One would hope that if they took advantage of this technology in anything, it would be for a scale-free finder interface. Instead of picking a particular resolution for your screen (1024x768, 640x480, and so forth) you just run a slider that brings it to the desired size. Since LCDs have but one native resolution, you're effectively doing this anyway, except in a far less flexible or elegant fashion. Heck, instead of using bitmapped graphics for system interface elements we could be using vector graphics.
At the same time, it would probably make sense to introduce new, better ways of expressing the size of objects on screen. For instance, instead of going by pixels (which becomes problematic with screens with very fine dot pitch) you could preferentially display as per physical size in inches or centimeters or points. We've been using pixels alone for so long that the transition could be difficult, but if anyone can swing it Apple can.
I suppose I should have mentioned that with MY teeth, this is a subject I am following with great interest. There's this one tooth in particular that I finally had to get a crown on... so I guess I don't have much need for a new tooth now, I've already paid to get the damn thing fixed.
Wouldn't it make more sense to grow the teeth IN the jaw? I mean it's not like you haven't done so many times in your life. Just start the tooth bud off and implant it such that the nerves and blood vessels all attach properly. A little orthodonture and you're good as new.
I thought somebody else was working on a way to stimulate the existing tooth buds in the jaw (you have extras) but I can't find a reference.
China outsources alot of its technical censorship solutions to America. We're talking about Chinese rights, and there's profits to be had. Liberty and Justice for Us.
You know what pisses me off most? Not naive idiots like you, but that George Bush was a pussy. If we had treated Iraq like we did Germany or France at the end of WWII there would be *no* uprisings, car bombs, or anyother getting out of line. But no. Jr. had to go and do a 'humane' war. Dont bomb infrastructure.. dont bomb civies. Uncle.
But I thought we were there to "liberate" them. But then again, we were also there to eliminate a "clear and present danger" from "weapons of mass destruction." If the government is going to use patently false motives and act contrary to their declarations, then why aren't they going all the way?
Well, you'd better get used to it. Half-assed implementation of wildly unrealistic policy is the hallmark of the Bush administration.
No it won't. The oil producing countries are mostly politically weak and economically underdeveloped in everything except the oil industry. The corporations that manage oil won't have influence, because the moment an alternative is announced their stocks will go into the toilet (semi-justifiably).
If anything, wars would be sparked because there were no longer any economic entanglements to hold them back.
Why not just make election day a national holiday as has been proposed a number of times? No excuse not to vote....except for the sales at the mall. Why waste a free day voting?
You would have two receipts. One you sign to verify/authenticate that you voted, along with your picture or thumbprint (required in many countries). This would prevent fraud. It is registered electronically, and you can keep a copy if you want just to prove you did vote.
The second would just say who was being voted for, and no other information. This would be put in a ballot box (the deposit slot or something else?) in case they needed/wanted to do a hand count. It also assures the voter that they will not be disenfranchised by an erroneous machine. And no hanging chads, just a clear printout, perhaps with a barcode for faster scanning.
It's perfectly simple to make software that is both secure and fair. Of course, without open review and rigid authentication of the software, you the voter can never be sure that the machine WON'T be recording your vote with your name for the government. For that, you need the authentication and voting to be conducted completely separately.
It's worth noting that there are always ways to defraud the system or break anonymity. Many systems in place are at risk of ballot stuffing, or even tying votes in to people with some probability if they don't shuffle the ballot boxes. As is, how a district votes overall is not private - and those districts are rewarded or punished based on that, particularly in the legislature by way of pork and regulation. Covert surveillance of voting is always possible. You just can't guarantee complete fairness, and some trust in the system has to be given.
And perhaps most import, online voting does not guarantee the anonymity of the voter and allows people to vote on behalf - or rather than - other voters. Specifically, you'll have situations where the head of household is standing over the rest of the family as they cast their votes, or even doing it for them without their permission. "I know you're busy so I voted for XXXX for you. If you were going to vote for anyone else I'd have to punish you." This issue would be even worse in locales without American-style conscientiousness, with local bosses or party officials exercising complete control over the process. In fact they could prevent or preempt people from going to polling stations and casting their real vote to ensure results, and no one would be the wiser.
