Under the 1996 Telecommunications Act, TV makers are required to embed the V-chip within televisions to allow parents to block content according to a rating system.'" Wow, my oldest TV I bought in 2003. So both of my TVs have V-chips? This is news to me, and I tend to pride myself on being tech savoy. I wonder how many people know their TVs actually have this, or for that matter, how many people actually use it.
DVD players usually have parental control, but I have never seen anyone use it, except for the default settings on the PS2. Most parents I know just keep the bad DVDs put up and away from the kids. If the kids are old enough to start snooping around and find it and curouious enough to watch it, its probably time to have the talk with them.
Truthfully, does anyone here actually know how to even access the VChip in their TV and set it up?
Copyright law is much older than the DMCA. My guess is what they are claiming in these DMCA claims are that they are using modchips to break copy-protection built into the systems. Whether you are using backups of software you legally own, are playing pirated software, or running home-brewed apps, if you are using a modchip which can circumvent copy protection of the system, said modchip is illegal under the DMCA, regardless of intent.
Actually, this is useful. I work in Desktop Support at an IT company, and we finally had to turn off Microsoft Updates, as it was crippling us. Of course, the answer would be to use some type of update management solution, but that has not happened yet. Its just good to know ahead of time that users might be experiencing problems.
Of couse, one could argue that Microsoft releases patches just about every Tuesday. Just expect to have higher than average traffic on your helpdesk come Wednesday morning.
I have two work computers, a Mac running OSX and a PC running XP that I try to update as soon as the updates come out so I know how users will be affected. My home computer is dualbooting between XP SP2 and Vista 64bit Business (blah! What's the point of drivers in a 64 bit OS if you have no hardware acceleration!). I gave up on Linux. We do not use it at work except for one or two servers, and for what I do at home, lets just say that I tend to crash my Mac and Linux way more often than I crash XP. Vista crashes if you look at it weird. Actually it crashes if you don't look at it. Oh, Vista is just unstable, and no one should use it, ever.
Until Slashdot posts that Microsoft is releasing stability updates for Vista, that is. A rewrite of the kernel would be nice!
The 64 bit version of Farcry will not install in vista 64 bit. The 64 bit NVidia video drivers for vista do not seem to have 3D acceleration. Getting iTunes to run in XP 64 or Vista 64 is like pulling teeth. If you manage to get iTunes working, good luck getting the device to sync (iPod, iPhone, etc). They just released drivers for my scanner in vista 64 about a month ago, still no support for XP 64 bit. My webcam does not work in 64 bit versions of Windows. PowerDVD will not install in either the 32 it or 64 bit versions of Vista. No surround sound on the Audigy. But, oh, the 64 bit version of Solitaire runs oh so fast.
No, the thought that the iPhone does not run on a 64 bit operating system does not surprise me. I got sick of stuff not working, and now dual boot. While I love my 64 bit computing, have to go back to a 32 bit version of XP to make sure stuff works.
I am not siding with Microsoft here, but there is really nothing new here. I mean, is it really that big of a surprise that Activation and Digital Rights Management phones home? Duh. And in the article it says that it reports about spyware. Doesn't Windows defender ask you in XP if you want to report findings to Microsoft? Is it that big of a surprise that Vista has it on by default? OMG, Vista phones home to look for codecs! Hasn't that been part of WMP for years? OMG, Vista looks for updates to hardware drivers! Hasn't that been part of Windows Updates for years? OMG, E-mail via Hotmail gets sent to Microsoft! Duh! I can see why the article was flagged as paranoia, there is nothing in this article that is news to me, or that concerns me. Now if it starts telling Microsoft about every non-drm file I play, every picture I put on my computer, and sends the contents of every word document and excel file to Microsoft, then I would be concerned.
I tried when the webtv came out, then i realized that if i just wrote with standards, while it may not look great on non-pc platforms, it looked good enough that you could get what you needed. Now if the page did not work at all on the iphone, that owuld be one thing, but my guess is that it will display just fine, just not be "Optimized" for it. And quite frankly, my site is probably not something people are going to want to be browsing from a mobile device anyway. I point this out to our users all the time when they grip about their blackberries not having all the features of Outlook - Your mobile device is there as a CONVIENIENCE, not as a replacement for your desktop / laptop. Quite frankly, I do not see the lure of mobile devices. I want my phone to make phone calls and do text messaging. I am not going to try to type out an e-mail on one of those tiny keypads (omg, have you tried typing on a Pearl?), the screen is really too small to read anything more than maybe a rss feed, data plans are astronomical, and speeds suck.
