Ok, lets try again, oh CDCP? Sure, we have it, Lets see, its 19.2K (Higher with compression, WOW!)
A modern solution like CDMA 2000 or GSM offers 80Kbps or higher, which quite honestly is an entirely usable speed for wireless surfing, etc. Indeed, even CDPD's 19.2Kbps is entirely usable. In the case of ad hoc or banded together 802.11 systems, there is a very relevant competitor, and that is the nationwide phone carriers and their new technologies.
I'm surprized at how seldom he is mentioned, but one of the most prolific and notorious spammers, Mr. Sanford Wallace, AKA Spamford Wallace, was responsible for the vast majority of spam that cluttered inboxes about 5 years ago (ah, a lifetime in Internet time). This notorious individual was targetted by hackers, and he even floated a trial balloon that he'd start his own spam friendly backbone after getting chased from provider to provider.
Anyways, the legal system worked as Cyberpromotions was shut down by lawsuits. Sort of like crime, the reality was that it was only a few individuals who were responsible for the overwhelming majority of spam, and that was true in this case too: After Spamford was shut down, the amount of spam hitting inboxes literally slowed to a crawl.
I'm not quite sure if you're being sarcastic or not, however the power savings of an LCD monitor can pay for itself over about 3 years. Of course, if one has limited power resources, such as in this case, it wouldn't be a "CRT versus LCD", but rather "LCD versus nothing".
Well, they were some pretty low hanging fruit... How about saying "Don't use your computer"? Most computers nowadays have DPMI on the motherboard, and the operating system is responsible for spooling down the hard drive, and other power saving features (not the BIOS). Furthermore, a good tip isn't to reduce the size of one's monitor, but rather to invest in an LCD or plasma monitor: They use some 1/4 the power of a normal screen (which during the summer means 1/4 of the heat dissipation, which means less AC running).
3) Consider replacing your Athlon Windows XP machine with a 386/33 with 4MB of RAM, running Linux of course.
4) Better yet, replace your computer altogether with an abacus.
5) Don't use a hard drive : They wastefully spins all the time the system is on. Stick with a 3 1/2" (or 5 1/4") floppy disk drive.
6) This one is a big one, but many people are not aware of it: Each incoming bit cumulates power into your system, to the point that a fast incoming stream with minimal outgoing can actually power your system purely by the internet connection. This is a tremendous power saving (or even GENERATING) tip: Go onto IRC into some of the hackers, and threaten those bisnatchis that you have a tremendous connection, and they can't possibly DOS you, etc. Soon they'll have all their clients ping you, and you'll be literally soaking up the wattage packaged bits. If you can keep this going overnight, your computer will actually start feeding power into your houses grid (MAKE SURE IT CAN HANDLE THIS! You may need a flux capacitor to ensure that it can modulate and store the excess).
Firstly, it was brutally obvious what we were talking about, as it was a reply to a gentleman talking about the cost of HDTV sets versus a non-HDTV set.
Secondly, what in the world does this have to do with "Moore's Law", which you seem to be grossly taking out a context. Like any esoteric technology, the manufacturing process that builds the HDTV sets is being supported by a minimal number of purchasers, hence they are paying a hefty premium (the actual root cost, per copy, of an HDTV TV set is absolutely trivial compared to the cost of the R&D/technology behind it). When HDTV sets his the mass market, just like virtually every advanced technology before them, the R&D will be spread out so much that the premium is minimal.
Please feel free to quote laws relating to transistor counts, or to presume that I'm talking about monkey mating.
Clearly I was talking about the premium over other big, heavy, expensive CRTs (i.e. the price premium of an HDTV set over a normal set, clearly evident by the post I was replying to).
Absolutely there are limits where additional gains are for diminished returns, but I'd say that drawing the line in the sand at DVD quality is naive: DVD looks great compared to VHS, but it looks bad compared to 1080 HDTV. Even 1080 HDTV is comparative to marginal resolution that many of us run on our 19" monitors, yet its expanded out to 32"+ TVs. On top of all of that is the fact that not only is the resolution of DVD not high enough, but that which is there is overcompressed: It decays during high motion scenes, like most compression codecs, it exhibits banding in scenes like misty cloudy scenes, etc.
