return vents to the furnace is just the space between the studs (no ductwork).
Well, that's no longer allowed by code in most areas of the country. A lot of older homes are built like that (mine is... last year I went around and mastik'd every return vent I could access to reduce leakage), but few newer homes should be.
In theory it's a bad idea anyway, because the HVAC system is rated for a certain load on input and output. Cutting a hole into the system and adding load will reduce your efficiency by unbalancing the system. In reality it probably won't matter, since most systems aren't that well tuned anyway, and leakage occurs in all but the newest systems. Age makes things get out of whack, and you're only adding a few CFM to the system anyway.
Not really. It says that the number of transistors will double -- it says nothing about how this is accomplished.
It's entirely possible that some researcher could discover a method that would allow production of larger dies without an increase in cost... I'll admit that this is deeply unlikely, and it wouldn't help ramp up speeds, but it could allow continued growth of transistor counts.
Alternately someone could finally figure out how to do three dimensional dies effectively... which could certainly help perpetuate Moore's Law, increase speeds, etc. all while keeping the density constant.
Poor example... you've compared an expanding rule of thumb (Moore's Law) vs a contracting one (time to run a marathon). Furthermore you did exponential vs subtractive.
On a purely theoretical level you could take an expanding series out to infinity. And you'll reach it fairly quickly since, in this case, the series is exponential in nature and not merely additive or multiplicative. Ok, yes, you can never "reach" infinity, but you get the idea. With a subtractive series that has a hard limit (in this case, 0) you're going to reach the limit at some point, and that's it.
Moore's Law isn't a law anyway... it's a rule of thumb. And eventually we'll hit the limit of physics - a single quantum changing states in picoseconds (if that long - I dunno, I'm not a physicist). We'll probably hit other limits well before then, but who knows -- everytime someone thinks we're up against the wall someone else discoveries a way around the wall and we keep on going for another year or two. Keep in mind that we're using, by and large, the exact same semi-conductor process that was invented by TI back in 1954. There have been thousands or even millions of refinements in the process, but we haven't switched to a non-silicon substrate, moved to light based computing, quantum computing, or anything else.
Hey, why don't we test it with Quake1? Bet we can come close to 1000 fps.
And, yet, even with Q1 running at 1000 fps UT2k3 only runs at 140 fps. Wonder what something with even more complexity than that would run at... oh, look, there's a benchmark that only did 41 fps.
Or go look at CodeCult.com's Codecreatures, which does a lovely 6 fps on a 2.5 GHz P4 w/ Radeon 9700 at 1600x1200 anti-aliased and ansitropic filtering. And it still doesn't look real.
Until we have holographic imaging that's indistinguishable from reality the cards aren't there yet. If you don't need/want it, then fine, don't buy it. But whining that it's clearly beyond what's needed is, well, stupid.
The release drivers are rarely substantially different from the "early beta" drivers... unless the beta drivers had massive amounts of debugging enabled, but that's generally not true either since video card makers want developers to have an actual reference platform and can send debug mode drivers if needed.
The speed improvements for the Detonator drivers have come over time as nVidia has refined the drivers. The speed improvements rarely coincided with the relase of a new card, but instead came 1-2 months afterwards. Or even in between product cycles. Hardly a case of beta vs release drivers.
While humorous, once upon a time it did matter how fast you could scroll text, and cards would be benchmarked based on how fast they could do it in a window (doing it in a FS text session was a non-issue).
I won a Number9 Imagine128 card at Comdex back in the early 90s... I distinctly remember being amazed since for the first time ever it was faster to scroll text in a window than it was full-screen.
Nowadays it's a total non-issue of course.
Oh, and I get far better FPS in Nethack. You're just a slow typist;)
You realize that Clinton rejected Kyoto first, right? This is not a Bush administration thing. Kyoto pretty much screws the US while letting the worlds biggest polluters off scott free. It also has a time period that just so happens to exclude the emissions from the Eastern Bloc nations -- which would utterly screw most of Europe (especially Germany).
The reason the US won't ratify it is because it's not a fair treaty.
As for Mr. Goodwin's suggestions -- I'd love to know where he got the Iraq bit, since it's not like the US is going to have outright control of the oil supplies regardless of what occurs in the next few months (and while I'm not in favor of an invasion currently, I don't see how we're going to avoid it... Bush has Iraq on the brain, and all I can hope is that there's some intelligence information that's supporting the inanity currently going on).
DirecTV and EchoStar pay a hefty sum annually to the FCC for the right to broadcast in that spectrum. It is not being "stolen". It's being regulated. Get it right.
