Actually, a format called EVD already exists in China which does just that, but we'll never see it over here.
EVD was originally going to be VP5 video, which would have made it competitive with the WMVHD DVDs we currently see. Instead, lawsuits happened, and that article states their using MPEG-2 video. Well, encoding MPEG-2 to 1080 on a DVD-9, is going to take massive filtering, and result in a really muddy and detail-less picture. So, you can basically consider it the VCD of HD movies...
Good going HD-DVD and Blu Ray for not jumping on THAT, sheesh - that would be so bad for business if people could get higher quality movies without having to also buy another $600 player!
That's absolutely moronic. Your $40 DVD player couldn't output 1080 material to save it's life. No matter what disc format you use, you're simply going to need to buy a new $500 player that can decode 6X larger video, decode more advanced video/audio codecs, output to 1080, etc. The cost of the players would only be very slightly less if you left out the blue laser, and for that little bit of money, you lose a lot of potential space on newer movies. Remember, both HD-DVD and Blu-ray can play HD movies on DVD-9s, they just aren't limited to only playing that.
VP3 was a pretty advanced codec in 2001 when On2 relinquished their patents on it... Now, after 5 years of Xiph.org nonsense, the quality hasn't improved one bit, the performance hasn't improved any, etc.
VP3 (aka Theora) has several advantages over MPEG-4, and several disadvantages as well. If some of the very intelligent people in the open source world started hacking on it right now, it could become competitive with H.264 in a few months, but don't hold your breath. Xiph has a talent for being painfully slow, and they've managed to entirely waste away the great potential it had. Theora has become the new "HURD"; all hype, no reality.
Xiph should really drop Theora all-together (hoping somebody else picks it up, or that Dirac/Snow take it's place), and perhaps focus on all the unrealized promises of Vorbis, like bitrate peeling, joint encoding with more than 2 channels, improving the acoustic model to fix some common distortions, etc. It's like they get lots of fantasy projects started, and finish nothing... It's a miracle Vorbis got out the door, even though several years too late to actually compete with MP3, AAC, AC3, DTS, etc.
and people around here seem to have a pretty good idea of what they want (no DRM, as high-definition as possible).
Knowing what you want is very, very easy. Balancing what you want, with what is practical in hardware is the difficult part. Take a look at DVD players...
It would have been a big advantage if DVD video could be encoded with any arbitrary aspect, but they decided the scaler would be too expensive, and stuck with only 16:9 and 4:3 instead, hence the black bars on just about every movie. Difficult decisions like that are what make a standard practical or impractical, make the hardware incredibly expensive, or keep costs down...
Hmmm, if the format war drags out too long it will be a moot point.
Yes, but in this case, too long==20 years, so it's a pretty ridiculous claim.
When I can easily rent a movie and download it to my TiVo in just a few minutes, I won't care about DVD formats at all.
Yes, well, at the current speeds, you're looking at a couple days of maxing-out a high-speed connection to get a single 1080 movie. Besides, what are you going to store that movie on once you get it? Are you going to keep deleting movies, are you going to spend $30 (per movie) on hard drives to store each movie, or are you going to be buying a Blu-ray burner and (much cheaper) discs?
So the Sony and Toshiba camps would be smart to settle their differences quickly before the consumer moves on.
If you need for cable TV is really limited to two or three shows you should ave gotten rid of it by now.
Not quite. I'm in a bad area, where the analog signal from OTA broadcasters out of L.A. are so weak it's practically unwatchable. It's only with the switch to digital/HDTV, and possibly a damn good antenna, that cable TV won't be necessary for me.
If you can't find them, keep in mind a DVD of National Geographic Programs can be bought for what $24.95 at the most? Less than you'd pay for a month of cable.
It's not that I only watch a show or two, it's that I only watch 2 or 3 cable channels... However, I do watch those 2 or 3 quite a lot, which is why the alternatives haven't worked, just yet. The "Akimbo" service looks like it might work really well, but they are really vague with details on their website, so I'm not too confident about them.
Besides, those $25 National Geo DVDs don't contain several programs, they each contain one ~45 minute program, which makes them a very serious rip-off.
Gee, so instead of a spare hard drive, and a $99 copy of Windows, I only need to spend $1,000 on a new Mac. That's a big improvement there.
I'm sorry Apple didn't immediately cater to your whim as soon as they launched their new service.
Nice trolling there. I didn't say they should be doing that right now, or even that they should do that at all, did I?
