On the other hand, since the Telco would never accept responsibility for your data, only the apps and connection, you could get the nearest geek to make you a livecd or livedvd with the requisite browser/mail/messenger/whatever apps.
$X a month for Telco support.
$0 a month for geeky disk
Tough call for joe sixpack.
So all the aliens 20 light years away who have just heard about SETI starting up and have started building radio transmitters will be wasting their tme now we are switching to lasers. Do I have to organise everyone? Why can't these people think things through?
Normal people take time even distinguishing 64k AAC clips from the original sometimes. But with visuals it's easy to spot artifacts.
What original? The cd? So what original are you approximating with your fancy shmancy codec? Mpeg2?
trading quality for file size is getting less appealing as storage gets cheaper. You want to do something useful in codec development? Make a codec that enhances the framerate and resolution of the mpeg2 sources found on bits of plastic everywhere so it looks nicer on the next generation of displays. Shrinking dvds has been done. The divx codec is in commodity priced dvd players. Get over it.
I am not saying that 640 kB should be enough for everyone, or that since we have Microsoft Word we have reached a level of acceptability I am saying that there is less need to 'make software work within 640 kb', to use your analogy. A lot of codec development is , to use your analogy again, like making new fonts for Microsoft Word. Until there is a better 'original' than the dvd standard to encode from, the gains are getting smaller and smaller.
Video codec's will always be worked on and updated, as higher quality video is demanded, sizes get larger and larger and more unworkable. When you have a large HDTV, do you really want to watch a divx video with blocky motion artifacts?
Ever hear of diminishing returns?
divx is watchable and a good size/quality compromise. You can get a 90 minute film onto a cd, for instance. If, in the future, you can encode a 90 minute hdtv into 700mb with no quality loss, the hardware needed to decode and render the film will probably not use cds. The codec will probably run into Gb.
And, yes, those stairs, rain and especially faces ARE blurred in real life.
Okay, children, your assignment today is to work out how big 1 pixel is on the screen in front of you and stick a piece of blutack, sticky paper or appropriate opaque material on the screen. The effect you are aiming for is to hide 1 pixel as though it is broken. For a 15" display running 1200 x 1024, the blob will be about one hundredth of an inch square or a quarter of a millimetre square. Doesn't sound like much does it?
Okay, now you all have your pretend broken pixels, use your screen as normal and see how annoying and distracting that blob is. Try inviting a friend to look at a document or animation on your screen and see how long it takes before they wipe off the blob.
Erm, this may only apply to old codgers with failing faculties like myself, but I think that a level of acceptability has been reached. Just as mp3(and similar) is good enough to listen to and jpg, bmp and gif are good enough for the various static images needs, divx(xvid) and mpeg2 fill the processing requirements for moving images.
With the cost of storage falling there is less need to build a higher compression video codec. If you want to do some good, come up with faster and higher quality ways to transcode things to an existing open codec standard.
I doubt that we have seen the end of evolution. Firstly: The 'successful' people will meddle with their kids dna for desirable features, this will increase the chances of evolution as it introduces 'mutations' of the genes that would otherwise take a long time to happen by accident.
Secondly: You assume that having more kids will mean that your genes will take over from the less reproductive people. This is only true when the two variants are competing for resources. If there ever comes a time when the rich/smart are heading for a real fight for resources for their kids, don't bet on the poor.
I am in a bad mood this morning so I would like to opine that the explosion in weblogs is due to the mainstream news media becoming so inept, distorted and lame that ordinary idiots realise they could do the job themselves.
Depends on what you do. If you mark a 32" plasma as 'tin of beans, $0.25' then the cashier may become suspicious, if you mark it as a 32" CRT tv of the same brand then you may get away with it. There are only a few characters on the till's readout and the cashier can't be expected to know every item. If the scanner accepts the barcode and the display reads something plausible "Tv 32 XYZ123 $300" then your minimum wage cashier might move on to the next thing in the basket.
