Please explain to me why my PS2 can play my DVD-R backups without complaint, but people in forums are calling DVD+R compatibility hit-and-miss.
Really? According to this page, older Sony PS2s did have trouble with DVD+RW discs (does yours read DVD-RWs?), but newer ones don't. And both types have been reported to successfully read DVD+R discs, which is exactly what I'd expect.
Sony is a member of the DVD Alliance (as well as the DVD Forum), and they sell DVD+R/RW drives. Since they are pushing the PS2 as a general purpose platform (e.g. Linux), it's in their interest to ensure compatibility with home-burned discs of both types, which they appear to have done.
You can't fit a whole movie on a home recorded DVD?R anyway.
Sure you can. Maybe not the movie, multiple soundtracks AND featurettes, trailers, interviews etc, all at the original quality, but just the movie is no trouble.
The bitrate for DVD-compliant MPEG2 video is between 2 Mb/s and 8 Mb/s, but most pre-recorded movies vary around 3-5 Mb/s. That gives you between 119 and 199 minutes - more than enough for most movies.
Alternatively, you can encode your movies in a tighter format like DivX. I've seen remarkably good quality from a 90 minute movie squeezed onto a single CD, let alone a DVD. You can fit 6 of those movies onto a single DVD, and play them back on your computer any time.
I personally use mine for recording TV shows that I can't find on DVD yet, like Family Guy. I can fit 6 episodes in standard MPEG2 format, and the quality is as good as I recorded it at.
And haven't we been here before with Betamax et al?
Nope, that was quite different. Betamax & VHS were completely incompatible standards. Tapes recorded for one were not readable by the other, so rental stores had to stock movies in both formats.
DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW drives will both read standard DVD-ROM and DVD-Video discs. They will even read each other's write-once and rewritable discs. The only difference is in the media they write to (and how they do it), and since it's much cheaper to stock two types of blank media than two types of pre-recorded media, I think there'll be no availability problems for the usable life of the drives at least.
The DVD+R group do not have approval of the official authoratative body and simply rely on the fact that they are a few of the larger manufacturers around and may be able to force the standard on everyone else.
That, and the fact that it's faster, more flexible, and just as compatible.
The DVD Forum was there first, the DVD Alliance (proponents of the DVD+R/RW standard) came up with a better design. Both work just fine in "official" DVD players. They even read each other's media, despite them having different logos.
You're confusing DVD+R with DVD+RW. DVD+R is very similar in compatibility with DVD-R, perhaps a touch better.
DVD+RW has much lower compatibility than DVD-R or DVD+R - as does DVD-RW. Both rewritable formats use a recording surface with a lower reflectivity than the write-once formats, confusing some older DVD players into thinking the disc is dual layer instead of single.
Earlier DVD+RW drives were dismissed as less compatible solely because they were unable to burn write-once discs, unlike the competing DVD-R/RW drives. Second generation drives such as the HP dvd200i will happily burn write-once and rewritable media, same as the DVD-R/RW drives.
The reality is, although DVD+R/RW has a theoretical edge in compatibility due to its lossless linking feature, both formats are actually very similar in results. Just be sure not to get the older drives that can't do DVD+R.
Only if you wanted to emulate a few hundred slow x86 machines.
You can connect 10,000 CPUs/cells/whatever together and tell your marketing department that you now have a computer that is 10,000 faster. Which might be true, if all you want to do is process highly parallel tasks with no bandwidth requirements, like ray tracing.
But most things people want to do with computers end up being highly serial in nature - you have to finish the previous thing before you can start working on the next thing - which means that you might as well do that job on a single CPU/cell/whatever, so you're no better off.
A PS3 will do a lot of graphics, which tends to be parallel in nature, so a 16-way Cell would be a good match (though it'll still be difficult to program - parallel tasks always are). Individual CPUs are designed for serial tasks, so of course emulating a CPU is also a serial task, and Cell is of no help at all.
They look like they have been lifted directly off the ExLuna BMRT (kudos to Larry Gritz for a great renderer) gallery page.
