nemesis wrote:
> really? 

Really. I worked across the hall from the guys inventing it.

The signals from ADSL are about 1% the strength of the signals from voice. 
There's no connection there other than you to the line card. That's why you 
can still talk on the phone when you have ADSL.

(Now, without appropriate filters, maybe nowadays you can hear the ADSL. And 
it's doing things vaguely modem-like. But only over the wire. By the time it 
gets to the switch, it's on a separate path already.)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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Invisible wrote:

> Hell, when I was at uni ten years ago we had computers exceeding these 
> resolutions. With Windows NT 4.0, Service Pack 4. Has technology not 
> moved on since then? It's not like there's any technical challenge to 
> using a higher resolution, after all...

Government regulators, for whom being safe is generally more important 
than being right, had a major role in the determination of the standard. 
  The standard had to allow for broadcast within a strictly-defined 
frequency band, and this limit was chosen based on technology that is 
now ready for deployment to your local museum, because these decisions 
were made years ago.

If I am remembering things correctly, there was even some insistence 
that the signal be displayable by sets designed for the old broadcast 
standard.  If that sounds thinking-impaired, well, that's the FCC for you.

Regards,
John

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On 27-4-2010 14:07, Phil Cook v2 wrote:
> And lo On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:01:41 +0200, andrel <byt### [at] gmailcom> 
> did spake thusly:
> 
>> On 26-4-2010 14:49, Warp wrote:
>>> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>>>>> Question: Why aren't there any widescreen cinemas yet?
>>>>> At risk of entirely misunderstanding the question, all cinemas have 
>>>>> shown all
>>>>> films in 16:9 or wider for almost a hundred years.
>>>
>>>> Really?
>>>
>>>> Huh, well, you learn something every day. The picture always looked 
>>>> fairly square to me...
>>>    I'm beginning to suspect that this is not Andrew, and instead some 
>>> troll
>>> is posting using his nickname.
>>>    If even TV is not square (it's 4:3), how in the world could you ever
>>> think that movies are square? I don't get it.
>>>    The narrowest aspect ratio used in movies for the past 20+ years has
>>> usually been 1.85:1. The most common aspect ratios for big movies today
>>> is 2.25:1 and even 2.35:1 (that's well over twice as wide as tall).
>>>
>> a few days ago I heard a talk that might provide an explanation. 
>> Someone set up an experiment with 180 degrees view and figured out how 
>> wide they perceived it. You get a camel distribution with one hump at 
>> 180 and another, larger! one at 90. Experiment was reproducable per 
>> person.
>>
>> Hard to believe but apparently true. Something fishy in our brain. Jan 
>> Koenderink, who was giving the talk, is trying to figure out why.
> 
> Perhaps something similar to line perception where we overestimate acute 
> angles and underestimate obtuse ones.
> 
Is that also wildly variable between people? (I wouldn't know, because I 
am only one person)

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On 04/27/10 07:57, Mike Raiford wrote:
> Whats not to follow? They stream movies directly from the internet
> (albeit at SD resolutions ..)

	Depends on how you define SD - I've seen movies through it that are
definitely beyond DVD quality.

-- 
I considered atheism but there weren't enough holidays.

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> Hmm, interesting. Where I live, most people have between 2 Mbit/sec and 8 
> Mbit/sec.

Which is plenty.

Check out the freeview bitrates:

http://dtt.me.uk/

If the average bitrate of a BBC channel is 3.2 Mbit/s (higher than most 
other channels) using MPEG2, then I'm pretty sure watching the same signal 
compressed with MPEG4 at 2 Mbit/s is going to look virtually identical.

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>> Hard to believe but apparently true. Something fishy in our brain. Jan 
>> Koenderink, who was giving the talk, is trying to figure out why.
> 
> Perhaps something similar to line perception where we overestimate acute 
> angles and underestimate obtuse ones.

My mother believes she can sing. Even though she's actually about a 
fifth to a third flat. The result sounds truly *horrible*! You'd think 
she could hear the difference, but no...

She also claims to be unable to tell the difference between major and 
minor chords, which is impressive given the vast, world-alering 
difference between the two.

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And lo On Tue, 27 Apr 2010 23:29:15 +0200, andrel <byt### [at] gmailcom>  
did spake thusly:

> On 27-4-2010 14:07, Phil Cook v2 wrote:
>> And lo On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:01:41 +0200, andrel  
>> <byt### [at] gmailcom> did spake thusly:
>>> Hard to believe but apparently true. Something fishy in our brain. Jan  
>>> Koenderink, who was giving the talk, is trying to figure out why.
>>  Perhaps something similar to line perception where we overestimate  
>> acute angles and underestimate obtuse ones.
>>
> Is that also wildly variable between people? (I wouldn't know, because I  
> am only one person)

Supposedly 'in-built' but it would be interesting to run those perception  
tests on the same group of people if only to dismiss it as a factor.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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On 4/27/2010 11:15 AM, Darren New wrote:

>
> Seriously, I don't have ethernet *everywhere*. I couldn't do
> surround-sound speakers over ethernet. Wireless maybe, but not ethernet.
>
> I told them to put an ethernet wire from the closet to each phone jack.
> I should have said from the closet to each cable TV box as well.
>

How times change. I remember back when I had my house built (Shame I'm 
not in that house anymore, but its all for the better) I requested a 
phone jack near the entertainment center (I did have the living room 
wired for 5.1 surround.

Now with internet-ready consoles and blue-ray players it makes perfect 
sense to have ethernet wired to the entertainment center as well. I 
wanted to wire the house for ethernet, but the builder didn't supply it, 
and wouldn't allow it. But that was no big deal. I think the next house 
I wind up in will likely be an existing home rather than a new build 
since most of the new homes are now too far out of the way for us, so it 
could be interesting to wire some extended services into an existing home.

-- 
~Mike

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Mike Raiford wrote:

> I wanted to wire the house for ethernet, but the builder didn't supply it, 
> and wouldn't allow it.

My dad wired it himself. ;-)

(As in, he literally chiselled out chunks of wall and then plastered it 
over again.)

And then we replaced the Ethernet router with a wireless one. Um... OK.

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On 4/27/2010 12:59 PM, nemesis wrote:
> Darren New escreveu:
>> nemesis wrote:
>>> BTW, don't you guys find it funny that ADSL is "dial-up" too?
>>
>> Not really. It's built into the line card, so you're not actually
>> dialing anything. You're just using the same wires you would be
>> dialing on.
>
> really? I used to connect without a line filter in my other telephone
> across the room and, thus, if you happened to pick up the nearby phone
> while it was connecting, you would listen to a bit of that "folkloric"
> well-known old-modem dialing-up tune.
>

probably hearing some artifacts from the out-of-band signaling the ADSL 
modem is doing. Which is why you need the filter ;) I remember back when 
I had ADSL forgetting a filter on a phone jack, and picking up that 
phone. It was more like I had a bad connection than anything, though.

-- 
~Mike

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