The problem being you wrote all your figures as "Gb" while some of them should have been written as "GB." I was pointing out your typo, basically, but I was not sure of the original figures, so I phrased my comment that way.
Basically, by committing to makin drivers for the Radeon 8500, they are committing to a specific revision of ATi's hardware platform. By the time TWC is ready to put such systems into production, ATi won't even make that card any more. Are they supposed to buy all their equipment from closeout stores?
In other words, my point is that the're abandoning one dead platform and leaping towards a platform that will be dead by the time anything worthwhile comes out of this driver development. What issue is that solving for them? Nothing, as far as I can see.
My question is...why go ATi? I would think using the perfectly functional (though, admittedly, closed) NVidia drivers should suffice, at a much lower cost. I didn't read the article (yeah, bad, sue me) so maybe they answer this question, but another nagging issue gets to me.
I would hope they are looking at the long-term position this will put them in. The 8500 is getting close to a year old now. It will be an out of production before the O2s are finally killed.
Why spend the resources to develop drivers for a card that will be gone in relatively short order? It will no doubt be a rather expensive venture no matter what.
So what GUI component is there to the filesystem, really? I can see having a config applet for the graphics, but really having a control panel for ReiserFS seems to me less than pointless. I know I don't perticularly want an applet whose only purpose is to be an "about" window.
IMHO, the jury's out on whether properly-encoded MP3s sound better or worse than WMA, but MS really sucks at proving that WMA is better.
At a recent promo event on my campus, they played the same music clip in three formats for us: The RealMedia version, the MP3 version, and a WMA-encoded version. Everybody thought the Real file was horrendous. It was, but then that codec is designed for very low bitrates. Then, they played the next two and had us guess which was which. The sounds were almost identical, but one was louder. Most of us voted for the quieter sounding clip, because it was in general more pleasing to the ear. As it turned out, the louder clip was the WMA.
It seems one of the key things MS does to improve WMA's chance subjective quality tests is EQ and volume tweaking. They jack up a few frequencies and raise the volume overall, to make the sound more "clear." It backfired that day, but I wonder how many people hear such comparisons and really think the louder version of the clip is better, because they're expecting to hear better sound, and that's what they do.
All I can say is, let me set the EQ myself. I know how to adjust for my speakers much better than MS does...and I personally bet their EQ tweaking is based on the "turn it all up!" method home/car stereo know-it-alls like to use. You know, the ones where the bass is +20dB and clipping everywhere, or maybe everything is turned up and the WHOLE FRIGGING THING is clipped...
First off, the TV biz is not the MPAA. The MPAA makes movies.
Now, TiVo may be "in bed" with the TV companies, but I think it's more an issue of them playing both sides. TiVo wants to be everyone's friend. The removal of 30-second-skip as a backdoor feature was right about the time SonicBlue got sued. If I was them, I'd be scared too. When it became apparent they were not going to be sued, or at least not right then, TiVo put the feature back in - might as well keep the customers happy if it's not doing any harm.
It may also be important to note that the feature they removed temporarily was never an official feature anyway. That's like complaining the MS removed the flight-simulator easter egg from Excel. It's undocumented and officially not there, so don't expect it to go away. Now, if TiVo started killing features that were officially in place, you would have something to ysll about.
I think it's no so much that they don't want to fight those TiVo features...they're just testing the legal waters. If they fight the ReplayTV and win, they have an improved chance of winning again. If they fight TiVo and lose, there goes their chance to win against SonicBlue. Since the ReplayTV box is the "worst offender" in their eyes, it seems the logical one to go after first. It should be the easiest to win/hardest to lose because of a few specific stances SonicBlue has taken thet TiVO has not.
You make a big deal about D-VHS being lossy, but in reality all those formats are lossy. It's a truism that digital formats are compressed, because you can really cut the size of something in half (or a fourth) without losing much detail at all.
Production houses/news crews are used to big cameras, so the extra size of a D-VHS taps shouldn't be that big a deal to them. I think the bigger issue is the cost of entry, when the one real benefit over D8 and MiniDV is HD-compatibility.
Just like DAT made its way into the consumer sector so well, I would expect D-VHS to do the same! With prices like these, who could resist!?
Now, really, I see this taking the place of Beta, MiniDV, and D8 in the content-creation field. It could be rather good for them, because it provides digital video (something Beta doesn't) along with HD support, something MiniDV and D8 can't.
BUT you gave the non-open nature of the product as the reason for its lack of popularity. WMV/WMA and Real are both proprietary, but they're both rather popular.
(I haven't looked at the stats lately, but my guess is actually that MS's formats are in the lead, while QT and Real are probably about even these days.)
I forgot to mention the other thing: Even with this model, there is th eimportant consideration of price. With this kind of system, you could change th eprice of things with the perceived value, but logically the rules of supply and demand should be somewhat reversed. If millions of people watch a show, the price should go down. If there is a show with lower viewership, the price should go up a bit...so the cost of production can be subsidized with the lower count of viewers.
