"DVD was launched in 1997, and it wasn't until 2002 that I got a player. It cost £100"
Let's compare apples to apples, please. I know you blokes in BriTan are used to getting screwed over with higher prices than the rest of the world. Here in the states electronics prices tend to have an accelerated price curve downwards. I bought an Apex DVD player sometime between 1997-1998 for under $200. I'd have to dig out the receipt to be absolutely certain, but it was definitely purchased before 2000.
Point is that Sorny gouges people, a fact that can be substantiated by their history of proprietary formats. BetaMax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, etc etc... Memory Stick is the easiest current comparison. Compared to equivalent SD or CF, Memory Stick carries a 50-100% price premium. Explain how that's anything other than corporate greed (the volume argument is bogus because Sorny could just as easily have used SD in all their products).
"prices went up because they don't have to undercut their costs anymore. now, prices will eventually go down when the technology is actually cheaper. DVDs were expensive at one point too, but had no competition at the time (if you really want to count VHS, thats up to you)."
In the real world, yes. Sony is too arrogant to follow those well-established rules. DVD player prices didn't stay as high for as long as BR. BR is more expensive because Sorny is a greedy lil b*tch who loves to charge exorbitant royalties. They may be basking in this short-lived "victory", but in the end they're shooting themselves in the foot.
"illegal" in the vernacular means against the law. The wiretaps *were* illegal. If the bill passes, it may not be illegal in the future. That doesn't diminish the fact that it was and currently still is illegal.
Perhaps the better question would be to ask yourself if you know what illegal means.
This "study" made me recall a saying about benchmarks (there are lies, damned lies, and then there are benchmarks). Same thing could be applied to studies like this. Stats can be bent to fit the pre-conceived conclusions of the alleged researchers.
I know a number of engineers, none of whom are overly religious. Most lean away from religion. Engineers seem to be more centrist than conservative. Conservatives are generally ignorant and closed-minded, qualities which would doom an engineer's career.
"we can totally feel how an HTC TyTN II might be paired with an earthy unlimited plan followed by the soft nutty finish of a 200-minute a month daytime calling package."
The writer of that schpiel is
A) Gay
B) Trying too hard to impress/.
C) Egomaniac
D) Kleptomaniac
"Good design skills and a reasonable brain are all one needs to avoid threading pitfalls.."
That alone keeps it out of the mainstream.
"repeat after me - VB is not a mainstream language!"
'Mainstream' is not about quality, it's about how widely adopted the language is. VB has become popular due to its ease of use by beginners. It excels at facilitating easy and relatively advanced GUI applications. I'm no fan of VB either; in fact I hate coding in it and avoid it whenever possible.
Anyway, whether you like it or not, VB is mainstream, and whether you like it or not, optimized multithreading languages are not.
".. by the same kind of historical reasoning we should have said goodbye a long time ago to such stuff as: [superfluous analogies]"
Hyperthreading tries to extract thread-level parallelism and fill in unused slots (bubbles) in the CPU pipes. There are two problems with this approach:
1) Optimized multi-threaded apps are not common in the x86 market. Aside from server apps such as databases, it is difficult to pull thread-level parallelism from an application. True, you could run multiple apps, but if your bottleneck is a single application, it won't offer a performance increase.
2) Bubbles in the CPU pipe are already very rare. Modern compilers generate very efficient code which separate dependencies between adjacent instructions. In the cases that the compiler doesn't optimize the code well enough, the CPU's hardware instruction reordering does an amazing job of filling in those bubbles.
#1 is also a problem with multi-core processors. Add #2 to that and hyperthreading's value diminishes to almost nothing. Hyperthreading might be of some value if it were applied to many-core chips. The CPU could present itself as N processors with only M cores (e.g. 12 to 8). The hyperthreading scheduler could then dole out 12 threads to the 8 cores dynamically to minimize bubbles. But for a single-core chip, hyperthreading doesn't make much sense.
