You're quite right, and I apologize if my post wasn't clear. The non-HD transition is years away, and yes, it will break existing boxes. HD won't even be done in all markets by the end of 2006, judging from DirecTV's announcements. They will also be subsidizing replacement boxes, although they won't be Tivos.
What I was trying to say is that this is a long, slow transition starting with HD locals and gradually working its way down to the SD channels.
It should be noted that this is not a troll. DirecTV is going to break compatibility with existing boxes in more than one way, too-- not only are they transitioning the compression system to MPEG4, they will be switching modulation schemes to cram more into their airspace.
But this will NOT be a "cutoff." It will be a gradual, market-by-market transition, and SD probably won't happen until churn converts enough people to the newer boxes without directv having to foot the bill.
Plus, I believe they are moving to the tivo interface down the road on the comcast hardware, due to Comcast's recent agreement with tivo. It won't exactly *be* a tivo, but the onscreen system will look and act like it, which is all that matters.
They may even be doing it with software upgrades on existing hardware, but if they aren't, you can swap out the box for a new one whenever you want.
The first thing in MPEG4 will be HD locals, which you don't have now, so you won't really be losing anything. Up next will be the existing HD channels, and that's where you'll feel the first loss. The real kicker is when the full MPEG4 transition occurs-- this is where you're going to lose all your non-HD channels.
It's likely that they will offer you a replacement box (although this is just me speculating) for free or at a steep discount, since those of you with the HD-Tivo are highend customers. Unfortunately for the Tivo faithful, it won't be a Tivo.
The information may be there, but organizing it and putting it down in a useful fashion is not something most developers ever do, let alone do quickly. It's rare that I see good info, particularly on side effects and non-parameter requirements (file formats, db requirements, external system constraints and expectations, etc...)
I agree with you that a good programmer should be able to do this instinctively after design and implementation of the code. Unfortunately, not every (or even most) programmers are good. Real life, however, forces you to deal with and create procedures for the lousy programmers. A manager who doesn't understand the variation among his developers is asking for crap when proper documentation is not checked and enforced-- and when the time it really takes is not factored into the project estimates.
The dipshits do deserve termination. I'd rather have nothing than crap. Sadly, you will almost always have to work with people like this-- and you (and/or the project manager) will *have* to find ways to coax usable output out of them, or you end up doing their jobs for them.
I'm just saying that putting the time squeeze on people who are already just barely getting things done isn't going to result in a font of wisdom in the comments. By not making allowances for differences in skill (and thus development time) you end up making maintenance or expansion drastically more difficult down the road, because documentation is what gets crapified first.
And remember: there is always somebody smarter than you, too. So don't be too smug with the dipshits.
I agree. This happens all too often-- it's what you get when you mandate code comments but don't add time for it to your project schedule. Doing it right can frequently take longer than writing the code, and sadly, nobody will pay for the time it takes. So the programmers tag every "i=1;" with a "//set i equal to 1" and leave out anything even remotely subtle or useful.
You two are arguing about different things. He's talking about "energy payoff" and you're talking about "financial payoff."
You're both right. Electricity is so cheap right now that *financial* payoff can take more than a decade. In terms of the energy requirement for production, though, panels pay themselves off in a few years (my research put the figure at more like 3 or 4 years).
So, to set a few things straight:
1. Buying panels is only a financial gain in the long-term. To pay themselves off at today's power rates (assuming they don't increase) it will take more than a decade. However, the panels will last a good 20 years, and they *will* be a financial gain in the long run.
2. Producing panels does not "use more energy than the panels will produce." The panels will produce enough energy to pay this back in a few years-- it varies by panel, but in the 3-4 year ballpark. And again, they will last around 20 years.
However, assuming that in their entire lifetime the panels only made 1.1x the amount of energy required to make them, it's still a net gain. Can you think of another way to invest 100kwhs and some cash, and end up with 110kwhs? And in this case, the numbers are more like 100kwhs, some cash, and ending up with 500kwhs and more cash than you started with.
It does sound like he got a hell of a deal, though. The systems I've been looking at cost about as much as a small car.
I would think so! All the "big" chess computers (Deep Blue, etc...) have just been massively parallel systems, and chess is one of those things that people have been coding and refining for years. I'm not much of a chess player myself-- computers have been kicking my ass since the 1MHz era, but it appears that multiprocessor chess software is already available for end-users:
I have a $300 Onkyo amp, a pair of $180 bookshelf speakers, and a whopping 10" sub. Not much to write home about, but slightly better than the ancient, distorted things I had in college.
