First PAL/SECAM line _and_ color resolution are vastly better than NTSC in the first place. So there's less urge to improve on a blurry, washed out picture with a color palette that is outdone by most neanderthal cave paintings.
Second the European market has accepted analog _widescreen_ TV sets since the mid-nineties. Since the late nineties, it was hard to find any "squarescreen" set except in the low end of the market.
Accordingly, most of the Tapes, DVDs and broadcast of movies where already letterboxed and anamorphic widescreen. Digital cable channel have been broadcasting anamorphic widescreen shows since the late nineties, and these would appear with black bars on standard sets.
And finally, the transfer of movies to video is one film frame -> two interlaced video frames instead of the clunky one film frame -> three or two interlaced video frame. Thus de-interlacing is easy and lossless. Most high-end TV sets have for years de-interlaced their analog inputs and display them with a double frame-rate (100 Hz scanning), thus eliminating any flicker.
And by the way, basically all TVs sold in Europe since the mid-80s are RGB monitors. You can directly drive the R, G and B valeus of each of the beams through three different analog signals in the SCART plug. This has made it so nice for video-game systems and the 1980s "plug-on-tv" family computers...
Most of the fullscreen releases are Pan&Scan. This is obviously the case when the movie was shot with an anamorphic lens, and that the whole negative _is_ widescreen. However it does happen that movies are shot with both 4:3 and wide aspect ratios in mind, and that the DVD is relesed as a "full screen" with the whole negative picture and that the same movie is shown with the bottom and top trimmed of in theaters. The only case that I know about is Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Many cinematographers actually leave mikes and travelling rails in the areas of the frame that are supposed to be hidden.
Coding standards are language standard, or language specifications. A developer who does not understand any piece of code does not understand the language and hence is incompetent. Of course one can write obfuscated code, and developers should be encouraged not to. If your developers are not capable of writing meaningful code in a language, change the language, change the developers, or as a last resort change careers, your company stinks. Setting coding standards would be the same as restricting the English language to a subset in which, for example, George W Bush would be capable of forming a meaningful and consistent sentence.
No. That was between 1987. Since then, several changes in the law makes it that you can give any name. There is still the possibility of having it refused if the authorities find that the name would obviously hurt the child. If your last name is Hiller, they wouldn't let you name your boy Adolphe, even though its as tradiationnal a name as it gets.
I've been an early adopter of the widescreen format for TVs (since the late 90s). However I find it completely inadequate for most of what is done on a computer and I personnaly use a conventionnal aspect "tilted" LCD in the portrait position. Most web pages are vertically formatted, so you wast less screen space reading them this way. Reading PDF is even better, since these can never been dynamically formatted and scrolling through each page is a pain. Even for photo editing in Photoshop, I find that I like to display the picture "before" and "after" during editing one on top of the other, which fits perfectly on a portrait oriented 4:3 screen if the photos are in landscape orientation.
So if I were to purchase a laptop for personnal use I would certainly avoid a widescreen. I cannot get portrait orientation on a laptop but let's not make it worse either.
Has anybody noticed how a "Wall street journal editor" got to can 6 out of 7 candidates with no oversight ? That's pretty much enough to strip these awards of any credibility whatsoever.
I do hope I don't have to explain quite how horrifying the idea of a British citizen patriotically launching into space to the sound of "Cinq... quatre... trios... deux... un!" sounds to the average Brit.
In other news, the British MoD has recently contracted the design of the RN's future aircraft carriers to a French firm.
Proxies can be used for absentee ballots, with a limited number of proxy votes per person (one or two). And polls are held on Sundays in most countries, and the law can guarantee for those who work to have the opportunity to take time off.
Voting over the internet, or any kind of distance voting for that matter, violates a very basic premise of the democratic process : that each vote is guaranteed to belong to the one in the name of whom it is cast. There is no guarantee with remote voting that the voter has not sold her vote, or that no pressure has been exercised on her.
Voting should consist in having people go completely alone in isolated booths. A vote on a country's government is not an internet poll.
We're getting offtopic here, but as a Frenchman father of two and living in the US, I know exactly what you mean.
Even though it might be counter-intuitive, I would say that life in Europe is actually more relatively favorable for two-income families than for single-income, compared to the situation in the US, when the children are young. The reason is that, the cost of early (0-6 yo) childcare being so dramatically lower in Europe (in France full time pre-school is free for all from age 2 or 3), that the "virtual salary" of the stay-at-home parent, that is, the economic advantage over couples who have two jobs and have to pay for childcare, is much lower there.
Interestingly enough, it's not in less "well-off" markets that DVDs are cheaper. The pricing of "virtual" goods seems to be a very mysterious topic. It probably boils down to just "how much are people ready to pay ?". DVDs in Europe tend to be more expensive than in the US, even before factoring the VAT in, even though Europeans have less disposable income in general. But maybe they are just willing to spend more. You can make as much profit or even more by selling less units each at a higher prices. On the other hand, Europeans get "luxury packagings" with nice custom packs more often.
