On that note.. Do you think this idea will actually Float? After all how many times did you hear something that was too good to be true that actually was like they said? Theres a good reason why Cable and internet is costing you 75$ a month... I don't think they will be able to wave a magic wand and make alot of the charges that a normal cable company/internet service provider have to pay go away. But they did mention Cable-like.. so that means inferior to me.
"the technical challenges of laying fiber and maintaining a network to serve 9000+ citizens are mind boggling. Policy decisions, network abuse, outages, spam, filtering (god forbid), all nightmares that will require a dedicated, 24/7 network maintenance team"
The Technical Challenges of laying this type of network are just a small portion of it... One this infastructure is in place bot the cable and the Telco's fiber networks will become idle and Cause quite a stir... Mind you in a town of that size the cable company might not be utilizing a HFC network yet unless they offer internet services if they do you can bet that they have some fiber layed out... But the Telco will definately have some... so they will surely launch a lawsuit to recoup cost of investment on infastructure not to mention revenue loss.
On another note is it feasable to have Fiber to the home at this point when WDM technology is so costly but would be a Massive cost saving technology to utilize it a roll out of this nature? When the price of this equipment drops thats when Fiber to the home will truely be viable from a finical Standpoint.
As for maintaining this type of network.. Its alot easier than you would think (from a operational standpoint).. Fiber networks are far easier to maintain due to the reduced ammount of active hardware to keep running. The real concern would be bandwidth management... for internet services anything more than a 5Mbit commection to the internet is getting wastefull for a home user and just asking for abuse to set in. While the additional bandwidth avilable for other services is definately a bonus...
Lasers are the hugest expence you would have for a project like this.. as they are Still very expencive and a minimum of 2 would be required for each home. It would make alot more sence to run fiber within 500 feet of homes and utilize other technology to take the last little bit... One could even run Multimode for this last portion. But I haven't seen any devices that have been made for this type of service..
For the most part Fiber to the home is a fair ways off from becoming Feasable due to a wide range of factors.. But getting fiber closer to the home is where the largest benefits are as it brings your infastructure closer to the home for when WDM and other technologies that reduce fiber requirments drop in price.
For 9,000 homes... You could easily feed the entire city and every home off 2 active fibers (once all the signals have been multiplexed) of backbone. So laying out 1000's of fibers in such a small area seems a bit of a waste. For Example Futjitsu's DWDM systems can run 1.76 Terabits of data/s utilizing OC192 sonnet signals.. as OC768 becomes a more viable a sonnet speed 1.76Tb/s will jump by a factor of 4.. not to mention that fujitsu's gear also is only utilizing 2 optical bands currently and will soon be utilizing a third which would allow another 88 sonnet signals. While my example is unbelieveable overkill it demonstrate the point that rolling out massive fiber counts is pointless.
But more day to day Fiber management for infastructure.. Cut Fibers and Faulty lasers are 98% of your problems and they both are quite uncommon. So the more fiber you have the cheaper your maintenance cost will be.
I think feeding 25-30 homes off a pair of fiber is still overkill but WAY cheaper to roll out this type of infastructure.
I doubt MS would attempt to lock the engine down to Xbox. The Offsetting cost would too large to make it worth ID's time. But I could see it happening though.. MS still needs to get a better market share to compete with the other consoles.. but once they are really in the ring and on par with the other consoles (as far as unit sales go) I could see them really toss down the gauntlet when it comes to licencing to obtain a monopoly on the market. I don't think the Xbox is anywhere near mature(significant enough of a market share) to make licencing for a game engine Xbox concole exclusive.
But I think one of the big purposes of the Xbox was to maintain thier Monopoly on OS's... look at the power of todays consoles... They can easily be Usable computers.. if MS totally let the console market run away and not get into it they would have a serious pontial problem.. as they would have a bunch of platforms which people could compute on that they don't have a foot hold in.. The Xbox gives them 2 advantages as i see it. Firstly Its establishes a foothold in the console market which is another market they can exploit. Secondly it gives them added security of the PC as well as games will still be released on the PC which is thier cash cow since porting from Xbox to the PC is pretty much a no-brainer with virtually minimal cost to the software company. Which will slow down/eliminate the vast ammount of games geting released for consoles only.
But in general exclusive licencing is not healthly for a market when done in excess.
But when you get down to it... Truely unique games are pretty much unheard of these days.. What makes games these days are pretty graphics, game play and genre.. for the largest pay its game play (Playability.. how fun it is/control setup/game detail ect..) which is the largest factor if a game is successful or not.
The only real thing about Doom III is that the title has a history of ground breaking quality of innovation in the FPS genre of games. Any game built on that engine should be able to obtain equivilant sales figures.. Which that is the only thing that MS or 99.9999% of the software development industry really cares about.
Its amazing how the Media and Marketing guru's can change the definition of just about anything.. But marketing loves to create new buzzwords to fuel the fires of thier newest endevors. Broadband existed long before networks ran at 110baud.. yes Baud.. Thats 110 bit per second.. No Kilo about it... (Well I wouldn't actually call this a network at this point they weren't using a "Network Protocol" to aid in the transmission)and thats also including parity.. Thats about 8 bytes per second... So someone piping up and pointing fingers at a company thats offering speeds too slow to be called broadband is really out there.
People wonder how a language in a educated nation can pop up out of nowhere... Its things like this that start the ball rolling.. Ebonic's is an extreame example of what can happen when people are allowed to run amok with a language without being corrected.
More or less you see the same thing starting to happen with "Free".. how much "Free" stuff have people paid for or payed money to access. The term hacker has been stripped down to mean nothing more than a malicious attack on a computer. When hacking actually has alot more to do with a mindset of a person rather than the result of his actions.
