Okay, so I AM the world's leading expert on video compression codecs and formats (no, really, I am). I cover the same ground in my book, and in a series of articles for DV magazine over the last five years. So I'm pretty picky on this kind of things. But these guys couldn't compress themselves out of a wet paper bag.
Some fundamental errors:
They're using MPEG-2 sources, which are already highly compressed (this has been amply covered by other posters).
They talk about converting to an "uncompressed" AVI, but never specify which flavor of uncompressed. They should have used a lossless codec that uses the native Y'CbCr color space of video, like Huffyuv. They way they just said "uncompressed" suggests they used the AVI "None" codec, which is uncompressed RGB. This causes two lossly color space conversions - one from the Y'CbCr of the source to RGB, and then back to Y'CbCr in the delivery codec.
They used Indeo 5.1 as their intermediate codec. This is terrible. Indeo uses what's called YUV-9 sampling. There is only one measurement of color per 4x4 block of pixels. This throws away 75% of the color information from the DVD (which uses 4:2:0 sampling, with 2x2 blocks), before it even touches a codec. And this results in very ugly blocks whenever there are highly saturated regions with sharp contrast. So, all the output is going to look highly compressed when rendered from these intermediates, even if further compression is lossless. Look at the Spider Man test frame for an example. Notice the red blooming around the shoulders of the vocalist. And the color everywhere is very muddled. Indeo can also be slow to decode, unless it was encoded with all keyframes. And how slow it is to decode will vary with the tool, which probably added measurable error to their encoding time measurements.
They don't know the difference between Sorenson Video 3, which comes free with QuickTime, and Sorenson Video 3.3 Professional, which you have to pay for and is what Apple uses for their movie trailers. With the Pro version, critical features like B-frames and 2-pass VBR are available.
Apple's MPEG-4 encoder isn't very good - 1-pass only, tuned for speed more than quality. A file with the exact same compatibility could be made with Squeeze, Compression Master, Envivio, etcetera with MUCH better quality. And the Divx MPEG-4 codec is, of course, also MPEG-4.
They didn't use 2-pass encoding! No quality-concious encoder would ever put content on spinning disc without using 2-pass. And they didn't mention most of the other encoding settings they used, which by context I'd guess were basic defaults.
That's from an initial skim. If I spent more time with the article.
In summary, these guys spent hours and hours analyzing the results of tests, where they would have been WAY better off spending an hour asking someone who knew anything about video compression how to administer this kind of test.
Oddly enough, their results are vaguely like you'd expect - WMV9 and DivX do well, Sorenson less so, and Apple MPEG-4 at the rear. Done properly, I imagine WMV9 would have had a slight lead, and Sorenson 3 Pro would have been a lot closer to DivX. And no one uses Apple's MPEG-4 codec for content distribution. QuickTime's decoder is fine, so folks would use a professional-grade MPEG-4 encoder instead.
I present at 6-8 trade shows a year, for about five years now. I've also done a lot of booth duty over the years, and covered shows as press.
One thing the original article missed is the big difference between people who pay the $300-$1200 to attend the sessions and seminars, and those who get the free (theoretically you have to pay ~$50, but free passes are very readily available).
Those two groups have very different experiences. Exhibit-only folks don't hear any sessions other than sponsored sessions. Full attendees get to do sessions, and often free food and decent swag, like conference bags. Best show ever for that kind of thing is Apple's WWDC. For example, free sit-down dinners, all the Krusty Kreme you can eat in the morning, fresh Jamba Juice throughout the day, an honestly good bag, and something Impressive. Last year, everyone got a free iSight, for example.
Lots of people I've hears complaining about how lame a show is are exhibit-only, and are missing the bulk of it. Also, folks in the booths are often told to prioritize their attention depending on the badge type. Attendees and press get the most attention - attendees since they've already shown they're willing to spend some money, and press because they're press. Speaker badges are pretty effective as well. Exhibitor badges make get a close look to see if it's from a competitor. Exhibit-only are on the bottom of the totem pole - they'll get talked to, but with less attention than any of the above.
The other thing that may not be apparent is the cost of the booths for exhibitors. A small booth rental, plus the cost of shipping of equipment, and transport for booth workers can easily be $100,000 for a significant show. I'm sure companies like Sony spent well in excess of $10M for a big show like NAB.
My personal favorite show is DV Expo, just because it's a fun group of folks, and at a human scale. NAB is where I do business development for the next year. WWDC wins for sheer geek envy.
Yep. If we ever had a real conservative government, as opposed to the inexplicable religous-reactionary win-at-any-cost bunch in office now, cutting agriculture and textile trade restrictions.
