You're a moron. Storing 25Hz/30Hz progressive content as 50Hz/60Hz interlaced content is a non-lossy process. You can get back the original 25Hz/30Hz progressive content with a simple, deterministic algorithm, regardless of 3:2 pulldown and other issues. (Note: I am talking about 24 fps film to PAL or NTSC here. This is the important case, and also, which is my point here, the trivial case).
Now, in reality, a lot of releases do exist that has the wrong flagging and so forth, that will make crappy dvd players output a crappy signal that has been de-interlaced in the wrong way.
But interlacing is not the issue with dvd. The vast amount of dvds will play flawlessly and losslessly progressively if you have a good (or nowadays, just decent) dvd player. And of course you need a progressive display, but virtually all LCDs, plasmas, digital front projectors, back projectors etc. are progressive. If they're not fed a progressive signal from your dvd player, they will deinterlace it themselves. Are you sure you have ever watched a dvd interlaced and "flickering"? You might have, on your old CRT. But HD-DVD and BluRay will also flicker on your old CRT. Because it is an interlaced display.
The issue with dvd is not interlacing (although it would be nice to get rid of). It is mainly pixel resolution and color resolution (dvd only has half vertical color resolution, to put it shortly)./David
They are better because when you've found your.exe, you're done. Downloading and installing are trivial steps.
With package management systems such as apt and tools like Aptitude, you just have to hope that the software in question is already in your repository. If not, you have set up alternate repositories, or as I do myself, a local repository in which to put downloaded packages, and install from there. Installing from various sources, repositories, tarballs, etc., often becomes a mess.
And don't get me started on installing proprietary closed source software on Linux. It often works only on a particular distribution, and/or it requires special treatment during installation etc.
As long as the software you need is in your repository, things are easy. Whenever they are not, things become needlessly complicated. From a usability view, it is much easier to just download an.exe and be done with it.
I know this is not particular to Aptitude or to package managers in general, but is about the whole software installation school of thought that lives in the *nix world. But I think it is old fashioned and is only holding Linux back.
I am familiar with those terms. But for all practical consumer purposes, going from a high resolution digital or analog master to low resolution CD quality is equivalent to a lossy compression. You lose information and sound quality, hence the lossy. And the result takes up less space, hence the compression. Converting a 192 KHz 24-bit digital master to 44.1KHz 16-bit _is_ a valid form of compression. It is a compression algorithm by all means.
And yes, lossless compression does exist even then. Of course it does. If the original recorded signal is 192 Khz 24-bit PCM and you release it as 192 KHz 24-bit PCM compressed with FLAC or zip for that matter, you have a lossless compression. As long as you can recreate the original from the copy and the copy takes up less space, you have lossless compression.
Of course, recording in 192 KHz 24-bit PCM or high quality analog is a lossy process itself, in the sense that you cannot create the same reality, the same experience from the recording. It will not be the same as actually being there during the recording (here I am of course assuming live performances, not layered, post-processed productions). But those are just limitations of our recording technologies so far. All of them have limited dynamic range, have limited frequency response, introduce noise, introduce distortion compared to reality, or more precisely, the capabilites of the human ear.
But that's not the same as saying that lossless compress does not exist. Of course it does. For practical purposes, it means that you have some digital content that you call "the original" and a (perhaps only similar) "copy" of this original, that takes up less space that said "original". If the original can be recreated from the copy, you have a lossless compression scheme. If the original cannot be recreated, you have a lossy compression scheme.
And there is of course the philosophical question of what is a similar copy. If no person on earth is able to recognize the (lossy) copy as a copy of the original, I guess it is no longer a copy in some sense. But that's beyond the scope of this thread.../David
Well, CD music _is_ compressed. It is compressed from master quality to 44.1 KHz 16-bit PCM. This is also a form of lossy compression.
And also, lossless compression _does_ exit. FLAC is a prominent example.
I know that the winds are not blowing that way these days, but I would really like to be able to buy my favorite well-produced music (Pink Floyd, for example, as another poster mentioned) in a quality better than CD quality. A step in the right direction would be if I could get it on SACD or DVD-Audio. And I am talking about putting the original stereo masters out on these formats, not gimmicky multi-channel releases.
