I just did a patent search, and found NOT, AND, OR, NOR, and NAND have not yet been patented... so I'm filing today. Sadly, CadTrak already got XOR, back in the 70s.
How should someone who writes and records an album verify that the songs he wrote don't accidentally infringe a third party's copyright?
The same way all other musicians do it -- write original music, and hope you don't get sued. You don't actually think the major labels do this for their artists, do you?
How should they promote it to listeners who aren't already streaming music in their vehicles? These listeners use FM radio because they don't already have a sufficiently expensive data plan or they aren't aware of the streaming sites.
Not necessary. Sure, if you have no following, you have some work to do to attract one. But it's hardly necessary to sell a gold album to make a living from music -- you don't need to hit everyone. In fact, few of those artists who hit gold or platinum in their early recording careers are making a living off the album sales. They're only getting maybe $1.00 per CD, much less (as little as nothing, depending on the contract) on legal, paid downloads. Plus, artists these days cover the entire cost of the album production.
So let's say your CD goes gold... that means you sold a million dollars worth. For simplicity's sake, that's $100,000 in royalties, 100,000 loyal fans buying your disc. You spent $50,000 of the record company's money (cheap) making that CD, and that's not even counting the fact you had to pay for living expenses and all during the two years you worked on that debut disc. So that's $50,000 in your pocket -- of course, that's divided four ways, since you're an equal partner in a band (the usual configuration)... oh, but also that 10% for your manger off the top. So it's $45,000, split four ways... you hit gold, which is rare enough, an have $11,250 to show for it. But hey, if the record goes platinum (one million copies), there may be some real money coming.
Let's say, instead, you self-produce. It costs you $1.00 to make each disc, and you're selling discs online for $15.00, or just the download for $5.00. You sell CDs to 5000 fans, 15,000 to buy the download... that's $120,000 (CD cost already factored in) from 20,000 fans.. you made more money, but needed only 1/5 the listeners. And if you're really creative, you use something like Kickstarter, and offer a bunch of perks to your fans, in addition to the new album. This lets them pre-pay for the music, giving you more control over how much you actually spend on production.
And it can do far, far better. A recent example: Amanda Palmer. You may not have heard of her, but she does have a following.. and she sold her new album, plus perks, on Kickstarter, to 24,883 fans... not far off my made-up example. She had a goal of $100,000... again, about what she might hope to make on a gold record, almost exactly. She actually brought in $1,192,793... over 10x as much. Versus the $24,883 that she would have grossed selling that many records. Now sure, the CD will likely keep selling once it's out. And most musicians who aren't filling arenas are making most of their money touring, not on music sales... but a big part of that's the whole system. The big labels are the RIAA are not necessary.
Currently, if you take all forms of personal computer (Windows, Linux, desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone), iOS has just under 10% of the total market, Android 4.7% of the market. So that's not quite 15% of all computers regularly using touchscreens. On this same scale, MacOS is at 7.5%, Windows Vista at 7.7%, Windows XP at 23%, and Windows 7 at 38%. Touchscreen devices aren't close to taking over. But they are the fastest growing market.
What Microsoft seems to be ignoring, in their quest to join the Apple/Android mobile party, is that touchscreens are a compromise. I'm willing to smear my greasy fingers over my viewing surface, or to have virtual input device take up half my viewing area, but only so that I can have this cool skinny thing in my pocket or a small folio. On the desktop, touch screens are pointless, regardless of the latest fads in mobile. We have the room for a keyboard (over 10x faster at text entry than the best virtual keyboard), or a mouse, a graphics tablet, a Space Explorer... hell, all of 'em at once.
And touchscreens are not built for the way we're made. We tried that back in the 70s, with light pens and actual touch screens (usually using optical sensors, not R/C methods). They work pretty well on things you hold horizontally. They suck rocks at things you hold vertically. Use a touchscreen on a PC desktop all day, and the RSI you'll be experiencing makes keyboard/mouse seem like a walk in the park.
And room for 2-3 screens, too. Big screens. The other compromise Microsoft wants to bring to the desktop is the full-screen-only application. This definitely made sense when smartphones had 3.5" screens at 480x320. With today's 4-5" screens and 1280x720 or more, I'm not too sure about that... that's higher resolution in my pocket right now than I had on all but my latest laptop (more computing power, too). And it's extremely silly on a dual-monitor desktop... it's nice to be able to maximize an application from time to time, but it's pretty rare thing for me.
If they're streaming Netflix in HD, you'll saturate those three T1s with just one viewer. The problem there would be using 51-year-old links to backhaul an internet connection sold as "modern".
Depends on what you have already. For 12Mb/s access with no caps, I'd happily turn over the $120/month I'm paying for satellite (1.5Mb/s, 550MB daily cap). And that's currently the best satellite deal I can get, which is better than anyone's 3G cellular (no company is doing fixed terrestrial wireless here). No other options.
On the other hand, if you have cable and FiOS both available, and 100Mb/s plans for $50/month, then yeah, 12Mb/s would be pretty slow, and I'd expect it cheap.
