I disagree with this position and people don't quite understand what I mean.
If Microsoft said to the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray consortiums:
"We don't care if you allow your content to play on PC's or don't. We won't stop your attempt to secure content played on Windows, but we won't assist, either"
People generally assume that we would have no next generation content or devices. I say the opposite... the next generation content couldn't get started; there simply would not be a critical mass necessary for widespread adoption of the format. My contention is the personal computer is so important to mass adoption of any consumer technology that MS could easily say "No".
There's a subtle point here that most people miss... media companies like DRM not because they're trying to protect content, they've simply done the calculation and figured they'll make more money that way. If their calculation turns out to be wrong (i.e. DRM hurts sales and adoption), they'll drop it.
The history fo devices heavily locked down with DRM has not been terribly successful. SCMS was mandated by law on early digital and late analog recording technologies with the result that they were completely ignored by the consumer market. Not because people didn't want new technology, but because they didn't want a tape recorder that couldn't record their buddy's vinyl or CD.
The truth is that Microsoft and Apple see a huge opportunity by catering to the media companies with a promise of effective DRM. There's money in being a media cartel, but there's a lot of money being the tollgate for the media cartel, too. I am somewhat amused by people who think Apple is somehow pulling a fast one on RIAA members by putting weak DRM on music. The truth is, Apple is pulling a fast one on consumer by selling people music at $1 a song in a very limited format and removing basic rights that most people take for granted (i.e. loaning a CD to your buddy at work).
My final point is that Microsoft is not in a position of weakness when it comes to content protection in Vista; in fact, MS designed most of the protections for media in Vista in hopes that they can license much of it to the media cartel. The truth of the matter is, if they didn't have these protections in Vista, Blu-Ray and other content would make it to Vista anyway. There's no choice. If you want to succeed with a consumer technology it must work with Windows.
At this point, I'm not going to buy HD-DVD or Blu-Ray until it's clear there's a winner. The player is the easy part; I just don't want to invest a lot of money in content that I'll end up selling for $50 on eBay in 2 years.
But it gets worse.
Now that I know there's a "new" format, I'm less willing to buy releases on DVD because of the expectation that a new format will be prominent in 18 months, and I'd rather have the high def version.
So my response at this point is to slow way down on DVD purchases.
As a consumer, that's the only sensible thing to do.
No, you're wrong about the I/O thing. It's not the decompression that's the problem; UnRAR'ing basically is a background task. It's the I/O that's killing windows. In XP workstation, anything I/O intensive will kill off Explorer as a means to interact with the operating system
Take 100G of files and copy them from one disk to another (local disks). Your system is basically unusable at that point until the copy is complete. Writing to optical disks at 16x extracts a huge performance penalty. To make matters worse, XP will take a long time to do the I/O. You'd think if it was going to render itself unusable it might actually do it with some speed.
As to the swap, it's still broken in XP. It swaps immediately on startup. It's almost like MS optimized swapping for 256M systems, and then they never bothered to check what would happen if it had plenty of memory. It's the OS, shouldn't it know when to turn off swap on it's own? I mean, if you're going to make the OS that big, might as well make it a little intelligent.
I'm not an expert in operating systems, but Windows XP is just horrible how I/O really affects overall system performance.
For example, do something very I/O intensive (unzipping a 6G file), and then watch how CPU utilization goes through the roof and basically stops the rest of the system. I never got why that happens. It seems to happen much less in Unix based systems.
I've bumped my memory up to 3G in my system and it hasn't helped that issue.
Another pet peeve... if you have a swap file, you lose a chunk of performance. Even if there is no reason to swap. Again, when I added 3G to my system, there no reason for the system to swap. But if you watch what happens with a couple of tools that watch I/O it's swapping. If you look in MS's documentation, they deny that it swaps in this circumstance, but in fact it does. Hopefully they fixed this annoyance.
The only thing that is clear is that Sony clearly lacks the market clout to push a standard that doesn't have widespread industry approval. Blu-Ray does not, as of today, have the approval.
Sure, but if Vista doesn't play blu ray or HD DVD, then how will you play it on a computer? I'm not questioning Sony's ability to produce a new format and players and TV's that make it all secure and Sony happy, but so what? Sony's last few attempts to establish formats that aren't widely supported have not been much of a success... SACD, their proprietary Memory Sticks, the PSP, ATRAC3, none of these have been much of a success.
