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Products like those are already out there.

Basically since HDCP start showing up on the first sets years ago, we knew this was going to happen with future generations of STB's and DVD formats.

Here is one of may solutions:

http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/21/the-clicker-hdc ps-shiny-red-button/

HA! I don't read digg, but I tried it out. Funny thing was that this was posted on slashdot over a month ago!. And the omments are retarded...

One character every two seconds? Way too slow. I'll stick to T9 predictive input thank you. And I'm not one of the textaholic types that the article refers to.

You must not have seen the Tonight Show episode that pitted two hams (using Morse code) against two people using SMS. Morse code was faster.

I suspect that email through a Treo or a BlackBerry would be faster than either of them, due to the availability of a keyboard that makes punching in text much less tedious than on the average cellphone. Given a choice between flat-rate email ($15/month for unlimited wireless Internet) and charge-by-the-message SMS, I know which one works better for me, anyway.

I was gonna make an April Fools jab, but then I realized owning a room full of 30 year old tin boxes is no laughing matter.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/20/samsung-sued-ov er-dvd-duping-by-discontinued-player/

Turns out you have to drop to the service menu to disable the copyright protection, and that this player has been discontinued for a while. Thanks for the studios for making this knowledge public!

Engadget has a slightly more information.

And ultimately, Google News will provide all the stories you could want

To summarize the facts:
1. Samsung stopped producing this drive a year and a half ago
2. The 'features' were unlockable through remote control key combos
3. "The DVD-HD841 DVD-player can allow region encoding and high-bandwidth digital-content protection (HDCP) bypassing, provided a code is entered by remote control. Although pulled off shelves, its genes appear to have been transmitted to the DVD-HD747 and DVD-HD941." reference here

HDCP Bypassing!!
Weren't we just complaining about HDCP a day or two ago?

Run, don't walk, to eBay and get one of these players before Samsung pulls 'em.

In the US there should be just 5 versions, currently counting media center they have 3 versions of XP. I would have to see what they come with and how much they are charging for them before I decide if the extra 2 version are a good idea or not.

"Windows Starter 2007 - Vista without Aero, probably meant for developing nations.

Windows Vista Home Basic - Basic Windows Vista for your single PC fam, doesn't sound like much going on here. Analagous to XP Home.

Windows Vista Home Basic N - European version of the same, but without Media Player (because of antitrust rulings against MS in the EU).

Windows Vista Home Premium - This is the one we're all probably gonna own. It's got Media Center functionality, Cable Card support, the whole home-media shebang.

Windows Vista Business - Think of it as XP Pro, but Vista.

Windows Vista Business N - Think of it as XP Pro, but Vista, but Euro.

Windows Vista Enterprise - Business version of Vista with numerous enterprise features, like Virtual PC, volume encryption, etc.

Windows Vista Ultimate - Love that name. This one does all of the above (and more); what else do you need to know? It's ultimate Windows.."

More choices are rarely a bad idea. I dislike bundled crapola that I'll never need or want.

One big reason Qt is GPL'd is that it allows them to sell licenses to those who want to develop proprietary Qt applications. This, using your reasoning, makes them no better than Fluendo.

By licensing Qt as Free and Open Source Software under the GPL, Trolltech is encouraging developers to also release derivative work to the community as Free Software.

If a third-party wants to develop proprietary apps on the Qt framework, then they are not sharing back to the community and it is only fair that they compensate Trolltech. Share and share alike, but if you don't want to share, pay up. Qt licensing makes perfect sense, and it is how Free Software was designed to work and be self-funding.

This is in stark contrast with how Fluendo operates -- its business model is based on handcuffing users and denying them the right to use, study, modify, redistribute, and improve the source code of GStreamer's DRM, proprietary plugins. Not only that, Fluendo actually pays patent licensing fees to the RIAA and MPAA, making those monopolies even richer and more powerful than they already are.

So if you're Fluendo customer, you can be sure part of your money goes into the pockets of the media barons. And if you're a GStreamer developer, you can be sure that your code will be used by the same entertainment moguls to rip off and spy on their users through DRM.

