You risk losing eight desktops instead of just one to a single component failure (eg, a faulty motherboard).
With resource sharing like this, it becomes far, far more cost-effective to use more reliable components. You can buy a high-end hot-swap power supply, instead of 8 individual ones, thereby making it more reliable, not less. Same thing goes for hard drives (RAID), RAM (ECC), etc.
It's comparable to the current situation with printers... You could have a high-end document center shared by several hundred people, or each person could have a crappy $50 inkjet printer on their desk. Sure, you're consolidating risk as well, but then you're getting far more reliable components (less risk) for less money, and it's a lot easier to maintain/service those consolidated components as well.
their prices are so low, and they are so easy to acquire that I doubt that there would be much in the way of cost savings to be had when comparing eight single-CPU PCs to one eight-headed hydra.
Generally, resource-sharing works. Those 8 won't all being doing CPU-intensive operations at the same time, so they're going to get much more than 1/8th of the CPU-time when they need it. With individual PCs, 7 of them could be mostly or completely idle, while the 8th is taking a very long time with a CPU-intensive operation... The same thing goes for disk space, RAM, etc.
You'll see power-savings as well, since you won't have those 7 idle computers (and disks, and RAM, and power supplies) using up so much power while they're doing practically nothing.
But mainly, you get real administration savings. Less things to go wrong, far, far fewer machines to maintain/patch/upgrade/etc.
No, what we really want is......VMWare to come out with their VMWare Workstation (or even the player) for the Mac.
Why wait for VMWare? QEMU is open source, and the performance feels about the same. Actually, VMware is pretty slow, too, so there's still plenty of reason for getting Windows running natively, and having QEMU emulating an x86 system on PPC would probably be nearly as fast (slow?).
It would probably be pretty trivial to start using it on OSX right now through OSX's x11 server. In fact, I see it's in FINK CVS already.
Reporting news is a serious issue and the facts should have been checked first, which clearly wasn't done.
There are many things you can't verify 100%. One of those are covert/secret government actions. You can call them up and ask, but they'll deny it either way, so you haven't accomplished anything. The reporter in question, would be considered an honest and reliable source, before this hoax...
I believe the news stories should have noted much more clearly that it was an "unconfirmed report" rather than reporting it so matter-of-fact, but that point isn't a major one.
doesn't compiling code with Intel's cc result in significantly better binaries than any flag you can throw at gcc??
Depends on the code. With things that have been highly optimized for speed already, such as xmame, mplayer, etc., icc may churn out slow or (often) even corrupt code.
With ICC, or with gcc using aggressive cflags (ie. -O3), I'd do some very extensive testing to make sure numbers aren't getting swapped somewhere in the process. Significantly better compiler performance often comes at the cost of opmitizing out important pieces of code.
ICC is at a huge disadvantage just due to GCC being so very easily available. Coders for CPU-intensive programs do some tricks to opmitimize for gcc, or re-write in assembly things GCC can't make fast enough... ICC doesn't have anything like that.
So, basically it's named after an in-joke about a software package that everyone forgot about 20 years ago. That's a great reason to keep it! Go Go OSS Marketing.
You're right! Successful products like "Mozilla" "GIMP" "Linux" et al. don't name their software that way!
WE ran a DVD from a Sony DVD player that was up-converting everything to 1080 lines of resolution, and it looked as good, if not better than 35mm...
You must have had unbelievably crappy projectors and film, for 480p material to look anywhere near as good. Or, perhaps you're talking about a theatre with very tiny screens...
So anyway, we now show independent filmmaker's films, and DVD trailers - and an occasional a public domain film - and NO ONE had every questioned the quality.
Well, either they expect low quality from independent films, your theatre screens are tiny, or you're cheap enough that nobody expects much quality for their money...
That's great, you should make a standard form response out of that...
Not just communications, but any over-hyped product. Reading it, I was immediately reminded of the unbelivable hype about the Itanium, which caused companies like Compaq, HP, SGI, etc., to hitch their company to a sinking ship (pardon the "Itanic" pun).
(I only watch the network channels and a handful of basic cable channels, so I'm sure there's plenty else on that I don't know about).
Don't be so sure. Thanks to my DVR, I actually have a detailed record of what I watch... I was quite surprised to discover that something like 90%+ of what I watch is on OTA channels.
