Film making doesn't necessarily have to be expensive. £8500 is more than the entire budget of El Mariachi. There are independent filmmakers for whom the $1000 to submit the film for a rating could be an onerous burden... and that's just for ONE country.
File downloads aren't limited at the server end until you get a much faster connection. I have done plenty of them that have maxed out my 100Mbps connection, so I know the ceiling is higher than that.
In the short term I expect they will charge the same amount for drone delivery as for same-day delivery by human drivers, with perhaps a short term offering of free or reduced rate shipping to get people to try it. In the long term it will depend on how the costs shake out; if it turns out to be costlier than dispatching drivers they will charge extra for right-now delivery, if it's cheaper they will use drones for all the same-day deliveries that are within the weight limit.
The PCIe card is also useful if you ever need to recover the data from the M.2 drive. Most of us don't have a second system or an external drive case or adapter that can handle an M.2 drive; putting the module in the PCIe card lets you remove the drive from your laptop and put it in a desktop system to read if necessary.
Skylake support is problematic on most Linux distros. But that will get better; it's in the current kernel. Once that happens, these sticks should work nicely on Linux and they look like an interesting option for home theater use.
Even the Denali might have made sense if it was mostly driven in the city. Assuming, that is, that owning a Denali of any type made sense, which I consider doubtful. The overall mileage improvement was only 2 MPG, but that broke down to 1 MPG on the highway and 5 MPG in the city.
The money equation for many hybrids can be marginal in typical driving. But an Uber or Lyft driver does not use a car in a typical way. Like taxis, their driving tends to tilt more toward stop-and-go driving where hybrids are at their best. So driving a Prius or other hybrid makes a lot of sense.
Nope, not mistaken. If a TV is connected to the internet there will be somebody watching what you do with it.
The alternative is to use a non-smart TV (or to not plug the TV into the network) and use a set-top box instead. But then somebody will watch what you do with the box instead. TiVo started that game early and has released various statistics about TiVo watching over the years. (To the best of my knowledge the company has done a good job of protecting personal information and has only released statistics.)
What the article says is that there are three possible ways to do interstellar travel.
#1 is a generation ship. This travels at a speed well below light and takes hundreds of years to reach nearby star systems. The duration of the trip means that the people who originally board the ship die on board; it's their descendants who reach the destination.
#2 is a near-lightspeed (NAFAL) ship. Relativistic time dilation makes it possible for the original crew to reach the destination, and some form of hibernation might be used to stretch that farther. But the trip still takes hundreds or thousands of years from the point of view of an Earth observer.
#3 is future technologies or loopholes: warp drive, wormholes, etc.
Nothing new here for science fiction readers. All three possibilities have been done many times in the literature.
We haven't seen a standard faster than SATA 3 emerge for hard drives because there is no need for one. It is already faster than the drives are. SSDs are starting to become available with faster interfaces because they can actually use them; current high end drives can exceed the maximum data rate of SATA.
From Wikipedia: "A solid-state drive (SSD, also known as a solid-state disk although it contains neither an actual disk nor a drive motor to spin a disk) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently." The term is in popular use because SSDs serve the same function as hard disk drives and most connect to a computer or other device using the same interface standards (most commonly SATA). So it's linguistically wrong but it is standard tech jargon.
An SSD could be made on a round circuit board and thus actually be a disk. But there is no particular reason to do that and some good reasons not to. IC packages are square or rectangular, so placing them on a round board would lead to inefficient use of board real estate. Many SSDs are made to fit in the same space as hard drives (the most popular being the 2.5" size that is commonly used in laptops), and those spaces are rectangular.
Ford SYNC is already being replaced although they are keeping the name. The first two generations of SYNC were based on Windows Embedded. Generation 3 is based on QNX and has a new simplified user interface. The jury is still out on whether it is as good as what other software developers might be able to provide, since it just started to appear in a few 2016 models in September.
Makes sense. Ford has expertise and factories to mass produce cars. Google has the AI, computer vision, and other necessary expertise to make the self-driving part work. Google is not a manufacturing company at heart and it doesn't make sense for it to become one, at least not right now. (That could change in the future, as it has for Microsoft.)
Some hard questions remain. Should Google find an exclusive manufacturing partner or offer Google Cars that are made by more than one company? How should the cars be branded: Ford, Google, Google Car by Ford, Ford featuring Google Car, or something else?
Devices are programmable. But devices (as opposed to computers) often have relatively wimpy CPUs and depend on specialized decoding hardware for acceptable performance. Switching from a codec that has hardware support to one that does not will not work well on such devices. That includes most set-top boxes and smart TVs.
