They'll have HDTivos in all those secondary rooms (guest bedroom, kitchen, etc) of their house.
I agree with your larger point, though -- the cable company provided box is a huge defense against obsolence, repair, and overpriced periodic subscription fees (or "lifetime" gambles).
It's one of the reasons that Tivo is in a tough spot; people who need a cable box will find the cable provided box to be an automatic "yes", given that it's little or no extra cost and zero integration effort as is required with a Tivo.
Tivo's salvation *may* be the new cable-card standard, which would give a standalone Tivo access to the same digital bitstream as the cable company provided boxes, enabling stuff like multi-channel recording and HD recording far simpler (since you just store the bitsream off the line, not re-encoding the actual picture).
I've been told that the cable companies really don't like being in the hardware business. While it seems like easy money, in many urban areas the losses and repairs have to make it a break-even deal at best.
$50k per year as a family income is hardly extravagent where I live. That's two spouses earning $12.50 per hour, roughly double minimum wage. after taxes, it's around $35K. Start figuring rent/mortgage, utilities, food, transportation, and ask yourself how "fancy" such a life REALLY is.
The adherents of oversimplified global economics grossly trivialize both the investment made into past careers and the time and money required to start a new career (assuming, of course, that the "new jobs" are actually open to displaced workers).
That rhetoric may work for factory workers with 6 months training, but for people with 4+ years of college education? "Labor mobility" and "labor flexibility" are one of the great jokes of economics.
Why not just dub from Tivo to the Panny via SVHS cables? At the top two Tivo quality settings and the Panny set to SP, the qulity vs. the built-in tuner is negligable. It's a nuisance, admittedly, and not an optimal solution, but it does work really well and eliminates any gripes about the Panny's scheduling, which is no better or no worse than the VCR.
They could fix the letter-entry method, although I've kind of gotten over it (I gave up the compulsion of labeling both a recorded program AND titling the disc) and don't care anymore. An IR keyboard would be trivial and very effective, but then again, it's like 30 chracters, not "War and Peace."
The disc copy issue is eternally stupid, though. EVEN IF they wanted to make it a copyright tool, at least only allow ripping of Panny-made discs or all non-copyrighted discs. The E85 can, apparently, but its crippled by beaing real-time (unlike -RAM copies) and requiring an MPEG2 transcode as well.
Someone in another thread said it learns, so perhaps it uses a simple method like a Markov chain and then re-sorts the list based on words you use, and offers suggestions by presenting you with the most common Markov matches first.
It's been reported the government is acting almost serious about spam as a criminal enterprise lately (although not as serious as it is about other so-called crimes).
The government's misguided priorities aside, I wonder if the government hasn't finally woken up and begun to consider spam for what it really is, a criminal conspiracy, and rightly defining "criminal conspiracy" to include people knowingly and willingly providing services that furthered the conspiracy.
Rather than actually taking the time to file genuine RICO cases, perhaps they are threatening them (or at least laying out a pretty solid criminal conspiracy cases in the more obvious situations) and some of the people playing ball with spammers aren't going to get scared out of doing that.
Not everyone will get scared, but if enough did, it might just cut off enough of the air supply to spamming to tip the balance in the direction of making spam too expensive and not portable enough to work. It wouldn't go away 100%, but it would be back to the levels of the late 90s when it was far less pervasive.
At some point in time (during my lifetime), schools became something other than a place where you learned to read, write, and do arithmatic. They became social welfare delivery systems -- they were public-funded compulsory institutions with high standing among the public (up until the latter half of the 20th century, attending school through high school was an honor and a privilege). Persuing social welfare goals was a "natural" fit for the school system when Johnson started the war on poverty.
Since then, we've evolved to a situation where solving a kid's social welfare needs is both more important than the educational effort and a manditory precursor to any expectation of academic success.
This has left the school system overburdened, both in mission and in mandate, and turned calls for improvements to *education* into left/right battles over social policy.
Social policy needs to be divested from the eductional system. If a child goes to school, it should be to learn the "three Rs". All other problems children have need to be solved outside of the educational system. This is why parents love private schools -- not that the teachers are smarter, but by and large more affluent parents expect less social welfare delivery and the schools do less of it and more teaching, plus it's expensive and they demand results.