Heck, I wouldn't mind buying online music if I could buy everything with no more lossy compression than the above-mentioned master to CD compression. And certainly not if I could buy it in DVD-Audio quality or similar. But that is not going to happen, I'm afraid.
But as for the original question posed in TFA: Since everybody has DVD players and recorders everywhere now, one would think that at least DVD would be the preferred way of distributing audio. But then, one could ask, isn't the DVD becoming obsolete? Disregarding all the DRM associated with BluRay and HD-DVD, we really need a new physical format with more space and the possibility of more modern codecs. A higher capacity medium is one battle. DRM is another battle. Let's first get BluRay (or HD-DVD, but...) to be the standard, then when it is cheap and we all have recorders, I am sure we can begin fight DRM in various, possibly illegal ways. Fair use./David
I love Linux and friends as much as the next guy, and hate Windows as much as the next guy, but...
As with so many other things on Linux compared to Windows, something is missing to make the experience "just as good" or "purely better" (just as is the case with drivers (faster and more available on Windows), responsivity (Linux with X always feels slower to me in everyday desktop work) etc. In this case, while MythTV is great and offer a lot of unique features, there is not match on linux for Windows technologies such as Avivo and PureVideo for HD playback for instance. FFMPEG filters and similar offerings on Linux are great, but not as good. And also, they are not hardware accelerated.
It's not that it isn't possible to have something equivalent or better on Linux. It's just not there yet. So switching from a Windows Media Center to Linux with MythTV is not exactly a no-brainer./David
The main thing wrong with DVI is that it is too fragile. It only supports cables up to 5 meters. And yes, this is a real life issue. Many, many appliances have problems if you use, say, a 10 meter cable. And 10 meters is not a lot. For a small home theater installation, you will easily need that and more.
HDMI remedies this a bit, both in theory (allows longer cables) and also in practice.
That said, HDMI is still way too fragile and complicated. A good 10+ meter HDMI cable costs a fortune. A digital transfer standard should at least have some Reed-Solomon coding or equivalent error correction.
Another poster asked why he would need audio and video in the same cable. The reason is simple: A/V receivers works conveniently by letting you choose an input and an output source independantly. So you would route all your A/V sources (HDMI and other, say a dvd player and a DVB-S receiver etc.) to your receiver and connect your receiver to all your A/V destinations (HDMI and other, TVs, projectors, surround speakers etc.), and then when you switch input signal on your remote to, say, dvd, it would switch both the video and the audio in one go. A/V receivers without HDMI have done this for many years./David
You are right that AMD wasn't the first company to make a 64-bit CPU. But they were the first to make a widely adopted 64-bit CPU. X86-64 has proven to be a much better way in practice to spread 64-bit to the mases, than was Itanium, let alone the Alpha or the crappy SPARCs.
Also, X86-64 is not a hack. It is by far the cleanest and best branch on the X86-tree. The performance you get out of a modern AMD or Intel X86-64 CPU greatly surpasses what you will ever get from those old 64-bit CPUs that you mention, and even today, there are no competitors. The fastest SPARC is still a lot slower and a lot more expensive than the cheapest X86-64 CPU. X86-64 is not a hack, it is state of the art./David
Health care is most important for the people who can't afford it. And there is only one way to get a good, solid health care system that welcomes every member of society: pay for it. This means that the people who _have_ money will have to pay for it.
This is the way it works in all successful health care systems in the world in general and specifically in Denmark where I live. The Danish health care system costs more than the (non-existent) US health care system, but it is also much, much better. And it is free for everybody. And everybody pays for it on their tax bill.
I have understood why libertarians don't just make their own non-society. The purpose of a society is exactly to pool your efforts for the greater good. Otherwise, you might just be a bunch of individuals, no society.
And let me just add that Denmark is one of the most economically competitive countries of the world, so it is actually possible to do it this way. But probably very "un-american".
Well, that's because health care is most important for the people who can't afford it. And there is only one way to get a good, solid health care system that welcomes every member of society: pay for it. This means that the people who _have_ money will have to pay for it.
This is the way it works in all successful health care systems in the world in general and specifically in Denmark where I live. The Danish health care system costs more than the (non-existent) US health care system, but it is also much, much better. And it is free for everybody. And everybody pays for it on their tax bill.
