Funny, when I was going through CEGEP a bit more than half a decade later, we had moved up to... VB6:P There were two major revisions of VB.NET out at the time, but of course the school was still running Visual Studio 6, not VS.NET or VS.NET 2002.
You have very little choice as to what courses you take in highschool in Quebec. You get one elective per semester, normally (so you take something like pottery or woodworking), and everything else is decided by the government. About the only selection beyond that is to decide which difficulty of a course you take. For example, do you take science 416 or 436. Same general kind of material, varies in difficulty. There was also that choice for math. How it matters is that different CEGEP programs have different pre-requisites in terms of which one you had to have taken to get into that CEGEP program. CEGEP is the first chance you get to start deciding for yourself what you want to study. There are still a bunch of core requirements everybody has to take, so even though I was in computer science I had to take English, French, Humanities, etc. But even then, you get some choice about that; there are different humanities courses that cover different topics, you could pick. IIRC there wasn't much choice about the English or French courses, though.
By university, you're picking it entirely for yourself; you pick the university program you enter, and there are no common requirements between programs.
In terms of the restrictiveness of highschool, I've always assumed it was the same everywhere else, and that without CEGEP, people outside Quebec only got to decide the course of their own education when they hit university.
He did something wrong, sure. But what he did was not bad enough to justify completely destroying his future from an academic and professional standpoint.
He's lucky that this story has attracted as much international attention as it has (and it certainly is strange to be reading about local news stories on international sites like Slashdot, when I work across the street from Al Khabaz' school). If it hadn't attracted all this attention, he wouldn't have had all these job offers, and would have been screwed.
Dawson tried to leave him in debt, unable to enter any other CEGEP, unable to enter any university (you're required to graduate from CEGEP to get into university in Quebec), and with severely diminished job prospects.
Should he have been punished? Yes. Should Dawson have tried to destroy his life? Certainly not.
When I was in CEGEP taking compsci as Al-Khabaz is (at John Abbott, though, not Dawson), we were the first year that didn't have a mandatory COBOL course. This was in like 2003, 2004 or so.
Dawson is not a university. In Quebec, "College" and "University" mean different things. Dawson is a CEGEP, which is a mandatory level of education between highschool and university.
CEGEPs in Quebec has two kinds of programs. 2-year Pre-university programs can be considered to replace the final year of highschool and first year of university (as in, highschool and university are both one year shorter in Quebec). They also have three-year programs (like the computer science program Al-Khabaz is in), which are vocational degrees intended to prepare a student for the job market rather than university. Graduating from either type of program grants you a degree called a DEC ("Diploma of College Studies" in English), which also happens to be required for admission to any university.
Many students, however, do what I did, and get a three-year vocational compsci DEC and then go to university and get their BCompSc. Yeah, it takes you an extra year (as compared to the pre-uni DEC), but CEGEP is the first time as a student that you get to study what YOU want instead of what the government says you must take, and I had a fantastic time.
The KT133a was definitely a bunk chipset, sure. But most of my problems stemmed from Abit. The "future processor" thing really aggravated me, for example.
The KT7a came out in mid 2001. The AthlonXP came out a few months later in late 2001. The KT7a was plastered with, as one of the features listed, "Supports future socket A CPUs!" or some such thing. However, the very next CPU model that comes out (AthlonXP), only a few months later, was not supported. Abit claimed it was a "hardware limitation", and that only a newer revision of the KT7a would support the XP. Existing users, who bought the board, expecting it would work with the AthlonXP when available, got shafted, and Abit just said "tough luck".
I ended up sticking an AthlonXP 1900+ in the board anyhow, and it more or less worked. There were a few quirks, and the motherboard was utterly convinced it was using a ridiculously highly clocked Athlon 4 mobile processor, (the Athlon 4 was the mobile version of the AthlonXP, and came out half a year before the desktop version). That worked well enough... but the burst capacitor issue made it all kind of moot, and I lived for years with a computer that would frequently spontaneously reboot itself, since I couldn't afford a replacement, and abit refused to fix it (the class action lawsuit against abit was only settled four years later, and didn't cover Canadian customers).
Abit may have made some decent products, but they burned me so badly that I was quite pleased when they went out of business. I had a certain satisfaction that karma had caught up with them.
But that's the thing. It costs Netflix more to serve you than it does to serve me. Should Netflix be forbidden from passing the savings on to me, or should they be required to charge everybody the highest price? Now what if they decide to put that savings into extra bandwidth, enabling SuperHD?
I'd argue that any ISP in the world can connect to OpenConnect (either by peering or caching), so there's no net neutrality issue here.
Abit? Really? I'll admit to having limited experience, but the one Abit motherboard I ever owned, the KT7a, was a disaster. Not only for me, but everybody else; it had a reputation.