I'll have to admit to periodic fascination with national socialism, and there are points made by the neo-nazi movements that can't honestly be dismissed by a wave of the hand.
From reading I've done, the very early roots of fascism were a legitimate, honest attempt to find a "third way" which somehow fused (or tossed) elements of both the "right" and the "left" to find solutions to problems raised by rigid adherence to the philosophies of the right or the left.
I'm forced to discount any movement that tries to import the symbolism of Germany's Nazi party. There was too much wrong with that movement, and it only provokes fear/anger/hate. That being said, I think the people behind that web site are probably actually trying for something different.
I ended up, literally, close to Nelson Mandela and the Dali Lama. Yet personally I support (with some qualifications on all of these) the death penalty, nearly unlimited gun ownership, English as the official US language, and hard-core enforcement of immigration laws.
Yet at the same time, I'm also deeply suspicious of the motivations of large corporations and the very rich and believe strongly that economic balance needs to be enforced and that some government spending on the public welfare is not only just/fair, but a damn good investment, too. I'm also 100% against any censorship, totally pro-choice, pro-sex ed (it should teach technique as well as mechanics), strict church/state seperation, and legalizing drugs.
I'm a touch libertarian, a touch socialist, a touch neofascist, and a touch liberal.
Where is that? I haven't seen it as an option on my Asus P4P800-E Deluxe mainboard, but I haven't looked close, either.
The other thing that's missing is a decent, small, bootable repair OS with full networking support and a servicable GUI. There are some small-footprint stuff (like Bart's PE and the proprietary MS one it's based on). It needs to be able to run most any application, read/write NTFS,
In an ideal world, Windows would have a "lightweight" install option that would let you turn off unneeded features and run from a read-only environment so that you could create a Windows for CD/DVD systems, flash, and so on.
Even being able to a boot Windows from a USB-ized IDE disk would be a help, and I'm not sure you can do that, either.
The Marxists I know generally agree that slavery came to an end because of economics, not because of any good-natured social goal by the Union. Another issue not mentioned was the expansion of slavery -- it was often economically unpopular in the north because it meant vast plantations, not homesteads for individuals crowded out of the limited agricultural land of the Northeast.
I think it's a bit of a strech to call this corporatism -- some might argue it's highly populist to support restricting slavery to gain the support of what was essentially the American worker/farmer.
Slave owners favored slavery and the plantation economic system because it preserved a "natural" social order -- an American aristocracy. Capitalism was far less respectful of aristocratic social orders, and often undermined them.
Americans complaining about offshoring is often criticized as being "nationalistic" and "selfish"; this is an interpretation that's largely grounded in misguided jealousy and a gross misunderstanding of domestic American economic realities.
Even households with two "good" jobs often struggle to meet the operating costs of lifestyles that are far from extravagent; two automobiles are often *required* just to get both spouses to work (poor/no mass transit, affordable, safe housing often distant from workplaces), child care can run $1200/month for anything resembling clean/safe, housing is terribly expensive for decent accomodations in safe neighborhoods.
Loss of one of those incomes largely renders the family economically non-viable, and commonly can push these families into a spiral of debt that can end in homelessness or poverty. With this as a possible outcome and with most being otherwise responsible people who spent good money on higher education on contemporary disciplines they *were told* would leave them competitive in the workplace.
There's a big world out there, and the US have been spouting off about capitalism and free markets for decades. Now you get what you have asked for: you have to actually compete!
Competition as fine as long as the competitive environments are equal. First, health and safety standards need to be equal to or better than that of the United States. Second, minimum wages and other labor standards need to be identical to that of the United States. As long as those things aren't equal, it's not a competitive environment. In a place that requires a household income of $50,000 per year to be more than poverty-bound, saying "work for $10,000" isn't asking me to be competitive, it's asking me to be suicidal.
Furthermore, how about government involvement of the labor market? I love how the Chinese labor market is "competitive" when the government maintains a stranglehold on labor activism and organizing. It must be nice having the government maintain a competitive environment at the barrel of a gun.
I wonder if Intel's processor roadmap will extend 64-bit memory addressing to all their desktop line by then. At that point, I'd expect 2GB to be minimum, 4GB common, and 8GB "power desktop" configurations.
