I would like to point out at this time that nothing like what you're talking about has even been discussed by legislators to date. The tax system we have in this country works very well as it is, and nobody is looking to outlaw cash to plug leaks in it.
Well getting a credit card if you're under 21 is not an option.
For good reason. I'm sure participation in any hypothetical (I'd say mythical, but I'm being sporting) digital cash system would have a lower age limit as well, if for no other reason than to protect against mischievous fraud.
there's probably an arbitrary upper limit on the value of transactions that Visa, Mastercard, et al will accept.
Unless you're using a card with which I'm not familiar, the upper limit is your credit limit. Many cards-- well, not many, but several-- have no upper limit at all. Not just anybody can get those cards. The ones from Visa and AmEx are by invitation only. But with those cards, like Mark's black AmEx, you can literally buy anything you can afford. Car, island, basketball team, 757, whatever. No limit at all. I think AmEx requires that one of your family members actually live at the AmEx offices at all times in order to get that card, though, or something. I'm having a hard time imagining how anybody would trust another person that much. But, evidently, it happens.
we are able to have anonymous digital money right now.
How? I'm not going to accept payment from you unless I know that it's genuine. (We'll leave out for the moment the idea that it might be genuine, but have no value on the open market. That's a different issue.) How can I know that it's genuine? Well, either it has to have inherent, independently verifiable value-- like gold or diamonds or currency-- or somebody has to vouch for it. If you were using a credit card, the AmEx people would vouch for the transaction, saying that they'll accept responsibility for making sure I get my value from you. I don't trust you, but I trust AmEx and AmEx trusts you, so all's well. Except anonymity goes right out the window, but quick.
How could you possibly conduct a transaction like that anonymously? Somehow make the bits themselves have independently verifiable value? Impossible: I don't trust you, so naturally I don't trust your bits. They could very easily be forged. (Where "very easily" means different things in different contexts.)
I assert to you that "digital cash"-- and I put the term in quotes because I'm trying to talk about it in the sense that you're talking about it, very specifically-- is one of two things. One: it's possible using a trust network that eliminates the possibility of anonymity (because anonymity and accountability are incompatible ideas), in which case we've already got it with credit cards and wire transfers, and banks could very easily add the service levels you want if the demand were sufficient.
Two: it's impossible. Impossible to do it and meet all of your criteria for anonymity and so on.
i'm quite sure it won't be long before digital cash is illegal
I'm sure "digital cash" won't ever be illegal because there's basically no basis for it in reality. You might as well outlaw unicorns, or ban mermaids.
Niven wrote an essay once called, "Yet Another Modest Proposal." It's collected in one or another of his books; I believe it's in my copy of All the Myriad Ways. In it, he pitched the idea of putting US currency on the uranium standard. Coins would be made of actual radioactive uranium, in concentrations proportional to their value.
The benefits would be legion. Counterfeiting would become a crime of the past, because anybody with a Geiger counter could tell if your scratch was genuine. And what better way to keep the economy going than to encourage the circulation of money?
Lends a whole new meaning to the phrase, "burning a hole in your pocket."
Can you use them to buy something that costs $0.05? How about something that costs $500,000?
Yes, definitely. Well, not half a million bucks. My credit line isn't that good. But if you dropped one of those zeros, I could truthfully answer yes. And I know a guy with one of those American Express black cards. He can literally buy anything he wants with it. He also owns an NBA team and a TV network, so that should tell you everything you need to know about his line of credit.;-)
Can you use them anonymously?
You'll never be able to use any form of money anonymously except for stuff that has inherent physical value, like gold coins or diamonds or cash. I don't believe you'll ever be able to have anonymous digital money, popular science fiction notwithstanding.
As for your thing about small businesses, most of the businesses I interact with are sole proprietorships and limited partnerships: restaurants, markets, stuff like that. According to Quicken, I spend more money each month on restaurants than I do on anything else, excepting big-ticket fixed-cost items like the mortgage and the car note. Every one of those small businesses takes credit cards. Credit cards don't seem to suck for those small businesses at all. I think perhaps you're over-generalizing a bit.
MS licensing is about as complex as income tax law, and not as well documented. I may be wrong about this, but when I last looked into SQL server pricing for a web app (about three months ago), I read of an item called the "Internet connector license," or something like that. Basically-- if I interpreted the wording correctly-- it was a license for unlimited Internet users, analogous to a client access license. It obviated the need for a per-processor (i.e., "really expensive") license for SQL server.
Again, I could be totally wrong about this. SQL Server is not for everyone; talk to your doctor. Professional driver on closed course: do not attempt. Must be 18 years or older to enter. Guarantee void in Tennessee.
What does this digital money do that my regular money doesn't?
Excellent question. Banks are considered safe because they're insured by the FDIC, and because they've got a really good track record. Not to mention that it's just empirically hard to rob a bank. Credit, usually being an extension of a bank, is also very secure. People have problems with their credit accounts all the time, but that's nothing new, and there are well-established procedures for working out those problems.
I have a couple of cards in my wallet, and with them I can buy just about any product or service in real life, over the phone, or on the Internet. For managing my actual physical money, I log on to my bank's web site. As far as I'm concerned, "digital cash" is here.
If you don't want to help, shut up. Seriously, nobody asked you what your opinion is of Microsoft or companies (of which there are literally thousands) that sell Microsoft software, or what you think of people that work for those companies. I really, really mean this from the bottom of my heart: shut up.
I reiterate my original two points. One: you are an arrogant, judgmental prick who does more harm to the reputation of the community through this attitude than a whole truckloads of Microsofts could ever do. And two: you really, really need to learn how to use the shift key.
I'll tell you what I told Kevin-- only without using so much profanity, because this kind of response from you seems out of character with your usual posts; I'm extending the benefit of the doubt here and assuming that you happened to be an asshole in this instance, but that you're not usually an asshole.
This kind of attitude and a stance of open-source advocacy are incompatible. When using, or even thinking of using, open-source software, one has nowhere to turn but to the community itself for advice and help. When someone does that, it's critically important that the members of the community not be assholes. This kind of behavior just shatters whatever tiny grains of credibility the community of hobbyists and hackers has managed to accumulate over the years.
In other words, take your mama's advice. If you can't say something nice, shut the fuck up.
i don't mean to be rude but you've chosen to work at what i'd consider to be an unethical company.
How do you know what company she works for? She doesn't say in her submission. Do you know this submitter?
For sake of argument, let's just assume you don't. For sake of argument, let's just assume that you keyed in on the words "Microsoft reseller" and let fly with the spit and invective. Let's just assume that, shall we?
You ignorant, arrogant bastard. How dare you jump to conclusions about this poor person's company based solely on two words in an "Ask Slashdot?" You wanna talk about "actively hostile?" How's this for "actively hostile?" You, Kevin, give the community of computer hobbyists and open source advocates a bad name, and that's saying something. People wonder why Linux and open-source software in general are having trouble gaining acceptance in the market. This post of yours is an excellent example of why this is so. For every generous and helpful soul out there in the community, there's some arrogant little shit like you telling people to "go fuck off" when they ask for help.
Bite me, Kevin Lyda.
Oh, one more thing. You're not e.e. cummings, you know. Learn to use a fucking shift key. Asshole.
Whew. That felt good. Some people just needs flamin', you know?
Seriously though, Perl, PHP, etc are all available for Windows.
Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server, too. Installed by default, even.
Re:Hello Shitty Quality
on
Review: EyeTV
·
· Score: 2
If you were capturing the output, you would *still* be capturing the full uncompressed analog frames at the exact same rate- regardless of the original "source" bitrate.
Ah, I see the problem. You don't realize that this device takes analog video input and encodes it to an MPEG-1 bitstream, then sends the bitstream over the USB connection to the computer. The data pushed over USB in this case never exceeds about 180 KB/s, so USB is more than adequate for that task.
If this device included a better encoder, it could generate an MPEG-2 bitstream at 6 Mbps, which is visually indistinguishable from broadcast-quality SDTV to the casual observer. USB could carry that bitstream to the computer quite easily. You said, "USB1.1 does not have the bandwidth to capture that at any decent framerate/resolution." That's not true at all.
Modern DV cameras produce resolutions higher than that.
