So, why architect for a statistically insignificant group of people who obsessively re-load slashdot?
I agree that the per page load model would in reality work well for most people. But the perception, and effect on usage is another matter.
Even if the cost is trivial, the thought is still in my mind that every time I view slashdot, it's taking a piece of that allotment away.
So, maybe I check Slashdot less often because it costs me something. Or, maybe I don't check back on stories & reply to other posts, etc. I think that subtle psychological effect could be damaging.
I think there are several other options that would work better:
- Flat Rate. Forget about the compulsive reloaders. It doesn't effect enough to matter.
- Flat Rate, with caps. $5 for 6 months, with a cap at 3,000 page views per month.
- Transitional pricing. Flat rate with the ability to track your page views per day. Users can decide for themselves that page view pricing is cheaper for their usage.
The ATSC digital broadcast standard is well defined. MPEG2 in the data stream is well defined. 1080i, 720p, 480p, and the other video formats are well defined. THESE are HDTV.
What is being discussed in the article is the digital connection between a computer (set top box) and a display device. HDTV can be done without this. DVI is simply an add-on to HDTV to limit access to the data.
The first example of this threat is satellite TV. DirecTV. Almost all HDTV decoders today also do DirecTV. These boxes carry a warning saying they can down-res the signal if the copyright holders choose. So, when DVI is set as the standard, they tell HBO & DirecTV, and they flip the switch. After that, my HBO-HD is no longer 1080i, it is now 480p.
Broadcast TV is another matter. I think that broadcast TV will not be effected by this. But, given the history of this stuff, I am not willing to assume that.
Almost all HDTV's sold today still have analog component video inputs. The only ones (maybe) not susceptible to this are the sets with internal HDTV tuners. Since the link between the HDTV decoder and the display is not accessible, it doesn't need to be encrypted. (at least that's the logical conclusion.. Noone would claim that logic governs the existing requirements).
Contradicting this stance on encryption, JVC and a few of the studios just announced last week that they will be selling HDTV movies on D-VHS tapes this year. The content on the tape is copy protected, but the link to the display is plain old unencrypted component video.
Also, the argument they make to justify this requirement is that they don't want people to be able to make "perfect digital copies" of their movies. That's very reasonable, I am fine with that. But, component outputs are ANALOG. To record a movie via the analog outputs does not create a perfect copy. And the equipment to do so is not cheap or accessible. How many of you have seen a VCR capable of recording a VGA output? That's what would be needed (in fact, the output of my RCA HDTV decoder is VGA).
DVI is solving a problem that does not exist. They try to put spin on it & represent it as a benefit to the consumer. But, that is the opposite of the truth. On my tube based HDTV, component or VGA inputs are capable of sending an image better than the set can display. There is no quality advantage. It only adds cost / complexity / and obsoletes a lot of hardware.
Take a look at the box your HDTV Set Top Box came in, or look at the manual. It includes the capability to "down-res" the analog output, if copyright holders so choose.
That is what is obsoleting your old set. When the industry decides that DVI is the only acceptable interface, they flip the switch, and the 1080i signal is now down-res'd to 480p.
What a luxury, to be an industry that can spit on consumers & still flourish. In fact, HDTV owners are often some of the biggest movie fans, trying to get the best quality possible for their movie viewing. And the movie industry says "screw you"!
I have never seen an HDTV set that upconverted 1080i to 720p. 720p is generally harder for a TV to support, most of the HDTV's being sold today support 1080i and not 720p.
Many people consider 720p to be the higher quality format because of the progressive display at 60 fields per second. When I bought my HDTV, I made sure it supported 720p and 1080i.
Perhaps what you're talking about is the ability of the display to completely show a 1920x1080 image. Given the dot pitch of my set, and the size of the display area (34" 16:9), the effective resolution of the 1080i image is somewhat less than 1920 x 1080. But, this is very difficult to tell with the naked eye.
Other displays, such as plasma flat panels, may have a lower native resolution, and downsample 1080i images to their native resolution.
This is something to be aware of when shopping for an HDTV display, but I would not call it a scam.
I know there are advantages for the film producer in doing all digital. Editing, and special effects are easier in an all digital medium.
Digital may also (theoretically) solve distribution problems, allowing them to download the films to the theaters, rather than shipping the physical films around.
But, what is the benefit to the theater or the viewer?
