Email doesn't require much processing power, so why waste the electricity on a high performance machine?
Better question: Why waste money on a new VIA C7, when an actual PIII-800 (cheap these days) uses less power?
If they make a higher performance chip that get within the range of a Core 2, I'd consider buying one to replace my higher performance server in a few years.
That's a huge "if" there. VIA doesn't make high performance chips, and they don't make low power chips. The only thing VIA does effectively is heavy marketing, that has quite effectively tricked people into believing their CPUs are either... I can't see any reason to believe their next CPU will be any different.
the broadcast TV model has already proven profitable,
And is becoming less profitable by the day...
and there are a LOT of people in the US with out HD TV's/Converters.
This is just stupid. People don't have converter boxes now, but by 2009 damn near all of them are sure to, on the government's dime. Not to mention that digital will give you the opportunity for 4+ channels in the same amount of spectrum, and that the crappy quality of analog broadcasts is what drove many of the people in the country to PAY for cable/sat.
I think, however, you could be on the right track... It's an interesting situation we find ourselves in. The 700MHz spectrum is going to be for sale for private use, yet it was a fairly recent decision to auction it off, so every digital TV tuner made will still tune to those frequencies. With enough money, you could build a private (digital) TV network that is tunable with standard equipment all consumers already have, yet not being subjected to the FCC's regulations of broadcast TV...
I've also thought about satellites... 700MHz is a high enough frequency to penetrate the atmosphere, can be tuned to by cheap and widely installed DTV tuners, and common UHF antennas happen to be rather high gain, especially at 700MHz... Would it really be possible to have a satellite broadcasting an HDTV signal from space, that could be picked up by anyone in the hemisphere, just by pointing their cheap UHF antennas towards the sky rather than the horizon, and hooking it up to their HDTV tuners? The broadcast power needed from the satellite's solar panels might make it impractical, but it's still a very enticing thought. The receiving equipment would be much less expensive than a dish & LNBF, basically free because it is already commonly available. And from the viewer's perspective, what about the prospect of a strong (and free) TV signal, anywhere you are?
But anybody that lives out in the boonies, the places where getting quite a bit of static are going to be screwed over if they haven't gone satellite.
Actually, you've got that exactly backwards. Those on the fringes who get ANY picture on analog TV stations, should expect to get a perfect ATSC signal. It has been proven in practice a great many times (a web search should turn up plenty of accounts). And more to the point, broadcast radius is, in fact, ATSC's biggest strength over DVB.
PBS stations are just coming off their months of [expletive deleted] pledge-drives, and getting back to regular programming. That means you've already missed the first new episodes of Nova, Frontline, Nature, POV, and Masterpiece Theatre this year. The good but less polished shows like Endless Voyage, Common Ground, Unfinished Nation, Western Tradition, Farmers' Almanac, Travels to the Edge, and more, have also resumed.
American Experience, Secrets of the Dead, several "This Old House" spin-offs, History Detectives, and others will be starting their new seasons soon enough.
News-type shows like NOW, Charlie Rose, and Bill Moyer's Journal (best US political coverage ANYWHERE) continue, uninterrupted.
Assuming you have a DVR, that's 16 hours of programming a week, in addition to whatever other shows your local PBS station has (Movies, Music, kids shows, etc.). Probably even more programming is available, if you have an HDTV tuner.
The only reason I've even noticed the writers have been on strike is the 2 months of reruns of The Daily Show. And if I may editorialize for a moment, it's amazing how often Bill Moyers shows exactly the same (hilariously ironic) news clips as Jon Stewart...
In addition to all of that, I've had a Netflix subscription for years, so throw in another, say, 3 movies a week. Even after watching several hundred movies through Netflix, I've still got a very full queue. And let's not forget they've just recently lifted their limit on "Watch Instantly," which allows downloading of several dozen major films, lots of old and current TV shows, and many more independent films, musical performances, stand-up acts, and documentaries.
think most people, or at least enough to make the advertisers happy, would go straight to the source for their entertainment and put up with the commercials
If it's 1/3rd commercials, like regular TV, you'll see edited torrents spring up instantly, and take over... Making large, slow downloads take 50% longer is a complete deal-breaker, IMHO.
If it's significantly less, however, like 10%, then I agree that it would be a workable model, and perhaps the lower cost of distribution would still make it profitable.
