Let's not forget the obscene processor requirements for _watching a flat image_. This isn't polygons being generated on the fly. Why do I need a dual-core processor to decode some freaking movie frames? Ridiculous.
Becuase they use codecs that do a very good job of maintaing video quality at the same bitrates compared to previous codecs, but at the expense of added CPU power required to decode the video.
1) There is no need for single-file-divx movies with more than 4G in size.
Sure there is, if you like HD.
3) At the current rate hdd's will out-cheap discs very soon. Even Blu-Ray or HD-DVD.
So you're saying hard drives will cost 1/5 as much very soon?
DVD+-R is $0.06/gig or less (Ritek discs). Hard drives seem to bottom out around $0.29/gig right now.
Hard drives are subject to failure at any time. Optical media decays, but when stored properly should actually last a predictable amount of time.
You can have as many optical discs as you want and easily insert them into a drive. Hard drives must be connected to a computer. You'd have to buy enclosures for each drive or plug in the drive every time you want to use it, and the computer you're trying to use must have the requisite connection.
BD-R disks are $0.51/gig right now. HD-DVD-R is $0.54/gig. If anything, it'll be the new HD discs becoming cheaper per gigabyte than hard drives first.
What exactly makes NTFS not a "real filesystem"? Is it the highly advanced (close to NFSv4 ACLs) ACL system that's more advanced than the POSIX ACLs in most Linux filesystems? Is it the extended metadata support? Is it the journaling? Is it the integrated compression? Is it the support for filesystems larger than 8TB (like ext2/3)? Is it the ability to safely recover from power failure, something XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS struggle with?
Perhaps he/she is referring to the many companies that will accept a routing and account number and EFT money directly out of your bank account (for example, Chase).
People mistake my laptop for a ThinkPad when they don't see it up close. It's obviously not a Thinkpad, and it's lacking some of the ThinkPad features. But it's built pretty well. It's got an excellent 14.1" WXGA screen that's surprisingly about as bright or brighter than my desktop LCD panels. It's got the ambient light sensor and hard drive accelerometer. It actually has *more* battery options that the equivalent ThinkPad model -- there's a 12-cell addon available that brings total estimated capacity to 16hr.
Most importantly, it was hundreds cheaper than an equivalent ThinkPad.
1) I am sick and tired of poor quality television on cable. If I understand how it works, analog would be a better quality picture than digital. When digital loses some info, it really messes up the screen. This happens to much and makes me yearn for yesteryear's age of television.
Digital television looks worse than a strong analog signal simply because of the low bitrate compression they use. I don't have issues with signal quality on my connection, and analog TV looks better than the digital channels unless the signal is being deinterlaced poorly. (if only the DVR would record the analog channels instead of the digital simulcasts...)
Sounds like your cable company sucks. Here we can get higher latency/slightly jittery std cable (5/384) at $45/mo, or business cable (7/1) at $80/mo at a residence location.
or we can get low-latency (ping times 17ms to some locations) DSL at $28 for the highest tier (6/768).
Neither have transfer limits/quotas/throttling. I haven't checked but I believe there are competing DSL carriers on many exchanges as well. They are reliable in my area, and usually send out a technician the next day if you have a problem.
TWC provided us with the proper splitters and a two-way amplifier..for free.
I have a SA 8300HD (running the Passport OS, which is supposed to work better than Scientific Atlanta's SARA OS).
In nearly three months of having the box, it's only crashed 3-4 times total -- and never when I was actually watching something (only when I was wasting my times on the stupid card games or surfing channels).
They recently updated the firmware to support the eSATA port as well.
TV's supporting cable card would also work, but few people currently have them
Not quite necessary. CableCard simply isn't needed if they trashed analog and tiered the digital channels so that they could filter the channels like they used to for lifeline/basic/etc. Many new (released this year) TVs today support unencrypted QAM, meaning that they will show unencrypted digital channels, and CableCard TVs should be able to show these channels. This includes the local channels in HD in most areas, and if they neglect to encrypt some other channels, you can get them as well.
CableCard 1.0 and/or unencrypted QAM aren't really the best solution, though. On clear QAM and AFAIK, on CableCard 1.0 as well, the channel numbers are the standard analog channel followed by the stream ID. This makes it so that HD channel 8 is channel 108-2. Showtime HD West and HBO HD West end up being like 113-7 and 113-62.
