DirecTV won't have to recompress the channels at all. The 2 new SPACEWAY sats can easily deliver every current local HD channel, with plenty of room for expansion.
Estimates put the total capacity for SPACEWAY at around 500 full-bitrate HD channels. Multiply by two satellites (the third is a spare), and that's 1000 HD channels (note that this figure is based on a 25/75 mix of 720p to 1080i).
There are around 1800 channels in the country, but at least half of those (religous channels, shopping channels, etc.) have no plans to broadcast HD in the immediate future.
"I have a Windows XP box on my desk right now; the only drop shadows I see are under the icon text."
Try opening up a menu sometime. While I agree that the XP shadows aren't as pretty, there are 3rd party applications that can create the "pretty" drop shadows. The layered window support in Windows since Windows 2000 allows per-pixel alpha to be specified for windows. With the proper graphics drivers, it's even hardware accelerated.
"I had a direcTV sub and I let it lapse because the quality was so bad the rips I was getting of my favorite tv shows were of MUCH lower quality than what I could download off usenet for free. "
Where the hell are you finding these rips?
I know that DirecTV's quality leaves quite a bit to be desired, but it's far superior to the 600MB DIVX rips you normally get online.
Perhaps you've found a source of decent DIVX rips, but 95% of the stuff online is poorly compressed 320x240 crap.
If I want to watch a show in high quality, I do one of the two things:
- Watch it live in HD, over the air (I don't have an HD TiVo yet)
- Rent it on DVD.
Both methods are far superior to anything that you're going to get on the internet, and they aren't in violation of copyright law, either.
"Switching back and forth between Macs and PC's (windows), it's amazing how much better the mac fonts look and feel than windows."
I've found exactly the opposite to be true. The Mac OS X rasterizer seems to "over anti-alias" the fonts - it makes everything too soft and makes any font below 9 points hard to read. With ClearType on, Windows fonts look sharp but not aliased.
So, for larger sizes, Mac OS X wins, but for the smaller sized fonts, Windows XP wins.
Note that the default font size on Mac OS X is larger than on Windows XP. The controls are larger on OS X as well. The same is true of Linux - but with the added disadvantage that the fonts aren't well hinted like Apple's or Microsoft's.
Tahoma, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Georgia, and the rest of Microsoft's "web core fonts" are so well done that Apple ships them with OS X. Now, you shouldn't use Tahoma or Verdana for a printed document, but as a screen font it's excellent.
The whole G5 PowerBook thing is dumb, as is the watercooling in the PowerMac G5.
Here's why:
- PC notebooks frequently contain a 70W+ Pentium 4-M CPU.
- The TDP of the PPC 970 is 90W. The PPC 970FX, used in the second-generation PowerMacs (the liquid cooled ones) is 55W.
- A PowerPC G5 notebook would have issues with cooling and battery life. However, these issues would be less severe than they would be on Pentium 4-M notebooks.
- Other notebook manufacturers have been building Pentium 4-M notebooks for years. Some are as light as 5.2lbs. Now, Apple probably couldn't release a G5 12" Powerbook, but they certainly *could* release a higher-end 17" PowerBook G5. If Dell can create a 17" notebook with a 105W P4 Prescott, Apple can certainly create a 17" notebook with a 55W PPC970FX.
- Desktop manufacturers, such as HP, have successfully created cool and quiet systems around the P4 Prescott. Even two PPC970FX CPUs are only 5W higher in TDP than a single P4 Prescott. The liquid-cooling and thermal zones of the G5, while cool, are unneccessary. Companies like HP make systems that are every bit as quiet as the G5, without the 9 fans or liquid cooling.
Clearly Apple could release a PowerMac G5, but it wouldn't be as thin and light as the 12" G4.
At a recent LAN party, we were ribbing a friend about how his cordless mouse (MX700) needed to be recharged. He kept talking about how it wasn't an issue.
Halfway through a game of Starcraft, his mouse went dead. When your MX700 goes dead (after about 7 hours of use), it takes a good 20 minutes to charge up enough to be usable.
Not to mention that the base for the MX700 is absolutely huge, as is the mouse itself.
No thanks. I have my lovely MX300. No batteries, no charging.
Now, if you are going to get a wireless mouse, get the MX700. It's the only cordless mouse without horrible lag.
