Maybe it's just me, but it really sounds like he should have just spent the money to hire a real chemist in the first place, rather than spending about 10 years on trial and error, and causing lots of damage.
I was taken to a small wine shop that sold wine in bulk; bring your container, they'd fill it up from what looked like a gas hose.
There's nothing quite like a glass of wine, from a 55 gallon drum, after a long day.
Wouldn't it be nice to do the same with music and your flash drive?
If the music was dirt cheap, that would be a great model. People would bring in their iPods, removable hard drives, etc, and just load them up with whatever looks even a little interesting. If it's cheap enough, you wouldn't mind it being junk you only listen to once.
I think Netflix has a similar business model... Recomend dozens and dozens of similar movies, and people will try them out, and not matter much if they're junk, because it costs them very, very little to watch it.
No slight against BNL is intended, though I'm not thrilled that they're only distributing lossy encodings.
All recordings are inherently lossless. You can never perfectly capture every bit of sound made.
Putting this in a more useful perspective... If the MP3s were made from a much higher quality source than a CD, they could potentially sound much better than a CD.
But the sales department comes to you with a sad face. You made 85,000 3.4 GHz CPU's, but they have orders for only 1,000 of those, the rest of the orders are for 2GHz chips.
The problem is incredibly stupid marketing. If (instead of having hundreds of different models and speeds) they reduced it down to a handful, you wouldn't have stupid problems like that.
Also, sell the products closer to their actual price, and then people will happily buy the 3.4GHz CPUs for the price they were expecting to pay for a 2GHz model.
Incidentally, this kind of thing does always piss me off... Companies making vastly different products, but with the same model number. eg. You expect to get the cool running 2GHz CPU, but instead you get a 2GHz CPU that uses twice as much power, yet you can't return it for the one you were expecting.
No! It can't be true!/. already told me what Google's dark fiber is for... They're using it to build a parallel internet. I'm still waiting, but surely Google will be giving away free internet access any time now.../. can't be wrong! Their stories are always so well thought-out and fully researched!
First of all, it's a bit unrealistic to expect realism from a sci-fi film
No, it isn't. I'm not talking about explaining the science behind everything, I'm just talking about actions making sense, not having some random person come back from the dead at the very last second to save the hero, etc.
Secondly, in case you didn't get it, "Starship Troopers" was meant to be unrealistic.
I got it. I still didn't particularly like it, though.
Similarly, Besson wanted to make the "5th Element" a film completely fantastic.
That would be fine. The visuals were quite good, but the whole cartoonish villians/heros wasn't
but within the frames of the genre (remember that the film's a fairytale), it's completely logical that you'd send one man instead of an army.
No, it's logical that they would want to write it that way. That doesn't make it logical within the movie/story. If it doesn't matter how they get there, why not just have the good guys losing for the entire film, then at the end have some guy with a new super-weapon (you've never seen or heard anything about before) come and save the day?
The whole point of having a story is to work out the holes, rather than just a buch of unrelated action scenes, one after the other.
If you don't mind the lack of a sensible story, don't mind the terrible cartoonish characters, that's just fine. Saying it's a great movie though, is rubbish.
I wouldn't have even spoken up if the lack of audience for that lowsy movie wasn't blamed on advertising, rather than people really just not enjoying it.
it just didnt do well in the theaters (probably due to lack of publicity,
More likely due to the lack of quality.
IMHO, it was the worst type of cartoonish film. Even more extremely unrealistic (in all aspect) than "Starship Troopers". Incredibly stupid and sappy lines like "I do not know love" just make you want to go out and slap the writer. The plot is equally bad... Complete destruction of the Earth is imminent, but we don't want to send the military and ruin the vacation of a few rich people...
Completely untrue. DirecTV is using it because they can get the same quality as MPEG-2, at much lower bitrates.
MPEG-4 includes all of the old coding methods used by MPEG-2, and adds more advanced ones to the standard. It's ridiculous to claim MPEG-4 can't look better than MPEG-2 at lower bitrates.
MPEG-4 hasn't caught-on with broadcasters, because they are already set-up to support MPEG-2 datarates, MPEG-4 is more computation-intensive, and because the license fees for MPEG-4 are higher, so the benefits aren't there for them.
