the equating of the look and the feel of the american dollar and its "heft" is just a subconcious connection that depends upon factors going on in your emotions, not in any intrinsic value to the actual design or look or feel of the bill.
I have to disagree. US money does have a much darker, stronger design than any others I've seen.
This is changing with the new paper bills, that are much, much lighter than the old, as well as the "50 state" quarters aren't as significant as the traditional design, but it's still reasonably well designed.
It makes me sick every time I see articles about people flipping real-estate. They HAVE to know properties are over-valued. They just have to. With each sale, the next owner expects the property to either keep its value or go up. When people are flipping properties so quickly, everything has a sale price higher than its actual value. Here in St. Louis, the impact of it has already started to take hold: no one is buying. The market will only bear so much insanity.
I've thought the same thing about the stock market for a very long time before the real estate bubble.
Practically all stocks are orders of magnitude beyond the actual value of the companies in question. The stock market as a whole has seemingly become a big pyramid scheme. And now most everyone's retirement depends on it, whether directly or indirectly. When bigger idiots stop coming along, something very very bad is going to happen.
Release a new half-dollar coin that is about the size and cost of a nickel.
A bit small, but sounds good otherwise.
except its a "tenth dollar," not ten cents.
Uhh?? The difference being?
Nobody feels cheated by rounding because its no different than rounding to cents is now.
I feel cheated just reading it... Losing 9 cents on EVERY item would become very significant, very quickly. The new system raises the price of eleven $0.31 tacos from $3.40 to $4.40, due to rounding error.
Dropping a decimal point is much too significant, at least right now. I could otherwise support your plan, though, if it also included a 2 cent piece as well, at least for the next few decades. That would mesh with those 10 and 50 cent pieces perfectly.
5. At the same time, increase the mass production of the dollar coin. With room for it in the cash register, it'll see increasing use.
No. No it won't. As long as there are dollar bills, nobody will want equivalent coins.
Besides that, 50cent pieces are so close to $1, why would you possibly want both? Quarters are the reason 50 cent coins never caught on.
So magine the shit-storm when customers start flooding the Best Buy customer support aisle thinking that their machine is broken,
It's only one software player in question, and the updated version will probably be automatically download, or such, so few people even notice.
And when a hardware device key is revoked, you can bet the geniuses at Best Buy will be only too happy to explain either that their player is an "old model" which can't play newer discs, or that their player is old and worn out, so that it doesn't work anymore...
There will be NO mention of the fact that the industry intentionally sabotaged their equipment.
The thing that made the hindenburg so dangerous actually was the skin;
According to ONE NASA scientists theory. Everyone else in the world says it was the hydrogen.
"New" theories always get serious press, in particular when the "old" theory is well-establish and otherwise universally accepted. That it gets press coverage doesn't mean it's any more sound than the old tried and true theory.
The only truly, intentionally open standard I know of is Theora, and I really haven't heard much about it.
MPEG-1 (Video/Audio/Container). Open spec, patent-free, plays absolutely everywhere, etc. Surprisinly good quality too, easily better than VP3, and in most cases, nearly as good as MPEG-4 (better in a few, very specific cases, like excess noise, or high resolution with very low bitrate).
Besides that, there is Dirac and Snow, which certainly is better than h.264 in many cases, though both are still in development, and not ready for distributing files.
Of course, I often just keep the original DVD stream around, which means -- what -- mpeg2+aac?
And better/more advanced interactivity, and serious scratch resistance (Blu-ray).
Besides, DVD needed to be a very significant improvement over VHS, since it wasn't backwards compatible. Since both highdef formats are, it's a much lower barrier to entry than DVD was.
(which imho it's already clear enough).
Again, something you could just as well have said about VHS...
Without enough space and a modern codec to take advantage of it, it's completely useless to even have that higher resolution capability. You could rewrite the VCD spec to support 1080p as well, but it wouldn't do any good.
It does appear that the VP6 codec remains the EVD standard despite the unhappiness of On2.
And where did you get that information? AVS is the standard codec, AFAIK.
The motherboard's size really isn't the constraining factor in mini systems.
The reason people use micro-ATX systems is because they can still use (at least one of) their regular PCI cards in it. Without that, you could just as well load up any really tiny, oddball embedded system that has video-outs.
The size of a PCI card, perpendicular to a motherboard, will continue to constrain the minimum case size. Until some company gets the bright idea to bring risers back from the dead.
I can't help but wonder why 1U and 2U rack server designs haven't been repurposed into cheap, consumer-level DVRs.
Obviously, the material cost of the 2 gigs of flash is less than 19 bucks,
Not by much. And it's sure as hell several orders of magnitude more expensive than the material cost of DVDs.
How about next time, you try to understand my point before flaming me.
Sadly, it looks like I did understand your point. You don't understand that it's the movies, not the DVD disc itself, that makes up most of that price. Put it on a 2GB flash, and you'll have low quality $40 movies instead. And for what?
Already you can get a 2 GB memory key for 19 bucks from NewEgg, which is just over the price of a DVD.
WTF? How the hell is $19 for 2GB "just over the price of a [4.9GB, $0.10] DVD"???
Or are you doing something incredibly stupid, like comparing the retail cost of a movie on DVD to just the material cost of flash storage? (not taking into account the cost of the movie itself)
I'm not certain why this is hard for a lot of tech sites, as well as the companies that pushed these technologies, to figure out.
Maybe because they happen to be a lot smarter than you.
They keep all the problems that DVD had, such as possibility of scratching and moving parts.
Blu-ray discs are far more durable than DVDs.
A storage system like this will be cheap
No. Complex circuits will never be cheaper than 4cm plastic discs.
and durable.
Not at all likely. Plastic discs aren't susceptible to magnetic and electrical surges. Only scratches, which is fixed by blu-ray, and could be even better handled by a caddy. Beyond that, solid state has no chance of being any more durable.
The lack of moving parts (aside from what is used to eject it/hold it in place) will make for less failures.
With discs, the drive may eventually fail, but the discs remain. With flash disks, any failure means you lose data.
come up with a good format standard across ALL studios, and then wait for the price of flash memory to drop more.
And while you're waiting, Blu-ray players will have dropped to $40 a piece.
Moving everyone from VHS to DVD took some time and that was making a change to a much higher quality and compact format
VHS to DVD was also backwards-incompatible, which DVD to Bluray/HD-DVD is not.
Also, the picture and sound quality was something you could enjoy without upgrading the other parts of your entertainment system.
Not really. The sound quality wasn't any better unless you had a 5.1 surround sound receiver. And a huge number of people didn't have A/V or S-Video inputs, and needed RF converters to use most DVD players. That significantly degraded the video quality as well.
In the case of Blu-ray and HD-DVD, the high quality has extra costs. The television and players required to get the full effect are much more expensive.
Nobody expects people to go out and buy HDTVs to watch HD-DVD/Blu-ray. People WILL go out and get HDTVs, whether there is a highdef disc format available or not. WHEN they do get a new TV, THEN they might also want to buy a highdef disc player.
Not to mention that DVD players, when they first debuted, were just as expensive as highdef players are now. For both, the price goes down over time, and as popularity rises.
I wonder if the next format should not be based on discs, but more like flash drives with your movie.
Let me know when flash drives are cheaper than little 4cm plastic discs.
The great part about that would be plugging it into your "home entertainment hard drive" and installing the movie for future viewings.
If you're talking about hundreds of flash devices plugged into your tower, I can't imagine how you hope to get that to work in the real world.
If you're talking about copying from flash to your hard drive array, I don't see how flash makes that any easier or better than discs.
I think digital downloads will replace physical ownership of discs.
Not a chance... at least for well over a decade in the future.
High-speed internet access is expensive, and if you're downloading highdef movies constantly, you end up paying more for even higher speeds, just so you can use it for it's original purpose once in a while.
Hard drive and Flash memory storage space will continue to be significantly more expensive than tiny plastic discs for a long time to come. As well as less reliable.
