That's bizarre. Not all pageviews are equal. IGN's pageviews are people who are researching what games to buy, and are therefore prequalified for IGN's advertisers (and a large percentage *will* spend money in that area in the immedaite future).
MySpace's pageviews are teenagers who have little income, and who are not prequalified for any particular product or service, so advertising return rates (and therefore advertising revenue) will be dramatically lower.
I don't know about the "it was stolen from me" angle, but the pricing comparison to IGN is such incredibly fallacious reasoning that it really reduces the guy's credibility in my eyes.
Since they apparently didn't correlate it to breaks and lunches and stuff.
I wonder how many full-time-employee-equivalents it would take to cover all of the time that DOI employees spend eating, in the restroom, etc? And are those crises too?
Defcon is for you. Online play, but scores just disappear after each game. No ladders, no high scores, no score history, no levels, nothing. Plus, the whole point is to blow everyone up, so there's not a lot of room for griefers (what are they going to do, *not* launch their nukes?). It's not an RPG or anything, but it's the first online game I've ever been able to enjoy *every* game, not just when I happen to fall in with decent people.
You're spot on. I just can't wait to see how "this crowd" changes its tune 30 years down the road, when its significant contributions are old news and everyone's getting older. It's easy to despise the rich and demand more open economics when you're young and idealistic and either making lots of money or still looking forward to money making years.
Somehow it all changes when those years are in your past and you see other people continuing to make good money the work you did years ago.
Gotta love these programs. If you're spending a lot of money and claim to have some means of preventing terrorism, you're golden.
Nevermind that terrorists rarely publish their plans in mass media in advance. And nevermind that the kind of publications that terrorists communicate with are small circulation. And nevermind that if we do get our hands on them, an actual educated and experienced human is paid to read it over.
Nope, we have to spend millions of dollars on experimental systems that will tell us "most of the world thinks the US is arrogant, obnoxious, paranoid, and largely out of control. They must all be terrorists. We should attack." Heck, we get the same thing from the President, and we only pay him $200k.
It's truly sad that we cannot just trust those around us
No, it's just sad that you can't let go of $20 without demanding DNA tests and genealogy charts. For me, the website is plausible enough, and the address and everything makes sense, so I'll take the minor chance that my contribution is going to a scammer, or that it's going to the right guy and that he's choosing to use it for something other than rent. Whatever. If either of those turn out to be the case, I will be neither bitter nor angry; it's $20, FFS.
There's no rational reason why it should be so, but karma definitely exists. Just remember this post when the time comes that you genuinely need some minor assistance and people demand urine samples and documentation from lawyers and truestees. "Wow," you will think. "I was a snotty little kid back then." And you will be right.
...which would be a great and insightful viewpoint if it weren't for the government itself operating lotteries. As usual, the high ideals (whether or not they are correct) fall in the face of the almighty dollar. It's the "unless we can make a buck" exception to the "people need to be protected from themselves" belief.
I'm with you on the overpriced nature of the PS3, and the blatant rip-off price structure of GT:HD (if what we've heard is correct, and it is always wise to stock up on grains of salt before believing pre-release info).
But I gotta ask: you're willing to replace your LCD TV (~ $1000) and buy a PS3 and the game (~$600) just to play GT:HD... but you're not willing to spend $200 the cars and tracks? By my math, that's only a 12.5% premium. So is it a question of that last $200 being the final straw, or that you can barely afford $1600 and $1800 is out of the question, or a matter of principle?
If the game is that important to you, and you've been looking forward to it that much, why not spend the extra couple of hundred? If it's the only game you play in the next 5 years, that amortized cost is $40/year.
I'm genuinely curious, and not trying to play devil's advocate or anything. Me, I can't imagine replacing my already-modern TV just for a game, so I'm trying to get some insight into a more enthusiastic fan's reasons for drawing the line at micropayments.
Sure. And if a boss tells 30 of is subordinates all do to the same thing, is it unreasonable or unwanted if they collaborate?
The point of my little satire wasn't that there's no point to evaluative thinking, argumentation, and the cogent presentation of ideas. The point was that this little tempest in a teapot is about students evolving the same techniques that are appropriate in business: do as little work as necessary to produce a valid result.
