The real problem with the F-22 right now is that for whatever reason (it could be a good one or not, I don't know), its being cast as either we make them all now, or just let the whole program go.
IMHO, the bigger problem is the reimplementation of the technology in the F-35 JSF. Now, instead of a single platform, we're developing TWO that have a LOT of similarity, but most certainly aren't interchangeable (equipment-wise). So, the effort gets divided, development costs are significantly increased, and incremental costs are higher as well. It has also cost a lot of mind share, in that the F-35 looks cheaper on paper, because it's based on the technology previously developed in the F-22. So now, the F-22 is competing with its own offspring.
Nowhere near true. Clock for clock, the Cortex A8 has similar performance to the Pentium-M.
Even ARM's own marketing department isn't so brave/deluded as to claim this.
They state just "2.0 DMIPS/MHz". I don't have any numbers for Pentium-Ms handy, but Pentium 3s were well in excess of that, at ~ 2.8 DMIPS/MHz. Athlon TBirds were the same. Modern x86 CPUs are much, MUCH further ahead still...
2.0 DMIPS/MHz would, at best, put them on-par with Pentium-4 CPUs. And, with ARM CPUs maximum clock speeds of 1GHz at this DMIPS/MHz rate, besides just x86, that puts them YEARS behind even MIPS CPUs thanks to China's Dragon Chip efforts. And they're even FURTHER behind low power PowerPC chips from the likes of FreeScale that get just under 3DMIPS/MHz (figure is a bit old, current PowerPC cores may be better) and yet can be had in 1GHz+ speeds quite easily and inexpensively.
multimedia capabilities would have eventually been added to the protocol out of demand. We'd have the same web we have today.
We would have multimedia, but it's likely it would have been done BETTER all around.
With gopher, you would more or less be forced to have a list of links, a TOC of sorts, in a common place, rather than being forced to learn a whole new badly designed UI upon vising every page. Even now, while website design and navigation has largely been standardized, it remains a huge and unnecessary waste of time and effort.
No screwing around with "do I need to click on the menu, or just mouse-over?" Just scroll to the TOC and ignore the rest.
I woul LOVE a world where multimedia can be included in web pages, but can't be made a functional or active part of the page in any way... Where the worst web designer in the world can't shoot themselves in the foot. Where web pages are so simple small programs could automatically process them all, and present it in whatever for and format the user wants. You wouldn't need different style sheets, or entirely different pages for different screen sizes and input methods. That is the ultimate realization of the web, NOT a bunch of product brochures/games written in HTML.
Symbian and most other vendors in the embedded space do not have the resources to compete with the FOSS world, neither do Apple. Nokia, and M$ have the money but not the High Level Architects to compete in a pro-active and agile way, they are forever in catch up.
FOSS has its place, but it's in areas where you need a large number of not so highly skilled people all contributing and collaborating a little bit. Where you need the highly skilled experts, even a small bit of cash blows away "free" every time.
USB support? Stable/reliable ACPI suspend support? Open source video card drivers with full OpenGL? Rockbox barely working on (OLD!) hardware MP3 players. ZFS features slowly being reimplemented in Btrfs? Decent GUI design?
I like open source software more than most, but it has some pretty serious drawbacks, and you seem to be promoting one of them as its strength...
Its such a difficult and expensive process to get a new power station built (of any fuel) that the power companies want to keep these coal plants running for another 40 years. You can blame the NIMBY folks, or the environmentalists that require environmental study after study before ground is broken.
No, you can blame the companies themselves, who have lobbied hard to get their existing power plants grandfathered in, to avoid having to comply with more recent clean-air standards.
You see, if they keep their old plant going, they're exempt. If they build a new one, they'll have to OBEY THE LAW. Following the law is more expensive (but not onerously so) and they'd much rather keep that money in their own pockets as extra profit.
This is why you will likely NEVER see a new oil refinery built. It's got nothing to do with environmental regulations, and everything to do with WORKER SAFETY laws. It'll take a few dozen more oil refinery workers getting killed in a horrible explosion before congress will act, and take away their grandfather clauses and exemptions.