So there's no question about it. Polling stations that verify identity and ensure anonymous voting in the booth are essential. Online voting, even of the optional variety, wouldn't improve turnout, it would increase disenfrancisement. If you want to improve turnout, extend the voting period to more than a day (a week seems good, 24/7). And make exit polls illegal while you're at it.
This does not exclude electronic voting machines. I think a simple modified ATM with privacy curtain and polling monitors outside would be ideal. You could go in, slide in your voting card, get your picture taken for verification, possibly sign or thumbprint for, cast your vote, recieve a printed receipt that you verify your choices and deposit to leave a paper trail, and then leave.
I know they're a big cash cow for the state and all (why do you think they're so high) but now they're getting in the way of communication. Screw the state governments, they'll have to deal with the loss of revenue some other less sneaky way. Even the much-ballyhooed rural service fee is no longer justified. There are cheaper ways of communicating from the middle of nowhere than stringing copper out there. They pay less to live out in the middle of nowhere, why should the rest of us pay more to support their choice?
The thing is what you watch may be limited by the number of channels you receive, but it is primarily limited by time. Particularly your free time when you have nothing better to do than watch TV. You can only watch so much television in a day. Maybe you watch one channel a lot, or a lot of different channels, but you're probably watching the same amount.
In that sense, it makes sense to charge for a whole package, and extra for slightly more special services. There aren't that many cable packages and they're pretty straightforward: the local package, the basic channels, the next tier up (sometimes, mostly sports and disney), premium movie channels, and pay per view. And that's it. So yeah, it may feel like extortion to pay all this money when all you're watching is Comedy Central and Fox, but you're probably watching it a lot, and flipping channels besides.
- self healing DVD-RWs: having many Reed-Solomon code based parity blocks of for arbitrary data recovery and error detection (a parchive, allowing the player to find and compensate for errors in the disk media on the fly, possibly even repairing them in the process.
If they do this right, they could set up the reader to support lower resolutions of data as well. That would allow for very cheap consumer level printers (and cheaper mass production) and disks Blu-Ray-DVD-Rs that could still play back on devices. Also, lower resolutions would presumably be more durable since it would take more to destroy a bigger dot.
Well, I was all for some of the other technologies out there, but this sounds pretty darn good. Here's hoping they update the DVD protocol to support everything they should have supported in the original:
- arbitrary data (XML based) and arbitrary code (interpreted?) to allow for functions and services not invented yet. Possibly doing away with the current structure entirely such that players provide the ability to decode and render the main types of data and run code for everything else. Among other things, this would allow for highly customized menus, widgets, and popups. Of course you would probably want a default interaction.
- Unicode-based text tracks with embedded fonts in full color (preferably keeping the timing and typesetting and animated positioning data separate), sprites and secondary video tracks for more complex additions (censoring, sign replacement, etc.)
- the ability to use online services to extend disk function, or allowing small programs/files to use data on the disk, which is particularly useful for letting people write their own subtitle tracks for the disk - or even automatic machine translations of the native one.
- the ability to read, record, and erase small amounts of data to the disk itself, allowing for settings to be saved. Specifically, things like activation codes, saved games, and when the disk was last stopped. In other words, doing away with the need for memory cards. Authentication services would probably be necessary for this.
- Better provisions for direct use by computers, a directory structure and file format that makes sense, just because. I'd like for it to be such that each section can be separately copied and played but fair use goes against the business model doesn't it?
- Single releases meant for a world market, with broad language support, no region coding, and low prices. Also, smarter players that choose the default settings you want (like native audio plus subtitles, except when audio is in english).
