To hell with "Streaming TV." If the iTV does a good job of getting DVDs, music videos, and maybe some tunes with visualization on my plasma TV from my Windows or Ubuntu boxes, I'm going to be first in line to buy one.
It seems to me that the only thing he proved was that shopping at Wal-Mart instead of buying all your "pharmacy items" at the local pharmacy will save you more money than finding the cheapest gas station.
This is neither a surprise nor relevant.
Sure, some people go overboard by going out of their way for a station that's 2 cents cheaper, but in my area, a 1/2 mile drive up the road to Valero saves me an average of 10 cents per gallon over the Mobil and Citgo stations next to my house. $3-$5 a month isn't super-significant, but it does matter, so I do the drive.
They might "tend to be" expensive, but HDMI and DVI cables can easily be bought for the same price as component cables. Check out monoprice.com for high quality HDMI cables with prices like $10 for 25 feet.
Weird that you say that, considering you can get seriously higher quality out of a DVD using component cables from a progressive scan DVD player outputting 480p.
High-quality, well-calibrated CRT's still kill them in terms of picture quality. I've seen the best plasmas, and own a very very good one, and the black levels and color accuracy of a professionally calibrated high quality 50" CRT set really do blow them all away. There are a lot of POS CRTs out there, though no company currently manufactures them.
I bought the plasma because the slightly lower picture quality is still stunning and I don't have to have a finicky set of CRTs inside a huge ugly box in my living room;)
"It's very hard to argue that a properly calibrated 720p picture looks better than a properly calibrated 1080p picture, regardless of the underlying technology."
No, it's not. A well-calibrated quality CRT showing inredible contrast and deep dark blacks in 720p or 1080i will blow away any 1080p LCD or DLP/LCoS you can find.
But regardless, 1080p on a CRT is perfectly doable. Production models don't exist because no one would buy them due to size/calibration/etc. Engineering on them basically stopped years ago.
HD CRT sets do not max out at 24 inches. There are plenty of big screen rear projection HD CRT's that arguably have better picture quality than any other HD set out there when properly calibrated.
CRT's have plasma's ass when it comes to pixel density. Show me a 20" plasma with a 1600x1050 resolution and I'll eat my hat..... then I'll eat your hat too.
CRT's are perfectly capable of 1080p, and higher, but no one wants to buy 1080p CRTs. There are 1080p CRT projectors.
Because it would probably be boring as hell. WWII puts soldiers with old-school rifles and old-school artillery in massive battles with thousands of soldiers that take place in a very familiar environment - European cities and countryside. You get to run through houses, city halls, town squares, demolished offices, seaside bunkers, you name it.
I think it's possible to make a fun Vietnam game, but the battles would be monotonous. Being part of a large armed force fighting against small groups of geurilla soldiers would get tiring really quickly.
There's a reason that WWII veterans look back somewhat fondly on their accomplishments, but Vietnam veterans don't. Vietnam was f'in hell. WWII was a soldier's war.
When there are fans in the stands with blatantly racist signs, and large groups of them wearing Nazi logos and giving the Nazi salute to on-field players - who occasionally return the salute - as well as players being hounded *on the field by other players* and FIFA does *nothing at all about it* something is fucked up. If someone showed up at an American football game and waved a swastika while calling Daunte Culpepper racist slurs, or even simply *threw bananas at him*, he would be escorted out of the stadium and probably brought up on charges.
First up is the Sirius Sportster I had hooked up to the aux input of my Blaupunkt San Jose. Switching between a song on Sirius Hits 1 and the same song encoded at 128kbps on an mp3 CD in the head unit was a *glaring* and *obvious* improvement in sound quality.
Next up is an Audiovox XM unit hooked up to the aux input on a nice new Panasonic deck. Exact same story.
Next is my JVC Arsenal head unit with Sirius tuner built-in connected to the hide-in-the-dash Sirius receiver unit. Again, exact same story.
Finally, the Sportster hooked up to my entirely decent home theater (Denon 7.1 receiver, home-built 12" subwoofer that has an F3 of under 20Hz, and Polk tower speakers) as compared to my PC playing 128kbps MP3s.
Guess what. Same story.
Go check out the Sirius or XM forums and see what people have to say. It's widely known in the satellite radio community that the sound quality on the music channels is far inferior to FM.
The talk channels are all far far lower in quality as well. If I had to guess, I'd say roughly equivalent to 32kbps or less MP3. They're in mono, too.
Slashdot Mirror
To hell with "Streaming TV." If the iTV does a good job of getting DVDs, music videos, and maybe some tunes with visualization on my plasma TV from my Windows or Ubuntu boxes, I'm going to be first in line to buy one.
It seems to me that the only thing he proved was that shopping at Wal-Mart instead of buying all your "pharmacy items" at the local pharmacy will save you more money than finding the cheapest gas station.
This is neither a surprise nor relevant.
Sure, some people go overboard by going out of their way for a station that's 2 cents cheaper, but in my area, a 1/2 mile drive up the road to Valero saves me an average of 10 cents per gallon over the Mobil and Citgo stations next to my house. $3-$5 a month isn't super-significant, but it does matter, so I do the drive.
http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.as p?c_id=101&cp_id=10110&style=
$28 for a manual pushbutton HDMI switch and $80 for an automatic/remote control one.
They might "tend to be" expensive, but HDMI and DVI cables can easily be bought for the same price as component cables. Check out monoprice.com for high quality HDMI cables with prices like $10 for 25 feet.
If it could print.
And run iTunes.
And connect to their digital camera.
And.. uh... HAD A HARD DRIVE.
