Space might be cheap but $2000.00 just for a larger hard drive isn't. I'm sorry, but I will never love TV that much.
Esp. since I expect someone to figure out how to send shows to a Linux box rather then another ReplayTV, so you don't need to store everything on the Replay, just whatever you don't have time to transfer.
Especially when NVidia is coming out with a product that will run on my PC and support as large a HDD as I can afford!
There is some advantage to having a dedicated device with (I assume) a real OS. Maybe not such an issue if your PC runs Linux, but I'm expecting it will be a while until you can use the NVidia with ease to capture TV shows (including tuning the cable box) under Linux. I have the competing product (TiVo) and it has never ever crashed. It has lost power a few times, but never had some random DLL blow up and cause me to miss a TV show.
Yes, there is a reason to use USB2. As far as I know, USB devices won't work on a Firewire port, and will work on USB2 ports [usbworkshop.com]. In effect, USB2 will already have it's user base, and Firewire will have to build one up.
Um, haven't FireWire cameras (still and video), CD-RWs, Hard Disks, RAID arrays, and what not been shipping for at least 18 months?
Firewire may be a superior technology, but customers will find USB2 more convenient because they've already got the peripherals to go with it. Firewire will remain a high-end professional video tool and nothing more.
High end video? All of the digital video cameras I have seen had FireWire. That's $800 cameras at the local 1 hour film shop!
You do have to go pretty far up the food chain on computers to find FireWire though, like Viaos and Macs.
So I don't see a big installed base of USB2 devices. I won't be upset to see USB2 drive down the cost of fast external drives or whatever. As long as it doesn't turn out to suck.
Re:USB was designed by Intel to waste cpu power
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USB 2.0 For Linux
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· Score: 2
All of the hard processing is done by the Host Controllers (UHCI, OHCI and EHCI).
Either UHCI or OHCI is a pretty dumb part and doesn't do a whole lot of work. The other is a bit better, but I don't think it does scatter gather like many SCSI controllers (and gigabit ethernets). I have no idea about EHCI, it might be pretty bright.
In fact, USB from a CPU perspective is simpler than SCSI, IP and in fact, is roughly as complex as Firewire
Simper is not the same as more efficient. Copying all the data to a fixed location, fixed size buffer, or even doing OUTB in a loop is quite simple. Setting up a scatter gather ring buffer and letting the (non-CPU) hardware do all the hard work is frequently much much faster.
1394 provides an isosyncronous mode of transmision. This is required for streaming video.
USB1 (and I assume 2) has isosyncronous transmision, I think it was for the speakers that didn't catch on. You don't really need isosyncronous transmision to do streaming you need a buffer twice the size of the jitter. However to sync up multiple event streams isosyncronous transmision makes life way simpler.
That said, I continue to enjoy my FireWire CD-RW, I'm not going to speed right out and buy a USB2 anything.
Current generation IDE devices are more than enough for everyday computer use.
Most people wouldn't even notice even someone switched their disks to SCSI.
Yeah, but we could have been there 10 years ago (well 7) if SCSI had been pushed to the mass market. Now we would have way way faster systems, plus it wouldn't be such a pain to get a whole bunch of IDE controlers in a machine to build a huge MP3 jukebox (since SCSI can handle 7 or 15 drives on the bus).
Plus I'm not convinced that IDE is as easy on the system as command tagged SCSI, and the IDE command tagging is still kinda buggy. It is definitly much closer then ever though, and very seldom is SCSI worth paying the 3x price jump for disks... (or whatever the conversion ratio is today)
It's true that a TV network is more effective at transmitting TV (obviously), but I still think that money would have been better spent on a next-generation IP based network.
Well, the problem is it is a lot of money. I don't know enough about building a CATV network (I know a lot more about building big IP networks), but it could cost more then ten times as much to build a data network to carry TV then it would to build a TV network.
Since I don't have any use for a CATV network (I have a dish), the CATV network isn't worth one tenth the price of an IP network to me. However I expect most people would rather pay $30 a month for TV over a CATV network then $300 for TV over an IP network. In fact I would rather have a smaller IP network so I could pay more like $100 to $150...