Mobile has the same problem on older devices but a different one on new devices.The CPU might have enough computing power to handle the new codec but doing the decoding in the CPU rather than the video hardware is likely to shorten battery life considerably.
So I think my basic point stands. Switching to H.265 is not viable for the majority of the installed base right now, but if Netflix is willing to do dual encoding they could get some benefit by using it for the users that can handle it. That will change with time as more of the installed base gets H.265 hardware decoding. But perhaps by then the hot topic will be whether to switch to Daala: https://xiph.org/daala/
Meanwhile, if they have found a way to improve the efficiency of their H.264 encoding that's a win all around. Lower bandwidth bills for Netflix, less congestion on the internet pipes for everybody, and everybody's systems still work. And they plan to do the re-encoding by using their existing hardware during off-peak hours so the only expense is a bit of extra electricity, because modern computers consume more power when they're actually doing something than when they are idle.
The delay is unfortunate. But it is better than putting out a release with serious problems. Presumably the Insider program revealed some flaws that are deal breakers for the general public.
This plan, though it might be environmentally beneficial, does nothing to compensate the car owners for their substantial losses. They are stuck with cars that they can't drive in good conscience, and can only sell at a considerable loss.
You can download trial versions to see if they do enough to keep you happy.
Unlike iMovie and the like, the Sony Studio applications use the same interface as the Pro versions and just take out some features. They also bundle fewer assets and plugins. In DVD Architect Studio, the most notable limitation (other than the track count) is that it can only do stereo PCM audio; no Dolby Digital (that encoder would add to the cost of the program) and no multichannel PCM.
Both the Studio and Pro versions of DVD Architect have limited video encoding options: CBR only and the only progressive frame rate available is 24p. Sony Vegas has more options; if you're working entirely in the Sony ecosystem the expectation is that you will encode the video there and then bring the encoded video tracks into DVD Architect. I believe that will also work with video from non-Sony applications but I've never tried that. Similarly, you can import encoded audio tracks.
Your level of experience is well beyond the "give simple discs to my friends" level, so I suspect you would find the limitations of the Studio version to be too restrictive. But as you point out, $200 for the full version isn't too bad and better prices are available: B&H sells it for $155.
The problem they are addressing is the cost of bandwidth. When you're sending out bits on the scale of Netflix the bills add up. Saving 20% of that is well worth the effort.
They are talking about improving the process for encoding with their current codec. Going to H.265 might happen in the future but right now it would only work well for a small percentage of playback devices, so they could do it as an option but would still have to offer the existing encoder as well.
Full featured Blu-Ray mastering software is still expensive. But if you can live with more limited capabilities it doesn't have to be. Sony's Movie Studio 13 Suite lists for $140 and B&H is currently selling it for $90; it can create Blu-Ray discs with basic menus. You will also need a Blu-Ray drive for your computer, which starts at around $50 for an internal SATA drive or $75 for an external USB drive. Perhaps the most important limitation is that it can't do surround sound; for that you'll have to step up to a more complete (and expensive) solution.
Of course, for some users that's still a lot of money. But it's a lot less expensive than what you would have needed a couple of years ago.
People doing disc encoding generally plan to use all or most of the capacity of the disc; they want to make the disc look as good as possible given the technical limits of the media. Putting more bits on the disc (so long as you don't have to step up to a higher capacity version) adds nothing to the manufacturing cost. So a major release of a new film on Blu-Ray will be on a BD50 dual-layer disk and use 40GB or more unless the film is very short. Older catalog titles that originally release at $10 or less might be done on a single layer BD25 disc to lower the manufacturing cost. DVD mastering is similar; major films will fill a DVD9 while catalog releases may be on a DVD5. Some early DVDs were DVD10 flip-disc releases with anamorphic widescreen on one side and 4:3 fullscreen on the other, but I haven't seen a new release done that way for years.
When Ultra Blu-Ray comes out next year I expect to see a similar differentiation. New flagship releases will be BDXL100 discs (three 33GB layers) but older titles might be done on BD50; those can be manufactured on existing Blu-Ray pressing lines rather than requiring new manufacturing equipment. I don't expect to see BDXL66 (two 33GB layers) get used often; the makers will either spring for the full 100GB or compress down a bit more to get to 50GB.
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Film making doesn't necessarily have to be expensive. £8500 is more than the entire budget of El Mariachi. There are independent filmmakers for whom the $1000 to submit the film for a rating could be an onerous burden... and that's just for ONE country.
