But at the very least, shouldn't the OSS community have an army of lawyers willing to work probono, or financed by various foundations, for this kind of thing exactly?
Hah! Almost spit milk through my nose reading this line. Lawyers? Probono on commercial work? (even if it's unpaid, it's commercial work). Lawyers expect to get paid for work just as most software developers expect to get paid at their day jobs. Defending a license like GPL isn't something a lawyer can do with a few hours of labor on Saturday afternoon.
And it would take an 'army' of them to fight these infractions. So unless everybody in the OSS community wants to pay dues to some foundation to fund a staff of 8 to 10 lawyers and their 16 to 20 support personnel this isn't likely to happen. Even EFF has only about 9 staff attorneys and they cover a huge mandate, not just FOSS software violations. http://www.eff.org/about/staff Their budget is close to 3.6 Million per year.
So if you want an army of lawyers to defend GPL or other licenses, build a foundation and raise 4 million per year.
Of course you can DIY the law yourself, you just have to spend your own time and money doing it.
It unfortunately becomes an addiction. I ended up having to upgrade all my machines to SSD after using it on one. Couldn't take what then seemed like intolerable sluggishness after upgrading the first machine. Would never go back to HD for OS drives.
Additionally, if you do database work, SSD is like crack cocaine. Instead of drives being the performance limiter, you'll actually start to saturate your CPU and WAN connections (particularly for slave operations.)
Seems like everybody in the media and quite a few here on Slashdot are not understanding the $15 for 4 weeks is not the same thing as $15 for a month. The tradition understanding of a 'month' is 12 months per year. There are 13 '4-week-months' in a year, not 12.
Just a word about location precision.
For large areas, GPS is your best bet, UNLESS your inside of building.
If you're trying to track equipment within a building and in the sub 10 ft range, then you're looking a something much more complicated. Currently there's a lot of work being done in UWB which can theoretically resolve down to 6 to 12 inches of precision. Fantastically complicated right now and definitely not an OS solution.
As others mention, if GPS accuracy is all you're looking for, take a look at the OpenStreetMap project and its spin offs.
BGANs ROCK! It's a total geek mobility device. I was able to take an extended vacation to some very remote parts of Laos while still being able to check in on our servers and IT stuff. (We're a super small company, so I'm the IT guy even while on vacation.)
Any case, the BGAN is really small and also doubles as a satellite phone. I think phone service was like 0.75 or 1.00 per minute which was totally reasonable. Data rate was per MB and they also offer a 32, 64, and 128kbit streaming connection. I didn't use the streaming as it was more expensive than the packet rate data and I didn't have any need, but it's there if you need it.
As there are only a couple of satellites servicing the BGAN, I highly recommend you take a compass with you as you will need to point it in both the right direction and at the right amount of tilt to get a signal. It's fairly sensitive, so the compass helps you get it pointed in the right direction within a couple of degrees. Once you're in the ball park, a rising and falling tone will help you train in on the signal. It takes less than a minute to lock once you initiate a connection. Depending on how far you need to tilt down towards the horizon will determine how much 'clearing' you'll need to be in to get a signal. It works best in places you're least likely to have other sources of internet. When I tested in in Los Angeles prior to leaving, I pretty much had to point it the horizon towards South America. If you're near the equator, you'll more or less be pointing it straight up.
The one 'gotcha' that almost freaked me out is that when you move to different satellite zones, it takes A LONG TIME for it to initially acquire the new satellite the first time. The terminal uses GPS to determine what part of the world it's in and it's not super fast at determining this. I actually thought the damn thing was broken initially before I sat on the beach and RTFM. It was trying to connect to the satellite over South America instead of the one over South East Asia. Expect to take like 20 to 30 minutes if you change zones before you can 'lock' the new satellite. The fewer GPS satellites covering your area, the longer it takes to figure out where it is. Once that's set though, assuming you don't move more than something like 400 miles away from the new location, you don't have to 'reset'; and the connection to the satellite can be acquired quite quickly on subsequent uplinks.
