Oh, the GIMP's interface drives me insane, and I have 8 years of experience with Unix and X11 applications.
Its feature set is something I can't find a match for without considering Photoshop, which I can't justify paying full price for.
Now maybe Corel Draw or some other such package might meet my needs.
My point was just that there are free software packages out there that are hard to beat without spending serious cash, and you mentioned one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a registered user of Graphic Converer, which is fantastic at what it does, but like most shareware it doesn't try to too much. This is a positive thing, but I need other tools to go with it.
Actually there are many great free software server apps (Apache, mysql etc etc) but as you were talking about desktop apps not server apps, I responded to that specifically.
I can't see how "Plain Old Text" can be read as meaninging "you can type HTML in here". The logical reading of the English words would be "whatever you type in here is treated as plain old text" To me that implies markup should have no effect.
I can't guess what that would be, becuase I don't know how it differs from "Code" and "HTML Formatted".
There's got to be a more descriptive name. Then again, given one of the options is named "Extrans (html tags to text)", I guess my expectations are too high. I suppose the bit in brackets is obvious enough, but why not just "Convert all HTML tags to Plain Text"? What is Extrans? The software used to do the conversion? What % of Slashdot users benefit from knowing the name of the process?
as the story author is, he's actually being grammatically incorrect (because he should be using an apostrophe). However if he does the "right" thing and uses an apostrophe, it looks uglier.
This one is interesing too: http://new.fastolfe.net/reference/charsets/u nicode -search?query=%60&type=string&font=
Yes, its a grave accent, but most programmers would know it as a "back quote" or "back tick". I guess that's an example of a particular technical group repurposing an existing symbol because it happened to be convenient historically (as its a part of basic ASCII).
Yes, a very good point. UTF-8 would be a better idea.
I didn't actually know the "smart" quotes were missing from ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) but a brief trip to Character Map on NT confirms what you say. They're in "Windows Characters" and 147 and 148, but not in "Latin 1".
I knew Microsoft used a modified version of Latin 1 for the "standard" windows charset, but I didn't realize how different they were until 5 minutes ago.
True enough, but few typefaces would distingiush a right single curly quote from an apostrophe.
It would be interesting to know if Unicode actually makes such a distinction. If so, you could use the appropriate escape code and get it right.
Might fall into the category of splitting hairs though. Its the sort of thing I'd like my software to figure out and do for me, rather than I myself needing to worry over much about it.
OK, so let's look at this XHTML compliant document shall we?
Do a view source, look at the first coupld of lines, which is the same ordinary "start of page" you're going to find on every page on Slashdot:
"<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN"> <html><head><title>Slashdot | Joe Clark's Answers -- In Valid XHTML</title>"
See how it claims to be HTML 3.2. Not XHTML at all.
So now we page down 3-4 times.... now we see this:
<p> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transition al.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/>
<title>Ask the Expert: Accessibility</title> </head> <body>
Hilarious. So this guy sent them a complete, well-formatted XHTML document, and they pasted it into a
tag in the middle of a regular Slashdot page.
What exactly was that supposed to achieve? How stupid do you have to be?
At the very least they could have stripped out the and tags, because as it is they now have a document with *nested* html, and body elemements, and 2 head elements. This is illegal in every version of HTML that's ever existed.
Utterly utterly missing the point!
Even worse, Slashdot's Plain Old Text mode doesn't even let me paste that HTML in. I have to go through by hand and manually escape each and every < and > into < and > . What's the point of a plain text mode that doesn't know how to escape stuff for me. I can't just type Plain Old Text - instead I have to know all about escape codes and enter them myself?
I probably can't actually demonstrate it to you because the Slashcode will filter them out (LAME), but what he's doing is using curly rather than straight quotes.
There are three single quotes and three double quotes common on most computers. Good old ' and " which are straight, and the much nicer to look at curly or "smart" quotes (see MS Word, or the post above).
I think ” would make a right double quote if Slashdot allowed me to enter one.
Many people edit their HTML text in Word or some other editor which automatically inserts curly quotes. However, you'll often see a problem if the article writer has a Mac and you have a PC, or vice versa. All of the "smart" curly quotes get converted to meaingless codes like this: it?s. This is because the curly quotes aren't in the 7-bit (0..127) ASCII range, rather they're either Microsoft or Apple 8-bit (0..255) extensions, which are different.
