But the Windows market is bigger, so even after the piracy comes out, there are still higher sales.
Additionally, note that these pirates weren't going to pay for the software anyway. If they couldn't steal it, they'd almost always just do without.
But this doesn't contradict what I said, it backs it. The Linux market is similar to the windows pirats.. Most desktop linux customers wouldn't pay for apps no matter what, whether it's because they're cheapskates/broke or just constutionally opposed to paying for software (free/open source fans).
I do see a huge future for Linux in turnkey solutions, that means people actually paying for applications (typically through the nose).
You are obviously a huge fan of your own IT department. I dunno if you guys ever make mistakes, but I'll say a lot of other IT departments do. Just because you're making all the smart decisions doesn't mean the market moves that way.
Because Linux users aren't really used to paying anything north of $0 for their software.
You really think people who selected a free OS are then going to pay for a draw program?
I don't think the market is there yet. Perhaps if MS really bungles Vista and people run Linux for the features, things could change.
But right now, the Linux desktop market is mostly made up of cheapskates and people who don't pay for software because of principles. This hurts the profitability from selling applications to this market.
Electricity also travels at the speed of light (well, very close).
But the speed of signal propagation in a wire is less than the speed of light because no electron makes the entire journey. The electrons run into atoms, and are absorbed by those atoms momentarily, before ejecting another electron to continue the propagation. The distance the electrons go before hitting an atom is called the "mean free path" of electrons in the material. Higher mean free path increases the conductivity of the material and I believe also the propagation speed.
Photons in fiber do the same thing. The protons do travel down the fiber, but they hit the atoms that make up the fiber from time to time, causing this knock-on effect. This slows propagation in fiber to well below the speed of light also.
Also note that the speed of light is only constant in a vacuum, in a medium it can be different.
"Since the refractive index of glass is around 1.5, the speed of light in the fiber is around 200,000 km/s, or two thirds of the speed of light in a vacuum."
This is the same info I gave you a moment ago and you ignored and contradicted.
You're confused about the higher voltages thing. Again, higher voltages do not speed up electrons. Voltages don't accelerate electrons either. Voltage is a measure of the number of electrons in an area.
I think you're confused because raising voltage increases the rate of voltage change at a particular point in a circuit. That is, if the voltage at a point in a circuit is 0V and I apply some power, it goes from 0 to 1V. If I apply ten times as much power it goes from 0 to 1V 10X quicker than before. You see this as making electrons go faster, but it isn't. It's putting in more electrons in the same amount of time. It's doing this by using more power to overcome the resistance in the area.
But what we're really talking about here anyway is propagation. Propagation is the way this change in voltage (which becomes a curve when measured in time) propagates down the wire. Raising the voltage quicker makes the curve steeper but it doesn't mean the change propagates down the wire more quickly.
You can think of this with water and waves, because waves propagate in the ocean simiar to voltage potentials do in wire (and light does in fiber). If I jump in the water I make a small wave. If I do a cannonball, I make a tall wave. But, if you look at the waves as they propagate away from the point where I entered the water, although the cannonball waves are taller, they don't propagate from the entry point to the other end of the pool more quickly. They're taller when they start, they're taller when they get there, but they don't move any faster.
Electron velocity is not determined by voltage. Electrons have a fixed charge, higher voltage only changes the number of them, not the speed of them. I don't think you even understand you are talking about.
I stole this sheet from the internet, showing the propagation speeds in various wires and fiber:
It kind of hurts your argument for the speed of fiber, doesn't it?
The cheap plastic multimode fibers used in SPDIF do not have particularly high bandwidth capacity.
I don't see how you think the deployment was justifiable economically when it was undeployed as fast as it was deployed. Soon after appearing on portable CD players, SPDIF disappeared again.
Optical has been the future for home systems for a long time. But we've not outgrown the ability for wire to carry data so far. I remember when 100 mbit ethernet was optical only. And when GigE was optical only. Now GigE is twisted-pair based and 10Gig is just starting to be.
The problem with optical is the cost of terminations and transceivers. Over a 10km haul, putting on terminations (ends) is no big deal, you're already paying thousands of dollars for the fiber itself, what's another couple hundred for terminations? But when your cable is 1.5m long, the cost of the terminations is problematic. And then you have to put a transceiver in each device too. Yeah, there are cheaper alternatives to all this, but these reduce the bandwidth to a point where it doesn't hold any bandwidth advantage over wire.
Wire will remain the smart choice for home interconnects for the near future at least, twisted pair mainly.
Yeah, LaserDisc. You know, that format that many people dump on as being a failure (sometimes saying BluRay or HD-DVD will be a failure like LaserDisc).
LaserDisc may not have been huge, but it lasted a long time and it was WAY ahead of its time. The industry learned a lot from LaserDisc, not the least of which was how to soak top videophiles for enormous amounts of dough. LaserDisc players were expensive, and the discs also. And top tier of LD people went from composite to component and from stereo to digital stereo to digital dolby surround to pro logic to Dolby Digital 5.1 to digital ES. And they were also the first to buy 16:9 TVs to display widescreen content with improved resolution ("squeeze LDs", which were anamorphic like DVDs).
