Now, about this wide-screen claim.... 1400x900 makes the aspect ratio 14:9, not the 16:9 that would be more desirable for videos. My guess is that at 14:9 they want to letterbox for wide-screen and pillarbox for narrow-screen (which is 4:3 or 12:9; 14:9 is halfway between), but since there is a general transition toward wide-screen, and LCD's don't suffer burn in anywhere near as bad as CRT and plasma displays do, why not just give us a 16:9 screen?!? For that matter, make it do at least 1920x1080.
Lastly, expanding on minimum resolution, if they must use a 14:9 aspect ratio, let's make it such that a high-def video will be able to be displayed with no down scaling. Maintaining the 14:9 ratio of the screen, this would be 1920x1234.
If we want to have them meet Dell's standard of pixel density, we need to do a little math.
A 15 inch display is 12 inches wide by 9 inches high. Inside this, they fit 1600 pixels wide by 1200 pixels high, or 133.3 dpi.
A 17 inch display of 4:3 ratio would be 13.6 inches wide by 10.2 inches tall. Its res should be 1814x1360.
A 17 inch display of 14:9 ratio (if you really must) is 14.3 inches by 9.2 inches. Its resolution should be 1906x1226 (tell me we couldn't squeeze in an extra 14 pixels and make it an even 1920!)
A 17 inch display of 16:9 ratio would be 14.8 inches wide by 8.33 inches high. Its resolution would be 1973x1110, and I would advocate making it 1920x1080 instead, droppig the dot pitch back to 129.7 dpi--not a big drop.
Those are the standards I think should be met. Nice try, but not there yet.
First off, let me state that for the vast majority of people (myself included), CD is superior to vinyl.
That said, vinyl has a superior frequency response (potentially 5Hz-27kHz) than CD. To someone with odd hearing (yes, I knew someone who could hear that high) this makes a difference, provided the source material was also analogue, or at least sampled fast (e.g. 96kHz).
CD blows vinyl away on signal-to-noise ratio (98dB vs. ~40dB) distortion, wow and flutter, and, most pronounced, media durability.
I would propose that those who say that vinyl sucks have not listened to vinyl on a GOOD turntable. I would also propose that the reason CD rocks is that you don't need to spend a fortune to get good equipment.
I suspect that the love of vinyl is a mixture of wanting to be unusual and of nostalgia. For the record (no pun intended), I do play vinyl, but my MP3 collection gets the biggest workout, most of which was ripped from my legitimately-owned CD's. I encode at 192kb/s, and it sounds very nice.
I wonder if there is partial prior art in my satellite provider's pay-per-view system? You select programs from a scrollable list. Speed of scrolling is variable based on how fast you hit the buttons on the remote (and how fresh the remote batteries are). Previews are peppered all over every channel during commercial breaks. You never wait more than 30 minutes for the start of a show. A feature called "themes" groups content.
The part that is bothersome is that out-of-state vehicles will not pay a tax that is assessed in this manner. They will, however, pay a gas tax as they pass through the state. Sure, there will be cases where someone comes in with gas that was bought in another state, but that will be offset by people who fill up before leaving the state, so what's the issue?
This is bound to piss of more people even more and faster than any attempts to raise the gas tax. If people won't put up with a rise in gas tax, they sure as hell won't put up with this!
Just for kicks and giggles, after signing the petition, I went to the last page of signatures and hit reload every five seconds or so for about a minute. I saw between one to five new signatures show up with each reload. For that matter, the web site says 'over 500' and when I signed my signature landed somewhere in the 1500's. This is clearly a popular move.
Maidenhead Grid Squares are used by the amateur radio community to give location. They can range from four to 8 characters in length, depending on the level of precision required. At four characters, you are looking at around a 110km by 160km square in the continental U.S. (gets squarer as you approach the equator). Add two more characters, and it gets down to a 5km by 6km square. Add two more and it gets even closer. As an example, my grid square to six characters (sufficient for my ham radio activities) is LN32at. Not long, not difficult to remember.
Re:Instead...
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Don't you think that the addition of sales tax already solves this problem?
On untaxed items (e.g. Groceries here in New York State) your explanation makes sense, but on most items we pay a sales tax somewhere between 4 and 9 percent, depending on the county and item. It almost always requires change.