I've never understood while the failure of a family farm is some existential tragedy, while the failure of a family restaurant is the market at work. The government shouldn't be choosing individual industries as winners and losers.
Then you wind up with stupidity like steel tariffs that cost more jobs in manufacturing and shipping then are saved in steel production.
I guess if you have to be a failing industry, make darn sure to be in a swing state with a lot of electoral votes.
It's frustrating to me, as a liberal Democrat, to have to take up the mantle of hard-nosed realism that the Republicans seem to have forgotten was their job.
Aren't we on the same planet on India? The money doesn't really leave in any case. The difference between a job going across the country and across the ocean is a matter of degree, not of fundamentals.
India does have a dumb policy of not allowing immigration, so moving there directly isn't an option unless you have a job there, but I haven't had any trouble working on projects where some engineers have been in India from here.
Anyway, lots of people talk about a "flight to the bottom" like this has ever actually happened in the history of world trade.
A century ago South Carolina had a per capita income of less than 20% of, say, Nevada. And without an income tax, federal spending was much less important than state spending.
So, a hundred years ago, your argument would suggest that Nevada bar imports of products from South Carolina.
But, of course they couldn't since the most effective free trade pact in the world is the constitution of the united states. And in fact, requiring fully free trade between states was one of the big reasons why the constitution was needed to replace the articles of confederation, which didn't prevent states from having tariffs against other states.
The track record of free trade overwhelmingly shows it is of substantial advantage to both parties.
And the Romans made the same mistake that most folks here are focusing on. They focused on labor-intensive projects, and actively resisted labor saving methods of construction, in order to provide more jobs for the "masses." Which resulted in a busy society, but one that was much less productive than it should have been. I'm sure they would much rather have had a lot more, and efficiently built granaries, city walls, etcetera, in order to hold off against the barbarian invasions. Plus having freed up some labor for a more effective military.
In the long run, labor saving techniques just means more gets done per worker. Bear in mind in that at least 90% of the jobs of 100 years ago no longer exist, but that we have a lot less than 90% unemployment.
The solution to free trade isn't less free trade, but a good social safty net and retraining, so that workers who aren't competitive can become competitive. Reducing trade is a subsidy by another name, and an expensive one at that.
Nope, outsoucing will create more jobs than not outsourcing.
The choice isn't between letting jobs go overseas and not. The choice is whether to let US companies make products in the most efficient way or not.
Let's say that Dell isn't allowed to have non-US call centers. And thus, say, a Legend computer is $200 cheaper since they can have their tech support in China. Then ban the import of competers from China. Then US companies will have to pay, say $200 more per computer than companies we compete with. We just got less competitive! Plus, the computers are just getting assembled here, so let's require that all the components be built in the US. Those used to be a lot of high paying jobs.
So, now Taiwanese motherboards, South Korean RAM, etcetera. So, all of a sudden the cheap parts of the computer get a lot more expensive. And the part added by US companies, the CPU and the OS, wind up getting a smaller part of the pie. And they start making less money because they sell fewer units.
And now buying a personal computer in the US costs $1000-$2000 more than in other countries. So, now, hiring a worker in the US gets that more expensive.
Anything gotten better yet?
Don't think about this as China and India stealing our jobs. Think of it as they gave us lots of extra jobs during the decades they opted out of the global economy, and are just now getting back to where they should have been in the first place.
If people are really worried about familes not having enough food to eat and clothes to wear, let's end the massively damanging trade barriers against third world nations on food and textiles! Food and Clothing will cost half as much, and that'll cost a lot less than doubling unemployment payments. And dropping farm supports would go a long way towards closing the deficit.
People are always threatened by free trade, since the benefits are diffuse, but the pain concentrated.
So, here's a thought experiment:
Explain why you think outsourcing to India is bad, or evil, or should be illegal.
And then explain why the same isn't true of outsourcing to say, South Carolina.
South Carolina has lower environmental and labor standards that the rest of the us. Lower wages.
You really want every state to make their own cars? Furniture? Grow their own oranges? Wouldn't that make more jobs everywhere.
In fact, couldn't we cure suburban blight by preventing cities from importing products from their suburbs?
Now, how is that a better alternative?
And how's that meaningfully different than what's happening in India.
And yes, I am a liberal Democrat who works in the technology industry. The job that might get exported is my own. But I've also worked on a job where engineering was in India, and product management was in the US. That particular product was something that wouldn't have been worth doing at US labor rates. In many cases, this isn't a matter of exporting jobs, but creating jobs that didn't exist before, or couldn't have had as much labor behind them.
