Well, mainly the fact that Akimbo was a decent service before now. It's not just PPV, there's plenty of decent "free" content as well.
Not NEARLY enough, IMHO, but the partnership with AT&T could be a very, very good thing for Akimbo.
I certainly like the idea of an alternative to getting a thousand crappy channels on Cable/Sat for $50/month. Now that they have the backing of a big company like AT&T, maybe that will happen, and it won't be all 99% odd niche stuff.
No it doesn't, not if you have many connections, and connections which send big packets of data without waiting for every ACK;
You're correct that it won't really be 1/2 the bandwidth, but I simply thought I should make the theoretical example as simple as possible.
since doubling the latency as you proposed means hitting the sender so hard that it might exceed its max window size.
You don't quite understand. ACKs are NOT and cannot be sent async. A large window may mean it only needs an ACK after every 20 packets, but the ACK can't be sent until #20 has been recieved, or the timeout (waiting for #20) has been exceeded.
So, if you delay the outgoing ACK by 10ms, there will be no incomming traffic for the next 10ms. For bandwidth shaping, the router dynamically adjusts this delay to get the approximate throughput you want. And yes, if the machines use a ridiculously large sliding window, the router won't be able to hold all the packets, some will be dropped, and the machines will negotiate a smaller window because of that increase in packet loss.
I think I could set up a test which proves my views as well.
I don't see how. The point still remains that increasing the latency is HOW bandwidth shaping is done. I really can't see any way of doing one, without doing/causing the other.
Well, I suggested that ISPs set up P2P nodes, and since I am the thread starter it is my idea as far as slashdot is concerned.
Yes, but that alone will help very little, without the dual-level bandwidth I discussed.
and finally caching all HTTP replies in a proxy requires a big proxy or proxy farm - this means that downstream-ISPs would actually carry the costs of the big content providers or have to pay for the slashdot effect. I guess you see the problem in there.
No. The whole idea is that running a few servers with a lot of storage on their network is much cheaper than purchasing that much more internet bandwidth, for the ISP.
but why should the ISP volunteer to provide the bandwidth for another business?
For them to save money on their upstream ISP bill, to provider their customers with a much better service, etc.
I get the feeling like I'm arguing with a brick wall. How many times do I need to say these exact same things over and over, before they register with you?
I guess in two years we will talk again on slashdot and you will say you always have been saying that protocols need to be improved or changed.
Not at all. I've posted this idea to slashdot several times in the past, and I'm sure anyone who searches through my comment history can find numerous mentions of it. Nothing on the web is ever lost. Besides, as I've said, yours does not include dual-level bandwidth, or anything similar, which would be rather necessary for this to work well.
I know what you will say now, it is not my business what you do with your bandwidth as you pay for it, but as you seem to be opposed to increased fees for power users, it seems you don't like paying that much either.
I'm very tired of repeating myself over and over, so I'm just going to copy/paste the exact same thing I said last time:
The only fair thing ISPs can do, is exactly what they don't want to do... Have a much lower-speed 128k/16k plan, and charge maybe $10 for it. That way the power users really will want the higher-speed plan, and average users will get to pay less. Obviously, they want to keep the minimum plan as expensive as possible, which has been the root of this "power users" problem for the past decade.
but then you get lost in arguing that latency and bandwidth is the same, which it clearly isn't.
This is COMPLETELY idiotic...
I didn't say latency and bandwidth are the same, and I can't imagine how you could actually believe I did. In fact, I think you're just trying a little straw man here.
You said: "I did not say he should throttle P2P bandwidth, which is what you are talking about, but that the ISP should use latency to shape traffic."
Clearly you've never done any bandwidth shaping/throttling. What you don't realize is that the way bandwidth is throttled, is by increasing the latency between packets, once you've reach a certain bandwith. If it takes 10ms for a packet to get from the server to you, and the router holds that packet for 10ms longer, that throttles your bandwidth to half what it otherwise would be.
So, in this instance, the two will have effectively the same result. If you increase latency, you will be throttling the bandwidth.
I guess to top it off you probably have a job where you in theory know this stuff better than me.
That's funny. I can see from your webpage that you are a software architect, not a network admin. Since I do this stuff from day to day, I'd say quite the reverse is probably true. You think you know the theory, but don't actually have any experience with it.
