With Chatter, I get IMAP email pushed in real time to my treo.No extra server needed here either, just a _standard_ IMAP server which supports IDLE, and my treo can get email pushed to it in the background.
The chatter thing, I take it the phone needs to be connected for it to work then? If so, that's not push email, and most IMAP devices already do that (including current M$ pdas). True push mail should be able to go to the phone without requiring a WiFi, GPRS or other form of connection to be active.
People who buy iPods aren't looking for some freebie toss-it-in music player.
And in 2/3 years when phones have as much storage space? There is no reason that a stand-alone player would be any better than one that was integrated with a phone. We aren't talking hi-fi separates here, just look at the earbuds everyones using.
Plus, with the phones if you don't like the media player or front end, there are plenty of other ones you can get. Ones that might even play other formats other than iTunes wares.
Lock-in is unlikely, unless you buy one of the really (rare) crappy ones that is designed to milk cash out you. All the decent phones can play mp3, and with no OS lock you can run any software to play any format that you want. Interestingly, all of the Microsoft ones have been very open, and it's the low-tech love-child Nokia that is completely tied down. Most decent phones play wavs/mp3s as ring tones, so you just roll your own or download any of the billions of audio clips that are on the net already.
A fool and his money are easily parted, that much is true. If you actually check up on which ones are good, you can have a bells and whistles device without being someone elses bitch.
Yet another the US is to blame for helping others.
What? It was 100% self-interest every time. Is democracy coming to Iraq for the people or for the oil markets? Are you really that blind? Go read some history. The "helping" America only exists in Hollywood, which is where 99% of your preception of the US abroad comes from.
We did provide support to various groups in Afganistans fighting the Soviets, some of then when on to betray us but a whole lot more of thoses people unfortunatly died fighting the Taliban.
They were terrorists then and they are terrorists now. You dance with the devil. When CIA lawyers were worried about giving sniper rifles to some groups as they are assassination tools, they called them "long range sighting aids". That's the level of double-speak present in this game. Regan's quote "one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter" pretty much sums it up. Or you could go Orwellian and say "we have always been at war with Saddam".
The US is the #1 sponsor of terrorism in the world, by just about every definition of the word terrorism. The vast majority of terrorists in South America, and a large percentage of the war criminals and downright heinous fuckers were trained at The School Of The Americas, in your own country. Provided they were only killing "commies", it was alright apparently. Where they learn things like hit & run techniques, kidnapping, psychological warfare. Many of the training manuals are declasified, perhaps you should check them out.
The IRA in the british isles was almost entirely funded by US contributions, ironically largely from New York. They used to bomb shopping malls all the time by the way. Since 9/11 their tactics have had to change because their funds began to dry up, and it wasn't "good PR" anymore. So, from this are we to assume that terrorism is A-OK, until it's you? What was 9/11? 3,000 dead? Fuck you. The *innocent* death toll in Iraq is over 25,000, and that's the conservative, "verifyable with two different sources" numbers. Other numbers go as high as 125,000. And there's no guesses as to how many people who picked up a weapon to essentially defend their country against a foreign agressor have been killed. The geneva convention is the only reason we have the 25,000 number, because it demands that is kept.
So, it would seem that in order to prevent an event like 9/11, with 3,000 deaths, you are willing to kill 25,000 foreigners. And you wonder why the world is looking at you in shock and fear?
Afganistan was cold-war by proxy, as was Vietnam. Iraq first time was the result of a bullshit PR campaign full of lies, paid for by disposed Kuwaiti dictators. Until they got the US public thinking Saddam was a baby killer, he was a US ally. There ain't NO righteousness there at all my friend. Besides, the Gulf War was not America, it was the US and a much larger collalition of countries who were all duped into thinking that the lying Kuwait dictators were worth fighting for.
ANYTHING you do on your own is with nothing else in mind other than the gain of those doing it. What I take issue with is the way you pretend it is in some way in charity. Either you are a moron or one of those spreading the myth.
The UN resolutions against Israel are always worth a good laugh, such as forbiddening them from expelling a leader of people who goes around telling people to blow themselves up in shopping centers.
Perhaps you are spreading the myth, no sane person could reply like that unless they had an agenda. You of course forget the mention the resolutions about illegal nuclear weapons, illegal occupation (in the UN's own words) of many parts of neighbouring countries, illegal walls, routine killing. Blatant violations. There is debate whether Iraq was in violation of anything, and this is kicking up a shitstorm here in the UK right now about the legality of the war. I'm not saying those who blow themselves up are any better, but you are a fucktwad of the highest order if you thing that your response is a valid claim against the fact the UN resolutions against Iraq justify ANYTHING that you have done there.
But hey, as long as you can sleep easy. It's not as if anyone you know is dying for your SUV privlidges.
a significant problem that was encountered was the delay of the actuators and controls to the output on the screen.
Saw the site earlier linked elsewhere, before it got slashdotted. For the controls, they had the steering column linked to a IIRC logitech steering wheel where the universal joint would have been, so there were no gears. Apparently the force feedback on it still works as well. If you could get the existing steering column to move fairly freely, it should work rather well.
Actually, most of the blame lies with the policies that led to people having so much hate they felt 9-11 was justified. Thing is, if you read the history from their point of view, you can see why they are pissed. For example, why is no one angry that the Taliban & Osama are children of the CIA? Back when they were fighting the commies, training them to conduct terrorism was seen as helpful. Then when Afgan is in the current sights, they are suddenly the bad guys. We have always been at war with Afganistan is seems...
Bitching about the inteligence communities is locking the door after the horse has fled. Why not sort out the profiteers who saw fit to overthrow democratic governments to replace them with dictators that were more forthcoming to their business aims? Stop selling weapons to anyone with a chequebook would be a better way to start to bring peace to the world; it was mostly US equiptment that rolled into Kuwait for those that remember. We have always been at war with Iraq it would also seem....
Most history scholars will agree that the foreign policy of the US is very inconsistent, and is a major factor in most of these problems. I'm not even gonna get started on Israel, the nation that has illegal nukes, numerous UN resolutions against them, and has a habit of invading others lands. Unfortunately, most of this crap comes back to the USA's blind support of pretty much anything they do.