Its very sad to see the widespread gross misuse of a word then have people argue that the public impression of that word has got nothing to do with the actual definition.
Broadband has got nothing to do with data Zero Zip Nadda Ziltch. Broadband is a transmission descriptor on how the medium is utilized. The term has become widely misused.. Just like the Term Hack... if your a hacker by todays media terminology you a bad person... Yet back in the pre-80's computing era hackers are the ones that built home computers and created the demand for home computing as it is today... if it wsn't for those hackers i would have to say we would likely not see nearly any of the innovations we do today because we would be following IBM vision of only a small handfull of computers would be needed world wide to do very few tasks.
Just because its Called a Parkway doesn't mean you park on it:) and Driving on a Driveway isn't what you would expect if you didn't know that you park in driveways..
Once again the meaning of a word is wildly misused and has lead people to beliving a false definition of a word.
"broadband refers to telecommunication in which a wide band of frequencies is available to transmit information. Because a wide band of frequencies is available, information can be multiplexed and sent on many different frequencies or channels within the band concurrently, allowing more information to be transmitted in a given amount of time..."
Broadband doesn't mean highspeed.. Broadband is a technology concept that virtually all highspeed providers utilize to give access to thier highspeed networks.. It has nothing to do with Speed at all... Any datarate can be carried over a broadband.
High-Speed is also being Twisted aswell.. Since normal speed is generally considered 28.8.. I see alot of 56K providers starting to use High-speed now too. Most people Tout DSL being faster than cable with isn't a accurate thing to say either.. and anyone that says Cable is faster than DSL is also spouting off uninformed. Either one can suck due to poor engineering design or just being plain greedy and shutting down the pipe to a slow trickle.. Or not having enough bandwidth to supply the demand..
And realistically 128K conecction for 40$ a month is over priced (When not abused). One of the big things that has had the largest negitive impact on High-Speed networks is people that are under the impression that since they have access to a 10Mbit datarate they can use that 10Mbits 24/7 doing what ever they want and still only pay 40$ a month. And the public has such a cautious view of metered connections (It just nukles marketing when you see restrictions printed on something) that if they said this is how much data you get for 40$ it would draw very few customers. The business plan that makes highspeed work is alot of customers using X ammount of bandwidth(or less) per day/week/month so the cost of the extreamly expencive backbone connection is spread out among 1000's of customers.
Voice over Wireless Intelectual Property? Thats a interesting one:)
I could be just Daft but VOIP is old hat.. very little ground to break.. Just cause your medium is wireless it shouldn't affect IP there for VOIP should work. Unless they are doing special work to some how retrive lost packets from a poorly designed wireless network that has a high packet loss or incredibly high latency... Either way I wouldn't invest in a company trying to reinvent the wheel like this.
Its just plain shameful to see such a large number of contradictions in such a short time.
>> For instance the new Pentium-M is an all new from the ground up processor that at 1.6 Ghz, outperforms the Pentium 4 at 2.8 Ghz. The Pentuim 4 is still faster than the Athlon though, becuase it has a higher clockspeed. Oh, and the Pentium-M is a Pentium III using a Pentium 4 bus and 1 mb of L2 Cache.
"Pentium-M is al All New Processor.... Pentium-M is a Pentium III using a Pentium 4 bus and 1 mb of L2 Cache"... What Happened to All new? sounds way more like modified old.
"...at 1.6 Ghz, outperforms the Pentium 4 at 2.8 Ghz. The Pentuim 4 is still faster than the Athlon though, becuase it has a higher clockspeed" But Wait just a few words ago you demonstrated that clockspeed Doesn't mean jack.. after all 1.6G is faster than 2.8G but 2.8G is faster than a Athalon because of its faster clock speed?
I just have to stop there... this post is just plain shameful.
I think they are hoping they can get this money to buy more life support systems for thier Business model.
Some gourp really needs to do a study to find how how much harm the RIAA is doing to thier own market by pursuing this in the manner they are..
Also just for Fun.. It would be funny to see the same dollar figure associated they use in thier court cases... It would be funny to see a figure like 97.8 Centillion dollar loss in the recording industry due to bad business practices and poor treatment of thier customer base.
I must say that the headline for this is outright Punny! its one of the Punniest ones I have seen yet!
Try being a canadian on the internet.. 99.9% of Spam Doesn't even come close to applying to us.. Yet we get it anyways and treamendous ammounts of it.
Its sickening and annoying has hell and there is so little you can actually do about it. Fixing Email so its alot harder/impossible to anonymously spam is taking too damn long.
With the number of ISP's decreasing in North America it should be getting easier and easier to impliment a new Protocol for sending mail.. if you take the top 20-30 ISP's in north america and utilize a new more secure protocol for sending mail you will have a massive portion of people on the ineternet.. and Throw in Webmail hosts I wouldn't be shocked if suddenly you have 70%+ or more of the email addresses Suddenly Spam free (Or next to it).. Once you have achived that level of penatration of a new protocol it would be treamendously easier to identify Spam and get rid of it long before it gets into a Inbox of a user that would make some sort of responce to it to fuel the spammers to do it more often.
For example DNS for your domain returns a record that you Support the new protocol so any inbound traffic from that domain that isn't in the new "secure" format can be tossed away as it will be forged... Suddenly The number of domains available for spammers to spoof from is drastically reduced. Secondly once 90% or more of the likely legitimate mail passes easily through the mail servers. Suddenly incomming Spam will be highly obvious as the volume of inbound spam is virtually impossible to hide amongst Legitimate Email. Couple that with unassured delivery of the old protocol will put pressure on mail providers to upgrade to the new Protocol so there should be a fairly rapid change of protocol.
