Assuming that you're spending money heating your house in the winter, isn't it effectively impossible to "waste" electricity?
Nope.
First, there's the question of: where do you want that heat most? If most of your devices consuming electricity are at the opposite end of the house from where you want the heat, you're wasting much of it.
Second, the issue of the price difference between electricity and natural gas is overwhelming. You're probably talking 2-3Xs more expensive for electricity.
Then there's the Power Factor (PF) issue, which it seems, even around here, almost nobody understands. As I've said many times before:
"An electric heater will be a purely resistive load, giving you a nearly perfect power factor of 1.0, whereas your VCR probably has a cheap power supply with a power factor as low as 0.4. So the VCR is causing a lot more power loss [higher line losses], even though it's the same 5watts. Residential customers generally don't get billed for their overall power factor, but companies certainly do."
That's more or less a prisoner's dilemma. If only a few people use a lot of high-wattage, low-PF devices, that cost will be spread-out over everyone. If EVERYONE starts doing it, though, you'll end up paying a lot more on your monthly bill, to cover the PF losses.
From a thermodynamic perspective though, everything is just a fancy heater.
Not entirely. If you look into Power Factor (PF) you'll see that a 90W power supply can be a less effecient heater than a 90W heater, thanks to increased line-losses.
Home users are lucky enough to not have to pay more for their PF directly, but businesses certainly do.
your experience with the real world is SERIOSULY lacking.
No, it's not. You're just applying my general information to specific devices.
I personally witnessed small compact hifi systems drawing 30W while "off" compared to 35W while on without any load.
I've seen worse with cheapo DVD players. This is becomming a problem as Wal-Mart style dirt-cheap Chinese imports become more common. Just a few years ago, you'd almost never see it.
Still, those devices are serious exceptions, and the heat comming off of them while powered-down should be obvious.
But more to the point at hand... there's nothing inherent about a device having a "remote control" that causes such ineffeciency, and devices lacking remotes can just as easily have such problem.
The entire article is filled with it issues (namely size and practicality) that would make a helicopter although more expensive millions of times more practical.
If you wanted to gather high altitude weather information, a helicopter would be much better than a balloon... </SARCASM>
Somehow, I must have missed the part of the article that said this is designed to be used by individuals who want to commute to work and back.
This is something like why drive your car to work when you can use this perfectly awesome toy wagon with new wheel design.
No, it's more like: "why drive your car around the yard..."
(When your TV, Stereo, etc. has a remote control that lets it turn on, that means it is really ALWAYS on, just in a kind of 'sleep' mode, draining some power, costing your money)
It's an immeasurably small ammount of power. A fraction of a watt.
The drain comes from the ineffecient power supply, when totally idle. Even if your device doesn't have a remote, unless it has a heavy duty 120V/10A power switch, your power supplies are probably drawing 2W constantly, even when off. That includes all wall-warts, (ATX) computers, TVs, etc.
HD's are already alot cheaper than a DVD's in space, money, and transfer time.
A little physical space isn't much of a premium.
"money"? How is that different than "price" which you mention below?
Transfer time is a non-issue, as I can't watch my movies much faster than realtime anyhow.
Oh yeah HD are already available, are continuously being upgraded and are not made by any companies that end in -ONY, which will always make them cheaper overall.
In no way are hard drives cheaper than even the latest disc formats.
And that's JUST the drives. You've got to get the movie ONTO the drive somehow, so you're either buying the disc anyhow, or you're paying ridiculous ammounts of money for a high-speed connection, which (you can't use for just about anything else, since it'll be constantly busy downloading movies). I can buy 100s of discs for what you'd pay to download 10, and I'll have mine in about 5 minutes.
The only way DVD's are currently cheaper than HD is in price, but there are many things more valuable than money, such as time and convience.
You're right. Discs are faster AND more convenient than hard drives. That they're so much cheaper is just a big plus.
So exactly how are little pieces of plastic cheaper than HD again?