I wonder if that might be because nVidia recently bought ExLuna...
NOT a TV Tuner, a TV *Encoder*
on
nForce2 Preview
·
· Score: 4, Informative
...and a TV Tuner.
This is incorrect. The chipset includes a TV Encoder, i.e. supports "TV Out" - S-Video or composite out to a TV. From the press release:
NVIDIA nForce2 Platform Processors offer a staggering array of features including:
* TV-encoder and HDTV processor for optimal visual quality
It does not include a TV Tuner capable of receiving broadcast TV. You'll have to add one yourself.
BTW, if you're wondering, the HDTV processor simply means it is capable of decoding HDTV-format MPEG2 video. You would still need an HDTV tuner/receiver to get the signal first.
"Popular with some amateur programmers"? How about 99% of the entire professional graphics industry?
Games are fine, and you're right about the balance of power there. But believe it or not, there does exist a larger world out there, and OpenGL is all of it. DirectX is not making much headway there.
Besides, you're also ignoring the not-insignificant Macintosh games market, not to mention the substantial PS2 and GameCube (and even occasional Xbox) games. MS is far from dominant there.
There's no such thing as "the OpenGL patents". Microsoft have some IP claims related to one proposed ARB extension, not the whole API. The IHVs have been controlling DirectX, not the other way round - DX8 & DX8.1 were both released pretty much just to support nVidia's and ATI's hardware, respectively.
As for DX9, we'll see how closely it relates to the NV30.
DirectX 7 had no programmable pipeline abilities at all - completely fixed-function.
DirectX 8 did, but no earlier than OpenGL. nVidia developed the programmable pixel/vertex shading hardware, licenced the IP to Microsoft, and added extensions to support it in OpenGL at the same time.
? How do you figure MS has a monopoly on 3D graphics? They don't make any 3D hardware. DirectX is a Windows-only API, but you can also use the popular & platform-independant OpenGL API (yes, even on the Xbox, though you can thank nVidia for that).
Pretty much all consumer-level hardware comes with both DirectX and OpenGL drivers, thanks mostly to id Software. Until recently, almost all professional-level hardware only came with OpenGL support. SGI are still in there, the Linux 3D scene is improving daily, and Apple are throwing ever more weight behind OpenGL too. 3D is hardly an MS-only game (at least until MS eliminates all other OS competitors completely).
In fact, Sony is a very minor player. They have their own weirdo hardware (which is incompatible with all non-PS2 software), but what would they do with it? Stick it on a PCI card with OpenGL & DirectX drivers, just like nVidia, ATI, Matrox, 3dlabs etc etc? Invent their own peculiar API that no-one supports? What exactly are they supposed to do that isn't already being done by everyone else?
MS don't look like they're after royalties or anything; the notes suggest they're willing to cross-licence it, or perhaps licence it for free - they just want to hang on to their IP. At least, that's my impression, but they haven't fully defined their position on it yet.
However, I'm a little confused. What parts of vertex & fragment shader are they actually claiming IP on? I thought it was nVidia that had IP on hardware vertex & fragment shader extensions, and that they licenced that IP to Microsoft for use in DX8.
- Limited precision of intermediate results -> restricted space of implementable algorithms
Granted, for today's hardware at least. Although float precision (coming with NV30 & maybe R300) still isn't up to the accuracy levels required by some algorithms, it's good enough for the great majority, and certainly enough to make nearly anything possible, if not perfect. In any case, way better than the 8/9/10/12 bit integer hardware out there now.
- Very restricted data addressing modes -> you need to build lookup-tables at run-time which can eat into your performance for certain algorithms
Yeah, but performance isn't really the issue, so much; chances are it's still going to be way faster than executing on a CPU. And if not, well, GPUs are increasing speed at 3x the rate of CPUs...
- Difficult to implement conditional tests
Harder, yes, but possible using the stencil buffer. The compiler can take care of implementing it. Perhaps inefficient, but see above point.