When the costs of the increase in safety make it too expensive for the poor to afford even the cheapest "safe" car.
That sounds like it makes sense, but then again... explain the lack of roll-cages to me.
Jaguar is touting their automatic roll-bar, which is controlled by a high-tech system that deploys it when needed, but that's so insanely unnecessary that it sounds like some sort of electronic deadbolt which only engages when someone walks up to the door...
Roll-cages are as cheap as the cost of a few feet of metal tubing, and there is no other safety feature more thoroughly tested in history. There aren't any drawbacks where it could be more dangerous than without it, unlike A.B.S., air bags, and even seatbelts.
So, please explain to me, by what criteria do air bags become required standard equipment, while a basic roll cage doesn't qualify?
This is part of the reason most cars are front wheel drive now (in addition to being cheaper to bolt together). The panic reaction in a front wheel drive is the safe one, turn the wheel the way you want to go and floor it.
Although "cheaper" probably enters into it, the main reason for FWD is traction. You have all the weight in the front, right over the wheels, which happen to be the wheels you steer with as well. You can take a corner at several times the normal speed, you can stop in shorter distances in bad conditions, you can go through much softer dirt, mud, etc. You only need one set of snow chains to have complete control of the vehicle, etc.
I was opposed to FWD cars in the beginning, mainly because of just how crappy the transaxles were, and how they were the first thing to fail, and needed serious work to rebuild. Now that it's not much of an issue, and I've seen, over and over, the advantages of FWD, I made it a point that my truck would have to be AWD (have you EVER seen a FWD truck?).
Gentlemen, we can rebuild her... We have the technology. We can make her stronger. Faster. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic mom.
I think there's a perception (wrong or not) that companies based in Western nations are more accountable than companies based in China.
You're close, but not quite on the mark.
What drives me crazy about Chinese products is that brand-names are a dime a dozen.
IBM would spend significant ammounts to make sure nothing associated with IBM is regarded as poor quality. The brand is worth a lot to them. To a lesser extent, the same is true of Dell, HP, etc.
Enter China. Start a company named "Apex", manufacture cheap DVD players that actually work quite well and get a good reputation in the US. Then cash-in on that reputation by churning out with model after model of junk, priced well in excess of what it's worth. Now that nobody would ever consider buying Apex DVD player again, change your name to "CyberHome" and start churning out more cheap junk. When people catch-on to that one, just change your brand-name again. Or even better, buy a well-known, but failed brand like "Polaroid", and cash-in by selling complete junk products to people loyal to the brand (who probably don't know it was sold to some 2-bit Chinese junk manufacturer).
American (and European) brands tell you what level of quality you can expect, with a few exceptions (ie. Sony).
but when it came to the actual performance of the machine, competitors always beat them and at a cheaper price too.
Yes, IBMs laptops were slightly slower than the competition, but for that slight drop in speed, you'd get TWICE the battery life of just about any other notebook.
It really amazes me that, no matter how much more effecient electronics get, notebooks continue to get the same 3hr battery life they did 10+ years ago. With the exception of IBM and Toshiba, it seems like they go out of they way to reduce the size of their batteries, and use higher-power components, to keep the runtime down to 3hours.
As for the price, like anything else, you usually get what you pay for.
You mentioned HTTP proxies yourself, and HTTP is supposed to serve web pages, not documents or images.
Well, you've completely lost me there. First of all, "web pages" contain "documents" and "images", so I don't see your point. Second, HTTP is a transfer protocol for ANYTHING. Linux ISOs are transfered over HTTP constantly. Large videos are being downloaded over HTTP constantly.
Static images that are part of the page are cached by the browser anyway,
Yeah, cached by your neighbors browser, while yours has to go download them from the source. That's the whole point of a caching proxy. Browser caches are also very small, making them of limited usefulness.
Regarding "When there is a multi-MB file embedded in that web-page", maybe you just shouldn't embed such big images,
That's the most ridiculous argument I've heard so far. I guess people should only use the internet how you see fit. Besides, you clearly don't understand that this isn't limited to things embedded in web pages. Any HTTP traffic will greately benefit.
either the target audience is to small to make the ISP set up a proxy for them, or you should deliver the content by other protocols.