There isn't anything on the web that can make me forget I'm watching it on a PC monitor
It's trivially easy to find dirt-cheap video cards with TV-out. An IR pickup costs, what, $5?
You could setup such a system in a day or two. It will blow your DVD player away (no forced trailers, no region control, etc.), and an old 500MHz PC is more than fast enough for the job... Hell, I've got two unused systems that would work, right next to me.
Getting a TV tuner to work may be fairly easy, or difficult, depending on what you get. A Hauppauge MPEG-2 capture card will be quite simple to set-up... Follow the IVTV docs step by step, and you'll be done in an hour. A no-name, RAW bttv capture card will take quite a bit more effort, though cheaper, and can give much better quality and tiny file-sizes, if everything is configured correctly.
Clearly, he hasn't. That "amateur radio band" he mentioned in his second sentence is something else... But certainly not shortwave...
DHSS? 802.11?
802.11 works reasonably well because it's is on a nearly line-of-sight frequency, and required to stay very low power. Requiring users of the 700MHz spectrum to only broadcast at low power would eliminate any benefits it has over the existing unregulated frequencies.
Technology always has an answer. Government regulations always have questions.
That's crap. Government regulation of the airwaves gives us cell phones, broadcast TV, radio, etc. Would you care to explain what's wrong with those?
Government regulations are what keep your neighbor's microwave, wireless speakers, 802.11 router, etc. from crapping all over the spectrum, and making it completely useless for you. It's also what keeps the phone companies from setting up an 802.11 jammer on every street corner... Not to mention that it's government regulation that is kicking companies off the 700MHz frequencies they were previously using, and making it available for other uses. It's government regulation that has been pushing for old equipment that inefficiently utilizes spectrum to be replaced.
There needs to be rationing of the spectrum of some sort. Claiming anarchy will make everything fine and dandy is idiotic.
Everything you've said is technically true... However, it has nothing at all to do with DRM. If you control the system, and the 'users' are just extremely restricted accounts, you have no need, and would get no benefits, from DRM. I also don't believe that's the scenario outlined in the article.
See, you may be paying $50/month for an "unlimited" connection at 6 megabits/second. But guess what? 6 megabits of bandwidth costs your ISP *at least* twice that.
It was ENTIRELY their decision to advertise a 6mbps "unlimited" service. If they expect users to stay under some amount of data transfer every month, they should advertise as such.
Many, many years ago... my cable modem service was advertised as 386kbps. Yet if you were a light user, for any given week, the modem speed would double, until you started utilizing it more heavily. Yet, they didn't advertise the doubled speed, that they couldn't sustain... they advertised the speed they COULD actually supply. Will wonders never cease?
Also, ISPs are quick to whine and complain about their bandwidth costs, yet for some strange reason they aren't begging companies (eg. Google, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft) to setup a mirror server in their offices. Even though it would be technically pretty simple to do so, for some reason, ISPs don't provide the maximum possible speed for in-network traffic (to/from your neighbors, and/or the ISP's caching proxy server, and what-not) and only limit speed when it has to go over their oh-so-expensive leased lines. So while ISPs cry uncle, they've taken NO technical measures that would save them money, while benefiting their customers.
For all those who are saying "open source DRM" is an oxymoron, they should have a look at OpenIPMP, which is an open-source DRM solution for video formats.
It is still an oxymoron.
If you see my comment posted shortly after yours, I mention OGG-S/Media-S. They are, at least, honest about their "open source" DRM system. In their FAQ they explain while it is GPL'd, you can buy a (closed-source) license so that it's anything other than a public-key encryption system. ergo: Open source DRM is an oxymoron.
DRM depends on proprietary software. You are encrypting a file, then giving the user the key to decode it, while telling the program in question to decode the file, but only allow it to be used in one of a few ways (eg. display PDF, but don't print).
Such a system is untenable with proprietary software (just need to find the right memory address), and absolutely impossible with open source software, as you can simply remove the line in the program that tells it what actions not to allow. (See xpdf). With proprietary DRM systems, the companies just hope it's difficult enough to decipher the compiled code of the proprietary programs, that it takes a while before someone finds the right spots in memory to probe/change, and publishes the details... Then, they make trivial changes to the DRM system, and call it a new, "fixed" version that everyone should start using quickly (before someone figures it out).
The only thing DRM can do effectively, is to prevent the first opening of the file. After you send that first key (eg. via server), no matter what the DRM involved, the user can (trivially) strip the DRM off, and do whatever they want with the unencrypted file.