There have been numerous papers on running Renderman shaders in hardware. (Very) simple ones are possible with just register combiners, but the upshot was that, with dependant texture lookups & float pixel support (available now, & end of the year), full Renderman support was possible.
I'd guess that SIGGRAPH this year will see a few very interesting RT shader examples running on "unannounced' hardware, and by next year it'll pretty much be a done deal. In 18 months to two years, it should be more than possible - I'd expect it to have hit mainstream.
I had this. Solution: Q302089. You will never see it again, guaranteed:-)
If you're not running WinXP, get TweakUI (Power Toys, MS Downloads). It's very helpful for stopping those annoying programs that insist on starting every reboot.
That isn't necesssary; the gfx hardware isn't doing it all by itself, the CPU is controlling it.
The hardware is just accelerating the process by doing most of the grunt work of multiply-adds & shifting bits around, on a dedicated chip with 4 or 8 pipelines using multiple vector ALUs each, fed by 10 or 20 GB/s of local bandwidth. And gfx hardware is increasing in speed & complexity a lot faster than CPU hardware.
Think of it as a massive SIMD array coupled to a Turing-complete CPU, and you'll have the right idea.
According to the article there aren't/won't be any loading issues involved with the PS2 version at all. So much for your for harddrive argument.
Well, duh. An online game like EverQuest shouldn't use a harddrive, it uses the one on the server. And you ignore my other 4 points, not unexpectedly.
You're obviously a PS2 fan; I'm happy for you. But do try to avoid "arguing" about things that you know little about. We see enough of that around here.
True, they can't legally stop you modifying your own box. But they can stop you running code linked with their XDK.
You could build your own opensource box, sure. People do it every day, it's called a PC. But PCs aren't being subsidised to the tune of $150. You just can't build a better "piece of junk" for that $199.
Have you heard of "programmable hardware shaders"? I hear they're all the rage these days. When there's something you want to change in the rendering process, you can fix the code, recompile, & run your app. Done, and done a lot sooner too.
Come to think of it, I believe these miracle shaders have something to do with the "Cg" language this article just happened to be about. What a coincidence.
You really don't know much about what you're talking about, do you?
MS have never said Xbox would be "integrable" with "other stuff". They never pushed the fact that it was based on standard PC parts. They always pushed it as a killer game console, nothing else.
There will never be a "commercial OS" to run on the Xbox, if MS have anything to do with it. Repeat after me: It's a game console, not a PC.
The online service has not been opened yet, but even so you can still play half a dozen games, including Halo, Tony Hawk (2X & 3) and Nascar Heat, over the net. Not quite "no inter-web games available", whatever that means. When Xbox Live opens in a few weeks, there will be dozens of net-based games, as promised.
And clearly you haven't looked at what uses the hard drive HAS been getting. First off, virtually infinite save games. Second, rip your music & play it from there without the CD, or play it instead of a game's supplied soundtrack (this is really nice). Third, caching game data really does speed up game load times, especially during the game itself. Fourth, it allows you to add content to a game, as DOA3 did with their recent bonus add-on disc.
Fifth, and most important, games are starting to use the hard disk for LARGE amounts of persistent data. Morrowind is a current example of a huge, really detailed world that is simply not possible without the HD. Project Ego is an even more ambitious RPG that preserves & evolves every last detail of the world - forget doing that on a memory save card!
And of course they're pissed off at modders. They will oppose anything that gives people a reason to buy the Xbox (which they take a loss on) and not buy games from it, at least until they can break even on the sale of the box. They will (of course) also oppose anything that might promote or allow piracy of games, to protect their publisher partners.
They haven't "given us a bunch of resources", they're selling a game console, just like Sony et al. And just as with the other consoles, people are seeing the Xbox as a challenge - one with more promise than PS2, DC etc, since it has a built-in HD & ethernet, a faster CPU, more RAM, better gfx & sound and it's a largely familiar architecture.
You're complaining that the Xbox is "useless" because of its lack of non-gaming support, yet you claim MS doesn't belong in the gaming industry? Make up your mind.
You do raise a good point, but Xbox was incompletely locked down. The boot decryption code was placed in the MCPX chip, where it could be snooped as it crossed the HyperTransport bus on the way to the CPU to be executed. Still requires a hardware mod to bypass it, but the point is the decryption keys get exposed, and it CAN be bypassed.
What Palladium is proposing is that the boot decryption keys are embedded in the CPU itself. They need AMD & Intel's cooperation for this, of course, and now they have it. This way, it's all but impossible to modify the boot code or to view the encryption keys, except perhaps by shaving the top off the CPU & examining the ROM mask directly with a (very) high-powered microscope.
Palladium may not take off (there's going to be a lot of privacy concerns, and it's going to be very difficult to secure comprehensive industry support, or it just won't fly), but they sure as hell can implement it in Xbox 2.
Even this approach can be defeated by e.g. bugs, human error, social engineering etc etc, but it makes things a lot harder to crack/reverse engineer from the hardware/software aspect. Look for Xbox 2 as a feasibility study of the Palladium concept.
Check out www.tech-report.com for a good first look. Particularly towards the end, where they show a 16x FAA screenshot & give AA benchmarks. Some aniso filtering reporting too.
Everything's a bit light on right now, as most sites only received their hardware late last week.
Is that you again, daveschroeder? "frightful experience"? I mean, come on.
Some virus software stops working, which he presumes is related to installing the DVD drive software (or possibly the virus software doesn't deal well with writable DVDs? who can say?), everything else is positive, and that's a "frightful experience" that's supposed to scare people into buying a Mac instead? What kind of outrageous FUD is that?
My, don't you sound bitter. What is it with you & this weird agenda? Is it all because Apple promoted DVD-R, and somehow you associate DVD+R with the Wintel crowd, which is therefore the Enemy? Sigh.
The DVD Forum backs the DVD-R format, the DVD Alliance backs the DVD+R format, and consumers couldn't give a damn about either of them, except apparently you. The DVD logo is only usable by DVD Forum-approved products, the DVD+RW logo is only usable by DVD Alliance-approced products, and again you dredge up another meaningless legal distinction.
But where you get the idea that DVD+RW products "technically" aren't DVDs and can't even be called DVDs, I still don't know. The letters "DVD" are not a trademark, so it's not even a legal issue. Technically, since DVD+R discs more closely resemble DVD Video discs due to how they're written, that makes them more a DVD that DVD-R, but again - who cares. They're both equally compatible with DVD Video players & DVD ROM drives, even with each other - they both read each other's discs.
Since "better" is a very subjective term, it's pointless arguing over that. One could say that DVD+R/RW writers are faster & moreflexible than even the 2nd gen of DVD-R/RW writers, but then DVD-R/RW writers & media are still a little cheaper, so maybe that's "better" for some. Or maybe just that Apple is backing DVD-R (since it was available first) and not DVD+R, is enough for you.
In any case, get over it. Both standards have their advantages, and since each will read the other's discs, the only real concern consumers need have is where to get the appropriate media. There's no need for such blatent FUD, even here on/.
So you say, but I certainly haven't seen any evidence of this, not in the last 3 years.
Before then, THG was one of the better sites on the web (that I knew about at least). Now I will only go there if I'm really bored or looking for a laugh. www.tech-report.com, www.aceshardware.com or www.realworldtech.com are SO much more informed.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? According to this page, older Sony PS2s did have trouble with DVD+RW discs (does yours read DVD-RWs?), but newer ones don't. And both types have been reported to successfully read DVD+R discs, which is exactly what I'd expect.
Sony is a member of the DVD Alliance (as well as the DVD Forum), and they sell DVD+R/RW drives. Since they are pushing the PS2 as a general purpose platform (e.g. Linux), it's in their interest to ensure compatibility with home-burned discs of both types, which they appear to have done.
Sure you can. Maybe not the movie, multiple soundtracks AND featurettes, trailers, interviews etc, all at the original quality, but just the movie is no trouble.