Since I was using it primarily to check email and shell into servers, I was able to keep my Bandwidth charges down. If you start downloading the NY Times home page every time you log in, expect a hefty bandwidth charge when you get back. The BGAN software provides a handy usage gauge, so you'll have nobody but yourself to blame if you start going crazy on the bandwidth.
Many customers also use their DNS service, (the EV1 DNS), so while there are 9000 servers physically 'off' there are many more effectively 'black' as the conical names no longer resolve.
I'm one of those customers. We're a very small business as are many of the other customers of The Planet (formerly Everyones Internet -- EV1.net)
I can still access our sever via the IP address, but not via the conical name.
While we host our site on a private server, many of the servers of other customers are resellers and with the DNS service, I could easily see how 10s of thousand of actual sites are down beyond the 9000 physical servers.
Is it just me or has anybody else noticed that Google doesn't make much effort to catalog the photos on Flickr, which is incidentally owned by Yahoo.
Or is it that Yahoo is blocking Google?????
Needless to say, if you search for a restricted set in Yahoo image search, you will pull up all of the Flickr photos. The same search in Google will often yield nothing from Flickr.
This is being done/worked on. It's called Terra Petra "Black Earth" and is being developed for use in biomass gasification.
Basically you gassify carbonaceous materials such as wood or other biomass. Instead of allows all the biomass to be consumed in the process, you pull a portion of the charcoal out of the gasification stream and then disc it into the earth. Charcoal, being a fairly stable version of high density carbon will remain in this state for a very long time and in a sense becomes fertilizer for the soil (over time). Charcol is a more stable form of carbon than just raw biomass which will otherwise decay into CO2 as it rots
In fact, in the amazon, this has been going on for 1000s of years and is a way to make otherwise not so great tropical soils fertile.
Gasification combined with Terra Petra has the possibility of not only being carbon neutral, but carbon negative. If you gassify existing biomass (in particular the waste wood and garden clipping stream of most municipal wastes) you start out carbon neutral. The carbon in the waste stream is already destined to either be incinerated or 'mulched' which releases the carbon as CO2 either way.
If during the process of gassifying this biomass stream, you extract a portion of the charcoal that is created, you can then sequester it in the soil. Thus becoming carbon negative to the extent you pull from your gassifier. The trade off is that you have less carbon to convert to CO for use as a producer gas.
'Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0--the wisdom of the crowds--and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.'
If that's really what Web 3.0 is going to be, it will fail. Adding an editorial layer DOES NOT SCALE.
It's hard to imagine that we'd give up all the truly valuable contributions from the wisdom of the crowds, of which there is actually quite a bit, in order to filter it through an editorial layer which by it's very definition would result in a much, much smaller pool of knowledge. That idea is essentially nonsense.
Will probably cause further re-evaluation of the Business Process Outsourcing model. And this time a more serious concern.
The bloom first goes off BPO where you realize the logistical and cultural hurdles of dealing with a supplier/'partner' very far off-shore.
This however is more crucial, because if you can always tell yourself that the BPO partner 'will get better' with time, but a lack of connectivity is like a lack of oxygen. Infrastructure re-evaluations are much more difficult to handle or weasel your way out of.
When you saturate your uplink, you are preventing ACK packets from efficiently responding during downlink. When you receive a downlink packet, your computer sends back and acknowledgment packet. If your saturating your uplink with an upload, then your ACK has to get in line to be sent out, thus slowing the response time by the sending server to send you more packets for your download.
On Mac OX we use "Throttled" which allows you to limit your upload speed in exchange for allowing you to saturate both upload and download at the same time.