People saying that MPEG-4 is only good at low bitrates have only ever seen some old Divx DVD rips, downscaled to half the size and encoded at 600k (from the original 8Mb MPEG-2 DVD).
Use a quality MPEG-4 codec, with the right options (most err on the side of low bitrates and fuzzy picture), and you can get perfect video at half the size of MPEG-2.
It's only when the DVD player is set for progressive mode that it applies 3:2 pulldown, thus returning to a full-res 24p.
So, you have absolutely everything the exact opposite of what it really is. Soft-telecined material is stored as 23.976fps progressive, with soft-telecine fields in the video. To play it back at 59.98Hz, the player must perform the 3:2 pulldown process. For progressive display, you just need to ignore those flags, you don't need to rebuild or reverse anything, since it is already a frame.
It's only in the case of hard-telecined material (uncommon on DVDs) that it's stored interlaced, and needs 2:3 pullup (inverse telecine) to be displayed progressive. Hard-telecined is what you get with TV broadcasts, since it need to be broadcast as interlaced fields. There it's really a set of 60 interlaced fields per second, and needs to be reversed for progressive-scan display.
In actuality, all video DVDs contain interlaced fields, with no exceptions
That's just completely wrong.
The 48 field thing is roughly true for mixed-mode DVDs (not really, but similar), but most DVDs are completely progressive, not mixed hard/soft telecine material like that. From your many misconceptions, I doubt you actually understand what you're even saying.
(I remember an old Usenet posting by Chad Fogg that explained why the MPEG 2's progressive-video flag was not supported)
I haven't been able to find that at all. In fact there's a massive DVD FAQ on the web, authored by Chad Fogg, talking about where the progressive_frame flag is used in a 3:2 pulldown sequence. Of course, I'm just assuming that was what you meant, since there is no such thing as a "progressive-video flag".
Perhaps you are talking about DVD not supporting native 23.976fps material, and requiring soft telecine flags in the video for interlaced playback?
Thus, movies are stored as 480i @ 48 fields per second
I must admit, I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say here, but I suspect you aren't either.
480i means interlaced, so fields that match-up don't count. Interlaced video and soft telecine are mutually exclusive and can't be used at the same time. You really can't have 480i@~48 fields on a DVD.
A progressive DVD player has to unify the fields for display,
A progressive-scan DVD player has a hard time with DVDs because of mixed soft/hard telecined content. Nothing to do with progressive being interlaced, or crazyness like that.
the resulting video does not have quite as high of a vertical resolution as true 480p video is capable of because the 480i video was filtered for interlaced display
While it's true DVD video is filtered to reduce certain artifacts, that doesn't mean it isn't progressive by any stretch of the imagination, and certainly doesn't mean it's stored as fields instead of progressive frames.
Either you're confused about the subject, or perhaps you've come-up with the best troll I've ever seen.
I was under the impression that the pull-up done to convert 24fps film into interlaced video is completely reversible, and so 1080 progressive quality is already available through 1080i broadcasts.
Even that site you linked to, mentiones that there are occasionally artifacts from reversing the 3:2 pulldown, even with expensive equipment. Still, if you have a 1080p display, which does a good job of 2:3 pullup, then you are getting very nearly progressive content.
That said, hard telecine (pulldown) does waste a significant ammount of bandwidth to stores these extra fields, so broadcasting in 1080p would allow them to give you higher quality at the same bitrate.
Under that light, the "larger disc space" argument for blue-ray becomes a moot point, quickly.
Bullshit. They both support exactly the same video codecs. HD-DVD supports MPEG-2, so you can expect that the first discs they press will be encoded with MPEG-2 as well.
A completely false assertion, that has been addressed over and over again. DirecTV isn't switching over from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 so they can provide HDTV to your cellphone.
Wouldn't they get higher def or longer movies if they standardized around XVID or some other variant of MPEG-4?
Most ignorant comment I've seen this week...
BluRay has been covered on/. dozens of times now, and just about every time, it is explained in detail that BluRay supports MPEG-2, WMV3 (aka WMV9, aka VC1), and H.264 (aka AVC) for video.
