Well, besides the attitude, it's overly simplistic.
Lets say you invested in blueray, and HD wins. It's not just the cost of the player, it's the media. SO if your old blueray player breaks 5 years down the road, your only option to watch your content is trying to find some other old player off ebay. Frankly, I don't want to use either player - I want to use my home media server.
The bigger issue, and I've said it before, is being able to exercise your fair use rights and be able to make backups / format shift. Until I can, I won't invest in either format. I waited years before buying DVD's until the process was easy / reliable. I don't want my purchased content locked to a particular format / device. I don't want the player locking me into to watch 10 mins of trailers before I can get to the damn movie.
Agree on the quality of standard DVD's with a good HD set and player... But there is another issue too. I won't buy an HD player until I can be sure I can make media backups 100% of the time like I can with standard DVD's. THAT, more than anything else, is what is holding me back.
Do you live in a home or apartment? Do you buy stuff? Then you are a consumer. Deal with it. Can't help that you don't like the label - you are what you are. I'm not the one dumbing things down - thank the media and PR people. Allowing the utility company to manage your large energy loads could qualify you for lower rates. That sound good? You can always opt to pay more - that's your choice. There is nothing being forced on you. This is good thing.
Getting energy using devices talking to each other is a reality. It's here today. Just not at the consumer level with VERY few exceptions. But it's growing.
The consumer electronics industry on the other hand is a lost cause. They refuse to work together for competitive reasons. Worse, they refuse to be compatible with themselves. Just have to look at the IR mess to see that. And RF remote control? Hahahaha!! I won't see any standards there in my lifetime, that's for sure. Even with they DO come up with a standard, it sucks (like HDMI, which has severe length limits. It should have been an optical cable from day one. It would have been cheaper and easier. Idiots.)
This is not about controlling your dishwasher through a web browser. That's fucking stupid and everyone in the industry knows it's stupid. Unfortunately, things are dumbed down for the consumer to understand.
This is about automated energy management. Devices need to talk to each other and with the grid in order to be "smart". This allows energy suppliers and users to be able to manage / balance energy usage. But it's more than just energy usage - it's about devices that cooperate with each other. Your occupancy sensor works with the lighting and heating systems to keep people comfortable. They work with ambient light sensors and window blinds to keep the sun out when it is at a bad angle, or let let it in and power off / dim the overhead lights... You can come up with thousands of examples here...
Echelon in San Jose has been developing this technology for many years, as have others. It's secure and reliable. Hell - remote energy management has been desirable / SOP for at LEAST 15 years, where chain stores remote control heating / lighting from corporate headquarters. It's just that power-line network technology has gotten good and inexpensive enough to move into much smaller devices. No, this isn't X-10 crap, it uses 128 bit device ID's and is a full network protocol. I tossed all my X10 crap years ago as it was WAY too unreliable and devices were poor quality. Unfortunately, the good stuff hasn't really made it down to the consumer level yet.
It's as pointless as any other video game, fiction book, movie, music, sporting event, party, etc.
Oh wait - maybe entertainment is not pointless. Maybe it lets us express ourselves, or enjoy our time outside of work. Maybe SL is a way to interact with people from different countries / cultures - playing together. Or you can spend your life working, eating, and sleeping and nothing else. I think SL is a little silly, but I feel the same about all video games.
Yes, Linden dollars do equate to real dollars. You can buy them, or you can create them by creating objects people buy or offering a service that other people pay for. Why do people buy? It's part of the game. Nearly every game out there costs money. Many are subscription. SL is similar. You can always play and not spend any real money at all. as most places to visit are free, and there is plenty of free items out there.
It's entertainment. People are willing to pay for entertainment.
Even if you were on the path of dark fiber, it was very expensive to hook up. I had a few buildings in San Francisco that had dark fiber from several companies in the street out front. Getting it hooked up was a 6 month $100,000 effort (for a Metro Area Network) plus recurring (back around 2000.) The city, tired of having all the streets ripped up all the time, made things VERY difficult. That was problem 1.