The problem lies in the artifical handicap of "assignments." If a professor wants students to actually think and produce new (or at least constructively derivative) material, the assignment can't be the same for everyone in every class, at college after college, year after year.
The answer is fairly obvious: since universities are largely becomming vocational trade schools for professionals, model the assignments after professional projects. Come up with projects that require several students to interact ccollaboratively -- just as they will have to later in life.
The world has changed, and will continue to do so. The "problem" presented in the original article reflects on the static nature of academia, not the current generation of students. Until academia evolves, students can hardly be blamed for solving old-world problems with new-world approaches.
When these damned cheaters get out into the workforce, they are going to continue to cheat! If their boss demands a recent history of the economy in Brazil, these losers will just hop online and get the answers rather than going to the library and doing their research. Heck, many of them may even cut and paste text directly from internet resources into their reports, further debasing themselves.
I don't work in an engineering field, but a friend who does told me -- in strict confidence, so please don't quote me on this -- that many engineers these days use computer programs to do their job, and only keep slide rules on their desk in case their boss comes by.
It is a scary world we are entering, with both the workplace and the university become result-oriented rather than method-oriented. One day soon, people may even think they can get a decent education without sitting in lecture halls for 20 hours a week!
Man, I dunno -- seems to me that if you get suckered into giving someone your account information, that's kind of your own problem.
I'm with you, in principle. However, how about when someone at the bank leaks your info? Hardly fair to make the customer pay in the case, and the difficulty lies in *proving* how the information was compromised. If we are going to move to a system where customers are responsible for losses due to stupidly giving out their information, the burden of proof had damned well better be on the bank and not the customer
It doesn't matter how careful you are with your info and identity. It's going to be very, very hard to *proove* that you didn't fall for phishing.
I'm sure the US court system has looked at something similar, but balked at the cost and complexity of factoring in how much the defendent spent on their lawyer.
Wow, I was wondering if someone would manage to spin this into an anti-MS rant, and you managed it. Damn near the top of the page, even. Good for you.
It's about progress, man. This is progress. It may not be perfect, it may not reverse every evil / vile / satanic thing they've ever done, but it marks a step forward in their relationship with open source and web standards.
Go on and burn Gates in effigy and do little hate voodoo dances if you like, but those of us grounded in reality have every reason to applaud a positive step from MS, without feeling like we are implicitly approving of everything they have ever done in business or technology. They do enough wrong that there's no need to cast their (few) good deeds as further proof of their evilness.
It's embarassing to be associated with this kind of crap, even just reading it. Sure, the patent system is broke. Sure, Microsoft's business ethics have historically been just a hair above the mafia's.
But it's somewhere between bizarre and pathetic to distort facts so severely to justify moral outrage. Not a word of the topic is actually true. Maybe the original submission was meant as a joke, but our illustrious/. editors didn't see it because it was so similar to submissions made in complete earnest.
What's next? Facetious "news" of Microsoft engaging in genocide? There's certainly room for that kind of zealotry in the world. I wish I could say that this was a new low for/., but a more accurate appraisal is that it's a continuation of the decline. WTF are editors for, if not to ensure a high standard? If we want mindless mob mentality, we'll go to digg. What value add is there in slashdot's editorial structure if the lowest of the low makes it to the front page, with apparently no fact checking or even the weakest attempt at keeping things realistic?
You do realize that sheer volume of words doesn't equate to a sensible opinion, right?
Your very first sentence gives you away. DVD's on a 55" monitor look no different at 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, or 1080p, unless you are using an upscaler. DVD's themselves are encoded at very low bitrate 640x480, and the display resolution can only enlarge that -- much like playing a 640x480 game on a 1280x1024 monitor. Increasing the display resolution has no bearing on the source resolution.
DVD's have terrible artifacts. MPEG-2 is more or less better than VHS, but if you have ever actually watched a standard DVD on a 55" display, you are either blind or you have noticed the arifacts. They're there in every frame of a standard DVD, but if you aren't used to actually paying attention to video quality, start with the credits of a movie -- a lot of them are totally unreadable on DVD. The source material was fine in the theatre, but DVD simply can't reproduce the level of detail needed to display small text. Now, nobody cares about small text per se, but the same lack of detail you see there (I hope!) is reflected in every other frame of the movie.