Since both DirecTV and EchoStar do minimal (if any) sell through advertising, and finance most of the cost of buying systems, they have no revenue stream if they don't charge for the use of their service. Don't want to pay? Then don't use the service. It's not being forced on you, and it's but one of several options you have for television -- including the choice of opting out entirely.
Any non-citizen of the US convicted of a felony is deported after serving their sentence as a matter of course.
That said, a lot of these people wind up in legal limbo and in jail forever since their home countries refuse to admit them back, or they cry political sanction because they'd be killed or maimed in their home country. Amnesty International has been protesting this lovely quirk of US law for sometime now, but nobody has a particularly reasonable solution.
FWIW, most of the ex-convicts in question were found guilty of violent crimes, not white collar crime.
Serebryany, however, did not profit from them, does not appear to expect to profit, and the websites do not appear to be profiting
Anyone who produces counterfeit cards using this information and sells them will profit.
Anyone who uses the information to get DirecTV for free will profit (by means of getting the service without payment).
Frankly, this is corporate espionage no matter how you slice it. Revealing trade secrets is a no-no. A big one. And is protected under both civil and criminal law -- as long as you take reasonable and prudent methods to protect the trade secret.
You might be able to argue that his act doesn't fit the letter of the law, but it certainly does the spirit.
If he had reverse engineered it or used some other method that would have otherwise been legal (lets just ignore the DMCA for now, since it's pretty widely regarded as a bad law), then that's fine.
Ok, I suppose you want to argue that this is a bad law... to which I hope we can agree to disagree on.
Actually, there is an exception to my statement - there is a single flag on the HDTV bitstream that says whether or not it is recordable. The first D-VHS deck that was available completely ignored this flag. To my knowledge the PC based decoders also ignore it (they kinda have to... and while software should adhere to it, let's be realistic).
To my knowledge it's never been turned on intentionally. Although it was unintentionally turned on for awhile by one of the early PBS stations... as I recall some newbie tech flipped the wrong bit in the broadcast software.
As for the rest - it's too late. The bitstream is set. The decoders are already in millions of homes and the industry is gearing up to include decoders in every TV set within a couple years, and they won't pay attention to the flags and/or will not be able to decode a modified stream. If the MPAA, et. al. wanted additional copy restrictions then they should've gotten them into the standard 5 years ago.
Oh, and they did try about 3 years ago... all the consumer electronics manufacturers absolutely refused to implement their draconian DRM requests.
First off HDTV will fail completely if you can't record the signal for personal use.
You can record HDTV. Period. End of story. There are D-VHS decks available (yes, they're expensive... it's early-adopter status still), and there are HDTV receiver cards available for the computer. Nobody has built an off-the-shelf HDTV PVR yet, but that's due to a lack of market share more than anything else.
This most recent agreement will allegedly preserve the "analog hole" that currently exists as well, although I don't know of anything that will record analog HD at full resolution. I'm sure you could bodge something together on a PC though.
Secondly the killer apps for HDTV are probably DVD and satelite signals. I very much doubt that the cable industry can upgrade in time to be relevant
The killer app for HDTV is sports. It's what will bring Joe Consumer in. It hasn't worked thusfar because the broadcasters have been going about it wrong... although Fox (amazingly) is closer than most.
To take the Superbowl as an example (and it's not a bad one, given how many large screen TVs are sold just before the game), CBS did broadcast it at 1080i HDTV. But using different announcers (the second string ones), and different camera locations (because they didn't downsample the HD for regular broadcast, and you can't feasibly fit both HD and regular cameras in the same pit), which meant that you had inferior commentary and inferior camera angles. Using the second best crew of camera operators, post-production people, etc. All in all it wasn't very good.
Fox, however, used the same cameras, commentators, etc... they only broadcast it at 640p, but at least it was the same thing as what everyone else saw and heard. Much, much better.
The same is pretty much true of all the other sporting events... the broadcasters have put the HD portions as second-rate, not advertised them, and generally beat them down. But sports is practically what HDTV was designed for, and when the networks finally get it right Joe Consumer will be lining up for HD.
I won't be lining up for sports, and you may not either, but a rather large portion of America will be.
As for cable and HD -- it's coming, and it's coming more and more quickly. There really isn't that big of a problem in upgrading the network, most of the work has been done already to provide digital cable and broadband.
The only reason the FTC keeps banging on on the broadcast HDTV is that without broadcast the rationale for such a high degree of FTC involvement goes away
FTC has nothing to do with HDTV. The FCC does. And regardless of whether or not the broadcast industry is involved, the FCC is. It's the Federal Communications Commission. Cable and sat both fall squarely under their domain.