Of corse there is the chance to design a IP network with traffic shaping and multicast allowed only for some senders. Then you might come closer to the cost of a CATV network, but it will be a pretty bad IP network, and still cost more then a CATV network.
There are a lot of technical problems, but spending money on a proprietary system compared to taking a little more risk and planning in the long run seems an awful waste... I have to pay tax for this in any case!
In the USA most places grant a cable company a ten (or longer) year monopoly in exchange for part of the take. It gets us kind of crappy CATV (no competition), and expensive service (again, no competition). However for people that don't care about the CATV, it is totally free. In fact it is a slight negative tax.
In a very few parts of the USA no monopoly is granted, or a very limited number of providers (say, two) are allowed. They tend to have better service, and cheeper. The local government doesn't get as much of the take though. Even though I don't have CATV I think that's a better method. I might not even have a dish if CATV were cheaper and better...
I am aware of a number of "hacks" to allow you to attach more sensors and motors (my favorite involves a system whereby a circuit senses when a sensor is toggled between two certain modes, in that there is a current drop or something involved in the switch, and can activate a multiplexing system to select a different set of three outputs), but these systems all are custom, and require a bit of hardware skill and modeling skill to build - plus, no one else can replicate your machine unless they build that same system.
Yeah, it wouldn't have made things that much more costly if they had designed a daisy chain system for the sensors, and then they could make more money off selling a bunch of extras.
Having an arbitrary number of motors would be much harder, so all I can realistically hope for is "more". So I do. However I would really like support for motors like the Lego Cybermaster has with built in tach sensors. That makes it trivial to do things like "drive straight", or "turn left" even with different traction on the different sides of the robot.
If the chip makers were serious, they would start helping Linux out today. Case in point: gcc. Why don't the chip makers hand over their internal compilers to the GCC developers, so that GCC can produce optimal code for their processor?
In the past Intel (at least) has done major work on gcc. The first time I remember seeing anything about it they dumped a ton of patches off and they were wrong. There were a lot of Intel-specific patches in the machine independent parts, and lots of machine independent parts in the x86 only part.
The patches were not accepted (someone did fork off a pgcc or something like that for a while). Much of that work has been re-done right in egcs (now gcc 3).
I don't know if they have been contributing a lot recently, with luck they will get the two messages "smaller patches tend to be better", and "stick with the framework (we'll give help if you ask)".
Apple does seem to have learned. A lot of their patches made it into egcs. Unfortunitly their pre-compiled headers code didn't make it in (it is in their gcc that they ship), maybe for 3.1...
(Part of the reason I think that is that it's my belief that one of the reasons PC hardware and software is so unreliable is the size of the market. It's prohibitively expensive to test everything with everything, and not only that, but it's also just very chaotic. It's difficult to make a system work well under those conditions. Sun doesn't suffer from that problem as much because their market is smaller and not only that but simpler.)
Not just that, but if you do find, say, a glitch in the L2 cache controller on an x86 design that might cause one lock up every year or so you can talk yourself out of fixing it since most x86 machines run Windows, and one extra crash a year will be unnoticed, and blamed on MS anyway.
The SPARC designers are going to assume you run Solaris, and one hardware caused crash a year may well be the crash for the year. Way more incentive to fix it.
Lest you think this is totally theroitical, I use to work for a company that owned 100 or so DEC PC machines with a little L2 problem... and we noticed because we were running a real OS.
Similarly it looks like Linux on the AMD's Hammer chipset [x86-64.org] is already way underway as a project while according to the article Microsoft has no current plans to support that chipset
Heh, it shouldn't be too hard since NetBSD already runs on the x86-64, so there should be a compiler and such you can borrow, and TLB faulting code you can take (you can relicence BSD code to GPL, just not so easy it go the other way).
My understanding (and I might be wrong) is that Display PDF fixes a lot of the brain damage that was in DPS.
No, it doesn't. In fact it loses some of the nice DPS and NeWS things, like there being no real standard way to embed a PDF drawing in another PDF (you can encapsulate a PS in another PS -- that is what EPS is for). Also with NeWS at least you could have the "display engine" do a fair bit of local processing, PDF dispenses with most (or all) of the programmability, it is pretty much just a rendering system.