Further, if your explanation were the correct one, then gasoline would not be priced such that it is always something and 9 mils (e.g. $1.529).
1920x1080 at 24p/30p/30i; presented to your monitor as 30i. Aspect ratio is 16:9. Total 3 modes.
1280x720 at 24p/30p/60p; presented to your monitor as 60p. Aspect ratio is 16:9. Total 3 modes.
Other DTV modes are:
704x480 at 24p/30p/30i/60p; presented to your monitor as 30i or 30p, depending on configuration (mine does 30p). Aspect ratio is 16:9 or 4:3. Total 8 modes (4 rates X 2 aspect ratios).
640x480 at 24p/30p/30i/60p; presented to your monitor as 30i or 30p, depending on configuration (mine does 30p). Aspect ratio os 4:3. Total 4 modes.
When you're done, you have a total of 18 DTV modes. All 6 of the HDTV modes are 16:9.
The most sane idea expressed so far has been the idea of using conduits to ensure that you can change the wires in the future without tearing your walls apart again.
For those that want to go digital: Run Cat 5e. You will hate yourself if you use wireless.
For those that want to go analog: Use RG-6 or RG-59, in multiple runs. The RG-59 will suffice for line-level audio, and composite video, S-Video or component video (using 1, 2 or 3 runs respectively). Use RG-6 for any RF (antenna, cable, satellite) runs.
If you go analog, I highly recommend that you (a) use isolating transformers on both ends of the audio links (prevents ground loops) and (b) run enough for component video, because that is the direction in which analog is headed.
One last piece of advice. Analog does not suck by nature. Please remember that. It is very useful to have a system in place that sounds really good and doesn't need you to fix it every five minutes like a lot of digital setups require, especially those that involve a general-purpose computer.
So what am I doing? Both. I just bought a house. I will be running multiple runs of both RG-6 and Cat 5e along with some RG-8 (for ham radio) all over the house, in conduit (we're remodelling and insulating, so the walls will be open anyway). I won't be shipping around any video at first, but this may change later. Two satellite receivers are being wired for, and all line-level video runs will be short-haul. Only audio and ethernet will be all through the house at first.
Noteworthy: Road Runner customers (such as myself) are also unable to send email to AOL from a self-hosted MTA. Why is this noteworthy? Because Road Runner is a subsidiary of AOL/TW.
Additionally, I cannot simply forward to RR's mail server, because my email goes out with a different domain than nycap.rr.com (this is the domain for the Capital District (i.e. Albany area) of New York State). I have email forwarded through my domain registrar, and I want my outbound email to bear that domain, not RR's.
The introduction of intelligence onto a power line is not a new idea. Witness the "wireless" intercoms that have been available since the 70's that work by inserting a radio wave into the power cord. Witness also "carrier current" radio stations found on college campuses that work by putting a signal (usually AM) into the campus power grid.
Similarly, the introduction of a power supply in a wire intended to carry intelligence is not a new idea. Witness the use of the coaxial cable of a satellite receive system to feed power to the low-noise block frequency converter (LNBF) on the dish, or, for that matter, a much simpler device like.... the telephone!
What media fusion were proposing is to use the magnetic field of the AC separately from its electrical field. That is bunk, pure and simple.
The real trick, in any actual system, is to use a frequency that is not found in the normal use of the medium. In the U.S., the grid is 60Hz, it is 50Hz in most of the rest of the world. These two frequencies are far too low to carry much intelligence anyway, so you pick a frequency well above them and hope for the best.
This leaves three problems:
The transformers that are scattered around the grid tend not to pass anything outside of the 50/60 Hz passband.
Lower frequencies (e.g. 455kHz as used on the wireless intercoms) have limited bandwidth (you need a frequency that is at least your highest intended frequency of transmission. For digital data, this would be the nyquist frequency, e.g. for 9600 bits/sec, it would be 4800Hz. There are exceptions, but they are beyond the scope of this commentary--remember, it has to be cheap!).
Higher frequencies tend to radiate out of the wires, making them a huge transmitting antenna, and causing interference to legitimate radio users. This doesn't happen with ethernet, telephone (running DSL) or CATV lines, due to the design of the cables used.
The big advantage would be speed. Packet radio is slow. 1200baud is still the norm on the 2m band.