For example, our service is 768 up / 3mbit down. At our location this translates to raw speeds of 85KB up and 327KB down. With Throttled, we limit our up to 75KB, thus providing 10KB of overhead to allow ACK packets to be feed during downloads. Works great and you tweak it until you get the maximum UPlink speed versus DOWNlink performance. We consistently now saturate both our uplink and downlink at the same time at 75KB/327KB
I work on the biz side of this.
It costs about $2500 per hour of TV to get it 'close captioned'. The only reason it's done is because it's required by law. Without the law, you can bet $2500 dollars, that not a single show would do it.
There's about a snowflakes-chance-in-hell that anybody is going to willing close caption something for the web unless: 1) it required. 2) they already did it anyways and can cross purpose it. 3) it's targeted for a specific audience that is large enough to justify it, 4) being shamed into doing it. 5) captions can be used to make video 'searchable'.
Only #5 shows any real incentive for captions right now. As we all know search only works on text (right now), so shows with captions attached have a better chance of being 'searchable'. Thus if your video is in someway designed to draw search attention to you or your product/cause, then caption text provided a nice 'two-for-one' option.
Contray to much talk on this board about lack of use, I think this could be huge in the film industry. It's not uncommon for workstations and editors to use terabytes of data when working on a project.
At the end of any particular project, you wipe everything off and move to the next one. You don't, as it seems many suggest, simply add more storage to hold archives of the old stuff. Most films are built by sub-contractors, so once the job is done, the key is to REUSE the expensive hardware over and over and over, not simply add to it for each project.
Of course the important stuff is backed up to tape or 'printed out' to film negative, but it would certainly be cool to simply back up each bay to a single Disc and then place those in storage versus the large number of DLT tapes currently being used. It's all about the data density for archiving the petabytes of data that now make up a film production.
DV and Digibeta are NO WHERE NEAR the same thing. To suggest otherwise is to reveal that you do not work with the two formats extensively.
Yes many productions are moving to DV. But only because it is cheaper.
The image quality, particuluarly on anything that will be extensively processed is far greater on DigiBeta than DV. Try pulling a decent key with DV!
At 270mbit/second versus 25mbits per second, Digibeta contains far more image information and detail and can handle far more secondary processing than DV. Additionally the color space on Digibeta is 4:2:2 versus 4:1:1 on DV. Digitbeta can be 10bit verus 8bit maximum for DV. (sunsets, car grills, anything with a gradient will look visibly worse on 8bit DV than either 8bit or 10bit Digibeta.)
Don't get me wrong, DV is great, I've shot plenty of stuff with it. I even like HDV which a lot of people scoff at, but to say DV is qualitatively close to Digibeta is laughable. The same film footage transfered to DV and Digibeta and then played back on match monitor simultaniously would be like watching VHS on one monitor and a DVD on the other.
The reason for the move to FCP (which I've used since 1.0) is cost, cost, cost. In the 5e9 channel universe, production budgets have been cut, cut, cut. (audience isn't expanding, but channels are == less money to go around). This is the reason for the acceptance of DV as a production format by broadcasters, not because it's comparable to Digibeta!!! It is orders of magnitude cheaper to cut on FCP versus avid.
Microfilm is not dense enough to be practical. You can only print so small on any film. Basically the level at which a discernable '1' or '0' can be recognized over the background noise of the film grain. I think you would find that the density you could achieve on any piece of microfilm would be relatively low by comparison to other methods of equal duration.
I didn't mean to infer that people are not buying HD TVs/Monitors/Projectors. Clearly that is the case. The point is that most people watch standard Def DVDs on their HD televisions. That IS a fact.
The move to being able to watch HD porn on an HD TV will not be the deciding factor in the HD/Blue Ray debate. There's no additional market to capture. Anybody who's already spending money on DVD porn MAY eventually switch to HD porn, but it will not be the driving factor to purchase HD/Blue Ray players in THE SAME WAY it was during the VHS/Betamax era.