Anyone who thinks a new multimedia format can succeed without full Windows support is being pretty myopic. And that's really my point. Sony doesn't have the ability to withhold support for Windows because it's not secure enough. If they do that, Blu-Ray will fail. I think the original article had it right... Microsoft is supporting these special secure paths not to parley favor with the media companies, they're doing it so they can get the same lock-in for movies that Apple has for music.
"If Vista doesn't support those requirements, then it cant access the media."
So if vista doesn't support those requirements, then who will?
Do you really think Hollywood (et al) will sit on content saying "Nope. Not selling it. Not enough copy protection".
That's never happened, and never will. They don't make content to lock in a vault. The only reason Hollywood cares about about content is because it makes profit. If content sits in a film can, it cannot make a profit.
"3rd party Developers are not looking at the Wii as a place to make new creative games"
Perhaps you're right. However, isn't it possible that given the incredible interest in the Wii, a lot of companies may change their mind. I'm guessing Sony execs aren't enjoying this Christmas.
It really doesn't matter. So you buy it in 6 weeks. You realize that by the end of January, there will likely be stacks of the things sitting around. And if not then, 4 weeks later. The games will still be good, and it's not like there aren't plenty of good PS2 games to tide you over for a few weeks until you get a new system.
I belong to Sony/BMG record club and right now they're selling new CD's for $6.77 delivered. Yeah, you've got to wait 2 weeks. Selection isn't the entire catalog. But it's pretty good. Or, my favorite method is to buy used from Amazon. Usually about $6-7 delivered. To me, that's the real price of CD's.
And for that price, I'm buying a lot of CD's lately. Mostly back catalog; re-creating my 300 vinyl collection from the 70's. In the past 2 years, CD prices have effectively fallen because of factors that I won't pretend to understand, but has to include the effects of piracy, as well as the ease at which used CD's can be purchased from Amazon, ebay, and a host of legitimate sources.
I can't be the only person who has noticed this. More to the point, I'm sure the record companies can see this as well, and I'm guessing they're very unhappy.
But plenty of people winterize cabins for the winter. I would contact the state extension office for booklets on the subject.
I know that you have to shut off the water, some people put plywood on the windows. Some people put a minimal amount of heat to avoid sub freezing temps inside the house itself.
Which is exactly right. Why doesn't the press ever point out that the RIAA does not represent the artist? It represents the people who distribute music, i.e. the middleman.
BMI & ASCAP actually represents songwriters and composers (i.e. artists), and while I don't agree completely with their full agenda, so far they have managed to not sue music fans.
Perhaps the RIAA is suing fans because they've already sucked the artist dry? Who knows.
When you click the link, as it turns out the recording industry has cheated Olivia Newton John out of royalties related to her Grease movie.
Doesn't that put it all into perspective. Some poor slob gives a copy of a CD to his mother and he's a criminal. The recording industry cheats millions from performers and it's just an accounting practice.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree with this position and people don't quite understand what I mean.
If Microsoft said to the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray consortiums:
"We don't care if you allow your content to play on PC's or don't. We won't stop your attempt to secure content played on Windows, but we won't assist, either"
People generally assume that we would have no next generation content or devices. I say the opposite... the next generation content couldn't get started; there simply would not be a critical mass necessary for widespread adoption of the format. My contention is the personal computer is so important to mass adoption of any consumer technology that MS could easily say "No".
There's a subtle point here that most people miss... media companies like DRM not because they're trying to protect content, they've simply done the calculation and figured they'll make more money that way. If their calculation turns out to be wrong (i.e. DRM hurts sales and adoption), they'll drop it.
The history fo devices heavily locked down with DRM has not been terribly successful. SCMS was mandated by law on early digital and late analog recording technologies with the result that they were completely ignored by the consumer market. Not because people didn't want new technology, but because they didn't want a tape recorder that couldn't record their buddy's vinyl or CD.
The truth is that Microsoft and Apple see a huge opportunity by catering to the media companies with a promise of effective DRM. There's money in being a media cartel, but there's a lot of money being the tollgate for the media cartel, too. I am somewhat amused by people who think Apple is somehow pulling a fast one on RIAA members by putting weak DRM on music. The truth is, Apple is pulling a fast one on consumer by selling people music at $1 a song in a very limited format and removing basic rights that most people take for granted (i.e. loaning a CD to your buddy at work).
My final point is that Microsoft is not in a position of weakness when it comes to content protection in Vista; in fact, MS designed most of the protections for media in Vista in hopes that they can license much of it to the media cartel. The truth of the matter is, if they didn't have these protections in Vista, Blu-Ray and other content would make it to Vista anyway. There's no choice. If you want to succeed with a consumer technology it must work with Windows.
I thought SCO has pulled the Linux IP claims and now it's down to a straight "IBM didn't live up to the contract" kind of dispute?
3rd party utilities will do this already.
The full Nero package does this quite painlessly; if your iPod it attached, it will send it directly to your iPod without putting it in iTunes first.
There are literally dozens of free, or almost free, utilities that do this already.
I would agree 100% with this.
However, there is nothing preventing Apple from offering this at a later date, although the low battery life makes this device problematic as a PDA.
I'm assuming this is just like iTunes/iPod where you can put any sort of content into it.
At this point, I'm not going to buy HD-DVD or Blu-Ray until it's clear there's a winner. The player is the easy part; I just don't want to invest a lot of money in content that I'll end up selling for $50 on eBay in 2 years.
But it gets worse.
Now that I know there's a "new" format, I'm less willing to buy releases on DVD because of the expectation that a new format will be prominent in 18 months, and I'd rather have the high def version.
So my response at this point is to slow way down on DVD purchases.
As a consumer, that's the only sensible thing to do.
No, you're wrong about the I/O thing. It's not the decompression that's the problem; UnRAR'ing basically is a background task. It's the I/O that's killing windows. In XP workstation, anything I/O intensive will kill off Explorer as a means to interact with the operating system
Take 100G of files and copy them from one disk to another (local disks). Your system is basically unusable at that point until the copy is complete. Writing to optical disks at 16x extracts a huge performance penalty. To make matters worse, XP will take a long time to do the I/O. You'd think if it was going to render itself unusable it might actually do it with some speed.
As to the swap, it's still broken in XP. It swaps immediately on startup. It's almost like MS optimized swapping for 256M systems, and then they never bothered to check what would happen if it had plenty of memory. It's the OS, shouldn't it know when to turn off swap on it's own? I mean, if you're going to make the OS that big, might as well make it a little intelligent.
I'm not an expert in operating systems, but Windows XP is just horrible how I/O really affects overall system performance.
For example, do something very I/O intensive (unzipping a 6G file), and then watch how CPU utilization goes through the roof and basically stops the rest of the system. I never got why that happens. It seems to happen much less in Unix based systems.
I've bumped my memory up to 3G in my system and it hasn't helped that issue.
Another pet peeve... if you have a swap file, you lose a chunk of performance. Even if there is no reason to swap. Again, when I added 3G to my system, there no reason for the system to swap. But if you watch what happens with a couple of tools that watch I/O it's swapping. If you look in MS's documentation, they deny that it swaps in this circumstance, but in fact it does. Hopefully they fixed this annoyance.
"when Sony is clearly popular and will prevail"
Clearly popular?
The only thing that is clear is that Sony clearly lacks the market clout to push a standard that doesn't have widespread industry approval. Blu-Ray does not, as of today, have the approval.
I'm not quite sure how it works, but the composer always makes money on airplay, I think it's called "Mechanical Royalties". There's an article here: http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/music-royal ties6.htm
but I have no idea if it's accurate.
"it's a fudge that dodges the meat "
There's goodness in that. Really.
At the risk of being modded redundant to myself, people should look at this link before drawing conclusions about the development costs of drugs.
d f
http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/econ/dimasi2003.p
And I think that you're being modded a troll is complete incorrect. Moderators, just because you don't agree with someone doesn't make them a troll.
It appears in many studies that R&D costs and clinical studies are the main drivers of cost:c le/2006/12/19/AR2006121901510.html
d f
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
A comprehensive look (and really interesting read) is here:
http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/econ/dimasi2003.p
Where it goes into great detail about drug development costs.
