Double agreement, sir. I use one every day, and have used them preferentially since the mid 80's. My g/f worked for years at an art supply store, and she stocked them just for me. Now I have to find another source - and it appears that the style I like have been discontinued... sob.
Double bullshit. If you ran your tub 24x7, would it be fair to ask the rest of the students in the building to shower in a cold dribble? How about all the students on the entire campus? "Oh, but I PAID for that water in the residence fee! They should upgrade the water service!"
Grow up.
You use all the bandwidth, then I either get none or I have to pay more next semester to cover the cost of upgrading service I already paid for, and never could get because you used it all. And then you increase your usage to the point where I *still* don't get any bandwidth...
Oh, and here at UF, nobody has to live in any dorms. The waiting list, however, is a year long to get into some of the on-campus housing.
See? See how lame that was? It's not even remotely on target, doesn't inspire any sort of emotional reaction... in short, it's a pitiful excuse for a troll.
I mean, really. You might as well spout off a "lol...ur teh luser..." This is what passes for a troll these days? You really have some work to do, even to come up to the level of the average Slashdot troll - which is pretty mediocre.
See, just getting a reply doesn't count. You have to really annoy someone, or get them to argue a point that allows you to slowly drift them over to a position that they themselves cannot defend, and in fact disagree with. Or else post a troll that's so clever and subtle that people admire it. These are suitable goals for a troll.
Please. Try just a *little* harder. Have some pride in your craft. You're only embarassing yourself.
Hey, spin this one however you want. I'm simply trying to help you improve your game... but if you want to wallow in the shallows of mediocrity, it's your choice.
Or is it that you simply take pleasure in having your own shortcomings pointed out in public?
Either way, you have failed to make me feel dumb or impress anyone else. Like I said, don't come back until you can bring your A-game.
Oh, please. Everybody knows that rockets have to have air to push against, but aether? Please. Quit trying to fool the above poster with your farcical stories about aether.
Any respectable scientist knows that space travel is impossible anyway, that NASA never put any men on the moon, and that any satellite in orbit that you might THINK you see is really swamp gas, reflected off of Venus...
And as for my sibling posters in this subthread, you might wanna turn up the sensayumor knob in yer forebrain.
Hi, troll. Please abstain from commenting again until you understand even a fraction of the subject about which you are trolling. That attempt was weak, d00d.
I think the whole point, which you are obviously incapable of grasping, is that recording and "dubbing" (whatever you think that means) budgets do not make a successful artist, and intense marketing budgets do not make good artists.
See, what you need to do is learn something about the subject you wish to troll, and then troll on a *subtle* point that some poor sucker will fall all over himself to refute. This one simply highlights your ignorance, and makes you troll attempt much more blatant and thus ineffective.
So you've never seen your bill go up. So? Fact remains: I pay for my internet service. Spam costs me money. For the same reasons that telemarketing to cell phones is illegal, unsolicited marketing email should be illegal. Your right to market to me ends when I have to pay for your marketing.
You say that my example illustrates that spam represents a "tiny fraction of received mail *in terms of size*." It does no such thing. It illustrates a single example. I would suggest that many of the accounts which have more stringent limits (my girlfriend's Hotmail account, e.g.) in fact receive MORE spam than useful email.
Additionally, the whole point of the conversation is this: You believe that current legal precedent and constitutional interpretation allows for no a priori rejection of marketing calls. Yet, it IS illegal to perform that same marketing activity to a cell phone - BEFORE the recipient informs you that it is a cell phone. Clearly, this is a relevant counterexample. There are already conditions in which current legal precedent and constitutional interpretation do NOT allow for telemarketing, on an a priori basis.
Allow me to further offer an observation, sir. Place not your faith in judges, either, as they are but men like you and I. They make mistakes as well, especially in areas in which they are insufficiently knowledgeable. As do we all...
And again, you miss the point that those are NOT protected free speech rights.
Context or not, the citation clearly shows that marketing is not protected free speech. Therefore, whether it's preemptive or not doesn't matter.
You also attempt to blur the line between individuals and corporations by referring to them as 'groups'. This is not valid. The two types of entity are not functionally identical, and the citation above makes that point as well.
The defining difference here, of course, is the charges involved.
When a telemarketer calls, you don't pay any extra for the call. Unless it's a cell phone, in which case it's already illegal.