Either one of those would make it impractical, and you have to overcome both, before either highdef disc format catches on enough that nobody WANTS to download HD video.
It will be a few years before high definition televisions become mainstream affordable.
HDTVs are down to $400. How much more affordable does it need to get?
It's just a matter of time... It will take a few years for the large installed-base of old SDTVs to crap-out, and get replaced by HDTVs.
Portable players will be much better served by a digital download to their hard drive or (more likely) flash memory.
No. And what "portable players" do you have that can display 1920x1080?
I am glad the summary thought best to inform us that all that are not male, are female.
You never know... There could be a significant amount of movie downloading by hermaphroditic or neuter people. Not to mention a large number of non-human web users.
With all due respect, I don't think it's even possible to get scaling artifacts on an exact resize like that,
It's most definately possible. Depending on the scaling algorithym, you could expect excessive aliasing, blurring, etc.
"Lossless" scalers don't look the best on non-exact resizing, and I doubt most HDTVs have the smarts to switch between multiple different scalers, depending on the resolution.
Not unless you also output twice as many frame per second (60FPS@540p)... which they wouldn't, of course, since the whole idea is to DEGRADE the quality.
So, unless your source material isn't very active, the video quality is basically the same.
It's not like the first DeCSS that used stolen Xing keys and could only work for as long as the keys weren't revoked.
Actually, yes, it's just about the same thing this time around.
This uses the keys specific for the DISC, which can't be changed anymore.
Already-published DVDs would continue to work with DeCSS forever even if the key was revoked for future discs, just as current highdef disc keys will. It's being able to grab future keys that is in question.
It only rely to the fact that, whatever player you choose, at one moment it needs the volume key - which you can then grab and share on the net.
It relies on the fact that the key is EASY to get. Once they start obfusticating the key in-memory, this will stop working.
If data must be decrypted on the buyer's computer, then nothing cab prevent it from being circumvented.
Technically true, BUT you certainly CAN make it ridiculously difficult to do.
It's not a "reward". However, it certainly is about filtering out the crap and misinformation.
If you find yourself shaking your head and grimacing at someone's misinformation, mod them up so that someone else can debunk it.
No, mod them down, or reply. Giving idiots a larger audience will only help to spread ignorance. Sure, someone will eventually come along and debunk it, but only after thousands of people have read it, and likely taken it as fact.
If you want to educate... Reply and correct factual inaccuracies. But do it as an AC, so you can come back and mod them down for their nonsense.
Modding-up blatant factual inaccuracies is likely to get you killed in M2, and stop you from getting any mod points in the future.
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This is changing with the new paper bills, that are much, much lighter than the old, as well as the "50 state" quarters aren't as significant as the traditional design, but it's still reasonably well designed.
Practically all stocks are orders of magnitude beyond the actual value of the companies in question. The stock market as a whole has seemingly become a big pyramid scheme. And now most everyone's retirement depends on it, whether directly or indirectly. When bigger idiots stop coming along, something very very bad is going to happen.
Dropping a decimal point is much too significant, at least right now. I could otherwise support your plan, though, if it also included a 2 cent piece as well, at least for the next few decades. That would mesh with those 10 and 50 cent pieces perfectly. No. No it won't. As long as there are dollar bills, nobody will want equivalent coins.
Besides that, 50cent pieces are so close to $1, why would you possibly want both? Quarters are the reason 50 cent coins never caught on.
And when a hardware device key is revoked, you can bet the geniuses at Best Buy will be only too happy to explain either that their player is an "old model" which can't play newer discs, or that their player is old and worn out, so that it doesn't work anymore...
There will be NO mention of the fact that the industry intentionally sabotaged their equipment.
"New" theories always get serious press, in particular when the "old" theory is well-establish and otherwise universally accepted. That it gets press coverage doesn't mean it's any more sound than the old tried and true theory.
Besides that, there is Dirac and Snow, which certainly is better than h.264 in many cases, though both are still in development, and not ready for distributing files. No, DVDs use AC3 audio.