Yes, but a RGBA image takes up more space than an 8-bit image.
When I use PNG, I always downsample my images to 8bpp. The program I use (Paint Shop Pro) does an excellent job of dithering, and an 8bpp image compresses better than a 32bpp image.
At 184KB, it's far inferior to PNG, and it's not compatible with a lot of applications, but the assertion that GIF is limited to 256 colors is simply untrue.
"To make Windows secure, that is. I know lately that Microsoft-bashing has gone from being the in thing to being "trolling", but it's true. Just because it's become less fashionable to say so doesn't change the fact. I don't understand how Windows users can continue to use these machines. I live in a relatively remote area of Japan, and yet somehow within 4 minutes after hooking up my brand-spanking new machine to the Internet, I started getting Code Red connection attempts and repeated assaults on various four-digit ports. I guess they don't respect geographic boundaries either. By the way, this all happened while I was downloading XP2/SP2. It's not going to help when we don't even have time to install it before getting our machines "owned".
I've always criticised Linux users for being sloppy and the like, but the operating system itself is at least rock solid. It rarely crashes, it has a decent windowing system, and I don't see advisories for it on Bugtraq every 8 hours. Windows is easy to install, but it's all too easy for someone else to compromise. Ease of use is nice, but I think I'll take peace of mind with GNOME on Fedora Core."
Let's go install RedHat 7.3 on a system open to the internet. We all know how secure that is.
The Code Red patch was released SIX MONTHS before the worm hit.
When the OpenSSH remote root exploit became public, the admin of my Linux virtual server installed the patch within hours. If most Windows users had done the same thing with the Code Red patch (well, not the same thing - they did have six months to apply the patch), then Code Red would never have been a problem.
" NT 3.1 and has been compounded by the integration of IE into the kernel"
showdocvw.dll, mshtml.dll, and the other DLLs that make up the Microsoft HTML Rendering Engine (the engine behind Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, the help system, and a lot more) are definately not part of the kernel.
"Imagine you're a video card manufacturer. You realise people are overclocking your previous line of cards instead of buying the new faster range of cards."
You mean like NVIDIA? They make it really hard to overclock. So hard, in fact, that it's built right into the drivers - automated.reunone the less.
Guess what? It works! WordPad doesn't support tables, graphics, or many of the other features of Word, but it can read the text and formatting of Word documents just fine.
My Word 2002 has no problem opening Word 2003 documents. PowerPoint 2000 has no problem opening documents from PowerPoint 2002. Word 2000 works great with documents created with my Word 2003. Even my Word for Windows 95 opens Word 2002 documents fine.
Apparently, DOC is backwards compatible. All the way down to Wordpad.
You're thinking about the 3.1/95/98/ME notepad, which is limited to 32kb. The Windows 2000/XP notepad has no problems opening documents several megabytes in size.
Besides, if your web page is over 32kb, you need to fire your web designer. Seriously. 32kb is 6.5 seconds on 56k - with a good connection. And that's before you add in all the graphics, stylesheets, scripts, and other external jazz.
The US Constitution is less than 28kb. Why should your web page be any longer?
97's grammar checker did indeed suck. It commented on stupid things like using non gender-neutral nouns "anchorman".
2002's grammar checker is considerably smarter and less invasive. When it says something, there's probably something wrong. It can help avoid those little mistakes that you probably know about but made anyway. Just like spell check.
"I think this is the "age of irrelevance" for Microsoft. The "real" internet doesn't even come into contact with Microsoft anymore. Companies don't have internet-facing Microsoft servers anywhere that I can tell. Those who do obviously aren't going to have much uptime. (Would you run a Microsoft server without a firewall between it and the internet?)"
Apparently, the 2nd, 4th and 6th largest websites in the US aren't part of the "real" internet.
"Perhaps the same that make TI calculators need 5 seconds to calculate 50!"
No. The TI-89 can bust through 50! without any noticeable delay.
The TI's biggest slowness when working with large integers is the display time - the "pretty print" routine is slow when working with them. If you put "(100!)^2->X" in a program and execute it, it only takes a fraction of a second.
Note that the TI does not display integers greater than 10^1000.
It's far easier to remember names like "PowerPoint" or "Excel"; both are built from standard English words. "Kopete, Juk, and KWin" are not only harder to pronounce and spell, they're harder to remember.