Now that is just unfair! If The recent history of lucrative government contracts *cough* EDS *cough* is anything to go by, the government will pay hundreds of millions to a company to develop something which will never work and be scrapped before it reaches roll-out. The most secure code is that which is never run (failure rate 0%). Any bureaucrat can see the logic of this.
Seriously, there will be a national ID in britain soon, probably implanted rfid. It fits so well with government policy of hugely inconveniencing everyone who isn't in power (If you are in power you can erase all that troubling data that have acculmulated in the huge Database of Everything and Everyone."David? Hi, it's Tony. Listen, the wife is going ballistic because the nanny can't take the boys shopping in manhatten . Could you have a word with records about her clearance? Thanks").
FFS! If anywhere is to be the 51st state then it should be Engle-land (The Scots, Welsh, Irish and NuLabour get to see England abolished. A dream come true for them). We have the baseball caps, the obesity and the fast food. All we are lacking is the 'Easy-to-tell-if-it-is-the-right-way-up' flag and some constitutional protection of our rights. And some rights.
Come on guys, Put the American border 20 miles from France!:-)
Well duh. I would swap all the engineering of driveshafts and constant velocity joints for increased unsprung mass any day. Put some balloon tires on to protect the motors and put up with the roll. Most drivers come to a virtual standstill to corner anyway, the racers like me will be laughing as we boing and slide around the bends.
I can hardly wait until there are more electric vehicles around and being crashed. Please god, let the manufacturers build the motors into the wheel hubs!
Why? Because then we can then power old(broken) cars with newer electric axles, running from car batteries when passing emissions inspections, and running from generators the rest of the time. When the generator dies it will be much easier to swap than a 'normal' car engine as it doesn't need to fit the transmission, have a fancy engine management system etc. Wiring is easier to do than gearcutting.
....for a certain value of 'truck', maybe. I used to drive a seven and a half ton truck. It was 8 feet wide and thirteen feet tall and 'powered' by a six litre normally aspirated diesel. That thing had the drag factor of a parachute, 'cruising' was accomplished at 60mph on the flat with full throttle. It accelerated to about 20mph ok though.
WTF? You can drastically cut the bandwidth needed by storing the station logos and advertising locally on the aircraft. Even better, since most TV is repetitive, you could generate it 'on the fly' (ha ha).
People who will buy a cheap vcd release are already doing so from pirates. You can either take the profits away from pirates by competing with them or throw money away trying to shut them down.
The voices in my head say that shutting bittorrent sites is a cunning plan.
1. Buy stocks cheaply in ailing movie/recording companies.
2. Shut down suprnova. Instantly, all the leeches switch off their computers and sprint to the nearest shop to buy CDs and DVDs. Sales skyrocket, share prices skyrocket.
3. Sell shares and then reactivate suprnova.
Repeat as necessary.
I reckon it maximises their REALISTIC profitability rather than their THEORETICAL profitability. CEO: "Our spies tell us that a 15 year old unemployed stoner downloaded 100 films this month over his neighbour's wifi internet account! Therefore, if our DRM was impregnable, that same unemployed stoner would have paid $1500 to buy the DVDs!"
Shareholders : "OMFG! Buy more DRM and Lawyers!"
The voices that the CIA beam into my teeth tell me that promoting a film costs about as much as making the film. Halving the costs seems a fine start to the economic fight. Setting up a cdr manufacturing plant probably costs quite a few $million too, but their product gets to the shop for pennies.
The market has set the price for DVDs; it is the price that the pirates sell at.
To recap:
Reduce the costs (no advertising means less staff to deal with the advertising which means less office space which.....etc)
Make a few cents on each VCD sold (and more on the download).
Make even more cents on each label-less DVD (more on download).
Make a few dollars on each fancy boxed set.
Make a few dollars at the theatre.
And this will remove the demand for pirated movies too, as customers can 'preview' a film on a grotty format before paying big bucks for higher quality versions all of which you will make money on . You can even put trailers for your other films on the discs. vcd and low quality dvd copies of your film will be availible on streetcorners whatever you do, do you want to make money on those sales or not?
1. Forget chasing 'pirates'. This will save a lot of expensive legal bills. Cut back drastically on advertising too, as you don't need to whip people up into a frenzy to get them to theatres in the first week.
