While you are correct that Sony is quite paranoid about wanting to DRM everthing, you are incorrect about the PSP and PS3 being generic Sony products. They are Sony Computer Entertainment products (SCE), not Sony products. This is a key difference. SCE is quite independent in its decision making. SCE has been aggressively supporting multiple media formats on its platforms to Sony's chagrin. Both the PSP and the PS3 are good examples of this media format agnosticism - MP3, AAC, ATRAC3, WAV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (PS,TS), H.264/MEPG-4 AVC, MPEG-4 SP, etc. - the list gets ever longer when you consider that that the PS3 also openly supports linux.
I don't believe it allows you to send live TV over the internet.
The PS3 is a DLNA client. If you have any DLNA server on your network (there are many and more are coming from the consumer electronics and PC industries), you will be able to see live TV over the internet.
I can see one or two rare situations where this would be of use, but generally, uses are there for this type of technology? This is an incredibly useful tool. It makes it easy for any company to easily allow its customers to contact the company directly via telephones. All while leveraging the exisiting telephony infrastructure. There are wide-ranging uses for this type of connectivity for corporate use. Many users do not want to download helper applications and being able to just click on a web page to make a phone call is extremely helpful for them. IRC and other techno-weenie tools may be useful for the slashdot crowd, but nothing beats a no-brainer point and click in a web page for the vast majority of website users.
Reading through your posts shallow "tuxlove", it is obvious you are Steve Scherf or one of your Gracenote buddies. However:
I just read the court documents at the Gracenote legal page, and they indicate (1) that Gracenote won the trial where Musicmatch was suing them (and that was the only trial there ever was), and (2) that the court's earlier pretrial rulings against Gracenote were overturned by the very judge that issued them in the first place. OVERTURNED. So can you please point to the document that shows where musicmatch defeated gracenote? Sorry but you are incorrect. The decision was not overturned. The decision was vacated because Gracenote demanded this as a condition of the settlement. It is quite common to vacate pretrial decicsions of this type as a part of the settlement process. The court's decision cleary shows that Musicmatch did not infringe on any of Gracenote's very specific patents. This is why Musicmatch is still, to this date more than two years later, still operating its CD identifcation service. You will also notice that the documents postedd at the Gracenote legal page are hardly comprehensive and only selectively show information that Gracenote would like to show. This is not the wole truth, merely the misleading truthiness of Steve Scherf & Company..
all of the data collected before CDDB went commercial has already been released, and the lookup code is GPLed too? Surely you jest. Right after the commercial release, not only did these jokers lock up the database, they also threatened anyone using the GPL'd version of the database or the code (it is called freedb) with potential patent infringement lawsuits. They followed through by suing customers such as Roxio in 2000, and Musicmatch in 2002. There were numerous cases of other customers being bullied by these same tactics and forced into a path which avoided use of freedb. You can read one developer's story in the Rants & Raves at the bottom of the Wired article. There are many others if you ask around in the digital music industry. It was not until Musicmatch defeated the Gracenote patent infringement lawsuit in August 2004 (the companies settled shortly thereafter), that developers were set free to use CDDB/Gracenote alternatives without fear of being legally beaten with a large patent stick. Scherf & Company did everything in their power to make sure this "released" database was not used by anyone. Neitther Scherf nor his company did not "release" the database, it was already in the public domain because of Ti Kan - who does not work at (dis)Gracenote.