If I could get The Daily Show/Colbert Report shows, and History/National Geographic channels, I'd cancel my cable subscription as soon as I could install a (very good) antenna, and buy an HDTV reciever.
It's only been about the past 2 years or so that things have been so bad. Discovery and TLC, in particular, used-to have extremely interesting programs. The rise of the unscripted "reality" shows like American Choppers and Trading Spaces turned 99% of cable programming into an ultra-low-budget crap-fest. Sci-Fi channel had stuff worth watching most of the time, too, before the monster-of-the-day movies. And on and on it goes. Plus, OTA channels are now the only place you can watch shows without MASSIVE distractions, like 1/3rd of the screen being covered for several minutes with pop-up ads for other shows, sound effects designed to distract you, etc.
I'm very much on the verge of canceling my subscriptions, and I can't imaging how other people can justify spending so much money on so much crap.
Actually the Sun won't go nova, it isn't the type of stars that do that.
Considering the limited information they have to work with, and the fact that scientists' theories change daily, I'd much rather not bet my life on that.
Instead it will have a prolonged death, allowing us plenty of time to see the warning signs (and they haven't started just yet) and either die out or skip to the closest star system.
However, the first warning sign will be the Sun turning into a red giant large enough that it completely consumes the Earth and Mars, and causing all kinds of catastrophic changes, quite probably making the entire solar system incapable of supporting any life...
I'll admit that the majority of TV isn't worth watching, but I'd bet that was always the case, or at least has been as long as we've had hundreds of cable channels.
"As we've had hundreds of cable channels"? So, basically, you're limiting this to, oh, the past 5 years or so?
Cable TV has been around much longer, but until digital broadcasting in the last few years, you couldn't get more than 100 channels.
Sure, if you spend five hours a day channel surfing, you may not be able to keep yourself entertained, but that's your own fault. Watch the good stuff, and do something else with the rest of your free time.
1000 channels, for at least $50 per month, and you should only expect to get a total of 4 hours of interesting content per day? That's not just setting the bar low, that's having NO expectations at all. Who, in their right mind, would consider that a good deal?
Few power supplies much better than 80% efficiency, so with a 1KW PSU you can expect 800 W that is usable.
No, NO, NO, NO, NO! It doesn't matter if you have a 10% effecient power supply, or a 100% effecient power supply. A 1000WATT power supply will OUTPUT 1000WATTS. The difference in effeciency is how much INPUT power it will need to do that, and how much waste heat it will produce in the process.
Power supplies are not, and have never been, rated by their INPUT. That would be just stupid, as it would seriously penalize those companies that make more energy-effecient units.
What's more, most server rooms have a power backup unit, which converts from AC to DC and back to AC again, just so that the computers can convert it back to DC. This is terribly inefficient just in terms of electricity, and it also creates a whole lot of heat, just so that we can air condition these rooms with huge air conditioners!
That's just completely, totally, untrue. Converting from AC to DC and back causes nominal losses.
It's the conversion from 120v to 12v, then up to 120v again that is the real problem, and that could be easily solved if a company like APC would just create a product that uses higher-voltage banks of batteries.
In short, it's been discussed again and again, and DC barely has any advantage at all. With a few switching power supplies getting to be 80%+ effecient (http://www.80plus.org/), their losses (including the UPSes converters/inverters) are lower than the line losses you'd get with high-amp DC distribution, not to mention how much more dangerous high-amp DC is to work with.
There are other practical problems with DC as well. Go lift the hood of your car, and take a look at the battery terminals...!
Supermicro is generally pretty good but packing a kilowatt of consumption into a 1U package is about as smart as running your home PC in the oven set on bake.
A kilowatt in a 1U package is generally called a "Deluxe George Foreman Grill".
If you pack the front and rear panels with several high-speed ear-piercing fans, you could disperse that kind of heat. You'll need to wear hearing protection when you go into your server room, but it's certainly possible.
Still, these are the kinds of absolutely ridiculous solutions you get when co-hosting companies all decide to charge an arm and a leg because of "size" rather than making "wattage" the most important factor.
But let's assume that most people are happy to go out and but a new TV as well as a new DVD player.
