OK, here's a question.. Say the average HD film in MPEG-4 takes up 25GB. How many of those can you fit on to a 1TB disk? About 40? My DVD collection is north of 250 and that's not even that big. My HDDVD collection is about 10 or so now, not counting some on order from Amazon. Even if Microsoft rented 1080p for the 360, I couldn't fit a whole film of it on there! All these fancy game consoles cum video players, the PS3 80GB could hold 3 movies?
Nope, as long as optical media price/density, durability and ease-of-use beat magnetic media, there will be some disc format or another. And while you have advances in magnetic media, optical isn't sitting still. Maybe when home video goes 4K we'll have the next gen of holographic disc to hold the 100GB for a 4k film..
HD-DVD's whole premise was to be quick and cheap for duplication houses. Since Blu-Ray disc prices are on average cheaper than HD-DVD, these seems not to have mattered.
I have no idea what you're talking about. HDDVD at retail chains I have found to be identical or better in price, and most catalog HDDVDs on Amazon I've seen for $19. I call shenanigans.
XBox 360 HDDVD drive is USB and works with at least XP and Vista (not sure about OSX I think it's unlikely). Check Doom9 forums for HDDVD crack information. You'd be able to rip HDDVDs if you had about 20-30G per movie to spare.
I'd hold out for the cheap burners though. I wonder who will make it to $99 for an internal SATA burner first?
Heh, that and a few features from Columbia (most notably _Monty Python & The Holy Grail_) that I would like. But Sony's stuff is largely popcorn summer garbage that I don't care about, and Disney's basically baby tranquilizer except for the Pixar films that look great upconverted on my XA2 (as does _South Park: The Movie_ unsurprisingly).
BUT.. (and it's a big but):
Most of those Bluray exclusive studios are exclusive only in the North America region. There are a number of films from those studios available on HDDVD in other regions (such as Europe and Asia) and since HDDVD has no region encoding and there's no more PAL/NTSC bullshit, you can order them from foreign distributors (or domestics that source from foreign) and get them here.
Well, perhaps Toshiba isn't any less evil "per capita" than Sony, but Sony's much bigger and more diversified, and has stuck little clumps of feces into an awful lot more pies than Toshiba..
Well _Monty Python & The Holy Grail_ is distributed by Columbia TriStar so it's unlikely to be available on HDDVD.. But I have the HD-DVD of _Excalibur_ and it's most definitely _not_ a model there..
(I wonder if Warners' has _Excalibur_ on Bluray yet?)
Personally, I like having less infringement on my freedom (weaker copy protection, no region coding) and better video quality (initial BR discs were shitty MPEG2 rather than modern MPEG4, 3x the space use yet crappier video?), and avoiding Sony garbage is just a fringe benefit.
Plus, _The Big Lebowski_, _Heroes_, _Dune_ and _Serenity_ are exclusive. As will be _Scarface_ and the rest of the NBC Universal range.
You can keep _Star Wars_ and Disney stuff thanks.
Then again, if I can find a BR player for $199, maybe I'd consider giving it my receiver's remaining HDMI port.
Will we ever have more than tiny revolutions where real "thinking" becomes popular?
Revolutions run by intellectuals are pretty much bloody horrors. There's a difference between wisdom and intelligence (there's a reason why they're separate D&D stats;) and if you define "real thinking" as intellectualism, you get bolsheviks, jacobins, national socialists, the whole bloody lot.
Actually, most of those horrors come from romanticism, which needs to be eradicated from "real thinking" when it comes to dealing with governments and regulating peoples' rights. Romanticism (as opposed to realism) may very well be too dangerous to be allowed to control things, if the 20th century is any guide.
Beauty is _not_ truth. That's just what beauty wants you to _think_, so you'll be able to rationalize your succumbing to romanticism.
using a real world benchmark, a very complex blender model. rendering time took LESS on the PPC G5 dual core than any comperable mhz dual core processor I could find.
Because the folks who ported that app didn't use the SSE3-optimized Accelerate.framework?
Perhaps these CPUs have better hardware floating-point support than Cell? IIRC Cell has limited double-precision support, though some enterprising folks have found ways to work around it and put Cell to good use..
And upgrading PPC cores is the easier way to go, being able to reuse plenty of existing firmware and associated hardware. Not to mention that IBM probably committed Cell to PS3 for quite awhile, and maybe they don't have the capacity to start spinning custom revs (say with more SPEs or with extended double support) with PS3 demand.