I believe that CableCard 2.0 will fix that and add a program guide, pay per view, and on demand service as well.
TWC gave me a 2 hour window -- 4 to 6 pm -- last time I had to deal with them. 3 hours before that window started, they called and asked if they could come early. So they did.
Unfortunately, last I heard a CableCard Media Center PC would require the entire system to be "certified", meaning that the appropriate CableCard-supporting tuner would not be available over standard retail channels.
as of Vista build 5472, Windows has much improved DPI handling... sort of. The default action for any random app is to simply scale the program to size, which doesn't look too great. I assume it's just a quick flag or attribute change to get Windows to render the program as it wants to. Both Opera and Gaim were scaled, but after turning off DPI scaling in the Compatibility settings for both, they rendered at the higher DPIs just fine. The OS itself looks great at high DPI.
I remember this now-defunct store, possibly called "Media Play" that sold shareware on floppy disks for $5 ea. One of the games was Wolfenstein 3D... in 1996.
While it seems like Media Play went out of business recently, that store closed at least eight years ago...
no, these motherboards are for the LGA775 socket, not the LGA771 socket used by the Xeons in the Mac Pro or the Socket 479 used by the iMac/Mac notebooks/Mac mini.
"Clovertown" may be a quad-core version of the "Woodcrest" Xeon chips used in the Mac Pro, although I couldn't find anything definitive.
I'm not sure if Intel has any plans for quad-core mobile chips (the Core Duo used in the iMac/Mac Mini is the mobile-oriented chip, but has shown up in smaller desktop computers incl. the Macs).
I have a AB9 Pro Intel 965-based board here with a Core 2 Duo E6400, and I can't get it to boot half the time. I get an error code 8.7. on the motherboard's LCD, which means "Check CPU Core Voltage". When it does boot, I occasionally get an error or "Device Verify Failed" from the AHCI BIOS while identifying my hard drives.
The system is impressively fast when it actually boots and works, but those two issues make the motherboard very difficult to actually use.
TWC seems to manage here with their digital phone, lots of on-demand programming, 10+ HD channels, 45 music channels, 20 international channels, 75 analog channels also simulcast in digital, home and business class data services, 50 digital cable channels, 40 movie channels, and so on.
Enabling 256QAM isn't just flipping a switch, either. A lot of things have to fall into place and there are often problems with SNR, etc, and if they don't, the upgrades are extremely expensive and time consuming, not to mention that it is often difficult to just pin the problems down, it takes a lot of experience and some good luck to quickly root out issues.
as for the TWC network I am on, you only get less than the rated speed if they were having temporary issues or you happened to live on a very crowded node during peak times. Otherwise, you can regularly use all 5mbit/384k. On Business Class's 7/1 (mbit) plan, we have no trouble using all of that bandwidth.
Latency is pretty horrible, and is usually at least 45 ms. The network is often subject to jitter and occasionally packets arriving out of order, which causes problems for voice.
DSL otoh has ping times as low as 17ms to some destinations and an average of 30-40 ms. Unless you go for business class cable, it's also faster (6/768 vs 5/384) and cheaper ($45 vs. $28) than cable.
Please read the entire post before replying in a condescending manner. I was referring to the pathetic excuse of VoIP/on demand services using too much bandwidth. While I didn't make that immediately clear in my post, reading past the first sentence would have made that easy to understand.
My ISP, Rogers Communications has all sorts of bandwidth shaping and usage restrictions in place. This is, from what I've read, apparently so they can have the bandwidth available for their VoIP and on-demand streaming TV services.
That's a lie. From what I understand a docsis channel can trasnmit 27 mbit/sec., which is plenty of voice calls. With an average of 100-500 customers on each HFC node, they'd be hard pressed to fill up just one channel worth of voice calls -- basically, if every single customer on that node had the voice service and a few hundred used the phone at the same time, they might have a problem.
I wonder how popular on-demand really is - I can't ever say that I've watched a show on-demand; just a few music videos. I'd think the use of the on-demand channels is mostly limited to a) those that have digital cable but not the DVR, b) those that actually want to watch the limited content available, and c) those who aren't frustrated by the confusing interface. During those times when I do actually watch something on demand, it usually ends up failing 1/10 times -- worse if something happens to degrade my signal.