I have understood why libertarians don't just make their own non-society. The purpose of a society is exactly to pool your efforts for the greater good. Otherwise, you might just be a bunch of individuals, no society.
And let me just add that Denmark is one of the most economically competitive countries of the world, so it is actually possible to do it this way. But probably very "un-american".
Hmm. Assembly is still relevant and useful for certain tasks, of course.
But two things come to mind:
1: Handcoders can code better than good compilers?
Yeah, in some cases after a lot of refining. But it is not as easy as it once was.
Compilers have gotten much better and processors have gotten a lot more complex. It's not just "how many clock cycles does this instruction use?", you also have to take various forms of micro-parallelism (pipelining, branch prediction, etc.) and cache hierachy issues into account.
2: It's good to know what goes on under the hood, sure.
But in many, many software developer tasks, early optimization is the root of all evil.
I would actually much rather recommend a top-down approach for most problems, abstracting away low-level details, rather than going bottom-up. The teaching approach of the great "Accelerated C++" comes to mind.
A lot of developers that know a little or a lot about low-level programming write less than excellent code in other regards (algorithmic complexity, design, re-use, etc.) and they can't seem to stop focusing on performance throughout the process.
For most problems, performance isn't critical, and even when it is, it might be better to look for algorithmic enhancements (lowering complexity) rather than do low-level fiddling./David
Eh, no. Ever heard of FFDShow? Lanzcos scaling and other scaling algorithms? Noise reduction algorithms? Sharpening algorithms? Proper MPEG decoding (without chroma bug) etc.?
Of course, Avivo and PureVideo do exist, but not all like them (or use them, for instance under Linux). A setup as the one described above _will_ use a lot of CPU power. And that's only for DVD. Playing HD on an old, slow computer is not always, well... possible./David
Conventional energy sources have had 100+ years of intense research and development to make it effecient. Engines running on fossil fuels were not as effecient in the beginning as it is now.
I am 100% positive that if we by some magic accident (legislation for instance) were _forced_ to use renewable energy sources exclusively, there would be much more brainpower going into this and much more technological advancement, and that we _would_ be able to sustain humanity energy-wise.
But it is not going to happen if we keep things in the lab and wait for hydrogen to suddenly becoming an instant economical win.
That is simply not true. First of all, when DVD came out, the players didn't cost $500. It cost at lot more than the first HD-DVD and BluRay players cost now.
Also, at least here in Denmark, a _lot_ of people are getting cheap HD ready flat screens anyway. Soon there will be more people with a (cheap) high definiton flat screen than people with old, small CRT tvs. And they will want a worthy signal source to go with that tv. The existing HD-DVD and BluRay players don't cost more than the cheapest high-end DVD-players.
Also, film studios, tv networks etc. are making big investments in HD. They will put out and broadcast HD whether people think they need it or not. At the same time, more and more titles will be released and prices will drop. With HD-DVD coming to the 360 and BluRay in PS3 (even with all their shortcomings (PS2 was a crappy DVD player as well)), many people will have hardware for these formats in the house anyway. When they go by a movie, they might as well get it in the superior format instead of DVD. Even if they can't utilize the advantages of the format. Video enthusiast might be a rare breed, but many homes will have a 360 with HD-DVD or a PS3 with BluRay whether they think they need it or not.
These formats are not stillborn, and they will not go away anytime soon. Which one wins, I don't know.
The difference _is_ substantial. Not on a 20" CRT tv but on larger high resolution displays like big LCD and plasma screens and most notably a 100" picture from even a cheap 1280x720 front projector. The flaws of DVD are all too evident in these cases. And likewise the superiority of the new formats.
I don't even know where to begin...
It of course takes some time for the sales of HD-DVD and BluRay to get some momentum. Look at the sales of DVD when it arrived in 1996. I would say that it was only by 2000 that it was beginning to be very common and much later than that before DVD was more common than VHS.
Slowly, as more and more people get displays capable of true 1080p, the need for better picture quality will be evident to everyone. Even the best DVDs look like crap on a large high-resolution display compared to a true HD source. The low resolution and compression artifacts of DVD are all too evident. Then slowly HD-DVD and BluRay players will get as cheap as DVD players are now, all the while more and more titles will be released on the two formats.