What is the big advantage of display PDF? Well display PostScript requires a Adobe license. Adobe wanted to make PDF a standard so it is free, and Adobe licenses it's patents on whatever PDF needs for free as well. Display PDF being an extension of PDF is also free (well, Apple doesn't have to pay Adobe, that doesn't mean we get it for free).
Just imagine how much better off we could have been if all that money had been spent on a broadband infrastructure for transporting any data, including TV.
Maybe, but a network built for TV can take a lot of short cuts that a generic data network can't. So a TV style network will be a lot less expensive then a generic data network (and also less useful).
The TV network can assume that there are a small number of transmitters, and a large number of listeners, and that the listeners don't need to ACK traffic. So something like a T3 (about 45Mbits/sec) could transmit about 30 channels (assuming 1.5Mbit/sec of MPEG2 data) to any number of listeners. You can set up the network as a tree and get full use of the bandwidth from the head end out to the listeners with very very little back channel (for ordering Pay Per View, or you can do that fully out of band).
A generic data network wouldn't be able to assume a single source point for all the traffic, so they can't be built like a giant tree. They have to be built like more of a web. Much more costly. Of corse it is more useful as well, but not everyone is willing to pay extra money to be able to do more then just watch TV.
The glut of fiber tends to be more in the metro space. I really don't see the middle of Iowa with a ton of fiber. What this does is give the opportunity for metro buildouts. It's going to be the battle of the cities verus the towns all over again
Two things
All that fiber from NY to LA has to get through those big flat mostly empty states in the middle of the USA somehow. While I don't think Iowa has been a big winner, I think Kansas is (at least for AT&T and WCOM's networks). Also if you want to keep latancy low to LA and NY, but only want one server location, the center of the country isn't so bad. Real estate is cheep there even.
The glut of fiber seems to be long distance, so not in NY, but from NY to other big cities. Getting fiber to a downtown NY location is still non-trivial (easier then ten years ago though).
Personally, I can't wait to have my own 100mb connection to the net
Me neither. I fact I can't wait to trade up my crappy IDSL back in for something more like 256Mbits/sec like I use to have.
The conversion from film (24frames/s) to ntsc(60 fields/s) then to pal (50 fields/s) means there's a stutter every second on long pans.
One of the reasons I buy the US versions of DVDs when I can.
This is a DVD of a TV show (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), so I'm not sure it was filmed at 24fr/sec rather then slapped onto beta tape at 60fr/sec. I'm not really sure how they "film" TV shows though.
I would own the US version if there was one. It is likely I'll buy the US version when Fox, UPN, and WB settle out on who gets how much of the money from it. Then I can stop using the crappy "world" DVD player.
P.S. did you mean 24/sec to 50/sec to 60/sec? I'm watching a PAL disc on a NTSC device, not NTSC on PAL.
GSM phones work at two frequencies - 900MHz and 1800MHz (the US is 1900MHz). There was a large analog infrastructure, but this has gone (or will be gone very shortly). The reasons for this have been rehashed here several times, but in the UK the caller pays for the call which has lead to something like >80% of the population with a mobile. Mobile numbers are obviously mobile numbers too - in the UK they start with 07, compared to 01 or 02 for land lines, and 08 and 09 for special rates (from free to expensive). In the US I believe that the owner of the cellphone has to pay a proportion if people call. I know the reasons, but it always comes as a surprise to Europeans when they find this out.
Ah! Yes, I knew about the call-ee pays (and in fact that land line costs are normally per call too right? it is normaly "free" in a "local calling area" here). I just hadn't really thought much about it. Of corse that would make cell phones more popular.
Yes, most cell phones here cost the person with the cell phone. There are exceptions, many systems now have the "first incoming minute free" (Sprint). Some do incoming calls free (NexTel -- maybe only with some plans). Most do cost though.
I also didn't know about all mobile numbers starting with 07. I'm not sure how important that is, but it is interesting.
