I know that power outage is the problem with RAM. But how often does that actually happen?
With laptops... frequently. And really, even once is too many, considering the extensive data loss and filesystem corruption inherent with a loss of such huge amounts of data.
Why not include a battery for flushing to Flash/disc in the event?
Because it would take a large battery (and a fairly complex controller) when space is already at a premium. If you're going to put a battery on your RAM, get rid of the disk or Flash all together and just go with battery-backed RAM drives.
And though of course more main memory, or even CPU cache, can improve performance, that requires much more config than transparent performance improvements on the drive itself.
No, it doesn't require any configuration at all. Every operating system since MS-DOS transparently handles disk caching to RAM. It gives much faster access since you aren't going out over the ATA buss, can be much faster in writing to disk, since the OS/filesystem can organize the data in RAM better, and is much more reliable, since the OS/filesystem will flush the parts that are important for filesystem integrity immediately, and delay the less important bulk of the data.
Since RAM costs 50% what Flash costs, a drive costing 150% of a simple drive would have to last only 50% longer to be cost effective.
It would have to be equally low-power, and equally as small and light, none of which it is. That's why it's not cost-effective to use 3.5" drives in notebooks, and why it's not cost effective to add RAM and a large battery back-up to existing storage methods.
It's debatable whether the Flash drive would last any longer with a RAM cache, since wear leveling and similar features should already give it a life span long far longer than even the more fervent equipment recycler (like myself) should want to use it.
And going with your numbers, why not get rid of the Flash all together, it will just cost 50% more than your hybrid Flash drive, BUT it will be 33% smaller, AND give users insanely great performance across the entire drive, while using far less power, and allowing it to last indefinitely (what is 200% divided by infinity?) (not including replacing the back-up battery every few years)?
Of course it would last longer than that, and offer higher performance, too.
Increasing main system RAM would give a much bigger performance boost, without requiring any more physical space, nor a back-up battery.
The problem is that there are 18 different (ATSC) acceptable formats, and the result was years of delay and tons of poor products.
The different possible resolutions and frame rates certainly didn't cause any delays. Once you've implemented the highest, the rest are simple. And for high definition, there's really only 2 formats (720p/1080i).
I don't have any problems with sports on film, and that's only 24fps.
Your poor vision shouldn't be the basis for video standards.
Interlacing is a crutch of television technology, and the inabilityof 1950s technology to get horizontal refresh rates high enough to do progressive scanning.
That was the original reason for it. However, I've listed the other attributes it has, which make it relevant and desirable even with progressive displays.
The problem is that the FCC decided to let the decision made by someone else - and the result has been two decades of poor results.
Still, I have NO IDEA what "poor results" you are trying to refer to.
Still, there is absolutly no reason for interlaced video today
I've already described the reasons for interlaced video today.
and there is sufficient horsepower in dedicated chips to decode 60 frames per second.
Funny. You were complaining about how long it took for ATSC to gain traction in your previous sentences, yet you want to force them to an even higher-end standard, which would have delayed things a few years more.
Also, the CPU power may be there (now), but the bandwidth certainly isn't. There's no way you're going to convince the FCC to allow TV stations several more MHz of bandwidth, and you're certainly not going to get much traction convincing people that their 1080 TV sets should be downgraded to 720, just because you don't happen to like interlacing.
And you'd be taking a bigger hit on movies, forcing the resolution way down to 720p, yet still only having 24fps, so wasting more than half of the potential.
Higher frame rates are nice, but not at the expense of the deinterlacing gymnastics that has to be done on the back end.
No deinterlacing needed. The majority of HDTV sets support 1080i natively (which is why it's used). And for flat screens that can do 1080p@60fps, it's just a matter of line-doubling to get an equally perfect picture. It's only the very cheap/low-end flat-screen that get screwed by interlacing, but that's because they can't really do 60fps to begin with, so they lose quite a bit with 720p also.
As for my OTA comment - the FCC fucked that up, too. We should be watching 720p, period. If it weren't for all those mama's boy TV manufacturers who were so damned afraid of losing their interlaced teddy bears, we'd have been much better off.
I'm not quite sure what your complaint is.
Despite interlacing artifacts (spacial/temporal aliasing), it gives the best of both worlds. You have 1080p/30 resolution with low/slow motion, and 60fps during fast motion.
I would very much like to see 1080p become standard instead of interlaced, but I certainly wouldn't like downgrading to 720p just to avoid the interlacing.