A single coaxial cable carries the same data as that optical (TOSLink) cable. Some say it carries it better. But either way, it doesn't carry it worse, and an RCA connector is cheaper than an optical one. Pro electronics usually use coax instead (ADAT being the biggest exception).
There's nothing lower latency about optical compared to a digital coax. Both are too slow. The speed of propagation in a fiber or wire is only so fast. It would make computer busses a lot more complex to have to soak up 1.5m of latency.
Optical isn't necessarily high power, but it's not lower power than a wire either.
Optical interchip busses would be odd, the transceivers would take up a fair amount of space.
Sounds like you're used to the infinitely reconfigurable world of software.
Video cards need high bandwidth low latency connections. High bandwidth/low latency connections are difficult to extend to the back of your case, let alone up to the top of your desk. And you definitely cannot daily-chain them to multiple monitors.
And why would you use optical? Wire is all you need for short distances. The bandwidth of twisted pair is very large, the capacity of a coax is enormous. Optical would just add cost.
I started using gmail in the early days, and the UI was too sparse. They wanted to force me to search. I didn't want to search. Additionally, they made the compose button look different from the rest, making it difficult for me to find (call me retarded, I don't care).
I went back to yahoo. I use my gmail account for almost nothing. I go there about once a month.
I just wish I could get onto the Yahoo beta. Will they ever finish that?
That people will complain about anything. That on the internet when 5 people have a problem, they can make it seem like 50% of people are having a problem. That people don't want to part with their Powerbooks.
The first item is because this is just a button feeling a bit squishy. It doesn't even misoperate, it just doesn't feel great. I didn't see "has buttons with great tactile feedback" in the spec sheets for the products, so perhaps the feel of the click on the trackpad button isn't necessarily one of those features that it is absolutely critical it work exactly the same on all Macs, as long as it does work. The second is just from experience really, but all you see is the complainers. And they make blogs, link to them and because people will view them (and thus view ads), slashdot greenlights the articles. Other places do the same. There are plenty of people getting good service, they don't blog about it so often. The third item is because people like this guy don't even call tech support, or don't avail themselves of it. This fellow might not be an example of it, but the people fiddling with their heatsink goop definitely are. If your laptop is overheating (meaning malfunctioning due to heat or getting so hot you can't touch it comfortably), then you take it in and get it fixed, not open it up and fiddle the heatsink goop.
On the last item, I have to ask, you say Apple has a reputation for quality products. Is that true? They have a rep for cool products that have a good user experience, but are they really known for quality? I'm not saying the quality is worse than average, but I don't know if I ever considered it better either.
188 was a bit more successful, due to allowing lower cost designs (at lower performance).
Both integrated some extra logic to simplify design. This meant it had more pins, which led to it being the first Intel CPU in the family delivered in a PLCC package instead of a DIP.
Perhaps concidentally, the Motorola 68K family also had a chip that didn't go far, the 68010 (and 68012 and 68008), which integrated some logic and implemented some changes necessary for full virtualization. Apollo used this chip and I think Groupe Bull. The major proponent of 68K (Apple) skipped it.
I think the 8086 was the first x86 chip not derived from the 80386. It also was microcoded, like every other processor of its day. Microcode is an internal format not expose externally. 486 was the first processor in the family to break from microcoding, they "compiled the microcode" for common instructions, giving them much faster execution by putting them into fully decoded logic instead of micro-ops.
Pentium also broke down instructions into ops, stuffing them into separate pipes. And since it had parallel pipes, it had to have a special retirement/writeback unit that was greatly different than any before (although less complex than Pentium Pro). 386 and earlier didn't even have a pipeline!
Each is the previous divided by the square root of 2.
The reason for this is that if you decrease the feature size by the square root of 2 on each side, the feature shrinks to half size (since they are 2D features).
I guess doubling the number of things (transistors) makes sense to humans. It sure makes it easy to calculate how many dice you can fit on a wafer after a shrink. It'll be about twice as many as before.
You see it in hard drive sizes: 8^2 = 64 5.25^2 = 28 3.5^2 = 12.25 2.5^2 = 6.25 1.8^2 = 3.24 1.3^2 = 1.69 (missing for some reason) 1^2 = 1
You also see it in f-stops on cameras, where each f-stop lets in twice the light of the previous
Then I can just as easily say it's all the 80386. Because these new fancy chips may have new names like core, and they may have been derived from Pentium Pros, but Pentium Pro was derived from 386, and so we all know they're all just 80386s deep down.
Ask someone who lives at the coastline, like in Manhattan what they think about climate change.
They paid a lot for that land.
Whether it's natural for the Earth to get warmer or not, there's a big reason to fight it.
Could it have seemingly random consequences? Yes. But global warming will have random consequences too.
Also, just because people believe in evolution doesn't mean they love it. Evolution involves the unfit dying. Few people want their relatives to die just because they don't have perfect health.
I hear you about having just x86. Seems risky. But you realize they have abandoned Pentium, right? There's only one Pentium left to be released. Everything else is Core .
Again, the language included "stealing cable" long before the RIAA got involved.