With respect to demand for the HD disc players from Porn consumers, the price of players will be a key factor (decrease in price = increase in demand). There is some incremental demand for the higher definition Porn, no doubt, but nothing like the untapped demand that existed in the VHS/Betamax days. This is refered to as the elasticity of demand. Currently it is very elastic, meaning small change in price cause big changes in demand. (witness Flat Screen sales over the Holidays)
In the VHS/Betamax era, demand was inelastic, basically people had high demand and were willing to pay high prices, basically 'demand at any price'. It wasn't that people deperately wanted a video player per say, it was that they wanted to watch porn at home and a video player met that demand. Now, people can already watch porn at home, at work, on their cell phones, etc so the demand for the player of HD content is a qualitative issue for the consumer, not a 'have/not have' one.
Yes, eventually everything will be some variation of HD (players, TV, projectors, etc). I agree with you there.
Porn will not make as big of an impact as it did in the VHS/Betamax wars.
Porn is currently much more available. During the DVD/VHS wars, porn could only otherwise be viewed in seedy theaters where you ran the risk of being seen by friends, neighbors, etc, or at stag parties on Super-8. The tipping of the VHS/Betamax war was due primarily to pent-up demand (so to speak).
On-Line: Porn is most easily consumed using the most anonymous method available. Stag Parties -> VHS -> DVD -> On-Line. HD/Blue ray are really just an off-shoot of DVD. The real progression is to online delivery of media. This is the fastest growing segment of the porn industry and will eventually be more profitable than DVDs/VHS/HD sales combined.
Gaming is the New Porn
The selection of various disk formats by which ever turns out to be the most popular gaming system will have a broader impact. It certainly doesn't hurt that XBox can play high-rez porn now, but pornl won't be the deciding factor.
And the winner is:
Neither! In my business classes, our entreprenuership professors always said to 'supply' demand and not try to create 'demand' to meet your 'supply'. While I work in the entertainment industry and do appreciate the higher resolution of HD in general, for most people can barely tell the difference between VHS and DVD let alone HD. Where's the Demand??
Only gamers truely have exhibited true 'demand' for HD content and the large data capacity of these disks.
You fail to realize that Ticketmaster has EXCLUSIVE rights to sell tickets at most venues that it has tickets for. Therefore, as the artist, you can not book a show at say the Hollywood Bowl without going through Ticketmaster. If you're a large, popular act, you can not book a national tour without Ticketmaster being involved.
This is certainly the case at all 'largish' venues, and is becoming so with even the medium to small venues, (but not the smallest, since there's no money in it.)
As more and more venues became 'Ticketmaster' venues, it forced the other large venue to fall in line. When Ticketmater purchased Ticketron many years ago, this game was essentially over.
This and other types of solid state storage are on the cusp of replacing video tape as a production format.
Take the DV format for example, DV tape holds roughly 5 minutes of NTSC video per gig if you look at it from a storage point of view. A 60 minute DV tape =~ 12 gigs.
Moving to a higher chip density will allow these cameras and the new generation of HD pro-sumer cameras to record directly to "disk", saving huge amounts of production and post-production time in terms of media management.
The Panasonic AG-HVX200 http://www.dvxuser.com/articles/HVX200/ records directly to their "P2" cards which are currently 2GB per card. Recording in HD100 mode eats up 1GB per minute. Only has slots for 4 P2 cards. Move up to 8GB per card or 16GB per card drastically expands on-camera capacity. This is a HUGE market.
Unless you're in some very, very new field, it is hubris to assume that nothing older than 10 years is relevant.
Once you are at a higher level of studies such as Masters or PhD, you will find that you are primarily reading research journals. Most fields have 'seminal' papers that establish the current paradigms. Subsequent papers build on those. Most of these for most fields were written before 1995. Most of them are not on-line in full text.
To a certain extent the internet has spawned laziness in referencing, as many students simply only reference articles that they can pull up on-line. If it involves a trip to the stacks, forget it. They'll just assume that issue or reference has been settled and not bother to check or read the original reference underlying most articles. It is as if everything before the internet doesn't exist in their world of research.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when did the rule of law apply in Russia?
