How does it make any sense for someone to sell service on a wire they don't own?
Good question. Why don't you ask the telcos that, because they don't own the lines either.
Why should the company contracted to maintain the lines be the only one who can sell a service on the lines? You could just as well say Caltrans is the only company that can sell commercial trucking services...
The DSL companies pay a fee to the telcos for the physical lines. As long as they do that, why should they be locked out?
Since when did the "small shops" receive some type of right to exist and operate?
They don't have a "right" to exist and remain profitable. However, it's rather well-accepted that they are better for the (local) economy than large shops.
In cases of very large shops (eg Walmart), they can crush the economies of entire cities quite easily, which they exploit to get extreme tax breaks, incentives, etc., which serve to further improve their own economic position, and further increase the economic success and weight they have to do that.
Small shops don't have a right to exist, and neither do large shops by the same rationale. A small change in economics or ordinances, and either one may be gone.
In fact I don't know any one who bought an american car new or otherwise in the past 7 years who was able to drive it for more than 50,000 without needing at the very least their valves ground. From the Dodge Neon to the Pontiac.
That's patently ridiculous. Myself and numerous friends and family members own GM-made cars, and all of them have gone better than 150,000 before requiring the slightest bit of work, and it's usually just the alternator going out.
Meanwhile, I know a couple Toyota owners who have had their cars in and out of the shop about every 6 months, for the past few years.
She didn't quite understand there was a good reason that a newer Dodge was 1/4 the price than a 20 year old toyota... cause they were crap.
No, actually it's because Toyota has all the hype in the world going for it. They aren't any better than similarly-priced American cars, but people like you keep hyping them, for no real reason.
Going by looks alone, american cars have much to offer.
You've clearly misread my statement. I didn't say American cars "look good", I said the DETAILS are WHERE they look best, compared to Japanese cars.
Specifically, things like head and leg room, how well the doors/windows fit, conveniences like fold down/removable seats, readable instrument panel. etc. That's not the only place they out-match Japanese cars, but it's one place American cars are FAR ahead of Japanese cars.
On SDTV a 2.39:1 image stored anamorphically gets squished down to 640x268.
TVs generally display about 704 columns, not 640. But it's completely besides the point. Yes, DVDs will look better on HDTVs (not twice as good, but there's no reason to argue the point). However, BluRay/HD-DVDs will still look 6Xs better.
Also, it's quite ironic that you say that DVDs are a 2X improvement over VHS tapes, then mention that DVDs are usually widescreen, which means people really only get half that increased resolution anyhow.
So the more pixels are visible, the less valuable additional pixels become. [...] but the higher resolution will not be as appreciated as much as it was when switching to DVD.
There is such a thing as diminishing returns, but that doesn't mean NO returns. Even with diminishing returns, that 6X improvement is going to big a huge difference, and diminishing returns will not have a big enough effect to negate that.
HD-DVD will bring more than double the image quality compared to VHS --> DVD,
Why is the/. mantra that AMD has supply problems, while Intel supposedly has excess capacity? This story outlines Intel's current shortages, even though the PR guy spun it like it's just a regular occurance...
Why do stories about Intel opening a new fab get posted to/. numerous times, while stories about AMD opening a new fab don't even get a mention?
I get the feeling this story wouldn't be here if the submitter had made it about Intel's supply problems, rather than the retirement of a few low-end chips?
WARNING: Power-down all sarcasm meters before progessing any further. They may explode, causing serious injury...
I, for one, couldn't care less about the lack of HD-DVD on Xbox 360. I'm going to get an Xbox 360 to play the games, and when in some distant future HD-DVD movies start becoming widely available, I'll get the Xbox upgrade or buy an HD-DVD player.
Yes, because the only possible uses a high-capacity optical disc could have on a game console would be for watching movies. You couldn't possibly use the much higher-capacity discs for games on this gaming system, right?
Do you not think Microsoft did some market research to see how many people would hold out on getting their new gaming platform because of the lack of HD-DVD support?
Right, and marketing research is always 100% accurate... Nobody has ever done marketing research that said a product would be a great success, only to have it become a terrible failure, right?
