Personally, I'd like to kick most of the popular culture out of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia isn't very good at it.
I have yet to find the topic that WP is good at. It certainly isn't technical topics, which quickly get turned into factually inaccurate misinformation.
I'd say pop is the closest fit, since WP's policy of "an article can be crap for any length of time" is best suited for topics where accuracy doesn't really matter...
Problem is, the entire global economy is affected when the US is in a recession....and most of us cringed when we saw that you reelected Bush
The US economy affects the world, but it's much more significant in this case than it should be...
The entire global economy is MUCH WORSE off than if they were just dealing with a US recession. This is because banks (and mutual funds, and other investors) around the world were foolish enough to blindly buy up sub-prime mortgages. Governments around the world were silent as both private and public institutions took-up such risky investments as well.
Bush most certainly didn't force them to do so. You get to take a good share of the blame, yourselves.
Hmm, insane gyroscopic effects from such a flywheel will give a car rather poor handling.
Only if you insist on using one single extremely large flywheel. It's more practical to have a large number of smaller flywheels, in which case they can be counter-rotating, and canceling out the forces.
There's several spinning away on ISS right now, so NASA has obviously managed to avoid such problems (no doubt the same way).
The only drawback, was that if the bloody thing ever got out of containment, you had a death dealing juggernaut that would buzz-saw a swatch of destruction through the middle of wherever the now flying flywheel was pointed.
Actually not.
The RPM rate is so high that flywheels get insanely hot as soon as the vacuum is broken, and it has to deal with friction from the air.
With metallic flywheels, this means it breaks apart, and you've got thousands of bits of white-hot magma flying through the air, in a straight line from the direction the flywheel was spinning. Of course your car is going to turned into swiss cheese, and the two cars directly in front/back of you are likely to get damaged as well, but it's not Armageddon.
With carbon-fiber flywheels, the flywheel material is completely incinerated instantly, and DOESN'T risk turning into such deadly projectiles. HOWEVER, you have to have a very good design to deal with the HUGE amount of unimaginably hot air now erupting out the top of the flywheel housing. Mount it properly, eg. externally, on the roof of your car, with a nice thick base-plate, and your vehicle quite quite likely wouldn't face any structural damage. Though, you can definitely expect to need a new coat of paint.
but is anyone else nervous about being around that degree of stored energy?
I drive my car every day, sitting in front of a tank with HUGE amounts of energy, in the form of gasoline... So no.
I for one would treat an ultracapacitor as a potential source of devastation until proved safe by a long period of use...
Capacitors are CURRENTLY used for high instantaneous storage/use of power. They aren't yet used for energy STORAGE. As soon as they are seeing significant use as battery replacements, you can expect their designs to change, slightly, to PREVENT the fast discharge they are known for. Just adding a weak resistor internally to the capacitor (also doubling as a makeshift fuse), should do a lot to prevent most potential causes for capacitor damage. Other, internal, redesigns are also likely, once there's a market for them.
Sometimes something truly sucks, and there is no way to put it in a positive light.
It's not a question of positive / negative. That assumes a quality judgment in the first place, which should not be involved in fair reporting.
This is an extremely very clear case of bias... Phrasing like to try and defend itself makes it extremely obvious the submitter has already passed judgment, even before hearing the described forthcoming justification from "the other side" of the argument. That is no longer reporting, since it doesn't present FACTS, but spouting off an opinion (biased as it is).
Let's try an example, shall we... Take the hypothetical example of a news story on flat-earthers. Now write a few headlines for the story.
Unbiased: Some believe Earth is flat, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Biased: Some stupid people believe the backwards theory that Earth is flat.
Also Biased: Experts attempting to show that Earth is flat, having difficulty fighting entrenched round-earth theory.
All are factually correct, and "truely sucks" describes nothing better than flat-earthers. But that doesn't mean you can't tell the truth without bias.
...a very backwards fight over royalties......how insane it is......Copyright Royalty Board to try and defend itself......No one seems to be trying to defend or explain...