You can talk about how people "should" change the internet to suit you all you want, but it's not going to happen. The fact is, massive ammounts of HTTP traffic ARE accounted for by sites like video.google.com, and a caching proxy can reduce that massive ammount of traffic down to practically nothing.
Sadly, it still doesn't sound like you understand.
I did not say he should throttle P2P bandwidth, which is what you are talking about, but that the ISP should use latency to shape traffic.
Those two are almost exactly the same thing.
and usually it is hard to make P2P work like proxies because the number of clients willing to upload a specific file at a specific time is small.
No, actually it's fairly easy. For Gnutella and kin, setup a node on an ISP server with massive disk-space, have it act as a supernode for all users, and have it save a copy of your downloads to it's local storage. Then, future downloaders will automatically see that file as an alternate location, and it will be downloaded from there automatically.
Now, it's really the dual-level bandwidth that makes this work... Since your ISP's node will allow you to download the file at 3Mbps, and you'll be getting at most 768k from all the rest, it will download the vast majority from the ISP's node, dramatically cutting down on internet traffic.
Although I don't know of any real proxing method, it would have similar benefits for bittorrent too. When one of the seeds/peers is on the same ISP as you, you will download the vast majority of the file(s) from them (at high-speed) instead of over the (slow) internet.
Why do ISPs always insist on working AGAINST anyone that uses the internet, rather than trying to work with them to save money on their infrastructure, while providing a much, much better service to their customers? They just keep raising speeds, all the while trying to make it harder to do anything with.
Well, the problem with HTTP proxies is that today most of content of the www is dynamic in some way - so caching is not that useful.
Congratulations. You managed to completely miss the point.
People aren't going to notice the difference between 768Kbit and 3Mbit when they're just loading a web-page. There, latency is dominant. When there is a multi-MB file embedded in that web-page, however, they will, and large files are rarely served dynamically. AJAX has nothing to do with this at all.
It is not as simple as that, ISPs face the "empty seat problem". If they charge the casual user for a fully used 768k line, they will lose these customers to other ISPs.
Oh yes it is. Saying, "Other ISPs are falsely advertising, so we have to too," is not a workable legal defense.
This means that those who run P2P 24/7 are perceived as problems in the business plan, which they are.
It's not my job to make sure an ISPs is making a profit, nor is it grounds to violate a contract, or falsely advertise services.
They can limit available bandwidth specifically to you, and they will happily do so.
Not without a lawsuit they won't.
You want to be able to run BitTorrent and Quake 4 simultaneously, but BitTorrent eats up all your available bandwidth, so you can't play Quake 4 with a P2P client running.
It's fairly easy to configure traffic-shaping (to slow bittorrent) on your own firewall/router, and still mascarade as port 80 HTTP in public.
You're saying the exact same things I've said for years, except I was talking HTTP/FTP, before P2P came on the scene.
ISPs could save a LOT of money on bandwidth if they had caching proxy servers.
Customers aren't going to use the proxy out of the kindness of their heart, so they need some incentive. To do that, ISPs need to uncap the speed when downloading from the ISPs network (the fastest the modem can provide), and only cap it at the 768Kbps speed when the data has to travel out to the internet.
So, the company saves money on bandwidth, and the customers get extremely high speed downloads from other subscribers on the same ISP, or when using the caching proxy server instead of a direct connection.
I am not even mentioning that ISPs should structure their contracts in such a way that power-users with high network load pay more.
Absolutely not. ISPs are advertising 768K, and they have to do their very best to provide that. No matter what kind of a user you are, you're just utilizing the service, exactly as described (did the flashy commercials say 5 hours per day, max? No.)
The only fair thing ISPs can do, is exactly what they don't want to do... Have a much lower-speed 128k/16k plan, and charge maybe $10 for it. That way the power users really will want the higher-speed plan, and average users will get to pay less. Obviously, they want to keep the minimum plan as expensive as possible, which has been the root of this "power users" problem for the past decade.
As far as I've heard, HD-DVD only supports up to 1080i, which means 30fps 3:2 telecined films. Meanwhile, Blu-ray is the one that will actually support 1080p.
a reader managed to grab one and two discs, and he was not pleased.