This reminds me of people complaining about the quality of stuff on the itunes music store. So before videos were not at full dvd resolution. Guess what, the ipod doesn't support that resolution. So what if the songs are at 128k, the majority of people are listening on earbuds anyways, not on a full stereo system.
The point is, the trouble of rewrittign a site for the iPhone is just not worth it unless you are something like CNN or BBC or Google. You are not going to be browsing your church website, pepsi.com or a porn site on your iPhone, are you? (Okay, SOMEONE will, but not the majority of people).
When I was even running highly popular sites, in the days when webtv was popular, with the hundreds of hits I got a day, I may get a hit once every two weeks from a webtv. I spent hours pulling out my hair trying to get it all looking pretty for them, and in the end, the tradeoff just wasn't there. It worked, it just was not optimized before.
I mean, I am sorry, but unless you are running one of the top 20 internet sites, there is just no reason to optimize your site for the iPhone. Its pointless, its a waste of time, and people are not going to want to view your myspace profile from a mobile device, you just are not that popular.
who sees where they are coming from? Okay, so I just skimmed the article, but don't most native Americans thing that everything is sacred in some way, including the air? Okay, yes, most of us will sit here and laugh about this, but think about it. You are brought up in a culture where everything is sacred. The water, the earth, the soil, the trees, the air. Someone from another culture upstream decides to build a damn that alters the water and how it flows. Most of us would argue they have a reason for compensation. We come in and decide to cut down their trees, they would want compensation. These to us are physical things that we can put monatary value on. But the natives are seeing it not as just a physical thing, but as a spiritual thing. Extending this thinking to the air waves is not that far of a stretch. And the thought of radio waves are invading their aerospace is actually a really good argument. Most countries that I know of require any device that operates that puts out any type of radio waves or electromagnetic field to be licensed and regulated. Broadcasters and radio operators must pay for braodcast licenses. If there is an Indian nation where we are sending radio waves through their aerospace without paying them a licensing fee, the idea of paying for compensation suddenly does not become so outragious.
I must agree. Just look at Final Fantasy 11. This game split fans of the francise, with them either saying FF11 was the way to the future and so forth and so on, or people absolutely hating it. I am the later. RPGs and MMOG are NOT the same thing. MMORPG is not the same as an RPG. Its like saying that the first person shooter is going to replace the platformer. I guess realistically speaking, it kinda did, but they are not the same genera. Its like the silly Mac / PC commercials. There may be a small number of people you convert from one to the other, but both have their set markets.
I must disagree, but please listen before you tune me out.
Evolutionism and Creationislm (bad spelling) are two opossite ends of the spectrum. One is Judeo/Christian at its fineist (once again, horrible spelling), the other pretty much directly attacks it.
The issue comes into play where you teach one or the other as absolute truth to people who may not support your views. Teaching evolutionism directly stomps on the religious rights of parents trying to bring their children up with religious views, whereas teaching Creationalism to a group of kids whose parents are agnostic / atheist also stomps on their religious rights.
You cannot just teach one or the other and expect to make everyone happy. There are only two possible solutions to this.
1) Don't teach either. This way, you do not insult anyone.
2) Teach both. Unfortunately, this has issues as well, in that you are limiting yourself to Judeo/Christian and Science. You must include all religions. Actually, my public high school is doing this as an elective, they cover Christianity, Judiasm, Islam, native-American views, so forth and so on. Present the kids with all the information from different religions and theories in science, let them make up their own mind. I support this, but only in the teenage years, when the student's mind have evolved to the point where they can make an informed decision. Some will probably choose to go with views different than what their parents believe, most will go with how they have been raised, but at least the information has been presented in a non-biased manner.
Wow, someone ranting on Slashdot. What a surprise. I also usually do not do a quote and paste, but must in this case.
* There are around 200k HD-DVD players in the US today. There are 2+ MILLION PS3's that play Blu-Ray, plus whatever standalone players Blu-Ray has managed to sell.
100% of the people who bought HD DVD players, bought them to play HD DVD movies. I can guarantee you that the vast, VAST majority of PS3 owners got it to play games.