The new format war was already being won while HD-DVD and Blue-ray were still in the crib. I can see media centers going mainstream once 1TB drives hit the $200 mark sometime next year.
Let me know when hard drives + bandwidth are as cheap as a little round piece of plastic with a metallic coating.
My main question is, is there an open source EVD codec available anywhere? A 'Royalty free codec' with the goal of fast widespread adaptation
The AVS codec has been available in ffmpeg/libavcodec (and so, any program that uses libavcodec) for quite a while now.
It is NOT, however, royalty free. They intend to keep the fees lower than other codecs, but that's all.
For royalty-free video, you have a few to choose from:
Dirac/Snow: Very impressive codecs at the range of bitrates (slightly better than even h.264), but even more CPU-intensive, and both (sadly) perpetually unfinished.
MPEG-1: actually does quite well with modern encoders like libavcodec... At lower bits/pixel rates (eg. 720x480 @600k) , it often looks better than MPEG-4/Divx. At higher bitrates, MPEG-4 slowly starts looking a little bit better than MPEG-1, but it's still rather competitive. It's only near DVD bitrates that better MPEG-4 encoders look obviously better (sharper details) than MPEG-1 (where MPEG-2 will likely outperform MPEG-4, anyhow).
VP3/Theora: Blocky, distorted mess, in most expert opinions (IMHO, that's slightly harsh). Does okay at very low resolution (320x240) and tiny bitrates (~300k), but not impressively well even then.
MJPEG/NUV: High-speed, but needs extremely high bitrates to be watchable at all. Competitive, perhaps, with MPEG-2 at DVD bitrates.
Royalty-free audio codecs:
MPC/MP+/Musepack: Very good quality, and very fast. Lowest selectable bitrate ~60kbps. Not yet designed to fit in a A/V container with video (not packetized) but can be done in non-standard, non-compatible ways.
Vorbis: CPU-intensive. Mostly good quality, but completely blows-up on certain sounds. Uncommonly supported. Fits in very few containers (Ogg and MKV).
MP2: Supported everywhere. Anything that can play MP3 can play MP2 as well. Pretty good at 128kbps and above. Surpasses MP3 quality when approaching 192kbps.
I am made curious: how is EVD, and can it do 1080p?
China's hype exceeds it's grasp. Their claims of AVS (their video codec--NOT MPEG-2) being better than h.264 while being computationally simpler, are the exact opposite of reality. The quality/bitrate is (AT BEST) slightly lower quality than MPEG-2, and all while being as CPU-intensive as h.264. That's not exactly a winning combination.
Also, the AVS videos samples they've provided contain suspicously little noise, which is very atypical, and either indicates they did strong denoising before encoding (to make the codec look better) or the samples were hand-picked for their low noise, as being the best possible examples to make AVS look better.
Not likely. Certainly a large volume of scrapes and bruises, but deaths are quite low for the numbers of kids that own them.
Of course, continuing on this line of thought... Perhaps automobiles would be a better candidate, with thousands of 16 and 17 year-olds being killed each year?
It amazes me how utterly disconnected from the physical world the majority of people are, that ANY physical activity is not understood by average adults, and therefore considered dangerous.
The saddest example I've ever seen is people trying to capture loose animals. Even the "professionals" seem to be less knowledgable than ANYONE who has ever played tug-of-war with their dog... God help them when they think they're going to outrun and outmanuver a chicken.
Getting hurt, just like copyright infringement, is a question of "when" in life, not "if". If you prevent one means people will inevitably encounter another through which to learn these lessons.
These aren't toys that will rip off a finger nail. These are toys that will give you 3rd degree burns, strangle you in an inescapable web of netting, lodge in your throat, BREAK RIBS, AMPUTATE FINGERS, BURN DOWN YOUR HOUSE, etc.
Danger is supposed to be learned with toys... but in a graduated level. 7 year-olds should be learning about scratches, bruises, and mildly "hot" objects. They don't yet have the judgment to handle non-obvious and/or life-threatening dangers.