No, let's not assume that. You're jumping to the conclusion that EVERYONE has a very old HDTV, before HDCP came around, which I'm sure isn't true. The "early adopters" are getting screwed in the deal, I must admit, but it's not everybody. My (first and only) HDTV has HDMI input, and will work just fine. No need to "go out and buy a new TV" for the large majority of people. Besides, HDTV isn't exactly widely adopted as-is. The people that have yet to buy an HDTV, when they do, will certainly find that they all have HDMI inputs.
If you make a point of looking for the detail, and doing direct comparisons then yes you probably will notice the difference. But by the time you are five minutes into watching a film (rather than just measuring specs) you are unlikely to notice any more, unless you've got a big display,
That's absolutely moronic. You're clearly showing your ignorance, and that you've never even SEEN an HDTV picture. A 6X improvent is not small at all. It's not something you have to look for. The jump from VHS to DVD was only a 2-3X improvement, while the jump from DVD to HDTV is a 6X improvement.
DVD is already at the point of diminishing returns for small to medium sized screens.
No, it's certainly not. You clearly just made that up on the spot (or you heard it from some other idiot posting to a forum somewhere). Of course, feel free to point me to whatever research papers you can find that talk about diminishing returns in video resolution, such that a 6X improvement on, say, a 27" screen wouldn't be noticable. (Hint: You won't find any)
Scratch proof disks. Scratch proof coatings can be used on normal DVDs just as easily as Blu-ray disks. I've never had a problem with scratched DVDs anyway, but this is not a differentiator.
CAN BE used on DVDs, but WILL BE used on Blu-ray discs. That's a world of difference there.
This is a huge difference to a large number of people. Anyone with children, anyone who rents DVDs, Netflix/Blockbuster, etc.
More audio tracks. Again, how many do you want? You typically already get the film in multiple languages, plus several commentaries.
Usually English is the only audio track with 5.1 sound, the rest (1 or 2) are typically stereo or even mono. Besides that, this would make it far more practical to print a single disc for distribution throughout the world. Include every available language track on each disc, and you're set.
Personally, I think it's pretty difficult to find a DVD in your native language, unless you speak english. Some discs may include English and Spanish, while others include English and French, etc. The pairings seem rather arbitrary, and greatly reduce the usefulness of the feature, all around.
Higher quality audio. Technically true, but who's going to notice? CDs are technically better than MP3s, but that hasn't caused MP3s to flop, because it's very hard for most people to tell the difference.
No, it's hard for anybody to tell, while they're listening through ear-buds, on the subway... In a nice quiet home-theatre room, anybody can tell the difference between low-bitrate MP3s and CDs. With very expensive surround-sound recievers and speaker systems, you can bet many people will be able to tell the difference.
5. More advanced menu system. Which makes the film more enjoyable how? I thought the point of watching a film was to watch the film - not to play with the menu system. 6. Interactive features. I thought you wanted to watch a film, not play a game?
No, we aren't talking about FILM here, we are talking about Blu-ray/HD-DVD. If you wanted to specifically talk about only the advantages specific to watching FILMS, y
Yes you did say "computer" once, but you repeatedly imply stand-alone DVD players. You don't acctually believe a Blu-ray-ROM for your PC will cost $600 do you?
I actually use my computer to view DVDs thankyouverymuch.
So do I. I've had a DVR system set up for around 4 years now, playing DVDs, recorded TV programs, and anything else I download. Copying, re-encoding, and burning all of the above to various formats. Doing this all from a remote, and displaying on a TV screen.
With an HD solution that fit on a DVD I'd be quite happy.
I'd have to say that the majority of computers that are in-use are utterly incapable of decoding 1080 VP5 video, and displaying it in realtime.
You'd really want at LEAST a 3GHz P4 (or 3000 Athlon) with NOTHING ELSE running at the same time. Windows, in particular, is a real dog on video, and I doubt even that hardware would be sufficient.
Shame about the lawsuits, seems like the EVD could have been a useful format.
Umm, no. The lawsuit was long after EVD had failed miserably, it had nothing to do with it. If EVD had sprung-up 5 years ago, when it was first announced, it could have been very useful, and gained some market. Since it's been vaporware for so long, even with the best design, it's got about 0 chance of going anywhere.
But Intel has had them beat in one area and probably will for a very long time: production capacity. Intel's fabs can crank out processors in a day that matches AMD's production in a year (exaggeration, but run with it). There is NO way that AMD could meet the demands of the business world in sheer scale of orders.
Completely untrue, and I can't imagine how this complete bullshit got started.
Even with AMD taking more and more business away from Intel, it's still Intel that has been having real problems making enough chips. Particularly chipsets, which they had a serious shortage of, and then EOLed that line early to help hide the shortfall, and basically gave up that port of the business to VIA/SIS.
AMD has been launching new fabs, has excess capacity, and has contracts with 3rd party manufacturers to produce cores in the event AMD eventually can't meet the demand (ie. if Intel closes up shop one night, like in your insane senario there).
Obviously AMD couldn't meet the demand, overnight, but the idea that Intel is making VASTLY more CPUs than AMD is quite simply wrong. The idea that Intel has fab capacity to burn is not only wrong, but it actually seems to be the exact opposite of reality, with AMD having a lot of capacity to burn, and Intel struggling, recently, to keep up with demand.
If Intel decided to close-up shop tomorrow, the federal government would step-in, preventing that from happening, and AMD would spare no expense, building a dozen new fabs in the following 6 months to meet the new demand.
No you can't, smartass, because Xvid is open-source under a GNU GPL license. That means you couldn't wrap the format in any DRM format which restricts its open-source nature.
Congratulations, that's the stupidest thing I've heard today.
DRM doesn't need to be included with the Xvid codec, so the GPL doesn't have anything to do with it at all. Even if that weren't the case, Xvid files can be played back with any MPEG-4 codec, and they certainly aren't all GPL'd.
Xvid files can be put on any storage device/media!
So can H.264 files.
Furthermore, they have a greater reaching compatibility: you can play them on Linux, Mac, Windows,
You can do that with H.264 as well.
and many DVD players.
Okay, the (tiny number of) MPEG-4 DVD players are a tiny advantage Xvid has, but that's only for very strictly encoded MPEG-4 files, and certainly doesn't support any videos at HD resolutions.
If a device doesn't support your Xvid file, there are free tools (mencoder) available that let you re-encode it into almost any other format and codec.
Also true for H.264.
The unfortunate part is that you can't buy these superior Xvid files, because none of the companies that sell TV shows are willing to sell such a great product.
There's nothing "superior" about Xvid files over standard DVDs. MPEG-4 has it's advantages over MPEG-2 video, and they have a few nasty disadvantages, too.
Luckily, "torrent sites" have filled the gap in the market.
P2P files are encoded in whatever format the individual happened to like. They might be in Xvid, or WMV9, or H.264, or MPEG-2, etc.
I think Sony's Playstation team is deliberately holding up the PS3 launch because they aren't at all sure Blu-ray will win.
Nonsense. They can just up and change major components like this on a whim.
PS3 will certainly die if it has a completely unwanted component that makes up for a third of its cost.
Nonsense. The PS3 isn't a home multimedia center. Even if nobody buys a single Blu-ray movie, you'll still see tons of blu-ray PS3 games.
Look at the PS1, Saturn, Sega CD, etc., which had standard CD-ROM, but couldn't even be used to play VCDs, SVCDs, etc. Look at something like the Dreamcast which used Yamaha's weird 1GB CDs. Hell, look at any of the consoles made before discs. Your videogame system doesn't have to play all your movies to be successful. It's a possible additional source of sales, but that's all.
1. Higher resolution (which hardly anyone will even notice - certainly not the majority of people who don't have huge displays).
Even with the smallest 27" HDTVs, you'll easily notice the difference between 480i (DVDs) and 1080 (HDTV). It's 6X the resolution!
2. Erm, that's it really.
Congratulations. You've managed to prove you have no idea what you're talking about. You didn't bother to list scratch-proof Blu-ray discs, higher capacity meaning more "extra" features, more audio tracks, higher quality (lossless) audio, far, far more advanced menu system, interactive features, etc.
Unless the DRM is removed (which isn't likely), then the only interest I have in this technology is watching it fail as a film format,
Yes, I'm sure you're boycotting DVDs as well, since they contain DRM...
We have the technology to build drives that support both, but this will result in more expensive devices, especially given that both formats require different physical lasers.