Indiana Jones and the Wheelchair of Doom
Sure, but if Vista doesn't play blu ray or HD DVD, then how will you play it on a computer? I'm not questioning Sony's ability to produce a new format and players and TV's that make it all secure and Sony happy, but so what? Sony's last few attempts to establish formats that aren't widely supported have not been much of a success... SACD, their proprietary Memory Sticks, the PSP, ATRAC3, none of these have been much of a success.
Anyone who thinks a new multimedia format can succeed without full Windows support is being pretty myopic. And that's really my point. Sony doesn't have the ability to withhold support for Windows because it's not secure enough. If they do that, Blu-Ray will fail. I think the original article had it right... Microsoft is supporting these special secure paths not to parley favor with the media companies, they're doing it so they can get the same lock-in for movies that Apple has for music.
"If Vista doesn't support those requirements, then it cant access the media."
So if vista doesn't support those requirements, then who will?
Do you really think Hollywood (et al) will sit on content saying "Nope. Not selling it. Not enough copy protection".
That's never happened, and never will. They don't make content to lock in a vault. The only reason Hollywood cares about about content is because it makes profit. If content sits in a film can, it cannot make a profit.
"3rd party Developers are not looking at the Wii as a place to make new creative games"
Perhaps you're right. However, isn't it possible that given the incredible interest in the Wii, a lot of companies may change their mind. I'm guessing Sony execs aren't enjoying this Christmas.
It really doesn't matter. So you buy it in 6 weeks. You realize that by the end of January, there will likely be stacks of the things sitting around. And if not then, 4 weeks later. The games will still be good, and it's not like there aren't plenty of good PS2 games to tide you over for a few weeks until you get a new system.
"when I can get a real CD on Amazon for $10-12"
I belong to Sony/BMG record club and right now they're selling new CD's for $6.77 delivered. Yeah, you've got to wait 2 weeks. Selection isn't the entire catalog. But it's pretty good. Or, my favorite method is to buy used from Amazon. Usually about $6-7 delivered. To me, that's the real price of CD's.
And for that price, I'm buying a lot of CD's lately. Mostly back catalog; re-creating my 300 vinyl collection from the 70's. In the past 2 years, CD prices have effectively fallen because of factors that I won't pretend to understand, but has to include the effects of piracy, as well as the ease at which used CD's can be purchased from Amazon, ebay, and a host of legitimate sources.
I can't be the only person who has noticed this. More to the point, I'm sure the record companies can see this as well, and I'm guessing they're very unhappy.
Most times they screw the consumer for the artist.
But this time, given the popularity of ringtones, they're screwing the artist for the children.
But plenty of people winterize cabins for the winter. I would contact the state extension office for booklets on the subject.
I know that you have to shut off the water, some people put plywood on the windows. Some people put a minimal amount of heat to avoid sub freezing temps inside the house itself.
"Does Vista protect anything other than media restrictions imposed by producers?"
Let's just say it protects everything is was designed to protect. To a certain extent.
"it's not about protecting any goddamn artists"
Which is exactly right. Why doesn't the press ever point out that the RIAA does not represent the artist? It represents the people who distribute music, i.e. the middleman.
BMI & ASCAP actually represents songwriters and composers (i.e. artists), and while I don't agree completely with their full agenda, so far they have managed to not sue music fans.
Perhaps the RIAA is suing fans because they've already sucked the artist dry? Who knows.
In your plan, the record companies seem to be getting a lot more money for what I already have when I buy a CD.
I have to pay a yearly fee to have them acknowledge I own something.
I have to pay a fee to give my music to someone else.
I have to pay a fee if I want to download the song again.
Wouldn't it be simpler just to buy a CD? It's cheaper, and I don't need to pay some mega-opoly to acknowledge that I just paid some mega-oply.
I realize your heart's in the right place, but it seems we're doing an awful lot of work to make things "easier".
In the sidebar is this little gem:
s tm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6214512.
When you click the link, as it turns out the recording industry has cheated Olivia Newton John out of royalties related to her Grease movie.
Doesn't that put it all into perspective. Some poor slob gives a copy of a CD to his mother and he's a criminal. The recording industry cheats millions from performers and it's just an accounting practice.
Holy cow.