How many standalone Blu-Ray players were sold out there? Let's compare those numbers for a more realistic trend. When you go to register the PS3, one of the questions asked is why you bought the PS3, and the answers include to Play games, Watch BluRay movies, or for the Cell Processor. If people are picking that they bought it because of the BluRay player, then that is the consumers reporting this, not FUD from Sony.
I am the only one I know who has a PS3. I bought it primaraly for the BluRay, but doubt I would have payed $600 for the BluRay player alone. I would not have payed $600 for a game system alone. However, $600 for a next-gen game console, an HD video player, and for something to upscale my older games was deffinately worth the price. I have two PS3 games, 12 BluRay movies, and tons of demos. Keep in mind that there are only about 20 PS3 games out right now, and they are in different generas, so at the moment, the PS3 is not a strong gaming platform (although many are suppsoed to be released this year).
I know people who have both a standalone BluRay player and a standalone HDDVD player, and, surprise of surprise, most of their purchaces lately have been BluRay. The only movies I can think of that were exclusive to HD-DVD that I had any intrest in was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (surprising as its a WB disc, who is releasing movies for both formats), and the Matrix Trilogy (also a WB title). Strangely, Terminators 1-2 were released only on BluRay whereas 3 was released only on HDDVD.
* Blu-Ray discs, since the start of the year, have outsold HD-DVD discs by three to one margin (or higher).
Sony bundle the PS3 with Blu-Ray movies and put this in their sale figures. Again, notice the buyers didn't have much choice. They just got it with their PS3.
The trend in such a case may have nothing to do with current sales figures. Really? I should demand my money back, I certainly did not get any movies bundled with my PS3. However, I see ads all the time saying you get free HD-DVD movies when you buy a HD-DVD player. Sounds like you got your formats reversed. Sony bundles nothing with their PS3. No game, no movie. Toshiba bundles in some cases up to 5 movies with their HD-DVD players (many of the movies they show in their ads I have on BluRay, such as Last Samurai and Phantom of the Opera). Yet BluRay is still outselling HD-DVD
A news article from Blu-ray.com:
PS3 Boosts European Blu-ray Sales
Posted May 21, 2007 by Josh
Blu-ray Disc Prior to the release of the PS3 in Europe, HD DVD was comfortably outselling Blu-ray discs on a weekly basis. But now, less than two months since PS3's release, Blu-ray has gained a 64% share on the year, and consistently outsells HD DVD weekly. Specifically, last week's data shows Blu-ray having a weekly sales ratio 3-to-1 over HD DVD, a ratio Blu-ray in the US has only managed once (when Casino Royale was released). Sounds to me like the PS3 is deffinately driving the sales of BluRay movies.
* Universal is the only major studio still wholly behind HD-DVD (The Weinstien Brothers have announced Hard Boiled will come on Blu-Ray, including the movie and a PS3 game).
How many studios (except Sony Pictures I presume) are only behind Blu-Ray? Disney (Pirates of the Carabian, Dinosaur, Cars (coming soon) Narnia (coming soon)), Lions Gate (Stargate), 20th Century Fox, MGM, Sony.
Sounds like the poster should do a bit of research before
The post and the article focus on the marketing and advertising involved in the MacBook. The advertise milions of colors, they do not deliver. The cause is that they use a 6 bit display, but the technical aspects of using a 6 bit over an 8 bit is not what the article is about, its about a lawsuit being issued over Apple not being able to deliver on something in their marketing.
I work in a Fortune 500 advertising company, and we use Macs almost exclusively for creative work. Now, you do need to calibrate the display if you are doing something that intensive, and chances are, in our company at least, you will not be doing creative work on a laptop. But when you are creating 40 foot by 10 foot billboards, you want to be sure that your colors are exact. The majority of Apple's clients are creatives, and if you are marketing your product to this market, you better be sure you can deliver what you are advertising
One of our local elementary schools recently did something similar. The difference - parents were made aware before hand of what was going on. Ours actually lasted hours, with the local SWAT team in on it, negotiating with the "intruder" as he slowly let students go. I am not sure if the students knew it was mock or not.
Mock drills are not a bad thing, the issue here is that the teachers did not clear this with parents or even other staff members (ie The Principal and school board) first. Probably some minor disciplanary actions should be taken. My guess is that this will be blown way out of proportion, teachers will not only be fired, but banned from ever teaching again. There should be something like a suspension of so many days without pay. While the intention was good, it was obviously very poor planning, probably a spur of the moment decision.