I believe that Lucas is doing Star Wars in 1080p24 (1080 lines, progressive scanned at 24 frames per second). A good 35mm film will offer much better resolution than that.
Wouldn't a better option for quality be 70mm, like Imax uses. Or, even cranking up the frame rate.. how about a 60fps film. The motion blur at 24fps is horrible.
I assume that almost all of the people with the comments like "tape sucks, why would I want this?" have never seen an HDTV broadcast..
It's all about quality. Ever since I got my HDTV, I find it difficult to watch standard (Lo-Res) TV. After watching High Definition movies on HBO-HD, DVD's look poor by comparison.
I will probably buy one of the D-VHS units, because I want the best quality I can get. I would rather have HD-DVD, but I'll use D-VHS for the five years until HD-DVD arrives.
I can't believe the reaction this is getting on Slashdot. This is basically giving the MPAA all the ammunition it needs to get their increasingly restrictive controls approved.
I am completely against all the extreme restrictions that things like the DMCA can put upon us. But, I am completely for the protection of intellectual properties for their creators. If the movie houses don't make money off of their movies, you can expect the quantity and quality to go way down.
This format is currently very limited. They have built-in copy protection to limit what you can record and make copies of.
But, it is also not possible to record most HD material with these VCR's today. It can only record via the copy protected firewire port. But, none of currently available set top boxes have firewire output. They only have component video output.
Also, because of the copy protection, it's not clear if they will 'allow' you to copy channels like HBO-HD, or other 'premium' content.
These issues need to be resolved before this technology is going anywhere.
I would expect it to use some payment system like in many hotels.. You connect, and it blocks any access until you register. Any WWW site you request is replied to with their registration page.
And, like most other airport goods and services, it won't be cheap.
Mr. Katz's review seems to follow the government approved propaganda.. Here is a story from "The Independant", a London newspaper, with a different take on the events in Somalia:
But, that's the whole point.... Building a digital VCR is NOT hard. We have the technology to do it. The problem is when groups create artificial limitations that stop us from using the technology.
If the big business sponsored copy control legislation gets passed, they will have a legal means for stopping the production of any devices that incorporate the technologies you describe. So, they intimidate, scare, and bully the companies into not producing digital VCR's, so that there is not chance of us watching that TV show when they don't want us to, or fast forwarding through that commercial, or -heaven forbid- copying that baseball game for my neighbor when he's out of town.
Once again, big business tries to subvert copyright to enforce their control over consumers. There is absolutely no benefit to the consumers in anything they are proposing. It is all just restrictive overhead they would require of the equipment that would do nothing but limit the capabilities, and add cost/complexity to the production.
With the republican administration, sponsored by corporate America, we can't expect the government to control any of this.
Once again, the EFF is our only hope. Open those check books wide.
"As broadcasters, we saw the opportunity to provide a service to the unserved users in those areas while delivering free, high definition television to the viewing public."
How the hell do they propose to offer both HDTV and data at the same time? A 1080i video stream can easily take the full 20Mbps 8VSB channel.
The truth is, they have no intention of carrying HDTV programming, because that would take up all the bandwidth. They will only provide a highly compressed SDTV signal, to keep the FCC off their back, and sell the more profitable internet access as their main business.
This will greatly hurt the DTV conversion process. Who will bother to convert to a digital TV if it offers no advantage over their current cable or satellite service.
Billion citizens != Billion Internet Users
on
The Internet Shifts East
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The latest UN statistics show China's per-capita income at $798 USD.
Does that sort of income enable the purchase of a computer, or the recurring costs of a phone line and ISP?
If it does, then what are the Internet applications driving this incredible influx of mandarin/cantonese users? Without the huge economic/retail motive that drove American adoption, it's hard to see the huge growth in users and services. And, obviously, there is absolutely no way this will happen by 2007, as it says in the article.
The only interesting thing in the announcement was support for 720p (1280x720, progressive scan). For the growing HDTV market, this is a great improvement.
I'll reserve judgement until I see two things:
- How restrictive is the format? I don't have any need/desire to copy DVD's, so as long as it doesn't impede the user experience I don't care about underlying protections.
- How good is the *REAL* quality of the video. They use vague terms about the quality relative to DVD, but no quantitative analysis. While the video might look great in a window on my 19" monitor, how does it look on my 34" HDTV, or on a 100" projection system. Current 1080i and 720p HDTV look great in those formats, if this doesn't it's useless to HDTV consumers.