The only way for me to pick and choose is to get a C-band sat, which my HOA would never approve.
Not sure about C-band but your HOA absolutely positively CAN'T prevent you from installing a smaller KU band dish (thanks to recent federal regulations) and it seems most content has moved to KU-band over the past few years, anyhow.
The problem with a-la-carte pricing is that it makes it impossible for new networks to get enough subscribers to start up.
Nope, EXACTLY the opposite.
It's MUCH easier to convince individuals to pay a couple dollars a month for a new channel than it is to convince a big cable company to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to be allowed to carry a new channel that there's no guarantee their viewers will want to watch.
The only exception is spin-offs from already-big cable networks... If Viacom starts up another cable channel, they can force it to be carried by everyone, everywhere. So ala carte could only possibly lower the barrier to entry for new and independent cable channels.
What's more, it might finally allow cable channels to die, when the quality turns to crap. When companies/channels change from science programming to all-reality-shows, all-the-time, and/or increase bad/annoying advertising, etc., the viewers could actually speak out, and directly stop their money going to those channels, sending a very clear message, and potentially bankrupting previously popular channels that have turned to crap. If ala carte happens, look for an immediate end to distracting ads on-top of shows like TNT, FX, and USA are so very fond of.
Think about it - how many of us would personally watch LOGO, the Gay/Lesbian Network? Some, but not enough for it to survive without charging an insane amount per subscriber.
How is that a problem? IF they can't make enough on advertising to support themselves, AND IF they can't get enough viewers to have a reasonably low price, AND IF they can't get their niche viewers to pay high enough monthly fees to support the channel, they fully deserve to go out of business.
I'm certainly one of the ones only interested in the less popular cable channels, but for the handful I watch, I'd be willing to pay $10 each, and more if they'd improve the content of the programming, and reduce or do away with ads.
I can't wait for ssd's. Every hard drive I've owned has been noisy and they drive me nuts.
Drives have gotten much quieter over the years. Today, the vast majority of the noise is due to the high speed of the read arm/voice coil, and that can be extremely effectively eliminated by aggressive use of the acoustic noise management setting nearly every hard drive supports. Under Linux, just run hdparm -M128.
Under Windows, sit around your computer and let the noise from the hard drive be a reminder of the consequences of your choice.
For smaller storage ( Worst of both worlds! Yea! Where do I sign up?
For that matter, how come we never saw magnetic drives with builtin RAM caches in the GB scale, occasionally written (in parallel) back to the magnetic disc for reliability?
Because anything more than a few MBs of cache, and a sudden power outage will completely corrupt your partition.
Some kind of hybrid RAM/Flash or RAM/Disk drive is just plain stupid. If you've got GBs of RAM, just use it. With large amounts of RAM, you absolutely MUST have a back-up battery in there, so just make it a bigger one that will last for weeks without power, and entirely forgo the hindrance of slow and bulky Flash/Disks.
You do see large caches, but separate from the drives. With SCSI RAID controllers, it's pretty common to see SIMMS or SODIMM slots that will accept hundreds of MBs of RAM, if not a couple GBs. They, however, have built-in rechargeable batteries, which will keep the RAM refreshed for 2-3 days after a power outage, so it can be flushed to disk when it is next powered-up.
If you want a disk drive, but with GBs of cache for performance, put a few GBs of main memory in your system, and let the operating system take care of it. It will perform much better, and be much more reliable.
So Opera corp. or Mozilla Foundation are fools too, when they are working on Theora support in the next versions of their browsers?
Yes. Video codecs don't belong in browsers. That's what plugins are for.
Ask them why they're supporting Theora now, and not VP3.2 when it was released 6+ years ago, or MPEG-1 way back when the patents expired. And how about audio like Vorbis, Musepack, FLAC, speex, etc. Will they integrate those as well, since they're patent-free?
Do you mind if I use your car to go to the grocery store? [...] what if I lived in your house while you were on vacation, as long as I don't use electricity/water or disturb your stuff
The analogy doesn't remotely hold up.
Wear-and-tear is what eventually makes cars, carpets, appliances, furnishings etc. worthless. Driving my car and staying in my house shortens it's usable life.
Access to cars and houses is a security issue... Once you've got my car, or are inside my house, it would be far easier for you to steal something very valuable from me.
And there are privacy issues as well. I certainly don't want to leave someone alone in my house, even if I otherwise like and trust them, just because of the possibility they may go snooping through my stuff.
