And because it is dying, as is Grass Valley Group itself.
Let's be clear, reports say that Thomson is in trouble and needs to sell Grass Valley Group to sure up its balance sheet. GVG appears to be doing fine, they are still selling plenty of switchers and servers.
GXF is a fairly simple (57 page standard) container which is best for exchanging completed video programs. GXF demux filters are built into VLC and FFMPEG.
MXF was built to do everything (more like 500 pages of standards). It has a rich object model, but the number of capabilities makes interoperability challenging except in limited configurations (such as various registered disclosure documents in SMPTE for the carriage of specific codecs in specific systems, such as Sony e-VTR with IMX). MXF has a lowest layer called "KLV" (key, length, value) that is similar in many ways to EBML.
On the other hand, you don't have to pay any money to get the Matroska technical description.
The Society for Motion Picture Engineers has already gone to great lengths (in coordination with the EBU) to create some containers, such as GXF, and MXF.
Europe, Russia, India, Australia, and China have been using DVB-T for their digital broadcast television. Support for DVB hardware in free operating systems like Linux
The advanced FEC in DVB-S2 has now allowed satellite transponder users to get about 10-20% more data through the satellite at the same downlink signal-to-noise ratio.
Thus many folks who have previously used DVB-S QPSK modulation are now moving to DVB-S2 8PSK modulation while retaining the same size dishes.
Of course, the other way to go is stay DVB-S2 QPSK but use smaller dishes...
Either way, DVB-S2 is making satellite transponder use more efficient, so perhaps this is marginally reducing the need for more satellites. There is a very slow move from MPEG-2 to H.264 encoding for video traffic, which is also marginally reducing the need for more satellites (actually there are a number of full-transponder analog video feeds that have not even gone to MPEG-2, but they are getting rare).
The other big force is that fiber is dominating most point-to-point applications, and satellite is being left for point-to-multipoint communications (over 100 receive sites, for example).
One of the best educational experiences of my life was when my (public) high school calculus and physics teachers coordinated together so that you would learn calculus we needed as we were learning physics (surely Newton would approve). That way you could learn integration one hour, and find out how to use integration to solve kinetics with velocity and acceleration in the next hour.
If the dictator Joseph Stalin had not have killed a few million German soldiers and destroyed I think at least 20,000 tanks during the course of the Russio-German war, D-Day would have been awful tough
This is like saying "Hey Holy See, give up your control of the Catholic Church!"
No one is stopping you from starting your own religion!
There is no law or technical reason why one has to follow the dictates of ICANN.
If you don't like ICANN, start your own! Start using MIME-TYPE "bite/me"! Set your computer and routers to whatever IP address you want! Use the ".ZZZ" TLD in your DNS servers! Go for it!
If this is an average flu season at least a couple dozen kids in the US have died already from the standard A/B/whatever strains vs 1 for the swine flu.
The difference is that influenze strains that start in Asia usually give six months of warning before they become circulating widely in the US, enough time to put together a vaccine for the particular strain and to vaccinate those most medically at risk.
If it starts in Mexico, there may be much less time to develop a vaccine, so the death rates will be higher among those who are at risk.
You're delusional if you think that these companies are the most efficient way of getting money spent on the research and development of new drugs.
According to their Financial Report 2008, Pfizer spent $2.6 billion on advertising in 2008. The rest of SIA is used for "shipping and handling, information technology and non-manufacturing employee compensation". I don't know if the G&A expense of FDA trials falls here or in R&D, likely some of it is spread over both depending on the tax laws. The average cost of clinical trials has risen to nearly 60% of total development costs, compared to just over 30% in the 1980s.
I am sure that if Pfizer didn't spend $2.6 billion on advertising that they would not have $48.3 billion in revenue, in which case they most likely would have had less than $8 billion to spend on R&D...
But please, if you think you can run a more efficient company, start one and beat them if it is so simple! I've run my own company, dealt with overhead and marketing costs, and it is tough.