True, but there is still a connection from the isp to the internet. So while the line from the isp to the neighborhood or to the house is undersubscribed, the line from the isp to the internet is still probably oversubscribed
Its true for anyone who is redistributing internet. You can have fiber between the buildings on a college campus and gigabit ethernet to the rooms, but if you are trying to split one T1 line between 1500 students, faculty, administration and your dialup users, its going to be slow. Even when we had dialup (before they installed the fiber, my university had its on isp, well to an extent), during peak hours you could see a drop in transfer rates from 5-6k a second down to 1 or 2.
Even if you have a T1 directly into the backbone of the internet, many other people are plugged into that connection. You only have a finite amount of bandwidth, even on the backbone, and if the line you are getting your service off of is congested, your service will suffer. Period. End of story. Does not matter if you have dialup or OC48
Actually, if you have a volume license key for microsoft, you can log into their site and download the software from them. Its how our company got Office 2007, Project 2007 and Vista 32 and 64 bit versions. But I am sure this is not what you are refering to.
I have contacted MS about this before, because I was having similar issues when working on people's machines. MS tech support told me that they could care less where you got the media from, they are worried as to whether or not you purchased a license.
As for Dell, all our machines we recieve from dell come with an OEM copy of XP Professional, and a seperate driver disc. You can install the XP on any computer, but if its not on a Dell product, it will not activate. So in effect, you could stick in the XP cd, do a clean install on the machine, and then install the drivers. Not all that hard.
However, on Dell's newer machines, they are usually fast enough that when I am working on a home machine, it takes less time to uninstall the crap that comes with them and then run CCleaner and Spybot than to reload the system. Dell also has wonderful tech support, and I usually talk people into paying the $50 or so extra and get the extended warrenty.
In response to the Topic, I installed Vista 64 bit at home. Its just like any new operating system that comes out, sleek, pretty, runs fast, but nothing freakin runs in it until everyone updates their drivers and software. Remember the issues we had with 2000 and XP when they came out? It also has an annoying habbit of going to sleep and not waking up, even with the sleep option turned off. Needless to say, Vista 64 is not running as my primary operating system. Give it about a year, it will be good, bugs will be worked out, it will start selling
So open free hotspots bad, but the kid can go down to McDonald's, by internet for $2.95 an hour, and get all the porn he wants? He can go home to his FIOS line and get porn at blazing fast speeds?
While it does not upscale to 1080, it does upconvert all PSX and PS2 games to 480p. REALLY nice feature. The question should not be if its going to upscale the resolution, but rerender 3D models at a higher resolution. If you are rendering graphics at 480i and upconverting them to 1080, its not going to look that well. You can see this now if you try putting in a PSX Final Fantasy game into the PS3, you get 480p resolution, with jagged edges on the 3D models. You do emulation on the PC with the same game, even at 640x480, but have it rendering the video in hardware mode, you get these absolutely stunning 3D models.
What needs to happen is not a software only emulation, but rather a software emulation that rerenders 3D graphics through the PS3 video processor.
I have had no issues running PS2 games on the PS3. I have had some issues with two PSX games (Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 4) with sound hicups and occassional tearing of video, but as the PSX version of these games were SNES ports to begin with (okay, they rewrote the text), I am not terribly disappointed in it.
As for the image reader, this is an incredibly nice feature. Actually get to look at my images at 1920x1080. Granted, I could use the hdtv breakout box on my pc for this - wait, I already do. What is annoying is that the PS3 does not support NTFS formats. So while it will read my thumbdrive, it will not read my usb2 500gig drive that I have everything stored on. Wow, it sure would be nice to sit on the couch and go through my pictures with a wireless controler. Too bad they do not make wireless keyboards or remotes to control the PC:-)
I find the webbrowser to be practically useless. Unless you have a 70 inch screen, you cannot read a webpage rendered at 1920x1080.
It does not support enough video formats and does not seem to like stuff recorded at non-standard resolutions and framerates. Sticking in a CD of old MPEGs, while it did upconvert, which looked nice, resulted in tearing around the edges and choppiness. It will not read TS streams burned on a CD, and the only way to get HD material from your computer to the PS3 is to render it in some strange MP4 format that I have never heard of before. And unfortunately, all the utilities I have found on the net that do this for you for some odd reason downconverts all audio to MP3 stereo sound. As it stretches old dvd movies into 16:9 format, this makes the PS3 useless as a video player for anything other than BluRay (my main function of it) and the trailers you download from sony.