As a network guy, I find these really cool. In your typical office environment the 100Mbps uplink would be fine. But, for the more technical environments, where they make heavier use of the network, a Gigabit ethernet option would be great. Either a gigabit uplink, or even a full gigabit switch.
Re:The other way round
on
MAME On Xbox
·
· Score: 1
Huh? There are plenty of PC motherboards that use a unified memory architecture. There have been for 5+ years.
Because of memory bandwidth bottlenecks the performance always sucked & were limited to low end machines. The Nvidia nForce chipset greatly improves the memory access bandwidth, to the point that it make a good performing video solution.
I had the same complaint.. It's compounded by the fact that I have three machines running (Windows desktop, Linux server, and Linux firewall).
I just ordered a VIA C3 800MHz CPU. It's a 0.13 micron manufactured chip, so it runs cool enough to use only passive cooling. But, it's performance is comparable to a Celeron in everything but gaming (floating point is weak). Toss a quiet power supply in there, with a Seagate Barracuda IV quiet drive, and it's a pretty quiet box.
So, for my Windows box that spends 95% of the time doing WWW Browsing, E-Mail, Word Processing, Winamp, etc. This chip does fine. It will also be great for the firewall box. I'll keep my P3 box around for the occasional game.
The submittor is in a program for a "Bachelor of Business Administration in Management Information Systems". This program is specifically designed to be a bit of everything. If you want specialization in Finance, do a Finance program. If you want specialization in programming, go for a Computer Science degree.
In an engineering program, there is plenty of opportunity for specialization. Even more so when you continue into a post grad program.
There has been a Mac emulator around for a LONG time.. Executor, from http://www.ardi.com/ runs mac applications. It's available for Linux PPC, but also available for Linux x86.
Slashdot Mirror
So, why architect for a statistically insignificant group of people who obsessively re-load slashdot?
I agree that the per page load model would in reality work well for most people. But the perception, and effect on usage is another matter.
Even if the cost is trivial, the thought is still in my mind that every time I view slashdot, it's taking a piece of that allotment away.
So, maybe I check Slashdot less often because it costs me something. Or, maybe I don't check back on stories & reply to other posts, etc. I think that subtle psychological effect could be damaging.
I think there are several other options that would work better:
- Flat Rate. Forget about the compulsive reloaders. It doesn't effect enough to matter.
- Flat Rate, with caps. $5 for 6 months, with a cap at 3,000 page views per month.
- Transitional pricing. Flat rate with the ability to track your page views per day. Users can decide for themselves that page view pricing is cheaper for their usage.
Never been an HDTV standard, Huh?
The ATSC digital broadcast standard is well defined. MPEG2 in the data stream is well defined. 1080i, 720p, 480p, and the other video formats are well defined. THESE are HDTV.
What is being discussed in the article is the digital connection between a computer (set top box) and a display device. HDTV can be done without this. DVI is simply an add-on to HDTV to limit access to the data.
No.. this is not correct.
The first example of this threat is satellite TV. DirecTV. Almost all HDTV decoders today also do DirecTV. These boxes carry a warning saying they can down-res the signal if the copyright holders choose. So, when DVI is set as the standard, they tell HBO & DirecTV, and they flip the switch. After that, my HBO-HD is no longer 1080i, it is now 480p.
Broadcast TV is another matter. I think that broadcast TV will not be effected by this. But, given the history of this stuff, I am not willing to assume that.
Almost all HDTV's sold today still have analog component video inputs. The only ones (maybe) not susceptible to this are the sets with internal HDTV tuners. Since the link between the HDTV decoder and the display is not accessible, it doesn't need to be encrypted. (at least that's the logical conclusion.. Noone would claim that logic governs the existing requirements).
Contradicting this stance on encryption, JVC and a few of the studios just announced last week that they will be selling HDTV movies on D-VHS tapes this year. The content on the tape is copy protected, but the link to the display is plain old unencrypted component video.
Also, the argument they make to justify this requirement is that they don't want people to be able to make "perfect digital copies" of their movies. That's very reasonable, I am fine with that. But, component outputs are ANALOG. To record a movie via the analog outputs does not create a perfect copy. And the equipment to do so is not cheap or accessible. How many of you have seen a VCR capable of recording a VGA output? That's what would be needed (in fact, the output of my RCA HDTV decoder is VGA).