It's so nice to see unbiased articles about copyright here on/.
I would say it appears that the marketing trolls in the automobile companies (around the world) have it set in their minds that Americans don't want diesel. They still seem stuck in the mindset from 5 or more years ago that the only vehicles that sell well in the states weigh 6,000 pounds or more and get no more than 10 mpg.
Yes. It couldn't be that the high-sulfur diesel sold in the US (until just recently) made it nearly impossible to utilize emissions control devices, and pollution regulations were so strict that practically no diesel automobiles could meet them... Regulations which did not apply to large trucks. And after a decade without nearly any diesel automobiles sold in the US, makers found there was no existing market and have just barely yet started attempting to build one.
Unfortunately, many people aren't aware of the progress that diesel engines have made in the past 30 years. And it would seem some of those uninformed people are working for the big 3 automakers.
What?
The "big 3" are in fact very successfully selling numerous diesel vehicles around the world. They just never introduce them to the American market.
If you RTFA, you will discover they are using LED.
I did RTFA.
LEDs are not magic. They still have a relatively short lifespan, and no doubt much HIGHER replacement cost. They just happen to use up slightly less power than HID bulbs.
On the other hand, MPlayer seems to agree with Apple and runs 640x480.
That shouldn't be the case (I know MPlayer pretty damn well)... If you're getting a 640x480, there must be some odd option in your config or command-line, or something strange about your specific -vo method. Perhaps the GUI (I assume...) you're using is choosing to do that... for some reason.
But my point wasn't to debate the finer nuances of computer video... just to point out that 640x480 is in fact good enough to call "DVD Quality"
Yes, I agree it's close enough.
With a proper (16:9 anamorphic) lens, it could do equally well on widescreen DVD (at the expense of 4:3 fullscreen being lower res).
But your figures seem to be missing the overscan, so unless you're cropping that away somewhere else, you're going to be showing too much (and you'll be slightly squished horizontally as a result...).
Overscan happens in BOTH the horizontal and vertical direction, and to almost the same degree, so nothing gets squished (nominal), and there's little point in including it in (casual approximations of) aspect ratio calculations.
I would think it was preferable to lose some info rather than pretend you have more than you do,
Actually, upscaling won't cost you much in bits with lossy compression. Even if you "pretend" to have a higher resolution, the codec will still very effectively omit redundant info.
thus ripping DVD video to 640x480 being far more common than ripping DVD video to 720x540.
540 is also not a multiple of 16, so encoding using that resolution is a bad idea all-around.
Downscaling the width will save you some bits, but downscaling the height will as well. And with any decent container, you can preserve aspect ratio info, and is common with eg. MP4, MKV, MPG, etc..
As for "common"? I certainly haven't seen a rash of 640x480 videos floating around. You're more likely to see video widths downscaled to the 500s (and height adjusted accordingly) rather than 640...
And, in fact, I just opened Apple's built-in DVD player with a 4:3 movie, and it uses 640x480,
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Maybe it defaults to a display size of "640x480", but I'm quite sure they would still preserve (decode and display) the full resolution. So, if you've got the DVD displayed full-screen, it will display all 720 columns, even if it defaults to 640 in a window.
With projectors, the cost of replacement lamps QUICKLY surpasses the cost of the projector itself. So, quoting just the sale price of a projector is a bit like quoting the price of a new car, without any mention of gas mileage (or engine specs like # of cyl. and hp, which can give you some idea).
While being "pocket" sized is interesting, I don't think the size convenience is nearly enough to make up for the short lived and very expensive bulbs found is ALL mass-market projectors. Size and inital price be-dammed... I'd much rather spend slightly more up-front, and deal with a physically larger projector, to get one that runs for 6000 hours on a $30 bulb, like the Lumenlab's EVO http://www.aboutprojectors.com/Lumenlab-eVo-v12-projector.html
It looks like they've discontinued production, but it's Lumenlabs, so you can download the plans and start making one yourself.
Don't the 720 pixels get squished down to 640 for 4:3?
No.
