There's a reason why in management if you need to discipline/warn an employee, you do it in private not over the company mailing list.
And what reason would that be? To protect others from the verbal barrage? If nobody wants to read Linus's tirade, then nobody has to; it's easy to avert one's attention elsewhere.
IMHO, but: If a thing is worth saying, it's worth saying in front of peers (which happens to be public on the LKML, but I digress).
Linus is not known to be predisposed toward individualized coddling, and I applaud his honesty* and openness.
*: Honesty, for those who don't know, is more about saying exactly what's on your mind than it is about being nice.
and I post often, getting moded up quite frequently
And how, pray tell, will I be able to know that if you're posting as an AC? It's just an idle assertion, and there's no way for you to back it up.
I used to give ACs an automatic +1 to put their comments on equal footing with others. I stopped doing that years ago when the signal to noise ratio got too bad for my liking.
The only practical option was to get a static IP address at extra expense. Several years hence, it hasn't been a problem again.
Having a static IP address seems to be one of the costs of running a mail server, these days, for better or worse. Bitching about it won't help because the folks doing the blocking are subscribing to these RBLs on purpose.
(Also: "f*cking"? Who are you trying to protect by censoring the word "fucking"?)
I don't want to eat GM food because I don't want to. I have no rational basis for my opinion or mindset, but it is my opinion nonetheless.
No amount of research on my part is going to change my opinion on this matter, nor will any amount of argument. I will cheerfully vote with my dollars in order to avoid such food wherever possible.
Indeed, if GM salmon becomes genuinely impossible to distinguish from normal salmon at the consumer level, then I suppose salmon will drop completely off of my menu.
At this point in the discussion comes an obvious question: Why do you give a fuck about what I want don't want to eat? Do you feel that I, a free-thinking person, am somehow not entitled to my own opinion (however irrational it might be) about the food that I eat?
As a side note, I like mentioning corn. Do you really think our corn is 'natural'? Have you seen corn from a thousand years ago? I have, it looks like wheat. What we call corn now is a fast growing freakishly huge form that was created by the form of genetic manipulation techniques known as hybridization and selective breeding.
I like mentioning domestic cows, chickens, and pigs: All of these have been selectively bred in order to produce more of whatever they're producing, and none of them have a whole lot of resemblance to their natural predecessors.
But I think that's kind of the point: I'm OK with eating the results of selective breeding and common hybrids. This includes grapes, bananas, tomatoes, and darn near everything else: While wild strawberries tend to be small and bitter, domestic strawberries are big and tasty. We, as humans, have been doing this for thousands of years, and we're made to eat the stuff that we've developed in this way.
But I'm not OK with eating the results of a program wherein man has manually diddled the structure of DNA. Such processes have nothing to do with the selection of the fittest survivors for higher-level breeding, or even cross-breeding, but instead are the result of very purposeful fuckery at the lowest level we can perceive.
We have the ability to produce entire new species of plants and animals on a broad scale. And that's very neat, and all, but it's so far removed from both the natural order and our normal mechanisms for steering it that I don't want it in my stomach any more than I want to slug down some soylent green.
What does it matter what silly pseudonym is displayed above a good comment, or how many digits are in the number next to it?
Simple: In a discussion, I like to know if discussing with the same person, a different person, or with several people.
I also prefer some level of surety that the person I'm replying to might actually read it.
I do realize that logging in on/. offers no guarantee of either of these things, but it's a start.
Meanwhile, I killfile all reply notifications that come from Anonymous Cowards because doing so makes discussing things on/. feel more like conversing with humans instead of talking at a wall.
If I wanted an anonymous place to randomly comment on the world with no sense of personification, I'd just go over to pastebin and be ignored there instead.
It's Christmas time, and all the while I've been drinking samplers of good, cheap beer and completely oblivious to the fact that there are mountains of eggnog at the store right next to the booze section.
Thanks for reminding me. Now I know how my Friday is going to turn out, and it is good.
What's this trend in attacking 'negativity' as though doing so is a legit argument against what was said? Is this some kind of peer pressure to conform to the head-in-ground masses of ostriches who can't handle reality because they're too weak willed to not take everything personally?
We're a kinder, softer, and somewhat more squishy generation. Name-calling is forbidden, and making fun of someone's work doubly so.