Apple didn't do much for computer based audio, companies like Steinberg did. Go read some music history. Samples were never traded in aiff, it was mostly wav from my experience. Jeez, it was pretty much an all-Atari affair for many years, it was only during the 90's that others began to come onto the scene, including Apple. It was only after Atari was proven to be going nowhere that the other PC's and Macs got a look-in.
That's because you're a fucking idiot. QT is what gives you interoperability! Without QT, there is no interoperabillity!
As a consumer, that's not the case, otherwise tools like Bink & Smacker would not exist to hack the content out. To me, QuickTime is lock-in, just like any track bought from any of the popular online music stores. Yes, AVI's suck and have some serious limitations, but at least there's a whole range of free tools I can use to cut them up. Apple stuff might be great if you have deep pockets, but I see no need to spend that kind of money for my own personal use. VirtualDub does everything I'm going to need, lets face it, a little bit of re-sequencing, reframing and recompressing to a new target format is what most folk will be doing.
Anamorphic means that the footage was recorded with one aspect ratio and is played back at another. [snip] Apple figured out how to do it. Nobody else has.
Nobody ever said it was magical.
The original poster I replied to did. I think he was looking to suck the cock of the person that created it, going on his enthusiasm.
As an early adopter of widescreen (and I mean UK early, which was AT LEAST six years ago), I call BS. I've always changed the aspect ratio of any video playback to my TV to make use of anamorphic video over the S-Video hookup on my video card, as zooming produces noticable lines on the screen. The player I use has the ability to restretch the image to ANY aspect ration (including custom ones, handy if the source has an small error). This is NOT some new idea or anything. I've been an anamorphic advocate for years and I've even written a couple of articles on why it's important in DVDs. However, it should not need to be important looking ahead. Yes, in supporting legacy technology it's key, but I don't agree that it should really be around for much longer. It's a hack basically.
My original point, which seems to have become completely bastardised now by the incoherent slabberings of the other AC, was that it isn't some uber-cool and brand-new technology that's going to take us through the 21st century. It exists to get the most out of older technology.
Why do I get the feeling that you know the other AC, and perhaps work together, and you were called over to help him out. Thanks for that, you for one DO actually know what you are talking about, and yes, I've had to eat my words on a few things. I'm still going to pick the brains of a couple of TV producers & editors I know though, to see if they have come across QT professionally. Not to check up on you, just because I'm interested, I have been meaning to sneak onto an editing suite for ages because I know it's something I don't have a much experience on. I know all the theory, just never seen the practice.
Preaching to the choir buddy, I hardly watch any TV and what I do watch is automatically grabbed for me.:-) I did some other things on the trip, like write some emails etc, but there are times when you can't really be constructive, or just can't be bothered with the concentration.
To be honest though, I don't think people will want just pure video-only devices. That was the limit with the portable TVs; that was all they did. Give it ten years or so, and todays latest portable device will be a dodo. I do think video will be a part of whatever comes around. You'll likely be able to send the video to a more suitable display for when you have one nearby.
Video podcasting is inveitable, combined with bittorrent it's a really effective media distribution channel. I don't know why the TV execs don't get this concept; they could distribute shows with commercial breaks in the video, and it's actually better than current broadcasting. The viewers get to choose their time (bigger market) and importantly, the download centre would be able to count every download. Granted, it's not an exact eyeball count for the advertisers, but it's a hell of an improvement over the current ratings systems.
Just looking ahead. I feel like the kid from the Six Sense saying "I see 'we only need 640k' people, and they don't even know it".
Very interesting, especially about how the format has stayed the same since 1991. OK, I conceed that multiple data tracks and references were well ahead of their time, and it is impressive that there has been no change needed to this as things progressed. I'd bet there was some debate over whether or not to do it that way, especially back then. Kudos to the guys who pushed for it!
That's for putting your point a little better than the other AC!
Now, if Apple just improved their free player to allow full screen, I'd be very happy!
It's the absolute industry standard for dealing with time-based media like video and audio.
Maybe for video, I've not got all that much direct first hand of working with commercial digital video sutes. However, I've been involved in computer based audio since "the old days" and I can't remember ever seeing quicktime in use for sequencing and/or sampling. Can't think of a single record in my collection that was produced on QT software.
OK, you say QT has a good internal design. Fair play, and I'm not claiming MS make better stuff either, I don't use their stuff much either. I was under the impression that most devices do codecs on a component model. I've never developed on an QT API myself, so yeah, pehaps it is easy to work with. However, this discussion about the innards isn't directly relevant to a consumer device. Apple haven't exactly embraced third-party iPod software, why should any new video based device be any different in this regard? Especially if it has licencing agreements with the media companies producing the content, as is the current iPod model. It is in their interests to lock it down to enable the media deals that will make it commercially viable. Your Joe Public user is not going to be technically capable (or willing) to dub his original sources into a format/size that is optimized for a mobile device, so it will have to be produced for him. A good API will only be a godsend to a handful of people.
I'll give you a hint, shitwit. If you can't play back the movie stretched to square pixels without dropping frames, then you need to offload the transform onto the GPU, don't you?
Hey man, chill. No need to be so agro.
Well, of course that is the case. It still wasn't relevant to the original point that was made that anamorphic support isn't all that magical. ANY scaling needs do be done without dropping frames, and pretty much any time you play video you will be scaling, especially if you run on a large desktop resolution and don't want videos the size of postage stamps. If the video itself is stored in it's native resolution, then "anamorphic" is not relevant to anything as it does not need to have it's aspect ratio altered. It only matters when you send the video down 4x3 technologies, such as RGB, S-Video, composite video and RF. If you are using a digital hookup, it should not be relevant as "anamorphic" works by not wasting bandwidth on black bars in the video signal. There shouldn't be any black bars in the video at all nowadays if it's a half-decent implementation.
Perhaps the QT implementation of this gives you a hard-on , but jesus christ, calm down. You'd think you'd given birth to it and I'd just eaten your first-born.
It's not proprietary once MPEG puts their stamp on it.