IF the video has to be scaled to compensate for square pixels (like many, but not all, computer monitors) then you always only scale UP to avoid such loss of information.
So for 4:3, you get 720x540 NTSC or 768x576 PAL. For 16:9 you get 854x480 NTSC or 1024x576 PAL.
This is north county, the high desert. Not the basin
Ah, I see. Palmdale/Lancaster, then...
During the 2003-04 fiscal year, the Districts' sewerage system conveyed and treated approximately 510 mgd of wastewater. Approximately 187 mgd was treated to a tertiary level and approximately 65 mgd (35 percent) of this amount was beneficially reused for a variety of applications, which include landscape and agricultural irrigation, recreational impoundments, wildlife habitat maintenance, and groundwater recharge.
At the same time, local groundwater basins are not adjudicated and experience overdrafting problems such as reduced aquifer storage capacity, land subsidence, and continually increasing pumping costs.
See "Analysis of Developing and Implementing a Groundwater Recharge Reuse Project in the Antelope Valley" in Appendix E
It seems, reasonably obvious from the description it's going to be some kind of receiver that uses waves other than visible light.
It could be an extra-sensitive FLIR type device, which allows picking up very very small thermal patterns, such as your footprints where you entered a building. Such tech could potentially even pick up a person's thermal signature through relatively thin ceiling materials... that would at least indicate how many people are inside, and where they all approximately are. You could track an individual from entry if he is the only one in that 10m/sq. area of building, or if everyone else but the target is largely stationary (eg. sleeping)... The new terrorist weapon of choice? Insulation.
I think this is the most straight-forward and obvious option. Despite spy fantasy novels, classified tech is very often based on the same things we civilians use, just improved in effectiveness by an order of magnitude, through spending ridiculous amounts of money to push the tech just a bit further along, and using impractically expensive (for civilians) designs and/or materials.
Alternatively, they could be doing this with something akin to radar, but at unusual frequencies that can apparently penetrate some common building materials.
Both are fed by a very large underground river that originates outside this county, and which there are zero efforts to "replenish" by anyone.
"Tertiary-treated municipal wastewater (recycled water) has been used to replenish the Central Basin in Los Angeles County for over 40 years."http://pubs.usgs.gov/wri/wrir034279/
Additionally, the "local water-management agencies" are also responsible for projects preventing "seawater intrusion into freshwater aquifers".
you are prohibited from restarting your well, and you MUST hook up to the water company's system. Needless to say, this gov't-enforced enhancement of their busines model makes the little local water companies delerious with joy.
It's not like it's just a handout.
If you're pumping ground water, you're drawing down the water table. If more than a few people are doing this, the water table then has to be replenished regularly.
Individuals that have drilled their own wells aren't going to pay to replenish their own water usage... It's up to government to pay for all that. That's precisely what is happening where I am. Your city/county has just decided to contract that job out to the water district, and it's no surprise they've decided that it's cheaper for everyone, and more fair, if they run water pipes instead of letting people drill wells, and charge people per gallon.
It's certainly quite irritating for those that spent the money, but aren't lucky enough to be grandfathered in for years, but no rule is perfect.
Now, if you were, instead, operating off your own cistern, and they made you stop, that would be pretty onerous, since it doesn't draw down the ground water, and therefore doesn't require the government to spend money to replenish the supply (...of rain).
Yours is the kind of response that I hate getting the most. You obviously didn't bother to read my post all the way through, AND most certainly didn't follow the link I provided where I explained everything in detail...
Yet, you spend time on a lengthy, indignantly reply, where you proceed to waste both your and my time, with questions I've already answered, in-depth. It only makes it more sad to know that your pointless rant got modded up. Anyhow, I'm going to skip those which you could already have read the answer to, and just cover the other points.
arithmetic coding is even more efficient
It's a nice addition, but the improvement is rather small... Less than 10% in the best case. Not ground breaking.
but AVC should still be more efficient.
Of course is, but only minimally, as I've said.
The fixed resolutions, bit rate limitations (both max and min bitrates), and GOP limits make it much easier to create a compatible hardware decoder.
Not really. The GOP size could be up to 137 frames IIRC (almost 10x the standard 15-18 size), and compatible with all MPEG-2 hardware. That's the minimum required for IEEE-1180 compatibility, so all decoder chips can manage at least that much without problems.
More (wider than 16/9) aspect ratios could have been included to avoid needing black bars on every single DVD.
Within these significant limitations, the studio-grade encoding software and technicians are PHENOMENAL at delivering maximum quality.
Utterly WRONG...
Every time you see edge-noise encoded on a DVD, you're seeing sheer human stupidity in action. Every time you see black bars that don't fall on a macroblock (16 pixel) boundary, you're seeing a HUGE waste of bits.
These problems are universal to damn near ALL DVDs, even though it's absolutely trivial to avoid. The "technicians" involved have NO IDEA what they are doing, and waste a huge amount of bits, and significantly lower quality, because of it. It's just incredibly fortunate DVDs have such a huge amount of bandwidth that these idiotic mistakes can be covered up by increasing the bitrate further. Of course, if they try to squeeze a film onto a single-layer DVD for cost, or include a lot of extras, then the video starts looking pretty lousy because of it.
compilers aren't generally good at generating SSE code yet.
GCC certainly isn't, but GCC is more or less the slow dog in the race. ICC does quite a bit better.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be hand written ASM. Intrinsics seem to be gaining a bit more popularity in modern programs.
The big question is, how much of the code you run is optimised for the SSE units found in modern processors, and how much of it uses it at all?
I'd bet a significant portion of the CPU-intensive programs out there, particularly multimedia, can utilize it. x264 and the like certainly can.
How much of the precompiled software you download is compiled to run on a 386, and thus makes no use whatsoever of modern processor features?
You can "-mtune" for modern CPUs to get a big boost when running on those CPUs, while still retaining full binary compatibility with x386 systems.
I still think AMD CPUs are generally a better choice, but mainly because of power consumption and multiprocessor memory bandwidth. Sheer number crunching performance usually isn't paramount.
but if a solution already existed as you seem to imply, Intel, AMD, Microsoft and the others would not be spending tens of millions of dollars a year to find a solution. The parallel programming problem is not just a problem. It is a crisis.
You seem to not understand the difference (or that there is a difference) between multi-threaded programming, and SIMD data processing.
The former requires dividing a single application up into independent parts (threads), where no one part needs to wait for the output of another, yet all are doing important processing, that comes together in the end to accomplish something the user wanted.
The later simply requires recognizing what algorithms you are performing repeatedly and sequentially in a program (like video processing) and using the appropriate instructions to send those commands to the SIMD unit in the CPU (or, potentially, the GPU, as I was hypothesizing in my last comment) so that they will be performed much more quickly, rather than each operation sequentially.
The former (threading) is a complex problem, which isn't remotely as earth-shattering as the crazy tech press would have you believe. It's just biting the CPU manufacturers in the ass, because that's the only way they know how to make more money, and the rest of the world isn't coming along as quickly as they'd like. But most importantly, it isn't useful for, nor relevant to GPUs.
Slashdot Mirror
I have yet to find the topic that WP is good at. It certainly isn't technical topics, which quickly get turned into factually inaccurate misinformation.
I'd say pop is the closest fit, since WP's policy of "an article can be crap for any length of time" is best suited for topics where accuracy doesn't really matter...
The US economy affects the world, but it's much more significant in this case than it should be...
The entire global economy is MUCH WORSE off than if they were just dealing with a US recession. This is because banks (and mutual funds, and other investors) around the world were foolish enough to blindly buy up sub-prime mortgages. Governments around the world were silent as both private and public institutions took-up such risky investments as well.
Bush most certainly didn't force them to do so. You get to take a good share of the blame, yourselves.
Only if you insist on using one single extremely large flywheel. It's more practical to have a large number of smaller flywheels, in which case they can be counter-rotating, and canceling out the forces.
