This provides both router and a Wifi infrastructure mode, not ad-hoc mode. And the router is the real thing, much better than MS's crufty ICS. For one, ad-hoc connections are usually limited to 802.11b speeds, up to 11Mb/s... infrastructure can go full speed (g/n). Probably no big deal for connection sharing, but for streaming media, big deal. You also can't disable SSID broadcast in ad-hoc mode (haven't figured out how to in Connectify yet, either, but it's at least technically possible).
Apparently, this works even if the network you're sharing is hooked in via the same Wifi connection.That might not seem useful, but certainly for pay-for-access Wifi, this lets all your devices, friends or associates, etc. share just one pay-for connection (airports, some hotels, etc). Some public hotspots are also hostile to small devices, they only want to see computers. So there's some sense in here. And hey, free right now anyway. I figure I'll see if it's something I use now, before there's any money involved.
Another example... my kid's college dorm doesn't allow the use of Wifi based routers, but everyone has a laptop. If we install this on his laptop, in theory he'll be able to get iPod and X-Box connectivity in "stealth" mode... no router to be seen, no SSID broadcast, and every Wifi device is happy on infrastructure... some have issues in ad-hoc mode. That's what led me to playing with this on my Win7 machine this week (the kid doesn't have Win7 installed yet, but he's nearly as eager as I to see Vista wiped from all memory, machine and human, both. Still deciding about upgrading the XP machine... it ain't exactly broken, not sure it needs fixing).
Obviously, skilled Ubuntu users have less need of simple, end-user tweaked solutions. They write their own:-) Not as often or as well as Gentoo or Slackware users, but sure, if Ubuntu can't already configure your PC as with a router and infrastructure mode, you'll code that puppy up over morning coffee. In Python, most likely.. every Ubuntu coder I know just LOVES the Python.
... well, at least not here in the USA. But if it weren't for the separation of Church and State, EVERY religion would eventually be up on fraud charges. And while I do think it's ludicrious and rather sad that anyone believes in a religion that EVERYONE KNOWS was invented by a schlock science fiction writer, with the express purpose of making big money, who announced said intentions to fellow writers (Harlan Ellison for one... google it) before the fact and all... it is their right to be just that stupid, at least here. And for me, this is only slightly less disturbing than religions founded on the wanderings of stone age desert dwellers a few thousand years ago.
For one, they could raise the initial price. Back in the VHS days, media companies released a rental video some weeks before the consumer edition. The rental version usually cost around $80-$100. Video stores could refuse to stock them, but they risk losing out to their competition.
The major video stores all entered into deals with the studios. They get DVDs cheap, but pay some negotiated pre-rental fees... thus, the studios share in the risk but also the profits. This removed the point of having separate rental and consumer release days... also, consumer purchases got way more profitable than rentals, so they don't want too many things getting in the way of that.
Still, major rental companies have to fall in line. They don't have to get low cost DVDs to stock their chain stores, but without that deal with the studios, they'll be paying more per video and they'll have supply problems. RedBox might have some breathing room, but most of the major chains are renting videos for about the consumer limit... if they upped the price, they'd lose customers even faster than they are now.
Online, it's worse. Netflix needs direct delivery of new titles, and they'd be in trouble if the prices shot up. Plus, they depend on good relations with the studios for video distribution... the studios could shut that down overnight if they wanted to. Or make them wait a few weeks. Tiered releases are the rule rather than the exception, anyway. Most of the time, the film hits the theaters, often released at a strategic time to maximize viewers (eg, you probably don't want your new film going out the same weekend as the next "Batman" or "Harry Potter"). The it's on to video, often with a similar strategy (eg, get those discs into stores when the sequel is hitting theaters, or during Christmas shopping season, etc). From there, you got wait, pay-per-view, wait, HBO/Starz/Showtime, wait, ad-driven-TV, wait, Wal-Mart $5 or $10 discount bin.
So from the distribution point of view, it makes perfect sense that rentals would follow DVD sales after a wait, there's just no easy way to enforce this. But there are ways. And they could certainly treat network-based rental as just another kind of PPV, rather than treating it as a physical rental. It's their product, after all... no one's making anyone watch these things. Well, other than Dr. Forrester or Dr. Erhardt.
Blu-Ray players start at $100 these days (store brand at Best-Buy this week), and it's actually getting difficult to find one much over $300. I have nearly 50 BDs, and have never paid even close to $40 for a disc... usually around $20-$25. Oh, I did buy "Lost: Season 3" on BD for $39.95, but TV series are typically more expensive.
If you think $5-$10 for a movie is a normal price, I guess you're one of those guys raiding the discount bins at Wal-Mart for older DVDs. That's what make Wal-Mart the top DVD reseller in the USA. If you're not after newer titles, you're better off buying used DVDs at yard sales and flea markets... newer titles show up there before they do at Wal-Mart's discount bin, and going rate for DVDs at yard sales is $3.00 each.
Of course, if you're that cheap, you probably haven't bought a decent HDTV either, so HD is rather pointless for you anyway.
Yeah, 8% in September... of 2008. But it was only 3% of the market for all of 2008... sales have been rapidly increasing. On some titles, it's more like 35% ("The Dark Knight", "Watchmen"... obviously, those films with appeal to early adopters). Overall, it's currently averaging just over 12% of video sales. Blu-Ray sales were up 66.3 percent to $161 million in the third quarter of 2009 and are up 83 percent year-to-date to $568 million, according to the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG). That's over 100 million discs projected for 2009. Best Buy, the leading Blu-Ray retailer (at around 50% of the US market) is also making more money on Blu-Ray sales than DVD sales at the moment.
And then there are the player sales... 3.3 million players sold in 2009 so far, not counting the PS3. But the real kicker here is that Blu-Ray player sales are poised to generate more revenue than DVD player sales in the US, this year. There are basic, entry-level players, already out, selling at $150-$200 or less as an everyday price, not some Black Friday thing. Right now, Wal-Mart is listing two players below $150, and an additional 10 for under $200. Best-Buy has their store brand for $99, and an additional 10 under $200.
That's important, because that's an established price point in the DVD player market for premium units. When 480p players were first introduced, they averaged around $150. Then it was HDMI upscaling players, also around $150. This year, the premium DVD player is a Blu-Ray player. The holiday season hasn't even kicked in yet.
I think Windows 7 may be an improvement over Vista simply based Vista's failure.
For any new OS, you need a rationale for that OS. Ideally, you NEVER need a new OS. After all, any proper OS is designed with full modularity in mind... you can plug in new stuff and it just works.
There's no downside to make an "New OS" in the FOSS community.. you're always free to take some of the new and bolt it on to what you already have.
In the commercial sector, there are other forces. Sometimes they benefit the consumer, sometimes not-so-much. With Windows in particular, though, they have an obliged new OS date.. every 3 or 4 years, the OEMs want a new OS to push hardware sales, simply because there is a class of consumer that thinks (or can be made to think) they need a new OS, but they're too timid to try installing said new OS on their existing PC. Plus, they bought an entry-level XP PC five years ago for $500, the Windows upgrade is over $100, but they can get a much better entry level PC today for $350.
Microsoft's Prime Directive in recent times, if not always, has been "Ensure Our Domination". So, when you look at a list of ideas for the next OS, it runs something like this:
1. Get something out the door, now, to make Dell, HP, et al happy. 2. Compatible enough with last version, so they have no excuse to jump platform, thus keeping us in power. 3. Change driver model, to keep those hardware companies doing what we tell them, thus keeping us in power. 4. Any other new technologies that keep us in power.. what about that Web thing? 5. Make friends with Hollywood, via DRM, to keep us in power 6. Eye candy and other bright shiny objects to fool consumers into upgrades 7. Gaming and video enhancements, to make stuff play well on Windows, to keep us in power.... 100. Wasn't there a bug list somewhere.