When I was trying to do what you and I would consider "sane" product research to figure out what was of decent quality in my price range, I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of ridiculous misinformation and crap out there on the internet. People REALLY BELIEVE that they need to replace the power cables on their amps for better sound, etc, or that putting the *receiver* on a block of granite will improve quality by reducing vibration. (turntable, yes. receiver.... well, you decide.)
Audiophile insanity vs. gamer insanity
on
SLI Primer
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· Score: 5, Interesting
"No, gamers have always been much worse than audiophiles. "
You're kidding, right? Audiophiles are off the deep end. I don't think you have ever seen an *actual* audiophile-- you're mixing them up with people who like stereos. Audiophiles do things like buy $3000 cables. Or put all their components on 200lb. granite blocks or $600-per-component magnetic levitation dampers to ease vibration. Power conditioners. Huge stacks of tube amps. Subwoofers that require special basement rooms to be built to act as the box.
In the worst cases, the quest for perfect audio goes so far as to become pointless. There's an article I wish I could find for you about one particularly off-the-deep-end audiophile who paid so much for the system he used to listen to classical recordings that had he kept the money, he would have had enough to bring the *actual orchestra* to his house to play for him regularly, for years. Say what you want about huge stereos, but if it gets to the point where you can afford to bring the source home with you, you don't need reproduction.
The worst gamers can't hope to touch this. The most expensive rig on the market with a massive hang-on-the-wall plasma or whatever as your huge monitor is still just a drop in the bucket compared to people who will spend $3000 on three feet of speaker cable. And unlike some of the audiophile quackery, at least a fast machine has measurable performance gains. Try convincing a real engineer that your $1000 power cable makes a detectable difference in sound quality.
For your reference, as a guide to the levels this insanity can reach:
There's much worse. Try pricing out monoblock tube amps. Keep in mind they're not just going to buy one per channel (the minimum), but probably one per *driver* (as in, three per speaker if you have a woofer, mid, and tweeter).
Apparently, your television stations are nicer than mine. I routinely see ads that take up roughly the bottom 1/4 to 1/3 of the screen, covering the entire width. They are animated, occasionally breaking out of their already huge "strip" with a person or logo that stands up. And to make it worse, in the last year or two, they've started having SOUND.
Even the "nicer" stations are now animating their little logos, which are substantially larger than they used to be.
This version is an old-school hip-hop track, consisting solely of short, reordered samples from the original, with the addition of turntable scratching with the mixer volume turned all the way down.
The rare occurence of this sort of profoundly geeky post is why I still come to slashdot. God bless you, crazy GPU vector coprocessor finite difference code matrix guy!
The day my CPU cache surpassed my first machine's disk space has come and gone.
The 1541 disk drive I used with my Commodore 64 stored 170k per side. My current (laptop) Pentium M CPU has 512k of L2 cache. Up next is L1 cache larger than the old 1541 disk, followed by enough registers to out-store the 1541.
Not the case here, although that does make some difference. The difference between the two when both batteries were brand-new was still more than double. The *most* I ever managed on the PIII (A30) was a hair under two hours, with aggressive power management. By the end of a year, I was getting just over 90 minutes, and it dropped to slightly below that at the end of two.
At the end of one year, my R40 is *still* getting significantly more than four hours-- more than double what the A30 was capable of when it was brand-new.
As somebody else suggested, your best bet is ripping to the hard drive first and then shutting down the DVD drive. This was enough to buy me an extra 15 minutes or so on my old machine.
In the longer run, my biggest gain came from moving from an old PIII laptop to a Pentium M machine-- I get battery life reliably over four hours, and sometimes over five. The battery doesn't have any significant capacity advantage over my old one (it's a hair bigger), and the screen is the same size (15.1"), but I get a staggering increase in battery life. If you're in the market for a new one, make sure to hunt around for a nice Pentium M machine. Mine's an IBM A30, for reference.
Cablecard will fix this, but how soon?
on
Can TiVo be Saved?
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· Score: 1
The cablecard standard fixes this problem, allowing standardized access to digital and HD cable programming across different providers. Tivo's got a two-tuner cablecard box coming, but it's not due out for a year, and we all know that nothing ships on time, so expect it to be a year and a half.
It's just what I want, but the big question is "will it be fast enough to save tivo from their loss of DirecTV and all the cheaper competition?"
Over half are directv, and directv ditched tivo.
on
Can TiVo be Saved?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Hard to say. The "oh crap, they're dying" most likely comes from the fact that the majority of their subscribers are through DirecTV, and that DirecTV has chosen both not to renew their contract with Tivo and to pursue their own DVRs.
They're probably still raking in customers, but the majority of them are still DirecTV folks. And those will start to disappear as DirecTV drops support and people start upgrading in a few years. I believe the contract is through 2007. With DirecTV's impending move to MPEG4, the existing tivo units won't even work once the transition is complete. The HD-Tivo owners will get screwed first, as HD locals will be the first to move to mpeg4, followed by non-local HD, and finally by all the SD channels.
I'm hoping tivo succeeds, though-- I've really liked the two tivos I've had, despite the sluggishness of the directv models. I'm hoping that the upcoming dual-tuner cablecard unit (buy it and use it on any cable system) will finally do what i want. Dual tuner, fully digital recording, all the SA tivo features, and the ability to move from network to network.
Plus, their list of supported games is a fantastic guide to all of the sweet point-and-click adventure games that you never heard of. There were probably twice as many that I *hadn't* played, and I was pretty hooked on those games as a kid.:)
Those Lumileds LEDs are what you'd call "spectacularly bright." I have a pair I ordered to assemble a bike light for night riding-- they're the tiny 1-watt ones, and they're damn bright. The red-orange 1-watter I have makes 55 Lumens, and I'd guess you get a lot more light from the 3w and 5w versions.
The bike light is fantastic-- I get hours and hours of life from a few AA batteries. Great little toys.
Slashdot Mirror
You're quite right, and I apologize if my post wasn't clear. The non-HD transition is years away, and yes, it will break existing boxes. HD won't even be done in all markets by the end of 2006, judging from DirecTV's announcements. They will also be subsidizing replacement boxes, although they won't be Tivos.
What I was trying to say is that this is a long, slow transition starting with HD locals and gradually working its way down to the SD channels.
It should be noted that this is not a troll. DirecTV is going to break compatibility with existing boxes in more than one way, too-- not only are they transitioning the compression system to MPEG4, they will be switching modulation schemes to cram more into their airspace.
But this will NOT be a "cutoff." It will be a gradual, market-by-market transition, and SD probably won't happen until churn converts enough people to the newer boxes without directv having to foot the bill.
Plus, I believe they are moving to the tivo interface down the road on the comcast hardware, due to Comcast's recent agreement with tivo. It won't exactly *be* a tivo, but the onscreen system will look and act like it, which is all that matters.
They may even be doing it with software upgrades on existing hardware, but if they aren't, you can swap out the box for a new one whenever you want.
If only I didn't hate comcast so much.
The first thing in MPEG4 will be HD locals, which you don't have now, so you won't really be losing anything. Up next will be the existing HD channels, and that's where you'll feel the first loss. The real kicker is when the full MPEG4 transition occurs-- this is where you're going to lose all your non-HD channels.
It's likely that they will offer you a replacement box (although this is just me speculating) for free or at a steep discount, since those of you with the HD-Tivo are highend customers. Unfortunately for the Tivo faithful, it won't be a Tivo.
The information may be there, but organizing it and putting it down in a useful fashion is not something most developers ever do, let alone do quickly. It's rare that I see good info, particularly on side effects and non-parameter requirements (file formats, db requirements, external system constraints and expectations, etc...)
I agree with you that a good programmer should be able to do this instinctively after design and implementation of the code. Unfortunately, not every (or even most) programmers are good. Real life, however, forces you to deal with and create procedures for the lousy programmers. A manager who doesn't understand the variation among his developers is asking for crap when proper documentation is not checked and enforced-- and when the time it really takes is not factored into the project estimates.
The dipshits do deserve termination. I'd rather have nothing than crap. Sadly, you will almost always have to work with people like this-- and you (and/or the project manager) will *have* to find ways to coax usable output out of them, or you end up doing their jobs for them.
I'm just saying that putting the time squeeze on people who are already just barely getting things done isn't going to result in a font of wisdom in the comments. By not making allowances for differences in skill (and thus development time) you end up making maintenance or expansion drastically more difficult down the road, because documentation is what gets crapified first.
And remember: there is always somebody smarter than you, too. So don't be too smug with the dipshits.
I agree. This happens all too often-- it's what you get when you mandate code comments but don't add time for it to your project schedule. Doing it right can frequently take longer than writing the code, and sadly, nobody will pay for the time it takes. So the programmers tag every "i=1;" with a "//set i equal to 1" and leave out anything even remotely subtle or useful.
Multi-hundred? Mine was $50 up front with an $80 rebate when I signed up with DirecTV. I made $30 getting a tivo.
I wonder if the DirecTV tivos are safe from this due to DirecTV's policy of never updating their version of the tivo software... finally, a benefit!
Just pretend the "s" everybody puts at the end stands for "System." You'll feel better.
Also, I can't spell "disappointed."
"Grumpy Gamer Disapopinted by New Zelda Footage, Is One of At Least Two."
I can only speak for myself, but I *liked* Wind Waker's graphics.
You two are arguing about different things. He's talking about "energy payoff" and you're talking about "financial payoff."
You're both right. Electricity is so cheap right now that *financial* payoff can take more than a decade. In terms of the energy requirement for production, though, panels pay themselves off in a few years (my research put the figure at more like 3 or 4 years).
So, to set a few things straight:
1. Buying panels is only a financial gain in the long-term. To pay themselves off at today's power rates (assuming they don't increase) it will take more than a decade. However, the panels will last a good 20 years, and they *will* be a financial gain in the long run.
2. Producing panels does not "use more energy than the panels will produce." The panels will produce enough energy to pay this back in a few years-- it varies by panel, but in the 3-4 year ballpark. And again, they will last around 20 years.
However, assuming that in their entire lifetime the panels only made 1.1x the amount of energy required to make them, it's still a net gain. Can you think of another way to invest 100kwhs and some cash, and end up with 110kwhs? And in this case, the numbers are more like 100kwhs, some cash, and ending up with 500kwhs and more cash than you started with.
It does sound like he got a hell of a deal, though. The systems I've been looking at cost about as much as a small car.
I would think so! All the "big" chess computers (Deep Blue, etc...) have just been massively parallel systems, and chess is one of those things that people have been coding and refining for years. I'm not much of a chess player myself-- computers have been kicking my ass since the 1MHz era, but it appears that multiprocessor chess software is already available for end-users:
Deep Junior 9 and Deep Shredder 9 support multiple processors, and should have no trouble on a multicore system.
Each core doubles how many moves it can evaluate in a given time-- and searching possible moves is primarily how chess algorithms work.
Plus... Shredder renders a fancy 3D glass chess set for you, making sure your GPU doesn't get lonely with nothing to do.
I have a $300 Onkyo amp, a pair of $180 bookshelf speakers, and a whopping 10" sub. Not much to write home about, but slightly better than the ancient, distorted things I had in college.
When I was trying to do what you and I would consider "sane" product research to figure out what was of decent quality in my price range, I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of ridiculous misinformation and crap out there on the internet. People REALLY BELIEVE that they need to replace the power cables on their amps for better sound, etc, or that putting the *receiver* on a block of granite will improve quality by reducing vibration. (turntable, yes. receiver.... well, you decide.)
"No, gamers have always been much worse than audiophiles. "
You're kidding, right? Audiophiles are off the deep end. I don't think you have ever seen an *actual* audiophile-- you're mixing them up with people who like stereos. Audiophiles do things like buy $3000 cables. Or put all their components on 200lb. granite blocks or $600-per-component magnetic levitation dampers to ease vibration. Power conditioners. Huge stacks of tube amps. Subwoofers that require special basement rooms to be built to act as the box.
In the worst cases, the quest for perfect audio goes so far as to become pointless. There's an article I wish I could find for you about one particularly off-the-deep-end audiophile who paid so much for the system he used to listen to classical recordings that had he kept the money, he would have had enough to bring the *actual orchestra* to his house to play for him regularly, for years. Say what you want about huge stereos, but if it gets to the point where you can afford to bring the source home with you, you don't need reproduction.
The worst gamers can't hope to touch this. The most expensive rig on the market with a massive hang-on-the-wall plasma or whatever as your huge monitor is still just a drop in the bucket compared to people who will spend $3000 on three feet of speaker cable. And unlike some of the audiophile quackery, at least a fast machine has measurable performance gains. Try convincing a real engineer that your $1000 power cable makes a detectable difference in sound quality.