TV in the UK is available in widescreen (if you get digital signals via satellite or cable). I don't know if that is the case in the US.
Not really, there are a few HDTV stations (on-air in some places, on digital satellite for HBO, and I think Showtime). HDTV sets are not popular though. Nor are "normal" widescreen sets (which are mostly used for DVDs). There are "widescreen" broadcasts of shows on HBO, but they are normal NTSC broadcasts with black bars (-- including Band of Brothers, my TiVo is set already...)
Our pubs are infinitely more advanced, and so is the beer. How do you drink that stuff over there?
I don't. At least not the mass market crap. The microbrews are pretty good though (some local restaurants and pubs brew their own). Even some of the "mass market microbrews" aren't bad. None of the mass market "microbrew" stuff was as nice as the the warm ale from the pubs the locally brewed stuff is as good as what I had in the UK (but not better).
One thing - GSM cell phones these days in europe come with all sorts of PDA-like features - mine's got calendar/appointments/memo/calculator/minesweeper/
address book. And a wap browser I never use...
A lot of CDMA phones (esp Nokia's) have that. I assume in part because Nokia already devloped it for the EU market. My friend with a Nokia didn't use any of it (other then storing phone numbers).
And it's "old" - a siemens M35. It's water resistant and shock resistant too, which is nice (I've dropped it countless times with no ill effects, only to have the display get a "dead row" when I left it out in the summer sun for 5 hours one morning...)
I can see some advantage to that. I was worried that my "GSM-1900" Nokia had gotten destroyed a few years ago when it (and I) accidentally fell into a hot tub. Actually a not-so-hot-tub at that moment. However after letting it dry all night it was pretty much OK for the next two years (until Sprint switched to CDMA). The vibrating battery decided to "do it's thing" about a half dozen times that night. I was sure it was destroyed, but it was OK too.
And it's "old" - a siemens M35. It's water resistant and shock resistant too, which is nice (I've dropped it countless times with no ill effects, only to have the display get a "dead row" when I left it out in the summer sun for 5 hours one morning...)
The same integration is happening here too, but I only know one person that has one. At least they are now smaller then a PDA plus the phone, at least in most cases.
PAL TV has higher resolution and better colour fidelity than NTSC, but flickers more - NTSC is 60Hz, PAL 50Hz. It's perceptible enough that most americans feel uncomfortable after an hour or two watching PAL.
Hmmm, I'm not sure that counts as being more advanced. I think it is just because they tied the scan freq to the AC freq (not surprising, we did too). So they got a different set of tradeoffs.
I do own one set of PAL DVDs, and they don't seem to make me uncomfortable, but I guess I'm getting a 60Hz physical refresh, with only 50Hz of new frames spread over it (it only looks odd for long smooth shots, like panning shots following walking).
I was flabbergasted with how advanced some of the telecommunications technology is. The USA is in the goddamn stone ages as far as cell, PDA, and television is concerned.
Hmmmm. I've ben to the UK, and they are "ahead" in cell phones in as much as they are all GSM, no old analog system left (or maybe none was deployed, thus the quick uptake on the newer system). It was also nice that they run their GSM at about 900Mhz so it works through walls and plants and stuff way better then here. Land line phones didn't seem any more advanced. Did you notice differently?
They didn't seem any more advanced in PDAs, in fact I think I saw fewer PDAs there then here (that was about two years ago though). So what seemed more advanced when you were there?
TVs didn't seem a bit different, but I didn't spend any real amount of time watching them, I was out at the pubs. The beer there I can state is clearly more advanced then ours. So how did their TV seem more advanced then ours?
The source of this allegation seems to be that the serial number is alledged to be transmitted during the same session in which the data is collected.
Please don't. If you use a X-Ray safe lead bag they can't see the film, so it doesn't get hurt. Then they blast it with a stronger dose until they can see. Of corse since they have to go through the lead twice the x-rays that hit your film are much much stronger.
The safest thing to do is get film in clear cylinders (Kodak select films and many Fuji films come that way), take them out of the boxes, put them in a ziplock bag. Don't put more then can be pressed to a single layer.
Have the ziploc bags of film hand checked (dump them in the change bucket).