Slashdot Mirror
DVD players usually have parental control, but I have never seen anyone use it, except for the default settings on the PS2. Most parents I know just keep the bad DVDs put up and away from the kids. If the kids are old enough to start snooping around and find it and curouious enough to watch it, its probably time to have the talk with them.
Truthfully, does anyone here actually know how to even access the VChip in their TV and set it up?
Copyright law is much older than the DMCA. My guess is what they are claiming in these DMCA claims are that they are using modchips to break copy-protection built into the systems. Whether you are using backups of software you legally own, are playing pirated software, or running home-brewed apps, if you are using a modchip which can circumvent copy protection of the system, said modchip is illegal under the DMCA, regardless of intent.
Stupid question, but OSX is BSD based, right? So hasn't it always been Unix? I thought BSD was a unix flavor, like Ultrix or Solaris (not Linux).
Actually, this is useful. I work in Desktop Support at an IT company, and we finally had to turn off Microsoft Updates, as it was crippling us. Of course, the answer would be to use some type of update management solution, but that has not happened yet. Its just good to know ahead of time that users might be experiencing problems.
Of couse, one could argue that Microsoft releases patches just about every Tuesday. Just expect to have higher than average traffic on your helpdesk come Wednesday morning.
I have two work computers, a Mac running OSX and a PC running XP that I try to update as soon as the updates come out so I know how users will be affected. My home computer is dualbooting between XP SP2 and Vista 64bit Business (blah! What's the point of drivers in a 64 bit OS if you have no hardware acceleration!). I gave up on Linux. We do not use it at work except for one or two servers, and for what I do at home, lets just say that I tend to crash my Mac and Linux way more often than I crash XP. Vista crashes if you look at it weird. Actually it crashes if you don't look at it. Oh, Vista is just unstable, and no one should use it, ever.
Until Slashdot posts that Microsoft is releasing stability updates for Vista, that is. A rewrite of the kernel would be nice!
Appa rentl y pr oof reding is a think of t he pass.
The 64 bit version of Farcry will not install in vista 64 bit. The 64 bit NVidia video drivers for vista do not seem to have 3D acceleration. Getting iTunes to run in XP 64 or Vista 64 is like pulling teeth. If you manage to get iTunes working, good luck getting the device to sync (iPod, iPhone, etc). They just released drivers for my scanner in vista 64 about a month ago, still no support for XP 64 bit. My webcam does not work in 64 bit versions of Windows. PowerDVD will not install in either the 32 it or 64 bit versions of Vista. No surround sound on the Audigy. But, oh, the 64 bit version of Solitaire runs oh so fast.
No, the thought that the iPhone does not run on a 64 bit operating system does not surprise me. I got sick of stuff not working, and now dual boot. While I love my 64 bit computing, have to go back to a 32 bit version of XP to make sure stuff works.
I am not siding with Microsoft here, but there is really nothing new here. I mean, is it really that big of a surprise that Activation and Digital Rights Management phones home? Duh. And in the article it says that it reports about spyware. Doesn't Windows defender ask you in XP if you want to report findings to Microsoft? Is it that big of a surprise that Vista has it on by default? OMG, Vista phones home to look for codecs! Hasn't that been part of WMP for years? OMG, Vista looks for updates to hardware drivers! Hasn't that been part of Windows Updates for years? OMG, E-mail via Hotmail gets sent to Microsoft! Duh! I can see why the article was flagged as paranoia, there is nothing in this article that is news to me, or that concerns me. Now if it starts telling Microsoft about every non-drm file I play, every picture I put on my computer, and sends the contents of every word document and excel file to Microsoft, then I would be concerned.
Somehow I doubt that this is the trailer they are refering to. This trailer, according to the website, is over 2 years old
I tried when the webtv came out, then i realized that if i just wrote with standards, while it may not look great on non-pc platforms, it looked good enough that you could get what you needed. Now if the page did not work at all on the iphone, that owuld be one thing, but my guess is that it will display just fine, just not be "Optimized" for it. And quite frankly, my site is probably not something people are going to want to be browsing from a mobile device anyway. I point this out to our users all the time when they grip about their blackberries not having all the features of Outlook - Your mobile device is there as a CONVIENIENCE, not as a replacement for your desktop / laptop. Quite frankly, I do not see the lure of mobile devices. I want my phone to make phone calls and do text messaging. I am not going to try to type out an e-mail on one of those tiny keypads (omg, have you tried typing on a Pearl?), the screen is really too small to read anything more than maybe a rss feed, data plans are astronomical, and speeds suck.