But at the very least, shouldn't the OSS community have an army of lawyers willing to work probono, or financed by various foundations, for this kind of thing exactly?
Hah! Almost spit milk through my nose reading this line. Lawyers? Probono on commercial work? (even if it's unpaid, it's commercial work). Lawyers expect to get paid for work just as most software developers expect to get paid at their day jobs. Defending a license like GPL isn't something a lawyer can do with a few hours of labor on Saturday afternoon.
And it would take an 'army' of them to fight these infractions. So unless everybody in the OSS community wants to pay dues to some foundation to fund a staff of 8 to 10 lawyers and their 16 to 20 support personnel this isn't likely to happen. Even EFF has only about 9 staff attorneys and they cover a huge mandate, not just FOSS software violations. http://www.eff.org/about/staff Their budget is close to 3.6 Million per year.
So if you want an army of lawyers to defend GPL or other licenses, build a foundation and raise 4 million per year.
Of course you can DIY the law yourself, you just have to spend your own time and money doing it.
Concur.
It unfortunately becomes an addiction. I ended up having to upgrade all my machines to SSD after using it on one. Couldn't take what then seemed like intolerable sluggishness after upgrading the first machine. Would never go back to HD for OS drives.
Additionally, if you do database work, SSD is like crack cocaine. Instead of drives being the performance limiter, you'll actually start to saturate your CPU and WAN connections (particularly for slave operations.)
Check out this presentation with regards to mySQL: http://www.slideshare.net/matsunobu/ssd-deployment-strategies-for-mysql#
Seems like everybody in the media and quite a few here on Slashdot are not understanding the $15 for 4 weeks is not the same thing as $15 for a month. The tradition understanding of a 'month' is 12 months per year. There are 13 '4-week-months' in a year, not 12.
52 / 4 = 13 'months'
Just a word about location precision. For large areas, GPS is your best bet, UNLESS your inside of building. If you're trying to track equipment within a building and in the sub 10 ft range, then you're looking a something much more complicated. Currently there's a lot of work being done in UWB which can theoretically resolve down to 6 to 12 inches of precision. Fantastically complicated right now and definitely not an OS solution. As others mention, if GPS accuracy is all you're looking for, take a look at the OpenStreetMap project and its spin offs.
BGANs ROCK! It's a total geek mobility device. I was able to take an extended vacation to some very remote parts of Laos while still being able to check in on our servers and IT stuff. (We're a super small company, so I'm the IT guy even while on vacation.)
Any case, the BGAN is really small and also doubles as a satellite phone. I think phone service was like 0.75 or 1.00 per minute which was totally reasonable. Data rate was per MB and they also offer a 32, 64, and 128kbit streaming connection. I didn't use the streaming as it was more expensive than the packet rate data and I didn't have any need, but it's there if you need it.
As there are only a couple of satellites servicing the BGAN, I highly recommend you take a compass with you as you will need to point it in both the right direction and at the right amount of tilt to get a signal. It's fairly sensitive, so the compass helps you get it pointed in the right direction within a couple of degrees. Once you're in the ball park, a rising and falling tone will help you train in on the signal. It takes less than a minute to lock once you initiate a connection. Depending on how far you need to tilt down towards the horizon will determine how much 'clearing' you'll need to be in to get a signal. It works best in places you're least likely to have other sources of internet. When I tested in in Los Angeles prior to leaving, I pretty much had to point it the horizon towards South America. If you're near the equator, you'll more or less be pointing it straight up.