But unlike DVD, where is the consumer excitement for HD-DVD?
There wasn't any consumer excitment over DVD a year before the earliest hardware came to market. In fact, there wasn't too much interest for the first year or two after hardware was introduced. After all, other high-end formats that were just as high quality had come claiming to be the next big thing, and gone away with a wimper. People weren't anxious to jump on the DVD bandwagon.
The visual leap up from VHS was so great,
And the visual leap from DVDs will be even greater... By a LONGSHOT.
DVDs are about 2X the resolution of VHS tapes. Meanwhile, HDTV at 1080i is 6X the resolution of DVDs.
Nintendo has always seemed to have a talent for coming up with a decent library of original games that keeps the devoted coming back. Sony, on the other hand, seems to push quantity over quality when it comes to their library.
I agree. Unfortunately, the numbers speak for themselves. Nintendo isn't doing nearly as well as Sony or Microsoft, so I doubt they are going to change their strategy completely around and follow the lead of the last-place competitor.
"...allowing users to tell the good files from the bad ones."
Don't you mean the real illegal files from the fake illegal files?
Not true at all. Just seach for ANY popular terms, (celebrity names, current events, etc) and you will see a HUGE number of fake files that are not what they claim to be.
News video actually turns out to be porn. Pictures with any naming usually turns out to be an ad for one website or another. Worms/Viruses that will make-up filenames out of every combination of dictionary words it can come up with. etc.
I have, in-fact, searched for legal files numerous times, only to find the contents to be completely different, mislabeled junk.
You clearly have a serious bias on the issue, and don't use P2P networks much. These would be real problems even if the RIAA/MPAA wasn't contributing to the problem.
For an example, try searching for the trailers of a recent movie, and you'll see the problem. Surely the MPAA wants wide distribution of trailers, but you find lots of junk instead, and generally be unable to find the trailer you're looking for.
1. Mark a bunch of good files as good
2. Mark your bogus file as good
That would still have more of a positive effect than a negative one. That one file will be marked-down very quickly, and ignored. It's not like causing people to download one bad file out of 100 is doing any real harm.
In addition, you have an issue with semi-good files. What if the encoding is flawed, should you mark it as bad or good? Either case can put you at odds with the general opinion.
You have a good point there, but this could be fixed by either a more fine-grained voting system, or just a written policy saying something like "low-quality/damaged files, that don't say as much in the title, should be marked as "'BAD'".
Create a "non-obviously" bogus file, which some people will mark bad, others good.
That would not work for the RIAA/MPAA. Right now, they deliver complete trash and no content. If they, themselves, were delivering parts of movies or music they own the copyright on, that would essentially be them giving away that content for free, forfeiting their copyright on that segment of content.
Go for the most trusted, most highly rated individuals and take out the most influential (central? critical?) nodes.
No, you don't rate individuals, you rate FILES. Specifically, the SHA1 checksum of the files.
There's absolutely no reason it should be rated by individual, rather than by file.
The RIAA could sue the people sharing the most legit files, but that's pretty much exactly what they do now, and this system won't make that any easier.
And, what? I'm supposed to click on all the links, and just close the ones that don't actually contain the story I'm looking for? Oh right, this is slashdot, you won't want readers to be able to find the story, lest they discover the summaries are usually wrong, and criticize the editors for it...
Of course a link named "DefCon WiFi Shootout" wouldn't be the story, right? It would be info about the event, right? After all, the first link,which is named "Team iFibre Redwire" is a rather spartan page about the group, and and not a link to the story.
Bad editing on/. is only slightly annoying usually, because most stories only have 2 links. Now, with about a dozen terribly non-descript links, it's getting awfully bad, making several recent/. stories unreadable.
It would be nearly fatal to impose stiff tariffs, too.
That's absolutely ridiculous. In fact it would be VERY benefitial to impose stiff tarrifs. The trade gap is MASSIVE, and blocking Chinese-made products would bolster American manufacturing dramatically.
Now you want US corporations to try to dictate internal policy to other countries as well? Why? Who made Cisco into World Policemen, Jr.?
This is NOTHING about Policing other countries. This is pure capitalism.