The proper list, more or less, would be more like this:
1. Fix all bugs that require major architectural changes in order to fix correctly (all other bugs were of course fixed with free updates). 2. Cool new features to make users lives easier. 3. Cool new features to make programmer's lives easier. 4. Bug fixes for 2,3.. before release....
The problem with Microsoft is that, basically, new releases have never been about users. Why do I want to update? Well, I don't... ever. Traditionally, MS has found a way to force the issues... new apps won't run in the old OS, we know of horrible bugs we'll never fix, no new device drivers for that new thing that's out, we aren't supporting that new bus, whatever. The attention to users has largely been "find a bright shiny object for them"... we need them, but they're stupid, so we can trick them into upgrades.
That worked, for quite some time. It failed with Vista... perhaps because of the bugs in Vista, but I do recall a bug list for XP at some 20,000+ known bugs. It got better.
It seems like, certainly to the functional failure of Vista. If the new OS doesn't overtake the old one in installed base, that's a fairly in MS's book. On many levels.. there's a snowball effect for a well received new OS.. 3rd party apps starting moving to only run in the new OS, bringing more people into it, etc. The opposite happened with Vista.. XP was still the applications model, not Vista. The only major impact of Vista was that MS finally released a fully supported 64-bit OS (hardware companies didn't have to do 64-bit XP drivers, they did have to do 64-bit Vista drivers).
Certainly, consumer oriented FOSS releases, and even MacOS to an extent, are more likely to follow that second list... FOSS because the users are the authors, to a large extent. MacOS because, being proprietary, Apple doesn't have the same kind of OS to PC relationship... everyone upgrades their MacOS install, new MacOS upgrades are cheap, and they don't couple the OS release to selling new hardware. Certainly they do stuff that's designed to help Apple, but they're also adding in "cool" new features. Of course, Mac people are kind of retro, thinking OSs are cool enough anymore to even have features that interesting. Usually no, even in MacOS. The market's mature.. your best result is not alienating your customer base.
Thing is, non-geeks don't drive the market. They do enable it.. the technologies everyone gets in their PCs makes everyone else's HDDs cheaper. But there is always going to be the 1 platter rule... consumer PCs get an HDD with one platter, whatever that is. In order to make larger drives cost effective, the HDD makers need to leverage from the consumer market (as do any other companies serving a variety of markets in a very competitive field). The cheapest HDD made will always be based on the commodity technology of the day, the same stuff used in all but perhaps the crazy high-end.
Also, there's competition. An OEM pays $35-$50 for an entry-level PC HDD, last I checked (I used to do this stuff professionally). That's fallen slightly over the last few decades, but slowly. You will never find, say, a Seagate claiming that 500GB or 5TB or whatever is "enough", simply because, if they did, in a year or so Western Digital or someone else would deliver a 1TB or 10GB drive at the same price, and the OEM wouldn't pause a femtosecond in deciding to go ahead with that.
SSD have a different problem.. flash cells are only good for a relatively small number of rewrites. Ok, maybe it's 500,000 rather than 10,000 (what you can expect from earlier generation dual-level NAND flash), but it's not even remotely comparable to the media life of an HDD.
HDDs will grow in size entirely independently of consumer size. It's the old "because we can" argument. You can't make an HDD cheaper than a single platter unit, which will cost an OEM around $40 these days. The prices have fallen slightly over the last several decades, but not all that much.. the capacity changes. There is enough of a demand in the HDD market, outside of consumer products, to increase the density, that this will keep happening for the foreseeable future. That new technology will always be applied to the single platter consumer drives, to help establish economies of scale for the rest of the product line.
The end result is that HDD size in consumer PCs will keep growing. There's a small market for SSD in laptops, but this won't translate to PCs anytime soon.. as much as Joe Sixpack doesn't need a 1TB drive, he also doesn't worry about 150MB/s vs. 75MB/s (or whatever).
Cinematic film should be good up to about 8Mpixel scanning... that holds us though HDTV and into 4K video. Much of early television was done this way. Sure, anything that wasn't Kodachrome and was shot in the 60's is suffering color issues, but much of that can be repaired in modern editing.
Star Trek-TOS looks better on Blu-Ray than ever before. Of course they did enhanced versions... George Lucas established this as mandatory. But you can turn that off, at least on the BDs. You can also listen to magically created 7.1 sound, or the original mono. Whether the enhanced video ruins it or enhances it is certainly an individual choice. I like the idea.. the series was generally strong enough in storytelling, that was the point. Improving the look makes it more accessible to newbies. I don't think the cheesy SFX were really any kind of "point" to the original series, they were simply part of the reality of NBC budgets convolved with the state of film-making technology back in the mid 1960s.
MP3 itself has improved a bit, but sure, we have older collections. Mine's a bit newer.. my old, not-backed-up HDD crashed some years back, so when I re-ripped everything, I got to use LAME at 320Mb/s, rather than "whatever" at 128Mb/s. These days, I like FLAC for ripping... with that, I can transcode for any device I might have, now or in the future, without any additional quality loss.
Decade-old MKV collections shouldn't seem odd, but rather, kinda the point. MKV is gaining popularity largely because it's an open standard, rather than closed standard like Quicktime or MPEG-4. It's not that everyone migrates to MKV because it's open.. it's the openness that delivers free tools that make it easier to use. That won't go away. Though there's a nearly 100% chance that the device you have your MKV files on today will be replaced before then. Open source is the best possible hedge against format rot... crazy consumer acceptance is the next best.
It goes with money.. I can get a 2TB drive for about $200. In mid-1999, a 17GB drive cost about $350 (MSRP), give or take.
250GB will definitely be joke in 10 years, just as 250MB is today. I mean, you can buy 4GB flash card for the price of a big Latte at Starbucks today. I designed a couple of R/C radio controllers (Nomadio), and put 512MB of NV storage in those... just for settings and stuff, several years back. Why is there only 256MB in the Nintendo DSi? Easy.. there's still a joke, it's just on you. They want to keep you dependent on the online site... there's enough flash to keep a few games, a couple MP3s, whatever, on the unit, but hardly enough to keep you away from their portal for long, if you're an avid user. The point of changing the model to online is to increase sales, and that only happens if they get you in the store on a regular basis.
The cost of the HDD in your PC is pretty invariant... what changes is the capacity. And that can't change, because the cost of the parts remains pretty fixed, so HDDs can only get so small. Sure, flash drives can replace them, to an extent (eg, as long as you're a light user, otherwise, the SSD will wear out long before the HDD would have), for low power/low use situations. But that's going to increase, too, and certainly tape new NV technologies over the next 10 years.. flash itself will probably fail in the marketplace. But for the near future, HDDs will still be cheaper than SDDs, and so storage will rise, simply because that $40-$50 HDD (OEM price in quantity) is still the best option, whether its 40MB or 40TB.
I wish. I have 30% free on my 6TB RAID, 12% free on my 1.5TB boot drive, and 50% free on my auxiliary 1.5TB drive. Sure, some data can probably be archived, but that's real time involved. It might be cheaper just to drop a couple 2TB drives into the RAID. Ok, I do HD video, one of the big consumers of HDD space.. I don't have a single "ripped" video online. If you did, in HD, you'd need a system that dwarfs this.