What have you been smoking? Blu-ray units are already going to have two lasers to support Blu-ray discs and still be backwards compatible with DVDs/CDs. Since people aren't going to give up backwards compatibility easily, I wouldn't call that "more expensive". You can expect all single-format blu-ray drives will already have them.
and it will probably take a lot longer for drives to drop to the magic price point where Joe Sixpack will buy one, if they have to include support for two physical formats.
No, actually it will take LESS TIME, since the two formats will be forced to compete. Having a single format, lacking all competition, would result in higher prices for much longer periods of time.
The format war will fizzle -- but wouldn't it be better for everyone, including device manufacturers, if we skipped the nonsense this time?
It's better that we have two competitors on a level playing field. They are actually forced to compete on features and price, rather than fiat... Maybe one company will make their DRM more easily bypassed to spur consumer adoption.
Dual format will be better for the studios, as then they can chose which disc format has better features and lower costs, and can do so on a movie by movie basis if they like.
Device manufacturers, that's harder to say. This could be better for them, or it could be worse for them. Two HD formats is certainly better than none, though, and stalling the process until a signal standard is available would be very bad. Also, device manufacturers could benefit from the competition between the two, lowering license fees, adding features, etc.
Still, it might slow adoption, or it might not. Nobody can really be entirely sure.
Cool I thought, then after poking around the disk realized it was some windows media format that I can't play on my mac. But isn't the h268 codec good enough for hi-def movie on regular dvd?
You couldn't play them even if you had an x86 box with the WMV3 (aka WMV9/VC-1) codecs. The only way to strip the DRM is by using a Windows system which can authorize playback.
If you actually want to watch it, I suggest installing the qemu emulator, and Windows 98. It will be slow, but you can authorize playing the videos, then strip the DRM to get standard WMV3 files (you'll have to fix the aspect yourself), and then use a program such as MPlayer/Mencoder for Windows to use the binary DLLs in the emulator to re-encode the WMV3 to something standard, such as MPEG-2. It will take a very long time, of course, but you can just let it run overnight, and watch your video the next day.
Even if it was H.264, you can bet it would have DRM that would stop you from using it, anyhow... And, of course, it's always possible to fit high-res video on a tiny medium, it will just look like crap. So, even though you can fit 1080 on a DVD, you'll get much better video quality on a medium with more storage space.
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With resource sharing like this, it becomes far, far more cost-effective to use more reliable components. You can buy a high-end hot-swap power supply, instead of 8 individual ones, thereby making it more reliable, not less. Same thing goes for hard drives (RAID), RAM (ECC), etc.
It's comparable to the current situation with printers... You could have a high-end document center shared by several hundred people, or each person could have a crappy $50 inkjet printer on their desk. Sure, you're consolidating risk as well, but then you're getting far more reliable components (less risk) for less money, and it's a lot easier to maintain/service those consolidated components as well.
Generally, resource-sharing works. Those 8 won't all being doing CPU-intensive operations at the same time, so they're going to get much more than 1/8th of the CPU-time when they need it. With individual PCs, 7 of them could be mostly or completely idle, while the 8th is taking a very long time with a CPU-intensive operation... The same thing goes for disk space, RAM, etc.
You'll see power-savings as well, since you won't have those 7 idle computers (and disks, and RAM, and power supplies) using up so much power while they're doing practically nothing.
But mainly, you get real administration savings. Less things to go wrong, far, far fewer machines to maintain/patch/upgrade/etc.
I expect the storm of interrupts would bring this system of yours to a crawl long before you got even a fraction of that throughput.
Why wait for VMWare? QEMU is open source, and the performance feels about the same. Actually, VMware is pretty slow, too, so there's still plenty of reason for getting Windows running natively, and having QEMU emulating an x86 system on PPC would probably be nearly as fast (slow?).
It would probably be pretty trivial to start using it on OSX right now through OSX's x11 server. In fact, I see it's in FINK CVS already.
Windows on non-x86 systems won't run Win32 binaries. So, this is very, very, very, different.
There are many things you can't verify 100%. One of those are covert/secret government actions. You can call them up and ask, but they'll deny it either way, so you haven't accomplished anything. The reporter in question, would be considered an honest and reliable source, before this hoax...