So, where do we start... There was the burst capacitors, there was the latency issues that caused crackling audio if you used a soundblaster card, there was the false promises about compatibility with future processors (don't sell a motherboard claiming it will support future processors if the very next processor using that socket to come out is unsupported), there was the refusal to replace boards affected by design flaws (like burst caps)... Of all the motherboards that I've ever owned or worked with, it was the worst, and Abit's handling of all these problems was atrocious. Even ECS' boards were better, and they were complete garbage.
It seems to me more like Netflix's position is more along the lines of "If it costs less to send data to your customers, we can afford to send them higher bitrate video."
Actually, the speed requirements (2 Gbps on a 10 Gbps port) only apply to private peering with Netflix. Public peering with Netflix has no bandwidth requirements; if you're on AMS-IX, for example, you can be doing 100 Mbps to Netflix and still benefit.
In fact, you don't even have to directly peer with Netflix. Your transit provider could be peering with Netflix, and you'd still qualify as being on OpenConnect. That's how a lot of ISPs in Canada got on OpenConnect without taking any action.
Netflix doesn't care if an ISP is peering directly with them, they just care which route they take to get to that ISP. If the packets go out an OpenConnect link, and then through a bunch of transit providers, it's all the same to Netflix.
This doesn't only help Netflix. Any bandwidth your ISP is sending through the Netflix caching box on their network or through a peering connection is bandwidth they aren't sending through paid transit links. ISP saves money, reduces load, customers benefit even if they aren't Netflix subscribers.
So, let me get this straight... An ISP can either take advantage of a free peering arrangement (paying only connection fees), or accept a free caching appliance, and ultimate ends up SAVING money through reduction in transit, but somehow this is Netflix making non-subscribers pay for SuperHD? TFS is bullshit, pure FUD.
Almost every ISP in Canada is already on Netflix OpenConnect, qualifying for SuperHD. Some of them are huge, like Bell, some of them are tiny little indie ISPs, like Colba. Many of them didn't do anything specific to get on OpenConnect, but got it for free by already participating in a peering point that Netflix is on, or using a transit provider on OpenConnect.
But that division is also losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, which isn't sustainable. I don't think they'll ditch the xbox, but it seems likely to me like they might gut a bunch of other stuff in the entertainment & devices division. Windows Phone could be a candidate. Bizarrely, the Macintosh Business Unit, which produces Microsoft Office for Mac, is also in the E&D division... They're also still operate the WebTV service, although they (relatively) recently stopped selling new devices. But on the other side of things, it would appear as though the Surface tablets are NOT part of the Entertainment & Devices division, but instead the Windows and Windows Live division.
ipv6.google.com isn't required. If you do a regular nslookup for google.com, they return an AAAA record, which includes the IP 2607:f8b0:4006:800::100e
GTG latency figures reported by manufacturers are meaningless because they're not standardized. The U2711's response time is low enough to be imperceptible; you couldn't tell the difference in response time between it and one claiming a 1ms or 2ms response time. Of all the potential complaints about the U2711 (and there are a few), the response time is the least valid thing possible.
You're discussing resolution, not dot pitch. They're not quite the same thing, although they're related. In the CRT days, at least, two monitors of identical size and resolution could have very different dot pitches.
I'm skeptical as to if Kodak's situation is a problem. IMAX would own the rights to everything about the film in terms of the physical properties (dimensions, feed mechanism, etc), and there are other companies making film that could be used if required.
The noname brand 27" monitors are very affordable, and often use the same panels, but since they're often the reject stock, they're not exactly the best quality. They have an enormously higher occurrence of dead pixels, for example, and their onboard display circuitry is often primitive at best. Sometimes this can be a good thing, as it also tends to mean minimal latency.
Dot pitch hasn't been relevant on desktop displays for more than a few years... Many modern displays have a lower dot pitch than 0.21mm. Most notebook monitors certainly do, and the U2711 is only slightly higher.
Except it's not. I saw Skyfall in theatres last night. I sat in roughly the middle. The theater I went to uses 2K projectors in all except their premium hall. For photographic imagery, it was OK. For text, I could see the pixelation. For high-contrast text (such as the end-credits), I could see the screendoor effect between pixels...
I think there's a strong case for 4K projection in movie theatres. Heck, stuff shot and displayed in IMAX looks much better than even 4K. That should be roughly 16K equivalent resolution?
Slashdot Mirror
So, you install nothing but Cat 7a cables, then?
Funny, when I was going through CEGEP a bit more than half a decade later, we had moved up to... VB6 :P There were two major revisions of VB.NET out at the time, but of course the school was still running Visual Studio 6, not VS.NET or VS.NET 2002.