It doesn't matter if little Timmy's science project is an abomination that only serves to display how little he knows about the subject, but only that Timmy tried. Trying is good enough.
There are no winners, and no losers. No reward for being the best at something, and no detriment for being the worst, but just the same mediocre praise...as long as they tried.
So, any expressed negativity can only serve one purpose: To hurt someone's feelings. And feelings are what's really important.*
Why are you so mean? Can't you see that they tried?
(* Yes, this is non-requiter, but then so is reality.)
Any additional layer of complexity increases the rate of failure, especially if that complexity's sole purpose is to make it fail on purpose, no matter the system that it is applied to.
I used to have a big, huge, ancient 160,000BTU gas furnace in my house. It was a simple electromechanical beast, built around a simple blower, a valve, a couple of mechanical thermostats, and a huge cast iron heat exchanger. It had one safety feature: The thermocouple that would shut off the gas valve if the pilot light went out.
So one day I woke up to a very cold house, and found that the furnace didn't work.
Some troubleshooting revealed that everything was working fine except for the thermocouple itself.
It's obvious that it failed safely, as designed. The repair was about $5 at the corner hardware store. It was mostly an annoyance.
But in the event of extra complexity in a firearm, I'm not sure that the definition of "failing safe" is so well defined as that of a furnace:
While furnaces with safety features bypassed can (and do!) blow up houses and neighborhoods without intervention, guns never go off by themselves, and always need to operate when it is demanded of them.
And if the most mundane thing (thermocouple != complicated) can bring a simple furnace to an unexpected halt, I shudder to think what a complicated thing would do to a firearm except make things worse.
I could have easily replaced the thermocouple with a battery, or even a potato, and gotten the furnace running -- unsafely -- more or less immediately and without leaving my house. Similarly, I'm quite sure that if I were presented with a firearm (which is just another simple, mechanical thing) with an authentication system, that I could bypass it with some basic disassembly and metalwork. (Especially with Google at my aid.)
I might even be particularly motivated to do this if I had a nefarious purpose in mind.
So, best case: Extraneous measures make guns less reliable (we both agree on that, yes?), and may serve to help idiots from harming themselves or others...but accidental shootings are already covered by basic gun safety (which every gun owner should be practicing already, and I'm OK with requiring a basic safety course for gun owners).
Furthermore, such measures will do absolutely nothing to prevent a motivated person from using it as weapon, which obviously is the context here...not accidental shootings.
I mean, FFS: This is Slashdot, where we all implicitly expect DRM to absolutely fail (for good, or for bad) on the broadest of scales. Forget metalwork: Do you really think that an an electronic authentication system in a firearm would fare differently than damn near every attempt to lock down any other device has?
We can't even build secure voting systems, and you think we can build secure firearms?
It's not unlikely that we'll have a 0-day exploit before Smith & Wesson even manages to ship such weapons to the shop. So what, exactly, is gained?
Yes, that's the typical answer. Except with digital video, the power frequency doesn't matter at all. Keeping things in multiples of 30 is/was only important for historic reasons relating to their existing media and production chain.
Meanwhile, if anyone is still reading: Someone's going to ask "Well, why not 50FPS? That way the Europeans get the most benefit!", to which I'll retort that I don't care. Europeans have had 60Hz NTSC-compatible playback equipment for eons, whereas Americans almost never have 50Hz-compatible gear.
So the most broadly-supportable format would be, AFAICT, 60 FPS (for both sides of the pond).
Especially the just-makes-it-past-warranty crap that's sold these days.
I've been hearing this for the entirety of my worldly awareness (several decades), and the song remains the same.
Eventually, I'd hoped that folks would realize that they were unlucky or were just buying garbage, instead of the insipidly assuming that such-and-such widget was so perfectly constructed and planned that it failed within hours/days of the warranty expiring -- just as designed.
The truth is that no matter what the nature of the item, or the term of the limited warranty: Given sufficient quantity, some of them are going to fail mere seconds after the warranty is gone.
Such as it is.
We all want everything we buy to work perfectly and last forever, but nothing ever does. It should be no surprise that this is not the result of any conspiracy, but just life. Things wear out. (Even DIMMs.)
But it's already doing far better than Laserdisc: In my entire life, I've never seen a Laserdisc for sale on a shelf in a big box store.