Anyway, since it seems that most digital cable channels have low bandwidth allocations (and on-demand probably uses even less bandwidth), I'd say that they use no more than 2 mbits/second on each on demand stream, and probably less. If they can really achieve ~38mbit/sec on a QAM256 channel, they can probably do at least 15 on demand streams per channel. The nature of on-demand doesn't really lead to lots of people watching it at the same time......so I suspect they're using those two services as convenient excuses to not provide unlimited service.
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Could you kindly advise us to what makes the United States "communist"?
Do you even know what the word means?
Becuase they use codecs that do a very good job of maintaing video quality at the same bitrates compared to previous codecs, but at the expense of added CPU power required to decode the video.
Sure there is, if you like HD.
So you're saying hard drives will cost 1/5 as much very soon?
DVD+-R is $0.06/gig or less (Ritek discs). Hard drives seem to bottom out around $0.29/gig right now.
Hard drives are subject to failure at any time. Optical media decays, but when stored properly should actually last a predictable amount of time.
You can have as many optical discs as you want and easily insert them into a drive. Hard drives must be connected to a computer. You'd have to buy enclosures for each drive or plug in the drive every time you want to use it, and the computer you're trying to use must have the requisite connection.
BD-R disks are $0.51/gig right now. HD-DVD-R is $0.54/gig. If anything, it'll be the new HD discs becoming cheaper per gigabyte than hard drives first.
What exactly makes NTFS not a "real filesystem"? Is it the highly advanced (close to NFSv4 ACLs) ACL system that's more advanced than the POSIX ACLs in most Linux filesystems? Is it the extended metadata support? Is it the journaling? Is it the integrated compression? Is it the support for filesystems larger than 8TB (like ext2/3)? Is it the ability to safely recover from power failure, something XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS struggle with?
XP has the ability to create MS-DOS startup disks which can be used to flash the BIOS. I assume Vista will also have this functionality.
Some BIOSes are include builtin flashing utilities that do not require one to boot into DOS.
Perhaps he/she is referring to the many companies that will accept a routing and account number and EFT money directly out of your bank account (for example, Chase).
I've heard that the HP Compaq Business Notebook line is very comparable to a ThinkPad and they tend to be cheaper.
Note that this is NOT the dv- or V- series line of their consumer notebooks.
I personally own a HP Compaq nc6400.
Because WPA is inconvenient when you're using a device that doesn't support it.
People mistake my laptop for a ThinkPad when they don't see it up close. It's obviously not a Thinkpad, and it's lacking some of the ThinkPad features. But it's built pretty well. It's got an excellent 14.1" WXGA screen that's surprisingly about as bright or brighter than my desktop LCD panels. It's got the ambient light sensor and hard drive accelerometer. It actually has *more* battery options that the equivalent ThinkPad model -- there's a 12-cell addon available that brings total estimated capacity to 16hr.
Most importantly, it was hundreds cheaper than an equivalent ThinkPad.
don't forget that DVI is easily converted to HDMI...
Digital television looks worse than a strong analog signal simply because of the low bitrate compression they use. I don't have issues with signal quality on my connection, and analog TV looks better than the digital channels unless the signal is being deinterlaced poorly. (if only the DVR would record the analog channels instead of the digital simulcasts...)
Sounds like your cable company sucks. Here we can get higher latency/slightly jittery std cable (5/384) at $45/mo, or business cable (7/1) at $80/mo at a residence location.
or we can get low-latency (ping times 17ms to some locations) DSL at $28 for the highest tier (6/768).
Neither have transfer limits/quotas/throttling. I haven't checked but I believe there are competing DSL carriers on many exchanges as well. They are reliable in my area, and usually send out a technician the next day if you have a problem.
TWC provided us with the proper splitters and a two-way amplifier..for free.
I have a SA 8300HD (running the Passport OS, which is supposed to work better than Scientific Atlanta's SARA OS).
In nearly three months of having the box, it's only crashed 3-4 times total -- and never when I was actually watching something (only when I was wasting my times on the stupid card games or surfing channels).
They recently updated the firmware to support the eSATA port as well.
Not quite necessary. CableCard simply isn't needed if they trashed analog and tiered the digital channels so that they could filter the channels like they used to for lifeline/basic/etc. Many new (released this year) TVs today support unencrypted QAM, meaning that they will show unencrypted digital channels, and CableCard TVs should be able to show these channels. This includes the local channels in HD in most areas, and if they neglect to encrypt some other channels, you can get them as well.