What race are they against, then? Considering that offshoring implies sending work to foreign countries, which isn't limited to any particular region of the world, and could mean many races, including many situations where jobs are transferred to people of the *same* race.
"Subtle racism" is also another diversity-inspired term used to bolster the charge of racism when the claimants cannot clearly demonstrate any real racism, usually when the people they are trying to brand as racists are arguing for something that doesn't involve race. "Subtle racism" allows an opponents entire argument to be tainted with an unproven and usually unprovable shibboleth.
What would be cool though is if someone found a way to pass arbitrary video data directly to the iTVC15 MPEG encoder used in the M179 and Haup PVR-x50 tuner boards, rather than only being able to encode from external sources.
This is the problem with nearly every MPEG2 compressor board out there; they're designed to convert existing video to MPEG2 at real time. Canopus have a card that will do that *and* transcode DV to MPEG2, but they list the transcoding at "near real time" which is essentially worthless. Even cards that can do it real time cost thousands.
I can't figure out if this is a limitation of the MPEG2 chipsets available -- in other words, they're designed as a package to allow a composite video input and an MPEG2 stream output, or just simply a lack of demand.
Given the rising popularity of PC-based video editing and DVD being a popular output medium, you'd think that inclusion of MPEG2 compression ASICs on some part of a system would be a big selling advantage, even if single-pass 2x was the fastest it could go, with 4x being about the point where a single-disc system would bottleneck on HDD speed.
Not sure if video encoding is a place where GP-GPU would do well.
Nevertheless, Nvidia are touting programmable video transcoding as a capability of the 6 series GPUs. whatever functionality was missing from the GPU to enable it to do this kind of task was likely added.
One of the most effective ways of ending the free exchange of ideas is to posit that they somehow violate the basic tenets of "diversity". Claiming that an idea is racist is one of the most important ones, and is pretty effective at limiting the discussion of immigration, criminal justice, schools, and even offshoring.
The idea is simple -- since offshoring generally involves non-white workers taking the jobs of white workers (when, in fact, it could be entry-level black American workers being replaced by white Russians), opposing offshoring *must* be racist since it implies a desire to prefer whites over some minority group.
There's a blurb on the 6 series of GeForce cards that claim they can do video transcoding; since an hour of 2 pass encoded MPEG2 video takes my P4-3.2c about 2.5 hours, I'd love to get it at least 1x real time encoding speed (for 2-pass encodes) or at least 2x real time (for 1-pass encodes).
Anyone know any more about this? Audio is nice, but its not nearly as CPU intensive as video transcoding.
At least newscasts generally attempt to give a framework and a grasp of what's happening. He is offering nothing more than an ersatz experience made all the more ersatz by emulation. When will this technology spatter blood on its viewers too?
I've got to ask -- what is it with people who don't want facts portrayed directly? Maybe if people got to see actual combat in high-def, surround sound they'd not get some George Bush hard-on to go kill something every time they don't get their way.
Look at "Saving Private Ryan" -- a lot of vets said that the beach invasion scene was pretty much dead on -- guys getting cut to bits, bleeding, etc.
The generic media view of war is way too sanitized -- a bunch of tanks running around, quickie shots of rebels with RPGs and AKs firing at nothing, and then some BS snoozer commentary by a geek in a suit, followed by the usual double-speak from government officials. That's supposed to be an "informative" view of war, while hi-res shots of guys getting their heads blown off is mere voyeurism?
Where does the money come from to build it? I'm all in favor of diverting money they're already taking from me for other purposes, but please don't seriously propose another new tax to accomplish yet another pet project with pie-in-the-sky return on investment.
Simply saying "get rid of the profit" doesn't magically create the real money it takes to pull of any project. I want a swimming pool in my back yard, can't I just say "maybe if we got rid of the profit" it'd suddenly make free swimming pools viable?
In fact, the linked article in the original post shows the Achilles heel of such a strategy: "For one thing, a homegrown format like EVD would become useless if few movies are released for it."
I don't see this as an issue at all. EVD devices would likely be cheap, since they'd be oriented towards the Chinese market, and would therefore likely be popular in the entire Asian rim of the Pacific.