Look at Apple's iLife: they add a letter to a standard English word. Or look at their other names - Safari, Expose, Finder, Preview, Inkwell, Quartz, Rendezvous, Sherlock, Darwin.
All of these names are based on existing words.
Look at product names in industry. Products like "Athlon" or "Opteron" - both based on word parts that are easy to pronounce and remember. Even "Centrino" is a play on an English word.
Some GNOME projects have done pretty well. "Evolution" is a pretty easy to remember name. "Totem" is good. "X-Chat" is good. "Nautilus" is good.
Some projects still have sub-optimal names. "The GIMP" has negative connotations, and "Epiphany" can be hard to spell.
That a nation has sovereignty does not make their actions right.
The grandparent is condemning those nations who enforce laws that restrict freedoms in unreasonable manners. It's not acceptable to make it illegal to sell a product becuase the map isn't "correct" according to the government. It's not acceptable to threaten developers for referring to Taiwan as something other than what the government views as "correct".
I can respect the rights and laws of other nations. That doesn't mean that I believe that they are right. Speaking out against unjust laws isn't illegal.
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I've seen 15 comments talking about how we don't need 1500 channels.
That's not what SPACEWAY is about. It's about HD local channels.
SPACEWAY can't even broadcast 1500 national channels. It relies on spot-beam technology for it's immense bandwidth.
DIRECTV already broadcasts 1500 channels from 3 orbital slots. Most of them are local-into-local.
DirecTV won't have to recompress the channels at all. The 2 new SPACEWAY sats can easily deliver every current local HD channel, with plenty of room for expansion.
Estimates put the total capacity for SPACEWAY at around 500 full-bitrate HD channels. Multiply by two satellites (the third is a spare), and that's 1000 HD channels (note that this figure is based on a 25/75 mix of 720p to 1080i).
There are around 1800 channels in the country, but at least half of those (religous channels, shopping channels, etc.) have no plans to broadcast HD in the immediate future.
No, but a BIOS password and a chassis lock can. Or you could just remove the CD and floppy drives.
"I have a Windows XP box on my desk right now; the only drop shadows I see are under the icon text."
Try opening up a menu sometime. While I agree that the XP shadows aren't as pretty, there are 3rd party applications that can create the "pretty" drop shadows. The layered window support in Windows since Windows 2000 allows per-pixel alpha to be specified for windows. With the proper graphics drivers, it's even hardware accelerated.
"I had a direcTV sub and I let it lapse because the quality was so bad the rips I was getting of my favorite tv shows were of MUCH lower quality than what I could download off usenet for free. "
Where the hell are you finding these rips?
I know that DirecTV's quality leaves quite a bit to be desired, but it's far superior to the 600MB DIVX rips you normally get online.
Perhaps you've found a source of decent DIVX rips, but 95% of the stuff online is poorly compressed 320x240 crap.
If I want to watch a show in high quality, I do one of the two things:
- Watch it live in HD, over the air (I don't have an HD TiVo yet)
- Rent it on DVD.
Both methods are far superior to anything that you're going to get on the internet, and they aren't in violation of copyright law, either.
"Switching back and forth between Macs and PC's (windows), it's amazing how much better the mac fonts look and feel than windows."
I've found exactly the opposite to be true. The Mac OS X rasterizer seems to "over anti-alias" the fonts - it makes everything too soft and makes any font below 9 points hard to read. With ClearType on, Windows fonts look sharp but not aliased.
So, for larger sizes, Mac OS X wins, but for the smaller sized fonts, Windows XP wins.
Note that the default font size on Mac OS X is larger than on Windows XP. The controls are larger on OS X as well. The same is true of Linux - but with the added disadvantage that the fonts aren't well hinted like Apple's or Microsoft's.
Tahoma, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Georgia, and the rest of Microsoft's "web core fonts" are so well done that Apple ships them with OS X. Now, you shouldn't use Tahoma or Verdana for a printed document, but as a screen font it's excellent.
The whole G5 PowerBook thing is dumb, as is the watercooling in the PowerMac G5.
Here's why:
- PC notebooks frequently contain a 70W+ Pentium 4-M CPU.
- The TDP of the PPC 970 is 90W. The PPC 970FX, used in the second-generation PowerMacs (the liquid cooled ones) is 55W.