I knew of them; I even worked for a store that sold the players. But the media itself always seemed relegated to mail order. If BD were as dead as Laserdisc, it wouldn't be possible to find them at Wal-Mart at any price.
Meanwhile I find that big box stores are a lousy place to find movies, anyway, unless it is within a week or two of release: Chances are excellent that I either already have or do not want most of what is on their normally-stocked shelves.
Pricing. Let's take another couple of examples: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
There are two different versions of this film currently in circulation, and both are available on DVD and BD (and none of them at my local Wal-Mart).
At Amazon, the normal release is $7.49 on DVD, and $11.49 on BD.
Likewise at Amazon, the Criterion release is $17.39 on DVD, and $17.99 on BD.
I do not find these prices to be appalling in any capacity.
It's easy to list dead/stillborn consumer media formats that never really managed to populate store shelves: DCC, Minidisc, UMD video, Laserdisc, VCD, SVHS, D-VHS, DVD-Audio, SACD [...]. Some of these were always intended to be niche, high-end formats, and others were aimed squarely at the pit of consumerism. They all have one thing in common, and that is failure to thrive and become accepted in the marketplace.
BD doesn't show any sort of that level of failure, and with price-parity existing between BD players and DVD players, it's unlikely that the format will die any time soon: Even at the 30:1 ratio you keep mentioning, that's an absolute fuckload of sales.
And, AFAICT from memory and looking at the dates, it does seem to be catching on at about the same rate as DVD did even though DVD was never cursed with a real format war* ala HD-DVD vs. BD.
(*There was that whole Circuit City DIVX debacle, but it never had any teeth.)
No. NTSC television is (as there are still LP NTSC transmitters broadcasting), as best as anyone can figure, 29.970026164311878597592883307169 Hz. (And yes, it matters.)
Note that this is still not quite 29.97002617, which seems to be a result of rounding up at the 10 parts per billion resolution.
So I guess the final conclusion is that the exact frame rate for NTSC turns out NOT to be 30000/1001, but rather to be 7159090/238875, which can be reduced to 1431818/47775.
Most people think the stereo that came with their car sounds good enough, because that's all they've had.
Most people think the earbuds that came with their MP3 player are good enough, because they've never tried anything different.
Most people think Bud Light is OK, because that's what everyone else seems to be drinking.
FFS: Most people ran their CRT monitors at 640x480 @ 60Hz, before Windows started defaulting to 800x600 (still at 60Hz), and they were OK with that because it was all they knew. And I know, without asking, that as a helpful computer guy you've spent a few minutes fixing that for countless people, all of whom were thankful at the difference it made.
I don't care what most people think is "good enough". I care about what I perceive to be better: An old 3-cylinder Metro is big enough to haul my family and carry the product of my errands, and would be "good enough". But I drive an old 6-cylinder BMW instead, because I perceive it to be in many ways that are important to me. It's faster, safer, funner, a bit larger, more comfortable...and also heavier and less-efficient. (I'm OK with that -- it's efficient enough.)
And there seems to be enough folks (no, not "most people") who think similarly enough to me to keep BD movies on physical shelves at real stores: If it were a total flop, as you suggest, it would have already disappeared or resigned itself to a special-order niche item ala Laserdisc.
(And why buy a $50 DVD player, when you can instead buy a $50 Blu-Ray player?)
What camera man in his right mind would shoot faster than 1/24s shutter speed and then display it at 24 FPS?
Seeing as it's physically impossible to shoot slower than 1/24s on a 24 FPS film camera:
Disregarding any cinematic effect (see Saving Private Ryan): If exposure adjustments need to be made (due to lighting, film, or lens availability), they can only happen in one direction: Faster.
Why didn't the industry standardize around 48FPS? Well, for most broadcasters, bandwidth is money, and the higher frame rate would have massively increased the cost of distribution. Secondly, at the birth of digital HD, encoding and decoding at this rate was much more expensive, and LCD TVs have a very poor response rate, making them (at the time) a poor match for higher rates.
The reasons are simpler than that. At the time, VHS was still king. LCD TVs were expensive, small, and fickle novelties. CRT televisions seldom even had an S-Video port, let alone the ability to display anything other than 480i NTSC. And MPEG2 was the best that anyone could reliably get away with, which has never been considered to be all that bandwidth-efficient.