We are still in the very early phase. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already more early adopters of HD-DVD and BluRay than there were early DVD adopters shortly after its release. And the early players are even cheaper than the first DVD players.
The formats are not stillborn, they are just in their infancy. Do you expect them to replace DVD overnight? Do you think that replacing DVD overnight is a criterion of success for the parties supporting and developing the formats?
Dolby Digital and DTS in theatres is a totally different beast from the ones on DVD. They have nothing in common but the name. Also, true HD programming viewed on capable equipment (which we will all get, sooner or later) is vastly superior to DVD, for everyone to see.
Yeah, you are all so clever here...
If you have a large, good display like a front projector and a 100" screen, you will notice the differences between good and bad DVD players (and between good and bad HD). But if you have that, you probably have been playing your DVDs from a PC for a long time already, and the OPs "news" is not really news. Already 2 years ago, when there were much less hardware acceleration of "smart" DVD decoding features, people were running FFDShow (FFMPEG) and the like and were upscaling DVD video to double size with a good algorithm (Lanzcos), removing noise, adding a hint of artificial sharpness, and scaling down again to the native resolution of the display to get 1:1 pixel mapping, not to mention using a good DVD decoder without chroma bug and what not. And getting a picture that was much better than a high end player, not to mention the cheap players you own. They all look like CRAP on a large, good display.
You argue within your limitations. You say yourself that you don't use debuggers much, only when a program segfaults. You can't possibly imagine all the things that people use debuggers for that you haven't tried yourself. Most people that don't like debuggers haven't used them much. Most people that have used debuggers a lot sees their value. For embedded programming, multithreaded programming, highly recursive systems and for many other cases, debuggers are an invaluable tool. Obviously./David
Frankly, Linus sounds like a guy who haven't used a debugger much and therefore thinks it's a bad tool. Very unprofessional, if you as me. There are many, many programmers that are much more talented than him, that use debuggers all the time. More than anything, it shows Linus' limited capabilites./David
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You're a moron. Storing 25Hz/30Hz progressive content as 50Hz/60Hz interlaced content is a non-lossy process. You can get back the original 25Hz/30Hz progressive content with a simple, deterministic algorithm, regardless of 3:2 pulldown and other issues. (Note: I am talking about 24 fps film to PAL or NTSC here. This is the important case, and also, which is my point here, the trivial case).
/David
Now, in reality, a lot of releases do exist that has the wrong flagging and so forth, that will make crappy dvd players output a crappy signal that has been de-interlaced in the wrong way.
But interlacing is not the issue with dvd. The vast amount of dvds will play flawlessly and losslessly progressively if you have a good (or nowadays, just decent) dvd player. And of course you need a progressive display, but virtually all LCDs, plasmas, digital front projectors, back projectors etc. are progressive. If they're not fed a progressive signal from your dvd player, they will deinterlace it themselves. Are you sure you have ever watched a dvd interlaced and "flickering"? You might have, on your old CRT. But HD-DVD and BluRay will also flicker on your old CRT. Because it is an interlaced display.
The issue with dvd is not interlacing (although it would be nice to get rid of). It is mainly pixel resolution and color resolution (dvd only has half vertical color resolution, to put it shortly).
Yeah, 'cause goat herding is all we do here in the EU...
They are better because when you've found your .exe, you're done. Downloading and installing are trivial steps.
.exe and be done with it.
With package management systems such as apt and tools like Aptitude, you just have to hope that the software in question is already in your repository. If not, you have set up alternate repositories, or as I do myself, a local repository in which to put downloaded packages, and install from there. Installing from various sources, repositories, tarballs, etc., often becomes a mess.
And don't get me started on installing proprietary closed source software on Linux. It often works only on a particular distribution, and/or it requires special treatment during installation etc.
As long as the software you need is in your repository, things are easy. Whenever they are not, things become needlessly complicated. From a usability view, it is much easier to just download an
I know this is not particular to Aptitude or to package managers in general, but is about the whole software installation school of thought that lives in the *nix world. But I think it is old fashioned and is only holding Linux back.