In my area at the time there were flame wars on local BBS' by the dozens, relating to such smoldering issues as the speed advantage of the ST (8Mhz versus 7.14, I believe), the advantage of MIDI on the ST (you know, because suddenly we were all musicians. MIDI made us musicians, rather than being musicians who bought an ST for the MIDI), and the 4096 colour advantage of the Amiga. This was "long" before the STE.
I don't remember that game, but I did play a lot of great games on my ST. My favourite had to be Falcon, but when I think back to it now it almost seems silly : A perfectly flat world that really simulated very little. Hard to compare it to a modern game (or even the semi-dated Falcon 4)
Huh? The point is that a DVD compressed down to a 700MB file only looks good if your standards are so low that you're not used to better. I've seen divxs of this size, and they are not DVD quality (not even remotely close). Hence the whole "it matters what the viewer, AKA `the guy looking at it', has as his personal quality standards".
I take it you live in a college dorm, then. In the real world where people go to work for 40+ hours a week, piracy usually isn't worth the trouble. The only reason audio piracy is such a problem is that the biggest acts biggest consumers happen to fall in that "lots of free time on their hands" categories : Teenagers. I have one friend who is into grabbing divx movies: I'd rather spend $2 and rent it from Blockbuster, thanks (or for great movies like Fight Club I buy it).
When DVD players first came out they cost about $800, yet they've ebbed down to where they can be had for ~$100 now (in many cases less than VHS decks). There is no reason why HDTV will not follow the current trend: Right now they're imposing the early adoptor "wealth" tax on it, but eventually the technology will become commonplace. One net effect of the government(s) imposing mandatory HDTV broadcasting is that virtually instantly it will become a commonplace technology, and the prices will plummet.
I bet that HD-DVD and this blue laser DVD are going to flop for putting a single movie on because the human eye isn't that presise
The human eye isn't that precise? You sound like Atari ST fanatics (I was an ST fanatic, but I always disagreed with this ludicrous claim) back in the day versus the Amiga users : You see the ST fanatics claimed that the 512 colours was more than adequate because the, err, human eye, yeah that's it, can't see more. You see, the 4096 colours of the Amiga was mere waste. Of course we've long since proven this to be absolutely absurd. About 99% of the time that someone claims that something is "as good as it can be", it's proven to be completely ignorant in the future.
Whenever someone sits in front of an HDTV screen (with an HDTV source), they are blown away by the image because their eyes, contrary to your claim, are that precise. This is especially the case as we move to larger screens, and with lightweight screen technologies such as plasma or LCD panel you can expect screen sizes to edge ever upwards. As such, the need for higher resolutions are going to be increased. DVD started its life as insufficient for HDTV (HDTV has 1080 lines, versus the 500 or so for DVD), so already HDTV users notice a difference switching between an HDTV source, and the significantly lower quality DVD. DVD needs to be resolution enhanced, and the reality is that even HDTV is pretty subpar when it's on 50"+ TVs.
I disagree. I "have a choice" and there is zero chance that I would waste my time downloading and burning movies when I can pay $17 and buy them at Future Shop (for a much higher quality version with DTS surround sound). The idea that you do it because of some enhanced skill is absurd. I know how to dupe a DVD onto my VHS deck, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to rent from Blockbuster and give myself a subpar copy just because I could.