In terms of bandwidth: These days I get far better pictures from a ~6Mbps h.263-ish stream over the Internet than I ever do from a ~19Mbps MPEG2 stream over ATSC, so it seems plain to me that it's entirely possible to do more with less. But in the early-mid 90's the tech wasn't there yet.
Furthermore, the broadcaster's actual band-width is the same as it was before: 6MHz.
Who knows how they (broadcasters, legislators, FCC) would have acted back then if they had the same technology then as we do now, or if they had a magic looking-glass that could show them that in the mysterious future folks would have large-format televisions that are only an inch thick, with digital interconnection and the ability to display unique 1920x1080 images at 120Hz...
Framerate? Meh. When the first grumblings of "HD TV" made the rounds, most folks I talked to didn't want it at all. Given the negativity associated with it, and the 15-20 years it took for the concept to get from conjecture to actually supplanting NTSC, I'm frankly astounded that it works as well as it does even if it is limited to 480i, 720p, or 1080i at various multiples and permutations of ~30 FPS.
All that said: Why was the magic number of 30 chosen? It should be no surprise that broadcast television is run by broadcasters, not the movie industry, and 24 and 48 FPS simply didn't fit well with their existing program material and signal chain. 30 and 60, however, fit very nicely. Trying to add even more complexity to a system that, at the time, most folks didn't want would not have done a single positive thing to hasten its acceptance (which, as I stated, was already very lengthy).
Perhaps a better question is this: With movies being shot with digital gear and projected with digital projectors, why is 48 FPS even in the running for future formats? Would 60 not be a better and more-compatible cinematic framerate?
I highly doubt that any of these planes utilize QoS properly anyway. So the second anyone uploads a file or attempts to sync their e-mail, the entire connection comes to a screeching halt.
Because nobody has ever uploaded anything or sync'd their inbox on a shared ~3Mbps connection with no QoS.
Slashdot Mirror
And what reason would that be? To protect others from the verbal barrage? If nobody wants to read Linus's tirade, then nobody has to; it's easy to avert one's attention elsewhere.
IMHO, but: If a thing is worth saying, it's worth saying in front of peers (which happens to be public on the LKML, but I digress).
Linus is not known to be predisposed toward individualized coddling, and I applaud his honesty* and openness.
*: Honesty, for those who don't know, is more about saying exactly what's on your mind than it is about being nice.
Everyone knows that all of the best Slashdot UIDs are less than 21055.
I take it that you have a TV with "Google TV" built in.
How does any of your experience differ from having a dumb TV with the "Google TV" functionality in an outboard box?
All of the "smart" BFTs I've installed recently had a big, fat Netflix button right on the remote.
I've never used it (indeed, we make a point of not connecting the television to the network), but it's there...
And how, pray tell, will I be able to know that if you're posting as an AC? It's just an idle assertion, and there's no way for you to back it up.
I used to give ACs an automatic +1 to put their comments on equal footing with others. I stopped doing that years ago when the signal to noise ratio got too bad for my liking.
We had this issue with Time Warner.
The only practical option was to get a static IP address at extra expense. Several years hence, it hasn't been a problem again.
Having a static IP address seems to be one of the costs of running a mail server, these days, for better or worse. Bitching about it won't help because the folks doing the blocking are subscribing to these RBLs on purpose.
(Also: "f*cking"? Who are you trying to protect by censoring the word "fucking"?)
Where do you buy non-E10? Around here (NW Ohio), we have extremely humid summers and E10 seems to be simply all that is available.
I don't want to eat GM food because I don't want to. I have no rational basis for my opinion or mindset, but it is my opinion nonetheless.
No amount of research on my part is going to change my opinion on this matter, nor will any amount of argument. I will cheerfully vote with my dollars in order to avoid such food wherever possible.
Indeed, if GM salmon becomes genuinely impossible to distinguish from normal salmon at the consumer level, then I suppose salmon will drop completely off of my menu.
At this point in the discussion comes an obvious question: Why do you give a fuck about what I want don't want to eat? Do you feel that I, a free-thinking person, am somehow not entitled to my own opinion (however irrational it might be) about the food that I eat?
Please explain.
