Naturalization == US citizen. The only difference is that they would have become US citizens by virtue of naturalization and not birth. If they are naturalized then they will already have sworn an oath.
I think you mean that your relatives are 'Permanent Residents', in other words they have green cards. Being a permanent resident is not the same as becoming naturalized.
"A citizen of the United States loses U.S. citizenship by becoming a citizen of a foreign country unless a special exception is made by the State Department. A person can also lose U.S. citizenship for serving in the armed forces of, or holding office in, a foreign government. U.S. citizenship can also be taken away from people who have been convicted of a major federal crime, such as treason. But people cannot lose their citizenship for something they were forced to do. A person who is forced to serve in a foreign army, for example, will not lose U.S. citizenship."
See http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/government/civics5.htm
Could be. Having never seen 60p on anything larger than a 47" set I can't say. But in the end, emotion counts for a heck of a lot.
What film is better: "Star Wars: Episode IV", or "Star Wars: Episode I". Technically, Episode I beats IV hands down. But what film would you rather own on DVD, I'm betting Episode IV, the first movie, because "Phantom Menace" just sucked. "A New Hope" has that emotional element. I suppose "Phantom Menace" has a large emotional element too - disappointment.
The objective test would be to watch "Phantom Menace" at both 24p and 60p on the big screen.
In the US, the ATSC have standardized on MPEG-2 with a maximum resolution of 1920x1080 interlaced and 1280x720 progressive. This is set in stone (so to speak) and will therefore be used for many years to come.
The DBS satellite providers e.g. DirecTV and EchoStar will never broadcast any material greater than MPEG-2 HD, as a) there is currently no standard for such a format, and b) doing so would require them to swap out their entire transmission system, move to a new compression algorithm, and replace millions of set-top boxes currently in the field.
Your $10,000 purchase is safe for now. Assuming of course, that you have the new HDCP connector. If not, then you really are toast/behind the times/in a sorry state/check the sellers return policy now.
Here is a quote from the October 2003 issue of Digital Video. "24p: Back to the Future?"
"When Douglas Trumbull developed Showscan (70mm at 60 fps) in 1976, he noted a profound psychological reaction among his test audiences when the frame rate hit 60 fps: The film ceased to be a film and was more like a window into reality: It just wasn't any good for storytelling, Trumbull claimed. Showscan was thus relegated to theme park immersive venues, and a grand experiment in theatrical storytelling frame rates was shunted aside.
Is it just me, or does anyone else feel nauseous when, in this day and age, a device with an embedded microcontroller is still described as having a computerised brain ?
Just like in the 90's when the Internet went commercial and news announcers - when giving the URL to a website - would spell out H-T-T-P-COLON-FORWARDSLASH-FORWARDSLASH-W-W-W-DOT- C-N-N-DOT-COM.
You are right, 10 years ago there were no agreed upon standards. Now there are, which is why HDTV can now take off in the US.
no market
Just like there was no market for television when it first was released. The first TV broadcasts were of radio shows. Who the heck would want to pay $$$$ for a TV just to watch some guy speak into a microphone ?
Just like there was no market for color television when it was first released. Do you know how long it took for broadcasters to move from black and white to color ? Current belief is that the real number is closer to 1,000 sets sold to the public. Thats how many color TV sets were sold where first released. See TV History
Japan and Germany have had it for a decade
They had analog, uncompressed HDTV. i.e. No MPEG-2.
From Evolution of TelevisionJapanese HDTV takes 20 MHz of bandwidth to send pictures with over 675,000 pixels. In the United States, a standard ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) screen can have up to 1080 lines of 1920 pixels each, or 2,073,600 pixels per frame. (in 6Mhz of bandwidth)
Japan are moving towards digital HDTV. DVB now has provisions for HD transmissions.
MPEG-LA, the body in charge of setting licensing/royalty payments are asking the concerned parties to submit all patents and IP relating to H.264. I guess this is to make sure that submarine patents can't emerge at a later date... If you are a patent holder and you miss the boat, tough luck for you I suppose.
What this means is that the licensing process will not trial the H.264 standardization process, as it did in MPEG4 by a couple of years.
However I am not yet aware of the type of licensing scheme they will come up with. I'm sure Microsoft are hoping that it will be similar to MPEG4, in which case people may jump ship from H.264 to Microsoft's WM 9.
If you were over 12 when the movie came out, then yes, you are the only one.
I was 11 at the time. Ah, those were the days.
However if my son, now 2 years old, ever watches Episodes I & II and actually decides he likes Jar-Jar Binks... well, I'll have to take another look at the will.
Ok then. Suppose a situation arose where it became possible to use the DCMA to sue the RIAA or MPAA ? The Slashdot crowd would go freakin' nuts. You can bet that all 'moral' and 'ethical' concerns would go flying out the window and the raving masses would slap the snot out of each other just to be the first in line to turn the law back on its creators.
