That means that it's certainly possible for a device to draw power when off even if it doesn't have a remote.
I understand perfectly. But there is absolutely ZERO value in pointing it out.
It can't possibly help someone determine if their device is not drawing power. That is has a remote won't tell you any more about power consumption than if it didn't.
You might as well say the sky is blue. A completely worthless observation.
I assume USB and 1394 hardware do something more direct-to-RAM in order to circumvent CPU needs.
It's that it's an entirely different type of interface. USB is a peripheral interface, instead of a network interface. Never the twain shall meet.
Perhaps something similar could be done with NICs.
Not in any way that would make it remotely resemble ethernet... You'd, at the very least, need to have a seperate NIC for your devices. At which point, you aren't gaining anything by using ethernet (USB cards are as cheap as NICs, and have more ports). Speed would also surely be compromised. It would still be a more expensive chipset for every device.
But one thing I've learned from software is that it's usually better to build on something that works instead of starting over from scratch.
My experience is different. It's FAR better to discard piles of irrelevant cruft, and come out with a simple, fast, cheap, standard.
I don't see how this is really that different from what's done with USB.
One would expect that people working on decoder software that requires multiple CPUs to run in realtime would probably develop it... for multiple CPUs.
That makes no sense what-so-ever.
There is no magic codec that requires X CPU time. As you change the resolution, bitrate, and encoding options, CPU requirements change dramatically.
The question was, why no multicore codecs for common video formats?
That isn't even remotely close to the question asked.
As far as I know mplayer doesn't, xine doesn't and vlc doesn't.
MPlayer does.
For any video that can be played by libavcodec (maybe 95% of them, including practically all the common HDTV formats, and otherwise CPU-intensive ones like WMV9 and H.264) you just need to set the -lavdopts threads= option.
Threads are also supported for encoding, though you inherently get some quality loss by encoding with seperate threads, so it's a trade-off, and I'd prefer to stick with one, faster core.
I don't know anyone with a WinMobile device that has half the stability I do, let alone with the same degree of customization. It works, it's reliable, and it's pretty (PalmOS supports higher res screens than WinMoble).
So true. Windows CE is crud.
However, I don't know anyone with a Palm device that has half the stability of my Psion devices. If my Psion has ever crashed, it must have been a LONG time ago, cause I certainly can't remember ever having to reboot it.
why we have USB and Firewire when it seems like it would be just as effective, and more standardized, for every device to just have built-in gigabit ethernet chips that can communicate using UDP or something.
Multi-GHz desktop CPUs have a hard time keeping up with gigabit ethernet. Imagine what kind of CPU your digital camera and USB flash drive is going to need...
And once you have it connected, it still doesn't solve anything, because you have to decide on protocols over ethernet (unlike USB/Firewire/etc.) because there is no standard system of multi-user authenticated bidirectional communications over IP. Everyone will create their own propritary communication app, or downgrade to brain-dead file-copy-only with none of the useful features of the device (a lot like many MP3 players, sadly).
Protocol? Why not USB over ethernet? Or use OpenSoundControl! _anything_ standardized...
No, no, no. There has to be ONE standard, or there's no point. There's one set way for USB devices to communicate, so every system on the planet has those built in. Once you have 500 different protocols for different devices, you've completely ruined the utility of your Ethernet peripheral interface.
It makes little sense to me.
Don't go into hardware... Please!
The nice thing about sticking to STANDARDS is that the next time they upgrade the ethernet hardware (10 Gb onboard, for example), device communication would automatically be upgraded with it.
You mean EXACTLY like the switch from USB1.1 to USB2?
That's true in every country in the world, except the USA and New Zeland (IIRC).
Patients go in and demand the name brand of the drug they saw on TV
Then they fill their perscription at most any drug store, which automatically substitutes the name brand for the generic equivalent at a fraction of the price.
(which further feeds into the trend of self-diagnosis, but that is another rant)
If it wasn't for self-diagnosis, there'd be no diagnosis at all...
Doctors are complete idiots, who will continue giving you a drug, over and over, despite your complaints, even if it should be overwhelmingly obvious to them that you're having an (non-life threatening) alergic reaction to it.
If we really want to see new drugs AND get cheaper health care, banning advertisements is a good start.
If drug advertisements were the reason for high heath-care rates, I'd be immensely happy... That would mean all the non-idiots out there who don't do that kind of crap could just get the cheaper drugs, easily. That is obviously not the case. In fact, perscription drugs are a very minor part of the ridiculously huge healthcare costs in the US.
A thousand years for a language to disappear? All it takes is a generation who doesn't speak it and it might as well be considered gone.
Not a chance in hell of that ever happening in the real world.
You'd have to seperate every single child from their parents at birth, send them to some far away land where the old language isn't spoken at all, and make sure they never meet anyone who speaks anything else.
Languages are handed down from parent to child, for several generations before they are forgotten, even when they are completely foreign to everyone else. When there are also numerous others that still know how to speak the language (as happens in any real senario) it stays useful, and is passed on for many more generations.
Any physical media which is not used for a generation of technology (maybe less than 10 years) quickly becomes difficult to read as the machinery required to read it fails.
I think you've completely misunderstood the senario in question.
10 year disruption -- content formats have moved on; readers are scarce
I've been using computers for well more than 10 years, and ASCII is still just as readable as ever.
Mark-up languages like HTML, XML, or RTF may die off eventually (several hundred years at least), but you can always strip the markup (either with code, or mentally by ignoring it). Plus, with the formats being so simple, and book layout being so obvious, it should take 5 minutes to write a new parser for any of them.
100 year disruption -- hard drives, DVDs decay to unreadability
Both of the above would be unreadable by the standard pick-up mechanism, but manually reading it, bit-by-bit with something like an electron microscope should be possible for many, many more years after that. Just as technology has made it possible to read previously erased text on paper, so to will it be easier, in the future, to read physically decaying digital media.
>1000 year disruption -- even if it's chiseled into a stone tablet, the language might be extinct
It takes many thousands of years for even uncommon languages to disappear. And if they were even remotely similar to our own, they can be deciphered without any advanced knowledge. So, I'd be worried about the long-term chances of a complex language like Chinese to be preserved, but anything with Latin roots, that uses a small alphabet should do fine.
Besides that, you can ensure the language survives by having multiple language tranlations, side-by-side. If any one of them is understood in the distant future, they can use it to learn all the rest. See: The Rosetta Stone
This is the second example, but certainly not the last, where China has set a defacto standard for us.
That's 100% crap.
First, they are TRYING to set a standard for everyone, which they've done many times in the past, with ZERO results.
China likes to roar about what a major world power it is, but very, very little ever comes of it.
Here's what they did with DVD formats.
No, that's what they're TRYING to do with DVD formats. EVD has precisely a 0% chance of replacing DVD, as the video codec is well below the quality of MPEG-2, and the processing power required is much higher. So EVD players will be more expensive, incompatible with the installed base, etc.
SVCD had a better chance of replacing DVDs, and how many SVCDs do you own?
Maybe we'll wake up to obvious one of these days.
Most people know where things stand. You're the one living in some imaginary world where China is going to take over.
I haven't seen the film in years, but I still can't imagine how someone could misremember it like that.
Probably because YOU are misremembering it so badly...
Yes, that is what happens in the end, but the OP's synopsis is perfectly accurate. Broderick's character spends the whole movie trying to convince the HUMANS in-charge not to launch a counterstrike. It's only in the very last few minutes that you are "surprised" by the fact the computer can potentially launch the missles on it's own.
You might as well say "The Matrix" is about Neo running around, killing Agents...
No, if you were to take the thing that the dog sniffs at and put it in your mouth, *that* is what the dog smells.
That's just fine... No problem... I'll believe that...
The problem is, you said: "You can smell about as well as a dog can," suggesting something like a 100X improvement in the human sense of smell, when accessed via your mouth.
Is there any good way to store power locally, while presenting a purely resistive load to the grid?
