No, Aero Glass steals GPU cycles away, not CPU cycles.
I set up Server 2008 on my 8-core 1.8 GHz Barcelona system with an ATI 2600 GPU, and the GUI was noticeably MORE performant once I turned Glass back on.
Try using a CPU monitor as you drag a big window around the screen. You'll see much more CPU utilization using software rendering than hardware.
Have you ever watched those discs? Horrible, lowest common denominator quality, compressed onto a single layer so they don't have to pay the extra tens of cents it would cost for a dual-layer disc.
I think those are a great example of what I'm talking about - since the upside revenue of each title is so small, they don't have the budget to add any real value.
I want content, and want to pay for content, that's been done well and with pride by professioanls. I want it well encoded, with good audio, and with clever easter eggs in the menus. This is MST3K for goodness sake! If there was ever a series demanding nifty interactivity, that's it.
Economics lesson (Re:This is why)
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Joel Hodgson Answers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It makes perfect sense. With semi-made up numbers...
Say it costs $100K/disc to get to the first copy, in content licensing fees, remastering, compression, menu authoring, glass master. That's fixed, and needs to be paid back by selling more than that first disc
Each disc costs an additional $2 to make in dupliation fees, packaging, shipping to distributors, etcetera.
Let's say Rhino gets 60% of the retail price of $10/disc. And give 10% of retail price in royalty to Bad Brains. So, at $10 they net $4/disc. To recoup that initial $100K, they'd need to sell 25K copies (and would target 2x that - you don't grow business by hoping to break even per project, and you need overhead to run the business overall).
But lets say half the potential audience would pirate the content under some justification or another. All of a sudden, they can only sell 12.5K copies. For 12.5, they'd need to net $8 per disc to break even. Which would raise the retail price by $8 (since they only keep half of retail). So, $18/disc instead of $10/disc. And sure, the higher price could further incresae piracy to a certain point (although it's not clear how "elastic" the price is at which people who would pirate content above but not below is), so maybe they have to go up to $20 to compensate.
And you can imagine that there's a point at which piracy shrinks both the potential market and pricing flexibility to the point where a company just doesn't bother to release the content, or skimps on production quality to get that initial $100K down to, say, $50K upfront by eliminating extras and scriping on video quality.
Along similar lines, if people don't buy enough copies of Joel's new show to cover production costs, they'll either stop doing it, or do it more cheaply.
Now, the above dynamic is certainly nothing that's been added by internet piracy - art has been struggling for how to finance itself for centuries. But "free riders" who consume but don't pay for content will fine that the volume and quality of content they're interested in goes down if more and more people don't wind up contributing, directly or indirectly, to its cost of production. Moral/legal issues asside, the economic consequences of changing how content gets funded are hard to avoid. Widespread piracy will tend to shift the focus of content production to stuff that appeals to demographics that pirate less (hence all the teen and boomer stuff on the Billboard charts these days), or content with other funding mechanisms, like infomercials and public service content.
Assuming that I live another 50 years, I'd pay out $9000 for Zune or equivalent service. I'd pay a lot more to buy the amount of music I'd listen to in that time frame otherwise. Heck, I've certainly downloaded a good $500 of music in the last 24 hours, which is several years of subscription fees.
But do you really listen to 30 year old recordings much? I listen to stuff that old, but music I like that that's old typicall has has multiple remsterings and re-releases in that timeframe. And I'm really not interested in having to keep my act together to keep a digital archive together for 30 years, without any backup failures, etcetera.
Maybe I've been a heavier music consumer than you, but if I live for another 50 years, I couldn't spend as much buying music as I did from 18-30. Zune Pass works well for folks who'd otherwise buy at least a disc or two a month on average.
What is the world of music sharing as it would be? The unrestricted ability to distribute music without fear of sanction?
Seems like there's some tipping point at which sharing becomes copyright infringement. We can argue where that point is, but it might be nice if you could explicitly state where you think it should be.
...and the above is an excellent argument for a music subscription service, so you don't need to deal with the mechanics of preserving files.
I much prefer the Zune Marketplace Zunepass, and URGE before that, as a model. A fixed monthly fee, and I can download whatever I want, whenever I want. Last night I downloaded all of the Rock Band tracks, including most of the albums they were off of, and 85% or so of them were available via subscription (the Metallica stuff required a purchased download). Nice way to sample stuff without having to pay hundreds of dollars.
Much bigger screen and broader format support? Certainly better than the Classic for video watching, with a lot more capacity and a lower price than the Touch.
The Nielsen numbers don't count the "free" discs that come with a player, since they aren't processed at retail. Lots of HD DVD players are bundled wih 5 or 10 free HD DVD titles, which the Neilson numbers don't capture, and which account for a substantial portion of the discs out there (the average PS3 user has only about 1 BD disc last I heard).
Of course, the studios who make decisions about format support know how many of their titles are getting bundled.
HD DVD offers DVD backward compatibilty in two ways that BD can't
First, dual-sided discs. One side of HD DVD, and one of DVD, both full capacity. Lots of discs using this are in the market.
Second, mixing DVD and HD DVD layers on a single side of a disc. The disc can be two layers of HD DVD and one of DVD, or two of DVD and one of HD. That would allow studios to publish ALL DVD discs with 15 GB of HD DVD data, and not have to worry about any players being able to play the disc (even the PS3 could play the DVD layers).
BD uses a different thickness of substrate, so it's capable of either of those modes.
Also, note that the Zune 4/8/80 has the new touch-sensitive controller for velocity-sensitive scrolling. Quite an improvement over the Zune 30 one which just clicked.
The Zune has an optional subscription service - flat rate "all you can eat" music downloads for up to three PCs and three devices. It'll stream to the Xbox as well.
...and for content available without a DRM license, Zune Marketplace makes it available for purchase as 256 Kbps MP3.
Although my preference is for the flat-rate subscription service, since I can listen to all the music I want on multiple PCs and devices for a monthly fee, and don't have to worry about buying music I decide I don't like.
Actually, if you were using Office 2007, your papers probably would look a lot better.
Nice new templates, nice help in building good object oriented documented with styles instead of manual formatting. Easy wasy to apply appropriate styles to charts and tables that match the overall design of the document.
Say what you will about Office, but the new version is a big step forward in helping users to make more attractive documents.
Sure, there's off-the-shelf stuff to use as a starting point. But those need to get bought and integrated. This is like saying building a database is easy because SQL Server is cheap and readily available.
That said, just think of the database behind all this. It needs to store accurate information on all BBC shows. Certainly not trivial, just for that component!
0 days to market? Ignoring all the player side stuff, how long do you think it took the BBC to build the system that can ingest multiple channels of real-time video data, encode it to a distributable format, flag it with metadata, etcetera.
Building a player is only a minority of the work in a content publishing scheme of this scale.
I worked remotely for Terran Interactive/Media 100 from 1999-2001, at home for myself 2001-2005, and remotely for Microsoft since 2005.
Overall working from home has worked out quite nicely. Both companies are pretty distributed, and a big part of my role has been doing presentations at trade shows and at client sites, so no matter where I was based, there would be some visit to other sites, and also visits with coworkers during events.
As for visibility, both were organizations very much driven my email, so I was in the thick of it as much as everyone else. At Microsoft, people I've been working with on projects for a while are still sometimes surprised to realize I don't report out of Redmond (easier since it's only a 3 hour drive from Portland, so it's easy to drop in for a couple of days a few times a month).
In either organization, there were interesting jobs that I could have taken that would have required a relocation, but I never felt punished for declining them, and I've been consistently reviewed well.
And there are a lot of pluses for working from home. My main focus in video encoding, so being able to pop down to the basement to double-check on a render after the kids are in bed is a lot easier than having to go back to the office, or try to remote into HD video. I certainly did my time doing 3 am render babysitting in the mid-90's, and I'm happy to be done with that. Plus I can have a lot of video gear and 7.1 audio in my own basement, which is 12'x20' - much bigger than any office I could get on a corporate campus, and I can make a lot more noise as well.