You have very little choice as to what courses you take in highschool in Quebec. You get one elective per semester, normally (so you take something like pottery or woodworking), and everything else is decided by the government. About the only selection beyond that is to decide which difficulty of a course you take. For example, do you take science 416 or 436. Same general kind of material, varies in difficulty. There was also that choice for math. How it matters is that different CEGEP programs have different pre-requisites in terms of which one you had to have taken to get into that CEGEP program. CEGEP is the first chance you get to start deciding for yourself what you want to study. There are still a bunch of core requirements everybody has to take, so even though I was in computer science I had to take English, French, Humanities, etc. But even then, you get some choice about that; there are different humanities courses that cover different topics, you could pick. IIRC there wasn't much choice about the English or French courses, though.
By university, you're picking it entirely for yourself; you pick the university program you enter, and there are no common requirements between programs.
In terms of the restrictiveness of highschool, I've always assumed it was the same everywhere else, and that without CEGEP, people outside Quebec only got to decide the course of their own education when they hit university.
He did something wrong, sure. But what he did was not bad enough to justify completely destroying his future from an academic and professional standpoint.
He's lucky that this story has attracted as much international attention as it has (and it certainly is strange to be reading about local news stories on international sites like Slashdot, when I work across the street from Al Khabaz' school). If it hadn't attracted all this attention, he wouldn't have had all these job offers, and would have been screwed.
Dawson tried to leave him in debt, unable to enter any other CEGEP, unable to enter any university (you're required to graduate from CEGEP to get into university in Quebec), and with severely diminished job prospects.
Should he have been punished? Yes. Should Dawson have tried to destroy his life? Certainly not.
When I was in CEGEP taking compsci as Al-Khabaz is (at John Abbott, though, not Dawson), we were the first year that didn't have a mandatory COBOL course. This was in like 2003, 2004 or so.
Dawson is not a university. In Quebec, "College" and "University" mean different things. Dawson is a CEGEP, which is a mandatory level of education between highschool and university.
CEGEPs in Quebec has two kinds of programs. 2-year Pre-university programs can be considered to replace the final year of highschool and first year of university (as in, highschool and university are both one year shorter in Quebec). They also have three-year programs (like the computer science program Al-Khabaz is in), which are vocational degrees intended to prepare a student for the job market rather than university. Graduating from either type of program grants you a degree called a DEC ("Diploma of College Studies" in English), which also happens to be required for admission to any university.
Many students, however, do what I did, and get a three-year vocational compsci DEC and then go to university and get their BCompSc. Yeah, it takes you an extra year (as compared to the pre-uni DEC), but CEGEP is the first time as a student that you get to study what YOU want instead of what the government says you must take, and I had a fantastic time.
The KT133a was definitely a bunk chipset, sure. But most of my problems stemmed from Abit. The "future processor" thing really aggravated me, for example.
The KT7a came out in mid 2001. The AthlonXP came out a few months later in late 2001. The KT7a was plastered with, as one of the features listed, "Supports future socket A CPUs!" or some such thing. However, the very next CPU model that comes out (AthlonXP), only a few months later, was not supported. Abit claimed it was a "hardware limitation", and that only a newer revision of the KT7a would support the XP. Existing users, who bought the board, expecting it would work with the AthlonXP when available, got shafted, and Abit just said "tough luck".
I ended up sticking an AthlonXP 1900+ in the board anyhow, and it more or less worked. There were a few quirks, and the motherboard was utterly convinced it was using a ridiculously highly clocked Athlon 4 mobile processor, (the Athlon 4 was the mobile version of the AthlonXP, and came out half a year before the desktop version). That worked well enough... but the burst capacitor issue made it all kind of moot, and I lived for years with a computer that would frequently spontaneously reboot itself, since I couldn't afford a replacement, and abit refused to fix it (the class action lawsuit against abit was only settled four years later, and didn't cover Canadian customers).
Abit may have made some decent products, but they burned me so badly that I was quite pleased when they went out of business. I had a certain satisfaction that karma had caught up with them.
But that's the thing. It costs Netflix more to serve you than it does to serve me. Should Netflix be forbidden from passing the savings on to me, or should they be required to charge everybody the highest price? Now what if they decide to put that savings into extra bandwidth, enabling SuperHD?
I'd argue that any ISP in the world can connect to OpenConnect (either by peering or caching), so there's no net neutrality issue here.
Abit? Really? I'll admit to having limited experience, but the one Abit motherboard I ever owned, the KT7a, was a disaster. Not only for me, but everybody else; it had a reputation.