If that is what you want... I would suggest using public-key encryption to protect the file instead of a commercial "DRM" system. Either PGP or SSL (keys in combination with a password) can make absolutely sure only the intended recipient can make use of the file, even if others obtain copies of it. If you are expecting any more control over what others do with the file, you are simply denying reality.
So far, all American sources have refused to cover the story.
You make it sound as if EVERY American news organization is corrupt... As opposed to the VERY LIKELY possibility she's just full of crap.
One person makes an unbelievable assertion, with NO evidence to back any of it up, and a few foreign media outlets, with questionable journalistic integrity, run with it. That's not even news, that's the status quo.
Next up, ex US military employees, who saw little green men at Area 51...
What makes everyone think that just because someone worked for the government, they are immune from lying (for money/publicity/revenge), becoming psychotic, etc.?
I remember something a fear [sic] years ago about the switch to HDTV somehow opening up a range frequencies on the FM dial
It's nothing inherent to HDTV... It's just that broadcasters are now abandoning VHF-low (CH2-7) en-masse, and CH6 happens to cover the lower end of the FM spectrum. CH5 was just below the FM range, so it could potentially be extended (downward) as well. I really don't expect either...
I never liked DSL, btw. It seemed like the public was being duped into agreeing that they have no business using modems that fast without paying the phone companies for compensation.
The DSLAM (head-end of a DSL connection) inherently needs to be on the physical phone line, ie. in the telco's switching center.
You may, instead, be confusing DSL with ISDN, where you pay the telco extra for a higher-speed (64kbps) switching connection, rather than the lower quality/bitrate voice connection.
I started reading up on it and learned that Japan had gone digital TV quite some time ago,
"ISDB-T was adopted for commercial transmissions in Japan in December 2003."
but was still using the same airspace; they just managed to use compression to fit around two digital channels into the same bandwidth as one of our analogues.
It's said that ATSC can fit up to 6 SD signals on a single 6MHz broadcast, though 4 is the more accepted number. ATSC uses the same 6MHz bandwidth as old analog TV transmissions.
But every time I hear of one of these things, the next time I hear about it it's somehow greatly diminished in cool-factor (like going from "a little bit" being used for emergency and military, to a bit more) or else I just don't hear about it again.
You keep talking about what you "hear" as if you're on an abandoned island, with a radio broadcasting slashdot as your only source of information...
An hour on Wikipedia, or searching the web, would quickly answer any questions you have, and clear up the misinformation.
Could anybody actually sit down and write out some sort of template for what we can expect out of the future?
I'm going to say, no. Nobody can tell you what is going to happen in the future.
I saw the BBS-over-HAM stuff: it sort of sucked, even compared to using a noisy landline with a 2400bps modem! Who wants to go back to that?
HAM radio is very noisy and unreliable, since it depends on the ionosphere for propagation. HAM radio is also used over extremely small bits of bandwidth, barely enough for one-way, intelligible speech.
TV broadcasts (and, in fact, the vast majority of the radio spectrum) is the polar opposite of HAM/Shortwave.
I don't have a clue why your comment got modded up. You're just complaining about what you don't know.
What does setting a price point the market will bear have to do with simplicity of design?
I addressed price, assuming you had some idea what you were talking about... "Simplicity of design" is complete and total nonsense. One more chip (MPEG-2 encoder) on your tuner won't have any effect at all on the "design" of the rest of the device.
DVB can be used for HD transmissions as well as SD ones
Can be, but isn't. The converter boxes aren't set-up for it, so broadcasters need dual stations to broadcast HD. In practice, quite simply, it rarely happens, and switching everyone to high-def, after already switching them to digital, will probably never happen, or at least it will take decades.
if the viewer has an old SD TV plugged into a set-top box (as the majority will) everything's still going to look like it did before.
True only in the very short term. You can't buy SD TVs anymore, and the existing ones won't last for too many years, even if the owners don't upgrade just for HD (as many have).
Another thing to take into account is that most stations may not have much HD content
The switchover has been on the horizon for over a decade. Major stations have been broadcasting in HD for years, and all but the crappiest TV stations have been recording every one of their shows in HD for at least the past couple years, and usually, longer. It's true that it won't ALL be HD, but most is.
my multi-region DRM-free DVD-RAM recorder has none of those problems
Really?