The current Secretary of Defense is very big on fighting the current wars instead of developing more cold-war relics like the F-22,
Try not to bash the high-tech weaponry being developed by the US military.
For one, other "cold war relics" like the stealth bombers have been used extensively and extremely effective in modern wars.
Secondly, and this is really the more important issue... maintaining vast military superiority over all potential challengers is what has provided the relative levels of peace that most of the world has experienced since the end of WWII.
It's not anti-insurgency weapons that keep hostile nations like North Korea and Iran in line, and it's certainly not nukes (because they know the US would be hard pressed to use them in any but the most dire situations, and even then, may cause more collateral damage than enemy damage). Knowing that you are at odds with countries that can annihilate you 6 ways from Sunday in mere moments, without any real effort, is an extremely strong diplomatic tool.
Of course, you only need to look at the start of the trend to see the reasons behind it... WWII started specifically because allied nations had not been pushing to advance their military technology, while Germany had. This gave the tiny nation an overwhelming capability to relatively easily take over nearly all of Europe, Africa, and much of Asia, if not for poor decisions, both political and militarily.
Nowhere near true. Clock for clock, the Cortex A8 has similar performance to the Pentium-M.
Prove it. I haven't seen ONE benchmark that would put any ARM CPUs within a factor of 4 of any x86 CPUs. Now, SIMD instructions like SSE3 are just widening the gap further.
In our present world animals have to kill other animals in order to live. This will no longer be the case for the days that the Prophet is writing about. Everybody will be a vegetarian and the competitive struggle for existence will cease.
And the angel of the lord came unto me, snatching me up from my place of slumber. And took me on high, and higher still until we moved to the spaces betwixt the air itself. And he brought me into a vast farmlands of our own midwest. And as we descended, cries of impending doom rose from the soil. One thousand, nay a million voices full of fear. And terror possessed me then.
And I begged, "Angel of the Lord, what are these tortured screams?" And the angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots! You see, Reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust." And I sprang from my slumber drenched in sweat like the tears of one million terrified brothers and roared, "Hear me now, I have seen the light! They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers!" Can I get an amen? Can I get a hallelujah? Thank you Jesus.
If google is dishonest, they can make some immediate bucks.
However, the instant they do that, advertisers all realize they're barely getting any return on all the advertising money they've spent, and drop out. At which point, Google has to lower ad fees across the board to entice advertisers to come back... then Google has to make up the money with more ads, which means even less return on ad dollars.
It's an endless cycle, whose end result we've seen in commercial TV... (In the 50s and 60s, they made just as much money from 1/3rd as many ads)
The latest ARM SoCs from Freescale cost $23 in bulk, including 1GHz CPU,
MHz myth in effect... Now that Intel has gotten out of the business of pushing trumped up MHz numbers, ARM is the last big perpetrator of this bullshit marketing.
Even a 400MHz Pentium2 will run circles around those 1GHz ARM CPUs.
and a DSP that can decode H.264 at 720p.
That's the point, really, isn't it? ARM chips need special hardware DSPs for just about ANYTHING you want to do.
And point of fact, video BITRATE matters a lot more than resolution.
In terms of power per Watt and power per dollar, they beat anything Intel has to offer
That's certainly true at the low end, because Intel just doesn't have ANYTHING way down there. Atom isn't even remotely in the same market.
There's a reason most of the netbook manufacturers have ARM releases planned for the next few months.
Yes, because most people don't do anything computationally intensive with their netbooks, so manufacturers are hoping they can fool people into not noticing the difference between a "good" netbook and a "bad" one, just the price tag and assuming everything is the same.
why pay for x86 compatibility if the users aren't going to be able to install Word or the windows drivers for the printer they just bought?
Because economies of scale make x86 compatibility MORE THAN FREE. ie. Much less expensive than something without that "feature".
You might as well go fully incompatible and buy cheaper chips that use less power etc.
ARM chips use less power, and cost less, but at the expense of VASTLY less computational horsepower. Just fine if you need low-end apps, and don't mind waiting for Firefox to slowly render a web page, but aren't going to handle much multimedia playback, and the like.