Schedule wise, it works well with having kids. In a typical day, I'll work 9-3, do kid stuff after school through dinner and bedtime, and then 7-10. Looking at relocation options a couple of times, I never saw a good case where, adding in commute time, I could really have both breakfast and dinner with the family on an average day.
I travel more than if I was based at an office (I do 3-4 trips a month, mostly 1-2 days each), but not overwhelmingly slow. And with little kids around, sometimes a good night's sleep in a hotel bed is exactly what I need:).
There are hundreds of titles out there - I'm sure some of them have a shot like you describe. There's titles like King Kong which are 3+ hours and over a year old which provide extremely good video quality, even for some very challenging scenes.
Yeah, that's what I get for posting from my phone:).
In general, H.264 and VC-1 are about 2-3x as efficient as MPEG-2 at HD data rates.
Also, DVD isn't 720p24 @ 10 Mbps. It's 480p24 @ around 4.5 Mbps average 8 Mbps peak for your typical Hollywood movie. All optical disc encoding is variable bit rate, so we can use more bits when the complexity gets higher.
Also, note that the bits per pixel required for a given codec goes down as the frame size goes up, since there's relatively less image detail as the frame gets bigger.
In general, with our current VC-1 implementations, we hit transparency to the source somewhere in the 9-18 Mbps range depending on the source content.
Once content visually looks like the source, more bits aren't going to make it look any differnt. Not having enough bits is a big problem, but having more than enough is just burning capacity.
Try making some JPEG exports in the 80-100 quality range, and look at the connection between file size and vistual quality. You'll not that there's a point where a higher quality doesn't look any different, but the file size keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Also, nothing is wrong with my eyes or my television, since I'm a professional compressionist who works with professional grade video displays:).
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If pudge was to work for Microsoft, he'd get free health care and see how the European model works!
http://members.microsoft.com/careers/mslife/benefits/plan.mspx#healthbenefits
No, Aero Glass steals GPU cycles away, not CPU cycles.
I set up Server 2008 on my 8-core 1.8 GHz Barcelona system with an ATI 2600 GPU, and the GUI was noticeably MORE performant once I turned Glass back on.
Try using a CPU monitor as you drag a big window around the screen. You'll see much more CPU utilization using software rendering than hardware.
Silverlight has always been cross platform Mac/Win. Every beta and full release has been Mac/Win day and date.
Linux is coming via Moonlight.
Silverlight has been shipping on Mac and Windows day-and-date. A Linux version based on Mono is being developed with Microsoft's cooperation.
If you have non-DRM'ed 1080p content, it will play at 1080p just fine in Vista!
Try it - there's plenty around.
Have you ever watched those discs? Horrible, lowest common denominator quality, compressed onto a single layer so they don't have to pay the extra tens of cents it would cost for a dual-layer disc.
I think those are a great example of what I'm talking about - since the upside revenue of each title is so small, they don't have the budget to add any real value.
I want content, and want to pay for content, that's been done well and with pride by professioanls. I want it well encoded, with good audio, and with clever easter eggs in the menus. This is MST3K for goodness sake! If there was ever a series demanding nifty interactivity, that's it.
It makes perfect sense. With semi-made up numbers...
Say it costs $100K/disc to get to the first copy, in content licensing fees, remastering, compression, menu authoring, glass master. That's fixed, and needs to be paid back by selling more than that first disc
Each disc costs an additional $2 to make in dupliation fees, packaging, shipping to distributors, etcetera.
Let's say Rhino gets 60% of the retail price of $10/disc. And give 10% of retail price in royalty to Bad Brains. So, at $10 they net $4/disc. To recoup that initial $100K, they'd need to sell 25K copies (and would target 2x that - you don't grow business by hoping to break even per project, and you need overhead to run the business overall).
But lets say half the potential audience would pirate the content under some justification or another. All of a sudden, they can only sell 12.5K copies. For 12.5, they'd need to net $8 per disc to break even. Which would raise the retail price by $8 (since they only keep half of retail). So, $18/disc instead of $10/disc. And sure, the higher price could further incresae piracy to a certain point (although it's not clear how "elastic" the price is at which people who would pirate content above but not below is), so maybe they have to go up to $20 to compensate.