Seem the only people that think there is still a format war, are Xbox360 HD-DVD add-on owners, and 80,000 vocal standalone HD-DVD owners...... And folks who prefer the lesser of two weevils (HDDVD = no region coding, slightly milder DRM, lower cost media, ability to play back HD home burns on non-HD media), and folks who enjoy the NBC/Universal exclusive catalog (such as _Heroes_, _Battlestar Galactica_, _Shaun of the Dead_, _The Big Lebowski_, etc.. And presumably other Uni features such as _Scarface_).
I still think Sony is stupid enough to keep licensing costs high enough for BD players up over $300 for quite awhile yet, while HDDVD will probably be first to go to China and come out in the states for less than $200. I'm thinking Toshiba branded players for $200 for XMas, Chinese knockoffs for $150 or so.
Folks don't have enough bandwidth for digital delivery of HD, and nobody's doing 1080p digital delivery yet AFAIK (everything I've seen on XBL is 720p)
If a star 100LY away goes supernova and launches this much matter our way, how much warning would we have before the planet was destroyed?
Would this much matter at that speed ignite Jupiter?
This is the sort of thing that helps me not care too much about what goes on in the world, we could all be snuffed out in an instant by something like this, asteroid strike, supervolcano, etc..
reduce miles driven, thus reducing wear-and-tear on roads
reduce the average weight of vehicles, ditto
lower weight vehicles = more efficient, thus reducing oil use
reduce the open market price of oil, thus castrating our enemies
increase demand for newer, more efficient vehicles, thus helping our friends and providing more work for smart engineers.
I'd also like to see the cost of defending the Freedom of the Seas and access to the Persian Gulf put into the federal tax on gasoline, and ideally a uniform level of auto liability insurance as well so you only pay car insurance when you're actually _driving_ and there would be no more uninsured motorists.
Sounds like an awful lot of win to me, and the only folks who get screwed are the poor (who should be taking mass transit anyway) and SUV drivers (either phallic symbols or vehicles with lots of kids, whose schools I'm already subsidizing). I haven't even mentioned any sort of so-called global warming mitigation, largely because I believe that the current global warming craze is where all the Marxist pinkos went after their last pseudoscientific religion got debunked by the pimp hand of History. But turning the Arab lands back into a bunch of smelly, irrelevant migrant simpletons that are safe to ignore? I am all about that.
Because, to paraphrase Reagan, Milton Friedman, et al. :
If you want less of something, tax it.
I believe we should stop using petrofuels, therefore tax them more, but reward people for using biofuels. This turns into a wonderfully vicious/virtuous cycle where governments need to keep hiking petro taxes higher as petro use goes down. Until we are completely weaned from imported petroleum, _then_ start applying some taxes to biofuels.
This is just special pleadiing that since it's vegetable based fuel he shouldn't have to pay road tax. Wrong. He gets to pay road tax just like the rest of us, or don't use that fuel on public roads.
Frankly, biofuel users should pay no road tax, and instead road tax on petrofuels should be raised to compensate.
Until then? Less ambiguous bumper stickers are probably the prudent choice.
BTW, offroad fuel IIRC is dyed to stain fuel lines and if the stain is detected in an onroad vehicle it's supposed to be reported.. Veggie oil or biodiesel has no dyes...
"Sad, but I was p.o.ed that Deadwood and Rome ended too."
Agree on Deadwood, but as good as Rome was, I've already got the "I, Claudius" box set, and I don't know how much of a season is in the middle there.
Then again, jumping past Nero and focusing seasons on whole other reigns (Hadrian, Vespasian, Marcus Aurelius, Constantine) could be interesting, but that would essentially require whole new casts and sets..
Babylon 5 suffered in season 5 quite a bit, the whole psi war was weak IMO. Granted, that's in comparison to seasons 3 and 4, which few scifi shows in history can hope to do. And yeah, maybe stuff was pulled into S4 because of the ever-present fear of cancellation, but still.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, here's a question.. Say the average HD film in MPEG-4 takes up 25GB. How many of those can you fit on to a 1TB disk? About 40? My DVD collection is north of 250 and that's not even that big. My HDDVD collection is about 10 or so now, not counting some on order from Amazon. Even if Microsoft rented 1080p for the 360, I couldn't fit a whole film of it on there! All these fancy game consoles cum video players, the PS3 80GB could hold 3 movies?