If you don't like the products a company produces, or their labor record, or their history of pollution, you buy your products from somewhere else.
The same goes for corporations. If their shareholders don't like the practices of China, they go somewhere else. China isn't getting forced to do anything, just as companies aren't forced to do anything when you decide not to buy from them anymore. They just lose X ammounts of income if they do nothing.
Doesn't China already have a home grown router based on stolen Cisco tech that's just as good?
The way to combat copyright infringement isn't to stop selling your legitimate product, and forcing people to use the illegal one, rather than nothing at all...
Come on Cisco, get your head our of your ass and wake up!
You could say that about every company drooling over the low cost of manufacturing in China. It's already very well established that, as soon as the Chinese factories know how to make your products, they will make massive numbers of illegal rip-offs, and the government is fully supporting this process.
All the companies manufacturing in China are essentially out-sourcing almost their entire company to their biggest competitor, and they can't do it fast enough, because it's cheaper, and they'll make more money off of it in the short-term.
It's becoming popular to link to a seperate site that the user has to click through in order to get to the site the post mentions. For example this post here doesn't even mention who or what makes the device, only that linux devices is running a profile on it.
Quite true.
Does anyone else here remember when the "Related Links" section filled with advertising links? Remember when the text actually told you what the link really was about?
"Lan Game Reviews has posted an article on how to use an old computer and FreeBSD distro m0n0wall to create a gaming router.
Actually, no they haven't. They've posted the FIRST PART of an article on how to do this. Right now, it's just how to setup a basic router with m0n0wall.
From the article: When you are ready to really squeeze the best performance from your router, you will want to add your own traffic shaping rules to the configuration. Next week will bring the Lan Game Reviews tutorial on how to set these up for the most popular games, so check back often!
Sadly I know of nobody who has measured who much the separate memory controller costs in power. Could range from insignificant to nearly as much as the CPU.
In most notebooks, you can expect it to be reasonably insignificant. They don't accept the latest and greatest high-speed DDR400 RAM, so they are much lower-power than desktop counterparts. Still, you'd get a few watts benefit if you could eliminate the memory controller (I'd estimate it to be 5-10watts).
In desktops though, Northbridges are up to approx 40watts, and still climbing. That ammount of power isn't very noticable with a 130W P4, but it's pretty significant when you're trying to build a low-power AMD Socket-A system, and decent motherboards are all designed for gamers these days.
Both SIS and VIA are pretty consistent and evenly matched here. I haven't tested any Nforce chipsets, but I hear mostly good things about them.
1. AMD will be getting a new fab online soon, and they have a contract with another company to produce cores if AMD's plants can't meet the demand.
2. EM64 sucks. They're so screwed-up you might as well just stick with a P4. They can't access 4GB+ of RAM with DMA, IIRC, so there's no point in being 64-bit. They don't have the built-in memory controller, so the performance even below 4GBs is poor compared to AMD64. They are just as power-hungry and hot as other P4s. They don't have speed-step (P-M) or Cool-n-Quiet (AMD64) so they run MUCH hotter all-around.
Plus, you need to switch motherboards anyhow, so instead of making an EM64 motherboard, make an AMD64 motherboard. The cost of switching will be about the same as just upgrading with Intel. And they automatically get the option of going to dual-core AMD64 chips, whereas Intel doesn't really have any dual-core chips that can compete with AMD (here, Intel has the real "supply problems").
I think you missed those Pound signs in his post. What you say may be true for the US market,
No, I didn't miss those pound signs. You missed the part where I said "in the US" every few sentences, and the part where I guessed he was talking about PAL, even though he was very vague about it.
but is the US market big enough to make HD a global success?
Sure it is. A guaranteed US market, and the first standard to be widely deployed. That means commodity prices on the equipment for the rest of the world, whenever they are ready. Of course, who knows what politics may bring?
And as digital signals in Europe are generally standard definition, even new digital sets generally won't be HD.
Digital signals are also standard def in the US right now (satellite/cable). Even OTA DTV signals are still mostly standard-def (with a few notable exceptions). Still, when you are going to buy a new digital TV anyhow, you might as well go with one that can display at HDTV resolutions too. So almost all digital TVs on the market are also HD-capable.