The Netherlands enjoys very high levels of business freedom, trade freedom, monetary freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom, and property rights. Business regulation is efficient. Virtually all commercial operations are simple and transparent. Foreign investment is actively promoted, and 100 percent foreign ownership is allowed in sectors where foreign investment is permitted. Monetary stability is well maintained, and the highly developed financial sector serves as a European banking hub. The judiciary, independent of politics and free of corruption, has demonstrated an exemplary ability to protect property rights.
On the other hand, taxes are high, overall tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was 39.5%. Government spending is 46.1% of GDP.
US spending by Federal, state, and local governments has been aorund 35% of GDP, but will be 44% of GDP in 2009. So we'll end up being more like the Netherlands soon;)
The Netherlands has 85% of US GDP per capita.
Despite some tough labor laws, the Netherlands manages to have a low unemployment rate and high labor force participation. For the moment, anyway...
Clinton, though, was helped by the dot-com boom, which was entirely NOT his doing
I can tell you what Clinton did NOT do...he did NOT try to regulate the Internet much, enforce "net neutrality", etc. Otherwise there would not have even been a dot-com boom...
Currently, their strategy is to create the same drug which is coming out of patent protection and can start being made by generics, tweak the formula slightly, whip up an ad campaign and start pushing the drug on doctors to prescribe this so-called "new and better" drug
Perhaps you are not one of the people who need a "me too" drug because of side-effects or different efficacy of an existing drug. In which case, why don't you stick with the old generic drug, and let the people who need these new drugs buy them.
America's pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies invested a record $65.2 billion in R&D in 2008. There are now more than 2,900 medicines in development in the U.S., including 750 compounds in development for cancer, 312 for heart disease and stroke, 150 for diabetes, 109 for HIV/AIDS and 91 for Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
Drugs approved by the FDA in 2008 include Degarelix for prostate cancer, Promacta for idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, Tapentadol for acute pain, Banzel for seizures of Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, Toviaz for overactive bladder, Vimpat for epilepsy, Cimzia for Crohn's disease, and many more.
Because microwave ovens, lasers, LEDs, solar cells, and satellites wouldn't be around if it weren't for pure research in the fields of physics, chemistry, and material science...Businesses don't invent things from scratch, they rework what's already known into a commercial product.
The LED is a prime example of private-industry R&D...
Electroluminescence was discovered in 1907 by the British experimenter H. J. Round of Marconi Labs, using a crystal of silicon carbide and a cat's-whisker detector.
Rubin Braunstein of the Radio Corporation of America reported on infrared emission from gallium arsenide (GaAs) and other semiconductor alloys in 1955
In 1961, experimenters Bob Biard and Gary Pittman working at Texas Instruments, found that GaAs emitted infrared radiation when electric current was applied and received the patent for the infrared LED.
The first practical visible-spectrum (red) LED was developed in 1962 by Nick Holonyak Jr., while working at General Electric Company.
Similarly, the first working laser was demonstrated on 16 May 1960 by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories, the research arm of the Hughes Aircraft Company.
I'll agree that most of the R&D on microwave ovens came from for military radar work during WWII, and early satellites were mainly government-funded, although the first non-passive communications satellite, Telstar, was built by AT&T at Bell Telephone Laboratories.
We are dangerously close to the point that the rest of the world will say enough is enough and stop buying our debt.
[citation needed]
Speaking on the sidelines of an Asian central bankers' meeting in February, Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of China's central bank, asked: "is it time for China to consider using the reserves somewhere else, instead of concentrating too much on the United States?"
In 2007, the US spent $368 billion on R&D, 2.6% of GDP.
Of that spending, $245 billion was from private industry and $98 billion was from the Federal Government (there was other, smaller, spending by non-profits and non-Federal goverment).
Overall R&D spending by the United States far exceeds that of all other countries, although a few (such as Japan, South Korea, and Sweden) exceed the US on R&D to GDP ratios. Sweden is highest at 3.73%. France only has 2.11% and the UK only has 1.78%.
The death rate is high, considering it's in Mexico
The funny thing is that the swine H1N1 cases in the US have been mild. I wonder if the form of the virus that goes from swine to human (which you would expect people in rural Mexico to get) is slightly different than the human to human virus (which you would expect American tourists to get).
There is no doubt that it's better to take the train from DC to NY city than to fly.
I remember one day I took the train from DC to NYC for a meeting, and it was an ice/snow mix outside. Planes were grounded, roads were unpassable, but the train made it through!
(Of course, there are summer rainstorms that cause flooding and delay train travel for a while to inspect the bridges across the thousand little streams up the East Coast...)
75 MW is a large solar farm. The largest operating farm in the US is the 4.6 MW Springerville Generating Station near Tucson, Arizona. There are plans for an 80 MW San Joaquin Valley Solar Farm near Fresno that would be 260 hectares large (think a square 1.6 km on a side), so assume that is about as large as this Florida farm would need to be.
Air conditioning is considered a requirement for any type of operation in Florida for much of the year. Since "The community will ultimately contain 19,500 homes", that's ~4 kW sourced per house. Assume at least 3 kW per house in air conditioning (that's very efficient), so don't run your 1.2 kW hair drier!
Recent AP1000's cost about $5 billion to get you 1 GWe. On average, the US uses ~3,000 GWe. The 10-year cost of the Obama Stimulus plan is $3.3 trillion, so we could have 660 1GWe nuclear plants built for that cash (probably more given economies of that scale), which would take us up from 20% to 40% of electricity generated by nuclear in the US.
My beagles ate a DVD once. They also apparently like Python, as they ate the cover off of "Programming Python".
And because it is dying, as is Grass Valley Group itself.
Let's be clear, reports say that Thomson is in trouble and needs to sell Grass Valley Group to sure up its balance sheet. GVG appears to be doing fine, they are still selling plenty of switchers and servers.
On the server side, GVG recently sold K2 servers to NBCu O&Os, a large FOX installation, PBS station WTTW, and CBS Television Distribution. So I expect to see a lot more GXF in the near future!
Interesting, I'd never heard of GXF./I.
GXF is a fairly simple (57 page standard) container which is best for exchanging completed video programs. GXF demux filters are built into VLC and FFMPEG.
MXF was built to do everything (more like 500 pages of standards). It has a rich object model, but the number of capabilities makes interoperability challenging except in limited configurations (such as various registered disclosure documents in SMPTE for the carriage of specific codecs in specific systems, such as Sony e-VTR with IMX). MXF has a lowest layer called "KLV" (key, length, value) that is similar in many ways to EBML.
On the other hand, you don't have to pay any money to get the Matroska technical description.
I'm a fan of Fluidics, which can create analog or digital devices based on fluid flow.
See this powerpoint for a great history of fluidics.
The Society for Motion Picture Engineers has already gone to great lengths (in coordination with the EBU) to create some containers, such as GXF, and MXF.
MXF is already being used as part of the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) spec that delivers standardized digital cinema content to theaters. There is already a registered MIME type for MXF.
By the way, you can be mad at Microsoft and their love of Windows Media, but then there is Apple Final Cut Pro and QuickTime (ack!).
Europe, Russia, India, Australia, and China have been using DVB-T for their digital broadcast television. Support for DVB hardware in free operating systems like Linux
To implement DVB-T legally, you need to pay the DVB-T license pool.
The advanced FEC in DVB-S2 has now allowed satellite transponder users to get about 10-20% more data through the satellite at the same downlink signal-to-noise ratio.
Thus many folks who have previously used DVB-S QPSK modulation are now moving to DVB-S2 8PSK modulation while retaining the same size dishes.
Of course, the other way to go is stay DVB-S2 QPSK but use smaller dishes...
Either way, DVB-S2 is making satellite transponder use more efficient, so perhaps this is marginally reducing the need for more satellites. There is a very slow move from MPEG-2 to H.264 encoding for video traffic, which is also marginally reducing the need for more satellites (actually there are a number of full-transponder analog video feeds that have not even gone to MPEG-2, but they are getting rare).
The other big force is that fiber is dominating most point-to-point applications, and satellite is being left for point-to-multipoint communications (over 100 receive sites, for example).
How math is taught IS important.
One of the best educational experiences of my life was when my (public) high school calculus and physics teachers coordinated together so that you would learn calculus we needed as we were learning physics (surely Newton would approve). That way you could learn integration one hour, and find out how to use integration to solve kinetics with velocity and acceleration in the next hour.