Which in turn means a huge market, either legitimate, or otherwise. Movies in format xx would be dubbed or transcoded to EVD by the pirate market.
I always wonder if the Chinese stanards are an attempt not at market control/freedom from royalties, but actually a form of information control. If EVD is cheapest, it can win in the market, and the government can control what gets released internally on EVD.
I've always thought that DVD regions were a form of that as well -- what's the deal with countries as proximate as Japan, China and Viet Nam being in *three* different regions? Why is China in its own region? Why have different regions for Western Europe *and* Russia/Eastern Europe, despite EU membership spanning that divide?
I'm sure the standard was in development during the cold war and those regional codings reflected political wills -- no worries to Soviet or Chinese censors about evil outside influences, since supposedly their players wouldn't even play outside content.
I know we're told its about release timing and regional marketing, but it smells like politics to me.
Which has been done and tried (Amex gave me a smart card reader, Visa has tried 1-time CC numbers picked up their site.
I'd like to see more of that kind of thing, preferrably all of the following as options:
One-time credit card numbers
One-time PIN numbers
Region lock in and lock out, with 'region' being defined as geographically tight as possible and discontiguous region mapping allowed (eg, MN yes, Africa No, with "undefined=no" being the default). And yes, I know this would be tough to guarantee.
Merchant/bank lock-in and lock-out -- either limit to specific merchants or ban specific merchants or banks. My grocery store OK, Paypall not OK
"Good everywhere all the time, with no control at all" just seems like a bad idea. But since banks either shit on the consumer or the merchant when it comes to fraud, they have little incentive to secure the system. When they pass the new bankruptcy bill in congress, even shoddy lending practices will be given a pass as well.
However, it turns out Verizon has simply disabled the rest of the functionality (OBEX and others) because of bugs in the phone's implementation, not because of any vast conspiracy. As they fix the bugs, they've promised to make new versions of the phone's firmware available for free at any Verizon store.
If it's not a conspiracy, why can't I just download the fscking firmware on my PC from Verizon's web site and then flash my own phone?
Unlike you, I *do* believe that there's at least something of a conspiracy to lock users out of their phones, otherwise why wouldn't I just be able to USB my phone to my PC and copy pictures, ringtones, edit the directory, etc? I think Verizon at minimum has a desire to ensure that anything to do with the phone, even if it doesn't involve the cellular network, is a value-added service that you have to pay for. I would have spent the extra money on a camera phone if I could download my pictures, but no -- only sending through the cell net.
I couldn't even get a Bluetooth enabled phone from Verizon until about 2 months ago. My year old laptop doesn't have support, so I'd have to add bluetooth to it.
I'd consider it useful if I could make modem calls from my laptop via my wireless phone (whether they're 3G or 56k), and if someone would cut through the shiite and make it trivial to sync my contacts list with my phone.
I spent the extra money on a cable and software for my current T730 from motorola -- shit software, no dialup without special service, yuck.
From previous Slashdots about GPU processing, I get the impression that GPUs are limited in what they can do (primarily matrix transforms and shading).
I can't find too many good GPU references that talk about their use for non-3D gaming purposes, but a page hit at NVidia for the 6 series GPUs indicates that video encoding is purpose-added feature. Their pages lack a lot of other detail about the throughput capabilities or even the availability of software that can use the GPU's engine for accelerating MPEG2 encodes.
Anyway, this leads me to believe that as a solution path, GPU-based MPEG2 encoding leaves something to be desired. Either you need a specific, top-of-the-line GPU (ie, GeForce 6x00) or you could expect little acceleration due to limitations in older iterations of GPUs.
It's probably the right path to take for future machines, but considering GeForce's specifically able to encoding in the GPU are $600, it sounds like a better idea to buy a Matrox RTX100 and get a bunch of other video encoding features.
Why is that everyone in the FOSS community always wants EVERYTHING to be a web-based application.
The unpopular reason that hasn't been posted yet is due to the circus involved in making a GUI application under UNIX. First you fight about KDE/GNOME, then GTK/Qt, packaging, installation, on and on and on.
Making it web based avoids all this, allows for much simpler development (PHP, MySQL, etc), and instantly creates cross-platform compatibility.