But consider this... in 1993, I was doing serious MIDI music, but I wanted to get into recording. So I spent the $1200 for a Seagate "multimedia capable" HDD.. 2GB. In 2008, I could buy a 2GB flash card for under $10.
Thus, hopefully, in 2025, I'll be able to buy a 6TB flash card for under $5.. I only paid half that for the storage in the RAID (obviously, the RAID box itself cost something, too).
Sure, Blu-Ray is more expensive than DVD, and if you needed to be 10,000 DVDs versus 2,000 BDs, and either would do, sure, go for the DVDs. But below a certain point, the price isn't germaine.
DVDs offer about 40GB/dollar, while with BDs, it's more like 10GB/dollar (in small cakeboxes, BD-R 25s cost about $2.50 right now.. I suspect some of you haven't really been paying attention). The cheapest external large drive I could find on NewEgg last week (1GB) ran me 11GB/dollar. I am writing of prices I actually pay... obviously, if you buy HDDs in bulk, you're getting a better price. Then again, they're not likely paying even $0.50 a disc for the glass mastered BD50s you find in most Blu-Ray retail boxes.
Anyone with a source for HDDs of a modern size (eg, not firesale 100GB models that pretty much can't be sold) for $0.05/GB, quantity one, send me a link.
Most of us? Well, for new disc releases, it varies between 10% and 35% of the discs sold. So technically, yeah, that's "most of us", if you count everyone in the country. Somehow, I suspect it's not passing by "most of us" when it comes to/. users.
Or Best-Buy customers.. they're making more money on BD than DVD already. Sure, BD titles are more expensive, but it's also true that much of the volume of DVD sales is in older stuff. Wal-Mart is the largest reseller of DVDs in the country, but that's boosted dramatically by their bins of $5 discs and racks of $10 discs.
BD is already a win, and this Christmas will prove it, for those non-believers. BD players are hitting the $100 mark.. and not just on special deals. There are a number of new, basic units selling with an MSRP at $150, street price around $100. These have already filled this "high end" niche within the DVD player world (at $500-$1000, BD was unto itself... not really part of the DVD ecosystem). That's the $100-$150 market into which they push a new upscale feature every year or two. When 480p players hit the market (curiously, the first one had a 480i MPEG-2 decoder that fed a 480i->480p frame conversion device.. zero advantage over feeding 480i into the average modern TV of the day), they were in this price range. Next came upconverting DVD players.. despite the fact that your HDTV also has an upconverter.. at least, if you're tech savvy, you can figure out which is better. So this year, Blu-Ray is that niche in DVD players. In two years, it'll drop to the $50 player point.
And even then, the HD-DVD fanboys will still reject it. But the world won't care if those 4,256 guys don't buy BD players...
If you're into video, you already knew HD had won... it's difficult to find a camcorder for much over $400 these days that isn't HD. Last year it was $1000, next year, we'll be seeing SD start to vanish.
Frame rate is already on the rise.. the $400 Sanyo VPC-FH1 does 1080/60p recording (MPEG-4 AVC) already. It's not going to scare away $4,000 professional cameras, but it's actually delivering video only slightly lower in quality than this years' $1200-$1500 consumer models. This is a portent of things to come in the camcorder market. Most new higher end camcorders this year support xyYCC mode, which isn't higher bitrate, but a higher color mode that uses the full range of 8-bit YUV color, as well as the specs in HDMI 1.3 that support 10-bit, 12-bit, and 16-bit color (that's bits-per-channel, the usual way to speak of these things in digital video terms).
I don't think anyone's talking about real 3D... all the 3D hype is about stereoscopic video. Stereoscopic video doesn't break when you move, unless you're counting on one of the weird no-glasses displays being played around with. It's just that stereoscopic isn't full 3D. Most people watching a television have no need for prespectives to change from one end of the couch to the next. Stereoscopic video needs about twice the bandwidth as monoscopic, maybe a bit less (eg, using differential encoding), certainly no more than that.
I think we'll have to wait for real 3D until they perfect that direct brain interface. At that point, the bandwidth should drop dramatically.
Whoops.. and certainly not for the $3K... but the Red "Mysterium Monstro" 645, already annouced, is nearly IMAX resolution. The "Mysterium Monstro" 617, on the other hand, is over twice that resolution (168mm x 56mm)... at least as far as image sensor goes (you can argue about the specific resolution of film, depending on the specific film involved). This is part of Red's DSMC system... crazy modular. So maybe it won't take until 2025 to see IMAX resolutions in the home:-)
Yeah, he should have said "a small fraction". And getting smaller.. the digital revolution has, more than anything, been about turning every electronic device into a computer. So your cellphone, camcorder, camera, car, GPS, music player, music recorder, watch, video player, video recorder, TV, guitar, piano, toy, thermometer, oven, and even sometimes your frickin' sneakers are also computers.
Well, sure, but unlike VHS and even DVD to an extent, porn wasn't necessary to push HDTV. After all, we all get it online, anyway, and it's one of the few video art-forms that, as you say, does not benefit in any way from higher resolutions.
Some companies are already working on post-HD displays for consumer electronics. Digital cinema is moving to 4K video (nominally 4096x2160 pixels).. high end consumer gear won't be far behind. NHK (Japan) is working on nearly 8K systems (7680x4320) for 2025 or thereabouts.
Videophiles and home theater enthusiasts would buy this stuff today. And most of the pieces are already in place to enable this. The nice video DSP technology we have for upscaling DVD will be applied to upscale Blu-Ray initially, so a 4K display will actually produce a better picture from existing material than today's HD displays. The interfaces, like HDMI and Displayport, as well as most PC graphics cards, already support at least 2560×1600.. HDMI over type B signalling/connector can deliver 3840×2400, today.
Consumer camcorders and DSLRs are headed that way, fast. Most of the top consumer video camcorders are already using much larger imagers; lots of 6Mpixel-8Mpixel camcorders went out this year. Sanyo already makes a $400 consumer model, the VPC-FD1, which can shoot at a full 1080/60p, twice the rate of Blu-Ray (however, already supported by more recent HDTVs). Many of this years' DSLRs are supporting 1080p video with 12-14Mpixel sensors.
IMAX resolution? Don't know about that... or even just what that is, since it's film. Well, let's see.. a standard 35mm frame is 36mm x 24mm, that's from an SLR (the sensor in a "full frame" DSLR is the same size). Film cameras shoot half-frame, which is 24mm x 18mm , roughly (the "Academy" format, as delivered to theaters, is 21.95mm x 18.6mm... there's an optical audio track alongsize, but that's not present on the cameras themselves). I believe from my own film scanning that you can get an honest 20Mpixels out of a good 35mm image... as long as you're shooting something like Kodachrome 25. Today's best full frame DSLRs also top out in the 20Mpixel range. So that's a good basis. So you should expect about 10Mpixel per film frame.. which isn't a far cry from the 4K standard moving into theaters now, at 8.8Mpixels.
An IMAX frame is 70mm x 48.5mm.. nearly 8x the area of a standard 35mm film frame. So call that 80Mpixels. I don't think we're going to see a consumer video camera shooting 80Mpixels anytime soon. Even in a handheld... you're going to start running out of space in a 35mm format... the sensors can only get so small. I think we're approaching that limit, but it's more that every time you shrink the sensor, you lose light sensitivity. So pixels will probably only increase as technology improves light sensitivity, unless there's a big push. In fact, in the big push to HD, pretty much every HD camera lost sensitivity over its SD predecessor. They're only now starting to catch up (the standard for low-light in prosumer camcorders in the SD days was the Sony VX2100....good video down to 1 lux).