CableCard 1.0 and/or unencrypted QAM aren't really the best solution, though. On clear QAM and AFAIK, on CableCard 1.0 as well, the channel numbers are the standard analog channel followed by the stream ID. This makes it so that HD channel 8 is channel 108-2. Showtime HD West and HBO HD West end up being like 113-7 and 113-62.
I believe that CableCard 2.0 will fix that and add a program guide, pay per view, and on demand service as well.
TWC gave me a 2 hour window -- 4 to 6 pm -- last time I had to deal with them. 3 hours before that window started, they called and asked if they could come early. So they did.
Unfortunately, last I heard a CableCard Media Center PC would require the entire system to be "certified", meaning that the appropriate CableCard-supporting tuner would not be available over standard retail channels.
Had Slashdot been around twelve years ago, everyone would complain about NT's bloatedness and high system requirements over Windows 3.1...
as of Vista build 5472, Windows has much improved DPI handling... sort of. The default action for any random app is to simply scale the program to size, which doesn't look too great. I assume it's just a quick flag or attribute change to get Windows to render the program as it wants to. Both Opera and Gaim were scaled, but after turning off DPI scaling in the Compatibility settings for both, they rendered at the higher DPIs just fine. The OS itself looks great at high DPI.
I remember this now-defunct store, possibly called "Media Play" that sold shareware on floppy disks for $5 ea. One of the games was Wolfenstein 3D... in 1996.
While it seems like Media Play went out of business recently, that store closed at least eight years ago...
no, these motherboards are for the LGA775 socket, not the LGA771 socket used by the Xeons in the Mac Pro or the Socket 479 used by the iMac/Mac notebooks/Mac mini.
"Clovertown" may be a quad-core version of the "Woodcrest" Xeon chips used in the Mac Pro, although I couldn't find anything definitive.
I'm not sure if Intel has any plans for quad-core mobile chips (the Core Duo used in the iMac/Mac Mini is the mobile-oriented chip, but has shown up in smaller desktop computers incl. the Macs).
I have a AB9 Pro Intel 965-based board here with a Core 2 Duo E6400, and I can't get it to boot half the time. I get an error code 8.7. on the motherboard's LCD, which means "Check CPU Core Voltage". When it does boot, I occasionally get an error or "Device Verify Failed" from the AHCI BIOS while identifying my hard drives.
The system is impressively fast when it actually boots and works, but those two issues make the motherboard very difficult to actually use.
*Every* channel here seems to use QAM256.
as for the TWC network I am on, you only get less than the rated speed if they were having temporary issues or you happened to live on a very crowded node during peak times. Otherwise, you can regularly use all 5mbit/384k. On Business Class's 7/1 (mbit) plan, we have no trouble using all of that bandwidth.
Latency is pretty horrible, and is usually at least 45 ms. The network is often subject to jitter and occasionally packets arriving out of order, which causes problems for voice.
DSL otoh has ping times as low as 17ms to some destinations and an average of 30-40 ms. Unless you go for business class cable, it's also faster (6/768 vs 5/384) and cheaper ($45 vs. $28) than cable.
Please read the entire post before replying in a condescending manner. I was referring to the pathetic excuse of VoIP/on demand services using too much bandwidth. While I didn't make that immediately clear in my post, reading past the first sentence would have made that easy to understand.
That's a lie. From what I understand a docsis channel can trasnmit 27 mbit/sec., which is plenty of voice calls. With an average of 100-500 customers on each HFC node, they'd be hard pressed to fill up just one channel worth of voice calls -- basically, if every single customer on that node had the voice service and a few hundred used the phone at the same time, they might have a problem.
I wonder how popular on-demand really is - I can't ever say that I've watched a show on-demand; just a few music videos. I'd think the use of the on-demand channels is mostly limited to a) those that have digital cable but not the DVR, b) those that actually want to watch the limited content available, and c) those who aren't frustrated by the confusing interface.
During those times when I do actually watch something on demand, it usually ends up failing 1/10 times -- worse if something happens to degrade my signal.
Anyway, since it seems that most digital cable channels have low bandwidth allocations (and on-demand probably uses even less bandwidth), I'd say that they use no more than 2 mbits/second on each on demand stream, and probably less. If they can really achieve ~38mbit/sec on a QAM256 channel, they can probably do at least 15 on demand streams per channel. The nature of on-demand doesn't really lead to lots of people watching it at the same time...