Thirdly the FTC mandate for large TVs to have HDTV tuners will fail
No it won't. Because if they're "computer monitors" then they can't have any tuner integrated at all. And that includes NTSC, DirecTV, digital cable decoder, and DTV. The industry has tried several times to just produce a monitor, and consumers have rejected it everytime. I'd rather have one, and I'm sure you would too, but that's not what the general public thinks it wants. And re-education along those lines is going to take more time than the manufacturers have.
Fourthly convergence between the computer and the TV will drive the large scale adoption of HDTV
While I agree to some extent, I think your estimate of the number of computers hooked up to televisions is a serious overestimate. Computer interfaces are nowhere even close to being usable for the average consumer, and a lot of high-end consumers (such as those buying plasmas) are very willing to pay for usability. Of course, it depends on what you mean by "computer". If you mean any kind of console, or a TiVo, then I'm sure you're right. If you mean a HTPC I'll go back to saying your estimate is off.
And while I'd like to think the HTPC revolution is coming, it's not going to occur without a lot more work on the UI. General usage HTPCs are pretty abysmal, while specific-function ones (like consoles or TiVo) are really damn good.
Where did you see it? Best Buy? Circuit City? Some other consumer electronics retailer? None of them have it setup right. Heck, they don't even have the standard def TVs setup worth a crap (take a look sometime and ask yourself if those skin tones exist in real life).
I've seen a lot of deeply unimpressive HD presentations... and I've seen one that just blew me away. The unimpressive ones make me wonder "what's the point?", but all I have to do is remember the good one and I start lusting after a nice HDTV setup again.
The setup wasn't even all that good really... it was a 34"-ish HDTV (one of the drawbacks of HD is that it doesn't do well on small screens - 36" is the quietly talked about minimum size), displaying a 1080i feed from a Sony HD video camera. The footage wasn't all that impressive either - just a shuttle launch. And I was watching it with about 30 other geeks clustered around at a Unix SIG meeting, so far from "ideal" viewing conditions.
But... wow. It was so crisp and clear that it looked like a picture window. No grain, no zig zags, no junk at all. It's really not something that can be described... it just has to be seen.
Setting up HD isn't all that difficult from what I understand (again, I don't have a set yet... I have a ton of money put aside for one, considerably more than is needed nowadays, but don't have the space for it yet), it's just that it doesn't behoove itself to multi-screen displays like they use in most stores. Heck, most places they aren't even showing an HD feed - just a standard feed running into the HDTVs. Which means it just looks somewhat better than a normal TV at best. And in most cases it actually looks worse -- because taking a 4:3 image and stretching it to 16:9 makes everyone look like dwarves. Stocky dwarves. Again, it's not that hard to setup, but they just don't bother (or someone has fooled around with the remote and screwed it up).
Where can you find a good HD setup? Most mid to high end HiFi stores will have one. If you have a friend who loves HDTV then they'll probably have one. Beyond that, I dunno.
Each channel has a single drive in SATA. I'm not sure about command re-ordering though. For some reason I believe it's allowed by SATA, but I'd have to go read some tech specs to double check.
A cable model would be of very, very limited value. More and more people are being forced to use cable boxes due to digital cable... TiVo has enough problems just changing the channel on these, and it's absolutely impossible to watch two things at once with one.
I suppose you could call it "fear", but I'd call it business sense... commercial auto-skipping guarantees a lawsuit and loss of VC money from some investors (like NBC). Lossless copies? Uh... a non-MPEG2 compressed 2 hour movie would eat a 30G drive. There's really no point. DVDs are MPEG2 compressed too ya know.
Most of the features people ask for - like sharing video streams - aren't done because TiVo knows they'd get sued. It's a given. Replay's already done it, and is currently fighting a legal action. Why not wait for the results of that one? If Replay is found not guilty I bet that TiVo will have video extraction as an official feature within a month. Otherwise you're just wasting money fighting a legal action that's pointless.
I do wish TiVo had better organization of shows... but other than that I'm pretty happy with my TiVos. They've done a great job of supporting the community too, and are very clear on what's forbidden when it comes to mods... at least on the official site.
The best analogy is tape vs CD... one of the biggest reasons I ditched tapes was the whole rewind/seek crap. Most people in their mid-20s and up can relate to that (many younger people don't know what the hell a cassette tape is).
Of course, the better sound from CDs didn't hurt at all:)
As for your gf's sister - just do us a favor and try to keep her from breeding.
Don't overuse thumbs... if it records something you don't want, don't give it 3 thumbs down, give it one. It's much, much more effective this way.
That and setting up "Channels You Receive" to only be channels you watch is a good thing (although, occasionally, weird things go on weird channels - like TNN having ST:TNG).
Frankly, everytime someone says something against PVRs they're saying it out of misinformation. About the only valid argument is cost, since the upfront cost of a PVR is higher. But you'll eventually make that back in tapes and time.