DVI is solving a problem that does not exist. They try to put spin on it & represent it as a benefit to the consumer. But, that is the opposite of the truth. On my tube based HDTV, component or VGA inputs are capable of sending an image better than the set can display. There is no quality advantage. It only adds cost / complexity / and obsoletes a lot of hardware.
Actually, No..
Take a look at the box your HDTV Set Top Box came in, or look at the manual. It includes the capability to "down-res" the analog output, if copyright holders so choose.
That is what is obsoleting your old set. When the industry decides that DVI is the only acceptable interface, they flip the switch, and the 1080i signal is now down-res'd to 480p.
What a luxury, to be an industry that can spit on consumers & still flourish. In fact, HDTV owners are often some of the biggest movie fans, trying to get the best quality possible for their movie viewing. And the movie industry says "screw you"!
I have never seen an HDTV set that upconverted 1080i to 720p. 720p is generally harder for a TV to support, most of the HDTV's being sold today support 1080i and not 720p.
Many people consider 720p to be the higher quality format because of the progressive display at 60 fields per second. When I bought my HDTV, I made sure it supported 720p and 1080i.
Perhaps what you're talking about is the ability of the display to completely show a 1920x1080 image. Given the dot pitch of my set, and the size of the display area (34" 16:9), the effective resolution of the 1080i image is somewhat less than 1920 x 1080. But, this is very difficult to tell with the naked eye.
Other displays, such as plasma flat panels, may have a lower native resolution, and downsample 1080i images to their native resolution.
This is something to be aware of when shopping for an HDTV display, but I would not call it a scam.
I know there are advantages for the film producer in doing all digital. Editing, and special effects are easier in an all digital medium.
Digital may also (theoretically) solve distribution problems, allowing them to download the films to the theaters, rather than shipping the physical films around.
But, what is the benefit to the theater or the viewer?
I believe that Lucas is doing Star Wars in 1080p24 (1080 lines, progressive scanned at 24 frames per second). A good 35mm film will offer much better resolution than that.
Wouldn't a better option for quality be 70mm, like Imax uses. Or, even cranking up the frame rate.. how about a 60fps film. The motion blur at 24fps is horrible.
I assume that almost all of the people with the comments like "tape sucks, why would I want this?" have never seen an HDTV broadcast..
It's all about quality. Ever since I got my HDTV, I find it difficult to watch standard (Lo-Res) TV. After watching High Definition movies on HBO-HD, DVD's look poor by comparison.
I will probably buy one of the D-VHS units, because I want the best quality I can get. I would rather have HD-DVD, but I'll use D-VHS for the five years until HD-DVD arrives.
I can't believe the reaction this is getting on Slashdot. This is basically giving the MPAA all the ammunition it needs to get their increasingly restrictive controls approved.
I am completely against all the extreme restrictions that things like the DMCA can put upon us. But, I am completely for the protection of intellectual properties for their creators. If the movie houses don't make money off of their movies, you can expect the quantity and quality to go way down.
This format is currently very limited. They have built-in copy protection to limit what you can record and make copies of.
But, it is also not possible to record most HD material with these VCR's today. It can only record via the copy protected firewire port. But, none of currently available set top boxes have firewire output. They only have component video output.
Also, because of the copy protection, it's not clear if they will 'allow' you to copy channels like HBO-HD, or other 'premium' content.
These issues need to be resolved before this technology is going anywhere.
I would expect it to use some payment system like in many hotels.. You connect, and it blocks any access until you register. Any WWW site you request is replied to with their registration page.
And, like most other airport goods and services, it won't be cheap.
Much of the optimization he discusses in the article are based on optimizing MMX and SSE scenarios. Does gcc even use these features of the x86 CPU's?
In a benchmark environment, it's very easy to come up with examples that shine with SSE. But, it's much harder for real world applications.
The Intel compiler may very well be more efficient than gcc. But, I highly doubt that it is ~40% faster in real applications.
Mr. Katz's review seems to follow the government approved propaganda.. Here is a story from "The Independant", a London newspaper, with a different take on the events in Somalia:
1 3
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=1140
But, that's the whole point.... Building a digital VCR is NOT hard. We have the technology to do it. The problem is when groups create artificial limitations that stop us from using the technology.