I don't think Apple will cater to the DRM-hating linux users for a while. In fact I don't think anyone will cater to the DRM-hating linux users.
Gee, I can only think of one, single, gigantic problem with that... These are shows that are currently widely available without any kind of DRM at all. I have a cheap capture card, and I record these shows daily, as well as many others. Just tell me why there should be addition restrictions placed on me, because I'm PAYING EXTRA to download them from Apple? If I wanted to do anything nefarious with them, the copies I'm currently making are FAR higher quality than what you can get from iTunes anyhow.
It's beyond ridiculous to put any DRM on TV shows.
That would be great, if I didn't need Windows to get and play those DRM-encumbered videos. I'd also like a few History Channel and National Geographic programs on occasion. If I got that, I'd cancel my cable TV, and put up a (BIG!) HDTV antenna...
I've looked at my viewing habits very closely, and the Daily Show/Colbert Report are the only important things I watch that aren't available OTA, for free.
I really believe HDTV stands a good chance of killing off (or at least seriously wounding) cable/satellite companies.
Let's see. What possible advantage could there be in not having 4 completely unnecessary context switches, assorted interrupts and an application scheduler call for EVERY packet that traverses the system... Hmmmmm. Tricky. Let me know when you've worked it out.
If you've got some actual benchmarks to show that it is slow, rather than just baselessly implying things, point me there.
Well, in the case of 240v 50Hz, it is better - at least I can power an electric kettle off a normal wall socket without having to wait forever for it to boil.
You can on 120V as well (and 50/60Hz doesn't change anything). In fact George Foreman-branded electric grills have been quite popular for some time.
The voltage really doesn't matter, it's voltage times current. I don't know what current your typical wall outlets can support, but 20 amps is pretty standard in the USA, and there are very, very few items that need more power than that.
Some washing machines and dryers run off of 240v, but that's not actually very common. Mine run off of 120v and just have a standard plug. Besides, getting 240v for the few things that need it isn't difficult, you just run two 120v lines, instead of one.
Besides, the issue isn't quite so simple. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. Line losses, potential for shocks, arcing, fire hazards, etc.
Besides, that's not really the point. The point is that people so often like to complain that the US is going for their own (usually technically superior) systems, when it's commonly Europe that goes out of their way to cause these incompatibilities in the first place by NOT adopting the earlier US standards.
I just decided since that this was/. and not a moderated publication that I wasn't going to run around looking for the exact reference.
In other words, you have no source for that incredibly unbelivable claim... That sure lends credibility to your argument.
All the critical acclaim this year's movies kind of nullifies your argument.
Not at all. Critics are no measure of anything, except themselves. Critical opinions have never been in-line with popular opinions.
So where are all those box office dollars coming from?
What a highly intelligent argument... No, I didn't even suggest that EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE had stopped going to movies. There has been a VAST decline in theatre profits over the past couple years, and you can't even pretend it doesn't exist.
Way to read into my post something that isn't there. I never said that the "horrible sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and comic-book movies" aren't why people are going to the movies.
Sure you did, in fact, you almost specifically said that's what they WANT:
there is little evidence that the movie-going masses would have preference for "more imaginative" movies.
Basically they want special effects. And not just any special effects, modern special effects.
they expect repetition. Repetition in effects, in plot, in characters. This is why sequels have been and are so popular.
Audiences no longer go to movies to see something different every time. They want comfort food.
Yes, "people aren't going to movies nearly as much" but when they do, they go see "horrible sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and comic-book movies" and as long as they do, Hollywood will keep putting them out.
Not true at all. There have been a few very successfull "horrible sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and comic-book movies", but most have actually been gigantic bombs.
This is basically RAID over the network. Personally, I can't see a lot of use for it... Just put the second drive in the machine, and use software RAID, rather than putting the second drive in a network server. Less network slowdown and congestion that way, not to mention CPU-time wasted packetizing, encrypting, etc.
As always, RAID (and now this) is not a backup solution.
How would you want all lead women action roles to be portrayed?
Problem 1: They shouldn't ALL be portrayed the same way. Problem 2: Why do you insist on one extreme or the other? It's not like you really have to chose between completely helpless, and invincible super-hero.
The women gets her ass kicked in the first scene and then goes back to cooking in the kitchen?
Here's a few ideas:
1. How about NOT casting a 90lbs. underwear model in the role of the super-strong female lead? 2. How about NOT having her always fight men that are 5Xs larger and obviously stronger than she is? 3. How about giving her some OTHER advantage that makes sense, rather than pretending she is just vastly stronger? 4. How about NOT making it necessary for her to do all the fighting? Plenty of movies have wimpy/nerdy characters that are still heros.
Private citizens are freaked out about both meltdowns and terrorism, so they'll lobby to have new plants built in someone else's backyard.
In ultra-dense European counties, that might be the case, but in the USA, there are large spans of hundreds of miles of empty land, where NOBODY lives.
In the southwest it's large parts of the deserts of California and Arizona. In the central areas it's the vast plains where there's nothing but grasslands, and perhaps a few farms, for hundreds of miles. In the frozen northern state, just stay away from major cities and you only have to worry about radioactive deer.
The truth is, it would be quite easy to build numerous reactors, and keep them far away from ANYONE'S backyard... They install them right next to a major city to cut down on line losses, reduce the costs of running power lines further, and have a large population of workers that don't have to travel very far. All of these can be easily handled, thereby keeping the reactors hundreds of miles away from just about anybody.
First, everyone likes to point at how Hollywood likes remakes. Well this isn't a recent phenomenon. King Kong wasn't just remade in 2005 but in 1976.
People aren't complaining that Hollywood is making a few remakes. People are complaining that remakes and sequals are 90% of what Hollywood is churning out right now. Having a remake of King Kong every 20 years isn't too bad, but having a remake of EVERY MOVIE would be horendous.
Yes, the remakes have been very, very bad. Still, even with the best possible remake, you already know the story, there are no surprises, and it just can't possibly be as good as an original story.
And that leads to the emergent behavior of movie goers: they expect repetition. Repetition in effects, in plot, in characters. This is why sequels have been and are so popular.
That's just pure bullshit. Sequels are popular because the original was good, and people expect that the sequal will be, too. Sequels are popular because they hardly need any advertisement to bring in audiences who know whether or not they would be interested in seeing it. In truth, it's not movie goers who like sequels, it's movie studios, who consider them enough of a sure-thing.
Look at something like Jurassic Park... It was a completely original story line, and it grossed more than any other movie ever had. The sequals didn't do a fraction as well.
That last one is the killer, something like only 5% of non-franchise movies recoup the costs of the other 95%.
Bah. You just pulled that out of your ass.
Folks aren't looking for plot-driven, nonstandard movies. Look at the Best Picture nominees this year: Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich. Their nominations were out over a month ago and only Brokeback has gone over 75 million.
That might have something to do with the fact that none of them are particularly good movies. We didn't have a Jurassic Park released this year, a Shawshank Redemption, or a Fight Club for that matter. The sorry state of Hollywood is the real problem.
Audiences no longer go to movies to see something different every time.
Correction: "Audiences no longer go to see movies." That's all there is to it. Hollywood turned out piece of crap after piece of crap, and now people aren't going to the theatre every few weeks, as they used-to, expecting that there will be a couple good movies they will want to see.
I find it really surprising that you think churning out hundreds of horrible sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and comic-book movies had nothing to do with the fact that people aren't going to movies nearly as much, and the public's unwillingness to take a chance on Hollywood movies anymore.
Ma Bell charged, what, a dollar a minute or something along those lines? I don't know how important it is for it to stay broken up now (keeping in mind that cable can provide internet access), but it pretty obviously brought down long distance prices back when that actually mattered a lot (no widely available email in those days).
No, the continual advance of technology brought down long-distance prices... In fact, it was the microwave communications systems, which AT&T invented, which made it possible for 3rd parties to provide long-distance service in the first place. Without that, companies like MCI would have needed to actually lay copper lines for each phone call across the entire country...
However, that's somewhat besides the point, because I was refering to local telco service... Long distance service can still be made competitive.
and a system lacking competition in this vital area is not healthy
When did we EVER have competition? Except in the biggest markets, people have never had any choice for their local telco.
The only difference between now, and when it was a monopoly, is that they go by a different name in different areas. They're still just matching each other's prices, terms, etc.
The whole idea of a telco is antiquated. Now, at least we're seeing competition to the telcos via cable and wireless providers.
It probably was just a waste to break AT&T up. What good things can you list, that have come out of it?
Haven't they done this multiple times before - say like the iOpener or WebTV?
No. Those were browser-only computers. They couldn't be used to put together documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, watch videos (let alone re-encoding). Hell, you couldn't even store anything except your bookmarks on those things.
Unlike those "web applicances" this will be a full-fledged (managed) computer, it will just be at the datacenter, instead of being in your house.
Because the hardware/software for encoding/decoding MPEG-2 is far cheaper, and the patent fees are significantly less as well. The bandwidth really shouldn't be an issue.
Also thin client is not the same as VNC or remote desktop,
It certainly is. Thin clients aren't dumb terminals. The client is only doing some basic compression/decompression. You can easily find RDP/Citrix thin clients. Unfortunately, I haven't seen VNC thin clients yet, most likely because dirt-cheap (old) hardware is being repurposed, via netbooting or a VNC client on CD/floppy.
I still don't understand WHY... Why a massive tower, instead of something fairly light and simple like a large flagpole? Or, if you're willing to wait, there are these things called TREES which get fairly high above ground.
Personally, I prefer the option of "stepping a few few to the left" to get out of the shadow of the church, and running a few wires. This is a rural area, so that shouldn't be a problem. You can do the same thing wirelessly, also.
It costs _so_ much to fight a case like this, that, even if you think you will eventually prevail, it is often cheaper to settle.
You know, insurance companies believed the same thing... Then a rash of frivilous lawsuits for a few thousand dollars (far less than it would cost to fight) happened. It ended up costing them far more than if they had fought a few of those frivilous lawsuit, and scared-off the rest of the idiots.
IMHO, you should always fight, even if you know you can't win. Take a big enough chunk out of your opponent that it scares off anyone else who has the same idea. Plus, you can try to get awarded attorneys fees, and possibly counter-sue for just a bit more cash over what it costs to defend yourself in the first place.
Also, remember that juries on cases like this are not technologists who will readily understand a complex technological argument,
That's what you have lawyers and judges for, to explain things like this to normal people.
but "peers" who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.
This phrase always makes my skin crawl. You're assuming that EVERYONE in the country will do ANYTHING to get out of jury duty. It may be a nuisance, but jury duty isn't exactly torture. Many people get paid by their employer for jury duty, so depending on what you do, it may be an improvement.
1. At least in the U.S., there just isn't a good enough broadband Internet infrastructure to handle the bandwidth required to drive a dumb terminal and provide anything near the current desktop experience with games, movies, etc.
There's more than enough bandwidth for remote desktops. Video is a slightly more difficult issue, but that could be EASILY handled by on-the-fly MPEG-2 compression at the datacenter, and a dirt-cheap MPEG-2 decoding chip in the thin clients. Games are a non-starter, but other than that, I think we're ready to go.
2. Even if point 1 wasn't an issue, it'd still be a gradual process to get people to switch to something like that,
Actually, I think you could get a very large number of people to switch right away. Offer them an "internet computer" (read thin client) for free, and only slightly higher broadband fees to cover the ISP's costs. Advertise it to the people that don't know which end of a computer is up, as something they can't possibly make a mistake on (and "low power" and "all the software you'll ever need, built-in"), and you'd have a good-sized market, almost instantly.
plus it would take time for various service providers to come up with the hardware and software infrastructure to do it, and finally there'd be a big market war.
When there's money to be made, believe me, the service providers can do it at record-breaking speeds. 99% of the software already exists, they'd just have to expand their datacenters, wire them up in a cluster for failover, reasonable back-ups, etc. I really can't see any reason they couldn't put this all together, and start signing customers within 6 months.
I know I'd never sign-up for anything like that, but I know a lot of people that would fit into this model perfectly, provide there are good terms in place, and getting copies of your own data (eg. on DVD-Rs) isn't too expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
EVD was originally going to be VP5 video, which would have made it competitive with the WMVHD DVDs we currently see. Instead, lawsuits happened, and that article states their using MPEG-2 video. Well, encoding MPEG-2 to 1080 on a DVD-9, is going to take massive filtering, and result in a really muddy and detail-less picture. So, you can basically consider it the VCD of HD movies...
That's absolutely moronic. Your $40 DVD player couldn't output 1080 material to save it's life. No matter what disc format you use, you're simply going to need to buy a new $500 player that can decode 6X larger video, decode more advanced video/audio codecs, output to 1080, etc. The cost of the players would only be very slightly less if you left out the blue laser, and for that little bit of money, you lose a lot of potential space on newer movies. Remember, both HD-DVD and Blu-ray can play HD movies on DVD-9s, they just aren't limited to only playing that.