This reminds me of people complaining about the quality of stuff on the itunes music store. So before videos were not at full dvd resolution. Guess what, the ipod doesn't support that resolution. So what if the songs are at 128k, the majority of people are listening on earbuds anyways, not on a full stereo system.
The point is, the trouble of rewrittign a site for the iPhone is just not worth it unless you are something like CNN or BBC or Google. You are not going to be browsing your church website, pepsi.com or a porn site on your iPhone, are you? (Okay, SOMEONE will, but not the majority of people).
When I was even running highly popular sites, in the days when webtv was popular, with the hundreds of hits I got a day, I may get a hit once every two weeks from a webtv. I spent hours pulling out my hair trying to get it all looking pretty for them, and in the end, the tradeoff just wasn't there. It worked, it just was not optimized before.
I mean, I am sorry, but unless you are running one of the top 20 internet sites, there is just no reason to optimize your site for the iPhone. Its pointless, its a waste of time, and people are not going to want to view your myspace profile from a mobile device, you just are not that popular.
I did not say it was right, I said I see where they are coming from. Big difference.
who sees where they are coming from? Okay, so I just skimmed the article, but don't most native Americans thing that everything is sacred in some way, including the air? Okay, yes, most of us will sit here and laugh about this, but think about it. You are brought up in a culture where everything is sacred. The water, the earth, the soil, the trees, the air. Someone from another culture upstream decides to build a damn that alters the water and how it flows. Most of us would argue they have a reason for compensation. We come in and decide to cut down their trees, they would want compensation. These to us are physical things that we can put monatary value on. But the natives are seeing it not as just a physical thing, but as a spiritual thing. Extending this thinking to the air waves is not that far of a stretch. And the thought of radio waves are invading their aerospace is actually a really good argument. Most countries that I know of require any device that operates that puts out any type of radio waves or electromagnetic field to be licensed and regulated. Broadcasters and radio operators must pay for braodcast licenses. If there is an Indian nation where we are sending radio waves through their aerospace without paying them a licensing fee, the idea of paying for compensation suddenly does not become so outragious.
I must agree. Just look at Final Fantasy 11. This game split fans of the francise, with them either saying FF11 was the way to the future and so forth and so on, or people absolutely hating it. I am the later. RPGs and MMOG are NOT the same thing. MMORPG is not the same as an RPG. Its like saying that the first person shooter is going to replace the platformer. I guess realistically speaking, it kinda did, but they are not the same genera. Its like the silly Mac / PC commercials. There may be a small number of people you convert from one to the other, but both have their set markets.
I must disagree, but please listen before you tune me out.
Evolutionism and Creationislm (bad spelling) are two opossite ends of the spectrum. One is Judeo/Christian at its fineist (once again, horrible spelling), the other pretty much directly attacks it.
The issue comes into play where you teach one or the other as absolute truth to people who may not support your views. Teaching evolutionism directly stomps on the religious rights of parents trying to bring their children up with religious views, whereas teaching Creationalism to a group of kids whose parents are agnostic / atheist also stomps on their religious rights.
You cannot just teach one or the other and expect to make everyone happy. There are only two possible solutions to this.
1) Don't teach either. This way, you do not insult anyone.
2) Teach both. Unfortunately, this has issues as well, in that you are limiting yourself to Judeo/Christian and Science. You must include all religions. Actually, my public high school is doing this as an elective, they cover Christianity, Judiasm, Islam, native-American views, so forth and so on. Present the kids with all the information from different religions and theories in science, let them make up their own mind. I support this, but only in the teenage years, when the student's mind have evolved to the point where they can make an informed decision. Some will probably choose to go with views different than what their parents believe, most will go with how they have been raised, but at least the information has been presented in a non-biased manner.
100% of the people who bought HD DVD players, bought them to play HD DVD movies. I can guarantee you that the vast, VAST majority of PS3 owners got it to play games.
How many standalone Blu-Ray players were sold out there? Let's compare those numbers for a more realistic trend. When you go to register the PS3, one of the questions asked is why you bought the PS3, and the answers include to Play games, Watch BluRay movies, or for the Cell Processor. If people are picking that they bought it because of the BluRay player, then that is the consumers reporting this, not FUD from Sony.