In order to avoid that happening to anyone he's using Unicode escapes which specify the character precisely. Ultimately, it wouldn't really be necessary if people used better tools to edit HTML, or used Unicode aware editors and had their web server mark the pages as Unicode when served.
NTSC & PAL differ in both the frequency of the signal (50vs 60 hz) and the color encoding scheme used.
These VCRs convert the color (because that's cheap and easy) but not the frequency (because its expensive to do).
So what comes out of the VCR is a hybrid signal. Its frequency is NTSC and its color is PAL. Most TVs you'll see today in the UK, and indeed all new ones, will be able to handle the 10hz frequency difference. Older TVs cannot always do so.
It really does mean "you can play back this NTSC on (a compatible) PAL TV. The signal is not NTSC or PAL, but something inbetween.
I take your point - though actually France doesn't use PAL it uses SECAM which isn't colour compatible. If you care enough, go look it up.
In reality the video standard used isn't really an issue - certainly pretty much any TV/DVD you buy in the UK can handle US/Japan's NTSC these days (sadly, a lot of US stuff still won't play PAL:-( )
I guess the point I was trying to make is there are social (ie, censors' idea of what's OK being different in different countries) issues which prevent the goal of releasing only a single disk. You're quote right - region coding doesn't directly help or prevent that in the UK/France case. If I'd said UK/USA (where censors cut for violence vs. cut for sex) it would have been more directly relevant.
If you ignore the possibility that they won't fit in the available MB because of the extra 30 minutes of outakes and inane commentaries, then the original idea was that DVDs could be sold with multiple soundtracks & subtitles thus reducing costs.
In reality, 2 reasons are cited in defense of region coding:
* fees for extras (commentaries, FOX tv "making-of" specials) are often negotiated per region. It would cost the studios some effort and $ to get permission for all of the pieces in every market, so they make a European version without all that stuff [1]
* Censorship. Most European countries have their own version on the MPAA rating scheme. What's OK in the UK might not be in France, and vice versa. So there end up being a dozen different little cuts that have to be made to get the rating [2]
My personal feeling is it exists to maintain the old price differentials. DVDs are more expensive outside of the UK. Most of the studios have a European distributor who fiddles with the artwork, replaces the [R] rating with a (18) logo etc. If you could just use the region 1 disk, all of the "value" these people add wouldn't be needed anymore. The middleman would have to adapt - and we know that unfortunately people often try to use a technical fix to prop up their existing revenue model.
For a reverse example, the BBC usually region codes its TV shows. This is, I've heard, because it has a US distributor (Warner Home Video) who is supposed to get first refusal for all US releases - and they would feel threatened if people could just import what they wanted to watch when its released in the UK. So they mandate region coding. Not sure what would be in it for the BBC otherwise - its certainly a Hollywood studio thing.
[1] the smart reader will have figured out you can do this whether you region code the disk or not. [2] once again the smart reader will be wondering how the hell this sort of granstanding by a few un-elected arbiters of taste is supposed to be beneficial in any way.
Its also not Apple's fault you don't know how to FTP an oldstyle.sit file with a resource fork (they don't have one in the newer version). Hint - use.bin or.hqx.
I meant to say, what % of disks burned are CDRW. Obv. most drives sold can burn them now.
Re:You misrepresent the issue & Apple reversed
on
Death to the 3.5" Floppy?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Nah, it was too soon when Steve did it at NeXT with the NeXT cube.
As for misreprenting the issue. This is 1998 we're talking about. CD-R maybe, CD-RW? Not on many of the PCs I saw. Hell, even today, what % is CD-RW?
That said, Apple were late to the party shipping CDRW in a machine, something Steve said on stage. You can pull him on all sorts of bullshit, but that's not one of them.
Arguably they were busy being early(ish) to the party with DVD as standard. Choice would have been nice though...
2-3 years ago apple had been booting from CD for over 5 years. No need for boot disks -> Mac people already rarely used floppies, relatively speaking.
Anyone with old floppies had an old computer by definition. They just did what I did and copied those things they needed using the old machine.
Or bought a floppy drive *IF* they had a need for one, and shared it between several machines as needed. Aparently "now it would be fine", but 2-3 years ago it was retarded? What changed? That *was* forward thinking.