Ok, it isn't real, but I once submitted this as an article and it was rejected. /. could have a blast with this one...like I can't wait to get my hands on one of these!

http://www.engadget.com/2005/10/13/medical-and-mus ical-breast-implants/

Usurper_ii

somebody's gonna come up with a little adapter box

You mean spatz-tech.de ?
It even takes care of HDCP:

http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/15/spatz-techs-dvi magic-killing-on-hdcp/

Not S-Video, but this device will do the trick.

The part after "aditionally" is blatantly cut/pasted from the Engadget discussion on the same topic found at http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/18/playstation-3-c osts-900-sez-merrill-lynch-mob/#c1063780. Unless this person happens to be the poster of the comment on Engadget (and he didn't bother to direct people to it), it should be modded down even though he makes a great point.

Does anyone honestly _want_ HDMI support?

I own 3 30+ LCDs. I've got a 42" plasma, and a 60" plasma. None of which support HDMI or HDCP. Guess what, I don't give a flying fuck (pardon my french).

My cable boxes output beautiful HDTV through DVI. So do my various (Mac and/or Linux) computers. So does my xbox. And I'm expected to replace _everything_ for absolutely no extra technical capabilities?

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH AHAHA

Hardware solutions like this: http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/15/spatz-techs-dvi magic-killing-on-hdcp/ already effectively crack HDCP. Do you really not expect mplayer/vlc/xine for Linux and OSX not do to the same? The technical details of how to break it are already public knowledge: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/20/025 1206&mode=nested&threshold=3

HDCP is dead on arrival, as far as I'm concerned. All it will mean is that the good, more functional equipment that supports standard DVI will be cheaper. I can get that 30" LCD for my bathroom, and maybe an outdoor one for my hot tub. No offense to the rest of slashdot, but its people (like me) that spend a substantial amount of their income on home "tech" that drive the industry, and most people I know are NOT going to replace their setups unless they see substantially improved features.

HDMI + 4 times HDTV resolution + Real 3D versus Standard HDTV on DVI? Yeah, maybe we'll upgrade.
HDMI + Standard HDTV versus DVI + Standard HDTV? Bwahahaha. Tell me another.

> You see, there are tons of news about RFID being broken, but when was the last time you saw that about a smart card?

Using your terminology where these things everyone else is calling RFIDs but you want to call contactless smart cards?

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,69453-1.htm l?tw=wn_story_page_next1
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/30/dutch_biom etric_passport_crack/
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/000434.html
http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/03/dutch-rfid-e-pa ssport-cracked-us-next/

See for yourself. Blu-ray sucks.. However DRM encumbered that HD-DVD is, it comes nowhere near the sheer evilness of this. This is the next generation of DRM, and I do NOT intend to support it in any way. I mean, we as consumers have been putting up with things such as having to have our games in the CD-ROM at all times, dealing with games that don't even work with the original discs due to copy protection, DVDs that we can't play on our system of choice, and lots of other things. Consumers still support them, as they want the content. I would think that piracy is on the rise, partly because people don't want to deal with that nonsense. It's only legitimate users who deal with that.

So I say, take a stance. It's too late to stop DRM... but it's not too late to keep DRM from going even further.

There is another method to get round the HDCP trap, which is to buy one of the Spatz boxes http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/15/spatz-techs-dvi magic-killing-on-hdcp/ - there's no way that it could be embargoed - the point of the device is to enable legacy devices to receive HDCP output. That is not illegal, or unethical.

There is another method to get round the HDCP trap, which is to buy one of the Spatz boxes - there's no way that it could be embargoed - the point of the device is to enable legacy devices to receive HDCP output. That is not illegal, or unethical.

If you follow the link to the DVI MAGIC page, you get a 404 page. It also doesn't appear to be listed among their current HD offerings, or at least not by that name. Gone also is the DVIHDCP box referenced by engadget's source.

Keep in mind that that article was written on July 15th, 2005. They may have gotten their equivalent of a cease and desist order by now.

There is another method to get round the HDCP trap, which is to buy one of the Spatz boxes http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/15/spatz-techs-dvi magic-killing-on-hdcp/ - there's no way that it could be embargoed - the point of the device is to enable legacy devices to receive HDCP output. That is not illegal, or unethical.

A few years of digital prohibition, where the more skilled among us can make truckloads of money building grey/black-market hardware, workarounds, etc.

Once you crack one of those, you get the master key for all the HD disks produced so far. All the goons can do is to change the master key for all future releases and then invalidate the particular device/vendor key. But that does not get them all their previous contents back, only locks the new products, until another device key gets cracked and the new master is out. Rinse, repeat.

Well, basically, the whole system is already compromised. There are devices that pretend to be a legit HDCP monitor, but just passes the signal through with HDCP stripped out.

I'm sure that there will other exploits.

Man, slashdotters can be so fucking annoying sometimes...

1. Another defunct one: Turtle Beach Audiotron
2. Yet Another: KiSS DP-500
3. This one's actually for sale on Amazon: Roku Soundbridge M1000
4. Also for sale: Slim Devices Squeezebox
5. On the high ($2000) end, Denon AVR-4036 Receiver has streaming (among many other things.)
6. And the winner of our "strangest item": sermonaudio.com internet radio. Though I suspect you'd have to hack it to get it to play anything other than their content :)
7. Oh, I guess you don't have to hack it, you can just buy the un-sermonized version as Penguin Radio.
8. D-Link has a DVD player with internet streaming radio called DSM-320RD Medialounge. It's even wireless. There's also a HD version, the DSM-520.
9. Even Philips has a series called Boombox.

I'm sorry my initial example was poor. I just grabbed the first link and didn't look at it much. Nonetheless, there are umpteen fucking examples of streaming internet radio devices. Many of them are available on the shelf, even at places like Circuit Shitty. And I've seen several at Fry's, come to think of it.

Broadcast radion in general is purely an annoyance to listen to. Yes, I am an XM radio subscriber. In fact, I have XM at home and in my vehicle. I love it. Why? Well, it's very simple. You don't hear stupid "radio voices". You don't hear all the damn commercials for stuff you don't want from companies who are too cheap to film TV commercials. You can get specialized content and stations that you can't get anywhere else. The stations are added and deleted based on listener support of a station. You can see title and artist of songs and hear a lot more music in the spectrum because they're not driven completely on playlists. They have REAL deejays that do take requests.

Now for those of you with the torches out, cap them please. Don't trip over your 8-tracks while trying to flame me. People try to make tha argument of, "Well, there are still commercials on XM!" Well, that's true, but the "commercials" on the music stations are really lineup notes. They advertise about other special programs on other XM channels. With such a wide variety of stations and content, the average listener would never been able to know what was on. The "ads" are relevent to the listenership of that particular station. You're not going to hear commercials for "XM 66 RAW (Uncensored Hip Hop Station)" on "XM 121 Fox News". It doesn't fit the demographic for that channel. So I would say they do a pretty good job there.

If I hear another "Free FM" radio spot, I might vomit. It really is a sad thing. "Free radio" had no problem running XM's radio spots when XM was getting started [read as, 'taking XM's money while in infancy'] because they never thought it would take off. With the new portable radios that XM is putting out, the Pioneer Inno and the Samsung Helix, XM will actually become portable, aside from the already available XM Delphi MiFi that is kind clunky. Sirius' best offering is a little behind with a potable that's more like a brick than a radio -- so they're a little behind in that department. Anyway, my .02.
Xserv

Apple does Windows (Mobile)?
http://www.engadget.com/2005/09/22/the-palm-treo-7 00w-aka-treo-670-exclusive-first-look/

"You see, we alaready got one! Izza verra nize!"

Samsungs players are nice.

The T8 does Video, Ogg and the usual stuff. The U1 is more like a Shuffle replacement, but with a 4 line display (that even his Steveness claims otherwise is very helpful). The U1 is mass storage compliant and works under Linux. The T8 is rather new and I don't know anything about it.

Bye egghat

Samsungs players are nice.

The T8 does Video, Ogg and the usual stuff. The U1 is more like a Shuffle replacement, but with a 4 line display (that even his Steveness claims otherwise is very helpful). The U1 is mass storage compliant and works under Linux. The T8 is rather new and I don't know anything about it.

Bye egghat

I was under the impression that ATI had recently announced a CableCard 2.0 USB device for PCs and was looking forward to getting digital HDTV with it in the near future. Did something change?

Sigh.... Anyone actually like to find the article. I found this which shows it's a year old. PS. Woot. My first dupe whine. http://www.engadget.com/2005/09/07/boil-an-egg-ins tead-of-your-brain-with-your-cellphones/

Umm, sorry Technoextreme, but we call it a dupe when it is on slashdot twice. Otherwise, you could say that you already saw this in the dictionary, and you just rearranged the words. This is not your first dupe when, it is your first whine as a dope.

Sigh.... Anyone actually like to find the article. I found this which shows it's a year old. PS. Woot. My first dupe whine. http://www.engadget.com/2005/09/07/boil-an-egg-ins tead-of-your-brain-with-your-cellphones/

The bathroom is missing this. I saw it in person at MacWorld in January. I believe we have now officially crossed the line on acceptable iPod accessories/gear.

In this case I don't think you need to worry about that.

NTP is the one gaming the system here -- the NY Times called them a "virtual corporation" (according to Engadget), and they're nothing but a holding company with a fat war chest set up to create landmine lawsuits over the patents that they hold.

In terms of patent abuse, these guys make Microsoft look like Mother Teresa. They don't make anything (except lawsuits), they don't do anything, and the only way they have of making money is by going after the 'deep pockets' of established, successful companies. In short, they're an inherently parasitic business.

Is what they're doing legal? Yes. Should it be? Clearly not.

It would be different if they actually had a wireless-email product which was being infringed on by the Blackberry, but they don't and never did. All they ever wanted to do was bleed RIM for about a half billion dollars, and the hell with anyone who uses the service.

I think RIM is going to come out of this okay, and kudos to them for standing up to NTP. Regardless of what I'm sure were self-interested reasons for doing so, it was the right thing to do.

Engadget had the 'scoop' on the mini three a long time ago, too - practically since the "Coming on Feb 1st" message apppeared on the site.

For those complaining about the site being down without a mirror of a picture.... a little googling does help

Heres a review (with pics) from engadget

I know some people need a lot of storage, but c'mon:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/30/emc-rolls-out-4 -million-petabyte-array/

Four million petabytes?

Anyway, anyone else remember Arthur C. Clarke's "3001 The Final Odyssey"? By the time you start talking about petabytes, we could think about storing not just great works of art, but also the artist who created them. Let's see, some math is in order:

Fat artist: 75kg = 75000 g. Since we're 70% water, we'll say the average molar mass is 20g, so that's 3750 moles of molecules. Multiply by Avogadro's number and we get 2.2575 x 10^27 molecules. One petabyte is 10^15 bytes, so we need another 12 orders of magnitude before we can even devote 1 byte per molecule.

Even millions of petabytes leaves us short. Yawn, wake me up when we have 4 million zettabyte drives. Of course, by then the drive manufacturers will have redefined the prefixes again...

Here ya go, Arrogance Boy.

>PSP might be nice hardware, but until it gets the really fun games, people won't care. GBA emulator in the works. :) http://www.engadget.com/2005/06/22/game-boy-advanc e-emulator-for-psp/

Have we all forgotten the Engadget interview in which our good friend Jack V said "Now, fair use is not in the law. People are taking fair use and changing it to unfair use and claiming that it's fair use."

Sorry, but they can't have it both ways. Either there's fair use and they can make copies for internal/non-revenue generating purposes (and so can everybody else), or they can pay a ridiculous amount of money to the owners of the copyright for breaking the law as they see and try to enforce it.

As an aside, do you think one of those questionably legal/illegal copies of the movie ended up making the rounds on BitTorrent? Just a thought...

I don't understand why NTP has a case at all. I thought the USPTO announced that it would rule against NTP's patents.

http://www.engadget.com/2005/12/20/uspto-calls-rim -to-give-support/

I believe that the USPTO hasn't ruled yet, but given that they've announced that they will rule in favor of RIM, I don't know how NTP could enforce an injuction against RIM.

When I first saw the Revolution's controllers, I thought they were neat and all, but couldn't ever imagine playing a game virtually like that for hours, like you would with a standard controller. It would be a neat thing for an arcade, but not a home console.