For your reference, as a guide to the levels this insanity can reach:
$23,000 for a pair of 8-foot speaker cables
$75,000 per speaker
$40 silver-plated electrical outlet (because... ummm... you can't just use any old outlet with the next item:)
$1000 5-foot AC power cable
There's much worse. Try pricing out monoblock tube amps. Keep in mind they're not just going to buy one per channel (the minimum), but probably one per *driver* (as in, three per speaker if you have a woofer, mid, and tweeter).
I've never used flashblock, and hadn't heard of it before. The *first match* on a google search for the word "flashblock" took me to their site:
flashblock.mozdev.org
Looks like an easy install, although for some reason you're supposed to restart the browser twice. Hope it works for you!
Apparently, your television stations are nicer than mine. I routinely see ads that take up roughly the bottom 1/4 to 1/3 of the screen, covering the entire width. They are animated, occasionally breaking out of their already huge "strip" with a person or logo that stands up. And to make it worse, in the last year or two, they've started having SOUND.
Even the "nicer" stations are now animating their little logos, which are substantially larger than they used to be.
This version is an old-school hip-hop track, consisting solely of short, reordered samples from the original, with the addition of turntable scratching with the mixer volume turned all the way down.
The rare occurence of this sort of profoundly geeky post is why I still come to slashdot. God bless you, crazy GPU vector coprocessor finite difference code matrix guy!
The day my CPU cache surpassed my first machine's disk space has come and gone.
The 1541 disk drive I used with my Commodore 64 stored 170k per side. My current (laptop) Pentium M CPU has 512k of L2 cache. Up next is L1 cache larger than the old 1541 disk, followed by enough registers to out-store the 1541.
I'm sure other folks passed it a while back.
Not the case here, although that does make some difference. The difference between the two when both batteries were brand-new was still more than double. The *most* I ever managed on the PIII (A30) was a hair under two hours, with aggressive power management. By the end of a year, I was getting just over 90 minutes, and it dropped to slightly below that at the end of two.
At the end of one year, my R40 is *still* getting significantly more than four hours-- more than double what the A30 was capable of when it was brand-new.
Whoops-- you're right. The A30 was my previous laptop, the PIII model. The new one is an R40. Sorry for the mixup!
As somebody else suggested, your best bet is ripping to the hard drive first and then shutting down the DVD drive. This was enough to buy me an extra 15 minutes or so on my old machine.
In the longer run, my biggest gain came from moving from an old PIII laptop to a Pentium M machine-- I get battery life reliably over four hours, and sometimes over five. The battery doesn't have any significant capacity advantage over my old one (it's a hair bigger), and the screen is the same size (15.1"), but I get a staggering increase in battery life. If you're in the market for a new one, make sure to hunt around for a nice Pentium M machine. Mine's an IBM A30, for reference.
The cablecard standard fixes this problem, allowing standardized access to digital and HD cable programming across different providers. Tivo's got a two-tuner cablecard box coming, but it's not due out for a year, and we all know that nothing ships on time, so expect it to be a year and a half.
It's just what I want, but the big question is "will it be fast enough to save tivo from their loss of DirecTV and all the cheaper competition?"
Hard to say. The "oh crap, they're dying" most likely comes from the fact that the majority of their subscribers are through DirecTV, and that DirecTV has chosen both not to renew their contract with Tivo and to pursue their own DVRs.
They're probably still raking in customers, but the majority of them are still DirecTV folks. And those will start to disappear as DirecTV drops support and people start upgrading in a few years. I believe the contract is through 2007. With DirecTV's impending move to MPEG4, the existing tivo units won't even work once the transition is complete. The HD-Tivo owners will get screwed first, as HD locals will be the first to move to mpeg4, followed by non-local HD, and finally by all the SD channels.
I'm hoping tivo succeeds, though-- I've really liked the two tivos I've had, despite the sluggishness of the directv models. I'm hoping that the upcoming dual-tuner cablecard unit (buy it and use it on any cable system) will finally do what i want. Dual tuner, fully digital recording, all the SA tivo features, and the ability to move from network to network.
Plus, their list of supported games is a fantastic guide to all of the sweet point-and-click adventure games that you never heard of. There were probably twice as many that I *hadn't* played, and I was pretty hooked on those games as a kid. :)
Those Lumileds LEDs are what you'd call "spectacularly bright." I have a pair I ordered to assemble a bike light for night riding-- they're the tiny 1-watt ones, and they're damn bright. The red-orange 1-watter I have makes 55 Lumens, and I'd guess you get a lot more light from the 3w and 5w versions.
The bike light is fantastic-- I get hours and hours of life from a few AA batteries. Great little toys.