And legal precedent doesn't extend to choice of wording. It's about the interpretation of the law only.
Since Congress (the ultimate maker of the laws) has passed laws covering "theft of service" and "identity theft", then it would appear that the law sees that there there are other definitions of theft than just what you would specify it to be.
You're trying to twist language and then blaming it on someone else. I'm sure you have noticed you're going "against the flow" on this usage. Does that not indicate to you what the generally accepted definition of the word is and that perhaps you're on the minority side?
"So, LCD has color problems, viewing angle problems, and is expensive. CRT has excellent color, full field of view, and is cheap. Plasma has excellent color, full field of view, and is expensive. How is LCD not the worst of the group? For rear projection, DLP is still the winner, with LCD having problems, and LCoS having less problems than LCD, but more than DLP, and is more expensive than both."
LCD does have some color problems. It doesn't have viewing angle problems (in direct-view), go to a store and look at a good LCD display from the side. Even at 85 degrees off angle, it looks fine on color and resolution.
I do not find the look of plasma pleasing. I already said that. I'm not even going there.
I wouldn't give you a nickel for a consumer DLP rear projection TV. Rear LCD looks much better (and is cheaper), and rear LCOS blows rear LCD away. I cannot put up with the poor near blacks and the "jittery" picure of DLP. DLP gets a lot of marketing push from TI, I'll give it that.
You again assert CRTs are expensive. True, in certain sizes. In the small sizes, LCD is already making huge inroads on price meeting CRT on price in some cases, in the middle sizes LCD can perhaps catch up by the end of the year. In the large sizes, LCD is already ahead on price. And again, current CRT units are very low quality, even from the top brands. There's no money left in them so they are in a price war, making them crappier and crappier to stay below other technologies on price.
CRT will be a niche market soon. No, it won't die. Film and vinyl are still alive too. But LCDs will make more sense for most things. Plasma might stick around, and SED might come on too.
Your assertions about DRM are still incorrect. Yes, it's DRM, I'm not denying that. I don't like DRM. But you also imply that HDTV ports are confusing, the customer is confused by them and having a bad experience with them. That's simply not true. Analog still works fine for everything except 1080P, and all digital ports on HDTVs have HDCP, so they work fine too.
As to waiting until it's bypassed, HDCP is already easily bypassed. Also, buying into DRM only if it is bypassed is not going to accomplish your goals. If you deny companies your dollar because they use DRM, they get the message that DRM isn't a way to make profit. If you pay them for DRM stuff because it's been broken, they get the message that DRM can be profitable, and that next time they should make it harsher so it won't be broken. Eventually, they'll make it so you can't break it (or so inconvenient that it cannot be). Note that HDCP is no more harsh than CSS, it's more of a money making scam for Intel (who I believe created it) than a real restriction. Unless you bought a computer monitor and wanted to use it to view HD, you will have no problems. And even that works right now, it'll only stop if the image constraint token comes into play.
I don't get your comment about buzzwords. Was that meant as a reply to the industry redefining words? They're just making new words. Nothing new there.
Cabling has been confusing for a long time now. How RCAs on analog amps were labelled "in and out", but if it was a tape deck, then "record and play" (because otherwise people couldn't figure to hook ins to outs and vice versa). Then composite video came (I had the first home TV with composite inputs). And then S-video, a crappy connector that is difficult to get oriented and seated. Component debuted a long time ago, long before HDTV, and that didnt' help much with its reuse of a red RCA.
Europe figured it all out with SCART. Well, except there's some SCARTs that accept RGB, some only accept composite, and others will take S-video but not RGB. And 5.1 (also around long before HDTV, debuting in about 1990) can't be carried over SCART.
Cabling has always been a mess. HDMI is the latest attempt to try (and probably fail) to make a single connector do it all.
You're really picking nits over that article. I found 10 others that were similar but didn
I see. This one happens to agree with you, and so she's aces.
But if she were ruling that DRM were legal, I would expect she would be villified as knowing nothing.
Plenty of people got in trouble with the law for stealing cable. It becomes a non-civil matter when it is criminalized. Which that was. And recording the screen in a movie theater.
Speak of precise language?
Here's a 2001 ruling from a US court where the court quotes Congress several times in calling stealing cable theft and the court also turns a phrase with it.
Language games are pointless. "A rose by any other name"
The key issue should be the actual act, punishment and hopefully future revisions to copyright law in the US. Not on redefining words so as to win semantic arguments.
It must be true. First time you baldly asserted it, I didn't believe you. But since you did it again, I'm soooo convinced.
I wasn't quibbling with your argument that BluRay may have a problem finding customers because people don't care enough. I was calling you out on your wildly incorrect assesment of the state of who is buying HDTVs and LCDs right now.
And I was right.
You don't even know what direct view means.
LCD is by far not the worst tech on the market. If you think so too, I think you're not looking at decent LCDs. I'd never buy a plasma or a DLP. And I like my current rear projection LCD a lot more than my previous CRT HDTV. I'm not going to lie, the picture does suffer in some ways. But it's two years old now. And it's a lot better in many other ways. Current RP LCOS TVs (like the Sony SXRDs) look much better and fix all the problems I have except viewing angle (which direct-view LCD fixes just fine if you want to pay for it).