When a bulk mailer sends you unsolicited bulk mail, you don't pay for it. It has been suggested that the vast quantities of unsolicited bulk mail actually subsidize useful mail.
Having a salesman knock at your door does not cost you money. Furthermore, a 'no solicitation' sign out front eliminates that right for the salesman.
Unsolicited bulk email, however, DOES cost you money. Nearly every account I've ever seen puts a limit on mailbox size, on amount of data transferred per billing period, and charges extra when those limits are exceeded.
So, say I have a 1.5GB limit each month. Say I get 30MB of spam. Then I download a couple of Linux.iso's, my legitimate email, a few pr0n pics - and I'm over by 25MB. I get charged more. Now the spammer has caused me to be charged more money by my ISP. And you can't stop it. You can't ask the spammer to stop, because he's a lying, cheating shithead who exists only to make Bill Gates look less evil.:-)
That, my friend, is why spam is NOT protected First Amendment speech. Cost.
You have my admiration for your energetic defense of the First Amendment, but your reasoning and conclusions are flawed.
With the obvious clarification that Pininfarina was only responsible for the MGB-GT - the Roadster was designed in-house, and Pininfarina was called in when they couldn't figure out how to make a decent hardtop version. He made the windshield taller, and that's about it.
Your point is well-made, though. Not only does the rubber bumper look awful, but the ride height had to be increased so that the bumper was high enough. THAT killed the handling, so the RB was really a double insult.
1. The original poster specified modern music. Perhaps I misinterpreted that, or interpreted it more narrowly than you do. Ornette Coleman is, by nearly any measure, less of an influence on what I consider modern music than the Beatles. Certainly less by volume, if not by quality.
2. Congratulation on being a jazz pianist. Your parents must be very proud.
3. Hmm... penis-waving time? Quoth ye: "Start playing music professionally (any genre!)..." I have played professionally, but not for a few years. Nothing so grand as jazz piano (sorry) - but professionally nonetheless. Never hit it big, I admit. I've also made a significant fraction of my life's earnings as a studio engineer, and have recorded everything from monks (Tibetan) to punks. Lots of jazz, classical, rock, country, metal, grunge, blah, blah, blah. Perhaps, just *perhaps*, I'm more of an expert than you are. Or not. I submit, however, that I am qualified to have an opinion in the matter. Who's more annoying? The guy who has an opinion you disagree with? Or the guy who assumes your opinion re: music is shit because he's a jazz pianist?
At no point did I specify that all music post-1962 sprang fully-formed from the head of John Lennon. I would certainly agree that Bob Dylan (and Elvis Presley, while we're at it) were huge influences on modern music, especially pop - including the Beatles. So what? I'm kinda doubting that Dylan was that big an influence on jazz piano.
Next question is, how do you define influence? Robert Johnson, e.g., was cited by many of the 60's Brits (Stones, Zeppelin, etc.) as being their largest influence. While I truly enjoy much of their music, I find Johnson unlistenable. Did he do anything new? Hardly. Was he an influence on me? Certainly.
I might offer the suggestion that the very widespread popularity of the Beatles, whether you believe they deserved it or not, influenced everyone who heard it - some more than others, but the overall effect is large. If 10 million kids wanted to play rock because the Beatles made them feel crazy, that's influence with a capital 'I'. Are they the most important influence in modern music? Probably not. (Although we still must settle on a definition of 'modern' ). You yourself said "Bob Dylan and John Lee Hooker have more to do with my music than the Beetles" (emphasis mine). That's very possible. Are you saying the Beatles have nothing to to do with your music? Honestly, I'm kinda curious how Hooker influences your career as a modern jazz pianist.
The argument that the Beatles didn't do anything completely new is actually pretty irrelevant. I never said that they invented a new 15-tone scale, or based their compositions on the elements of the periodic table ( I once recorded Roy Wooten conducting a composition he wrote based on the periodic table, and it was awful). You wanna know who REALLY influenced modern music? Les Paul, that's who. He developed multitrack recording as we know it, and while there are some live to 2-track recordings being made even today, almost everything (in terms of quantity, not in terms of genre) is recorded via multitrack of some sort. He didn't invent multitrack, or magnetic tape, or the vacuum tube, or the electric guitar - but he polished 'em. He put 'em all together. You can't point to anything Les Paul did that was unique or completely original, but boy! was he influential.
