Do the great unwashed masses really need to eck out that last 500KB/sec from their ISP? Does it really matter that "naughty farm animals" loads in 1/8 of a second instead of 1/4 of a second?
I know, Netflix, Hulu and more recently Amazon have finally made movies on demand practical, but past about 10 Mb/sec does speed really matter?
I recently called my ISP and asked to be reduced to the slowest speed they offer -- 15 Mb/sec -- to save money and because even as a geek doing geeky things, I still wasn't using a sizable fraction of the bandwidth (25 Mb/sec) I had before. And guess what -- the Roku box, and Netflix plugin for Media Center, continued to function just fine.
This doesn't stop the local competitor (who will remain nameless but starts with a C) from coming to my door twice a month with promises of blazing speed if I'd only switch to them. I try to explain that I really don't need that kind of speed, and they look at me like I had said I really don't breathe very much.
I suspect a lot of this "get the screamingist bandwidth you can afford!" is just marketing to consumers that don't understand what bandwidth buys you. (And doesn't buy you.)
Yeah, I can't count the times I've seen someone breaking into a car or mugging a woman on the street, and I've yelled at him "Hey! What you're doing is illegal!"
Then he'd beat the tar outta me and take my wallet. I'm pretty sure that's illegal too. I'll have to check.
As an early adopter of Laserdisc, I think I can say that VHS over any kind of cable was never "fine". But you prove my point: That for many people, 200+ lines interlaced has been "fine" for many years, still is for most of them, and under that expectation, 540 non-interlaced is an embarrassment of riches. (Not to mention the lack of time base errors and much improved color accuracy.)
Point is, when you subtract geeks and the people easily swayed by marketing out of the equation, the great unwashed masses can't really tell (or don't care about) the difference between 540P (or even 480P) and 1080P except the latter probably costs more. Especially on TVs less than 50 inches. I can't tell you how many installations I've seen where consumers have plugged their HD capable set top box to their HD capable tv over NTSC channel 3 and have been perfectly satisfied with the results. Mother in law's excuse was that she already had an antenna cable and the HDMI cable cost extra.
And so, a few geeks and genuine videophiles will complain, but the great majority of viewers won't even notice. Which begs the question, what exactly are the studios trying to accomplish? All they're doing is setting up a situation where Fred and Ethyl are even more likely to say "Well, we got one 'a' them-there Blue Ray players and got some Blue Ray disks, and we don't see no difference from our old DVDs."
Combat piracy? Are you kidding? This is the industry where in-theater camcorder captures are "good enough". Where compressing a movie onto a VCD is "good enough". So, somehow 540P is suddenly not going to be good enough?
I'm at a loss as to what this move is supposed to accomplish.
Your mileage, as always, may vary, but Verizon succeeded where AT&T failed in three very key areas -- reception at my work, reception at my home, and reception on the route between. "Why" is immaterial; despite all the marketing, it's the ability to make a call that counts. (Note I didn't even say 'reliably make a call'.)
I agree, but the "verizon agrees in court that they have poor coverage in that area" goes, I think, into the category of "in a perfect world...."
But you have a valid point -- I know what questions to ask, how to direct my lawyer, and I stand a better chance of avoiding such a situation.
Remember, though, that the great majority of us in this forum are geeks and we know how this stuff works (or doesn't). Janey Murtz, daughter of Fred and Ethyl, who thinks youtube is too complicated to figure out, will probably not even know what questions to ask, which leaves her at the mercy of the PD, who in technical matters is almost certainly out of his depth also. Could get ugly.
I have a hard time believing that all the great unwashed masses that thought VHS over a composite cable was fine, who buy a 52 inch HDTV and connect the set top box via the RF port, who have their DVD player connected via composite or s-video, or are watching ATSC broadcasts over a converter to their tube TV, are going to be at all put out by this. It's still better than 480P, and I would venture to guess that the great majority of tv watchers aren't even seeing 480P.
...so switching to component video at 520p is still quite the improvement over what most people have. And for less than 50", there's not a lot of visible difference between that and 1080p.
So, like what? They're making a change that only geeks will care about? Are geeks that much of a market?
