Not when they are running a modern 3D FPS for hours at a time, which most gaming PCs are perfectly capable of doing without catching fire.
As far as phones, etc, they do all of this in dedicated hardware, anyway. This whole thread is such FUD from people who know nothing about the actual topic (H.265 decoding hardware)...
I don't need to RTFA (though I did). I work in the industry. H.265 is already in every 4K TV on the market. Netflix, Amazon, MGo, and others are already streaming it. It's going to be the basis of the 4K Blu-Ray successor.
Customers may not even know they are watching H.265 encoded video, but that doesn't really matter. The "users" in this case are the CE manufacturers and the content providers, who have already made the decision to adopt it.
Which requires a lot of electricity - internet streaming and hard disk space don't require a lot of electricity. So I'd prefer that H.265 doesn't make it big until most equipment has dedicated decoder silicon.
Except H.265 doesn't require that much from a decent GPU. A LOT LESS than your average 3D game that people play for hours a day. This is a silly non-issue. And as I already said most equipment already does have dedicated silicon. 4K TVs have had it for 2 years. PC GPUs accelerate most of the computationally intensive operations as well.
Oh, and all of that hard disk space and the servers that contain them requires a shitload of electricity. Do you think sever-class HDDs just spin through perpetual motion?
Not just bandwidth costs, but storage costs as well. B/W + storage for Netflix's entire content library is well over $100M / year (I have heard that their total for encoding+storage+streaming is closer to $500M). Cutting that in half would be huge.
Not to mention it's not just about the providers costs, but the customer's ability to stream it - high quality 1080p for 3-5Mbps means most people could stream HD now.
That said, this is not going to magically solve any of those issues - they have something like 10-15 streaming formats to support various devices. But I'm pretty sure their 4K is all HEVC over MPEG-DASH.
That's ridiculous. I wanted to assume this was a joke but there just wasn't anything particularly funny about it.
First: computers/devices are designed to let their CPUs run at 100% with whatever cooling mechanism they have designed.
Second: PCs are a tiny minority of the devices that stream/decode video these days - especially 4K. Obviously, you don't need a 4k stream on a device that only has a 2k display or less (almost all PCs, tablets, and phones). So that leaves 4K TVs, BD players, and high end gaming-type PCs to do HEVC 4K. On the first two in that list, these days it's all done on a dedicated chip (or really, an SoC - system on a chip - that contains most of the functionality of the device. On the gaming PC, it's done on the GPU and is TRIVIAL compared to running a modern 3D game.
H.265 is going to become the standard in the near future - not just for 4K (in which is will pretty much be the only solution) but for 1080p as well, since you get significantly higher quality (including 10 or 12 bit color, BT2020 colorspace, high dynamic range, etc) for about 1/2 the bandwidth. Basically 5 Mbps to stream near Blu-ray quality 1080p movies, and even at 3Mbps 1080p looks decent. That will put HD streaming in the homes of about 90% of the US population. And that's just the first generation HEVC encoders - like X264 has over the years, they will continue to improve...
That's the first thing I thought. Twitter: the WORST WAY TO TELL A STORY EVER.
Yeah, I know exactly how the Chromecast works and its advantages and disadvantages... I have developed streaming software for it and many other devices.
If you want to have an ultra-portable device for traveling it has potential, but is not nearly as convenient as you describe for first time setup. When you move it to a different AP you have to go through the whole process to set it up again (though it does remember a few after you have done it). And if you are in, say, a hotel room with a walled garden sign up you are screwed, and need to bring your own wireless AP to set up the connection.
Not to mention it has a pretty anemic processor and can *barely* stream/decode 1080p content.
But anyway, I agree that Chromecast is a very different beast than something like a Roku. My point was if you want a device to plug into WIRED ETHERNET (the point of this article!) for streaming, it's very likely in a fixed location where portability is not an issue, and there are such better options for fixed-location streaming devices than Chromecast. Ie. the hardwired Chromecast adaptor is a pretty niche product.
And with that you can't play (legal) 1080p video to a TV... which is ALL I want to do, and without any effort.