Nope, as long as optical media price/density, durability and ease-of-use beat magnetic media, there will be some disc format or another. And while you have advances in magnetic media, optical isn't sitting still. Maybe when home video goes 4K we'll have the next gen of holographic disc to hold the 100GB for a 4k film..
HD-DVD's whole premise was to be quick and cheap for duplication houses. Since Blu-Ray disc prices are on average cheaper than HD-DVD, these seems not to have mattered.
I have no idea what you're talking about. HDDVD at retail chains I have found to be identical or better in price, and most catalog HDDVDs on Amazon I've seen for $19. I call shenanigans.
XBox 360 HDDVD drive is USB and works with at least XP and Vista (not sure about OSX I think it's unlikely). Check Doom9 forums for HDDVD crack information. You'd be able to rip HDDVDs if you had about 20-30G per movie to spare.
I'd hold out for the cheap burners though. I wonder who will make it to $99 for an internal SATA burner first?
Heh, that and a few features from Columbia (most notably _Monty Python & The Holy Grail_) that I would like. But Sony's stuff is largely popcorn summer garbage that I don't care about, and Disney's basically baby tranquilizer except for the Pixar films that look great upconverted on my XA2 (as does _South Park: The Movie_ unsurprisingly).
6 97243&pp=60 (Studio Canal releases Fox and MGM HDDVDs)
BUT.. (and it's a big but):
Most of those Bluray exclusive studios are exclusive only in the North America region. There are a number of films from those studios available on HDDVD in other regions (such as Europe and Asia) and since HDDVD has no region encoding and there's no more PAL/NTSC bullshit, you can order them from foreign distributors (or domestics that source from foreign) and get them here.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/printthread.php?t=
Well, perhaps Toshiba isn't any less evil "per capita" than Sony, but Sony's much bigger and more diversified, and has stuck little clumps of feces into an awful lot more pies than Toshiba..
Well _Monty Python & The Holy Grail_ is distributed by Columbia TriStar so it's unlikely to be available on HDDVD.. But I have the HD-DVD of _Excalibur_ and it's most definitely _not_ a model there..
(I wonder if Warners' has _Excalibur_ on Bluray yet?)
You can keep it.
Personally, I like having less infringement on my freedom (weaker copy protection, no region coding) and better video quality (initial BR discs were shitty MPEG2 rather than modern MPEG4, 3x the space use yet crappier video?), and avoiding Sony garbage is just a fringe benefit.
Plus, _The Big Lebowski_, _Heroes_, _Dune_ and _Serenity_ are exclusive. As will be _Scarface_ and the rest of the NBC Universal range.
You can keep _Star Wars_ and Disney stuff thanks.
Then again, if I can find a BR player for $199, maybe I'd consider giving it my receiver's remaining HDMI port.
Will we ever have more than tiny revolutions where real "thinking" becomes popular?
;) and if you define "real thinking" as intellectualism, you get bolsheviks, jacobins, national socialists, the whole bloody lot.
Revolutions run by intellectuals are pretty much bloody horrors. There's a difference between wisdom and intelligence (there's a reason why they're separate D&D stats
Actually, most of those horrors come from romanticism, which needs to be eradicated from "real thinking" when it comes to dealing with governments and regulating peoples' rights. Romanticism (as opposed to realism) may very well be too dangerous to be allowed to control things, if the 20th century is any guide.
Beauty is _not_ truth. That's just what beauty wants you to _think_, so you'll be able to rationalize your succumbing to romanticism.
using a real world benchmark, a very complex blender model. rendering time took LESS on the PPC G5 dual core than any comperable mhz dual core processor I could find.
Because the folks who ported that app didn't use the SSE3-optimized Accelerate.framework?
Or are you running in Rosetta?
(Is there a version that's compiled for SSE3?)
Perhaps these CPUs have better hardware floating-point support than Cell? IIRC Cell has limited double-precision support, though some enterprising folks have found ways to work around it and put Cell to good use..
And upgrading PPC cores is the easier way to go, being able to reuse plenty of existing firmware and associated hardware. Not to mention that IBM probably committed Cell to PS3 for quite awhile, and maybe they don't have the capacity to start spinning custom revs (say with more SPEs or with extended double support) with PS3 demand.
Also, Shadowrun has nothing to do with Shadowrun PnP. It should have been named something else.
That's an understatement.
For my part, I still wish crippling, incurable and fatal cancer on all involved with this abortion of a game. It's worse than Highlander 2.