That's exactly the issue -- people will inevitably blame the application rather than the driver choosing (if this proves to be the case) to use it inappropriately. If the driver truly was facebooking while driving (not clear at all to me, as facebook for smartphones often delays updates) then it's her fault, not the application's fault.
I'm not sure I would go that far, but you bring up a brilliant point. If she struck and killed someone due to inattention, especially (as reported elsewhere) if she was passing an accident scene at the time, then she's truly screwed and deserves to be.
(This is the important point.) What she was doing at the time doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference, whether it was putting on makeup, reading the paper, arranging flowers, or updating facebook.
I think there is a danger in concentrating on the facebook issue (other than the illegality and totally screwed-up-ness of texting while driving) in that it puts the blame on facebook phone apps rather than a driver's really bad decision to use it while at speed.
> Assuming the phone times were accurate and in sync (big assumption), someone was calling 911 on the victim's phone at the same time as she hit "submit" on her Facebook upgrade.
That's scary. Facebook updates are frequently delayed, especially in areas of poor reception, or if you're connected to a dodgy wifi. I've seen this often. (Sitting in restaurants, not driving in my car.) The update will keep trying until it gets reception.
It's a little chilling, the thought that I could update facebook, get in the car, have a drunk walk in front of me as I pull out of the parking lot, and lose the case because of a delayed update. (I use the drunk example because that has actually happened to me, in the era before smartphones. He was taken away in ambulance. The officer did not cite me.)
For what they offer, tablets are too expensive. Part of this is probably NRE, most, I believe, is because they're the next cool gadget and marketeers know that gadgeteers will pay a premium to have one first.
For the purposes of this conversation, I am excluding the sub-$200 tablets that are still running Android 1.X, can't use the market, and have no upgrade path. (waves hand...) Those aren't the tablets you're looking for.
I'm actually looking forward to Microsoft getting into the tablet market and diluting it a bit. I wouldn't buy a Windows 7 tablet on a very large bet, but I suspect that Windows tablet offerings will help drag the price down when millions of people read the reviews, decide to stick with their PC, and leave a glut on the market.
I've read the comic, and I think they did what they could on the adaptation, and did a lot better job than most.
On top of that, despite the changes, (the original ending, which would have been a howler if done in this day and age, the lack of smoking, which ruined one of the best lines of the comic) and things they just couldn't do in film, (the Under the Hood excerpts, the bilateral symmetry of issue #6, the Black Freighter) I thought the film stood on it's own and I really enjoyed it.
Plotwise, the only place the film fell down, in my opinion, was the Comedian's visit to Moloch, which, given the changed ending, was rendered somewhat pointless.
I may be getting the director's cut DVD and theatrical version confused, but I remember seeing the kid there. What wasn't there was the dialog between the kid and the vendor (which was rather sparse in the comic) or the text of what the kid was reading (The Black Freighter comic) which couldn't possibly have fit in a feature film, having enough content for an entire other feature film. (I'm aware of the black freighter animated movie on the DVD, but haven't watched it as that part of the story never really grabbed me.) I remember the kid, the vendor and the psychologist all in-frame just before, you know, what happened to New York.
Parenthetically, in situations where there is a substantial difference between the theatrical release and the director's cut, I always consider the latter to be the "real" movie. I realize this isn't fair, because the great majority will have seen the cut-down version in theater, and sometimes it makes for misunderstandings when debating the merits of a film, but I can't help it -- so often these days, films are cut back so much for running time that one could legitimately consider the theatrical release to be nothing more than an extra long trailer.
Inebriated, maybe, but surprised, no. Self defense, if taught properly, is not something you have to think about. The forebrain is too slow. To be effective, it has to be a set of reflexes, like stomping on the brake when a kid runs out in front of your car. You don't think about it any more than you think about sneezing.
As to being prohibitively time consuming, a determined woman can learn to be pretty effective in a fraction of the time you spendt on Call of Duty.
When a new OS comes out, updates do matter because they solve significant bugs or add significant functionality. As the OS matures, updates become less and less important.
The update from 2.1 to 2.2 does have some importance to non-geeks because 2.2 has flash support. Even as a geek I'm not sure what 2.3 will buy me if anything, which indicates (at least to me) that we may be getting up on the mature end of the curve.
