February 2000 Meeting Report
by Howard L. Bonar
Secretary, Alaska Computer Society

The February 10, 2000 meeting of the Alaska Computer Society was held at the Northern Lights Inn starting at 7:05 pm.

Questions & Answers

When processing large animated graphics files the user cannot do anything else on the computer. The member has 512MB of RAM installed. A suggestion was to get a program such as Memory Plus which can allocate the amount of memory to be used by each application. Windows seems to have only limited memory handling ability.

Word Perfect 9 envelope addressing question. The process is so simple Corel didn't think it needed any instructions (they were wrong). Click on format and select envelope. The envelope layout is appended to the bottom end of the document. The heading of the letter, if there is one, will be displayed in the address section. The last return address used will be displayed in the return section. Click on the address area and the Icons for the envelope options appear in the property bar. They are for changing the return and mailing addresses, repositioning the addresses, and selecting the envelope size. To print, just select the envelope page and print the current page.

Main Meeting

The regular meeting called to order at 7:15 pm. President Gene White opened the meeting by introducing the board members, SIG leaders, and other volunteers present.

Dawn Scott discussed our proposed web domain name. Some proposals are ACS-online, ak-acs; apcgroup; acs-ak; alaskacomputersociety. Email your ideas and suggestions to our webmaster using the FeedBack link on our current website at www.alaska.net/~acs.

Mike Jacquot, SIG leader of the Clipper SIG and our new Webmaster, described the latest features on the ACS website at www.alaska.net/~acs. Internet Alaska has donated six months hosting of our website and new domain name. Thank You IA! There is a Message Board with different forums for questions and comments.

Apple computer group member Mike Rath invited all ACS members to their meetings.

The March 9th meeting will be at the BP Amoco building on Benson and Seward. Bill Matson of MemoryTime will speak to us about computer memory issues, the types of memory and upgrading your computer memory. (We are planning on giving one of the ADT Winchip mother boards with 200 mhz chip as the door prize for members.)

The April 13th meeting presentation will be on Internet and E-Mail Policy Issues. It will be held at the BP Amoco building at Benson and Seward. This could be very important for anyone doing company business on the Internet.

The Microsoft Office 2000 Premium Edition Door prize was won by Bronwyn Hillman. It couldn't happen to a nicer person.

The Presentation

Terry Shimek of Shimek's Audio located at 570 East Benson Blvd. presented an exciting live demonstration of HDTV quality features. His outline of the coming revolution in home television viewing with High Definition Television combined with computer and Internet technologies demonstrated just how far we have progressed in the past few years.

TIME LINE FOR HIGH DEFINITION TV

In November of 1998 several stations were scheduled to begin broadcasting NTSC standard digital signals. In May of 1999 all of the major networks were mandated to be digital ready in the top 10 markets. In addition, by November of 1999, all of the 11- to 30 top markets were to be ready. By May of 2002 all commercial stations must be ready and by May of 2003 all PBS stations must be ready. By 2006 the entire industry must switch over to digital only programming. The only exceptions will be in those markets where the consumer penetration hasn't reached 85% digital. HDTV is not yet available from our local broadcasters.

SATELLITE ACCESS

HDTV may be available here soon over the satellites. Small disk (2' diameter) service is now available in Alaska but HDTV requires the use of one of the 6' diameter disks to get signal quality good enough to use. Nation-wide, there are over 2 million satellite subscribers.

One of the problems of satellite subscribers is the difficulty of getting local channels on their satellite viewing setups. FCC rules have been a road block but one possible resolution is coming whereby local signals can be linked into the satellite system.

Satellite capacity for carrying television signals is impressive. There are five networks in the sky. Each satellite has 32 transponders per unit. Each transponder can carry several TV channels. Digitizing the signals and compression will multiply the number of channels that can be carried.

As more and more of the city is wired with fiber to the curb, getting all of the potential channels into the home will become a reality. Until that happens there are over 5000 DVD tapes available including most of the recent hits. More will be made available as new movies are released.

Cable modems are now in nearly 1.5 million households, an estimated 4.1 million households subscribe to digital cable, and it is available to millions more. Almost 500,000 households access the Internet are using high-speed DSL connections. And there are almost 11 million digital satellite households.

DVD Players can play analog programs using a process called "Progressive Scan".

MOVEMENTS IN THE INDUSTRY

A number of industry giants are getting in on the DVD action. AOL and AT&T are joining together on a DVD project. HBO and Showtime on another. Dish Network and Microsoft and

Intel & PBS are collaborating on projects.

ADVANTAGES OF DIGITAL TV TRANSMISSION

Digital signals are virtually impervious to electrical interference (noise). The viewing area is re-scalable to fill the screen. The HDTV format results in a wider screen for more realistic reproduction of the scenes. Digital signals can be compressed far more efficiently to release bandwidth for other uses. With five channels of audio available, true surround sound is now available.

Digital channels require less bandwidth than analog TV. The excess bandwidth can be used for streaming digital data over the air for very high speed data transmission speeds.

Digital broadcast TV shows all the lines of resolution available giving more picture detail in the same amount of time. It is possible to change the aspect ratios to fill blank bars on sides or top and bottom of the screen. (this may crop off part of the edges of the picture.)

THE ACRONYMS AND SPECIFICS

ATSC - Advanced Television Systems Committee.

ETV - Enhanced TV.

HDTV - High Definition TeleVision.

IPTV - Can mean "Internet Protocol TV," because it can serve as an on-ramp to the Internet. It can also mean "Intelligent Personal TV," because it is a "smart TV", and has much of the intelligence formerly in the network now in the television set.

NTSC - National Television Standards Committee.

MPEG-1 - Motion Picture Experts Group for low-quality video, and later as MPEG-2 for broadcast quality video, and formats better than broadcast quality. MPEG-2 made the direct-broadcast satellite practical.

Standards Comparison: Regular NTSC broadcast television has a total of 525 scan lines with 486 actually containing video information. The HDTV system has a total of 1125 lines with 1080 carrying video information. The resulting difference is 720x486 pixels for standard TV whereas HDTV can have a maximum resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. The difference in aspect ratios, 4x3 versus 16x9 also results in an improved perception of the viewed screens.

HDTV sets will have smaller, square pixels, and many more of them. Picture detail will be sharper with more detail in close-ups and panoramas.

EQUIPMENT IN THE HOME

The trend now is for the video display unit to have no smarts - it is just a monitor. The channel selection, storage, and sound units are completely separate and independent. As new features are made available, it will not be necessary to discard the most expensive part of the system to gain them.

With five channels of sound available and the Dolby digital system, the quality of sound will match a live performance at its best.

HDTV AT THE MOVIES

The average movie on the market today has a distribution of from 800 to 1000 copies. Each print costs about $1000 and has to be replaced after about 65 showings. The costs of just the film gets to be huge. It is very easy for the pirates to steal a copy of the film and make as many copies as they want. With HDTV, the digitized film can be encrypted so that no copies or no more than one copy can be made.

Present video projection units are not yet capable of filling a huge theater screen with the same brightness levels available from films. New technology is closing the gap. For the present projection TV is limited to smaller venues. The demonstration of scenes from "Shakespeare in Love" gave graphic proof of how good the detail can be.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

www.FCC.gov - Federal Communications Commission

www.NAB.org - National Association of Broadcasters

www.PBS.org/opb/crashcourse/hdtv - Public Broadcast Service

www.PBS.org/digitaltv/dtvtech - Public Broadcast Service