Wrong. "Modern DV cameras" produce exactly 480 lines at 59.94 fields per second, nothing more. (Well, NTSC cameras, anyway. PAL cameras produce a picture that's slightly different.) In fact, they produce a picture that's considerably worse than broadcast quality, because the DV codec preserves full-bandwidth luminance data but discards more than half of the color data. In video jargon, this is called "4:1:0." Whereas broadcast-quality video (4:2:2) can be represented as an 8, 6, or even 4 Mbps bitstream with no objectionable artifacts or macroblocking, DV video (including DVCPRO and DVCAM) can easily be squeezed down to a megabit or less, due to the lower effective resolution in the color channels.
This device is *severely* limited- period.
That's true, but not for the reason you keep repeating. It's got nothing to do with USB qua USB. It's limited by the fact that it includes a cheap MPEG encoder chip. Saying "USB1.1 does not have the bandwidth to capture that at any decent framerate/resolution" is just exaggeration.
I use Sherlock almost every day. I keep an eye on a number of stocks, and Sherlock shows me their activity and news about them. I use the Yellow Pages feature regularly. The killer for me was the map feature: every entry you find comes with driving directions and a map automagically. Same with the movie browser; Sherlock shows me a list of theaters in my city and the movies playing at them. Click a movie and the trailer starts downloading automatically. Finally, the flight info tracker is critical to anybody who travels even occasionally. It's really neat that it gives you a real-time map of the plane's location as it's in flight, too.
And all of this without advertising. It's schweeeet.
I'm typing this on a computer with a 17" LCD monitor. My monitor is wider than my keyboard, meaning it would be possible to display a picture of a keyboard on my screen at full size. I'd love to be able to touch-type on such a keyboard. It would suck ergonomically, it it'd be a challenge to have a touch-response system that's fast enough to keep up without errors-- you'd also have to have one that could recognize and handle multiple distinct touch-events simultaneously, as in holding down the shift key to type a capital letter. But if there were a way to pull it off, it would be a fantastic feature for quick, short entry. It would make a tablet or slate computer practical for uses like sending short emails or instant messages.
The real question is how useful is a keyboardless computer (regardless of the os)?
I recently left a job with a (failing) software company. They owned the laptop I'd been using for the past few years, so naturally when I was laid off I gave it back. I'm surprised by how often I miss it. I often find myself downstairs-- in the kitchen, or watching TV, or reading a book-- wanting to just check my email quickly, or send a short instant message, or look something up on the web. A "slate" computer would be great for just those sorts of uses. Lighter than a laptop, with longer battery life, and a pen interface for doing simple data entry, like into search or address fields or IM windows.
Of course, the one I buy, should it become available, will be a Mac, with Ink for handwriting recognition and all that wonderful Aqua goodness.
I'm not sure if I'll have the time or the motivation to do this myself, but I really would like to build a Sherlock channel for TV listings, similar to Watson's TV channel, but including information about whether a program is available in HDTV or not. The web sources for such info aren't that hot; TitanTV, the best-known, is slower than ass and a pain to use.
Maybe some enlightened reader with free time and energy will take this idea and run with it.
No, Apple included an update to Sherlock inside 10.2.2. If this kit depends on anything in 10.2.2-- I haven't found anything that indicates that it does, exactly-- that's probably it.
Cecil: Goodness! I had no idea! For you see, I have been on Mars for the past decade. In a cave. With my eyes shut, and my fingers in my ears.
Bob: Touche, Cecil.
;-)
Re:Hello Shitty Quality
on
Review: EyeTV
·
· Score: 2
I have to confess that your point about "it doesn't matter what Mbps the signals are sent to me at" was completely lost on me. Huh?
USB can handle that ridiculous resolution at 30fps just fine, but thats TV quality, and looks really crappy on a computer monitor
That is, after all, what we're talking about here. TV signals: 480 lines at 59.94 fields per second. That's all the data you're ever going to get out of an SDTV signal, no matter how you slice it. This particular encoder down-rezzes the picture to half-D1, but that's to comply with the VideoCD spec, not a limitation of USB per se.
FWIW- HDTV and DVDs are at a much higher resolution as well.