Another way to think of it: How much extra are you willing to spend on products in order to have them done in the USA. Are you willing to have your support contracts 4x higher to have an American answer them. Are you willing to pay 4x more for clothes? $400 Nikes?
Me neither.
Moreso, I'd rather have Africa get richer exporting food, Pakistan richer exporting clothes, and then get to pay even less for those goods. Ever wonder how much each of us is paying in tax dollars per American farmer?
Note that, if your income stays still, and you pay twice as much for everything, you just had a 50% pay cut. Anyone think outsourcing would get as bad as that? Nope.
As David Ricardo proved a couple of centuries ago, the strongest economy is one where everyone does what they're best at. Trying to pick winners and losers just drags everyone down.
The problem with our economy today isn't outsourcing and free trade. It's the most bolluxed up, politicized, fundamentally ignorant economics team in the history of the country. I would have been hard pressed to find a way to have spent MORE money with LESS economic stimulus than the the Bush economic "plan."
I don't see the case for the Aeron being overpriced.
Assuming a one weeks for 50 weeks a year for 8 hours a day, that's 2000 hours a week.
Assuming the chair lasts for five years (mine has been going strong for four, with a replacement of the lumbar support covered under warranty), that's 10,000 hours of use.
So, if you paid an overpriced $1200, that works out to $0.12/hour of use. Very price effective luxury. WAY better than spending more for a better car, for example. Not quite as good as the lovely luxury price-performance of 3-ply toilet paper.
Another way of looking at it is in costs saved. For example, it doesn't take too many fewer chiropractor visits to pay for the chair.
Bigger news for me is the new DSL Deluxe plan. Right now I have a 640 Kbps symmetrical DSL. I pay over $150/month today for the Qwest fee and my DSL provider (the highly excellent Spirit One).
With the new DSL Delux plan, I'll more than double my rated and actual speeds, and for me uploads are really important. Plus it'll be way cheaper - only $78 total for a corporate grade account (8 static IP's, 8 mailboxes, web hosting, professional grade support contract).
It's really, really good stuff. And it certainly had the intended effect of getting me to stop thinking wistfully about cable.
Only drawback is I'll have to switch from my ancient Cisco 675 in CAP mode to DMT, which will add 16 ms to my ping time. But I think 16 ms is a fair price to pay for more than doubled bandwidth and saving $80/mo.
The best you could hope for, and it's a distant hope, is that when we're subvocalizing, the neural activity that controls the throat is active, but suppressed by some other system. And then there is some way to measure that activity.
When someone is speaking, measuring nerve impulses could happen, but by definition those nerves would be suppressed when subvocalizing.
To flip it around, let's look at the visual system, about which we know much more. We can kind of track how some very basic bit-map like activity happens in the back of the brain. But the closer it becomes something like "seeing" the more complicated and unknown everything gets. There aren't neurons for symbols - consciousness seems to be an emergent property of the system. Even if you knew the complete state of the system, you likely wouldn't know what it "meant."
So, pretty much, the more interesting the thing you would want to learn by this mechanism, the less likely it's going to be.
I could imagine that some combination of fortunate neuroanatomy and future science could make reading sub-vocalization possible, maybe.
As for your example, I have no real idea what you're thinking. I know what you type, and I can make a mental model of why I think you're doing it. But I'm probably wrong. For example, I really don't have any idea why you decided this conversation is worth having, just like you don't know why I'm spending time with it either. In fact, NEITHER of us really has any idea of our OWN motivations. We make guesses, but I think they're largely post-facto, and unprovable hypotheses.
And in what form is the speech coded in the brain? It isn't like there is one neuron per letter or sound or something. Different parts of the brain are responsible for different parts of speech.
Also, at best you'd then have a way to find out what someone is saying without listening to them. But how about when someone isn't talking? Even though your perception of consciousness may seem verbal, that doesn't mean that there is anything like a verbal "signal" that could be extracted.
Even if we had a moment by moment reading of the status of every neuron in your brain, knowing what you're thinking is likely impossible.
The brain is kind of like macroeconomics. We know a lot about the high level behavior, and the very low level behavior, but how one controls the other is only very vaguely understood.
So what's the signal of thought? What symbols would tell me what you're thinking?
Telepathy or brain wiping?
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Comic Book Physics
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· Score: 4, Interesting
But if you put someone else's impulses on your brain, wouldn't you become them?
Telepathy is basically an emulation problem. Even if there was some way of extracting the neural state of someone else's brain, what would you do with that information?
What you're suggesting is that you would have enough brain-power (fuzzy concept) to emulate someone else's mind, AND be able to interpret that emulation in some fashion. Assuming you're both human, how would that work?