If you happen to have an x-ray bag you can put the film in that after you have gone through the x-ray. It will keep the film from fogging in flight (there is less atmosphere to protect it).
Even low speed film is damaged by x-ray, just not very much. The fogging is normally slight, unless the airport happens to be extra paranoid, or you take lots of flights. Of corse there is no reason for you to buy slow film unless you want the best quality shots, so the slight fogging should be unacceptable to you, esp when getting hand checked is such an easy option...
(yes, I'm a film geek -- and a digital camera geek)
I love Macs, too, but anyone who would call classic MacOS "stable" is full of shit.
On the other hand OS X is pretty stable. Not as stable as my FreeBSD machine (which is modestly more stable then my Linux box, but that may be hardware related), but pretty good. It did refuse to unsusspend once last month, and it does panic when you umount -f. I also tend to reboot it a little more frequently for upgrades.
Re:Look into the future ...
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ACM vs. RIAA
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· Score: 2
Seeing as there wouldn't be much to sell if science and research didn't exist, the RIAA would be prudent to listen. Studio technology is one of the most important aspects of (at least many genres') selling a hit record (unfortunately), and probably wouldn't be where it is today without that good old unbridled R&D. Just to expand on that, for those who don't understand what I'm getting at, studio production values are to music what happy endings are to hollywood
The thing is if your in first place new technology can only hurt you. If you are in second place it might help you take first place, or it might help the next 5 guys down to take you out. If you are pretty happy with where you are, stopping the march of progress doesn't really hurt you as much as it helps.
Even when new technologies expand a market they tend to bring in enough new players that it isn't really a help to the old players. So really the big guys only care about advancing the state of the art when the other choice is letting someone else do it, and thus letting the someone else take the market away.
So I wouldn't expect big business to be saving researches butt. It may be in the interest of business in general to do so, but it is not in the interest of the current winners to do it!
What can one do for me that a notepad, a pen, and a cellphone can't do for considerably less money?
Search for things. Beep before you miss important meetings (or whatever). Play games or let you read books if you get unexpectedly stuck waiting in a line (or stopped traffic). It should be smaller then a cell phone plus a notepad (at least one the size of a typical day planner). The "display" isn't as good as a day planner though, unless you have trouble with your own handwriting.
It also sucks differently if you lose it. If you lose your paper day planner you probably lose your only copy of some dates, and some phone numbers and things. If you lose a PDA it should be backed up, depending on how recently you sync'ed it. Of corse it costs way more to replace.
There's no doubt that both palm and Motherboard Manufacturers should do better when designing for ESD resistance, but users should be careful rather than sue...
Which is it? Palm/mobo should handle ESD better, or users should be more careful? If the Palm/mobo really should handle ESD better, shouldn't the users sue? How else would the get better ESD handling? If the users really should be more careful, why should Palm/mobos waste money on better ESD handling?
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Esp. since I expect someone to figure out how to send shows to a Linux box rather then another ReplayTV, so you don't need to store everything on the Replay, just whatever you don't have time to transfer.
There is some advantage to having a dedicated device with (I assume) a real OS. Maybe not such an issue if your PC runs Linux, but I'm expecting it will be a while until you can use the NVidia with ease to capture TV shows (including tuning the cable box) under Linux. I have the competing product (TiVo) and it has never ever crashed. It has lost power a few times, but never had some random DLL blow up and cause me to miss a TV show.
Um, haven't FireWire cameras (still and video), CD-RWs, Hard Disks, RAID arrays, and what not been shipping for at least 18 months?
High end video? All of the digital video cameras I have seen had FireWire. That's $800 cameras at the local 1 hour film shop!
You do have to go pretty far up the food chain on computers to find FireWire though, like Viaos and Macs.
So I don't see a big installed base of USB2 devices. I won't be upset to see USB2 drive down the cost of fast external drives or whatever. As long as it doesn't turn out to suck.
Either UHCI or OHCI is a pretty dumb part and doesn't do a whole lot of work. The other is a bit better, but I don't think it does scatter gather like many SCSI controllers (and gigabit ethernets). I have no idea about EHCI, it might be pretty bright.