VP3 was a pretty advanced codec in 2001 when On2 relinquished their patents on it... Now, after 5 years of Xiph.org nonsense, the quality hasn't improved one bit, the performance hasn't improved any, etc.
VP3 (aka Theora) has several advantages over MPEG-4, and several disadvantages as well. If some of the very intelligent people in the open source world started hacking on it right now, it could become competitive with H.264 in a few months, but don't hold your breath. Xiph has a talent for being painfully slow, and they've managed to entirely waste away the great potential it had. Theora has become the new "HURD"; all hype, no reality.
Xiph should really drop Theora all-together (hoping somebody else picks it up, or that Dirac/Snow take it's place), and perhaps focus on all the unrealized promises of Vorbis, like bitrate peeling, joint encoding with more than 2 channels, improving the acoustic model to fix some common distortions, etc. It's like they get lots of fantasy projects started, and finish nothing... It's a miracle Vorbis got out the door, even though several years too late to actually compete with MP3, AAC, AC3, DTS, etc.
Knowing what you want is very, very easy. Balancing what you want, with what is practical in hardware is the difficult part. Take a look at DVD players...
It would have been a big advantage if DVD video could be encoded with any arbitrary aspect, but they decided the scaler would be too expensive, and stuck with only 16:9 and 4:3 instead, hence the black bars on just about every movie. Difficult decisions like that are what make a standard practical or impractical, make the hardware incredibly expensive, or keep costs down...
Yes, but in this case, too long==20 years, so it's a pretty ridiculous claim.
Yes, well, at the current speeds, you're looking at a couple days of maxing-out a high-speed connection to get a single 1080 movie. Besides, what are you going to store that movie on once you get it? Are you going to keep deleting movies, are you going to spend $30 (per movie) on hard drives to store each movie, or are you going to be buying a Blu-ray burner and (much cheaper) discs?
Quickly==20 years
I think they'll work something out by then...
Okay, I've really looked through it now, and I'm sure I'm not interested.
With every even mildly interesting (~45min) show costing $1.99 each, I'm sure I'd end up paying more than I do for cable...
Oh well. It's too bad, it sounded like a great deal, if only most of the channels were free, and perhaps if they removed the DRM...
I can already get all this stuff DRM-free (for $19/mo with DishNet) why would I even consider paying more, and not being able to (easily) record it?
Not quite. I'm in a bad area, where the analog signal from OTA broadcasters out of L.A. are so weak it's practically unwatchable. It's only with the switch to digital/HDTV, and possibly a damn good antenna, that cable TV won't be necessary for me.
It's not that I only watch a show or two, it's that I only watch 2 or 3 cable channels... However, I do watch those 2 or 3 quite a lot, which is why the alternatives haven't worked, just yet. The "Akimbo" service looks like it might work really well, but they are really vague with details on their website, so I'm not too confident about them.
Besides, those $25 National Geo DVDs don't contain several programs, they each contain one ~45 minute program, which makes them a very serious rip-off.
Gee, so instead of a spare hard drive, and a $99 copy of Windows, I only need to spend $1,000 on a new Mac. That's a big improvement there.
Nice trolling there. I didn't say they should be doing that right now, or even that they should do that at all, did I?
Gee, I can only think of one, single, gigantic problem with that... These are shows that are currently widely available without any kind of DRM at all. I have a cheap capture card, and I record these shows daily, as well as many others. Just tell me why there should be addition restrictions placed on me, because I'm PAYING EXTRA to download them from Apple? If I wanted to do anything nefarious with them, the copies I'm currently making are FAR higher quality than what you can get from iTunes anyhow.
It's beyond ridiculous to put any DRM on TV shows.
Very interesting... I've been wondering how long it would take for something just like that to come around.
Got any tips? Anything important that's not listed on the site?
So do I, but 99% of it is crap I don't WANT.
Give me comedy central, History, and National Geographic for $5/month, and I'd drop my cable subscription in an instant.
That would be great, if I didn't need Windows to get and play those DRM-encumbered videos. I'd also like a few History Channel and National Geographic programs on occasion. If I got that, I'd cancel my cable TV, and put up a (BIG!) HDTV antenna...
I've looked at my viewing habits very closely, and the Daily Show/Colbert Report are the only important things I watch that aren't available OTA, for free.
I really believe HDTV stands a good chance of killing off (or at least seriously wounding) cable/satellite companies.