You still need to license it most of the time IIRC. mpeg aren't doing it for free. Yeah, I have no issue with the mpeg formats, in fact I'd say the majority of my media is in some way derived from them. However, it's the more obscure ones that annoy me, as I cannot play them on my media centre, or convert for a mobile device, or burn to DVD. To me, QT represents lack of interoperability. It seems iPod is the same, even the former head of the RIAA is complaining about DRM now! Unless Apple change this take, I will not be interested in any of their offerings, and should friends ask me for advice (as they often do), I'll be sure to point out the restrictions. It's only fair, you wouldn't get very far if you recommended cars that only ran on Esso fuel would you? Yes, I know I'm not their target market and they don't care what I think.
PS, the "take it outside" was sort of a joke, sort-of aimed at slashdot itself. I'm not a format zealot, I just want ones that allow me to import and export for personal use, without having to buy expensive licenses.
When OEMs start making Windows Mobile devices with form factors similar to the Blackberry, you'll start to see the Blackberry go the way of the doe-doe. I'm predicting this will happen very soon.
Take a look around then, there are numerous WM devices out already that have qwerty keyboards; mine does!:-) When you say very soon, I think 2005 may even be the year for them. As mentioned in the article though, one handed use is key. I can just about get away with it on mine, but it's not designed with that in mind.
Sync: you can sync with (just) one device. Don't ever try to unsync with that device, tho - in my case, you just can't. My notebook and phone are bonded forever.
That's not true at all. I sync with two PC's and have done since the first Smartphone. On the second PC connecting, you are asked if you want to use both, or delete the existing. When you connect to a third PC, you are given the option to remove one of the existing ones. I use the sync feature a lot, as it effectively allows you to sync all your callendar, contacts and tasks between two PCs, my home and office one basically. Having one global contact list is great, worth doing for that reason alone.
Agreed on boot time, right pain in the ass. Crashes I found rare, depends on a lot of things like the apps you install, or how good the bundled software the network provider puts on. Some are really bad in that respect.
You can do all your changes thru a desktop app, check out the free (as in beer) Remote Display util from Microsoft. Yeah, entering server addresses and especially non-weak passwords on a phone keypad is really sucky.
You get charged for everything: there is seemingly no community, but just software vendors.
To a certain extent that is true. There are heaps of free apps available though that do just about anything you need, and some of the free games are really good as well. However, I have moaned publicly about the lack of community in the OS in terms of software development. Some of the user groups, such as this one do have a great and helpful community, it's just that the creators of the free apps don't embrace OSS at all.:-(
Microsoft has a lot of work here before they kill anything. I'm hating this thing so much that I'm about ready to go back to my "dumb" phone and PDA combo that I used before.
Don't give up just yet, it was free for you so you might as well give it a chance. Check out Modaco where you'll find all the apps, games and help you'll need. Perhaps you'll be turned to the dark side; I was, though nowadays I'm on the Windows Mobile PDA devices.
Actually, as a long time and mostly happy Microsoft phone OS user, it can be a right pain in the ass though thankfully it's rarer and rarer now. However, the way I see it is, these are bleeding edge devices and this sort of thing is to be expected. The first few decades of land lines were ropey, and I personally witnessed some of the problems in the early days of GSM phones. I had a friend that had an analogue mobile at the same time, I swear to god it was like using a CB.
If you really need a 100% reliable device, do what NASA do and stick with the tried and trusted tech. I've learned to appreciate that my pda has phone features, not the other way around. It's a PDA first, a phone second. Still works very well, and I'm really happy with it (Win Mobile 2003 nowadays).
The only thing that would prevent this OS from being a blackberry killer is the lack of "blackberry style" device form factors.
I'm confused. The new OS is an merger of the Smartphone OS and the Windows Mobile OS. What form factor does blackberry come in that isn't all ready available with the existing mobile OS from M$?
Quicktime is a media player AND a media container. What is there to not get?,It doesn't do anything that the other players doesn't do, and usually it's done better elsewhere. Most view it alongside RealPlayer in terms of annoyance.
What does shifting the load onto the gpu have to do with determining whether anamorphic is useful? The semantics of how the image is stretched is irrelevant to this discussion. Using video overlays are hardly a new development, so the idea of having the gpu do most of the work isn't all that innovative. What, do you think we should give them a medal? What makes quicktime so superdooper pray tell...? I'm fairly sure my three year old graphics card is quite capable of scaling the video in realtime, though I'd need to check to be sure. Going by performance not being impacted in the slightest when you resize the frame, I'd hazard a guess of that being the case.
Ok, so you do have some good codecs licensed. This is slashdot mate, take the proprietary crap outside. Besides, the codec is only an extension to the format, so you can't judge the format by it.
As for "zero maintenance", show me a quicktime device that displays to a domestic TV and has digital audio out. That is networked, has a remote that the application was designed for (makes a huge UI difference), that can play almost any media (except some of the uh-hu, quicktime ones). And of course, do anamorphic output if you have a widescreen tv WITH automatic switching of the tv to the correct display mode? Sorry, but it's the best thing on the market by a long shot and just works. Have you ever even built a home media centre? There is no commercially available product that comes close yet, and it's been available for several years. If they could sell it, it would be hugely successful, then legislated into oblivion unfortunately.
Looks like I'm succeeding in winding up a fanboi!:-) Paris Hilton references, very classy!
Doesn't even know what QuickTime is, trying to particpate in a discussion at this level. Idiot.
"At this level"? Pull your head out of your arse and stop worshiping yourself. I've been working & authoring digital media since before 1990. Firstly, quicktime is nagware, so IMHO it's a piece of crap that I have to tolerate for the one interesting video now and then that won't play elsewhere. Can't even do fullscreen, so anamorphic presentation isn't even relevant for most of the installs of it.
Ooo, it has support for anamorphic, wooo, fancy! Actually, it's fucking simple coordinate math. Look at source video, look at display capabilities, figure out best way to present it. Not rocket science, in fact it's it's damn easy. I've been using a free (as in beer) windows player that could do that for AT LEAST three years, originally through a laptop, then later through a dedicated desktop. I now use an xbox media centre setup as all this crap is built into it, and it's easier to maintain & updated regularly with new features. Being able to mess with the aspect ratio and audio sync were two of the first features, in order to sort out all the people encoding video without having a clue.
Apple. Running around two years behind everyone else. But that doesn't matter to the consumer, as long as it looks pretty.
TV's were limited due to reception, you weren't able to move around nor could you use one when you might actually want to e.g. on a plane or a train (tunnels). Screen sizeds were tiny, and the batteries lasted an hour or so. They still sold a shedload of them. To early tech wise IMHO.