The bitrate for DVD-compliant MPEG2 video is between 2 Mb/s and 8 Mb/s, but most pre-recorded movies vary around 3-5 Mb/s. That gives you between 119 and 199 minutes - more than enough for most movies.
Alternatively, you can encode your movies in a tighter format like DivX. I've seen remarkably good quality from a 90 minute movie squeezed onto a single CD, let alone a DVD. You can fit 6 of those movies onto a single DVD, and play them back on your computer any time.
I personally use mine for recording TV shows that I can't find on DVD yet, like Family Guy. I can fit 6 episodes in standard MPEG2 format, and the quality is as good as I recorded it at.
Nope, that was quite different. Betamax & VHS were completely incompatible standards. Tapes recorded for one were not readable by the other, so rental stores had to stock movies in both formats.
DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW drives will both read standard DVD-ROM and DVD-Video discs. They will even read each other's write-once and rewritable discs. The only difference is in the media they write to (and how they do it), and since it's much cheaper to stock two types of blank media than two types of pre-recorded media, I think there'll be no availability problems for the usable life of the drives at least.
That, and the fact that it's faster, more flexible, and just as compatible.
The DVD Forum was there first, the DVD Alliance (proponents of the DVD+R/RW standard) came up with a better design. Both work just fine in "official" DVD players. They even read each other's media, despite them having different logos.
DVD+RW has much lower compatibility than DVD-R or DVD+R - as does DVD-RW. Both rewritable formats use a recording surface with a lower reflectivity than the write-once formats, confusing some older DVD players into thinking the disc is dual layer instead of single.
Earlier DVD+RW drives were dismissed as less compatible solely because they were unable to burn write-once discs, unlike the competing DVD-R/RW drives. Second generation drives such as the HP dvd200i will happily burn write-once and rewritable media, same as the DVD-R/RW drives.
The reality is, although DVD+R/RW has a theoretical edge in compatibility due to its lossless linking feature, both formats are actually very similar in results. Just be sure not to get the older drives that can't do DVD+R.
Only if you wanted to emulate a few hundred slow x86 machines.
You can connect 10,000 CPUs/cells/whatever together and tell your marketing department that you now have a computer that is 10,000 faster. Which might be true, if all you want to do is process highly parallel tasks with no bandwidth requirements, like ray tracing.
But most things people want to do with computers end up being highly serial in nature - you have to finish the previous thing before you can start working on the next thing - which means that you might as well do that job on a single CPU/cell/whatever, so you're no better off.
A PS3 will do a lot of graphics, which tends to be parallel in nature, so a 16-way Cell would be a good match (though it'll still be difficult to program - parallel tasks always are). Individual CPUs are designed for serial tasks, so of course emulating a CPU is also a serial task, and Cell is of no help at all.
I wonder if that might be because nVidia recently bought ExLuna...
This is incorrect. The chipset includes a TV Encoder, i.e. supports "TV Out" - S-Video or composite out to a TV. From the press release:
NVIDIA nForce2 Platform Processors offer a staggering array of features including:
* TV-encoder and HDTV processor for optimal visual quality
It does not include a TV Tuner capable of receiving broadcast TV. You'll have to add one yourself.
BTW, if you're wondering, the HDTV processor simply means it is capable of decoding HDTV-format MPEG2 video. You would still need an HDTV tuner/receiver to get the signal first.
Games are fine, and you're right about the balance of power there. But believe it or not, there does exist a larger world out there, and OpenGL is all of it. DirectX is not making much headway there.
Besides, you're also ignoring the not-insignificant Macintosh games market, not to mention the substantial PS2 and GameCube (and even occasional Xbox) games. MS is far from dominant there.
There's no such thing as "the OpenGL patents". Microsoft have some IP claims related to one proposed ARB extension, not the whole API. The IHVs have been controlling DirectX, not the other way round - DX8 & DX8.1 were both released pretty much just to support nVidia's and ATI's hardware, respectively.
As for DX9, we'll see how closely it relates to the NV30.