Hopefully the OSS community will develop the new protocol and scaleable mail engines so the cost of implimentation is extreamly and Large ISP's will be movitvated to adpot it while making it attractive for the little guys to use aswell.
After all if all the major ISP's were to donate even.05$ a month to a fund such a OSS project they would gain quite a decent return on that investment as all the hardware used to filter spam ect would not be required.. Look at the ammount of money being spent to reduce spam that is delivered instead of inhibit the sending of it.
The idea of moving to a more secure mail protcol just seems to be one of the most common sence things you can think of.. You almost woner if there arn't a bunch of patents out there preventing this from happening.:)
The current laws do not promote diveristy in content.. A Media company should be able to as many Significantly diverse Mediums in any given area to promote Jobs and Diversity of content. This would make life way more interesting. Right now with the few media conglomerates there are they keep pressure on to keep diversity down to a minimum to maximize profits.. Abolishing the current laws will only aid them in quashing diverse upstarts that will reduce thier market share and force them into more diverse programming.
After everything is about maximizing profits for as little overhead as possible(or for the least they can get away with). Look at TV for instance.. Get rid of movies and TV shows that yet still may be good but are canceled/retired. and whats actually left to watch on TV not a heck of alot other than educational programming which I am taking a guess here but the ammount of new/diverse educational content is largely due to Government Grants/Incentives for corprate funding ect and the low cost nature of production comapred to Sitcoms and other "Mainstream" TV shows.. (I could be wrong but I would think that is a good reason).
And really these days the idea of Democracy is pretty much dead as it was origonally intened. The Government for the People Elected by the people has been really demented by corprations.. Its now the Government for the Corprations Elected by the people (Only after corparations have weeded out the people they deem as undesireable to have in power as thier political views could hamper thier business).
It definately seems that the majority of governments focus is spent on the needs of Corprate America rather than the indivudal.
it almost seems that the government throws the public enough bones to keep it happy while mostly catering to Corprate America.
God in the thread I See 2 very common big problems with what people are talking about... getting packet loss so what do they do.. make an assumption that the singal level is too low so they boot the level with new antennas withdoing doing research and proper troubleshooting to find the actual cause (which could possibly be signal strength but doubtful from the close proximity described).
I see far too much of this style of troubleshooting in the computer related sector. People making diagnosis based on speculation rather than a understanding the problem. Then when thier problem still exsists after a random remedy for the perceived problem has been implimented they blame the technology for its suposed shortcommings.
Was the singal strength actually too low? Was the Carrier to Noise Ratio too high? Excessive Packet collisions causeing the loss? Could have some of the loss come from the wierd portion of the network? Could part of the problem be with the wireless hardware itself( if you stand right ontop of the AP do you still get significant loss)? These are your basic components to start looking at to properly troubleshoot Wi-Fi problems. Once you know one of these basic contributing factors then there is much more exploration of the problem may be needed to be done to find the root cause of the problem so it can be properly rectified or the decision can be made that Wi-Fi is not an acceptable technology to use in your instance/application(which this last one is by far the most overlooked).
But these simple basic things are really what set people in the IT sector apart. There are far too many people that utilize the "Pin the tail on the Donkey"/"Processes of Elimination" troubleshooting methods instead of logical deductive reasoning.
Yes I am sure its not the cable box.. used to work for one of the big 2 Cable Co's in Canada and the picture still looked the same on the "Headend" quality equipment.. Poor encoding yes.. over compressed yes aswell.. Most of the channels they had were compressed at "8:1" rates or higher.. they transmitted alot of PPV stuff for a ATM fiber network and those channels were compressed ALOT more (To the point any massive quick change to the picture would cause pixelization to occur).. I have a Sat dish and the compression isn't anywhere near what it was on cable(all of the places i have seen digital cable I have seen alot of signs of over compression to where it was visually noticeable/obvious).
As for starfields... That was the best example i have seen to show people that don't understand the loss of detail while retaining "Perceived Quality"...
The largest Quantity of people will belive hype about how much better something is without understanding what is actually going on. A good example is cell phones.. Look how long the carriers were charging more for Digital service over analog (Or making it sound like they were doing you a HUGE favor by giving you a great short term deal to switch to digital) when in the long run going digital for the cell carriers was 90% more of a bonus for the carrier rather than the customer.. There was a bit of a odd tradeoff to make.. Clarity for range.. as when your out of digital range you flip to analog as it has a better range.. but at the longer ranges the quality of analog suffers(Which just reminds you how much "Better" digital is:) )
End customers here "Digital" and automatically they think this has got to be way better and since its way better Its worth more. When actually their capacity increases by a substantial factor and they also get to charge alot more for this technology. Look at CD's and Audio Tape.. Why have the price of CD's barely budged over time and Audio Tapes remain cheaper by a fair ammount when the cost of a CD is much much lower than a Audio tape. (But Medium longevity is much lower as Audio Tapes tend to need to be repurchased way more than CD's)
But really starting to get off track from the original Discussion here... The main point I was trying to make was Digital compression in a movie theater is a bad thing:) regardless of the codec.. as to achieve any decent ammount of compression you need to loose quality in one aspect or another.
Since nonlossy type compression schemes seem to be near their limit for our current understanding is today. Increased Quality means increased size.. if you increase the quality without increasing size or even further reducing size you add addition loss of quality.. Its virtually impossible to get around this simple fact. If the data can't be further compressed without loss.. loss must occur to reduce the size.. Where the loss is introduced maybe less noticeable to some people moreso than others..
Any for anyone that wants to start talking about the newest form of music compression that more or less breaks music down to a Postscript type language so it can be reproduced by hardware... We will see how well this works (I haven't heard it yet:) ) and I don't think it will be so easily applied to video:)
Its been a little while since i have been to a movie rtheather and sat right up front.. but if you take the resolution of 1440 (About doubble the quality of a dvd) and compare the resolution of a 60 foot wide movie screen to a 20 inch(for easy sake its a real 20 inch viewable) monitor on a 20 inch monitor you would get about 72 pixels/horizontal inch.. on a 60 foot wide screen each pixel would be about 2 inches. I know when take it into perspective it wouldn't seem as big.. But I don't think you could tell me that a letter on the Movie screen that was 1 foot high when you walk up to it only consists of 6 pixels. I think you are under estimating the resolution of 35mm film.
and as for noise.. HDTV still has to hold true to the GIGO standard.. Garbage in Garbage out..the digital representation can never be higher quality than its source (without alot of digital remastering work). I don't know anything about the optical distortions and light dispursion factors involved when making copies of Film but I imagine they are not that significant like analogue magnetic storage mediums.
I did a bit of poking around and found a artical that shows 2 diffrent resolutions for HDTV which should still be alot lower than the resolution you would get from hollywood quality film. they are 1440X1152 and 1920X1152 with max bitrates of 60 and 80 Mb/s. Now that is the maximum bit rate possible for the MPEG2 standard and it would be significantly diffrent for MPEG4 but I can't see being able to get away with alot of compression in the movie theater.. As the backgrounds lost detail will standout alotmore when its alot larger than life.. (Ever watch the starfield on any startrek on UPN.. they use crazy compression and man do those stars JUMP accross the screen.. there isn't any movement at all with them)
I am really getting sickened with the level of video compression cable is using these days... but thats getting off topic.
I still would expect a full length movie (90mins) of Equiv. Quality of what we have today with film to be Terabyes.. not Gigs.
But this is not how digital technology has progressed so far (as far as video goes). There have been Great quality sacrifices in degital technologies. It mainly comes from cable co's as they have really abused digital signals and compression to combat the satellite market.
Too many active devices, too long cascades, cracked cables among other things distorted and degraded analog signals alot. Firstly going digital Wiped out practically all of the picture degradation that took place from thier "Headend" to your TV. There for the public perceived this as increased Quality. at the same time they started compressing the hell out of the signal.. So instead of a snowy faded picture with nasty lines running through it.. You got a clean picture (Lots of detail is missing.. but you never noticed it before cause the picture was so snowy and poor. There for you have perceived Quality instead of Actual Quality. I would take a Clean analog signal anyday over a digital one.. But that isn't reasonable.
But in the theater the only bonus/quality that will be increased is imperfections in the film and dust ect gathering on the film... In fact if you notice they have purposely put in cracks and pops into the audio and alot of imperfections at the very beging of a movie to give you that right feel and a real theater experience.
>> What the hell are you talking about? Have you ever watched a DVD that you bought in the store? It sure seems to fit to me, and thats with MPEG-2 encoding...using newer compression schemes gets you a lot better.
Yes I have... could you imagine how bad that resolution would look when its blown up way over 100 times the size... It was made to look good on your average tv set... unless your blind theater screens are Way larger then your TV set to resolution will need to increase even with increased compression File sizes would be vastly larger.
>> And for all the bad jokes about WMP (which I personally hate), they probably won't use the same player program, unless they really are extremely stupid.
Yeah they were pretty bad... but I can imagine a few of them happening though.. looking at MS past track record... and for not using the same code base I really doubt that.. They would need to modify that code base and use a larger scale impimentation.. After all if they were to turn thier backs on thier current code base and start from scratch would be completely mad... Do you think they will write a completely new operating system aswell? (Wich would be a good idea actually slimming down the OS and trim the Fat that aids the instability)
DVD format isn't good enough to hold to movie.. I am taking a guess that even after encoding movies would be many terabytes in size.. so that would mean 100's of DVD's to hold 1 movie. and for downloading.. Currently cost prohibitive i would guess... each theater would a pretty massive pipe to download all these movies in a reasonable time. Mind ya this would be a perfect time to use a P2P network to propigate the file so that the studio wouldn't need a data pipe bigger than life to propigate the file.
Remembers Bill gates "Vision" of a pc in every home running his software.. Visions of Windows enabled electronics Spread through the huse as well.. It sure seems that MS is not working the way he invisioned the future.. Linux is breaking more ground and seems to be the "OS" that will be powering all the electronics in the home.
This is most annoying when after quite a few years after something is really common place a company discovers it has a patent on something that is widely used... Downloading files on the internet is one.. Can't what company had it.. but that was Idiotic of them to think of attempting to enforce it (I think it was mid to late 90's when it came to surface).
Someone should patent the idea of patenting common place "Technology"..
Or better yet.. Patent the idea of Music copy-protection.. Or the idea making laws like the DMCA
Just goes to show ya how so many people blidly trust what others have to say without doing any research at all into anything.. You can't trust or belive 99% of people these days.. They allways have a distorted view or are just plain flat out talking about stuff they have no idea about... (Kinda like Bill Gates and how Bug free Windows 95 was just before it blue screned on him during a presentation)
Re:t is also not a book which will teach you
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Linux Server Hacks
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It is also not a book which will teach you how to break into Linux servers.
Then what good is it!?
God I hate seeing Comments like this on here...
But i have noticed a few recent stories that use the term "Hack" correctly... Its the media that a corrupted the meaning of Hack to breaking into systems.