In a world where everybody knows what everybody else is thinking at all times and all places, anybody with evil plans would find it hard to carry them out.
What makes, eg. bidding/negotiations some form of "evil plans"? Such methods certainly require secrecy on the part of BOTH parties.
I thought they would have a cool multi laser burner by now to up the write speed
Not likely. It's tricky enough having one laser doing "burn-free" and picking up where it left off... It's not going to happen with multiple laser, let alone improve speeds.
or move the laser instead of the disc? You can build the laser stronger and rotate it at 10,000 rpm if you like.
You can rotate the laser, but then you have MANY problems to address. Highly precise hinged wire harnesses, an extremely heavy rotating mount that can keep the laser perfectly steady, and continual centripetal compensation as the laser lens moves to focus the beam.
It's possible, but very difficult.
And no, you can't just rotate it at 10,000 RPMs. The laser mechanism won't take the force any better than the discs do. It's technically possible, but would be ludicrously expensive.
And all for what? So you can buy one slightly faster disc burner, rather than hundreds of slightly slower disc burners, running in parallel.
I don't carry a cellphone anymore. I hate being 'on call' like that when I'm away.
You can opt to shut off your cell phone, disable the ringer, or just don't pick it up when it rings, at any time you like.
More importantly, though... Cell phones can be CHEAPER than a land-line, and it can be quite difficult to find a VoIP solution that is notably less expensive than a cell.
one problem, though. have you notice that payphones are almost non-existant now? they are almost impossible to find.
Yes. As people use them less, the pay-phone companies jacked up their prices, setting a very high minimum monthly fee which is very unlikely to be covered by the small number of calls... Really... the exact OPPOSITE of what they SHOULD be doing when business gets bad, and have put the nails in their own coffin.
Solution: Get a pre-paid cell phone for the rare occasions you need to make a call, and leave it turned off otherwise (much longer battery life that way).
Most pre-paid carriers require you to purchase ~$10 of "minutes" every 90 days to keep your phone active. But I bet most people will need more than 1 minutes of talk time per-day, anyhow, and if not, they roll-over with most carriers, so you can use several months' worth of pre-paid time all at once when some emergency (or non-emergency) comes up. $40/year ($3.40/month) isn't too bad for basic phone service that you can use anywhere, even as just an insurance policy if you never use it. Did you always have coins on you when you really needed to make a call? I know I didn't...
If you want a cell just for REAL emergencies, then you don't even need to active it or buy minutes, as you will ALWAYS be able to call 911 if the phone works at all.
The 1/3rd of air-time is an American thing. I always find it pretty shocking, and don't know how any of you watch tv at all. When "hour long" American shows are on tv in the uk they are put into 45 minute slots....
If you'd really like to know, people simply don't sit around and watch TV. Commercial breaks are a nice long opportunity to go to the restroom, go grab (or start cooking) some food, go out and get the mail, walk the dog, etc. etc.
Re:It was obvious 10 years ago
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Why TV Lost
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Once you could inexpensively publish online, and once a PC could do full motion video, it was only a matter of time.
Once TVs could inexpensively provide interactive features, it was only a matter of time before PCs died...
Somebody has to pay the bills, and I'd rather have that somebody be a company hawking their product.
I would be fine with that if it was done better.
Why do we need to see the same commercial, 10 times, over the length of a single show? Why does a single commercial need to be in such a tight rotation that I'll see it dozens of times in a day? Why do ads have to be LOUDER than the program, completely clash with the theme and pace of the show, and take up 1/3rd of the air time?
If they took care of a few of those, others would follow... Once the commercials less numerous, and less irritating, they'll have a MUCH bigger impact, and broadcasters will easily make the same amount of money. And when commercial time has a greater impact, companies can justify spending much more money on an ad, making it more entertaining, less annoying, etc.
I'd be happy to pay for TV, but only if it was much better than any currently existing... You know, the exact OPPOSITE of EVERYTHING on cable. One channel with a mix of GOOD shows, news, sports, etc. After all, I don't watch 24 hours of TV a day, why do I need 999 channels which broadcast around the clock. If ONE of them was DECENT, we wouldn't need the rest.
