damn, there wasn't a single sentence here that I understood. DAMN!
Any takes to translate this to 'dumbspeak?'
Sure, I've been meaning to brush-up on my dumbspeak...
You don't necessarily need to change the size, you need to change the frequency at which it vibrates and resistant to electromagnetic energy. This is currently done with 'automatic' antenna tuning circuits using variable capacitors and other components/switching circuitry that varies the frequency at which it vibrates by varying the current (to get the desired voltage).
It does lose something in the translation, though. Perhaps I'm not as good at dumbspeak as others.
I've been researching similar technologies over the past few years because I believe we can see an amazing communications "utopia" by deregulating (or at least minimizing regulations) all the frequencies we're blocking for specific uses.
Same old anarchic anti-government trolls, huh dada21?
At any given moment in any given area, there is a ton of bandwidth going unused.
Yes, because of all the legacy equipment still in-use. You can't phase it out overnight can you? Everyone is bitching that the FCC is forcing broadcasters to shut-off their TV signal, all the while saying the FCC should be much quicker in forcing OTHER PEOPLE to replace all their radio equipment... no, that's not hypocritical at all.
Actually, it's quite ironic that the organization you want to do-away with has, in-fact, been the force gradually making companies reduce their spectrum use through newer technologies.
Combine that with a much wider bandwidth and we can see higher data rates, lower battery usage and maximum bandwidth allocation everywhere you go.
Sure, if you take the bandwidth away from somebody else, and use it for your own purposes, you'll get better data rates...
And "maximum bandwidth allocation is just a euphamism for noise all across the spectrum...
Can you imagine how incredible the Internet would be if we had nearly infinite spectrum to use (compared to the limited spectrum we have now)?
No, I can't imagine it being all that wonderful really. How does that solve any of the problems of the internet? Bandwidth would be somewhat cheaper, and you wouldn't be tied-down to a landline, but that wouldn't stop spam, trolls like yourself, DDoS attacks, worms, etc. It wouldn't really increase the content on the web, make it more useful, or make it more accessible to people in poor nations.
maybe it is time to open up little bits of unregulated spectrum piece-by-piece and let's see what happens.
While not completely unregulated, the CB band is wide-open, and getting practically no use. Before you start complaining that you don't have enough spectrum for public use, why not try utilizing what is available first?
I understand how you can use software to replace some of the active circuitry, but how are you going to change the size and shape of an antenna via software?
Shape is nothing. You'll never strictly need a different shape of antenna.
As for size, how do you think your TV antenna works? A VHF antenna is designed to cover all frequencies from 30MHz up to 300MHz.
Basically all you need to effeciently cover the full range of frequencies effeciently is a balun (or "un-un") or an antenna tuner which could be software-controlable.
To really get started on SDR, check out the Ten-Tec RX320D shortwave receiver. It outputs a 12 kHz-wide IF signal from the front end to an audio jack, which can then be fed to a PC soundcard.
Why spend that much ($350+), when you can order a dirt-cheap shortwave radio for maybe $40 and just use a simple 455 kHz to 12 kHz adaptor?
"audio/video encoding"--Both of those have been able to benefit massively from multiple processors for some time. Infact both of these operations are damn near 100% parallelizable.
Not true. Threading of video encoding results in a significant quality loss, and there's no practical way to eliminate that trade-off.
Ever heard of SOI? Because it seems that Intel hasn't.
Unfortunately for AMD, even as they transition to use 65 nm processes, Intel is about a generation ahead of them, with the first batch 45nm chips due next year.
That could turn out to be a completely bullshit number on Intel's part... or not. Until they're really being sold, it's just vapor.
Intel's wiping them in the notebook arena at the moment.
That's just nonsense. Intel has a fairly small advantage over AMD with the Core Duo, and that's only for multi-threaded applications. If you're using CPU-intensive single-threaded applications like audio/video encoding, encryption, etc. you're still better of with AMD.
Maybe not in CPU speeds, but in performance testing and battery life, Intel still has a pretty good advantage.