I am the only one I know who has a PS3. I bought it primaraly for the BluRay, but doubt I would have payed $600 for the BluRay player alone. I would not have payed $600 for a game system alone. However, $600 for a next-gen game console, an HD video player, and for something to upscale my older games was deffinately worth the price. I have two PS3 games, 12 BluRay movies, and tons of demos. Keep in mind that there are only about 20 PS3 games out right now, and they are in different generas, so at the moment, the PS3 is not a strong gaming platform (although many are suppsoed to be released this year).
I know people who have both a standalone BluRay player and a standalone HDDVD player, and, surprise of surprise, most of their purchaces lately have been BluRay. The only movies I can think of that were exclusive to HD-DVD that I had any intrest in was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (surprising as its a WB disc, who is releasing movies for both formats), and the Matrix Trilogy (also a WB title). Strangely, Terminators 1-2 were released only on BluRay whereas 3 was released only on HDDVD. * Blu-Ray discs, since the start of the year, have outsold HD-DVD discs by three to one margin (or higher).
Sony bundle the PS3 with Blu-Ray movies and put this in their sale figures. Again, notice the buyers didn't have much choice. They just got it with their PS3.
The trend in such a case may have nothing to do with current sales figures. Really? I should demand my money back, I certainly did not get any movies bundled with my PS3. However, I see ads all the time saying you get free HD-DVD movies when you buy a HD-DVD player. Sounds like you got your formats reversed. Sony bundles nothing with their PS3. No game, no movie. Toshiba bundles in some cases up to 5 movies with their HD-DVD players (many of the movies they show in their ads I have on BluRay, such as Last Samurai and Phantom of the Opera). Yet BluRay is still outselling HD-DVD
A news article from Blu-ray.com: PS3 Boosts European Blu-ray Sales
Posted May 21, 2007 by Josh
Blu-ray Disc Prior to the release of the PS3 in Europe, HD DVD was comfortably outselling Blu-ray discs on a weekly basis. But now, less than two months since PS3's release, Blu-ray has gained a 64% share on the year, and consistently outsells HD DVD weekly. Specifically, last week's data shows Blu-ray having a weekly sales ratio 3-to-1 over HD DVD, a ratio Blu-ray in the US has only managed once (when Casino Royale was released). Sounds to me like the PS3 is deffinately driving the sales of BluRay movies. * Universal is the only major studio still wholly behind HD-DVD (The Weinstien Brothers have announced Hard Boiled will come on Blu-Ray, including the movie and a PS3 game).
How many studios (except Sony Pictures I presume) are only behind Blu-Ray? Disney (Pirates of the Carabian, Dinosaur, Cars (coming soon) Narnia (coming soon)), Lions Gate (Stargate), 20th Century Fox, MGM, Sony.
Sounds like the poster should do a bit of research before
The post and the article focus on the marketing and advertising involved in the MacBook. The advertise milions of colors, they do not deliver. The cause is that they use a 6 bit display, but the technical aspects of using a 6 bit over an 8 bit is not what the article is about, its about a lawsuit being issued over Apple not being able to deliver on something in their marketing.
I work in a Fortune 500 advertising company, and we use Macs almost exclusively for creative work. Now, you do need to calibrate the display if you are doing something that intensive, and chances are, in our company at least, you will not be doing creative work on a laptop. But when you are creating 40 foot by 10 foot billboards, you want to be sure that your colors are exact. The majority of Apple's clients are creatives, and if you are marketing your product to this market, you better be sure you can deliver what you are advertising
One of our local elementary schools recently did something similar. The difference - parents were made aware before hand of what was going on. Ours actually lasted hours, with the local SWAT team in on it, negotiating with the "intruder" as he slowly let students go. I am not sure if the students knew it was mock or not.
Mock drills are not a bad thing, the issue here is that the teachers did not clear this with parents or even other staff members (ie The Principal and school board) first. Probably some minor disciplanary actions should be taken. My guess is that this will be blown way out of proportion, teachers will not only be fired, but banned from ever teaching again. There should be something like a suspension of so many days without pay. While the intention was good, it was obviously very poor planning, probably a spur of the moment decision.
True, but there is still a connection from the isp to the internet. So while the line from the isp to the neighborhood or to the house is undersubscribed, the line from the isp to the internet is still probably oversubscribed
Its true for anyone who is redistributing internet. You can have fiber between the buildings on a college campus and gigabit ethernet to the rooms, but if you are trying to split one T1 line between 1500 students, faculty, administration and your dialup users, its going to be slow. Even when we had dialup (before they installed the fiber, my university had its on isp, well to an extent), during peak hours you could see a drop in transfer rates from 5-6k a second down to 1 or 2.