The Vi vs Emacs wars at least have two viable options... VCRs are only viable if you don't know the entire truth.
SCSI drives with comparable specs, right now, don't cost much more than IDE drives
Uh... right.
Which is why a 160 GB IDE drive is $205 and a 146 GB SCSI drive is $887. Ok, the SCSI drive is unquestionably faster -- for one thing it's 10k RPM, while the IDE is 7200. And you're right, SCSI command queueing and such make it better in large server situations.
In virtually every size the SCSI drives cost 2-3x as much. That's not "reasonable prices".
SATA bumps the price of the drive up by about $20 right now. That's normal with new technology, and once it's mass produced the price difference will disappear. And, actually, as the industry shifts to SATA the PATA drives will become more expensive due to economies of scale (yah, I know, the only difference is in the electronics. That used to be true of SCSI vs IDE as well, and yet the SCSI drives magically cost twice as much still).
Frankly, I've used both SCSI and ATA drives, and there's no way I'd ever go back to SCSI on a desktop system. The cost/benefit is simply not there. Modern ATA drives are not the godawful beasts of yesteryear, which sucked up massive amounts of CPU and were dog slow. All modern drives use DMA, so CPU usage is no more than 2-3%, pretty much the same as SCSI. The drives are rapidly approaching theoretical speed limits, and the main reason SCSI is faster is because they spin the platters faster. Command-queueing and reordering is nice, but it makes relatively little difference on the desktop. And while the whole master-slave thing does suck, SATA is getting away from that forever.
Don't get me wrong -- on a serious high end desktop (think medical imaging or CAD/CAM -- your gaming PC does not qualify) or any server I'd recommend SCSI still. And SATA isn't going to change that. But SCSI makes absolutely no sense on the desktop, and hasn't for nearly a decade now.
Who gives a crap about the PCI bus speed, or the theoretical maximum throughput of the ATA bus? The drives can't generate more than ~50 MB/s sustained transfer rate anyway. Yup, that's right! ATA-66 is fast enough for every PATA and SATA drive on the market today.
Oh, sure, you'll spike the transfer rate when reading from cache. I've done the numbers before, and it's something like a 0.1 millisecond difference between ATA-66 and ATA-133, since the largest cache is a mere 8 MB.
You are correct about SATA being faster than PCI, but it just doesn't matter. Nor do the future possibilities of SATA-300 or -600. The hardware just isn't fast enough.
And just to cover all the bases, once SATA is integrated into the south bridge chipset it won't be reliant on PCI. In the case of nVidia chipsets (and any Athlon64/Opteron chipset) it would then go over HyperTransport, which is 800 MB/s. I'm not sure what the backplane speed on Intel chips is, but I believe it's faster than PCI.
Is pausing/rewinding/ff'ing TV going to be the saving grace of mankind? Of course not. Is it a damn useful thing for watching TV? Yup.
Frankly, being able to rehear that line I missed is a nice advantage. With a single press of a button, instead of the hopeless attempts of doing the same thing with a VCR. Of course, you could argue that that's irrelevant with live TV because any shows you actually care to watch are being taped anyway. And I'd agree with you.
But what about the news or the weather? Sure, they'll repeat, or you can go get them off the net, but if you're watching TV already then going to the computer is a disconnect and an inconvienence. If you're watching TV, why on earth should you have to wait 15-30 minutes for the story to repeat if you've got rewind capability?
Of course, you don't have the ability to pause live TV. Like so much else with PVRs, it's a situation where you don't get it until you've got it.
But I presume that instead of grokking this you'll just continue snarky comments pretending that you're somehow superior to everyone else. Enjoy.
About the only reason I can see to use one of these (at least, once you get out of the geek subset that's into case modding) is for a home theater PC. Having an HTPC that could display current input, current song/video playing with time elapsed, etc. would be nice. And most LCDs have a visibility measured in inches (centimeters) rather than feet (meters).
Would probably want to be able to turn the brightness down though, since if it's too bright it's distracting in a darkened room.
And, all of that said, this display is too large to be used for most HTPCs -- the display itself is about the right size, but requiring 2 5.25" drive bays kills it.
It's a licensing issue. One copy of XP for one machine, period, end of story.
Oh, you can go look at site license pricing, but it's not made for that few machines... more like hundreds or thousands. And it now incurs a yearly fee.
There are, of course, methods of getting around the Windows Product Activation that enforces the 1 license/computer bit, but that's another kettle of worms.
Slashdot Mirror
return vents to the furnace is just the space between the studs (no ductwork).
Well, that's no longer allowed by code in most areas of the country. A lot of older homes are built like that (mine is... last year I went around and mastik'd every return vent I could access to reduce leakage), but few newer homes should be.
In theory it's a bad idea anyway, because the HVAC system is rated for a certain load on input and output. Cutting a hole into the system and adding load will reduce your efficiency by unbalancing the system. In reality it probably won't matter, since most systems aren't that well tuned anyway, and leakage occurs in all but the newest systems. Age makes things get out of whack, and you're only adding a few CFM to the system anyway.
Not really. It says that the number of transistors will double -- it says nothing about how this is accomplished.
It's entirely possible that some researcher could discover a method that would allow production of larger dies without an increase in cost... I'll admit that this is deeply unlikely, and it wouldn't help ramp up speeds, but it could allow continued growth of transistor counts.
Alternately someone could finally figure out how to do three dimensional dies effectively... which could certainly help perpetuate Moore's Law, increase speeds, etc. all while keeping the density constant.
Poor example... you've compared an expanding rule of thumb (Moore's Law) vs a contracting one (time to run a marathon). Furthermore you did exponential vs subtractive.
On a purely theoretical level you could take an expanding series out to infinity. And you'll reach it fairly quickly since, in this case, the series is exponential in nature and not merely additive or multiplicative. Ok, yes, you can never "reach" infinity, but you get the idea. With a subtractive series that has a hard limit (in this case, 0) you're going to reach the limit at some point, and that's it.
Moore's Law isn't a law anyway... it's a rule of thumb. And eventually we'll hit the limit of physics - a single quantum changing states in picoseconds (if that long - I dunno, I'm not a physicist). We'll probably hit other limits well before then, but who knows -- everytime someone thinks we're up against the wall someone else discoveries a way around the wall and we keep on going for another year or two. Keep in mind that we're using, by and large, the exact same semi-conductor process that was invented by TI back in 1954. There have been thousands or even millions of refinements in the process, but we haven't switched to a non-silicon substrate, moved to light based computing, quantum computing, or anything else.
Hey, why don't we test it with Quake1? Bet we can come close to 1000 fps.
And, yet, even with Q1 running at 1000 fps UT2k3 only runs at 140 fps. Wonder what something with even more complexity than that would run at... oh, look, there's a benchmark that only did 41 fps.
Or go look at CodeCult.com's Codecreatures, which does a lovely 6 fps on a 2.5 GHz P4 w/ Radeon 9700 at 1600x1200 anti-aliased and ansitropic filtering. And it still doesn't look real.
Until we have holographic imaging that's indistinguishable from reality the cards aren't there yet. If you don't need/want it, then fine, don't buy it. But whining that it's clearly beyond what's needed is, well, stupid.
Apples and oranges.
The release drivers are rarely substantially different from the "early beta" drivers... unless the beta drivers had massive amounts of debugging enabled, but that's generally not true either since video card makers want developers to have an actual reference platform and can send debug mode drivers if needed.
The speed improvements for the Detonator drivers have come over time as nVidia has refined the drivers. The speed improvements rarely coincided with the relase of a new card, but instead came 1-2 months afterwards. Or even in between product cycles. Hardly a case of beta vs release drivers.
While humorous, once upon a time it did matter how fast you could scroll text, and cards would be benchmarked based on how fast they could do it in a window (doing it in a FS text session was a non-issue).
;)
I won a Number9 Imagine128 card at Comdex back in the early 90s... I distinctly remember being amazed since for the first time ever it was faster to scroll text in a window than it was full-screen.
Nowadays it's a total non-issue of course.
Oh, and I get far better FPS in Nethack. You're just a slow typist
You realize that Clinton rejected Kyoto first, right? This is not a Bush administration thing. Kyoto pretty much screws the US while letting the worlds biggest polluters off scott free. It also has a time period that just so happens to exclude the emissions from the Eastern Bloc nations -- which would utterly screw most of Europe (especially Germany).
The reason the US won't ratify it is because it's not a fair treaty.
As for Mr. Goodwin's suggestions -- I'd love to know where he got the Iraq bit, since it's not like the US is going to have outright control of the oil supplies regardless of what occurs in the next few months (and while I'm not in favor of an invasion currently, I don't see how we're going to avoid it... Bush has Iraq on the brain, and all I can hope is that there's some intelligence information that's supporting the inanity currently going on).
What a load of crap.
DirecTV and EchoStar pay a hefty sum annually to the FCC for the right to broadcast in that spectrum. It is not being "stolen". It's being regulated. Get it right.
Since both DirecTV and EchoStar do minimal (if any) sell through advertising, and finance most of the cost of buying systems, they have no revenue stream if they don't charge for the use of their service. Don't want to pay? Then don't use the service. It's not being forced on you, and it's but one of several options you have for television -- including the choice of opting out entirely.