DVD players are still new, expensive and the region coding kinda was a nail in the coffin (international travelers). You won't see someone walking down the street with one of course, that's not what they are for. To be honest, most folk won't use one in public as they only exist to kill time that you are not spending in public. "seeing them" is not a good metric. I do know a couple of people that have them, but I'm not sure how often they currently use them.
The best thing for them is TV shows, movies are just to long. Once TV is legally available on the net, I think there will be quite a few of these devices. Won't be as popular as mp3 etc, but there is still a market.
Even if it's just funny internet videos of monkeys smelling their own shit, portable video is here to stay. I often watch the odd trailer on my PDA, streaming off the web, but that's more geek factor than anything, just because I can!
How many people using 2" TVs have you seen in the past week?
Hope you don't work in marketing or design. Copying other peoples trends is NOT the way to make money. Unless you are an Apple exec "hey, let's make everyone think we invented mp3". Bloody good marketing guys, much respect! But that's generally the exception.
Yes, entertainment for travellers is a big market, but no, 2" TVs are not the solution. Try again.
How about 5" - 6" as they all seem to be in reality? I was very happy to kill time with Family Guy, god, even the guy next to me was laughing at times and he couldn't hear the sound!
Whenever someone on Slashdot bitches about America, the vast majority of the Americans are more than willing to join in. So, perhaps your statement is correct only as long as the country in question isn't the USA.
Hey, check my posting history, I slag the UK quite a lot as well. I'd completely disagree with what you are saying about "majority", that is just not the case. Even if you suggest in a very slight way that the US is not #1 for whatever metric, you'll get your balls toasted instantly. Much like your response to mine, Americans usual seem to take things personally. Just because someone criticises your country on one small respect, it doesn't mean they want to fly a jet into a building. It's all down to that wankers "with us or against us crap" that was deliberately used to polarise any issue that got in the way of their goals.
Of course not! You'd just be encoding artifacts! You encode it at 720x480 and then stretch it on playback just like DVD players do.
Which was the point I was making, who's the dumbass? The storage medium should not need anamorphic stretching on it, it should run at the correct resolution. The original poster said the codec had support for anamorphic media, this is the wrong place. The codec should list the resolution and it should be down to the player to use the correct ratio depending on the output device.
It is caused by economic and cultural problems, like poor schools, lack of decent jobs, a huge number of single parent and no-parent households, and more.
How is that different to anywhere else on the planet? We have exactly the same problems.
I'm not sure what you mean by every country in the free world allowing more personal freedom than the US.
Badly worded, my bad. My point was that having the second ammendment has made no difference to freedom. Countries with and without similar gun freedom have more and some have less freedom than you. Currently the trend is for you all to have less freedom, certainly that's the impression an outsiders getting.
I haven't agreed with anything you've said, BTW.
Nope, we both agreed that the US has guns due to the whole independance wars thing.
In short, if the government has all the guns, and you don't have any, what do you do when the government tells you to do something you don't want to do? Where do you run to?
I'm watching it happen in your country right now. I don't see the second ammendment helping any at all. Perhaps should things get so bad as to be a civil war (doubtful) then they might come into play. But they haven't stopped the war rhetoric and other such things that are destroying America's last remnants of credibility. Nor have they stopped the religious rights attempt to essentially remove the first ammendment and replace it with a copy of the Bible. Bush says "God" almost as much as he saids "terror" in his speaches. Personally, I'd fight more for the first ammendment myself, religious leadership pretty much always goes bad and your founding fathers realised that.
Most people tout the second as being some form of tynany overthrower. The thought might make sense a hundred years ago, but wars aren't really fought with rifles now. I think we can predict the outcome between a war between the US population and the army. You'd end up just like the Iraqi's; scoring the odd insurgent-style attack rather than winning any battles.
Kinda lends credence to the idea that high crime and high prison populations aren't directly related to the number of guns now, doesn't it?
Yup, it's just one of many things that all come together. To be honest, I'd say a bigger cause of the problem in the US is racism. Unless you are White Anglo Saxan Prodestant (wasp), the odds are against you from the start. But guns do make crime so much easier. Killing with a gun is a doddle, it's the same interface as a basic kodak camera. With a knife, it's actually difficult and repulsive. You physically feel the squishyness as it goes in. One wound rarely kills, and even then there are a limited number of places you can actually do some real damage. You also have to be close to do it, and you have to be a hell of a lot more determined to do so. It's not the number of guns that's the problem; it's your countries "love 'em" attitude really. Here guns are stigmatised; over your way you can get posters and coloring-in books.
How do you know your 4 foot street punk isn't armed? You're saying no criminals in the UK have weapons? I find that hard to believe. I'd welcome some proof, and not just something that's anecdotal.
Nationmaster is a favourite site of mine, but they only have one stat for firearms I can find, "murders with firearms". Here in 1999, there were 62 murders, and the polulation was 60+ million that year. The per capita figure is therefore one death per million. For the states, the figures were 8,259 deaths for a pop of over 290 million.
So, UK = 1 in 1,000,000
and US = 1 in 35,000
Nuff said...as for annectotal, well, I don't exactly lead a fully legal lifestyle, and I known a lot of questionable characters. I've seen and done things that most folk will never get to see. And throught all this, I've yet to meet someone with a gun. I have never even seen one in the country, with the exception of a.22 rifle on a range at some summer fair years ago.
This can't hold forever though. The number of guns in my country can only go up, and thanks to action movies and the constant glorification of guns, more and more punks want them.
The article is xenophobic and patronising to the British.
Bull, you are way too touchy
It's all in the wording. If I were to desribe your country using derogatory words, you'd fell the same way. It's surprising how many people don't realise that the content of an article is often less important that the tone. This is especially true in propaganda, have you been watching internatial news lately? Language is specifically choosen to get a point across. Replace "assasination" with "targeted killing" and you are good to go...
All the net is is basically a military implementation of packet switching, INVENTED BY BRITISH TELECOM, the subject of this article. Methinks he misses the point of international community. Are we going to ask for refridgeration, the steam engine and the wheel back just because we get all snotty now and then?
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Newton.