And with a car at least, there is the issue of access. I wouldn't mind someone borrowing it, if I could be 100% sure I wouldn't unexpected want or need it while they are gone.
Not to mention the issues of your own legal liability should someone be injured with your car, or inside your house.
If you could eliminate all those problems, and perhaps a few more I haven't thought of yet, then yes, I'd be happy to let someone else get the benefits of my house/car if it didn't negatively impact me in the slightest. Who in the world would be so sociopathic as to decide otherwise? Who would go out of their way to deprive someone of something, when it wouldn't impact you at all to let them have it?
In fact, something similar quite often happens. Up north, nearly every year, on the off-season, secluded cabins, hunting lodges, etc. will be used by people who just happen to stumble upon them. The owners rarely if ever complain or make an (trivial) effort to prevent them from doing so in the future.
the internet usecase is free for several more years,
Yes, that's true. But that wasn't what you asked.
and is renewable on the original terms.
No, I think you misread that sentence. It only says the fees for (non-fee-based) internet distribution won't be any higher than for (non-fee-based) TV broadcasting.
using DC across the board would greatly reduce cooling costs.
Except that it wouldn't...
Switching (AC) power supplies have the potential to be just as efficient, if not more so, than DC power supplies.
With a DC datacenter, you have to have a big central AC/DC converter, and then a bunch of DC/DC voltage converters. There's very little to gain, even in theory.
In practice, you'd probably do far better if you took a fraction of the money it would cost to make a DC datacenter, and instead replace all the PSUs with more efficient models.
Is having to pay royalties to broadcast or transmit a format 'better'?
If the cost of the royalties allow you to save far more in bandwidth costs... Yes, that would be a hell of a lot better.
Theora is far from a 'hobbyist' project
Quite the opposite. Not only is it a hobbyist project, but it's a pretty sad one. Something like 4 years behind schedule in even releasing a BETA version of the software, let alone a final 1.0 version. Theora has stagnated to the point of ridiculousness.
VP3 was just barely competitive when it was released, and now, many years, later stands no chance against modern codecs like h.264 and VC-1.
The web was intended to be open and inclusive for everyone, as such proprietary codecs are not always appropriate.
h.264 is an open and decidedly non-proprietary codec.
H.264 is great but it does nothing to address the container format like AVI, MP4, MKV.
Except that you're completely wrong...
MP4 is THE container for h.264 video. You CAN use AVI and MKV but you'll never find h.264 in AVI/MKV, unless you make it yourself, or are getting files from some amateur release group idiot.
They need to come up with a standard container,
Which is exactly what they did, many years ago, creating the MP4 format.
I've actually produced many Flash solutions that required a less bytes than the canned "multibrowserconfigurableexpandingmenus.js" stuff people use.
Flash files are compressed when they are created, while the javascript version will be dynamically compressed (mod_gzip) before it's sent over the wire. So I'm willing to bet the js version is actually significantly smaller.
Every website that wanted to do something a little more advanced then showing a couple of animated gifs, usually had or made their own plug in that worked only for Windows, or sometimes in a rare occurrence there was a plug in that would work on different OS's.
In the case of video, at least the formats are simple, and the file directly embedded, so there are plenty of 3rd party (open source) browser plug-ins for handling videos.
With FLV, however, videos are not directly embedded, but instead handled indirectly. A SWF video player program/applet is embedded, and only it knows where to find the actual FLV. So it's practically impossible to write your own plug-in that will handle FLVs embedded in web pages, even though several players can play them, if you can decipher the real URL for the it.
I also agree I hate it for the lack of control, bugginess of the free/proprietary/binary plugin, etc., as others have said.
Now that Flash can play high-quality HD video (and extremely-small-file-size SD video), and preparing with one codec can prepare for everything from phones to HD televisions, what appeal does Microsoft's codecs and containers have?
VC-1 has far lower license fees than h.264. Don't underestimate price.
Surely no one can suggest that Windows Media Player has better deployment than Adobe's Flash?
Yes, I can. Windows Media Player penetration is just under 90%, but basically ALL of those support WMV9 (aka. WMV3/VC-1) thanks to WMP's ability to download needed codecs. Flash may have just under 95% penetration, but NONE of those supports h.264 yet.
It's going to take a long time for everyone to update their Flash player, and I'm willing to bet at least 5%+ won't upgrade their Flash player to 9+ (essentially) ever, giving WMV9 the advantage.