DirectX 8 did, but no earlier than OpenGL. nVidia developed the programmable pixel/vertex shading hardware, licenced the IP to Microsoft, and added extensions to support it in OpenGL at the same time.
Pretty much all consumer-level hardware comes with both DirectX and OpenGL drivers, thanks mostly to id Software. Until recently, almost all professional-level hardware only came with OpenGL support. SGI are still in there, the Linux 3D scene is improving daily, and Apple are throwing ever more weight behind OpenGL too. 3D is hardly an MS-only game (at least until MS eliminates all other OS competitors completely).
In fact, Sony is a very minor player. They have their own weirdo hardware (which is incompatible with all non-PS2 software), but what would they do with it? Stick it on a PCI card with OpenGL & DirectX drivers, just like nVidia, ATI, Matrox, 3dlabs etc etc? Invent their own peculiar API that no-one supports? What exactly are they supposed to do that isn't already being done by everyone else?
However, I'm a little confused. What parts of vertex & fragment shader are they actually claiming IP on? I thought it was nVidia that had IP on hardware vertex & fragment shader extensions, and that they licenced that IP to Microsoft for use in DX8.
- Limited precision of intermediate results -> restricted space of implementable algorithms
Granted, for today's hardware at least. Although float precision (coming with NV30 & maybe R300) still isn't up to the accuracy levels required by some algorithms, it's good enough for the great majority, and certainly enough to make nearly anything possible, if not perfect. In any case, way better than the 8/9/10/12 bit integer hardware out there now.
- Very restricted data addressing modes -> you need to build lookup-tables at run-time which can eat into your performance for certain algorithms
Yeah, but performance isn't really the issue, so much; chances are it's still going to be way faster than executing on a CPU. And if not, well, GPUs are increasing speed at 3x the rate of CPUs...
- Difficult to implement conditional tests
Harder, yes, but possible using the stencil buffer. The compiler can take care of implementing it. Perhaps inefficient, but see above point.
There have been numerous papers on running Renderman shaders in hardware. (Very) simple ones are possible with just register combiners, but the upshot was that, with dependant texture lookups & float pixel support (available now, & end of the year), full Renderman support was possible.
I'd guess that SIGGRAPH this year will see a few very interesting RT shader examples running on "unannounced' hardware, and by next year it'll pretty much be a done deal. In 18 months to two years, it should be more than possible - I'd expect it to have hit mainstream.
If you're not running WinXP, get TweakUI (Power Toys, MS Downloads). It's very helpful for stopping those annoying programs that insist on starting every reboot.
The hardware is just accelerating the process by doing most of the grunt work of multiply-adds & shifting bits around, on a dedicated chip with 4 or 8 pipelines using multiple vector ALUs each, fed by 10 or 20 GB/s of local bandwidth. And gfx hardware is increasing in speed & complexity a lot faster than CPU hardware.
Think of it as a massive SIMD array coupled to a Turing-complete CPU, and you'll have the right idea.
Well, duh. An online game like EverQuest shouldn't use a harddrive, it uses the one on the server. And you ignore my other 4 points, not unexpectedly.
You're obviously a PS2 fan; I'm happy for you. But do try to avoid "arguing" about things that you know little about. We see enough of that around here.
You could build your own opensource box, sure. People do it every day, it's called a PC. But PCs aren't being subsidised to the tune of $150. You just can't build a better "piece of junk" for that $199.
Come to think of it, I believe these miracle shaders have something to do with the "Cg" language this article just happened to be about. What a coincidence.
MS have never said Xbox would be "integrable" with "other stuff". They never pushed the fact that it was based on standard PC parts. They always pushed it as a killer game console, nothing else.
There will never be a "commercial OS" to run on the Xbox, if MS have anything to do with it. Repeat after me: It's a game console, not a PC.
The online service has not been opened yet, but even so you can still play half a dozen games, including Halo, Tony Hawk (2X & 3) and Nascar Heat, over the net. Not quite "no inter-web games available", whatever that means. When Xbox Live opens in a few weeks, there will be dozens of net-based games, as promised.