Hey, Millenium wasn't that bad once you got past the cheesy 80-ness of it. I'll give you Overdrawn at the Memory Bank unconditionally though (which I thought was a Philip K. Dick story, but that was Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (which was butchered into Total Recall)). Those effects make Dr. Who look like Weta.
Please, anyone but SciFi! I am a die-hard SF fan, and I HATE the SciFi channel. They produce way too much crap. Except for Farscape associated with those gods among geeks, the Jim Henson Creature Shop, which they CANCELLED and only belatedly brought back in a limited capcity after the most vocal outcry against the cancelling of a show in my recollection. Bastards.
So now they want to trash the Ringworld eh? Who's next? John Varley? Bruce Sterling?
Back in high school, I used Hypercard to shut down At Ease and gain access to the regular OS and play Crystal Quest of a floppy, or fool around with our video capture card. The one hack I figured out for myself.
You obviously know nothing about digital compression. Digital compression is a *quantity* issue, not quality. Digital compression allows for the hundreds of channels we have today. Overuse of digital compression leads to picture pixellation and grainy, faded-looking colors. Really looks bad on a larger screen television.
a) You obviously know nothing about me
b) Having a high quantity of content greatly improves the quality of the act of watching TV, since it dramatically increases your ability to choose. And content matters the most. "Entertainment Tonight" in high-def is still crap.
c) By not sending the redundant information you have more room for meaningful information in the same space (be it bandwidth or disk or whatever). Whether that is devoted to improving the resolution of a single data stream (HDTV) or applied to separate streams (more TV channels) is up to the distributor. 6x higher resolution or 6 channels over the same bandwidth, both using digital compression. Unlike analogue, the transmission of the signal is not directly tied to its storage and decoding.
Ironically, for such a high tech nation, there hasn't been a major quality improvement in TV broadcast images for a half-century until the 2006 changeover to HDTV.
Assuming HDTV actually switches over in 2006...
I would argue that there were two major quality improvements in TV with the advents of video tape and digital compression. The first was a revolution of time, since people could now watch what they wanted when they wanted regardless of when the stations/theaters were showing it. The second enabled a revolution in distribution, as it allows cleaner transmission in smaller channels and arbitrary additional content. This is mainly manifested in DVD but is equally applicable to digital cable, video on demand, and online distribution (legal or otherwise, with anime fansubs and other non-domestic shows being the most striking application). Thanks to digital tech you can bundle on a ton of extras, edit with ease, and lower the cost of distribution and replication to inconsequential levels.
HDTV is a nice improvement in video quality to theater-grade levels. But the video and digital revolutions are far more significant, and will continue to trump HD where both can not be accomodated. After all, what matters the most is not the presentation but content.
Re-releasing makes perfect sense if you can make money off of it. If a movie came out a generation ago (which Life of Brian did) then that's a whole generation in the original target demographic that didn't see it in the theaters, most of whom never saw it at all.
Frankly I wish they'd re-release more good old movies. It would cut down on the embarassingly crappy remakes, and hopefully cut back on the number of crappy movies made yearly as well since they'd have some stiff competition. Film festivals just don't have the critical mass and eyeball coverage that a wide re-release does.
Personally I rarely watch anything more than once, and if I do it's generally many many years apart. So buying DVDs/videos doesn't make any sense to me in the first place. I rent or see it in the theaters.
As for The Passion, Mel Gibson has cleverly made a film that people go to as an act of faith. He'll be making money hand over fist on this film for years if not decades to come. People don't even have to enjoy it, they just have to feel like seeing it makes them pious. Because if you haven't seen The Passion you're not a good Christian.
So here's the real question - what will be re-released next year around easter as counterprogramming to the re-release of The Passion of The Christ? And the next? And will this lead to more companies re-releasing old films in theaters?
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever happened with the X-Jet anyway?
One would hope that if they took advantage of this technology in anything, it would be for a scale-free finder interface. Instead of picking a particular resolution for your screen (1024x768, 640x480, and so forth) you just run a slider that brings it to the desired size. Since LCDs have but one native resolution, you're effectively doing this anyway, except in a far less flexible or elegant fashion. Heck, instead of using bitmapped graphics for system interface elements we could be using vector graphics.