Perhaps he didn't use the HDMI connector?
but 1080i content encoded with MPEG-2 to a single layer HD DVD would indeed be a disaster.. two times the space for 4 times the amount of pixels - you do the math.
This comment shows a serious lack of knowledge about how video compression works. Increasing the size of the picture does not require an equally large bitrate increase. A lot of MPEG overhead is fixed, and can't be reduced, no matter how low the resolution is. Meanwhile, motion estimation/compensation, DCT, etc., do not require twice as many bits to work on 2X the pixel-area, and lossy visual tricks become more effecient when you increase the resolution of an image.
For an easy example... you may find that D1 NTSC video (720x480) video encoded in MPEG-4 will look fine at 1000kbps. So, using this mistaken idea, 360x240 video should look just as good at 256kbps. If you try this, you will find that is certainly not the case, and decreasing the resolution to lower bitrate has severely diminishing returns.
So, doing the math, 2X the space should be perfectly acceptable for 4X the resolution. In-fact, another poster already pointed out that 15GBs should be more than large enough for a couple hours, at standard HD-broadcast bitrates, assuming limited extras.
Also, 1080i (1920x1080) is exactly 5Xs more pixels than PAL DVDs (720x576) at a 20% higher refresh-rate, and 6X more pixels than NTSC DVD (720x480) at the same refresh-rate. So, I don't know where that 4X came from.
I must be missing something... Maybe the article is just light on details, but I can't see how this is any more advanced than the rear window defroster standard in every car made in the past couple decades.
Electricity turns to heat, and melts the ice. Yippie. In this instance it sounds like electricity is being applied directly to the ice, possibly making this slightly quicker and more effecient, but I don't see anything revolutionary here. I also can't see how this is any less obtrusive...
With DVDs and CDs one bit of corruption kills the entire work, making you wish there was just a drop out or two . ..
For realtime playback, DVDs are less resilient to errors. However, if you're looking to copy them, you can always read-around an error, and get 99% of the data as perfect as the day it was pressed. Also, if you're willing to do it by hand (with an electron microscope), you can practically always recover the data, even in heavily scratched areas. Short of the metal actually flaking off, the data is still there, just unreadable at 2X...
Also, you can always put d-skins on your disks before they get scratched, giving them very good protection.
Despite a few drawbacks, I'm much happier with DVDs.
I have video tapes from the early eighties that play just fine. I also have DVDs I burned six months ago that are already deteriorating
Yes, well, if you paid as much for the VHS tapes as you did for those DVD-Rs, they'd probably be dust by now.
Of course vinyl has them both beat, but that's another story.
I'd love to see your vinyl-based video recording system.
One scratch on an optical disk and the whole thing is pretty much ruined.
Scratches can be repaired rather easily, and with a small investment you can prevent them from ever happening. Besides that, DVDs can always be salvaged, using something like "dd conv=noerror" to copy everything, and fill the damaged portion with zeros.
DVDs and CDs are of course made for skipping chapters/tracks, but for jumping back a few seconds or a minute tape is much easier to use.
DVDs are mastered with a keyframe every 1/2 second, so it's actually quite easy to handle seeking accurately. Cheapo DVD players just... don't.
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Well, mainly the fact that Akimbo was a decent service before now. It's not just PPV, there's plenty of decent "free" content as well.
Not NEARLY enough, IMHO, but the partnership with AT&T could be a very, very good thing for Akimbo.
I certainly like the idea of an alternative to getting a thousand crappy channels on Cable/Sat for $50/month. Now that they have the backing of a big company like AT&T, maybe that will happen, and it won't be all 99% odd niche stuff.
Ask Slashdot: Why do I need to buy the latest and greatest shoe? Note: Both my legs were amputated, so I don't have feet.
Actually, this is a great thing.
Now, companies can't do this (force you to watch ads) without PAYING PHILIPS for the privlidge.
I guess the absolutely ridiculous patent system works in the public's favor once in a while, too.
You're correct that it won't really be 1/2 the bandwidth, but I simply thought I should make the theoretical example as simple as possible.