On the User:Scherf talk page at Wikipedia, Scherf is discussing his request to get his own bio article deleted from Wikipedia. He says he originally created the page to avoid similar issues created in a famous Wikipedia incident. It turns out that the incident he was "responding" to happened a year after he created his own page. This is all fine and dandy, but when an anonymous editor pointed this out, a Wikipedia editor deleted it, twice! You can see this happening in the different revisions. Since this will probably get deleted soon anyway, here's the actual comment from Scherf and the response that is getting deleted (for being "abusive"?!?!):
Scherf's comment:
I created this page some time ago myself in response to the John Seigenthaler, Sr. incident. I wanted to set the tone to something neutral before some anonymous crazy person created a article like that with my name on it. It appears that it made no difference, as people seem determined to post negative commentary anyway, regardless of fact. I have no interest in having a Wikipedia page of my own. The approach I want to take, frankly, is whatever approach is most likely to thwart further vandalism. I presume deletion would be the best, assuming nobody could just arbitrarily recreate the page. I agree that I am not noteworthy enough for my own page anyway. Steve Scherf 01:48, 28 November 2006 (UTC) Wikipedia Arbitrator deleted comment:
You say you created it in response to the Seigenthaler incident? You aren't doing anything for your credibility here. This original revision of the article (soon to disappear when the deletion process completes) by 12.177.18.41 (an IP that belongs to gracenote, according to the whois) is dated November 17 2004. The John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy broke a year later, in November 2005. - Anon reader. 06:37, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
This is enlightening. It is pretty clear that CDDB did not "pioneer" cd identification per the Scherf version, Apple was doing this kind of stuff back in the 1980's. The Scherf version removes any hint of controversy as though it did not exist. It makes it seem as though Gracenote won the Musicmatch case, although Musicmatch beat all charges of patent infringement and forced a settlement. In the discussion pages, he is denying that any CDDB developers moved to freedb or other identification services, while Microsoft, Roxio (then sued for using freedb), and Musicmatch and many other shareware and freeware applications did switch away from CDDB/Gracenote. This guy is out of control.
Found this wonderful bit of truthiness from Scherf at the Gracenote talk page at Wikipedia. He is in denial that no developers dropped CDDB (now Gracenote) after the commercialization. His memory must be deteriorating:
(snip) you would understand that Microsoft was never a licensee, so the claim that they dropped Gracenote is totally impossible and false. Microsoft initially used third parties (who in turn used a wide variety of data sources, sometimes their own hand-entered data), not CDDB/Gracenote for its "Deluxe CD Player" product.(/snip)
Here is the press release from Scherf's own company Gracenote's former parent, Escient about their purchase of CDDB, and it clearly states that Microsoft was a licensee:
The CDDB database currently provides music CD identification information to more than 25 officially-supported players, including the new Microsoft(R) Deluxe CD Player (MSFT), as well as the Notify CD Player, Quintessential CD Player, Discplay 4, and Xmcd. http://web.archive.org/web/20000528085307/www.esci ent.com/aug1198.htm
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While you are correct that Sony is quite paranoid about wanting to DRM everthing, you are incorrect about the PSP and PS3 being generic Sony products. They are Sony Computer Entertainment products (SCE), not Sony products. This is a key difference. SCE is quite independent in its decision making. SCE has been aggressively supporting multiple media formats on its platforms to Sony's chagrin. Both the PSP and the PS3 are good examples of this media format agnosticism - MP3, AAC, ATRAC3, WAV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (PS,TS), H.264/MEPG-4 AVC, MPEG-4 SP, etc. - the list gets ever longer when you consider that that the PS3 also openly supports linux.
I don't believe it allows you to send live TV over the internet.
The PS3 is a DLNA client. If you have any DLNA server on your network (there are many and more are coming from the consumer electronics and PC industries), you will be able to see live TV over the internet.
The PSP with its new firmware plus the PS3 with its firmware from last week does the same thing for music, pictures, and video. Wonder how MLB will treat it? http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/31/psp-3-50-firmwa re-available-remote-play-over-the-internet/
This is enlightening. It is pretty clear that CDDB did not "pioneer" cd identification per the Scherf version, Apple was doing this kind of stuff back in the 1980's. The Scherf version removes any hint of controversy as though it did not exist. It makes it seem as though Gracenote won the Musicmatch case, although Musicmatch beat all charges of patent infringement and forced a settlement. In the discussion pages, he is denying that any CDDB developers moved to freedb or other identification services, while Microsoft, Roxio (then sued for using freedb), and Musicmatch and many other shareware and freeware applications did switch away from CDDB/Gracenote. This guy is out of control.