I have an Apex, and it's the only one that actually has a power switch rather than a standby mode button.
That's true, but if you power off via the remote, it goes on using a serious ammount of power. You won't see the "Energy Star" stamp on any of their units! They have that 120/240v switch on the front because they have to due to terribly poor design.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't Google wonderful? They're letting me hear advertising and sales pitches over the phone... FOR FREE!!!
Why isn't everyone doing this!
Maybe it's just me, but it really sounds like he should have just spent the money to hire a real chemist in the first place, rather than spending about 10 years on trial and error, and causing lots of damage.
Why in the hell did you get a "+1 Funny" mod for that?
Sounds to me like the security of quantum fiber-optic links are now in question. This isn't directly applicable to taping one, but it's a start.
(Not a quantum physicist, but I can play one on slashdot can't I?)
There's nothing quite like a glass of wine, from a 55 gallon drum, after a long day.
If the music was dirt cheap, that would be a great model. People would bring in their iPods, removable hard drives, etc, and just load them up with whatever looks even a little interesting. If it's cheap enough, you wouldn't mind it being junk you only listen to once.
I think Netflix has a similar business model... Recomend dozens and dozens of similar movies, and people will try them out, and not matter much if they're junk, because it costs them very, very little to watch it.
All recordings are inherently lossless. You can never perfectly capture every bit of sound made.
Putting this in a more useful perspective... If the MP3s were made from a much higher quality source than a CD, they could potentially sound much better than a CD.
The problem is incredibly stupid marketing. If (instead of having hundreds of different models and speeds) they reduced it down to a handful, you wouldn't have stupid problems like that.
Also, sell the products closer to their actual price, and then people will happily buy the 3.4GHz CPUs for the price they were expecting to pay for a 2GHz model.
Incidentally, this kind of thing does always piss me off... Companies making vastly different products, but with the same model number. eg. You expect to get the cool running 2GHz CPU, but instead you get a 2GHz CPU that uses twice as much power, yet you can't return it for the one you were expecting.
No! It can't be true! /. already told me what Google's dark fiber is for... They're using it to build a parallel internet. I'm still waiting, but surely Google will be giving away free internet access any time now... /. can't be wrong! Their stories are always so well thought-out and fully researched!
</SARCASM>
No, it's just that most people (myself included) simply don't like braindead movies with nothing but special effects to it.
No, that was the whole point... Being completely arbitrary, just like this top 10 list.
No, it isn't. I'm not talking about explaining the science behind everything, I'm just talking about actions making sense, not having some random person come back from the dead at the very last second to save the hero, etc.
I got it. I still didn't particularly like it, though.
That would be fine. The visuals were quite good, but the whole cartoonish villians/heros wasn't
No, it's logical that they would want to write it that way. That doesn't make it logical within the movie/story. If it doesn't matter how they get there, why not just have the good guys losing for the entire film, then at the end have some guy with a new super-weapon (you've never seen or heard anything about before) come and save the day?
The whole point of having a story is to work out the holes, rather than just a buch of unrelated action scenes, one after the other.
If you don't mind the lack of a sensible story, don't mind the terrible cartoonish characters, that's just fine. Saying it's a great movie though, is rubbish.
I wouldn't have even spoken up if the lack of audience for that lowsy movie wasn't blamed on advertising, rather than people really just not enjoying it.
More likely due to the lack of quality.
IMHO, it was the worst type of cartoonish film. Even more extremely unrealistic (in all aspect) than "Starship Troopers". Incredibly stupid and sappy lines like "I do not know love" just make you want to go out and slap the writer. The plot is equally bad... Complete destruction of the Earth is imminent, but we don't want to send the military and ruin the vacation of a few rich people...
Uhh, Contact is about as scientifically accurate as Star Trek. Contact also seems like the odd-man-out because the rest mostly take place in space.
I agree. The category and ratings are is completely arbitrary.
Next list: Top Ten Octopus Videos
1. James Bond in Octopussy
2. Documentary: Octopus Mating Habbits
3. Japanese take-out restaurant commercial
etc...
