North American high-definition television sales grew about 60% to 10 million units in the fourth quarter as Samsung and Sony gained market share at the expense of Sharp and other manufacturers, NPD Group unit DisplaySearch said.
While this doesn't confirm that 25% market penetration referenced in the GP, it does point to a fairly significant level. It isn't clear from the article whether the growth is relative to the previous quarter or to the same quarter of the previous year, which would obviously make a big difference (assuming the growth has been trending). Other growth numbers in the article do explicitly compare to the previous year, but that doesn't prove anything.
What does this mean? Well, as I said, it doesn't confirm the 25% market penetration, but it might indicate a higher level of penetration than you expected.
Also, your 80 million number for America is way too high because we need to look at the number of households, not the total population. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html gives the 2000 number of households for the US as 105,480,101 and gives a population growth from 2000 to 2006 of 6.4%, which gives us an estimate for the number of household in 2006 as 112,230,827. Throw in another couple of percent to get to 2008 as a pure guess: 114,475,444.
Back to penetration -- 25% of households is 28,618,861 -- call it 29 million. With 10 million sold in the 4th quarter of 2007, and at least another 6 million in the 3rd quarter (based on the 60% growth rate), thats 17 million HDTVs in just the last half of 2007. You decide how likely the 25% penetration is given this.
Another reference, http://www.rtoonline.com/Content/article/Oct07/Nielson_HDTV_Household_DMA_Estimates7975789103007.asp, gives the US HDTV penetration as 13% at the end of last October. Even assuming that a full third of the 10 million HDTVs sold in the 3rd quarter were sold in October, that still pushes the penetration up to almost 19%. Not 25%, but in the ballpark. Of course, this over-counts those purchases a bit since some are likely purchased as upgrades or as second (or more) HDTVs for a given household.
Ever considered taking a power cable with you on holiday? Or are you talking about a camping trip or something similar? In which case you presumably don't need the phone on very often....
Also, the iPhone battery easily lasts more than 8 hours on standby -- or even light use. Apple says 8 hours of talk-time. More specifically, from http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html:
Maximum Battery Life
iPhone offers up to 8 hours of talk time,(1) 6 hours of Internet use,(2) 7 hours of video playback,(3) or 24 hours of audio playback(4) on a full charge at original capacity. In addition, iPhone features up to 250 hours of standby time.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but if ESPN will only agree to let a given cable company carry it if that company agrees to a per-cable subscriber charge (not per-ESPN subscriber, but per-cable subscriber) and the cable company decides not to carry ESPN, then the most likely result is that a large number of subscribers switch to satellite or some other provider that does carry ESPN.
Now, I don't think this rules out ala carte pricing, as I believe it is the exception rather than the rule. Essentially, it forces the cable provider to treat ESPN as a loss-leader to attract subscribers. It is unlikely that there are very many channels that have the power to negotiate per-cable subscriber pricing, so there should be plenty of room to make-up the cost across the other channels.
In the end, it seems likely that ala carte pricing will only save money for the few people that truly only want very few channels. It wouldn't surprise me if wanting more than 4 or 5 channels pushes the ala carte price above some of the bundle prices, though it would presumably vary based on the specific channels.
For example, my cable provider currently offers the following packages (which it actually refers to as ala carte as they are not bundled with Digital Phone & Internet):
$10.50 Basic (primarily broadcast channels, including HD) $53.35 New Standard (what many people refer to as "Basic" cable, things like E!, Discovery, TLC, Nick, CNN, ESPN. I believe this also includes HD versions of these channels, if carried) $61.30 Digital (Digital versions of many of the channels, plus some extra channels like VH1 Classic, The Science Channel, Sleuth, several extra Nick and ESPN channels)
Each of this is cumulative with the packages above it.
There are several additional packages available that I would characterize as semi-ala carte already, including Sports Pak and Movie Pak. These have several channels for a relatively low price, but appear to require the Digital Package.
[As an aside, I see now that there is one potential exception that might be nice for some people, that I doubt many know about it unless they find it on the web site or complain enough on the phone that it gets offered. It is the Family Choice Tier for $12.99 and includes 15 channels and only requires the Basic package (though it is listed as requiring the Digital package in one place, but that doesn't make since because most of its channels are already in the Digital package). It contains channels like Disney, Discovery Kids, HGTV, CNN-HN and The Science Channel.]