Any non-citizen of the US convicted of a felony is deported after serving their sentence as a matter of course.
That said, a lot of these people wind up in legal limbo and in jail forever since their home countries refuse to admit them back, or they cry political sanction because they'd be killed or maimed in their home country. Amnesty International has been protesting this lovely quirk of US law for sometime now, but nobody has a particularly reasonable solution.
FWIW, most of the ex-convicts in question were found guilty of violent crimes, not white collar crime.
Serebryany, however, did not profit from them, does not appear to expect to profit, and the websites do not appear to be profiting
Anyone who produces counterfeit cards using this information and sells them will profit.
Anyone who uses the information to get DirecTV for free will profit (by means of getting the service without payment).
Frankly, this is corporate espionage no matter how you slice it. Revealing trade secrets is a no-no. A big one. And is protected under both civil and criminal law -- as long as you take reasonable and prudent methods to protect the trade secret.
You might be able to argue that his act doesn't fit the letter of the law, but it certainly does the spirit.
If he had reverse engineered it or used some other method that would have otherwise been legal (lets just ignore the DMCA for now, since it's pretty widely regarded as a bad law), then that's fine.
Ok, I suppose you want to argue that this is a bad law... to which I hope we can agree to disagree on.
Actually, there is an exception to my statement - there is a single flag on the HDTV bitstream that says whether or not it is recordable. The first D-VHS deck that was available completely ignored this flag. To my knowledge the PC based decoders also ignore it (they kinda have to... and while software should adhere to it, let's be realistic).
To my knowledge it's never been turned on intentionally. Although it was unintentionally turned on for awhile by one of the early PBS stations... as I recall some newbie tech flipped the wrong bit in the broadcast software.
As for the rest - it's too late. The bitstream is set. The decoders are already in millions of homes and the industry is gearing up to include decoders in every TV set within a couple years, and they won't pay attention to the flags and/or will not be able to decode a modified stream. If the MPAA, et. al. wanted additional copy restrictions then they should've gotten them into the standard 5 years ago.
Oh, and they did try about 3 years ago... all the consumer electronics manufacturers absolutely refused to implement their draconian DRM requests.
First off HDTV will fail completely if you can't record the signal for personal use.
You can record HDTV. Period. End of story. There are D-VHS decks available (yes, they're expensive... it's early-adopter status still), and there are HDTV receiver cards available for the computer. Nobody has built an off-the-shelf HDTV PVR yet, but that's due to a lack of market share more than anything else.
This most recent agreement will allegedly preserve the "analog hole" that currently exists as well, although I don't know of anything that will record analog HD at full resolution. I'm sure you could bodge something together on a PC though.
Secondly the killer apps for HDTV are probably DVD and satelite signals. I very much doubt that the cable industry can upgrade in time to be relevant
The killer app for HDTV is sports. It's what will bring Joe Consumer in. It hasn't worked thusfar because the broadcasters have been going about it wrong... although Fox (amazingly) is closer than most.
To take the Superbowl as an example (and it's not a bad one, given how many large screen TVs are sold just before the game), CBS did broadcast it at 1080i HDTV. But using different announcers (the second string ones), and different camera locations (because they didn't downsample the HD for regular broadcast, and you can't feasibly fit both HD and regular cameras in the same pit), which meant that you had inferior commentary and inferior camera angles. Using the second best crew of camera operators, post-production people, etc. All in all it wasn't very good.
Fox, however, used the same cameras, commentators, etc... they only broadcast it at 640p, but at least it was the same thing as what everyone else saw and heard. Much, much better.
The same is pretty much true of all the other sporting events... the broadcasters have put the HD portions as second-rate, not advertised them, and generally beat them down. But sports is practically what HDTV was designed for, and when the networks finally get it right Joe Consumer will be lining up for HD.
I won't be lining up for sports, and you may not either, but a rather large portion of America will be.
As for cable and HD -- it's coming, and it's coming more and more quickly. There really isn't that big of a problem in upgrading the network, most of the work has been done already to provide digital cable and broadband.
The only reason the FTC keeps banging on on the broadcast HDTV is that without broadcast the rationale for such a high degree of FTC involvement goes away
FTC has nothing to do with HDTV. The FCC does. And regardless of whether or not the broadcast industry is involved, the FCC is. It's the Federal Communications Commission. Cable and sat both fall squarely under their domain.
Thirdly the FTC mandate for large TVs to have HDTV tuners will fail
No it won't. Because if they're "computer monitors" then they can't have any tuner integrated at all. And that includes NTSC, DirecTV, digital cable decoder, and DTV. The industry has tried several times to just produce a monitor, and consumers have rejected it everytime. I'd rather have one, and I'm sure you would too, but that's not what the general public thinks it wants. And re-education along those lines is going to take more time than the manufacturers have.
Fourthly convergence between the computer and the TV will drive the large scale adoption of HDTV
While I agree to some extent, I think your estimate of the number of computers hooked up to televisions is a serious overestimate. Computer interfaces are nowhere even close to being usable for the average consumer, and a lot of high-end consumers (such as those buying plasmas) are very willing to pay for usability. Of course, it depends on what you mean by "computer". If you mean any kind of console, or a TiVo, then I'm sure you're right. If you mean a HTPC I'll go back to saying your estimate is off.
And while I'd like to think the HTPC revolution is coming, it's not going to occur without a lot more work on the UI. General usage HTPCs are pretty abysmal, while specific-function ones (like consoles or TiVo) are really damn good.
Where did you see it? Best Buy? Circuit City? Some other consumer electronics retailer? None of them have it setup right. Heck, they don't even have the standard def TVs setup worth a crap (take a look sometime and ask yourself if those skin tones exist in real life).
I've seen a lot of deeply unimpressive HD presentations... and I've seen one that just blew me away. The unimpressive ones make me wonder "what's the point?", but all I have to do is remember the good one and I start lusting after a nice HDTV setup again.
The setup wasn't even all that good really... it was a 34"-ish HDTV (one of the drawbacks of HD is that it doesn't do well on small screens - 36" is the quietly talked about minimum size), displaying a 1080i feed from a Sony HD video camera. The footage wasn't all that impressive either - just a shuttle launch. And I was watching it with about 30 other geeks clustered around at a Unix SIG meeting, so far from "ideal" viewing conditions.
But... wow. It was so crisp and clear that it looked like a picture window. No grain, no zig zags, no junk at all. It's really not something that can be described... it just has to be seen.
Setting up HD isn't all that difficult from what I understand (again, I don't have a set yet... I have a ton of money put aside for one, considerably more than is needed nowadays, but don't have the space for it yet), it's just that it doesn't behoove itself to multi-screen displays like they use in most stores. Heck, most places they aren't even showing an HD feed - just a standard feed running into the HDTVs. Which means it just looks somewhat better than a normal TV at best. And in most cases it actually looks worse -- because taking a 4:3 image and stretching it to 16:9 makes everyone look like dwarves. Stocky dwarves. Again, it's not that hard to setup, but they just don't bother (or someone has fooled around with the remote and screwed it up).
Where can you find a good HD setup? Most mid to high end HiFi stores will have one. If you have a friend who loves HDTV then they'll probably have one. Beyond that, I dunno.
Each channel has a single drive in SATA. I'm not sure about command re-ordering though. For some reason I believe it's allowed by SATA, but I'd have to go read some tech specs to double check.
And each drive is on it's own channel, each of which has the 150 MB/s bandwidth.
Your point?
A cable model would be of very, very limited value. More and more people are being forced to use cable boxes due to digital cable... TiVo has enough problems just changing the channel on these, and it's absolutely impossible to watch two things at once with one.
I suppose you could call it "fear", but I'd call it business sense... commercial auto-skipping guarantees a lawsuit and loss of VC money from some investors (like NBC). Lossless copies? Uh... a non-MPEG2 compressed 2 hour movie would eat a 30G drive. There's really no point. DVDs are MPEG2 compressed too ya know.
Most of the features people ask for - like sharing video streams - aren't done because TiVo knows they'd get sued. It's a given. Replay's already done it, and is currently fighting a legal action. Why not wait for the results of that one? If Replay is found not guilty I bet that TiVo will have video extraction as an official feature within a month. Otherwise you're just wasting money fighting a legal action that's pointless.
I do wish TiVo had better organization of shows... but other than that I'm pretty happy with my TiVos. They've done a great job of supporting the community too, and are very clear on what's forbidden when it comes to mods... at least on the official site.
The best analogy is tape vs CD... one of the biggest reasons I ditched tapes was the whole rewind/seek crap. Most people in their mid-20s and up can relate to that (many younger people don't know what the hell a cassette tape is).
:)
Of course, the better sound from CDs didn't hurt at all
As for your gf's sister - just do us a favor and try to keep her from breeding.
Drives in TiVos do sit on rubber pads.
Frankly, the biggest noise usually comes from the fan, not the HD.
Don't overuse thumbs... if it records something you don't want, don't give it 3 thumbs down, give it one. It's much, much more effective this way.
That and setting up "Channels You Receive" to only be channels you watch is a good thing (although, occasionally, weird things go on weird channels - like TNN having ST:TNG).
Not really.