Direct-view CRT is dead for HDTV. My HDTV I got rid of is better than what you can get now in CRTs. There is no margin to be made on CRTs anymore, so they are decontenting them a lot. It is making the pictures worse, and the reliability is dropping through the floor. Quality (longevity) cannot be seen on the store shelf, so in a tight commodity market it's the first thing companies take out.
Consumer DLPs don't have good near blacks. The rainbows are pretty much gone, but they still use temporal dithering to emulate luminance, and it makes the picture jittery to my eyes. Plasma is the same way. Also note there is no real 1080P DLP right now because all consumer 1080P DLPs woblerate and thus don't actually display all 1920x1080 pixels at once like a true progressive display would. I just don't find consumer DLP very pleasing.
As to your comments about DRM, they are typical uninformed Slashdot crap. I bought one of the very first TVs with digital video input, and it supports HDCP (thus has no compatibility problems). And even if you want to use analog only, you have no problems either right now because the image constraint token is not being used (due to being unpopular).
I can't see being confused by the versions of HDMI. Just ignore all that crap. I assure you that isn't confusing the average person, they don't know what HDMI is, let alone the versions.
I don't agree about the TV prices. LCD (and plasma) TV sales are booming.
That means people are spending more than they absolutely need to. It isn't going to matter soon anyway. CRTs can only get so cheap (shipping along is expensive), and LCDs will catch up on price by the end of this year for any size over 20".
What do you mean by abusing what had been established terms? I'm have to say I'm slightly skeptical since you seem to have problems with the terms yourself. Could you fill me in?
And since most people get their HDTV from non-OTA sources, it doesn't matter whether it has a tuner or not. Personally, I do get tons of HD from OTA, and my TV has a tuner, but I don't use it because I only view TV from a PVR now, I have no use for a tuner without a drive.
Yes, $1500 is cheap for this TV. It's not half of street (Best Buy will sell you the TV right now for $2K, go order one). But it is cheap. However, $3600 was also cheap for the Sharp 45" when my friends bought it (list was $8K, street was just a hair under $K), so the comparison is fair. Prices have dropped a lot.
"First off- not everyone buying new TVs today goes for HD. THe vast majority don't. "
LCD sales are booming. Go to Target and see what TVs they have for sale. Tons of LCDs. And that's a low-end store. And virtually all LCD TVs are 16:9. That means they're really more suited for HDTV content than regular TV, even if they aren't full rez. These people are becoming HDTV consumers almost by accident.
"LCD prices are barely dropping (and not everyone wants an LCD- horrible picture quality compared to a tube IMO). Sales of HDTV are basicly flat."
Sales are very far from flat, and LCD prices are dropping like a rock. At the beginning of this year, two of my coworkers got Sharp 45" 1080P (resolution and input) LCD direct-view panels for $3600, and we were aghast as to how cheap they were. Two weeks a coworker got a Westinghouse 42" direct-view LCD 1080P (resolution and 4 inputs) LCD direct-view panel for $1500. Does falling over half in 5 months mean not dropping? And if you want a 1368x768 panel, you can get a 42" direct-view LCD panel for $1200 right now.
Sales of HDTVs are booming.
"And the OTA drop dead date has been pushed back twice already- its going to be pushed back again." "The product has failed in the marketplace so badly even Congress had to admit to it and push back adoption dates twice."
Congress is only mandating digital TV, not HDTV. And the drop-dead date is when the old channels get shut off. Digital TV (including HDTV) is already available in all major markets, you just aren't forced to use it yet. Is FM a failure because AM is still around?
"Basicly, the vast majority of people don't give a shit about HDTV. On top of that the format changed so even early adopters are scared of reinvesting. HD is a no go, write it off."
When people were already stealing cable (the accepted term) back in the 70s and 80s, I doubt you were even old enough to discuss it. And the Russians "stole the secrets to the atomic bomb" from the US a long time before that.
Stop trying to redefine the English language to fit your narrow definitions. Both the language and the law recognize more than just depriving someone of property as theft.
The first release doesn't indicate how the format will do.
Older films will unavoidably show grain on HDTV. That's the way film was back then. Modern films (80s and later) should look great once transferred properly.
Slashdot Mirror
And that does hurt profitability.
But the Windows market is bigger, so even after the piracy comes out, there are still higher sales.
Additionally, note that these pirates weren't going to pay for the software anyway. If they couldn't steal it, they'd almost always just do without.
But this doesn't contradict what I said, it backs it. The Linux market is similar to the windows pirats.. Most desktop linux customers wouldn't pay for apps no matter what, whether it's because they're cheapskates/broke or just constutionally opposed to paying for software (free/open source fans).
I do see a huge future for Linux in turnkey solutions, that means people actually paying for applications (typically through the nose).
You are obviously a huge fan of your own IT department. I dunno if you guys ever make mistakes, but I'll say a lot of other IT departments do. Just because you're making all the smart decisions doesn't mean the market moves that way.