It's free? It performs all necessary wiring, by itself? It will record to disc any data from your computer? It will record and playback high-def video?
it's much simpler to dump a MPEG2 signal to HD than it is to encode an analogue signal
Apparently not. Analog MPEG-2 PCI capture cards for computers are (still) no more expensive than PCI DVB cards.
You also don't explain how this (even if it was true) could possibly have given DVDs any advantage over DVRs. Tivo isn't the only one making them, BTW, not by a long shot.
I'm morally obliged to point out that the sales figures for various different recording devices reflect the US's technological backwardness in yet another sector as Europe is all shiny and DVB and the US is not.
Your explanation doesn't hold-up, so that's a big no.
And I suggest you learn to accept technological backwardness... In just a year from now, the US will completely bypass the rest of the world, and force every last viewer from analog TV straight to high definition (1080i) digital broadcasts. Enjoy.
The real story is that TV in the rest of the world can be considered viewable without heavy editing.
We have commercial-free, non-profit public TV (PBS) in the US as well.
A 1h show is actually a 43minutes torrent, which means that every night, you have 17+ minutes of commercial during an episode.
45+ minutes is more accurate, and the other ~15 minutes isn't entirely commercials either. That 15 includes a few minutes for the intros, credits, etc., etc. Even on PBS, an uninterupted 1 hour show can be edited down to ~52 minutes without losing anything. Go download a torrent of NOVA / Frontline / American Experience / Secrets of the Dead / etc.
This is the reason Tivo and DVR caught faster in the US than in the rest of the world, because they make the TV watchable again. This is a patch for a broken system.
I watch PBS probably ~85% of the time and I was still one of the early DVR adopters. Time-shifting is a great thing, even without the added benefit of skipping commercials.
After that, I agree that the DVR is a much better device than a DVD-recorder, but it does have some trade-offs, mostly that you cannot move a show and share it with your neighbors/friends.
Mostly untrue. Tivos have an option to move (not copy) a show between DVRs over the network, so it can be done. There were also Tivos with DVD Burners built-in. Not to mention that there are modifications available for commercial DVRs like Tivos to disable protections, and home-built DVRs inherently have no limitations at all.
Why in the world would anyone get a crippled stand-alone DVD recorder? You have to put up with macrovision, and digital tokens preventing recording from DVDs or VHS tapes, and even sometimes digital cable/satellite tuners.
You have to record in real-time, at low quality, and that's if you or an installer can even figure out how to get the wiring right... Most satellite installers can't figure out how to keep a single VCR in the loop, let alone VCR+DVD+DVDR+DVR.
Meanwhile, if you put a TV tuner and DVD-Burner in your computer, you can (trivially) edit out commercials, decide after the fact whether or not it's worth wasting a disc on the show... You can make backup DVD copies at 16X. You can back-up data from your computer. You can record high-def video to disc. etc., etc.
The story here is that Americans aren't stupid enough to buy DRM crippled, expensive, and inherently limited, stand-alone DVD recorders.
The "solar constant" is measured "on the outer surface of [the] atmosphere", most certainly NOT at ground level. Down here, you get around 100W/m2, during daylight, in the summer, with no cloud cover, etc.
Did you really think that our previous "blackest" materials were simply so highly reflective as to make such a scheme impossible? No, they absorb something like 95%+ of light. But with that, you simply need a huge area to get a useful amount of energy.
Slashdot Mirror
Better question: Why waste money on a new VIA C7, when an actual PIII-800 (cheap these days) uses less power?
That's a huge "if" there. VIA doesn't make high performance chips, and they don't make low power chips. The only thing VIA does effectively is heavy marketing, that has quite effectively tricked people into believing their CPUs are either... I can't see any reason to believe their next CPU will be any different.
And is becoming less profitable by the day...
This is just stupid. People don't have converter boxes now, but by 2009 damn near all of them are sure to, on the government's dime. Not to mention that digital will give you the opportunity for 4+ channels in the same amount of spectrum, and that the crappy quality of analog broadcasts is what drove many of the people in the country to PAY for cable/sat.
I think, however, you could be on the right track... It's an interesting situation we find ourselves in. The 700MHz spectrum is going to be for sale for private use, yet it was a fairly recent decision to auction it off, so every digital TV tuner made will still tune to those frequencies. With enough money, you could build a private (digital) TV network that is tunable with standard equipment all consumers already have, yet not being subjected to the FCC's regulations of broadcast TV...