You haven't seen Sky's broadcasts, obviously. Given how much they compress signals already in order to get the maximum number of channels onto the stream, I find it unlikely that they will move many to HD.
You could replace "Sky" with "DirecTV" for the US and it would match-up perfectly. However, since there was increasing demand for HD channels, they sent up a new satellite that could carry ALL their channels in full-bitrate HDTV, with plenty of room for expansion. Europe may be behind the US in the timeframe of the switch to HD, but I expect you'll go through the same things shortly.
Initially, however, they are going to be expensive, premium devices.
Not really. Right now, while they only have about a dozen HDTV channels, and few subscribers, a DirecTV HD reciever costs less than a normal HDTV reciever (about $200), and they give you a rebate for most of the costs of the equipment if you get it along with a contract for 1 year of service with them. The recievers only need to drop slightly in price before they are effectively free to customers.
whilst NTSC looks like crap, PAL actually looks pretty good [...] so for European consumers, there's much less of an incentive to upgrade.
That's pretty ridiculous, but there's no point in arguing with you. PAL is just barely higher quality than NTSC, and at the expense of a 20% slower refresh rate. As I've already said, HDTV is MUCH, MUCH higher quality than PAL, no matter how you look at it. 4.7 times the resolution (~ 470%), still with 20% faster screen-refresh.
I suspect you have simply never seen an HDTV in action.
I think you're wrong on the 20% higher refresh rate, too - The European HDTV standard seems to be 50Hz refresh.
PAL is 50Hz, while NTSC and HDTV is 60Hz. That is 20% higher.
modern standard-definition PAL TVs store and duplicate each half-frame so that the screen is refreshed at 100Hz, and there's no discernible flicker.
Flicker is not the only issue, though. 20% faster/smoother motion is nothing to scoff at. Sporting events in particular look far better at higher refresh-rates.
The other advantage of PAL's refresh rate is that there are no pull-down artefacts when watching film-sourced material
There's absolutely no such thing as "[pulldown artifacts]". The conversion process is unusual, but there are no visible artifacts from it. It looks perfect on a 60Hz screen.
Pulldown is only an issue when you are capturing 60Hz broadcast signals, and want to convert them to their original rate (rather than just leaving them interlaced). And even in that case, it's just a matter of running them through an inverse-tele
Don't take my comments the wrong way. I am playing devil's advocate here. Whether HD discs succeed or fail simply has nothing to do with some of these arguments being presented as 'proof' that it will succeed/fail.
My point was, there is nothing stopping the world from continuing to use DVDs for a very long time into the future.
The same will be true of BluRay and HD-DVD players. It won't be long before they're cheap and people will buy them.
DVD players are dirt-cheap, but the discs are not. DVDs are about as cheap to produce as VHS tapes, yet the price on DVD movies has not dropped much, and are still several times that of VHS movies. Studios can drive the prices down, or they can keep them artifically inflated.
Also, people needed their VHS recorders to record stuff.
The same was true when DVDs became popular. Tivo had JUST come out when DVDs were getting popular, and couldn't have been an influence.
CD, which could not be recorded on, also gained popularity over a previous format which was easily recordable.
Much like CDs, DVDs provide more than acceptable quality to the masses.
No, with audio CDs, almost everyone literally can't hear the difference with a higher-quality format. With HDTV, people can easily see the difference between 480 and 1080.
I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but your rationalle is certainly wrong.
The major broadcast TV companies will be switching to HD in the next decade. That will mean that all the DVD's of your favorite shows will be in HD format
That's jumping to conclusions. Sure, TV will be in HD soon, but TV was in 480i when VHS was popular, which only delivered half that. Yet, LaserDiscs which could deliver full TV resolution didn't catch-on.
Down converting HD to DVD-resolution is very easy, and I can't see any inherent reason why that wouldn't be done.
Slashdot Mirror
Good question. Why don't you ask the telcos that, because they don't own the lines either.
Why should the company contracted to maintain the lines be the only one who can sell a service on the lines? You could just as well say Caltrans is the only company that can sell commercial trucking services...