In the days of 768K DSL, was 50K dialup unacceptable? Given an upward limit of 100-300Mb/s from some suppliers, it's not at all wrong to think of 3Mb/s and under as the trailing, embarrassing edge of internet access these days.
The white spaces are inherently free and unlicensed... it's just that the technology for this (802.22) isn't quite in place yet. The folks who actually do have the licenses (eg, broadcast television) worked very hard to make it nearly impossible to build a working white space radio, and even harder to use it (you had to have both a GPS and an internet connection of some kind, to make sure it was still legal to use the frequency you wanted to use, even before making that first connection). The FCC relaxed some of the rules a little bit last year, and that's likely to make it more practical.
For those who don't know, the idea of a white space radio is to re-purpose the unused parts of the TV band, dynamically, as another ISM style band (like 2.4GHz and 900MHz, only with hundreds of megahertz of bandwidth). To make this work, you have to play very nicely with neighboring television channels. Part of that's restricting every channel to 6MHz, but also backing off of adjacent channels in use (one of the frustrating things of the original specs, you had to have crazy quiet side lobes on your signal, way beyond anything required for 802.11 or cellular, and then STILL had lower power limits if there wasn't a guard channel between you and the occupied ATSC channel), and checking your location via an online database to eliminate known commercial stations. And still, you were supposed to be able to detect analog microphone use in some of the ranges (there were only about 50 licenses sold, nationally, for wireless analog mics, but there are tens of thousands or more in actual use).
Depends on what you're streaming. 720p video is 2Mb/s from YouTube, 2.8-3.4Mb/s from Netflix. Yes, you can stream ok-quality SD video at 1Mb/s. Or download a moderate Linux distro in a day or so. My HughesNet connection is theoretically 1.5Mb/s, but there's that whole "weakest link" thing... it's not coming down at 1.5Mb/s if it doesn't get past other bottlenecks at that speed (which is the case with all ISPs, it's just a couple of levels worse with satellite, plus the 750ms or so minimum latency... it does take time for the trip to orbit and back).
Broadband is what you want... it's the correct solution to the problem. The problem isn't the broadband, it's getting connections to people at a price both these consumers and some supplier are willing to agree upon. The solutions for rural folks, like myself, are never likely to involved wires/fibers -- there's just too little incentive for the network suppliers, even with their 40% profit margins, to hook us up. And mobile wireless is no better -- in the USA, it's actually been in retrograde for some time. Sure, the bandwidths have improved, but the cost of service has been going up over the last ten years, with data caps and increased per GB charges.
So it's likely to remain some form of fixed wireless. I'm on satellite now, and that's $120/month for HughesNet's SoHo service, which has crazy low daily data caps and service that was considered broadband when I signed up ten years ago, but no longer qualifies (1.5Mb/s down, up to 500Mb/s up). They claim they're speeding it up this fall, we'll see... and they've said nothing about increasing the data caps, so I assume it's still 550MB per day.
Health Insurance is broken because "Insurance" is the wrong answer. It should be Health Care. I insure my house, my car, etc. because, while I'm not expecting them to be damaged, I know it's possible. People, on the other hand, will break -- it's inevitable. The only question is whether that first big health problem kills you or not. The high corporate profits (typically in excess of 30%), the incentive to over test and over prescribe, it's all part of the basis for healthcare being private industry insurance. It's a fundamentally wrong solution to the problem. Looking at countries that do it differently (pretty much every other major Western Democracy), they're getting better healthcare, living longer, and spending half of what we in the US spend on it.
Sure, it's easy to ignore... until something serious hits you or a family member. If you're lucky, you're covered, at least mostly. If not, you're probably going to have to sell your house, maybe even go into bankruptcy, to keep yourself or that family member alive. My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer two-and-a-half year... pretty common; about 12% of all women in the USA will get it within their lifetime. She's going for her 11th surgery this Monday. She was fortunately covered, though it's nearly always an argument with the Insurance Company for each new test or procedure -- I believe this is standard policy at most insurance companies, since plenty of their customers don't know if they're covered or not, and when intimidated by the insurance company, they simply pay the bill. Medical expensive have run well in excess of either of our salaries these last couple of years. And in the grand scheme of things, this was a relatively minor cancer (stage 2, the 15% of breast cancers that don't show up at all on X-Ray). In other countries, this would have been treated the same way (I have an Oncologist friend in Italy I conferred with the entire time), but the costs would have been dramatically lower: lower prices on the same drugs, and no skimming 30%+ to pay an unnecessary layer of insurance company profits and management (compare to Medicare, which I'm sure isn't perfect, but has a 2% overhead).
There are only about 800,000 Native Americans living on tribal lands, based on the last census. Even if no tribal lands had any form of broadband, that still leaves a heck of a lot of us white-eyes without broadband.
Most of Iceland would fit in my livingroom... but yeah, it's a recent thing in the USA to ignore our infrastructure entirely. After all, rich people can always get very good internet connections.
And it's corporate greed. Where I live, I could get a decent DSL connection. But the telecom won't sell me one, because they just don't see any point in installing DSL support (the local node is already in place -- I can see it from my driveway, and it is DSL compatible) for, at best, a couple of houses. That's the private sector for you -- they cherry pick for the highest profit per installation, and there's no requirement that they cover those who are slightly less profitable.