And what would a telepathy actually perceive? Someone's sub-vocalized self-commentary? An echo of how they're feeling. Drill deep, and you'll realize you really don't have much of an idea of what telepathy would actually be like.
Heck, it's not like our own self-awareness is much beyond post-hoc justification.
Well, it's not like every dollar of your store purchase goes back to the creators. There's the store markup, distributor markup, etcetera. Plus the cost of actually making the DVD and its packaging.
I'd be surprised if even 50% of the cost you paid went back to the entities who financed the show in the first place. So, you're really looking at 4-5 M sales of a DVD to cover the costs of production. That would be a massive DVD hit.
I'm sure FireFly will sell far more than well enough to cover the costs of making the DVD, and will probably cover some or all of the losses on making the series.
Japan has had a long tradition of direct-to-video series. But that's really an artifact of there being an artificially low number of TV channels there. In the US, there are so many darn TV stations that almost any show you can imagine can get broadcast somewhere. I'm sure USA, Spike, or other lower-tier cable network would be happy to broadcast FireFly, they just wouldn't sell enough ads to cover the production cost. So even if you did a show mainly to sell DVDs, you'd still broadcast it for marketing reasons, and to get the additional marginal revenue.
Yeah, UT2004 is the first thing I've been able to run on my new box where it really felt like all the potential performance was on the screen.
I've got a Dual G5 2.0 with the BTO Radeon 9800 card, attached to the 23" Cinema HD display. Running Halo on it was fun, but I had to stick to 800x600 or so to get semi-decent performance, and even then fps would drop down to like 1-2 if I died near an explosion or something. UT2004 runs at the native 1920x1200 of the display wickedly fast (never noticed the frame rate getting low enough to notice), and looks great.
It's striking to be able to play a game on a Mac with absolutely no performance issues! Been a long time since that happened for me!
Sure, but there are open-source broadcasting tools compatible with the Darwin Streaming Server.
Like:
http://mpeg4ip.sourceforge.net/
Been around for over 2 years, and is an honest to goodness 1.0 release now.
Of course, it's hard to beat the simple integration of an iBook G4 + QuickTime Broadcaster. Dead simple, decent quality, and under 5 lbs and under $1000.
Well, considering the open-source Darwin Streaming Server runs on Solaris AND Linux, I don't know why you're waiting forthe Xserve's. Sure, the GUI isn't quite as nice, but all the features are there.
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/strea mi ng/
Yeah, not sure about that. Most metafiles I've seen are automatically converted when the doc is opened on Mac. Stuff authored on Mac with the included Equation Editor seems to work just fine on Windows.
The trickiest case is digital media, since PowerPoint on Mac supports QuickTime, but not WMV, and PowerPoint on Windows uses DirectShow for playback, but won't do QuickTime. Embedding square pixel MPEG-1 is the best solution I've found.
Given all the times/.'ers complain about Microsoft doing bloatware, you'd think there would be some thanks for doing a new version that's snappier, up to date, but doesn't go overboard on new features.
I easily spend 1000+ hours a year in Office v.X, and I'm really looking forward to the new version. It's darn complete - there really weren't that many holes, and it looks like they're filling most of them.
Oh, Adobe did Premiere for Mac up until the summer 2004 release of Premiere Pro (which was an all new product, really). You can still buy Premiere 6.5 for Mac, and it's Mac OS X native and everything. I still use it for things like it's very cool analyzer and bitrate graph.
Well, maybe Wintel laptops don't have great keyboards, but I've written thousands of pages, including a complete published book, on various PowerBooks over the years. They've always had nice keyboards. I also have a 12" Vaio, and the keyboard is almost unusable, what with the weird shift key, and just a lousy feel.
Heck, I even won the original Unreal on a PowerBook G3 400, using the trackpad instead of a mouse. In retrospect, that was probably silly:).
So, what's so invasive about modern versions of QuickTime? You get the "upgrade to pro" message about once a month. Other than that it has always been pretty polite.
Yeah, I'll give you a 4 out of 5. Like I said, I said plenty of erroneous things when I first starting writing articles in this space five years ago. I'm sure a little Slashdotting will result in a much enhanced 2.0.
Now that After Effects and PhotoShop support 16-bit rendering for most filters and effects, I'm increasingly able to do everything in 16-bit RGB 10-bit Y'CbCr. This results in significantly better quality with multiple generations of rendering.
Lots of other tools, like Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro, are native Y'CbCr rendering internally.
The interconnect would help, but you'd still have to deal with the lower compression that having to use RGB 4:4:4 mandates. You couldn't get a good 2 hour movie on a single DVD in RGB.