I believe the news stories should have noted much more clearly that it was an "unconfirmed report" rather than reporting it so matter-of-fact, but that point isn't a major one.
Depends on the code. With things that have been highly optimized for speed already, such as xmame, mplayer, etc., icc may churn out slow or (often) even corrupt code.
With ICC, or with gcc using aggressive cflags (ie. -O3), I'd do some very extensive testing to make sure numbers aren't getting swapped somewhere in the process. Significantly better compiler performance often comes at the cost of opmitizing out important pieces of code.
ICC is at a huge disadvantage just due to GCC being so very easily available. Coders for CPU-intensive programs do some tricks to opmitimize for gcc, or re-write in assembly things GCC can't make fast enough... ICC doesn't have anything like that.
You're right! Successful products like "Mozilla" "GIMP" "Linux" et al. don't name their software that way!
You must have had unbelievably crappy projectors and film, for 480p material to look anywhere near as good. Or, perhaps you're talking about a theatre with very tiny screens...
Well, either they expect low quality from independent films, your theatre screens are tiny, or you're cheap enough that nobody expects much quality for their money...
That's great, you should make a standard form response out of that...
Not just communications, but any over-hyped product. Reading it, I was immediately reminded of the unbelivable hype about the Itanium, which caused companies like Compaq, HP, SGI, etc., to hitch their company to a sinking ship (pardon the "Itanic" pun).
Don't be so sure. Thanks to my DVR, I actually have a detailed record of what I watch... I was quite surprised to discover that something like 90%+ of what I watch is on OTA channels.
If I could get The Daily Show/Colbert Report shows, and History/National Geographic channels, I'd cancel my cable subscription as soon as I could install a (very good) antenna, and buy an HDTV reciever.
It's only been about the past 2 years or so that things have been so bad. Discovery and TLC, in particular, used-to have extremely interesting programs. The rise of the unscripted "reality" shows like American Choppers and Trading Spaces turned 99% of cable programming into an ultra-low-budget crap-fest. Sci-Fi channel had stuff worth watching most of the time, too, before the monster-of-the-day movies. And on and on it goes. Plus, OTA channels are now the only place you can watch shows without MASSIVE distractions, like 1/3rd of the screen being covered for several minutes with pop-up ads for other shows, sound effects designed to distract you, etc.
I'm very much on the verge of canceling my subscriptions, and I can't imaging how other people can justify spending so much money on so much crap.
Considering the limited information they have to work with, and the fact that scientists' theories change daily, I'd much rather not bet my life on that.
However, the first warning sign will be the Sun turning into a red giant large enough that it completely consumes the Earth and Mars, and causing all kinds of catastrophic changes, quite probably making the entire solar system incapable of supporting any life...
"As we've had hundreds of cable channels"? So, basically, you're limiting this to, oh, the past 5 years or so?
Cable TV has been around much longer, but until digital broadcasting in the last few years, you couldn't get more than 100 channels.
1000 channels, for at least $50 per month, and you should only expect to get a total of 4 hours of interesting content per day? That's not just setting the bar low, that's having NO expectations at all. Who, in their right mind, would consider that a good deal?
Umm, actually there's a lot we could do about that, if we even tried to do so.
Unless the Sun goes supernova soon... Then humanity anywhere in the solar system will go extinct.
No, NO, NO, NO, NO! It doesn't matter if you have a 10% effecient power supply, or a 100% effecient power supply. A 1000WATT power supply will OUTPUT 1000WATTS. The difference in effeciency is how much INPUT power it will need to do that, and how much waste heat it will produce in the process.
Power supplies are not, and have never been, rated by their INPUT. That would be just stupid, as it would seriously penalize those companies that make more energy-effecient units.
That's just completely, totally, untrue. Converting from AC to DC and back causes nominal losses.
It's the conversion from 120v to 12v, then up to 120v again that is the real problem, and that could be easily solved if a company like APC would just create a product that uses higher-voltage banks of batteries.
In short, it's been discussed again and again, and DC barely has any advantage at all. With a few switching power supplies getting to be 80%+ effecient (http://www.80plus.org/), their losses (including the UPSes converters/inverters) are lower than the line losses you'd get with high-amp DC distribution, not to mention how much more dangerous high-amp DC is to work with.