The latter are good reasons, but I think the former ranks as a dirty secret FOSS advocates would rather not talk about. I agree with your sentiment about web interfaces. I hate them less than I used to, but there are still times where a real application is much easier and faster to use than a web application.
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They'll have HDTivos in all those secondary rooms (guest bedroom, kitchen, etc) of their house.
I agree with your larger point, though -- the cable company provided box is a huge defense against obsolence, repair, and overpriced periodic subscription fees (or "lifetime" gambles).
It's one of the reasons that Tivo is in a tough spot; people who need a cable box will find the cable provided box to be an automatic "yes", given that it's little or no extra cost and zero integration effort as is required with a Tivo.
Tivo's salvation *may* be the new cable-card standard, which would give a standalone Tivo access to the same digital bitstream as the cable company provided boxes, enabling stuff like multi-channel recording and HD recording far simpler (since you just store the bitsream off the line, not re-encoding the actual picture).
I've been told that the cable companies really don't like being in the hardware business. While it seems like easy money, in many urban areas the losses and repairs have to make it a break-even deal at best.
This is a great statement to read while eating some jumbo shrimp.
While parking in the driveway, or driving on the parkway!
$50k per year as a family income is hardly extravagent where I live. That's two spouses earning $12.50 per hour, roughly double minimum wage. after taxes, it's around $35K. Start figuring rent/mortgage, utilities, food, transportation, and ask yourself how "fancy" such a life REALLY is.
The adherents of oversimplified global economics grossly trivialize both the investment made into past careers and the time and money required to start a new career (assuming, of course, that the "new jobs" are actually open to displaced workers).
That rhetoric may work for factory workers with 6 months training, but for people with 4+ years of college education? "Labor mobility" and "labor flexibility" are one of the great jokes of economics.
Why not just dub from Tivo to the Panny via SVHS cables? At the top two Tivo quality settings and the Panny set to SP, the qulity vs. the built-in tuner is negligable. It's a nuisance, admittedly, and not an optimal solution, but it does work really well and eliminates any gripes about the Panny's scheduling, which is no better or no worse than the VCR.
They could fix the letter-entry method, although I've kind of gotten over it (I gave up the compulsion of labeling both a recorded program AND titling the disc) and don't care anymore. An IR keyboard would be trivial and very effective, but then again, it's like 30 chracters, not "War and Peace."
The disc copy issue is eternally stupid, though. EVEN IF they wanted to make it a copyright tool, at least only allow ripping of Panny-made discs or all non-copyrighted discs. The E85 can, apparently, but its crippled by beaing real-time (unlike -RAM copies) and requiring an MPEG2 transcode as well.
Someone in another thread said it learns, so perhaps it uses a simple method like a Markov chain and then re-sorts the list based on words you use, and offers suggestions by presenting you with the most common Markov matches first.
It's been reported the government is acting almost serious about spam as a criminal enterprise lately (although not as serious as it is about other so-called crimes).
The government's misguided priorities aside, I wonder if the government hasn't finally woken up and begun to consider spam for what it really is, a criminal conspiracy, and rightly defining "criminal conspiracy" to include people knowingly and willingly providing services that furthered the conspiracy.
Rather than actually taking the time to file genuine RICO cases, perhaps they are threatening them (or at least laying out a pretty solid criminal conspiracy cases in the more obvious situations) and some of the people playing ball with spammers aren't going to get scared out of doing that.
Not everyone will get scared, but if enough did, it might just cut off enough of the air supply to spamming to tip the balance in the direction of making spam too expensive and not portable enough to work. It wouldn't go away 100%, but it would be back to the levels of the late 90s when it was far less pervasive.
At some point in time (during my lifetime), schools became something other than a place where you learned to read, write, and do arithmatic. They became social welfare delivery systems -- they were public-funded compulsory institutions with high standing among the public (up until the latter half of the 20th century, attending school through high school was an honor and a privilege). Persuing social welfare goals was a "natural" fit for the school system when Johnson started the war on poverty.
Since then, we've evolved to a situation where solving a kid's social welfare needs is both more important than the educational effort and a manditory precursor to any expectation of academic success.
This has left the school system overburdened, both in mission and in mandate, and turned calls for improvements to *education* into left/right battles over social policy.