Because Linux users aren't really used to paying anything north of $0 for their software.
You really think people who selected a free OS are then going to pay for a draw program?
I don't think the market is there yet. Perhaps if MS really bungles Vista and people run Linux for the features, things could change.
But right now, the Linux desktop market is mostly made up of cheapskates and people who don't pay for software because of principles. This hurts the profitability from selling applications to this market.
Electricity also travels at the speed of light (well, very close).
But the speed of signal propagation in a wire is less than the speed of light because no electron makes the entire journey. The electrons run into atoms, and are absorbed by those atoms momentarily, before ejecting another electron to continue the propagation. The distance the electrons go before hitting an atom is called the "mean free path" of electrons in the material. Higher mean free path increases the conductivity of the material and I believe also the propagation speed.
Photons in fiber do the same thing. The protons do travel down the fiber, but they hit the atoms that make up the fiber from time to time, causing this knock-on effect. This slows propagation in fiber to well below the speed of light also.
Also note that the speed of light is only constant in a vacuum, in a medium it can be different.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fibre
"Since the refractive index of glass is around 1.5, the speed of light in the fiber is around 200,000 km/s, or two thirds of the speed of light in a vacuum."
This is the same info I gave you a moment ago and you ignored and contradicted.
You're confused about the higher voltages thing. Again, higher voltages do not speed up electrons. Voltages don't accelerate electrons either. Voltage is a measure of the number of electrons in an area.
I think you're confused because raising voltage increases the rate of voltage change at a particular point in a circuit. That is, if the voltage at a point in a circuit is 0V and I apply some power, it goes from 0 to 1V. If I apply ten times as much power it goes from 0 to 1V 10X quicker than before. You see this as making electrons go faster, but it isn't. It's putting in more electrons in the same amount of time. It's doing this by using more power to overcome the resistance in the area.
But what we're really talking about here anyway is propagation. Propagation is the way this change in voltage (which becomes a curve when measured in time) propagates down the wire. Raising the voltage quicker makes the curve steeper but it doesn't mean the change propagates down the wire more quickly.
You can think of this with water and waves, because waves propagate in the ocean simiar to voltage potentials do in wire (and light does in fiber). If I jump in the water I make a small wave. If I do a cannonball, I make a tall wave. But, if you look at the waves as they propagate away from the point where I entered the water, although the cannonball waves are taller, they don't propagate from the entry point to the other end of the pool more quickly. They're taller when they start, they're taller when they get there, but they don't move any faster.
Low electron velocity at low voltages?
.77c (231,000 km/sec) .65c (195,000 km/sec) .59c (177,000 km/sec) .66c (198,000 km/sec) .65c (195,000 km/sec)
Electron velocity is not determined by voltage. Electrons have a fixed charge, higher voltage only changes the number of them, not the speed of them. I don't think you even understand you are talking about.
I stole this sheet from the internet, showing the propagation speeds in various wires and fiber:
Medium Propagation Speed
------ -----------------
Thick Coax
Thin Coax
Twisted Pair
Fiber
AUI Cable
It kind of hurts your argument for the speed of fiber, doesn't it?
The cheap plastic multimode fibers used in SPDIF do not have particularly high bandwidth capacity.
I don't see how you think the deployment was justifiable economically when it was undeployed as fast as it was deployed. Soon after appearing on portable CD players, SPDIF disappeared again.
Optical has been the future for home systems for a long time. But we've not outgrown the ability for wire to carry data so far. I remember when 100 mbit ethernet was optical only. And when GigE was optical only. Now GigE is twisted-pair based and 10Gig is just starting to be.
The problem with optical is the cost of terminations and transceivers. Over a 10km haul, putting on terminations (ends) is no big deal, you're already paying thousands of dollars for the fiber itself, what's another couple hundred for terminations? But when your cable is 1.5m long, the cost of the terminations is problematic. And then you have to put a transceiver in each device too. Yeah, there are cheaper alternatives to all this, but these reduce the bandwidth to a point where it doesn't hold any bandwidth advantage over wire.
Wire will remain the smart choice for home interconnects for the near future at least, twisted pair mainly.
"It could cost you your life, and unlike driving drunk, where you tend to be unhurt due to being relaxed, you are actually more likely to be hurt."
What a bunch of hooey. Blunt force trauma doesn't care if you're relaxed or not.
Yeah, LaserDisc. You know, that format that many people dump on as being a failure (sometimes saying BluRay or HD-DVD will be a failure like LaserDisc).
LaserDisc may not have been huge, but it lasted a long time and it was WAY ahead of its time. The industry learned a lot from LaserDisc, not the least of which was how to soak top videophiles for enormous amounts of dough. LaserDisc players were expensive, and the discs also. And top tier of LD people went from composite to component and from stereo to digital stereo to digital dolby surround to pro logic to Dolby Digital 5.1 to digital ES. And they were also the first to buy 16:9 TVs to display widescreen content with improved resolution ("squeeze LDs", which were anamorphic like DVDs).
A single coaxial cable carries the same data as that optical (TOSLink) cable. Some say it carries it better. But either way, it doesn't carry it worse, and an RCA connector is cheaper than an optical one. Pro electronics usually use coax instead (ADAT being the biggest exception).