The bandwidth of 802.11b is too much to be run on any of the VHF bands, but 70cm (440MHz) or higher may be plausible. I envision the first efforts no on 2.4GHz involving a transverter (which would convert 2.4GHz down to something else for transmission, and back up for reception)
As for usage of the existing 2.4GHz band, I regret to inform the unlicensed users that radio amateurs had greater legal access to the band well before 802.11 came along. We have a secondary allocation to part of the band, and primary to another part. Unlicensed users, using the band under the part 15 rules, have no rights whatsoever. Even so, I see no reason why we need to go chasing each other around the bands, and I disagree with the point of view that was expressed in the ARRL article. You might, though, as a courtesy to us, pick a channel above 5, since only 1-5 can be used uner part 97... where they can be used with linear amplifiers quite legally (again, assuming the user is in posession of a license).
Regarding this system replacing the internet.... I am not certain that ham radio can do that. My main concern is the fact that we cannot carry messages for hire, nor can we carry any sort of commercial traffic (a single pop-up, spam, or ecommerce site would cause a legal problem). What will make things interesting is that it will be possible for someone with an unlicensed rig to communicate with someone using a high-powered licensed rig. This will mix up the rules a bit and I'm not sure what the end result will be....
...and for those accessing the server via unix workstations, look in/mnt/smbserver/archived/userFolders/shlemiel/appfi les/textdocs/myFavEditorFiles/compDocs/scratch/Why HierarchicalFSBad.txt
...or is it just/smbserver/archived/userFolders/shlemiel/appfiles/ textdocs/myFavEditorFiles/compDocs/scratch/WhyHier archicalFSBad.txt
I have, currently in service, a K5 running 133MHz with 64MB RAM and 4GB disk. It is being used primarily as a near-real-time dynamic range compressor and audio recorder. I say near-real-time because there is approximately.5 second lag between the time audio enters and exits the box. It is able to keep up without damaging the audio.
Also currently in my service is an AMD 5x86 (a glorified 486DX4) running 133MHz with 32MB RAM and 4GB SCSI disk. It is the border box for my home network, and works as a web server (Apache), web proxy (Squid), ssh server (OpenSSH; for using the web proxy and accessing internal machines remotely), and does NAT and some firewalling. I am also going to add a POP proxy soon for spam filtering purposes (POPfile).
A friend of mine has two web servers, one is a 486DX running 33MHz with 16MB of RAM and 2GB of SCSI disk. He also has a Sun Sparc IPX (40MHz, I think?) with 32MB of RAM and 4GB of SCSI disk.
I would like to make a suggestion that is somewhat radical, but I will make it anyway. After all, if you can't say something radical on/., where can you say it?
For the past four or five years, a group called Adbusters has sponsored an anti-consumption event, called Buy Nothing Day. It takes place on Black Friday. I will be one of the participants who leaves my wallet in my pocket for the day, and by so doing, avoids the consumer orgy. For more information, go to Adbusters' page on Buy Nothing Day.
Of course, I will also be putting Staples, Wal*Mart, Target and BestBuy on my shitlist and spending my money elsewhere for a period of time that I haven't yet determined (suggestions? I was thinking 6 mos maybe) unless they reverse their stance before Monday, and letting them all know why. I think you (yes, you who are reading this right now) should join me in this.
BMG is a record company. BMI is a music publisher.
Dish Network already does this
on
Cable TV A La Carte?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
For a very large part, Dish Network already does this. They have an service called "Dish Picks" where you select any channels you like at $1.50/month*channel with a $5.00/month minimum. You can also add this service to any other tiered service, forgoing the $5/month minimum (I get two channels this way, in addition to the 150-channel tier).
Not every channel is available a la carte, though, because some content providers (notably Viacomm) won't permit their channels to be broken up this way.
Also, some channels are lumped into subpackages that can be ordered alone. Only want HBO? You can do that. Same for Cinemax. Want just the five "superstations?" Sure! $5/month gives you all five of them.
The factor that has been constraining the cable companies on this front is that the content on their analog cable systems is fundamentally unencrypted. It takes the combination of encryption plus an addressable box in order to implement channels a la carte. Otherwise, the filters and traps needed to make it work would be a nightmare!
Slashdot Mirror
My dell also does 1600x1200 in 15".