I like mentioning domestic cows, chickens, and pigs: All of these have been selectively bred in order to produce more of whatever they're producing, and none of them have a whole lot of resemblance to their natural predecessors.
But I think that's kind of the point: I'm OK with eating the results of selective breeding and common hybrids. This includes grapes, bananas, tomatoes, and darn near everything else: While wild strawberries tend to be small and bitter, domestic strawberries are big and tasty. We, as humans, have been doing this for thousands of years, and we're made to eat the stuff that we've developed in this way.
But I'm not OK with eating the results of a program wherein man has manually diddled the structure of DNA. Such processes have nothing to do with the selection of the fittest survivors for higher-level breeding, or even cross-breeding, but instead are the result of very purposeful fuckery at the lowest level we can perceive.
We have the ability to produce entire new species of plants and animals on a broad scale. And that's very neat, and all, but it's so far removed from both the natural order and our normal mechanisms for steering it that I don't want it in my stomach any more than I want to slug down some soylent green.
Simple: In a discussion, I like to know if discussing with the same person, a different person, or with several people.
I also prefer some level of surety that the person I'm replying to might actually read it.
I do realize that logging in on /. offers no guarantee of either of these things, but it's a start.
Meanwhile, I killfile all reply notifications that come from Anonymous Cowards because doing so makes discussing things on /. feel more like conversing with humans instead of talking at a wall.
If I wanted an anonymous place to randomly comment on the world with no sense of personification, I'd just go over to pastebin and be ignored there instead.
No. A 486 is not a combination of a 386 and a 387.
Eggnog!
I forgot about the fucking EGGNOG!
It's Christmas time, and all the while I've been drinking samplers of good, cheap beer and completely oblivious to the fact that there are mountains of eggnog at the store right next to the booze section.
Thanks for reminding me. Now I know how my Friday is going to turn out, and it is good.
We're a kinder, softer, and somewhat more squishy generation. Name-calling is forbidden, and making fun of someone's work doubly so.
It doesn't matter if little Timmy's science project is an abomination that only serves to display how little he knows about the subject, but only that Timmy tried. Trying is good enough.
There are no winners, and no losers. No reward for being the best at something, and no detriment for being the worst, but just the same mediocre praise...as long as they tried.
So, any expressed negativity can only serve one purpose: To hurt someone's feelings. And feelings are what's really important.*
Why are you so mean? Can't you see that they tried?
(* Yes, this is non-requiter, but then so is reality.)
Any additional layer of complexity increases the rate of failure, especially if that complexity's sole purpose is to make it fail on purpose, no matter the system that it is applied to.
I used to have a big, huge, ancient 160,000BTU gas furnace in my house. It was a simple electromechanical beast, built around a simple blower, a valve, a couple of mechanical thermostats, and a huge cast iron heat exchanger. It had one safety feature: The thermocouple that would shut off the gas valve if the pilot light went out.
So one day I woke up to a very cold house, and found that the furnace didn't work.
Some troubleshooting revealed that everything was working fine except for the thermocouple itself.
It's obvious that it failed safely, as designed. The repair was about $5 at the corner hardware store. It was mostly an annoyance.
But in the event of extra complexity in a firearm, I'm not sure that the definition of "failing safe" is so well defined as that of a furnace:
While furnaces with safety features bypassed can (and do!) blow up houses and neighborhoods without intervention, guns never go off by themselves, and always need to operate when it is demanded of them.
And if the most mundane thing (thermocouple != complicated) can bring a simple furnace to an unexpected halt, I shudder to think what a complicated thing would do to a firearm except make things worse.
I could have easily replaced the thermocouple with a battery, or even a potato, and gotten the furnace running -- unsafely -- more or less immediately and without leaving my house. Similarly, I'm quite sure that if I were presented with a firearm (which is just another simple, mechanical thing) with an authentication system, that I could bypass it with some basic disassembly and metalwork. (Especially with Google at my aid.)
I might even be particularly motivated to do this if I had a nefarious purpose in mind.
So, best case: Extraneous measures make guns less reliable (we both agree on that, yes?), and may serve to help idiots from harming themselves or others...but accidental shootings are already covered by basic gun safety (which every gun owner should be practicing already, and I'm OK with requiring a basic safety course for gun owners).
Furthermore, such measures will do absolutely nothing to prevent a motivated person from using it as weapon, which obviously is the context here...not accidental shootings.