Maybe WMV9's advantage could be overcome by the combination of Flash plus other h.264 players (like Quicktime, open source players, etc.) but with the absolutely idiotic way FLVs have to be played, by the use of an embedded SWF video controller/player app, FLV (intentionally or not) locks out all other players, unless web devs everywhere suddenly wise-up and provide two different links for every video.
Your comments are extremely ignorant, and just plain incorrect...
The obvious question now, IS --- why doesnt youtube use on2's superior vp6 codec and get the pretty video? Becuase ffmpeg cant legally support it (I dont think, but ive seen hacks) and to license from on2 is just not economically feasible from a business standpoint
There are NO legal issues stopping ffmpeg from including VP6 support. ffmpeg includes all other manner of patented and copyrighted codecs, that had to be reverse engineered. If anyone was willing to put the effort into reverse engineering VP6, ffmpeg would include it.
Since no-one has been interested enough to do so, using the binary codec is the only option, but ffmpeg doesn't support loading of (Win32 DLLs) binary codecs. With mencoder however, you can quite easily encode VP6 FLVs.
As far as the legal constraints or fees, I dont think their are any (please correct me here if im wrong,
You are COMPLETELY, TOTALLY, and UTTERLY WRONG.
H.264 patent-license fees are in fact quite high. Lower license fees are almost certainly the main reason they went with VP6 in the first place, rather than jumping on the h.264 bandwagon in the Flash7 days.
ffmpeg supports it out of the box ( apparently you can make standard h264 video files, or you can make a flv using the h264 codec, although the new file format the adobe guys are workign with seems to be superior.)
ffmpeg's included h264 codec is quite simple/primitive. You really should use x264 instead.
x264 is only hosted on videolan's servers. It's widely available, in many forms. Directshow DLLs for encoding/decoding under Windows have been around for years, and Mencoder has supported encoding with x264 from the very beginning (mainly because a couple MPlayer developer were heavily involved in writing it from the start).
It was called a sad publicity stunt. A few Chinese manufacturers have already jumped ship, despite the issue of making the guys with the guns very unhappy with them.
I would assume their players will be cheap:)
You would assume wrong.
China has nice cheap labor, for assembling chips designed and manufactured in the West. It gets a bit trickier when they try to develop the technology themselves.
The AVS video codec they've developed recently is well below-par, even compared with the decade-old MPEG-2 codec which is standard on DVDs. To add insult to injury, AVS uses FAR more resources for decoding the video, making players more expensive. The newness of AVS, and the much smaller potential market than MPEG-2, means they don't have the benefits of economies of scale, either, making EVD players more expensive still.
China is a big fan of the publicity stunt, but they never actually work out.
I know these new formats offer better quality, but the difference and enhancements are not enough to warrant an upgrade. From VHS to DVD was worthwhile, this is just a stop gap measure.
Yes, the 3X improvement from VHS to DVD was worthwhile, but the 6X improvement from DVD to 1080p certainly isn't...
I personally don't plan to upgrade at all until something significantly better comes along.
Let's see... NTSC has been around for about 70 years, and most people still haven't switched to HD/ATSC. If the wait for a better-than-HD standard is even remotely as long, I can't help but admire your mind-boggling patience... I hope your existing DVD collection and player can get you through the decades, as you won't find any new ones available in 10 years time.
For all the hysteria about the failure of the US educational system, going back at least to Sputnik and probably long before, it continues to generate the most creative, innovative people in the world.
Actually, the facts are that a large number of the senior scientists in the US space program were foreign born and educated, and either fled to the US to escape WWII, or were captured by the military and forced to immigrate.
Even today, a large number of scientists and other experts in the US are immigrants.
Schools are NOT the beginning and end of our education unless we choose to believe it (unfortunately many of us do nowadays.) Fortunately if you have a gifted person and just give them the opportunity to learn and explore and show them where resources are and how to use them (Library, searching Google, etc.) they will go running with their education themselves.
Very true, but you've completely missed the important part...
School is MANDATORY, no matter how smart or stupid you are. For those who learn (far) more on their own, 6+ hours of school per day for 12+ years is a huge waste of their life, that could be better spent. Not to mention the astronomical waste of money when it's not accomplishing much.
IBM has turned to long time rival Sun in an effort to bring Solaris to its mainframes.
Yes, if you want Solaris, Sun would be the company to talk to. The fact that they WANT Solaris to run on their machines (not yet mainframes) is the news here, since they've been fierce competitors for decades.
Sun may be taking this chance to drop out of the server market while at the same time capture Solaris subscriptions via IBM sales.