The DSL companies pay a fee to the telcos for the physical lines. As long as they do that, why should they be locked out?
Moderations on
They don't have a "right" to exist and remain profitable. However, it's rather well-accepted that they are better for the (local) economy than large shops.
In cases of very large shops (eg Walmart), they can crush the economies of entire cities quite easily, which they exploit to get extreme tax breaks, incentives, etc., which serve to further improve their own economic position, and further increase the economic success and weight they have to do that.
Small shops don't have a right to exist, and neither do large shops by the same rationale. A small change in economics or ordinances, and either one may be gone.
That's patently ridiculous. Myself and numerous friends and family members own GM-made cars, and all of them have gone better than 150,000 before requiring the slightest bit of work, and it's usually just the alternator going out.
Meanwhile, I know a couple Toyota owners who have had their cars in and out of the shop about every 6 months, for the past few years.
No, actually it's because Toyota has all the hype in the world going for it. They aren't any better than similarly-priced American cars, but people like you keep hyping them, for no real reason.
You've clearly misread my statement. I didn't say American cars "look good", I said the DETAILS are WHERE they look best, compared to Japanese cars.
Specifically, things like head and leg room, how well the doors/windows fit, conveniences like fold down/removable seats, readable instrument panel. etc. That's not the only place they out-match Japanese cars, but it's one place American cars are FAR ahead of Japanese cars.
TVs generally display about 704 columns, not 640. But it's completely besides the point. Yes, DVDs will look better on HDTVs (not twice as good, but there's no reason to argue the point). However, BluRay/HD-DVDs will still look 6Xs better.
Also, it's quite ironic that you say that DVDs are a 2X improvement over VHS tapes, then mention that DVDs are usually widescreen, which means people really only get half that increased resolution anyhow.
There is such a thing as diminishing returns, but that doesn't mean NO returns. Even with diminishing returns, that 6X improvement is going to big a huge difference, and diminishing returns will not have a big enough effect to negate that.
What?
Well, that explains Ford's problems, but not GM's. GM cars have a far better and more reliable powertrain than Ford, or Toyota.
I don't know where you get that idea from. The details are really where American cars look good.
Why is the /. mantra that AMD has supply problems, while Intel supposedly has excess capacity? This story outlines Intel's current shortages, even though the PR guy spun it like it's just a regular occurance...
/. numerous times, while stories about AMD opening a new fab don't even get a mention?
Why do stories about Intel opening a new fab get posted to
I get the feeling this story wouldn't be here if the submitter had made it about Intel's supply problems, rather than the retirement of a few low-end chips?
Yes, because the only possible uses a high-capacity optical disc could have on a game console would be for watching movies. You couldn't possibly use the much higher-capacity discs for games on this gaming system, right?
Right, and marketing research is always 100% accurate... Nobody has ever done marketing research that said a product would be a great success, only to have it become a terrible failure, right?
There wasn't any consumer excitment over DVD a year before the earliest hardware came to market. In fact, there wasn't too much interest for the first year or two after hardware was introduced. After all, other high-end formats that were just as high quality had come claiming to be the next big thing, and gone away with a wimper. People weren't anxious to jump on the DVD bandwagon.
And the visual leap from DVDs will be even greater... By a LONGSHOT.
DVDs are about 2X the resolution of VHS tapes. Meanwhile, HDTV at 1080i is 6X the resolution of DVDs.
I agree. Unfortunately, the numbers speak for themselves. Nintendo isn't doing nearly as well as Sony or Microsoft, so I doubt they are going to change their strategy completely around and follow the lead of the last-place competitor.
Not true at all. Just seach for ANY popular terms, (celebrity names, current events, etc) and you will see a HUGE number of fake files that are not what they claim to be.
News video actually turns out to be porn. Pictures with any naming usually turns out to be an ad for one website or another. Worms/Viruses that will make-up filenames out of every combination of dictionary words it can come up with. etc.
I have, in-fact, searched for legal files numerous times, only to find the contents to be completely different, mislabeled junk.