At the same time, it would probably make sense to introduce new, better ways of expressing the size of objects on screen. For instance, instead of going by pixels (which becomes problematic with screens with very fine dot pitch) you could preferentially display as per physical size in inches or centimeters or points. We've been using pixels alone for so long that the transition could be difficult, but if anyone can swing it Apple can.
...the best thing to happen to GUIs in years... a command line on steroids. I can barely stand using computers without it anymore.
I suppose I should have mentioned that with MY teeth, this is a subject I am following with great interest. There's this one tooth in particular that I finally had to get a crown on... so I guess I don't have much need for a new tooth now, I've already paid to get the damn thing fixed.
Wouldn't it make more sense to grow the teeth IN the jaw? I mean it's not like you haven't done so many times in your life. Just start the tooth bud off and implant it such that the nerves and blood vessels all attach properly. A little orthodonture and you're good as new.
I thought somebody else was working on a way to stimulate the existing tooth buds in the jaw (you have extras) but I can't find a reference.
China outsources alot of its technical censorship solutions to America. We're talking about Chinese rights, and there's profits to be had. Liberty and Justice for Us.
Now do a belly flop from 50 ft ;)
I did that from about 15. OW. Quite high enough for me, thanks.
Hey, Frank Herbert's Dune got it right.
You know what pisses me off most? Not naive idiots like you, but that George Bush was a pussy. If we had treated Iraq like we did Germany or France at the end of WWII there would be *no* uprisings, car bombs, or anyother getting out of line. But no. Jr. had to go and do a 'humane' war. Dont bomb infrastructure.. dont bomb civies. Uncle.
But I thought we were there to "liberate" them. But then again, we were also there to eliminate a "clear and present danger" from "weapons of mass destruction." If the government is going to use patently false motives and act contrary to their declarations, then why aren't they going all the way?
Well, you'd better get used to it. Half-assed implementation of wildly unrealistic policy is the hallmark of the Bush administration.
No it won't. The oil producing countries are mostly politically weak and economically underdeveloped in everything except the oil industry. The corporations that manage oil won't have influence, because the moment an alternative is announced their stocks will go into the toilet (semi-justifiably).
If anything, wars would be sparked because there were no longer any economic entanglements to hold them back.
Why not just make election day a national holiday as has been proposed a number of times? No excuse not to vote. ...except for the sales at the mall. Why waste a free day voting?
You would have two receipts. One you sign to verify/authenticate that you voted, along with your picture or thumbprint (required in many countries). This would prevent fraud. It is registered electronically, and you can keep a copy if you want just to prove you did vote.
The second would just say who was being voted for, and no other information. This would be put in a ballot box (the deposit slot or something else?) in case they needed/wanted to do a hand count. It also assures the voter that they will not be disenfranchised by an erroneous machine. And no hanging chads, just a clear printout, perhaps with a barcode for faster scanning.
It's perfectly simple to make software that is both secure and fair. Of course, without open review and rigid authentication of the software, you the voter can never be sure that the machine WON'T be recording your vote with your name for the government. For that, you need the authentication and voting to be conducted completely separately.
It's worth noting that there are always ways to defraud the system or break anonymity. Many systems in place are at risk of ballot stuffing, or even tying votes in to people with some probability if they don't shuffle the ballot boxes. As is, how a district votes overall is not private - and those districts are rewarded or punished based on that, particularly in the legislature by way of pork and regulation. Covert surveillance of voting is always possible. You just can't guarantee complete fairness, and some trust in the system has to be given.
And perhaps most import, online voting does not guarantee the anonymity of the voter and allows people to vote on behalf - or rather than - other voters. Specifically, you'll have situations where the head of household is standing over the rest of the family as they cast their votes, or even doing it for them without their permission. "I know you're busy so I voted for XXXX for you. If you were going to vote for anyone else I'd have to punish you." This issue would be even worse in locales without American-style conscientiousness, with local bosses or party officials exercising complete control over the process. In fact they could prevent or preempt people from going to polling stations and casting their real vote to ensure results, and no one would be the wiser.