Anyway, my suspicion is that if you handed the average cable subscriber a list of available channels and had them select the ones they wanted to receive, they would end up selecting more than a few -- probably at least ten or twelve. At that point, they are unlikely to benefit from ala carte pricing. In fact, in order to allow the people that really do only want a few channels to actually pay less, it is likely that these packages would need to cost slightly more. When put this way, it seems obvious to me that in the current situation it is not really that some channels are subsidizing other channels, but rather that some subscribers (those that really only want a few channels, but are willing -- even grudgingly -- to pay for a much larger package of channels) are subsidizing those that want a larger subset of the package.
Not sure what you mean by "not for very long" -- there are plenty of old movies available at each of the Blockbusters near me. The "hits" part may be true, though there seem to be plenty of B-grade movies as well.
What seems more likely is that they lean heavily toward mainstream movies, though I cannot specifically confirm this.
A DVD I recently watched had an add for either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray (I believe I've seen one of each and I'm not sure which this was) that mentioned as one of the selling points that it would play the movie immediately.
"In 1999, the ReplayTV system was unveiled to the public, largely promoted as a successor to the common and extremely popular VCR. While the Tivo system which was also introduced in 1999, focused on simplicity and ease of use, ReplayTV focused on advanced features, offering many features and connections that Tivo and most other home entertainment components did not."
Not only this, but I had personally had conversation with other people prior to 1999 (and prior to hearing any rumours about TiVo or ReplayTV, though admittedly after 1997 when both companies apparently started working on their products) about exactly this type of functionality.
My point is simply this -- without TiVo, there would still have been ReplayTV to capture the same market. It might have taken a bit longer as ReplayTV was not as well funded as TiVo, but not much longer I suspect. So praise TiVo all you want for their accomplishment, but realize that they were not actually alone even at the beginning.
I switched from GAIM to Kopete a month or two ago and I wonder what pushed you back to GAIM? Note that I haven't used Trillian so I don't know what Trillian-esque means.
One of the things I like about Kopete as compared to GAIM is the way the history is displayed. In GAIM, each "conversation" is a separate entry in the history, which often makes me hesitant to close a conversation. In Kopete, history entries for a given contact are split by day, which I find much more convenient.
Additionally, the way Kopete deals with grouping multiple contacts for a single person together seems more useful.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_media_tax, "[the tax] only applies to CDs which are labeled and sold for music use; they do not apply to blank computer CDs, even though they can be (and often are) used to record or 'burn' music from the computer to CD."
As you SURELY know, a great deal of content on the HD channels is not really HD. In particular, most movie content broadcast in HD is actually still coming from DVD quality sources; after all most movies aren't actually available in HD, even to the networks.
It is simply untrue that most movies broadcast in HD are DVD quality. While there are cases (TNT-HD) where upscaling is used, as well as cases where an SD version is broadcast even on an HD station (which is then obvious because it is 4:3), when any of the major networks broadcast their Sunday Night Movie (or whatever) in HD, it is noticeably better quality than a DVD. Likewise, many (if not most) of the movies that are broadcast on the HD-specific movie channels (HD-NET, HBO-HD, etc.) are also most assuredly HD.
>> USB sticks, iPods, DVD burners, all kinds of multimedia, SFTP/DAV/SMB/etc integration, openoffice, and many more
>None of this should be the job of the Window Manager
Neither Gnome nor KDE are Window Managers -- they are Desktop Environments, and automatically presenting the user with an interface for this devices and files does fall into their purview.
It is exactly this act of publishing or sharing the idea that transforms it from private to public. The privacy concerns come into play when a third party is the one that makes the conversion happen.
The second you admit that you accept that your "truthes" in science may be completely bogus if the true nature of reality were completely different from what it actually is, I'll let you go. But as long as you assert that science is absolutely objective; I will disagree with you.
Not speaking for Daniel, but from an apparently similar position: of course his "truths" in science may be completely bogus. In science, "truth" is an unattainable goal. Science (or a scientist) produces falsifiable theories that attempt to explain observed phenomena and predict future results. While objectivity is desired, there is no contention that it is absolutely achieved.