You make several good points. However I ran the comparison against both the Divx and the MS MPEG4 encoders - however the quality was almost identical in both (even Divx 2 pass). Yes, the MS MPEG4 and Divx encoders may not have been the best encoders to use (for example, the Philips MPEG4 implementation may have been more efficient), but I was comparing these encoders to the H.264 reference encoder circa December 2001 December. How efficient was the reference MPEG2 encoder when it first appeared ? It certainly couldn't compress 1080i at 19Mbps with the same resultant quality as current MPEG2 implementations. So in my mind, the MPEG4 implementations I used had time to mature, whereas the H.264 implementation was very imature.
However I must respectfully disagree with you concerning the implementation of hardware MPEG4 encoders . A number of companies that have been working on such MPEG4 devices, most notably Philips - who had a huge MPEG4 display at NAB last year (including hardware MPEG4 encoders etc.) - have completely pulled out of the business. Other companies who had been working on MPEG4 solutions have laid of employees or have completely cut back. I seems that H.264 has all the momentum that MPEG4 had at one time. Add the MPEG4 licensing terms to the mix, and the long term outlook for large scale MPEG4 roll-outs don't seem good.
As an example.... ATSC, DVB and the HD forum are all considering H.264 for the next generation of their respective standards, not MPEG4.
Because the MPEG4 you know and love is dead
on
First HDTV Camcorder
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There, I've said it. The latest MPEG work is centered around a new algorithm named H.264, or Advanced Video Coding.
This algorithm used to be called MPEG4 part 10, but is sufficiently different to MPEG4 to warrant a new name. Basically the H.264 algorithm gets you video that is the SAME quality as MPEG4 but at around HALF (that's 50%) of the bit rate. This means that you can in fact have 1080i video at bit rates lower than 9Mbps.... well within the maximum throughput of the current generation red laser DVD technology.... which explains why the DVD forum is considering using H.264 for the next generation of DVD's.... High Definition DVD. A whole High definition movie on a single DVD - and that's without having to move to a blue laser.
Don't believe me ? Take a look at the evaluation I did (self plug - who cares) a year ago comparing MPEG4 with H.264, I have a screenshot at balooga.com
The other point worth mentioning, that not many people realize, is that MPEG4 works well at low bit rates. As the bit rate increases, the efficiency gains afforded by MPEG4 diminish until a point is reached where you are better of using a good MPEG2 encoder. There are stations in the US that are actually broadcasting good quality 1080i at 12Mbps. MPEG4 won't get you anything more than MPEG2 at that bit rate.
The only niggle about the H.264 algorithm is the processing power required. My dual Xeon 2.8Ghz takes around nine hours (yes, I said hours) to encode a single ten second 1080i sequence. Granted the reference H.264 decoder (which is available for download off the web, by the way) is not optimized for speed and is not multithreaded in any way.... which is why I run three encoding sessions in parallel.
The H.264 algorithm requires so much power because it does so much. For example: Macroblocks can be any shape. The algorithm remembers scene changes so 'I' frames are not required when a camera goes from the head shot of the news presenter, to video footage, and back to the presenter. It senses those atrifacts that become apparent around, for example, text/subtitles in the MPEG2 domain and smoothes them out. It will iterate over a group of pictures again and again until it finds the best possible method for compression. In short, H.264 is amazing.
So Americans have no problem poaching foreign nationals for top positions in our national sports teams. Half the ice-hockey team is made up of Russians? Who cares. 30% of the athletes in professional baseball aren't from the continental US? Who cares, just as long as the team in your city keeps winning their games.
What about the American athletes who can't move up from the minor leagues? No-one cares as long as the team keeps winning and people can shout "USA, we're number 1".
Manufacturing jobs moved to Mexico ? Who cares, I just want my DVD/MP3 player for less than $100.
(sarcasm)What, you mean the IT industry is going the same way ? Oh woe. Quick, where are the tar and feathers, we're going to have a lynching.(/sarcasm)
Slashdot Mirror
The Tandy Model 100 was one of the last laptops with a decent keyboard, unfortunately. Anything since varies between god-awful and revolting.
Or if it does, then it needs to be towed outside the environment :)
One more reason to carry your C64 around with you everywhere you go.
Flappy Bird on the C64
Naturalization == US citizen. The only difference is that they would have become US citizens by virtue of naturalization and not birth. If they are naturalized then they will already have sworn an oath.
I think you mean that your relatives are 'Permanent Residents', in other words they have green cards. Being a permanent resident is not the same as becoming naturalized.