Moreover, the European market is further artificially segmented into separate markets because different editions of the same movies will have different dubbing and subtitles available.
I know they were not popular, and also I know that there was an even bigger technical hurdle to watching them, because it is much easier today to hack a DVD player out of its zone control than it was to play PAL/SECAM tapes on American VCRs. At least most DVD players will take care of the PAL->NTSC conversion at no cost, while multi-standard VCRs or stand alone converters were pricey.
However, with DVDs and their optionnal subtitling capability, there was a huge opportunity to open the American market at very low cost, and apparently Hollywood has made sure it wouldn't happen.
I've always found it interesting how region coding was giving an advantage to Hollywood movies. Everything out of Hollywood, even the least interesting tripe, gets released in other region codes than north America, notably in the Europe/Japan zone (2). On the other hand, only a relatively few movies from Europe and Japan get an "American release" on Zone 1 DVDs. Hence the zoning works as a one-way filter and keeps American consumers from most foreign movies.
The theater release date argument toward zoning is not good because more and more of the most anticipated movies have worldwide release, and also because then why would zoning apply to old classics and other pre-dvd era movies that are still to be released ?
This has a fundamental chicken and egg problem: So you store the information, you also need to store the format of that information. So then how do you read "format of the information" document? What format is *that* in?
It looks like you'd enjoy reading Godel, Escher, Bach by D. Hofstadter. The whole book's about dealing with the philosophical implications of this problem.
Yes but then I figure it couldn't be because they say specifically : "In a galaxy FAR AWAY". So the Death Star was never in our galaxy in the first place.
I've checked out the link that appears as the parent's author webpage, and man, what a dense service of fresh, steaming bullshit that is. Was parent moderated funny because of irony ?
Slashdot Mirror
But these don't exist in the US.
Plus some DVD players are doing nifty up-conversion, which actually can yield astounding pictures.
Now of course if you plug a $30 player on the composite input, yeah it's king of useless.
The story is completely different in Europe:
First PAL/SECAM line _and_ color resolution are vastly better than NTSC in the first place. So there's less urge to improve on a blurry, washed out picture with a color palette that is outdone by most neanderthal cave paintings.
Second the European market has accepted analog _widescreen_ TV sets since the mid-nineties. Since the late nineties, it was hard to find any "squarescreen" set except in the low end of the market.
Accordingly, most of the Tapes, DVDs and broadcast of movies where already letterboxed and anamorphic widescreen. Digital cable channel have been broadcasting anamorphic widescreen shows since the late nineties, and these would appear with black bars on standard sets.
And finally, the transfer of movies to video is one film frame -> two interlaced video frames instead of the clunky one film frame -> three or two interlaced video frame. Thus de-interlacing is easy and lossless. Most high-end TV sets have for years de-interlaced their analog inputs and display them with a double frame-rate (100 Hz scanning), thus eliminating any flicker.
And by the way, basically all TVs sold in Europe since the mid-80s are RGB monitors. You can directly drive the R, G and B valeus of each of the beams through three different analog signals in the SCART plug. This has made it so nice for video-game systems and the 1980s "plug-on-tv" family computers...
Most of the fullscreen releases are Pan&Scan. This is obviously the case when the movie was shot with an anamorphic lens, and that the whole negative _is_ widescreen. However it does happen that movies are shot with both 4:3 and wide aspect ratios in mind, and that the DVD is relesed as a "full screen" with the whole negative picture and that the same movie is shown with the bottom and top trimmed of in theaters. The only case that I know about is Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Many cinematographers actually leave mikes and travelling rails in the areas of the frame that are supposed to be hidden.
Coding standards are language standard, or language specifications.
A developer who does not understand any piece of code does not understand the language and hence is incompetent.
Of course one can write obfuscated code, and developers should be encouraged not to. If your developers are not capable of writing meaningful code in a language, change the language, change the developers, or as a last resort change careers, your company stinks.
Setting coding standards would be the same as restricting the English language to a subset in which, for example, George W Bush would be capable of forming a meaningful and consistent sentence.
No. That was between 1987. Since then, several changes in the law makes it that you can give any name. There is still the possibility of having it refused if the authorities find that the name would obviously hurt the child. If your last name is Hiller, they wouldn't let you name your boy Adolphe, even though its as tradiationnal a name as it gets.
My computer multitasks so that I don't have to.
I've been an early adopter of the widescreen format for TVs (since the late 90s). However I find it completely inadequate for most of what is done on a computer and I personnaly use a conventionnal aspect "tilted" LCD in the portrait position. Most web pages are vertically formatted, so you wast less screen space reading them this way. Reading PDF is even better, since these can never been dynamically formatted and scrolling through each page is a pain. Even for photo editing in Photoshop, I find that I like to display the picture "before" and "after" during editing one on top of the other, which fits perfectly on a portrait oriented 4:3 screen if the photos are in landscape orientation.