There are other practical problems with DC as well. Go lift the hood of your car, and take a look at the battery terminals...!
A kilowatt in a 1U package is generally called a "Deluxe George Foreman Grill".
If you pack the front and rear panels with several high-speed ear-piercing fans, you could disperse that kind of heat. You'll need to wear hearing protection when you go into your server room, but it's certainly possible.
Still, these are the kinds of absolutely ridiculous solutions you get when co-hosting companies all decide to charge an arm and a leg because of "size" rather than making "wattage" the most important factor.
No, let's not assume that. You're jumping to the conclusion that EVERYONE has a very old HDTV, before HDCP came around, which I'm sure isn't true. The "early adopters" are getting screwed in the deal, I must admit, but it's not everybody. My (first and only) HDTV has HDMI input, and will work just fine. No need to "go out and buy a new TV" for the large majority of people. Besides, HDTV isn't exactly widely adopted as-is. The people that have yet to buy an HDTV, when they do, will certainly find that they all have HDMI inputs.
That's absolutely moronic. You're clearly showing your ignorance, and that you've never even SEEN an HDTV picture. A 6X improvent is not small at all. It's not something you have to look for. The jump from VHS to DVD was only a 2-3X improvement, while the jump from DVD to HDTV is a 6X improvement.
No, it's certainly not. You clearly just made that up on the spot (or you heard it from some other idiot posting to a forum somewhere). Of course, feel free to point me to whatever research papers you can find that talk about diminishing returns in video resolution, such that a 6X improvement on, say, a 27" screen wouldn't be noticable. (Hint: You won't find any)
CAN BE used on DVDs, but WILL BE used on Blu-ray discs. That's a world of difference there.
This is a huge difference to a large number of people. Anyone with children, anyone who rents DVDs, Netflix/Blockbuster, etc.
Usually English is the only audio track with 5.1 sound, the rest (1 or 2) are typically stereo or even mono. Besides that, this would make it far more practical to print a single disc for distribution throughout the world. Include every available language track on each disc, and you're set.
Personally, I think it's pretty difficult to find a DVD in your native language, unless you speak english. Some discs may include English and Spanish, while others include English and French, etc. The pairings seem rather arbitrary, and greatly reduce the usefulness of the feature, all around.
No, it's hard for anybody to tell, while they're listening through ear-buds, on the subway... In a nice quiet home-theatre room, anybody can tell the difference between low-bitrate MP3s and CDs. With very expensive surround-sound recievers and speaker systems, you can bet many people will be able to tell the difference.
No, we aren't talking about FILM here, we are talking about Blu-ray/HD-DVD. If you wanted to specifically talk about only the advantages specific to watching FILMS, y
Yes you did say "computer" once, but you repeatedly imply stand-alone DVD players. You don't acctually believe a Blu-ray-ROM for your PC will cost $600 do you?
So do I. I've had a DVR system set up for around 4 years now, playing DVDs, recorded TV programs, and anything else I download. Copying, re-encoding, and burning all of the above to various formats. Doing this all from a remote, and displaying on a TV screen.
I'd have to say that the majority of computers that are in-use are utterly incapable of decoding 1080 VP5 video, and displaying it in realtime.
You'd really want at LEAST a 3GHz P4 (or 3000 Athlon) with NOTHING ELSE running at the same time. Windows, in particular, is a real dog on video, and I doubt even that hardware would be sufficient.
Umm, no. The lawsuit was long after EVD had failed miserably, it had nothing to do with it. If EVD had sprung-up 5 years ago, when it was first announced, it could have been very useful, and gained some market. Since it's been vaporware for so long, even with the best design, it's got about 0 chance of going anywhere.
Completely untrue, and I can't imagine how this complete bullshit got started.
Even with AMD taking more and more business away from Intel, it's still Intel that has been having real problems making enough chips. Particularly chipsets, which they had a serious shortage of, and then EOLed that line early to help hide the shortfall, and basically gave up that port of the business to VIA/SIS.
AMD has been launching new fabs, has excess capacity, and has contracts with 3rd party manufacturers to produce cores in the event AMD eventually can't meet the demand (ie. if Intel closes up shop one night, like in your insane senario there).