Social policy needs to be divested from the eductional system. If a child goes to school, it should be to learn the "three Rs". All other problems children have need to be solved outside of the educational system. This is why parents love private schools -- not that the teachers are smarter, but by and large more affluent parents expect less social welfare delivery and the schools do less of it and more teaching, plus it's expensive and they demand results.
I'll have to admit to periodic fascination with national socialism, and there are points made by the neo-nazi movements that can't honestly be dismissed by a wave of the hand.
From reading I've done, the very early roots of fascism were a legitimate, honest attempt to find a "third way" which somehow fused (or tossed) elements of both the "right" and the "left" to find solutions to problems raised by rigid adherence to the philosophies of the right or the left.
I'm forced to discount any movement that tries to import the symbolism of Germany's Nazi party. There was too much wrong with that movement, and it only provokes fear/anger/hate. That being said, I think the people behind that web site are probably actually trying for something different.
I ended up, literally, close to Nelson Mandela and the Dali Lama. Yet personally I support (with some qualifications on all of these) the death penalty, nearly unlimited gun ownership, English as the official US language, and hard-core enforcement of immigration laws.
Yet at the same time, I'm also deeply suspicious of the motivations of large corporations and the very rich and believe strongly that economic balance needs to be enforced and that some government spending on the public welfare is not only just/fair, but a damn good investment, too. I'm also 100% against any censorship, totally pro-choice, pro-sex ed (it should teach technique as well as mechanics), strict church/state seperation, and legalizing drugs.
I'm a touch libertarian, a touch socialist, a touch neofascist, and a touch liberal.
Where is that? I haven't seen it as an option on my Asus P4P800-E Deluxe mainboard, but I haven't looked close, either.
The other thing that's missing is a decent, small, bootable repair OS with full networking support and a servicable GUI. There are some small-footprint stuff (like Bart's PE and the proprietary MS one it's based on). It needs to be able to run most any application, read/write NTFS,
In an ideal world, Windows would have a "lightweight" install option that would let you turn off unneeded features and run from a read-only environment so that you could create a Windows for CD/DVD systems, flash, and so on.
Even being able to a boot Windows from a USB-ized IDE disk would be a help, and I'm not sure you can do that, either.
Some random comments:
The Marxists I know generally agree that slavery came to an end because of economics, not because of any good-natured social goal by the Union. Another issue not mentioned was the expansion of slavery -- it was often economically unpopular in the north because it meant vast plantations, not homesteads for individuals crowded out of the limited agricultural land of the Northeast.
I think it's a bit of a strech to call this corporatism -- some might argue it's highly populist to support restricting slavery to gain the support of what was essentially the American worker/farmer.
Slave owners favored slavery and the plantation economic system because it preserved a "natural" social order -- an American aristocracy. Capitalism was far less respectful of aristocratic social orders, and often undermined them.
Americans complaining about offshoring is often criticized as being "nationalistic" and "selfish"; this is an interpretation that's largely grounded in misguided jealousy and a gross misunderstanding of domestic American economic realities.
Even households with two "good" jobs often struggle to meet the operating costs of lifestyles that are far from extravagent; two automobiles are often *required* just to get both spouses to work (poor/no mass transit, affordable, safe housing often distant from workplaces), child care can run $1200/month for anything resembling clean/safe, housing is terribly expensive for decent accomodations in safe neighborhoods.
Loss of one of those incomes largely renders the family economically non-viable, and commonly can push these families into a spiral of debt that can end in homelessness or poverty. With this as a possible outcome and with most being otherwise responsible people who spent good money on higher education on contemporary disciplines they *were told* would leave them competitive in the workplace.
There's a big world out there, and the US have been spouting off about capitalism and free markets for decades. Now you get what you have asked for: you have to actually compete!
Competition as fine as long as the competitive environments are equal. First, health and safety standards need to be equal to or better than that of the United States. Second, minimum wages and other labor standards need to be identical to that of the United States. As long as those things aren't equal, it's not a competitive environment. In a place that requires a household income of $50,000 per year to be more than poverty-bound, saying "work for $10,000" isn't asking me to be competitive, it's asking me to be suicidal.