200 yards from houses with cable... I'd offer to pay one of neighbors broadband bills (or pay for the upgrade to the fastest available at their house), and set up their wireless, and wash their car, and give their dogs a bath, in exchange for letting me set up a house to house 802.11n link (given where my house is, probably at 900MHz.... trees eat 2.4GHz).
Where I am, I can get Verizon 3G pretty well, but it's way too slow and, of course, there are tiny caps. So I'm on satellite, which has a 550MB daily cap before being POTS-i-fied for 24 hours (no caps between 2AM and 7AM). That's 1.5Mb/s down and somewhere around 500kb/s up, the fastest currently from Hughesnet. That's $120/month. They claim a speed upgrade is coming this fall... a way to tear through that 550MB even faster, I'm guessing.
In theory, Verizon will have every cell in their network on LTE before the end of next year. But their pricing precludes any use of LTE for home connections. Eventually, maybe, we'll see 802.22 providers -- white space radio isn't practical for mobile, and there's a ton of potential bandwidth, and the frequencies are the correct ones for rural and other underserved homes. But that's probably a few years away, the way these things move, even with last least relaxation of the white space rules.
I can see a local telephone node from my mailbox, and yeah, it's DSL-capable (a phone tech even told me, once, the board set and software revision needed). But just try finding anyone who'll sell you a DSL connection where the DSL boards aren't already installed. I mean, if they can't also sell TV, they're not interested.
It's all relative... the 2560x1440 IPS monitor I just bought cost $100 less than either of my 1920x1200 MVA monitors from ~6 years ago. That's the positive effect of the TV-PC merger... you may not want a base level, TN-LCD at 1920x1080, but the fact of those monitors being so cheap (well under $200 if you shop around) drags the whole industry down in price.
Given that the same folks who built the display for Apple (Samsung, LG) are perfectly willing to sell similar displays to anyone else, I don't imagine it'll take a year. Falling prices, sure, the main reason companies will jump on this is the promise of higher margins. But at least there's a chance of falling prices -- the Mac version is going to always be way overpriced.
And ironically, just as laptops are getting a long-needed boost in resolution, Windows 8 is coming along and expecting everyone to run everything fullscreen, pretty much erasing any advantage. Well, hopefully, no vendors of "real" applications jump on that bandwagon to hell, and things get fixed in Windows 9.
A laptop is my last choice for a real work PC anyway (CAD, embedded software, video, photography, etc). Guess they're not terrible for web browsing, but I can't imagine anyone getting real work done on a single 17" screen. That's far more limiting than a difference in 120 lines. I do have a single 24" monitor in my home lab, due to size constraints, but it's not far from my main desktop and 2-3 screens (the third is mostly just for video work).
But I do think the "retina on a PC" meme is coming. After all, my cellphone's 4.6" screen is 1280x720... why limit a 17" screen to only 1920x1080? It is also correct, though, that operating systems need better scaling/sizing options to deal with more of a disjoint between screen resolution and viewing size than we currently have, before this really works well. Even Apple's "retina" MacBook is kind of a kludge, software-wise.
Oh, please. Do you really need to run every app full screen? Are you not using an OS that has resizable windows?
Hey, that's not such a silly question. It seems that the folks in charge of Microsoft, Apple, and even Canonical these days are trying in various ways to do just that: release operating systems that don't support Windows. In "Windows" 8, Microsoft is calling the existing stuff "Legacy" or "Classic", and their new "Don't-Call-It-Metro" APIs and UI is now "Windows 8 Style Application". And they don't Window -- run it on that 8K screen, it's still a full screen application. Stupid, amazingly stupid. But not really a moot question, with this de-evolution in the works, and not just one place, but with multiple outbreaks throughout the industry.
Otherwise, I completely agree with your assertion... my PDFs or other "traditional" documents can go top to bottom, with plenty of room to reading, and plenty of space for other windows at the same time. Given that I have over 30 open at the moment, this is very much an increase in productivity over the single-window display.
Well, the original specs permitted both 1080/60i and 1080/24p... but maintaining the logical ability to do interlaced video was really about about bandwidth. Kind of a shame... if they had based it all on AVC rather than MPEG-2, a higher 1080p format would have been possible. On the other hand, the broadcasters had enough trouble dealing with two format options... they really didn't need more to consumer them:-)
It's also telling that it was only the very first generation of HDTV, those CRT/CRT-projector based models, that actually did 1080i. Digital displays came into their own right pretty much in the second generation of HDTV (once you could swap a YPrPb input for HDMI or other digital interfaces), and the various digital displays can't actually display an interlaced video stream -- it's all upscaled to 1080p anyway.
Computer monitors, at least the cheap ones, are build from television pieces. So any news related to new TV formats directly impacts the kind of computer monitors that are going to be built. All of them. After all, you're not likely to be able to sell many 2560x1400 monitors for $1500 when TV panels deliver 3840x2160 for $250.
In MOST areas of the USA the TV bandwidth goes unused - it could be giving us true cell phone broadband.