"A citizen of the United States loses U.S. citizenship by becoming a citizen of a foreign country unless a special exception is made by the State Department. A person can also lose U.S. citizenship for serving in the armed forces of, or holding office in, a foreign government. U.S. citizenship can also be taken away from people who have been convicted of a major federal crime, such as treason. But people cannot lose their citizenship for something they were forced to do. A person who is forced to serve in a foreign army, for example, will not lose U.S. citizenship."
See http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/government/civics5.htm
An advanced civilization must be militarily advanced. If only to not have their asses kicked by less ethically advanced civilizations.
Also, it's a bit of a security risk for a device to be able to send executable code to the PC and actually have it get executed.
Ha. The joke is on you. You have obviously not yet watched "Space Buddies".
Could be. Having never seen 60p on anything larger than a 47" set I can't say. But in the end, emotion counts for a heck of a lot.
What film is better: "Star Wars: Episode IV", or "Star Wars: Episode I". Technically, Episode I beats IV hands down. But what film would you rather own on DVD, I'm betting Episode IV, the first movie, because "Phantom Menace" just sucked. "A New Hope" has that emotional element. I suppose "Phantom Menace" has a large emotional element too - disappointment.
The objective test would be to watch "Phantom Menace" at both 24p and 60p on the big screen.
Not really.
In the US, the ATSC have standardized on MPEG-2 with a maximum resolution of 1920x1080 interlaced and 1280x720 progressive. This is set in stone (so to speak) and will therefore be used for many years to come.
The DBS satellite providers e.g. DirecTV and EchoStar will never broadcast any material greater than MPEG-2 HD, as a) there is currently no standard for such a format, and b) doing so would require them to swap out their entire transmission system, move to a new compression algorithm, and replace millions of set-top boxes currently in the field.
Your $10,000 purchase is safe for now. Assuming of course, that you have the new HDCP connector. If not, then you really are toast/behind the times/in a sorry state/check the sellers return policy now.
Here is a quote from the October 2003 issue of Digital Video. "24p: Back to the Future?"
"When Douglas Trumbull developed Showscan (70mm at 60 fps) in 1976, he noted a profound psychological reaction among his test audiences when the frame rate hit 60 fps: The film ceased to be a film and was more like a window into reality: It just wasn't any good for storytelling, Trumbull claimed. Showscan was thus relegated to theme park immersive venues, and a grand experiment in theatrical storytelling frame rates was shunted aside.
Is it just me, or does anyone else feel nauseous when, in this day and age, a device with an embedded microcontroller is still described as having a computerised brain ?
- C-N-N-DOT-COM.
Just like in the 90's when the Internet went commercial and news announcers - when giving the URL to a website - would spell out H-T-T-P-COLON-FORWARDSLASH-FORWARDSLASH-W-W-W-DOT
And those handy dandy batteries that power portable power tools.
"The entire computer industry was driven to micro-miniaturization and 'chips' by the huge costs per pound of putting computers into space."
And the cost per pound comes from flinging people into space. (Astronauts were really freaking heavy in those days.)
Mmmmm... Tang."
Now the whole office can join in the QuakeIII deathmatch.
I patented the idea of ice under the Martian poles years ago.
Now all your Mars base are belong to me.
No agreed-upon standards
You are right, 10 years ago there were no agreed upon standards. Now there are, which is why HDTV can now take off in the US.
no market
Just like there was no market for television when it first was released. The first TV broadcasts were of radio shows. Who the heck would want to pay $$$$ for a TV just to watch some guy speak into a microphone ?
Just like there was no market for color television when it was first released. Do you know how long it took for broadcasters to move from black and white to color ? Current belief is that the real number is closer to 1,000 sets sold to the public. Thats how many color TV sets were sold where first released. See TV History
Japan and Germany have had it for a decade
They had analog, uncompressed HDTV. i.e. No MPEG-2.
From Evolution of Television Japanese HDTV takes 20 MHz of bandwidth to send pictures with over 675,000 pixels. In the United States, a standard ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) screen can have up to 1080 lines of 1920 pixels each, or 2,073,600 pixels per frame. (in 6Mhz of bandwidth)
Japan are moving towards digital HDTV. DVB now has provisions for HD transmissions.
I'm surprised it's not a $500 tax per email.
More to the point, guns, be they a fundamental American right or not, kill vastly greater numbers of innocents each year than video games.
What about the lacerations caused from the shards that fly when you snap a CD ? It's almost life threatening.
MPEG-LA, the body in charge of setting licensing/royalty payments are asking the concerned parties to submit all patents and IP relating to H.264. I guess this is to make sure that submarine patents can't emerge at a later date... If you are a patent holder and you miss the boat, tough luck for you I suppose.
What this means is that the licensing process will not trial the H.264 standardization process, as it did in MPEG4 by a couple of years.