That doesn't sound too likely, with open sourcing the core of Solaris a while back, as well as some important components. Admittedly, RedHat is doing fine with that strategy, but it really doesn't sound like something Sun would risk.
Why do I get the feeling both companies expect to be able to screw each other over, somehow in the future, with this agreement?
Either way, this certainly pressures HP in the server department.
Why? Even if IBM gets a few more points of the server market (taking it from Sun) HP's market share shouldn't be affected.
With Netflix, service doesn't hardly matter. The automated forms covered the vast majority of issues, going on at least 4 years now. The reason they're working on service is because 60 Minutes did a story on Netflix, brought up the issue of a couple disgruntled customers trying to work out a billing issue, and even the CEO had a hard time finding the phone number buried on the web site. No doubt that spurred them to improve the support situation.
The only time I had to contact Netflix was to get them to remove a highly inappropriate comment (review), and that was a horrendous experience... After 3 e-mails, and a MONTH of waiting, I finally got a reply saying it would be taken care of. After another month without action, I e-mailed again, and within a few weeks, the comment was finally removed. However, even that has (finally) been resolved, as reporting an "offensive" comment is now just a button on the site.
IMHO, since service is almost entirely automated, PRICE is a much bigger issue, and Netflix really shot themselves in the foot there... When they raised their monthly fee from $20 to $22 (a bit more than a year ago IIRC) it was at the worst possible time, when Walmart's service was going strong and ~$4 less, and Blockbuster was just about to enter the fray.
I have no doubt they lost a lot of customers with that stupid decision, because I nearly left myself... After 3 years of Netflix, I got ready to switch by moving the few DVDs which Walmart didn't have available, to the top of my Netflix queue, so I could go through them, and leave. Luckily the list was long enough that I stayed for 2 months, when they suddenly dropped the price to $18... I can't help but wonder how many long-time Netflix viewers made the exodus, as I was about to, which made them completely reverse their mistake. In any case, they've announced another $1 price drop, and frankly, I'd much rather have them drop another dollar from the price, rather than setting up a call center 99% of subscribers will never use.
Additionally, should the condenser hit 214+F it won't work at all. The summer temps here regularly hit over 100, and in full sun on black asphalt you'll get a nice cozy 140+. Add in engine compartment heat where (surprise!!) the condenser sits....
Sorry, but no sale. Condensers sit in FRONT of (or beside) the radiator, so they get the very coolest air coming in the front of the car. The only possible issue is when your car is stopped (eg. in traffic, but only after several minutes of warm-up/run time) and idling to do nothing but run the A/C. Even then, most vehicles turn on the fan to supply the compressor with cool air in such situations (as they should). So, there's very few or no circumstances where the 200F max temp. should be an issue.
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With laptops... frequently. And really, even once is too many, considering the extensive data loss and filesystem corruption inherent with a loss of such huge amounts of data.
Because it would take a large battery (and a fairly complex controller) when space is already at a premium. If you're going to put a battery on your RAM, get rid of the disk or Flash all together and just go with battery-backed RAM drives.
No, it doesn't require any configuration at all. Every operating system since MS-DOS transparently handles disk caching to RAM. It gives much faster access since you aren't going out over the ATA buss, can be much faster in writing to disk, since the OS/filesystem can organize the data in RAM better, and is much more reliable, since the OS/filesystem will flush the parts that are important for filesystem integrity immediately, and delay the less important bulk of the data.
It would have to be equally low-power, and equally as small and light, none of which it is. That's why it's not cost-effective to use 3.5" drives in notebooks, and why it's not cost effective to add RAM and a large battery back-up to existing storage methods.
It's debatable whether the Flash drive would last any longer with a RAM cache, since wear leveling and similar features should already give it a life span long far longer than even the more fervent equipment recycler (like myself) should want to use it.
And going with your numbers, why not get rid of the Flash all together, it will just cost 50% more than your hybrid Flash drive, BUT it will be 33% smaller, AND give users insanely great performance across the entire drive, while using far less power, and allowing it to last indefinitely (what is 200% divided by infinity?) (not including replacing the back-up battery every few years)?
Increasing main system RAM would give a much bigger performance boost, without requiring any more physical space, nor a back-up battery.
The different possible resolutions and frame rates certainly didn't cause any delays. Once you've implemented the highest, the rest are simple. And for high definition, there's really only 2 formats (720p/1080i).
Your poor vision shouldn't be the basis for video standards.