So, where do we start... There was the burst capacitors, there was the latency issues that caused crackling audio if you used a soundblaster card, there was the false promises about compatibility with future processors (don't sell a motherboard claiming it will support future processors if the very next processor using that socket to come out is unsupported), there was the refusal to replace boards affected by design flaws (like burst caps)... Of all the motherboards that I've ever owned or worked with, it was the worst, and Abit's handling of all these problems was atrocious. Even ECS' boards were better, and they were complete garbage.
It seems to me more like Netflix's position is more along the lines of "If it costs less to send data to your customers, we can afford to send them higher bitrate video."
Netflix explicitly calls out Bell as being on OpenConnect:
https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect
Actually, the speed requirements (2 Gbps on a 10 Gbps port) only apply to private peering with Netflix. Public peering with Netflix has no bandwidth requirements; if you're on AMS-IX, for example, you can be doing 100 Mbps to Netflix and still benefit.
In fact, you don't even have to directly peer with Netflix. Your transit provider could be peering with Netflix, and you'd still qualify as being on OpenConnect. That's how a lot of ISPs in Canada got on OpenConnect without taking any action.
Netflix doesn't care if an ISP is peering directly with them, they just care which route they take to get to that ISP. If the packets go out an OpenConnect link, and then through a bunch of transit providers, it's all the same to Netflix.
This doesn't only help Netflix. Any bandwidth your ISP is sending through the Netflix caching box on their network or through a peering connection is bandwidth they aren't sending through paid transit links. ISP saves money, reduces load, customers benefit even if they aren't Netflix subscribers.
So, let me get this straight... An ISP can either take advantage of a free peering arrangement (paying only connection fees), or accept a free caching appliance, and ultimate ends up SAVING money through reduction in transit, but somehow this is Netflix making non-subscribers pay for SuperHD? TFS is bullshit, pure FUD.
Almost every ISP in Canada is already on Netflix OpenConnect, qualifying for SuperHD. Some of them are huge, like Bell, some of them are tiny little indie ISPs, like Colba. Many of them didn't do anything specific to get on OpenConnect, but got it for free by already participating in a peering point that Netflix is on, or using a transit provider on OpenConnect.
But that division is also losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, which isn't sustainable. I don't think they'll ditch the xbox, but it seems likely to me like they might gut a bunch of other stuff in the entertainment & devices division. Windows Phone could be a candidate. Bizarrely, the Macintosh Business Unit, which produces Microsoft Office for Mac, is also in the E&D division... They're also still operate the WebTV service, although they (relatively) recently stopped selling new devices. But on the other side of things, it would appear as though the Surface tablets are NOT part of the Entertainment & Devices division, but instead the Windows and Windows Live division.
ipv6.google.com isn't required. If you do a regular nslookup for google.com, they return an AAAA record, which includes the IP 2607:f8b0:4006:800::100e
Google reports about 1% of their traffic is IPv6. That's probably a better estimate of IPv6 deployment.
GTG latency figures reported by manufacturers are meaningless because they're not standardized. The U2711's response time is low enough to be imperceptible; you couldn't tell the difference in response time between it and one claiming a 1ms or 2ms response time. Of all the potential complaints about the U2711 (and there are a few), the response time is the least valid thing possible.
There are the Korean no-frills high-risk 27" displays with 2560x1440 resolution available for in the ballpark of $300ish, but it's a bit of a gamble.
You're discussing resolution, not dot pitch. They're not quite the same thing, although they're related. In the CRT days, at least, two monitors of identical size and resolution could have very different dot pitches.
I'm skeptical as to if Kodak's situation is a problem. IMAX would own the rights to everything about the film in terms of the physical properties (dimensions, feed mechanism, etc), and there are other companies making film that could be used if required.
I should clarify that Ivy Bridge is capable of displaying and decoding *4K* h.264 video in hardware. Somehow I forgot to type that part.
The noname brand 27" monitors are very affordable, and often use the same panels, but since they're often the reject stock, they're not exactly the best quality. They have an enormously higher occurrence of dead pixels, for example, and their onboard display circuitry is often primitive at best. Sometimes this can be a good thing, as it also tends to mean minimal latency.
It's a gamble, though.
Dot pitch hasn't been relevant on desktop displays for more than a few years... Many modern displays have a lower dot pitch than 0.21mm. Most notebook monitors certainly do, and the U2711 is only slightly higher.
Except it's not. I saw Skyfall in theatres last night. I sat in roughly the middle. The theater I went to uses 2K projectors in all except their premium hall. For photographic imagery, it was OK. For text, I could see the pixelation. For high-contrast text (such as the end-credits), I could see the screendoor effect between pixels...
I think there's a strong case for 4K projection in movie theatres. Heck, stuff shot and displayed in IMAX looks much better than even 4K. That should be roughly 16K equivalent resolution?