So if I were to purchase a laptop for personnal use I would certainly avoid a widescreen. I cannot get portrait orientation on a laptop but let's not make it worse either.
Has anybody noticed how a "Wall street journal editor" got to can 6 out of 7 candidates with no oversight ? That's pretty much enough to strip these awards of any credibility whatsoever.
I do hope I don't have to explain quite how horrifying the idea of a British citizen patriotically launching into space to the sound of "Cinq... quatre... trios... deux... un!" sounds to the average Brit.
In other news, the British MoD has recently contracted the design of the RN's future aircraft carriers to a French firm.
Proxies can be used for absentee ballots, with a limited number of proxy votes per person (one or two). And polls are held on Sundays in most countries, and the law can guarantee for those who work to have the opportunity to take time off.
Voting over the internet, or any kind of distance voting for that matter, violates a very basic premise of the democratic process : that each vote is guaranteed to belong to the one in the name of whom it is cast. There is no guarantee with remote voting that the voter has not sold her vote, or that no pressure has been exercised on her.
Voting should consist in having people go completely alone in isolated booths. A vote on a country's government is not an internet poll.
Of course its sensor comes in the form of Fuji Velvia 100, Agfa RSX II 100 and Fuji NPZ 800 film that I load in it according to the circumstances.
We're getting offtopic here, but as a Frenchman father of two and living in the US, I know exactly what you mean.
Even though it might be counter-intuitive, I would say that life in Europe is actually more relatively favorable for two-income families than for single-income, compared to the situation in the US, when the children are young. The reason is that, the cost of early (0-6 yo) childcare being so dramatically lower in Europe (in France full time pre-school is free for all from age 2 or 3), that the "virtual salary" of the stay-at-home parent, that is, the economic advantage over couples who have two jobs and have to pay for childcare, is much lower there.
Interestingly enough, it's not in less "well-off" markets that DVDs are cheaper. The pricing of "virtual" goods seems to be a very mysterious topic. It probably boils down to just "how much are people ready to pay ?". DVDs in Europe tend to be more expensive than in the US, even before factoring the VAT in, even though Europeans have less disposable income in general. But maybe they are just willing to spend more. You can make as much profit or even more by selling less units each at a higher prices. On the other hand, Europeans get "luxury packagings" with nice custom packs more often.
Moreover, the European market is further artificially segmented into separate markets because different editions of the same movies will have different dubbing and subtitles available.
I know they were not popular, and also I know that there was an even bigger technical hurdle to watching them, because it is much easier today to hack a DVD player out of its zone control than it was to play PAL/SECAM tapes on American VCRs. At least most DVD players will take care of the PAL->NTSC conversion at no cost, while multi-standard VCRs or stand alone converters were pricey.
However, with DVDs and their optionnal subtitling capability, there was a huge opportunity to open the American market at very low cost, and apparently Hollywood has made sure it wouldn't happen.
I've always found it interesting how region coding was giving an advantage to Hollywood movies. Everything out of Hollywood, even the least interesting tripe, gets released in other region codes than north America, notably in the Europe/Japan zone (2). On the other hand, only a relatively few movies from Europe and Japan get an "American release" on Zone 1 DVDs. Hence the zoning works as a one-way filter and keeps American consumers from most foreign movies.
The theater release date argument toward zoning is not good because more and more of the most anticipated movies have worldwide release, and also because then why would zoning apply to old classics and other pre-dvd era movies that are still to be released ?
If you think you're going to produce better code by splurging $$$ on a shiny desk, maybe you should give up programming.
The accessories you need are a pile of paper and some good pencils, with which you can design your code nicely before you even fire up your IDE.
An illegal war of choice : $200bn and counting
A mishandled natural disaster : $100bn
A permanent tax cut for the rich : $800bn
A trip to the moon like in the '70s : $100bn
Driving your country into bankrupcy : priceless.
This has a fundamental chicken and egg problem: So you store the information, you also need to store the format of that information. So then how do you read "format of the information" document? What format is *that* in?
It looks like you'd enjoy reading Godel, Escher, Bach by D. Hofstadter. The whole book's about dealing with the philosophical implications of this problem.
Because I don't personnaly own an helicopter and the skills to fly it over streams of hot lava ?
I don't care about a volcano poping up in my backyard, as long as the Bush administration is not in charge of evacuating my ass.
Yes but then I figure it couldn't be because they say specifically : "In a galaxy FAR AWAY". So the Death Star was never in our galaxy in the first place.
I've checked out the link that appears as the parent's author webpage, and man, what a dense service of fresh, steaming bullshit that is. Was parent moderated funny because of irony ?
Which proves the point.
If I watch TV, I become stupid, hence TV is a quantum information device.