- A PowerPC G5 notebook would have issues with cooling and battery life. However, these issues would be less severe than they would be on Pentium 4-M notebooks.
- Other notebook manufacturers have been building Pentium 4-M notebooks for years. Some are as light as 5.2lbs. Now, Apple probably couldn't release a G5 12" Powerbook, but they certainly *could* release a higher-end 17" PowerBook G5. If Dell can create a 17" notebook with a 105W P4 Prescott, Apple can certainly create a 17" notebook with a 55W PPC970FX.
- Desktop manufacturers, such as HP, have successfully created cool and quiet systems around the P4 Prescott. Even two PPC970FX CPUs are only 5W higher in TDP than a single P4 Prescott. The liquid-cooling and thermal zones of the G5, while cool, are unneccessary. Companies like HP make systems that are every bit as quiet as the G5, without the 9 fans or liquid cooling.
Clearly Apple could release a PowerMac G5, but it wouldn't be as thin and light as the 12" G4.
"Once again the competition fails to grasp the fact that you cannot easily scan through over 1000 songs with a nub and your thumb."
Perhaps you failed to grasp that the Rio Carbon has a scroll wheel.
I have to disagree.
At a recent LAN party, we were ribbing a friend about how his cordless mouse (MX700) needed to be recharged. He kept talking about how it wasn't an issue.
Halfway through a game of Starcraft, his mouse went dead. When your MX700 goes dead (after about 7 hours of use), it takes a good 20 minutes to charge up enough to be usable.
Not to mention that the base for the MX700 is absolutely huge, as is the mouse itself.
No thanks. I have my lovely MX300. No batteries, no charging.
Now, if you are going to get a wireless mouse, get the MX700. It's the only cordless mouse without horrible lag.
Yes, but a RGBA image takes up more space than an 8-bit image.
When I use PNG, I always downsample my images to 8bpp. The program I use (Paint Shop Pro) does an excellent job of dithering, and an 8bpp image compresses better than a 32bpp image.
That's not quite true:
http://phil.ipal.org/tc.html
At 184KB, it's far inferior to PNG, and it's not compatible with a lot of applications, but the assertion that GIF is limited to 256 colors is simply untrue.
"A binary driver means planned obsolescence for your hardware as soon as the manufacturer loses interest."
No, it doesn't. I have a Rio 500. Rio went out of business some time ago (and, no, the new "Rio" isn't the same as the old Rio).
Yet my device still works? Why? Because the old Windows 2000 driver still works in Windows XP SP2.
Planned obsolescence is only an issue if new software isn't binary compatible with old software.
Repeat after me:
We shouldn't have to recompile modules for new kernels. Windows and Mac OS X users don't have to, so why should Linux users have to.
"To make Windows secure, that is. I know lately that Microsoft-bashing has gone from being the in thing to being "trolling", but it's true. Just because it's become less fashionable to say so doesn't change the fact. I don't understand how Windows users can continue to use these machines. I live in a relatively remote area of Japan, and yet somehow within 4 minutes after hooking up my brand-spanking new machine to the Internet, I started getting Code Red connection attempts and repeated assaults on various four-digit ports. I guess they don't respect geographic boundaries either. By the way, this all happened while I was downloading XP2/SP2. It's not going to help when we don't even have time to install it before getting our machines "owned".
I've always criticised Linux users for being sloppy and the like, but the operating system itself is at least rock solid. It rarely crashes, it has a decent windowing system, and I don't see advisories for it on Bugtraq every 8 hours. Windows is easy to install, but it's all too easy for someone else to compromise. Ease of use is nice, but I think I'll take peace of mind with GNOME on Fedora Core."
Let's go install RedHat 7.3 on a system open to the internet. We all know how secure that is.
The Code Red patch was released SIX MONTHS before the worm hit.
When the OpenSSH remote root exploit became public, the admin of my Linux virtual server installed the patch within hours. If most Windows users had done the same thing with the Code Red patch (well, not the same thing - they did have six months to apply the patch), then Code Red would never have been a problem.
" NT 3.1 and has been compounded by the integration of IE into the kernel"
showdocvw.dll, mshtml.dll, and the other DLLs that make up the Microsoft HTML Rendering Engine (the engine behind Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, the help system, and a lot more) are definately not part of the kernel.
"Imagine you're a video card manufacturer. You realise people are overclocking your previous line of cards instead of buying the new faster range of cards."