So-called "white space" radio is a real thing... using any of that unused TV spectrum for ISM-style wireless. And in fact, the FCC recently relaxed the rules a bit, which were written to make things very difficult on radio designers (I was, in fact, designing a radio a few years back for white space compatibility, but the company nixed that feature, not as being undoable, just too expensive for a small company).
But work has continued. There's a spec for a standard waveform now (802.22), and lots of companies making chips. Curiously, this targets exactly the kind of thing you're talking about -- Wireless Regional Area Networks. Given that my only option in internet right now is satellite, I'm really anxious to see this meet reality.
The average cable or satellite system does 30-60Mb/s per 6MHz analog TV slot... and that number has been increasing (going from 64QAM to 256QAM, etc). Satellites have relatively few analog slots, but they are evolving. Cable has a pretty crazy amount of bandwidth, but has to devote some of that to internet service. Fiber, on the other hand, uses frequency multiplexing to essentially overlay cable, voice, and internet on the same optical cable. So there's plenty of bandwidth for higher definition.
As well, work continues on more advanced compression algorithms. The limit is infrastructure and computing power -- it takes some years to build up industry-wide support for a given video CODEC (MPEG-2, AVC), so there's resistance to changing for something slightly better. And for any successful replacement, it'll be necessary to deliver encoders that can function on mobile cameras, decoders that can comfortably live on set top boxes, PCs, smartphones, etc.
And it doesn't necessarily have to happen all at once. I suspect they're going to 8K with the idea of a replacement broadcast system, in a large part because going to 4K would be too soon. We're already seeing 4K technology in televisions (LG has one shipping in Korea next month), camcorders (JVC released a $5,000 4K camera a few months back), etc.... all built on existing technology. 4K films might be delivered on Blu-ray or BD-XL discs, maybe with H.265 on standard Blu-ray, nothing too crazy... you'd need a new player, but that player could handle the older formats, scale to your particular display device, etc. The packaged disc would include both standard and 4K version, maybe something like what they're doing with 3D today. This wouldn't be something all that new, but rather, Yet Another Blu-ray Profile (with the standard software upgrade to the PS3... though in reality, I suspect the PS3 of being too weak to decode 4K and downscale to HD... more of a PS4 thing), etc.
Going to 8K, it might be a big bunch of new stuff. In any case, the consumer push to 4K has already started. Maybe it's just for videophiles, maybe not. Given the fall in prices on TVs, I could see a 4K television selling in a few years for about what I paid for my 71" DLP six years ago.
You pretty much do need to grow TV size to make a higher resolution more practical. But that's happening, anyway. My parents' "big" TV was a 24" console. My "big" TV is a 71" DLP.
To _fully_ resolve 1080p on your 50" TV, you'd need to be viewing from no more than 6.5 feet away (the recommended THX distance is 5.6 feet, but that's about viewing angle, not resolution). Farther than that, and you will definitely start to diminish the return on the difference between 720p and 1080p. If you have average vision, of course (for distance, I'm 20/20 in one eye, 20/25 in the other, so I pretty much follow these recommendations successfully). You can go to nearly 10ft (9.75) and still fully resolve the 720p image.
The 1080p thing has been selling TVs, and the 4K or 8K thing may, eventually. And while there's nothing wrong with offering higher resolution, there are going to be plenty of folks who paid more for a higher resolution, yet never really see it.
That's incorrect -- network-wise, only Fox and ABC broadcast in 720/60p. There is no 720/30p, that's not a legal ATSC format.
The choice of 720p was never very popular among most of the networks. It was pushed hard by ABC due to their ESPN division -- 720/60p really is better than 1080/60i for many sports. I've shot soccer video in 720/60p for the last eight years... it's definitely better, most of the time. You'll find ABC or FOX owned channels in 720/60p, along with a few sports-only satellite channels. Pretty much everything else is in 1080/60i, in the USA. Some satellite programming is available in 1080/24p as well, not sure about cable, but it does make sense.
All cable and satellite companies have the ability to reformat your video on the fly, as well as re-encode it, generally from MPEG-2 to AVC, at least on satellite. But that's specific to your cable system... that's not the way its broadcast.
That's nominally 3840 x 2160, aka, "4K".. you get it, or something like it, at the better movie theaters these days. There are already camcorders shipping that do this, and televisions coming Real Soon Now (http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/22/3259613/lg-84-inch-4k-tv-korea-release-north-america-europe-latin-asia). YouTube already supports 4K video. HDMI 1.4 does, too, at least up to 24p.
So if it's already real, it's hopefully not the subject of work on new standards. And the 4K stuff is coming on fast enough that it's all based on logical extensions to what already exists. TVs are smart enough to adapt to the input and reformat lower resolution video. Disc delivery doesn't matter as much as it used to, but just like 3D, if 4K is important in the home, a new Blu-ray profile will cover it (if you really want more storage, the existing BD-XL format might get employed).
Starting out worrying about 8K video now, these guys will have the time to think about much larger changes in the video infrastructure.
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I just did a patent search, and found NOT, AND, OR, NOR, and NAND have not yet been patented... so I'm filing today. Sadly, CadTrak already got XOR, back in the 70s.