HDTV, yes; DVD, no. HDTV can come in a variety of formats, but the most common are 1080i (1080 lines at 59.94 fields per second) and 720p (720 lines at 60 frames per second). DVD, on the other hand, has exactly one resolution: 480 lines at 59.94 fields per second, same as over-the-air television. Some-- many-- DVD players can do a reverse 3:2 pulldown and turn the 480i picture back into a 480/24p picture, but that's just trickery with fields. It doesn't actually give you any more resolution. Also, most DVDs contain an anamorphic picture that your TV stretches out (or squeezes down, depending on whether your screen is 4:3 or 16:9), but that doesn't magically give you any more resolution either. In fact, you're decreasing the effective horizontal resolution of the picture when you do it. You're trading horizontal resolution for vertical resolution, and just about everybody agrees that it's a good trade-off.
But the idea that DVDs contain more resolution than regular TV signals is a myth.
Re:USB vs. Firewire
on
Review: EyeTV
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Whether the device uses USB or not probably has nothing to do with quality of the encoded material. As I said in another post, broadcast TV only uses 8 Mbps (of MPEG-2), so the 12 Mbps available over USB is plenty. (Assuming you're not sharing that particular bus, but that's obvious.)
Now, your experience may simply have been with crappy devices. But that doesn't necessarily mean that USB sucks.
I mean, USB does suck, but just not in this particular way.
Re:Hello Shitty Quality
on
Review: EyeTV
·
· Score: 2
Ack. Sorry to reply to my own post, but I let that last one go out with a typo. Damn you "Preview" button!
That should have read, "The SDTV signals you get over digital broadcast TV are only encoded at 8 Mbps, albeit with MPEG-2."
Oops.
Re:Hello Shitty Quality
on
Review: EyeTV
·
· Score: 2
MPEG1? USB1.1 does not have the bandwidth to capture that at any decent framerate/resolution.
Twelve megabits is plenty for full-motion, full-resolution video. The SDTV signals you get over digital broadcast TV are only encoded at 4 Mbps, albeit with MPEG-2. MPEG-1 at 12 Mbps won't look that shit-hot, but that's a limitation of the codec, not of USB.
I've read it. It's pretty lame. Some of the similarities are nothing more than coincidences. I mean, "Villain turns out to be hero's grandfather?" That's nothing more than a footnote, and it's not even revealed in Dune itself. Then there's the great "both heros have Biblical names" thing. Pick a normal anglo-saxon name at random; odds are that name is in the Bible. And, lest we forget, the Jawas were actually inspired by the Fremen. Riiiiight.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to point out at this time that nothing like what you're talking about has even been discussed by legislators to date. The tax system we have in this country works very well as it is, and nobody is looking to outlaw cash to plug leaks in it.
Basically, you're spewing FUD. What's worse, it's silly FUD.
Well getting a credit card if you're under 21 is not an option.
For good reason. I'm sure participation in any hypothetical (I'd say mythical, but I'm being sporting) digital cash system would have a lower age limit as well, if for no other reason than to protect against mischievous fraud.
there's probably an arbitrary upper limit on the value of transactions that Visa, Mastercard, et al will accept.
Unless you're using a card with which I'm not familiar, the upper limit is your credit limit. Many cards-- well, not many, but several-- have no upper limit at all. Not just anybody can get those cards. The ones from Visa and AmEx are by invitation only. But with those cards, like Mark's black AmEx, you can literally buy anything you can afford. Car, island, basketball team, 757, whatever. No limit at all. I think AmEx requires that one of your family members actually live at the AmEx offices at all times in order to get that card, though, or something. I'm having a hard time imagining how anybody would trust another person that much. But, evidently, it happens.
we are able to have anonymous digital money right now.
How? I'm not going to accept payment from you unless I know that it's genuine. (We'll leave out for the moment the idea that it might be genuine, but have no value on the open market. That's a different issue.) How can I know that it's genuine? Well, either it has to have inherent, independently verifiable value-- like gold or diamonds or currency-- or somebody has to vouch for it. If you were using a credit card, the AmEx people would vouch for the transaction, saying that they'll accept responsibility for making sure I get my value from you. I don't trust you, but I trust AmEx and AmEx trusts you, so all's well. Except anonymity goes right out the window, but quick.
How could you possibly conduct a transaction like that anonymously? Somehow make the bits themselves have independently verifiable value? Impossible: I don't trust you, so naturally I don't trust your bits. They could very easily be forged. (Where "very easily" means different things in different contexts.)