You don't quite understand. ACKs are NOT and cannot be sent async. A large window may mean it only needs an ACK after every 20 packets, but the ACK can't be sent until #20 has been recieved, or the timeout (waiting for #20) has been exceeded.
So, if you delay the outgoing ACK by 10ms, there will be no incomming traffic for the next 10ms. For bandwidth shaping, the router dynamically adjusts this delay to get the approximate throughput you want. And yes, if the machines use a ridiculously large sliding window, the router won't be able to hold all the packets, some will be dropped, and the machines will negotiate a smaller window because of that increase in packet loss.
I don't see how. The point still remains that increasing the latency is HOW bandwidth shaping is done. I really can't see any way of doing one, without doing/causing the other.
The same reason they feel compelled to contribute to the debate when a new study comes out that says smoking and drinking is good for your health...
Most people are not scientists of any kind, but that doesn't make them idiots, unable to contribute anything useful to a scientific debate.
Yes, but that alone will help very little, without the dual-level bandwidth I discussed.
No. The whole idea is that running a few servers with a lot of storage on their network is much cheaper than purchasing that much more internet bandwidth, for the ISP.
For them to save money on their upstream ISP bill, to provider their customers with a much better service, etc.
I get the feeling like I'm arguing with a brick wall. How many times do I need to say these exact same things over and over, before they register with you?
Not at all. I've posted this idea to slashdot several times in the past, and I'm sure anyone who searches through my comment history can find numerous mentions of it. Nothing on the web is ever lost. Besides, as I've said, yours does not include dual-level bandwidth, or anything similar, which would be rather necessary for this to work well.
I'm very tired of repeating myself over and over, so I'm just going to copy/paste the exact same thing I said last time:
The only fair thing ISPs can do, is exactly what they don't want to do... Have a much lower-speed 128k/16k plan, and charge maybe $10 for it. That way the power users really will want the higher-speed plan, and average users will get to pay less. Obviously, they want to keep the minimum plan as expensive as possible, which has been the root of this "power users" problem for the past decade.
This is COMPLETELY idiotic...
I didn't say latency and bandwidth are the same, and I can't imagine how you could actually believe I did. In fact, I think you're just trying a little straw man here.
You said: "I did not say he should throttle P2P bandwidth, which is what you are talking about, but that the ISP should use latency to shape traffic."
Clearly you've never done any bandwidth shaping/throttling. What you don't realize is that the way bandwidth is throttled, is by increasing the latency between packets, once you've reach a certain bandwith. If it takes 10ms for a packet to get from the server to you, and the router holds that packet for 10ms longer, that throttles your bandwidth to half what it otherwise would be.
So, in this instance, the two will have effectively the same result. If you increase latency, you will be throttling the bandwidth.
That's funny. I can see from your webpage that you are a software architect, not a network admin. Since I do this stuff from day to day, I'd say quite the reverse is probably true. You think you know the theory, but don't actually have any experience with it.
That sounds like it makes sense, but then again... explain the lack of roll-cages to me.
Jaguar is touting their automatic roll-bar, which is controlled by a high-tech system that deploys it when needed, but that's so insanely unnecessary that it sounds like some sort of electronic deadbolt which only engages when someone walks up to the door...
Roll-cages are as cheap as the cost of a few feet of metal tubing, and there is no other safety feature more thoroughly tested in history. There aren't any drawbacks where it could be more dangerous than without it, unlike A.B.S., air bags, and even seatbelts.
So, please explain to me, by what criteria do air bags become required standard equipment, while a basic roll cage doesn't qualify?
Although "cheaper" probably enters into it, the main reason for FWD is traction. You have all the weight in the front, right over the wheels, which happen to be the wheels you steer with as well. You can take a corner at several times the normal speed, you can stop in shorter distances in bad conditions, you can go through much softer dirt, mud, etc. You only need one set of snow chains to have complete control of the vehicle, etc.
I was opposed to FWD cars in the beginning, mainly because of just how crappy the transaxles were, and how they were the first thing to fail, and needed serious work to rebuild. Now that it's not much of an issue, and I've seen, over and over, the advantages of FWD, I made it a point that my truck would have to be AWD (have you EVER seen a FWD truck?).
Gentlemen, we can rebuild her... We have the technology. We can make her stronger. Faster. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic mom.
You're close, but not quite on the mark.
What drives me crazy about Chinese products is that brand-names are a dime a dozen.
IBM would spend significant ammounts to make sure nothing associated with IBM is regarded as poor quality. The brand is worth a lot to them. To a lesser extent, the same is true of Dell, HP, etc.
Enter China. Start a company named "Apex", manufacture cheap DVD players that actually work quite well and get a good reputation in the US. Then cash-in on that reputation by churning out with model after model of junk, priced well in excess of what it's worth. Now that nobody would ever consider buying Apex DVD player again, change your name to "CyberHome" and start churning out more cheap junk. When people catch-on to that one, just change your brand-name again. Or even better, buy a well-known, but failed brand like "Polaroid", and cash-in by selling complete junk products to people loyal to the brand (who probably don't know it was sold to some 2-bit Chinese junk manufacturer).
American (and European) brands tell you what level of quality you can expect, with a few exceptions (ie. Sony).
Really? You don't think it has something to do with Lenovo's well-established reputation for manufacturing cheap flimsy crap?
Yes, IBMs laptops were slightly slower than the competition, but for that slight drop in speed, you'd get TWICE the battery life of just about any other notebook.
It really amazes me that, no matter how much more effecient electronics get, notebooks continue to get the same 3hr battery life they did 10+ years ago. With the exception of IBM and Toshiba, it seems like they go out of they way to reduce the size of their batteries, and use higher-power components, to keep the runtime down to 3hours.
As for the price, like anything else, you usually get what you pay for.
Well, you've completely lost me there. First of all, "web pages" contain "documents" and "images", so I don't see your point. Second, HTTP is a transfer protocol for ANYTHING. Linux ISOs are transfered over HTTP constantly. Large videos are being downloaded over HTTP constantly.
Yeah, cached by your neighbors browser, while yours has to go download them from the source. That's the whole point of a caching proxy. Browser caches are also very small, making them of limited usefulness.
That's the most ridiculous argument I've heard so far. I guess people should only use the internet how you see fit. Besides, you clearly don't understand that this isn't limited to things embedded in web pages. Any HTTP traffic will greately benefit.
You can talk about how people "should" change the internet to suit you all you want, but it's not going to happen. The fact is, massive ammounts of HTTP traffic ARE accounted for by sites like video.google.com, and a caching proxy can reduce that massive ammount of traffic down to practically nothing.
Sadly, it still doesn't sound like you understand.
Those two are almost exactly the same thing.
No, actually it's fairly easy. For Gnutella and kin, setup a node on an ISP server with massive disk-space, have it act as a supernode for all users, and have it save a copy of your downloads to it's local storage. Then, future downloaders will automatically see that file as an alternate location, and it will be downloaded from there automatically.
Now, it's really the dual-level bandwidth that makes this work... Since your ISP's node will allow you to download the file at 3Mbps, and you'll be getting at most 768k from all the rest, it will download the vast majority from the ISP's node, dramatically cutting down on internet traffic.
Although I don't know of any real proxing method, it would have similar benefits for bittorrent too. When one of the seeds/peers is on the same ISP as you, you will download the vast majority of the file(s) from them (at high-speed) instead of over the (slow) internet.
Why do ISPs always insist on working AGAINST anyone that uses the internet, rather than trying to work with them to save money on their infrastructure, while providing a much, much better service to their customers? They just keep raising speeds, all the while trying to make it harder to do anything with.
Congratulations. You managed to completely miss the point.
People aren't going to notice the difference between 768Kbit and 3Mbit when they're just loading a web-page. There, latency is dominant. When there is a multi-MB file embedded in that web-page, however, they will, and large files are rarely served dynamically. AJAX has nothing to do with this at all.
Oh yes it is. Saying, "Other ISPs are falsely advertising, so we have to too," is not a workable legal defense.
It's not my job to make sure an ISPs is making a profit, nor is it grounds to violate a contract, or falsely advertise services.
Not without a lawsuit they won't.
It's fairly easy to configure traffic-shaping (to slow bittorrent) on your own firewall/router, and still mascarade as port 80 HTTP in public.
ISPs could save a LOT of money on bandwidth if they had caching proxy servers.