There's several spinning away on ISS right now, so NASA has obviously managed to avoid such problems (no doubt the same way).
Actually not.
The RPM rate is so high that flywheels get insanely hot as soon as the vacuum is broken, and it has to deal with friction from the air.
With metallic flywheels, this means it breaks apart, and you've got thousands of bits of white-hot magma flying through the air, in a straight line from the direction the flywheel was spinning. Of course your car is going to turned into swiss cheese, and the two cars directly in front/back of you are likely to get damaged as well, but it's not Armageddon.
With carbon-fiber flywheels, the flywheel material is completely incinerated instantly, and DOESN'T risk turning into such deadly projectiles. HOWEVER, you have to have a very good design to deal with the HUGE amount of unimaginably hot air now erupting out the top of the flywheel housing. Mount it properly, eg. externally, on the roof of your car, with a nice thick base-plate, and your vehicle quite quite likely wouldn't face any structural damage. Though, you can definitely expect to need a new coat of paint.
I drive my car every day, sitting in front of a tank with HUGE amounts of energy, in the form of gasoline... So no.
Capacitors are CURRENTLY used for high instantaneous storage/use of power. They aren't yet used for energy STORAGE. As soon as they are seeing significant use as battery replacements, you can expect their designs to change, slightly, to PREVENT the fast discharge they are known for. Just adding a weak resistor internally to the capacitor (also doubling as a makeshift fuse), should do a lot to prevent most potential causes for capacitor damage. Other, internal, redesigns are also likely, once there's a market for them.
WTF?
I said nothing about 2003, and just because something can't be sold, doesn't then make the object "illegal".
So you know exactly what I was talking about, and knew I was correct, but chose to feign ignorance and ridicule the point I was making anyhow?
Yes, that makes perfect sense. At least it explains your near conspiracy theory-esque delusions.
Goodbye.
It's not a question of positive / negative. That assumes a quality judgment in the first place, which should not be involved in fair reporting.
This is an extremely very clear case of bias... Phrasing like to try and defend itself makes it extremely obvious the submitter has already passed judgment, even before hearing the described forthcoming justification from "the other side" of the argument. That is no longer reporting, since it doesn't present FACTS, but spouting off an opinion (biased as it is).
Let's try an example, shall we... Take the hypothetical example of a news story on flat-earthers. Now write a few headlines for the story.
Unbiased: Some believe Earth is flat, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Biased: Some stupid people believe the backwards theory that Earth is flat.
Also Biased: Experts attempting to show that Earth is flat, having difficulty fighting entrenched round-earth theory.
All are factually correct, and "truely sucks" describes nothing better than flat-earthers. But that doesn't mean you can't tell the truth without bias.
It's so nice to see unbiased articles about copyright here on /.
A very, very small number, relative to gasoline vehicles. I believe it was circa 2007 there were practically NONE that could be legally sold.
Yes. It couldn't be that the high-sulfur diesel sold in the US (until just recently) made it nearly impossible to utilize emissions control devices, and pollution regulations were so strict that practically no diesel automobiles could meet them... Regulations which did not apply to large trucks. And after a decade without nearly any diesel automobiles sold in the US, makers found there was no existing market and have just barely yet started attempting to build one.
It couldn't be that at all.
What?
The "big 3" are in fact very successfully selling numerous diesel vehicles around the world. They just never introduce them to the American market.
I did RTFA.
LEDs are not magic. They still have a relatively short lifespan, and no doubt much HIGHER replacement cost. They just happen to use up slightly less power than HID bulbs.
That shouldn't be the case (I know MPlayer pretty damn well)... If you're getting a 640x480, there must be some odd option in your config or command-line, or something strange about your specific -vo method. Perhaps the GUI (I assume...) you're using is choosing to do that... for some reason.
Yes, I agree it's close enough.
With a proper (16:9 anamorphic) lens, it could do equally well on widescreen DVD (at the expense of 4:3 fullscreen being lower res).
You know, the title sounds MUCH more interesting than the actual story.
Na na na na na...
Where's Michael Ironside when you need him?
Overscan happens in BOTH the horizontal and vertical direction, and to almost the same degree, so nothing gets squished (nominal), and there's little point in including it in (casual approximations of) aspect ratio calculations.
Actually, upscaling won't cost you much in bits with lossy compression. Even if you "pretend" to have a higher resolution, the codec will still very effectively omit redundant info.
540 is also not a multiple of 16, so encoding using that resolution is a bad idea all-around.
Downscaling the width will save you some bits, but downscaling the height will as well. And with any decent container, you can preserve aspect ratio info, and is common with eg. MP4, MKV, MPG, etc..
As for "common"? I certainly haven't seen a rash of 640x480 videos floating around. You're more likely to see video widths downscaled to the 500s (and height adjusted accordingly) rather than 640...
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Maybe it defaults to a display size of "640x480", but I'm quite sure they would still preserve (decode and display) the full resolution. So, if you've got the DVD displayed full-screen, it will display all 720 columns, even if it defaults to 640 in a window.
With projectors, the cost of replacement lamps QUICKLY surpasses the cost of the projector itself. So, quoting just the sale price of a projector is a bit like quoting the price of a new car, without any mention of gas mileage (or engine specs like # of cyl. and hp, which can give you some idea).
While being "pocket" sized is interesting, I don't think the size convenience is nearly enough to make up for the short lived and very expensive bulbs found is ALL mass-market projectors. Size and inital price be-dammed... I'd much rather spend slightly more up-front, and deal with a physically larger projector, to get one that runs for 6000 hours on a $30 bulb, like the Lumenlab's EVO http://www.aboutprojectors.com/Lumenlab-eVo-v12-projector.html
It looks like they've discontinued production, but it's Lumenlabs, so you can download the plans and start making one yourself.
No.
IF the video has to be scaled to compensate for square pixels (like many, but not all, computer monitors) then you always only scale UP to avoid such loss of information.
So for 4:3, you get 720x540 NTSC or 768x576 PAL. For 16:9 you get 854x480 NTSC or 1024x576 PAL.
Ah, I see. Palmdale/Lancaster, then...
During the 2003-04 fiscal year, the Districts' sewerage system conveyed and treated approximately 510 mgd of wastewater. Approximately 187 mgd was treated to a tertiary level and approximately 65 mgd (35 percent) of this amount was beneficially reused for a variety of applications, which include landscape and agricultural irrigation, recreational impoundments, wildlife habitat maintenance, and groundwater recharge.
At the same time, local groundwater basins are not adjudicated and experience overdrafting problems such as reduced aquifer storage capacity, land subsidence, and continually increasing pumping costs.
See "Analysis of Developing and Implementing a Groundwater Recharge Reuse Project in the Antelope Valley" in Appendix E
http://www.lacsd.org/info/publications_n_reports/wastewater_reports/palmdale2025/default.asp
It seems, reasonably obvious from the description it's going to be some kind of receiver that uses waves other than visible light.
It could be an extra-sensitive FLIR type device, which allows picking up very very small thermal patterns, such as your footprints where you entered a building. Such tech could potentially even pick up a person's thermal signature through relatively thin ceiling materials... that would at least indicate how many people are inside, and where they all approximately are. You could track an individual from entry if he is the only one in that 10m/sq. area of building, or if everyone else but the target is largely stationary (eg. sleeping)... The new terrorist weapon of choice? Insulation.
I think this is the most straight-forward and obvious option. Despite spy fantasy novels, classified tech is very often based on the same things we civilians use, just improved in effectiveness by an order of magnitude, through spending ridiculous amounts of money to push the tech just a bit further along, and using impractically expensive (for civilians) designs and/or materials.
Alternatively, they could be doing this with something akin to radar, but at unusual frequencies that can apparently penetrate some common building materials.
"Tertiary-treated municipal wastewater (recycled water) has been used to replenish the Central Basin in Los Angeles County for over 40 years." http://pubs.usgs.gov/wri/wrir034279/
Additionally, the "local water-management agencies" are also responsible for projects preventing "seawater intrusion into freshwater aquifers".