For the record, very little has been invented in the USA, unless it has a direct military application. That's a fact that CANNOT be disputed.
Some content will be provided to us in 720-by-486 anamorphic
What what what? The anamorphic technique is used to shoehorn the highest resolution out of a 4x3 medium. What in the hell is it doing in a NEW format? I think you miss the point of what it achieves. Simply encode the video at the native resolution and have the player decide how to output it. For a PC, it would be in it's native resolution, but when played full-screen to an EXTERNAL 16x9 device, only then will you need to playabout with making it anamorphic. If a new format needs it, it was a bad design to start with.
I'm guessing now that the US must be beginning to adopt widescreen, and anamorphic is one of the brilliant buzzwords used for selling it. It's a shame no-one knows what it really means.
Just to repeat; the anamorphic technique is a hack to get widescreen into existing formats, without wasting huges bands of vertical resolution by carrying the borders in the image. It has NO PLACE in new video formats, except for the final playback if played via NTSC/PAL type cabling.
I moved on from DVD to Divx a while back, so I haven't touched anything anamorphic in years. I'm formerly a strong advocate for the technique, on DVD's it's essential. Shame really, due to the non-adoption of 16x9 in the US, most of my region one imports are non-amorphic. Viewing the UK release of A Bugs Life (one of the first DVD releases) next to the US one is an eye opener; it's practically double the vertical resolution!
From a personal standpoint, if you want my buy-in on this, make it so I can view the media on my hacked-xbox media centre. Otherwise I'm not interested; I'll watch a TV show on my PC but not a movie when I've got a home cinema set up in the other room. Though my money suggests you'll want use to buy YOUR hardware to do this...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
The chatter thing, I take it the phone needs to be connected for it to work then? If so, that's not push email, and most IMAP devices already do that (including current M$ pdas). True push mail should be able to go to the phone without requiring a WiFi, GPRS or other form of connection to be active.
And in 2/3 years when phones have as much storage space? There is no reason that a stand-alone player would be any better than one that was integrated with a phone. We aren't talking hi-fi separates here, just look at the earbuds everyones using.
Plus, with the phones if you don't like the media player or front end, there are plenty of other ones you can get. Ones that might even play other formats other than iTunes wares.
Lock-in is unlikely, unless you buy one of the really (rare) crappy ones that is designed to milk cash out you. All the decent phones can play mp3, and with no OS lock you can run any software to play any format that you want. Interestingly, all of the Microsoft ones have been very open, and it's the low-tech love-child Nokia that is completely tied down. Most decent phones play wavs/mp3s as ring tones, so you just roll your own or download any of the billions of audio clips that are on the net already.
A fool and his money are easily parted, that much is true. If you actually check up on which ones are good, you can have a bells and whistles device without being someone elses bitch.
What? It was 100% self-interest every time. Is democracy coming to Iraq for the people or for the oil markets? Are you really that blind? Go read some history. The "helping" America only exists in Hollywood, which is where 99% of your preception of the US abroad comes from.
We did provide support to various groups in Afganistans fighting the Soviets, some of then when on to betray us but a whole lot more of thoses people unfortunatly died fighting the Taliban.
They were terrorists then and they are terrorists now. You dance with the devil. When CIA lawyers were worried about giving sniper rifles to some groups as they are assassination tools, they called them "long range sighting aids". That's the level of double-speak present in this game. Regan's quote "one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter" pretty much sums it up. Or you could go Orwellian and say "we have always been at war with Saddam".
The US is the #1 sponsor of terrorism in the world, by just about every definition of the word terrorism. The vast majority of terrorists in South America, and a large percentage of the war criminals and downright heinous fuckers were trained at The School Of The Americas, in your own country. Provided they were only killing "commies", it was alright apparently. Where they learn things like hit & run techniques, kidnapping, psychological warfare. Many of the training manuals are declasified, perhaps you should check them out.
The IRA in the british isles was almost entirely funded by US contributions, ironically largely from New York. They used to bomb shopping malls all the time by the way. Since 9/11 their tactics have had to change because their funds began to dry up, and it wasn't "good PR" anymore. So, from this are we to assume that terrorism is A-OK, until it's you? What was 9/11? 3,000 dead? Fuck you. The *innocent* death toll in Iraq is over 25,000, and that's the conservative, "verifyable with two different sources" numbers. Other numbers go as high as 125,000. And there's no guesses as to how many people who picked up a weapon to essentially defend their country against a foreign agressor have been killed. The geneva convention is the only reason we have the 25,000 number, because it demands that is kept.
So, it would seem that in order to prevent an event like 9/11, with 3,000 deaths, you are willing to kill 25,000 foreigners. And you wonder why the world is looking at you in shock and fear?
Afganistan was cold-war by proxy, as was Vietnam. Iraq first time was the result of a bullshit PR campaign full of lies, paid for by disposed Kuwaiti dictators. Until they got the US public thinking Saddam was a baby killer, he was a US ally. There ain't NO righteousness there at all my friend. Besides, the Gulf War was not America, it was the US and a much larger collalition of countries who were all duped into thinking that the lying Kuwait dictators were worth fighting for.
ANYTHING you do on your own is with nothing else in mind other than the gain of those doing it. What I take issue with is the way you pretend it is in some way in charity. Either you are a moron or one of those spreading the myth.
The UN resolutions against Israel are always worth a good laugh, such as forbiddening them from expelling a leader of people who goes around telling people to blow themselves up in shopping centers.
Perhaps you are spreading the myth, no sane person could reply like that unless they had an agenda. You of course forget the mention the resolutions about illegal nuclear weapons, illegal occupation (in the UN's own words) of many parts of neighbouring countries, illegal walls, routine killing. Blatant violations. There is debate whether Iraq was in violation of anything, and this is kicking up a shitstorm here in the UK right now about the legality of the war. I'm not saying those who blow themselves up are any better, but you are a fucktwad of the highest order if you thing that your response is a valid claim against the fact the UN resolutions against Iraq justify ANYTHING that you have done there.
But hey, as long as you can sleep easy. It's not as if anyone you know is dying for your SUV privlidges.
Saw the site earlier linked elsewhere, before it got slashdotted. For the controls, they had the steering column linked to a IIRC logitech steering wheel where the universal joint would have been, so there were no gears. Apparently the force feedback on it still works as well. If you could get the existing steering column to move fairly freely, it should work rather well.