That was the original reason for it. However, I've listed the other attributes it has, which make it relevant and desirable even with progressive displays.
Still, I have NO IDEA what "poor results" you are trying to refer to.
I've already described the reasons for interlaced video today.
Funny. You were complaining about how long it took for ATSC to gain traction in your previous sentences, yet you want to force them to an even higher-end standard, which would have delayed things a few years more.
Also, the CPU power may be there (now), but the bandwidth certainly isn't. There's no way you're going to convince the FCC to allow TV stations several more MHz of bandwidth, and you're certainly not going to get much traction convincing people that their 1080 TV sets should be downgraded to 720, just because you don't happen to like interlacing.
And you'd be taking a bigger hit on movies, forcing the resolution way down to 720p, yet still only having 24fps, so wasting more than half of the potential.
No deinterlacing needed. The majority of HDTV sets support 1080i natively (which is why it's used). And for flat screens that can do 1080p@60fps, it's just a matter of line-doubling to get an equally perfect picture. It's only the very cheap/low-end flat-screen that get screwed by interlacing, but that's because they can't really do 60fps to begin with, so they lose quite a bit with 720p also.
I'm not quite sure what your complaint is.
Despite interlacing artifacts (spacial/temporal aliasing), it gives the best of both worlds. You have 1080p/30 resolution with low/slow motion, and 60fps during fast motion.
I would very much like to see 1080p become standard instead of interlaced, but I certainly wouldn't like downgrading to 720p just to avoid the interlacing.
Not sure about C-band but your HOA absolutely positively CAN'T prevent you from installing a smaller KU band dish (thanks to recent federal regulations) and it seems most content has moved to KU-band over the past few years, anyhow.
Nope, EXACTLY the opposite.
It's MUCH easier to convince individuals to pay a couple dollars a month for a new channel than it is to convince a big cable company to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to be allowed to carry a new channel that there's no guarantee their viewers will want to watch.
The only exception is spin-offs from already-big cable networks... If Viacom starts up another cable channel, they can force it to be carried by everyone, everywhere. So ala carte could only possibly lower the barrier to entry for new and independent cable channels.
What's more, it might finally allow cable channels to die, when the quality turns to crap. When companies/channels change from science programming to all-reality-shows, all-the-time, and/or increase bad/annoying advertising, etc., the viewers could actually speak out, and directly stop their money going to those channels, sending a very clear message, and potentially bankrupting previously popular channels that have turned to crap. If ala carte happens, look for an immediate end to distracting ads on-top of shows like TNT, FX, and USA are so very fond of.
How is that a problem? IF they can't make enough on advertising to support themselves, AND IF they can't get enough viewers to have a reasonably low price, AND IF they can't get their niche viewers to pay high enough monthly fees to support the channel, they fully deserve to go out of business.
I'm certainly one of the ones only interested in the less popular cable channels, but for the handful I watch, I'd be willing to pay $10 each, and more if they'd improve the content of the programming, and reduce or do away with ads.
Drives have gotten much quieter over the years. Today, the vast majority of the noise is due to the high speed of the read arm/voice coil, and that can be extremely effectively eliminated by aggressive use of the acoustic noise management setting nearly every hard drive supports. Under Linux, just run hdparm -M128.
Under Windows, sit around your computer and let the noise from the hard drive be a reminder of the consequences of your choice.
Yes. Video codecs don't belong in browsers. That's what plugins are for.
Ask them why they're supporting Theora now, and not VP3.2 when it was released 6+ years ago, or MPEG-1 way back when the patents expired. And how about audio like Vorbis, Musepack, FLAC, speex, etc. Will they integrate those as well, since they're patent-free?
The analogy doesn't remotely hold up.
Wear-and-tear is what eventually makes cars, carpets, appliances, furnishings etc. worthless. Driving my car and staying in my house shortens it's usable life.
Access to cars and houses is a security issue... Once you've got my car, or are inside my house, it would be far easier for you to steal something very valuable from me.
And there are privacy issues as well. I certainly don't want to leave someone alone in my house, even if I otherwise like and trust them, just because of the possibility they may go snooping through my stuff.
And with a car at least, there is the issue of access. I wouldn't mind someone borrowing it, if I could be 100% sure I wouldn't unexpected want or need it while they are gone.
Not to mention the issues of your own legal liability should someone be injured with your car, or inside your house.