It may be that you just don't care about video quality; I know plenty of people who can't tell the difference between stereo and mono audio, and a few people who are so tone deaf that they can't tell whether a melody is going up or down. I'm sure that the same issues apply to video as well; physiological and experiential differnece no doubt cause differences to vary in their obviousness.
Anyways, if you really think that standard DVD is fine on a 55" display, stick with it. There are plenty of people watching movies in stereo because surround sound doesn't add anything they can notice. And you're right -- why spend money on something you're not paying enough attention to notice?
Dunno if you're familiar with operating systems, but they're pretty big things. From drivers to installers to background images to copy, there are hundreds of thousands or millions of pieces.
It's not at all unusual, even for/. blessed OSes like MacOS, OSX, Linux, BSD, etc, to add device drivers and genrally improve things after a release candidate. Not all/. blessed OSes use public release candidates of course, but that's because not all of them have the market penetration that Windows does. If you have a significant device driver flaw on old soundblasters in BSD, you may inconvenience a few hundred people. If Vista shipped with a flaw like that, it would affect tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
And, believe it or not, a whole bunch of manufacturers will release new hardware and software between now and when Vista ships. Again, the curse of being the dominant platform. It would be crazy to say that anything not supported today won't be supported if/when Vista launches. Hence, new bits will be written between now and then.
Not something to get stressed or outraged about; it's totally normal for any operating system. If you're going to have a go at MS for continuing to add bits after a RC, either you're a knee jerk anti-MS type or you have to demonstrate the same ignorance in regards to OSX, Linux, BSD, etc.
Argh, I hate misinformation. If you don't know what you're talking about, why post?
There are plenty of reasons not to buy HDDVD/Bluray. But you're way off base here, with the exception of DRM, which is as much a philosophical argument as anything. Let me count the ways that you have erred:
1) Standard DVD's look like crap on 55" screens. This is subjective, sure, but if you really believe this, you will *never* need HD because you're blind. Standard DVD's leave tons of compression artifacts in dark scenes (even title credits!) which are very visible. Tell me, would you run a 21" computer monitor at 640x480 -- with uncompressed video data? No? Then why do you think that *very* lossy compression of 640x480 looks good at 55"?
2) HDVD players are under $500. Sure, that's expensive compared to $39 Kmart DVD players, but comprable to or cheaper than a videophile DVD player. Again, if you can't see the difference, you're not the target market.
3) The average joe can buy a fine 720p screen, which is all you need for the difference to be very apparent. My local Walmart has a crappy but functional 720p 55" screen for $700.
4) Your last point is the most misinformed. Neither HDDVD nor Bluray downsample for non-HDCP displays. To get educated so you can stop spouting misinformation, search for "image constraint token" on google. Short version: the technical capacity is there, but studios have agreed not to use it until at least 2010. At which point you can whine that these technologies downsample on displays older than 4 years, which is still a valid point but a little different than what you've erroneously claimed.
Lest people think I'm a fanboy, let me list the *legitimate* reasons for waiting on HD formats:
- The format war means that any investment in players and/or media has some liklihood of being wasted money
- Bluray, in particular, uses the same poor compression technology as standard DVD, and displays a lot of the same artifacting (less extreme, because it's higher resolution and bitrate, but nevertheless there)
- Neither format has real buy-in from CE manufacturers who don't have a vested interest
- The early players available for both formats have many quirks and annoyances (an HDDVD player takes almost a minute to eject a disk when in the "off" state)
For the record, I bought a $500 HDDVD player. My rationale: I use netflix, so I'm not investing in media that may be worthless later. And even if HDDVD or both formats bomb, I'm sure I can get at least a couple of hundred dollars for it on ebay. So I'm paying maybe $300 for a year or two of a fantastic upconverting standard DVD player, with the bonus of getting to enjoy some HD stuff.
Um, you seem to be complaining about a semantic difference. Everyone knows she was fired, and why. The only negative associated with being fired is what it says about you to future employers, and she will suffer from that sitgma every bit as much as one of you peons who gets fired.
Why worry about the semantics when the reality is clear to everyone?