So let's look at the long-haul dark fiber. Problem 2 was that the need didn't exist because high speed to the last mile did not exist in any meaningful way. It's getting better with FiOS and other projects, but VERY few telcos are doing more than plain ADSL which is severely distance limited, rather than using new DSL technologies that can provide 10 times the bandwidth over the same wires much farther. Some can be repeated too.
Problem 3 is that the existing copper is frequently VERY old. They have been tapped into hundreds of times over the years, have load coils, bridge taps, are too narrow of guage for high speed, and frequently get flooded when it rains. I was talking with a local tech the other day for a noise problem and he told me that many of the lines from the CO to the neighborhood were well over 50 years old. The infrastructure needs to be replaced anyway, so it may as well be replaced with fiber - even if it is fiber fed DLC/DSLAM's for now, and fiber to the home / small business later.
Maybe not unlimited happiness, but maybe more choice. And maybe new ways to communicate with each other. The current internet is either too slow or too unreliable (latency, packet loss) for a lot of applications. Not only does "the last mile" need to improve, so does the backbone.
Frankly, the US needs to make REAL high-speed internet a reality to compete in the global market. In the next 30 years or so, it will be CRITICAL.
But not all of that $200 can pay for the installation. It also pays for back-end systems, labor, and content. Increase the materials cost and it takes an extra YEAR to recover, or more. On the other hand, you can offer more services over fiber and perhaps increase your billings. There is a limit to how much people will pay for non-critical services however in most markets. Comcast basically wants about $100 / month / subscriber (phone, internet, TV package.) That's about max they can get away with.
WiFi SUCKETH. Hell - I can hardly get it to work in my house much less across town. I've repositioned my access point numerous times, purchased external antennas, etc. I'm even on a channel not used by other AP's nearby (BTW, there really are only about 3 USABLE channels out there due to overlap.)
2.4Ghz is a cesspool used by WAY WAY too many competing technologies. Unfortunately, it's hard to find devices that support the 5Ghz band, so that's not a viable alternative at the moment. Even many of the new N devices don't support it.
The only way it works across any distance at all is in wide open spaces with directional antennas. Pah. I spit on wifi. While every room in my house has multiple cat-5e drops totaling well over a mile worth of cable, not every device can or should be wired. Wifi is good for some things, but shared high speed access over long distances is not one of them.
Installation costs for wifi are hardly zero.
Frankly, cheap flexible fiber would be nice for other things too. I would love to use a simple fiber cable instead of the abortion that is HDMI. The 50' HDMI cable I bought ended up 1/2" thick and is a bear to bend - makes it hard to plug into the flatscreen on the wall.
I have a mac mini (dual core w/2G ram) setup as a home media machine. I was unable to create a mp4 video that quicktime could handle. Anyone know the magic incarnation (exact parameters) for mencoder that will create a mp4 video in the one limited sub-format that quicktime is able to handle? Mplayer handles just about everything I can throw at it.
Why do I want this? Quicktime seems to use some hardware acceleration that mplayer does not because mplayer playback is frequently a little choppy where quicktime is flawless on the few videos I was able to play with it (hence the request above.) If I could get similar performance from mplayer, I would shitcan quicktime totally. Maybe I need to shitcan OS X totally and just install Ubuntu...
Apple rant... Why oh why does quicktime SUCK at playing multiple file formats? You have only been doing this twice as long as the freeware mplayer team. Isn't multi-media at the CORE of everything you do?
I know ONE person with a zune. I have never hear anyone else even MENTION "zune". I know HUNDREDS with iPod's though. Yes it's anecdotal, but perception means more than sales figures. I must ask - where ARE all those zunes? In the bottom of people's junk drawers? They sure as hell are not being used.
Business models of systems will have good drivers for XP for a very long time because large enterprise customers will demand it. Dell / HP doesn't have a choice.
Ebooks solve the problem of "out of print" and "out of date" completely since there is never a reason to stop selling an ebook, and ebooks can be updated with current content as needed. For academic / technical books, the concept of ebooks is a "no-brainer". It would totally disrupt the current business model for textbooks however (in a good way for students) so we probably won't see it anytime soon. Maybe we can get more "open content" books out there written by profs that have more than profit as a motive for writing. These books would also be good for our government to fund - it benefits all of society.