Here is a list of crap that I won't put up with: Unskippable DVD menus. Region locks. Content that expires before I'm ready to let it go. ******* Commercials. Ghetto satellite dish on my house. Somebody else's schedule. Inability to pause. Driving to rent/buy physical media. The redundant TV screen itself.
Funny. I get all that stuff, legally, with OTA digital TV with a home-made DVR, and Netflix.
Waiting a week longer than American audiences (BBC iplayer)
Now you're just being a jackass. In what cosmic way are you harmed by someone on the other side of the planet being able to watch a show a few days before you? It's not at all unusual for a show to sit on my DVR longer than that. And you know something... Dr Who is just now starting to be broadcast in the US... 4 years later, and I don't mind one damn bit.
why do even small 4cyl cars get such bad mileage today? Is it just the weight of added safety features?
It's not just safety features...
People dislike it when their ears bleed, and they go deaf, so a SUBSTANTIAL amount of weight goes into quieting road noise. A car that seems just fine at 45MPH turns into a cacophony of painful noise at 80MPH. A half-hour commute in an old, ultralight car is a NIGHTMARE. From the 70s until the 90s, the 55MPH speed limit made this vastly less of an issue.
Perhaps partially related to the above as well... NOBODY will make a car with as little horsepower today, as they happily did 15+ years ago. Plenty of old cars did fine with less than 50HP, but now you can hardly find anything less than 100HP. This despite the fact that even 50HP is overkill for a 1.5-ton car.
And besides noise reduction and safety features, don't forget POLLUTION-REDUCTION devices. Tiny cars like the Geo Metro needed NO pollution control devices to be certified by the EPA for sale... These days, a significant amount of fuel is wasted for the sake of reduced smog, particulates, etc., etc. Why do you think your car idles as 5X higher than normal for the first couple minutes after start-up? It certainly doesn't save you any fuel.
H.264 has a significantly better motion vector system at practical bitrates that will produce a far superior image than MPEG-2.
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.
When a video is highly quantitized, the block is FAR less likely to change from one frame of video to the next, because so many details have been removed. HOWEVER, when it hasn't been quantitized at all, the difference (error) between a macroblock and the one it was predicted from, becomes nearly as big as fully encoding the block over again. Nothing ever stays the same.
To prove this fact is EXTREMELY easy. Pick a source video, and use mencoder to reencode it with different settings:
You will notice that with the high quality version, a GOP size of 300 only reduces the filesize by a factor of 2-3. While with the terrible quality version, a high GOP size is able to reduce the filesize by a HUGE factor. In both cases, changing the GOP size does not affect quality.
Furthermore, MPEG-2's half-pixel precision is more than adequate, and at high resolution, it makes less and less sense to use finer precision... What was one pixel at standard definition, is now 6 pixels, so why use qpel? There is no reason to do so.
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.)
Hardware MPEG-2 encoders are lousy. They are all based on 15 year old implementations, with minimal concern towards efficiency.
With H.264, the implementations are all brand new, and there is a lot of competition for a potentially highly-profitable market. You simply can't compare the output, and assume something is better/worse. I'm sure there's old implementations of the ZIP compressed file format that do a terrible job as well...
Due to the HDTV standard, MPEG-2 encoders are starting to get a little bit of attention, and are doing a slightly better job, but good software encoders still put them to shame.
h.264 reserves more data for colour information and picks it better, reducing the appearance of large macro blocks of the same colour.
No lossy video codec reserves a certain amount of the bitrate for "color" information. Video is split into 3 fields, one represents B&W, two represent color information. All three look exactly the same to the encoder (except that Cb and Cr is subsampled by 1/4 BEFORE it reaches the codec).
The step that reduces the color information is quantization... The level of quantization is adjusted dynamically to fit within the specified bitrate. A high enough bitrate, and NO color need be lost with any codec. With too low a bitrate, H.264 will reduce the color space to a blocky mess the same way any other codec does.