There's nothing lower latency about optical compared to a digital coax. Both are too slow. The speed of propagation in a fiber or wire is only so fast. It would make computer busses a lot more complex to have to soak up 1.5m of latency.
Optical isn't necessarily high power, but it's not lower power than a wire either.
Optical interchip busses would be odd, the transceivers would take up a fair amount of space.
Sounds like you're used to the infinitely reconfigurable world of software.
Video cards need high bandwidth low latency connections. High bandwidth/low latency connections are difficult to extend to the back of your case, let alone up to the top of your desk. And you definitely cannot daily-chain them to multiple monitors.
And why would you use optical? Wire is all you need for short distances. The bandwidth of twisted pair is very large, the capacity of a coax is enormous. Optical would just add cost.
And free, just like google.
http://domains.live.com/
I use yahoo. Did before. Do now.
I started using gmail in the early days, and the UI was too sparse. They wanted to force me to search. I didn't want to search. Additionally, they made the compose button look different from the rest, making it difficult for me to find (call me retarded, I don't care).
I went back to yahoo. I use my gmail account for almost nothing. I go there about once a month.
I just wish I could get onto the Yahoo beta. Will they ever finish that?
I get some different messages.
That people will complain about anything.
That on the internet when 5 people have a problem, they can make it seem like 50% of people are having a problem.
That people don't want to part with their Powerbooks.
The first item is because this is just a button feeling a bit squishy. It doesn't even misoperate, it just doesn't feel great. I didn't see "has buttons with great tactile feedback" in the spec sheets for the products, so perhaps the feel of the click on the trackpad button isn't necessarily one of those features that it is absolutely critical it work exactly the same on all Macs, as long as it does work.
The second is just from experience really, but all you see is the complainers. And they make blogs, link to them and because people will view them (and thus view ads), slashdot greenlights the articles. Other places do the same. There are plenty of people getting good service, they don't blog about it so often.
The third item is because people like this guy don't even call tech support, or don't avail themselves of it. This fellow might not be an example of it, but the people fiddling with their heatsink goop definitely are. If your laptop is overheating (meaning malfunctioning due to heat or getting so hot you can't touch it comfortably), then you take it in and get it fixed, not open it up and fiddle the heatsink goop.
On the last item, I have to ask, you say Apple has a reputation for quality products. Is that true? They have a rep for cool products that have a good user experience, but are they really known for quality? I'm not saying the quality is worse than average, but I don't know if I ever considered it better either.
188 was a bit more successful, due to allowing lower cost designs (at lower performance).
Both integrated some extra logic to simplify design. This meant it had more pins, which led to it being the first Intel CPU in the family delivered in a PLCC package instead of a DIP.
Perhaps concidentally, the Motorola 68K family also had a chip that didn't go far, the 68010 (and 68012 and 68008), which integrated some logic and implemented some changes necessary for full virtualization. Apollo used this chip and I think Groupe Bull. The major proponent of 68K (Apple) skipped it.
I think the 8086 was the first x86 chip not derived from the 80386. It also was microcoded, like every other processor of its day. Microcode is an internal format not expose externally. 486 was the first processor in the family to break from microcoding, they "compiled the microcode" for common instructions, giving them much faster execution by putting them into fully decoded logic instead of micro-ops.
Pentium also broke down instructions into ops, stuffing them into separate pipes. And since it had parallel pipes, it had to have a special retirement/writeback unit that was greatly different than any before (although less complex than Pentium Pro). 386 and earlier didn't even have a pipeline!
Each is the previous divided by the square root of 2.
The reason for this is that if you decrease the feature size by the square root of 2 on each side, the feature shrinks to half size (since they are 2D features).
You can see this by squaring them all
180^2 = 32,400
130^2 = 16,900
90^2 = 8,100
65^2 = 4,225
45^2 = 2,025
32^2 = 1,024
22^2 = 484
16^2 = 256
See how each is half the size of the previous?
I guess doubling the number of things (transistors) makes sense to humans. It sure makes it easy to calculate how many dice you can fit on a wafer after a shrink. It'll be about twice as many as before.
You see it in hard drive sizes:
8^2 = 64
5.25^2 = 28
3.5^2 = 12.25
2.5^2 = 6.25
1.8^2 = 3.24
1.3^2 = 1.69 (missing for some reason)
1^2 = 1
You also see it in f-stops on cameras, where each f-stop lets in twice the light of the previous
1/22^2 = 1/484
1/16^2 = 1/256
1/11^2 = 1/121
1/8^2 = 1/64
1/5.5^2 = 1/30
1/4^2 = 1/16
1/2.7^2 = 1/8
1/2^2 = 1/4
1/1.4^2 = 1/2
1/1^2 = 1
All are arbitrary, being for the convenience of humans doing math in their heads.
Then I can just as easily say it's all the 80386. Because these new fancy chips may have new names like core, and they may have been derived from Pentium Pros, but Pentium Pro was derived from 386, and so we all know they're all just 80386s deep down.