Oh, and what's with the A/C? Afraid someone's going to find out you're really John Tesh?:-)
We can argue whether rap is, in fact, music another time; however, go ask George Clinton about the Beatles. Then go ask any rapper about P-Funk. Perhaps it's a 2nd order influence, but I'll bet it's there.
As for dance music, I'll stick to my guns on that one. I'd be willing to say that the Beatles did more seminal work in the field of "Music to be chemically altered by" than perhaps you think.
Of course, this could all be my personal prejudice. But I am a musician, and my experience suggests that influence is *occasionally* more subtle than simply performing a cover song. I still say that the Beatles influenced modern music more than any other band, in every style you can think of.
You wanna talk equally relevant? Then go have a little chat with *ANY* of the artists who make the music you like. Ask *THEM* how relevant they think the Beatles are.
I guarantee that each and every single one, 100%, not one artist excluded, will tell you that the Beatles were a *MAJOR* influence upon them and their music. Let me qualify that - there might be a few musicians who *THINK* the Beatles weren't an influence, but unless they specialize in perfect reproduction of 14th century chants or some such shit, they're wrong. And that's hardly "modern" anyway.
You can't see the Beatles' influence on the music you like for the same reason that you can't see the forest because of all those interfering trees. Imagining modern music without the Beatles' influence is about as hard as extrapolating the course of human civilization without gravity, or if we had 9 fingers. It's just too basic.
Don't like 'em? That's fine. You could even tell me that you actually know their music and still don't like it, and I'd say you have that right. But calling their music irrelevant is false-to-fact.
Dude - it's like saying AT&T Unix isn't relevant to Linux.
Or, perhaps, it could be that cheap-assed "bargain" batteries cut corners on the parts of the control circuit which provide temperature feedback to the phone when it's charging... or perhaps there isn't a control circuit at all. Sorta like those cheap laser pointers which don't use current limiting for the laser diode, instead depending on the high series resistance of the little batteries to limit the current. Works most of the time... but how many of those things fail under normal usage, and aren't sent off for repair because a) you can't find the mfg and b) it was only $5 anyway?
NiMH batteries, for example, are actually rather difficult to charge correctly, especially fast charge. And what about those schmucks who put a Li-Ion battery in a case for a phone whose charger only groks NiMH? "Amazing New Li-Ion Technology! Lasts 3X longer! Smaller! Lighter!" You'd buy it at a flea market, because you don't believe that third party parts CAN be inferior. What happens when it finally fails? Hint: there's probably fire involved.
Your assertion that "The ONLY thing wrong with third party accessories is that the Original Equipment Manufacturer doesn't make a buck out of it" is probably wrong in this case, and thus a false statement.
"However, why couldn't this be done on a PocketPC? I'm guessing it would only take some software."
The JVC MP-PV331 performs MPEG-4 capture. It does not specify resolution or bitrate. I personally would be (very) surprised to find that it was 640x480 at a decent data rate, but let's assume that it is.
The reason that this idea is not yet ready for prime time (literally!) is that it's still cheaper, easier, more reliable, and of higher quality to run coax instead of being wireless.
rice_web, I've done literally hundreds of live sporting events for cable, including baseball, hockey, football, basketball, sportfishing, boxing, and more. I've produced, directed, done Audio1 and Audio 2, graphics, instant replay, and (most often) been truck engineer. EVERY camera we use, on every remote production truck I've worked on, was connected via copper wire. This includes cameras on the sidelines of football, under the goals in basketball, etc, where you'd think wireless would be great. Why copper? Because it works. Optical fiber would work, too, but it's more expensive and the cables are more fragile.
We started off using a bundle of RG-59 cables, tie-wrapped together, connected to Betacams without tapes in 'em and running off of batteries, for our sideline cameras. This is roughly analogous to the level of production you're talking about - cheap, nasty, and less than reliable. Why a bundle?
Because you have to have several signals: Video from camera to video switcher; genlock (video sync) from switcher to camera; two-way intercom from switcher operator to cameraman, and back; audio from camera microphone to audio mixer.
Now, using an MPEG-4 stream over wireless means that you can replace the video from camera and audio from camera with a wireless link. You can avoid using the genlock return if you use a switcher with built-in timebase corrector (and the consumer DV cams can't take genlock, anyway). You can use a wireless system like FRS radios to communicate back and forth to the camera people.
