The best option, of course, would be for every TiVo owner and non-subscriber to raise such a fuss that they back down. If normal mortals can't restore v1.3, the best bet is to make sure those features are re-implemented in v2.1.
Even if you aren't TiVo subscribers, you are TiVo customers. It might be hard to get TiVo to pay attention, but not all corporations are necessarily evil -- they might just need "encouragement," in the form of negative publicity. Or class-action lawsuits, if this is indeed illegal. (And it should be, IMHO, unless there was a clear warning that TiVo reserved the right to change the feature set at any time.)
We are now controlling the transmission.
on
TiVo Upgrade Isn't
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· Score: 1
Any service that can update itself is potentially a cause for concern, because the user is no longer in control of their hardware. Do you really want to buy something that may start to behave differently after you bought it?
When I read about the "time bombs" that were to be built-in to SDMI, this is exactly the sort of thing that came to mind. For those of you who might not be aware, the SDMI group proposed that the SDMI restrictions be implemented in several phases. They would first roll out "phase 1" to get the technology in the market, and then upgrade those players to "phase 2" when a better watermarking technology was ready. When a phase 1 MP3 player detected a phase 2 watermark in the audio, it would ask the user to install new firmware. Some suggested that when this so-called "millenium time-bomb" was activated, the player could refuse to play MP3s until the upgrade was installed. (I'm leaving out a lot of the details here. This information was revealed at MP3.com a few years ago, but I cannot locate the articles now.)
The same thing might be in the future for all of our software, if the "software as a service" model takes off. There were mumblings that in the future, different components of Microsoft Office could be licenced individually. (If you don't want the spell checker, for example, you don't have to pay for it.) Also note that Microsoft wants people (or at least corporations) to start paying yearly subscription fees for their software, instead of purchasing it outright. What happens if they change their pricing scheme? Or decide that they're going to start renting the spell checker, grammar checker, and thesaurus as a bundle, instead of offering them individually?
The solution is simple: become a highly-paid celebrity programmer. Watch out for me in a few years on the cover of People. Everyone will want me in all my geekish charm. Muscular? No, but I write some mean C.
This DVD has the interesting feature of having two sets of English subtitiles -- there are the regular subtitles that reflect what the actors say, and there is another set of subtitles that gives the original literal Japanese->English translation. You can watch the movie in dubbed English with the literal English subtitles to see just how much they differ.
It's been a few months, but I seem to recall that the two translations were pretty close. There were, however, several instances of a character saying something in English that was completely different from the literal translation. But many were more subtle, such as the "forest spirit" becoming the "deer god."
On the other hand, what guarantee is there that the subtitles are any good? One of my Chinese-speaking friends has commented that sometimes even the subtitles on Chinese movies aren't very accurate.
I wouldn't just roll over when they're trying to pass the global DMCA. It doesn't matter to me that the pirate shops in China will be able to stay open. What's important is that a law like this will be used for evil purposes by corporations that can't see beyond the dollar signs dancing in front of their eyes. "Here, RIAA, take some ammunition so you can go bully foreign countries into doing your bidding. It's okay, because we'll still have China." Does that make much sense?
The next step will be to adopt a pay-per-use scheme for laws. In order to read the laws, you'd have to pay a fee. But since the legal firm would obviously want a cut every time someone was charged with breaking the law, you'd have to pay a licence fee if you were planning to break the law, too.
Man: "Hi, I'd like to buy one 'grand theft auto', please."
Officer: "Okay, that will be $19.95. Hey, wait a just a minute... what are you planning to do with a grand theft auto licence?"
Man: "Well I already have one in my reference library at home, but I wanted to have one for work, too. It's illegal to make a duplicate of a copyrighted work, you know."
Officer: "Very well. Here's you're grand theft auto licence."
Officer: "I'm writing you a ticket for driving over the speed limit."
Woman: "I'm sorry, but I don't have a licence for the speeding law."