That being said, it is certainly common for scientists (or those that support a scientific world-view, whether or not they themselves are actually scientists) to deride "theories" that are advanced that do not seem to be reasonably supported by observation, even if that theory can explain those observations. That is, if a theory seems to make large or complex assumptions that do not appear to be necessary -- yet could still be true -- it is likely to be met with resistance. Of course, if such a theory is also non-falsifiable, then it will surely be meet by much more than resistance.
If the pricing is ridiculous, why do you pay it? It is exactly this action by a large number of people that allows the pricing to continue to be as high as it is.
For #1 and #3, there are Firefox extensions that add these functionalities. I am currently using "Tab Mix Plus" that allows both of these (and much more).
Regarding consistency being more important than convenience, that is probably true for the default configuration, but there's nothing wrong with allowing a user to override the consistent behavior for their own convenience.
The idea is not to predict what the system can be used to do, but rather what each individual system call can do. There would not be a way to invoke a system call to do arbitrary things. If a user level program implemented something that ran into the halting problem, that would not keep the kernel from servicing other user level programs.
I believe the primary trade-off of this type of kernel is probably performance, which in this scenario is certainly worth sacrificing (up to a point) for stability.
If I were forced to make an even-money bet on whether or not I would be faced with paying $3/gallon for gasoline this year, I would bet against it. It's certainly possible, though.
Actually, a $1/year increase for the next two decades might be just the right speed to encourage an appropriate amount of investment in alternative fuel sources. Of course, $1/year is not the "bad" scenario, as it isn't an increasing rate of increase...
Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't it the case that conservation of a dimishing resource will really only work if nearly everyone conserves? Otherwise, the result is just that those that do not conserve get to benefit from the lower prices being available just that much longer.
Also, if it were the case that we were simply going to run out of oil one day, then the concern of a radically steep price increase might be valid. But it is my understanding that a more realistic scenario is that we have to work harder and harder to extract additional oil -- this would result in a somewhat more gradual price increase. Thus, it is not difficult to imagine that there will come a time when the rising cost of oil makes other fuel sources attractive enough to warrant the requisite investments.
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While this doesn't confirm that 25% market penetration referenced in the GP, it does point to a fairly significant level. It isn't clear from the article whether the growth is relative to the previous quarter or to the same quarter of the previous year, which would obviously make a big difference (assuming the growth has been trending). Other growth numbers in the article do explicitly compare to the previous year, but that doesn't prove anything.
What does this mean? Well, as I said, it doesn't confirm the 25% market penetration, but it might indicate a higher level of penetration than you expected.
Also, your 80 million number for America is way too high because we need to look at the number of households, not the total population. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html gives the 2000 number of households for the US as 105,480,101 and gives a population growth from 2000 to 2006 of 6.4%, which gives us an estimate for the number of household in 2006 as 112,230,827. Throw in another couple of percent to get to 2008 as a pure guess: 114,475,444.
Back to penetration -- 25% of households is 28,618,861 -- call it 29 million. With 10 million sold in the 4th quarter of 2007, and at least another 6 million in the 3rd quarter (based on the 60% growth rate), thats 17 million HDTVs in just the last half of 2007. You decide how likely the 25% penetration is given this.
Another reference, http://www.rtoonline.com/Content/article/Oct07/Nielson_HDTV_Household_DMA_Estimates7975789103007.asp, gives the US HDTV penetration as 13% at the end of last October. Even assuming that a full third of the 10 million HDTVs sold in the 3rd quarter were sold in October, that still pushes the penetration up to almost 19%. Not 25%, but in the ballpark. Of course, this over-counts those purchases a bit since some are likely purchased as upgrades or as second (or more) HDTVs for a given household.
More like you made a copy of a book (or more than one copy) and left it inside a bus with a note saying "free copy, please take".
Perhaps I'm missing something, but if ESPN will only agree to let a given cable company carry it if that company agrees to a per-cable subscriber charge (not per-ESPN subscriber, but per-cable subscriber) and the cable company decides not to carry ESPN, then the most likely result is that a large number of subscribers switch to satellite or some other provider that does carry ESPN.