Remember that we're talking about the average Joe, not the penny pinching open source fanatic whose willing to spend days downloading a movie. To the average Joe, they like to have the feeling that they are experiencing the "real thing", and the greater the difference between the retail version and the duped version, the greater the likelihood that he'll pay $20 for a real copy (which is why audio piracy virtually disappeared in the early days of CDs : Who wanted a tape dupe when it was so much worse than the real thing? Of course, before CDs a tape dupe was perfectly fine, but standards were raised). Already there are only a few dedicated thieves who could tolerate SVCD quality versus DVD (I was at a friends house once when he put on a SVCD, and I was blown away at the crap quality. Coming from watching the "real thing", it was literally intolerable to me. The only people who can tolerate SVCDs, in my opinion, are those to whom VHS is currently the standard).
we can currently cut down multi-gig DVDs to ~700 Megs little quality loss
I think this depends on the viewer. I find 700MB SVCDs to be TRASH, and saying that it's a "little quality loss" says more about a lack of personal standards than it does about the standard of the medium.
"Already"? I've had and used a DVD player for several years, and have been looking to replace it anyways (because of support for things like MP3 playback. On top of that, as mine was one of the early players menu switches and such takes a lot of time). If the new players, when they come out (probably not for about 2 years) let you enjoy your old library as well (which I have zero doubt that it will), then where's the downside?
The TV issue is a non-issue anyways: Already the TV shops are filling up with HDTV TVs, and the avaialability of media is increasing. Hell, we've used the same format (NTSC) for a long, long time now, and it is quite obsolete.
Personally I thought it was an absolutely hilarious article, and being within the age span that you indicated, let me say that I have never in my life heard the term "Gordon is a moron" (is it a British thing? Here in Southern Ontario it wasn't in any of my schools).
His point was that people use grossly inefficient tools (interpreted languages) where the value of the versatility of the tool exceeds the cost of the inefficiency of the tool. Java, HTML, XML, etc: All could be "Better" represented for specific cases more efficiently, but to say that therefore they are "bloated" is naive and misinformed.
As far as the assembly, while there are countless situations where benefits can be derived by actually doing custom optimizations in assembly (yes, you could by hand plan around parallel execution, pre-caching, etc), perhaps a better analogy nowadays would be C : C is the most efficient general purpose language out there, yet there are countless shops churning out Java, Visual Basic,.NET, etc, all because the benefits of those languages exceeds the additional cost (the benefits could be as simple as "we can find programmers cheaper than those who understand C"). Again, casting it all in one "if A is faster than B, then A is superior" is foolish.
The opposite case is very possible as well. At a prior position the organization had a problem with an onsite monitoring system (a system monitoring thousands of points and logging them constantly to a database, feeding them through HTTP, doing replication between sites, etc). Anyways, after they had spent literally hundreds of hours trying to optimize the software I offered the suggestion that perhaps they should just upgrade the CPU and add some RAM. The minimalist's foolish reply "Yeah, well I don't want to just throw more hardware at the problem". Uh huh. Instead of throwing $250 worth of hardware, we spent over $8000 in labour trying to optimize, and to the best of my knowledge the situation still exists.
So very true. A good example I alluded to is cable modems/DSL: In any of the countless stories about some cable or DSL provider or another, the same tired, predictable, and largely factless debates about cable versus DSL breaks out. The sad thing is that it's largely a verbatim recreation of the same argument that's played out about 2^16 times on here.
In any case, I just wish that they would have broken the GPL so that we could have tested it in court! Of course, the GPL prohibits competitive forces and thus diminishes the freedoms that all of us desire.
Yeah, it was real highbrow. You see, among any sort of technical group my "joke" sensors would go off pretty easy, but the sad thing is that drop such "sarcastic" comments on Slashdot is very unwise: There are countless morons who continually say precisely the kind of thing that he said (see another thread where a moron went around "correcting" everyone into his "fact" that a T1 was 1.5 Megabyte/second. I'm sure he'll come running back to claim that it was all just a funny joke though).
Sarcasm is one of the cheapest forms of humor, and saying that the joke went over anyone's head is ridiculous, er, rediculous. I think a better saying would be "Look in the gutter, you might see the original joke flowing by with the refuse".
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, lets try again, oh CDCP? Sure, we have it, Lets see, its 19.2K (Higher with compression, WOW!)