Are you sure you're not in marketing?:P The current mainstream development languages (C, C++, VB, etc..) are not tailored to multi-threaded coding. Yes it can be done, but that in no way says anything about how efficient or bug-free the development process is. Multi-threading of serious complexity is quite unruly in C++. There has been alot of research into improving the state of the state, but until it goes mainstream it's not going to be used by alot of developers. The future most certainly is not now (refer to A Christmas Carol).
"..because AMD at one point couldn't get hyperthreading right and had its marketers convince..."
Quick history lesson. Intel tried pawning off hyperthreading to the market. If you mean that AMD should have done hyperthreading, perhaps you should look at the reviews/benchmarks to see that it reduced performance in many cases. In the future, more software might by able to take advantage of increased thread parallelism, but that future is not now, at least in the x86 world.
Those 100-cylinder engines sure are light. After all, the metal necessary to build such an engine would only make up the majority of the weight of the car. Use 10 cylinders to drag around the rest of the 90, now that's efficiency.
"[CF] takes more energy to make then it saves, has heavy metals so now when people throw them away the land is polluted more then the energy needed"
Please cite your sources. Otherwise you're just spouting off a bogus conspiracy theory. The heavy metals are a real concern, but that can be addressed by proper recycling. The same issue exists with rechargeable batteries. It's a matter of educating consumers and making recycling centers accessible. Motor oil is toxic too, but it's not dumped dumped en masse into the environment.
For all practical purposes, solar energy is limitless.
I stand corrected. I meant to write that power is limited. While the sun's energy will be there for the next billion years, the planet's surface area is finite and limits the amount of power that we can capture from the sun. Power is the key point, because it is the rate at which energy is produced/consumed that is challenging.
Firstly, even with AC cycling, the temperature of the house will not increase to 90 degrees (unless you set the thermostat to 88 or 89 deg to begin with). I've never seen my temperature vary more than 1 degree during the summer with AC cycling. AC cycling does NOT cut off your AC in the sense of not allowing it to run. It simply adjusts the points at which the AC cuts on & off to prevent everyone's AC from sucking down power at the same time. It's a smarter way of power distribution. Are you offended that incandescent light bulbs are being phased out in favor of the more efficient compact fluorescent bulbs? Same amount of light output at a fraction of the power consumption.
Go fuck yourself and keep your regulations out of my home. It's already bad enough the kind of regulation that's been placed on the home... People like you have destroyed that concept.
There's a saying "let your dim light shine". Yours truly is dim. Your the "type" that has gotten us into this oil-dependent, blood-for-war quandry due to unmitigated energy wastage. Energy is not limitless, that is a fact. You want sole control of your energy, go buy a generator and do what you like. There's no law that says electricity is a right. In fact, areas which do not take conservationist measures have much higher electric rates. What's your point?
Your response is yet again another example of ignorance. The AC cycling program is voluntary in Austin. They could do the same in CA. Whatever they ultimately decide in CA is up to the politicians, who answer to the voters. That is the way the US system works. You want dictatorship, move to South America. You want anarchy, move to central Africa.
Austin Energy (Austin TX) has been doing this for years. They offer incentives for people who voluntarily sign up to have their AC cycled during peak summer days. By reducing peak demand in the summer, which has the highest energy usage spikes, they have been able to avoid building yet another coal/oil-fired power plant. This reduces their costs and reduces customers' electricity bills. In fact, Austin Energy customers pay some of the lowest rates in the state.
All the alarmists crying about their AC being "turned off" haven't a clue about how this works. Even without AC cycling, the AC unit doesn't stay on constantly (not for 99.9% of households). Instead, the AC runs for a while, then shuts off when the set temperature has been reached. As the temperature rises, the AC kicks in to push the temperature back down. There's a small range that the thermostat allows the temperature to play in so that the AC doesn't constantly turn on & off. In engineering it's called hysteresis. Usually the AC kicks in every ~30 minutes, depending on the temperature differential with the outside and how well insulated the structure is. The energy company uses the thermostats to stagger these cycles so that the AC units in peoples' houses don't kick on all at once.