How should someone who writes and records an album verify that the songs he wrote don't accidentally infringe a third party's copyright?
The same way all other musicians do it -- write original music, and hope you don't get sued. You don't actually think the major labels do this for their artists, do you?
How should they promote it to listeners who aren't already streaming music in their vehicles? These listeners use FM radio because they don't already have a sufficiently expensive data plan or they aren't aware of the streaming sites.
Not necessary. Sure, if you have no following, you have some work to do to attract one. But it's hardly necessary to sell a gold album to make a living from music -- you don't need to hit everyone. In fact, few of those artists who hit gold or platinum in their early recording careers are making a living off the album sales. They're only getting maybe $1.00 per CD, much less (as little as nothing, depending on the contract) on legal, paid downloads. Plus, artists these days cover the entire cost of the album production.
So let's say your CD goes gold... that means you sold a million dollars worth. For simplicity's sake, that's $100,000 in royalties, 100,000 loyal fans buying your disc. You spent $50,000 of the record company's money (cheap) making that CD, and that's not even counting the fact you had to pay for living expenses and all during the two years you worked on that debut disc. So that's $50,000 in your pocket -- of course, that's divided four ways, since you're an equal partner in a band (the usual configuration)... oh, but also that 10% for your manger off the top. So it's $45,000, split four ways... you hit gold, which is rare enough, an have $11,250 to show for it. But hey, if the record goes platinum (one million copies), there may be some real money coming.
Let's say, instead, you self-produce. It costs you $1.00 to make each disc, and you're selling discs online for $15.00, or just the download for $5.00. You sell CDs to 5000 fans, 15,000 to buy the download... that's $120,000 (CD cost already factored in) from 20,000 fans.. you made more money, but needed only 1/5 the listeners. And if you're really creative, you use something like Kickstarter, and offer a bunch of perks to your fans, in addition to the new album. This lets them pre-pay for the music, giving you more control over how much you actually spend on production.
And it can do far, far better. A recent example: Amanda Palmer. You may not have heard of her, but she does have a following.. and she sold her new album, plus perks, on Kickstarter, to 24,883 fans... not far off my made-up example. She had a goal of $100,000... again, about what she might hope to make on a gold record, almost exactly. She actually brought in $1,192,793... over 10x as much. Versus the $24,883 that she would have grossed selling that many records. Now sure, the CD will likely keep selling once it's out. And most musicians who aren't filling arenas are making most of their money touring, not on music sales... but a big part of that's the whole system. The big labels are the RIAA are not necessary.
Currently, if you take all forms of personal computer (Windows, Linux, desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone), iOS has just under 10% of the total market, Android 4.7% of the market. So that's not quite 15% of all computers regularly using touchscreens. On this same scale, MacOS is at 7.5%, Windows Vista at 7.7%, Windows XP at 23%, and Windows 7 at 38%. Touchscreen devices aren't close to taking over. But they are the fastest growing market.
What Microsoft seems to be ignoring, in their quest to join the Apple/Android mobile party, is that touchscreens are a compromise. I'm willing to smear my greasy fingers over my viewing surface, or to have virtual input device take up half my viewing area, but only so that I can have this cool skinny thing in my pocket or a small folio. On the desktop, touch screens are pointless, regardless of the latest fads in mobile. We have the room for a keyboard (over 10x faster at text entry than the best virtual keyboard), or a mouse, a graphics tablet, a Space Explorer... hell, all of 'em at once.
And touchscreens are not built for the way we're made. We tried that back in the 70s, with light pens and actual touch screens (usually using optical sensors, not R/C methods). They work pretty well on things you hold horizontally. They suck rocks at things you hold vertically. Use a touchscreen on a PC desktop all day, and the RSI you'll be experiencing makes keyboard/mouse seem like a walk in the park.
And room for 2-3 screens, too. Big screens. The other compromise Microsoft wants to bring to the desktop is the full-screen-only application. This definitely made sense when smartphones had 3.5" screens at 480x320. With today's 4-5" screens and 1280x720 or more, I'm not too sure about that... that's higher resolution in my pocket right now than I had on all but my latest laptop (more computing power, too). And it's extremely silly on a dual-monitor desktop... it's nice to be able to maximize an application from time to time, but it's pretty rare thing for me.
If they're streaming Netflix in HD, you'll saturate those three T1s with just one viewer. The problem there would be using 51-year-old links to backhaul an internet connection sold as "modern".
Depends on what you have already. For 12Mb/s access with no caps, I'd happily turn over the $120/month I'm paying for satellite (1.5Mb/s, 550MB daily cap). And that's currently the best satellite deal I can get, which is better than anyone's 3G cellular (no company is doing fixed terrestrial wireless here). No other options.
On the other hand, if you have cable and FiOS both available, and 100Mb/s plans for $50/month, then yeah, 12Mb/s would be pretty slow, and I'd expect it cheap.
Umm.. the Post Office is self-funded. It's regulated by Congress, but not funded by Congress.
In the days of 768K DSL, was 50K dialup unacceptable? Given an upward limit of 100-300Mb/s from some suppliers, it's not at all wrong to think of 3Mb/s and under as the trailing, embarrassing edge of internet access these days.
The white spaces are inherently free and unlicensed... it's just that the technology for this (802.22) isn't quite in place yet. The folks who actually do have the licenses (eg, broadcast television) worked very hard to make it nearly impossible to build a working white space radio, and even harder to use it (you had to have both a GPS and an internet connection of some kind, to make sure it was still legal to use the frequency you wanted to use, even before making that first connection). The FCC relaxed some of the rules a little bit last year, and that's likely to make it more practical.
For those who don't know, the idea of a white space radio is to re-purpose the unused parts of the TV band, dynamically, as another ISM style band (like 2.4GHz and 900MHz, only with hundreds of megahertz of bandwidth). To make this work, you have to play very nicely with neighboring television channels. Part of that's restricting every channel to 6MHz, but also backing off of adjacent channels in use (one of the frustrating things of the original specs, you had to have crazy quiet side lobes on your signal, way beyond anything required for 802.11 or cellular, and then STILL had lower power limits if there wasn't a guard channel between you and the occupied ATSC channel), and checking your location via an online database to eliminate known commercial stations. And still, you were supposed to be able to detect analog microphone use in some of the ranges (there were only about 50 licenses sold, nationally, for wireless analog mics, but there are tens of thousands or more in actual use).
Depends on what you're streaming. 720p video is 2Mb/s from YouTube, 2.8-3.4Mb/s from Netflix. Yes, you can stream ok-quality SD video at 1Mb/s. Or download a moderate Linux distro in a day or so. My HughesNet connection is theoretically 1.5Mb/s, but there's that whole "weakest link" thing... it's not coming down at 1.5Mb/s if it doesn't get past other bottlenecks at that speed (which is the case with all ISPs, it's just a couple of levels worse with satellite, plus the 750ms or so minimum latency... it does take time for the trip to orbit and back).
Broadband is what you want... it's the correct solution to the problem. The problem isn't the broadband, it's getting connections to people at a price both these consumers and some supplier are willing to agree upon. The solutions for rural folks, like myself, are never likely to involved wires/fibers -- there's just too little incentive for the network suppliers, even with their 40% profit margins, to hook us up. And mobile wireless is no better -- in the USA, it's actually been in retrograde for some time. Sure, the bandwidths have improved, but the cost of service has been going up over the last ten years, with data caps and increased per GB charges.
So it's likely to remain some form of fixed wireless. I'm on satellite now, and that's $120/month for HughesNet's SoHo service, which has crazy low daily data caps and service that was considered broadband when I signed up ten years ago, but no longer qualifies (1.5Mb/s down, up to 500Mb/s up). They claim they're speeding it up this fall, we'll see... and they've said nothing about increasing the data caps, so I assume it's still 550MB per day.
Health Insurance is broken because "Insurance" is the wrong answer. It should be Health Care. I insure my house, my car, etc. because, while I'm not expecting them to be damaged, I know it's possible. People, on the other hand, will break -- it's inevitable. The only question is whether that first big health problem kills you or not. The high corporate profits (typically in excess of 30%), the incentive to over test and over prescribe, it's all part of the basis for healthcare being private industry insurance. It's a fundamentally wrong solution to the problem. Looking at countries that do it differently (pretty much every other major Western Democracy), they're getting better healthcare, living longer, and spending half of what we in the US spend on it.
Sure, it's easy to ignore... until something serious hits you or a family member. If you're lucky, you're covered, at least mostly. If not, you're probably going to have to sell your house, maybe even go into bankruptcy, to keep yourself or that family member alive. My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer two-and-a-half year... pretty common; about 12% of all women in the USA will get it within their lifetime. She's going for her 11th surgery this Monday. She was fortunately covered, though it's nearly always an argument with the Insurance Company for each new test or procedure -- I believe this is standard policy at most insurance companies, since plenty of their customers don't know if they're covered or not, and when intimidated by the insurance company, they simply pay the bill. Medical expensive have run well in excess of either of our salaries these last couple of years. And in the grand scheme of things, this was a relatively minor cancer (stage 2, the 15% of breast cancers that don't show up at all on X-Ray). In other countries, this would have been treated the same way (I have an Oncologist friend in Italy I conferred with the entire time), but the costs would have been dramatically lower: lower prices on the same drugs, and no skimming 30%+ to pay an unnecessary layer of insurance company profits and management (compare to Medicare, which I'm sure isn't perfect, but has a 2% overhead).
There are only about 800,000 Native Americans living on tribal lands, based on the last census. Even if no tribal lands had any form of broadband, that still leaves a heck of a lot of us white-eyes without broadband.
Most of Iceland would fit in my livingroom... but yeah, it's a recent thing in the USA to ignore our infrastructure entirely. After all, rich people can always get very good internet connections.
And it's corporate greed. Where I live, I could get a decent DSL connection. But the telecom won't sell me one, because they just don't see any point in installing DSL support (the local node is already in place -- I can see it from my driveway, and it is DSL compatible) for, at best, a couple of houses. That's the private sector for you -- they cherry pick for the highest profit per installation, and there's no requirement that they cover those who are slightly less profitable.
200 yards from houses with cable... I'd offer to pay one of neighbors broadband bills (or pay for the upgrade to the fastest available at their house), and set up their wireless, and wash their car, and give their dogs a bath, in exchange for letting me set up a house to house 802.11n link (given where my house is, probably at 900MHz.... trees eat 2.4GHz).
Where I am, I can get Verizon 3G pretty well, but it's way too slow and, of course, there are tiny caps. So I'm on satellite, which has a 550MB daily cap before being POTS-i-fied for 24 hours (no caps between 2AM and 7AM). That's 1.5Mb/s down and somewhere around 500kb/s up, the fastest currently from Hughesnet. That's $120/month. They claim a speed upgrade is coming this fall... a way to tear through that 550MB even faster, I'm guessing.
In theory, Verizon will have every cell in their network on LTE before the end of next year. But their pricing precludes any use of LTE for home connections. Eventually, maybe, we'll see 802.22 providers -- white space radio isn't practical for mobile, and there's a ton of potential bandwidth, and the frequencies are the correct ones for rural and other underserved homes. But that's probably a few years away, the way these things move, even with last least relaxation of the white space rules.
I can see a local telephone node from my mailbox, and yeah, it's DSL-capable (a phone tech even told me, once, the board set and software revision needed). But just try finding anyone who'll sell you a DSL connection where the DSL boards aren't already installed. I mean, if they can't also sell TV, they're not interested.
It's all relative... the 2560x1440 IPS monitor I just bought cost $100 less than either of my 1920x1200 MVA monitors from ~6 years ago. That's the positive effect of the TV-PC merger... you may not want a base level, TN-LCD at 1920x1080, but the fact of those monitors being so cheap (well under $200 if you shop around) drags the whole industry down in price.
Given that the same folks who built the display for Apple (Samsung, LG) are perfectly willing to sell similar displays to anyone else, I don't imagine it'll take a year. Falling prices, sure, the main reason companies will jump on this is the promise of higher margins. But at least there's a chance of falling prices -- the Mac version is going to always be way overpriced.
And ironically, just as laptops are getting a long-needed boost in resolution, Windows 8 is coming along and expecting everyone to run everything fullscreen, pretty much erasing any advantage. Well, hopefully, no vendors of "real" applications jump on that bandwagon to hell, and things get fixed in Windows 9.
A laptop is my last choice for a real work PC anyway (CAD, embedded software, video, photography, etc). Guess they're not terrible for web browsing, but I can't imagine anyone getting real work done on a single 17" screen. That's far more limiting than a difference in 120 lines. I do have a single 24" monitor in my home lab, due to size constraints, but it's not far from my main desktop and 2-3 screens (the third is mostly just for video work).
But I do think the "retina on a PC" meme is coming. After all, my cellphone's 4.6" screen is 1280x720... why limit a 17" screen to only 1920x1080? It is also correct, though, that operating systems need better scaling/sizing options to deal with more of a disjoint between screen resolution and viewing size than we currently have, before this really works well. Even Apple's "retina" MacBook is kind of a kludge, software-wise.
Oh, please. Do you really need to run every app full screen? Are you not using an OS that has resizable windows?
Hey, that's not such a silly question. It seems that the folks in charge of Microsoft, Apple, and even Canonical these days are trying in various ways to do just that: release operating systems that don't support Windows. In "Windows" 8, Microsoft is calling the existing stuff "Legacy" or "Classic", and their new "Don't-Call-It-Metro" APIs and UI is now "Windows 8 Style Application". And they don't Window -- run it on that 8K screen, it's still a full screen application. Stupid, amazingly stupid. But not really a moot question, with this de-evolution in the works, and not just one place, but with multiple outbreaks throughout the industry.
Otherwise, I completely agree with your assertion... my PDFs or other "traditional" documents can go top to bottom, with plenty of room to reading, and plenty of space for other windows at the same time. Given that I have over 30 open at the moment, this is very much an increase in productivity over the single-window display.
Well, the original specs permitted both 1080/60i and 1080/24p... but maintaining the logical ability to do interlaced video was really about about bandwidth. Kind of a shame... if they had based it all on AVC rather than MPEG-2, a higher 1080p format would have been possible. On the other hand, the broadcasters had enough trouble dealing with two format options... they really didn't need more to consumer them :-)
It's also telling that it was only the very first generation of HDTV, those CRT/CRT-projector based models, that actually did 1080i. Digital displays came into their own right pretty much in the second generation of HDTV (once you could swap a YPrPb input for HDMI or other digital interfaces), and the various digital displays can't actually display an interlaced video stream -- it's all upscaled to 1080p anyway.
Computer monitors, at least the cheap ones, are build from television pieces. So any news related to new TV formats directly impacts the kind of computer monitors that are going to be built. All of them. After all, you're not likely to be able to sell many 2560x1400 monitors for $1500 when TV panels deliver 3840x2160 for $250.
Windows? Don't you know that Apple and Microsoft are getting rid of those? It's all full screen in the future (yuk)!