I've also thought about satellites... 700MHz is a high enough frequency to penetrate the atmosphere, can be tuned to by cheap and widely installed DTV tuners, and common UHF antennas happen to be rather high gain, especially at 700MHz... Would it really be possible to have a satellite broadcasting an HDTV signal from space, that could be picked up by anyone in the hemisphere, just by pointing their cheap UHF antennas towards the sky rather than the horizon, and hooking it up to their HDTV tuners? The broadcast power needed from the satellite's solar panels might make it impractical, but it's still a very enticing thought. The receiving equipment would be much less expensive than a dish & LNBF, basically free because it is already commonly available. And from the viewer's perspective, what about the prospect of a strong (and free) TV signal, anywhere you are?
Actually, you've got that exactly backwards. Those on the fringes who get ANY picture on analog TV stations, should expect to get a perfect ATSC signal. It has been proven in practice a great many times (a web search should turn up plenty of accounts). And more to the point, broadcast radius is, in fact, ATSC's biggest strength over DVB.
Worst... pick-up... line... EVER!
PBS stations are just coming off their months of [expletive deleted] pledge-drives, and getting back to regular programming. That means you've already missed the first new episodes of Nova, Frontline, Nature, POV, and Masterpiece Theatre this year. The good but less polished shows like Endless Voyage, Common Ground, Unfinished Nation, Western Tradition, Farmers' Almanac, Travels to the Edge, and more, have also resumed.
American Experience, Secrets of the Dead, several "This Old House" spin-offs, History Detectives, and others will be starting their new seasons soon enough.
News-type shows like NOW, Charlie Rose, and Bill Moyer's Journal (best US political coverage ANYWHERE) continue, uninterrupted.
Assuming you have a DVR, that's 16 hours of programming a week, in addition to whatever other shows your local PBS station has (Movies, Music, kids shows, etc.). Probably even more programming is available, if you have an HDTV tuner.
The only reason I've even noticed the writers have been on strike is the 2 months of reruns of The Daily Show. And if I may editorialize for a moment, it's amazing how often Bill Moyers shows exactly the same (hilariously ironic) news clips as Jon Stewart...
In addition to all of that, I've had a Netflix subscription for years, so throw in another, say, 3 movies a week. Even after watching several hundred movies through Netflix, I've still got a very full queue. And let's not forget they've just recently lifted their limit on "Watch Instantly," which allows downloading of several dozen major films, lots of old and current TV shows, and many more independent films, musical performances, stand-up acts, and documentaries.
If it's 1/3rd commercials, like regular TV, you'll see edited torrents spring up instantly, and take over... Making large, slow downloads take 50% longer is a complete deal-breaker, IMHO.
If it's significantly less, however, like 10%, then I agree that it would be a workable model, and perhaps the lower cost of distribution would still make it profitable.
Unfortunately... they weren't all that entertaining in the old days, anyhow.
And you could at least have linked to Archive.org's collection:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Afeature_films&sort=-avg_rating%3B-num_reviews
It's trivially easy to find dirt-cheap video cards with TV-out.
An IR pickup costs, what, $5?
You could setup such a system in a day or two. It will blow your DVD player away (no forced trailers, no region control, etc.), and an old 500MHz PC is more than fast enough for the job... Hell, I've got two unused systems that would work, right next to me.
Getting a TV tuner to work may be fairly easy, or difficult, depending on what you get. A Hauppauge MPEG-2 capture card will be quite simple to set-up... Follow the IVTV docs step by step, and you'll be done in an hour. A no-name, RAW bttv capture card will take quite a bit more effort, though cheaper, and can give much better quality and tiny file-sizes, if everything is configured correctly.
Akimbo is years ahead of this...
Clearly, he hasn't. That "amateur radio band" he mentioned in his second sentence is something else... But certainly not shortwave...
802.11 works reasonably well because it's is on a nearly line-of-sight frequency, and required to stay very low power. Requiring users of the 700MHz spectrum to only broadcast at low power would eliminate any benefits it has over the existing unregulated frequencies.
That's crap. Government regulation of the airwaves gives us cell phones, broadcast TV, radio, etc. Would you care to explain what's wrong with those?