Remember slashdot when the iMac first came out?
on
Death to the 3.5" Floppy?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I do.
The noise! The fury! The whining!
It'll never sell, they said. What will people do without their floppy drive! Hell, I hardly even use the Zip drive on my G4 for anything anymore.
Are they links to something irrelevant or offensive or biased? Was anyone forcing you to click the links?
The readers in the lobby were obviously expected to know the people and the movies mentioned. The wider Slashdot audience will probably have heard of few or none of the actors or films. What's wrong with supplying context unobtrusively? I moused over the links to confirm my suspicion they were IMDB links, but I didn't feel the need to follow them.
Links to background information from a respected publically available source looks to me like: No harm done.
>Like the PowerBooks, the new eMacs can be attached >to an external monitor in either Mirror or >dual-monitor mode.
What makes you think that?
I can see a lot of references to video mirroring mode but none to "2 displays showing different things".
I think its much more likely to work like an iMac where you can only have mirrored displays. > 1 display is reserved for the G4 TiBook and the G4 towers, and I'm betting they're not going to change that any time soon?
Yup, DVD currently isn't HDTV, but its not tied to any particular video standard. It handles NTSC and PAL just fine right now[*].
Larger DVD sizes are in the pipeline. HDTV support was always planned for the future. See google for linkage, or old slahdot stories on bigger DVD sizes.
Of course, you'll have to buy a new player;)
[*] yes, the disk *is* encoded differently, but most players can convert on the fly, so you'll usually never notice unless you get a cheapo player (more likely in the US that you get one that doesn't support PAL than the reverse in Europe)
I heard about this 3 years ago, when DVD was 1/10 what it is now, and I didn't think it would succeed then.
Let me see, even if it were not copy protected in new and interesting ways, its a tape, meaning you get the following lovely limitations:
* Minutes to Rewind and Fast Forward, certainly no useful "scene selection"
* Stretch, snap, oh dear.
* Yay, its magnetic. Degrades over time (much faster than an optical disk)
* Multiple versions of moive on one tape with seamless branching to let you watch either theatrical or directors cut.
So basically its backwards compatible with VHS.
hrm, anyone remember Philips DCC - the competitor to Sony minidisc from the early 90s. A tape format which played regular cassettes. (Basically, an inferior consumer DAT with extra copy protection and backwards compatibility).
Nope. Didn't think you would remember it!
Minidisc may not have set the world on fire (at least in the US) but its still here. People are used to the advantages of disk and solid state (flash memory) formats.
You'd be hard pressed to buy a TV in England which isn't capable of displaying anamorphic pictures. Its a constant source of puzzlement to me why US consumer electronics are so obviously behind in some areas but not others...
I mean, its not like my mother (I'm British) cares about this stuff... ie, I mean, I can't see demand in the UK being higher than in the US. If anything most Americans are *more* gadget obsessed.
Similarly, both Japan and the US use NTSC, so there's no need for JP manufacturers to make extensive changes for the US market (whereas most of Europe is PAL or SECAM).
Similarly, *a lot* of people I know in the UK who have bought TVs recently have bought 16x9 TVs. Not HDTV, just regular old analogue PAL TVs that happen to have that ratio. Sure, there's a lot more broadcast 16x19 in the UK (heh, and even some PAL+ on Channel 4) and it *is* great for DVDs (anamorphic or just regular widescreen), but that doesn't really explain it.
I must say I'm surprised that there's such a gap.
The people I know aren't the type to spend more than a hundred pounds extra or so more to get a 16x9 TV than a 4x3 TV. As I understand it, widescreen sets (but not HDTV) are available all the way up and down the spectrum of prices and screensizes now.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, the GIMP's interface drives me insane, and I have 8 years of experience with Unix and X11 applications.
Its feature set is something I can't find a match for without considering Photoshop, which I can't justify paying full price for.
Now maybe Corel Draw or some other such package might meet my needs.
My point was just that there are free software packages out there that are hard to beat without spending serious cash, and you mentioned one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a registered user of Graphic Converer, which is fantastic at what it does, but like most shareware it doesn't try to too much. This is a positive thing, but I need other tools to go with it.
Actually there are many great free software server apps (Apache, mysql etc etc) but as you were talking about desktop apps not server apps, I responded to that specifically.
You know a native OS X program with more capabilities than The GIMP (in particular, a full layers model) that doesn't cost any money?