Obviously AMD couldn't meet the demand, overnight, but the idea that Intel is making VASTLY more CPUs than AMD is quite simply wrong. The idea that Intel has fab capacity to burn is not only wrong, but it actually seems to be the exact opposite of reality, with AMD having a lot of capacity to burn, and Intel struggling, recently, to keep up with demand.
If Intel decided to close-up shop tomorrow, the federal government would step-in, preventing that from happening, and AMD would spare no expense, building a dozen new fabs in the following 6 months to meet the new demand.
Congratulations, that's the stupidest thing I've heard today.
DRM doesn't need to be included with the Xvid codec, so the GPL doesn't have anything to do with it at all. Even if that weren't the case, Xvid files can be played back with any MPEG-4 codec, and they certainly aren't all GPL'd.
So can H.264 files.
You can do that with H.264 as well.
Okay, the (tiny number of) MPEG-4 DVD players are a tiny advantage Xvid has, but that's only for very strictly encoded MPEG-4 files, and certainly doesn't support any videos at HD resolutions.
Also true for H.264.
There's nothing "superior" about Xvid files over standard DVDs. MPEG-4 has it's advantages over MPEG-2 video, and they have a few nasty disadvantages, too.
P2P files are encoded in whatever format the individual happened to like. They might be in Xvid, or WMV9, or H.264, or MPEG-2, etc.
Nonsense. They can just up and change major components like this on a whim.
Nonsense. The PS3 isn't a home multimedia center. Even if nobody buys a single Blu-ray movie, you'll still see tons of blu-ray PS3 games.
Look at the PS1, Saturn, Sega CD, etc., which had standard CD-ROM, but couldn't even be used to play VCDs, SVCDs, etc. Look at something like the Dreamcast which used Yamaha's weird 1GB CDs. Hell, look at any of the consoles made before discs. Your videogame system doesn't have to play all your movies to be successful. It's a possible additional source of sales, but that's all.
Even with the smallest 27" HDTVs, you'll easily notice the difference between 480i (DVDs) and 1080 (HDTV). It's 6X the resolution!
Congratulations. You've managed to prove you have no idea what you're talking about. You didn't bother to list scratch-proof Blu-ray discs, higher capacity meaning more "extra" features, more audio tracks, higher quality (lossless) audio, far, far more advanced menu system, interactive features, etc.
Yes, I'm sure you're boycotting DVDs as well, since they contain DRM...
What have you been smoking? Blu-ray units are already going to have two lasers to support Blu-ray discs and still be backwards compatible with DVDs/CDs. Since people aren't going to give up backwards compatibility easily, I wouldn't call that "more expensive". You can expect all single-format blu-ray drives will already have them.
No, actually it will take LESS TIME, since the two formats will be forced to compete. Having a single format, lacking all competition, would result in higher prices for much longer periods of time.
It's better that we have two competitors on a level playing field. They are actually forced to compete on features and price, rather than fiat... Maybe one company will make their DRM more easily bypassed to spur consumer adoption.
Dual format will be better for the studios, as then they can chose which disc format has better features and lower costs, and can do so on a movie by movie basis if they like.
Device manufacturers, that's harder to say. This could be better for them, or it could be worse for them. Two HD formats is certainly better than none, though, and stalling the process until a signal standard is available would be very bad. Also, device manufacturers could benefit from the competition between the two, lowering license fees, adding features, etc.
Still, it might slow adoption, or it might not. Nobody can really be entirely sure.
You couldn't play them even if you had an x86 box with the WMV3 (aka WMV9/VC-1) codecs. The only way to strip the DRM is by using a Windows system which can authorize playback.
If you actually want to watch it, I suggest installing the qemu emulator, and Windows 98. It will be slow, but you can authorize playing the videos, then strip the DRM to get standard WMV3 files (you'll have to fix the aspect yourself), and then use a program such as MPlayer/Mencoder for Windows to use the binary DLLs in the emulator to re-encode the WMV3 to something standard, such as MPEG-2. It will take a very long time, of course, but you can just let it run overnight, and watch your video the next day.
Even if it was H.264, you can bet it would have DRM that would stop you from using it, anyhow... And, of course, it's always possible to fit high-res video on a tiny medium, it will just look like crap. So, even though you can fit 1080 on a DVD, you'll get much better video quality on a medium with more storage space.