Asians are hot. They have it in their blood. I call them genes.
Am I racist now?
That was classic. Just the right mix of replies.
Kudos to you, my friend.
Weird that you say that, considering you can get seriously higher quality out of a DVD using component cables from a progressive scan DVD player outputting 480p.
S-video doesn't do 480p.
S-video does standard definition 480i in a 4:3 aspect ratio. 480p is considered enhanced definition, is capable of 16:9, and requires component.
Getting a stingray barb *through the chest* is no accident.
This wasn't a sting. This was a penetration wound from a barb (these things are like sharp knives and can be up to a foot long).
Stingrays actively defend themselves by stabbing with their barbs.
I own a brand new 50" Pioneer plasma panel ;)
;)
High-quality, well-calibrated CRT's still kill them in terms of picture quality. I've seen the best plasmas, and own a very very good one, and the black levels and color accuracy of a professionally calibrated high quality 50" CRT set really do blow them all away. There are a lot of POS CRTs out there, though no company currently manufactures them.
I bought the plasma because the slightly lower picture quality is still stunning and I don't have to have a finicky set of CRTs inside a huge ugly box in my living room
"It's very hard to argue that a properly calibrated 720p picture looks better than a properly calibrated 1080p picture, regardless of the underlying technology."
No, it's not. A well-calibrated quality CRT showing inredible contrast and deep dark blacks in 720p or 1080i will blow away any 1080p LCD or DLP/LCoS you can find.
But regardless, 1080p on a CRT is perfectly doable. Production models don't exist because no one would buy them due to size/calibration/etc. Engineering on them basically stopped years ago.
HD CRT sets do not max out at 24 inches. There are plenty of big screen rear projection HD CRT's that arguably have better picture quality than any other HD set out there when properly calibrated.
0 8814&page=1&pp=30&highlight=1080p+crt
As for a CRT doing 1080p, see this thread:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=7
You don't see production models because no one wants to buy a big CRT projector, despite its technical superiority.
CRT's have plasma's ass when it comes to pixel density. Show me a 20" plasma with a 1600x1050 resolution and I'll eat my hat..... then I'll eat your hat too.
CRT's are perfectly capable of 1080p, and higher, but no one wants to buy 1080p CRTs. There are 1080p CRT projectors.
You don't even need a hack.
The two reasons were:
1) Lack of OEM PCs with HDCP-compliant video outputs.
2) Lack of commercial software supporting Blu-Ray decryption.
Solutions:
1) There are aftermarket video cards that support HDCP.
2) There are OEM versions of WinDVD that support Blu-Ray (ships with a Sony Blu-Ray notebook)
Parents don't use DVR's to produce commercially sold edited copies of content published by another party.
Because it would probably be boring as hell. WWII puts soldiers with old-school rifles and old-school artillery in massive battles with thousands of soldiers that take place in a very familiar environment - European cities and countryside. You get to run through houses, city halls, town squares, demolished offices, seaside bunkers, you name it.
I think it's possible to make a fun Vietnam game, but the battles would be monotonous. Being part of a large armed force fighting against small groups of geurilla soldiers would get tiring really quickly.
There's a reason that WWII veterans look back somewhat fondly on their accomplishments, but Vietnam veterans don't. Vietnam was f'in hell. WWII was a soldier's war.
From what I hear, the actual astronauts are much, much more accepting of risk than the engineers or management.
So, I don't think you'd hear the astronauts being the most conservative on this decision just because they're in the ship.
Huh. A typical DVD is 9MB/s.
A typical HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movie is going to be 15-30MB/s.
I'm not sure what kind of 1.7MB/s movie I'd be paying for.
When there are fans in the stands with blatantly racist signs, and large groups of them wearing Nazi logos and giving the Nazi salute to on-field players - who occasionally return the salute - as well as players being hounded *on the field by other players* and FIFA does *nothing at all about it* something is fucked up. If someone showed up at an American football game and waved a swastika while calling Daunte Culpepper racist slurs, or even simply *threw bananas at him*, he would be escorted out of the stadium and probably brought up on charges.
Why do you assume that because Alyssa Milano is a celebrity, she automatically is also a dimwit who knows nothing about technology?
I have a variety of radios.
First up is the Sirius Sportster I had hooked up to the aux input of my Blaupunkt San Jose. Switching between a song on Sirius Hits 1 and the same song encoded at 128kbps on an mp3 CD in the head unit was a *glaring* and *obvious* improvement in sound quality.
Next up is an Audiovox XM unit hooked up to the aux input on a nice new Panasonic deck. Exact same story.
Next is my JVC Arsenal head unit with Sirius tuner built-in connected to the hide-in-the-dash Sirius receiver unit. Again, exact same story.
Finally, the Sportster hooked up to my entirely decent home theater (Denon 7.1 receiver, home-built 12" subwoofer that has an F3 of under 20Hz, and Polk tower speakers) as compared to my PC playing 128kbps MP3s.
Guess what. Same story.
Go check out the Sirius or XM forums and see what people have to say. It's widely known in the satellite radio community that the sound quality on the music channels is far inferior to FM.
The talk channels are all far far lower in quality as well. If I had to guess, I'd say roughly equivalent to 32kbps or less MP3. They're in mono, too.
XM and Sirius music stations are *lower* quality than FM. This is widely known.
The sound quality is roughly on par with 96kbps MP3. Comparing to a 128kbps MP3 makes it obvious that the MP3 has higher sound quality.
GM and Chevy trucks with Quadrasteer.
A 4x4 truck doesn't have 16 wheels.