A modern solution like CDMA 2000 or GSM offers 80Kbps or higher, which quite honestly is an entirely usable speed for wireless surfing, etc. Indeed, even CDPD's 19.2Kbps is entirely usable. In the case of ad hoc or banded together 802.11 systems, there is a very relevant competitor, and that is the nationwide phone carriers and their new technologies.
I'm surprized at how seldom he is mentioned, but one of the most prolific and notorious spammers, Mr. Sanford Wallace, AKA Spamford Wallace, was responsible for the vast majority of spam that cluttered inboxes about 5 years ago (ah, a lifetime in Internet time). This notorious individual was targetted by hackers, and he even floated a trial balloon that he'd start his own spam friendly backbone after getting chased from provider to provider.
Anyways, the legal system worked as Cyberpromotions was shut down by lawsuits. Sort of like crime, the reality was that it was only a few individuals who were responsible for the overwhelming majority of spam, and that was true in this case too: After Spamford was shut down, the amount of spam hitting inboxes literally slowed to a crawl.
I'm not quite sure if you're being sarcastic or not, however the power savings of an LCD monitor can pay for itself over about 3 years. Of course, if one has limited power resources, such as in this case, it wouldn't be a "CRT versus LCD", but rather "LCD versus nothing".
Well, they were some pretty low hanging fruit... How about saying "Don't use your computer"? Most computers nowadays have DPMI on the motherboard, and the operating system is responsible for spooling down the hard drive, and other power saving features (not the BIOS). Furthermore, a good tip isn't to reduce the size of one's monitor, but rather to invest in an LCD or plasma monitor: They use some 1/4 the power of a normal screen (which during the summer means 1/4 of the heat dissipation, which means less AC running).
3) Consider replacing your Athlon Windows XP machine with a 386/33 with 4MB of RAM, running Linux of course.
4) Better yet, replace your computer altogether with an abacus.
5) Don't use a hard drive : They wastefully spins all the time the system is on. Stick with a 3 1/2" (or 5 1/4") floppy disk drive.
6) This one is a big one, but many people are not aware of it: Each incoming bit cumulates power into your system, to the point that a fast incoming stream with minimal outgoing can actually power your system purely by the internet connection. This is a tremendous power saving (or even GENERATING) tip: Go onto IRC into some of the hackers, and threaten those bisnatchis that you have a tremendous connection, and they can't possibly DOS you, etc. Soon they'll have all their clients ping you, and you'll be literally soaking up the wattage packaged bits. If you can keep this going overnight, your computer will actually start feeding power into your houses grid (MAKE SURE IT CAN HANDLE THIS! You may need a flux capacitor to ensure that it can modulate and store the excess).
Firstly, it was brutally obvious what we were talking about, as it was a reply to a gentleman talking about the cost of HDTV sets versus a non-HDTV set.
Secondly, what in the world does this have to do with "Moore's Law", which you seem to be grossly taking out a context. Like any esoteric technology, the manufacturing process that builds the HDTV sets is being supported by a minimal number of purchasers, hence they are paying a hefty premium (the actual root cost, per copy, of an HDTV TV set is absolutely trivial compared to the cost of the R&D/technology behind it). When HDTV sets his the mass market, just like virtually every advanced technology before them, the R&D will be spread out so much that the premium is minimal.
Please feel free to quote laws relating to transistor counts, or to presume that I'm talking about monkey mating.
Clearly I was talking about the premium over other big, heavy, expensive CRTs (i.e. the price premium of an HDTV set over a normal set, clearly evident by the post I was replying to).
Absolutely there are limits where additional gains are for diminished returns, but I'd say that drawing the line in the sand at DVD quality is naive: DVD looks great compared to VHS, but it looks bad compared to 1080 HDTV. Even 1080 HDTV is comparative to marginal resolution that many of us run on our 19" monitors, yet its expanded out to 32"+ TVs. On top of all of that is the fact that not only is the resolution of DVD not high enough, but that which is there is overcompressed: It decays during high motion scenes, like most compression codecs, it exhibits banding in scenes like misty cloudy scenes, etc.