Now, about this wide-screen claim.... 1400x900 makes the aspect ratio 14:9, not the 16:9 that would be more desirable for videos. My guess is that at 14:9 they want to letterbox for wide-screen and pillarbox for narrow-screen (which is 4:3 or 12:9; 14:9 is halfway between), but since there is a general transition toward wide-screen, and LCD's don't suffer burn in anywhere near as bad as CRT and plasma displays do, why not just give us a 16:9 screen?!? For that matter, make it do at least 1920x1080.
Lastly, expanding on minimum resolution, if they must use a 14:9 aspect ratio, let's make it such that a high-def video will be able to be displayed with no down scaling. Maintaining the 14:9 ratio of the screen, this would be 1920x1234.
If we want to have them meet Dell's standard of pixel density, we need to do a little math.
A 15 inch display is 12 inches wide by 9 inches high. Inside this, they fit 1600 pixels wide by 1200 pixels high, or 133.3 dpi.
A 17 inch display of 4:3 ratio would be 13.6 inches wide by 10.2 inches tall. Its res should be 1814x1360.
A 17 inch display of 14:9 ratio (if you really must) is 14.3 inches by 9.2 inches. Its resolution should be 1906x1226 (tell me we couldn't squeeze in an extra 14 pixels and make it an even 1920!)
A 17 inch display of 16:9 ratio would be 14.8 inches wide by 8.33 inches high. Its resolution would be 1973x1110, and I would advocate making it 1920x1080 instead, droppig the dot pitch back to 129.7 dpi--not a big drop.
Those are the standards I think should be met. Nice try, but not there yet.
First off, let me state that for the vast majority of people (myself included), CD is superior to vinyl.
That said, vinyl has a superior frequency response (potentially 5Hz-27kHz) than CD. To someone with odd hearing (yes, I knew someone who could hear that high) this makes a difference, provided the source material was also analogue, or at least sampled fast (e.g. 96kHz).
CD blows vinyl away on signal-to-noise ratio (98dB vs. ~40dB) distortion, wow and flutter, and, most pronounced, media durability.
I would propose that those who say that vinyl sucks have not listened to vinyl on a GOOD turntable. I would also propose that the reason CD rocks is that you don't need to spend a fortune to get good equipment.
I suspect that the love of vinyl is a mixture of wanting to be unusual and of nostalgia. For the record (no pun intended), I do play vinyl, but my MP3 collection gets the biggest workout, most of which was ripped from my legitimately-owned CD's. I encode at 192kb/s, and it sounds very nice.
Yes, I do know the answer to that, and so do most of you, but the hordes of Windows users out there do not.
What will happen is that the WinZip will win this feud, simply because it is what people use.
...and since the problem stems from PK not sharing information, UNIX zip implementations will likely behave in the same manner as WinZip.
To paraphrase K-9, "Coefficient of relevance to hotel of the future: zero"
Dude, it was sorta half tongue in cheek.
I wonder if there is partial prior art in my satellite provider's pay-per-view system? You select programs from a scrollable list. Speed of scrolling is variable based on how fast you hit the buttons on the remote (and how fresh the remote batteries are). Previews are peppered all over every channel during commercial breaks. You never wait more than 30 minutes for the start of a show. A feature called "themes" groups content.
It might not wash, but it might be worth a shot.
Can't do that! That would make too much sense!
The part that is bothersome is that out-of-state vehicles will not pay a tax that is assessed in this manner. They will, however, pay a gas tax as they pass through the state. Sure, there will be cases where someone comes in with gas that was bought in another state, but that will be offset by people who fill up before leaving the state, so what's the issue?
This is bound to piss of more people even more and faster than any attempts to raise the gas tax. If people won't put up with a rise in gas tax, they sure as hell won't put up with this!
No. This is not life-plus-fifty; it is fifty from the date of publication, not fifty from the death of the author.
Just for kicks and giggles, after signing the petition, I went to the last page of signatures and hit reload every five seconds or so for about a minute. I saw between one to five new signatures show up with each reload. For that matter, the web site says 'over 500' and when I signed my signature landed somewhere in the 1500's. This is clearly a popular move.