I am familiar with those terms. But for all practical consumer purposes, going from a high resolution digital or analog master to low resolution CD quality is equivalent to a lossy compression. You lose information and sound quality, hence the lossy. And the result takes up less space, hence the compression. Converting a 192 KHz 24-bit digital master to 44.1KHz 16-bit _is_ a valid form of compression. It is a compression algorithm by all means.
/David
And yes, lossless compression does exist even then. Of course it does. If the original recorded signal is 192 Khz 24-bit PCM and you release it as 192 KHz 24-bit PCM compressed with FLAC or zip for that matter, you have a lossless compression. As long as you can recreate the original from the copy and the copy takes up less space, you have lossless compression.
Of course, recording in 192 KHz 24-bit PCM or high quality analog is a lossy process itself, in the sense that you cannot create the same reality, the same experience from the recording. It will not be the same as actually being there during the recording (here I am of course assuming live performances, not layered, post-processed productions). But those are just limitations of our recording technologies so far. All of them have limited dynamic range, have limited frequency response, introduce noise, introduce distortion compared to reality, or more precisely, the capabilites of the human ear.
But that's not the same as saying that lossless compress does not exist. Of course it does. For practical purposes, it means that you have some digital content that you call "the original" and a (perhaps only similar) "copy" of this original, that takes up less space that said "original". If the original can be recreated from the copy, you have a lossless compression scheme. If the original cannot be recreated, you have a lossy compression scheme.
And there is of course the philosophical question of what is a similar copy. If no person on earth is able to recognize the (lossy) copy as a copy of the original, I guess it is no longer a copy in some sense. But that's beyond the scope of this thread...
Well, CD music _is_ compressed. It is compressed from master quality to 44.1 KHz 16-bit PCM. This is also a form of lossy compression.
/David
And also, lossless compression _does_ exit. FLAC is a prominent example.
I know that the winds are not blowing that way these days, but I would really like to be able to buy my favorite well-produced music (Pink Floyd, for example, as another poster mentioned) in a quality better than CD quality. A step in the right direction would be if I could get it on SACD or DVD-Audio. And I am talking about putting the original stereo masters out on these formats, not gimmicky multi-channel releases.
Heck, I wouldn't mind buying online music if I could buy everything with no more lossy compression than the above-mentioned master to CD compression. And certainly not if I could buy it in DVD-Audio quality or similar. But that is not going to happen, I'm afraid.
But as for the original question posed in TFA: Since everybody has DVD players and recorders everywhere now, one would think that at least DVD would be the preferred way of distributing audio. But then, one could ask, isn't the DVD becoming obsolete? Disregarding all the DRM associated with BluRay and HD-DVD, we really need a new physical format with more space and the possibility of more modern codecs. A higher capacity medium is one battle. DRM is another battle. Let's first get BluRay (or HD-DVD, but...) to be the standard, then when it is cheap and we all have recorders, I am sure we can begin fight DRM in various, possibly illegal ways. Fair use.
I love Linux and friends as much as the next guy, and hate Windows as much as the next guy, but...
/David
As with so many other things on Linux compared to Windows, something is missing to make the experience "just as good" or "purely better" (just as is the case with drivers (faster and more available on Windows), responsivity (Linux with X always feels slower to me in everyday desktop work) etc. In this case, while MythTV is great and offer a lot of unique features, there is not match on linux for Windows technologies such as Avivo and PureVideo for HD playback for instance. FFMPEG filters and similar offerings on Linux are great, but not as good. And also, they are not hardware accelerated.
It's not that it isn't possible to have something equivalent or better on Linux. It's just not there yet. So switching from a Windows Media Center to Linux with MythTV is not exactly a no-brainer.
The main thing wrong with DVI is that it is too fragile. It only supports cables up to 5 meters. And yes, this is a real life issue. Many, many appliances have problems if you use, say, a 10 meter cable. And 10 meters is not a lot. For a small home theater installation, you will easily need that and more.
/David
HDMI remedies this a bit, both in theory (allows longer cables) and also in practice.
That said, HDMI is still way too fragile and complicated. A good 10+ meter HDMI cable costs a fortune. A digital transfer standard should at least have some Reed-Solomon coding or equivalent error correction.