Slashdot Mirror
On that note.. Do you think this idea will actually Float? After all how many times did you hear something that was too good to be true that actually was like they said? Theres a good reason why Cable and internet is costing you 75$ a month... I don't think they will be able to wave a magic wand and make alot of the charges that a normal cable company/internet service provider have to pay go away. But they did mention Cable-like.. so that means inferior to me.
"the technical challenges of laying fiber and maintaining a network to serve 9000+ citizens are mind boggling. Policy decisions, network abuse, outages, spam, filtering (god forbid), all nightmares that will require a dedicated, 24/7 network maintenance team"
The Technical Challenges of laying this type of network are just a small portion of it... One this infastructure is in place bot the cable and the Telco's fiber networks will become idle and Cause quite a stir... Mind you in a town of that size the cable company might not be utilizing a HFC network yet unless they offer internet services if they do you can bet that they have some fiber layed out... But the Telco will definately have some... so they will surely launch a lawsuit to recoup cost of investment on infastructure not to mention revenue loss.
On another note is it feasable to have Fiber to the home at this point when WDM technology is so costly but would be a Massive cost saving technology to utilize it a roll out of this nature? When the price of this equipment drops thats when Fiber to the home will truely be viable from a finical Standpoint.
As for maintaining this type of network.. Its alot easier than you would think (from a operational standpoint).. Fiber networks are far easier to maintain due to the reduced ammount of active hardware to keep running. The real concern would be bandwidth management... for internet services anything more than a 5Mbit commection to the internet is getting wastefull for a home user and just asking for abuse to set in. While the additional bandwidth avilable for other services is definately a bonus...
Lasers are the hugest expence you would have for a project like this.. as they are Still very expencive and a minimum of 2 would be required for each home. It would make alot more sence to run fiber within 500 feet of homes and utilize other technology to take the last little bit... One could even run Multimode for this last portion. But I haven't seen any devices that have been made for this type of service..
For the most part Fiber to the home is a fair ways off from becoming Feasable due to a wide range of factors.. But getting fiber closer to the home is where the largest benefits are as it brings your infastructure closer to the home for when WDM and other technologies that reduce fiber requirments drop in price.
For 9,000 homes... You could easily feed the entire city and every home off 2 active fibers (once all the signals have been multiplexed) of backbone. So laying out 1000's of fibers in such a small area seems a bit of a waste. For Example Futjitsu's DWDM systems can run 1.76 Terabits of data/s utilizing OC192 sonnet signals.. as OC768 becomes a more viable a sonnet speed 1.76Tb/s will jump by a factor of 4.. not to mention that fujitsu's gear also is only utilizing 2 optical bands currently and will soon be utilizing a third which would allow another 88 sonnet signals. While my example is unbelieveable overkill it demonstrate the point that rolling out massive fiber counts is pointless.
But more day to day Fiber management for infastructure.. Cut Fibers and Faulty lasers are 98% of your problems and they both are quite uncommon. So the more fiber you have the cheaper your maintenance cost will be.
I think feeding 25-30 homes off a pair of fiber is still overkill but WAY cheaper to roll out this type of infastructure.
Maybe They are Using a morw Broad Definition of Adult Content.. :) After All.. The ad doesn't apply to tots and toddlers :)
I doubt MS would attempt to lock the engine down to Xbox. The Offsetting cost would too large to make it worth ID's time. But I could see it happening though.. MS still needs to get a better market share to compete with the other consoles.. but once they are really in the ring and on par with the other consoles (as far as unit sales go) I could see them really toss down the gauntlet when it comes to licencing to obtain a monopoly on the market. I don't think the Xbox is anywhere near mature(significant enough of a market share) to make licencing for a game engine Xbox concole exclusive. But I think one of the big purposes of the Xbox was to maintain thier Monopoly on OS's... look at the power of todays consoles... They can easily be Usable computers.. if MS totally let the console market run away and not get into it they would have a serious pontial problem.. as they would have a bunch of platforms which people could compute on that they don't have a foot hold in.. The Xbox gives them 2 advantages as i see it. Firstly Its establishes a foothold in the console market which is another market they can exploit. Secondly it gives them added security of the PC as well as games will still be released on the PC which is thier cash cow since porting from Xbox to the PC is pretty much a no-brainer with virtually minimal cost to the software company. Which will slow down/eliminate the vast ammount of games geting released for consoles only. But in general exclusive licencing is not healthly for a market when done in excess. But when you get down to it... Truely unique games are pretty much unheard of these days.. What makes games these days are pretty graphics, game play and genre.. for the largest pay its game play (Playability.. how fun it is/control setup/game detail ect..) which is the largest factor if a game is successful or not. The only real thing about Doom III is that the title has a history of ground breaking quality of innovation in the FPS genre of games. Any game built on that engine should be able to obtain equivilant sales figures.. Which that is the only thing that MS or 99.9999% of the software development industry really cares about.
Its amazing how the Media and Marketing guru's can change the definition of just about anything.. But marketing loves to create new buzzwords to fuel the fires of thier newest endevors. Broadband existed long before networks ran at 110baud.. yes Baud.. Thats 110 bit per second.. No Kilo about it... (Well I wouldn't actually call this a network at this point they weren't using a "Network Protocol" to aid in the transmission)and thats also including parity.. Thats about 8 bytes per second... So someone piping up and pointing fingers at a company thats offering speeds too slow to be called broadband is really out there.
People wonder how a language in a educated nation can pop up out of nowhere... Its things like this that start the ball rolling.. Ebonic's is an extreame example of what can happen when people are allowed to run amok with a language without being corrected.
More or less you see the same thing starting to happen with "Free".. how much "Free" stuff have people paid for or payed money to access. The term hacker has been stripped down to mean nothing more than a malicious attack on a computer. When hacking actually has alot more to do with a mindset of a person rather than the result of his actions.