Please share!
I know you're making a point about X11 apps, but the primary reason I have fink installed is for the GIMP. Its enough in and of itself.
Fair enough. If that's how it actually works.
I don't think that's very logical.
I can't see how "Plain Old Text" can be read as meaninging "you can type HTML in here". The logical reading of the English words would be "whatever you type in here is treated as plain old text" To me that implies markup should have no effect.
I can't guess what that would be, becuase I don't know how it differs from "Code" and "HTML Formatted".
There's got to be a more descriptive name. Then again, given one of the options is named "Extrans (html tags to text)", I guess my expectations are too high. I suppose the bit in brackets is obvious enough, but why not just "Convert all HTML tags to Plain Text"? What is Extrans? The software used to do the conversion? What % of Slashdot users benefit from knowing the name of the process?
Heh. That's almost ironic. So by using
u nicode -search?query=%60&type=string&font=
Dec8217 Hex 2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
as the story author is, he's actually being grammatically incorrect (because he should be using an apostrophe). However if he does the "right" thing and uses an apostrophe, it looks uglier.
This one is interesing too:
http://new.fastolfe.net/reference/charsets/
Yes, its a grave accent, but most programmers would know it as a "back quote" or "back tick". I guess that's an example of a particular technical group repurposing an existing symbol because it happened to be convenient historically (as its a part of basic ASCII).
Yes, a very good point. UTF-8 would be a better idea.
I didn't actually know the "smart" quotes were missing from ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) but a brief trip to Character Map on NT confirms what you say. They're in "Windows Characters" and 147 and 148, but not in "Latin 1".
I knew Microsoft used a modified version of Latin 1 for the "standard" windows charset, but I didn't realize how different they were until 5 minutes ago.
Cheers.
True enough, but few typefaces would distingiush a right single curly quote from an apostrophe.
It would be interesting to know if Unicode actually makes such a distinction. If so, you could use the appropriate escape code and get it right.
Might fall into the category of splitting hairs though. Its the sort of thing I'd like my software to figure out and do for me, rather than I myself needing to worry over much about it.
Do a view source, look at the first coupld of lines, which is the same ordinary "start of page" you're going to find on every page on Slashdot:
"<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<html><head><title>Slashdot | Joe Clark's Answers -- In Valid XHTML</title>"
See how it claims to be HTML 3.2. Not XHTML at all.
So now we page down 3-4 times.... now we see this:
<p>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitio
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1"
<title>Ask the Expert: Accessibility</title>
</head>
<body>
Hilarious. So this guy sent them a complete, well-formatted XHTML document, and they pasted it into a
tag in the middle of a regular Slashdot page.
What exactly was that supposed to achieve? How stupid do you have to be?
At the very least they could have stripped out the and tags, because as it is they now have a document with *nested* html, and body elemements, and 2 head elements. This is illegal in every version of HTML that's ever existed.
Utterly utterly missing the point!
Even worse, Slashdot's Plain Old Text mode doesn't even let me paste that HTML in. I have to go through by hand and manually escape each and every < and > into < and > . What's the point of a plain text mode that doesn't know how to escape stuff for me. I can't just type Plain Old Text - instead I have to know all about escape codes and enter them myself?
I probably can't actually demonstrate it to you because the Slashcode will filter them out (LAME), but what he's doing is using curly rather than straight quotes.
There are three single quotes and three double quotes common on most computers. Good old ' and " which are straight, and the much nicer to look at curly or "smart" quotes (see MS Word, or the post above).
I think ” would make a right double quote if Slashdot allowed me to enter one.
Many people edit their HTML text in Word or some other editor which automatically inserts curly quotes. However, you'll often see a problem if the article writer has a Mac and you have a PC, or vice versa. All of the "smart" curly quotes get converted to meaingless codes like this: it?s. This is because the curly quotes aren't in the 7-bit (0..127) ASCII range, rather they're either Microsoft or Apple 8-bit (0..255) extensions, which are different.
In order to avoid that happening to anyone he's using Unicode escapes which specify the character precisely. Ultimately, it wouldn't really be necessary if people used better tools to edit HTML, or used Unicode aware editors and had their web server mark the pages as Unicode when served.
Rightly or wrongly, I think many helpdesks would be happier with machines that users leave well alone!