Now, I don't think this rules out ala carte pricing, as I believe it is the exception rather than the rule. Essentially, it forces the cable provider to treat ESPN as a loss-leader to attract subscribers. It is unlikely that there are very many channels that have the power to negotiate per-cable subscriber pricing, so there should be plenty of room to make-up the cost across the other channels.
In the end, it seems likely that ala carte pricing will only save money for the few people that truly only want very few channels. It wouldn't surprise me if wanting more than 4 or 5 channels pushes the ala carte price above some of the bundle prices, though it would presumably vary based on the specific channels.
For example, my cable provider currently offers the following packages (which it actually refers to as ala carte as they are not bundled with Digital Phone & Internet):
$10.50 Basic (primarily broadcast channels, including HD)
$53.35 New Standard (what many people refer to as "Basic" cable, things like E!, Discovery, TLC, Nick, CNN, ESPN. I believe this also includes HD versions of these channels, if carried)
$61.30 Digital (Digital versions of many of the channels, plus some extra channels like VH1 Classic, The Science Channel, Sleuth, several extra Nick and ESPN channels)
Each of this is cumulative with the packages above it.
There are several additional packages available that I would characterize as semi-ala carte already, including Sports Pak and Movie Pak. These have several channels for a relatively low price, but appear to require the Digital Package.
[As an aside, I see now that there is one potential exception that might be nice for some people, that I doubt many know about it unless they find it on the web site or complain enough on the phone that it gets offered. It is the Family Choice Tier for $12.99 and includes 15 channels and only requires the Basic package (though it is listed as requiring the Digital package in one place, but that doesn't make since because most of its channels are already in the Digital package). It contains channels like Disney, Discovery Kids, HGTV, CNN-HN and The Science Channel.]
Anyway, my suspicion is that if you handed the average cable subscriber a list of available channels and had them select the ones they wanted to receive, they would end up selecting more than a few -- probably at least ten or twelve. At that point, they are unlikely to benefit from ala carte pricing. In fact, in order to allow the people that really do only want a few channels to actually pay less, it is likely that these packages would need to cost slightly more. When put this way, it seems obvious to me that in the current situation it is not really that some channels are subsidizing other channels, but rather that some subscribers (those that really only want a few channels, but are willing -- even grudgingly -- to pay for a much larger package of channels) are subsidizing those that want a larger subset of the package.
Tivo HD is *based* on Series 3 and also comes with an Ethernet port.
Not sure what you mean by "not for very long" -- there are plenty of old
movies available at each of the Blockbusters near me. The "hits" part
may be true, though there seem to be plenty of B-grade movies as well.
What seems more likely is that they lean heavily toward mainstream movies,
though I cannot specifically confirm this.
A DVD I recently watched had an add for either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray (I believe I've seen one of each and I'm not sure which this was) that mentioned as one of the selling points that it would play the movie immediately.
"When Tivo was introduced - there really wasn't anything like it..."
y tv_intro.php:
Except that ReplayTV was introduced at about the same time and was almost exactly like it....
From http://pvr.digitalinsurrection.com/replaytv/repla
"In 1999, the ReplayTV system was unveiled to the public, largely promoted as a successor to the common and extremely popular VCR. While the Tivo system which was also introduced in 1999, focused on simplicity and ease of use, ReplayTV focused on advanced features, offering many features and connections that Tivo and most other home entertainment components did not."
Not only this, but I had personally had conversation with other people prior to 1999 (and prior to hearing any rumours about TiVo or ReplayTV, though admittedly after 1997 when both companies apparently started working on their products) about exactly this type of functionality.
My point is simply this -- without TiVo, there would still have been ReplayTV to capture the same market. It might have taken a bit longer as ReplayTV was not as well funded as TiVo, but not much longer I suspect. So praise TiVo all you want for their accomplishment, but realize that they were not actually alone even at the beginning.
Works fine for me with Firefox on Linux.
I switched from GAIM to Kopete a month or two ago and I wonder what pushed you back to GAIM? Note that I haven't used Trillian so I don't know what Trillian-esque means.