If you could eliminate all those problems, and perhaps a few more I haven't thought of yet, then yes, I'd be happy to let someone else get the benefits of my house/car if it didn't negatively impact me in the slightest. Who in the world would be so sociopathic as to decide otherwise? Who would go out of their way to deprive someone of something, when it wouldn't impact you at all to let them have it?
In fact, something similar quite often happens. Up north, nearly every year, on the off-season, secluded cabins, hunting lodges, etc. will be used by people who just happen to stumble upon them. The owners rarely if ever complain or make an (trivial) effort to prevent them from doing so in the future.
Yes, that's true. But that wasn't what you asked.
No, I think you misread that sentence. It only says the fees for (non-fee-based) internet distribution won't be any higher than for (non-fee-based) TV broadcasting.
You are very, very wrong.
Trivially easy to find:
http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf
Page 3 and 4 cover per-user and/or per-channel fees for selling/broadcasting video encoded with AVC/h.264.
Except that it wouldn't...
Switching (AC) power supplies have the potential to be just as efficient, if not more so, than DC power supplies.
With a DC datacenter, you have to have a big central AC/DC converter, and then a bunch of DC/DC voltage converters. There's very little to gain, even in theory.
In practice, you'd probably do far better if you took a fraction of the money it would cost to make a DC datacenter, and instead replace all the PSUs with more efficient models.
If the cost of the royalties allow you to save far more in bandwidth costs... Yes, that would be a hell of a lot better.
Quite the opposite. Not only is it a hobbyist project, but it's a pretty sad one. Something like 4 years behind schedule in even releasing a BETA version of the software, let alone a final 1.0 version. Theora has stagnated to the point of ridiculousness.
VP3 was just barely competitive when it was released, and now, many years, later stands no chance against modern codecs like h.264 and VC-1.
h.264 is an open and decidedly non-proprietary codec.
And you're a fool.
Except that you're completely wrong...
MP4 is THE container for h.264 video. You CAN use AVI and MKV but you'll never find h.264 in AVI/MKV, unless you make it yourself, or are getting files from some amateur release group idiot.
Which is exactly what they did, many years ago, creating the MP4 format.
Flash files are compressed when they are created, while the javascript version will be dynamically compressed (mod_gzip) before it's sent over the wire. So I'm willing to bet the js version is actually significantly smaller.
In the case of video, at least the formats are simple, and the file directly embedded, so there are plenty of 3rd party (open source) browser plug-ins for handling videos.
With FLV, however, videos are not directly embedded, but instead handled indirectly. A SWF video player program/applet is embedded, and only it knows where to find the actual FLV. So it's practically impossible to write your own plug-in that will handle FLVs embedded in web pages, even though several players can play them, if you can decipher the real URL for the it.
I also agree I hate it for the lack of control, bugginess of the free/proprietary/binary plugin, etc., as others have said.
VC-1 has far lower license fees than h.264. Don't underestimate price.
Yes, I can. Windows Media Player penetration is just under 90%, but basically ALL of those support WMV9 (aka. WMV3/VC-1) thanks to WMP's ability to download needed codecs. Flash may have just under 95% penetration, but NONE of those supports h.264 yet.
It's going to take a long time for everyone to update their Flash player, and I'm willing to bet at least 5%+ won't upgrade their Flash player to 9+ (essentially) ever, giving WMV9 the advantage.
Maybe WMV9's advantage could be overcome by the combination of Flash plus other h.264 players (like Quicktime, open source players, etc.) but with the absolutely idiotic way FLVs have to be played, by the use of an embedded SWF video controller/player app, FLV (intentionally or not) locks out all other players, unless web devs everywhere suddenly wise-up and provide two different links for every video.
There are NO legal issues stopping ffmpeg from including VP6 support. ffmpeg includes all other manner of patented and copyrighted codecs, that had to be reverse engineered. If anyone was willing to put the effort into reverse engineering VP6, ffmpeg would include it.
Since no-one has been interested enough to do so, using the binary codec is the only option, but ffmpeg doesn't support loading of (Win32 DLLs) binary codecs. With mencoder however, you can quite easily encode VP6 FLVs.
You are COMPLETELY, TOTALLY, and UTTERLY WRONG.
H.264 patent-license fees are in fact quite high. Lower license fees are almost certainly the main reason they went with VP6 in the first place, rather than jumping on the h.264 bandwagon in the Flash7 days.
ffmpeg's included h264 codec is quite simple/primitive. You really should use x264 instead.
x264 is only hosted on videolan's servers. It's widely available, in many forms. Directshow DLLs for encoding/decoding under Windows have been around for years, and Mencoder has supported encoding with x264 from the very beginning (mainly because a couple MPlayer developer were heavily involved in writing it from the start).