No, AMD's mobile Athlon-64s were faster as well as lower power than anything Intel had to offer... before the Duo came out. When AMD releases their next generation of chips, you can expect that to be the case once again.
IF you can wait then do if not then buy now. Things will always be better/cheaper in 6 months so if you can wait you get a better deal.
I found the opposite with CRTs a couple years ago. My 19" $150 monitor died after a year, and was now going for $200. No sales or rebates involved. I thought it was maybe just a fluke, but other monitors of various sizes all went up around $50 as well.
More recently, I've been looking for a DVB-S card (satellite). It's incredibly annoying to read a post from 2 years ago about buying one for $40, when the cheapest is $80 now...
Things usually go down, but inflation exists, and technology progresses, so electronics do sometimes go up in price.
But these days desktops are only about 50% of the market, and AMD really has nothing to compete with in the portable market.
AMD is slightly behind, only because they didn't jump to 65nm as fast as Intel. When they do (shortly) by all accounts they should jump right past Intel.
The idea that AMD doesn't have good mobile processors was from 5+ years ago, and wasn't completely true back then anyhow.
Yes, MPEG was always upfront that they were pooling patents and doing the RAND thing.
MPEG != MP3
When do they start expiring? I remember a VCD like tech (OS9-68K based, Phillips, brain cramp on the name now.... CDI?) in the late 1980's and VCD (MPEG1 video, MPEG1 layer 1 audio) itself not much later. MPEG1 layer 2 was the failed Phillips Compact Digital Cassette in what, 1992?
MPEG-1 video and audio (layer 1/2) patents have long since expired.
Question is what is the date on the patents, especially of course on MPEG 1 layer 3 audio and MPEG2 video.
There's no easy answer... Patents for any MPEG standard are filed over years and years. The question is, are the newer ones entirely essential, or can you leave the newest patents out, and be free and clear much earlier? I don't know MP3 or MPEG-2 well-enough to say for sure, but I'll hazard a few guesses...
For the liberal estimate, it will probably be legal in about 3 years if you are willing to leave out some newer/better coding methods that will not be free until about 7 years later.
For MPEG-2 I used the MPEGLA essentiallity PDF and the USPTO to look-up a sampling of what they have listed. It looks like MOST of the patent list was granted before 1994, which means 2011 for my liberal estimate. Many of the newer and presumably more advanced coding methods were granted before 2000, with a few as late as 2004, which means 2017 to be pretty safe, and 2021 to be completely in the clear.
Those (later) years may be under-estimated by as much as 3 years (very unlikely), as it would have been much more work to compare the filing date to the grant date, check which rules would apply during those years, and extend expiration dates as necessary.
AC3 audio is probably several years newer so the last part of DVD and HD-TV won't be public for a bit.
You've hit on something that pisses me off immensely. It would seem that Dolby is paying a lot of bribes for exclusive-use in every US standard. For DVDs, the patent-free MP2 audio can be used in PAL countries (as well as AC3), while it is not allowed on NTSC discs or NTSC players. In the DVB digital video standard (which is used pretty-much everywhere except but North America, Japan, and Korea) MP2 audio is allowed (as well as AC3) but in the ATSC standard, AC3 is defined, and MP2 is not allowed at all.
What the hell is that? Including a second simple audio codec wouldn't raise the cost of the hardware at all. Yet, patent-free audio is shunned in the USA, in favor of exclusive use of AC3. Sure, AC3 sounds better, but not significantly, and there's just no reason to exclude MP2.
For video, I don't understand why VP3 hasn't been used by anybody. On2 released all rights to it specifically so that it would be used in the ATSC standard, instead of patent-encumbered MPEG-2. How about the DVB standard, which wasn't as far along as ATSC? How about HD-DVD/Blu-Ray? How about DirecTV, which is going to start using the very expensive h.264, when VP3 (released patent-free in Sep 2001) is actually nearly as good. GAH!
I'm thinking we need to find out and start a countdown, much like everyone did for RSA and the GIF patents.