If the dictator Joseph Stalin had not have killed a few million German soldiers and destroyed I think at least 20,000 tanks during the course of the Russio-German war, D-Day would have been awful tough
Well, maybe if Stalin hadn't signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Germany in 1939 that secretly agreed to divide the countries of eastern Europe between them, which lead to the German and also Soviet invasion of Poland, not to mention the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement of 1940 and the German-Soviet Border and Commercial Agreement of 1941, WWII would have ended up looking a bit different...
This is like saying "Hey Holy See, give up your control of the Catholic Church!"
No one is stopping you from starting your own religion!
There is no law or technical reason why one has to follow the dictates of ICANN.
If you don't like ICANN, start your own! Start using MIME-TYPE "bite/me"! Set your computer and routers to whatever IP address you want! Use the ".ZZZ" TLD in your DNS servers! Go for it!
If this is an average flu season at least a couple dozen kids in the US have died already from the standard A/B/whatever strains vs 1 for the swine flu.
The difference is that influenze strains that start in Asia usually give six months of warning before they become circulating widely in the US, enough time to put together a vaccine for the particular strain and to vaccinate those most medically at risk.
If it starts in Mexico, there may be much less time to develop a vaccine, so the death rates will be higher among those who are at risk.
I've owned my 2003 Focus (manufacture date 2002) since Sept 2004
Do you have a ZX3/ZX5/FocusSVT hatchback? If so, during that time it was built in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico...
You're delusional if you think that these companies are the most efficient way of getting money spent on the research and development of new drugs.
According to their Financial Report 2008, Pfizer spent $2.6 billion on advertising in 2008. The rest of SIA is used for "shipping and handling, information technology and non-manufacturing employee compensation". I don't know if the G&A expense of FDA trials falls here or in R&D, likely some of it is spread over both depending on the tax laws. The average cost of clinical trials has risen to nearly 60% of total development costs, compared to just over 30% in the 1980s.
I am sure that if Pfizer didn't spend $2.6 billion on advertising that they would not have $48.3 billion in revenue, in which case they most likely would have had less than $8 billion to spend on R&D...
But please, if you think you can run a more efficient company, start one and beat them if it is so simple! I've run my own company, dealt with overhead and marketing costs, and it is tough.
The Netherlands enjoys very high levels of business freedom, trade freedom, monetary freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom, and property rights. Business regulation is efficient. Virtually all commercial operations are simple and transparent. Foreign investment is actively promoted, and 100 percent foreign ownership is allowed in sectors where foreign investment is permitted. Monetary stability is well maintained, and the highly developed financial sector serves as a European banking hub. The judiciary, independent of politics and free of corruption, has demonstrated an exemplary ability to protect property rights.
On the other hand, taxes are high, overall tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was 39.5%. Government spending is 46.1% of GDP.
US spending by Federal, state, and local governments has been aorund 35% of GDP, but will be 44% of GDP in 2009. So we'll end up being more like the Netherlands soon ;)
The Netherlands has 85% of US GDP per capita.
Despite some tough labor laws, the Netherlands manages to have a low unemployment rate and high labor force participation. For the moment, anyway...
Unfortunately, the other 3 pillars were the Banking, Insurance and Automobile industries.
You mean the unprofitable automobile industry. The profitable industry (such as Toyota) is doing OK without Obama's help.
Clinton, though, was helped by the dot-com boom, which was entirely NOT his doing
I can tell you what Clinton did NOT do...he did NOT try to regulate the Internet much, enforce "net neutrality", etc. Otherwise there would not have even been a dot-com boom...
Currently, their strategy is to create the same drug which is coming out of patent protection and can start being made by generics, tweak the formula slightly, whip up an ad campaign and start pushing the drug on doctors to prescribe this so-called "new and better" drug
Perhaps you are not one of the people who need a "me too" drug because of side-effects or different efficacy of an existing drug. In which case, why don't you stick with the old generic drug, and let the people who need these new drugs buy them.