I think the point is that there are no plans to ship games on HDDVD, which makes perfect sense because only a small percentage of 360 users will have the drive.
Since the HDDVD drive itself is basically a transport and laser, and just sends the raw bytes to the 360 for processing, it seems like it would just take a software update of the 360 itself to enable HDDVD games, should the need arise in a year or three. There's no actual movie-specific logic or hardware in the HDDVD drive; no vc-1 decoder, no surround sound processing, nothing. The drive is just like a hard drive: the 360 tells it what sector to read, the drive reads it and provides the raw data with no interpretation.
So it's not that the drive has some physical limitation that means that it can't be used for games, it's just that there are no plans to update the 360 to run games from the drive.
I hate patent abuse as much as the next guy, but this seems like it's just begging for abuse.
How's this for a (new) patent abuse business model: - Watch patent review wiki for interesting stuff - Steal good ideas that other people have - Instantly work on creating pre-dated "prior art" on websites, blog postings, etc - Use shill accounts to point out the "prior art" - Make some good cash off of other peoples' R&D
Or how's this for a "fuck with a much-hated company" mob mentality: - Watch for patent applications from the hated company - Instanlty work on creating pre-dated "prior art" on websits, blog postings, etc - Post to slashdot, digg, etc, linking to the manufactured "prior art" - Watch while thousands of tech zealots slam the patent on the wiki, citing your dishonest "prior art"
There are plenty more ways to abuse this, of course, those two just came to mind quickly and are kind of amusing.
The patent system is broken, that's for sure. But this isn't the answer. Or at least, if this is the answer, we might as well do away with patents altogether, since they will be very, very easy to dishonestly undermine. I know I'll get jumped on here, so let me ask that if you favor simply removing patents (or software patents, or whatever) from the law, please just say that and don't defend this terrible idea because it gets the outcome that you want while still pretending to support the idea of patents.
Slashdot Mirror
That's bizarre. Not all pageviews are equal. IGN's pageviews are people who are researching what games to buy, and are therefore prequalified for IGN's advertisers (and a large percentage *will* spend money in that area in the immedaite future).
MySpace's pageviews are teenagers who have little income, and who are not prequalified for any particular product or service, so advertising return rates (and therefore advertising revenue) will be dramatically lower.
I don't know about the "it was stolen from me" angle, but the pricing comparison to IGN is such incredibly fallacious reasoning that it really reduces the guy's credibility in my eyes.
-b
Since they apparently didn't correlate it to breaks and lunches and stuff.
I wonder how many full-time-employee-equivalents it would take to cover all of the time that DOI employees spend eating, in the restroom, etc? And are those crises too?
-b
Defcon is for you. Online play, but scores just disappear after each game. No ladders, no high scores, no score history, no levels, nothing. Plus, the whole point is to blow everyone up, so there's not a lot of room for griefers (what are they going to do, *not* launch their nukes?). It's not an RPG or anything, but it's the first online game I've ever been able to enjoy *every* game, not just when I happen to fall in with decent people.
You're spot on. I just can't wait to see how "this crowd" changes its tune 30 years down the road, when its significant contributions are old news and everyone's getting older. It's easy to despise the rich and demand more open economics when you're young and idealistic and either making lots of money or still looking forward to money making years.
Somehow it all changes when those years are in your past and you see other people continuing to make good money the work you did years ago.
-b
Gotta love these programs. If you're spending a lot of money and claim to have some means of preventing terrorism, you're golden.
Nevermind that terrorists rarely publish their plans in mass media in advance. And nevermind that the kind of publications that terrorists communicate with are small circulation. And nevermind that if we do get our hands on them, an actual educated and experienced human is paid to read it over.
Nope, we have to spend millions of dollars on experimental systems that will tell us "most of the world thinks the US is arrogant, obnoxious, paranoid, and largely out of control. They must all be terrorists. We should attack." Heck, we get the same thing from the President, and we only pay him $200k.
-b
No, it's just sad that you can't let go of $20 without demanding DNA tests and genealogy charts. For me, the website is plausible enough, and the address and everything makes sense, so I'll take the minor chance that my contribution is going to a scammer, or that it's going to the right guy and that he's choosing to use it for something other than rent. Whatever. If either of those turn out to be the case, I will be neither bitter nor angry; it's $20, FFS.