Ask someone who lives at the coastline, like in Manhattan what they think about climate change.
They paid a lot for that land.
Whether it's natural for the Earth to get warmer or not, there's a big reason to fight it.
Could it have seemingly random consequences? Yes. But global warming will have random consequences too.
Also, just because people believe in evolution doesn't mean they love it. Evolution involves the unfit dying. Few people want their relatives to die just because they don't have perfect health.
I hear you about having just x86. Seems risky. But you realize they have abandoned Pentium, right? There's only one Pentium left to be released. Everything else is Core .
Again, the language included "stealing cable" long before the RIAA got involved.
And legal precedent doesn't extend to choice of wording. It's about the interpretation of the law only.
Since Congress (the ultimate maker of the laws) has passed laws covering "theft of service" and "identity theft", then it would appear that the law sees that there there are other definitions of theft than just what you would specify it to be.
You're trying to twist language and then blaming it on someone else. I'm sure you have noticed you're going "against the flow" on this usage. Does that not indicate to you what the generally accepted definition of the word is and that perhaps you're on the minority side?
"So, LCD has color problems, viewing angle problems, and is expensive. CRT has excellent color, full field of view, and is cheap. Plasma has excellent color, full field of view, and is expensive. How is LCD not the worst of the group? For rear projection, DLP is still the winner, with LCD having problems, and LCoS having less problems than LCD, but more than DLP, and is more expensive than both."
LCD does have some color problems. It doesn't have viewing angle problems (in direct-view), go to a store and look at a good LCD display from the side. Even at 85 degrees off angle, it looks fine on color and resolution.
I do not find the look of plasma pleasing. I already said that. I'm not even going there.
I wouldn't give you a nickel for a consumer DLP rear projection TV. Rear LCD looks much better (and is cheaper), and rear LCOS blows rear LCD away. I cannot put up with the poor near blacks and the "jittery" picure of DLP. DLP gets a lot of marketing push from TI, I'll give it that.
You again assert CRTs are expensive. True, in certain sizes. In the small sizes, LCD is already making huge inroads on price meeting CRT on price in some cases, in the middle sizes LCD can perhaps catch up by the end of the year. In the large sizes, LCD is already ahead on price. And again, current CRT units are very low quality, even from the top brands. There's no money left in them so they are in a price war, making them crappier and crappier to stay below other technologies on price.
CRT will be a niche market soon. No, it won't die. Film and vinyl are still alive too. But LCDs will make more sense for most things. Plasma might stick around, and SED might come on too.
Your assertions about DRM are still incorrect. Yes, it's DRM, I'm not denying that. I don't like DRM. But you also imply that HDTV ports are confusing, the customer is confused by them and having a bad experience with them. That's simply not true. Analog still works fine for everything except 1080P, and all digital ports on HDTVs have HDCP, so they work fine too.
As to waiting until it's bypassed, HDCP is already easily bypassed. Also, buying into DRM only if it is bypassed is not going to accomplish your goals. If you deny companies your dollar because they use DRM, they get the message that DRM isn't a way to make profit. If you pay them for DRM stuff because it's been broken, they get the message that DRM can be profitable, and that next time they should make it harsher so it won't be broken. Eventually, they'll make it so you can't break it (or so inconvenient that it cannot be). Note that HDCP is no more harsh than CSS, it's more of a money making scam for Intel (who I believe created it) than a real restriction. Unless you bought a computer monitor and wanted to use it to view HD, you will have no problems. And even that works right now, it'll only stop if the image constraint token comes into play.
I don't get your comment about buzzwords. Was that meant as a reply to the industry redefining words? They're just making new words. Nothing new there.
Cabling has been confusing for a long time now. How RCAs on analog amps were labelled "in and out", but if it was a tape deck, then "record and play" (because otherwise people couldn't figure to hook ins to outs and vice versa). Then composite video came (I had the first home TV with composite inputs). And then S-video, a crappy connector that is difficult to get oriented and seated. Component debuted a long time ago, long before HDTV, and that didnt' help much with its reuse of a red RCA.
Europe figured it all out with SCART. Well, except there's some SCARTs that accept RGB, some only accept composite, and others will take S-video but not RGB. And 5.1 (also around long before HDTV, debuting in about 1990) can't be carried over SCART.
Cabling has always been a mess. HDMI is the latest attempt to try (and probably fail) to make a single connector do it all.
You're really picking nits over that article. I found 10 others that were similar but didn
I see. This one happens to agree with you, and so she's aces.
8 5341.txt
But if she were ruling that DRM were legal, I would expect she would be villified as knowing nothing.
Plenty of people got in trouble with the law for stealing cable. It becomes a non-civil matter when it is criminalized. Which that was. And recording the screen in a movie theater.
Speak of precise language?
Here's a 2001 ruling from a US court where the court quotes Congress several times in calling stealing cable theft and the court also turns a phrase with it.
http://vls.law.villanova.edu/locator/3d/Oct2001/9
Language games are pointless. "A rose by any other name"
The key issue should be the actual act, punishment and hopefully future revisions to copyright law in the US. Not on redefining words so as to win semantic arguments.