However I am not yet aware of the type of licensing scheme they will come up with. I'm sure Microsoft are hoping that it will be similar to MPEG4, in which case people may jump ship from H.264 to Microsoft's WM 9.
If you were over 12 when the movie came out, then yes, you are the only one.
I was 11 at the time. Ah, those were the days.
However if my son, now 2 years old, ever watches Episodes I & II and actually decides he likes Jar-Jar Binks... well, I'll have to take another look at the will.
Am I the only one on the planet (other than George) that actually liked the Ewoks ?
Ok then. Suppose a situation arose where it became possible to use the DCMA to sue the RIAA or MPAA ? The Slashdot crowd would go freakin' nuts. You can bet that all 'moral' and 'ethical' concerns would go flying out the window and the raving masses would slap the snot out of each other just to be the first in line to turn the law back on its creators.
You make several good points. However I ran the comparison against both the Divx and the MS MPEG4 encoders - however the quality was almost identical in both (even Divx 2 pass). Yes, the MS MPEG4 and Divx encoders may not have been the best encoders to use (for example, the Philips MPEG4 implementation may have been more efficient), but I was comparing these encoders to the H.264 reference encoder circa December 2001 December. How efficient was the reference MPEG2 encoder when it first appeared ? It certainly couldn't compress 1080i at 19Mbps with the same resultant quality as current MPEG2 implementations. So in my mind, the MPEG4 implementations I used had time to mature, whereas the H.264 implementation was very imature.
However I must respectfully disagree with you concerning the implementation of hardware MPEG4 encoders . A number of companies that have been working on such MPEG4 devices, most notably Philips - who had a huge MPEG4 display at NAB last year (including hardware MPEG4 encoders etc.) - have completely pulled out of the business. Other companies who had been working on MPEG4 solutions have laid of employees or have completely cut back. I seems that H.264 has all the momentum that MPEG4 had at one time. Add the MPEG4 licensing terms to the mix, and the long term outlook for large scale MPEG4 roll-outs don't seem good.
As an example.... ATSC, DVB and the HD forum are all considering H.264 for the next generation of their respective standards, not MPEG4.
There, I've said it. The latest MPEG work is centered around a new algorithm named H.264, or Advanced Video Coding.
This algorithm used to be called MPEG4 part 10, but is sufficiently different to MPEG4 to warrant a new name. Basically the H.264 algorithm gets you video that is the SAME quality as MPEG4 but at around HALF (that's 50%) of the bit rate. This means that you can in fact have 1080i video at bit rates lower than 9Mbps.... well within the maximum throughput of the current generation red laser DVD technology.... which explains why the DVD forum is considering using H.264 for the next generation of DVD's.... High Definition DVD. A whole High definition movie on a single DVD - and that's without having to move to a blue laser.
Don't believe me ? Take a look at the evaluation I did (self plug - who cares) a year ago comparing MPEG4 with H.264, I have a screenshot at balooga.com
The other point worth mentioning, that not many people realize, is that MPEG4 works well at low bit rates. As the bit rate increases, the efficiency gains afforded by MPEG4 diminish until a point is reached where you are better of using a good MPEG2 encoder. There are stations in the US that are actually broadcasting good quality 1080i at 12Mbps. MPEG4 won't get you anything more than MPEG2 at that bit rate.
The only niggle about the H.264 algorithm is the processing power required. My dual Xeon 2.8Ghz takes around nine hours (yes, I said hours) to encode a single ten second 1080i sequence. Granted the reference H.264 decoder (which is available for download off the web, by the way) is not optimized for speed and is not multithreaded in any way.... which is why I run three encoding sessions in parallel.
The H.264 algorithm requires so much power because it does so much. For example: Macroblocks can be any shape. The algorithm remembers scene changes so 'I' frames are not required when a camera goes from the head shot of the news presenter, to video footage, and back to the presenter. It senses those atrifacts that become apparent around, for example, text/subtitles in the MPEG2 domain and smoothes them out. It will iterate over a group of pictures again and again until it finds the best possible method for compression. In short, H.264 is amazing.
The world does not need another Care Bears movie.
So Americans have no problem poaching foreign nationals for top positions in our national sports teams. Half the ice-hockey team is made up of Russians? Who cares. 30% of the athletes in professional baseball aren't from the continental US? Who cares, just as long as the team in your city keeps winning their games.
What about the American athletes who can't move up from the minor leagues? No-one cares as long as the team keeps winning and people can shout "USA, we're number 1".
Manufacturing jobs moved to Mexico ? Who cares, I just want my DVD/MP3 player for less than $100.
(sarcasm)What, you mean the IT industry is going the same way ? Oh woe. Quick, where are the tar and feathers, we're going to have a lynching.(/sarcasm)
Apparently these dwellings last a long time. So the first item of business is to go find yourself a Hobbit.