Much time, money and effort is often put into locking machines down and making sure the users are anything but comfy.
Not that that's a reason to recommend one OS over another, but your point can be taken both ways.
No, it does make sense.
NTSC & PAL differ in both the frequency of the signal (50vs 60 hz) and the color encoding scheme used.
These VCRs convert the color (because that's cheap and easy) but not the frequency (because its expensive to do).
So what comes out of the VCR is a hybrid signal. Its frequency is NTSC and its color is PAL. Most TVs you'll see today in the UK, and indeed all new ones, will be able to handle the 10hz frequency difference. Older TVs cannot always do so.
It really does mean "you can play back this NTSC on (a compatible) PAL TV. The signal is not NTSC or PAL, but something inbetween.
I take your point - though actually France doesn't use PAL it uses SECAM which isn't colour compatible. If you care enough, go look it up.
:-( )
In reality the video standard used isn't really an issue - certainly pretty much any TV/DVD you buy in the UK can handle US/Japan's NTSC these days (sadly, a lot of US stuff still won't play PAL
I guess the point I was trying to make is there are social (ie, censors' idea of what's OK being different in different countries) issues which prevent the goal of releasing only a single disk. You're quote right - region coding doesn't directly help or prevent that in the UK/France case. If I'd said UK/USA (where censors cut for violence vs. cut for sex) it would have been more directly relevant.
If you ignore the possibility that they won't fit in the available MB because of the extra 30 minutes of outakes and inane commentaries, then the original idea was that DVDs could be sold with multiple soundtracks & subtitles thus reducing costs.
In reality, 2 reasons are cited in defense of region coding:
* fees for extras (commentaries, FOX tv "making-of" specials) are often negotiated per region. It would cost the studios some effort and $ to get permission for all of the pieces in every market, so they make a European version without all that stuff [1]
* Censorship. Most European countries have their own version on the MPAA rating scheme. What's OK in the UK might not be in France, and vice versa. So there end up being a dozen different little cuts that have to be made to get the rating [2]
My personal feeling is it exists to maintain the old price differentials. DVDs are more expensive outside of the UK. Most of the studios have a European distributor who fiddles with the artwork, replaces the [R] rating with a (18) logo etc. If you could just use the region 1 disk, all of the "value" these people add wouldn't be needed anymore. The middleman would have to adapt - and we know that unfortunately people often try to use a technical fix to prop up their existing revenue model.
For a reverse example, the BBC usually region codes its TV shows. This is, I've heard, because it has a US distributor (Warner Home Video) who is supposed to get first refusal for all US releases - and they would feel threatened if people could just import what they wanted to watch when its released in the UK. So they mandate region coding. Not sure what would be in it for the BBC otherwise - its certainly a Hollywood studio thing.
[1] the smart reader will have figured out you can do this whether you region code the disk or not.
[2] once again the smart reader will be wondering how the hell this sort of granstanding by a few un-elected arbiters of taste is supposed to be beneficial in any way.
Heh.
.hqx :)
:)
Well, I download an FTP program using the handy dandy web browser on the machine (or use a magazine cover cd). Better hope its not an
The bin or hqx decoder is tricky
Actually, as Apple used to pre-install Netscape, stuffit was usually included in the box (as it is/was bundled). Or see above maagazine cover CD.
I think my OS X came with Stuffit too, but then I had the public beta, so maybe it came from there.
Well, that's a good trick.
.sit file with a resource fork (they don't have one in the newer version). Hint - use .bin or .hqx.
Apple NEVER MADE a USB floppy drive.
Its also not Apple's fault you don't know how to FTP an oldstyle
>Hell, even today, what % is CD-RW?
I meant to say, what % of disks burned are CDRW. Obv. most drives sold can burn them now.
Nah, it was too soon when Steve did it at NeXT with the NeXT cube.
As for misreprenting the issue. This is 1998 we're talking about. CD-R maybe, CD-RW? Not on many of the PCs I saw. Hell, even today, what % is CD-RW?
That said, Apple were late to the party shipping CDRW in a machine, something Steve said on stage. You can pull him on all sorts of bullshit, but that's not one of them.
Arguably they were busy being early(ish) to the party with DVD as standard. Choice would have been nice though...
Oh blah blah blah.
2-3 years ago apple had been booting from CD for over 5 years. No need for boot disks -> Mac people already rarely used floppies, relatively speaking.