Officer: "You don't? Well perhaps I should charge you with copyright infringement instead? Where did you get permission to speed? Did you download an illegal copy of the law from Napster?"
Woman: "I was actually using a GPL'ed version of the speeding law. There is no fine for breaking that one, and it's freely available on the internet."
Officer: "What do you mean, GPL'ed laws?"
Woman: "Well since it's illegal to have a monopoly, the government had to open up the law licencing business to competition. Since the licence fees on your laws were so high, I decided to buy someone else's laws."
James Bond had a licence to kill, didn't he? Maybe they were trying to tell us something.
I guess we're going to have to start trading the text of the legal code on Gnutella.
Windows 95 came with a CD player application that used those IDs. It stored track name information in a file called cdplayer.ini. You had to enter the track names manually (24x7 internet access was uncommon back in 1994, so using a remote database wouldn't have made much sense.) But CDDB is essentially a giant cdplayer.ini that can be accessed from the internet.
Well our economy is based almost purely based on profit. If there was no profit to be made, there wouldn't be any businesses supplying us.
Rather than saying that's just the way things are and everything would fall apart if there weren't so many ways to get rich, I'd be more inclined to say that we should look for a new system that places less of a focus on "whoever has the most money wins." Of all of the political systems that have existed (and will exist in the future), each has its own advantages and disadvantages. The American system is far from the perfect system. (I personally dislike how big business seems to run the show, and even the "opinion" of the common people is strongly influenced by the media--also owned by big business.) There's a lot of room for improvement, I believe.
Here's another one I found a couple days ago. According to an article in Wired, it sounds like Microsoft is developing their own version of SDMI. (Article here.) Their proposed scheme will listen for watermarks in all of the music you play, and refuse to play any watermarked music that doesn't have a digital signature attached. Of course, digital signatures can only be included with WMA files, so don't plan on playing any watermarked MP3 music on Windows 2006. Fortunately, this is just a Microsoft Research project, so it's not going to appear in an operating system any time soon. It's a bit scary how close this gets to forcing everyone to use WMA for much of their commercial music needs. I'm sure they'd never take it that far, though.
In order for people not to but it, they will have to know why they shouldn't. Microsoft is pretty gung-ho about digital rights management -- in a future version of Windows Media, they'll proabably have an option "don't play this content unless monitor is encrypted." They may even go so far as they're doing with XP (so I've heard) -- to get a "designed for XP" logo, your sound card needs to support the encrypted "secure audio path." If this rumour is true, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that Windows 2006 will require a "secure video path" as well. You won't be able to play certain things without the encrypted monitor, so everyone will buy new encrypted monitors.
So can we do something to prevent this? What incentive does the average consumer have to stick with a standard monitor? If Linux is more common by that time, can we design something into it that is incompatible with the protection? (i.e. have the kernel fail to recognize the encryption handshake, meaning that in order to use Linux, you'll need an unencrypted display.)
We need to do the following:
- Avoid controversial lawsuits.
- Appeal to Joe Average, not just Joe Geek or Joe Free-Rights-Advocate.
Since these corporations own the mainstream media too, they'll paint us all as evil hackers -- that's something which must be avoided.
What's even more wonderful is that since now they've convinced the courts to make Napster filter its service, they can send threatening letters to everyone else. CuteMX, Scour, iMesh and Audiogalaxy have already caved, now Aimster is in trouble. (I'm not sure which were shut down or filtered voluntarily and which took "convincing".) Soon, you won't be able to download any major music from the internet. All that means is that none of those bands will be getting my business. What I've learned from my CD purchasing experiences is that you should always try before you buy. (and those little listening stations at the record stores don't count.) Several years ago, I got sick of wasting money on CDs, and stopped buying them. Napster changes that -- and I know many others who would agree.