The vast majority of systems out there can't handle h.264 playback in high def (1920x1080), and older systems can't even handle D1 (720x480).
If you want people to actually be able to watch your video (in realtime), encode with a good MPEG-4 (part 2) codec.
What do you get with h.264? An order of magnitude higher CPU requirements, for (if you're very lucky) a 20% reduction in video bitrate.
Besides, DVD needed to be a very significant improvement over VHS, since it wasn't backwards compatible. Since both highdef formats are, it's a much lower barrier to entry than DVD was. Again, something you could just as well have said about VHS...
Stick to low-power components, such as in this device, and you don't have any problem at all. I'm just talking about standardizing on the form factor, not using current rackmounts as DVRs.
The motherboard's size really isn't the constraining factor in mini systems.
The reason people use micro-ATX systems is because they can still use (at least one of) their regular PCI cards in it. Without that, you could just as well load up any really tiny, oddball embedded system that has video-outs.
The size of a PCI card, perpendicular to a motherboard, will continue to constrain the minimum case size. Until some company gets the bright idea to bring risers back from the dead.
I can't help but wonder why 1U and 2U rack server designs haven't been repurposed into cheap, consumer-level DVRs.
Who's winning the format war again.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
FVD uses AACS DRM just like HD-DVD/Blu-ray, yet has far less capacity.
Why would anyone in their right mind want to adopt either?
Or are you doing something incredibly stupid, like comparing the retail cost of a movie on DVD to just the material cost of flash storage? (not taking into account the cost of the movie itself)
Not to mention that DVD players, when they first debuted, were just as expensive as highdef players are now. For both, the price goes down over time, and as popularity rises. Let me know when flash drives are cheaper than little 4cm plastic discs. If you're talking about hundreds of flash devices plugged into your tower, I can't imagine how you hope to get that to work in the real world.
If you're talking about copying from flash to your hard drive array, I don't see how flash makes that any easier or better than discs.
High-speed internet access is expensive, and if you're downloading highdef movies constantly, you end up paying more for even higher speeds, just so you can use it for it's original purpose once in a while.
Hard drive and Flash memory storage space will continue to be significantly more expensive than tiny plastic discs for a long time to come. As well as less reliable.
Either one of those would make it impractical, and you have to overcome both, before either highdef disc format catches on enough that nobody WANTS to download HD video. HDTVs are down to $400. How much more affordable does it need to get?
It's just a matter of time... It will take a few years for the large installed-base of old SDTVs to crap-out, and get replaced by HDTVs. No. And what "portable players" do you have that can display 1920x1080?
Canon seems happy to be a niche player, with no interest in expanding. Maybe that will change, but not anytime soon.
And I've got news for you if you think Canon printer drivers are going to be any better than the experience you've had...
It's most definately possible. Depending on the scaling algorithym, you could expect excessive aliasing, blurring, etc.
"Lossless" scalers don't look the best on non-exact resizing, and I doubt most HDTVs have the smarts to switch between multiple different scalers, depending on the resolution.
Not unless you also output twice as many frame per second (60FPS@540p)... which they wouldn't, of course, since the whole idea is to DEGRADE the quality.
No.
Yes it can.
Actually, yes, it's just about the same thing this time around.
Already-published DVDs would continue to work with DeCSS forever even if the key was revoked for future discs, just as current highdef disc keys will. It's being able to grab future keys that is in question.
It relies on the fact that the key is EASY to get. Once they start obfusticating the key in-memory, this will stop working.
Technically true, BUT you certainly CAN make it ridiculously difficult to do.
It's not a "reward". However, it certainly is about filtering out the crap and misinformation.
No, mod them down, or reply. Giving idiots a larger audience will only help to spread ignorance. Sure, someone will eventually come along and debunk it, but only after thousands of people have read it, and likely taken it as fact.
If you want to educate... Reply and correct factual inaccuracies. But do it as an AC, so you can come back and mod them down for their nonsense.
Modding-up blatant factual inaccuracies is likely to get you killed in M2, and stop you from getting any mod points in the future.