There's no rational reason why it should be so, but karma definitely exists. Just remember this post when the time comes that you genuinely need some minor assistance and people demand urine samples and documentation from lawyers and truestees. "Wow," you will think. "I was a snotty little kid back then." And you will be right.
-b
And I thought just zapping unsuspecting friends with a 50kv taser was fun. This thing is going to be a blast!
-b
...which would be a great and insightful viewpoint if it weren't for the government itself operating lotteries. As usual, the high ideals (whether or not they are correct) fall in the face of the almighty dollar. It's the "unless we can make a buck" exception to the "people need to be protected from themselves" belief.
-b
Look on the bright side: if more antimatter had survived, we would all be made out of antimatter and living on antimatter planets. Scary!
It's only slander if it's not true. Do you really think that *anyone* would want to go to court and try to prove that they were not an idiot?
-b
I thought our rights ended years ago. Is there some question about that?
I'm with you on the overpriced nature of the PS3, and the blatant rip-off price structure of GT:HD (if what we've heard is correct, and it is always wise to stock up on grains of salt before believing pre-release info).
But I gotta ask: you're willing to replace your LCD TV (~ $1000) and buy a PS3 and the game (~$600) just to play GT:HD... but you're not willing to spend $200 the cars and tracks? By my math, that's only a 12.5% premium. So is it a question of that last $200 being the final straw, or that you can barely afford $1600 and $1800 is out of the question, or a matter of principle?
If the game is that important to you, and you've been looking forward to it that much, why not spend the extra couple of hundred? If it's the only game you play in the next 5 years, that amortized cost is $40/year.
I'm genuinely curious, and not trying to play devil's advocate or anything. Me, I can't imagine replacing my already-modern TV just for a game, so I'm trying to get some insight into a more enthusiastic fan's reasons for drawing the line at micropayments.
-b
Sure. And if a boss tells 30 of is subordinates all do to the same thing, is it unreasonable or unwanted if they collaborate?
The point of my little satire wasn't that there's no point to evaluative thinking, argumentation, and the cogent presentation of ideas. The point was that this little tempest in a teapot is about students evolving the same techniques that are appropriate in business: do as little work as necessary to produce a valid result.
The problem lies in the artifical handicap of "assignments." If a professor wants students to actually think and produce new (or at least constructively derivative) material, the assignment can't be the same for everyone in every class, at college after college, year after year.
The answer is fairly obvious: since universities are largely becomming vocational trade schools for professionals, model the assignments after professional projects. Come up with projects that require several students to interact ccollaboratively -- just as they will have to later in life.
The world has changed, and will continue to do so. The "problem" presented in the original article reflects on the static nature of academia, not the current generation of students. Until academia evolves, students can hardly be blamed for solving old-world problems with new-world approaches.
-b
When these damned cheaters get out into the workforce, they are going to continue to cheat! If their boss demands a recent history of the economy in Brazil, these losers will just hop online and get the answers rather than going to the library and doing their research. Heck, many of them may even cut and paste text directly from internet resources into their reports, further debasing themselves.
I don't work in an engineering field, but a friend who does told me -- in strict confidence, so please don't quote me on this -- that many engineers these days use computer programs to do their job, and only keep slide rules on their desk in case their boss comes by.
It is a scary world we are entering, with both the workplace and the university become result-oriented rather than method-oriented. One day soon, people may even think they can get a decent education without sitting in lecture halls for 20 hours a week!
-b
I'm with you, in principle. However, how about when someone at the bank leaks your info? Hardly fair to make the customer pay in the case, and the difficulty lies in *proving* how the information was compromised. If we are going to move to a system where customers are responsible for losses due to stupidly giving out their information, the burden of proof had damned well better be on the bank and not the customer
It doesn't matter how careful you are with your info and identity. It's going to be very, very hard to *proove* that you didn't fall for phishing.
-b
I'm sure the US court system has looked at something similar, but balked at the cost and complexity of factoring in how much the defendent spent on their lawyer.
Wow, I was wondering if someone would manage to spin this into an anti-MS rant, and you managed it. Damn near the top of the page, even. Good for you.