Simper is not the same as more efficient. Copying all the data to a fixed location, fixed size buffer, or even doing OUTB in a loop is quite simple. Setting up a scatter gather ring buffer and letting the (non-CPU) hardware do all the hard work is frequently much much faster.
USB1 (and I assume 2) has isosyncronous transmision, I think it was for the speakers that didn't catch on. You don't really need isosyncronous transmision to do streaming you need a buffer twice the size of the jitter. However to sync up multiple event streams isosyncronous transmision makes life way simpler.
That said, I continue to enjoy my FireWire CD-RW, I'm not going to speed right out and buy a USB2 anything.
Yeah, but we could have been there 10 years ago (well 7) if SCSI had been pushed to the mass market. Now we would have way way faster systems, plus it wouldn't be such a pain to get a whole bunch of IDE controlers in a machine to build a huge MP3 jukebox (since SCSI can handle 7 or 15 drives on the bus).
Plus I'm not convinced that IDE is as easy on the system as command tagged SCSI, and the IDE command tagging is still kinda buggy. It is definitly much closer then ever though, and very seldom is SCSI worth paying the 3x price jump for disks... (or whatever the conversion ratio is today)
Well, the problem is it is a lot of money. I don't know enough about building a CATV network (I know a lot more about building big IP networks), but it could cost more then ten times as much to build a data network to carry TV then it would to build a TV network.
Since I don't have any use for a CATV network (I have a dish), the CATV network isn't worth one tenth the price of an IP network to me. However I expect most people would rather pay $30 a month for TV over a CATV network then $300 for TV over an IP network. In fact I would rather have a smaller IP network so I could pay more like $100 to $150...
Of corse there is the chance to design a IP network with traffic shaping and multicast allowed only for some senders. Then you might come closer to the cost of a CATV network, but it will be a pretty bad IP network, and still cost more then a CATV network.
In the USA most places grant a cable company a ten (or longer) year monopoly in exchange for part of the take. It gets us kind of crappy CATV (no competition), and expensive service (again, no competition). However for people that don't care about the CATV, it is totally free. In fact it is a slight negative tax.
In a very few parts of the USA no monopoly is granted, or a very limited number of providers (say, two) are allowed. They tend to have better service, and cheeper. The local government doesn't get as much of the take though. Even though I don't have CATV I think that's a better method. I might not even have a dish if CATV were cheaper and better...
Yeah, it wouldn't have made things that much more costly if they had designed a daisy chain system for the sensors, and then they could make more money off selling a bunch of extras.
Having an arbitrary number of motors would be much harder, so all I can realistically hope for is "more". So I do. However I would really like support for motors like the Lego Cybermaster has with built in tach sensors. That makes it trivial to do things like "drive straight", or "turn left" even with different traction on the different sides of the robot.
In the past Intel (at least) has done major work on gcc. The first time I remember seeing anything about it they dumped a ton of patches off and they were wrong. There were a lot of Intel-specific patches in the machine independent parts, and lots of machine independent parts in the x86 only part.
The patches were not accepted (someone did fork off a pgcc or something like that for a while). Much of that work has been re-done right in egcs (now gcc 3).
I don't know if they have been contributing a lot recently, with luck they will get the two messages "smaller patches tend to be better", and "stick with the framework (we'll give help if you ask)".
Apple does seem to have learned. A lot of their patches made it into egcs. Unfortunitly their pre-compiled headers code didn't make it in (it is in their gcc that they ship), maybe for 3.1...
Not just that, but if you do find, say, a glitch in the L2 cache controller on an x86 design that might cause one lock up every year or so you can talk yourself out of fixing it since most x86 machines run Windows, and one extra crash a year will be unnoticed, and blamed on MS anyway.
The SPARC designers are going to assume you run Solaris, and one hardware caused crash a year may well be the crash for the year. Way more incentive to fix it.
Lest you think this is totally theroitical, I use to work for a company that owned 100 or so DEC PC machines with a little L2 problem... and we noticed because we were running a real OS.