What you lose is: Quality - the wireless 802.11b link will NOT be as reliable as a piece of copper coax, and so you'll get dropouts AND you have to decode the video signal at the receiving end to get a signal that your TBC-enabled switcher can handle. This assumes that the encoding PocketPC can sustain realtime encoding for the length of time that the camera is going to be "up" which strikes me as unlikely, and you have to assume that the decoding machine at the other end does the same. Software crashes, delays due to re-transmission of dropped packets, etc. are a killer - now the various cameras are showing events that happened at different times. The switcher with TBC isn't likely to be very high-quality, either, but that's spitting in the ocean at this point.
Note, I still don't think you'll get full-size, full-speed video with any kind of reasonable quality over this wireless link - don't count on more than 5 Mbit/s, which is about 50:1 compression. *You* may think of that as broadcast quality - but it isn't. Local cable ad quality, maybe.
Using FRS for your communications is workable, if no-one else in the area is on the frequency you want to use and your production can stand your cameramen saying"What?!" all the time when the crowd gets loud. Which it will. But you have to communicate with cameramen, unless you set up all static shots. Can't do a game like that.
And, you will be faced with the knowledge that for less money, you could have had more quality and more reliability.
Commercial wireless camera systems are OK, if you can spare another crewmember to follow the camera guy around pointing the transmitting antenna back to the receiving antenna ALL THE TIME. Batteries get heavy, though. Pulling a cable is usually easier.
A decent truck, with real cameras and real cables, can be had for a couple of grand a day or less, and turn out real broadcast quality video. You've got to pay crew either way, so why skimp on
"a typical camera goes at about 10MBytes a second, right?"
Wrong. 25 Mbit/sec is the rate at which consumer camcorders transfer video over Firewire. That's a little over 3 MBytes/sec. Pro DV formats (DVCPro, etc.) are 50 Mbit/s (6+ MBytes/s). 802.11b is 11 Mbit/s, which includes all the overhead and so your actal data throughput is considerably smaller.
Second, consumer cameras do NOT allow you to transcode on the fly, and so they CANNOT spit out video data at lower rates. When you run your MPEG-1 spots, those have been transcoded by a standalone PC (probably) to a lower bitrate, and a different encoding method.
You're now asking a PocketPC 2003 handheld to do real-time, on the fly video transcoding. It doesn't have the horsepower, and it's not stable enough for a production environment. Plus, you've got to have some way of switching between cameras for live events, which means DEcoding the data at the receiving end - figure on a PC per camera. If you're not going to switch live, then simply sticking a DV tape in each camera and doing everything in post is much simpler and more reliable.
Third, "more than acceptable" quality is fine if you're doing cable advertising. It looks like shit when you're doing live production. Looking "not bad, considering" doesn't get you return gigs.
So, to sum up:
Video bitrate is too high for WiFi.
PocketPC can't transcode in realtime.
Transmitted video over WiFi has to end up in a form that can be switched.
Simply putting tapes in the camcorders is MUCH simpler if you don't need to switch live anyway.
Even consumer DV cameras use 25 Mbit/s video streams. You might (might!) get one channel of video over an 802.11g link. To do multiple angles means multiple access points - that's a separate ethernet run over to the access point, which has to be fairly close to the camera... and trust me: even relatively inexpensive camera cables are more durable than Ethernet.
This is all assuming that the Pocket PC is capable of actually taking the DV stream in and firing it back out over WiFi - presumably 802.11b, which can't handle the datastream anyway.
I'm betting (having been there, thanks) that very few small TV stations are willing to trust multicamera setups to DV and Windows of any stripe.
It's a nice thought, though. Maybe in 5 or 10 years, OK?
Slashdot Mirror
Double agreement, sir. I use one every day, and have used them preferentially since the mid 80's. My g/f worked for years at an art supply store, and she stocked them just for me. Now I have to find another source - and it appears that the style I like have been discontinued... sob.
Double bullshit. If you ran your tub 24x7, would it be fair to ask the rest of the students in the building to shower in a cold dribble? How about all the students on the entire campus? "Oh, but I PAID for that water in the residence fee! They should upgrade the water service!"
Grow up.
You use all the bandwidth, then I either get none or I have to pay more next semester to cover the cost of upgrading service I already paid for, and never could get because you used it all. And then you increase your usage to the point where I *still* don't get any bandwidth...
Oh, and here at UF, nobody has to live in any dorms. The waiting list, however, is a year long to get into some of the on-campus housing.
You keep saying I've been trolled - but I'm enjoying this at least as much as you are.
I don't think you're really cut out for this.
See? See how lame that was? It's not even remotely on target, doesn't inspire any sort of emotional reaction... in short, it's a pitiful excuse for a troll.
I mean, really. You might as well spout off a "lol...ur teh luser..." This is what passes for a troll these days? You really have some work to do, even to come up to the level of the average Slashdot troll - which is pretty mediocre.
See, just getting a reply doesn't count. You have to really annoy someone, or get them to argue a point that allows you to slowly drift them over to a position that they themselves cannot defend, and in fact disagree with. Or else post a troll that's so clever and subtle that people admire it. These are suitable goals for a troll.
Please. Try just a *little* harder. Have some pride in your craft. You're only embarassing yourself.
Hey, spin this one however you want. I'm simply trying to help you improve your game... but if you want to wallow in the shallows of mediocrity, it's your choice.
Or is it that you simply take pleasure in having your own shortcomings pointed out in public?
Either way, you have failed to make me feel dumb or impress anyone else. Like I said, don't come back until you can bring your A-game.
Oh, please. Everybody knows that rockets have to have air to push against, but aether? Please. Quit trying to fool the above poster with your farcical stories about aether.
Any respectable scientist knows that space travel is impossible anyway, that NASA never put any men on the moon, and that any satellite in orbit that you might THINK you see is really swamp gas, reflected off of Venus...
And as for my sibling posters in this subthread, you might wanna turn up the sensayumor knob in yer forebrain.
Hi, troll. Please abstain from commenting again until you understand even a fraction of the subject about which you are trolling. That attempt was weak, d00d.
I think the whole point, which you are obviously incapable of grasping, is that recording and "dubbing" (whatever you think that means) budgets do not make a successful artist, and intense marketing budgets do not make good artists.
See, what you need to do is learn something about the subject you wish to troll, and then troll on a *subtle* point that some poor sucker will fall all over himself to refute. This one simply highlights your ignorance, and makes you troll attempt much more blatant and thus ineffective.
So you've never seen your bill go up. So? Fact remains: I pay for my internet service. Spam costs me money. For the same reasons that telemarketing to cell phones is illegal, unsolicited marketing email should be illegal. Your right to market to me ends when I have to pay for your marketing.
You say that my example illustrates that spam represents a "tiny fraction of received mail *in terms of size*." It does no such thing. It illustrates a single example. I would suggest that many of the accounts which have more stringent limits (my girlfriend's Hotmail account, e.g.) in fact receive MORE spam than useful email.
Additionally, the whole point of the conversation is this: You believe that current legal precedent and constitutional interpretation allows for no a priori rejection of marketing calls. Yet, it IS illegal to perform that same marketing activity to a cell phone - BEFORE the recipient informs you that it is a cell phone. Clearly, this is a relevant counterexample. There are already conditions in which current legal precedent and constitutional interpretation do NOT allow for telemarketing, on an a priori basis.
Allow me to further offer an observation, sir. Place not your faith in judges, either, as they are but men like you and I. They make mistakes as well, especially in areas in which they are insufficiently knowledgeable. As do we all...
And again, you miss the point that those are NOT protected free speech rights.
Context or not, the citation clearly shows that marketing is not protected free speech. Therefore, whether it's preemptive or not doesn't matter.
You also attempt to blur the line between individuals and corporations by referring to them as 'groups'. This is not valid. The two types of entity are not functionally identical, and the citation above makes that point as well.
Summary: Your logic is poor.
The defining difference here, of course, is the charges involved.
.iso's, my legitimate email, a few pr0n pics - and I'm over by 25MB. I get charged more. Now the spammer has caused me to be charged more money by my ISP. And you can't stop it. You can't ask the spammer to stop, because he's a lying, cheating shithead who exists only to make Bill Gates look less evil. :-)
When a telemarketer calls, you don't pay any extra for the call. Unless it's a cell phone, in which case it's already illegal.
