vehicle, but I can't imagine any system that would replace a spark plug that could ignite the same fuel in the same engine and give you significantly higher efficiency.