The one 'gotcha' that almost freaked me out is that when you move to different satellite zones, it takes A LONG TIME for it to initially acquire the new satellite the first time. The terminal uses GPS to determine what part of the world it's in and it's not super fast at determining this. I actually thought the damn thing was broken initially before I sat on the beach and RTFM. It was trying to connect to the satellite over South America instead of the one over South East Asia. Expect to take like 20 to 30 minutes if you change zones before you can 'lock' the new satellite. The fewer GPS satellites covering your area, the longer it takes to figure out where it is. Once that's set though, assuming you don't move more than something like 400 miles away from the new location, you don't have to 'reset'; and the connection to the satellite can be acquired quite quickly on subsequent uplinks.
Since I was using it primarily to check email and shell into servers, I was able to keep my Bandwidth charges down. If you start downloading the NY Times home page every time you log in, expect a hefty bandwidth charge when you get back. The BGAN software provides a handy usage gauge, so you'll have nobody but yourself to blame if you start going crazy on the bandwidth.
Overall, highly recommended!!
Not Totally True.
Many customers also use their DNS service, (the EV1 DNS), so while there are 9000 servers physically 'off' there are many more effectively 'black' as the conical names no longer resolve.
I'm one of those customers. We're a very small business as are many of the other customers of The Planet (formerly Everyones Internet -- EV1.net)
I can still access our sever via the IP address, but not via the conical name.
While we host our site on a private server, many of the servers of other customers are resellers and with the DNS service, I could easily see how 10s of thousand of actual sites are down beyond the 9000 physical servers.
Is it just me or has anybody else noticed that Google doesn't make much effort to catalog the photos on Flickr, which is incidentally owned by Yahoo.
Or is it that Yahoo is blocking Google?????
Needless to say, if you search for a restricted set in Yahoo image search, you will pull up all of the Flickr photos. The same search in Google will often yield nothing from Flickr.
This is being done/worked on. It's called Terra Petra "Black Earth" and is being developed for use in biomass gasification.
Basically you gassify carbonaceous materials such as wood or other biomass. Instead of allows all the biomass to be consumed in the process, you pull a portion of the charcoal out of the gasification stream and then disc it into the earth. Charcoal, being a fairly stable version of high density carbon will remain in this state for a very long time and in a sense becomes fertilizer for the soil (over time). Charcol is a more stable form of carbon than just raw biomass which will otherwise decay into CO2 as it rots
In fact, in the amazon, this has been going on for 1000s of years and is a way to make otherwise not so great tropical soils fertile.
Gasification combined with Terra Petra has the possibility of not only being carbon neutral, but carbon negative. If you gassify existing biomass (in particular the waste wood and garden clipping stream of most municipal wastes) you start out carbon neutral. The carbon in the waste stream is already destined to either be incinerated or 'mulched' which releases the carbon as CO2 either way.
If during the process of gassifying this biomass stream, you extract a portion of the charcoal that is created, you can then sequester it in the soil. Thus becoming carbon negative to the extent you pull from your gassifier. The trade off is that you have less carbon to convert to CO for use as a producer gas.
If that's really what Web 3.0 is going to be, it will fail. Adding an editorial layer DOES NOT SCALE.
It's hard to imagine that we'd give up all the truly valuable contributions from the wisdom of the crowds, of which there is actually quite a bit, in order to filter it through an editorial layer which by it's very definition would result in a much, much smaller pool of knowledge. That idea is essentially nonsense.
Will probably cause further re-evaluation of the Business Process Outsourcing model. And this time a more serious concern. The bloom first goes off BPO where you realize the logistical and cultural hurdles of dealing with a supplier/'partner' very far off-shore. This however is more crucial, because if you can always tell yourself that the BPO partner 'will get better' with time, but a lack of connectivity is like a lack of oxygen. Infrastructure re-evaluations are much more difficult to handle or weasel your way out of.
When you saturate your uplink, you are preventing ACK packets from efficiently responding during downlink. When you receive a downlink packet, your computer sends back and acknowledgment packet. If your saturating your uplink with an upload, then your ACK has to get in line to be sent out, thus slowing the response time by the sending server to send you more packets for your download.
On Mac OX we use "Throttled" which allows you to limit your upload speed in exchange for allowing you to saturate both upload and download at the same time.
For example, our service is 768 up / 3mbit down. At our location this translates to raw speeds of 85KB up and 327KB down. With Throttled, we limit our up to 75KB, thus providing 10KB of overhead to allow ACK packets to be feed during downloads. Works great and you tweak it until you get the maximum UPlink speed versus DOWNlink performance. We consistently now saturate both our uplink and downlink at the same time at 75KB/327KB
I work on the biz side of this. It costs about $2500 per hour of TV to get it 'close captioned'. The only reason it's done is because it's required by law. Without the law, you can bet $2500 dollars, that not a single show would do it. There's about a snowflakes-chance-in-hell that anybody is going to willing close caption something for the web unless: 1) it required. 2) they already did it anyways and can cross purpose it. 3) it's targeted for a specific audience that is large enough to justify it, 4) being shamed into doing it. 5) captions can be used to make video 'searchable'. Only #5 shows any real incentive for captions right now. As we all know search only works on text (right now), so shows with captions attached have a better chance of being 'searchable'. Thus if your video is in someway designed to draw search attention to you or your product/cause, then caption text provided a nice 'two-for-one' option.
Contray to much talk on this board about lack of use, I think this could be huge in the film industry. It's not uncommon for workstations and editors to use terabytes of data when working on a project. At the end of any particular project, you wipe everything off and move to the next one. You don't, as it seems many suggest, simply add more storage to hold archives of the old stuff. Most films are built by sub-contractors, so once the job is done, the key is to REUSE the expensive hardware over and over and over, not simply add to it for each project. Of course the important stuff is backed up to tape or 'printed out' to film negative, but it would certainly be cool to simply back up each bay to a single Disc and then place those in storage versus the large number of DLT tapes currently being used. It's all about the data density for archiving the petabytes of data that now make up a film production.
DV and Digibeta are NO WHERE NEAR the same thing. To suggest otherwise is to reveal that you do not work with the two formats extensively. Yes many productions are moving to DV. But only because it is cheaper. The image quality, particuluarly on anything that will be extensively processed is far greater on DigiBeta than DV. Try pulling a decent key with DV! At 270mbit/second versus 25mbits per second, Digibeta contains far more image information and detail and can handle far more secondary processing than DV. Additionally the color space on Digibeta is 4:2:2 versus 4:1:1 on DV. Digitbeta can be 10bit verus 8bit maximum for DV. (sunsets, car grills, anything with a gradient will look visibly worse on 8bit DV than either 8bit or 10bit Digibeta.) Don't get me wrong, DV is great, I've shot plenty of stuff with it. I even like HDV which a lot of people scoff at, but to say DV is qualitatively close to Digibeta is laughable. The same film footage transfered to DV and Digibeta and then played back on match monitor simultaniously would be like watching VHS on one monitor and a DVD on the other. The reason for the move to FCP (which I've used since 1.0) is cost, cost, cost. In the 5e9 channel universe, production budgets have been cut, cut, cut. (audience isn't expanding, but channels are == less money to go around). This is the reason for the acceptance of DV as a production format by broadcasters, not because it's comparable to Digibeta!!! It is orders of magnitude cheaper to cut on FCP versus avid.
Microfilm is not dense enough to be practical. You can only print so small on any film. Basically the level at which a discernable '1' or '0' can be recognized over the background noise of the film grain. I think you would find that the density you could achieve on any piece of microfilm would be relatively low by comparison to other methods of equal duration.
I didn't mean to infer that people are not buying HD TVs/Monitors/Projectors. Clearly that is the case. The point is that most people watch standard Def DVDs on their HD televisions. That IS a fact.