When a bulk mailer sends you unsolicited bulk mail, you don't pay for it. It has been suggested that the vast quantities of unsolicited bulk mail actually subsidize useful mail.
Having a salesman knock at your door does not cost you money. Furthermore, a 'no solicitation' sign out front eliminates that right for the salesman.
Unsolicited bulk email, however, DOES cost you money. Nearly every account I've ever seen puts a limit on mailbox size, on amount of data transferred per billing period, and charges extra when those limits are exceeded.
So, say I have a 1.5GB limit each month. Say I get 30MB of spam. Then I download a couple of Linux
That, my friend, is why spam is NOT protected First Amendment speech. Cost.
You have my admiration for your energetic defense of the First Amendment, but your reasoning and conclusions are flawed.
With the obvious clarification that Pininfarina was only responsible for the MGB-GT - the Roadster was designed in-house, and Pininfarina was called in when they couldn't figure out how to make a decent hardtop version. He made the windshield taller, and that's about it.
Your point is well-made, though. Not only does the rubber bumper look awful, but the ride height had to be increased so that the bumper was high enough. THAT killed the handling, so the RB was really a double insult.
1. The original poster specified modern music. Perhaps I misinterpreted that, or interpreted it more narrowly than you do. Ornette Coleman is, by nearly any measure, less of an influence on what I consider modern music than the Beatles. Certainly less by volume, if not by quality.
:-)
2. Congratulation on being a jazz pianist. Your parents must be very proud.
3. Hmm... penis-waving time? Quoth ye: "Start playing music professionally (any genre!)..." I have played professionally, but not for a few years. Nothing so grand as jazz piano (sorry) - but professionally nonetheless. Never hit it big, I admit. I've also made a significant fraction of my life's earnings as a studio engineer, and have recorded everything from monks (Tibetan) to punks. Lots of jazz, classical, rock, country, metal, grunge, blah, blah, blah. Perhaps, just *perhaps*, I'm more of an expert than you are. Or not. I submit, however, that I am qualified to have an opinion in the matter. Who's more annoying? The guy who has an opinion you disagree with? Or the guy who assumes your opinion re: music is shit because he's a jazz pianist?
At no point did I specify that all music post-1962 sprang fully-formed from the head of John Lennon. I would certainly agree that Bob Dylan (and Elvis Presley, while we're at it) were huge influences on modern music, especially pop - including the Beatles. So what? I'm kinda doubting that Dylan was that big an influence on jazz piano.
Next question is, how do you define influence? Robert Johnson, e.g., was cited by many of the 60's Brits (Stones, Zeppelin, etc.) as being their largest influence. While I truly enjoy much of their music, I find Johnson unlistenable. Did he do anything new? Hardly. Was he an influence on me? Certainly.
I might offer the suggestion that the very widespread popularity of the Beatles, whether you believe they deserved it or not, influenced everyone who heard it - some more than others, but the overall effect is large. If 10 million kids wanted to play rock because the Beatles made them feel crazy, that's influence with a capital 'I'. Are they the most important influence in modern music? Probably not. (Although we still must settle on a definition of 'modern' ). You yourself said "Bob Dylan and John Lee Hooker have more to do with my music than the Beetles" (emphasis mine). That's very possible. Are you saying the Beatles have nothing to to do with your music? Honestly, I'm kinda curious how Hooker influences your career as a modern jazz pianist.
The argument that the Beatles didn't do anything completely new is actually pretty irrelevant. I never said that they invented a new 15-tone scale, or based their compositions on the elements of the periodic table ( I once recorded Roy Wooten conducting a composition he wrote based on the periodic table, and it was awful). You wanna know who REALLY influenced modern music? Les Paul, that's who. He developed multitrack recording as we know it, and while there are some live to 2-track recordings being made even today, almost everything (in terms of quantity, not in terms of genre) is recorded via multitrack of some sort. He didn't invent multitrack, or magnetic tape, or the vacuum tube, or the electric guitar - but he polished 'em. He put 'em all together. You can't point to anything Les Paul did that was unique or completely original, but boy! was he influential.
Oh, and what's with the A/C? Afraid someone's going to find out you're really John Tesh?
No, no, Satan gave them to us. He squatted down, got all red in the face, and forgot to flush...
We can argue whether rap is, in fact, music another time; however, go ask George Clinton about the Beatles. Then go ask any rapper about P-Funk. Perhaps it's a 2nd order influence, but I'll bet it's there.