Not to name any names -- SAMSUNG -- but the update to 2.2 is important. After that, maybe not so much.
Perhaps. And perhaps, it gives us the opportunity to break up some fiefdoms, dump some bloat, and bring in new blood and new ideas. Or even, create a need that someone with a lot of dot com money might be interested in filling. Or all of the above.
> If you keep neglecting the roof, it will eventually cost you the house.
That's correct! Bravo!
And sometimes you just HAVE to replace the roof somehow, even if it means going deeper in debt, or come to terms with the fact that you won't have a place to live. (Although as much as I'd love to see it happen while I'm alive, I'm having trouble fitting "going to mars" into this category. Yeah, I know I know, the diaspora, emigrate to the stars, continuation of the race, etc, but -- let's face it -- you're talking REALLY long term now, not just 2011 -- 2013.)
But... if there is a reasonable likelihood that the roof will last another year or two, it could make more sense to wait until I can afford to have it replaced (which I am in fact doing) rather than paying the cost of money (taking out a loan) to fix it now. Make sense?
I fully realize I'm treading on sacred Geek ground here, and I'm not happy about it either.
> On the other hand, investing in these scientific programs could (and probably will) stimulate the economy in a feed-forward loop of its own.
Agreed, mostly. I was 14 when we landed on the moon, and I saw first hand the huge jump in technology we saw as a result of the moon mission. (It wasn't just about Tang...) It definitely used to work that way.
That said, what I'm seeing now just isn't of the same caliber as those times. I sometimes wonder if the US government, or any nation, has the guts and the will to do space research without drowning in well-meaning cruft and outright graft. Maybe it doesn't just take a powerful country, it takes a *young* powerful country, that hasn't yet been smothered in bureaucracy, to pull off very large research projects. Maybe it is time to let the private sector have a chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Do the great unwashed masses really need to eck out that last 500KB/sec from their ISP? Does it really matter that "naughty farm animals" loads in 1/8 of a second instead of 1/4 of a second?
I know, Netflix, Hulu and more recently Amazon have finally made movies on demand practical, but past about 10 Mb/sec does speed really matter?
I recently called my ISP and asked to be reduced to the slowest speed they offer -- 15 Mb/sec -- to save money and because even as a geek doing geeky things, I still wasn't using a sizable fraction of the bandwidth (25 Mb/sec) I had before. And guess what -- the Roku box, and Netflix plugin for Media Center, continued to function just fine.
This doesn't stop the local competitor (who will remain nameless but starts with a C) from coming to my door twice a month with promises of blazing speed if I'd only switch to them. I try to explain that I really don't need that kind of speed, and they look at me like I had said I really don't breathe very much.
I suspect a lot of this "get the screamingist bandwidth you can afford!" is just marketing to consumers that don't understand what bandwidth buys you. (And doesn't buy you.)
Yeah, I can't count the times I've seen someone breaking into a car or mugging a woman on the street, and I've yelled at him "Hey! What you're doing is illegal!"
Then he'd beat the tar outta me and take my wallet. I'm pretty sure that's illegal too. I'll have to check.
Yes, I wouldn't wear a giant neon sign with someone else's name, because that would be illegal...
Here you go. What do I win?
It must be nice to be able to afford all of that.
Try to use, and be constantly frustrated by ipads, wait in vain for an affordable and usable Android tablet, eventually go back to Windows on laptops.
> VHS over a composite cable is fine
As an early adopter of Laserdisc, I think I can say that VHS over any kind of cable was never "fine". But you prove my point: That for many people, 200+ lines interlaced has been "fine" for many years, still is for most of them, and under that expectation, 540 non-interlaced is an embarrassment of riches. (Not to mention the lack of time base errors and much improved color accuracy.)
Point is, when you subtract geeks and the people easily swayed by marketing out of the equation, the great unwashed masses can't really tell (or don't care about) the difference between 540P (or even 480P) and 1080P except the latter probably costs more. Especially on TVs less than 50 inches. I can't tell you how many installations I've seen where consumers have plugged their HD capable set top box to their HD capable tv over NTSC channel 3 and have been perfectly satisfied with the results. Mother in law's excuse was that she already had an antenna cable and the HDMI cable cost extra.