I think it's quite possible we'll see prosumer and then consumer video at increasingly higher resolution, going to 4K before you know it. This has already become crazy affordable for professionals, in the Red Camera. Between that and the push from the larger sensors in video-capable DSLRs, video is actually at a very interesting point in history. Even for consumer models, increased resolution is one of the only places for consumer video to go.. the quality is already getting crazy-good, and given the economies of things, significantly better optics, more buttons, many of these things will increase the cost of the gear, which, for the consumer and many pro markets, is fixed by tier (eg, since Video8, the top consumer camcorder models have been in the $1000-$1500 range, MSRP). Silicon features, including higher resolutions, while be among the lowest cost improvements to entice buyers to new models, probably within a few years. When every $400 camcorder can shoot a fabulous 1080/60i or 1080/24p or whatever, the $1200 models will have to offer something more.
The eye has a resolution limit, certainly. Optically, you have about 6 million chr
That sounds so much cooler than saying "2/3 of the people in Chicago have iTunes account". But not quite as cool as pointing out, if iTunes users had their own country, it would be around the size of Mexico, Japan, or Russia (numbers very a bit, depending on the source).
Spotify is too limited, anyway... it could work on an iPhone, but not an iPod, at least not without a Wifi connection.. and, well, Apple's approval. We already have Pandora here, which I would consider a better kind of technology for streaming audio (eg, like radio, it introduces music I might not know, but based on expressed preferences, I'm likely to like).
It's going to take a phenomenon like Google and Android, I suspect, to put a real dent in Apple's iPhone/iPod/iTunes market. And that's all based on purchases, not so much rentals or streaming. Apple's stuff doesn't change much anymore.. that's a pretty clear indication you're seeing a mature market. You need something profound to shake that up.
Profits on the iTunes store are decent (iTunes store revenue was $1.018 billion in Apple's fourth quarter.. this also includes licensing fees for iPod/iPhone accessories from third parties, they don't break it down any more), but also irrelevant. The existence of the tightly coupled iTunes store and iTunes player drives the sales of the very, very, very successful iPhone ($2.3 billion in the fourth quarter) and somewhat less successful, these days, iPod (apparently, people are buying iPhones instead... only 10.2 million iPhones sold that quarter, versus nearly 7.4 way more profitable iPhones).
Apple won the MP3 player market by delivering content, back when no one else had brokered any reasonable deal to do similarly with their player. Most still haven't done as well, though with DRM dead (for music, anyway), this matters much less than it once did. But take away the iTunes store, and then Apple's competing on a very even basis with everyone else. Sales would suffer, soon enough.
To really be successful against Apple, this kind of online point-of-sales won't hurt at all... there are plenty of users who can figure out other ways to download, sync, and install apps or music, but enough who can't, or simply don't want to be bothered.
Now, invent the mechanism, but make it non-exclusive, and you really have something. If I can shop for Android apps (and other stuff, like music and video.. might as well, once I'm there, eh) at the Google Store, the Verizon Store, the Amazon Store... well, then we've fixed one of the fundamental problems with Apple's model -- no competition. As a computer savvy person, I know I can get music from Amazon or a CD just as easily as from the iTunes store, but you need some knowledge for that.. most users take the easy way out. So Apple doesn't really have to compete with Amazon on prices for music. And it's way more complex for video or apps. Thus, no incentive to lower prices... they have a captive market. There's a big potential in retaining that ease of use, but also adding the market competition inherent in non-virtual consumer products.
Even without illegal downloads, Disney can't really control the distribution anymore.
The used tape and disc market thrives, at every flea market and yard sale in the country. I never bought videos for myself on VHS... just couldn't stand the lack-of-quality. But we had a ton of kid-vids, at least half of that from Disney. These all wound their way into yard sales, after the kids had long lost interest.
With DVDs, there's a pretty good chance that cycles through several times. Unless the kids pick up the discs themselves when they're at the "chew everything" stage (we lost a few computer games to chewing, but no tapes or DVDs), at least of most of these will survive to the next cycle. Anyone who bought used will certainly sell used, etc.
Depends on how many cycles you actually steal.. going full out, in deeper color modes, the 68K could grind to a halt for many, many cycles in a row.
The double-cycling of the memory was pretty much old-hat...they did the same thing on the Commodore 64, albeit at 1MHz (eg, RAM cycles at 2MHz, alternating between VIC and CPU access).
There were other memory tricks, too. In the A3000, we did some clever hacks that enabled the CPU to hit chip memory as 32-bit-wide memory, though the chipset was still 16-bit. In the A4000 (and any other AA machine), memory was mapped 32-bit and cycled in burst mode, so you really got 64-bits per chip access.
The big problem here was Commodore management.. they spent dramatically less on engineering and dramatically more on executive salaries than the typical computer company of the day. We had learned how to run lean and mean, but there are limits. You can get the best engineers (anyone who didn't measure up usually left of their own accord after a few months), never let them sleep, etc... that's useful. You can design a good hardware and software system, to optimize their efforts. But, in a system dependent on custom chips, you can't improve it if the powers-that-be won't fund new chips. In those days, there was no good reason for Commodore to have fallen behind in graphics chips... the bad reason was, they just didn't spend money wisely.
Even with proper funding, it wouldn't have lastest, though there were two generations of new chips (AAA and Hombre) in the works at the end. We actualyl had AAA, the "Advanced Amiga Architecture" in first prototype. This one did planar and chunky pixels, and some weird "hybrid" pixel types useful for hardware assisted video compression (nothing as sophisticated as MPEG, but similar to some of the other schemes being used in the late 80s and early 90s). Still had a blitter, much improved, and 32-bit or 64-bit memory access, with VRAM support.
Then came Hombre, which its own processor with 3D operations, and cool modes like four playfields of 16-bit chunky pixels. This was being designed in CAD, it wasn't built before the final days of Commodore.
But beyond that, I'm sure Commodore would have found, just like everyone else, that you need to be a real chip company to develop graphics chips... you need more customers than any single computer company will have. Same idea as being a CPU company. And curiously, today, two out of three of the GPU companies out there are also the leading x86 companies (nVidia makes some ARM processors, but no x86 yet).
I'm not sure how the old stuff would have been emulated... but sure, that could all be emulated. Amiga emulators abound, and they're pretty good. I usually recommend Amiga Forever, which includes emulator, many ROM images, and other goodies in the same package. Run this on a modern PC and it's the fastest Amiga ever, by far. There's a low cost downloadable version, and several options on DVD.
68K emulation built-in on an AmigaOS of 1995 or so would probably have been done more like the 68K emulation in MacOS, so you could mix and match PPC and 68K binaries, libraries, etc. That would have been an effective way to get to full PPC code without the need to have it all ported before testing could begin. If you did it today, it might make sense to run a full "boxed" emulation like Amiga Forever. Either way, this proves the concept of Amiga emulation.
There have also been projects aimed at re-implementing Amiga hardware, such as Minimig (designed by Dennis van Weeren), which basically gives you an A500 in a Xylinx Spartan chip. He's even duplicated the resistor-ladder DACs of the A500's "VIDIOT" hybrid device:-)
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This provides both router and a Wifi infrastructure mode, not ad-hoc mode. And the router is the real thing, much better than MS's crufty ICS. For one, ad-hoc connections are usually limited to 802.11b speeds, up to 11Mb/s... infrastructure can go full speed (g/n). Probably no big deal for connection sharing, but for streaming media, big deal. You also can't disable SSID broadcast in ad-hoc mode (haven't figured out how to in Connectify yet, either, but it's at least technically possible).