2. Make film (Citizen Kane: starring Adam Sandler or something).
3. Make a VCD cut and make unlabelled cheapo vcd's. Using the economies of scale, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate vcd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies. Your margin is the difference between a bulk pressed cd and a small scale burned copy.
4. Simultaneously sell the film as a download for the same price as you get for the vcd. ...wait a few weeks
5. Make a nicer, longer dvd cut of the film and, again, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate dvd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies.
6. Sell the dvd cut of the film online at the same price as the DVD wholesale price. .... wait some more
7. Theatre release of film in lovely THX/35mm
8. Boxed set dvd release with extra everything.
By doing this you make money from the guys currently selling 'pirated copies' of films and money from people who can't be bothered to find a torrent of your film. The money saved on lawyers and advertising would probably pay for setting up the servers.
At stage 3 you are the sole supplier of vcd of your film, it is uneconomic to burn copies so you own the market. People may share your film over the internet but the hassle of finding a torrent and/or running P2P software is competing against the paid download (4) which is priced as low as a blank cdr.
This is simple economics. Cut back on expensive things like lawyers and advertising, then put out bargain bin priced product to soak up the sales to misers and the poor. You can still make bigger margins on the nicely packaged versions to people who want to buy them.
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Taking the rim off a wheel just makes it smaller! What a stupid idea.
You foolish fool! We have to conserve water too! If you want a group of people to do something for the environment, mass suicide is the way to go.
On the other hand, since the Telco would never accept responsibility for your data, only the apps and connection, you could get the nearest geek to make you a livecd or livedvd with the requisite browser/mail/messenger/whatever apps.
$X a month for Telco support.
$0 a month for geeky disk
Tough call for joe sixpack.
What? I am running a ten year old pc, you insensitive clod.
So all the aliens 20 light years away who have just heard about SETI starting up and have started building radio transmitters will be wasting their tme now we are switching to lasers.
Do I have to organise everyone? Why can't these people think things through?
Normal people take time even distinguishing 64k AAC clips from the original sometimes. But with visuals it's easy to spot artifacts.
What original? The cd? So what original are you approximating with your fancy shmancy codec? Mpeg2?
trading quality for file size is getting less appealing as storage gets cheaper. You want to do something useful in codec development? Make a codec that enhances the framerate and resolution of the mpeg2 sources found on bits of plastic everywhere so it looks nicer on the next generation of displays. Shrinking dvds has been done. The divx codec is in commodity priced dvd players. Get over it.
I am not saying that 640 kB should be enough for everyone, or that since we have Microsoft Word we have reached a level of acceptability I am saying that there is less need to 'make software work within 640 kb', to use your analogy. A lot of codec development is , to use your analogy again, like making new fonts for Microsoft Word. Until there is a better 'original' than the dvd standard to encode from, the gains are getting smaller and smaller.
Video codec's will always be worked on and updated, as higher quality video is demanded, sizes get larger and larger and more unworkable. When you have a large HDTV, do you really want to watch a divx video with blocky motion artifacts? Ever hear of diminishing returns?
divx is watchable and a good size/quality compromise. You can get a 90 minute film onto a cd, for instance. If, in the future, you can encode a 90 minute hdtv into 700mb with no quality loss, the hardware needed to decode and render the film will probably not use cds. The codec will probably run into Gb.
And, yes, those stairs, rain and especially faces ARE blurred in real life.
Okay, children, your assignment today is to work out how big 1 pixel is on the screen in front of you and stick a piece of blutack, sticky paper or appropriate opaque material on the screen. The effect you are aiming for is to hide 1 pixel as though it is broken. For a 15" display running 1200 x 1024, the blob will be about one hundredth of an inch square or a quarter of a millimetre square. Doesn't sound like much does it?
Okay, now you all have your pretend broken pixels, use your screen as normal and see how annoying and distracting that blob is. Try inviting a friend to look at a document or animation on your screen and see how long it takes before they wipe off the blob.