Another poster asked why he would need audio and video in the same cable. The reason is simple: A/V receivers works conveniently by letting you choose an input and an output source independantly. So you would route all your A/V sources (HDMI and other, say a dvd player and a DVB-S receiver etc.) to your receiver and connect your receiver to all your A/V destinations (HDMI and other, TVs, projectors, surround speakers etc.), and then when you switch input signal on your remote to, say, dvd, it would switch both the video and the audio in one go. A/V receivers without HDMI have done this for many years.
You are right that AMD wasn't the first company to make a 64-bit CPU. But they were the first to make a widely adopted 64-bit CPU. X86-64 has proven to be a much better way in practice to spread 64-bit to the mases, than was Itanium, let alone the Alpha or the crappy SPARCs.
/David
Also, X86-64 is not a hack. It is by far the cleanest and best branch on the X86-tree. The performance you get out of a modern AMD or Intel X86-64 CPU greatly surpasses what you will ever get from those old 64-bit CPUs that you mention, and even today, there are no competitors. The fastest SPARC is still a lot slower and a lot more expensive than the cheapest X86-64 CPU. X86-64 is not a hack, it is state of the art.
Health care is most important for the people who can't afford it. And there is only one way to get a good, solid health care system that welcomes every member of society: pay for it. This means that the people who _have_ money will have to pay for it. This is the way it works in all successful health care systems in the world in general and specifically in Denmark where I live. The Danish health care system costs more than the (non-existent) US health care system, but it is also much, much better. And it is free for everybody. And everybody pays for it on their tax bill. I have understood why libertarians don't just make their own non-society. The purpose of a society is exactly to pool your efforts for the greater good. Otherwise, you might just be a bunch of individuals, no society. And let me just add that Denmark is one of the most economically competitive countries of the world, so it is actually possible to do it this way. But probably very "un-american".
Well, that's because health care is most important for the people who can't afford it. And there is only one way to get a good, solid health care system that welcomes every member of society: pay for it. This means that the people who _have_ money will have to pay for it.
This is the way it works in all successful health care systems in the world in general and specifically in Denmark where I live. The Danish health care system costs more than the (non-existent) US health care system, but it is also much, much better. And it is free for everybody. And everybody pays for it on their tax bill.
I have understood why libertarians don't just make their own non-society. The purpose of a society is exactly to pool your efforts for the greater good. Otherwise, you might just be a bunch of individuals, no society.
And let me just add that Denmark is one of the most economically competitive countries of the world, so it is actually possible to do it this way. But probably very "un-american".
Hmm. Assembly is still relevant and useful for certain tasks, of course.
/David
But two things come to mind:
1: Handcoders can code better than good compilers?
Yeah, in some cases after a lot of refining. But it is not as easy as it once was.
Compilers have gotten much better and processors have gotten a lot more complex. It's not just "how many clock cycles does this instruction use?", you also have to take various forms of micro-parallelism (pipelining, branch prediction, etc.) and cache hierachy issues into account.
2: It's good to know what goes on under the hood, sure.
But in many, many software developer tasks, early optimization is the root of all evil.
I would actually much rather recommend a top-down approach for most problems, abstracting away low-level details, rather than going bottom-up. The teaching approach of the great "Accelerated C++" comes to mind.
A lot of developers that know a little or a lot about low-level programming write less than excellent code in other regards (algorithmic complexity, design, re-use, etc.) and they can't seem to stop focusing on performance throughout the process.
For most problems, performance isn't critical, and even when it is, it might be better to look for algorithmic enhancements (lowering complexity) rather than do low-level fiddling.
Eh, no. Ever heard of FFDShow? Lanzcos scaling and other scaling algorithms? Noise reduction algorithms? Sharpening algorithms? Proper MPEG decoding (without chroma bug) etc.? Of course, Avivo and PureVideo do exist, but not all like them (or use them, for instance under Linux). A setup as the one described above _will_ use a lot of CPU power. And that's only for DVD. Playing HD on an old, slow computer is not always, well... possible. /David
Conventional energy sources have had 100+ years of intense research and development to make it effecient. Engines running on fossil fuels were not as effecient in the beginning as it is now. I am 100% positive that if we by some magic accident (legislation for instance) were _forced_ to use renewable energy sources exclusively, there would be much more brainpower going into this and much more technological advancement, and that we _would_ be able to sustain humanity energy-wise. But it is not going to happen if we keep things in the lab and wait for hydrogen to suddenly becoming an instant economical win.