I mean, FFS: This is Slashdot, where we all implicitly expect DRM to absolutely fail (for good, or for bad) on the broadest of scales. Forget metalwork: Do you really think that an an electronic authentication system in a firearm would fare differently than damn near every attempt to lock down any other device has?
We can't even build secure voting systems, and you think we can build secure firearms?
It's not unlikely that we'll have a 0-day exploit before Smith & Wesson even manages to ship such weapons to the shop. So what, exactly, is gained?
Yes, that's the typical answer. Except with digital video, the power frequency doesn't matter at all. Keeping things in multiples of 30 is/was only important for historic reasons relating to their existing media and production chain.
Meanwhile, if anyone is still reading: Someone's going to ask "Well, why not 50FPS? That way the Europeans get the most benefit!", to which I'll retort that I don't care. Europeans have had 60Hz NTSC-compatible playback equipment for eons, whereas Americans almost never have 50Hz-compatible gear.
So the most broadly-supportable format would be, AFAICT, 60 FPS (for both sides of the pond).
Zero?
Adding a bit-per-byte for ECC means multiplying the number of bits required by 1.125.
Not zero.
*ahem*
I've been hearing this for the entirety of my worldly awareness (several decades), and the song remains the same.
Eventually, I'd hoped that folks would realize that they were unlucky or were just buying garbage, instead of the insipidly assuming that such-and-such widget was so perfectly constructed and planned that it failed within hours/days of the warranty expiring -- just as designed.
The truth is that no matter what the nature of the item, or the term of the limited warranty: Given sufficient quantity, some of them are going to fail mere seconds after the warranty is gone.
Such as it is.
We all want everything we buy to work perfectly and last forever, but nothing ever does. It should be no surprise that this is not the result of any conspiracy, but just life. Things wear out. (Even DIMMs.)
But it's already doing far better than Laserdisc: In my entire life, I've never seen a Laserdisc for sale on a shelf in a big box store.
I knew of them; I even worked for a store that sold the players. But the media itself always seemed relegated to mail order. If BD were as dead as Laserdisc, it wouldn't be possible to find them at Wal-Mart at any price.
Meanwhile I find that big box stores are a lousy place to find movies, anyway, unless it is within a week or two of release: Chances are excellent that I either already have or do not want most of what is on their normally-stocked shelves.
Pricing. Let's take another couple of examples: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
There are two different versions of this film currently in circulation, and both are available on DVD and BD (and none of them at my local Wal-Mart).
At Amazon, the normal release is $7.49 on DVD, and $11.49 on BD.
Likewise at Amazon, the Criterion release is $17.39 on DVD, and $17.99 on BD.
I do not find these prices to be appalling in any capacity.
It's easy to list dead/stillborn consumer media formats that never really managed to populate store shelves: DCC, Minidisc, UMD video, Laserdisc, VCD, SVHS, D-VHS, DVD-Audio, SACD [...]. Some of these were always intended to be niche, high-end formats, and others were aimed squarely at the pit of consumerism. They all have one thing in common, and that is failure to thrive and become accepted in the marketplace.
BD doesn't show any sort of that level of failure, and with price-parity existing between BD players and DVD players, it's unlikely that the format will die any time soon: Even at the 30:1 ratio you keep mentioning, that's an absolute fuckload of sales.
And, AFAICT from memory and looking at the dates, it does seem to be catching on at about the same rate as DVD did even though DVD was never cursed with a real format war* ala HD-DVD vs. BD.
(*There was that whole Circuit City DIVX debacle, but it never had any teeth.)
3-8 times more expensive? With those figures, I'd be buying Blu-Rays for somewhere up to around $280.
You really need to get out more. These items simply aren't priced like that (if they were, I wouldn't be buying them).
Most of the movies I buy on BD are about 25% more expensive than the same film on DVD. Sometimes, the price is the same. Sometimes, it's even cheaper.
Last week, I picked up a trilogy on BD for $27, when just one of those movies was $20 on DVD.
*shrug*
No. NTSC television is (as there are still LP NTSC transmitters broadcasting), as best as anyone can figure, 29.970026164311878597592883307169 Hz. (And yes, it matters.)