Government regulations are what keep your neighbor's microwave, wireless speakers, 802.11 router, etc. from crapping all over the spectrum, and making it completely useless for you. It's also what keeps the phone companies from setting up an 802.11 jammer on every street corner... Not to mention that it's government regulation that is kicking companies off the 700MHz frequencies they were previously using, and making it available for other uses. It's government regulation that has been pushing for old equipment that inefficiently utilizes spectrum to be replaced.
There needs to be rationing of the spectrum of some sort. Claiming anarchy will make everything fine and dandy is idiotic.
Everything you've said is technically true... However, it has nothing at all to do with DRM. If you control the system, and the 'users' are just extremely restricted accounts, you have no need, and would get no benefits, from DRM. I also don't believe that's the scenario outlined in the article.
It was ENTIRELY their decision to advertise a 6mbps "unlimited" service. If they expect users to stay under some amount of data transfer every month, they should advertise as such.
Many, many years ago... my cable modem service was advertised as 386kbps. Yet if you were a light user, for any given week, the modem speed would double, until you started utilizing it more heavily. Yet, they didn't advertise the doubled speed, that they couldn't sustain... they advertised the speed they COULD actually supply. Will wonders never cease?
Also, ISPs are quick to whine and complain about their bandwidth costs, yet for some strange reason they aren't begging companies (eg. Google, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft) to setup a mirror server in their offices. Even though it would be technically pretty simple to do so, for some reason, ISPs don't provide the maximum possible speed for in-network traffic (to/from your neighbors, and/or the ISP's caching proxy server, and what-not) and only limit speed when it has to go over their oh-so-expensive leased lines. So while ISPs cry uncle, they've taken NO technical measures that would save them money, while benefiting their customers.
It is still an oxymoron.
If you see my comment posted shortly after yours, I mention OGG-S/Media-S. They are, at least, honest about their "open source" DRM system. In their FAQ they explain while it is GPL'd, you can buy a (closed-source) license so that it's anything other than a public-key encryption system. ergo: Open source DRM is an oxymoron.
DRM depends on proprietary software. You are encrypting a file, then giving the user the key to decode it, while telling the program in question to decode the file, but only allow it to be used in one of a few ways (eg. display PDF, but don't print).
Such a system is untenable with proprietary software (just need to find the right memory address), and absolutely impossible with open source software, as you can simply remove the line in the program that tells it what actions not to allow. (See xpdf). With proprietary DRM systems, the companies just hope it's difficult enough to decipher the compiled code of the proprietary programs, that it takes a while before someone finds the right spots in memory to probe/change, and publishes the details... Then, they make trivial changes to the DRM system, and call it a new, "fixed" version that everyone should start using quickly (before someone figures it out).
The only thing DRM can do effectively, is to prevent the first opening of the file. After you send that first key (eg. via server), no matter what the DRM involved, the user can (trivially) strip the DRM off, and do whatever they want with the unencrypted file.
If that is what you want... I would suggest using public-key encryption to protect the file instead of a commercial "DRM" system. Either PGP or SSL (keys in combination with a password) can make absolutely sure only the intended recipient can make use of the file, even if others obtain copies of it. If you are expecting any more control over what others do with the file, you are simply denying reality.
All that said, here is one open source DRM system: http://www.sidespace.com/products/oggs/
You make it sound as if EVERY American news organization is corrupt... As opposed to the VERY LIKELY possibility she's just full of crap.
One person makes an unbelievable assertion, with NO evidence to back any of it up, and a few foreign media outlets, with questionable journalistic integrity, run with it. That's not even news, that's the status quo.
Next up, ex US military employees, who saw little green men at Area 51...
What makes everyone think that just because someone worked for the government, they are immune from lying (for money/publicity/revenge), becoming psychotic, etc.?
Because one person doesn't know what he's talking about?
Welcome to the real world.
It's nothing inherent to HDTV... It's just that broadcasters are now abandoning VHF-low (CH2-7) en-masse, and CH6 happens to cover the lower end of the FM spectrum. CH5 was just below the FM range, so it could potentially be extended (downward) as well. I really don't expect either...
The DSLAM (head-end of a DSL connection) inherently needs to be on the physical phone line, ie. in the telco's switching center.
You may, instead, be confusing DSL with ISDN, where you pay the telco extra for a higher-speed (64kbps) switching connection, rather than the lower quality/bitrate voice connection.
"ISDB-T was adopted for commercial transmissions in Japan in December 2003."
It's said that ATSC can fit up to 6 SD signals on a single 6MHz broadcast, though 4 is the more accepted number. ATSC uses the same 6MHz bandwidth as old analog TV transmissions.