And clearly you haven't looked at what uses the hard drive HAS been getting. First off, virtually infinite save games. Second, rip your music & play it from there without the CD, or play it instead of a game's supplied soundtrack (this is really nice). Third, caching game data really does speed up game load times, especially during the game itself. Fourth, it allows you to add content to a game, as DOA3 did with their recent bonus add-on disc.
Fifth, and most important, games are starting to use the hard disk for LARGE amounts of persistent data. Morrowind is a current example of a huge, really detailed world that is simply not possible without the HD. Project Ego is an even more ambitious RPG that preserves & evolves every last detail of the world - forget doing that on a memory save card!
And of course they're pissed off at modders. They will oppose anything that gives people a reason to buy the Xbox (which they take a loss on) and not buy games from it, at least until they can break even on the sale of the box. They will (of course) also oppose anything that might promote or allow piracy of games, to protect their publisher partners.
They haven't "given us a bunch of resources", they're selling a game console, just like Sony et al. And just as with the other consoles, people are seeing the Xbox as a challenge - one with more promise than PS2, DC etc, since it has a built-in HD & ethernet, a faster CPU, more RAM, better gfx & sound and it's a largely familiar architecture.
You're complaining that the Xbox is "useless" because of its lack of non-gaming support, yet you claim MS doesn't belong in the gaming industry? Make up your mind.
What Palladium is proposing is that the boot decryption keys are embedded in the CPU itself. They need AMD & Intel's cooperation for this, of course, and now they have it. This way, it's all but impossible to modify the boot code or to view the encryption keys, except perhaps by shaving the top off the CPU & examining the ROM mask directly with a (very) high-powered microscope.
Palladium may not take off (there's going to be a lot of privacy concerns, and it's going to be very difficult to secure comprehensive industry support, or it just won't fly), but they sure as hell can implement it in Xbox 2.
Even this approach can be defeated by e.g. bugs, human error, social engineering etc etc, but it makes things a lot harder to crack/reverse engineer from the hardware/software aspect. Look for Xbox 2 as a feasibility study of the Palladium concept.
Everything's a bit light on right now, as most sites only received their hardware late last week.
Some virus software stops working, which he presumes is related to installing the DVD drive software (or possibly the virus software doesn't deal well with writable DVDs? who can say?), everything else is positive, and that's a "frightful experience" that's supposed to scare people into buying a Mac instead? What kind of outrageous FUD is that?
The DVD Forum backs the DVD-R format, the DVD Alliance backs the DVD+R format, and consumers couldn't give a damn about either of them, except apparently you. The DVD logo is only usable by DVD Forum-approved products, the DVD+RW logo is only usable by DVD Alliance-approced products, and again you dredge up another meaningless legal distinction.
But where you get the idea that DVD+RW products "technically" aren't DVDs and can't even be called DVDs, I still don't know. The letters "DVD" are not a trademark, so it's not even a legal issue. Technically, since DVD+R discs more closely resemble DVD Video discs due to how they're written, that makes them more a DVD that DVD-R, but again - who cares. They're both equally compatible with DVD Video players & DVD ROM drives, even with each other - they both read each other's discs.
Since "better" is a very subjective term, it's pointless arguing over that. One could say that DVD+R/RW writers are faster & more flexible than even the 2nd gen of DVD-R/RW writers, but then DVD-R/RW writers & media are still a little cheaper, so maybe that's "better" for some. Or maybe just that Apple is backing DVD-R (since it was available first) and not DVD+R, is enough for you.
In any case, get over it. Both standards have their advantages, and since each will read the other's discs, the only real concern consumers need have is where to get the appropriate media. There's no need for such blatent FUD, even here on /.
So you say, but I certainly haven't seen any evidence of this, not in the last 3 years.
Before then, THG was one of the better sites on the web (that I knew about at least). Now I will only go there if I'm really bored or looking for a laugh. www.tech-report.com, www.aceshardware.com or www.realworldtech.com are SO much more informed.