And so, a few geeks and genuine videophiles will complain, but the great majority of viewers won't even notice. Which begs the question, what exactly are the studios trying to accomplish? All they're doing is setting up a situation where Fred and Ethyl are even more likely to say "Well, we got one 'a' them-there Blue Ray players and got some Blue Ray disks, and we don't see no difference from our old DVDs."
Combat piracy? Are you kidding? This is the industry where in-theater camcorder captures are "good enough". Where compressing a movie onto a VCD is "good enough". So, somehow 540P is suddenly not going to be good enough?
I'm at a loss as to what this move is supposed to accomplish.
Your mileage, as always, may vary, but Verizon succeeded where AT&T failed in three very key areas -- reception at my work, reception at my home, and reception on the route between. "Why" is immaterial; despite all the marketing, it's the ability to make a call that counts. (Note I didn't even say 'reliably make a call'.)
that it's still better than AT&T. If I drop a call, I can retry. If I got no bars, I can't try at all.
I agree, but the "verizon agrees in court that they have poor coverage in that area" goes, I think, into the category of "in a perfect world...."
But you have a valid point -- I know what questions to ask, how to direct my lawyer, and I stand a better chance of avoiding such a situation.
Remember, though, that the great majority of us in this forum are geeks and we know how this stuff works (or doesn't). Janey Murtz, daughter of Fred and Ethyl, who thinks youtube is too complicated to figure out, will probably not even know what questions to ask, which leaves her at the mercy of the PD, who in technical matters is almost certainly out of his depth also. Could get ugly.
I have a hard time believing that all the great unwashed masses that thought VHS over a composite cable was fine, who buy a 52 inch HDTV and connect the set top box via the RF port, who have their DVD player connected via composite or s-video, or are watching ATSC broadcasts over a converter to their tube TV, are going to be at all put out by this. It's still better than 480P, and I would venture to guess that the great majority of tv watchers aren't even seeing 480P.
So, like what? They're making a change that only geeks will care about? Are geeks that much of a market?
Facebook Kills.
This is your brain on Facebook.
Etc...
That's exactly the issue -- people will inevitably blame the application rather than the driver choosing (if this proves to be the case) to use it inappropriately. If the driver truly was facebooking while driving (not clear at all to me, as facebook for smartphones often delays updates) then it's her fault, not the application's fault.
I'm not sure I would go that far, but you bring up a brilliant point. If she struck and killed someone due to inattention, especially (as reported elsewhere) if she was passing an accident scene at the time, then she's truly screwed and deserves to be.
(This is the important point.) What she was doing at the time doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference, whether it was putting on makeup, reading the paper, arranging flowers, or updating facebook.
I think there is a danger in concentrating on the facebook issue (other than the illegality and totally screwed-up-ness of texting while driving) in that it puts the blame on facebook phone apps rather than a driver's really bad decision to use it while at speed.
> Assuming the phone times were accurate and in sync (big assumption), someone was calling 911 on the victim's phone at the same time as she hit "submit" on her Facebook upgrade.
That's scary. Facebook updates are frequently delayed, especially in areas of poor reception, or if you're connected to a dodgy wifi. I've seen this often. (Sitting in restaurants, not driving in my car.) The update will keep trying until it gets reception.
It's a little chilling, the thought that I could update facebook, get in the car, have a drunk walk in front of me as I pull out of the parking lot, and lose the case because of a delayed update. (I use the drunk example because that has actually happened to me, in the era before smartphones. He was taken away in ambulance. The officer did not cite me.)
For what they offer, tablets are too expensive. Part of this is probably NRE, most, I believe, is because they're the next cool gadget and marketeers know that gadgeteers will pay a premium to have one first.
For the purposes of this conversation, I am excluding the sub-$200 tablets that are still running Android 1.X, can't use the market, and have no upgrade path. (waves hand...) Those aren't the tablets you're looking for.
I'm actually looking forward to Microsoft getting into the tablet market and diluting it a bit. I wouldn't buy a Windows 7 tablet on a very large bet, but I suspect that Windows tablet offerings will help drag the price down when millions of people read the reviews, decide to stick with their PC, and leave a glut on the market.