You keep talking about what you "hear" as if you're on an abandoned island, with a radio broadcasting slashdot as your only source of information...
An hour on Wikipedia, or searching the web, would quickly answer any questions you have, and clear up the misinformation.
I'm going to say, no. Nobody can tell you what is going to happen in the future.
HAM radio is very noisy and unreliable, since it depends on the ionosphere for propagation. HAM radio is also used over extremely small bits of bandwidth, barely enough for one-way, intelligible speech.
TV broadcasts (and, in fact, the vast majority of the radio spectrum) is the polar opposite of HAM/Shortwave.
I don't have a clue why your comment got modded up. You're just complaining about what you don't know.
I addressed price, assuming you had some idea what you were talking about... "Simplicity of design" is complete and total nonsense. One more chip (MPEG-2 encoder) on your tuner won't have any effect at all on the "design" of the rest of the device.
Can be, but isn't. The converter boxes aren't set-up for it, so broadcasters need dual stations to broadcast HD. In practice, quite simply, it rarely happens, and switching everyone to high-def, after already switching them to digital, will probably never happen, or at least it will take decades.
True only in the very short term. You can't buy SD TVs anymore, and the existing ones won't last for too many years, even if the owners don't upgrade just for HD (as many have).
The switchover has been on the horizon for over a decade. Major stations have been broadcasting in HD for years, and all but the crappiest TV stations have been recording every one of their shows in HD for at least the past couple years, and usually, longer. It's true that it won't ALL be HD, but most is.
Really?
It's free?
It performs all necessary wiring, by itself?
It will record to disc any data from your computer?
It will record and playback high-def video?
That's one hell of a device.
Apparently not. Analog MPEG-2 PCI capture cards for computers are (still) no more expensive than PCI DVB cards.
You also don't explain how this (even if it was true) could possibly have given DVDs any advantage over DVRs. Tivo isn't the only one making them, BTW, not by a long shot.
Your explanation doesn't hold-up, so that's a big no.
And I suggest you learn to accept technological backwardness... In just a year from now, the US will completely bypass the rest of the world, and force every last viewer from analog TV straight to high definition (1080i) digital broadcasts. Enjoy.
And Europeans apparently don't check other replies before they respond...
Of course. I am American after all...
(Sorry, I couldn't resist)
We have commercial-free, non-profit public TV (PBS) in the US as well.
45+ minutes is more accurate, and the other ~15 minutes isn't entirely commercials either. That 15 includes a few minutes for the intros, credits, etc., etc. Even on PBS, an uninterupted 1 hour show can be edited down to ~52 minutes without losing anything. Go download a torrent of NOVA / Frontline / American Experience / Secrets of the Dead / etc.
I watch PBS probably ~85% of the time and I was still one of the early DVR adopters. Time-shifting is a great thing, even without the added benefit of skipping commercials.
Mostly untrue. Tivos have an option to move (not copy) a show between DVRs over the network, so it can be done. There were also Tivos with DVD Burners built-in. Not to mention that there are modifications available for commercial DVRs like Tivos to disable protections, and home-built DVRs inherently have no limitations at all.
Why in the world would anyone get a crippled stand-alone DVD recorder? You have to put up with macrovision, and digital tokens preventing recording from DVDs or VHS tapes, and even sometimes digital cable/satellite tuners.
You have to record in real-time, at low quality, and that's if you or an installer can even figure out how to get the wiring right... Most satellite installers can't figure out how to keep a single VCR in the loop, let alone VCR+DVD+DVDR+DVR.
Meanwhile, if you put a TV tuner and DVD-Burner in your computer, you can (trivially) edit out commercials, decide after the fact whether or not it's worth wasting a disc on the show... You can make backup DVD copies at 16X. You can back-up data from your computer. You can record high-def video to disc. etc., etc.
The story here is that Americans aren't stupid enough to buy DRM crippled, expensive, and inherently limited, stand-alone DVD recorders.
No.
The "solar constant" is measured "on the outer surface of [the] atmosphere", most certainly NOT at ground level. Down here, you get around 100W/m2, during daylight, in the summer, with no cloud cover, etc.
Did you really think that our previous "blackest" materials were simply so highly reflective as to make such a scheme impossible? No, they absorb something like 95%+ of light. But with that, you simply need a huge area to get a useful amount of energy.