Furthermore, how about government involvement of the labor market? I love how the Chinese labor market is "competitive" when the government maintains a stranglehold on labor activism and organizing. It must be nice having the government maintain a competitive environment at the barrel of a gun.
I wonder if Intel's processor roadmap will extend 64-bit memory addressing to all their desktop line by then. At that point, I'd expect 2GB to be minimum, 4GB common, and 8GB "power desktop" configurations.
What race are they against, then? Considering that offshoring implies sending work to foreign countries, which isn't limited to any particular region of the world, and could mean many races, including many situations where jobs are transferred to people of the *same* race.
"Subtle racism" is also another diversity-inspired term used to bolster the charge of racism when the claimants cannot clearly demonstrate any real racism, usually when the people they are trying to brand as racists are arguing for something that doesn't involve race. "Subtle racism" allows an opponents entire argument to be tainted with an unproven and usually unprovable shibboleth.
What would be cool though is if someone found a way to pass arbitrary video data directly to the iTVC15 MPEG encoder used in the M179 and Haup PVR-x50 tuner boards, rather than only being able to encode from external sources.
This is the problem with nearly every MPEG2 compressor board out there; they're designed to convert existing video to MPEG2 at real time. Canopus have a card that will do that *and* transcode DV to MPEG2, but they list the transcoding at "near real time" which is essentially worthless. Even cards that can do it real time cost thousands.
I can't figure out if this is a limitation of the MPEG2 chipsets available -- in other words, they're designed as a package to allow a composite video input and an MPEG2 stream output, or just simply a lack of demand.
Given the rising popularity of PC-based video editing and DVD being a popular output medium, you'd think that inclusion of MPEG2 compression ASICs on some part of a system would be a big selling advantage, even if single-pass 2x was the fastest it could go, with 4x being about the point where a single-disc system would bottleneck on HDD speed.
Not sure if video encoding is a place where GP-GPU would do well.
Nevertheless, Nvidia are touting programmable video transcoding as a capability of the 6 series GPUs. whatever functionality was missing from the GPU to enable it to do this kind of task was likely added.
One of the most effective ways of ending the free exchange of ideas is to posit that they somehow violate the basic tenets of "diversity". Claiming that an idea is racist is one of the most important ones, and is pretty effective at limiting the discussion of immigration, criminal justice, schools, and even offshoring.
The idea is simple -- since offshoring generally involves non-white workers taking the jobs of white workers (when, in fact, it could be entry-level black American workers being replaced by white Russians), opposing offshoring *must* be racist since it implies a desire to prefer whites over some minority group.
There's a blurb on the 6 series of GeForce cards that claim they can do video transcoding; since an hour of 2 pass encoded MPEG2 video takes my P4-3.2c about 2.5 hours, I'd love to get it at least 1x real time encoding speed (for 2-pass encodes) or at least 2x real time (for 1-pass encodes).
Anyone know any more about this? Audio is nice, but its not nearly as CPU intensive as video transcoding.
At least newscasts generally attempt to give a framework and a grasp of what's happening. He is offering nothing more than an ersatz experience made all the more ersatz by emulation. When will this technology spatter blood on its viewers too?
I've got to ask -- what is it with people who don't want facts portrayed directly? Maybe if people got to see actual combat in high-def, surround sound they'd not get some George Bush hard-on to go kill something every time they don't get their way.
Look at "Saving Private Ryan" -- a lot of vets said that the beach invasion scene was pretty much dead on -- guys getting cut to bits, bleeding, etc.
The generic media view of war is way too sanitized -- a bunch of tanks running around, quickie shots of rebels with RPGs and AKs firing at nothing, and then some BS snoozer commentary by a geek in a suit, followed by the usual double-speak from government officials. That's supposed to be an "informative" view of war, while hi-res shots of guys getting their heads blown off is mere voyeurism?
Where does the money come from to build it? I'm all in favor of diverting money they're already taking from me for other purposes, but please don't seriously propose another new tax to accomplish yet another pet project with pie-in-the-sky return on investment.
Simply saying "get rid of the profit" doesn't magically create the real money it takes to pull of any project. I want a swimming pool in my back yard, can't I just say "maybe if we got rid of the profit" it'd suddenly make free swimming pools viable?