HUGE capacitors:-)
The better solution is active Power Factor Correction (PFC) in switching power supplies. I have no idea where to find things like VCRs and wal-warts with PFC built-in. But for computers, PFC is just a question of buying a slightly more expensive power supply, such as Seasonic's PSUs.
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That's not true with most modern codecs, and it's certainly not true with h.264.
Quite the opposite. There's ample evidence CoreAVC is significantly going against spec:
http://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=914265&post
http://www.uploadtemple.com/view.php/1165615987.p
I understand perfectly. But there is absolutely ZERO value in pointing it out.
It can't possibly help someone determine if their device is not drawing power. That is has a remote won't tell you any more about power consumption than if it didn't.
You might as well say the sky is blue. A completely worthless observation.
It's that it's an entirely different type of interface. USB is a peripheral interface, instead of a network interface. Never the twain shall meet.
Not in any way that would make it remotely resemble ethernet... You'd, at the very least, need to have a seperate NIC for your devices. At which point, you aren't gaining anything by using ethernet (USB cards are as cheap as NICs, and have more ports). Speed would also surely be compromised. It would still be a more expensive chipset for every device.
My experience is different. It's FAR better to discard piles of irrelevant cruft, and come out with a simple, fast, cheap, standard.
Sadly, I believe you...
That makes no sense what-so-ever.
There is no magic codec that requires X CPU time. As you change the resolution, bitrate, and encoding options, CPU requirements change dramatically.
That isn't even remotely close to the question asked.
CoreAVC is cheating. Though nobody has figured out quite how, yet. It doesn't decode the h.264 videos nearly bit-exact, like other codecs do.
You can demonstrate this by comparing the checksum of h.264 video frames decoded with CoreAVC to the same video decoded by anything else.
It's safe to say CoreAVC is lower quality, as well as closed source, non-free, etc.
Then you don't pay attention, and you've never heard about people working on highdef playback...
Your entire post is therefore moot.
MPlayer does.
For any video that can be played by libavcodec (maybe 95% of them, including practically all the common HDTV formats, and otherwise CPU-intensive ones like WMV9 and H.264) you just need to set the -lavdopts threads= option.
Threads are also supported for encoding, though you inherently get some quality loss by encoding with seperate threads, so it's a trade-off, and I'd prefer to stick with one, faster core.
So true. Windows CE is crud.
However, I don't know anyone with a Palm device that has half the stability of my Psion devices. If my Psion has ever crashed, it must have been a LONG time ago, cause I certainly can't remember ever having to reboot it.
Brother and Samsung printers are the only two brands that appear NOT to be encoding secret numbers (dots) on their print-outs.
Communication protocols are seconds to ridiculous prices for incredibly crappy hardware...
It's a shame. HP used to make very good equipment.
Multi-GHz desktop CPUs have a hard time keeping up with gigabit ethernet. Imagine what kind of CPU your digital camera and USB flash drive is going to need...
And once you have it connected, it still doesn't solve anything, because you have to decide on protocols over ethernet (unlike USB/Firewire/etc.) because there is no standard system of multi-user authenticated bidirectional communications over IP. Everyone will create their own propritary communication app, or downgrade to brain-dead file-copy-only with none of the useful features of the device (a lot like many MP3 players, sadly).
No, no, no. There has to be ONE standard, or there's no point. There's one set way for USB devices to communicate, so every system on the planet has those built in. Once you have 500 different protocols for different devices, you've completely ruined the utility of your Ethernet peripheral interface.
Don't go into hardware... Please!
You mean EXACTLY like the switch from USB1.1 to USB2?
You can buy snagless boots are EVERYWHERE, and on all but the cheapest pre-made cables. I suggest you stop buying crap.
That's true in every country in the world, except the USA and New Zeland (IIRC).
Then they fill their perscription at most any drug store, which automatically substitutes the name brand for the generic equivalent at a fraction of the price.
If it wasn't for self-diagnosis, there'd be no diagnosis at all...
Doctors are complete idiots, who will continue giving you a drug, over and over, despite your complaints, even if it should be overwhelmingly obvious to them that you're having an (non-life threatening) alergic reaction to it.