I've read the comic, and I think they did what they could on the adaptation, and did a lot better job than most.
On top of that, despite the changes, (the original ending, which would have been a howler if done in this day and age, the lack of smoking, which ruined one of the best lines of the comic) and things they just couldn't do in film, (the Under the Hood excerpts, the bilateral symmetry of issue #6, the Black Freighter) I thought the film stood on it's own and I really enjoyed it.
Plotwise, the only place the film fell down, in my opinion, was the Comedian's visit to Moloch, which, given the changed ending, was rendered somewhat pointless.
I may be getting the director's cut DVD and theatrical version confused, but I remember seeing the kid there. What wasn't there was the dialog between the kid and the vendor (which was rather sparse in the comic) or the text of what the kid was reading (The Black Freighter comic) which couldn't possibly have fit in a feature film, having enough content for an entire other feature film. (I'm aware of the black freighter animated movie on the DVD, but haven't watched it as that part of the story never really grabbed me.) I remember the kid, the vendor and the psychologist all in-frame just before, you know, what happened to New York.
Parenthetically, in situations where there is a substantial difference between the theatrical release and the director's cut, I always consider the latter to be the "real" movie. I realize this isn't fair, because the great majority will have seen the cut-down version in theater, and sometimes it makes for misunderstandings when debating the merits of a film, but I can't help it -- so often these days, films are cut back so much for running time that one could legitimately consider the theatrical release to be nothing more than an extra long trailer.
It's often not reported, or considered newsworthy when it is.
Inebriated, maybe, but surprised, no. Self defense, if taught properly, is not something you have to think about. The forebrain is too slow. To be effective, it has to be a set of reflexes, like stomping on the brake when a kid runs out in front of your car. You don't think about it any more than you think about sneezing.
As to being prohibitively time consuming, a determined woman can learn to be pretty effective in a fraction of the time you spendt on Call of Duty.
When a new OS comes out, updates do matter because they solve significant bugs or add significant functionality. As the OS matures, updates become less and less important.
The update from 2.1 to 2.2 does have some importance to non-geeks because 2.2 has flash support. Even as a geek I'm not sure what 2.3 will buy me if anything, which indicates (at least to me) that we may be getting up on the mature end of the curve.
Not to name any names -- SAMSUNG -- but the update to 2.2 is important. After that, maybe not so much.
Perhaps. And perhaps, it gives us the opportunity to break up some fiefdoms, dump some bloat, and bring in new blood and new ideas. Or even, create a need that someone with a lot of dot com money might be interested in filling. Or all of the above.
> If you keep neglecting the roof, it will eventually cost you the house.
That's correct! Bravo!
And sometimes you just HAVE to replace the roof somehow, even if it means going deeper in debt, or come to terms with the fact that you won't have a place to live. (Although as much as I'd love to see it happen while I'm alive, I'm having trouble fitting "going to mars" into this category. Yeah, I know I know, the diaspora, emigrate to the stars, continuation of the race, etc, but -- let's face it -- you're talking REALLY long term now, not just 2011 -- 2013.)
But... if there is a reasonable likelihood that the roof will last another year or two, it could make more sense to wait until I can afford to have it replaced (which I am in fact doing) rather than paying the cost of money (taking out a loan) to fix it now. Make sense?
I fully realize I'm treading on sacred Geek ground here, and I'm not happy about it either.
> On the other hand, investing in these scientific programs could (and probably will) stimulate the economy in a feed-forward loop of its own.
Agreed, mostly. I was 14 when we landed on the moon, and I saw first hand the huge jump in technology we saw as a result of the moon mission. (It wasn't just about Tang...) It definitely used to work that way.
That said, what I'm seeing now just isn't of the same caliber as those times. I sometimes wonder if the US government, or any nation, has the guts and the will to do space research without drowning in well-meaning cruft and outright graft. Maybe it doesn't just take a powerful country, it takes a *young* powerful country, that hasn't yet been smothered in bureaucracy, to pull off very large research projects. Maybe it is time to let the private sector have a chance.