What would happen if someone set a service like this outside of the U.S, where they wouldn't have to worry so much about the RIAA. Or would they have to filter out all U.S. traffic, like JumpTV does? (see the recent story about iCraveTV II)
It's also unfortunate that as the lack of big label music drives people away from these services, the amount of lesser-known stuff decreases too.
I wonder what a service like Fairtunes can do to get more business. Given the low value of donations to artists so far (just over $9000 total, with the 4th higheset-paid person being Linus Torvalds at $180) I wouldn't really say that it's been a success. That kind of thing would work a lot better if it were integrated with Winamp, BearShare, or some other such thing. (It should still be voluntary, so you can pay more for songs you like better, but pop up a little reminder once a month, giving a list of songs you've downloaded or played)
I have come to the conclusion that Mr. Merriam and Mr. Webster were computer programmers in a past life. A spade is "a spade-shaped instrument." They have certainly mastered recursion.
I guess it's the same way marketers think product placement works in movies. I could just be weird, but I find that advertisements in movies detract from the experience. When the hero pauses to takes a drink of cool, refreshing Pepsi before running off to save the world, it serves as a jarring reminder that you are just watching a movie and that you just saw an advertisement. Advertisements are harder to notice when done well, but often it's just too obvious. Charlie's Angels and Austin Powers tried to shove a brand name in your face every few minutes. On the other hand, while you probably remember the Nokia phones from The Matrix, that placement was much more subtle and didn't detract from the "illusion." You've heard of bad acting? Bad product placement can be just as annoying.
I saw a comment from someone at Survivor saying that people don't even notice the product placement in that show. I can't be the only one who has wondered how much of that million dollars came from Mountain Dew, Adidas, Doritos, and Target.
I read an article a couple of weeks ago saying that the RIAA was increasing funding to their "lobbying" efforts -- aimed both at the media and at "key political figures." (So in other words, they're buying popular opinion, and buying laws. That's where your CD dollar goes.) This web site must be a result of that.
Not to be paraniod or anything, but I have to wonder if the "skip forward 30 seconds" feature on the Replay TV will be removed in a future "upgrade." I heard a theory that TiVo can't add the feature because it would upset their corporate backers. Replay added the feature before getting corporate investors. (Other comments in this story mention that commercial skip was available on TiVo only as a hidden feature, which has since been removed.)
I had always been told that April Fool's ended at noon anyway... (News outlets in my home town would air a fake story throughout the morning, and not reveal it as a hoax until noon: the supposed end of April Fool's.)
Of course, what kind of geek gets up before noon on a Sunday.:)
So, just like software and CDs, when you buy the seed, you don't own it, you're just licencing it. In 20 years, will we all be trading the genetic code for houseplants in underground newsgroups? I can see it now... the SPAA (Seed Producers' Association of America) suing startup company Plantster for billions of dollars in lost "lawn licence" fees.:-)
A better solution would be to go to a judge and say, "Do you honestly think a non-profit internet standards organization is trying to rip off some little company? Is allowing domain names to be entered in any language such a brillint and inimaginable innovation that it deserves legal protection? Given the obvious demand for such a system, is there any way we could have done it better?"
Okay, so the U.S. legal system works nothing like that. After all, if they used common sense, we wouldn't need lawyers.
I guess I should have put in a humour disclaimer.:) I was trying to imply that since XP will be a consumer OS as well as a business OS, it might not look 8 times as good for your average consumer. (Yeah, there's the movie maker idea, the media player, and so on... but again, it was supposed to be funny... ah, well.)
At least with OS X you can see why it needs so much processing power to do all the animations and stuff... but what exactly has been added in XP that requires 8 times more memory than 95 did? The interface has barely changed at all since then. If I'm going to have to buy a fancy new computer to run this thing, my windows better schloop into a little icon like they do in OS X!