It's not like it's just a handout.
If you're pumping ground water, you're drawing down the water table. If more than a few people are doing this, the water table then has to be replenished regularly.
Individuals that have drilled their own wells aren't going to pay to replenish their own water usage... It's up to government to pay for all that. That's precisely what is happening where I am. Your city/county has just decided to contract that job out to the water district, and it's no surprise they've decided that it's cheaper for everyone, and more fair, if they run water pipes instead of letting people drill wells, and charge people per gallon.
It's certainly quite irritating for those that spent the money, but aren't lucky enough to be grandfathered in for years, but no rule is perfect.
Now, if you were, instead, operating off your own cistern, and they made you stop, that would be pretty onerous, since it doesn't draw down the ground water, and therefore doesn't require the government to spend money to replenish the supply (...of rain).
Yours is the kind of response that I hate getting the most. You obviously didn't bother to read my post all the way through, AND most certainly didn't follow the link I provided where I explained everything in detail...
Yet, you spend time on a lengthy, indignantly reply, where you proceed to waste both your and my time, with questions I've already answered, in-depth. It only makes it more sad to know that your pointless rant got modded up. Anyhow, I'm going to skip those which you could already have read the answer to, and just cover the other points.
It's a nice addition, but the improvement is rather small... Less than 10% in the best case. Not ground breaking.
Of course is, but only minimally, as I've said.
Not really. The GOP size could be up to 137 frames IIRC (almost 10x the standard 15-18 size), and compatible with all MPEG-2 hardware. That's the minimum required for IEEE-1180 compatibility, so all decoder chips can manage at least that much without problems.
More (wider than 16/9) aspect ratios could have been included to avoid needing black bars on every single DVD.
Utterly WRONG...
Every time you see edge-noise encoded on a DVD, you're seeing sheer human stupidity in action. Every time you see black bars that don't fall on a macroblock (16 pixel) boundary, you're seeing a HUGE waste of bits.
These problems are universal to damn near ALL DVDs, even though it's absolutely trivial to avoid. The "technicians" involved have NO IDEA what they are doing, and waste a huge amount of bits, and significantly lower quality, because of it. It's just incredibly fortunate DVDs have such a huge amount of bandwidth that these idiotic mistakes can be covered up by increasing the bitrate further. Of course, if they try to squeeze a film onto a single-layer DVD for cost, or include a lot of extras, then the video starts looking pretty lousy because of it.
GCC certainly isn't, but GCC is more or less the slow dog in the race. ICC does quite a bit better.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be hand written ASM. Intrinsics seem to be gaining a bit more popularity in modern programs.
I'd bet a significant portion of the CPU-intensive programs out there, particularly multimedia, can utilize it. x264 and the like certainly can.
You can "-mtune" for modern CPUs to get a big boost when running on those CPUs, while still retaining full binary compatibility with x386 systems.
I still think AMD CPUs are generally a better choice, but mainly because of power consumption and multiprocessor memory bandwidth. Sheer number crunching performance usually isn't paramount.
You seem to not understand the difference (or that there is a difference) between multi-threaded programming, and SIMD data processing.
The former requires dividing a single application up into independent parts (threads), where no one part needs to wait for the output of another, yet all are doing important processing, that comes together in the end to accomplish something the user wanted.
The later simply requires recognizing what algorithms you are performing repeatedly and sequentially in a program (like video processing) and using the appropriate instructions to send those commands to the SIMD unit in the CPU (or, potentially, the GPU, as I was hypothesizing in my last comment) so that they will be performed much more quickly, rather than each operation sequentially.
The former (threading) is a complex problem, which isn't remotely as earth-shattering as the crazy tech press would have you believe. It's just biting the CPU manufacturers in the ass, because that's the only way they know how to make more money, and the rest of the world isn't coming along as quickly as they'd like. But most importantly, it isn't useful for, nor relevant to GPUs.