In a few ways, things have gotten too safe, with trivial harm to older children resulting in recalls, but there are still MANY modern cases of life-threatening risks with toys, which should have been blindingly obvious to manufacturers.
I believe the latter over-senativity is fueled by the former, utter lack of sensativity.
The summary (and TFA) mentions that p2p can actually be more efficient than multicast, since it utilizes both the up- and downstream capacities of clients.
1) That makes absolutely no sense. Multicast distribution is as effecient as you can possibly get.
2) From TFA: "they distribute content more efficiently than centralized "unicast" technologies." He said UNICAST NOT multicast. Black and white difference.
I agree with you completely on all of the above. However, you barely covered the huge issue of "reliability."
Reliability is more than just the occasional crash:
Reliability is a system where the apps that worked yesterday day, work today. Having a previously-working program crash on startup, and need to be reinstalled was absolutely ridiculous 20+ years ago. Yet it's common today, on just one OS.
Reliability is a system that doesn't change file type associations without your explicit permission.
Reliability is a system which doesn't spontaniously "lose" your settings, requiring them to be input again.
Reliability is a system which doesn't randomly corrupt it's own system files after numerous boots.
etc. etc.
It seems like Microsoft is only in business, because they can continue to push their bugs off as someone else's fault (drivers, programs, hardware, etc.) as if they are faultless... Sadly, this seems to work, and most people have come to believe that "computers" as a whole are just incredibly fragile (and inflexible).
DVB is not only MPEG2. It defines the stream multiplexing and timing, additional services like subtitling, teletext, auxiliary data, multiple sound channels,
DVB pretty much just copied MPEG-2 TS, with some trivial changes. All of the above was quite common in MPEG before DVB came along, and ATSC does exactly the same things, and (for most major functions) in exactly the same way.
The studies I have read on the Internet make a big fuss about a difference of a few dB in required transmitter power (the most I have seen is 6dB, or a factor of 4), and downplay the multipath problem.
Funny. Most everything I've read downplays the power difference, and heavily emphasizes multipath and mobile reception for reasons I can't guess.
Specifically, this was the case with the report you cited in your last post. They crippled 8vsb by using the same power level for both, and tested in senarios that seem specifically crafted to give (older) ATSC recievers difficulty, like artifically simulated multipath interference and old omnidirectional antenna.
If you read more on ATSC, you'll see not only is the power difference very significant, but the particulars of 8vsb modulation helps to increase range much more than just the power difference can account for, giving a significantly larger broadcast area.
Small transmitters scattered over the area instead of one big tower with a megawatt ERP (as we had with analog TV). Try that with 8VSB.
That is in-fact possible with 8vsb, it's just not as easy as with COFDM.
Nobody in their right mind would do it that way, though. It's a workaround for the limitations of COFDM, not a benefit in and of itself.
The DVB systems use a different modulation optimized for each medium, and you need a separate tuner for each of them.
You're admitting it, but still ignoring my point. Since they're inherently different, there's no benefit to having them all under a single standard. It's purely asthetics.
Touting that as some sort of benefit (as you are) is just utter nonsense.
However, the demodulated bitstream is the same and from the tuner on, the hardware is the same.
From the tuner on, the demodulated DVB bitstream is compatible with ATSC as well... Hell, from the tuner on, the demodulated DVB bitstream is compatible with a $20 DVD player...
In digital communications, the tuner is practically the ONLY thing that matters. Saying you can swap tuners is equivalent to saying you can swap set-top-boxes on your TV (to go between ATSC and DVB)...
Try again.
Yet on American DTH satellites, DVB is used by one distributor and DSS by another.
Yes. DSS is there because DirecTV predates both ATSC and DVB standards. I'm sure they'd love to travel back in time and build their satellite to standards that were nonexistant at the time, if they could.
As for Dishnet using DVB, I don't specifically know why it was chosen, but just the fact that it's being used certainly isn't proof of anything. I have no doubt 8VSB modulation is being used in many places around the world as well.