A simplified example: say there are 300 houses running their AC in the middle of the day. Without AC cycling, all 300 of them can kick in from 2-2:30pm and cause a huge spike in power demand. With AC cycing, 100 go on from 2:00-2:10, another 100 go on @ 2:10-2:20, and the final 100 run from 2:20-2:30. The cycle then repeats. This is transparent to the homeowner and has little or no impact on the set temperature (1/2 a degree variance, perhaps). This is a simple example to give you an idea of what can happen, don't take it as gospel on how the system actually works on a large scale. The power company has a pool of tens or hundreds of thousands of customers, so their cycling pattern is undoubtedly much more complicated.
Look people, if we want to be smarter about our energy and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, we need to take measures like this. This buys us time to implement better methods of extracting renewable energy. Sophomoric and overprotective statements like "don't touch my AC" are based on ignorance. Understand the technology and how it really affects you before crying foul.
I agree. The C64 keyboard was far and away better than the chiclet keys from the IBM PC Jr, Atari and others. It wasn't perfect, but the keys were sturdy and had good feel without sound like a machine gun (ala the ancient IBM dinosaurs).
Their key layout complaint is without merit. Back then there was no "standard" layout, aside from the main alphabet QWERTY arrangement. The PC keyboard became the defacto standard layout after the PC took over the industry. But that hadn't happened in the C64 days. PC World is unashamedly showing their bias by ranking the C64 keyboard worse than the chiclets.
Maybe this is targeted at emergency scenarios. An example might be when Katrina knocked out much of the power/comms in New Orleans. They could drop one of these cargo containers at the dock and get the network back online quickly. That seems to be the only viable model for this, as it can't compete with land-based data centers in price and stability.
"1) Easier. To play HD content from a disc I just place a disc in a player, and it's playing. To get HD content online I have to decide to buy it from somewhere (and have an internet connection to my system at the TV). Then I have to wait for it to buffer enough to start watching." blah blah ad nauseum
Where exactly does this magical disc appear from? Last I checked, you have to go out and buy or rent one, which means driving out to the store, hoping that they have the particular title you want (in stock or at all). Oh you use Netflix? Let's see, that's 4+ days waiting for the disc to arrive in the mail. A minute of buffering doesn't sound so bad after all.
Broadband in the US is way behind. As it stands now, the streaming video experience isn't ideal. It will improve, as will just about every other technology.
.. the sensationalist headlines make it look like the Slashdot fellas all bought BR gear. Kinda sad how unabashedly they pimp their bias.
I'm convinced that HD-DVD's biggest mistake was the lack of burners. If burners had been available at reasonable prices (under $200), there would have been loads more HD-DVD owners. It was surprising to see BR burners out relatively early, though their cost is very prohibitive.
My biggest concern with BR is the encryption key changes that Sorny will inevitably push. They've already done it once after the initial release was cracked. That caused many players to break on the newer titles, requiring firmware updates. What happens down the road when manufacturers drop support for older models? 1st & 2nd gen players would be the first to suffer, as they would no longer be able to play newer titles with newer encryption/keys. It's enough for me to skip BR altogether, even if that bastard format "wins".
Uncompressed video is unnecessary for the consumer market. It's a nice utopia for video/audiophile geeks, but the cost of storage and distribution just isn't worth it.
The reason for multi-channel audio in the consumer space is to recreate surround sound, not to preserve individual instruments/voices. 6-channel (5.1) surround is plenty good, and 8-channel (7.1) is available at a marginal improvement. 16-channel for end-user consumption is absurd.
Your wishlist is kind of like asking magazine publishers to distribute all their prints with 4-color separations. Consumers don't care about preserving all the intermediary information, they just want the end product.