In MOST areas of the USA the TV bandwidth goes unused - it could be giving us true cell phone broadband.
So-called "white space" radio is a real thing... using any of that unused TV spectrum for ISM-style wireless. And in fact, the FCC recently relaxed the rules a bit, which were written to make things very difficult on radio designers (I was, in fact, designing a radio a few years back for white space compatibility, but the company nixed that feature, not as being undoable, just too expensive for a small company).
But work has continued. There's a spec for a standard waveform now (802.22), and lots of companies making chips. Curiously, this targets exactly the kind of thing you're talking about -- Wireless Regional Area Networks. Given that my only option in internet right now is satellite, I'm really anxious to see this meet reality.
The average cable or satellite system does 30-60Mb/s per 6MHz analog TV slot... and that number has been increasing (going from 64QAM to 256QAM, etc). Satellites have relatively few analog slots, but they are evolving. Cable has a pretty crazy amount of bandwidth, but has to devote some of that to internet service. Fiber, on the other hand, uses frequency multiplexing to essentially overlay cable, voice, and internet on the same optical cable. So there's plenty of bandwidth for higher definition.
As well, work continues on more advanced compression algorithms. The limit is infrastructure and computing power -- it takes some years to build up industry-wide support for a given video CODEC (MPEG-2, AVC), so there's resistance to changing for something slightly better. And for any successful replacement, it'll be necessary to deliver encoders that can function on mobile cameras, decoders that can comfortably live on set top boxes, PCs, smartphones, etc.
And it doesn't necessarily have to happen all at once. I suspect they're going to 8K with the idea of a replacement broadcast system, in a large part because going to 4K would be too soon. We're already seeing 4K technology in televisions (LG has one shipping in Korea next month), camcorders (JVC released a $5,000 4K camera a few months back), etc.... all built on existing technology. 4K films might be delivered on Blu-ray or BD-XL discs, maybe with H.265 on standard Blu-ray, nothing too crazy... you'd need a new player, but that player could handle the older formats, scale to your particular display device, etc. The packaged disc would include both standard and 4K version, maybe something like what they're doing with 3D today. This wouldn't be something all that new, but rather, Yet Another Blu-ray Profile (with the standard software upgrade to the PS3... though in reality, I suspect the PS3 of being too weak to decode 4K and downscale to HD... more of a PS4 thing), etc.
Going to 8K, it might be a big bunch of new stuff. In any case, the consumer push to 4K has already started. Maybe it's just for videophiles, maybe not. Given the fall in prices on TVs, I could see a 4K television selling in a few years for about what I paid for my 71" DLP six years ago.
You pretty much do need to grow TV size to make a higher resolution more practical. But that's happening, anyway. My parents' "big" TV was a 24" console. My "big" TV is a 71" DLP.
To _fully_ resolve 1080p on your 50" TV, you'd need to be viewing from no more than 6.5 feet away (the recommended THX distance is 5.6 feet, but that's about viewing angle, not resolution). Farther than that, and you will definitely start to diminish the return on the difference between 720p and 1080p. If you have average vision, of course (for distance, I'm 20/20 in one eye, 20/25 in the other, so I pretty much follow these recommendations successfully). You can go to nearly 10ft (9.75) and still fully resolve the 720p image.
The 1080p thing has been selling TVs, and the 4K or 8K thing may, eventually. And while there's nothing wrong with offering higher resolution, there are going to be plenty of folks who paid more for a higher resolution, yet never really see it.
That's incorrect -- network-wise, only Fox and ABC broadcast in 720/60p. There is no 720/30p, that's not a legal ATSC format.
The choice of 720p was never very popular among most of the networks. It was pushed hard by ABC due to their ESPN division -- 720/60p really is better than 1080/60i for many sports. I've shot soccer video in 720/60p for the last eight years... it's definitely better, most of the time. You'll find ABC or FOX owned channels in 720/60p, along with a few sports-only satellite channels. Pretty much everything else is in 1080/60i, in the USA. Some satellite programming is available in 1080/24p as well, not sure about cable, but it does make sense.
All cable and satellite companies have the ability to reformat your video on the fly, as well as re-encode it, generally from MPEG-2 to AVC, at least on satellite. But that's specific to your cable system... that's not the way its broadcast.
That's nominally 3840 x 2160, aka, "4K".. you get it, or something like it, at the better movie theaters these days. There are already camcorders shipping that do this, and televisions coming Real Soon Now (http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/22/3259613/lg-84-inch-4k-tv-korea-release-north-america-europe-latin-asia). YouTube already supports 4K video. HDMI 1.4 does, too, at least up to 24p.
So if it's already real, it's hopefully not the subject of work on new standards. And the 4K stuff is coming on fast enough that it's all based on logical extensions to what already exists. TVs are smart enough to adapt to the input and reformat lower resolution video. Disc delivery doesn't matter as much as it used to, but just like 3D, if 4K is important in the home, a new Blu-ray profile will cover it (if you really want more storage, the existing BD-XL format might get employed).
Starting out worrying about 8K video now, these guys will have the time to think about much larger changes in the video infrastructure.