It's _all_ Nuclear at some point. Once we accept that and work toward building safe reactor designs we'll be able to get on with "progress" without destroying the environment.
How's this for a safe design?
1. Build a long-term, self-sustaining nuclear reactor.
2. Install it, oh, maybe 146,000,000Km away from the nearest population centers.
3. Transfer the energy to the earth in some form that will traverse a vaccuum, like visible and IR/UV light.
4. Convert it back into electricity on Earth, and use it as needed.
Now THAT'S an incredibly safe nuclear reactor design.
I'd pretty much rather have sharp, full-bandwidth analog than digitally-washed-out HDTV.
You should put up an antenna, and get the full-bandwidth HDTV signal.
I think most people fail to realize that even with 999 channels, 95% of what they watch is on the handful of local broadcast stations... Which probably isn't worth the $50+ per month they're being charged.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope.
First, there's the question of: where do you want that heat most? If most of your devices consuming electricity are at the opposite end of the house from where you want the heat, you're wasting much of it.
Second, the issue of the price difference between electricity and natural gas is overwhelming. You're probably talking 2-3Xs more expensive for electricity.
Then there's the Power Factor (PF) issue, which it seems, even around here, almost nobody understands. As I've said many times before:
"An electric heater will be a purely resistive load, giving you a nearly perfect power factor of 1.0, whereas your VCR probably has a cheap power supply with a power factor as low as 0.4. So the VCR is causing a lot more power loss [higher line losses], even though it's the same 5watts. Residential customers generally don't get billed for their overall power factor, but companies certainly do."
That's more or less a prisoner's dilemma. If only a few people use a lot of high-wattage, low-PF devices, that cost will be spread-out over everyone. If EVERYONE starts doing it, though, you'll end up paying a lot more on your monthly bill, to cover the PF losses.
Not entirely. If you look into Power Factor (PF) you'll see that a 90W power supply can be a less effecient heater than a 90W heater, thanks to increased line-losses.
Home users are lucky enough to not have to pay more for their PF directly, but businesses certainly do.
No, it's not. You're just applying my general information to specific devices.
I've seen worse with cheapo DVD players. This is becomming a problem as Wal-Mart style dirt-cheap Chinese imports become more common. Just a few years ago, you'd almost never see it.
Still, those devices are serious exceptions, and the heat comming off of them while powered-down should be obvious.
But more to the point at hand... there's nothing inherent about a device having a "remote control" that causes such ineffeciency, and devices lacking remotes can just as easily have such problem.
If you wanted to gather high altitude weather information, a helicopter would be much better than a balloon... </SARCASM>
Somehow, I must have missed the part of the article that said this is designed to be used by individuals who want to commute to work and back.
No, it's more like: "why drive your car around the yard..."
You kids and your web...
I want my gopher sites back.
If you use NoScript (which you should to stop dangerous and irritating javascript code), you don't need Flashblock.
Yes I can.
Yes I can, and yes it is.
It already is...
For images, you have Adblock.
For cookies, it's "Cookie Button" https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1247/
Or in the status bar: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1328/
It's an immeasurably small ammount of power. A fraction of a watt.
The drain comes from the ineffecient power supply, when totally idle. Even if your device doesn't have a remote, unless it has a heavy duty 120V/10A power switch, your power supplies are probably drawing 2W constantly, even when off. That includes all wall-warts, (ATX) computers, TVs, etc.
A little physical space isn't much of a premium.
"money"? How is that different than "price" which you mention below?
Transfer time is a non-issue, as I can't watch my movies much faster than realtime anyhow.
In no way are hard drives cheaper than even the latest disc formats.
And that's JUST the drives. You've got to get the movie ONTO the drive somehow, so you're either buying the disc anyhow, or you're paying ridiculous ammounts of money for a high-speed connection, which (you can't use for just about anything else, since it'll be constantly busy downloading movies). I can buy 100s of discs for what you'd pay to download 10, and I'll have mine in about 5 minutes.