Its very sad to see the widespread gross misuse of a word then have people argue that the public impression of that word has got nothing to do with the actual definition.
Broadband has got nothing to do with data Zero Zip Nadda Ziltch. Broadband is a transmission descriptor on how the medium is utilized. The term has become widely misused.. Just like the Term Hack... if your a hacker by todays media terminology you a bad person... Yet back in the pre-80's computing era hackers are the ones that built home computers and created the demand for home computing as it is today... if it wsn't for those hackers i would have to say we would likely not see nearly any of the innovations we do today because we would be following IBM vision of only a small handfull of computers would be needed world wide to do very few tasks. Just because its Called a Parkway doesn't mean you park on it :) and Driving on a Driveway isn't what you would expect if you didn't know that you park in driveways..
Once again the meaning of a word is wildly misused and has lead people to beliving a false definition of a word.
..."
"broadband refers to telecommunication in which a wide band of frequencies is available to transmit information. Because a wide band of frequencies is available, information can be multiplexed and sent on many different frequencies or channels within the band concurrently, allowing more information to be transmitted in a given amount of time
Broadband doesn't mean highspeed.. Broadband is a technology concept that virtually all highspeed providers utilize to give access to thier highspeed networks.. It has nothing to do with Speed at all... Any datarate can be carried over a broadband.
High-Speed is also being Twisted aswell.. Since normal speed is generally considered 28.8.. I see alot of 56K providers starting to use High-speed now too. Most people Tout DSL being faster than cable with isn't a accurate thing to say either.. and anyone that says Cable is faster than DSL is also spouting off uninformed. Either one can suck due to poor engineering design or just being plain greedy and shutting down the pipe to a slow trickle.. Or not having enough bandwidth to supply the demand..
And realistically 128K conecction for 40$ a month is over priced (When not abused). One of the big things that has had the largest negitive impact on High-Speed networks is people that are under the impression that since they have access to a 10Mbit datarate they can use that 10Mbits 24/7 doing what ever they want and still only pay 40$ a month. And the public has such a cautious view of metered connections (It just nukles marketing when you see restrictions printed on something) that if they said this is how much data you get for 40$ it would draw very few customers. The business plan that makes highspeed work is alot of customers using X ammount of bandwidth(or less) per day/week/month so the cost of the extreamly expencive backbone connection is spread out among 1000's of customers.
Voice over Wireless Intelectual Property? Thats a interesting one :)
I could be just Daft but VOIP is old hat.. very little ground to break.. Just cause your medium is wireless it shouldn't affect IP there for VOIP should work. Unless they are doing special work to some how retrive lost packets from a poorly designed wireless network that has a high packet loss or incredibly high latency... Either way I wouldn't invest in a company trying to reinvent the wheel like this.
So if they reassesed that piece of land after.. Would you owe more or less in land tax?
naa! Can't be :).. I guess Insurance Companies earthquake Periums will go way up in about 1800 years or so.
Its just plain shameful to see such a large number of contradictions in such a short time.
.... Pentium-M is a Pentium III using a Pentium 4 bus and 1 mb of L2 Cache"... What Happened to All new? sounds way more like modified old.
>> For instance the new Pentium-M is an all new from the ground up processor that at 1.6 Ghz, outperforms the Pentium 4 at 2.8 Ghz. The Pentuim 4 is still faster than the Athlon though, becuase it has a higher clockspeed. Oh, and the Pentium-M is a Pentium III using a Pentium 4 bus and 1 mb of L2 Cache.
"Pentium-M is al All New Processor
"...at 1.6 Ghz, outperforms the Pentium 4 at 2.8 Ghz. The Pentuim 4 is still faster than the Athlon though, becuase it has a higher clockspeed" But Wait just a few words ago you demonstrated that clockspeed Doesn't mean jack.. after all 1.6G is faster than 2.8G but 2.8G is faster than a Athalon because of its faster clock speed?
I just have to stop there... this post is just plain shameful.
I think they are hoping they can get this money to buy more life support systems for thier Business model.
Some gourp really needs to do a study to find how how much harm the RIAA is doing to thier own market by pursuing this in the manner they are..
Also just for Fun.. It would be funny to see the same dollar figure associated they use in thier court cases... It would be funny to see a figure like 97.8 Centillion dollar loss in the recording industry due to bad business practices and poor treatment of thier customer base.
I must say that the headline for this is outright Punny! its one of the Punniest ones I have seen yet!
.05$ a month to a fund such a OSS project they would gain quite a decent return on that investment as all the hardware used to filter spam ect would not be required.. Look at the ammount of money being spent to reduce spam that is delivered instead of inhibit the sending of it.
:)
Try being a canadian on the internet.. 99.9% of Spam Doesn't even come close to applying to us.. Yet we get it anyways and treamendous ammounts of it.
Its sickening and annoying has hell and there is so little you can actually do about it. Fixing Email so its alot harder/impossible to anonymously spam is taking too damn long.
With the number of ISP's decreasing in North America it should be getting easier and easier to impliment a new Protocol for sending mail.. if you take the top 20-30 ISP's in north america and utilize a new more secure protocol for sending mail you will have a massive portion of people on the ineternet.. and Throw in Webmail hosts I wouldn't be shocked if suddenly you have 70%+ or more of the email addresses Suddenly Spam free (Or next to it).. Once you have achived that level of penatration of a new protocol it would be treamendously easier to identify Spam and get rid of it long before it gets into a Inbox of a user that would make some sort of responce to it to fuel the spammers to do it more often.
For example DNS for your domain returns a record that you Support the new protocol so any inbound traffic from that domain that isn't in the new "secure" format can be tossed away as it will be forged... Suddenly The number of domains available for spammers to spoof from is drastically reduced. Secondly once 90% or more of the likely legitimate mail passes easily through the mail servers. Suddenly incomming Spam will be highly obvious as the volume of inbound spam is virtually impossible to hide amongst Legitimate Email. Couple that with unassured delivery of the old protocol will put pressure on mail providers to upgrade to the new Protocol so there should be a fairly rapid change of protocol.
Hopefully the OSS community will develop the new protocol and scaleable mail engines so the cost of implimentation is extreamly and Large ISP's will be movitvated to adpot it while making it attractive for the little guys to use aswell.
After all if all the major ISP's were to donate even
The idea of moving to a more secure mail protcol just seems to be one of the most common sence things you can think of.. You almost woner if there arn't a bunch of patents out there preventing this from happening.
The current laws do not promote diveristy in content.. A Media company should be able to as many Significantly diverse Mediums in any given area to promote Jobs and Diversity of content. This would make life way more interesting. Right now with the few media conglomerates there are they keep pressure on to keep diversity down to a minimum to maximize profits.. Abolishing the current laws will only aid them in quashing diverse upstarts that will reduce thier market share and force them into more diverse programming.
After everything is about maximizing profits for as little overhead as possible(or for the least they can get away with). Look at TV for instance.. Get rid of movies and TV shows that yet still may be good but are canceled/retired. and whats actually left to watch on TV not a heck of alot other than educational programming which I am taking a guess here but the ammount of new/diverse educational content is largely due to Government Grants/Incentives for corprate funding ect and the low cost nature of production comapred to Sitcoms and other "Mainstream" TV shows.. (I could be wrong but I would think that is a good reason).
And really these days the idea of Democracy is pretty much dead as it was origonally intened. The Government for the People Elected by the people has been really demented by corprations.. Its now the Government for the Corprations Elected by the people (Only after corparations have weeded out the people they deem as undesireable to have in power as thier political views could hamper thier business).
It definately seems that the majority of governments focus is spent on the needs of Corprate America rather than the indivudal.
it almost seems that the government throws the public enough bones to keep it happy while mostly catering to Corprate America.
God in the thread I See 2 very common big problems with what people are talking about... getting packet loss so what do they do.. make an assumption that the singal level is too low so they boot the level with new antennas withdoing doing research and proper troubleshooting to find the actual cause (which could possibly be signal strength but doubtful from the close proximity described).
I see far too much of this style of troubleshooting in the computer related sector. People making diagnosis based on speculation rather than a understanding the problem. Then when thier problem still exsists after a random remedy for the perceived problem has been implimented they blame the technology for its suposed shortcommings.
Was the singal strength actually too low? Was the Carrier to Noise Ratio too high? Excessive Packet collisions causeing the loss? Could have some of the loss come from the wierd portion of the network? Could part of the problem be with the wireless hardware itself( if you stand right ontop of the AP do you still get significant loss)? These are your basic components to start looking at to properly troubleshoot Wi-Fi problems. Once you know one of these basic contributing factors then there is much more exploration of the problem may be needed to be done to find the root cause of the problem so it can be properly rectified or the decision can be made that Wi-Fi is not an acceptable technology to use in your instance/application(which this last one is by far the most overlooked).
But these simple basic things are really what set people in the IT sector apart. There are far too many people that utilize the "Pin the tail on the Donkey"/"Processes of Elimination" troubleshooting methods instead of logical deductive reasoning.
Yes I am sure its not the cable box.. used to work for one of the big 2 Cable Co's in Canada and the picture still looked the same on the "Headend" quality equipment.. Poor encoding yes.. over compressed yes aswell.. Most of the channels they had were compressed at "8:1" rates or higher.. they transmitted alot of PPV stuff for a ATM fiber network and those channels were compressed ALOT more (To the point any massive quick change to the picture would cause pixelization to occur).. I have a Sat dish and the compression isn't anywhere near what it was on cable(all of the places i have seen digital cable I have seen alot of signs of over compression to where it was visually noticeable/obvious).
:) )
:) regardless of the codec.. as to achieve any decent ammount of compression you need to loose quality in one aspect or another.
:) ) and I don't think it will be so easily applied to video :)
As for starfields... That was the best example i have seen to show people that don't understand the loss of detail while retaining "Perceived Quality"...
The largest Quantity of people will belive hype about how much better something is without understanding what is actually going on. A good example is cell phones.. Look how long the carriers were charging more for Digital service over analog (Or making it sound like they were doing you a HUGE favor by giving you a great short term deal to switch to digital) when in the long run going digital for the cell carriers was 90% more of a bonus for the carrier rather than the customer.. There was a bit of a odd tradeoff to make.. Clarity for range.. as when your out of digital range you flip to analog as it has a better range.. but at the longer ranges the quality of analog suffers(Which just reminds you how much "Better" digital is
End customers here "Digital" and automatically they think this has got to be way better and since its way better Its worth more. When actually their capacity increases by a substantial factor and they also get to charge alot more for this technology. Look at CD's and Audio Tape.. Why have the price of CD's barely budged over time and Audio Tapes remain cheaper by a fair ammount when the cost of a CD is much much lower than a Audio tape. (But Medium longevity is much lower as Audio Tapes tend to need to be repurchased way more than CD's)
But really starting to get off track from the original Discussion here... The main point I was trying to make was Digital compression in a movie theater is a bad thing
Since nonlossy type compression schemes seem to be near their limit for our current understanding is today. Increased Quality means increased size.. if you increase the quality without increasing size or even further reducing size you add addition loss of quality.. Its virtually impossible to get around this simple fact. If the data can't be further compressed without loss.. loss must occur to reduce the size.. Where the loss is introduced maybe less noticeable to some people moreso than others..
Any for anyone that wants to start talking about the newest form of music compression that more or less breaks music down to a Postscript type language so it can be reproduced by hardware... We will see how well this works (I haven't heard it yet
Its been a little while since i have been to a movie rtheather and sat right up front.. but if you take the resolution of 1440 (About doubble the quality of a dvd) and compare the resolution of a 60 foot wide movie screen to a 20 inch(for easy sake its a real 20 inch viewable) monitor on a 20 inch monitor you would get about 72 pixels/horizontal inch.. on a 60 foot wide screen each pixel would be about 2 inches. I know when take it into perspective it wouldn't seem as big.. But I don't think you could tell me that a letter on the Movie screen that was 1 foot high when you walk up to it only consists of 6 pixels. I think you are under estimating the resolution of 35mm film. and as for noise.. HDTV still has to hold true to the GIGO standard.. Garbage in Garbage out..the digital representation can never be higher quality than its source (without alot of digital remastering work). I don't know anything about the optical distortions and light dispursion factors involved when making copies of Film but I imagine they are not that significant like analogue magnetic storage mediums.
I did a bit of poking around and found a artical that shows 2 diffrent resolutions for HDTV which should still be alot lower than the resolution you would get from hollywood quality film. they are 1440X1152 and 1920X1152 with max bitrates of 60 and 80 Mb/s. Now that is the maximum bit rate possible for the MPEG2 standard and it would be significantly diffrent for MPEG4 but I can't see being able to get away with alot of compression in the movie theater.. As the backgrounds lost detail will standout alotmore when its alot larger than life.. (Ever watch the starfield on any startrek on UPN.. they use crazy compression and man do those stars JUMP accross the screen.. there isn't any movement at all with them) I am really getting sickened with the level of video compression cable is using these days... but thats getting off topic. I still would expect a full length movie (90mins) of Equiv. Quality of what we have today with film to be Terabyes.. not Gigs. But this is not how digital technology has progressed so far (as far as video goes). There have been Great quality sacrifices in degital technologies. It mainly comes from cable co's as they have really abused digital signals and compression to combat the satellite market. Too many active devices, too long cascades, cracked cables among other things distorted and degraded analog signals alot. Firstly going digital Wiped out practically all of the picture degradation that took place from thier "Headend" to your TV. There for the public perceived this as increased Quality. at the same time they started compressing the hell out of the signal.. So instead of a snowy faded picture with nasty lines running through it.. You got a clean picture (Lots of detail is missing.. but you never noticed it before cause the picture was so snowy and poor. There for you have perceived Quality instead of Actual Quality. I would take a Clean analog signal anyday over a digital one.. But that isn't reasonable. But in the theater the only bonus/quality that will be increased is imperfections in the film and dust ect gathering on the film... In fact if you notice they have purposely put in cracks and pops into the audio and alot of imperfections at the very beging of a movie to give you that right feel and a real theater experience.
>> What the hell are you talking about? Have you ever watched a DVD that you bought in the store? It sure seems to fit to me, and thats with MPEG-2 encoding...using newer compression schemes gets you a lot better. Yes I have... could you imagine how bad that resolution would look when its blown up way over 100 times the size... It was made to look good on your average tv set... unless your blind theater screens are Way larger then your TV set to resolution will need to increase even with increased compression File sizes would be vastly larger. >> And for all the bad jokes about WMP (which I personally hate), they probably won't use the same player program, unless they really are extremely stupid. Yeah they were pretty bad... but I can imagine a few of them happening though.. looking at MS past track record... and for not using the same code base I really doubt that.. They would need to modify that code base and use a larger scale impimentation.. After all if they were to turn thier backs on thier current code base and start from scratch would be completely mad... Do you think they will write a completely new operating system aswell? (Wich would be a good idea actually slimming down the OS and trim the Fat that aids the instability)
DVD format isn't good enough to hold to movie.. I am taking a guess that even after encoding movies would be many terabytes in size.. so that would mean 100's of DVD's to hold 1 movie. and for downloading.. Currently cost prohibitive i would guess... each theater would a pretty massive pipe to download all these movies in a reasonable time. Mind ya this would be a perfect time to use a P2P network to propigate the file so that the studio wouldn't need a data pipe bigger than life to propigate the file.
Remembers Bill gates "Vision" of a pc in every home running his software.. Visions of Windows enabled electronics Spread through the huse as well.. It sure seems that MS is not working the way he invisioned the future.. Linux is breaking more ground and seems to be the "OS" that will be powering all the electronics in the home.
Well This hype will be a money maker for them... Too many people will just belive this as the truth and flock towards it.
This is most annoying when after quite a few years after something is really common place a company discovers it has a patent on something that is widely used... Downloading files on the internet is one.. Can't what company had it.. but that was Idiotic of them to think of attempting to enforce it (I think it was mid to late 90's when it came to surface).
Someone should patent the idea of patenting common place "Technology"..
Or better yet.. Patent the idea of Music copy-protection.. Or the idea making laws like the DMCA
Just goes to show ya how so many people blidly trust what others have to say without doing any research at all into anything.. You can't trust or belive 99% of people these days.. They allways have a distorted view or are just plain flat out talking about stuff they have no idea about... (Kinda like Bill Gates and how Bug free Windows 95 was just before it blue screned on him during a presentation)
It is also not a book which will teach you how to break into Linux servers.
Then what good is it!?
God I hate seeing Comments like this on here...
But i have noticed a few recent stories that use the term "Hack" correctly... Its the media that a corrupted the meaning of Hack to breaking into systems.