If drug advertisements were the reason for high heath-care rates, I'd be immensely happy... That would mean all the non-idiots out there who don't do that kind of crap could just get the cheaper drugs, easily. That is obviously not the case. In fact, perscription drugs are a very minor part of the ridiculously huge healthcare costs in the US.
Not a chance in hell of that ever happening in the real world.
You'd have to seperate every single child from their parents at birth, send them to some far away land where the old language isn't spoken at all, and make sure they never meet anyone who speaks anything else.
Languages are handed down from parent to child, for several generations before they are forgotten, even when they are completely foreign to everyone else. When there are also numerous others that still know how to speak the language (as happens in any real senario) it stays useful, and is passed on for many more generations.
I think you've completely misunderstood the senario in question.
You're just simply wrong.
Their languages all work just fine without the few non-ASCII characters... Accents can be approximated easily enough.
A) Yes it is.
B) What made you confuse my post with a proposal for the universal book-digitizing system of the future?
C) I was illustrating a point.
Obviously, if such a system was started today, something like Unicode would be used.
I've been using computers for well more than 10 years, and ASCII is still just as readable as ever.
Mark-up languages like HTML, XML, or RTF may die off eventually (several hundred years at least), but you can always strip the markup (either with code, or mentally by ignoring it). Plus, with the formats being so simple, and book layout being so obvious, it should take 5 minutes to write a new parser for any of them.
Both of the above would be unreadable by the standard pick-up mechanism, but manually reading it, bit-by-bit with something like an electron microscope should be possible for many, many more years after that. Just as technology has made it possible to read previously erased text on paper, so to will it be easier, in the future, to read physically decaying digital media.
It takes many thousands of years for even uncommon languages to disappear. And if they were even remotely similar to our own, they can be deciphered without any advanced knowledge. So, I'd be worried about the long-term chances of a complex language like Chinese to be preserved, but anything with Latin roots, that uses a small alphabet should do fine.
Besides that, you can ensure the language survives by having multiple language tranlations, side-by-side. If any one of them is understood in the distant future, they can use it to learn all the rest. See: The Rosetta Stone
They focus solely on public-domain works, as opposed to fair-use of current, copyrighted works, as Google does.
That's 100% crap.
First, they are TRYING to set a standard for everyone, which they've done many times in the past, with ZERO results.
China likes to roar about what a major world power it is, but very, very little ever comes of it.
No, that's what they're TRYING to do with DVD formats. EVD has precisely a 0% chance of replacing DVD, as the video codec is well below the quality of MPEG-2, and the processing power required is much higher. So EVD players will be more expensive, incompatible with the installed base, etc.
SVCD had a better chance of replacing DVDs, and how many SVCDs do you own?
Most people know where things stand. You're the one living in some imaginary world where China is going to take over.
You were eaten by a grue.
Probably because YOU are misremembering it so badly...
Yes, that is what happens in the end, but the OP's synopsis is perfectly accurate. Broderick's character spends the whole movie trying to convince the HUMANS in-charge not to launch a counterstrike. It's only in the very last few minutes that you are "surprised" by the fact the computer can potentially launch the missles on it's own.
You might as well say "The Matrix" is about Neo running around, killing Agents...
That's just fine... No problem... I'll believe that...
The problem is, you said: "You can smell about as well as a dog can," suggesting something like a 100X improvement in the human sense of smell, when accessed via your mouth.
Quite possibly the biggest cop-out ever.
You're the one who brought skywave propgation into a completely unrelated discussion.
So plugging your nose, and breathing through your mouth makes odors STRONGER in your imaginary world?
HUGE capacitors
The better solution is active Power Factor Correction (PFC) in switching power supplies. I have no idea where to find things like VCRs and wal-warts with PFC built-in. But for computers, PFC is just a question of buying a slightly more expensive power supply, such as Seasonic's PSUs.
No, there isn't.
I've already covered this in my first reply in this thread (which you apparently didn't read).
I'll have you know my carbon-arc lamp is quite effecient, thank you very much.
So, you think everyone has a sound-proof house?