In my area at the time there were flame wars on local BBS' by the dozens, relating to such smoldering issues as the speed advantage of the ST (8Mhz versus 7.14, I believe), the advantage of MIDI on the ST (you know, because suddenly we were all musicians. MIDI made us musicians, rather than being musicians who bought an ST for the MIDI), and the 4096 colour advantage of the Amiga. This was "long" before the STE.
I don't remember that game, but I did play a lot of great games on my ST. My favourite had to be Falcon, but when I think back to it now it almost seems silly : A perfectly flat world that really simulated very little. Hard to compare it to a modern game (or even the semi-dated Falcon 4)
Huh? The point is that a DVD compressed down to a 700MB file only looks good if your standards are so low that you're not used to better. I've seen divxs of this size, and they are not DVD quality (not even remotely close). Hence the whole "it matters what the viewer, AKA `the guy looking at it', has as his personal quality standards".
I take it you live in a college dorm, then. In the real world where people go to work for 40+ hours a week, piracy usually isn't worth the trouble. The only reason audio piracy is such a problem is that the biggest acts biggest consumers happen to fall in that "lots of free time on their hands" categories : Teenagers. I have one friend who is into grabbing divx movies: I'd rather spend $2 and rent it from Blockbuster, thanks (or for great movies like Fight Club I buy it).
When DVD players first came out they cost about $800, yet they've ebbed down to where they can be had for ~$100 now (in many cases less than VHS decks). There is no reason why HDTV will not follow the current trend: Right now they're imposing the early adoptor "wealth" tax on it, but eventually the technology will become commonplace. One net effect of the government(s) imposing mandatory HDTV broadcasting is that virtually instantly it will become a commonplace technology, and the prices will plummet.
I bet that HD-DVD and this blue laser DVD are going to flop for putting a single movie on because the human eye isn't that presise
The human eye isn't that precise? You sound like Atari ST fanatics (I was an ST fanatic, but I always disagreed with this ludicrous claim) back in the day versus the Amiga users : You see the ST fanatics claimed that the 512 colours was more than adequate because the, err, human eye, yeah that's it, can't see more. You see, the 4096 colours of the Amiga was mere waste. Of course we've long since proven this to be absolutely absurd. About 99% of the time that someone claims that something is "as good as it can be", it's proven to be completely ignorant in the future.
Whenever someone sits in front of an HDTV screen (with an HDTV source), they are blown away by the image because their eyes, contrary to your claim, are that precise. This is especially the case as we move to larger screens, and with lightweight screen technologies such as plasma or LCD panel you can expect screen sizes to edge ever upwards. As such, the need for higher resolutions are going to be increased. DVD started its life as insufficient for HDTV (HDTV has 1080 lines, versus the 500 or so for DVD), so already HDTV users notice a difference switching between an HDTV source, and the significantly lower quality DVD. DVD needs to be resolution enhanced, and the reality is that even HDTV is pretty subpar when it's on 50"+ TVs.
I disagree. I "have a choice" and there is zero chance that I would waste my time downloading and burning movies when I can pay $17 and buy them at Future Shop (for a much higher quality version with DTS surround sound). The idea that you do it because of some enhanced skill is absurd. I know how to dupe a DVD onto my VHS deck, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to rent from Blockbuster and give myself a subpar copy just because I could.
Remember that we're talking about the average Joe, not the penny pinching open source fanatic whose willing to spend days downloading a movie. To the average Joe, they like to have the feeling that they are experiencing the "real thing", and the greater the difference between the retail version and the duped version, the greater the likelihood that he'll pay $20 for a real copy (which is why audio piracy virtually disappeared in the early days of CDs : Who wanted a tape dupe when it was so much worse than the real thing? Of course, before CDs a tape dupe was perfectly fine, but standards were raised). Already there are only a few dedicated thieves who could tolerate SVCD quality versus DVD (I was at a friends house once when he put on a SVCD, and I was blown away at the crap quality. Coming from watching the "real thing", it was literally intolerable to me. The only people who can tolerate SVCDs, in my opinion, are those to whom VHS is currently the standard).
we can currently cut down multi-gig DVDs to ~700 Megs little quality loss
I think this depends on the viewer. I find 700MB SVCDs to be TRASH , and saying that it's a "little quality loss" says more about a lack of personal standards than it does about the standard of the medium.