Frankly, everytime someone says something against PVRs they're saying it out of misinformation. About the only valid argument is cost, since the upfront cost of a PVR is higher. But you'll eventually make that back in tapes and time.
The Vi vs Emacs wars at least have two viable options... VCRs are only viable if you don't know the entire truth.
Oh, and Emacs sucks. Vi(m) forever.
SCSI drives with comparable specs, right now, don't cost much more than IDE drives
Uh... right.
Which is why a 160 GB IDE drive is $205 and a 146 GB SCSI drive is $887. Ok, the SCSI drive is unquestionably faster -- for one thing it's 10k RPM, while the IDE is 7200. And you're right, SCSI command queueing and such make it better in large server situations.
In virtually every size the SCSI drives cost 2-3x as much. That's not "reasonable prices".
SATA bumps the price of the drive up by about $20 right now. That's normal with new technology, and once it's mass produced the price difference will disappear. And, actually, as the industry shifts to SATA the PATA drives will become more expensive due to economies of scale (yah, I know, the only difference is in the electronics. That used to be true of SCSI vs IDE as well, and yet the SCSI drives magically cost twice as much still).
Frankly, I've used both SCSI and ATA drives, and there's no way I'd ever go back to SCSI on a desktop system. The cost/benefit is simply not there. Modern ATA drives are not the godawful beasts of yesteryear, which sucked up massive amounts of CPU and were dog slow. All modern drives use DMA, so CPU usage is no more than 2-3%, pretty much the same as SCSI. The drives are rapidly approaching theoretical speed limits, and the main reason SCSI is faster is because they spin the platters faster. Command-queueing and reordering is nice, but it makes relatively little difference on the desktop. And while the whole master-slave thing does suck, SATA is getting away from that forever.
Don't get me wrong -- on a serious high end desktop (think medical imaging or CAD/CAM -- your gaming PC does not qualify) or any server I'd recommend SCSI still. And SATA isn't going to change that. But SCSI makes absolutely no sense on the desktop, and hasn't for nearly a decade now.
*beats head against wall*
Who gives a crap about the PCI bus speed, or the theoretical maximum throughput of the ATA bus? The drives can't generate more than ~50 MB/s sustained transfer rate anyway. Yup, that's right! ATA-66 is fast enough for every PATA and SATA drive on the market today.
Oh, sure, you'll spike the transfer rate when reading from cache. I've done the numbers before, and it's something like a 0.1 millisecond difference between ATA-66 and ATA-133, since the largest cache is a mere 8 MB.
You are correct about SATA being faster than PCI, but it just doesn't matter. Nor do the future possibilities of SATA-300 or -600. The hardware just isn't fast enough.
And just to cover all the bases, once SATA is integrated into the south bridge chipset it won't be reliant on PCI. In the case of nVidia chipsets (and any Athlon64/Opteron chipset) it would then go over HyperTransport, which is 800 MB/s. I'm not sure what the backplane speed on Intel chips is, but I believe it's faster than PCI.
Pausing and rewinding live TV is good example
Whatever you want to make yourself believe.
Is pausing/rewinding/ff'ing TV going to be the saving grace of mankind? Of course not. Is it a damn useful thing for watching TV? Yup.
Frankly, being able to rehear that line I missed is a nice advantage. With a single press of a button, instead of the hopeless attempts of doing the same thing with a VCR. Of course, you could argue that that's irrelevant with live TV because any shows you actually care to watch are being taped anyway. And I'd agree with you.
But what about the news or the weather? Sure, they'll repeat, or you can go get them off the net, but if you're watching TV already then going to the computer is a disconnect and an inconvienence. If you're watching TV, why on earth should you have to wait 15-30 minutes for the story to repeat if you've got rewind capability?
Of course, you don't have the ability to pause live TV. Like so much else with PVRs, it's a situation where you don't get it until you've got it.
But I presume that instead of grokking this you'll just continue snarky comments pretending that you're somehow superior to everyone else. Enjoy.
About the only reason I can see to use one of these (at least, once you get out of the geek subset that's into case modding) is for a home theater PC. Having an HTPC that could display current input, current song/video playing with time elapsed, etc. would be nice. And most LCDs have a visibility measured in inches (centimeters) rather than feet (meters).
Would probably want to be able to turn the brightness down though, since if it's too bright it's distracting in a darkened room.
And, all of that said, this display is too large to be used for most HTPCs -- the display itself is about the right size, but requiring 2 5.25" drive bays kills it.
It's a licensing issue. One copy of XP for one machine, period, end of story.
Oh, you can go look at site license pricing, but it's not made for that few machines... more like hundreds or thousands. And it now incurs a yearly fee.
There are, of course, methods of getting around the Windows Product Activation that enforces the 1 license/computer bit, but that's another kettle of worms.