Erm, this may only apply to old codgers with failing faculties like myself, but I think that a level of acceptability has been reached.
Just as mp3(and similar) is good enough to listen to and jpg, bmp and gif are good enough for the various static images needs, divx(xvid) and mpeg2 fill the processing requirements for moving images.
With the cost of storage falling there is less need to build a higher compression video codec. If you want to do some good, come up with faster and higher quality ways to transcode things to an existing open codec standard.
How many dead bits per megabyte of ram do you find acceptable in your computer?
I doubt that we have seen the end of evolution.
Firstly: The 'successful' people will meddle with their kids dna for desirable features, this will increase the chances of evolution as it introduces 'mutations' of the genes that would otherwise take a long time to happen by accident.
Secondly: You assume that having more kids will mean that your genes will take over from the less reproductive people. This is only true when the two variants are competing for resources. If there ever comes a time when the rich/smart are heading for a real fight for resources for their kids, don't bet on the poor.
I am in a bad mood this morning so I would like to opine that the explosion in weblogs is due to the mainstream news media becoming so inept, distorted and lame that ordinary idiots realise they could do the job themselves.
Depends on what you do. If you mark a 32" plasma as 'tin of beans, $0.25' then the cashier may become suspicious, if you mark it as a 32" CRT tv of the same brand then you may get away with it. There are only a few characters on the till's readout and the cashier can't be expected to know every item. If the scanner accepts the barcode and the display reads something plausible "Tv 32 XYZ123 $300" then your minimum wage cashier might move on to the next thing in the basket.
Now that is just unfair! If The recent history of lucrative government contracts *cough* EDS *cough* is anything to go by, the government will pay hundreds of millions to a company to develop something which will never work and be scrapped before it reaches roll-out. The most secure code is that which is never run (failure rate 0%). Any bureaucrat can see the logic of this.
Seriously, there will be a national ID in britain soon, probably implanted rfid. It fits so well with government policy of hugely inconveniencing everyone who isn't in power (If you are in power you can erase all that troubling data that have acculmulated in the huge Database of Everything and Everyone."David? Hi, it's Tony. Listen, the wife is going ballistic because the nanny can't take the boys shopping in manhatten . Could you have a word with records about her clearance? Thanks").
FFS! If anywhere is to be the 51st state then it should be Engle-land (The Scots, Welsh, Irish and NuLabour get to see England abolished. A dream come true for them). We have the baseball caps, the obesity and the fast food. All we are lacking is the 'Easy-to-tell-if-it-is-the-right-way-up' flag and some constitutional protection of our rights. And some rights. :-)
Come on guys, Put the American border 20 miles from France!
Well duh. I would swap all the engineering of driveshafts and constant velocity joints for increased unsprung mass any day. Put some balloon tires on to protect the motors and put up with the roll. Most drivers come to a virtual standstill to corner anyway, the racers like me will be laughing as we boing and slide around the bends.
I can hardly wait until there are more electric vehicles around and being crashed. Please god, let the manufacturers build the motors into the wheel hubs!
Why? Because then we can then power old(broken) cars with newer electric axles, running from car batteries when passing emissions inspections, and running from generators the rest of the time. When the generator dies it will be much easier to swap than a 'normal' car engine as it doesn't need to fit the transmission, have a fancy engine management system etc. Wiring is easier to do than gearcutting.
....for a certain value of 'truck', maybe.
I used to drive a seven and a half ton truck. It was 8 feet wide and thirteen feet tall and 'powered' by a six litre normally aspirated diesel. That thing had the drag factor of a parachute, 'cruising' was accomplished at 60mph on the flat with full throttle. It accelerated to about 20mph ok though.
WTF? You can drastically cut the bandwidth needed by storing the station logos and advertising locally on the aircraft. Even better, since most TV is repetitive, you could generate it 'on the fly' (ha ha).
...etc for fricken hours at $20 an hour to the captive audience.
"Buy our product! Oooh yeah! It's really great! Woo!"
"You're watching Boeing-o-vision! Parp parp parp Boeing telly BOEING TELLY Boeing Telly parpity parp"
"And now, the news"
"News Time! News Time! Squeak! Parp! Toot! News Time!"