If the big business sponsored copy control legislation gets passed, they will have a legal means for stopping the production of any devices that incorporate the technologies you describe. So, they intimidate, scare, and bully the companies into not producing digital VCR's, so that there is not chance of us watching that TV show when they don't want us to, or fast forwarding through that commercial, or -heaven forbid- copying that baseball game for my neighbor when he's out of town.
Once again, big business tries to subvert copyright to enforce their control over consumers. There is absolutely no benefit to the consumers in anything they are proposing. It is all just restrictive overhead they would require of the equipment that would do nothing but limit the capabilities, and add cost/complexity to the production.
With the republican administration, sponsored by corporate America, we can't expect the government to control any of this.
Once again, the EFF is our only hope. Open those check books wide.
Check out this quote from the article:
"As broadcasters, we saw the opportunity to provide a service to the unserved users in those areas while delivering free, high definition television to the viewing public."
How the hell do they propose to offer both HDTV and data at the same time? A 1080i video stream can easily take the full 20Mbps 8VSB channel.
The truth is, they have no intention of carrying HDTV programming, because that would take up all the bandwidth. They will only provide a highly compressed SDTV signal, to keep the FCC off their back, and sell the more profitable internet access as their main business.
This will greatly hurt the DTV conversion process. Who will bother to convert to a digital TV if it offers no advantage over their current cable or satellite service.
The latest UN statistics show China's per-capita income at $798 USD.
Does that sort of income enable the purchase of a computer, or the recurring costs of a phone line and ISP?
If it does, then what are the Internet applications driving this incredible influx of mandarin/cantonese users? Without the huge economic/retail motive that drove American adoption, it's hard to see the huge growth in users and services. And, obviously, there is absolutely no way this will happen by 2007, as it says in the article.
The only interesting thing in the announcement was support for 720p (1280x720, progressive scan). For the growing HDTV market, this is a great improvement.
I'll reserve judgement until I see two things:
- How restrictive is the format? I don't have any need/desire to copy DVD's, so as long as it doesn't impede the user experience I don't care about underlying protections.
- How good is the *REAL* quality of the video. They use vague terms about the quality relative to DVD, but no quantitative analysis. While the video might look great in a window on my 19" monitor, how does it look on my 34" HDTV, or on a 100" projection system. Current 1080i and 720p HDTV look great in those formats, if this doesn't it's useless to HDTV consumers.
As a network guy, I find these really cool. In your typical office environment the 100Mbps uplink would be fine. But, for the more technical environments, where they make heavier use of the network, a Gigabit ethernet option would be great. Either a gigabit uplink, or even a full gigabit switch.
Huh? There are plenty of PC motherboards that use a unified memory architecture. There have been for 5+ years.
Because of memory bandwidth bottlenecks the performance always sucked & were limited to low end machines. The Nvidia nForce chipset greatly improves the memory access bandwidth, to the point that it make a good performing video solution.
For those of us not part of the kernel community, can you give us an overview of your background and past work done in the Linux world?
I had the same complaint.. It's compounded by the fact that I have three machines running (Windows desktop, Linux server, and Linux firewall).
I just ordered a VIA C3 800MHz CPU. It's a 0.13 micron manufactured chip, so it runs cool enough to use only passive cooling. But, it's performance is comparable to a Celeron in everything but gaming (floating point is weak). Toss a quiet power supply in there, with a Seagate Barracuda IV quiet drive, and it's a pretty quiet box.
So, for my Windows box that spends 95% of the time doing WWW Browsing, E-Mail, Word Processing, Winamp, etc. This chip does fine. It will also be great for the firewall box. I'll keep my P3 box around for the occasional game.
I can't wait to run my quantum computer, with it's optical storage system, off of fusion generated power. I hear it's right around the corner.
The submittor is in a program for a "Bachelor of Business Administration in Management Information Systems". This program is specifically designed to be a bit of everything. If you want specialization in Finance, do a Finance program. If you want specialization in programming, go for a Computer Science degree.
In an engineering program, there is plenty of opportunity for specialization. Even more so when you continue into a post grad program.
There has been a Mac emulator around for a LONG time.. Executor, from http://www.ardi.com/ runs mac applications. It's available for Linux PPC, but also available for Linux x86.