Your "clues" are based on a fantasy world. The fact that DVD has become the industry standard says nothing about acceptance of DRM. The DVD format became successful in spite of DRM. DVD's DRM was so easily cracked that it's essentially non-existent. There are dozens of programs, free or paid, that allow any user to easily bypass the encryption. DVDs are popular because consumers can easily back up their discs. Tell me, when are the movie studios going to replace for free HD/BR discs that get damaged? No? After all, from Hollywood's point of view, purchasers of movies don't really own the movie, just a "license" to view it. That being the case, Hollywood should bear the responsibility of replacing damaged media, no questions asked.
1. There is significant customer dissatisfaction with audio DRM. If that's not true, why have a large number of studios relented and agreed to DRM-free MP3 sales?
2. When I said "studios", I was referring to the entities that package & sell music to customers, not the physical recording studio with mics & recording equipment. Sheesh.. talk about picking nits. That part of your post is irrelevant anyway.
3. Are you so fanatically loyal to Bush that you can't see a joke? Sounds like you are the one who's lost.
The iPhone is a slick product. Kudos to apple for pushing the edge of UI design. But, once again apple's closed-system philosophy is their undoing. Yes they're releasing an SDK as a business response to Android. They're *responding* in this department, not innovating. That's why Google's Android will overrun the market and apple will be stuck with their ~3% market share just like the Mac.
Predictions are difficult, and I'm no seer. This one looks obvious to me though.
After the consumer lashback against DRM in the audio arena forced recording studios to go MP3, Hollywood is pursuing the Bush-style I-can't-be-bothered-with-history fiasco and repeating the same mistakes. Maybe after so many billions of lost revenue, they'll finally figure it out too. DRM is a dead end.
Slashdot Mirror
"DVD was launched in 1997, and it wasn't until 2002 that I got a player. It cost £100"
Let's compare apples to apples, please. I know you blokes in BriTan are used to getting screwed over with higher prices than the rest of the world. Here in the states electronics prices tend to have an accelerated price curve downwards. I bought an Apex DVD player sometime between 1997-1998 for under $200. I'd have to dig out the receipt to be absolutely certain, but it was definitely purchased before 2000.
Point is that Sorny gouges people, a fact that can be substantiated by their history of proprietary formats. BetaMax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, etc etc... Memory Stick is the easiest current comparison. Compared to equivalent SD or CF, Memory Stick carries a 50-100% price premium. Explain how that's anything other than corporate greed (the volume argument is bogus because Sorny could just as easily have used SD in all their products).
"prices went up because they don't have to undercut their costs anymore. now, prices will eventually go down when the technology is actually cheaper. DVDs were expensive at one point too, but had no competition at the time (if you really want to count VHS, thats up to you)."
In the real world, yes. Sony is too arrogant to follow those well-established rules. DVD player prices didn't stay as high for as long as BR. BR is more expensive because Sorny is a greedy lil b*tch who loves to charge exorbitant royalties. They may be basking in this short-lived "victory", but in the end they're shooting themselves in the foot.
"crazy guy who continues to argue that HD-DVD is the superior technology whether it's true or not."
If it's true, would the guy still be considered crazy?
"illegal" in the vernacular means against the law. The wiretaps *were* illegal. If the bill passes, it may not be illegal in the future. That doesn't diminish the fact that it was and currently still is illegal.
Perhaps the better question would be to ask yourself if you know what illegal means.
This "study" made me recall a saying about benchmarks (there are lies, damned lies, and then there are benchmarks). Same thing could be applied to studies like this. Stats can be bent to fit the pre-conceived conclusions of the alleged researchers.
I know a number of engineers, none of whom are overly religious. Most lean away from religion. Engineers seem to be more centrist than conservative. Conservatives are generally ignorant and closed-minded, qualities which would doom an engineer's career.