Another tip if you ever notice Windows swapping: earlier versions of Windows can really sound pretty bad if you're using the default swapfile settings and have less than 5% of your disk space free. I can't say much about swapping performance in 2000, because I like keeping my disk above 10% free -- but I do have 128MB of RAM, and notice that Windows typically uses all 128 MB with the number of programs I typically have running. (Right now, for example, Explorer is taking 5 MB, Internet Explorer is hogging 21 MB, 7 for Winamp, 5 for ad filter software, 4 for ICQ [that's ICQ 98: a "lite" version])
Re:This is a page from the Microsoft trick book
on
XBox Tidbits
·
· Score: 1
This is a page from any smart corproation's trick book. If I were a shareholder of Microsoft and they just sat around doing nothing to promote their upcoming product (even one that's a few months from release), I wouldn't be happy.
I also suspect that the buying patterns of individuals are a bit different from those of corporations. I'm not sure what the target age group is, but will the younger ones be more likely to use a "wait and see" approach or a "instant gratification" approach?
I don't see many signs of the PS2's sales being impacted (they just hit the 10 million mark ahead of schedule -- and face it, Sony's hype machine was rolling months in advance, too.) Nintendo, whose current console is next to last in market share, doesn't seem to be doing anything to promote their upcoming system. This sounds to me like damage control -- someone just realized a bit late that they're being severely out-marketed. Do you think Nintendo will wait until a week before release to send marketing material to retailers?
I'm sure if they were really trying to deceive us, they would have checked the images more throughly. The anti-aliasing error was pretty obvious. (The lighting looks all wrong, too, as if the character pasted on top was originally under indoor lighting.)
Slashdot Mirror
The best option, of course, would be for every TiVo owner and non-subscriber to raise such a fuss that they back down. If normal mortals can't restore v1.3, the best bet is to make sure those features are re-implemented in v2.1.
Even if you aren't TiVo subscribers, you are TiVo customers. It might be hard to get TiVo to pay attention, but not all corporations are necessarily evil -- they might just need "encouragement," in the form of negative publicity. Or class-action lawsuits, if this is indeed illegal. (And it should be, IMHO, unless there was a clear warning that TiVo reserved the right to change the feature set at any time.)
Any service that can update itself is potentially a cause for concern, because the user is no longer in control of their hardware. Do you really want to buy something that may start to behave differently after you bought it?
:-)
When I read about the "time bombs" that were to be built-in to SDMI, this is exactly the sort of thing that came to mind. For those of you who might not be aware, the SDMI group proposed that the SDMI restrictions be implemented in several phases. They would first roll out "phase 1" to get the technology in the market, and then upgrade those players to "phase 2" when a better watermarking technology was ready. When a phase 1 MP3 player detected a phase 2 watermark in the audio, it would ask the user to install new firmware. Some suggested that when this so-called "millenium time-bomb" was activated, the player could refuse to play MP3s until the upgrade was installed. (I'm leaving out a lot of the details here. This information was revealed at MP3.com a few years ago, but I cannot locate the articles now.)
The same thing might be in the future for all of our software, if the "software as a service" model takes off. There were mumblings that in the future, different components of Microsoft Office could be licenced individually. (If you don't want the spell checker, for example, you don't have to pay for it.) Also note that Microsoft wants people (or at least corporations) to start paying yearly subscription fees for their software, instead of purchasing it outright. What happens if they change their pricing scheme? Or decide that they're going to start renting the spell checker, grammar checker, and thesaurus as a bundle, instead of offering them individually?
Of course, I'm probably just paranoid.
The solution is simple: become a highly-paid celebrity programmer. Watch out for me in a few years on the cover of People. Everyone will want me in all my geekish charm. Muscular? No, but I write some mean C.
This DVD has the interesting feature of having two sets of English subtitiles -- there are the regular subtitles that reflect what the actors say, and there is another set of subtitles that gives the original literal Japanese->English translation. You can watch the movie in dubbed English with the literal English subtitles to see just how much they differ.
It's been a few months, but I seem to recall that the two translations were pretty close. There were, however, several instances of a character saying something in English that was completely different from the literal translation. But many were more subtle, such as the "forest spirit" becoming the "deer god."