Apparently, this works even if the network you're sharing is hooked in via the same Wifi connection.That might not seem useful, but certainly for pay-for-access Wifi, this lets all your devices, friends or associates, etc. share just one pay-for connection (airports, some hotels, etc). Some public hotspots are also hostile to small devices, they only want to see computers. So there's some sense in here. And hey, free right now anyway. I figure I'll see if it's something I use now, before there's any money involved.
Another example... my kid's college dorm doesn't allow the use of Wifi based routers, but everyone has a laptop. If we install this on his laptop, in theory he'll be able to get iPod and X-Box connectivity in "stealth" mode... no router to be seen, no SSID broadcast, and every Wifi device is happy on infrastructure... some have issues in ad-hoc mode. That's what led me to playing with this on my Win7 machine this week (the kid doesn't have Win7 installed yet, but he's nearly as eager as I to see Vista wiped from all memory, machine and human, both. Still deciding about upgrading the XP machine... it ain't exactly broken, not sure it needs fixing).
Obviously, skilled Ubuntu users have less need of simple, end-user tweaked solutions. They write their own :-) Not as often or as well as Gentoo or Slackware users, but sure, if Ubuntu can't already configure your PC as with a router and infrastructure mode, you'll code that puppy up over morning coffee. In Python, most likely.. every Ubuntu coder I know just LOVES the Python.
... well, at least not here in the USA. But if it weren't for the separation of Church and State, EVERY religion would eventually be up on fraud charges. And while I do think it's ludicrious and rather sad that anyone believes in a religion that EVERYONE KNOWS was invented by a schlock science fiction writer, with the express purpose of making big money, who announced said intentions to fellow writers (Harlan Ellison for one... google it) before the fact and all... it is their right to be just that stupid, at least here. And for me, this is only slightly less disturbing than religions founded on the wanderings of stone age desert dwellers a few thousand years ago.
There are a bunch of things they can do.
For one, they could raise the initial price. Back in the VHS days, media companies released a rental video some weeks before the consumer edition. The rental version usually cost around $80-$100. Video stores could refuse to stock them, but they risk losing out to their competition.
The major video stores all entered into deals with the studios. They get DVDs cheap, but pay some negotiated pre-rental fees... thus, the studios share in the risk but also the profits. This removed the point of having separate rental and consumer release days... also, consumer purchases got way more profitable than rentals, so they don't want too many things getting in the way of that.
Still, major rental companies have to fall in line. They don't have to get low cost DVDs to stock their chain stores, but without that deal with the studios, they'll be paying more per video and they'll have supply problems. RedBox might have some breathing room, but most of the major chains are renting videos for about the consumer limit... if they upped the price, they'd lose customers even faster than they are now.
Online, it's worse. Netflix needs direct delivery of new titles, and they'd be in trouble if the prices shot up. Plus, they depend on good relations with the studios for video distribution... the studios could shut that down overnight if they wanted to. Or make them wait a few weeks. Tiered releases are the rule rather than the exception, anyway. Most of the time, the film hits the theaters, often released at a strategic time to maximize viewers (eg, you probably don't want your new film going out the same weekend as the next "Batman" or "Harry Potter"). The it's on to video, often with a similar strategy (eg, get those discs into stores when the sequel is hitting theaters, or during Christmas shopping season, etc). From there, you got wait, pay-per-view, wait, HBO/Starz/Showtime, wait, ad-driven-TV, wait, Wal-Mart $5 or $10 discount bin.
So from the distribution point of view, it makes perfect sense that rentals would follow DVD sales after a wait, there's just no easy way to enforce this. But there are ways. And they could certainly treat network-based rental as just another kind of PPV, rather than treating it as a physical rental. It's their product, after all... no one's making anyone watch these things. Well, other than Dr. Forrester or Dr. Erhardt.
Blu-Ray players start at $100 these days (store brand at Best-Buy this week), and it's actually getting difficult to find one much over $300. I have nearly 50 BDs, and have never paid even close to $40 for a disc... usually around $20-$25. Oh, I did buy "Lost: Season 3" on BD for $39.95, but TV series are typically more expensive.
If you think $5-$10 for a movie is a normal price, I guess you're one of those guys raiding the discount bins at Wal-Mart for older DVDs. That's what make Wal-Mart the top DVD reseller in the USA. If you're not after newer titles, you're better off buying used DVDs at yard sales and flea markets... newer titles show up there before they do at Wal-Mart's discount bin, and going rate for DVDs at yard sales is $3.00 each.
Of course, if you're that cheap, you probably haven't bought a decent HDTV either, so HD is rather pointless for you anyway.
Yeah, 8% in September... of 2008. But it was only 3% of the market for all of 2008... sales have been rapidly increasing. On some titles, it's more like 35% ("The Dark Knight", "Watchmen"... obviously, those films with appeal to early adopters). Overall, it's currently averaging just over 12% of video sales. Blu-Ray sales were up 66.3 percent to $161 million in the third quarter of 2009 and are up 83 percent year-to-date to $568 million, according to the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG). That's over 100 million discs projected for 2009. Best Buy, the leading Blu-Ray retailer (at around 50% of the US market) is also making more money on Blu-Ray sales than DVD sales at the moment.
And then there are the player sales... 3.3 million players sold in 2009 so far, not counting the PS3. But the real kicker here is that Blu-Ray player sales are poised to generate more revenue than DVD player sales in the US, this year. There are basic, entry-level players, already out, selling at $150-$200 or less as an everyday price, not some Black Friday thing. Right now, Wal-Mart is listing two players below $150, and an additional 10 for under $200. Best-Buy has their store brand for $99, and an additional 10 under $200.
That's important, because that's an established price point in the DVD player market for premium units. When 480p players were first introduced, they averaged around $150. Then it was HDMI upscaling players, also around $150. This year, the premium DVD player is a Blu-Ray player. The holiday season hasn't even kicked in yet.
I think Windows 7 may be an improvement over Vista simply based Vista's failure.
For any new OS, you need a rationale for that OS. Ideally, you NEVER need a new OS. After all, any proper OS is designed with full modularity in mind... you can plug in new stuff and it just works.
There's no downside to make an "New OS" in the FOSS community.. you're always free to take some of the new and bolt it on to what you already have.
In the commercial sector, there are other forces. Sometimes they benefit the consumer, sometimes not-so-much. With Windows in particular, though, they have an obliged new OS date.. every 3 or 4 years, the OEMs want a new OS to push hardware sales, simply because there is a class of consumer that thinks (or can be made to think) they need a new OS, but they're too timid to try installing said new OS on their existing PC. Plus, they bought an entry-level XP PC five years ago for $500, the Windows upgrade is over $100, but they can get a much better entry level PC today for $350.
Microsoft's Prime Directive in recent times, if not always, has been "Ensure Our Domination". So, when you look at a list of ideas for the next OS, it runs something like this:
1. Get something out the door, now, to make Dell, HP, et al happy. ....
2. Compatible enough with last version, so they have no excuse to jump platform, thus keeping us in power.
3. Change driver model, to keep those hardware companies doing what we tell them, thus keeping us in power.
4. Any other new technologies that keep us in power.. what about that Web thing?
5. Make friends with Hollywood, via DRM, to keep us in power
6. Eye candy and other bright shiny objects to fool consumers into upgrades
7. Gaming and video enhancements, to make stuff play well on Windows, to keep us in power
100. Wasn't there a bug list somewhere.
The proper list, more or less, would be more like this:
1. Fix all bugs that require major architectural changes in order to fix correctly (all other bugs were of course fixed with free updates). ...