No reason you couldn't do the Y'CbCr in the player and output to RGB, though.
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Okay, so I AM the world's leading expert on video compression codecs and formats (no, really, I am). I cover the same ground in my book, and in a series of articles for DV magazine over the last five years. So I'm pretty picky on this kind of things. But these guys couldn't compress themselves out of a wet paper bag.
Some fundamental errors:
They're using MPEG-2 sources, which are already highly compressed (this has been amply covered by other posters).
They talk about converting to an "uncompressed" AVI, but never specify which flavor of uncompressed. They should have used a lossless codec that uses the native Y'CbCr color space of video, like Huffyuv. They way they just said "uncompressed" suggests they used the AVI "None" codec, which is uncompressed RGB. This causes two lossly color space conversions - one from the Y'CbCr of the source to RGB, and then back to Y'CbCr in the delivery codec.
They used Indeo 5.1 as their intermediate codec. This is terrible. Indeo uses what's called YUV-9 sampling. There is only one measurement of color per 4x4 block of pixels. This throws away 75% of the color information from the DVD (which uses 4:2:0 sampling, with 2x2 blocks), before it even touches a codec. And this results in very ugly blocks whenever there are highly saturated regions with sharp contrast. So, all the output is going to look highly compressed when rendered from these intermediates, even if further compression is lossless. Look at the Spider Man test frame for an example. Notice the red blooming around the shoulders of the vocalist. And the color everywhere is very muddled. Indeo can also be slow to decode, unless it was encoded with all keyframes. And how slow it is to decode will vary with the tool, which probably added measurable error to their encoding time measurements.
They don't know the difference between Sorenson Video 3, which comes free with QuickTime, and Sorenson Video 3.3 Professional, which you have to pay for and is what Apple uses for their movie trailers. With the Pro version, critical features like B-frames and 2-pass VBR are available.
Apple's MPEG-4 encoder isn't very good - 1-pass only, tuned for speed more than quality. A file with the exact same compatibility could be made with Squeeze, Compression Master, Envivio, etcetera with MUCH better quality. And the Divx MPEG-4 codec is, of course, also MPEG-4.
They didn't use 2-pass encoding! No quality-concious encoder would ever put content on spinning disc without using 2-pass. And they didn't mention most of the other encoding settings they used, which by context I'd guess were basic defaults.
That's from an initial skim. If I spent more time with the article.
In summary, these guys spent hours and hours analyzing the results of tests, where they would have been WAY better off spending an hour asking someone who knew anything about video compression how to administer this kind of test.
Oddly enough, their results are vaguely like you'd expect - WMV9 and DivX do well, Sorenson less so, and Apple MPEG-4 at the rear. Done properly, I imagine WMV9 would have had a slight lead, and Sorenson 3 Pro would have been a lot closer to DivX. And no one uses Apple's MPEG-4 codec for content distribution. QuickTime's decoder is fine, so folks would use a professional-grade MPEG-4 encoder instead.
I present at 6-8 trade shows a year, for about five years now. I've also done a lot of booth duty over the years, and covered shows as press.
One thing the original article missed is the big difference between people who pay the $300-$1200 to attend the sessions and seminars, and those who get the free (theoretically you have to pay ~$50, but free passes are very readily available).
Those two groups have very different experiences. Exhibit-only folks don't hear any sessions other than sponsored sessions. Full attendees get to do sessions, and often free food and decent swag, like conference bags. Best show ever for that kind of thing is Apple's WWDC. For example, free sit-down dinners, all the Krusty Kreme you can eat in the morning, fresh Jamba Juice throughout the day, an honestly good bag, and something Impressive. Last year, everyone got a free iSight, for example.
Lots of people I've hears complaining about how lame a show is are exhibit-only, and are missing the bulk of it. Also, folks in the booths are often told to prioritize their attention depending on the badge type. Attendees and press get the most attention - attendees since they've already shown they're willing to spend some money, and press because they're press. Speaker badges are pretty effective as well. Exhibitor badges make get a close look to see if it's from a competitor. Exhibit-only are on the bottom of the totem pole - they'll get talked to, but with less attention than any of the above.
The other thing that may not be apparent is the cost of the booths for exhibitors. A small booth rental, plus the cost of shipping of equipment, and transport for booth workers can easily be $100,000 for a significant show. I'm sure companies like Sony spent well in excess of $10M for a big show like NAB.
My personal favorite show is DV Expo, just because it's a fun group of folks, and at a human scale. NAB is where I do business development for the next year. WWDC wins for sheer geek envy.
Yep. If we ever had a real conservative government, as opposed to the inexplicable religous-reactionary win-at-any-cost bunch in office now, cutting agriculture and textile trade restrictions.