"we can totally feel how an HTC TyTN II might be paired with an earthy unlimited plan followed by the soft nutty finish of a 200-minute a month daytime calling package."
/.
The writer of that schpiel is
A) Gay
B) Trying too hard to impress
C) Egomaniac
D) Kleptomaniac
"Good design skills and a reasonable brain are all one needs to avoid threading pitfalls.."
That alone keeps it out of the mainstream.
"repeat after me - VB is not a mainstream language!"
'Mainstream' is not about quality, it's about how widely adopted the language is. VB has become popular due to its ease of use by beginners. It excels at facilitating easy and relatively advanced GUI applications. I'm no fan of VB either; in fact I hate coding in it and avoid it whenever possible.
Anyway, whether you like it or not, VB is mainstream, and whether you like it or not, optimized multithreading languages are not.
".. by the same kind of historical reasoning we should have said goodbye a long time ago to such stuff as: [superfluous analogies]"
Hyperthreading tries to extract thread-level parallelism and fill in unused slots (bubbles) in the CPU pipes. There are two problems with this approach:
1) Optimized multi-threaded apps are not common in the x86 market. Aside from server apps such as databases, it is difficult to pull thread-level parallelism from an application. True, you could run multiple apps, but if your bottleneck is a single application, it won't offer a performance increase.
2) Bubbles in the CPU pipe are already very rare. Modern compilers generate very efficient code which separate dependencies between adjacent instructions. In the cases that the compiler doesn't optimize the code well enough, the CPU's hardware instruction reordering does an amazing job of filling in those bubbles.
#1 is also a problem with multi-core processors. Add #2 to that and hyperthreading's value diminishes to almost nothing. Hyperthreading might be of some value if it were applied to many-core chips. The CPU could present itself as N processors with only M cores (e.g. 12 to 8). The hyperthreading scheduler could then dole out 12 threads to the 8 cores dynamically to minimize bubbles. But for a single-core chip, hyperthreading doesn't make much sense.
"future is most certainly now"
:P The current mainstream development languages (C, C++, VB, etc..) are not tailored to multi-threaded coding. Yes it can be done, but that in no way says anything about how efficient or bug-free the development process is. Multi-threading of serious complexity is quite unruly in C++. There has been alot of research into improving the state of the state, but until it goes mainstream it's not going to be used by alot of developers. The future most certainly is not now (refer to A Christmas Carol).
Are you sure you're not in marketing?
"..because AMD at one point couldn't get hyperthreading right and had its marketers convince..."
Quick history lesson. Intel tried pawning off hyperthreading to the market. If you mean that AMD should have done hyperthreading, perhaps you should look at the reviews/benchmarks to see that it reduced performance in many cases. In the future, more software might by able to take advantage of increased thread parallelism, but that future is not now, at least in the x86 world.
Those 100-cylinder engines sure are light. After all, the metal necessary to build such an engine would only make up the majority of the weight of the car. Use 10 cylinders to drag around the rest of the 90, now that's efficiency.
"[CF] takes more energy to make then it saves, has heavy metals so now when people throw them away the land is polluted more then the energy needed"
Please cite your sources. Otherwise you're just spouting off a bogus conspiracy theory. The heavy metals are a real concern, but that can be addressed by proper recycling. The same issue exists with rechargeable batteries. It's a matter of educating consumers and making recycling centers accessible. Motor oil is toxic too, but it's not dumped dumped en masse into the environment.
For all practical purposes, solar energy is limitless.
I stand corrected. I meant to write that power is limited. While the sun's energy will be there for the next billion years, the planet's surface area is finite and limits the amount of power that we can capture from the sun. Power is the key point, because it is the rate at which energy is produced/consumed that is challenging.