The ONLY REASON you don't see blockiness with H.264 is because AN IN-LOOP DEBLOCKING FILTER IS BUILT-IN. Shut that off, and the blockiness is still there (in fact worse, because H.264 is designed to be so dependent on it). And the deblocking in H.264 has the same drawbacks as all other kinds of deblocking. It blurs the picture, reducing detail, and is of no use at all at high bitrates.
IIRC, MPEG1 is still better than either at VERY low bitrates.
MPEG-2 is MPEG-1, with support for interlaced video added to it. Every MPEG-2 decoder in the world can decode MPEG-1 video for that reason.
If you want to go see a doctor every year, pay for it. If you get run over by a truck, that's what insurance is for.
Unfortunately, that is the current practice with health care, and we know what that leads to... Emergency rooms with 4 hour wait times....
It's a bit like saying, if you want to change your oil every 6 months, you should pay for it, your warranty is only for when your car has mechanical problems.
In both cases, if you skip the preventative step, you will end up having to go with the corrective step, which costs vastly, vastly more.
I've often thought that the most inexpensive health insurance, would be the one that REQUIRES you to get a full annual check-up, and accept early preventative care for any conditions found, or else you forfeit your insurance coverage for anything that could have been found and corrected earlier, at much less expense.
As an added bonus, more people would simply be healthier, live longer, and miss less work, all resulting in more money, for you (the health insurance provider).
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IMHO, the bigger problem is the reimplementation of the technology in the F-35 JSF. Now, instead of a single platform, we're developing TWO that have a LOT of similarity, but most certainly aren't interchangeable (equipment-wise). So, the effort gets divided, development costs are significantly increased, and incremental costs are higher as well. It has also cost a lot of mind share, in that the F-35 looks cheaper on paper, because it's based on the technology previously developed in the F-22. So now, the F-22 is competing with its own offspring.
But I may just be ranting now.
Even ARM's own marketing department isn't so brave/deluded as to claim this.
They state just "2.0 DMIPS/MHz". I don't have any numbers for Pentium-Ms handy, but Pentium 3s were well in excess of that, at ~ 2.8 DMIPS/MHz. Athlon TBirds were the same. Modern x86 CPUs are much, MUCH further ahead still...
2.0 DMIPS/MHz would, at best, put them on-par with Pentium-4 CPUs. And, with ARM CPUs maximum clock speeds of 1GHz at this DMIPS/MHz rate, besides just x86, that puts them YEARS behind even MIPS CPUs thanks to China's Dragon Chip efforts. And they're even FURTHER behind low power PowerPC chips from the likes of FreeScale that get just under 3DMIPS/MHz (figure is a bit old, current PowerPC cores may be better) and yet can be had in 1GHz+ speeds quite easily and inexpensively.
We would have multimedia, but it's likely it would have been done BETTER all around.
With gopher, you would more or less be forced to have a list of links, a TOC of sorts, in a common place, rather than being forced to learn a whole new badly designed UI upon vising every page. Even now, while website design and navigation has largely been standardized, it remains a huge and unnecessary waste of time and effort.
No screwing around with "do I need to click on the menu, or just mouse-over?" Just scroll to the TOC and ignore the rest.
I woul LOVE a world where multimedia can be included in web pages, but can't be made a functional or active part of the page in any way... Where the worst web designer in the world can't shoot themselves in the foot. Where web pages are so simple small programs could automatically process them all, and present it in whatever for and format the user wants. You wouldn't need different style sheets, or entirely different pages for different screen sizes and input methods. That is the ultimate realization of the web, NOT a bunch of product brochures/games written in HTML.
Funny, because it's FOSS that's always re-implementing proprietary software features, poorly.
FOSS has its place, but it's in areas where you need a large number of not so highly skilled people all contributing and collaborating a little bit. Where you need the highly skilled experts, even a small bit of cash blows away "free" every time.
USB support? Stable/reliable ACPI suspend support? Open source video card drivers with full OpenGL? Rockbox barely working on (OLD!) hardware MP3 players. ZFS features slowly being reimplemented in Btrfs? Decent GUI design?
I like open source software more than most, but it has some pretty serious drawbacks, and you seem to be promoting one of them as its strength...
No, you can blame the companies themselves, who have lobbied hard to get their existing power plants grandfathered in, to avoid having to comply with more recent clean-air standards.