"Britney has/hasn't had plastic surgery. The war against terror continues. More news later."
"News Time! News Time! Squeak! Parp! Toot! News Time!"
"You're watching Boeing-o-vision! Parp parp parp Boeing telly BOEING TELLY Boeing Telly parpity parp"
"Buy our product! Oooh yeah! It's really great! Woo!"
"No, buy our product instead! Oooh yeah! It's really great and better than the other stuff! Woo!"
"You stink, buy our deoderent!"
"you suck as a parent unless you buy your kid our plastic crap!"
"You're watching Boeing-o-vision! Parp parp parp Boeing telly BOEING TELLY Boeing Telly parpity parp"
"And now, I Love Lucy, followed by the news"
People who will buy a cheap vcd release are already doing so from pirates.
You can either take the profits away from pirates by competing with them or throw money away trying to shut them down.
The voices in my head say that shutting bittorrent sites is a cunning plan.
1. Buy stocks cheaply in ailing movie/recording companies.
2. Shut down suprnova. Instantly, all the leeches switch off their computers and sprint to the nearest shop to buy CDs and DVDs. Sales skyrocket, share prices skyrocket.
3. Sell shares and then reactivate suprnova.
Repeat as necessary.
I reckon it maximises their REALISTIC profitability rather than their THEORETICAL profitability.
CEO: "Our spies tell us that a 15 year old unemployed stoner downloaded 100 films this month over his neighbour's wifi internet account! Therefore, if our DRM was impregnable, that same unemployed stoner would have paid $1500 to buy the DVDs!"
Shareholders : "OMFG! Buy more DRM and Lawyers!"
The voices that the CIA beam into my teeth tell me that promoting a film costs about as much as making the film. Halving the costs seems a fine start to the economic fight. Setting up a cdr manufacturing plant probably costs quite a few $million too, but their product gets to the shop for pennies.
The market has set the price for DVDs; it is the price that the pirates sell at.
To recap:
Reduce the costs (no advertising means less staff to deal with the advertising which means less office space which.....etc)
Make a few cents on each VCD sold (and more on the download).
Make even more cents on each label-less DVD (more on download).
Make a few dollars on each fancy boxed set.
Make a few dollars at the theatre.
And this will remove the demand for pirated movies too, as customers can 'preview' a film on a grotty format before paying big bucks for higher quality versions all of which you will make money on . You can even put trailers for your other films on the discs.
vcd and low quality dvd copies of your film will be availible on streetcorners whatever you do, do you want to make money on those sales or not?
How's this for a solution to film piracy?
...wait a few weeks
.... wait some more
1. Forget chasing 'pirates'. This will save a lot of expensive legal bills. Cut back drastically on advertising too, as you don't need to whip people up into a frenzy to get them to theatres in the first week.
2. Make film (Citizen Kane: starring Adam Sandler or something).
3. Make a VCD cut and make unlabelled cheapo vcd's. Using the economies of scale, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate vcd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies. Your margin is the difference between a bulk pressed cd and a small scale burned copy.
4. Simultaneously sell the film as a download for the same price as you get for the vcd.
5. Make a nicer, longer dvd cut of the film and, again, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate dvd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies.
6. Sell the dvd cut of the film online at the same price as the DVD wholesale price.
7. Theatre release of film in lovely THX/35mm
8. Boxed set dvd release with extra everything.
By doing this you make money from the guys currently selling 'pirated copies' of films and money from people who can't be bothered to find a torrent of your film. The money saved on lawyers and advertising would probably pay for setting up the servers.
At stage 3 you are the sole supplier of vcd of your film, it is uneconomic to burn copies so you own the market. People may share your film over the internet but the hassle of finding a torrent and/or running P2P software is competing against the paid download (4) which is priced as low as a blank cdr.
This is simple economics. Cut back on expensive things like lawyers and advertising, then put out bargain bin priced product to soak up the sales to misers and the poor. You can still make bigger margins on the nicely packaged versions to people who want to buy them.