You clearly have a serious bias on the issue, and don't use P2P networks much. These would be real problems even if the RIAA/MPAA wasn't contributing to the problem.
For an example, try searching for the trailers of a recent movie, and you'll see the problem. Surely the MPAA wants wide distribution of trailers, but you find lots of junk instead, and generally be unable to find the trailer you're looking for.
Go visit kuro5hin.org and see. Collective editing means lowest-common-denominator stuff gets to be the most popular.
That would still have more of a positive effect than a negative one. That one file will be marked-down very quickly, and ignored. It's not like causing people to download one bad file out of 100 is doing any real harm.
You have a good point there, but this could be fixed by either a more fine-grained voting system, or just a written policy saying something like "low-quality/damaged files, that don't say as much in the title, should be marked as "'BAD'".
That would not work for the RIAA/MPAA. Right now, they deliver complete trash and no content. If they, themselves, were delivering parts of movies or music they own the copyright on, that would essentially be them giving away that content for free, forfeiting their copyright on that segment of content.
Absolutely no chance they would ever do that.
No, you don't rate individuals, you rate FILES. Specifically, the SHA1 checksum of the files.
There's absolutely no reason it should be rated by individual, rather than by file.
The RIAA could sue the people sharing the most legit files, but that's pretty much exactly what they do now, and this system won't make that any easier.
And, what? I'm supposed to click on all the links, and just close the ones that don't actually contain the story I'm looking for? Oh right, this is slashdot, you won't want readers to be able to find the story, lest they discover the summaries are usually wrong, and criticize the editors for it...
,which is named "Team iFibre Redwire" is a rather spartan page about the group, and and not a link to the story.
/. is only slightly annoying usually, because most stories only have 2 links. Now, with about a dozen terribly non-descript links, it's getting awfully bad, making several recent /. stories unreadable.
Of course a link named "DefCon WiFi Shootout" wouldn't be the story, right? It would be info about the event, right? After all, the first link
Bad editing on
That's absolutely ridiculous. In fact it would be VERY benefitial to impose stiff tarrifs. The trade gap is MASSIVE, and blocking Chinese-made products would bolster American manufacturing dramatically.
This is NOTHING about Policing other countries. This is pure capitalism.
If you don't like the products a company produces, or their labor record, or their history of pollution, you buy your products from somewhere else.
The same goes for corporations. If their shareholders don't like the practices of China, they go somewhere else. China isn't getting forced to do anything, just as companies aren't forced to do anything when you decide not to buy from them anymore. They just lose X ammounts of income if they do nothing.
The way to combat copyright infringement isn't to stop selling your legitimate product, and forcing people to use the illegal one, rather than nothing at all...
You could say that about every company drooling over the low cost of manufacturing in China. It's already very well established that, as soon as the Chinese factories know how to make your products, they will make massive numbers of illegal rip-offs, and the government is fully supporting this process.
All the companies manufacturing in China are essentially out-sourcing almost their entire company to their biggest competitor, and they can't do it fast enough, because it's cheaper, and they'll make more money off of it in the short-term.
Quite true.
Does anyone else here remember when the "Related Links" section filled with advertising links? Remember when the text actually told you what the link really was about?
Actually, no they haven't. They've posted the FIRST PART of an article on how to do this. Right now, it's just how to setup a basic router with m0n0wall.
From the article:
When you are ready to really squeeze the best performance from your router, you will want to add your own traffic shaping rules to the configuration. Next week will bring the Lan Game Reviews tutorial on how to set these up for the most popular games, so check back often!
In most notebooks, you can expect it to be reasonably insignificant. They don't accept the latest and greatest high-speed DDR400 RAM, so they are much lower-power than desktop counterparts. Still, you'd get a few watts benefit if you could eliminate the memory controller (I'd estimate it to be 5-10watts).
In desktops though, Northbridges are up to approx 40watts, and still climbing. That ammount of power isn't very noticable with a 130W P4, but it's pretty significant when you're trying to build a low-power AMD Socket-A system, and decent motherboards are all designed for gamers these days.
Both SIS and VIA are pretty consistent and evenly matched here. I haven't tested any Nforce chipsets, but I hear mostly good things about them.