Heh, it shouldn't be too hard since NetBSD already runs on the x86-64, so there should be a compiler and such you can borrow, and TLB faulting code you can take (you can relicence BSD code to GPL, just not so easy it go the other way).
No, it doesn't. In fact it loses some of the nice DPS and NeWS things, like there being no real standard way to embed a PDF drawing in another PDF (you can encapsulate a PS in another PS -- that is what EPS is for). Also with NeWS at least you could have the "display engine" do a fair bit of local processing, PDF dispenses with most (or all) of the programmability, it is pretty much just a rendering system.
What is the big advantage of display PDF? Well display PostScript requires a Adobe license. Adobe wanted to make PDF a standard so it is free, and Adobe licenses it's patents on whatever PDF needs for free as well. Display PDF being an extension of PDF is also free (well, Apple doesn't have to pay Adobe, that doesn't mean we get it for free).
Maybe, but a network built for TV can take a lot of short cuts that a generic data network can't. So a TV style network will be a lot less expensive then a generic data network (and also less useful).
The TV network can assume that there are a small number of transmitters, and a large number of listeners, and that the listeners don't need to ACK traffic. So something like a T3 (about 45Mbits/sec) could transmit about 30 channels (assuming 1.5Mbit/sec of MPEG2 data) to any number of listeners. You can set up the network as a tree and get full use of the bandwidth from the head end out to the listeners with very very little back channel (for ordering Pay Per View, or you can do that fully out of band).
A generic data network wouldn't be able to assume a single source point for all the traffic, so they can't be built like a giant tree. They have to be built like more of a web. Much more costly. Of corse it is more useful as well, but not everyone is willing to pay extra money to be able to do more then just watch TV.
Two things
Me neither. I fact I can't wait to trade up my crappy IDSL back in for something more like 256Mbits/sec like I use to have.
This is a DVD of a TV show (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), so I'm not sure it was filmed at 24fr/sec rather then slapped onto beta tape at 60fr/sec. I'm not really sure how they "film" TV shows though.
I would own the US version if there was one. It is likely I'll buy the US version when Fox, UPN, and WB settle out on who gets how much of the money from it. Then I can stop using the crappy "world" DVD player.
P.S. did you mean 24/sec to 50/sec to 60/sec? I'm watching a PAL disc on a NTSC device, not NTSC on PAL.
Ah! Yes, I knew about the call-ee pays (and in fact that land line costs are normally per call too right? it is normaly "free" in a "local calling area" here). I just hadn't really thought much about it. Of corse that would make cell phones more popular.
Yes, most cell phones here cost the person with the cell phone. There are exceptions, many systems now have the "first incoming minute free" (Sprint). Some do incoming calls free (NexTel -- maybe only with some plans). Most do cost though.
I also didn't know about all mobile numbers starting with 07. I'm not sure how important that is, but it is interesting.
Not really, there are a few HDTV stations (on-air in some places, on digital satellite for HBO, and I think Showtime). HDTV sets are not popular though. Nor are "normal" widescreen sets (which are mostly used for DVDs). There are "widescreen" broadcasts of shows on HBO, but they are normal NTSC broadcasts with black bars (-- including Band of Brothers, my TiVo is set already...)
I don't. At least not the mass market crap. The microbrews are pretty good though (some local restaurants and pubs brew their own). Even some of the "mass market microbrews" aren't bad. None of the mass market "microbrew" stuff was as nice as the the warm ale from the pubs the locally brewed stuff is as good as what I had in the UK (but not better).
Plus sometimes I visit places that stock wonderful imports.
A lot of CDMA phones (esp Nokia's) have that. I assume in part because Nokia already devloped it for the EU market. My friend with a Nokia didn't use any of it (other then storing phone numbers).
I can see some advantage to that. I was worried that my "GSM-1900" Nokia had gotten destroyed a few years ago when it (and I) accidentally fell into a hot tub. Actually a not-so-hot-tub at that moment. However after letting it dry all night it was pretty much OK for the next two years (until Sprint switched to CDMA). The vibrating battery decided to "do it's thing" about a half dozen times that night. I was sure it was destroyed, but it was OK too.