Note that thsi does not rule out the ability to give content away for free. I could see the first episode or three of new shows provided for free, or perhaps even give the viewer a $0.50-$1 credit for watching new shows. (the credit would only apply to the same network, of course) That way you have a good way to get viewers hooked on new shows. I bet a good number of people would watch a new show or two to get their weekly Friends fix for free.
Damn...all this talking just has me too excided. Of course, because it seems sane (to me at least) there's no way the content providers could ever go for it.
Want a season pass to Boston Public? Sure, it's $1 per episode with unskippable ads, or $2 per episode without ads. We'll give you a 10% discount if you order the whole season at once.
And THIS is where a TiVo or other PVR integrated with a digital sattelite/cable receiver could do wonders. It's video on demand, the right way. You "subscribe" to shows you want for a specified fee. Once you have it, you can watch it as much as you want. You could maybe even upgrade at a later date, so your $1 episode with ads becomes a $2 show without ads.
Really, this isn't too far away now. The only thing missing is the infrastucture to make the micropayments (which should not be hard, as the Pay-Per-View infrastructure is already there) and a meta-channel for everything to flag the beginning/end of ads and the exact beginning/ending of shows.
I've been looking for something to do recently, maybe I'll go incorporate a company to do just this.;)
You know, the/. crowd houses an alarming number of alarmists. I mean, it's good and all that people are ever-vigilant, yadda yadda, but areound here alert is raised just to be called off fully half the time.
If the editors edited instead of simply relaying common memes, maybe this problem would go away. At least a little bit.
And dammit...learn what the fuck "entitled" means. Read your sentence, and LOOK UP THE FUCKING WORD.
Entitled does NOT MEAN OBLIGATED. They are entitled to create a PDF for you. They are entitled to make it easier. They are not required to do so by any means.
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The problem being you wrote all your figures as "Gb" while some of them should have been written as "GB." I was pointing out your typo, basically, but I was not sure of the original figures, so I phrased my comment that way.
Need I remind you that GB and Gb are separate things?
If one is 116Gb/in^2 and the other is 29.7Gb/in^2, they will still keep the same ratios when converted to GB/in^2.
I evidently didn't mak emy point clear enough.
Basically, by committing to makin drivers for the Radeon 8500, they are committing to a specific revision of ATi's hardware platform. By the time TWC is ready to put such systems into production, ATi won't even make that card any more. Are they supposed to buy all their equipment from closeout stores?
In other words, my point is that the're abandoning one dead platform and leaping towards a platform that will be dead by the time anything worthwhile comes out of this driver development. What issue is that solving for them? Nothing, as far as I can see.
I find it encouraging, really. All too often a smaller company gets eaten alive, and totally stripped by unthinkign management.
Babycenter somehow dodged that bullet, and for that they are rather lucky.
My question is...why go ATi? I would think using the perfectly functional (though, admittedly, closed) NVidia drivers should suffice, at a much lower cost. I didn't read the article (yeah, bad, sue me) so maybe they answer this question, but another nagging issue gets to me.
I would hope they are looking at the long-term position this will put them in. The 8500 is getting close to a year old now. It will be an out of production before the O2s are finally killed.
Why spend the resources to develop drivers for a card that will be gone in relatively short order? It will no doubt be a rather expensive venture no matter what.
Something just doesn't quite make sense here.
So what GUI component is there to the filesystem, really? I can see having a config applet for the graphics, but really having a control panel for ReiserFS seems to me less than pointless. I know I don't perticularly want an applet whose only purpose is to be an "about" window.
Uh...references? I know what I heard...and I made my post after this one here, so I don't know what you're talking about.
I know what I heard two months ago...as do about 400 other people.
IMHO, the jury's out on whether properly-encoded MP3s sound better or worse than WMA, but MS really sucks at proving that WMA is better.
At a recent promo event on my campus, they played the same music clip in three formats for us: The RealMedia version, the MP3 version, and a WMA-encoded version. Everybody thought the Real file was horrendous. It was, but then that codec is designed for very low bitrates. Then, they played the next two and had us guess which was which. The sounds were almost identical, but one was louder. Most of us voted for the quieter sounding clip, because it was in general more pleasing to the ear. As it turned out, the louder clip was the WMA.
It seems one of the key things MS does to improve WMA's chance subjective quality tests is EQ and volume tweaking. They jack up a few frequencies and raise the volume overall, to make the sound more "clear." It backfired that day, but I wonder how many people hear such comparisons and really think the louder version of the clip is better, because they're expecting to hear better sound, and that's what they do.
All I can say is, let me set the EQ myself. I know how to adjust for my speakers much better than MS does...and I personally bet their EQ tweaking is based on the "turn it all up!" method home/car stereo know-it-alls like to use. You know, the ones where the bass is +20dB and clipping everywhere, or maybe everything is turned up and the WHOLE FRIGGING THING is clipped...
re: your sig Sorry kids; fat fairies, talking animals, singing frogs and silly masks DON'T fit into The Legend of Zelda.
There was a Fat Faerie in Link to the Past, and I assume you're just picking on the N64 games...
First off, the TV biz is not the MPAA. The MPAA makes movies.