As for dance music, I'll stick to my guns on that one. I'd be willing to say that the Beatles did more seminal work in the field of "Music to be chemically altered by" than perhaps you think.
Of course, this could all be my personal prejudice. But I am a musician, and my experience suggests that influence is *occasionally* more subtle than simply performing a cover song. I still say that the Beatles influenced modern music more than any other band, in every style you can think of.
You wanna talk equally relevant? Then go have a little chat with *ANY* of the artists who make the music you like. Ask *THEM* how relevant they think the Beatles are.
I guarantee that each and every single one, 100%, not one artist excluded, will tell you that the Beatles were a *MAJOR* influence upon them and their music. Let me qualify that - there might be a few musicians who *THINK* the Beatles weren't an influence, but unless they specialize in perfect reproduction of 14th century chants or some such shit, they're wrong. And that's hardly "modern" anyway.
You can't see the Beatles' influence on the music you like for the same reason that you can't see the forest because of all those interfering trees. Imagining modern music without the Beatles' influence is about as hard as extrapolating the course of human civilization without gravity, or if we had 9 fingers. It's just too basic.
Don't like 'em? That's fine. You could even tell me that you actually know their music and still don't like it, and I'd say you have that right. But calling their music irrelevant is false-to-fact.
Dude - it's like saying AT&T Unix isn't relevant to Linux.
Or, perhaps, it could be that cheap-assed "bargain" batteries cut corners on the parts of the control circuit which provide temperature feedback to the phone when it's charging... or perhaps there isn't a control circuit at all. Sorta like those cheap laser pointers which don't use current limiting for the laser diode, instead depending on the high series resistance of the little batteries to limit the current. Works most of the time... but how many of those things fail under normal usage, and aren't sent off for repair because a) you can't find the mfg and b) it was only $5 anyway?
NiMH batteries, for example, are actually rather difficult to charge correctly, especially fast charge. And what about those schmucks who put a Li-Ion battery in a case for a phone whose charger only groks NiMH? "Amazing New Li-Ion Technology! Lasts 3X longer! Smaller! Lighter!" You'd buy it at a flea market, because you don't believe that third party parts CAN be inferior. What happens when it finally fails? Hint: there's probably fire involved.
Your assertion that "The ONLY thing wrong with third party accessories is that the Original Equipment Manufacturer doesn't make a buck out of it" is probably wrong in this case, and thus a false statement.
Yeah, and 6,000 x $50 x 2 per person is $600,000. In four weeks.
That's a lot of G5's.
Monster Mash and RHPS? What?
Perhaps if his BS sensor were made with titania nanotubes, it would be more sensitive, more accurate, with fewer false positives.
Or 20 to 30 blocks per hour, even? [duh - long day]
365 days per year times 20 years is 7300 days. No holidays, of course. 12 hours of work every day gives us a total of 87,600 hours.
This is all approximate, of course. However...
2 million blocks divided by 87,600 is about 23. That's 23 blocks per hour, or about 2.7 minutes per block.
That's a factor of five different from your estimate, although still impressive. Did you mean 20 to 30 blocks per minute?
"However, why couldn't this be done on a PocketPC? I'm guessing it would only take some software."
The JVC MP-PV331 performs MPEG-4 capture. It does not specify resolution or bitrate. I personally would be (very) surprised to find that it was 640x480 at a decent data rate, but let's assume that it is.
The reason that this idea is not yet ready for prime time (literally!) is that it's still cheaper, easier, more reliable, and of higher quality to run coax instead of being wireless.
rice_web, I've done literally hundreds of live sporting events for cable, including baseball, hockey, football, basketball, sportfishing, boxing, and more. I've produced, directed, done Audio1 and Audio 2, graphics, instant replay, and (most often) been truck engineer. EVERY camera we use, on every remote production truck I've worked on, was connected via copper wire. This includes cameras on the sidelines of football, under the goals in basketball, etc, where you'd think wireless would be great. Why copper? Because it works. Optical fiber would work, too, but it's more expensive and the cables are more fragile.
We started off using a bundle of RG-59 cables, tie-wrapped together, connected to Betacams without tapes in 'em and running off of batteries, for our sideline cameras. This is roughly analogous to the level of production you're talking about - cheap, nasty, and less than reliable. Why a bundle?