I assert to you that "digital cash"-- and I put the term in quotes because I'm trying to talk about it in the sense that you're talking about it, very specifically-- is one of two things. One: it's possible using a trust network that eliminates the possibility of anonymity (because anonymity and accountability are incompatible ideas), in which case we've already got it with credit cards and wire transfers, and banks could very easily add the service levels you want if the demand were sufficient.
Two: it's impossible. Impossible to do it and meet all of your criteria for anonymity and so on.
i'm quite sure it won't be long before digital cash is illegal
I'm sure "digital cash" won't ever be illegal because there's basically no basis for it in reality. You might as well outlaw unicorns, or ban mermaids.
Niven wrote an essay once called, "Yet Another Modest Proposal." It's collected in one or another of his books; I believe it's in my copy of All the Myriad Ways. In it, he pitched the idea of putting US currency on the uranium standard. Coins would be made of actual radioactive uranium, in concentrations proportional to their value.
The benefits would be legion. Counterfeiting would become a crime of the past, because anybody with a Geiger counter could tell if your scratch was genuine. And what better way to keep the economy going than to encourage the circulation of money?
Lends a whole new meaning to the phrase, "burning a hole in your pocket."
Can you use them to buy something that costs $0.05? How about something that costs $500,000?
;-)
Yes, definitely. Well, not half a million bucks. My credit line isn't that good. But if you dropped one of those zeros, I could truthfully answer yes. And I know a guy with one of those American Express black cards. He can literally buy anything he wants with it. He also owns an NBA team and a TV network, so that should tell you everything you need to know about his line of credit.
Can you use them anonymously?
You'll never be able to use any form of money anonymously except for stuff that has inherent physical value, like gold coins or diamonds or cash. I don't believe you'll ever be able to have anonymous digital money, popular science fiction notwithstanding.
As for your thing about small businesses, most of the businesses I interact with are sole proprietorships and limited partnerships: restaurants, markets, stuff like that. According to Quicken, I spend more money each month on restaurants than I do on anything else, excepting big-ticket fixed-cost items like the mortgage and the car note. Every one of those small businesses takes credit cards. Credit cards don't seem to suck for those small businesses at all. I think perhaps you're over-generalizing a bit.
MS licensing is about as complex as income tax law, and not as well documented. I may be wrong about this, but when I last looked into SQL server pricing for a web app (about three months ago), I read of an item called the "Internet connector license," or something like that. Basically-- if I interpreted the wording correctly-- it was a license for unlimited Internet users, analogous to a client access license. It obviated the need for a per-processor (i.e., "really expensive") license for SQL server.
Again, I could be totally wrong about this. SQL Server is not for everyone; talk to your doctor. Professional driver on closed course: do not attempt. Must be 18 years or older to enter. Guarantee void in Tennessee.
What does this digital money do that my regular money doesn't?
Excellent question. Banks are considered safe because they're insured by the FDIC, and because they've got a really good track record. Not to mention that it's just empirically hard to rob a bank. Credit, usually being an extension of a bank, is also very secure. People have problems with their credit accounts all the time, but that's nothing new, and there are well-established procedures for working out those problems.
I have a couple of cards in my wallet, and with them I can buy just about any product or service in real life, over the phone, or on the Internet. For managing my actual physical money, I log on to my bank's web site. As far as I'm concerned, "digital cash" is here.
If you don't want to help, shut up. Seriously, nobody asked you what your opinion is of Microsoft or companies (of which there are literally thousands) that sell Microsoft software, or what you think of people that work for those companies. I really, really mean this from the bottom of my heart: shut up.
I reiterate my original two points. One: you are an arrogant, judgmental prick who does more harm to the reputation of the community through this attitude than a whole truckloads of Microsofts could ever do. And two: you really, really need to learn how to use the shift key.
I'll tell you what I told Kevin-- only without using so much profanity, because this kind of response from you seems out of character with your usual posts; I'm extending the benefit of the doubt here and assuming that you happened to be an asshole in this instance, but that you're not usually an asshole.
This kind of attitude and a stance of open-source advocacy are incompatible. When using, or even thinking of using, open-source software, one has nowhere to turn but to the community itself for advice and help. When someone does that, it's critically important that the members of the community not be assholes. This kind of behavior just shatters whatever tiny grains of credibility the community of hobbyists and hackers has managed to accumulate over the years.