Now, TiVo may be "in bed" with the TV companies, but I think it's more an issue of them playing both sides. TiVo wants to be everyone's friend. The removal of 30-second-skip as a backdoor feature was right about the time SonicBlue got sued. If I was them, I'd be scared too. When it became apparent they were not going to be sued, or at least not right then, TiVo put the feature back in - might as well keep the customers happy if it's not doing any harm.
It may also be important to note that the feature they removed temporarily was never an official feature anyway. That's like complaining the MS removed the flight-simulator easter egg from Excel. It's undocumented and officially not there, so don't expect it to go away. Now, if TiVo started killing features that were officially in place, you would have something to ysll about.
I think it's no so much that they don't want to fight those TiVo features...they're just testing the legal waters. If they fight the ReplayTV and win, they have an improved chance of winning again. If they fight TiVo and lose, there goes their chance to win against SonicBlue. Since the ReplayTV box is the "worst offender" in their eyes, it seems the logical one to go after first. It should be the easiest to win/hardest to lose because of a few specific stances SonicBlue has taken thet TiVO has not.
You make a big deal about D-VHS being lossy, but in reality all those formats are lossy. It's a truism that digital formats are compressed, because you can really cut the size of something in half (or a fourth) without losing much detail at all.
Production houses/news crews are used to big cameras, so the extra size of a D-VHS taps shouldn't be that big a deal to them. I think the bigger issue is the cost of entry, when the one real benefit over D8 and MiniDV is HD-compatibility.
No, it wasn't. Read this and notice the nesting.
Just like DAT made its way into the consumer sector so well, I would expect D-VHS to do the same! With prices like these, who could resist!?
Now, really, I see this taking the place of Beta, MiniDV, and D8 in the content-creation field. It could be rather good for them, because it provides digital video (something Beta doesn't) along with HD support, something MiniDV and D8 can't.
BUT you gave the non-open nature of the product as the reason for its lack of popularity. WMV/WMA and Real are both proprietary, but they're both rather popular.
(I haven't looked at the stats lately, but my guess is actually that MS's formats are in the lead, while QT and Real are probably about even these days.)
..and because Windows Media and Real are open, free solutions? Yeah, right.
Fuckwit.
DC gets wonky when you run it long distances, which really isn't very far when you're talking about 12V.
That's a big reason the power grids all over the world use AC instead of DC.
Rasputina
Over the Rhine
Kenna
Ani DiFranco
Jimmy Eat World
Joy Electric
John Mayer
Placebo
Portishead
The Bran Flakes
Wolfsheim
Tortoise
Some are more mainstream than others, and this is a VERY eclectic mix...just because one doesn't suit your fancy, don't discount the others.
I forgot to mention the other thing: Even with this model, there is th eimportant consideration of price. With this kind of system, you could change th eprice of things with the perceived value, but logically the rules of supply and demand should be somewhat reversed. If millions of people watch a show, the price should go down. If there is a show with lower viewership, the price should go up a bit...so the cost of production can be subsidized with the lower count of viewers.
Note that thsi does not rule out the ability to give content away for free. I could see the first episode or three of new shows provided for free, or perhaps even give the viewer a $0.50-$1 credit for watching new shows. (the credit would only apply to the same network, of course) That way you have a good way to get viewers hooked on new shows. I bet a good number of people would watch a new show or two to get their weekly Friends fix for free.
Damn...all this talking just has me too excided. Of course, because it seems sane (to me at least) there's no way the content providers could ever go for it.
Want a season pass to Boston Public? Sure, it's $1 per episode with unskippable ads, or $2 per episode without ads. We'll give you a 10% discount if you order the whole season at once.
;)
And THIS is where a TiVo or other PVR integrated with a digital sattelite/cable receiver could do wonders. It's video on demand, the right way. You "subscribe" to shows you want for a specified fee. Once you have it, you can watch it as much as you want. You could maybe even upgrade at a later date, so your $1 episode with ads becomes a $2 show without ads.
Really, this isn't too far away now. The only thing missing is the infrastucture to make the micropayments (which should not be hard, as the Pay-Per-View infrastructure is already there) and a meta-channel for everything to flag the beginning/end of ads and the exact beginning/ending of shows.
I've been looking for something to do recently, maybe I'll go incorporate a company to do just this.
That's HURD not Horde. Sheesh.
=)
You know, the /. crowd houses an alarming number of alarmists. I mean, it's good and all that people are ever-vigilant, yadda yadda, but areound here alert is raised just to be called off fully half the time.
If the editors edited instead of simply relaying common memes, maybe this problem would go away. At least a little bit.
Even worse, people who have seen the series would know he's really talking about a network like The Wired, not like a Navi. (Navi == computer)
Sheesh, Hemos is a geek poseur! =)
Fully 3D? Uh...I remember the "blood" being basically sprites rendered on planes...
But yeah. lots o' crap on the screen. That's what I live for.
Nobody modded me up...I have a +2.
And dammit...learn what the fuck "entitled" means. Read your sentence, and LOOK UP THE FUCKING WORD.
Entitled does NOT MEAN OBLIGATED. They are entitled to create a PDF for you. They are entitled to make it easier. They are not required to do so by any means.
Because that's nto what entitled means.