You're right. Discs are faster AND more convenient than hard drives. That they're so much cheaper is just a big plus.
In every single possible way?
I only mentioned MPEG-4/Divx in comparing it to MPEG-1 (which _is_ patent-free). What were you reading?
"MP2"... MP3 != MP2
MPC is NOT a derivitive of MP3.
If you would have done the most basic search, you'd have found detailed reports of MPC's former and current patent-status.
Yes, that was the point.
Though you could download the images using lynx, and display them by some other means.
Let me know when hard drives + bandwidth are as cheap as a little round piece of plastic with a metallic coating.
The AVS codec has been available in ffmpeg/libavcodec (and so, any program that uses libavcodec) for quite a while now.
It is NOT, however, royalty free. They intend to keep the fees lower than other codecs, but that's all.
For royalty-free video, you have a few to choose from:
Dirac/Snow: Very impressive codecs at the range of bitrates (slightly better than even h.264), but even more CPU-intensive, and both (sadly) perpetually unfinished.
MPEG-1: actually does quite well with modern encoders like libavcodec... At lower bits/pixel rates (eg. 720x480 @600k) , it often looks better than MPEG-4/Divx. At higher bitrates, MPEG-4 slowly starts looking a little bit better than MPEG-1, but it's still rather competitive. It's only near DVD bitrates that better MPEG-4 encoders look obviously better (sharper details) than MPEG-1 (where MPEG-2 will likely outperform MPEG-4, anyhow).
VP3/Theora: Blocky, distorted mess, in most expert opinions (IMHO, that's slightly harsh). Does okay at very low resolution (320x240) and tiny bitrates (~300k), but not impressively well even then.
MJPEG/NUV: High-speed, but needs extremely high bitrates to be watchable at all. Competitive, perhaps, with MPEG-2 at DVD bitrates.
Royalty-free audio codecs:
MPC/MP+/Musepack: Very good quality, and very fast. Lowest selectable bitrate ~60kbps. Not yet designed to fit in a A/V container with video (not packetized) but can be done in non-standard, non-compatible ways.
Vorbis: CPU-intensive. Mostly good quality, but completely blows-up on certain sounds. Uncommonly supported. Fits in very few containers (Ogg and MKV).
MP2: Supported everywhere. Anything that can play MP3 can play MP2 as well. Pretty good at 128kbps and above. Surpasses MP3 quality when approaching 192kbps.
China's hype exceeds it's grasp. Their claims of AVS (their video codec--NOT MPEG-2) being better than h.264 while being computationally simpler, are the exact opposite of reality. The quality/bitrate is (AT BEST) slightly lower quality than MPEG-2, and all while being as CPU-intensive as h.264. That's not exactly a winning combination.
Also, the AVS videos samples they've provided contain suspicously little noise, which is very atypical, and either indicates they did strong denoising before encoding (to make the codec look better) or the samples were hand-picked for their low noise, as being the best possible examples to make AVS look better.
Funny, because it downgrades quite well (now). No need for javascript, CSS, etc.
Not likely. Certainly a large volume of scrapes and bruises, but deaths are quite low for the numbers of kids that own them.
Of course, continuing on this line of thought... Perhaps automobiles would be a better candidate, with thousands of 16 and 17 year-olds being killed each year?
It amazes me how utterly disconnected from the physical world the majority of people are, that ANY physical activity is not understood by average adults, and therefore considered dangerous.
The saddest example I've ever seen is people trying to capture loose animals. Even the "professionals" seem to be less knowledgable than ANYONE who has ever played tug-of-war with their dog... God help them when they think they're going to outrun and outmanuver a chicken.
These aren't toys that will rip off a finger nail. These are toys that will give you 3rd degree burns, strangle you in an inescapable web of netting, lodge in your throat, BREAK RIBS, AMPUTATE FINGERS, BURN DOWN YOUR HOUSE, etc.