2. Cool new features to make users lives easier.
3. Cool new features to make programmer's lives easier.
4. Bug fixes for 2,3.. before release.
The problem with Microsoft is that, basically, new releases have never been about users. Why do I want to update? Well, I don't... ever. Traditionally, MS has found a way to force the issues... new apps won't run in the old OS, we know of horrible bugs we'll never fix, no new device drivers for that new thing that's out, we aren't supporting that new bus, whatever. The attention to users has largely been "find a bright shiny object for them"... we need them, but they're stupid, so we can trick them into upgrades.
That worked, for quite some time. It failed with Vista... perhaps because of the bugs in Vista, but I do recall a bug list for XP at some 20,000+ known bugs. It got better.
It seems like, certainly to the functional failure of Vista. If the new OS doesn't overtake the old one in installed base, that's a fairly in MS's book. On many levels.. there's a snowball effect for a well received new OS.. 3rd party apps starting moving to only run in the new OS, bringing more people into it, etc. The opposite happened with Vista.. XP was still the applications model, not Vista. The only major impact of Vista was that MS finally released a fully supported 64-bit OS (hardware companies didn't have to do 64-bit XP drivers, they did have to do 64-bit Vista drivers).
Certainly, consumer oriented FOSS releases, and even MacOS to an extent, are more likely to follow that second list... FOSS because the users are the authors, to a large extent. MacOS because, being proprietary, Apple doesn't have the same kind of OS to PC relationship... everyone upgrades their MacOS install, new MacOS upgrades are cheap, and they don't couple the OS release to selling new hardware. Certainly they do stuff that's designed to help Apple, but they're also adding in "cool" new features. Of course, Mac people are kind of retro, thinking OSs are cool enough anymore to even have features that interesting. Usually no, even in MacOS. The market's mature.. your best result is not alienating your customer base.
Thing is, non-geeks don't drive the market. They do enable it.. the technologies everyone gets in their PCs makes everyone else's HDDs cheaper. But there is always going to be the 1 platter rule... consumer PCs get an HDD with one platter, whatever that is. In order to make larger drives cost effective, the HDD makers need to leverage from the consumer market (as do any other companies serving a variety of markets in a very competitive field). The cheapest HDD made will always be based on the commodity technology of the day, the same stuff used in all but perhaps the crazy high-end.
Also, there's competition. An OEM pays $35-$50 for an entry-level PC HDD, last I checked (I used to do this stuff professionally). That's fallen slightly over the last few decades, but slowly. You will never find, say, a Seagate claiming that 500GB or 5TB or whatever is "enough", simply because, if they did, in a year or so Western Digital or someone else would deliver a 1TB or 10GB drive at the same price, and the OEM wouldn't pause a femtosecond in deciding to go ahead with that.
SSD have a different problem.. flash cells are only good for a relatively small number of rewrites. Ok, maybe it's 500,000 rather than 10,000 (what you can expect from earlier generation dual-level NAND flash), but it's not even remotely comparable to the media life of an HDD.
HDDs will grow in size entirely independently of consumer size. It's the old "because we can" argument. You can't make an HDD cheaper than a single platter unit, which will cost an OEM around $40 these days. The prices have fallen slightly over the last several decades, but not all that much.. the capacity changes. There is enough of a demand in the HDD market, outside of consumer products, to increase the density, that this will keep happening for the foreseeable future. That new technology will always be applied to the single platter consumer drives, to help establish economies of scale for the rest of the product line.
The end result is that HDD size in consumer PCs will keep growing. There's a small market for SSD in laptops, but this won't translate to PCs anytime soon.. as much as Joe Sixpack doesn't need a 1TB drive, he also doesn't worry about 150MB/s vs. 75MB/s (or whatever).
You almost certainly meant 10GB, not 10Gb (=1.25GB) . Not to be overly pedantic, but if you're doing this professionally, it matters.
Cinematic film should be good up to about 8Mpixel scanning... that holds us though HDTV and into 4K video. Much of early television was done this way. Sure, anything that wasn't Kodachrome and was shot in the 60's is suffering color issues, but much of that can be repaired in modern editing.
Star Trek-TOS looks better on Blu-Ray than ever before. Of course they did enhanced versions... George Lucas established this as mandatory. But you can turn that off, at least on the BDs. You can also listen to magically created 7.1 sound, or the original mono. Whether the enhanced video ruins it or enhances it is certainly an individual choice. I like the idea.. the series was generally strong enough in storytelling, that was the point. Improving the look makes it more accessible to newbies. I don't think the cheesy SFX were really any kind of "point" to the original series, they were simply part of the reality of NBC budgets convolved with the state of film-making technology back in the mid 1960s.
MP3 itself has improved a bit, but sure, we have older collections. Mine's a bit newer.. my old, not-backed-up HDD crashed some years back, so when I re-ripped everything, I got to use LAME at 320Mb/s, rather than "whatever" at 128Mb/s. These days, I like FLAC for ripping... with that, I can transcode for any device I might have, now or in the future, without any additional quality loss.
Decade-old MKV collections shouldn't seem odd, but rather, kinda the point. MKV is gaining popularity largely because it's an open standard, rather than closed standard like Quicktime or MPEG-4. It's not that everyone migrates to MKV because it's open.. it's the openness that delivers free tools that make it easier to use. That won't go away. Though there's a nearly 100% chance that the device you have your MKV files on today will be replaced before then. Open source is the best possible hedge against format rot... crazy consumer acceptance is the next best.
It goes with money.. I can get a 2TB drive for about $200. In mid-1999, a 17GB drive cost about $350 (MSRP), give or take.
250GB will definitely be joke in 10 years, just as 250MB is today. I mean, you can buy 4GB flash card for the price of a big Latte at Starbucks today. I designed a couple of R/C radio controllers (Nomadio), and put 512MB of NV storage in those... just for settings and stuff, several years back. Why is there only 256MB in the Nintendo DSi? Easy.. there's still a joke, it's just on you. They want to keep you dependent on the online site... there's enough flash to keep a few games, a couple MP3s, whatever, on the unit, but hardly enough to keep you away from their portal for long, if you're an avid user. The point of changing the model to online is to increase sales, and that only happens if they get you in the store on a regular basis.
The cost of the HDD in your PC is pretty invariant... what changes is the capacity. And that can't change, because the cost of the parts remains pretty fixed, so HDDs can only get so small. Sure, flash drives can replace them, to an extent (eg, as long as you're a light user, otherwise, the SSD will wear out long before the HDD would have), for low power/low use situations. But that's going to increase, too, and certainly tape new NV technologies over the next 10 years.. flash itself will probably fail in the marketplace. But for the near future, HDDs will still be cheaper than SDDs, and so storage will rise, simply because that $40-$50 HDD (OEM price in quantity) is still the best option, whether its 40MB or 40TB.
I wish. I have 30% free on my 6TB RAID, 12% free on my 1.5TB boot drive, and 50% free on my auxiliary 1.5TB drive. Sure, some data can probably be archived, but that's real time involved. It might be cheaper just to drop a couple 2TB drives into the RAID. Ok, I do HD video, one of the big consumers of HDD space.. I don't have a single "ripped" video online. If you did, in HD, you'd need a system that dwarfs this.