Customers aren't going to use the proxy out of the kindness of their heart, so they need some incentive. To do that, ISPs need to uncap the speed when downloading from the ISPs network (the fastest the modem can provide), and only cap it at the 768Kbps speed when the data has to travel out to the internet.
So, the company saves money on bandwidth, and the customers get extremely high speed downloads from other subscribers on the same ISP, or when using the caching proxy server instead of a direct connection.
Absolutely not. ISPs are advertising 768K, and they have to do their very best to provide that. No matter what kind of a user you are, you're just utilizing the service, exactly as described (did the flashy commercials say 5 hours per day, max? No.)
The only fair thing ISPs can do, is exactly what they don't want to do... Have a much lower-speed 128k/16k plan, and charge maybe $10 for it. That way the power users really will want the higher-speed plan, and average users will get to pay less. Obviously, they want to keep the minimum plan as expensive as possible, which has been the root of this "power users" problem for the past decade.
As far as I've heard, HD-DVD only supports up to 1080i, which means 30fps 3:2 telecined films. Meanwhile, Blu-ray is the one that will actually support 1080p.
You're only completely wrong... I guess that's close enough.
Sure they do. Give them a minute or so to warm up, and start driving.
On an airplane windsheild, the air is going several hundred MPH, and would work infinitely better than on a car.
I don't have Flash installed, and I have no intention of ever installing it again.
Good quote... showing just how ignorant he was...
Perhaps he didn't use the HDMI connector?
This comment shows a serious lack of knowledge about how video compression works. Increasing the size of the picture does not require an equally large bitrate increase. A lot of MPEG overhead is fixed, and can't be reduced, no matter how low the resolution is. Meanwhile, motion estimation/compensation, DCT, etc., do not require twice as many bits to work on 2X the pixel-area, and lossy visual tricks become more effecient when you increase the resolution of an image.
For an easy example... you may find that D1 NTSC video (720x480) video encoded in MPEG-4 will look fine at 1000kbps. So, using this mistaken idea, 360x240 video should look just as good at 256kbps. If you try this, you will find that is certainly not the case, and decreasing the resolution to lower bitrate has severely diminishing returns.
So, doing the math, 2X the space should be perfectly acceptable for 4X the resolution. In-fact, another poster already pointed out that 15GBs should be more than large enough for a couple hours, at standard HD-broadcast bitrates, assuming limited extras.
Also, 1080i (1920x1080) is exactly 5Xs more pixels than PAL DVDs (720x576) at a 20% higher refresh-rate, and 6X more pixels than NTSC DVD (720x480) at the same refresh-rate. So, I don't know where that 4X came from.
You thought wrong. Blu-ray and HD-DVD can both use MPEG-2, VC-1 (aka WMV3, WMV9), and h.264 for video.
I must be missing something... Maybe the article is just light on details, but I can't see how this is any more advanced than the rear window defroster standard in every car made in the past couple decades.
Electricity turns to heat, and melts the ice. Yippie. In this instance it sounds like electricity is being applied directly to the ice, possibly making this slightly quicker and more effecient, but I don't see anything revolutionary here. I also can't see how this is any less obtrusive...
For realtime playback, DVDs are less resilient to errors. However, if you're looking to copy them, you can always read-around an error, and get 99% of the data as perfect as the day it was pressed. Also, if you're willing to do it by hand (with an electron microscope), you can practically always recover the data, even in heavily scratched areas. Short of the metal actually flaking off, the data is still there, just unreadable at 2X...
Also, you can always put d-skins on your disks before they get scratched, giving them very good protection.
Despite a few drawbacks, I'm much happier with DVDs.
The issue was that "vinyl has them both beat", and I don't see anything that makes CEDs superior.
Yes, well, if you paid as much for the VHS tapes as you did for those DVD-Rs, they'd probably be dust by now.
I'd love to see your vinyl-based video recording system.
Scratches can be repaired rather easily, and with a small investment you can prevent them from ever happening. Besides that, DVDs can always be salvaged, using something like "dd conv=noerror" to copy everything, and fill the damaged portion with zeros.
DVDs are mastered with a keyframe every 1/2 second, so it's actually quite easy to handle seeking accurately. Cheapo DVD players just... don't.