The move to being able to watch HD porn on an HD TV will not be the deciding factor in the HD/Blue Ray debate. There's no additional market to capture. Anybody who's already spending money on DVD porn MAY eventually switch to HD porn, but it will not be the driving factor to purchase HD/Blue Ray players in THE SAME WAY it was during the VHS/Betamax era.
With respect to demand for the HD disc players from Porn consumers, the price of players will be a key factor (decrease in price = increase in demand). There is some incremental demand for the higher definition Porn, no doubt, but nothing like the untapped demand that existed in the VHS/Betamax days. This is refered to as the elasticity of demand. Currently it is very elastic, meaning small change in price cause big changes in demand. (witness Flat Screen sales over the Holidays)
In the VHS/Betamax era, demand was inelastic, basically people had high demand and were willing to pay high prices, basically 'demand at any price'. It wasn't that people deperately wanted a video player per say, it was that they wanted to watch porn at home and a video player met that demand. Now, people can already watch porn at home, at work, on their cell phones, etc so the demand for the player of HD content is a qualitative issue for the consumer, not a 'have/not have' one.
Yes, eventually everything will be some variation of HD (players, TV, projectors, etc). I agree with you there.
Has anybody done an analysis of previous slashdot coverage of this and tabulated the number of comments per story?
Seems to me the number of comments (and thus interest) is getting smaller and smaller per SCO story.
Porn will not make as big of an impact as it did in the VHS/Betamax wars.
Gaming is the New Porn
The selection of various disk formats by which ever turns out to be the most popular gaming system will have a broader impact. It certainly doesn't hurt that XBox can play high-rez porn now, but pornl won't be the deciding factor.
And the winner is:
Neither! In my business classes, our entreprenuership professors always said to 'supply' demand and not try to create 'demand' to meet your 'supply'. While I work in the entertainment industry and do appreciate the higher resolution of HD in general, for most people can barely tell the difference between VHS and DVD let alone HD. Where's the Demand??
Only gamers truely have exhibited true 'demand' for HD content and the large data capacity of these disks.
Cheaper to cover an area with radio signal than to trench cable any day of the week.
my dislexia must be getting worse. I thought for a secong that AJAX was going to the Moon.
You fail to realize that Ticketmaster has EXCLUSIVE rights to sell tickets at most venues that it has tickets for. Therefore, as the artist, you can not book a show at say the Hollywood Bowl without going through Ticketmaster. If you're a large, popular act, you can not book a national tour without Ticketmaster being involved. This is certainly the case at all 'largish' venues, and is becoming so with even the medium to small venues, (but not the smallest, since there's no money in it.) As more and more venues became 'Ticketmaster' venues, it forced the other large venue to fall in line. When Ticketmater purchased Ticketron many years ago, this game was essentially over.
How much of the ratings are attributed to casting Carrie?
Take the DV format for example, DV tape holds roughly 5 minutes of NTSC video per gig if you look at it from a storage point of view. A 60 minute DV tape =~ 12 gigs.
Moving to a higher chip density will allow these cameras and the new generation of HD pro-sumer cameras to record directly to "disk", saving huge amounts of production and post-production time in terms of media management.
The Panasonic AG-HVX200 http://www.dvxuser.com/articles/HVX200/ records directly to their "P2" cards which are currently 2GB per card. Recording in HD100 mode eats up 1GB per minute. Only has slots for 4 P2 cards. Move up to 8GB per card or 16GB per card drastically expands on-camera capacity. This is a HUGE market.
Once you are at a higher level of studies such as Masters or PhD, you will find that you are primarily reading research journals. Most fields have 'seminal' papers that establish the current paradigms. Subsequent papers build on those. Most of these for most fields were written before 1995. Most of them are not on-line in full text.
To a certain extent the internet has spawned laziness in referencing, as many students simply only reference articles that they can pull up on-line. If it involves a trip to the stacks, forget it. They'll just assume that issue or reference has been settled and not bother to check or read the original reference underlying most articles. It is as if everything before the internet doesn't exist in their world of research.