In other words, take your mama's advice. If you can't say something nice, shut the fuck up.
i don't mean to be rude but you've chosen to work at what i'd consider to be an unethical company.
How do you know what company she works for? She doesn't say in her submission. Do you know this submitter?
For sake of argument, let's just assume you don't. For sake of argument, let's just assume that you keyed in on the words "Microsoft reseller" and let fly with the spit and invective. Let's just assume that, shall we?
You ignorant, arrogant bastard. How dare you jump to conclusions about this poor person's company based solely on two words in an "Ask Slashdot?" You wanna talk about "actively hostile?" How's this for "actively hostile?" You, Kevin, give the community of computer hobbyists and open source advocates a bad name, and that's saying something. People wonder why Linux and open-source software in general are having trouble gaining acceptance in the market. This post of yours is an excellent example of why this is so. For every generous and helpful soul out there in the community, there's some arrogant little shit like you telling people to "go fuck off" when they ask for help.
Bite me, Kevin Lyda.
Oh, one more thing. You're not e.e. cummings, you know. Learn to use a fucking shift key. Asshole.
Whew. That felt good. Some people just needs flamin', you know?
Seriously though, Perl, PHP, etc are all available for Windows.
Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server, too. Installed by default, even.
If you were capturing the output, you would *still* be capturing the full uncompressed analog frames at the exact same rate- regardless of the original "source" bitrate.
Ah, I see the problem. You don't realize that this device takes analog video input and encodes it to an MPEG-1 bitstream, then sends the bitstream over the USB connection to the computer. The data pushed over USB in this case never exceeds about 180 KB/s, so USB is more than adequate for that task.
If this device included a better encoder, it could generate an MPEG-2 bitstream at 6 Mbps, which is visually indistinguishable from broadcast-quality SDTV to the casual observer. USB could carry that bitstream to the computer quite easily. You said, "USB1.1 does not have the bandwidth to capture that at any decent framerate/resolution." That's not true at all.
Modern DV cameras produce resolutions higher than that.
Wrong. "Modern DV cameras" produce exactly 480 lines at 59.94 fields per second, nothing more. (Well, NTSC cameras, anyway. PAL cameras produce a picture that's slightly different.) In fact, they produce a picture that's considerably worse than broadcast quality, because the DV codec preserves full-bandwidth luminance data but discards more than half of the color data. In video jargon, this is called "4:1:0." Whereas broadcast-quality video (4:2:2) can be represented as an 8, 6, or even 4 Mbps bitstream with no objectionable artifacts or macroblocking, DV video (including DVCPRO and DVCAM) can easily be squeezed down to a megabit or less, due to the lower effective resolution in the color channels.
This device is *severely* limited- period.
That's true, but not for the reason you keep repeating. It's got nothing to do with USB qua USB. It's limited by the fact that it includes a cheap MPEG encoder chip. Saying "USB1.1 does not have the bandwidth to capture that at any decent framerate/resolution" is just exaggeration.
I use Sherlock almost every day. I keep an eye on a number of stocks, and Sherlock shows me their activity and news about them. I use the Yellow Pages feature regularly. The killer for me was the map feature: every entry you find comes with driving directions and a map automagically. Same with the movie browser; Sherlock shows me a list of theaters in my city and the movies playing at them. Click a movie and the trailer starts downloading automatically. Finally, the flight info tracker is critical to anybody who travels even occasionally. It's really neat that it gives you a real-time map of the plane's location as it's in flight, too.
And all of this without advertising. It's schweeeet.
I'm typing this on a computer with a 17" LCD monitor. My monitor is wider than my keyboard, meaning it would be possible to display a picture of a keyboard on my screen at full size. I'd love to be able to touch-type on such a keyboard. It would suck ergonomically, it it'd be a challenge to have a touch-response system that's fast enough to keep up without errors-- you'd also have to have one that could recognize and handle multiple distinct touch-events simultaneously, as in holding down the shift key to type a capital letter. But if there were a way to pull it off, it would be a fantastic feature for quick, short entry. It would make a tablet or slate computer practical for uses like sending short emails or instant messages.
The real question is how useful is a keyboardless computer (regardless of the os)?