You aren't a history buff, are you? Don't say we didn't warn you...
Bitching about the inteligence communities is locking the door after the horse has fled. Why not sort out the profiteers who saw fit to overthrow democratic governments to replace them with dictators that were more forthcoming to their business aims? Stop selling weapons to anyone with a chequebook would be a better way to start to bring peace to the world; it was mostly US equiptment that rolled into Kuwait for those that remember. We have always been at war with Iraq it would also seem....
Most history scholars will agree that the foreign policy of the US is very inconsistent, and is a major factor in most of these problems. I'm not even gonna get started on Israel, the nation that has illegal nukes, numerous UN resolutions against them, and has a habit of invading others lands. Unfortunately, most of this crap comes back to the USA's blind support of pretty much anything they do.
That's because you're a fucking idiot. QT is what gives you interoperability! Without QT, there is no interoperabillity!
As a consumer, that's not the case, otherwise tools like Bink & Smacker would not exist to hack the content out. To me, QuickTime is lock-in, just like any track bought from any of the popular online music stores. Yes, AVI's suck and have some serious limitations, but at least there's a whole range of free tools I can use to cut them up. Apple stuff might be great if you have deep pockets, but I see no need to spend that kind of money for my own personal use. VirtualDub does everything I'm going to need, lets face it, a little bit of re-sequencing, reframing and recompressing to a new target format is what most folk will be doing.
Anamorphic means that the footage was recorded with one aspect ratio and is played back at another. [snip] Apple figured out how to do it. Nobody else has.
Nobody ever said it was magical.
The original poster I replied to did. I think he was looking to suck the cock of the person that created it, going on his enthusiasm.
As an early adopter of widescreen (and I mean UK early, which was AT LEAST six years ago), I call BS. I've always changed the aspect ratio of any video playback to my TV to make use of anamorphic video over the S-Video hookup on my video card, as zooming produces noticable lines on the screen. The player I use has the ability to restretch the image to ANY aspect ration (including custom ones, handy if the source has an small error). This is NOT some new idea or anything. I've been an anamorphic advocate for years and I've even written a couple of articles on why it's important in DVDs. However, it should not need to be important looking ahead. Yes, in supporting legacy technology it's key, but I don't agree that it should really be around for much longer. It's a hack basically.
My original point, which seems to have become completely bastardised now by the incoherent slabberings of the other AC, was that it isn't some uber-cool and brand-new technology that's going to take us through the 21st century. It exists to get the most out of older technology.
Why do I get the feeling that you know the other AC, and perhaps work together, and you were called over to help him out. Thanks for that, you for one DO actually know what you are talking about, and yes, I've had to eat my words on a few things. I'm still going to pick the brains of a couple of TV producers & editors I know though, to see if they have come across QT professionally. Not to check up on you, just because I'm interested, I have been meaning to sneak onto an editing suite for ages because I know it's something I don't have a much experience on. I know all the theory, just never seen the practice.
Which part of "free player" can you not read, moron? It's a pretty basic feature for gods sake.
To be honest though, I don't think people will want just pure video-only devices. That was the limit with the portable TVs; that was all they did. Give it ten years or so, and todays latest portable device will be a dodo. I do think video will be a part of whatever comes around. You'll likely be able to send the video to a more suitable display for when you have one nearby.
Video podcasting is inveitable, combined with bittorrent it's a really effective media distribution channel. I don't know why the TV execs don't get this concept; they could distribute shows with commercial breaks in the video, and it's actually better than current broadcasting. The viewers get to choose their time (bigger market) and importantly, the download centre would be able to count every download. Granted, it's not an exact eyeball count for the advertisers, but it's a hell of an improvement over the current ratings systems.
Just looking ahead. I feel like the kid from the Six Sense saying "I see 'we only need 640k' people, and they don't even know it".
That's for putting your point a little better than the other AC!
Now, if Apple just improved their free player to allow full screen, I'd be very happy!
It's the absolute industry standard for dealing with time-based media like video and audio.
Maybe for video, I've not got all that much direct first hand of working with commercial digital video sutes. However, I've been involved in computer based audio since "the old days" and I can't remember ever seeing quicktime in use for sequencing and/or sampling. Can't think of a single record in my collection that was produced on QT software.
OK, you say QT has a good internal design. Fair play, and I'm not claiming MS make better stuff either, I don't use their stuff much either. I was under the impression that most devices do codecs on a component model. I've never developed on an QT API myself, so yeah, pehaps it is easy to work with. However, this discussion about the innards isn't directly relevant to a consumer device. Apple haven't exactly embraced third-party iPod software, why should any new video based device be any different in this regard? Especially if it has licencing agreements with the media companies producing the content, as is the current iPod model. It is in their interests to lock it down to enable the media deals that will make it commercially viable. Your Joe Public user is not going to be technically capable (or willing) to dub his original sources into a format/size that is optimized for a mobile device, so it will have to be produced for him. A good API will only be a godsend to a handful of people.
I'll give you a hint, shitwit. If you can't play back the movie stretched to square pixels without dropping frames, then you need to offload the transform onto the GPU, don't you?
Hey man, chill. No need to be so agro.
Well, of course that is the case. It still wasn't relevant to the original point that was made that anamorphic support isn't all that magical. ANY scaling needs do be done without dropping frames, and pretty much any time you play video you will be scaling, especially if you run on a large desktop resolution and don't want videos the size of postage stamps. If the video itself is stored in it's native resolution, then "anamorphic" is not relevant to anything as it does not need to have it's aspect ratio altered. It only matters when you send the video down 4x3 technologies, such as RGB, S-Video, composite video and RF. If you are using a digital hookup, it should not be relevant as "anamorphic" works by not wasting bandwidth on black bars in the video signal. There shouldn't be any black bars in the video at all nowadays if it's a half-decent implementation.
Perhaps the QT implementation of this gives you a hard-on , but jesus christ, calm down. You'd think you'd given birth to it and I'd just eaten your first-born.
It's not proprietary once MPEG puts their stamp on it.
You still need to license it most of the time IIRC. mpeg aren't doing it for free. Yeah, I have no issue with the mpeg formats, in fact I'd say the majority of my media is in some way derived from them. However, it's the more obscure ones that annoy me, as I cannot play them on my media centre, or convert for a mobile device, or burn to DVD. To me, QT represents lack of interoperability. It seems iPod is the same, even the former head of the RIAA is complaining about DRM now! Unless Apple change this take, I will not be interested in any of their offerings, and should friends ask me for advice (as they often do), I'll be sure to point out the restrictions. It's only fair, you wouldn't get very far if you recommended cars that only ran on Esso fuel would you? Yes, I know I'm not their target market and they don't care what I think.
PS, the "take it outside" was sort of a joke, sort-of aimed at slashdot itself. I'm not a format zealot, I just want ones that allow me to import and export for personal use, without having to buy expensive licenses.
Take a look around then, there are numerous WM devices out already that have qwerty keyboards; mine does! :-) When you say very soon, I think 2005 may even be the year for them. As mentioned in the article though, one handed use is key. I can just about get away with it on mine, but it's not designed with that in mind.
That's not true at all. I sync with two PC's and have done since the first Smartphone. On the second PC connecting, you are asked if you want to use both, or delete the existing. When you connect to a third PC, you are given the option to remove one of the existing ones. I use the sync feature a lot, as it effectively allows you to sync all your callendar, contacts and tasks between two PCs, my home and office one basically. Having one global contact list is great, worth doing for that reason alone.
Agreed on boot time, right pain in the ass. Crashes I found rare, depends on a lot of things like the apps you install, or how good the bundled software the network provider puts on. Some are really bad in that respect.
You can do all your changes thru a desktop app, check out the free (as in beer) Remote Display util from Microsoft. Yeah, entering server addresses and especially non-weak passwords on a phone keypad is really sucky.
You get charged for everything: there is seemingly no community, but just software vendors.
To a certain extent that is true. There are heaps of free apps available though that do just about anything you need, and some of the free games are really good as well. However, I have moaned publicly about the lack of community in the OS in terms of software development. Some of the user groups, such as this one do have a great and helpful community, it's just that the creators of the free apps don't embrace OSS at all. :-(
Microsoft has a lot of work here before they kill anything. I'm hating this thing so much that I'm about ready to go back to my "dumb" phone and PDA combo that I used before.
Don't give up just yet, it was free for you so you might as well give it a chance. Check out Modaco where you'll find all the apps, games and help you'll need. Perhaps you'll be turned to the dark side; I was, though nowadays I'm on the Windows Mobile PDA devices.
Actually, as a long time and mostly happy Microsoft phone OS user, it can be a right pain in the ass though thankfully it's rarer and rarer now. However, the way I see it is, these are bleeding edge devices and this sort of thing is to be expected. The first few decades of land lines were ropey, and I personally witnessed some of the problems in the early days of GSM phones. I had a friend that had an analogue mobile at the same time, I swear to god it was like using a CB.
If you really need a 100% reliable device, do what NASA do and stick with the tried and trusted tech. I've learned to appreciate that my pda has phone features, not the other way around. It's a PDA first, a phone second. Still works very well, and I'm really happy with it (Win Mobile 2003 nowadays).
I'm confused. The new OS is an merger of the Smartphone OS and the Windows Mobile OS. What form factor does blackberry come in that isn't all ready available with the existing mobile OS from M$?
What does shifting the load onto the gpu have to do with determining whether anamorphic is useful? The semantics of how the image is stretched is irrelevant to this discussion. Using video overlays are hardly a new development, so the idea of having the gpu do most of the work isn't all that innovative. What, do you think we should give them a medal? What makes quicktime so superdooper pray tell...? I'm fairly sure my three year old graphics card is quite capable of scaling the video in realtime, though I'd need to check to be sure. Going by performance not being impacted in the slightest when you resize the frame, I'd hazard a guess of that being the case.
Ok, so you do have some good codecs licensed. This is slashdot mate, take the proprietary crap outside. Besides, the codec is only an extension to the format, so you can't judge the format by it.
As for "zero maintenance", show me a quicktime device that displays to a domestic TV and has digital audio out. That is networked, has a remote that the application was designed for (makes a huge UI difference), that can play almost any media (except some of the uh-hu, quicktime ones). And of course, do anamorphic output if you have a widescreen tv WITH automatic switching of the tv to the correct display mode? Sorry, but it's the best thing on the market by a long shot and just works. Have you ever even built a home media centre? There is no commercially available product that comes close yet, and it's been available for several years. If they could sell it, it would be hugely successful, then legislated into oblivion unfortunately.
Looks like I'm succeeding in winding up a fanboi! :-) Paris Hilton references, very classy!
"At this level"? Pull your head out of your arse and stop worshiping yourself. I've been working & authoring digital media since before 1990. Firstly, quicktime is nagware, so IMHO it's a piece of crap that I have to tolerate for the one interesting video now and then that won't play elsewhere. Can't even do fullscreen, so anamorphic presentation isn't even relevant for most of the installs of it.
Ooo, it has support for anamorphic, wooo, fancy! Actually, it's fucking simple coordinate math. Look at source video, look at display capabilities, figure out best way to present it. Not rocket science, in fact it's it's damn easy. I've been using a free (as in beer) windows player that could do that for AT LEAST three years, originally through a laptop, then later through a dedicated desktop. I now use an xbox media centre setup as all this crap is built into it, and it's easier to maintain & updated regularly with new features. Being able to mess with the aspect ratio and audio sync were two of the first features, in order to sort out all the people encoding video without having a clue.
Apple. Running around two years behind everyone else. But that doesn't matter to the consumer, as long as it looks pretty.
DVD players are still new, expensive and the region coding kinda was a nail in the coffin (international travelers). You won't see someone walking down the street with one of course, that's not what they are for. To be honest, most folk won't use one in public as they only exist to kill time that you are not spending in public. "seeing them" is not a good metric. I do know a couple of people that have them, but I'm not sure how often they currently use them.
The best thing for them is TV shows, movies are just to long. Once TV is legally available on the net, I think there will be quite a few of these devices. Won't be as popular as mp3 etc, but there is still a market.
Even if it's just funny internet videos of monkeys smelling their own shit, portable video is here to stay. I often watch the odd trailer on my PDA, streaming off the web, but that's more geek factor than anything, just because I can!
Hope you don't work in marketing or design. Copying other peoples trends is NOT the way to make money. Unless you are an Apple exec "hey, let's make everyone think we invented mp3". Bloody good marketing guys, much respect! But that's generally the exception.
Yes, entertainment for travellers is a big market, but no, 2" TVs are not the solution. Try again.
How about 5" - 6" as they all seem to be in reality? I was very happy to kill time with Family Guy, god, even the guy next to me was laughing at times and he couldn't hear the sound!
Hey, check my posting history, I slag the UK quite a lot as well. I'd completely disagree with what you are saying about "majority", that is just not the case. Even if you suggest in a very slight way that the US is not #1 for whatever metric, you'll get your balls toasted instantly. Much like your response to mine, Americans usual seem to take things personally. Just because someone criticises your country on one small respect, it doesn't mean they want to fly a jet into a building. It's all down to that wankers "with us or against us crap" that was deliberately used to polarise any issue that got in the way of their goals.
Which was the point I was making, who's the dumbass? The storage medium should not need anamorphic stretching on it, it should run at the correct resolution. The original poster said the codec had support for anamorphic media, this is the wrong place. The codec should list the resolution and it should be down to the player to use the correct ratio depending on the output device.
How is that different to anywhere else on the planet? We have exactly the same problems.
I'm not sure what you mean by every country in the free world allowing more personal freedom than the US.
Badly worded, my bad. My point was that having the second ammendment has made no difference to freedom. Countries with and without similar gun freedom have more and some have less freedom than you. Currently the trend is for you all to have less freedom, certainly that's the impression an outsiders getting.
I haven't agreed with anything you've said, BTW.
Nope, we both agreed that the US has guns due to the whole independance wars thing.
In short, if the government has all the guns, and you don't have any, what do you do when the government tells you to do something you don't want to do? Where do you run to?
I'm watching it happen in your country right now. I don't see the second ammendment helping any at all. Perhaps should things get so bad as to be a civil war (doubtful) then they might come into play. But they haven't stopped the war rhetoric and other such things that are destroying America's last remnants of credibility. Nor have they stopped the religious rights attempt to essentially remove the first ammendment and replace it with a copy of the Bible. Bush says "God" almost as much as he saids "terror" in his speaches. Personally, I'd fight more for the first ammendment myself, religious leadership pretty much always goes bad and your founding fathers realised that.
Most people tout the second as being some form of tynany overthrower. The thought might make sense a hundred years ago, but wars aren't really fought with rifles now. I think we can predict the outcome between a war between the US population and the army. You'd end up just like the Iraqi's; scoring the odd insurgent-style attack rather than winning any battles.
Kinda lends credence to the idea that high crime and high prison populations aren't directly related to the number of guns now, doesn't it?
Yup, it's just one of many things that all come together. To be honest, I'd say a bigger cause of the problem in the US is racism. Unless you are White Anglo Saxan Prodestant (wasp), the odds are against you from the start. But guns do make crime so much easier. Killing with a gun is a doddle, it's the same interface as a basic kodak camera. With a knife, it's actually difficult and repulsive. You physically feel the squishyness as it goes in. One wound rarely kills, and even then there are a limited number of places you can actually do some real damage. You also have to be close to do it, and you have to be a hell of a lot more determined to do so. It's not the number of guns that's the problem; it's your countries "love 'em" attitude really. Here guns are stigmatised; over your way you can get posters and coloring-in books.
How do you know your 4 foot street punk isn't armed? You're saying no criminals in the UK have weapons? I find that hard to believe. I'd welcome some proof, and not just something that's anecdotal.
Nationmaster is a favourite site of mine, but they only have one stat for firearms I can find, "murders with firearms". Here in 1999, there were 62 murders, and the polulation was 60+ million that year. The per capita figure is therefore one death per million. For the states, the figures were 8,259 deaths for a pop of over 290 million.
So, UK = 1 in 1,000,000
and US = 1 in 35,000
Nuff said...as for annectotal, well, I don't exactly lead a fully legal lifestyle, and I known a lot of questionable characters. I've seen and done things that most folk will never get to see. And throught all this, I've yet to meet someone with a gun. I have never even seen one in the country, with the exception of a .22 rifle on a range at some summer fair years ago.
This can't hold forever though. The number of guns in my country can only go up, and thanks to action movies and the constant glorification of guns, more and more punks want them.
It's all in the wording. If I were to desribe your country using derogatory words, you'd fell the same way. It's surprising how many people don't realise that the content of an article is often less important that the tone. This is especially true in propaganda, have you been watching internatial news lately? Language is specifically choosen to get a point across. Replace "assasination" with "targeted killing" and you are good to go...
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Newton.
For the record, very little has been invented in the USA, unless it has a direct military application. That's a fact that CANNOT be disputed.
What what what? The anamorphic technique is used to shoehorn the highest resolution out of a 4x3 medium. What in the hell is it doing in a NEW format? I think you miss the point of what it achieves. Simply encode the video at the native resolution and have the player decide how to output it. For a PC, it would be in it's native resolution, but when played full-screen to an EXTERNAL 16x9 device, only then will you need to playabout with making it anamorphic. If a new format needs it, it was a bad design to start with.
I'm guessing now that the US must be beginning to adopt widescreen, and anamorphic is one of the brilliant buzzwords used for selling it. It's a shame no-one knows what it really means.
Just to repeat; the anamorphic technique is a hack to get widescreen into existing formats, without wasting huges bands of vertical resolution by carrying the borders in the image. It has NO PLACE in new video formats, except for the final playback if played via NTSC/PAL type cabling.
I moved on from DVD to Divx a while back, so I haven't touched anything anamorphic in years. I'm formerly a strong advocate for the technique, on DVD's it's essential. Shame really, due to the non-adoption of 16x9 in the US, most of my region one imports are non-amorphic. Viewing the UK release of A Bugs Life (one of the first DVD releases) next to the US one is an eye opener; it's practically double the vertical resolution!
From a personal standpoint, if you want my buy-in on this, make it so I can view the media on my hacked-xbox media centre. Otherwise I'm not interested; I'll watch a TV show on my PC but not a movie when I've got a home cinema set up in the other room. Though my money suggests you'll want use to buy YOUR hardware to do this... ;-)