But consider this... in 1993, I was doing serious MIDI music, but I wanted to get into recording. So I spent the $1200 for a Seagate "multimedia capable" HDD.. 2GB. In 2008, I could buy a 2GB flash card for under $10.
Thus, hopefully, in 2025, I'll be able to buy a 6TB flash card for under $5.. I only paid half that for the storage in the RAID (obviously, the RAID box itself cost something, too).
Well, a couple of things here.
Sure, Blu-Ray is more expensive than DVD, and if you needed to be 10,000 DVDs versus 2,000 BDs, and either would do, sure, go for the DVDs. But below a certain point, the price isn't germaine.
DVDs offer about 40GB/dollar, while with BDs, it's more like 10GB/dollar (in small cakeboxes, BD-R 25s cost about $2.50 right now.. I suspect some of you haven't really been paying attention). The cheapest external large drive I could find on NewEgg last week (1GB) ran me 11GB/dollar. I am writing of prices I actually pay... obviously, if you buy HDDs in bulk, you're getting a better price. Then again, they're not likely paying even $0.50 a disc for the glass mastered BD50s you find in most Blu-Ray retail boxes.
Anyone with a source for HDDs of a modern size (eg, not firesale 100GB models that pretty much can't be sold) for $0.05/GB, quantity one, send me a link.
Most of us? Well, for new disc releases, it varies between 10% and 35% of the discs sold. So technically, yeah, that's "most of us", if you count everyone in the country. Somehow, I suspect it's not passing by "most of us" when it comes to /. users.
Or Best-Buy customers.. they're making more money on BD than DVD already. Sure, BD titles are more expensive, but it's also true that much of the volume of DVD sales is in older stuff. Wal-Mart is the largest reseller of DVDs in the country, but that's boosted dramatically by their bins of $5 discs and racks of $10 discs.
BD is already a win, and this Christmas will prove it, for those non-believers. BD players are hitting the $100 mark.. and not just on special deals. There are a number of new, basic units selling with an MSRP at $150, street price around $100. These have already filled this "high end" niche within the DVD player world (at $500-$1000, BD was unto itself... not really part of the DVD ecosystem). That's the $100-$150 market into which they push a new upscale feature every year or two. When 480p players hit the market (curiously, the first one had a 480i MPEG-2 decoder that fed a 480i->480p frame conversion device.. zero advantage over feeding 480i into the average modern TV of the day), they were in this price range. Next came upconverting DVD players.. despite the fact that your HDTV also has an upconverter.. at least, if you're tech savvy, you can figure out which is better. So this year, Blu-Ray is that niche in DVD players. In two years, it'll drop to the $50 player point.
And even then, the HD-DVD fanboys will still reject it. But the world won't care if those 4,256 guys don't buy BD players...
If you're into video, you already knew HD had won... it's difficult to find a camcorder for much over $400 these days that isn't HD. Last year it was $1000, next year, we'll be seeing SD start to vanish.
Frame rate is already on the rise.. the $400 Sanyo VPC-FH1 does 1080/60p recording (MPEG-4 AVC) already. It's not going to scare away $4,000 professional cameras, but it's actually delivering video only slightly lower in quality than this years' $1200-$1500 consumer models. This is a portent of things to come in the camcorder market. Most new higher end camcorders this year support xyYCC mode, which isn't higher bitrate, but a higher color mode that uses the full range of 8-bit YUV color, as well as the specs in HDMI 1.3 that support 10-bit, 12-bit, and 16-bit color (that's bits-per-channel, the usual way to speak of these things in digital video terms).
I don't think anyone's talking about real 3D... all the 3D hype is about stereoscopic video. Stereoscopic video doesn't break when you move, unless you're counting on one of the weird no-glasses displays being played around with. It's just that stereoscopic isn't full 3D. Most people watching a television have no need for prespectives to change from one end of the couch to the next. Stereoscopic video needs about twice the bandwidth as monoscopic, maybe a bit less (eg, using differential encoding), certainly no more than that.
I think we'll have to wait for real 3D until they perfect that direct brain interface. At that point, the bandwidth should drop dramatically.
Whoops.. and certainly not for the $3K... but the Red "Mysterium Monstro" 645, already annouced, is nearly IMAX resolution. The "Mysterium Monstro" 617, on the other hand, is over twice that resolution (168mm x 56mm)... at least as far as image sensor goes (you can argue about the specific resolution of film, depending on the specific film involved). This is part of Red's DSMC system... crazy modular. So maybe it won't take until 2025 to see IMAX resolutions in the home :-)
Yeah, he should have said "a small fraction". And getting smaller.. the digital revolution has, more than anything, been about turning every electronic device into a computer. So your cellphone, camcorder, camera, car, GPS, music player, music recorder, watch, video player, video recorder, TV, guitar, piano, toy, thermometer, oven, and even sometimes your frickin' sneakers are also computers.
Well, sure, but unlike VHS and even DVD to an extent, porn wasn't necessary to push HDTV. After all, we all get it online, anyway, and it's one of the few video art-forms that, as you say, does not benefit in any way from higher resolutions.
If it even takes THAT long.
Some companies are already working on post-HD displays for consumer electronics. Digital cinema is moving to 4K video (nominally 4096x2160 pixels).. high end consumer gear won't be far behind. NHK (Japan) is working on nearly 8K systems (7680x4320) for 2025 or thereabouts.
Videophiles and home theater enthusiasts would buy this stuff today. And most of the pieces are already in place to enable this. The nice video DSP technology we have for upscaling DVD will be applied to upscale Blu-Ray initially, so a 4K display will actually produce a better picture from existing material than today's HD displays. The interfaces, like HDMI and Displayport, as well as most PC graphics cards, already support at least 2560×1600.. HDMI over type B signalling/connector can deliver 3840×2400, today.
Consumer camcorders and DSLRs are headed that way, fast. Most of the top consumer video camcorders are already using much larger imagers; lots of 6Mpixel-8Mpixel camcorders went out this year. Sanyo already makes a $400 consumer model, the VPC-FD1, which can shoot at a full 1080/60p, twice the rate of Blu-Ray (however, already supported by more recent HDTVs). Many of this years' DSLRs are supporting 1080p video with 12-14Mpixel sensors.
IMAX resolution? Don't know about that... or even just what that is, since it's film. Well, let's see.. a standard 35mm frame is 36mm x 24mm, that's from an SLR (the sensor in a "full frame" DSLR is the same size). Film cameras shoot half-frame, which is 24mm x 18mm , roughly (the "Academy" format, as delivered to theaters, is 21.95mm x 18.6mm... there's an optical audio track alongsize, but that's not present on the cameras themselves). I believe from my own film scanning that you can get an honest 20Mpixels out of a good 35mm image... as long as you're shooting something like Kodachrome 25. Today's best full frame DSLRs also top out in the 20Mpixel range. So that's a good basis. So you should expect about 10Mpixel per film frame.. which isn't a far cry from the 4K standard moving into theaters now, at 8.8Mpixels.
An IMAX frame is 70mm x 48.5mm.. nearly 8x the area of a standard 35mm film frame. So call that 80Mpixels. I don't think we're going to see a consumer video camera shooting 80Mpixels anytime soon. Even in a handheld... you're going to start running out of space in a 35mm format... the sensors can only get so small. I think we're approaching that limit, but it's more that every time you shrink the sensor, you lose light sensitivity. So pixels will probably only increase as technology improves light sensitivity, unless there's a big push. In fact, in the big push to HD, pretty much every HD camera lost sensitivity over its SD predecessor. They're only now starting to catch up (the standard for low-light in prosumer camcorders in the SD days was the Sony VX2100....good video down to 1 lux).