So there's no question about it. Polling stations that verify identity and ensure anonymous voting in the booth are essential. Online voting, even of the optional variety, wouldn't improve turnout, it would increase disenfrancisement. If you want to improve turnout, extend the voting period to more than a day (a week seems good, 24/7). And make exit polls illegal while you're at it.
This does not exclude electronic voting machines. I think a simple modified ATM with privacy curtain and polling monitors outside would be ideal. You could go in, slide in your voting card, get your picture taken for verification, possibly sign or thumbprint for, cast your vote, recieve a printed receipt that you verify your choices and deposit to leave a paper trail, and then leave.
Was the anime in Cartoon Network brought up even once. It's like a red-headed Japanese stepchild to the rest of the block.
I know they're a big cash cow for the state and all (why do you think they're so high) but now they're getting in the way of communication. Screw the state governments, they'll have to deal with the loss of revenue some other less sneaky way. Even the much-ballyhooed rural service fee is no longer justified. There are cheaper ways of communicating from the middle of nowhere than stringing copper out there. They pay less to live out in the middle of nowhere, why should the rest of us pay more to support their choice?
Viva la VOIP!
The thing is what you watch may be limited by the number of channels you receive, but it is primarily limited by time. Particularly your free time when you have nothing better to do than watch TV. You can only watch so much television in a day. Maybe you watch one channel a lot, or a lot of different channels, but you're probably watching the same amount.
In that sense, it makes sense to charge for a whole package, and extra for slightly more special services. There aren't that many cable packages and they're pretty straightforward: the local package, the basic channels, the next tier up (sometimes, mostly sports and disney), premium movie channels, and pay per view. And that's it. So yeah, it may feel like extortion to pay all this money when all you're watching is Comedy Central and Fox, but you're probably watching it a lot, and flipping channels besides.
- self healing DVD-RWs: having many Reed-Solomon code based parity blocks of for arbitrary data recovery and error detection (a parchive, allowing the player to find and compensate for errors in the disk media on the fly, possibly even repairing them in the process.
If they do this right, they could set up the reader to support lower resolutions of data as well. That would allow for very cheap consumer level printers (and cheaper mass production) and disks Blu-Ray-DVD-Rs that could still play back on devices. Also, lower resolutions would presumably be more durable since it would take more to destroy a bigger dot.
Well, I was all for some of the other technologies out there, but this sounds pretty darn good. Here's hoping they update the DVD protocol to support everything they should have supported in the original:
- arbitrary data (XML based) and arbitrary code (interpreted?) to allow for functions and services not invented yet. Possibly doing away with the current structure entirely such that players provide the ability to decode and render the main types of data and run code for everything else. Among other things, this would allow for highly customized menus, widgets, and popups. Of course you would probably want a default interaction.
- Unicode-based text tracks with embedded fonts in full color (preferably keeping the timing and typesetting and animated positioning data separate), sprites and secondary video tracks for more complex additions (censoring, sign replacement, etc.)
- the ability to use online services to extend disk function, or allowing small programs/files to use data on the disk, which is particularly useful for letting people write their own subtitle tracks for the disk - or even automatic machine translations of the native one.
- the ability to read, record, and erase small amounts of data to the disk itself, allowing for settings to be saved. Specifically, things like activation codes, saved games, and when the disk was last stopped. In other words, doing away with the need for memory cards. Authentication services would probably be necessary for this.
- Better provisions for direct use by computers, a directory structure and file format that makes sense, just because. I'd like for it to be such that each section can be separately copied and played but fair use goes against the business model doesn't it?
- Single releases meant for a world market, with broad language support, no region coding, and low prices. Also, smarter players that choose the default settings you want (like native audio plus subtitles, except when audio is in english).