America's pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies invested a record $65.2 billion in R&D in 2008. There are now more than 2,900 medicines in development in the U.S., including 750 compounds in development for cancer, 312 for heart disease and stroke, 150 for diabetes, 109 for HIV/AIDS and 91 for Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
Drugs approved by the FDA in 2008 include Degarelix for prostate cancer, Promacta for idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, Tapentadol for acute pain, Banzel for seizures of Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, Toviaz for overactive bladder, Vimpat for epilepsy, Cimzia for Crohn's disease, and many more.
Because microwave ovens, lasers, LEDs, solar cells, and satellites wouldn't be around if it weren't for pure research in the fields of physics, chemistry, and material science...Businesses don't invent things from scratch, they rework what's already known into a commercial product.
The LED is a prime example of private-industry R&D...
Electroluminescence was discovered in 1907 by the British experimenter H. J. Round of Marconi Labs, using a crystal of silicon carbide and a cat's-whisker detector.
Rubin Braunstein of the Radio Corporation of America reported on infrared emission from gallium arsenide (GaAs) and other semiconductor alloys in 1955
In 1961, experimenters Bob Biard and Gary Pittman working at Texas Instruments, found that GaAs emitted infrared radiation when electric current was applied and received the patent for the infrared LED.
The first practical visible-spectrum (red) LED was developed in 1962 by Nick Holonyak Jr., while working at General Electric Company.
Similarly, the first working laser was demonstrated on 16 May 1960 by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories, the research arm of the Hughes Aircraft Company.
I'll agree that most of the R&D on microwave ovens came from for military radar work during WWII, and early satellites were mainly government-funded, although the first non-passive communications satellite, Telstar, was built by AT&T at Bell Telephone Laboratories.
We are dangerously close to the point that the rest of the world will say enough is enough and stop buying our debt.
[citation needed]
Speaking on the sidelines of an Asian central bankers' meeting in February, Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of China's central bank, asked: "is it time for China to consider using the reserves somewhere else, instead of concentrating too much on the United States?"
China Daily article here.
According to the NSF:
In 2007, the US spent $368 billion on R&D, 2.6% of GDP.
Of that spending, $245 billion was from private industry and $98 billion was from the Federal Government (there was other, smaller, spending by non-profits and non-Federal goverment).
Overall R&D spending by the United States far exceeds that of all other countries, although a few (such as Japan, South Korea, and Sweden) exceed the US on R&D to GDP ratios. Sweden is highest at 3.73%. France only has 2.11% and the UK only has 1.78%.
The death rate is high, considering it's in Mexico
The funny thing is that the swine H1N1 cases in the US have been mild. I wonder if the form of the virus that goes from swine to human (which you would expect people in rural Mexico to get) is slightly different than the human to human virus (which you would expect American tourists to get).
There is no doubt that it's better to take the train from DC to NY city than to fly.
I remember one day I took the train from DC to NYC for a meeting, and it was an ice/snow mix outside. Planes were grounded, roads were unpassable, but the train made it through!
(Of course, there are summer rainstorms that cause flooding and delay train travel for a while to inspect the bridges across the thousand little streams up the East Coast...)
Installation on the ground is less expensive than on rooftops.
Cleaning on the ground is also cheaper - PVs can get coated in dust and reduce their efficiency.
75 MW is a large solar farm. The largest operating farm in the US is the 4.6 MW Springerville Generating Station near Tucson, Arizona. There are plans for an 80 MW San Joaquin Valley Solar Farm near Fresno that would be 260 hectares large (think a square 1.6 km on a side), so assume that is about as large as this Florida farm would need to be.
Air conditioning is considered a requirement for any type of operation in Florida for much of the year. Since "The community will ultimately contain 19,500 homes", that's ~4 kW sourced per house. Assume at least 3 kW per house in air conditioning (that's very efficient), so don't run your 1.2 kW hair drier!
It costs big bucks to build a nuclear plant.
Recent AP1000's cost about $5 billion to get you 1 GWe. On average, the US uses ~3,000 GWe. The 10-year cost of the Obama Stimulus plan is $3.3 trillion, so we could have 660 1GWe nuclear plants built for that cash (probably more given economies of that scale), which would take us up from 20% to 40% of electricity generated by nuclear in the US.