And you can imagine that there's a point at which piracy shrinks both the potential market and pricing flexibility to the point where a company just doesn't bother to release the content, or skimps on production quality to get that initial $100K down to, say, $50K upfront by eliminating extras and scriping on video quality.
Along similar lines, if people don't buy enough copies of Joel's new show to cover production costs, they'll either stop doing it, or do it more cheaply.
Now, the above dynamic is certainly nothing that's been added by internet piracy - art has been struggling for how to finance itself for centuries. But "free riders" who consume but don't pay for content will fine that the volume and quality of content they're interested in goes down if more and more people don't wind up contributing, directly or indirectly, to its cost of production. Moral/legal issues asside, the economic consequences of changing how content gets funded are hard to avoid. Widespread piracy will tend to shift the focus of content production to stuff that appeals to demographics that pirate less (hence all the teen and boomer stuff on the Billboard charts these days), or content with other funding mechanisms, like infomercials and public service content.
Assuming immortality :).
Assuming that I live another 50 years, I'd pay out $9000 for Zune or equivalent service. I'd pay a lot more to buy the amount of music I'd listen to in that time frame otherwise. Heck, I've certainly downloaded a good $500 of music in the last 24 hours, which is several years of subscription fees.
But do you really listen to 30 year old recordings much? I listen to stuff that old, but music I like that that's old typicall has has multiple remsterings and re-releases in that timeframe. And I'm really not interested in having to keep my act together to keep a digital archive together for 30 years, without any backup failures, etcetera.
Maybe I've been a heavier music consumer than you, but if I live for another 50 years, I couldn't spend as much buying music as I did from 18-30. Zune Pass works well for folks who'd otherwise buy at least a disc or two a month on average.
What is the world of music sharing as it would be? The unrestricted ability to distribute music without fear of sanction?
Seems like there's some tipping point at which sharing becomes copyright infringement. We can argue where that point is, but it might be nice if you could explicitly state where you think it should be.
...and the above is an excellent argument for a music subscription service, so you don't need to deal with the mechanics of preserving files.
I much prefer the Zune Marketplace Zunepass, and URGE before that, as a model. A fixed monthly fee, and I can download whatever I want, whenever I want. Last night I downloaded all of the Rock Band tracks, including most of the albums they were off of, and 85% or so of them were available via subscription (the Metallica stuff required a purchased download). Nice way to sample stuff without having to pay hundreds of dollars.
Much bigger screen and broader format support? Certainly better than the Classic for video watching, with a lot more capacity and a lower price than the Touch.
The Nielsen numbers don't count the "free" discs that come with a player, since they aren't processed at retail. Lots of HD DVD players are bundled wih 5 or 10 free HD DVD titles, which the Neilson numbers don't capture, and which account for a substantial portion of the discs out there (the average PS3 user has only about 1 BD disc last I heard).
Of course, the studios who make decisions about format support know how many of their titles are getting bundled.
HD DVD offers DVD backward compatibilty in two ways that BD can't
First, dual-sided discs. One side of HD DVD, and one of DVD, both full capacity. Lots of discs using this are in the market.
Second, mixing DVD and HD DVD layers on a single side of a disc. The disc can be two layers of HD DVD and one of DVD, or two of DVD and one of HD. That would allow studios to publish ALL DVD discs with 15 GB of HD DVD data, and not have to worry about any players being able to play the disc (even the PS3 could play the DVD layers).
BD uses a different thickness of substrate, so it's capable of either of those modes.
None of you has ever used Hotmail :)?
If you like Rhapsody, you'll like ZunePass as well. Same basic concept, but I like the GUI better.
Or keep on using existig MP3 libraries, or buy music. Zune supports all these models.
Also, note that the Zune 4/8/80 has the new touch-sensitive controller for velocity-sensitive scrolling. Quite an improvement over the Zune 30 one which just clicked.
The Zune has an optional subscription service - flat rate "all you can eat" music downloads for up to three PCs and three devices. It'll stream to the Xbox as well.