Make that FN32at
Maidenhead Grid Squares are used by the amateur radio community to give location. They can range from four to 8 characters in length, depending on the level of precision required. At four characters, you are looking at around a 110km by 160km square in the continental U.S. (gets squarer as you approach the equator). Add two more characters, and it gets down to a 5km by 6km square. Add two more and it gets even closer. As an example, my grid square to six characters (sufficient for my ham radio activities) is LN32at. Not long, not difficult to remember.
Don't you think that the addition of sales tax already solves this problem?
On untaxed items (e.g. Groceries here in New York State) your explanation makes sense, but on most items we pay a sales tax somewhere between 4 and 9 percent, depending on the county and item. It almost always requires change.
Further, if your explanation were the correct one, then gasoline would not be priced such that it is always something and 9 mils (e.g. $1.529).
Yes.
HDTV formats are:
- 1920x1080 at 24p/30p/30i; presented to your monitor as 30i. Aspect ratio is 16:9. Total 3 modes.
- 1280x720 at 24p/30p/60p; presented to your monitor as 60p. Aspect ratio is 16:9. Total 3 modes.
Other DTV modes are:When you're done, you have a total of 18 DTV modes. All 6 of the HDTV modes are 16:9.
The most sane idea expressed so far has been the idea of using conduits to ensure that you can change the wires in the future without tearing your walls apart again.
For those that want to go digital: Run Cat 5e. You will hate yourself if you use wireless.
For those that want to go analog: Use RG-6 or RG-59, in multiple runs. The RG-59 will suffice for line-level audio, and composite video, S-Video or component video (using 1, 2 or 3 runs respectively). Use RG-6 for any RF (antenna, cable, satellite) runs.
If you go analog, I highly recommend that you (a) use isolating transformers on both ends of the audio links (prevents ground loops) and (b) run enough for component video, because that is the direction in which analog is headed.
One last piece of advice. Analog does not suck by nature. Please remember that. It is very useful to have a system in place that sounds really good and doesn't need you to fix it every five minutes like a lot of digital setups require, especially those that involve a general-purpose computer.
So what am I doing? Both. I just bought a house. I will be running multiple runs of both RG-6 and Cat 5e along with some RG-8 (for ham radio) all over the house, in conduit (we're remodelling and insulating, so the walls will be open anyway). I won't be shipping around any video at first, but this may change later. Two satellite receivers are being wired for, and all line-level video runs will be short-haul. Only audio and ethernet will be all through the house at first.
At least, that's the theory....
Noteworthy: Road Runner customers (such as myself) are also unable to send email to AOL from a self-hosted MTA. Why is this noteworthy? Because Road Runner is a subsidiary of AOL/TW.
Additionally, I cannot simply forward to RR's mail server, because my email goes out with a different domain than nycap.rr.com (this is the domain for the Capital District (i.e. Albany area) of New York State). I have email forwarded through my domain registrar, and I want my outbound email to bear that domain, not RR's.
The introduction of intelligence onto a power line is not a new idea. Witness the "wireless" intercoms that have been available since the 70's that work by inserting a radio wave into the power cord. Witness also "carrier current" radio stations found on college campuses that work by putting a signal (usually AM) into the campus power grid.
Similarly, the introduction of a power supply in a wire intended to carry intelligence is not a new idea. Witness the use of the coaxial cable of a satellite receive system to feed power to the low-noise block frequency converter (LNBF) on the dish, or, for that matter, a much simpler device like .... the telephone!
What media fusion were proposing is to use the magnetic field of the AC separately from its electrical field. That is bunk, pure and simple.
The real trick, in any actual system, is to use a frequency that is not found in the normal use of the medium. In the U.S., the grid is 60Hz, it is 50Hz in most of the rest of the world. These two frequencies are far too low to carry much intelligence anyway, so you pick a frequency well above them and hope for the best.
This leaves three problems:
I approve of the message, but not the tactic.
Rule 7 talks about proposing new laws; doesn't that rule out Einsteininan physics, since they require addenda to Newtonian physics?
Yeah, but imagine a Beowulf cluster of... oh, never mind.
The big advantage would be speed. Packet radio is slow. 1200baud is still the norm on the 2m band.