The problem is that the RSA and GIF (LZW) patents were just that, a single patent for each. With MP3 there are over a dozen, and for MPEG-2 there are HUNDREDS. Which one are you going to count-down to? You'd need (eg.) Fabrice Bellard or Michael Niedermayer (who wrote the ffmpeg/libavcodec MPEG-2 codec) to go through the list of MPEG-2 patents, in detail, to determine which ones are largely necessary, and which ones can be easily omitted. All that just to find the appropriate date to count-down to...
Here's a better idea... Just use MPEG-1/VP3/Theora/Dirac/Snow and Vorbis, and don't worry about MPEG-2/MP3.
The first step is to charge the people who actually use up the most of my ISPs resources, and one large consumer is the senders of UCE which contains images.
So AOL is getting reimbursed for their resources... How about you? Are you getting a cut of that, since AOL is selling your eyeballs and time to this company?
If you ever deal with AOL on a professional level, you'll realize that they actually are a pretty smart group of folks.
"Smart" doesn't mean "good" by any stretch. Lots of 'smart' people are evil, self-serving bastards.
Because a missile is hypersonic (multiple km/s) rather than supersonic?
I didn't claim you could just put SAMs into use as anti-ICBMs. However, there is nothing about the much higher speeds that makes this impossible.
Because at a cost of "only" millions of dollars, you can throw a whole mess of them at a target in hopes that one will get through?
That's not what the Star Wars program is about, in it's current form. It's about stopping a small number of missiles. In any case, being able to stop a few would be far better than none at all (the current situation).
Because a "mission kill" requires more than just exploding close enough to throw some shrapnel into a wing?
Some shrapnel in a wing wouldn't bring down most aircraft, and that's not how surface to air missiles are designed to work, anyhow.
Very much unlike bringing down aircraft, an anti-ICBM system projectile could have an incredibly powerful payload... Something like a MOAB fuel-air bomb would probably be effective at destroying any other missiles within a 2mi radius. So instead of hitting a bullet with a bullet, you just have to get it within a couple miles...
But hasn't the shield failed to even stop missiles when their trajectory is known before th test even starts?
No, actually that's the only time it has worked, if we're talking about the same incident.
I think that this is one of those things that is simply too difficult a task to make work under battle conditions.
Absolutely not. We already have the technology to "hit a bullet with a bullet" as everyone likes to say. They're called surface to air missiles, and they easily bring down supersonic aircraft.
Why the system has never worked I don't know... I have to assume it's a case of massive corruption.
Thats like me saying "well I tried running ventrilo under slackware 7.1 and a 4 year old copy of wine and it didn't work then so i assume it wont work today."
No, actually it's nothing like that at all. It's much more like saying "I tried last year's model, and it had thousands of problems, and I doubt they could have fixed them all, both because of the enormity of the problem, and because they've made very little progress over the past 10 revisions."
...and aluminum and titanium cost more than steel or brass or whatever it is they currently use
Yes, but they wouldn't even need an ounce of it. It would be a tiny price increase. Since the arm doesn't currently need to be rigid, they don't bother.
Yes, necessarily!
No. Again, they can use stronger material, rather than just making it thicker.
Notice that it still bends down just as easily as the thinner strip.
No, as a matter of fact it doesn't. It's just that it's so flimsy, relative to us, that we don't notice the difference. Use stronger materials, like metal, wood, etc, and use a scale for measuring the force. You'll see that twice the width does in fact mean about twice as much vertical strength. It is, obviously, easier to add a little bit of material vertically, to get a lot more vertical strength, but your little example test here is just nonsense. Not that it's relevant, since I wasn't proposing anything of the sort.
With OpenGL direct rending, display of standard-def material averages less than 1% of the CPU time, and a very big speed-up on HDTV material as well. I could hardly believe it myself when I first noticed. Try it for yourself:
It's quite funny that it's actually a lot faster than hardware acceleration (XVMC), as well as working with any codecs, and of course making it possible to use mplayer's interlacing and telecine filters (add filmdint before 'scale').
Kinda makes this benchmark seem pretty pointless, doesn't it? If they would work on reducing overhead (where much CPU time is wasted) hardware acceleration really wouldn't be important.