...and for content available without a DRM license, Zune Marketplace makes it available for purchase as 256 Kbps MP3.
Although my preference is for the flat-rate subscription service, since I can listen to all the music I want on multiple PCs and devices for a monthly fee, and don't have to worry about buying music I decide I don't like.
Actually, if you were using Office 2007, your papers probably would look a lot better.
Nice new templates, nice help in building good object oriented documented with styles instead of manual formatting. Easy wasy to apply appropriate styles to charts and tables that match the overall design of the document.
Say what you will about Office, but the new version is a big step forward in helping users to make more attractive documents.
Sure, there's off-the-shelf stuff to use as a starting point. But those need to get bought and integrated. This is like saying building a database is easy because SQL Server is cheap and readily available.
That said, just think of the database behind all this. It needs to store accurate information on all BBC shows. Certainly not trivial, just for that component!
0 days to market? Ignoring all the player side stuff, how long do you think it took the BBC to build the system that can ingest multiple channels of real-time video data, encode it to a distributable format, flag it with metadata, etcetera.
Building a player is only a minority of the work in a content publishing scheme of this scale.
I worked remotely for Terran Interactive/Media 100 from 1999-2001, at home for myself 2001-2005, and remotely for Microsoft since 2005.
:).
Overall working from home has worked out quite nicely. Both companies are pretty distributed, and a big part of my role has been doing presentations at trade shows and at client sites, so no matter where I was based, there would be some visit to other sites, and also visits with coworkers during events.
As for visibility, both were organizations very much driven my email, so I was in the thick of it as much as everyone else. At Microsoft, people I've been working with on projects for a while are still sometimes surprised to realize I don't report out of Redmond (easier since it's only a 3 hour drive from Portland, so it's easy to drop in for a couple of days a few times a month).
In either organization, there were interesting jobs that I could have taken that would have required a relocation, but I never felt punished for declining them, and I've been consistently reviewed well.
And there are a lot of pluses for working from home. My main focus in video encoding, so being able to pop down to the basement to double-check on a render after the kids are in bed is a lot easier than having to go back to the office, or try to remote into HD video. I certainly did my time doing 3 am render babysitting in the mid-90's, and I'm happy to be done with that. Plus I can have a lot of video gear and 7.1 audio in my own basement, which is 12'x20' - much bigger than any office I could get on a corporate campus, and I can make a lot more noise as well.
Schedule wise, it works well with having kids. In a typical day, I'll work 9-3, do kid stuff after school through dinner and bedtime, and then 7-10. Looking at relocation options a couple of times, I never saw a good case where, adding in commute time, I could really have both breakfast and dinner with the family on an average day.
I travel more than if I was based at an office (I do 3-4 trips a month, mostly 1-2 days each), but not overwhelmingly slow. And with little kids around, sometimes a good night's sleep in a hotel bed is exactly what I need
There are hundreds of titles out there - I'm sure some of them have a shot like you describe. There's titles like King Kong which are 3+ hours and over a year old which provide extremely good video quality, even for some very challenging scenes.
Yeah, that's what I get for posting from my phone :).
In general, H.264 and VC-1 are about 2-3x as efficient as MPEG-2 at HD data rates.
Also, DVD isn't 720p24 @ 10 Mbps. It's 480p24 @ around 4.5 Mbps average 8 Mbps peak for your typical Hollywood movie. All optical disc encoding is variable bit rate, so we can use more bits when the complexity gets higher.
Also, note that the bits per pixel required for a given codec goes down as the frame size goes up, since there's relatively less image detail as the frame gets bigger.
In general, with our current VC-1 implementations, we hit transparency to the source somewhere in the 9-18 Mbps range depending on the source content.
Once content visually looks like the source, more bits aren't going to make it look any differnt. Not having enough bits is a big problem, but having more than enough is just burning capacity.
:).
Try making some JPEG exports in the 80-100 quality range, and look at the connection between file size and vistual quality. You'll not that there's a point where a higher quality doesn't look any different, but the file size keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Also, nothing is wrong with my eyes or my television, since I'm a professional compressionist who works with professional grade video displays