It was called a sad publicity stunt. A few Chinese manufacturers have already jumped ship, despite the issue of making the guys with the guns very unhappy with them.
You would assume wrong.
China has nice cheap labor, for assembling chips designed and manufactured in the West. It gets a bit trickier when they try to develop the technology themselves.
The AVS video codec they've developed recently is well below-par, even compared with the decade-old MPEG-2 codec which is standard on DVDs. To add insult to injury, AVS uses FAR more resources for decoding the video, making players more expensive. The newness of AVS, and the much smaller potential market than MPEG-2, means they don't have the benefits of economies of scale, either, making EVD players more expensive still.
China is a big fan of the publicity stunt, but they never actually work out.
VHS tapes look fine, too.
Yes, the 3X improvement from VHS to DVD was worthwhile, but the 6X improvement from DVD to 1080p certainly isn't...
Let's see... NTSC has been around for about 70 years, and most people still haven't switched to HD/ATSC. If the wait for a better-than-HD standard is even remotely as long, I can't help but admire your mind-boggling patience... I hope your existing DVD collection and player can get you through the decades, as you won't find any new ones available in 10 years time.
Actually, the facts are that a large number of the senior scientists in the US space program were foreign born and educated, and either fled to the US to escape WWII, or were captured by the military and forced to immigrate.
Even today, a large number of scientists and other experts in the US are immigrants.
Very true, but you've completely missed the important part...
School is MANDATORY, no matter how smart or stupid you are. For those who learn (far) more on their own, 6+ hours of school per day for 12+ years is a huge waste of their life, that could be better spent. Not to mention the astronomical waste of money when it's not accomplishing much.
Yes, if you want Solaris, Sun would be the company to talk to. The fact that they WANT Solaris to run on their machines (not yet mainframes) is the news here, since they've been fierce competitors for decades.
That doesn't sound too likely, with open sourcing the core of Solaris a while back, as well as some important components. Admittedly, RedHat is doing fine with that strategy, but it really doesn't sound like something Sun would risk.
Why do I get the feeling both companies expect to be able to screw each other over, somehow in the future, with this agreement?
Why? Even if IBM gets a few more points of the server market (taking it from Sun) HP's market share shouldn't be affected.
With Netflix, service doesn't hardly matter. The automated forms covered the vast majority of issues, going on at least 4 years now. The reason they're working on service is because 60 Minutes did a story on Netflix, brought up the issue of a couple disgruntled customers trying to work out a billing issue, and even the CEO had a hard time finding the phone number buried on the web site. No doubt that spurred them to improve the support situation.
The only time I had to contact Netflix was to get them to remove a highly inappropriate comment (review), and that was a horrendous experience... After 3 e-mails, and a MONTH of waiting, I finally got a reply saying it would be taken care of. After another month without action, I e-mailed again, and within a few weeks, the comment was finally removed. However, even that has (finally) been resolved, as reporting an "offensive" comment is now just a button on the site.
IMHO, since service is almost entirely automated, PRICE is a much bigger issue, and Netflix really shot themselves in the foot there... When they raised their monthly fee from $20 to $22 (a bit more than a year ago IIRC) it was at the worst possible time, when Walmart's service was going strong and ~$4 less, and Blockbuster was just about to enter the fray.
I have no doubt they lost a lot of customers with that stupid decision, because I nearly left myself... After 3 years of Netflix, I got ready to switch by moving the few DVDs which Walmart didn't have available, to the top of my Netflix queue, so I could go through them, and leave. Luckily the list was long enough that I stayed for 2 months, when they suddenly dropped the price to $18... I can't help but wonder how many long-time Netflix viewers made the exodus, as I was about to, which made them completely reverse their mistake. In any case, they've announced another $1 price drop, and frankly, I'd much rather have them drop another dollar from the price, rather than setting up a call center 99% of subscribers will never use.
Sorry, but no sale. Condensers sit in FRONT of (or beside) the radiator, so they get the very coolest air coming in the front of the car. The only possible issue is when your car is stopped (eg. in traffic, but only after several minutes of warm-up/run time) and idling to do nothing but run the A/C. Even then, most vehicles turn on the fan to supply the compressor with cool air in such situations (as they should). So, there's very few or no circumstances where the 200F max temp. should be an issue.
Baseless bull.