The DRM is actually part of the HDCP specification, not HDMI. Almost all HDMI displays have HDCP capability now, but HDCP can also be implemented on DVI and DisplayPort. The PS4 and XBox One have to do HDCP negotiation for Blu-Ray playback; I don't know if they bother with it for games.
No, you won't get more kudos for getting partial answers without a calculator. You're being graded against other students and they are using calculators; if you handicap yourself by not using a calculator you're likely not to do as well as the students who use them and your grade will suffer. In science and engineering you aren't graded on effort, you are graded on results.
Calculators are appropriate professional tools for many science and math tasks, though the requirement that you use a dumbed down one with no programming capability is artificial. Yes, I understand that the requirement is necessary to prevent cheating.
It could be that cats have a different level of persistence of vision than humans, so 50 or 60Hz CRTs weren't adequate for them to perceive a proper picture. Pixels on LCD TVs are on all the time (well, aside from the flicker rate of the backlight but that's usually in the tens of KHz); the refresh rate only affects how quickly the pixels can change.
Ah, different point. You are mostly correct for now. I expect that to change in 2014, with both a download service and a upgraded Blu-Ray standard. Blu-Ray could gain the needed capacity by combining an upgrade to BDXL discs (100GB) and a switch to H.265 compression.
We're not likely to see 4K over the air. You could broadcast 4K at acceptable quality by switching from MPEG-2 encoding to H.265, which gives you about a 4:1 advantage in compression ratio, but such broadcasts would not be backward compatible so we're unlikely to see it happen.
The cable and satellite guys are already struggling to squeeze in the channels they have and maintain an acceptable level of quality; they're not going to be in a hurry to make a move that will double their bandwidth needs again. (Mostly they're already using MPEG-4 or H.264, so they only get a 2:1 advantage by going to H.265.) It could happen in a few years by the companies introducing next generation compression in their cable boxes now and throwing the switch in a few years once the older boxes have been replaced; you would then gain enough space by switching the existing 1080p channels to H.265 to make room for at least a few 4K channels.
There are plenty of films shot in 4K digital now. It is quickly becoming the dominant way of making major releases, though some directors prefer film. Documentaries are mostly being made in 1080p, and small budget films will probably switch from film to 1080p digital (rather than 4K) to keep costs down.
It's not QUITE true that there is no 4K media. Sony offers a movie server that comes with a few 4K movies and allows you to download more. Sadly, it only works with their own 4K TVs. But that one rather limited commercially available device isn't enough.
For 4K to have a chance of catching on, we need both an optical disc standard (probably an upgrade of Blu-Ray using BDXL discs and H.265 compression) and at least one download service that offers a universal player. And we need the 4K sets to have HDMI 2.0 inputs so they can connect to those players and offer an acceptable frame rate at full resolution.
Even with those things in place, 4K adoption will be slow for a while. The advantage is small and the price will be high at first. Unlike some observers, I think its time will come eventually, but it make take five years for it to be more than a small niche market.
Lyrics all by themselves have no significant monetary value. If they did, people would have been selling them for years.
Recorded music has monetary value. People buy it. Sheet music has monetary value, because people who want to perform songs need it. Lyrics sites attract people who want to understand the songs they hear, or perhaps sing along with them. Before the internet existed, they were never going to pay enough money for that to justify the existence of a business that distributed lyrics. Rare exceptions exist, such as the songbook Rise Up Singing (which unlike most music books contains ONLY lyrics and not sheet music.)
There is some modest amount of money to be made running lyrics sites; otherwise there wouldn't be so many of them. But there isn't a lot of money in it, and the size of the royalties that the music industry will undoubtedly ask for will make it impossible for lyrics sites to break even. (Just look at the current state of internet radio; nobody is making money, at least not anybody based in the US. The main reason is the crushing royalty rates - rates that are far higher than those paid by other forms of broadcasting.) The net result will be to make the world worse; a useful service will be replaced by nothing, and people will return to ignorance about the songs they hear. Or they will turn to underground channels to get their information.
If the music business thought there was enough money to be made to be worth the effort, they would start by creating their own lyrics site. Once it was up and running well, THEN they would send the takedown notices. But they're haven't created that site, nor are they going to.