Explanation from this posting:
Horizontal Scanning Frequency (lines/sec) / 525 (lines/frame) where
Horizontal Scanning Frequency = Chrominance Sub-Carrier * 2/455
Now, since Chrominance Sub-Carrier for NTSC is exactly 3,579,545Hz, then doing the arithmetic one ends up with:
( 3,579,545Hz * 2/455 ) lines/sec / 525 lines/frame = 29.970026164311878597592883307169 frames/sec
Note that this is still not quite 29.97002617, which seems to be a result of rounding up at the 10 parts per billion resolution.
So I guess the final conclusion is that the exact frame rate for NTSC turns out NOT to be 30000/1001, but rather to be 7159090/238875, which can be reduced to 1431818/47775.
Most people think the stereo that came with their car sounds good enough, because that's all they've had.
Most people think the earbuds that came with their MP3 player are good enough, because they've never tried anything different.
Most people think Bud Light is OK, because that's what everyone else seems to be drinking.
FFS: Most people ran their CRT monitors at 640x480 @ 60Hz, before Windows started defaulting to 800x600 (still at 60Hz), and they were OK with that because it was all they knew. And I know, without asking, that as a helpful computer guy you've spent a few minutes fixing that for countless people, all of whom were thankful at the difference it made.
I don't care what most people think is "good enough". I care about what I perceive to be better: An old 3-cylinder Metro is big enough to haul my family and carry the product of my errands, and would be "good enough". But I drive an old 6-cylinder BMW instead, because I perceive it to be in many ways that are important to me. It's faster, safer, funner, a bit larger, more comfortable...and also heavier and less-efficient. (I'm OK with that -- it's efficient enough.)
And there seems to be enough folks (no, not "most people") who think similarly enough to me to keep BD movies on physical shelves at real stores: If it were a total flop, as you suggest, it would have already disappeared or resigned itself to a special-order niche item ala Laserdisc.
(And why buy a $50 DVD player, when you can instead buy a $50 Blu-Ray player?)
Seeing as it's physically impossible to shoot slower than 1/24s on a 24 FPS film camera:
Disregarding any cinematic effect (see Saving Private Ryan): If exposure adjustments need to be made (due to lighting, film, or lens availability), they can only happen in one direction: Faster.
[duh.]
The reasons are simpler than that. At the time, VHS was still king. LCD TVs were expensive, small, and fickle novelties. CRT televisions seldom even had an S-Video port, let alone the ability to display anything other than 480i NTSC. And MPEG2 was the best that anyone could reliably get away with, which has never been considered to be all that bandwidth-efficient.
In terms of bandwidth: These days I get far better pictures from a ~6Mbps h.263-ish stream over the Internet than I ever do from a ~19Mbps MPEG2 stream over ATSC, so it seems plain to me that it's entirely possible to do more with less. But in the early-mid 90's the tech wasn't there yet.
Furthermore, the broadcaster's actual band-width is the same as it was before: 6MHz.
Who knows how they (broadcasters, legislators, FCC) would have acted back then if they had the same technology then as we do now, or if they had a magic looking-glass that could show them that in the mysterious future folks would have large-format televisions that are only an inch thick, with digital interconnection and the ability to display unique 1920x1080 images at 120Hz...
Framerate? Meh. When the first grumblings of "HD TV" made the rounds, most folks I talked to didn't want it at all. Given the negativity associated with it, and the 15-20 years it took for the concept to get from conjecture to actually supplanting NTSC, I'm frankly astounded that it works as well as it does even if it is limited to 480i, 720p, or 1080i at various multiples and permutations of ~30 FPS.
All that said: Why was the magic number of 30 chosen? It should be no surprise that broadcast television is run by broadcasters, not the movie industry, and 24 and 48 FPS simply didn't fit well with their existing program material and signal chain. 30 and 60, however, fit very nicely. Trying to add even more complexity to a system that, at the time, most folks didn't want would not have done a single positive thing to hasten its acceptance (which, as I stated, was already very lengthy).
Perhaps a better question is this: With movies being shot with digital gear and projected with digital projectors, why is 48 FPS even in the running for future formats? Would 60 not be a better and more-compatible cinematic framerate?
Because nobody has ever uploaded anything or sync'd their inbox on a shared ~3Mbps connection with no QoS.
Awesome. Thanks for that!