Seem the only people that think there is still a format war, are Xbox360 HD-DVD add-on owners, and 80,000 vocal standalone HD-DVD owners... ... And folks who prefer the lesser of two weevils (HDDVD = no region coding, slightly milder DRM, lower cost media, ability to play back HD home burns on non-HD media), and folks who enjoy the NBC/Universal exclusive catalog (such as _Heroes_, _Battlestar Galactica_, _Shaun of the Dead_, _The Big Lebowski_, etc.. And presumably other Uni features such as _Scarface_).
I still think Sony is stupid enough to keep licensing costs high enough for BD players up over $300 for quite awhile yet, while HDDVD will probably be first to go to China and come out in the states for less than $200. I'm thinking Toshiba branded players for $200 for XMas, Chinese knockoffs for $150 or so.
Folks don't have enough bandwidth for digital delivery of HD, and nobody's doing 1080p digital delivery yet AFAIK (everything I've seen on XBL is 720p)
There is a suspicion that the magnetic field generated by the new solar rays is interfering with their operation.
Maybe they can hack out some sort of EM shielding from noncritical parts in the ISS or the shuttle?
How do they ground electronics in space anyway?
If a star 100LY away goes supernova and launches this much matter our way, how much warning would we have before the planet was destroyed?
Would this much matter at that speed ignite Jupiter?
This is the sort of thing that helps me not care too much about what goes on in the world, we could all be snuffed out in an instant by something like this, asteroid strike, supervolcano, etc..
I'd also like to see the cost of defending the Freedom of the Seas and access to the Persian Gulf put into the federal tax on gasoline, and ideally a uniform level of auto liability insurance as well so you only pay car insurance when you're actually _driving_ and there would be no more uninsured motorists.
Sounds like an awful lot of win to me, and the only folks who get screwed are the poor (who should be taking mass transit anyway) and SUV drivers (either phallic symbols or vehicles with lots of kids, whose schools I'm already subsidizing). I haven't even mentioned any sort of so-called global warming mitigation, largely because I believe that the current global warming craze is where all the Marxist pinkos went after their last pseudoscientific religion got debunked by the pimp hand of History. But turning the Arab lands back into a bunch of smelly, irrelevant migrant simpletons that are safe to ignore? I am all about that.
Because, to paraphrase Reagan, Milton Friedman, et al. :
If you want less of something, tax it.
I believe we should stop using petrofuels, therefore tax them more, but reward people for using biofuels. This turns into a wonderfully vicious/virtuous cycle where governments need to keep hiking petro taxes higher as petro use goes down. Until we are completely weaned from imported petroleum, _then_ start applying some taxes to biofuels.
Only in proportion to the petrodiesel content. B20 = 80% road tax, B50 = 50% road tax, etc..
(also, "more ambiguous", not less.. wizard needs coffee badly...)
I was wondering where that Nucleon ended up...
This is just special pleadiing that since it's vegetable based fuel he shouldn't have to pay road tax. Wrong. He gets to pay road tax just like the rest of us, or don't use that fuel on public roads.
Frankly, biofuel users should pay no road tax, and instead road tax on petrofuels should be raised to compensate.
Until then? Less ambiguous bumper stickers are probably the prudent choice.
BTW, offroad fuel IIRC is dyed to stain fuel lines and if the stain is detected in an onroad vehicle it's supposed to be reported.. Veggie oil or biodiesel has no dyes...
... So I switched channels, then went back and saw the credits.
Weird.
Still, nice way for Phil to go.. A distant Irish relation shared a similar fate, _NEVER_ pass out on the curb while waiting for the bus...
.... _The Big Lebowski_ is slated to be an HDDVD exclusive.
/abide
That just made my mind up for me.
"Sad, but I was p.o.ed that Deadwood and Rome ended too."
Agree on Deadwood, but as good as Rome was, I've already got the "I, Claudius" box set, and I don't know how much of a season is in the middle there.
Then again, jumping past Nero and focusing seasons on whole other reigns (Hadrian, Vespasian, Marcus Aurelius, Constantine) could be interesting, but that would essentially require whole new casts and sets..
... Maybe 4 seasons is the charm?
Babylon 5 suffered in season 5 quite a bit, the whole psi war was weak IMO. Granted, that's in comparison to seasons 3 and 4, which few scifi shows in history can hope to do. And yeah, maybe stuff was pulled into S4 because of the ever-present fear of cancellation, but still.
DAMN!!
Wait, isn't Australia surrounded by water?
And filled with lots of uninhabitable desert: perfect for solar desalinization...