The new UHD ("4K") streams that some sites are now offering require 15-25Mbps. Reliably, not just once in a while. For one stream.
File downloads aren't limited at the server end until you get a much faster connection. I have done plenty of them that have maxed out my 100Mbps connection, so I know the ceiling is higher than that.
In the short term I expect they will charge the same amount for drone delivery as for same-day delivery by human drivers, with perhaps a short term offering of free or reduced rate shipping to get people to try it. In the long term it will depend on how the costs shake out; if it turns out to be costlier than dispatching drivers they will charge extra for right-now delivery, if it's cheaper they will use drones for all the same-day deliveries that are within the weight limit.
OCZ was bought by Toshiba a couple of years ago. The current company is probably not the same one that sold you the bad equipment.
The PCIe card is also useful if you ever need to recover the data from the M.2 drive. Most of us don't have a second system or an external drive case or adapter that can handle an M.2 drive; putting the module in the PCIe card lets you remove the drive from your laptop and put it in a desktop system to read if necessary.
Skylake support is problematic on most Linux distros. But that will get better; it's in the current kernel. Once that happens, these sticks should work nicely on Linux and they look like an interesting option for home theater use.
They don't need a car to have sex. They can have sex at home. Parental attitudes have changed.
Even the Denali might have made sense if it was mostly driven in the city. Assuming, that is, that owning a Denali of any type made sense, which I consider doubtful. The overall mileage improvement was only 2 MPG, but that broke down to 1 MPG on the highway and 5 MPG in the city.
The money equation for many hybrids can be marginal in typical driving. But an Uber or Lyft driver does not use a car in a typical way. Like taxis, their driving tends to tilt more toward stop-and-go driving where hybrids are at their best. So driving a Prius or other hybrid makes a lot of sense.
Nope, not mistaken. If a TV is connected to the internet there will be somebody watching what you do with it.
The alternative is to use a non-smart TV (or to not plug the TV into the network) and use a set-top box instead. But then somebody will watch what you do with the box instead. TiVo started that game early and has released various statistics about TiVo watching over the years. (To the best of my knowledge the company has done a good job of protecting personal information and has only released statistics.)
What the article says is that there are three possible ways to do interstellar travel.
#1 is a generation ship. This travels at a speed well below light and takes hundreds of years to reach nearby star systems. The duration of the trip means that the people who originally board the ship die on board; it's their descendants who reach the destination.
#2 is a near-lightspeed (NAFAL) ship. Relativistic time dilation makes it possible for the original crew to reach the destination, and some form of hibernation might be used to stretch that farther. But the trip still takes hundreds or thousands of years from the point of view of an Earth observer.
#3 is future technologies or loopholes: warp drive, wormholes, etc.
Nothing new here for science fiction readers. All three possibilities have been done many times in the literature.
They should spend their money on making good movies rather than wasting it on lawsuits.
We haven't seen a standard faster than SATA 3 emerge for hard drives because there is no need for one. It is already faster than the drives are. SSDs are starting to become available with faster interfaces because they can actually use them; current high end drives can exceed the maximum data rate of SATA.
From Wikipedia: "A solid-state drive (SSD, also known as a solid-state disk although it contains neither an actual disk nor a drive motor to spin a disk) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently." The term is in popular use because SSDs serve the same function as hard disk drives and most connect to a computer or other device using the same interface standards (most commonly SATA). So it's linguistically wrong but it is standard tech jargon.
An SSD could be made on a round circuit board and thus actually be a disk. But there is no particular reason to do that and some good reasons not to. IC packages are square or rectangular, so placing them on a round board would lead to inefficient use of board real estate. Many SSDs are made to fit in the same space as hard drives (the most popular being the 2.5" size that is commonly used in laptops), and those spaces are rectangular.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Ford SYNC is already being replaced although they are keeping the name. The first two generations of SYNC were based on Windows Embedded. Generation 3 is based on QNX and has a new simplified user interface. The jury is still out on whether it is as good as what other software developers might be able to provide, since it just started to appear in a few 2016 models in September.
Makes sense. Ford has expertise and factories to mass produce cars. Google has the AI, computer vision, and other necessary expertise to make the self-driving part work. Google is not a manufacturing company at heart and it doesn't make sense for it to become one, at least not right now. (That could change in the future, as it has for Microsoft.)
Some hard questions remain. Should Google find an exclusive manufacturing partner or offer Google Cars that are made by more than one company? How should the cars be branded: Ford, Google, Google Car by Ford, Ford featuring Google Car, or something else?
Devices are programmable. But devices (as opposed to computers) often have relatively wimpy CPUs and depend on specialized decoding hardware for acceptable performance. Switching from a codec that has hardware support to one that does not will not work well on such devices. That includes most set-top boxes and smart TVs.
Mobile has the same problem on older devices but a different one on new devices.The CPU might have enough computing power to handle the new codec but doing the decoding in the CPU rather than the video hardware is likely to shorten battery life considerably.
So I think my basic point stands. Switching to H.265 is not viable for the majority of the installed base right now, but if Netflix is willing to do dual encoding they could get some benefit by using it for the users that can handle it. That will change with time as more of the installed base gets H.265 hardware decoding. But perhaps by then the hot topic will be whether to switch to Daala: https://xiph.org/daala/
Meanwhile, if they have found a way to improve the efficiency of their H.264 encoding that's a win all around. Lower bandwidth bills for Netflix, less congestion on the internet pipes for everybody, and everybody's systems still work. And they plan to do the re-encoding by using their existing hardware during off-peak hours so the only expense is a bit of extra electricity, because modern computers consume more power when they're actually doing something than when they are idle.
The delay is unfortunate. But it is better than putting out a release with serious problems. Presumably the Insider program revealed some flaws that are deal breakers for the general public.
This plan, though it might be environmentally beneficial, does nothing to compensate the car owners for their substantial losses. They are stuck with cars that they can't drive in good conscience, and can only sell at a considerable loss.
You can download trial versions to see if they do enough to keep you happy.
Unlike iMovie and the like, the Sony Studio applications use the same interface as the Pro versions and just take out some features. They also bundle fewer assets and plugins. In DVD Architect Studio, the most notable limitation (other than the track count) is that it can only do stereo PCM audio; no Dolby Digital (that encoder would add to the cost of the program) and no multichannel PCM.
Both the Studio and Pro versions of DVD Architect have limited video encoding options: CBR only and the only progressive frame rate available is 24p. Sony Vegas has more options; if you're working entirely in the Sony ecosystem the expectation is that you will encode the video there and then bring the encoded video tracks into DVD Architect. I believe that will also work with video from non-Sony applications but I've never tried that. Similarly, you can import encoded audio tracks.
Your level of experience is well beyond the "give simple discs to my friends" level, so I suspect you would find the limitations of the Studio version to be too restrictive. But as you point out, $200 for the full version isn't too bad and better prices are available: B&H sells it for $155.
The problem they are addressing is the cost of bandwidth. When you're sending out bits on the scale of Netflix the bills add up. Saving 20% of that is well worth the effort.
They are talking about improving the process for encoding with their current codec. Going to H.265 might happen in the future but right now it would only work well for a small percentage of playback devices, so they could do it as an option but would still have to offer the existing encoder as well.
Full featured Blu-Ray mastering software is still expensive. But if you can live with more limited capabilities it doesn't have to be. Sony's Movie Studio 13 Suite lists for $140 and B&H is currently selling it for $90; it can create Blu-Ray discs with basic menus. You will also need a Blu-Ray drive for your computer, which starts at around $50 for an internal SATA drive or $75 for an external USB drive. Perhaps the most important limitation is that it can't do surround sound; for that you'll have to step up to a more complete (and expensive) solution.
Of course, for some users that's still a lot of money. But it's a lot less expensive than what you would have needed a couple of years ago.
People doing disc encoding generally plan to use all or most of the capacity of the disc; they want to make the disc look as good as possible given the technical limits of the media. Putting more bits on the disc (so long as you don't have to step up to a higher capacity version) adds nothing to the manufacturing cost. So a major release of a new film on Blu-Ray will be on a BD50 dual-layer disk and use 40GB or more unless the film is very short. Older catalog titles that originally release at $10 or less might be done on a single layer BD25 disc to lower the manufacturing cost. DVD mastering is similar; major films will fill a DVD9 while catalog releases may be on a DVD5. Some early DVDs were DVD10 flip-disc releases with anamorphic widescreen on one side and 4:3 fullscreen on the other, but I haven't seen a new release done that way for years.
When Ultra Blu-Ray comes out next year I expect to see a similar differentiation. New flagship releases will be BDXL100 discs (three 33GB layers) but older titles might be done on BD50; those can be manufactured on existing Blu-Ray pressing lines rather than requiring new manufacturing equipment. I don't expect to see BDXL66 (two 33GB layers) get used often; the makers will either spring for the full 100GB or compress down a bit more to get to 50GB.