Firstly, even with AC cycling, the temperature of the house will not increase to 90 degrees (unless you set the thermostat to 88 or 89 deg to begin with). I've never seen my temperature vary more than 1 degree during the summer with AC cycling. AC cycling does NOT cut off your AC in the sense of not allowing it to run. It simply adjusts the points at which the AC cuts on & off to prevent everyone's AC from sucking down power at the same time. It's a smarter way of power distribution. Are you offended that incandescent light bulbs are being phased out in favor of the more efficient compact fluorescent bulbs? Same amount of light output at a fraction of the power consumption.
Go fuck yourself and keep your regulations out of my home. It's already bad enough the kind of regulation that's been placed on the home. .. People like you have destroyed that concept.
There's a saying "let your dim light shine". Yours truly is dim. Your the "type" that has gotten us into this oil-dependent, blood-for-war quandry due to unmitigated energy wastage. Energy is not limitless, that is a fact. You want sole control of your energy, go buy a generator and do what you like. There's no law that says electricity is a right. In fact, areas which do not take conservationist measures have much higher electric rates. What's your point?
Your response is yet again another example of ignorance. The AC cycling program is voluntary in Austin. They could do the same in CA. Whatever they ultimately decide in CA is up to the politicians, who answer to the voters. That is the way the US system works. You want dictatorship, move to South America. You want anarchy, move to central Africa.
I am not Amercan, I am socialist-Swede!
No, you're an idiot who sounds like a redneck high-school dropout. Now go back to cleaning toilets at McD. No one cares what you think anyway.
Austin Energy (Austin TX) has been doing this for years. They offer incentives for people who voluntarily sign up to have their AC cycled during peak summer days. By reducing peak demand in the summer, which has the highest energy usage spikes, they have been able to avoid building yet another coal/oil-fired power plant. This reduces their costs and reduces customers' electricity bills. In fact, Austin Energy customers pay some of the lowest rates in the state.
All the alarmists crying about their AC being "turned off" haven't a clue about how this works. Even without AC cycling, the AC unit doesn't stay on constantly (not for 99.9% of households). Instead, the AC runs for a while, then shuts off when the set temperature has been reached. As the temperature rises, the AC kicks in to push the temperature back down. There's a small range that the thermostat allows the temperature to play in so that the AC doesn't constantly turn on & off. In engineering it's called hysteresis. Usually the AC kicks in every ~30 minutes, depending on the temperature differential with the outside and how well insulated the structure is. The energy company uses the thermostats to stagger these cycles so that the AC units in peoples' houses don't kick on all at once.
A simplified example: say there are 300 houses running their AC in the middle of the day. Without AC cycling, all 300 of them can kick in from 2-2:30pm and cause a huge spike in power demand.
With AC cycing, 100 go on from 2:00-2:10, another 100 go on @ 2:10-2:20, and the final 100 run from 2:20-2:30. The cycle then repeats. This is transparent to the homeowner and has little or no impact on the set temperature (1/2 a degree variance, perhaps). This is a simple example to give you an idea of what can happen, don't take it as gospel on how the system actually works on a large scale. The power company has a pool of tens or hundreds of thousands of customers, so their cycling pattern is undoubtedly much more complicated.
Look people, if we want to be smarter about our energy and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, we need to take measures like this. This buys us time to implement better methods of extracting renewable energy. Sophomoric and overprotective statements like "don't touch my AC" are based on ignorance. Understand the technology and how it really affects you before crying foul.
I agree. The C64 keyboard was far and away better than the chiclet keys from the IBM PC Jr, Atari and others. It wasn't perfect, but the keys were sturdy and had good feel without sound like a machine gun (ala the ancient IBM dinosaurs).
Their key layout complaint is without merit. Back then there was no "standard" layout, aside from the main alphabet QWERTY arrangement. The PC keyboard became the defacto standard layout after the PC took over the industry. But that hadn't happened in the C64 days. PC World is unashamedly showing their bias by ranking the C64 keyboard worse than the chiclets.