I figured they ditched the armored suits because Hollywood would have never made a film where the main characters spend 75% of their time with their faces hidden. The powered suits in Avatar later showed how to do it; nobody would actually build armor with huge windowed fronts for reasons of structural integrity, but they made it possible to have characters in armor but still visible to the movie audience.
OS X was based on BSD, so it wasn't an "all new OS". But it was new to Apple, and grafting the Mac GUI and some degree of compatibility with the Mac API onto the BSD framework was new. For a while, OS X also included the penalty box (pardon me, the compatibility box) and 68000 emulation so you could run many of your OS 9 applications. So maybe not 100% new, but certainly new enough.
A doctor with an affiliation to a major research hospital would probably have access. A doctor whose affiliation is with a smaller hospital, especially a for-profit one, likely would not.
There was a problem with the initial release of Unity on 12.04 where the border selection areas were very small and hard to grab. It was corrected in 12.10; the borders weren't actually made visibly larger but the selection area was. The correction was also backported to 12.04, and Ubuntu variants that use a different window manager (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu) never had the problem.
Not entirely true. Gamers will install SteamOS or buy a Steam Machine to play games, but they may also use it for their other computing needs. And if Valve delivers an easy to install OS with good graphics performance, some people might install it even if they're not planning to use it for gaming at all. For that to work well, Valve will either need to offer a good selection of free software on Steam or include an alternative method of installing software. Reports are it's based on Debian, so unless they omit all the necessary tools you should be able to use apt-get to turn your Steam Machine into a fully capable Linux system.
There was a version of MiniDisc for data storage - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data - but Sony never marketed it effectively so Zip drives ended up owning that market niche.
Er, no. The first version of VHS only had a two hour capacity, which is not long enough for a football game. Not American football anyway, where a professional game runs a bit over 3 hours. It's at least close to being long enough for a soccer/fútbol game, depending on how much penalty time there is. (An overtime game would fail.) LP recording (2x time), SLP/EP (3x time), and longer tapes (the ones marketed as 8, 9, and eventually 10 hour tapes, which were 2:40, 3 and 3:20 hours at the original recording speed) all came later.
The Wikipedia page on the Snapdragon SOC lists 10 devices that use the Snapdragon 800 and misses two recently announced ones (Galaxy S4 Mini and Samsung's new SM-W2014 flip phone). Many of them are not yet available; I think the ones on your list and the 7" Kindle (well, it's backordered but people have started to receive them) are the only ones you can buy right now. A large percentage of the Snapdragon 800 devices are phablets (plus one straight on tablet, the Kindle Fire HDX, and I'd say that devices that cross the 6" line like the Xperia Z Ultra are tablets that can make phone calls rather than phablets); I guess you need a big battery to make this high powered chip make sense.
Taza is Mexican style stone ground chocolate made in Somerville MA. Delicious, but a different experience from what most of us think of as chocolate bars. Definitely something to seek out and try if you haven't had it.
There are some excellent artisan chocolate makers here in the US. You can find their products in natural/health food stores including Whole Foods, in local food coops, and sometimes in gift shops and independent bookstores. Some of the chocolate makers also have their own shops.
The good chocolate at Trader Joe's is all imported. Excellent value though.
One advantage of a Nexus phone is that you are certain to get all the Android software updates, and get them in a timely manner. The other is that the software isn't messed up with "enhancements" to Android; you get everything that Google offers and nothing else.
These advantages are important to some people. For developers they are crucial; it means you're guaranteed to have an up to date device to test your apps.
The above is true for Nexus phones bought directly from Google. The Galaxy Nexus was sold both directly by Google and by carrier versions, but the carrier versions didn't always get the same updates. (Before that, the Nexus One was sold directly by Google in carrier-specific versions, and the Nexus S was only sold by carriers.) When the Nexus 4 came out, Google stopped doing carrier versions of the Nexus because that lack of software updates was damaging the brand. Verizon and Sprint customers are left out for now; Google does not offer CDMA versions of the Nexus phones, and a phone that is only usable on LTE networks is not yet viable because the carriers have not yet deployed voice over LTE.
At the moment the point-&-shoot has three real advantages over most smartphone cameras: optical zoom, image stabilization, and a better lens. Optical zoom gets you better images when you are zoomed in. Image stabilization gets better images in low light. A better lens gives you a sharper picture. The P&S is also likely to have a higher resolution sensor.
But smartphones are closing all of those gaps. Within a couple of years, high end smartphone cameras will approach feature parity with mainstream P&S cameras (a couple of models are already nearly there), and P&S cameras will largely die off.
Digital SLRs and mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras will still be available for professionals and serious enthusiasts, and probably a few models of high-end P&S cameras (like the digital Leicas and the Sony RX-100, though with higher specs as the technology improves) will survive. Those cameras will offer capabilities that smartphones are unlikely to be able to match for some time if ever: better low light performance (all else being equal, a larger image sensor and a bigger lens gather more light), capturing large bursts of images (in part because they have room for super high speed memory cards that won't fit in a phone), and more control over the image (because their larger bodies have room for more buttons and knobs). Finally, they offer a viewfinder (either an optical one as in most SLRs or an electronic view as in MILCs and the Sony Alpha SLRs), which is a big help in extremes of light. (In bright sunlight an LCD screen is hard to see. In dark situations a glowing screen distracts from the ambience of the situation; using a viewfinder avoids that problem.)
All that and reliability. The distinguishing feature of the professional isn't taking better pictures than the amateur (though they often do), but rather getting a good picture on every assignment. If you book a professional you have a high degree of confidence that you will get something you can use, whether it be the wedding photographer, the professional portrait photographer, the sports specialist, or the newspaper photographer who gets pictures of event scenes and interview subjects. An amateur might come back with something just as good or even better - or might come back with nothing.
Because keeping archive copies was expensive. They took up a lot of space that the BBC needed for other purposes. The Beeb is far from the only media organization that discarded archives; all the major US networks and many film studios are also guilty.
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The DRM is actually part of the HDCP specification, not HDMI. Almost all HDMI displays have HDCP capability now, but HDCP can also be implemented on DVI and DisplayPort. The PS4 and XBox One have to do HDCP negotiation for Blu-Ray playback; I don't know if they bother with it for games.
No, you won't get more kudos for getting partial answers without a calculator. You're being graded against other students and they are using calculators; if you handicap yourself by not using a calculator you're likely not to do as well as the students who use them and your grade will suffer. In science and engineering you aren't graded on effort, you are graded on results.
Calculators are appropriate professional tools for many science and math tasks, though the requirement that you use a dumbed down one with no programming capability is artificial. Yes, I understand that the requirement is necessary to prevent cheating.
It could be that cats have a different level of persistence of vision than humans, so 50 or 60Hz CRTs weren't adequate for them to perceive a proper picture. Pixels on LCD TVs are on all the time (well, aside from the flicker rate of the backlight but that's usually in the tens of KHz); the refresh rate only affects how quickly the pixels can change.
Ah, different point. You are mostly correct for now. I expect that to change in 2014, with both a download service and a upgraded Blu-Ray standard. Blu-Ray could gain the needed capacity by combining an upgrade to BDXL discs (100GB) and a switch to H.265 compression.
We're not likely to see 4K over the air. You could broadcast 4K at acceptable quality by switching from MPEG-2 encoding to H.265, which gives you about a 4:1 advantage in compression ratio, but such broadcasts would not be backward compatible so we're unlikely to see it happen.
The cable and satellite guys are already struggling to squeeze in the channels they have and maintain an acceptable level of quality; they're not going to be in a hurry to make a move that will double their bandwidth needs again. (Mostly they're already using MPEG-4 or H.264, so they only get a 2:1 advantage by going to H.265.) It could happen in a few years by the companies introducing next generation compression in their cable boxes now and throwing the switch in a few years once the older boxes have been replaced; you would then gain enough space by switching the existing 1080p channels to H.265 to make room for at least a few 4K channels.
There are plenty of films shot in 4K digital now. It is quickly becoming the dominant way of making major releases, though some directors prefer film. Documentaries are mostly being made in 1080p, and small budget films will probably switch from film to 1080p digital (rather than 4K) to keep costs down.
It's not QUITE true that there is no 4K media. Sony offers a movie server that comes with a few 4K movies and allows you to download more. Sadly, it only works with their own 4K TVs. But that one rather limited commercially available device isn't enough.
For 4K to have a chance of catching on, we need both an optical disc standard (probably an upgrade of Blu-Ray using BDXL discs and H.265 compression) and at least one download service that offers a universal player. And we need the 4K sets to have HDMI 2.0 inputs so they can connect to those players and offer an acceptable frame rate at full resolution.
Even with those things in place, 4K adoption will be slow for a while. The advantage is small and the price will be high at first. Unlike some observers, I think its time will come eventually, but it make take five years for it to be more than a small niche market.
Lyrics all by themselves have no significant monetary value. If they did, people would have been selling them for years.
Recorded music has monetary value. People buy it. Sheet music has monetary value, because people who want to perform songs need it. Lyrics sites attract people who want to understand the songs they hear, or perhaps sing along with them. Before the internet existed, they were never going to pay enough money for that to justify the existence of a business that distributed lyrics. Rare exceptions exist, such as the songbook Rise Up Singing (which unlike most music books contains ONLY lyrics and not sheet music.)
There is some modest amount of money to be made running lyrics sites; otherwise there wouldn't be so many of them. But there isn't a lot of money in it, and the size of the royalties that the music industry will undoubtedly ask for will make it impossible for lyrics sites to break even. (Just look at the current state of internet radio; nobody is making money, at least not anybody based in the US. The main reason is the crushing royalty rates - rates that are far higher than those paid by other forms of broadcasting.) The net result will be to make the world worse; a useful service will be replaced by nothing, and people will return to ignorance about the songs they hear. Or they will turn to underground channels to get their information.
If the music business thought there was enough money to be made to be worth the effort, they would start by creating their own lyrics site. Once it was up and running well, THEN they would send the takedown notices. But they're haven't created that site, nor are they going to.
I figured they ditched the armored suits because Hollywood would have never made a film where the main characters spend 75% of their time with their faces hidden. The powered suits in Avatar later showed how to do it; nobody would actually build armor with huge windowed fronts for reasons of structural integrity, but they made it possible to have characters in armor but still visible to the movie audience.
HTC, Huawei, and Samsung have all made Windows 8 phones. But none of them have sold well; Windows Phone 8 and Nokia are nearly synonymous.
OS X was based on BSD, so it wasn't an "all new OS". But it was new to Apple, and grafting the Mac GUI and some degree of compatibility with the Mac API onto the BSD framework was new. For a while, OS X also included the penalty box (pardon me, the compatibility box) and 68000 emulation so you could run many of your OS 9 applications. So maybe not 100% new, but certainly new enough.
A doctor with an affiliation to a major research hospital would probably have access. A doctor whose affiliation is with a smaller hospital, especially a for-profit one, likely would not.
But Macs and OS X are essential to Apple's core business because they are the development tool for iOS apps.
There was a problem with the initial release of Unity on 12.04 where the border selection areas were very small and hard to grab. It was corrected in 12.10; the borders weren't actually made visibly larger but the selection area was. The correction was also backported to 12.04, and Ubuntu variants that use a different window manager (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu) never had the problem.
Not entirely true. Gamers will install SteamOS or buy a Steam Machine to play games, but they may also use it for their other computing needs. And if Valve delivers an easy to install OS with good graphics performance, some people might install it even if they're not planning to use it for gaming at all. For that to work well, Valve will either need to offer a good selection of free software on Steam or include an alternative method of installing software. Reports are it's based on Debian, so unless they omit all the necessary tools you should be able to use apt-get to turn your Steam Machine into a fully capable Linux system.
There was a version of MiniDisc for data storage - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data - but Sony never marketed it effectively so Zip drives ended up owning that market niche.
VHS could record a football game from day one.
Er, no. The first version of VHS only had a two hour capacity, which is not long enough for a football game. Not American football anyway, where a professional game runs a bit over 3 hours. It's at least close to being long enough for a soccer/fútbol game, depending on how much penalty time there is. (An overtime game would fail.) LP recording (2x time), SLP/EP (3x time), and longer tapes (the ones marketed as 8, 9, and eventually 10 hour tapes, which were 2:40, 3 and 3:20 hours at the original recording speed) all came later.
The Wikipedia page on the Snapdragon SOC lists 10 devices that use the Snapdragon 800 and misses two recently announced ones (Galaxy S4 Mini and Samsung's new SM-W2014 flip phone). Many of them are not yet available; I think the ones on your list and the 7" Kindle (well, it's backordered but people have started to receive them) are the only ones you can buy right now. A large percentage of the Snapdragon 800 devices are phablets (plus one straight on tablet, the Kindle Fire HDX, and I'd say that devices that cross the 6" line like the Xperia Z Ultra are tablets that can make phone calls rather than phablets); I guess you need a big battery to make this high powered chip make sense.
The relevance of being European is that the OP can legally unlock the phone. In the US we currently can't.
Perhaps you'll like the Surface Pro 2. Better battery life (Haswell CPU) and there is an 8GB option.
Taza is Mexican style stone ground chocolate made in Somerville MA. Delicious, but a different experience from what most of us think of as chocolate bars. Definitely something to seek out and try if you haven't had it.
There are some excellent artisan chocolate makers here in the US. You can find their products in natural/health food stores including Whole Foods, in local food coops, and sometimes in gift shops and independent bookstores. Some of the chocolate makers also have their own shops.
The good chocolate at Trader Joe's is all imported. Excellent value though.
Except that it's been done (albeit with the editing done on the ground): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo
One advantage of a Nexus phone is that you are certain to get all the Android software updates, and get them in a timely manner. The other is that the software isn't messed up with "enhancements" to Android; you get everything that Google offers and nothing else.
These advantages are important to some people. For developers they are crucial; it means you're guaranteed to have an up to date device to test your apps.
The above is true for Nexus phones bought directly from Google. The Galaxy Nexus was sold both directly by Google and by carrier versions, but the carrier versions didn't always get the same updates. (Before that, the Nexus One was sold directly by Google in carrier-specific versions, and the Nexus S was only sold by carriers.) When the Nexus 4 came out, Google stopped doing carrier versions of the Nexus because that lack of software updates was damaging the brand. Verizon and Sprint customers are left out for now; Google does not offer CDMA versions of the Nexus phones, and a phone that is only usable on LTE networks is not yet viable because the carriers have not yet deployed voice over LTE.
At the moment the point-&-shoot has three real advantages over most smartphone cameras: optical zoom, image stabilization, and a better lens. Optical zoom gets you better images when you are zoomed in. Image stabilization gets better images in low light. A better lens gives you a sharper picture. The P&S is also likely to have a higher resolution sensor.
But smartphones are closing all of those gaps. Within a couple of years, high end smartphone cameras will approach feature parity with mainstream P&S cameras (a couple of models are already nearly there), and P&S cameras will largely die off.
Digital SLRs and mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras will still be available for professionals and serious enthusiasts, and probably a few models of high-end P&S cameras (like the digital Leicas and the Sony RX-100, though with higher specs as the technology improves) will survive. Those cameras will offer capabilities that smartphones are unlikely to be able to match for some time if ever: better low light performance (all else being equal, a larger image sensor and a bigger lens gather more light), capturing large bursts of images (in part because they have room for super high speed memory cards that won't fit in a phone), and more control over the image (because their larger bodies have room for more buttons and knobs). Finally, they offer a viewfinder (either an optical one as in most SLRs or an electronic view as in MILCs and the Sony Alpha SLRs), which is a big help in extremes of light. (In bright sunlight an LCD screen is hard to see. In dark situations a glowing screen distracts from the ambience of the situation; using a viewfinder avoids that problem.)
All that and reliability. The distinguishing feature of the professional isn't taking better pictures than the amateur (though they often do), but rather getting a good picture on every assignment. If you book a professional you have a high degree of confidence that you will get something you can use, whether it be the wedding photographer, the professional portrait photographer, the sports specialist, or the newspaper photographer who gets pictures of event scenes and interview subjects. An amateur might come back with something just as good or even better - or might come back with nothing.
Because keeping archive copies was expensive. They took up a lot of space that the BBC needed for other purposes. The Beeb is far from the only media organization that discarded archives; all the major US networks and many film studios are also guilty.