It's about progress, man. This is progress. It may not be perfect, it may not reverse every evil / vile / satanic thing they've ever done, but it marks a step forward in their relationship with open source and web standards.
Go on and burn Gates in effigy and do little hate voodoo dances if you like, but those of us grounded in reality have every reason to applaud a positive step from MS, without feeling like we are implicitly approving of everything they have ever done in business or technology. They do enough wrong that there's no need to cast their (few) good deeds as further proof of their evilness.
-b
It's embarassing to be associated with this kind of crap, even just reading it. Sure, the patent system is broke. Sure, Microsoft's business ethics have historically been just a hair above the mafia's.
/. editors didn't see it because it was so similar to submissions made in complete earnest.
/., but a more accurate appraisal is that it's a continuation of the decline. WTF are editors for, if not to ensure a high standard? If we want mindless mob mentality, we'll go to digg. What value add is there in slashdot's editorial structure if the lowest of the low makes it to the front page, with apparently no fact checking or even the weakest attempt at keeping things realistic?
But it's somewhere between bizarre and pathetic to distort facts so severely to justify moral outrage. Not a word of the topic is actually true. Maybe the original submission was meant as a joke, but our illustrious
What's next? Facetious "news" of Microsoft engaging in genocide? There's certainly room for that kind of zealotry in the world. I wish I could say that this was a new low for
-b
You do realize that sheer volume of words doesn't equate to a sensible opinion, right?
Your very first sentence gives you away. DVD's on a 55" monitor look no different at 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, or 1080p, unless you are using an upscaler. DVD's themselves are encoded at very low bitrate 640x480, and the display resolution can only enlarge that -- much like playing a 640x480 game on a 1280x1024 monitor. Increasing the display resolution has no bearing on the source resolution.
DVD's have terrible artifacts. MPEG-2 is more or less better than VHS, but if you have ever actually watched a standard DVD on a 55" display, you are either blind or you have noticed the arifacts. They're there in every frame of a standard DVD, but if you aren't used to actually paying attention to video quality, start with the credits of a movie -- a lot of them are totally unreadable on DVD. The source material was fine in the theatre, but DVD simply can't reproduce the level of detail needed to display small text. Now, nobody cares about small text per se, but the same lack of detail you see there (I hope!) is reflected in every other frame of the movie.
It may be that you just don't care about video quality; I know plenty of people who can't tell the difference between stereo and mono audio, and a few people who are so tone deaf that they can't tell whether a melody is going up or down. I'm sure that the same issues apply to video as well; physiological and experiential differnece no doubt cause differences to vary in their obviousness.
Anyways, if you really think that standard DVD is fine on a 55" display, stick with it. There are plenty of people watching movies in stereo because surround sound doesn't add anything they can notice. And you're right -- why spend money on something you're not paying enough attention to notice?
-b
Dunno if you're familiar with operating systems, but they're pretty big things. From drivers to installers to background images to copy, there are hundreds of thousands or millions of pieces.
/. blessed OSes like MacOS, OSX, Linux, BSD, etc, to add device drivers and genrally improve things after a release candidate. Not all /. blessed OSes use public release candidates of course, but that's because not all of them have the market penetration that Windows does. If you have a significant device driver flaw on old soundblasters in BSD, you may inconvenience a few hundred people. If Vista shipped with a flaw like that, it would affect tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
It's not at all unusual, even for
And, believe it or not, a whole bunch of manufacturers will release new hardware and software between now and when Vista ships. Again, the curse of being the dominant platform. It would be crazy to say that anything not supported today won't be supported if/when Vista launches. Hence, new bits will be written between now and then.
Not something to get stressed or outraged about; it's totally normal for any operating system. If you're going to have a go at MS for continuing to add bits after a RC, either you're a knee jerk anti-MS type or you have to demonstrate the same ignorance in regards to OSX, Linux, BSD, etc.
-b
Argh, I hate misinformation. If you don't know what you're talking about, why post?
There are plenty of reasons not to buy HDDVD/Bluray. But you're way off base here, with the exception of DRM, which is as much a philosophical argument as anything. Let me count the ways that you have erred:
1) Standard DVD's look like crap on 55" screens. This is subjective, sure, but if you really believe this, you will *never* need HD because you're blind. Standard DVD's leave tons of compression artifacts in dark scenes (even title credits!) which are very visible. Tell me, would you run a 21" computer monitor at 640x480 -- with uncompressed video data? No? Then why do you think that *very* lossy compression of 640x480 looks good at 55"?