A Roku (or many other devices, including PS3/PS4, many TVs and BDs) takes 10 minutes to set up and you are able to watch pretty much any movie or TV show you could think up via Netflix, VUDU, Amazon, Hulu, etc. No way your "$140 real linux PC" was at that point after a couple of hours (and probably never). Either way not worth the effort - I have a "real PC" (boots whatever I want) that cost a lot more than $140, but that doesn't mean I need to go through the pain of trying to watch a new release movie on my living room TV with it...
Chromecast all but requires another smart device running (continuously) to control it. You can't control it directly.
No buts - it requires another device, period.
Chromecast is one of the least useful of "the sticks", I agree, but really all of the sticks are currently horribly underpowered with fairly poor wifi reception.
Basically now for $30 + $15 = $45 you can get a slow "stick" device that still requires another device to work, but even when it does the experience kind of sucks. Or you can spend ~$90 for a Roku 3 that is blazingly fast for what it does, has a great remote, full wifi or IR control for other devices, and hundreds of 3rd party apps (not to mention the wifi signal is actually solid).
Don't underestimate convenience - that extra $45 cost will pay itself off in an hour for many people who actually value their free time and don't feel like fighting with a Chromecast.
I'm with you. Lagunitas and Rogue are two of my top 5... add Stone, Speakeasy, Firestone, Mendocino, Bear Republic... apparently I can't even pick 5, and those are just my tops on the West Coast, heh.
Anyway, as you can see I'm not going to argue that the American microbrewery movement doesn't blow away anywhere else in the world. Just that US MACRObreweries are ironically also the worst in the world
Wouldn't be surprised if there was some recompilation to improve the emulator. Just downloading new code would be pretty tiny compared to the assets. Or maybe all of the system libraries are x86 native. I'd be REALLY surprised if it was anything as simple as a PPC emulator running the XB360 OS.
More to the point, the CPU single-thread performance of the Xbone is also weaker than the XBOX360 clock for clock.
This sounds extremely suspect, especially since a quick search suggests that the XBox One has substantially lower clock speeds, which I would naively expect to be traded off for substantially better clock-for-clock performance, even if we assume that the XBox One favoured multithreading or GPU much more heavily at the expense of single-threaded CPU. Do you have a citation?
It's not just suspect, it's incorrect. I have developed apps for both and XBOne is definitely faster on single threaded code. The 1.75GHz x86-64 is faster than the 3.2GHz PPC (obviously clock rates aren't really relevant to the comparison, so his "clock for clock" is pointless) but a big part of it is a 32MB on-die cache on the XBOne CPU vs a 1MB L2 cache on the XB360.
Sure, they have a bunch of labels, but they are all pretty poor to average at best:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And of course Coors and Coors Light are still their signature brands. Just because they have a few decent niche brands doesn't mean they should be given a pass for the rest.
Not saying the US doesn't have good beer, but that "award" is clearly bullshit if COORS is considered the best "large brewery" in the world. IMO it's the worst in the *US*, and there are a lot of bad large US breweries.
Anyway, at the high end anyone can make good wine, beer, and cheese. Where Europe really smacks down the US is in the high quality of the basic, low cost items.
I can't believe that I haven't seen a single comment pointing out Elon Musk's hypocrisy and denial that his success was largely based (or at least enabled) by public support.
One of many available articles on the topic: http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
A few gems:
1. as soon at Tesla paid off their $465M loan, he stated that he thought the government should no longer loan money to companies like that. How convenient...
2. SolarCity basically lives or dies off of tax credits - *income* tax credits. But he has come out against income tax and in favor of use taxes - a very regressive tax policy that overly burdens the poor while letting the rich keep building their fortunes at an ever increasing rate.
3. he claimed he "got rich" from his earlier companies (Zip2 and Paypal) and "got zero government anything" to do so. He did make a total of ~$180M (before taxes) from those companies , but is worth $13B now - due mostly to Tesla and SolarCity IPOs. He seems good at math, so he really doesn't notice that almost 99% of his fortune was from his highly-government subsidized ventures?
Honestly I really want to like Musk, but the most I hear from him the more he is giving off a real Steve Jobs vibe - business genius, douchebag human. If he'd just drop some of the hypocritical libertarian "self made billionaire" attitude I might change my mind.
Absolutely - I agree with a programming overview, just that the details of computer science/programming beyond "this is basically how it works" is better left to college courses, same as anatomy for premed or fluid dynamics for ME, etc.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand
