Single-play DVDs a Hoax

psy writes "Ed Bott's blog states that in relation to a previously posted slashdot story "a hoax can spread just as fast as a genuine news story. That's the lesson from the bogus story published in an obscure UK business magazine yesterday that claimed Microsoft is about to unleash a new single-play DVD format. Paul Thurrott reprinted the story without giving credit to the original source. Bink.nu picked up the story from Paul and reprinted it verbatim. Techdirt commented on the original story, with attribution but without any fact-checking. So did John Walkenbach. The funny part? There's no truth to the story. None whatsoever. In fact, the original story sparked a flurry of e-mails around Microsoft as people in different groups tried to figure out where on earth this story came from. After the head-scratching stopped, a spokesmen told me, they concluded that the story was not true. "It appears to be confusing an existing feature within Windows Media DRM that allows for single-play of promotional digital material. This has been an option for content owners to use for some time for the Windows Media format - it does not apply to MPEG2 content found on DVDs."

Comments

Not quite a hoax

[powerpuffgirls]

After the head-scratching stopped, a Microsoft spokesman told me, they concluded that the story was not true.

How do we know Ed Bott's comment is not a hoax too? He just said a MS spokesman told him so, but where's the source?

I believe the real story is, MS did invent this Play-Once DVD, however due to huge amount of negative comments from Slashdot, they pulled a PR spin, and instructed that spokesman to tell Ed that it's a hoax.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

due to huge amount of negative comments from Slashdot, they pulled a PR spin, and instructed that spokesman to tell Ed that it's a hoax.

As oppose to the usual MS bashing that happens daily in /.?

Which planet did you come from...

Re:Not quite a hoax

[joeybagadonuts]

Yes, I have noticed that trend too. Whenever there is a negative comment on Slashdot with regard to Microsoft, they change product strategy.


You may want to consider the use of the sarcasm tag....please be sure to use it in the future so that people don't think you are serious.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

But I was looking forward to my Windows Vista Run Once Edition CD....

What would I do now...:(

Re:Not quite a hoax

[macdaddy357]

Maybe Windows Vista is a hoax, too.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[dotgain]

You don't think (Score 5, Funny) is a bit of a giveaway, do you?

Re:Not quite a hoax

[BottleCup]

due to huge amount of negative comments from Slashdot, they pulled a PR spin, and instructed that spokesman to tell Ed that it's a hoax.

As oppose to the usual MS bashing that happens daily in /.?

Which planet did you come from...

Hey, we all watched Mission Impossible. We know this has to be true!

Re:Not quite a hoax

[TallGuyRacer]

We can only hope.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been for 3+ years now. Or, do people stop counting after a while?

Re:Not quite a hoax

[LeonGeeste]

Yeah, it's called a trial balloon. Look it up. Let me make it easier for you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_balloon

They send out a press release with plausible deniability to see how their PR would suffer or improve if they took a certain action. Now they know it's a bad idea, and they don't have to go through the trouble of sticking their necks out, too. Politicians do this all the time.

It's a shame really. The single-use DVD merely gives people an additional option. You can buy the DVD for $20, or buy it for a single use for $3. All those who would pay $3 for a single use but not $20 for the full DVD now suffer, and those who buy normal DVD's are unaffected.

Good job guys.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you believe Windows 95 through Windows XP was all one big hoax, too.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[MightyMartian]

Oh yeah, Slashdot bent the might Microsoft. We'll really get 'em tomorrow, when the whole damn story is published again. Nothing like a dupe to get Redmond shaking in their boots. I even heard that Ballmer through a coffee table and shouted "I'll fucking kill CmdrTaco!"

Re:Not quite a hoax

[ZachPruckowski]

I think it is more of an inside joke.

The marketers promise things, then the programmers laugh, and go back to fixing the beta version that was XP. Then the bosses read their progress reports, which basically say "Hell is gonna freeze first". They put in a maintenence request on the air conditioning, and tell the marketing people to knock the release date back a few months and cut a few features. The marketing people vent steam by reaming out the programmers. The vented steam condenses on the AC machine, breaking it, and the cycle repeats.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they flushed the plans down the iLoo.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Buran]

Oh, it's "such a shame" that there's one fewer way to fill landfills with this crap, there's one fewer way to use polluting manufacturing processes to make this crap, when we can make stuff that isn't artificially limited?

Give me a break. Thumbs down to you.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[dcam]

Like the iLoo

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't read through the thousand evil microsoft posts to see if this has been covered... but this is NOT a new idea, if you might recall, I believe Circuit City or Best Buy, forget which, they are interchangable anyway a while back sold movies, in DIVX format that were run once or twice then self destructed. his was a umber of years ago when good DVD's were still in the $35 range, these disks were about $5, because A) They were DIVX and B) They were disposable.... so in effect you were getting a VHS quality Rental

Think about this..... when was the last "original" idea you can think of?

Re:Not quite a hoax

[popra]

I guess the whole thing with Microsoft building an OS was a hoax, or an office suite, or a browser... :P

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

i think this comment is a hoaz.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[gentlemanfox]

Maybe Bill is a hoax and the real Man behind Microsoft is Steve Job Scream

Re:Not quite a hoax

[LeonGeeste]

Not that anyone's still watching, but:

Garbage companies bear the full costs of using landfills. If we were running out of landfill space, that would be reflected in the cost of garbage disposal. As it stands, however, even accounting for costs of the landfill space, it's only $50/ton to dispose of garbage. And then the land above it is converted into some park, golf course, or nature preserve. We're not running out of landfill space. You could put all the trash in the US for the next 1000 years (accounting for population gain) in a 35 mile by 35 mile by 200 ft high (not unreasonable for landfills) landfill. Source: Penn & Teller's program Bull****!; I'm sure you can verify it. That's a tiny blip in Nebraska.

Regarding pollution, I don't know how much pollution is created in forming and stamping a DVD, but I'd venture it's a lot less than you regularly spew out of your car every day. So let's make DVD manufacturers bear the full cost of their pollution, causing the collapse of the DVD industry because they'd now have to pay 3.1 cents instead of 3 cents to make a DVD.

Oh, and if you're against producing stuff with a limited life, are you also against paper plate manufacturers for making a product that doesn't last forever? Durability issues are always considered when producing for consumers; sometimes, it's really not cost justified. The single-use DVD was an attempt to capture the "deadweight loss" (look up on Wikipedia) of people who would pay $3 for a single use, but not $20 for infinite use. It would satisfy a real consumer demand. But like "usury" in the Middle Ages and international trade today, people's emotional reactions on economic issues causes them to kill a process that ultimately benefits consumers.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

>I even heard that Ballmer through a coffee table

You heard him through a coffee table, I'm trying to picture that -- were you under the coffee table? Or did the coffee table repeat to you what it heard?

Oh, he threw a coffee table!!

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Buran]

Garbage companies bear the full costs of using landfills. If we were running out of landfill space, that would be reflected in the cost of g
garbage disposal.

Perhaps. But does that make it any more responsible to waste that capacity when there's no need to artificially limit the usefulness of an item that doesn't biodegrade? Yes, decay is slowed in a landfill environment -- but plastic (most plastic) will never decay, or at least for such a long time that it's just about the same thing as "never".

Regarding pollution, I don't know how much pollution is created in forming and stamping a DVD, but I'd venture it's a lot less than you regularly spew out of your car every day.

I drive a low-emissions vehicle so my car pollutes very little, and it's a fuel-efficient five-door hatchback, so I use a lot less gas than average vehicles do. It does pollute only a little bit -- but again -- it's irresponsible to waste raw materials and pollute to make junk that's only good for a limited time before it gets thrown away (and face it, a lot of people are just going to chuck them in the trash, not the recycle bin).

if you're against producing stuff with a limited life, are you also against paper plate manufacturers for making a product that doesn't last forever?

I don't use paper plates much (I use regular plates and wash them when the dishwasher gets full rather than every day) but again, the problem is biodegradability. Toss out a paper plate and it will decay. Throw out a DVD and it won't.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet you post from a thing that is barely recycled, fills landfills, and continues to create pound for pound more pollution in its manufacturing and electrical requirement (which is powered by unclean fossil fuels mostly).

So shut up unless you're living perfectly green.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Pope]

Wow, talk about not even using a hint of logic. The poster was criticising the way disposable DVDs create more waste, and you immediately go off on an irrelevant tangent that assumes he has a car and the pollution it may or may not cause.

That's not even arguing by anlogy, it's a strawman bullshit point.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[drew]

All those people who would pay $3 for a single use DVD can continue renting them rather than adding yet another one-off disposable item to American consumerism. Sorry, but it's just a dumb idea.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[wantobe]

It's highly unlikely that Slashdot comments changed Microsoft's strategy, because Techdirt (where I originally read the story) had posted the "it's a hoax" follow up a couple of hours before Slashdot had even posted the first story.

Oh, I know you were being sarcastic. I just wanted to use this opportunity to point out that Slashdot is increasingly getting behind the curve on these tech stories. They can't even keep up with the retractions.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

I even heard that Ballmer through a coffee table and shouted "I'll fucking kill CmdrTaco!"

Through the table? Were you under it at the time?

Re:Not quite a hoax

[LeonGeeste]

You talk repeatedly about the "unnecessary waste" involved, but I think I didn't make my point clear. "Waste" implies forgone opportunities. Landfill space is really not a forgone opportunity, not of the magnitude you're talking about. If there were really valuable (i.e., that people *value*) opportunities forgone through the use of landfill space, investors would speculate in the market, driving up the price to the point that throwing things away would be prohibitively expensive. Do you know what a futures market is? It's a really neat deal where investors - in pursuing profit - intertemporally allocate goods so that no generation overuses them. That landfill space is not bid up in price is evidence that waste in any meaninful sense of the term - forgone opportunities - isn't occurring with single-use DVD's.

The exact same argument applies to the "waste" in the materials involved in making a DVD.

Regarding pollution, I understand that it also imposes costs on others. And polluters - including small scale polluters - should pay for costs they impose on others. My point was that even if they did, that would not significantly alter the fact that it would not be wasteful. Everything's a tradeoff. The pollution involved in DVD's is small enough to be worth the tradeoff, even if paid for.

That ties in with the final point I was trying to make about the tradeoffs involved in making products with a lifetime less than infinity. Yes, it would be nice if every product lasted forever. But often that's not cost justified. Many people don't want to pay $20 for an infinite DVD, but they would gladly pay $3 for a single-use. The lack of such a market is a deadweight loss: those who would buy the single use DVD miss out, and so do the people that would sell them. No one wins!

Products are generally not made to last forever, because then they would be too expensive. Now you may reply that the limitations on a DVD are "artifical" while the limitations on say, how many times you can use a wheelbarrow is "inherent" or "natural". But in both cases, the limitation on usages is necessary for the product to be brought to the market in the first place. In the wheelbarrow case, it's because an infinite use wheelbarrow would be too expensive for the ordinary persons. In the DVD case, it's because the infinite use DVD would be too expensive for ordinary persons.

This is not to say I don't feel the same emotional response at the "unnecessary waste"; in fact, I feel the same way. But this is instinctual, or emotional, the result of humans historically living in times of extreme scarcity. In reality, the single-use DVD's are not a waste because if they were, it would already be prohibitively expensive.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[LeonGeeste]

The people who would buy the single use DVD's don't think it's a dumb idea. Maybe they are dumb. Or perhaps they just have different values than you do. They might not want to have to return the DVD or risk late fees. Or maybe they like going to the store rather than waiting ~2 days for the DVD to come in the mail through Netflix (I think that's a low estimate). That's assuming the rental costs are under $3, of course, which with monthly fees it may not be.

See my other posts in this thread regarding the disposability issue.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[LeonGeeste]

He did talk about pollution, that's why I brought it up. If he's willing to make DVD manufacturers pay exhorbitant costs for polluting, he should be willing to pay the same per-mass-pollutant cost of his car's pollution. The fact is, neither his car nor DVD production is very polluting. So my point was that the issue is a red herring.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, it's "such a shame" that there's one fewer way to fill landfills with this crap, there's one fewer way to use polluting manufacturing processes to make this crap, when we can make stuff that isn't artificially limited?

You really think this would be environment hostile? Guess what people do now when they have to return a DVD -- they drive to the fucking video store and return it. That's 10x the pollution you'll ever see from creating a DVD (or disposing of it).

Give me a break. Thumbs down to you.

Likewise.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Damer Face]

Let me preface this by saying I don't own a car.

Whilst one DVD may not be very polluting, the agenda of "sell more products" is. How un-polluting do you really suppose 100 million a year plus DVDs are? Now multiply this by all the crap-hole products that consumers buy and ditch often without even using said product.

Burying something in a landfill site, doesn't somehow mean that zero pollution is caused, which is what you seem to think. Chemicals will slowly leach out for years to come and what about the inital environmental costs of production?

"The fact is, ..."

Why is what you say a "fact"?

Re:Not quite a hoax

[LeonGeeste]

Okay, let's go over the meaning of pollution. Now, if I throw trash all over my living room, is that pollution? I don't think so. Pollution is when you impose environmental degradation on other people or their property. So does burying trash in a landfill count? No. It's one person's property. He bought out all future users of that property. If using that underground space as a landfill would forgo some great opportunity, specualtors would make that reflected in the price. In reality, it doesn't, because you can dig so deep to bury the trash and not affect the land above it.

Regarding potential for pollution bleeding into groundwater and such, do you really know how landfills work? They have to put a bottom layer of clay 8+ feet thick. (That's more than 2 meters if you're a communist.) They have to obey all kinds of regulations to insure the pollution doesn't bleed out. They generally hold insurance policies against liability in case it does, in which case the damage is paid out. (Fun fact: landfills extract the methane from degradation of garbage and use it to heat homes. So in one sense stuff you throw away already is recycled.) Source: again, the Penn and Teller show which can probably easily be verified. If you really want to oppose "unnecessary" product use on the grounds that it may (and is extremely unlikely to) pollute outside a landfill and not get cleaned up, you should advocate the extermination of "unnecessary" people who may commit crimes and be unable to compensate the victims.

The proof of the fact I gave at the end is simple: imagine your car's pollution for one day dispersed over a city. No measurement would detect it. This is not to say car polluters shouldn't pay; they should. What it does prove is that the marginal impact of one car is small, so even if they did pay for that, behavior wouldn't change behavior much. There are a lot of good arguments against cars, but claiming they would fall out of use if people had to pay for their pollution... just ain't one of 'em.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Damer Face]

"Okay, let's go over the meaning of pollution. Now, if I throw trash all over my living room, is that pollution? I don't think so. Pollution is when you impose environmental degradation on other people or their property. So does burying trash in a landfill count? No. It's one person's property. He bought out all future users of that property. If using that underground space as a landfill would forgo some great opportunity, specualtors would make that reflected in the price. In reality, it doesn't, because you can dig so deep to bury the trash and not affect the land above it."

Nice use of sophistry and handwaving nonsense to justify your selfish actions.
An extension of your "argument" would be that if I bury 10 tonnes of plutonium waste in back garden it isn't causing any pollution.

Another conclusion of your argument would be that the ozone hole isn't caused by CFC pollution, because no-one owns the ozone layer, so it cannot possibly suffer pollution. What about when the first person gets skin cancer from decreased UV protection? How does all the pollution that caused it suddenly magic itself into existence? Forgive my ignorance, I didn't study Republocrat Ecology 101 at University.

Your entire universe is clearly constucted around the principle of ownership. Thus you feel that if you "own" a patch of land then you own all the flora and fauna and that any action of yours which serve to kill them is not pollution as they're yours, to be exterminated at your whim.

Newsflash: we all own this planet. But I know you capitalist scum-fucks like to go round sticking your flags into the soil like substitue erections, and proclaiming it to be yours before murdering the indiginous populations.

"Regarding potential for pollution bleeding into groundwater and such, do you really know how landfills work? They have to put a bottom layer of clay 8+ feet thick."

"They have to ..."

There's the flaw in that argument right there. And clay is permeable to water you know. But 2 marks for your quick use of google there.

"(That's more than 2 meters if you're a communist.) "

The rest of the world seems to have cottoned-on to decimalisation as being a bit more advanced than denarii and heads of wheat and god knows what else. Sorry if you think that's communism. It's actually called intelligence. Something which either hasn't spread to whichever backwater hicksville you call home, or was selected out through ruthless (in-)breeding.

"They have to obey all kinds of regulations "

There it is again: "They have to". Seems to be a lot of court cases in the US at the moment about companies not doing what they legally "have to".

"to insure the pollution doesn't bleed out. They generally hold insurance policies against liability in case it does, in which case the damage is paid out."

And what exactly do you expect a load of dead animals to do with an insurance payout cheque.

Are you really so stupid as to think that an insurance payout miraculously heals all the damage that has been done by an event? Or did Penn and Teller tell you it is so.

"(Fun fact: landfills extract the methane from degradation of garbage and use it to heat homes. So in one sense stuff you throw away already is recycled.)"

Yeah? As a percentage, how many dumps do this? What do they do about all the other chemicals, liquid and gas that they release?

"Source: again, the Penn and Teller show which can probably easily be verified."

So verify it. Don't just quote known prestigidators.

"If you really want to oppose "unnecessary" product use on the grounds that it may (and is extremely unlikely to) pollute outside a landfill and not get cleaned up, you should advocate the extermination of "unnecessary" people who may commit crimes and be unable to compensate the victims."

Sorry what's your point? That people are products? Well that's the initial assumption of this argument. Newsflash: some of "communists" like to be believe that people are people, not property.

Here's hoping you choke on the next corporate cock that feeds you ...

Re:Not quite a hoax

[LeonGeeste]

Wow, you really need to tone it down a bit. I know the whole moral indignation thing works on most people, but it really doesn't work on me. You think that just because you're a lefty, you have justice on your side. You don't.

Let me try to briefly go over your non-emotion based points:

My argument doesn't extend to plutonium because obviously the radiation spills over to other people's property.

"We" do not own the earth. Specific individuals own specific parts of the earth, unless you're okay with me barging into your place and taking stuff you don't need.

The "metric communist" thing was a joke. Sheesh.

You totally missed the point about eliminating things because they're not necessary: your argument justifies the extermination of anyone who causes an "unnecessary" imposition.

Every landfill that can harvest methane, does. It's free money. Ditto for any other chemicals that can be resold.

Insurance does fix the damages. They have to pay for the cleanup of everything they damage. Again, I don't think you want a world where nobody is allowed to do anything on the off chance it might hurt someone, even if they're fully capable of compensating that damage, because that would justify zero products ever being brought to market.

It seems you've never actually learned the arguments of the people you disagree with, so you have to respond emotionally. That's also a sign you don't know where you really stand. Please remedy this, and try to make your case without naked appeal to emotion.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[jpowell180]

This concept was tried once, and (thankfully!) failed miserably - it was called DIVX (not to be confused with the divX which is used for playing back dowloaded video content). It was conceived by an L.A. law firm (not Wolfram & Hart, lol) in conjunction with Circuit City, and attempted to kill the DVD format. The whole scheme involved purchasing a disc for about 4-5.00 (no extra features, not even in widescreen), and playing it in your DIVX player - you had about 48 hours to watch it, and thereafter would be charged a fee (appx 4-5.00) to play it again for another 48 hour period (the machine was connected via a phone line to the DIVX office). If you wished to have permanent playback for the disc, you could activate it as "DIVX silver" for around &20.00, but only on your player. None of these discs play on anything anymore, unless someone has created a hack for them (but they're not even widescreen, so what's the point?). The whole concept was crap, and we're much better off that it died in June of '99 (less than a year after it's launch!).

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Damer Face]

> Wow, you really need to tone it down a bit. I know the whole moral indignation
> thing works on most people, but it really doesn't work on me. You think that
> just because you're a lefty,

I'm not a Lefty. I'm a Righty. Tough luck with the appeal to emotions there.

> you have justice on your side. You don't.

No. I don't pay enough.

> My argument doesn't extend to plutonium because obviously the radiation spills > over to other people's property.

As does water seeping through clay, and gas spreading out into the atmosphere.

> "We" do not own the earth. Specific individuals own specific parts of the
> earth, unless you're okay with me barging into your place and taking stuff you > don't need.

Specific individuals have taken large parts of the earth and now shoot or jail anyone who tries to do the same. True for the US and UK. Both those establishments barged into people's houses and took what they wanted.

Nice try with the old and tired (and emotive) argument against common land "well you wouldn't want me barging into your house etc". No I wouldn't (I might catch something), but a landfill site and it's surrounding area isn't a house, in fact most of this planet is not covered with houses, yet it all seems to be owned by someone for no very good reason. You just accept the law of voracious property-grabbing and I don't, and I think you're morally wrong for that. And a hypocrite to boot.

> The "metric communist" thing was a joke. Sheesh.

So were remarks regarding your ancestry. Sheesh yourself.

> You totally missed the point about eliminating things because they're not
> necessary: your argument justifies the extermination of anyone who causes an
> "unnecessary" imposition.

It's about trying to eliminate that which is unecessary and harmful.

> Every landfill that can harvest methane, does. It's free money. Ditto for any > other chemicals that can be resold.

So how many do?

> Insurance does fix the damages. They have to pay for the cleanup of everything > they damage. Again, I don't think you want a world where nobody is allowed to > do anything on the off chance it might hurt someone, even if they're fully
> capable of compensating that damage, because that would justify zero products > ever being brought to market.

And if your health has suffered irreprably? How's the insurance help there? What if you're dead?

I don't want such a world either. I'd like some more responsibility from people and corporations, not state control - see, not a lefty. I didn't say ban the DVDs did I? I just said it was wrong. Balfour Beatty were fined £10 million today, a piss in the lake as far they're concerned, for not bothering to mend some rail track properly, resulting in ... dead people.

I don't care a damn about sides but that is undoubtedly unjust.

And that was one of the few instances of a powerful group of people finally being held to account for the damage they've caused. Most of them get away with it.

> It seems you've never actually learned the arguments of the people you
> disagree with, so you have to respond emotionally. That's also a sign you
> don't know where you really stand. Please remedy this, and try to make your
> case without naked appeal to emotion.

An emotional ad hominem in itself.

I have studied arguments such as yours and decided not to learn them.

Your primary reason for justifying landfills, that they are clay-lined and therefore safe, was rebutted unemotionally twice: clay seeps through water. When you've answered that, we can move on from there.

Re:Not quite a hoax

[LeonGeeste]

As does water seeping through clay, and gas spreading out into the atmosphere.

See below.

Specific individuals have taken large parts of the earth ...

Look, as much as I'd like to tear you a new one regarding property theory, it's really getting off the main topic, which is whether we're really forgoing valuable opportunities by using landfills. If there were future alternate uses of this landfill space that actually satisfied human desires (including the desire to "save the earth"), there would be much more upward pressure on the price of landfill space, which would feed back to disposal costs and make people not want to throw so much away.

> The "metric communist" thing was a joke. Sheesh.

So were remarks regarding your ancestry. Sheesh yourself.

I took it as a joke. You did not take the communist comment as a joke.

> You totally missed the point about eliminating things because they're not
> necessary: your argument justifies the extermination of anyone who causes an
> "unnecessary" imposition.

It's about trying to eliminate that which is unecessary and harmful.

Many people are unnecesary and harmful! Okay, fine, so you want to cheat and exclude all people from your unnecessary/harmful category. Have you ever used a non-renewable resource that was not vital for your survival? You're excluding it from me. That's therefor unnecessary and harmful. You claim really doesn't hold up.

> Every landfill that can harvest methane, does. It's free money. Ditto for any > other chemicals that can be resold.

So how many do?

Every one that can sell it for more than the (trivial) cost of doing so. I don't have numbers, but look what you're really claiming here: that businesses are basically ignoring a chance to get free money. Now, you can claim corporations "only care about profit". Or you can claim they ignore profit opportunities to fuck up the environment, but you can't do both. You might as well claim that corporations regularly turn down donations from the public.

And if your health has suffered irreprably? How's the insurance help there? What if you're dead?

I don't want such a world either. I'd like some more responsibility from people and corporations, not state control - see, not a lefty. I didn't say ban the DVDs did I? I just said it was wrong. Balfour Beatty were fined £10 million today, a piss in the lake as far they're concerned, for not bothering to mend some rail track properly, resulting in ... dead people. ...

Okay, I'll play your game. No one should do anything if it has a finite chance of resulting in someone's death, even if they held an insurance policy that paid the victim's estate, say $10 million. Congratulations: you've just explained why no product should ever be brough to market, and no one should ever drive. Okay, fine, I agree with you. Fuck cars. Let's use trains instead. Oops, same problem. So let's all go back to the days of walking everywhere we want to go (bikes risk death too). See where this goes?

And that was one of the few instances of a powerful group of people finally being held to account for the damage they've caused. Most of them get away with it.

If you believe specific individuals are able to dodge legal responsibility, hey, I'm behind you. But that wasn't your earlier argument!

I have studied arguments such as yours and decided not to learn them.

Not as revealed by your statements. You actually seemed to not be aware of the role of futures markets in intertemporally allocating goos before this thread. I think you still aren't. You didn't even know about the methane recycling, or the implications of your "only do what's necessary" argument. Seriously, it's one thing to "care"; it's another thing to research if your caring actually accomplishes anything.

Your primary

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Fotinakis]

I'm sorry...which of the seven editions are you referring to?

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Damer Face]

> As does water seeping through clay, and gas spreading out into the atmosphere.

Well done, you've quickly checked that California uses so-called impermeable clay and slightly shored up the first point of your argument. But ... "see below".

> Look, as much as I'd like to tear you a new one regarding property theory,

So why don't you try? Because you know you're onto a loser. I seem to recall that most of california was stolen during the goldrush by the US Military and by scalp-hunters. Which also involved a lot of murder. You've lost your "property theory" before you've even begun.

> it's really getting off the main topic, which is whether we're really forgoing
> valuable opportunities by using landfills.

Well that's not the main topic either now is it. You posted on slashdot that the pollution caused by
millions of disposed DVDs is negligible and I responded that it is not. The topic as far as we are concerned would appear to be whether the pollution is negligible or not. So you seem to be slightly off on the facts again. But really the main topic as far as your concerned is hastily trying to conceal your rank stupidity.

You posted some "facts" about landfill which you'd heard on a TV program like some giddy fanboy, and have since tried every trick in the book to draw attention away from that. You finally got round to the phrase "impermeable clay" but probably got this from a landfill company's website which (surprise surprise) failed to mention that impermeable clay isn't actually impermeable.

You're now trying to turn it into an economic argument about speculation, but seeing as you didn't mention this to start with, it is, by your own criterion, invalid.

> If there were future alternate uses
> of this landfill space that actually satisfied human desires (including the
> desire to "save the earth"), there would be much more upward pressure on the
> price of landfill space, which would feed back to disposal costs and make
> people not want to throw so much away.

The futures market is based on cod economic theory and does little other than fuck up alot of poor people's lives whilst making some rich people even richer.

Most people don't spend their lives in minute analysis of the future consequences of their actions; and even if they did, corporate lobbyists and the governmental spin machine do a good job at keeping them ill-informed of said consequences. The theory also fails to work when applied to anything longer than the medium-term. No one buys or bets on anything based on its value in a hundred years time. Environmental processes generally operate over the long-term.

Your argument is that land used for rubbish dumps costs what it does now because no-one is speculating that it will cost more in the future thereby driving up the cost: it's cheap now because people think it will be cheap in the future. You have fantastically misunderstood whole swathes of economic theory.

> Every one that can sell it for more than the (trivial) cost of doing so. I don't have numbers,

No. You don't have ANY facts at your disposal whatsoever.

> look what you're really claiming here: that businesses are basically ignoring a chance to get free
> money. Now, you can claim corporations "only care about profit". Or you can claim they ignore
> profit opportunities to fuck up the environment, but you can't do both. You might as well claim
> that corporations regularly turn down donations from the public.

Actually all landfill sites have to recover methane else they suffer explosions, and quite alot of them just burn it off, thereby ignoring the chance to make free money. Check your facts.

I am claiming that corporations are largely irresponsible entities.

But I can claim what you state above. What alot of corporate management types fail to recognise these days is that eco-friendly tech often does provide a ROI. They hear "g

Re:Not quite a hoax

[LeonGeeste]

So why don't you try? Because you know you're onto a loser. ...

No, not at all. Because I have to make trade-offs. If I wanted to fully cover every side issue that comes up, I'd be here forever. But unlike you, I understand the concept of tradeoffs. If human life extremely valuable? Yes. Is it so valuable that no one should ever do anything that increases risk of death to themselves or others? No. Is pollution bad? Yes. Is pollution so bad that under no circumstance should anyone ignite anything? No. Is tearing slashdot environmentalists a collective new one on economics worth my time? Yes. Is doing so on political philosophy in an unrelated topic also worth my time? No.

> it's really getting off the main topic, which is whether we're really forgoing
> valuable opportunities by using landfills.

Well that's not the main topic either now is it. You posted on slashdot that the pollution caused by
millions of disposed DVDs is negligible and I responded that it is not. The topic as far as we are concerned would appear to be whether the pollution is negligible or not. So you seem to be slightly off on the facts again. But really the main topic as far as your concerned is hastily trying to conceal your rank stupidity.

Ah, the emotion bubbling up again. Yes, I am dicussing the same topic. You brought up pollution and the waste of landfill space. Those are separate issues. I agree that DVD makers should pay for the (tiny) pollution in the manufacturing of the DVD. The remaining question is, what is the harm of burying them in landfills? Are we really forgoing opportunities (i.e., causing waste) by burying them. In fact, we are not, and I address your argument against this below.

You're now trying to turn it into an economic argument about speculation, but seeing as you didn't mention this to start with, it is, by your own criterion, invalid.

Oh, I didn't mention it? I didn't mention it here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=164419&cid=137 31573

Or on a post you definitely read, I didn't mention it here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=164419&thresho ld=1&commentsort=0&tid=109&mode=thread&cid=1374070 7

You seem to be thinking I'm making up this speculation thing, because the concept is new to you. It's not new to me, or to anyone with a firm understanding of these issues. Things are getting used up. People see that they are getting used up. They see that this use will result in higher prices later. So someone buys the resource and holds it out of use (which I know you love, given your rhetoric about equal ownership of the earth), attempting to profit from its sale when today's shortsighted morons use up the resource. But then the process iterates and the price rises to the point that no generation can afford (in the pure financial sense) to overuse it. That's what happens in futures markets. This is news to you; it is not news to me.

The futures market is based on cod economic theory and does little other than fuck up alot of poor people's lives whilst making some rich people even richer.

Wow, strong counterargument.

Most people don't spend their lives in minute analysis of the future consequences of their actions; ...

Except that that doesn't matter. All that is necessary is that some people are doing it, which given the profit opportunities is inevitable. Their actions of bidding make people consider the long term affects. If a bad orange crop is predicted, orange futures prices go up now redirecting investment to correcting it now.

The theory also fails to work when ap

Re:Not quite a hoax

[Damer Face]

> No, not at all. Because I have to make trade-offs. If I wanted to fully cover every side issue that
> comes up, I'd be here forever. But unlike you, I understand the concept of tradeoffs.

Is that another one of your emotional ad hominems that you try to berate me for. Your double standards are becoming almost endearing now.

> If human life extremely valuable? Yes.

In dollar terms I'm sure you think it is.

> Is it so valuable that no one should ever do anything that increases risk of death to themselves or > others? No.

Contrary to your pretense no one is claiming that.

> Is pollution bad? Yes. Is pollution so bad that under no circumstance should anyone ignite
> anything?

Contrary to your pretense no one is claiming that.

> Is tearing slashdot environmentalists a collective new one on economics worth my time? Yes.

"[T]earing a new one" sounds dangerously like emotional talk. You don't tear anyone anything. On this particular issue, you steadfastly ignore all the environmental arguments (as you have no knowledge thereof) and come back with a load of "well it must be okay as otherwise it would cost more" nonsense.

See you shift the argument, or trade off (as you put it), from what you knwo you don't understand to what you think you do and then claim victory in an environmental argument by arguing (badly) about economics.

> Well that's not the main topic either now is it. You posted on slashdot that the pollution caused by
> millions of disposed DVDs is negligible and I responded that it is not. The topic as far as we are > concerned would appear to be whether the pollution is negligible or not. So you seem to be
> slightly off on the facts again. But really the main topic as far as your concerned is hastily trying > to conceal your rank stupidity.

> Ah, the emotion bubbling up again.

You call me stupid, that's okay. I call you stupid, that's not okay. Yes?

> Yes, I am dicussing the same topic. You brought up pollution and the waste of landfill space.

Are you on drugs? Seriously. You hallucinate. Where did I bring up the "waste of landfill space"? I'm bemoaning the use of landfill as a methodology, and therefore don't consider it possible to waste such a thing. I consider landfill sites a waste of ... land. Now I see where your total lack of understanding springs from, from the weird hallucinations you keep having.

The "lack of landfill space" was 1980s scare-mongering that no-one uses as part of an argument in favour of recycling. I guess Penn & Teller didn't make that clear, huh?

> Those are separate issues. I agree that DVD makers should pay for the (tiny) pollution in the
> manufacturing of the DVD. The remaining question is, what is the harm of burying them in
> landfills? Are we really forgoing opportunities (i.e., causing waste) by burying them. In fact, we
> are not, and I address your argument against this below.

You're redefining words to suit your whim. Municipal waste isn't "a forgone opportunity". Part of waste is a forgone opportunity sure, but that's all you can focus on. The money part, not the whole. There's more to life and there's more to problem of pollution.

Is shit the forgone opportunity of unmetabolised consumption? How about toxic effluent?

We don't "cause waste by burying" it. No one is claiming that.

"In fact, we are not, and I address your argument against this below." Well are you agreeing with me or not? You say "not X" and then say you'll address my argument against X. Sorry to be a grammar nazi, but ... learn english boy.

> You're now trying to turn it into an economic argument about speculation, but seeing as you
> didn't mention this to start with, it is, by your own criterion, invalid.

> Oh, I didn't mention it? I didn't mention it here:

>

Haha Slashdot got suckered!

[Aaron England]

Don't you all feel bright now for bashing Microsoft? Perhaps it isn't only the editors that should check the credibility of a story?

Re:Haha Slashdot got suckered!

[rtb61]

An interesting possible new marketing technique, plant false article, get /. to comment, deny article, attempt to ridicule /.. We /.ers feel we can ridicule ourselves and others quite readily, with out any outside assitance at all ;-) (somehow I just can't see it taking off, making yourself a target of ridicule on purpose). If /. is so in-effective why do so many companies pay people to post/moderate on it?

Re:Haha Slashdot got suckered!

[geekoid]

Maybe this is a hoax? Or a lie from MS PR team.

did you fact check THIS story?

Pot, kettle, black.

Re:Haha Slashdot got suckered!

[baryon351]

> Perhaps it isn't only the editors that should check the credibility of a story?

Everyone should check the credibility of what they read, for sure. A good friend of mine wrote a comical story on her blog at the beginning of this year about macintoshes getting intel upgrades. Remember this was before steve jobs let out the big news. Then in June when steve admitted it was true, someone submitted the story to slashdot. Then the world picked it up, and it was featured on engadget, the inquirer, hundreds of blogs, and within two weeks had made it to two US radio station broadcasts and was printed as a center piece in one Australian nationwide newspaper. The journalist at The Australian lost his job over it and a california radio news guy only just escaped with his.

The kicker was nobody wrote to her to check the origins of the story, not one solitary person until Media Watch, an Australian media watchdog television show contacted her to find out the reality behind the story in The Australian.

Tens of news sites blindly followed one another and printed what everyone else was printing. All the while many regular joes picked out it was meant for a laugh immediately.

Re:Haha Slashdot got suckered!

[grcumb]

"Don't you all feel bright now for bashing Microsoft?"

Actually, I was most amused by the report that even Microsoft got fooled. Instead of thinking 'That's bullsh*t - we would never do that!' they ran around trying to find out whose business group was responsible for it. Only when they couldn't get anyone to corroborate did they decide that it was untrue.

Apparently even Microsoft thinks this is the kind of thing Microsoft would do. 8^)

Re:Haha Slashdot got suckered!

[Ahnteis]

There was at least one comment in the previous story that said "um no, this isn't true".

It was probably modded down.

Re:Haha Slashdot got suckered!

[Kelson]

Actually, I saw several of them. Generally around 4 or 5, Informative.

Re:Haha Slashdot got suckered!

[Kelson]

You're right. Everyone just jumped on the opportunity to attack Microsoft. It's not like they would have ridiculed some random company that came up with the idea of disposable DVDs.

Oh, wait...

Re:Haha Slashdot got suckered!

[soft_guy]

Hoaxes are much more funny when they are somewhat improbably or ironic in some way. When I first saw this story, I was a bit surprised that Microsoft would come out with this kind of technology considering that Microsoft has not in the past developed any form of physical media - they have mostly been a software company. OTOH, it wasn't that long ago that they got into the hardware business and Microsoft clearly has enough money, industry influence, etc. that they could develop a single play DVD format.

It is not a humorous hoax in any way, nor do I feel bad for having believed it at face value - nor should you. It was clearly a plausible story.

Re:Haha Slashdot got suckered!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow sounds just like wikipedia!

Re:Haha Slashdot got suckered!

[lucien86]

" Hoaxes are much more funny when they are somewhat improbably or ironic in some way. When I first saw this story, I was a bit surprised that Microsoft would come out with this kind of technology considering that Microsoft has not in the past developed any form of physical media - they have mostly been a software company. OTOH, it wasn't that long ago that they got into the hardware business and Microsoft clearly has enough money, industry influence, etc. that they could develop a single play DVD format.

It is not a humorous hoax in any way, nor do I feel bad for having believed it at face value - nor should you. It was clearly a plausible story."

The joke here is that the story is a hoax. Knowing how things like DVD work I think its practically impossible to create a 'one use' disk. The only way to do it is if the DVD player itself deliberately destroys the disk. The problem is the 'one use' disk always fails ahead of the read and becomes a 'zero use' disk!

Environmentally - obviously zero use disks would be a waste to the environment because you could fill an entire landfill with them before you would see the whole movie even once.

Re:Haha Slashdot got suckered!

[soft_guy]

I don't understand. You would simply create a new type of DVD player that read the movie data onto its internal storage (like maybe a hard drive), then writes zeros tto the disc, destroying it. Once it verifies that the disc was destroyed, it plays the movie. You can pause, rewind, etc. Perhaps the DRM rules could be that you can watch the movie as much as you want until you eject the disc. Once you eject the disc to watch a different movie, the disc is no good and you throw it away.

And of course, the movie would be encrypted to prevent you from disassembling the device and mouting the storage system (HD or flash) on a another system and reading the data off.

I think the cost of such a player would be about the same as a DVD-RW + 4 GB of flash or a 4 GB HD for standard def video. In other words, maybe a $150 bill of materials? A bit more for high def.

Ummm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot? propagating rumors? noooooooooooo..... must be some other blog....

Re:Ummm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Your /end troll line is one sentence too early.

Secondly, riding the MS Bashing bandwagon whilst labeling Microsoft Innovations/Hoax statements as being reduntant is actually a proclimation of your redunant life.

Ironic, isn't it?

Re:Ummm....

[kesuki]

I can't believe anyone who gets the posts up in the first 10 minutes of an article being posted haasn't had time to fully fact check either ;) i mean it's the INTERNET it must be true!

I've written like a journal and several journal posts and main page posts all asserting numerous facts, and even with fact checking (which i normally skip) i got loads of stuff wrong ;) heck one thing i got wrong BECAUSE i Tried to fact check it int a 'hurry' and read cyanobacteria as bacteria. and didn't put it into context... which made me look like i slept through highschool biology (which i still aced and it was on a bell curve and i was threatend several times by classmates...)

Re:Ummm....

[blackholepcs]

Actually, the ironic thing is that I am a Microsoft supporter, and use Microsoft exclusively. I'm not riding the bandwagon, I'm simply waving hello to it as it passes by. As for my life being redundant, well, you don't know me, so shut your cake hole and go upstairs and apologize to your mom for being a basement hermit. Then go get a job at Taco Bell, where you can be their first 50 year old first-time-job-holder. Asshat.

/end seriousness

ya, well ...

[icepick72]

I wondered how the intricate points would work .... destroy-as-you-go and not be able to back up but only to go ahead, worked on existing players. Sounded too exceptional. It was fun while it lasted. Glad I didnt' post to that one ... would have looked like a big dummy right now!

All the more reason to check sources

[Infonaut]

I can understand bloggers screwing it up, but Thurrot, for all his annoyances, is supposedly a professional journalist.

Re:All the more reason to check sources

[hackstraw]

is supposedly a professional journalist

Shhhh! We don't talk about those things here!

Re:All the more reason to check sources

[HD Webdev]

Maybe he's smoking Crack these days.

I can't believe that he not only heard about this and didn't laugh so hard that he couldn't see through the tears, but he also repeated obvious hoax as serious business.

The overwhelming majority of people will not purchase a concrete item that expires after one use especially when it comes to the Almighty Idiot Box. (think 'my precious, my precious' and what behavioral changes happen to most people when the remote control doesn't work)

Even if they might possibly fall for that on Planet Stupid, it's not likely that they'd buy a second DVD player as well just to have compatibility for those self-destructing DVDs.

Re:All the more reason to check sources

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can understand bloggers screwing it up, but Thurrot, for all his annoyances, is supposedly a professional journalist."

Huh? Professional journalist? Oh yeah, I do remember seeing this on the local news... right after the weatherman called for Frost Warnings in Hell.

Re:All the more reason to check sources

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one make sure the concrete I buy is always reusable.

Re:All the more reason to check sources

[Anonymous Coward]

What about supposedly professional intelligence agencies? I thought WMDs in Iraq were a "slam dunk case".

phew

[the-amazing-blob]

I'm very glad that this was a hoax. It's a total waste to make disposable dvd's. Major environmental hazard, since no one would dispose correctly. Unless they also used the biodegradable (did I spell that right?) stuff I read about a while ago.

In Soviet Russia, hoax spread you!

Re:phew

[the-amazing-blobette]

I think this is one of those cases where "don't believe everything you read" is an important lesson. This should serve as a reminder next time one of gets an e-mail saying "drop everything and send us your credit card number before your computer explodes" that we should probably check it out before assuming that just because our computer told us so, it must be true. As for the whole "disposable DVD" idea - maybe we could recycle some AOL CDs and put those to new use? ^_^

Re:phew

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I thought there really was an attempt at a limited-play DVD, just not from Microsoft. It relied on a dye that activates once played, and that dye turns black in a few days. Still, it was a bad idea. I'd think that Video On Demand would be a better way to go.

Re:phew

[ThaFooz]

It's a total waste to make disposable dvd's. Major environmental hazard, since no one would dispose correctly. Unless they also used the biodegradable...

The mentality that "if its biodegradable it's ok" is a fallacy, as the current landfill strategy (here in the US anyways) is to pack tightly and bury it. NOTHING biodegrades in those conditions (insufficent oxygen and water); they've dug up bananna peels from the 70's. Plastics do degrade though, just not by microbes. All it takes is some concentrated UV and you'll be all set. And frankly, when compared to the energy infrastructure, the solid waste problem is hardly my biggest environmental concern.

Re:phew

[gatzke]

Exactly. Put a layer of dirt on top and you have a nice, new hippee-friendly hill to grow plants and trees on.

Sure, the chemicals / heavy metals can be a bitch when the landfill leaches into groundwater, but if that doesn't happen you can still enjoy your new hill.

Re:phew

[reclusivemonkey]

I'm sure for a lot of movies these days, more fun will be had flinging them out of the window "throwing star" style than actually watching them. Hey no, seriously kids, dispose of your hoaxes responsibly please...

Re:phew

[ezzzD55J]

I think this is one of those cases where "don't believe everything you read" is an important lesson.

Also, Don't believe everything you think.

Shock

[Anonymous Coward]

Did it seem a little odd to anyone else that Microsoft in their infinite wisdom would work on such a thing now that HD-DVD and Blu-ray are coming out soon? Ok, so maybe I give Microsoft a bit of credit, but still, that's low even for them!

Re:Shock

[superpulpsicle]

It was probably a real idea except the people on slashdot trashed it so fast, they cancelled all project plans asap.

Re:Shock

[Cheapy]

Do you honestly think that Microsoft cares what Slashdot says?

Re:Shock

[gl4ss]

having an idea doesn't help if you can't make the product reality. I got an idea for a car that moves instantly from one place to another, it's a good product idea in the sense that it would be useful and make a lot of money - but that doesn't mean that I could actually go and build it into a real product. i'm pretty sure someone at somewhere has had the idea for this magically working single use dvd a gazillion times(it's so obvious that calling it an idea is far fetching, really).

they got the feature in windows media, but how could they include something to allow this into the dvd standard?

(if it were software based solution, it wouldn't be just simple self destruction of the disc - which would make it quite hard to do it on a read only media on unconnected dumb players)

Re:Shock

[grcumb]

"Do you honestly think that Microsoft cares what Slashdot says?"

Given the depth of the astroturf and the number of banner ads they place here, I'd have to answer yes. 8^)

Re:Shock

[LaughingCoder]

I am going to propose a process change to the VP of Product Development at my company. I think we should insert a step between: 1) Develop product requirements 2) Develop detailed specifications This step, which I'll call "1a" would read like this: 1a) Distribute a press release describing the upcoming product and monitor SlashDot for feedback. Use feedback to make go/no-go decision. Think of all the bonehead projects that would get canceled ;-)

What a shock

[timecop]

Some stupid blogs pick up a hoax, and it gets on slashdot.
Like that doesn't happen every other day anyway.

Re:What a shock

[Mr. Underbridge]

Some stupid blogs pick up a hoax, and it gets on slashdot. Like that doesn't happen every other day anyway.

Only someone who reads slashdot every other day would say that. The rest of us know it's much more common than that.

That Paul Thurrott...

[Spaceman Spiff II]

What a guy. Anyway, I'm still waiting for his Part 2 to the OS X Tiger vs. Windows Vista Beta comparison that was on here a while ago. At the bottom of his comparison it reads:

In part 2 of my comparison of Windows Vista Beta 1 and Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger," I will examine the security, networking and power management features of the two operating systems.

Well, I'm curious about that! I hope he didn't just forget about it...

Anyway, on topic, I don't see any mention of this story on his site anymore, so he must have taken it down.

Re:That Paul Thurrott...

[Spaceman Spiff II]

Oops... wrong site. Reading the thing again I see now that it's talking about a different site of his. Man, that guy's prolific.

Re:That Paul Thurrott...

[weighn]

What a guy

If he keeps pulling scoops like this, perhaps he should consider changing his first name to Deep.../*DUCKS*/

Hoax? I think not

[aussie_a]

Obviously Microsoft realized that the public weren't ready to be shafted by single-play DVDs after the article was printed, so they cancelled development and had someone post a "blog" entry saying "haha. It was all a joke. Don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain."

I'm surprised they don't do this more often.

Re:Hoax? I think not

[master_gopher]

We Micro$oft-bash on /. all the time. And many people bash Micro$soft all the time anyway, just for fun, even though they *don't* hate them. Can you seriously see them calling off a project after a day or two of bad press?

Re:Hoax? I think not

[ArmorFiend]

That's the spirit! Remember when they canned their internet portapotty, the iLoo? Yeah, sure, that's a hoax. There's one born every minute.

Re:Hoax? I think not

[aussie_a]

Can you seriously

No, I can't. I was joking. Instead it looks like I got some mods who had their sense of humour surgically removed.

Re:Hoax? I think not

[geekoid]

Only on slashdot wuold the poster have an ego so big that they think /. represents a significant portion of there market.

sheesh, they don't care about slashdot.

Re:Hoax? I think not

[Tolkien]

Aww! They should have integrated a webcam so people can watch you crap!

Behavior Pattern?

[totallygeek]

Uh, so this is just another instance of Microsoft vaporware?

Re:Behavior Pattern?

[Skippy_kangaroo]

...but the DVD was really meant to be vapourware. You know, after you use it, the read laser turns the data layer to vapour and you can't use it again. What do you call vapourware vapourware? Vapidware?

Re:Behavior Pattern?

[CRC'99]

Just like the Windows Security Updates :)

It'll rear its ugly head again

[funkstick]

The fact that so many people believed it leads me to believe that we will still see another single use DVD format one day, dispite the failure of Circuit City's Divx.

Re:It'll rear its ugly head again

[heiders]

I truly doubt that. Divx was a complete flop, and given the response to the /. article before, it seems very unlikely that anyone will attempt (even MS) to make a single use DVD.

Re:It'll rear its ugly head again

[Kelson]

Yes, DIVX was a complete flop. And a couple of years later, FlexPlay was a complete flop. It's a dumb idea, but people keep trying to get it to work. That's what made the story so believable.

Re:It'll rear its ugly head again

[m50d]

Tinfoil-hat response: they leaked the story to sound out what the public reaction to such a format would be.

Re:It'll rear its ugly head again

[thesandtiger]

I hope we do see another version, if it were done right.

If it didn't require extra equipment or any kind of "call home" and if the disks were environmentally friendly (or, easier - had a deposit to encourage people to recycle them properly) and the price were right, yes, I'd like to see that.

Why? Because I don't like having to remember to return things and I don't like feeling like I'm under any time pressure at all (even if it is something "gentle" like "Keep it as long as you want") to watch recreational stuff. I had a NetFlix subscription, but I always felt like I was "wasting" it - and, really, for me, watching a movie is an impulse thing. I'm in the mood for whatever *right now,* not 2 days from now.

I could, however, easily see picking up a stack of 1-shot DVDs for $3-5 or whatever (and whenever - they'd be an impulse thing when I happened to pass by and saw a film that I want to watch "some day") and having them sitting on my shelf. When the urge to watch a movie strikes, I root through them, pick one I want to see at the moment, and pop it in. When I'm done, I put the used disk aside, and, at *MY* convenience (a day or a year later, shouldn't matter) I take the disks in for recycling and get my deposit back or give 'em to some homeless guy so he can get the cash for it.

In direct response to the parent, I think 1-shot DVDs failed because of the stupid hoops users had to jump through to use them. Lots of things failed the first time out - sometimes it's because they were just a bad idea in general, but many times it's because it was an awful incarnation of an OK idea.

You're just realizing it now?

[CyricZ]

I find it's difficult to trust any "journalist". Take the complete failure of the journalistic trade before and during the ongoing war in Iraq, for instance. That's proof enough that the vast majority of journalists aren't qualified to perform their job.

Unlike engineering or medicine, for instance, there is no penalty for those journalists who fail to do their job properly. The complete lack of accountability had resulted in most mainstream newspapers, magazines and television news programs being nothing but farcery.

Re:You're just realizing it now?

[zogger]

You can get quite a lot of good information from mainstream journals. The deal is, they do NOT connect the dots for you (usually), and frequently the juicier stuff is buried in the back pages. but it's there, just needs to be constantly looking and don't trust single sources.

That's why the net is good, you can read several versions from diverse places/regions and get a better handle on any given situation.

And some newsies get caught,publishing false info (created by themselves or acting as shills/FUD spreaders) and get punished by loss of jobs and reputation, etc. Hmm, recent examples, network news, Dan Rather using the forged documents (whether he knew or not), syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams caught feeding political propoganda as news, that thoroughly *weird* dude "Jeff Gannon" (if that is his real name) acting as a whitehouse talking points shill, and etc.

It is not perfect by any means, but the moral of the story is that they can and frequently do get caught. A lot will slip through, but the nature of lying is you have to keep lying, adding layers, eventually the liar slips up and it unravels.

That's the publics/readers job, to connect the dots and follow through. We are in a transition stage now with blogging and podcasting where the lines are getting hazier between journalism and ...whatever it will evolve into.

Fun times!

Re:You're just realizing it now?

[MasterNetHead]

BAM! That was CyricZ rightfully hitting the right nail right on the head.

I have yet to come across a journalist who I would feel comfortable with placing my complete trust in the information they present. What is to stop these "journalists" from resorting to yellow journalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism.

How can you trust someone to gather the infromation and news of the world and "report" it to you without knowing what kind a person they are. It is not enough to say, "If they aren't trustworthy, then they wouldn't have been hired, or people would stop listening to them." Apparently that just doesn't happen.

All you need is a pretty face, soothing voice, or persuasive pen to get people to listen to you. Even the almighty Slashdot has fallen to this sad trend in "unbiased" media, but that's OK, because they're still the coolest unbiased media around.

Re:You're just realizing it now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike engineering or medicine, for instance, there is no penalty for those journalists who fail to do their job properly.

It's called being fired.

Re:You're just realizing it now?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it's difficult to trust any "journalist". Take the complete failure of the journalistic trade before and during the ongoing war in Iraq, for instance. That's proof enough that the vast majority of journalists aren't qualified to perform their job.

Unlike engineering or medicine, for instance, there is no penalty for those journalists who fail to do their job properly. The complete lack of accountability had resulted in most mainstream newspapers, magazines and television news programs being nothing but farcery.

See now, it's irresponsible overzealous statements like the one above that are why real progress isn't made. Look, I'm not saying the state of journalism is flawless right now, but the claims you make are ridiculous. "Unlike engineering or medicine"...I'm sorry, what? Are you suggesting that engineers and doctors, unlike journalists, always do their homework and check their facts, and always take accountability for things? Well let's think about this for a moment...

Critical bug is found in your software, exposes millions to untold security risks. "We'll have it fixed by Monday, but it's not our FAULT -- it's to be EXPECTED that software has bugs in it." Or, "the security hole is caused by a module we use made by SOMEONE ELSE, we trusted their module, the security hole is THEIR fault."

And the doctors..."Well we just assumed that if a drug is good enough for the FDA's innocent-until-proven-guilty regulatory standards, it's good enough for our patients. It's not OUR fault, what did you want us to do, conduct our own tests of each drug we prescribe as a means of "FACT-CHECKING" the pharmaceutical studies?"

Yes, you engineers and medical practitioners are nothing like journalists.

TRUST is an inherent part of all of these trades. It's not at all practical for a journalist to double-check every fact given to them by their sources. They do their best, but ultimately, their safety-guard is that they only accept facts from sources they TRUST. Just like we don't personally inspect the source code of every piece of software and patch we download. We either trust the authors, or we trust some other respected group that has already inspected it.

When a journalist DOESN'T trust a source, that's when they do their fact-checking, and they often get blamed when they didn't second-guess a source that was obviously suspect. And the *penalty* for "bad journalism" is that people stop trusting that journalist as a reliable news source. And if no one wants to get their news from you, you're dead in the water, same as if no one wants to get their medical advice or their software from you.

And remember, "fact checking" doesn't mean running out to the battlefield to verify for yourself how many people died (despite what some TV journalists seem to think). It means confirming one source's information with a second, trusted source. Thus, if you trust the first source, there's usually limited value in fact-checking with a second trusted source.

Just because there's a problem with journalism that doesn't give you license to blow those problems out of proportion. Think of this like a "bug" in the software. It happens from time to time. It's reason for concern, but not reason to call out all journalists and say they're all incompetent and inferior to professionals in other fields.

Re:You're just realizing it now?

[u2pa]

Alot of journalism today is massproduced entertainment,

- Journalists that sit in an office, rewriting reuters news bulletins, with 24/7 live newsfeeds from all 25+ other news channels (if you think about it, they pretty much run a blog like slashdot, with all that implies, if you watch CNN for a couple of hours, its dupe after dupe after dupe, retelling the same story every 5-15 minutes)(i have a friend whom does exactly this for a MSM for a living)

- Dont be fooled, the mainstream media (MSM), are in the business of selling adds & selling subscribtions, that means telling the people what they want to hear, and keep shut about the stuff people dont want to hear about (fx. kids dying of hunger in 3rd world countries, because constant exposure to that would make the viewers/readers feel bad... so they wish it away/out of sight.)

In the end, todays wired world is a constant flurry of events & occurances, and we trust journalists to filter the news/information that reaches us.

Re:You're just realizing it now?

[Jesus_666]

True. Just looking at the German BILD (AFAIK the most widely read newspaper in Europe) shows you that journalists have no accountability. The BILD is making hidden advertisements for companies whose managers happen to be in the publisher's supervisory board. They print big stories with titles like "The murderer of $VICTIM was found" or "This pig has killes $VICTIM" when the police have officially announced that they only have the prime suspect and that it's ot clear whether he was guilty. In the last ten years they have been reprimanded for violating the German press codex almost seventy times, not counting the occasions on which the press council officially disapproved of their style of coverage - for example when they showed photographs of relatives of people involved in a crime case without bothering to make them unidentifiable (actually, according to the press codex they shouldn't print photographs of the relatives at all!).

I just read our local newspaper. They're not quite a high quality publication, but at least I can trust them not to ignore reality in order to put their spin on everything or to ignore the personality rights of people so that they can have one more sensationalist headline.

Re:You're just realizing it now?

[Jester998]

The modern purpose of news and media companies is to sell viewers/listerners/whatever to their advertisers, not actually provide any news.

single format please?

[morfiend]

This multiple format business is a mess. Look at the problems with SACD and DVD-A. Nobody is buying them (and if the music industry stopped suing people and promoted those formats that are so much better than downloaded music they would actually make more money because there is new value there.) But back to the topic at hand: The industry would benefit more from having ONE SINGLE TRUE UNIFIED STANDARD as opposed to a couple of standards, which would confuse people. The public at large (Joe Sixpack) gets all confused with this 2-format thing. They want to buy a movie and play it, not worry about if this disc will play on their type of player. When we have one unified standard, confusion is reduced, people can just buy and make the industry happy. The the industry focus can be put on actually releasing content and worthwhile stuff, as opposed to teaching consumers that they need a different player for their Fox releases versus some other studio and then wondering why people don't buy any of these confusing and conflicting products.

That's Unpossible

[T3h_3vi1_d3ad]

An obscure UK business magazine, an even more obscure blog, techdirt and paul thurrott those two bastions of journalistic integrity all got the story wrong????? Say it aint so! Whoa, did I take the red pill or what. Seriously folks as has already been said in the OP bogus stories will fly just as fast and gain just as much press time as any legit story will. The problem lies with the fact that not one of the half wits repeating the story (including those that posted it here to slashdot) bothered to check and see if it was corroborated by any major or at least more reputable sources. Then those reading it all jumped on the bandwagon, again without doing any research of their own. Common folks this is common sense 101 stuff here but yet and still people want to get all bent out of shape because they bought into this crap. At times this rabid knee jerk reaction to bash what or who ever is currently fashionable to bash will come around and bit you in the ass. When it does, say ouch and move along but don't go railing away because you let yourself be duped.

Ummm....

[blackholepcs]

Isn't saying that a story about a Microsoft "Innovation" is a hoax a redundant statement?

/end troll

Seriously though, think about it. It is. ;)

AWWW

[hurfy]

But it sounded so.... Microsoft :(

Oh well, it was good for a smile when i left work, stop at 7-11 and see a stack of old movies on DVD for $1 !

So what we've learned is

[Darth23]

That the fake story about Microsoft's nonexistant plans to sell crippled media hardware to computers might be confused with Microsoft's REAL plans to sell crippled media SOFTWARE.

Got it now.

Monopoly Money

[Doc Ruby]

Hey, now what am I going to spend that million dollars on, that I won from Bill Gates when I sent on the 1 millionth copy of the chain email he sent me?

Hoax and profit

[deodato]

Maybe the submitter, Auckland Map, was trying to Google Bomb his way up the search results and generate traffic to his AdSense site?

Humm... Only applys to windows Media format, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It appears to be confusing an existing feature within Windows Media DRM that allows for single-play of promotional digital material. This has been an option for content owners to use for some time for the Windows Media format - it does not apply to MPEG2 content found on DVDs."

Now can someone tell me, what video & DRM format does the Micrsoft backed HD-DVD use/support, and why I shouldn't be concerned about this quote?

I feel bright for bashing Microsoft....

[Anonymous Coward]

what? That's it.

Not a hoax - just misinformation

[krbvroc1]

My *guess* is that someone got the story wrong. My *guess* is that Microsoft wants to use its one-time-only DRM capability with the HD DVD in conjunction with Intels effort to 'get the data onto the server'. I think by the time the story made its way around the campfire it was modified.

no way!

[syrinx]

Slashdot posted an unconfirmed story?? No way! Next thing you know, someone will be telling me that most people who post to Slashdot don't read the articles!

Crap Journalism

[Punchinello]

There is a major down side to the speed with which information can spread on the internet. I'm not talking about blogs or rumor mills, discussion groups or chain emails. I'm talking about overzealous journalists. Get that rumor out there! I've got the scoop! Damned be the sources!

I have lost a lot of respect for Paul Thurrott (did I have any?). I read his article, and he never names a source... never says how he came to this information. Did he have inside information from a source at Microsoft? It seems not. He read the original bogus article and posted the information as somehow coming to him in a vision. Read Thurott's article. Heck, read his first paragraph. He writes it with authority as FACT.

Granted, this was a meaningless story (other than to get the hackles up on the tech crowd). But most readers don't look at the articles and think, "what's the source?" They rely on the journalist to have done his homework and report verifiable facts, or at least mention in the article that the story is rumor or what the source was.

People in the tech world rely on good internet journalism to get the information we need to make decisions, raise a protest, or cheer wildly. This is a major black eye to Windows IT Pro magizine. Plain and simple. The New York Times (or pick your favorite print journal) a) would not have allowed Thurott to publish that rubish, and b) would have fired him if he did.

Re:Crap Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

The New York Times gets an alarmingly large amount of factual errors printed daily. People in the know have all but given up on print journalism nowadays. The real investigative journalism etc etc is going on in weblogs.

Re:Crap Journalism

[Punchinello]

Factual errors are always going to happen. Humans make mistakes. Thurott published a story as fact with no sources. This is just as bad as making up a story. The Times fires people for making up stories.

Re:Crap Journalism

[BarryNorton]

People in the know have all but given up on print journalism nowadays. The real investigative journalism etc etc is going on in weblogs.

Thanks, anonymous poster - you're obviously 'in the know'. I'd completely given up on Slashdot, and only come here on a rainy morning for a cheap laugh, but now I've seen the light!

so what happens

[Anonymous Coward]

when the story gets duped here?

The Real Truth For Sure

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

Microsoft originally designed a single-play DVD. That much is true. It also had a new case. However, as time went by, they had to drop a number of features. The first to go was the 'DVD' part. Then they dropped the 'single-play' part. Now they just have a new case full of nothing.

Re:The Real Truth For Sure

[planetoid]

What also made me a little skeptical was Microsoft, to my knowledge, isn't really a hardware company (not counting the XBox of course). Isn't their speciality in annoying their customers through software, not hardware?

Counter PR?

[Lord_Dweomer]

You know...this was a pretty elaborate hoax...yes, it was debunked quickly, but the fact that they have no idea how this rumor got started, and that it is clearly pure flamebait got me thinking...

Since MS has such a good PR team, would it be so hard to imagine that people are initiating some Counter PR (read: pure lies) in order to try to generate some negative press about MS (like they need the help)?

I mean, just LOOK at all the negative comments they've received and how many websites picked this up. Really makes you wonder...

Another example of journalist's DOOPPPP

[xmas2003]

Christmas Lights webcam hoax ran from 2002 to 2004 until I outed myself. I can tell you from first hand experience that the fact checking of the mass media leaves a bit to be desired ... and that is being generous. A noteable exception was the Wall Street Journal - it was actually hard to convince 'em that the hoax was really a hoax - they were (rightfully so) concerned about a double-dupe ... too bad this /. story doesn't appear to have that element.

Having said all that, do you think it is "real" this time?!? ;-)

Re:Another example of journalist's DOOPPPP

[Sigg3.net]

Don't forget the surveillance pidgeons; http://sigg3.net/blogger/naap/pap.html

PLAGIARISM

[Jucius Maximus]

"This multiple format business is a mess. Look at the problems with SACD and DVD-A. Nobody is buying them (and if the music industry stopped suing people and promoted those formats that are so much better than downloaded music they would actually make more money because there is new value there.) But back to the topic at hand: The industry would benefit more from having ONE SINGLE TRUE UNIFIED STANDARD as opposed to a couple of standards, which would confuse people. The public at large (Joe Sixpack) gets all confused with this 2-format thing. They want to buy a movie and play it, not worry about if this disc will play on their type of player. When we have one unified standard, confusion is reduced, people can just buy and make the industry happy. The the industry focus can be put on actually releasing content and worthwhile stuff, as opposed to teaching consumers that they need a different player for their Fox releases versus some other studio and then wondering why people don't buy any of these confusing and conflicting products."

If you're set on becoming a karma whore, try writing your own posts!

And to think I was about to mod you up...

Re:PLAGIARISM

[d1v1d3byz3r0]

hey, sorry about that. i modded you down when i meant to mod the parent down. i'm posting this to undo my moderations. no hard feelings.

MS figured out

[mayhemt]

MS figured out that these DVDs functionality is unsupported on linux(in their linux test labs)...it was able to play again & again & again...a quick runnup of their statistics confirmed that this will make most people migrate towards linux. Eventually MS dropped the DVD.

Will the madness ever cease?

[dynooomite]

This has shaken my faith in the media to its core. I don't think I'll ever be able to look at the National Enquirer or The O'Reilly Factor ever again. I don't think my underworked heart can take the potential let down.

Credibility

[Anonymous Coward]

You might not like admitting it, but lately /. has been burning through cred like there is no tomorrow.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/0 1/1934229&tid=126&tid=14 (Perserved?)

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/2 5/1850228&tid=133 (Blown out of proportion)

etc,etc

Bullshit

[strcmp]

Anyone remember when they tried to convince us that dihydrogen monoxide was a hoax too?

Re:Bullshit

[Gleng]

Haha, from the site:

"What is DHMO?

Dihydrogen Monoxide, or DHMO, is a colorless and odorless chemical that kills or maims thousands each year, primarily through accidental inhalation."

Brilliant. :)

Re:Bullshit

[joostje]

This hoax lasted only a couple of hours, that's nothing compared to the hoax that people are falling for since 1547

Also, WinFX a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

After the head-scratching stopped, a spokesmen told me, they concluded that the story was not true. "It appears to be confusing an existing feature within Windows XP that allows for database to be built of files' metadata. This has been an option for files owners to use for some time even with NTFS - it does not mean we have anything smart like Reiser."

I, for one...

[Spy der Mann]

welcome our careless rumor spreading overlords :-P

Re:I, for one...

[RobbieGee]

Heh heh...

It's funny, because it's true.

So wait...

[Pichu0102]

Single-play DVDs a hoax? Yeah, it doesn't sound too likely either. Most everyone I know have incredibly old DVD players, and how would one use DVDs work on those? It obviously wouldn't, because it wasn't a standard when everyone got them. In other words, it would be incredibly ineffective to develop such single-play DVDs, because older players wouldn't understand it.

Re:So wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

not really; just make a normal DVD out of a material that reading off of scrambles. probably a delayed chemical reaction caused by the heat of the laser.

Where's the Slashdot retraction or apology?

[CanSpice]

Given that Slashdot was one of the "news" sites that perpetuated this myth, why aren't we seeing any kind of retraction or apology from the Slashdot editors that they screwed up in not fact-checking, especially on the original story? Would it be so hard for one of them to amend that story with a link to this one saying "sorry, this report isn't true"?

Re:Where's the Slashdot retraction or apology?

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to apologize. It was clearly a joke. Any /.'er could tell you that.

A DVD player lacks the controls required on ALL Microsoft products: CTRL-ALT-DEL.

Re:Where's the Slashdot retraction or apology?

[that IT girl]

Isn't this very story we're commenting on good enough to be a retraction?

Re:Where's the Slashdot retraction or apology?

[d34thm0nk3y]

uhhh...isn't this article a retraction?

Ears perking up

[appleLaserWriter]

Somewhere in redmond, someone is using that slashdot story to make the case for Microsoft getting into play-once disk technology.

Re:Ears perking up

[gl4ss]

actually I thought of a really good way to do that.

just make really, really, really crappy movies.

Re:Ears perking up

[KylePflug]

That doesn't seem to prevent piracy.

Re:Ears perking up

[KinkyClown]

'Gone in 60 seconds', right?

Re:Ears perking up

[clonmult]

Hollywood is already one step ahead of you on this one ....

Re:Ears perking up

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, sure. Feeling a bit embarrassed about yesterdays rant are we?

Re:Ears perking up

[Anonymous Coward]

who was ranting yesterday?

Doesn't matter,

[NullProg]

"It appears to be confusing an existing feature within Windows Media DRM that allows for single-play of promotional digital material. This has been an option for content owners to use for some time for the Windows Media format - it does not apply to MPEG2 content found on DVDs."

Hollywood+Microsoft == you don't decide on how to view/listen to what you legally purchased/downloaded. You can't transfer your media to another non-MS device. Why do you Windows users still insist on using the Windows Media Player(TM) format?

For the slow thinkers. What do you think the "existing feature within Windows Media DRM" option does?

Just curious...
Enjoy,

Did anyone read the original?

[Wengero]

In the original article http://www.thebusinessonline.com/Stories.aspx?Micr osoft%20invents%20a%20'one-play%20only'%20DVD%20to %20combat%20Hollywood%20piracy&StoryID=B7480068-F1 F6-4C7B-A7A5-EEFCED0320CB&SectionID=F3B76EF0-7991- 4389-B72E-D07EB5AA1CEE it says: Chairman Bill Gates has been working on a solution to the film industry's piracy problem since making a now legendary pitch to the industry in September 2002. Showing a video of himself dressed in a sailor suit pretending to audition for the blockbuster Titanic, Gates pitched Hollywood with the proposition that only Microsoft could solve its piracy problem by making its DRM software a standard across every home entertainment playback and recording device.

consperacy theory

[JonnyO]

Sounds like the media isn't immune to the same cost-cutting that the rest of the capitalist world is falling victim to. Fact-checkers are easy to cut out because they work behind the scenes. The horrible grammar that is evident in most journalism these days means the proofreaders got the chop as well. Not that it matters anyway, since news is now the new entertainment! (I promise my next post will be more upbeat)

Typical /.

[bsdrawkcab]

DUPE! Not even a day goes by and they post a second reference to the same unsubstantiated article. Why, when I think of how many times ... What's that you say? A retraction? What's that? ... in any case, as I was saying...

<rant about declining editorial standards/>

Actually, it's only a PARTIAL hoax.

[WidescreenFreak]

Although I'm sure that the Microsoft bit was a hoax, as far back as 2000 a company called Spectradisc, which has since been acquired by Flexplay, was actively working on a clear, chemical layer that would discolor when struck by the laser from the DVD player thus making the disc a single-play. They claim that their target market was for groups like the Academy Awards or those who want to offer promo material while preventing distribution or something like "pizza and a DVD", allowing the DVD to be viewed once.

Since then, Flexplay has used similar technology to discolor DVDs 48 hours after the case is open. In this case, the disc is sealed in an airtight container. When it comes in contact with oxygen, is begins the discoloration process to where it's unreadable in about 48 hours. Disney released several movies under the "EZ-D" label using this technology. It's the Circuit City DIVX scam in a new package.

I don't know if Flexplay is still pursuing the single-play DVD concept, but since they bought SpectraDisc they obviously have all of the research that SpectraDisc might have already done.

Re:Actually, it's only a PARTIAL hoax.

[geekoid]

"They claim that their target market was for groups like the Academy Awards or those who want to offer promo material while preventing distribution or something like "pizza and a DVD", allowing the DVD to be viewed once. "

that is actually a great marketing idea, and a good use for single play DVDs.

Yes, some people will rip it, but those are in the minority. It would be a way to sell DVDs.

Wow, what a relief!

[saskboy]

Next they'll come up with something crazy like disposable printers, or USB flash memory that wears out after being used.

Microsoft Toilet

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember the Microsoft Toilet from a little while back?

It was later reported to be a hoax.

It was later reported to possibly be a joke from someone inside Microsoft.

It was later reported that perhaps it was serious, but Microsoft decided not to go ahead with it.

I don't really understand how their Marketing Mind Games work, but I do know they won't work on me OK! I mean, maybe they will work, but I don't see a need for a single-play DVD. But if the DVD was cheap, and there was a DVD player fitted in the cubicle ... ARGH!

They call this a tech-news site?

[iroll]

OK, they aren't "single-play," but disposable DVD's have been around for YEARS. This was the first hit on Google:

wired news, 2003

I saw these for sale in a convinience store (Circle-K) TWO YEARS AGO. I haven't seen (noticed?) them lately, so they certainly didn't blow up in sales, but for heaven's sake: what are all of you smoking! Doesn't anybody read? (I'm not even talking about the article, I'm talking about tech news in general!) You guys call yourselves nerds? I can't believe all of these people are "up in arms" about a product that's been around and already failed in the marketplace. The only "hoax" is the idea that it was Microsoft; in fact, it was the arguably equally evil Disney that came up with this one.

Re:They call this a tech-news site?

[cobras2]

> in fact, it was the arguably equally evil Disney that came up with this one.

No argument.. definitely more evil.
Plus, they give themselves such a respectable image what with all the family friendly movies.. :)

Paul Thurrott reprinted the story without giving..

[FFFish]

Paul Thurrott reprinted the story without giving credit to the original source.

WTF?

Paul, please slap yourself for me. Now don't steal others' work again. Thanks.

should you choose to accept it...

[NotBorg]

I think slashdot should have an erase-as-you-go feature for some threads. This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds

Why is this a surprise?

[slashname3]

"Story posted on /. is hoax!"

Why is this a surprse to anyone? All of the major news media got most of the facts wrong on the Superdome incident after the Katrina hurricane. And that was a story that really mattered!

And anyone that takes what is published on /. as real news better learn to get used to being taken advantage of. News stories are an indication that something may have taken place. But don't count on the actual details being anything close to correct. How many times do you need to let Times reporters and national news casters lie to you before you realize this? And now you can add /. to the list of information sources that must be suspect.

Ask anyone that has direct first hand information on a news story that has been reported on just how many facts on their incident were reported correctly. I doubt that any story is ever reported 100% correctly.

And what is the deal with newscasters becoming part of the story instead of just reporting what is going on? News on TV has become nothing more than another entertainment show. "If it bleeds it leads!" The talking heads are full of themselves making important sounding noises, rolling their eyes, and making incredulous sounds on stories they obviously have strong opinions on. Add that to them only reporting the portions of a story they agree with or make people they don't like look bad, why do so many people believe them still? And they get to do this with no over sight. So Dan Rather retired a little early over that misunderstanding. The other talking heads have picked up the slack.

And while we are at it what the hell is the deal with Major League Baseball? Why they hell can't they set a no tolerance policy for steroid/drug use? One time and that player is banned. Why do they try these half measures giving they multiple times to try to get around the rules? [sorry, that last part just slipped out...]

Re:Why is this a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask anyone that has direct first hand information on a news story that has been reported on just how many facts on their incident were reported correctly. I doubt that any story is ever reported 100% correctly.

Very true. These are words of wisdom.

Why they hell can't they set a no tolerance policy for steroid/drug use?

They would lose all their big stars (read: big bucks) in no time at all. Always follow the money trail... and that applies to the slashtard editors, too.

Sailor Suit?@#!

[Anonymous Coward]

Showing a video of himself dressed in a sailor suit

Is this part true?

we had a bunch of tin-star sheriffs try it once

[swschrad]

called it DIVX, sold three disks and ten players, and folded. didn't help circuit city one bit, the principal money behind it, and curiously, the only place that sold those doomed discs of death. disney tried it again last year, bombed. the market doesn't want bs in a box. stop trying to sell it to us.

That's like stealing candy from a baby!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

We know /. editors don't check articles (except to make sure that they are dupes).

However, the main point is whether or not this **really** was a hoax. Leaking a "hoax" is a great way to judge user feedback etc without getting egg on your face.

Uh-huh

[jav1231]

Balmer: "ARGH!" (tosses chair, breaks glass, rips off tie) "I will OWN THE MEDIA MARKET! I WILL KILL THEM ALL! So, what did they think of our single-play DVD?"
Assistant: "Uh...they laughed, Sir."
Balmer: "Oh!...Ummm...Okay...well...uh...let's play it as a hoax."
Assistant: "Yes, Sir. New chair, Sir?"
Balmer: "That would be nice, and some decaf!"

Humor Nazi

[geekoid]

"Only someone who reads slashdot every other day would say that. The rest of us know it's much more common than that."

you know what would ahve made the a great punch line? leaving of the second sentence off. Never explain your joke unless asked*. Plus, only the intelligent moderators would mod you funny..oh wait.

Not to be confused with magic tricks.

darn...

[hobo sapiens]

I was SO looking forward to paying $3 for play once DVDs! I feel that that the MPAA needs more of my money!!!

Re:Humm... Only applys to windows Media format, hu

[Not The Real Me]

Yes, and more importantly, has anyone ever seen a workaround for DRM?

Nothing annoys me more than when I get my hands on a DRM enabled file, I try to play the file only to find out whoever authored it is no longer in business or the URL for the DRM license acquisition server is no longer valid.

Windows Vista will be far away

[failedlogic]

From the thread info:
"In fact, the original story sparked a flurry of e-mails around Microsoft as people in different groups tried to figure out where on earth this story came from. After the head-scratching stopped, a spokesmen told me, they concluded that the story was not true."

If it takes this much effort for one of the largest companies to come up with an answer to a seemingly simple question (let alone an IT company which sells software to orgnise information), it should cause us to re-think how we all organise business information. They should have had an answer in a few minutes (not) what seems to be several hours of communication between middle and upper management. Microsoft is not alone. I've worked for several large companies (one of which is a major market leader). Each time a "policy" or "product" question came up it would take hours or days to find out. Microsoft is not immune to this.

How you know it's a hoax

[toupsie]

Slashdot has only run the story once. If the editors dupe the article, then you know it's genuine. A lot of you gripe about dupe posts but at least you know the story is real the second time. It's a feature, not a bug...

My sincere hope...

[callipygian-showsyst]

...is that Microsoft sues the pants of /. for being so irresponsible.

I was a victim of this sort of wildfire...

[Shanep]

I was a witness in a court case. I stated my observations absolutely honestly and without bias. Anyone from either side of the case should have been able to see that my duty was to the court and that my own integrity was very important to me.

Somehow some idiot journalist did not see this, however. Through seemingly selective reporting and creative "quoting", I was somehow a bad guy. That story was then copied verbatim across many internet and print news outlets and it was even interpretted and "built on" by other idiot or perhaps dishonest journalists.

I no longer have any respect at all for the average journalist. They very rarely understand the issues they are reporting and sensationalize to the point of out-and-out lie. They do no favours to the subjects of their stories (except for the subjects who may be rich affiliates of course) and no favours to the general public who believe their lies.

Re:I was a victim of this sort of wildfire...

[FurryFeet]

Ken? Ken Lay? How've you been, man?

Re:I was a victim of this sort of wildfire...

[Shanep]

Ken? Ken Lay? How've you been, man?

I am just one person with an account of how I have been unjustly treated by journalists. Take my comments at face value or otherwise interpret them until you get to some conclusion that fits your ideals and makes you most comfortable. I could not care less anymore. My family, friends and most importantly myself, know the moral fibre which drives me to live my life in the honest manner in which I do and that is all that matters to me.

I am proud of who I am, what I do and what I have achieved. I would like to ask many journalists, "are you proud?" and if they claim to be, ask them what they have to be proud of.

I realise that not all journalists are scum, but so many seem to be more interested in making stories BIGGER, even if it means they become liars.

There are still reputable journalists

[Infonaut]

Just dispense with TV if you want to find 'em.

The New York Times has had its problems, but their reporters are some of the best in the business, and while there is an editorial slant, it isn't extreme. The Atlantic provides good monthly material, and The Economist does so on a weekly basis. Those are my picks for daily, weekly, and monthly news, but there are other sources. The Christian Science Monitor is a great daily paper, for example. You may agree or disagree with my picks, but the profession of journalism isn't dead, and good sources of news are available.

I would also advance the notion that just because the editorial bias of a newspaper is disagreeable to you doesn't mean that the organization is corrupt. Newspapers are run by people, and people sometimes make mistakes. Note that during the runup to the Iraq invasion, The Atlantic provided excellent coverage and made many warnings that the Administration's plans were misguided. To me that is proof that following only one news source is a bad idea. You have to read from more than one source, whose biases you know, and make your own assessments from there.

I realize that it's de rigeur to bash on the news media, whether you're attacking from the Right or the Left, but the media is a business, and it gives people what they want. Americans need to take responsibility for at least some of the sorry state of our media. We have consistently voted in politicians who allowed the media conglomerates more and more power. We watch trash like Fox News. We read USA Today. That's not proof of a lack of credible journalism. It's proof that we're lazy.

Re:There are still reputable journalists

[gregski]

"trash like Fox News"

Now come on we all know Fox News is "Fair & Balanced (TM)"

BTW i find the best online news to be http://news.bbc.co.uk/, but i also try to read from more than one source.

Re:There are still reputable journalists

[DeadScreenSky]

The New York Times has had its problems, but their reporters are some of the best in the business, and while there is an editorial slant, it isn't extreme.

Wasn't the Times one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq invasion and the WMD nonsense? We've had so many amazing journalistic failures during the past eight years, even from the Times, that it is really hard to believe that the journalists anywhere are doing their job correctly enough. Especially with the lack of any real public accountability for these mistakes, which is just galling. That's exactly what the grandparent post was referring to.

Re:There are still reputable journalists

[hywel_ap_ieuan]

Wasn't the Times one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq invasion and the WMD nonsense?

I'm not as familiar with their editorial position on the invasion, but the Times' Judith Miller (who just got out of prison in the Plame investigation) is routinely vilified in the lefty blogosphere for her uncritical reporting of the administration's now-discredited pre-war intelligence.

Re:Humm... Only applys to windows Media format, hu

[Skybyte]

The only workaround I know of requires you to already have the license unfortunately

Same thing happened to Mariah Carey!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've immensely disliked her ever since I heard that comment she made about flies and death and stuff. I only recently discovered that it was a hoax, picked up as a fact and then circulated around the world's press. Poor girl. And I thought she deserved it when J-Lo trampled all over her with Mariah's ex. I mean, I don't really like any of them that much, but nobody deserves to have that sort of shit flung at them.

Coasters business is safe for now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I guess my business venture is safe for now http://www.theludwigs.com/archives/000767.html

You've never worked with people, have you?

[NotQuiteReal]

People do the oddest things. Lots of people are really unpredictable.

Without defending any particular company, in general, if "Bob from company X said Blah"... how long do you think it should take company X to confirm or deny it?

a) if company X has 10 employees?
b) if company X has 100 employees?
c) if company X has 1000 employees?
d) if company MSFT has 61000 employees?

If it takes this much effort for one of the largest companies to come up with an answer to a seemingly simple question...

Of course it takes effort to come up with an answer... more so for a big company. Unless you just want a knee-jerk denial.

You're just realizing it recently?

[zippthorne]

What? That's nothing. You should'a seen 'em egg on the Spanish-American war. (Which by the way, our modern ironclads totally r0x0r3d their antequated wooden galleys)

There is a penalty for journalists who fail to do their job properly. It's called a 'pulitzer' (take that hearst)

But you can't blame them. They're not content to sit on the sidelines and tell people things they didn't know. (unless they're reporting about starving people or something) They want to be part of the story. Just watch a press conference on c-span. The reporters come up with some of the most lame-brained ideas*, which sound even stupider because they have to phrase their suggestions as questions.

*and that's saying something since the other people in the room are politicians.

conspiracy theories?

[almound]

Tired of hoaxes? Go to www.infowars.com or www.prisonplanet.tv and
get excellent films that report real issues in a truthful manner.

No worries there about one-view DVDs, pay-per-view DVDs, satellite downloads, key-logging uploads, etc. M$ is not involved.

There must be something to those websites. Time-Warner and AOL ISPs filter them via DNS. Fancy that! (Traceroute is great.)

But that's OK. Just go to infowars.net. The M$ clones overlooked that one.

Go and get your free movies and info-links about real issues reported in major news media (AP, Reuters, CNN, and the London Guardian). Fully half of the numerous hours of streaming video is freely viewable, and the other half just verifies and documents the first half.

Sure it was hoax...

[B11]

Or is it possible they leaked it to gauge reaction? Until wee know for sure, I have my tin-foil hat at the ready.

I was thinking of thinking out loud...

[angrykeyboarder]

"I wonder why it took hours for /. to in essence "retract" the original story. It was being refuted all over the web and /. was still 'sticking to thier guns' per se."

But alas, I won't think out loud. I'd not want to upset a mod or anything. :-P

when asked to produce hard evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

...all he could supply was a blank dvd.

'i'm telling you it had evidence on it yesterday'

This cannot be proven any more

[Ray Alloc]

... the original interview was recorded on one of thos "play once only" DVD, now evidence is gone.

Re:Paul Thurrott reprinted the story without givin

[Dahamma]

He may not have credited it (and given it was false, it's debatable if that's even worthwhile, though it probably would have HELPED his credibility to blame the origin on someone else!) but he definitely did not reprint it. RBFA (with B = both ;) and you can see Paul's is just a cheesy gossip-column quality summary, not a "reprint". The /. OP was fairly misleading on that...

Microsoft = Waste advocates

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, what about our enviroment, yet another throw away product. Surely Microsoft will be held liable and accountable for this technology.

Anonymous Coward

No harm done to Microsoft...

[OwlWhacker]

I don't think this affects anybody's perception of Microsoft.

I'm sure we all know that Microsoft will do just about anything to dominate a market.

The fact that so many people believed it, without question, goes to show what people really think of Microsoft.

Hoaxer, more free advertising to MS

[davro]

Quite a nice insight into how well this media driven western world runs. People have to keep bashing microsoft, keeping them in the picture, if all the computer dudes,dudetes would just forget about mickysoft and windows, and stop giving MS all this FREE puplicity, remember all news is good news, and MS really do not need this open/free marking ride.

The best results..

[DenDave]

Are achieved when the lie is plausible. And a behemoth of an organization is always slow to respond. You can compare any large organization to a garbage can! Lyndon et al have discussed this model for explaining strange behaviour of large organizations. http://choo.fis.utoronto.ca/mgt/DM.garbage.html

Basically change must be incremental for it too succeed in a garbage can.

Well, come on

[ajs318]

Copy prevention is mathematically impossible. Not just supremely difficult, like cracking RSA encryption; actually impossible. Like perpetual motion machines or faster-than-light travel. And limited-read media, by virtue of the fact they are as susceptible to copying as any other media now known or ever to be invented, do nothing to prevent illegal copying.

There was a bar that I used to drink in, back in my student days, which had a juke box. An NSM Prestige 160 if you care about these things; a lot like a Seeburg inside. It cost 10 pence a record {remember records?} and it was always playing. Once a fortnight, the amusement machine company came out to change the records. Well, one time, not only did they put in a whole load of new records, they also cranked up the price from 10p to 20p. And from that day on, the bar was like a Wetherspoons.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that if DVDs cost £3 each instead of £20, then more people would be more prepared to buy them; and they'd actually sell enough copies to make more of a profit. Instead of waiting to see if one of my friends bought a movie I would like to watch {in a kind of "chicken" game, where the loser is the one who actually buys the disc and then has either to lend it out to everyone else, thereby risking the disc becoming trashed; or invite them over for a viewing, thereby risking an enormous cost in drink, drugs, broken furniture and freaked-out neighbours} we could all just buy our own copy of the disc, and not have to worry about the intricate politics of the situation. Likewise, there would be next to no market in "piracy", since the margins involved would be ridiculously small. Back in 1998-99, a "pirated" music CD cost £3 {handwritten track listing, labelled with indelible marker} or £4 {inkjet printed cover artwork and label}. Writers were rare, not much faster than 4* or 8* and hardly anybody had ADSL. As a cottage industry, it was fine for awhile but it soon became unsustainable.

Oh, *PLEASE*

[Khyber]

We all knew this was a hoax. The typical /. response is "Microsoft BAD"

What nobody bothered to do (EDITORS) was check up on the story. The fact is, another company (can't remember whom) tried this same thing. Guess what? It DIDN'T WORK. The mass market said "NO" and with that simple bit of info from the past, why would Microsoft try doing it again? Hell, even they should know if it can be read once from a DVD, it could be copied ONCE, burned ONCE onto another disc and WATCHED FOREVER.

What we have here is a serious problem with Slashdot editors not checking up on stories, like REAL EDITORS DO. (Minus Fox News, which is FAR from 'Fair and Balanced.')

Give me a break, Slashdot. Your moderators mod me as a troll but your own editors can't even spot this simple fake? Yes, even I responded to the last story about this horse-hockey, and all I did was mention the above tactic of read/rip once, burn once, play forever. As a matter of fact, someone else in the comments before this story posted that IT WAS BULLSHIT. After being so thoroughly debunked by a simple (and unmodded) commentator, why the hell is this news to begin with? Play once DVD? *Penn and Teller Quote* BULL-SHIT.

Nothing for you to see here, move along. You should've all had the brains to figure this one out.

single-play dvds in Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw it on the news about a month ago. I am not sure if they are being sold already and I didn't have time to search the web. It comes in a vacuum wrap and after you open the paint in the dvd starts to oxidate. After a couple of days it is dark and unplayable. If anyone is interested i can find the news in japanese.

This is surprising why?

[Devistater]

How is this surprising? It happens all the time in mainstream media, reporters righting stories without fact checking or checking the source. Especially in science or medical stories, probably because the reporter doesn't know enough to know what questions to ask, and because they think they have to dumb it down for the public.

So why is it happening on the internet any differant?

Its especially funny when the mainstream media goes and reports someone dies who hasn't. That happens about once a year for someone famous lol.

Re:This is surprising why?

[chawly]

Well the idea of "reporters righting stories" surprised me a bit. I've heard of reporters lefting stories in bars after too much alcohol. I've heard of reporters writing stories in order to justify their existence and their right to eat. But "righting stories" is new for me. Perhaps this returns to their right to eat - they write the story and, having justified their right to eat, they then eat the story. Could the whole cycle be referred to as "righting" a story ? Begins with writing the story, continues with eating it, and ends with evacuating it ? After the cycle was complete, we'd have to refer to it as a "rightinged" story though - and this complicates the issue for a grammatical stand-point. The evacuation part of the cycle is troublesome also, since we're told to "stand up for our rights". Unless, of course, we say that this part of the cycle may be referred to as "sitting down for our writes". Life is complicated, ain't it.

The latest conspiracy theory

[beforewisdom]

Of course the latest conspiracy theory could be that it was an intentional hoax by the entertainment industry to test market reactions to the concept without having to take responsibility for suggesting the concept if the market reaction was bad.

My reaction would be good if the a choice in formats was made available with an appropriate difference in price. Say $2 for a single play dvd for something I know I only want to see once.

However there would be the environmental cost of throwing single play DVDs into the waste dumps ( translation: our children's future ) on top of all of those unsolicited snail mailed AOL CDs.

Hoax?

[heffrey]

Perhaps it would be better reported as having been a journalistic error. A hoax implies intent to mislead. This was just sheer incompetence.

Either could be plausible!

[scottsk]

Either a hoax or reality could be plausible.

After all, the MS strategy all along has been to sell shovels to the 49ers trying to get rich off the Internet. They're selling DRM solutions to people and getting their $ up front, not selling content which is a race to the $0.99 bottom as competitors try to put each other out of business. This is a good strategy, if your mission is to destroy traditional copyright and make money off of content ownership and licensing.

Reality is plausible: because MS could expand their DRM to physical media. The media could self-destruct or lock out after so many days, and people could pay to unlock it. A natural extension of the WMP DRM solution for content (like long movies or uncompressed audio) that's hard to sling around over the net.

A hoax is plausible: because MS knows any physical medium with DRM content blocks is usually worked around before the DRM is in active use. (Sharpies, the shift key, etc.) If they sold a DRM solution to companies that was broken almost instantly, it would be a silly black eye for their strategy.

The moral of this story is not to buy anything with DRM protection, and then no one will be able to sell anything with DRM protection because no one will buy it!

Paul Thurott - what an asshat thou art!

[Anonymous Coward]

What a toolish Microsoft fanboy Thurott has always been.

http://www.ipodhacks.com/article.php?sid=578

Oy.

Damn

[nearlygod]

I knew it was too good to be true. Now I will have to go back to driving to Blockbuster not once, but twice when I rent a movie. Or even worse, having to mail the damn discs when I'm done with them. What a pain!

Penny Arcade and Divx

[nickyj]

Divx is introduced Classic

So, it's DRM in software, not hardware...

[Anonymous Coward]

But just as undesirable and stupid.

"Play once" media files makes as much sense as "read once" books. Unless you happen to be part of the IMF and need to deliver a message that self-destructs, I can't see much value to the consumer.

Still, the exercise has been a nice commentary on how careful the news media are in their reporting.

Within large corporations...

[plopez]

it is not uncommon for the left hand to not know what the right hand is doing. I will wait and see, this could be interesting...

Hoax squared

[worldcitizen]

A recent article on how a Slashdot story was a hoax was itself proven to be a hoax...

Only sort of a hoax

[FreeUser]

This is only "sort of" a hoax. Yes, self-destructing DVDs a lá DivX are a hoax, but note carefully how Microsoft phrased their response.

MPEG2 streams cannot self-destruct in this way, but the option has been available for quite some time for material encoded in windows media, which just so happens to be the format for HD-DVD. So, while self-destructing DVDs are a hoax, self-destructing HD-DVDs are part of the design specification, whether it is marketed that way or not.

The problem with this? Now that we've had one asinine hoax (which, truth be told, was not all that implausible, given the history of DivX and the past behavior of Microsoft vis-á-vis "trusted computing" and DRM), Microsoft's spin machine will have a much easier time downplaying very legitimate fears when their HD-DVDs ship with exactly this capability designed in.

ObSovietRussiaStandy: In Fascist America they spread false rumor of something horrific, get reaction, debunk it, then quietly do something equally horrific and allow the outrage from the same group of people duped before to fall on deaf ears, getting away with it completely. When the consiquences come home to root, they turn around, blame the victim, and have their numbers go up in the polls. Welcome to the New World Order, shopper.

Hey...

[Chysn]

All this talk of a hoax gives me an IDEA... how about producing a DVD that can only be played ONCE? It can't miss! I'd better get going; what time does the patent office close?

from the no-shit-sherlock dept.

[MegaFur]

"a hoax can spread just as fast as a genuine news story. That's the lesson from the bogus story published in an obscure UK business magazine yesterday that claimed Microsoft is about to unleash a new single-play DVD format.

Yeah. Duh. I knew this lesson regarding hoaxes already. Why the fuck is it that so few people in the general news media and populace seem to understand this though? That's the part that bugs me.

CLUE: Whatever you do, never trust information that comes from only one source if the information is in any way important to you. Also never take information from slashdot at face value without at least a little independant verification.

At work today, someone was passing around a printout of a photo of an aligator that died while trying to eat a large snake. The photo apparently came from an MSN article so it has some non-trivial probability of being real. However, just to mess with people, he left the prinout where others can see and wrote something on the paper like: "found nearby yesterday morning--be careful out there today." So another hoax is begun. Hoaxes are actually easier to start and spread than genuine news information because you don't have to do any fact checking.

Microsoft single-play install DVD!

[oldbenway]

The Microsoft single-play DVD must have been a format they were researching for Office 2006 and Longhorn install disks. MS finally invented their ideal perfect licensing and distribution technology!

They were cheerleaders

[Infonaut]

Wasn't the Times one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq invasion and the WMD nonsense?

So was The New Republic. So were a lot of publications. Most of the press screwed that one up, plain and simple. But is the Iraq War really the only issue of importance? Does the rest of their reporting suddenly become less valuable because of their reporting failures with the Iraq War?

But...

[CoderJoe]

Notice the mention of "MPEG2 content found on DVDs"? There is no mention whatsoever of HD-DVD, which is supposed to use WMV9 for the compression on video discs. Now notice how they say "This has been an option for content owners to use for some time for the Windows Media format".

So is this "We never said that" story truth, or more misdirection?

where they stored the single-play design

[impeachsarbanes]

They mush have stored the designs for the single-play DVD on a single-play DVD.

Doh!