If you've got some actual benchmarks to show that it is slow, rather than just baselessly implying things, point me there.
You can on 120V as well (and 50/60Hz doesn't change anything). In fact George Foreman-branded electric grills have been quite popular for some time.
The voltage really doesn't matter, it's voltage times current. I don't know what current your typical wall outlets can support, but 20 amps is pretty standard in the USA, and there are very, very few items that need more power than that.
Some washing machines and dryers run off of 240v, but that's not actually very common. Mine run off of 120v and just have a standard plug. Besides, getting 240v for the few things that need it isn't difficult, you just run two 120v lines, instead of one.
Besides, the issue isn't quite so simple. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. Line losses, potential for shocks, arcing, fire hazards, etc.
Besides, that's not really the point. The point is that people so often like to complain that the US is going for their own (usually technically superior) systems, when it's commonly Europe that goes out of their way to cause these incompatibilities in the first place by NOT adopting the earlier US standards.
In other words, you have no source for that incredibly unbelivable claim... That sure lends credibility to your argument.
Not at all. Critics are no measure of anything, except themselves. Critical opinions have never been in-line with popular opinions.
What a highly intelligent argument... No, I didn't even suggest that EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE had stopped going to movies. There has been a VAST decline in theatre profits over the past couple years, and you can't even pretend it doesn't exist.
Sure you did, in fact, you almost specifically said that's what they WANT:
there is little evidence that the movie-going masses would have preference for "more imaginative" movies.
Basically they want special effects. And not just any special effects, modern special effects.
they expect repetition. Repetition in effects, in plot, in characters. This is why sequels have been and are so popular.
Audiences no longer go to movies to see something different every time. They want comfort food.
Not true at all. There have been a few very successfull "horrible sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and comic-book movies", but most have actually been gigantic bombs.
This is basically RAID over the network. Personally, I can't see a lot of use for it... Just put the second drive in the machine, and use software RAID, rather than putting the second drive in a network server. Less network slowdown and congestion that way, not to mention CPU-time wasted packetizing, encrypting, etc.
As always, RAID (and now this) is not a backup solution.
Problem 1: They shouldn't ALL be portrayed the same way.
Problem 2: Why do you insist on one extreme or the other? It's not like you really have to chose between completely helpless, and invincible super-hero.
Here's a few ideas:
1. How about NOT casting a 90lbs. underwear model in the role of the super-strong female lead?
2. How about NOT having her always fight men that are 5Xs larger and obviously stronger than she is?
3. How about giving her some OTHER advantage that makes sense, rather than pretending she is just vastly stronger?
4. How about NOT making it necessary for her to do all the fighting? Plenty of movies have wimpy/nerdy characters that are still heros.
In ultra-dense European counties, that might be the case, but in the USA, there are large spans of hundreds of miles of empty land, where NOBODY lives.
In the southwest it's large parts of the deserts of California and Arizona. In the central areas it's the vast plains where there's nothing but grasslands, and perhaps a few farms, for hundreds of miles. In the frozen northern state, just stay away from major cities and you only have to worry about radioactive deer.
The truth is, it would be quite easy to build numerous reactors, and keep them far away from ANYONE'S backyard... They install them right next to a major city to cut down on line losses, reduce the costs of running power lines further, and have a large population of workers that don't have to travel very far. All of these can be easily handled, thereby keeping the reactors hundreds of miles away from just about anybody.
People aren't complaining that Hollywood is making a few remakes. People are complaining that remakes and sequals are 90% of what Hollywood is churning out right now. Having a remake of King Kong every 20 years isn't too bad, but having a remake of EVERY MOVIE would be horendous.
Yes, the remakes have been very, very bad. Still, even with the best possible remake, you already know the story, there are no surprises, and it just can't possibly be as good as an original story.
That's just pure bullshit. Sequels are popular because the original was good, and people expect that the sequal will be, too. Sequels are popular because they hardly need any advertisement to bring in audiences who know whether or not they would be interested in seeing it. In truth, it's not movie goers who like sequels, it's movie studios, who consider them enough of a sure-thing.
Look at something like Jurassic Park... It was a completely original story line, and it grossed more than any other movie ever had. The sequals didn't do a fraction as well.
Bah. You just pulled that out of your ass.
That might have something to do with the fact that none of them are particularly good movies. We didn't have a Jurassic Park released this year, a Shawshank Redemption, or a Fight Club for that matter. The sorry state of Hollywood is the real problem.