I've never understood while the failure of a family farm is some existential tragedy, while the failure of a family restaurant is the market at work. The government shouldn't be choosing individual industries as winners and losers.
Then you wind up with stupidity like steel tariffs that cost more jobs in manufacturing and shipping then are saved in steel production.
I guess if you have to be a failing industry, make darn sure to be in a swing state with a lot of electoral votes.
It's frustrating to me, as a liberal Democrat, to have to take up the mantle of hard-nosed realism that the Republicans seem to have forgotten was their job.
Aren't we on the same planet on India? The money doesn't really leave in any case. The difference between a job going across the country and across the ocean is a matter of degree, not of fundamentals.
India does have a dumb policy of not allowing immigration, so moving there directly isn't an option unless you have a job there, but I haven't had any trouble working on projects where some engineers have been in India from here.
Anyway, lots of people talk about a "flight to the bottom" like this has ever actually happened in the history of world trade.
A century ago South Carolina had a per capita income of less than 20% of, say, Nevada. And without an income tax, federal spending was much less important than state spending.
So, a hundred years ago, your argument would suggest that Nevada bar imports of products from South Carolina.
But, of course they couldn't since the most effective free trade pact in the world is the constitution of the united states. And in fact, requiring fully free trade between states was one of the big reasons why the constitution was needed to replace the articles of confederation, which didn't prevent states from having tariffs against other states.
The track record of free trade overwhelmingly shows it is of substantial advantage to both parties.
And the Romans made the same mistake that most folks here are focusing on. They focused on labor-intensive projects, and actively resisted labor saving methods of construction, in order to provide more jobs for the "masses." Which resulted in a busy society, but one that was much less productive than it should have been. I'm sure they would much rather have had a lot more, and efficiently built granaries, city walls, etcetera, in order to hold off against the barbarian invasions. Plus having freed up some labor for a more effective military.
In the long run, labor saving techniques just means more gets done per worker. Bear in mind in that at least 90% of the jobs of 100 years ago no longer exist, but that we have a lot less than 90% unemployment.
The solution to free trade isn't less free trade, but a good social safty net and retraining, so that workers who aren't competitive can become competitive. Reducing trade is a subsidy by another name, and an expensive one at that.
Nope, outsoucing will create more jobs than not outsourcing.
The choice isn't between letting jobs go overseas and not. The choice is whether to let US companies make products in the most efficient way or not.
Let's say that Dell isn't allowed to have non-US call centers. And thus, say, a Legend computer is $200 cheaper since they can have their tech support in China. Then ban the import of competers from China. Then US companies will have to pay, say $200 more per computer than companies we compete with. We just got less competitive! Plus, the computers are just getting assembled here, so let's require that all the components be built in the US. Those used to be a lot of high paying jobs.
So, now Taiwanese motherboards, South Korean RAM, etcetera. So, all of a sudden the cheap parts of the computer get a lot more expensive. And the part added by US companies, the CPU and the OS, wind up getting a smaller part of the pie. And they start making less money because they sell fewer units.
And now buying a personal computer in the US costs $1000-$2000 more than in other countries. So, now, hiring a worker in the US gets that more expensive.
Anything gotten better yet?
Don't think about this as China and India stealing our jobs. Think of it as they gave us lots of extra jobs during the decades they opted out of the global economy, and are just now getting back to where they should have been in the first place.
If people are really worried about familes not having enough food to eat and clothes to wear, let's end the massively damanging trade barriers against third world nations on food and textiles! Food and Clothing will cost half as much, and that'll cost a lot less than doubling unemployment payments. And dropping farm supports would go a long way towards closing the deficit.
People are always threatened by free trade, since the benefits are diffuse, but the pain concentrated.
So, here's a thought experiment:
Explain why you think outsourcing to India is bad, or evil, or should be illegal.
And then explain why the same isn't true of outsourcing to say, South Carolina.
South Carolina has lower environmental and labor standards that the rest of the us. Lower wages.
You really want every state to make their own cars? Furniture? Grow their own oranges? Wouldn't that make more jobs everywhere.
In fact, couldn't we cure suburban blight by preventing cities from importing products from their suburbs?
Now, how is that a better alternative?
And how's that meaningfully different than what's happening in India.
And yes, I am a liberal Democrat who works in the technology industry. The job that might get exported is my own. But I've also worked on a job where engineering was in India, and product management was in the US. That particular product was something that wouldn't have been worth doing at US labor rates. In many cases, this isn't a matter of exporting jobs, but creating jobs that didn't exist before, or couldn't have had as much labor behind them.
Another way to think of it: How much extra are you willing to spend on products in order to have them done in the USA. Are you willing to have your support contracts 4x higher to have an American answer them. Are you willing to pay 4x more for clothes? $400 Nikes?
Me neither.
Moreso, I'd rather have Africa get richer exporting food, Pakistan richer exporting clothes, and then get to pay even less for those goods. Ever wonder how much each of us is paying in tax dollars per American farmer?
Note that, if your income stays still, and you pay twice as much for everything, you just had a 50% pay cut. Anyone think outsourcing would get as bad as that? Nope.
As David Ricardo proved a couple of centuries ago, the strongest economy is one where everyone does what they're best at. Trying to pick winners and losers just drags everyone down.
The problem with our economy today isn't outsourcing and free trade. It's the most bolluxed up, politicized, fundamentally ignorant economics team in the history of the country. I would have been hard pressed to find a way to have spent MORE money with LESS economic stimulus than the the Bush economic "plan."
I don't see the case for the Aeron being overpriced.
Assuming a one weeks for 50 weeks a year for 8 hours a day, that's 2000 hours a week.
Assuming the chair lasts for five years (mine has been going strong for four, with a replacement of the lumbar support covered under warranty), that's 10,000 hours of use.
So, if you paid an overpriced $1200, that works out to $0.12/hour of use. Very price effective luxury. WAY better than spending more for a better car, for example. Not quite as good as the lovely luxury price-performance of 3-ply toilet paper.
Another way of looking at it is in costs saved. For example, it doesn't take too many fewer chiropractor visits to pay for the chair.
Bigger news for me is the new DSL Deluxe plan. Right now I have a 640 Kbps symmetrical DSL. I pay over $150/month today for the Qwest fee and my DSL provider (the highly excellent Spirit One).
With the new DSL Delux plan, I'll more than double my rated and actual speeds, and for me uploads are really important. Plus it'll be way cheaper - only $78 total for a corporate grade account (8 static IP's, 8 mailboxes, web hosting, professional grade support contract).
It's really, really good stuff. And it certainly had the intended effect of getting me to stop thinking wistfully about cable.
Only drawback is I'll have to switch from my ancient Cisco 675 in CAP mode to DMT, which will add 16 ms to my ping time. But I think 16 ms is a fair price to pay for more than doubled bandwidth and saving $80/mo.
The best you could hope for, and it's a distant hope, is that when we're subvocalizing, the neural activity that controls the throat is active, but suppressed by some other system. And then there is some way to measure that activity.
When someone is speaking, measuring nerve impulses could happen, but by definition those nerves would be suppressed when subvocalizing.
To flip it around, let's look at the visual system, about which we know much more. We can kind of track how some very basic bit-map like activity happens in the back of the brain. But the closer it becomes something like "seeing" the more complicated and unknown everything gets. There aren't neurons for symbols - consciousness seems to be an emergent property of the system. Even if you knew the complete state of the system, you likely wouldn't know what it "meant."
So, pretty much, the more interesting the thing you would want to learn by this mechanism, the less likely it's going to be.
I could imagine that some combination of fortunate neuroanatomy and future science could make reading sub-vocalization possible, maybe.
As for your example, I have no real idea what you're thinking. I know what you type, and I can make a mental model of why I think you're doing it. But I'm probably wrong. For example, I really don't have any idea why you decided this conversation is worth having, just like you don't know why I'm spending time with it either. In fact, NEITHER of us really has any idea of our OWN motivations. We make guesses, but I think they're largely post-facto, and unprovable hypotheses.
And in what form is the speech coded in the brain? It isn't like there is one neuron per letter or sound or something. Different parts of the brain are responsible for different parts of speech.
Also, at best you'd then have a way to find out what someone is saying without listening to them. But how about when someone isn't talking? Even though your perception of consciousness may seem verbal, that doesn't mean that there is anything like a verbal "signal" that could be extracted.
Even if we had a moment by moment reading of the status of every neuron in your brain, knowing what you're thinking is likely impossible.
The brain is kind of like macroeconomics. We know a lot about the high level behavior, and the very low level behavior, but how one controls the other is only very vaguely understood.
So what's the signal of thought? What symbols would tell me what you're thinking?
But if you put someone else's impulses on your brain, wouldn't you become them?
Telepathy is basically an emulation problem. Even if there was some way of extracting the neural state of someone else's brain, what would you do with that information?
What you're suggesting is that you would have enough brain-power (fuzzy concept) to emulate someone else's mind, AND be able to interpret that emulation in some fashion. Assuming you're both human, how would that work?
And what would a telepathy actually perceive? Someone's sub-vocalized self-commentary? An echo of how they're feeling. Drill deep, and you'll realize you really don't have much of an idea of what telepathy would actually be like.
Heck, it's not like our own self-awareness is much beyond post-hoc justification.
Well, it's not like every dollar of your store purchase goes back to the creators. There's the store markup, distributor markup, etcetera. Plus the cost of actually making the DVD and its packaging.
I'd be surprised if even 50% of the cost you paid went back to the entities who financed the show in the first place. So, you're really looking at 4-5 M sales of a DVD to cover the costs of production. That would be a massive DVD hit.
I'm sure FireFly will sell far more than well enough to cover the costs of making the DVD, and will probably cover some or all of the losses on making the series.
Japan has had a long tradition of direct-to-video series. But that's really an artifact of there being an artificially low number of TV channels there. In the US, there are so many darn TV stations that almost any show you can imagine can get broadcast somewhere. I'm sure USA, Spike, or other lower-tier cable network would be happy to broadcast FireFly, they just wouldn't sell enough ads to cover the production cost. So even if you did a show mainly to sell DVDs, you'd still broadcast it for marketing reasons, and to get the additional marginal revenue.
Yeah, UT2004 is the first thing I've been able to run on my new box where it really felt like all the potential performance was on the screen.
I've got a Dual G5 2.0 with the BTO Radeon 9800 card, attached to the 23" Cinema HD display. Running Halo on it was fun, but I had to stick to 800x600 or so to get semi-decent performance, and even then fps would drop down to like 1-2 if I died near an explosion or something. UT2004 runs at the native 1920x1200 of the display wickedly fast (never noticed the frame rate getting low enough to notice), and looks great.
It's striking to be able to play a game on a Mac with absolutely no performance issues! Been a long time since that happened for me!
Sure, but there are open-source broadcasting tools compatible with the Darwin Streaming Server.
Like:
http://mpeg4ip.sourceforge.net/
Been around for over 2 years, and is an honest to goodness 1.0 release now.
Of course, it's hard to beat the simple integration of an iBook G4 + QuickTime Broadcaster. Dead simple, decent quality, and under 5 lbs and under $1000.
Well, considering the open-source Darwin Streaming Server runs on Solaris AND Linux, I don't know why you're waiting forthe Xserve's. Sure, the GUI isn't quite as nice, but all the features are there.
a mi ng/
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/stre
Yeah, not sure about that. Most metafiles I've seen are automatically converted when the doc is opened on Mac. Stuff authored on Mac with the included Equation Editor seems to work just fine on Windows.
The trickiest case is digital media, since PowerPoint on Mac supports QuickTime, but not WMV, and PowerPoint on Windows uses DirectShow for playback, but won't do QuickTime. Embedding square pixel MPEG-1 is the best solution I've found.
Given all the times /.'ers complain about Microsoft doing bloatware, you'd think there would be some thanks for doing a new version that's snappier, up to date, but doesn't go overboard on new features.
I easily spend 1000+ hours a year in Office v.X, and I'm really looking forward to the new version. It's darn complete - there really weren't that many holes, and it looks like they're filling most of them.
Oh, Adobe did Premiere for Mac up until the summer 2004 release of Premiere Pro (which was an all new product, really). You can still buy Premiere 6.5 for Mac, and it's Mac OS X native and everything. I still use it for things like it's very cool analyzer and bitrate graph.
Well, maybe Wintel laptops don't have great keyboards, but I've written thousands of pages, including a complete published book, on various PowerBooks over the years. They've always had nice keyboards. I also have a 12" Vaio, and the keyboard is almost unusable, what with the weird shift key, and just a lousy feel.
:).
Heck, I even won the original Unreal on a PowerBook G3 400, using the trackpad instead of a mouse. In retrospect, that was probably silly
So, what's so invasive about modern versions of QuickTime? You get the "upgrade to pro" message about once a month. Other than that it has always been pretty polite.
Yeah, I'll give you a 4 out of 5. Like I said, I said plenty of erroneous things when I first starting writing articles in this space five years ago. I'm sure a little Slashdotting will result in a much enhanced 2.0.
Now that After Effects and PhotoShop support 16-bit rendering for most filters and effects, I'm increasingly able to do everything in 16-bit RGB 10-bit Y'CbCr. This results in significantly better quality with multiple generations of rendering.
Lots of other tools, like Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro, are native Y'CbCr rendering internally.
The interconnect would help, but you'd still have to deal with the lower compression that having to use RGB 4:4:4 mandates. You couldn't get a good 2 hour movie on a single DVD in RGB.
No reason you couldn't do the Y'CbCr in the player and output to RGB, though.