Then I heard about the controller 'shells'

(^ The pic is fake, but it demonstrates the concept).

It makes much more sense now.

You could be able to put your remote-style controller inside a gun, fishing rod, or even just a standard controller.

But how will we play the downloadable classic games? I can't imagine playing it on the Revolution's controller.

Here's what I think is going to happen:

Nintendo could make a 'shell' for each system! You could actually play mario bros. on the original, brick-style, NES controller, or, maybe later, emulate a third party classic like the Atari 2600, or Sega Genesis--using the original controller!

Personally, I can't wait. I'd pick the original Donkey Kong to Halo anyday.

This would also provide a legal alternative to downloading roms, and with the two built in USB 2.0 ports you might even be able to upload them to your computer. Then again, this could be used as a mini computer since it supports computer moniters--Plug in a keyboard and mouse and you're set!

And the predicted low price certainly doesn't hurt either :P. I just hope the download prices for the games are cheap as well.

It's really useful if you reference your sources, BTW, so here's some I found for you:

http://www.engadget.com/2005/12/06/ign-digs-up-som e-new-info-on-the-nintendo-revolution/
http://revolution.ign.com/articles/673/673578p1.ht ml
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=62 491

Graphics: Nothing I've seen gives me any indication of how powerful this will actually be, only that it's designed by ATi, and designed as a completely different architecture to everything else. Having said that, I think we're at the point where it's fairly trivial to stuff as many polygons into a 480i/p display as you want, and unless it's missing some funky technology such as the lighting/shader stuff the XBox 360 and PS3 (will) have, there shouldn't be any real difference.

By which I mean, I think you're right. Pity it's not R5xx based though, it looked like XBox 360/Revolution dual format releases were going to be more or less trivial...

Memory: Yikes, that's not much at all. I'm suprised; memory is fairly cheap stuff, putting 256mb in would probably have made life a lot easier on devs, but nevermind...

CPU: Yup, agree.

Processor
Dual-core 64-bit processing power means smooth performance and complete control of your digital media.

I blogged this, and found a good 7 more links, excerpt from post below.

"Korea to unveil Police Robots in 5 years. This project is being spearheaded by KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology). Whom the team at engadget visited early last year. Some of KAIST's earlier robots, Ahra and Maru.

mefi thread here.

Update: Meant to include a link to the KAIST homepage... Also they created synthetic skin for robots this week with a 1mm spacial resoltuion, which is the highest to date...."

I blogged this, and found a good 7 more links, excerpt from post below.

"Korea to unveil Police Robots in 5 years. This project is being spearheaded by KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology). Whom the team at engadget visited early last year. Some of KAIST's earlier robots, Ahra and Maru.

mefi thread here.

Update: Meant to include a link to the KAIST homepage... Also they created synthetic skin for robots this week with a 1mm spacial resoltuion, which is the highest to date...."

I blogged this, and found a good 7 more links, excerpt from post below.

"Korea to unveil Police Robots in 5 years. This project is being spearheaded by KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology). Whom the team at engadget visited early last year. Some of KAIST's earlier robots, Ahra and Maru.

mefi thread here.

Update: Meant to include a link to the KAIST homepage... Also they created synthetic skin for robots this week with a 1mm spacial resoltuion, which is the highest to date...."

http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/08/turn-your-optic al-mouse-into-a-crappy-scanner/

Who saw that one coming?

One would expect Japan to come up with robotic advances (if you're an aficionado of Ghost in the Shell, Macross and other such series).

Instead, it seems South Korea is becoming a major actor in both robotics and cloning / stem cell research.

Earlier this week we were reading about Korea introducing Robotic Teachers and Robotic Aides.

It seems that this country will be experiencing a large scale robotization earlier than anyone expects.

If the government plans go as planned, the korean society should have robots in people's everyday life within 10 years!

This raises a lot of interesting questions:
- how will Korea deal with the arrival of workers that never get tired or seek and don't ask for a salary?
- what will be the economic impact of all the redudancies?
- how will the next generation of kids deal with those?
If people are becoming decreasing responsible and more and more assisted in the next years, what would a person's relation be with mankind, and robots?

YMMV