You see, if they keep their old plant going, they're exempt. If they build a new one, they'll have to OBEY THE LAW. Following the law is more expensive (but not onerously so) and they'd much rather keep that money in their own pockets as extra profit.
This is why you will likely NEVER see a new oil refinery built. It's got nothing to do with environmental regulations, and everything to do with WORKER SAFETY laws. It'll take a few dozen more oil refinery workers getting killed in a horrible explosion before congress will act, and take away their grandfather clauses and exemptions.
Try not to bash the high-tech weaponry being developed by the US military.
For one, other "cold war relics" like the stealth bombers have been used extensively and extremely effective in modern wars.
Secondly, and this is really the more important issue... maintaining vast military superiority over all potential challengers is what has provided the relative levels of peace that most of the world has experienced since the end of WWII.
It's not anti-insurgency weapons that keep hostile nations like North Korea and Iran in line, and it's certainly not nukes (because they know the US would be hard pressed to use them in any but the most dire situations, and even then, may cause more collateral damage than enemy damage). Knowing that you are at odds with countries that can annihilate you 6 ways from Sunday in mere moments, without any real effort, is an extremely strong diplomatic tool.
Of course, you only need to look at the start of the trend to see the reasons behind it... WWII started specifically because allied nations had not been pushing to advance their military technology, while Germany had. This gave the tiny nation an overwhelming capability to relatively easily take over nearly all of Europe, Africa, and much of Asia, if not for poor decisions, both political and militarily.
Helium is extremely rare and expensive. Hydrogen is inexhaustible and (relatively) very, very cheap.
Prove it. I haven't seen ONE benchmark that would put any ARM CPUs within a factor of 4 of any x86 CPUs. Now, SIMD instructions like SSE3 are just widening the gap further.
And the angel of the lord came unto me, snatching me up from my place of slumber. And took me on high, and higher still until we moved to the spaces betwixt the air itself. And he brought me into a vast farmlands of our own midwest. And as we descended, cries of impending doom rose from the soil. One thousand, nay a million voices full of fear. And terror possessed me then.
And I begged, "Angel of the Lord, what are these tortured screams?" And the angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots! You see, Reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust." And I sprang from my slumber drenched in sweat like the tears of one million terrified brothers and roared, "Hear me now, I have seen the light! They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers!" Can I get an amen? Can I get a hallelujah? Thank you Jesus.
If google is dishonest, they can make some immediate bucks.
However, the instant they do that, advertisers all realize they're barely getting any return on all the advertising money they've spent, and drop out. At which point, Google has to lower ad fees across the board to entice advertisers to come back... then Google has to make up the money with more ads, which means even less return on ad dollars.
It's an endless cycle, whose end result we've seen in commercial TV... (In the 50s and 60s, they made just as much money from 1/3rd as many ads)
MHz myth in effect... Now that Intel has gotten out of the business of pushing trumped up MHz numbers, ARM is the last big perpetrator of this bullshit marketing.
Even a 400MHz Pentium2 will run circles around those 1GHz ARM CPUs.
That's the point, really, isn't it? ARM chips need special hardware DSPs for just about ANYTHING you want to do.
And point of fact, video BITRATE matters a lot more than resolution.
That's certainly true at the low end, because Intel just doesn't have ANYTHING way down there. Atom isn't even remotely in the same market.
Yes, because most people don't do anything computationally intensive with their netbooks, so manufacturers are hoping they can fool people into not noticing the difference between a "good" netbook and a "bad" one, just the price tag and assuming everything is the same.
Because economies of scale make x86 compatibility MORE THAN FREE. ie. Much less expensive than something without that "feature".
ARM chips use less power, and cost less, but at the expense of VASTLY less computational horsepower. Just fine if you need low-end apps, and don't mind waiting for Firefox to slowly render a web page, but aren't going to handle much multimedia playback, and the like.
What makes, eg. bidding/negotiations some form of "evil plans"? Such methods certainly require secrecy on the part of BOTH parties.
Not likely. It's tricky enough having one laser doing "burn-free" and picking up where it left off... It's not going to happen with multiple laser, let alone improve speeds.
You can rotate the laser, but then you have MANY problems to address. Highly precise hinged wire harnesses, an extremely heavy rotating mount that can keep the laser perfectly steady, and continual centripetal compensation as the laser lens moves to focus the beam.
It's possible, but very difficult.
And no, you can't just rotate it at 10,000 RPMs. The laser mechanism won't take the force any better than the discs do. It's technically possible, but would be ludicrously expensive.
And all for what? So you can buy one slightly faster disc burner, rather than hundreds of slightly slower disc burners, running in parallel.
You can opt to shut off your cell phone, disable the ringer, or just don't pick it up when it rings, at any time you like.
More importantly, though... Cell phones can be CHEAPER than a land-line, and it can be quite difficult to find a VoIP solution that is notably less expensive than a cell.
Yes. As people use them less, the pay-phone companies jacked up their prices, setting a very high minimum monthly fee which is very unlikely to be covered by the small number of calls... Really... the exact OPPOSITE of what they SHOULD be doing when business gets bad, and have put the nails in their own coffin.
Solution: Get a pre-paid cell phone for the rare occasions you need to make a call, and leave it turned off otherwise (much longer battery life that way).
Most pre-paid carriers require you to purchase ~$10 of "minutes" every 90 days to keep your phone active. But I bet most people will need more than 1 minutes of talk time per-day, anyhow, and if not, they roll-over with most carriers, so you can use several months' worth of pre-paid time all at once when some emergency (or non-emergency) comes up. $40/year ($3.40/month) isn't too bad for basic phone service that you can use anywhere, even as just an insurance policy if you never use it. Did you always have coins on you when you really needed to make a call? I know I didn't...
If you want a cell just for REAL emergencies, then you don't even need to active it or buy minutes, as you will ALWAYS be able to call 911 if the phone works at all.
If you'd really like to know, people simply don't sit around and watch TV. Commercial breaks are a nice long opportunity to go to the restroom, go grab (or start cooking) some food, go out and get the mail, walk the dog, etc. etc.
Once TVs could inexpensively provide interactive features, it was only a matter of time before PCs died...
I would be fine with that if it was done better.
Why do we need to see the same commercial, 10 times, over the length of a single show? Why does a single commercial need to be in such a tight rotation that I'll see it dozens of times in a day? Why do ads have to be LOUDER than the program, completely clash with the theme and pace of the show, and take up 1/3rd of the air time?
If they took care of a few of those, others would follow... Once the commercials less numerous, and less irritating, they'll have a MUCH bigger impact, and broadcasters will easily make the same amount of money. And when commercial time has a greater impact, companies can justify spending much more money on an ad, making it more entertaining, less annoying, etc.
I'd be happy to pay for TV, but only if it was much better than any currently existing... You know, the exact OPPOSITE of EVERYTHING on cable. One channel with a mix of GOOD shows, news, sports, etc. After all, I don't watch 24 hours of TV a day, why do I need 999 channels which broadcast around the clock. If ONE of them was DECENT, we wouldn't need the rest.
Funny. I get all that stuff, legally, with OTA digital TV with a home-made DVR, and Netflix.
Now you're just being a jackass. In what cosmic way are you harmed by someone on the other side of the planet being able to watch a show a few days before you? It's not at all unusual for a show to sit on my DVR longer than that. And you know something... Dr Who is just now starting to be broadcast in the US... 4 years later, and I don't mind one damn bit.
As opposed to ALL OTHER JOKES, which get MUCH FUNNIER after being explained.
It's not just safety features...
People dislike it when their ears bleed, and they go deaf, so a SUBSTANTIAL amount of weight goes into quieting road noise. A car that seems just fine at 45MPH turns into a cacophony of painful noise at 80MPH. A half-hour commute in an old, ultralight car is a NIGHTMARE. From the 70s until the 90s, the 55MPH speed limit made this vastly less of an issue.
Perhaps partially related to the above as well... NOBODY will make a car with as little horsepower today, as they happily did 15+ years ago. Plenty of old cars did fine with less than 50HP, but now you can hardly find anything less than 100HP. This despite the fact that even 50HP is overkill for a 1.5-ton car.
And besides noise reduction and safety features, don't forget POLLUTION-REDUCTION devices. Tiny cars like the Geo Metro needed NO pollution control devices to be certified by the EPA for sale... These days, a significant amount of fuel is wasted for the sake of reduced smog, particulates, etc., etc. Why do you think your car idles as 5X higher than normal for the first couple minutes after start-up? It certainly doesn't save you any fuel.
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.
When a video is highly quantitized, the block is FAR less likely to change from one frame of video to the next, because so many details have been removed. HOWEVER, when it hasn't been quantitized at all, the difference (error) between a macroblock and the one it was predicted from, becomes nearly as big as fully encoding the block over again. Nothing ever stays the same.
To prove this fact is EXTREMELY easy. Pick a source video, and use mencoder to reencode it with different settings:
Very high quality:
mencoder SOURCEVIDEO -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts keyint=1:vqscale=2 -o quant2-key1.avi
mencoder SOURCEVIDEO -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts keyint=300:vqscale=2 -o quant2-key300.avi
Very low quality:
mencoder SOURCEVIDEO -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts keyint=1:vqscale=31 -o quant31-key1.avi
mencoder SOURCEVIDEO -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts keyint=300:vqscale=31 -o quant31-key300.avi
You will notice that with the high quality version, a GOP size of 300 only reduces the filesize by a factor of 2-3. While with the terrible quality version, a high GOP size is able to reduce the filesize by a HUGE factor. In both cases, changing the GOP size does not affect quality.
Furthermore, MPEG-2's half-pixel precision is more than adequate, and at high resolution, it makes less and less sense to use finer precision... What was one pixel at standard definition, is now 6 pixels, so why use qpel? There is no reason to do so.
Hardware MPEG-2 encoders are lousy. They are all based on 15 year old implementations, with minimal concern towards efficiency.
With H.264, the implementations are all brand new, and there is a lot of competition for a potentially highly-profitable market. You simply can't compare the output, and assume something is better/worse. I'm sure there's old implementations of the ZIP compressed file format that do a terrible job as well...
Due to the HDTV standard, MPEG-2 encoders are starting to get a little bit of attention, and are doing a slightly better job, but good software encoders still put them to shame.
No lossy video codec reserves a certain amount of the bitrate for "color" information. Video is split into 3 fields, one represents B&W, two represent color information. All three look exactly the same to the encoder (except that Cb and Cr is subsampled by 1/4 BEFORE it reaches the codec).
The step that reduces the color information is quantization... The level of quantization is adjusted dynamically to fit within the specified bitrate. A high enough bitrate, and NO color need be lost with any codec. With too low a bitrate, H.264 will reduce the color space to a blocky mess the same way any other codec does.
The ONLY REASON you don't see blockiness with H.264 is because AN IN-LOOP DEBLOCKING FILTER IS BUILT-IN. Shut that off, and the blockiness is still there (in fact worse, because H.264 is designed to be so dependent on it). And the deblocking in H.264 has the same drawbacks as all other kinds of deblocking. It blurs the picture, reducing detail, and is of no use at all at high bitrates.
MPEG-2 is MPEG-1, with support for interlaced video added to it. Every MPEG-2 decoder in the world can decode MPEG-1 video for that reason.
The margin is actually quite small, and CoreAVC does it's speed trick by compromising on quality.
Unfortunately, that is the current practice with health care, and we know what that leads to... Emergency rooms with 4 hour wait times....
It's a bit like saying, if you want to change your oil every 6 months, you should pay for it, your warranty is only for when your car has mechanical problems.
In both cases, if you skip the preventative step, you will end up having to go with the corrective step, which costs vastly, vastly more.
I've often thought that the most inexpensive health insurance, would be the one that REQUIRES you to get a full annual check-up, and accept early preventative care for any conditions found, or else you forfeit your insurance coverage for anything that could have been found and corrected earlier, at much less expense.
As an added bonus, more people would simply be healthier, live longer, and miss less work, all resulting in more money, for you (the health insurance provider).