Even if you have a T1 directly into the backbone of the internet, many other people are plugged into that connection. You only have a finite amount of bandwidth, even on the backbone, and if the line you are getting your service off of is congested, your service will suffer. Period. End of story. Does not matter if you have dialup or OC48
Thanks. Wish I could mod you up to informative for that
Actually, if you have a volume license key for microsoft, you can log into their site and download the software from them. Its how our company got Office 2007, Project 2007 and Vista 32 and 64 bit versions. But I am sure this is not what you are refering to.
I have contacted MS about this before, because I was having similar issues when working on people's machines. MS tech support told me that they could care less where you got the media from, they are worried as to whether or not you purchased a license.
As for Dell, all our machines we recieve from dell come with an OEM copy of XP Professional, and a seperate driver disc. You can install the XP on any computer, but if its not on a Dell product, it will not activate. So in effect, you could stick in the XP cd, do a clean install on the machine, and then install the drivers. Not all that hard.
However, on Dell's newer machines, they are usually fast enough that when I am working on a home machine, it takes less time to uninstall the crap that comes with them and then run CCleaner and Spybot than to reload the system. Dell also has wonderful tech support, and I usually talk people into paying the $50 or so extra and get the extended warrenty.
In response to the Topic, I installed Vista 64 bit at home. Its just like any new operating system that comes out, sleek, pretty, runs fast, but nothing freakin runs in it until everyone updates their drivers and software. Remember the issues we had with 2000 and XP when they came out? It also has an annoying habbit of going to sleep and not waking up, even with the sleep option turned off. Needless to say, Vista 64 is not running as my primary operating system. Give it about a year, it will be good, bugs will be worked out, it will start selling
I set up a user on our BES last week who had a Samsung phone
I love reading about this kind of stuff, but I am completely lost. Can someone dumb down and summerize the article and the slashdot blurb?
So open free hotspots bad, but the kid can go down to McDonald's, by internet for $2.95 an hour, and get all the porn he wants? He can go home to his FIOS line and get porn at blazing fast speeds?
While it does not upscale to 1080, it does upconvert all PSX and PS2 games to 480p. REALLY nice feature. The question should not be if its going to upscale the resolution, but rerender 3D models at a higher resolution. If you are rendering graphics at 480i and upconverting them to 1080, its not going to look that well. You can see this now if you try putting in a PSX Final Fantasy game into the PS3, you get 480p resolution, with jagged edges on the 3D models. You do emulation on the PC with the same game, even at 640x480, but have it rendering the video in hardware mode, you get these absolutely stunning 3D models.
:-)
What needs to happen is not a software only emulation, but rather a software emulation that rerenders 3D graphics through the PS3 video processor.
I have had no issues running PS2 games on the PS3. I have had some issues with two PSX games (Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 4) with sound hicups and occassional tearing of video, but as the PSX version of these games were SNES ports to begin with (okay, they rewrote the text), I am not terribly disappointed in it.
As for the image reader, this is an incredibly nice feature. Actually get to look at my images at 1920x1080. Granted, I could use the hdtv breakout box on my pc for this - wait, I already do. What is annoying is that the PS3 does not support NTFS formats. So while it will read my thumbdrive, it will not read my usb2 500gig drive that I have everything stored on. Wow, it sure would be nice to sit on the couch and go through my pictures with a wireless controler. Too bad they do not make wireless keyboards or remotes to control the PC
I find the webbrowser to be practically useless. Unless you have a 70 inch screen, you cannot read a webpage rendered at 1920x1080.
It does not support enough video formats and does not seem to like stuff recorded at non-standard resolutions and framerates. Sticking in a CD of old MPEGs, while it did upconvert, which looked nice, resulted in tearing around the edges and choppiness. It will not read TS streams burned on a CD, and the only way to get HD material from your computer to the PS3 is to render it in some strange MP4 format that I have never heard of before. And unfortunately, all the utilities I have found on the net that do this for you for some odd reason downconverts all audio to MP3 stereo sound. As it stretches old dvd movies into 16:9 format, this makes the PS3 useless as a video player for anything other than BluRay (my main function of it) and the trailers you download from sony.