Because you have to have several signals: Video from camera to video switcher; genlock (video sync) from switcher to camera; two-way intercom from switcher operator to cameraman, and back; audio from camera microphone to audio mixer.
Now, using an MPEG-4 stream over wireless means that you can replace the video from camera and audio from camera with a wireless link. You can avoid using the genlock return if you use a switcher with built-in timebase corrector (and the consumer DV cams can't take genlock, anyway). You can use a wireless system like FRS radios to communicate back and forth to the camera people.
What you lose is: Quality - the wireless 802.11b link will NOT be as reliable as a piece of copper coax, and so you'll get dropouts AND you have to decode the video signal at the receiving end to get a signal that your TBC-enabled switcher can handle. This assumes that the encoding PocketPC can sustain realtime encoding for the length of time that the camera is going to be "up" which strikes me as unlikely, and you have to assume that the decoding machine at the other end does the same. Software crashes, delays due to re-transmission of dropped packets, etc. are a killer - now the various cameras are showing events that happened at different times. The switcher with TBC isn't likely to be very high-quality, either, but that's spitting in the ocean at this point.
Note, I still don't think you'll get full-size, full-speed video with any kind of reasonable quality over this wireless link - don't count on more than 5 Mbit/s, which is about 50:1 compression. *You* may think of that as broadcast quality - but it isn't. Local cable ad quality, maybe.
Using FRS for your communications is workable, if no-one else in the area is on the frequency you want to use and your production can stand your cameramen saying"What?!" all the time when the crowd gets loud. Which it will. But you have to communicate with cameramen, unless you set up all static shots. Can't do a game like that.
And, you will be faced with the knowledge that for less money, you could have had more quality and more reliability.
Commercial wireless camera systems are OK, if you can spare another crewmember to follow the camera guy around pointing the transmitting antenna back to the receiving antenna ALL THE TIME. Batteries get heavy, though. Pulling a cable is usually easier.
A decent truck, with real cameras and real cables, can be had for a couple of grand a day or less, and turn out real broadcast quality video. You've got to pay crew either way, so why skimp on
Ah, advertising. Now it all makes sense.
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"a typical camera goes at about 10MBytes a second, right?"
Wrong. 25 Mbit/sec is the rate at which consumer camcorders transfer video over Firewire. That's a little over 3 MBytes/sec. Pro DV formats (DVCPro, etc.) are 50 Mbit/s (6+ MBytes/s). 802.11b is 11 Mbit/s, which includes all the overhead and so your actal data throughput is considerably smaller.
Second, consumer cameras do NOT allow you to transcode on the fly, and so they CANNOT spit out video data at lower rates. When you run your MPEG-1 spots, those have been transcoded by a standalone PC (probably) to a lower bitrate, and a different encoding method.
You're now asking a PocketPC 2003 handheld to do real-time, on the fly video transcoding. It doesn't have the horsepower, and it's not stable enough for a production environment. Plus, you've got to have some way of switching between cameras for live events, which means DEcoding the data at the receiving end - figure on a PC per camera. If you're not going to switch live, then simply sticking a DV tape in each camera and doing everything in post is much simpler and more reliable.
Third, "more than acceptable" quality is fine if you're doing cable advertising. It looks like shit when you're doing live production. Looking "not bad, considering" doesn't get you return gigs.
So, to sum up:
Video bitrate is too high for WiFi.
PocketPC can't transcode in realtime.
Transmitted video over WiFi has to end up in a form that can be switched.
Simply putting tapes in the camcorders is MUCH simpler if you don't need to switch live anyway.
You might consider changing your
I smell something less savory.
Even consumer DV cameras use 25 Mbit/s video streams. You might (might!) get one channel of video over an 802.11g link. To do multiple angles means multiple access points - that's a separate ethernet run over to the access point, which has to be fairly close to the camera... and trust me: even relatively inexpensive camera cables are more durable than Ethernet.
This is all assuming that the Pocket PC is capable of actually taking the DV stream in and firing it back out over WiFi - presumably 802.11b, which can't handle the datastream anyway.
I'm betting (having been there, thanks) that very few small TV stations are willing to trust multicamera setups to DV and Windows of any stripe.
It's a nice thought, though. Maybe in 5 or 10 years, OK?
Homonyms.