It must be true. First time you baldly asserted it, I didn't believe you. But since you did it again, I'm soooo convinced.
e ction=platforms&id=3087
I wasn't quibbling with your argument that BluRay may have a problem finding customers because people don't care enough. I was calling you out on your wildly incorrect assesment of the state of who is buying HDTVs and LCDs right now.
And I was right.
You don't even know what direct view means.
LCD is by far not the worst tech on the market. If you think so too, I think you're not looking at decent LCDs. I'd never buy a plasma or a DLP. And I like my current rear projection LCD a lot more than my previous CRT HDTV. I'm not going to lie, the picture does suffer in some ways. But it's two years old now. And it's a lot better in many other ways. Current RP LCOS TVs (like the Sony SXRDs) look much better and fix all the problems I have except viewing angle (which direct-view LCD fixes just fine if you want to pay for it).
Direct-view CRT is dead for HDTV. My HDTV I got rid of is better than what you can get now in CRTs. There is no margin to be made on CRTs anymore, so they are decontenting them a lot. It is making the pictures worse, and the reliability is dropping through the floor. Quality (longevity) cannot be seen on the store shelf, so in a tight commodity market it's the first thing companies take out.
Consumer DLPs don't have good near blacks. The rainbows are pretty much gone, but they still use temporal dithering to emulate luminance, and it makes the picture jittery to my eyes. Plasma is the same way. Also note there is no real 1080P DLP right now because all consumer 1080P DLPs woblerate and thus don't actually display all 1920x1080 pixels at once like a true progressive display would. I just don't find consumer DLP very pleasing.
As to your comments about DRM, they are typical uninformed Slashdot crap. I bought one of the very first TVs with digital video input, and it supports HDCP (thus has no compatibility problems). And even if you want to use analog only, you have no problems either right now because the image constraint token is not being used (due to being unpopular).
I can't see being confused by the versions of HDMI. Just ignore all that crap. I assure you that isn't confusing the average person, they don't know what HDMI is, let alone the versions.
I don't agree about the TV prices. LCD (and plasma) TV sales are booming.
http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?s
That means people are spending more than they absolutely need to. It isn't going to matter soon anyway. CRTs can only get so cheap (shipping along is expensive), and LCDs will catch up on price by the end of this year for any size over 20".
What do you mean by abusing what had been established terms? I'm have to say I'm slightly skeptical since you seem to have problems with the terms yourself. Could you fill me in?
Is the lack of a tuner.
And since most people get their HDTV from non-OTA sources, it doesn't matter whether it has a tuner or not. Personally, I do get tons of HD from OTA, and my TV has a tuner, but I don't use it because I only view TV from a PVR now, I have no use for a tuner without a drive.
Yes, $1500 is cheap for this TV. It's not half of street (Best Buy will sell you the TV right now for $2K, go order one). But it is cheap. However, $3600 was also cheap for the Sharp 45" when my friends bought it (list was $8K, street was just a hair under $K), so the comparison is fair. Prices have dropped a lot.
"First off- not everyone buying new TVs today goes for HD. THe vast majority don't. "
LCD sales are booming. Go to Target and see what TVs they have for sale. Tons of LCDs. And that's a low-end store. And virtually all LCD TVs are 16:9. That means they're really more suited for HDTV content than regular TV, even if they aren't full rez. These people are becoming HDTV consumers almost by accident.
"LCD prices are barely dropping (and not everyone wants an LCD- horrible picture quality compared to a tube IMO). Sales of HDTV are basicly flat."
Sales are very far from flat, and LCD prices are dropping like a rock. At the beginning of this year, two of my coworkers got Sharp 45" 1080P (resolution and input) LCD direct-view panels for $3600, and we were aghast as to how cheap they were. Two weeks a coworker got a Westinghouse 42" direct-view LCD 1080P (resolution and 4 inputs) LCD direct-view panel for $1500. Does falling over half in 5 months mean not dropping? And if you want a 1368x768 panel, you can get a 42" direct-view LCD panel for $1200 right now.
Sales of HDTVs are booming.
"And the OTA drop dead date has been pushed back twice already- its going to be pushed back again."
"The product has failed in the marketplace so badly even Congress had to admit to it and push back adoption dates twice."
Congress is only mandating digital TV, not HDTV. And the drop-dead date is when the old channels get shut off. Digital TV (including HDTV) is already available in all major markets, you just aren't forced to use it yet. Is FM a failure because AM is still around?
"Basicly, the vast majority of people don't give a shit about HDTV. On top of that the format changed so even early adopters are scared of reinvesting. HD is a no go, write it off."
Far from true.
When people were already stealing cable (the accepted term) back in the 70s and 80s, I doubt you were even old enough to discuss it. And the Russians "stole the secrets to the atomic bomb" from the US a long time before that.
Stop trying to redefine the English language to fit your narrow definitions. Both the language and the law recognize more than just depriving someone of property as theft.
The first DVD released. It looks like total shit.
The first release doesn't indicate how the format will do.
Older films will unavoidably show grain on HDTV. That's the way film was back then. Modern films (80s and later) should look great once transferred properly.