Anyone with old floppies had an old computer by definition. They just did what I did and copied those things they needed using the old machine.
Or bought a floppy drive *IF* they had a need for one, and shared it between several machines as needed.
Aparently "now it would be fine", but 2-3 years ago it was retarded? What changed? That *was* forward thinking.
I do.
The noise!
The fury!
The whining!
It'll never sell, they said. What will people do without their floppy drive!
Hell, I hardly even use the Zip drive on my G4 for anything anymore.
Fair enough, but if 80 million is the number of downloads
80 mil / 7 mil = ~11.5
which seems high, given the original poster said "80 million times in 2001". I don't think Apple released all that many version in 2001.
Numbers seem fishy...
?
Are they links to something irrelevant or offensive or biased?
Was anyone forcing you to click the links?
The readers in the lobby were obviously expected to know the people and the movies mentioned. The wider Slashdot audience will probably have heard of few or none of the actors or films.
What's wrong with supplying context unobtrusively? I moused over the links to confirm my suspicion they were IMDB links, but I didn't feel the need to follow them.
Links to background information from a respected publically available source looks to me like: No harm done.
>Like the PowerBooks, the new eMacs can be attached
>to an external monitor in either Mirror or >dual-monitor mode.
What makes you think that?
I can see a lot of references to video mirroring mode but none to "2 displays showing different things".
I think its much more likely to work like an iMac where you can only have mirrored displays. > 1 display is reserved for the G4 TiBook and the G4 towers, and I'm betting they're not going to change that any time soon?
Yup, DVD currently isn't HDTV, but its not tied to any particular video standard. It handles NTSC and PAL just fine right now[*].
;)
Larger DVD sizes are in the pipeline. HDTV support was always planned for the future. See google for linkage, or old slahdot stories on bigger DVD sizes.
Of course, you'll have to buy a new player
[*] yes, the disk *is* encoded differently, but most players can convert on the fly, so you'll usually never notice unless you get a cheapo player (more likely in the US that you get one that doesn't support PAL than the reverse in Europe)
I heard about this 3 years ago, when DVD was 1/10 what it is now, and I didn't think it would succeed then.
Let me see, even if it were not copy protected in new and interesting ways, its a tape, meaning you get the following lovely limitations:
* Minutes to Rewind and Fast Forward, certainly no useful "scene selection"
* Stretch, snap, oh dear.
* Yay, its magnetic. Degrades over time (much faster than an optical disk)
* Multiple versions of moive on one tape with seamless branching to let you watch either theatrical or directors cut.
So basically its backwards compatible with VHS.
hrm, anyone remember Philips DCC - the competitor to Sony minidisc from the early 90s. A tape format which played regular cassettes. (Basically, an inferior consumer DAT with extra copy protection and backwards compatibility).
Nope. Didn't think you would remember it!
Minidisc may not have set the world on fire (at least in the US) but its still here. People are used to the advantages of disk and solid state (flash memory) formats.
Yes, unfortunately that's true in the States.
You'd be hard pressed to buy a TV in England which isn't capable of displaying anamorphic pictures. Its a constant source of puzzlement to me why US consumer electronics are so obviously behind in some areas but not others...
I mean, its not like my mother (I'm British) cares about this stuff... ie, I mean, I can't see demand in the UK being higher than in the US. If anything most Americans are *more* gadget obsessed.
Similarly, both Japan and the US use NTSC, so there's no need for JP manufacturers to make extensive changes for the US market (whereas most of Europe is PAL or SECAM).
Similarly, *a lot* of people I know in the UK who have bought TVs recently have bought 16x9 TVs. Not HDTV, just regular old analogue PAL TVs that happen to have that ratio. Sure, there's a lot more broadcast 16x19 in the UK (heh, and even some PAL+ on Channel 4) and it *is* great for DVDs (anamorphic or just regular widescreen), but that doesn't really explain it.
I must say I'm surprised that there's such a gap.
The people I know aren't the type to spend more than a hundred pounds extra or so more to get a 16x9 TV than a 4x3 TV. As I understand it, widescreen sets (but not HDTV) are available all the way up and down the spectrum of prices and screensizes now.
800x600 on a 35" monitor.
;)
Wow. You could actually count each pixel and verify that you're not being shortchanged