The bandwidth of 802.11b is too much to be run on any of the VHF bands, but 70cm (440MHz) or higher may be plausible. I envision the first efforts no on 2.4GHz involving a transverter (which would convert 2.4GHz down to something else for transmission, and back up for reception)
As for usage of the existing 2.4GHz band, I regret to inform the unlicensed users that radio amateurs had greater legal access to the band well before 802.11 came along. We have a secondary allocation to part of the band, and primary to another part. Unlicensed users, using the band under the part 15 rules, have no rights whatsoever. Even so, I see no reason why we need to go chasing each other around the bands, and I disagree with the point of view that was expressed in the ARRL article. You might, though, as a courtesy to us, pick a channel above 5, since only 1-5 can be used uner part 97... where they can be used with linear amplifiers quite legally (again, assuming the user is in posession of a license).
Regarding this system replacing the internet.... I am not certain that ham radio can do that. My main concern is the fact that we cannot carry messages for hire, nor can we carry any sort of commercial traffic (a single pop-up, spam, or ecommerce site would cause a legal problem). What will make things interesting is that it will be possible for someone with an unlicensed rig to communicate with someone using a high-powered licensed rig. This will mix up the rules a bit and I'm not sure what the end result will be....
...and for those accessing the server via unix workstations, look in /mnt/smbserver/archived/userFolders/shlemiel/appfi les/textdocs/myFavEditorFiles/compDocs/scratch/Why HierarchicalFSBad.txt
...or is it just /smbserver/archived/userFolders/shlemiel/appfiles/ textdocs/myFavEditorFiles/compDocs/scratch/WhyHier archicalFSBad.txt
Oh! Maybe it's /nfsserver/smbserver/archived/userFolders/shlemiel /appfiles/textdocs/myFavEditorFiles/compDocs/scrat ch/WhyHierarchicalFSBad.txt
I can't quite remember where it was mounted.... Maybe it's mounted someplace else on your workstation....
I have, currently in service, a K5 running 133MHz with 64MB RAM and 4GB disk. It is being used primarily as a near-real-time dynamic range compressor and audio recorder. I say near-real-time because there is approximately .5 second lag between the time audio enters and exits the box. It is able to keep up without damaging the audio.
Also currently in my service is an AMD 5x86 (a glorified 486DX4) running 133MHz with 32MB RAM and 4GB SCSI disk. It is the border box for my home network, and works as a web server (Apache), web proxy (Squid), ssh server (OpenSSH; for using the web proxy and accessing internal machines remotely), and does NAT and some firewalling. I am also going to add a POP proxy soon for spam filtering purposes (POPfile).
A friend of mine has two web servers, one is a 486DX running 33MHz with 16MB of RAM and 2GB of SCSI disk. He also has a Sun Sparc IPX (40MHz, I think?) with 32MB of RAM and 4GB of SCSI disk.
I would like to make a suggestion that is somewhat radical, but I will make it anyway. After all, if you can't say something radical on /., where can you say it?
For the past four or five years, a group called Adbusters has sponsored an anti-consumption event, called Buy Nothing Day. It takes place on Black Friday. I will be one of the participants who leaves my wallet in my pocket for the day, and by so doing, avoids the consumer orgy. For more information, go to Adbusters' page on Buy Nothing Day.
Of course, I will also be putting Staples, Wal*Mart, Target and BestBuy on my shitlist and spending my money elsewhere for a period of time that I haven't yet determined (suggestions? I was thinking 6 mos maybe) unless they reverse their stance before Monday, and letting them all know why. I think you (yes, you who are reading this right now) should join me in this.
BMG is a record company. BMI is a music publisher.
For a very large part, Dish Network already does this. They have an service called "Dish Picks" where you select any channels you like at $1.50/month*channel with a $5.00/month minimum. You can also add this service to any other tiered service, forgoing the $5/month minimum (I get two channels this way, in addition to the 150-channel tier).
Not every channel is available a la carte, though, because some content providers (notably Viacomm) won't permit their channels to be broken up this way.
Also, some channels are lumped into subpackages that can be ordered alone. Only want HBO? You can do that. Same for Cinemax. Want just the five "superstations?" Sure! $5/month gives you all five of them.
The factor that has been constraining the cable companies on this front is that the content on their analog cable systems is fundamentally unencrypted. It takes the combination of encryption plus an addressable box in order to implement channels a la carte. Otherwise, the filters and traps needed to make it work would be a nightmare!