"Already"? I've had and used a DVD player for several years, and have been looking to replace it anyways (because of support for things like MP3 playback. On top of that, as mine was one of the early players menu switches and such takes a lot of time). If the new players, when they come out (probably not for about 2 years) let you enjoy your old library as well (which I have zero doubt that it will), then where's the downside?
The TV issue is a non-issue anyways: Already the TV shops are filling up with HDTV TVs, and the avaialability of media is increasing. Hell, we've used the same format (NTSC) for a long, long time now, and it is quite obsolete.
Here's a life size version that a friend and some of his associates made for burning man. I believe they built it on an old used van they bought.
Personally I thought it was an absolutely hilarious article, and being within the age span that you indicated, let me say that I have never in my life heard the term "Gordon is a moron" (is it a British thing? Here in Southern Ontario it wasn't in any of my schools).
Try exporting something for once he says as Canada continues to have year after year of staggering trade surpluses....
His point was that people use grossly inefficient tools (interpreted languages) where the value of the versatility of the tool exceeds the cost of the inefficiency of the tool. Java, HTML, XML, etc: All could be "Better" represented for specific cases more efficiently, but to say that therefore they are "bloated" is naive and misinformed.
.NET, etc, all because the benefits of those languages exceeds the additional cost (the benefits could be as simple as "we can find programmers cheaper than those who understand C"). Again, casting it all in one "if A is faster than B, then A is superior" is foolish.
As far as the assembly, while there are countless situations where benefits can be derived by actually doing custom optimizations in assembly (yes, you could by hand plan around parallel execution, pre-caching, etc), perhaps a better analogy nowadays would be C : C is the most efficient general purpose language out there, yet there are countless shops churning out Java, Visual Basic,
The opposite case is very possible as well. At a prior position the organization had a problem with an onsite monitoring system (a system monitoring thousands of points and logging them constantly to a database, feeding them through HTTP, doing replication between sites, etc). Anyways, after they had spent literally hundreds of hours trying to optimize the software I offered the suggestion that perhaps they should just upgrade the CPU and add some RAM. The minimalist's foolish reply "Yeah, well I don't want to just throw more hardware at the problem". Uh huh. Instead of throwing $250 worth of hardware, we spent over $8000 in labour trying to optimize, and to the best of my knowledge the situation still exists.
So very true. A good example I alluded to is cable modems/DSL: In any of the countless stories about some cable or DSL provider or another, the same tired, predictable, and largely factless debates about cable versus DSL breaks out. The sad thing is that it's largely a verbatim recreation of the same argument that's played out about 2^16 times on here.
In any case, I just wish that they would have broken the GPL so that we could have tested it in court! Of course, the GPL prohibits competitive forces and thus diminishes the freedoms that all of us desire.
Uh....Good?
Really though, what sort of conversation could possibly come of this? Maybe we can debate whether cable is better than DSL. Cable r00lz beyotchis!
Yeah, it was real highbrow. You see, among any sort of technical group my "joke" sensors would go off pretty easy, but the sad thing is that drop such "sarcastic" comments on Slashdot is very unwise: There are countless morons who continually say precisely the kind of thing that he said (see another thread where a moron went around "correcting" everyone into his "fact" that a T1 was 1.5 Megabyte/second. I'm sure he'll come running back to claim that it was all just a funny joke though).
Sarcasm is one of the cheapest forms of humor, and saying that the joke went over anyone's head is ridiculous, er, rediculous. I think a better saying would be "Look in the gutter, you might see the original joke flowing by with the refuse".