2) HDVD players are under $500. Sure, that's expensive compared to $39 Kmart DVD players, but comprable to or cheaper than a videophile DVD player. Again, if you can't see the difference, you're not the target market.
3) The average joe can buy a fine 720p screen, which is all you need for the difference to be very apparent. My local Walmart has a crappy but functional 720p 55" screen for $700.
4) Your last point is the most misinformed. Neither HDDVD nor Bluray downsample for non-HDCP displays. To get educated so you can stop spouting misinformation, search for "image constraint token" on google. Short version: the technical capacity is there, but studios have agreed not to use it until at least 2010. At which point you can whine that these technologies downsample on displays older than 4 years, which is still a valid point but a little different than what you've erroneously claimed.
Lest people think I'm a fanboy, let me list the *legitimate* reasons for waiting on HD formats:
- The format war means that any investment in players and/or media has some liklihood of being wasted money
- Bluray, in particular, uses the same poor compression technology as standard DVD, and displays a lot of the same artifacting (less extreme, because it's higher resolution and bitrate, but nevertheless there)
- Neither format has real buy-in from CE manufacturers who don't have a vested interest
- The early players available for both formats have many quirks and annoyances (an HDDVD player takes almost a minute to eject a disk when in the "off" state)
For the record, I bought a $500 HDDVD player. My rationale: I use netflix, so I'm not investing in media that may be worthless later. And even if HDDVD or both formats bomb, I'm sure I can get at least a couple of hundred dollars for it on ebay. So I'm paying maybe $300 for a year or two of a fantastic upconverting standard DVD player, with the bonus of getting to enjoy some HD stuff.
-b
I tend to agree with you. But then again, I'm sure that plenty of people said exactly the same thing when indoor plumbing replaced outhouses.
-b
Um, you seem to be complaining about a semantic difference. Everyone knows she was fired, and why. The only negative associated with being fired is what it says about you to future employers, and she will suffer from that sitgma every bit as much as one of you peons who gets fired.
Why worry about the semantics when the reality is clear to everyone?
I think the point is that there are no plans to ship games on HDDVD, which makes perfect sense because only a small percentage of 360 users will have the drive.
Since the HDDVD drive itself is basically a transport and laser, and just sends the raw bytes to the 360 for processing, it seems like it would just take a software update of the 360 itself to enable HDDVD games, should the need arise in a year or three. There's no actual movie-specific logic or hardware in the HDDVD drive; no vc-1 decoder, no surround sound processing, nothing. The drive is just like a hard drive: the 360 tells it what sector to read, the drive reads it and provides the raw data with no interpretation.
So it's not that the drive has some physical limitation that means that it can't be used for games, it's just that there are no plans to update the 360 to run games from the drive.
-b
I hate patent abuse as much as the next guy, but this seems like it's just begging for abuse.
How's this for a (new) patent abuse business model:
- Watch patent review wiki for interesting stuff
- Steal good ideas that other people have
- Instantly work on creating pre-dated "prior art" on websites, blog postings, etc
- Use shill accounts to point out the "prior art"
- Make some good cash off of other peoples' R&D
Or how's this for a "fuck with a much-hated company" mob mentality:
- Watch for patent applications from the hated company
- Instanlty work on creating pre-dated "prior art" on websits, blog postings, etc
- Post to slashdot, digg, etc, linking to the manufactured "prior art"
- Watch while thousands of tech zealots slam the patent on the wiki, citing your dishonest "prior art"
There are plenty more ways to abuse this, of course, those two just came to mind quickly and are kind of amusing.
The patent system is broken, that's for sure. But this isn't the answer. Or at least, if this is the answer, we might as well do away with patents altogether, since they will be very, very easy to dishonestly undermine. I know I'll get jumped on here, so let me ask that if you favor simply removing patents (or software patents, or whatever) from the law, please just say that and don't defend this terrible idea because it gets the outcome that you want while still pretending to support the idea of patents.
-b