Re:Scoffing Posts Are From Those With Sort/No Memo
on
Hard Drive Memory Lane
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· Score: 1
This has meant RAM has fallen way behind.
Sure, it would be nice if RAM was less expensive, but I think we've reached something of a plateau for RAM (enjoy it while it lasts). Modern computers run just fine with a measly 128MBs of RAM that costs $30. More is preferable, but hardly necessary like it used-to be, just a few short years ago. Perhaps that's partly a side-effect of faster hard drives making swaping less painful.
Besides, hard drives have gotten much larger and cheaper, but their performance hasn't improved nearly as significantly. That is the OPPOSITE of what I want from RAM. If I have to chose between twice as much RAM, or twice as fast RAM, I'm going for the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that nobody has even tried it yet.
I'd say watching cars drive around a tiny circular course is far more boring than FRICKIN' ROCKETS.
Besides, I seem to recall airshows being very near the top of the list of most popular spectator sports, worldwide.
Sure, I've been meaning to brush-up on my dumbspeak...
You don't necessarily need to change the size, you need to change the frequency at which it vibrates and resistant to electromagnetic energy. This is currently done with 'automatic' antenna tuning circuits using variable capacitors and other components/switching circuitry that varies the frequency at which it vibrates by varying the current (to get the desired voltage) .
It does lose something in the translation, though. Perhaps I'm not as good at dumbspeak as others.
Okay, then buy a dirt cheap, Made-in-China shortwave radio, with an American brand name on it.
Umm, everyone who can read the PDF... It's commonly published.
Again, buying a cheap shortwave radio doesn't preclude you from doing some basic research into the product before-hand.
Same old anarchic anti-government trolls, huh dada21?
Yes, because of all the legacy equipment still in-use. You can't phase it out overnight can you? Everyone is bitching that the FCC is forcing broadcasters to shut-off their TV signal, all the while saying the FCC should be much quicker in forcing OTHER PEOPLE to replace all their radio equipment... no, that's not hypocritical at all.
Actually, it's quite ironic that the organization you want to do-away with has, in-fact, been the force gradually making companies reduce their spectrum use through newer technologies.
Sure, if you take the bandwidth away from somebody else, and use it for your own purposes, you'll get better data rates...
And "maximum bandwidth allocation is just a euphamism for noise all across the spectrum...
No, I can't imagine it being all that wonderful really. How does that solve any of the problems of the internet? Bandwidth would be somewhat cheaper, and you wouldn't be tied-down to a landline, but that wouldn't stop spam, trolls like yourself, DDoS attacks, worms, etc. It wouldn't really increase the content on the web, make it more useful, or make it more accessible to people in poor nations.
While not completely unregulated, the CB band is wide-open, and getting practically no use. Before you start complaining that you don't have enough spectrum for public use, why not try utilizing what is available first?
Shape is nothing. You'll never strictly need a different shape of antenna.
As for size, how do you think your TV antenna works? A VHF antenna is designed to cover all frequencies from 30MHz up to 300MHz.
Basically all you need to effeciently cover the full range of frequencies effeciently is a balun (or "un-un") or an antenna tuner which could be software-controlable.
Why spend that much ($350+), when you can order a dirt-cheap shortwave radio for maybe $40 and just use a simple 455 kHz to 12 kHz adaptor?
Not true. Threading of video encoding results in a significant quality loss, and there's no practical way to eliminate that trade-off.
You clearly have never written a video codec...
Ever heard of SOI? Because it seems that Intel hasn't.
That could turn out to be a completely bullshit number on Intel's part... or not. Until they're really being sold, it's just vapor.
That's just nonsense. Intel has a fairly small advantage over AMD with the Core Duo, and that's only for multi-threaded applications. If you're using CPU-intensive single-threaded applications like audio/video encoding, encryption, etc. you're still better of with AMD.
No, AMD's mobile Athlon-64s were faster as well as lower power than anything Intel had to offer... before the Duo came out. When AMD releases their next generation of chips, you can expect that to be the case once again.
Which may explain why you have so much faith in them.