You mean like NVIDIA? They make it really hard to overclock. So hard, in fact, that it's built right into the drivers - automated.reunone the less.
Open a Word 2003 document in WordPad.
Guess what? It works! WordPad doesn't support tables, graphics, or many of the other features of Word, but it can read the text and formatting of Word documents just fine.
My Word 2002 has no problem opening Word 2003 documents. PowerPoint 2000 has no problem opening documents from PowerPoint 2002. Word 2000 works great with documents created with my Word 2003. Even my Word for Windows 95 opens Word 2002 documents fine.
Apparently, DOC is backwards compatible. All the way down to Wordpad.
You're thinking about the 3.1/95/98/ME notepad, which is limited to 32kb. The Windows 2000/XP notepad has no problems opening documents several megabytes in size.
Besides, if your web page is over 32kb, you need to fire your web designer. Seriously. 32kb is 6.5 seconds on 56k - with a good connection. And that's before you add in all the graphics, stylesheets, scripts, and other external jazz.
The US Constitution is less than 28kb. Why should your web page be any longer?
97's grammar checker did indeed suck. It commented on stupid things like using non gender-neutral nouns "anchorman".
2002's grammar checker is considerably smarter and less invasive. When it says something, there's probably something wrong. It can help avoid those little mistakes that you probably know about but made anyway. Just like spell check.
"I think this is the "age of irrelevance" for Microsoft. The "real" internet doesn't even come into contact with Microsoft anymore. Companies don't have internet-facing Microsoft servers anywhere that I can tell. Those who do obviously aren't going to have much uptime. (Would you run a Microsoft server without a firewall between it and the internet?)"
Apparently, the 2nd, 4th and 6th largest websites in the US aren't part of the "real" internet.
"Perhaps the same that make TI calculators need 5 seconds to calculate 50!"
No. The TI-89 can bust through 50! without any noticeable delay.
The TI's biggest slowness when working with large integers is the display time - the "pretty print" routine is slow when working with them. If you put "(100!)^2->X" in a program and execute it, it only takes a fraction of a second.
Note that the TI does not display integers greater than 10^1000.
"Access, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint"
Outlook just makes sense. The others, well, they have unique, memorable names that are easy to associate with their functionality.
Plus, most Microsoft apps *do* have logical names:
"Word"
"Notepad"
"Calculator"
"Internet Explorer"
"Windows Media Player"
"Windows Movie Maker"
"Windows Messenger"
"Paint"
"Address Book"
"Control Panel"
"Remote Desktop Connection"
"Volume Control"
"Sound Recorder"
It's far easier to remember names like "PowerPoint" or "Excel"; both are built from standard English words. "Kopete, Juk, and KWin" are not only harder to pronounce and spell, they're harder to remember.
Look at Apple's iLife: they add a letter to a standard English word. Or look at their other names - Safari, Expose, Finder, Preview, Inkwell, Quartz, Rendezvous, Sherlock, Darwin.
All of these names are based on existing words.
Look at product names in industry. Products like "Athlon" or "Opteron" - both based on word parts that are easy to pronounce and remember. Even "Centrino" is a play on an English word.
Some GNOME projects have done pretty well. "Evolution" is a pretty easy to remember name. "Totem" is good. "X-Chat" is good. "Nautilus" is good.
Some projects still have sub-optimal names. "The GIMP" has negative connotations, and "Epiphany" can be hard to spell.
That a nation has sovereignty does not make their actions right.
The grandparent is condemning those nations who enforce laws that restrict freedoms in unreasonable manners. It's not acceptable to make it illegal to sell a product becuase the map isn't "correct" according to the government. It's not acceptable to threaten developers for referring to Taiwan as something other than what the government views as "correct".
I can respect the rights and laws of other nations. That doesn't mean that I believe that they are right. Speaking out against unjust laws isn't illegal.
At least not in my nation. Not yet, at least.
No, but someone figured out how to hook up a PSOne LCD to a PC:
http://bit-tech.net/article/136/
Well, about 65% of US homes have Internet access, so 50% of 65% is 32.5%, still higher than in Europe.
World? Try South Korea and Canada.
8 96
Broadband penetration in Europe hasn't even reached 20%:
http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?ArticleID=1
Canada's around 65%, and South Korea is 80% or more. Everyone else is lower than the US.