On the other hand, what guarantee is there that the subtitles are any good? One of my Chinese-speaking friends has commented that sometimes even the subtitles on Chinese movies aren't very accurate.
I wouldn't just roll over when they're trying to pass the global DMCA. It doesn't matter to me that the pirate shops in China will be able to stay open. What's important is that a law like this will be used for evil purposes by corporations that can't see beyond the dollar signs dancing in front of their eyes. "Here, RIAA, take some ammunition so you can go bully foreign countries into doing your bidding. It's okay, because we'll still have China." Does that make much sense?
The next step will be to adopt a pay-per-use scheme for laws. In order to read the laws, you'd have to pay a fee. But since the legal firm would obviously want a cut every time someone was charged with breaking the law, you'd have to pay a licence fee if you were planning to break the law, too.
Man: "Hi, I'd like to buy one 'grand theft auto', please."
Officer: "Okay, that will be $19.95. Hey, wait a just a minute... what are you planning to do with a grand theft auto licence?"
Man: "Well I already have one in my reference library at home, but I wanted to have one for work, too. It's illegal to make a duplicate of a copyrighted work, you know."
Officer: "Very well. Here's you're grand theft auto licence."
Officer: "I'm writing you a ticket for driving over the speed limit."
Woman: "I'm sorry, but I don't have a licence for the speeding law."
Officer: "You don't? Well perhaps I should charge you with copyright infringement instead? Where did you get permission to speed? Did you download an illegal copy of the law from Napster?"
Woman: "I was actually using a GPL'ed version of the speeding law. There is no fine for breaking that one, and it's freely available on the internet."
Officer: "What do you mean, GPL'ed laws?"
Woman: "Well since it's illegal to have a monopoly, the government had to open up the law licencing business to competition. Since the licence fees on your laws were so high, I decided to buy someone else's laws."
James Bond had a licence to kill, didn't he? Maybe they were trying to tell us something.
I guess we're going to have to start trading the text of the legal code on Gnutella.
Windows 95 came with a CD player application that used those IDs. It stored track name information in a file called cdplayer.ini. You had to enter the track names manually (24x7 internet access was uncommon back in 1994, so using a remote database wouldn't have made much sense.) But CDDB is essentially a giant cdplayer.ini that can be accessed from the internet.
Well our economy is based almost purely based on profit. If there was no profit to be made, there wouldn't be any businesses supplying us.
Rather than saying that's just the way things are and everything would fall apart if there weren't so many ways to get rich, I'd be more inclined to say that we should look for a new system that places less of a focus on "whoever has the most money wins." Of all of the political systems that have existed (and will exist in the future), each has its own advantages and disadvantages. The American system is far from the perfect system. (I personally dislike how big business seems to run the show, and even the "opinion" of the common people is strongly influenced by the media--also owned by big business.) There's a lot of room for improvement, I believe.
Here's another one I found a couple days ago. According to an article in Wired, it sounds like Microsoft is developing their own version of SDMI. (Article here.) Their proposed scheme will listen for watermarks in all of the music you play, and refuse to play any watermarked music that doesn't have a digital signature attached. Of course, digital signatures can only be included with WMA files, so don't plan on playing any watermarked MP3 music on Windows 2006. Fortunately, this is just a Microsoft Research project, so it's not going to appear in an operating system any time soon. It's a bit scary how close this gets to forcing everyone to use WMA for much of their commercial music needs. I'm sure they'd never take it that far, though.
In order for people not to but it, they will have to know why they shouldn't. Microsoft is pretty gung-ho about digital rights management -- in a future version of Windows Media, they'll proabably have an option "don't play this content unless monitor is encrypted." They may even go so far as they're doing with XP (so I've heard) -- to get a "designed for XP" logo, your sound card needs to support the encrypted "secure audio path." If this rumour is true, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that Windows 2006 will require a "secure video path" as well. You won't be able to play certain things without the encrypted monitor, so everyone will buy new encrypted monitors.