In fact, the linked article in the original post shows the Achilles heel of such a strategy: "For one thing, a homegrown format like EVD would become useless if few movies are released for it."
I don't see this as an issue at all. EVD devices would likely be cheap, since they'd be oriented towards the Chinese market, and would therefore likely be popular in the entire Asian rim of the Pacific.
Which in turn means a huge market, either legitimate, or otherwise. Movies in format xx would be dubbed or transcoded to EVD by the pirate market.
I always wonder if the Chinese stanards are an attempt not at market control/freedom from royalties, but actually a form of information control. If EVD is cheapest, it can win in the market, and the government can control what gets released internally on EVD.
I've always thought that DVD regions were a form of that as well -- what's the deal with countries as proximate as Japan, China and Viet Nam being in *three* different regions? Why is China in its own region? Why have different regions for Western Europe *and* Russia/Eastern Europe, despite EU membership spanning that divide?
I'm sure the standard was in development during the cold war and those regional codings reflected political wills -- no worries to Soviet or Chinese censors about evil outside influences, since supposedly their players wouldn't even play outside content.
I know we're told its about release timing and regional marketing, but it smells like politics to me.
I'd like to see more of that kind of thing, preferrably all of the following as options:
"Good everywhere all the time, with no control at all" just seems like a bad idea. But since banks either shit on the consumer or the merchant when it comes to fraud, they have little incentive to secure the system. When they pass the new bankruptcy bill in congress, even shoddy lending practices will be given a pass as well.
However, it turns out Verizon has simply disabled the rest of the functionality (OBEX and others) because of bugs in the phone's implementation, not because of any vast conspiracy. As they fix the bugs, they've promised to make new versions of the phone's firmware available for free at any Verizon store.
If it's not a conspiracy, why can't I just download the fscking firmware on my PC from Verizon's web site and then flash my own phone?
Unlike you, I *do* believe that there's at least something of a conspiracy to lock users out of their phones, otherwise why wouldn't I just be able to USB my phone to my PC and copy pictures, ringtones, edit the directory, etc? I think Verizon at minimum has a desire to ensure that anything to do with the phone, even if it doesn't involve the cellular network, is a value-added service that you have to pay for. I would have spent the extra money on a camera phone if I could download my pictures, but no -- only sending through the cell net.
I couldn't even get a Bluetooth enabled phone from Verizon until about 2 months ago. My year old laptop doesn't have support, so I'd have to add bluetooth to it.
I'd consider it useful if I could make modem calls from my laptop via my wireless phone (whether they're 3G or 56k), and if someone would cut through the shiite and make it trivial to sync my contacts list with my phone.
I spent the extra money on a cable and software for my current T730 from motorola -- shit software, no dialup without special service, yuck.
From previous Slashdots about GPU processing, I get the impression that GPUs are limited in what they can do (primarily matrix transforms and shading).
I can't find too many good GPU references that talk about their use for non-3D gaming purposes, but a page hit at NVidia for the 6 series GPUs indicates that video encoding is purpose-added feature. Their pages lack a lot of other detail about the throughput capabilities or even the availability of software that can use the GPU's engine for accelerating MPEG2 encodes.
Anyway, this leads me to believe that as a solution path, GPU-based MPEG2 encoding leaves something to be desired. Either you need a specific, top-of-the-line GPU (ie, GeForce 6x00) or you could expect little acceleration due to limitations in older iterations of GPUs.
It's probably the right path to take for future machines, but considering GeForce's specifically able to encoding in the GPU are $600, it sounds like a better idea to buy a Matrox RTX100 and get a bunch of other video encoding features.
Why is that everyone in the FOSS community always wants EVERYTHING to be a web-based application.
The unpopular reason that hasn't been posted yet is due to the circus involved in making a GUI application under UNIX. First you fight about KDE/GNOME, then GTK/Qt, packaging, installation, on and on and on.
Making it web based avoids all this, allows for much simpler development (PHP, MySQL, etc), and instantly creates cross-platform compatibility.
The latter are good reasons, but I think the former ranks as a dirty secret FOSS advocates would rather not talk about. I agree with your sentiment about web interfaces. I hate them less than I used to, but there are still times where a real application is much easier and faster to use than a web application.