Danger is supposed to be learned with toys... but in a graduated level. 7 year-olds should be learning about scratches, bruises, and mildly "hot" objects. They don't yet have the judgment to handle non-obvious and/or life-threatening dangers.
In a few ways, things have gotten too safe, with trivial harm to older children resulting in recalls, but there are still MANY modern cases of life-threatening risks with toys, which should have been blindingly obvious to manufacturers.
I believe the latter over-senativity is fueled by the former, utter lack of sensativity.
1) That makes absolutely no sense. Multicast distribution is as effecient as you can possibly get.
2) From TFA: "they distribute content more efficiently than centralized "unicast" technologies." He said UNICAST NOT multicast. Black and white difference.
I agree with you completely on all of the above. However, you barely covered the huge issue of "reliability."
Reliability is more than just the occasional crash:
Reliability is a system where the apps that worked yesterday day, work today. Having a previously-working program crash on startup, and need to be reinstalled was absolutely ridiculous 20+ years ago. Yet it's common today, on just one OS.
Reliability is a system that doesn't change file type associations without your explicit permission.
Reliability is a system which doesn't spontaniously "lose" your settings, requiring them to be input again.
Reliability is a system which doesn't randomly corrupt it's own system files after numerous boots.
etc. etc.
It seems like Microsoft is only in business, because they can continue to push their bugs off as someone else's fault (drivers, programs, hardware, etc.) as if they are faultless... Sadly, this seems to work, and most people have come to believe that "computers" as a whole are just incredibly fragile (and inflexible).
DVB pretty much just copied MPEG-2 TS, with some trivial changes. All of the above was quite common in MPEG before DVB came along, and ATSC does exactly the same things, and (for most major functions) in exactly the same way.
Funny. Most everything I've read downplays the power difference, and heavily emphasizes multipath and mobile reception for reasons I can't guess.
Specifically, this was the case with the report you cited in your last post. They crippled 8vsb by using the same power level for both, and tested in senarios that seem specifically crafted to give (older) ATSC recievers difficulty, like artifically simulated multipath interference and old omnidirectional antenna.
If you read more on ATSC, you'll see not only is the power difference very significant, but the particulars of 8vsb modulation helps to increase range much more than just the power difference can account for, giving a significantly larger broadcast area.
That is in-fact possible with 8vsb, it's just not as easy as with COFDM.
Nobody in their right mind would do it that way, though. It's a workaround for the limitations of COFDM, not a benefit in and of itself.
You're admitting it, but still ignoring my point. Since they're inherently different, there's no benefit to having them all under a single standard. It's purely asthetics.
Touting that as some sort of benefit (as you are) is just utter nonsense.
From the tuner on, the demodulated DVB bitstream is compatible with ATSC as well... Hell, from the tuner on, the demodulated DVB bitstream is compatible with a $20 DVD player...
In digital communications, the tuner is practically the ONLY thing that matters. Saying you can swap tuners is equivalent to saying you can swap set-top-boxes on your TV (to go between ATSC and DVB)...
Try again.
Yes. DSS is there because DirecTV predates both ATSC and DVB standards. I'm sure they'd love to travel back in time and build their satellite to standards that were nonexistant at the time, if they could.
As for Dishnet using DVB, I don't specifically know why it was chosen, but just the fact that it's being used certainly isn't proof of anything. I have no doubt 8VSB modulation is being used in many places around the world as well.
How's this for a safe design?
1. Build a long-term, self-sustaining nuclear reactor.
2. Install it, oh, maybe 146,000,000Km away from the nearest population centers.
3. Transfer the energy to the earth in some form that will traverse a vaccuum, like visible and IR/UV light.
4. Convert it back into electricity on Earth, and use it as needed.
Now THAT'S an incredibly safe nuclear reactor design.
You should put up an antenna, and get the full-bandwidth HDTV signal.
I think most people fail to realize that even with 999 channels, 95% of what they watch is on the handful of local broadcast stations... Which probably isn't worth the $50+ per month they're being charged.