1. AMD will be getting a new fab online soon, and they have a contract with another company to produce cores if AMD's plants can't meet the demand.
2. EM64 sucks. They're so screwed-up you might as well just stick with a P4. They can't access 4GB+ of RAM with DMA, IIRC, so there's no point in being 64-bit. They don't have the built-in memory controller, so the performance even below 4GBs is poor compared to AMD64. They are just as power-hungry and hot as other P4s. They don't have speed-step (P-M) or Cool-n-Quiet (AMD64) so they run MUCH hotter all-around.
Plus, you need to switch motherboards anyhow, so instead of making an EM64 motherboard, make an AMD64 motherboard. The cost of switching will be about the same as just upgrading with Intel. And they automatically get the option of going to dual-core AMD64 chips, whereas Intel doesn't really have any dual-core chips that can compete with AMD (here, Intel has the real "supply problems").
No, I didn't miss those pound signs. You missed the part where I said "in the US" every few sentences, and the part where I guessed he was talking about PAL, even though he was very vague about it.
Sure it is. A guaranteed US market, and the first standard to be widely deployed. That means commodity prices on the equipment for the rest of the world, whenever they are ready. Of course, who knows what politics may bring?
Digital signals are also standard def in the US right now (satellite/cable). Even OTA DTV signals are still mostly standard-def (with a few notable exceptions). Still, when you are going to buy a new digital TV anyhow, you might as well go with one that can display at HDTV resolutions too. So almost all digital TVs on the market are also HD-capable.
You could replace "Sky" with "DirecTV" for the US and it would match-up perfectly. However, since there was increasing demand for HD channels, they sent up a new satellite that could carry ALL their channels in full-bitrate HDTV, with plenty of room for expansion. Europe may be behind the US in the timeframe of the switch to HD, but I expect you'll go through the same things shortly.
Not really. Right now, while they only have about a dozen HDTV channels, and few subscribers, a DirecTV HD reciever costs less than a normal HDTV reciever (about $200), and they give you a rebate for most of the costs of the equipment if you get it along with a contract for 1 year of service with them. The recievers only need to drop slightly in price before they are effectively free to customers.
That's pretty ridiculous, but there's no point in arguing with you. PAL is just barely higher quality than NTSC, and at the expense of a 20% slower refresh rate. As I've already said, HDTV is MUCH, MUCH higher quality than PAL, no matter how you look at it. 4.7 times the resolution (~ 470%), still with 20% faster screen-refresh.
I suspect you have simply never seen an HDTV in action.
PAL is 50Hz, while NTSC and HDTV is 60Hz. That is 20% higher.
Flicker is not the only issue, though. 20% faster/smoother motion is nothing to scoff at. Sporting events in particular look far better at higher refresh-rates.
There's absolutely no such thing as "[pulldown artifacts]". The conversion process is unusual, but there are no visible artifacts from it. It looks perfect on a 60Hz screen.
Pulldown is only an issue when you are capturing 60Hz broadcast signals, and want to convert them to their original rate (rather than just leaving them interlaced). And even in that case, it's just a matter of running them through an inverse-tele
My point was, there is nothing stopping the world from continuing to use DVDs for a very long time into the future.
DVD players are dirt-cheap, but the discs are not. DVDs are about as cheap to produce as VHS tapes, yet the price on DVD movies has not dropped much, and are still several times that of VHS movies. Studios can drive the prices down, or they can keep them artifically inflated.
The same was true when DVDs became popular. Tivo had JUST come out when DVDs were getting popular, and couldn't have been an influence.
CD, which could not be recorded on, also gained popularity over a previous format which was easily recordable.
No, with audio CDs, almost everyone literally can't hear the difference with a higher-quality format. With HDTV, people can easily see the difference between 480 and 1080.
I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but your rationalle is certainly wrong.
That's jumping to conclusions. Sure, TV will be in HD soon, but TV was in 480i when VHS was popular, which only delivered half that. Yet, LaserDiscs which could deliver full TV resolution didn't catch-on.
Down converting HD to DVD-resolution is very easy, and I can't see any inherent reason why that wouldn't be done.