Why you're comparing a software company (Microsoft) with a hardware company (Apple) I certainly don't understand.
I found the opposite with CRTs a couple years ago. My 19" $150 monitor died after a year, and was now going for $200. No sales or rebates involved. I thought it was maybe just a fluke, but other monitors of various sizes all went up around $50 as well.
More recently, I've been looking for a DVB-S card (satellite). It's incredibly annoying to read a post from 2 years ago about buying one for $40, when the cheapest is $80 now...
Things usually go down, but inflation exists, and technology progresses, so electronics do sometimes go up in price.
AMD is slightly behind, only because they didn't jump to 65nm as fast as Intel. When they do (shortly) by all accounts they should jump right past Intel.
The idea that AMD doesn't have good mobile processors was from 5+ years ago, and wasn't completely true back then anyhow.
NOBODY is one of those guys... They're practically all just pure bullshit, made-up rumors, that never actually happened.
MPEG != MP3
MPEG-1 video and audio (layer 1/2) patents have long since expired.
There's no easy answer... Patents for any MPEG standard are filed over years and years. The question is, are the newer ones entirely essential, or can you leave the newest patents out, and be free and clear much earlier? I don't know MP3 or MPEG-2 well-enough to say for sure, but I'll hazard a few guesses...
For MP3 I'll take the easy way out and rely on someone else's research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:MP3#patent
For the liberal estimate, it will probably be legal in about 3 years if you are willing to leave out some newer/better coding methods that will not be free until about 7 years later.
For MPEG-2 I used the MPEGLA essentiallity PDF and the USPTO to look-up a sampling of what they have listed. It looks like MOST of the patent list was granted before 1994, which means 2011 for my liberal estimate. Many of the newer and presumably more advanced coding methods were granted before 2000, with a few as late as 2004, which means 2017 to be pretty safe, and 2021 to be completely in the clear.
Those (later) years may be under-estimated by as much as 3 years (very unlikely), as it would have been much more work to compare the filing date to the grant date, check which rules would apply during those years, and extend expiration dates as necessary.
You've hit on something that pisses me off immensely. It would seem that Dolby is paying a lot of bribes for exclusive-use in every US standard. For DVDs, the patent-free MP2 audio can be used in PAL countries (as well as AC3), while it is not allowed on NTSC discs or NTSC players. In the DVB digital video standard (which is used pretty-much everywhere except but North America, Japan, and Korea) MP2 audio is allowed (as well as AC3) but in the ATSC standard, AC3 is defined, and MP2 is not allowed at all.
What the hell is that? Including a second simple audio codec wouldn't raise the cost of the hardware at all. Yet, patent-free audio is shunned in the USA, in favor of exclusive use of AC3. Sure, AC3 sounds better, but not significantly, and there's just no reason to exclude MP2.
For video, I don't understand why VP3 hasn't been used by anybody. On2 released all rights to it specifically so that it would be used in the ATSC standard, instead of patent-encumbered MPEG-2. How about the DVB standard, which wasn't as far along as ATSC? How about HD-DVD/Blu-Ray? How about DirecTV, which is going to start using the very expensive h.264, when VP3 (released patent-free in Sep 2001) is actually nearly as good. GAH!
The problem is that the RSA and GIF (LZW) patents were just that, a single patent for each. With MP3 there are over a dozen, and for MPEG-2 there are HUNDREDS. Which one are you going to count-down to? You'd need (eg.) Fabrice Bellard or Michael Niedermayer (who wrote the ffmpeg/libavcodec MPEG-2 codec) to go through the list of MPEG-2 patents, in detail, to determine which ones are largely necessary, and which ones can be easily omitted. All that just to find the appropriate date to count-down to...
Here's a better idea... Just use MPEG-1/VP3/Theora/Dirac/Snow and Vorbis, and don't worry about MPEG-2/MP3.
So AOL is getting reimbursed for their resources... How about you? Are you getting a cut of that, since AOL is selling your eyeballs and time to this company?
"Smart" doesn't mean "good" by any stretch. Lots of 'smart' people are evil, self-serving bastards.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
It will be a huge mess when the first big Mac worm gets into the wild...