That is simply not true. First of all, when DVD came out, the players didn't cost $500. It cost at lot more than the first HD-DVD and BluRay players cost now. Also, at least here in Denmark, a _lot_ of people are getting cheap HD ready flat screens anyway. Soon there will be more people with a (cheap) high definiton flat screen than people with old, small CRT tvs. And they will want a worthy signal source to go with that tv. The existing HD-DVD and BluRay players don't cost more than the cheapest high-end DVD-players. Also, film studios, tv networks etc. are making big investments in HD. They will put out and broadcast HD whether people think they need it or not. At the same time, more and more titles will be released and prices will drop. With HD-DVD coming to the 360 and BluRay in PS3 (even with all their shortcomings (PS2 was a crappy DVD player as well)), many people will have hardware for these formats in the house anyway. When they go by a movie, they might as well get it in the superior format instead of DVD. Even if they can't utilize the advantages of the format. Video enthusiast might be a rare breed, but many homes will have a 360 with HD-DVD or a PS3 with BluRay whether they think they need it or not. These formats are not stillborn, and they will not go away anytime soon. Which one wins, I don't know.
The difference _is_ substantial. Not on a 20" CRT tv but on larger high resolution displays like big LCD and plasma screens and most notably a 100" picture from even a cheap 1280x720 front projector. The flaws of DVD are all too evident in these cases. And likewise the superiority of the new formats.
I don't even know where to begin... It of course takes some time for the sales of HD-DVD and BluRay to get some momentum. Look at the sales of DVD when it arrived in 1996. I would say that it was only by 2000 that it was beginning to be very common and much later than that before DVD was more common than VHS. Slowly, as more and more people get displays capable of true 1080p, the need for better picture quality will be evident to everyone. Even the best DVDs look like crap on a large high-resolution display compared to a true HD source. The low resolution and compression artifacts of DVD are all too evident. Then slowly HD-DVD and BluRay players will get as cheap as DVD players are now, all the while more and more titles will be released on the two formats. We are still in the very early phase. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already more early adopters of HD-DVD and BluRay than there were early DVD adopters shortly after its release. And the early players are even cheaper than the first DVD players. The formats are not stillborn, they are just in their infancy. Do you expect them to replace DVD overnight? Do you think that replacing DVD overnight is a criterion of success for the parties supporting and developing the formats?
Dolby Digital and DTS in theatres is a totally different beast from the ones on DVD. They have nothing in common but the name. Also, true HD programming viewed on capable equipment (which we will all get, sooner or later) is vastly superior to DVD, for everyone to see.
Yeah, you are all so clever here... If you have a large, good display like a front projector and a 100" screen, you will notice the differences between good and bad DVD players (and between good and bad HD). But if you have that, you probably have been playing your DVDs from a PC for a long time already, and the OPs "news" is not really news. Already 2 years ago, when there were much less hardware acceleration of "smart" DVD decoding features, people were running FFDShow (FFMPEG) and the like and were upscaling DVD video to double size with a good algorithm (Lanzcos), removing noise, adding a hint of artificial sharpness, and scaling down again to the native resolution of the display to get 1:1 pixel mapping, not to mention using a good DVD decoder without chroma bug and what not. And getting a picture that was much better than a high end player, not to mention the cheap players you own. They all look like CRAP on a large, good display.
You argue within your limitations. You say yourself that you don't use debuggers much, only when a program segfaults. You can't possibly imagine all the things that people use debuggers for that you haven't tried yourself. Most people that don't like debuggers haven't used them much. Most people that have used debuggers a lot sees their value. For embedded programming, multithreaded programming, highly recursive systems and for many other cases, debuggers are an invaluable tool. Obviously. /David
Frankly, Linus sounds like a guy who haven't used a debugger much and therefore thinks it's a bad tool. Very unprofessional, if you as me. There are many, many programmers that are much more talented than him, that use debuggers all the time. More than anything, it shows Linus' limited capabilites. /David