Maybe this is targeted at emergency scenarios. An example might be when Katrina knocked out much of the power/comms in New Orleans. They could drop one of these cargo containers at the dock and get the network back online quickly. That seems to be the only viable model for this, as it can't compete with land-based data centers in price and stability.
"1) Easier. To play HD content from a disc I just place a disc in a player, and it's playing. To get HD content online I have to decide to buy it from somewhere (and have an internet connection to my system at the TV). Then I have to wait for it to buffer enough to start watching." blah blah ad nauseum
Where exactly does this magical disc appear from? Last I checked, you have to go out and buy or rent one, which means driving out to the store, hoping that they have the particular title you want (in stock or at all). Oh you use Netflix? Let's see, that's 4+ days waiting for the disc to arrive in the mail. A minute of buffering doesn't sound so bad after all.
Broadband in the US is way behind. As it stands now, the streaming video experience isn't ideal. It will improve, as will just about every other technology.
.. the sensationalist headlines make it look like the Slashdot fellas all bought BR gear. Kinda sad how unabashedly they pimp their bias.
I'm convinced that HD-DVD's biggest mistake was the lack of burners. If burners had been available at reasonable prices (under $200), there would have been loads more HD-DVD owners. It was surprising to see BR burners out relatively early, though their cost is very prohibitive.
My biggest concern with BR is the encryption key changes that Sorny will inevitably push. They've already done it once after the initial release was cracked. That caused many players to break on the newer titles, requiring firmware updates. What happens down the road when manufacturers drop support for older models? 1st & 2nd gen players would be the first to suffer, as they would no longer be able to play newer titles with newer encryption/keys. It's enough for me to skip BR altogether, even if that bastard format "wins".
Uncompressed video is unnecessary for the consumer market. It's a nice utopia for video/audiophile geeks, but the cost of storage and distribution just isn't worth it.
The reason for multi-channel audio in the consumer space is to recreate surround sound, not to preserve individual instruments/voices. 6-channel (5.1) surround is plenty good, and 8-channel (7.1) is available at a marginal improvement. 16-channel for end-user consumption is absurd.
Your wishlist is kind of like asking magazine publishers to distribute all their prints with 4-color separations. Consumers don't care about preserving all the intermediary information, they just want the end product.
Your "clues" are based on a fantasy world. The fact that DVD has become the industry standard says nothing about acceptance of DRM. The DVD format became successful in spite of DRM. DVD's DRM was so easily cracked that it's essentially non-existent. There are dozens of programs, free or paid, that allow any user to easily bypass the encryption. DVDs are popular because consumers can easily back up their discs. Tell me, when are the movie studios going to replace for free HD/BR discs that get damaged? No? After all, from Hollywood's point of view, purchasers of movies don't really own the movie, just a "license" to view it. That being the case, Hollywood should bear the responsibility of replacing damaged media, no questions asked.
"this post is crap."
1. There is significant customer dissatisfaction with audio DRM. If that's not true, why have a large number of studios relented and agreed to DRM-free MP3 sales? 2. When I said "studios", I was referring to the entities that package & sell music to customers, not the physical recording studio with mics & recording equipment. Sheesh.. talk about picking nits. That part of your post is irrelevant anyway.
3. Are you so fanatically loyal to Bush that you can't see a joke? Sounds like you are the one who's lost.
The iPhone is a slick product. Kudos to apple for pushing the edge of UI design. But, once again apple's closed-system philosophy is their undoing. Yes they're releasing an SDK as a business response to Android. They're *responding* in this department, not innovating. That's why Google's Android will overrun the market and apple will be stuck with their ~3% market share just like the Mac.
Predictions are difficult, and I'm no seer. This one looks obvious to me though.
After the consumer lashback against DRM in the audio arena forced recording studios to go MP3, Hollywood is pursuing the Bush-style I-can't-be-bothered-with-history fiasco and repeating the same mistakes. Maybe after so many billions of lost revenue, they'll finally figure it out too. DRM is a dead end.