If you plan on releasing in the USA, you do.
There wouldn't be (much) point to making ReactOS if people couldn't actually use it legally within the USA.
I didn't claim you could just put SAMs into use as anti-ICBMs. However, there is nothing about the much higher speeds that makes this impossible.
That's not what the Star Wars program is about, in it's current form. It's about stopping a small number of missiles. In any case, being able to stop a few would be far better than none at all (the current situation).
Some shrapnel in a wing wouldn't bring down most aircraft, and that's not how surface to air missiles are designed to work, anyhow.
Very much unlike bringing down aircraft, an anti-ICBM system projectile could have an incredibly powerful payload... Something like a MOAB fuel-air bomb would probably be effective at destroying any other missiles within a 2mi radius. So instead of hitting a bullet with a bullet, you just have to get it within a couple miles...
No, actually that's the only time it has worked, if we're talking about the same incident.
Absolutely not. We already have the technology to "hit a bullet with a bullet" as everyone likes to say. They're called surface to air missiles, and they easily bring down supersonic aircraft.
Why the system has never worked I don't know... I have to assume it's a case of massive corruption.
bgr24 is only slightly slower. I can't imagine any quality loss with that.
Only in libmpeg2 (unfortunately) and I guess with ffh264 as well.
Just barely though, and it's already under 1% anyhow.
I doubt it, since they were talking about 3:2 pulldown extensively.
Interlaced content doesn't look very good on a TV anyhow (mplayer doesn't support output to interlaced displays)
No, actually it's nothing like that at all. It's much more like saying "I tried last year's model, and it had thousands of problems, and I doubt they could have fixed them all, both because of the enormity of the problem, and because they've made very little progress over the past 10 revisions."
Actually, you wouldn't get 0% CPU. -vo null just prevents output, it's still decoded. You'd want -vc dummy to prevent that (same goes for audio).
Yes, but they wouldn't even need an ounce of it. It would be a tiny price increase. Since the arm doesn't currently need to be rigid, they don't bother.
No. Again, they can use stronger material, rather than just making it thicker.
No, as a matter of fact it doesn't. It's just that it's so flimsy, relative to us, that we don't notice the difference. Use stronger materials, like metal, wood, etc, and use a scale for measuring the force. You'll see that twice the width does in fact mean about twice as much vertical strength. It is, obviously, easier to add a little bit of material vertically, to get a lot more vertical strength, but your little example test here is just nonsense. Not that it's relevant, since I wasn't proposing anything of the sort.
Look at how thin and flimsy the lid is.
I've found that I can get absolutely insane performance with MPlayer on Linux.
Athlon XP 2000+ 1.66GHz
NVidia GeForce4 440 MX
(NVidia driver, 2.4 kernel)
MPlayer CVS snapshot (post 1.0pre7)
With OpenGL direct rending, display of standard-def material averages less than 1% of the CPU time, and a very big speed-up on HDTV material as well. I could hardly believe it myself when I first noticed. Try it for yourself:
mplayer -nocache -dr -vf scale,format=bgr16 -vo gl -nortc -framedrop -lavdopts fast
It's quite funny that it's actually a lot faster than hardware acceleration (XVMC), as well as working with any codecs, and of course making it possible to use mplayer's interlacing and telecine filters (add filmdint before 'scale').
Kinda makes this benchmark seem pretty pointless, doesn't it? If they would work on reducing overhead (where much CPU time is wasted) hardware acceleration really wouldn't be important.
Sure, it would be nice if RAM was less expensive, but I think we've reached something of a plateau for RAM (enjoy it while it lasts). Modern computers run just fine with a measly 128MBs of RAM that costs $30. More is preferable, but hardly necessary like it used-to be, just a few short years ago. Perhaps that's partly a side-effect of faster hard drives making swaping less painful.
Besides, hard drives have gotten much larger and cheaper, but their performance hasn't improved nearly as significantly. That is the OPPOSITE of what I want from RAM. If I have to chose between twice as much RAM, or twice as fast RAM, I'm going for the latter.