I recently left a job with a (failing) software company. They owned the laptop I'd been using for the past few years, so naturally when I was laid off I gave it back. I'm surprised by how often I miss it. I often find myself downstairs-- in the kitchen, or watching TV, or reading a book-- wanting to just check my email quickly, or send a short instant message, or look something up on the web. A "slate" computer would be great for just those sorts of uses. Lighter than a laptop, with longer battery life, and a pen interface for doing simple data entry, like into search or address fields or IM windows.
Of course, the one I buy, should it become available, will be a Mac, with Ink for handwriting recognition and all that wonderful Aqua goodness.
One plugs a keyboard in to the USB port.
Relax, Chicken Little. This may be an incredibly stupid idea, but it's not that stupid.
I'm not sure if I'll have the time or the motivation to do this myself, but I really would like to build a Sherlock channel for TV listings, similar to Watson's TV channel, but including information about whether a program is available in HDTV or not. The web sources for such info aren't that hot; TitanTV, the best-known, is slower than ass and a pain to use.
Maybe some enlightened reader with free time and energy will take this idea and run with it.
No, Apple included an update to Sherlock inside 10.2.2. If this kit depends on anything in 10.2.2-- I haven't found anything that indicates that it does, exactly-- that's probably it.
Bob: Touche, Cecil.
;-)
I have to confess that your point about "it doesn't matter what Mbps the signals are sent to me at" was completely lost on me. Huh?
USB can handle that ridiculous resolution at 30fps just fine, but thats TV quality, and looks really crappy on a computer monitor
That is, after all, what we're talking about here. TV signals: 480 lines at 59.94 fields per second. That's all the data you're ever going to get out of an SDTV signal, no matter how you slice it. This particular encoder down-rezzes the picture to half-D1, but that's to comply with the VideoCD spec, not a limitation of USB per se.
FWIW- HDTV and DVDs are at a much higher resolution as well.
HDTV, yes; DVD, no. HDTV can come in a variety of formats, but the most common are 1080i (1080 lines at 59.94 fields per second) and 720p (720 lines at 60 frames per second). DVD, on the other hand, has exactly one resolution: 480 lines at 59.94 fields per second, same as over-the-air television. Some-- many-- DVD players can do a reverse 3:2 pulldown and turn the 480i picture back into a 480/24p picture, but that's just trickery with fields. It doesn't actually give you any more resolution. Also, most DVDs contain an anamorphic picture that your TV stretches out (or squeezes down, depending on whether your screen is 4:3 or 16:9), but that doesn't magically give you any more resolution either. In fact, you're decreasing the effective horizontal resolution of the picture when you do it. You're trading horizontal resolution for vertical resolution, and just about everybody agrees that it's a good trade-off.
But the idea that DVDs contain more resolution than regular TV signals is a myth.
Whether the device uses USB or not probably has nothing to do with quality of the encoded material. As I said in another post, broadcast TV only uses 8 Mbps (of MPEG-2), so the 12 Mbps available over USB is plenty. (Assuming you're not sharing that particular bus, but that's obvious.)
Now, your experience may simply have been with crappy devices. But that doesn't necessarily mean that USB sucks.
I mean, USB does suck, but just not in this particular way.
Ack. Sorry to reply to my own post, but I let that last one go out with a typo. Damn you "Preview" button!
That should have read, "The SDTV signals you get over digital broadcast TV are only encoded at 8 Mbps, albeit with MPEG-2."
Oops.
MPEG1? USB1.1 does not have the bandwidth to capture that at any decent framerate/resolution.
Twelve megabits is plenty for full-motion, full-resolution video. The SDTV signals you get over digital broadcast TV are only encoded at 4 Mbps, albeit with MPEG-2. MPEG-1 at 12 Mbps won't look that shit-hot, but that's a limitation of the codec, not of USB.
I've read it. It's pretty lame. Some of the similarities are nothing more than coincidences. I mean, "Villain turns out to be hero's grandfather?" That's nothing more than a footnote, and it's not even revealed in Dune itself. Then there's the great "both heros have Biblical names" thing. Pick a normal anglo-saxon name at random; odds are that name is in the Bible. And, lest we forget, the Jawas were actually inspired by the Fremen. Riiiiight.
I believe everything I do, say, write or output in any other form is a combination what I have noticed around me before.
You stole that idea from me, you bastard!