I want a day-glo splotch big enough to see from earth. Ha ha moon! You're out of the game!
I meant We Can Remember it For You Wholesale. Gah.
Hey, Millenium wasn't that bad once you got past the cheesy 80-ness of it. I'll give you Overdrawn at the Memory Bank unconditionally though (which I thought was a Philip K. Dick story, but that was Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (which was butchered into Total Recall)). Those effects make Dr. Who look like Weta.
Please, anyone but SciFi! I am a die-hard SF fan, and I HATE the SciFi channel. They produce way too much crap. Except for Farscape associated with those gods among geeks, the Jim Henson Creature Shop, which they CANCELLED and only belatedly brought back in a limited capcity after the most vocal outcry against the cancelling of a show in my recollection. Bastards.
So now they want to trash the Ringworld eh? Who's next? John Varley? Bruce Sterling?
Back in high school, I used Hypercard to shut down At Ease and gain access to the regular OS and play Crystal Quest of a floppy, or fool around with our video capture card. The one hack I figured out for myself.
You obviously know nothing about digital compression. Digital compression is a *quantity* issue, not quality. Digital compression allows for the hundreds of channels we have today. Overuse of digital compression leads to picture pixellation and grainy, faded-looking colors. Really looks bad on a larger screen television.
a) You obviously know nothing about me
b) Having a high quantity of content greatly improves the quality of the act of watching TV, since it dramatically increases your ability to choose. And content matters the most. "Entertainment Tonight" in high-def is still crap.
c) By not sending the redundant information you have more room for meaningful information in the same space (be it bandwidth or disk or whatever). Whether that is devoted to improving the resolution of a single data stream (HDTV) or applied to separate streams (more TV channels) is up to the distributor. 6x higher resolution or 6 channels over the same bandwidth, both using digital compression. Unlike analogue, the transmission of the signal is not directly tied to its storage and decoding.
Ironically, for such a high tech nation, there hasn't been a major quality improvement in TV broadcast images for a half-century until the 2006 changeover to HDTV.
Assuming HDTV actually switches over in 2006...
I would argue that there were two major quality improvements in TV with the advents of video tape and digital compression. The first was a revolution of time, since people could now watch what they wanted when they wanted regardless of when the stations/theaters were showing it. The second enabled a revolution in distribution, as it allows cleaner transmission in smaller channels and arbitrary additional content. This is mainly manifested in DVD but is equally applicable to digital cable, video on demand, and online distribution (legal or otherwise, with anime fansubs and other non-domestic shows being the most striking application). Thanks to digital tech you can bundle on a ton of extras, edit with ease, and lower the cost of distribution and replication to inconsequential levels.
HDTV is a nice improvement in video quality to theater-grade levels. But the video and digital revolutions are far more significant, and will continue to trump HD where both can not be accomodated. After all, what matters the most is not the presentation but content.
Re-releasing makes perfect sense if you can make money off of it. If a movie came out a generation ago (which Life of Brian did) then that's a whole generation in the original target demographic that didn't see it in the theaters, most of whom never saw it at all.
Frankly I wish they'd re-release more good old movies. It would cut down on the embarassingly crappy remakes, and hopefully cut back on the number of crappy movies made yearly as well since they'd have some stiff competition. Film festivals just don't have the critical mass and eyeball coverage that a wide re-release does.
Personally I rarely watch anything more than once, and if I do it's generally many many years apart. So buying DVDs/videos doesn't make any sense to me in the first place. I rent or see it in the theaters.
As for The Passion, Mel Gibson has cleverly made a film that people go to as an act of faith. He'll be making money hand over fist on this film for years if not decades to come. People don't even have to enjoy it, they just have to feel like seeing it makes them pious. Because if you haven't seen The Passion you're not a good Christian.
So here's the real question - what will be re-released next year around easter as counterprogramming to the re-release of The Passion of The Christ? And the next? And will this lead to more companies re-releasing old films in theaters?