Correction: "Audiences no longer go to see movies." That's all there is to it. Hollywood turned out piece of crap after piece of crap, and now people aren't going to the theatre every few weeks, as they used-to, expecting that there will be a couple good movies they will want to see.
I find it really surprising that you think churning out hundreds of horrible sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and comic-book movies had nothing to do with the fact that people aren't going to movies nearly as much, and the public's unwillingness to take a chance on Hollywood movies anymore.
No, the continual advance of technology brought down long-distance prices... In fact, it was the microwave communications systems, which AT&T invented, which made it possible for 3rd parties to provide long-distance service in the first place. Without that, companies like MCI would have needed to actually lay copper lines for each phone call across the entire country...
However, that's somewhat besides the point, because I was refering to local telco service... Long distance service can still be made competitive.
When did we EVER have competition? Except in the biggest markets, people have never had any choice for their local telco.
The only difference between now, and when it was a monopoly, is that they go by a different name in different areas. They're still just matching each other's prices, terms, etc.
The whole idea of a telco is antiquated. Now, at least we're seeing competition to the telcos via cable and wireless providers.
It probably was just a waste to break AT&T up. What good things can you list, that have come out of it?
No. Those were browser-only computers. They couldn't be used to put together documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, watch videos (let alone re-encoding). Hell, you couldn't even store anything except your bookmarks on those things.
Unlike those "web applicances" this will be a full-fledged (managed) computer, it will just be at the datacenter, instead of being in your house.
Because the hardware/software for encoding/decoding MPEG-2 is far cheaper, and the patent fees are significantly less as well. The bandwidth really shouldn't be an issue.
It certainly is. Thin clients aren't dumb terminals. The client is only doing some basic compression/decompression. You can easily find RDP/Citrix thin clients. Unfortunately, I haven't seen VNC thin clients yet, most likely because dirt-cheap (old) hardware is being repurposed, via netbooting or a VNC client on CD/floppy.
Possibly, but it would definately require quite a bit of overhead.
I still don't understand WHY... Why a massive tower, instead of something fairly light and simple like a large flagpole? Or, if you're willing to wait, there are these things called TREES which get fairly high above ground.
Personally, I prefer the option of "stepping a few few to the left" to get out of the shadow of the church, and running a few wires. This is a rural area, so that shouldn't be a problem. You can do the same thing wirelessly, also.
You know, insurance companies believed the same thing... Then a rash of frivilous lawsuits for a few thousand dollars (far less than it would cost to fight) happened. It ended up costing them far more than if they had fought a few of those frivilous lawsuit, and scared-off the rest of the idiots.
IMHO, you should always fight, even if you know you can't win. Take a big enough chunk out of your opponent that it scares off anyone else who has the same idea. Plus, you can try to get awarded attorneys fees, and possibly counter-sue for just a bit more cash over what it costs to defend yourself in the first place.
That's what you have lawyers and judges for, to explain things like this to normal people.
This phrase always makes my skin crawl. You're assuming that EVERYONE in the country will do ANYTHING to get out of jury duty. It may be a nuisance, but jury duty isn't exactly torture. Many people get paid by their employer for jury duty, so depending on what you do, it may be an improvement.
Yes, good idea... That way you'll be shot-down in M2, and never get mod points again.
There's more than enough bandwidth for remote desktops. Video is a slightly more difficult issue, but that could be EASILY handled by on-the-fly MPEG-2 compression at the datacenter, and a dirt-cheap MPEG-2 decoding chip in the thin clients. Games are a non-starter, but other than that, I think we're ready to go.
Actually, I think you could get a very large number of people to switch right away. Offer them an "internet computer" (read thin client) for free, and only slightly higher broadband fees to cover the ISP's costs. Advertise it to the people that don't know which end of a computer is up, as something they can't possibly make a mistake on (and "low power" and "all the software you'll ever need, built-in"), and you'd have a good-sized market, almost instantly.
When there's money to be made, believe me, the service providers can do it at record-breaking speeds. 99% of the software already exists, they'd just have to expand their datacenters, wire them up in a cluster for failover, reasonable back-ups, etc. I really can't see any reason they couldn't put this all together, and start signing customers within 6 months.
I know I'd never sign-up for anything like that, but I know a lot of people that would fit into this model perfectly, provide there are good terms in place, and getting copies of your own data (eg. on DVD-Rs) isn't too expensive.