I think it's quite possible we'll see prosumer and then consumer video at increasingly higher resolution, going to 4K before you know it. This has already become crazy affordable for professionals, in the Red Camera. Between that and the push from the larger sensors in video-capable DSLRs, video is actually at a very interesting point in history. Even for consumer models, increased resolution is one of the only places for consumer video to go.. the quality is already getting crazy-good, and given the economies of things, significantly better optics, more buttons, many of these things will increase the cost of the gear, which, for the consumer and many pro markets, is fixed by tier (eg, since Video8, the top consumer camcorder models have been in the $1000-$1500 range, MSRP). Silicon features, including higher resolutions, while be among the lowest cost improvements to entice buyers to new models, probably within a few years. When every $400 camcorder can shoot a fabulous 1080/60i or 1080/24p or whatever, the $1200 models will have to offer something more.
The eye has a resolution limit, certainly. Optically, you have about 6 million chr
That sounds so much cooler than saying "2/3 of the people in Chicago have iTunes account". But not quite as cool as pointing out, if iTunes users had their own country, it would be around the size of Mexico, Japan, or Russia (numbers very a bit, depending on the source).
Spotify is too limited, anyway... it could work on an iPhone, but not an iPod, at least not without a Wifi connection.. and, well, Apple's approval. We already have Pandora here, which I would consider a better kind of technology for streaming audio (eg, like radio, it introduces music I might not know, but based on expressed preferences, I'm likely to like).
It's going to take a phenomenon like Google and Android, I suspect, to put a real dent in Apple's iPhone/iPod/iTunes market. And that's all based on purchases, not so much rentals or streaming. Apple's stuff doesn't change much anymore.. that's a pretty clear indication you're seeing a mature market. You need something profound to shake that up.
Profits on the iTunes store are decent (iTunes store revenue was $1.018 billion in Apple's fourth quarter.. this also includes licensing fees for iPod/iPhone accessories from third parties, they don't break it down any more), but also irrelevant. The existence of the tightly coupled iTunes store and iTunes player drives the sales of the very, very, very successful iPhone ($2.3 billion in the fourth quarter) and somewhat less successful, these days, iPod (apparently, people are buying iPhones instead... only 10.2 million iPhones sold that quarter, versus nearly 7.4 way more profitable iPhones).
Apple won the MP3 player market by delivering content, back when no one else had brokered any reasonable deal to do similarly with their player. Most still haven't done as well, though with DRM dead (for music, anyway), this matters much less than it once did. But take away the iTunes store, and then Apple's competing on a very even basis with everyone else. Sales would suffer, soon enough.
To really be successful against Apple, this kind of online point-of-sales won't hurt at all... there are plenty of users who can figure out other ways to download, sync, and install apps or music, but enough who can't, or simply don't want to be bothered.
Now, invent the mechanism, but make it non-exclusive, and you really have something. If I can shop for Android apps (and other stuff, like music and video.. might as well, once I'm there, eh) at the Google Store, the Verizon Store, the Amazon Store... well, then we've fixed one of the fundamental problems with Apple's model -- no competition. As a computer savvy person, I know I can get music from Amazon or a CD just as easily as from the iTunes store, but you need some knowledge for that.. most users take the easy way out. So Apple doesn't really have to compete with Amazon on prices for music. And it's way more complex for video or apps. Thus, no incentive to lower prices... they have a captive market. There's a big potential in retaining that ease of use, but also adding the market competition inherent in non-virtual consumer products.
Even without illegal downloads, Disney can't really control the distribution anymore.
The used tape and disc market thrives, at every flea market and yard sale in the country. I never bought videos for myself on VHS... just couldn't stand the lack-of-quality. But we had a ton of kid-vids, at least half of that from Disney. These all wound their way into yard sales, after the kids had long lost interest.
With DVDs, there's a pretty good chance that cycles through several times. Unless the kids pick up the discs themselves when they're at the "chew everything" stage (we lost a few computer games to chewing, but no tapes or DVDs), at least of most of these will survive to the next cycle. Anyone who bought used will certainly sell used, etc.
Depends on how many cycles you actually steal.. going full out, in deeper color modes, the 68K could grind to a halt for many, many cycles in a row.
The double-cycling of the memory was pretty much old-hat...they did the same thing on the Commodore 64, albeit at 1MHz (eg, RAM cycles at 2MHz, alternating between VIC and CPU access).
There were other memory tricks, too. In the A3000, we did some clever hacks that enabled the CPU to hit chip memory as 32-bit-wide memory, though the chipset was still 16-bit. In the A4000 (and any other AA machine), memory was mapped 32-bit and cycled in burst mode, so you really got 64-bits per chip access.
The big problem here was Commodore management.. they spent dramatically less on engineering and dramatically more on executive salaries than the typical computer company of the day. We had learned how to run lean and mean, but there are limits. You can get the best engineers (anyone who didn't measure up usually left of their own accord after a few months), never let them sleep, etc... that's useful. You can design a good hardware and software system, to optimize their efforts. But, in a system dependent on custom chips, you can't improve it if the powers-that-be won't fund new chips. In those days, there was no good reason for Commodore to have fallen behind in graphics chips... the bad reason was, they just didn't spend money wisely.
Even with proper funding, it wouldn't have lastest, though there were two generations of new chips (AAA and Hombre) in the works at the end. We actualyl had AAA, the "Advanced Amiga Architecture" in first prototype. This one did planar and chunky pixels, and some weird "hybrid" pixel types useful for hardware assisted video compression (nothing as sophisticated as MPEG, but similar to some of the other schemes being used in the late 80s and early 90s). Still had a blitter, much improved, and 32-bit or 64-bit memory access, with VRAM support.
Then came Hombre, which its own processor with 3D operations, and cool modes like four playfields of 16-bit chunky pixels. This was being designed in CAD, it wasn't built before the final days of Commodore.
But beyond that, I'm sure Commodore would have found, just like everyone else, that you need to be a real chip company to develop graphics chips... you need more customers than any single computer company will have. Same idea as being a CPU company. And curiously, today, two out of three of the GPU companies out there are also the leading x86 companies (nVidia makes some ARM processors, but no x86 yet).
I used them nearly every day for over 10 years, and never got a virus.
I'm not sure how the old stuff would have been emulated... but sure, that could all be emulated. Amiga emulators abound, and they're pretty good. I usually recommend Amiga Forever, which includes emulator, many ROM images, and other goodies in the same package. Run this on a modern PC and it's the fastest Amiga ever, by far. There's a low cost downloadable version, and several options on DVD.
68K emulation built-in on an AmigaOS of 1995 or so would probably have been done more like the 68K emulation in MacOS, so you could mix and match PPC and 68K binaries, libraries, etc. That would have been an effective way to get to full PPC code without the need to have it all ported before testing could begin. If you did it today, it might make sense to run a full "boxed" emulation like Amiga Forever. Either way, this proves the concept of Amiga emulation.
There have also been projects aimed at re-implementing Amiga hardware, such as Minimig (designed by Dennis van Weeren), which basically gives you an A500 in a Xylinx Spartan chip. He's even duplicated the resistor-ladder DACs of the A500's "VIDIOT" hybrid device :-)