Completely untrue. DirecTV is using it because they can get the same quality as MPEG-2, at much lower bitrates.
MPEG-4 includes all of the old coding methods used by MPEG-2, and adds more advanced ones to the standard. It's ridiculous to claim MPEG-4 can't look better than MPEG-2 at lower bitrates.
MPEG-4 hasn't caught-on with broadcasters, because they are already set-up to support MPEG-2 datarates, MPEG-4 is more computation-intensive, and because the license fees for MPEG-4 are higher, so the benefits aren't there for them.
People saying that MPEG-4 is only good at low bitrates have only ever seen some old Divx DVD rips, downscaled to half the size and encoded at 600k (from the original 8Mb MPEG-2 DVD).
Use a quality MPEG-4 codec, with the right options (most err on the side of low bitrates and fuzzy picture), and you can get perfect video at half the size of MPEG-2.
No, not even in NTSC-land is this true. The people saying so are very confused on the issue.
So, you have absolutely everything the exact opposite of what it really is. Soft-telecined material is stored as 23.976fps progressive, with soft-telecine fields in the video. To play it back at 59.98Hz, the player must perform the 3:2 pulldown process. For progressive display, you just need to ignore those flags, you don't need to rebuild or reverse anything, since it is already a frame.
It's only in the case of hard-telecined material (uncommon on DVDs) that it's stored interlaced, and needs 2:3 pullup (inverse telecine) to be displayed progressive. Hard-telecined is what you get with TV broadcasts, since it need to be broadcast as interlaced fields. There it's really a set of 60 interlaced fields per second, and needs to be reversed for progressive-scan display.
That's just completely wrong.
The 48 field thing is roughly true for mixed-mode DVDs (not really, but similar), but most DVDs are completely progressive, not mixed hard/soft telecine material like that. From your many misconceptions, I doubt you actually understand what you're even saying.
I haven't been able to find that at all. In fact there's a massive DVD FAQ on the web, authored by Chad Fogg, talking about where the progressive_frame flag is used in a 3:2 pulldown sequence. Of course, I'm just assuming that was what you meant, since there is no such thing as a "progressive-video flag".
Perhaps you are talking about DVD not supporting native 23.976fps material, and requiring soft telecine flags in the video for interlaced playback?
I must admit, I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say here, but I suspect you aren't either.
480i means interlaced, so fields that match-up don't count. Interlaced video and soft telecine are mutually exclusive and can't be used at the same time. You really can't have 480i@~48 fields on a DVD.
A progressive-scan DVD player has a hard time with DVDs because of mixed soft/hard telecined content. Nothing to do with progressive being interlaced, or crazyness like that.
While it's true DVD video is filtered to reduce certain artifacts, that doesn't mean it isn't progressive by any stretch of the imagination, and certainly doesn't mean it's stored as fields instead of progressive frames.
Either you're confused about the subject, or perhaps you've come-up with the best troll I've ever seen.
Even that site you linked to, mentiones that there are occasionally artifacts from reversing the 3:2 pulldown, even with expensive equipment. Still, if you have a 1080p display, which does a good job of 2:3 pullup, then you are getting very nearly progressive content.
That said, hard telecine (pulldown) does waste a significant ammount of bandwidth to stores these extra fields, so broadcasting in 1080p would allow them to give you higher quality at the same bitrate.
Easily.
They have to draw power to keep the infrared reciever operating, as well as whatever internal clocks, LEDs, and LCDs they may have.
It's not some conspiracy, it's convenience.
You're completely, factually, wrong.
Take your tin-foil hat, and go home.
Bullshit. They both support exactly the same video codecs. HD-DVD supports MPEG-2, so you can expect that the first discs they press will be encoded with MPEG-2 as well.
A completely false assertion, that has been addressed over and over again. DirecTV isn't switching over from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 so they can provide HDTV to your cellphone.
Most ignorant comment I've seen this week...
BluRay has been covered on
That's true, but if you power off via the remote, it goes on using a serious ammount of power. You won't see the "Energy Star" stamp on any of their units! They have that 120/240v switch on the front because they have to due to terribly poor design.
And the people in those countries won't be buying electricity from the US grid at average US prices, so you're just trolling.