Browsers (Was: A very basic blog about D)

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 00:28:11 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> They're corporations. It's not about turning a profit. It's 
> about being under a legal obligation to shareholders to extract
> *as much* money as possible.

Indeed. But at this rate, they're not even staying competitive 
with their corporate alternatives. The cable company will have to 
shape up or accept defeat, but nope, they keep raising their 
rates. Maybe they're just milking what they can.


And yeah, I agree with the sad state of tv. A lot of what I watch 
are actually reruns but there's a lot I like about regular tv 
over dvds: the cost (which was a pure loss with cable, but a win 
with over the air), the variety, and actually I kinda like 
commercials because they give me a chance to get up. Yes, I could 
pause a dvd whenever, and change the discs for variety, but eh 
the regular tv is nice and mindless.

> (usually anime)

Sailor Moon rocks btw!


> Or that awful digital "stutter".

Ugh, yeah. It is beautiful with a good signal, but just awful 
otherwise.

> were going to redo the protocol, I'm sure they could have done
> something far better than the non-degradable new system we 
> ended up with.

Yeah, my thought is at least they could interlace the frames, 
using the same signal they have now, just changing it from a high 
res compressed stream to a lower res, redundant and 
error-correction supporting stream. So it sends frames like:

1 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 3 2 2 1 4 3 2 1 5 4 3 2

well that's confusing looking, but the idea is if the resolution 
is like 1/4 the size, we should be able to send each frame 4 
times in the same digital signal. So then if your connection cut 
out and you lost a frame, it is ok because you'll have another 
chance to pick it up 50ms later. So if you then have a small like 
16 frame buffer in the box you could pick up almost a second to 
recover a frame and piece it together from its sub-frame 
checksumed chunks as it is rebroadcast, to give the user a smooth 
picture.


Or something like that, I'm not a signal expert nor a reliability 
engineer, but it seems to me that it ought to be possible.