The ebook reader also has to be better however. It needs to have a physically larger screen, full color, and very hi-res for a lot of content these types of books have. When I was going to school, it sure would have been nice to carry a little 2 pound ebook reader instead of 50 pounds of books in a backpack.
My concern is false positives, like comcast's torrent destroyer that also fucks up Lotus Notes. Stupid squared. Sigh. Another class action just waiting to happen.
There is NIMBYism with solar too. Someone nearby put up some panels in his yard and the neighbors sued claiming it destroyed their views. Now they may not WIN, but it will be expensive to defend against.
The problem is exactly what the first-post person was modded down for saying. Nobody wants ANY power generation of any type near them, yet they all want cheap power. You can't have both. All the alternative energy plans have environmentalists fighting them for various reasons - so we still burn coal, and lots of it. Give me nuke plants (modern breeder types), wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal. I want cheap power so we can do desalination and run electric cars. Kill the CO2 emissions so my great-grandchildren have a nice planet to live on...
No - I said that cable is cable, and that there is no such thing as digital cables. The cable, as long as it passes bits, will pass digital data perfectly and will not have ANY impact at all on shorter lengths. I could damn near use coat hangers and make it work.
You are confusing the error created by devices with error caused by cable quality.
Are you saying that office 2007 performs the same as office 2000? Or OOo the same as 2000? Really... Having run both, I beg to differ. Office 2K is much faster than current Open Office on the same machine. Open Office has been plagued with performance problems for years. In fact, MS Office 2K runs faster in a vmware virtual machine than open office does natively on the same machine! That says something.
Despite that, I still primarily use OOo because my modern linux systems are screaming fast and the result is "fast enough". I'm not knocking OOo (other than on performance, a criticism it deserves) as much as I am the performance that machine will have.
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Well, besides the attitude, it's overly simplistic.
Lets say you invested in blueray, and HD wins. It's not just the cost of the player, it's the media. SO if your old blueray player breaks 5 years down the road, your only option to watch your content is trying to find some other old player off ebay. Frankly, I don't want to use either player - I want to use my home media server.
The bigger issue, and I've said it before, is being able to exercise your fair use rights and be able to make backups / format shift. Until I can, I won't invest in either format. I waited years before buying DVD's until the process was easy / reliable. I don't want my purchased content locked to a particular format / device. I don't want the player locking me into to watch 10 mins of trailers before I can get to the damn movie.
Agree on the quality of standard DVD's with a good HD set and player... But there is another issue too. I won't buy an HD player until I can be sure I can make media backups 100% of the time like I can with standard DVD's. THAT, more than anything else, is what is holding me back.
Do you live in a home or apartment? Do you buy stuff? Then you are a consumer. Deal with it. Can't help that you don't like the label - you are what you are. I'm not the one dumbing things down - thank the media and PR people. Allowing the utility company to manage your large energy loads could qualify you for lower rates. That sound good? You can always opt to pay more - that's your choice. There is nothing being forced on you. This is good thing.
Getting energy using devices talking to each other is a reality. It's here today. Just not at the consumer level with VERY few exceptions. But it's growing.
The consumer electronics industry on the other hand is a lost cause. They refuse to work together for competitive reasons. Worse, they refuse to be compatible with themselves. Just have to look at the IR mess to see that. And RF remote control? Hahahaha!! I won't see any standards there in my lifetime, that's for sure. Even with they DO come up with a standard, it sucks (like HDMI, which has severe length limits. It should have been an optical cable from day one. It would have been cheaper and easier. Idiots.)
Journalistic garbage is what it is.
This is not about controlling your dishwasher through a web browser. That's fucking stupid and everyone in the industry knows it's stupid. Unfortunately, things are dumbed down for the consumer to understand.
This is about automated energy management. Devices need to talk to each other and with the grid in order to be "smart". This allows energy suppliers and users to be able to manage / balance energy usage. But it's more than just energy usage - it's about devices that cooperate with each other. Your occupancy sensor works with the lighting and heating systems to keep people comfortable. They work with ambient light sensors and window blinds to keep the sun out when it is at a bad angle, or let let it in and power off / dim the overhead lights... You can come up with thousands of examples here...
Echelon in San Jose has been developing this technology for many years, as have others. It's secure and reliable. Hell - remote energy management has been desirable / SOP for at LEAST 15 years, where chain stores remote control heating / lighting from corporate headquarters. It's just that power-line network technology has gotten good and inexpensive enough to move into much smaller devices. No, this isn't X-10 crap, it uses 128 bit device ID's and is a full network protocol. I tossed all my X10 crap years ago as it was WAY too unreliable and devices were poor quality. Unfortunately, the good stuff hasn't really made it down to the consumer level yet.
As was said elsewhere, yes you can sell your Linden dollars in exchange for real US dollars.
It's as pointless as any other video game, fiction book, movie, music, sporting event, party, etc.
Oh wait - maybe entertainment is not pointless. Maybe it lets us express ourselves, or enjoy our time outside of work. Maybe SL is a way to interact with people from different countries / cultures - playing together. Or you can spend your life working, eating, and sleeping and nothing else. I think SL is a little silly, but I feel the same about all video games.
Yes, Linden dollars do equate to real dollars. You can buy them, or you can create them by creating objects people buy or offering a service that other people pay for. Why do people buy? It's part of the game. Nearly every game out there costs money. Many are subscription. SL is similar. You can always play and not spend any real money at all. as most places to visit are free, and there is plenty of free items out there.
It's entertainment. People are willing to pay for entertainment.
Yeah - many of them were too early.
Even if you were on the path of dark fiber, it was very expensive to hook up. I had a few buildings in San Francisco that had dark fiber from several companies in the street out front. Getting it hooked up was a 6 month $100,000 effort (for a Metro Area Network) plus recurring (back around 2000.) The city, tired of having all the streets ripped up all the time, made things VERY difficult. That was problem 1.
So let's look at the long-haul dark fiber. Problem 2 was that the need didn't exist because high speed to the last mile did not exist in any meaningful way. It's getting better with FiOS and other projects, but VERY few telcos are doing more than plain ADSL which is severely distance limited, rather than using new DSL technologies that can provide 10 times the bandwidth over the same wires much farther. Some can be repeated too.
Problem 3 is that the existing copper is frequently VERY old. They have been tapped into hundreds of times over the years, have load coils, bridge taps, are too narrow of guage for high speed, and frequently get flooded when it rains. I was talking with a local tech the other day for a noise problem and he told me that many of the lines from the CO to the neighborhood were well over 50 years old. The infrastructure needs to be replaced anyway, so it may as well be replaced with fiber - even if it is fiber fed DLC/DSLAM's for now, and fiber to the home / small business later.
Maybe not unlimited happiness, but maybe more choice. And maybe new ways to communicate with each other. The current internet is either too slow or too unreliable (latency, packet loss) for a lot of applications. Not only does "the last mile" need to improve, so does the backbone.
Frankly, the US needs to make REAL high-speed internet a reality to compete in the global market. In the next 30 years or so, it will be CRITICAL.
But not all of that $200 can pay for the installation. It also pays for back-end systems, labor, and content. Increase the materials cost and it takes an extra YEAR to recover, or more. On the other hand, you can offer more services over fiber and perhaps increase your billings. There is a limit to how much people will pay for non-critical services however in most markets. Comcast basically wants about $100 / month / subscriber (phone, internet, TV package.) That's about max they can get away with.
Just a FYI, gigabit doesn't need cat6. 5e works fine. Plain cat5 is limited to 100Mb.
It hardly takes 15-20 mins. Maybe your first time, but once you have done a few you can pound them out fairly quickly.
WiFi SUCKETH. Hell - I can hardly get it to work in my house much less across town. I've repositioned my access point numerous times, purchased external antennas, etc. I'm even on a channel not used by other AP's nearby (BTW, there really are only about 3 USABLE channels out there due to overlap.)
2.4Ghz is a cesspool used by WAY WAY too many competing technologies. Unfortunately, it's hard to find devices that support the 5Ghz band, so that's not a viable alternative at the moment. Even many of the new N devices don't support it.
The only way it works across any distance at all is in wide open spaces with directional antennas. Pah. I spit on wifi. While every room in my house has multiple cat-5e drops totaling well over a mile worth of cable, not every device can or should be wired. Wifi is good for some things, but shared high speed access over long distances is not one of them.
Installation costs for wifi are hardly zero.
Frankly, cheap flexible fiber would be nice for other things too. I would love to use a simple fiber cable instead of the abortion that is HDMI. The 50' HDMI cable I bought ended up 1/2" thick and is a bear to bend - makes it hard to plug into the flatscreen on the wall.
I have a mac mini (dual core w/2G ram) setup as a home media machine. I was unable to create a mp4 video that quicktime could handle. Anyone know the magic incarnation (exact parameters) for mencoder that will create a mp4 video in the one limited sub-format that quicktime is able to handle? Mplayer handles just about everything I can throw at it.
Why do I want this? Quicktime seems to use some hardware acceleration that mplayer does not because mplayer playback is frequently a little choppy where quicktime is flawless on the few videos I was able to play with it (hence the request above.) If I could get similar performance from mplayer, I would shitcan quicktime totally. Maybe I need to shitcan OS X totally and just install Ubuntu...
Apple rant... Why oh why does quicktime SUCK at playing multiple file formats? You have only been doing this twice as long as the freeware mplayer team. Isn't multi-media at the CORE of everything you do?
I know ONE person with a zune. I have never hear anyone else even MENTION "zune". I know HUNDREDS with iPod's though. Yes it's anecdotal, but perception means more than sales figures. I must ask - where ARE all those zunes? In the bottom of people's junk drawers? They sure as hell are not being used.
Business models of systems will have good drivers for XP for a very long time because large enterprise customers will demand it. Dell / HP doesn't have a choice.
Depends. If you are in a company where the decision makers are clueless, this can happen. Wouldn't want to work there however. Better, sell short.
Ebooks solve the problem of "out of print" and "out of date" completely since there is never a reason to stop selling an ebook, and ebooks can be updated with current content as needed. For academic / technical books, the concept of ebooks is a "no-brainer". It would totally disrupt the current business model for textbooks however (in a good way for students) so we probably won't see it anytime soon. Maybe we can get more "open content" books out there written by profs that have more than profit as a motive for writing. These books would also be good for our government to fund - it benefits all of society.
The ebook reader also has to be better however. It needs to have a physically larger screen, full color, and very hi-res for a lot of content these types of books have. When I was going to school, it sure would have been nice to carry a little 2 pound ebook reader instead of 50 pounds of books in a backpack.
I tried to create my own one time pad by XORing the Windows install CD with the Ubuntu install.... My computer burst into flames...
My concern is false positives, like comcast's torrent destroyer that also fucks up Lotus Notes. Stupid squared. Sigh. Another class action just waiting to happen.
There is NIMBYism with solar too. Someone nearby put up some panels in his yard and the neighbors sued claiming it destroyed their views. Now they may not WIN, but it will be expensive to defend against.
The problem is exactly what the first-post person was modded down for saying. Nobody wants ANY power generation of any type near them, yet they all want cheap power. You can't have both. All the alternative energy plans have environmentalists fighting them for various reasons - so we still burn coal, and lots of it. Give me nuke plants (modern breeder types), wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal. I want cheap power so we can do desalination and run electric cars. Kill the CO2 emissions so my great-grandchildren have a nice planet to live on...
No - I said that cable is cable, and that there is no such thing as digital cables. The cable, as long as it passes bits, will pass digital data perfectly and will not have ANY impact at all on shorter lengths. I could damn near use coat hangers and make it work.
You are confusing the error created by devices with error caused by cable quality.
Jeff - we are dealing with the S/PDIF interface frequency - not the audio frequency. You are very confused.
Are you saying that office 2007 performs the same as office 2000? Or OOo the same as 2000? Really... Having run both, I beg to differ. Office 2K is much faster than current Open Office on the same machine. Open Office has been plagued with performance problems for years. In fact, MS Office 2K runs faster in a vmware virtual machine than open office does natively on the same machine! That says something.
Despite that, I still primarily use OOo because my modern linux systems are screaming fast and the result is "fast enough".
I'm not knocking OOo (other than on performance, a criticism it deserves) as much as I am the performance that machine will have.