The same integration is happening here too, but I only know one person that has one. At least they are now smaller then a PDA plus the phone, at least in most cases.
Hmmm, I'm not sure that counts as being more advanced. I think it is just because they tied the scan freq to the AC freq (not surprising, we did too). So they got a different set of tradeoffs.
I do own one set of PAL DVDs, and they don't seem to make me uncomfortable, but I guess I'm getting a 60Hz physical refresh, with only 50Hz of new frames spread over it (it only looks odd for long smooth shots, like panning shots following walking).
Hmmmm. I've ben to the UK, and they are "ahead" in cell phones in as much as they are all GSM, no old analog system left (or maybe none was deployed, thus the quick uptake on the newer system). It was also nice that they run their GSM at about 900Mhz so it works through walls and plants and stuff way better then here. Land line phones didn't seem any more advanced. Did you notice differently?
They didn't seem any more advanced in PDAs, in fact I think I saw fewer PDAs there then here (that was about two years ago though). So what seemed more advanced when you were there?
TVs didn't seem a bit different, but I didn't spend any real amount of time watching them, I was out at the pubs. The beer there I can state is clearly more advanced then ours. So how did their TV seem more advanced then ours?
Please don't. If you use a X-Ray safe lead bag they can't see the film, so it doesn't get hurt. Then they blast it with a stronger dose until they can see. Of corse since they have to go through the lead twice the x-rays that hit your film are much much stronger.
The safest thing to do is get film in clear cylinders (Kodak select films and many Fuji films come that way), take them out of the boxes, put them in a ziplock bag. Don't put more then can be pressed to a single layer.
Have the ziploc bags of film hand checked (dump them in the change bucket).
If you happen to have an x-ray bag you can put the film in that after you have gone through the x-ray. It will keep the film from fogging in flight (there is less atmosphere to protect it).
Even low speed film is damaged by x-ray, just not very much. The fogging is normally slight, unless the airport happens to be extra paranoid, or you take lots of flights. Of corse there is no reason for you to buy slow film unless you want the best quality shots, so the slight fogging should be unacceptable to you, esp when getting hand checked is such an easy option...
(yes, I'm a film geek -- and a digital camera geek)
On the other hand OS X is pretty stable. Not as stable as my FreeBSD machine (which is modestly more stable then my Linux box, but that may be hardware related), but pretty good. It did refuse to unsusspend once last month, and it does panic when you umount -f. I also tend to reboot it a little more frequently for upgrades.
The thing is if your in first place new technology can only hurt you. If you are in second place it might help you take first place, or it might help the next 5 guys down to take you out. If you are pretty happy with where you are, stopping the march of progress doesn't really hurt you as much as it helps.
Even when new technologies expand a market they tend to bring in enough new players that it isn't really a help to the old players. So really the big guys only care about advancing the state of the art when the other choice is letting someone else do it, and thus letting the someone else take the market away.
So I wouldn't expect big business to be saving researches butt. It may be in the interest of business in general to do so, but it is not in the interest of the current winners to do it!
Nope, I beleve the only unused hardware in the stand alone TiVos is the 2nd decoder for picture-in-picture. I'm not in any real hurry to get PIP.
Search for things. Beep before you miss important meetings (or whatever). Play games or let you read books if you get unexpectedly stuck waiting in a line (or stopped traffic). It should be smaller then a cell phone plus a notepad (at least one the size of a typical day planner). The "display" isn't as good as a day planner though, unless you have trouble with your own handwriting.
It also sucks differently if you lose it. If you lose your paper day planner you probably lose your only copy of some dates, and some phone numbers and things. If you lose a PDA it should be backed up, depending on how recently you sync'ed it. Of corse it costs way more to replace.
What's wrong with the ADC connector?
Which is it? Palm/mobo should handle ESD better, or users should be more careful? If the Palm/mobo really should handle ESD better, shouldn't the users sue? How else would the get better ESD handling? If the users really should be more careful, why should Palm/mobos waste money on better ESD handling?
It may have been, but there are other possibilities:
Plus all the other reasons an IP connection may suck one day, and not another.