One of the things I like about Kopete as compared to GAIM is the way the history is displayed. In GAIM, each "conversation" is a separate entry in the history, which often makes me hesitant to close a conversation. In Kopete, history entries for a given contact are split by day, which I find much more convenient.
Additionally, the way Kopete deals with grouping multiple contacts for a single person together seems more useful.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_media_tax, "[the tax] only applies to CDs which are labeled and sold for music use; they do not apply to blank computer CDs, even though they can be (and often are) used to record or 'burn' music from the computer to CD."
I believe that this tax only applies to *Audio* CD-Rs, not regular CD-Rs.
It is simply untrue that most movies broadcast in HD are DVD quality. While there are cases (TNT-HD) where upscaling is used, as well as cases where an SD version is broadcast even on an HD station (which is then obvious because it is 4:3), when any of the major networks broadcast their Sunday Night Movie (or whatever) in HD, it is noticeably better quality than a DVD. Likewise, many (if not most) of the movies that are broadcast on the HD-specific movie channels (HD-NET, HBO-HD, etc.) are also most assuredly HD.
>> USB sticks, iPods, DVD burners, all kinds of multimedia, SFTP/DAV/SMB/etc integration, openoffice, and many more
>None of this should be the job of the Window Manager
Neither Gnome nor KDE are Window Managers -- they are Desktop Environments, and automatically presenting the user with an interface for this devices and files does fall into their purview.
>Gnome and KDE suck
Of course, that may still be true....
It is exactly this act of publishing or sharing the idea that transforms it from private to public. The privacy concerns come into play when a third party is the one that makes the conversion happen.
FYI, you should be able to replace "hit shift-tab a couple of times" with ctrl-L.
This behavior is OS-dependant. For example, in modern versions of Linux applications do return memory to the OS.
Not speaking for Daniel, but from an apparently similar position: of course his "truths" in science may be completely bogus. In science, "truth" is an unattainable goal. Science (or a scientist) produces falsifiable theories that attempt to explain observed phenomena and predict future results. While objectivity is desired, there is no contention that it is absolutely achieved.
That being said, it is certainly common for scientists (or those that support a scientific world-view, whether or not they themselves are actually scientists) to deride "theories" that are advanced that do not seem to be reasonably supported by observation, even if that theory can explain those observations. That is, if a theory seems to make large or complex assumptions that do not appear to be necessary -- yet could still be true -- it is likely to be met with resistance. Of course, if such a theory is also non-falsifiable, then it will surely be meet by much more than resistance.
If the pricing is ridiculous, why do you pay it? It is exactly this action by a large number of people that allows the pricing to continue to be as high as it is.
For #1 and #3, there are Firefox extensions that add these functionalities. I am currently using "Tab Mix Plus" that allows both of these (and much more). Regarding consistency being more important than convenience, that is probably true for the default configuration, but there's nothing wrong with allowing a user to override the consistent behavior for their own convenience.
It doesn't look like using simple questions has much hope:
http://www.google.com/search?&q=What%20is%20sevenThe idea is not to predict what the system can be used to do, but rather what each individual system call can do. There would not be a way to invoke a system call to do arbitrary things. If a user level program implemented something that ran into the halting problem, that would not keep the kernel from servicing other user level programs. I believe the primary trade-off of this type of kernel is probably performance, which in this scenario is certainly worth sacrificing (up to a point) for stability.
If I were forced to make an even-money bet on whether or not I would be faced with paying $3/gallon for gasoline this year, I would bet against it. It's certainly possible, though.
Actually, a $1/year increase for the next two decades might be just the right speed to encourage an appropriate amount of investment in alternative fuel sources. Of course, $1/year is not the "bad" scenario, as it isn't an increasing rate of increase...
Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't it the case that conservation of a dimishing resource will really only work if nearly everyone conserves? Otherwise, the result is just that those that do not conserve get to benefit from the lower prices being available just that much longer.
Also, if it were the case that we were simply going to run out of oil one day, then the concern of a radically steep price increase might be valid. But it is my understanding that a more realistic scenario is that we have to work harder and harder to extract additional oil -- this would result in a somewhat more gradual price increase. Thus, it is not difficult to imagine that there will come a time when the rising cost of oil makes other fuel sources attractive enough to warrant the requisite investments.