So can we do something to prevent this? What incentive does the average consumer have to stick with a standard monitor? If Linux is more common by that time, can we design something into it that is incompatible with the protection? (i.e. have the kernel fail to recognize the encryption handshake, meaning that in order to use Linux, you'll need an unencrypted display.)
We need to do the following:
- Avoid controversial lawsuits.
- Appeal to Joe Average, not just Joe Geek or Joe Free-Rights-Advocate.
Since these corporations own the mainstream media too, they'll paint us all as evil hackers -- that's something which must be avoided.
What's even more wonderful is that since now they've convinced the courts to make Napster filter its service, they can send threatening letters to everyone else. CuteMX, Scour, iMesh and Audiogalaxy have already caved, now Aimster is in trouble. (I'm not sure which were shut down or filtered voluntarily and which took "convincing".) Soon, you won't be able to download any major music from the internet. All that means is that none of those bands will be getting my business. What I've learned from my CD purchasing experiences is that you should always try before you buy. (and those little listening stations at the record stores don't count.) Several years ago, I got sick of wasting money on CDs, and stopped buying them. Napster changes that -- and I know many others who would agree.
What would happen if someone set a service like this outside of the U.S, where they wouldn't have to worry so much about the RIAA. Or would they have to filter out all U.S. traffic, like JumpTV does? (see the recent story about iCraveTV II)
It's also unfortunate that as the lack of big label music drives people away from these services, the amount of lesser-known stuff decreases too.
I wonder what a service like Fairtunes can do to get more business. Given the low value of donations to artists so far (just over $9000 total, with the 4th higheset-paid person being Linus Torvalds at $180) I wouldn't really say that it's been a success. That kind of thing would work a lot better if it were integrated with Winamp, BearShare, or some other such thing. (It should still be voluntary, so you can pay more for songs you like better, but pop up a little reminder once a month, giving a list of songs you've downloaded or played)
I have come to the conclusion that Mr. Merriam and Mr. Webster were computer programmers in a past life. A spade is "a spade-shaped instrument." They have certainly mastered recursion.
So if I use 6,150,775 LEDs, does the patent not apply? :-)
I guess it's the same way marketers think product placement works in movies. I could just be weird, but I find that advertisements in movies detract from the experience. When the hero pauses to takes a drink of cool, refreshing Pepsi before running off to save the world, it serves as a jarring reminder that you are just watching a movie and that you just saw an advertisement. Advertisements are harder to notice when done well, but often it's just too obvious. Charlie's Angels and Austin Powers tried to shove a brand name in your face every few minutes. On the other hand, while you probably remember the Nokia phones from The Matrix, that placement was much more subtle and didn't detract from the "illusion." You've heard of bad acting? Bad product placement can be just as annoying.
I saw a comment from someone at Survivor saying that people don't even notice the product placement in that show. I can't be the only one who has wondered how much of that million dollars came from Mountain Dew, Adidas, Doritos, and Target.
I read an article a couple of weeks ago saying that the RIAA was increasing funding to their "lobbying" efforts -- aimed both at the media and at "key political figures." (So in other words, they're buying popular opinion, and buying laws. That's where your CD dollar goes.) This web site must be a result of that.
Not to be paraniod or anything, but I have to wonder if the "skip forward 30 seconds" feature on the Replay TV will be removed in a future "upgrade." I heard a theory that TiVo can't add the feature because it would upset their corporate backers. Replay added the feature before getting corporate investors. (Other comments in this story mention that commercial skip was available on TiVo only as a hidden feature, which has since been removed.)
I had always been told that April Fool's ended at noon anyway... (News outlets in my home town would air a fake story throughout the morning, and not reveal it as a hoax until noon: the supposed end of April Fool's.)
:)
Of course, what kind of geek gets up before noon on a Sunday.
So, just like software and CDs, when you buy the seed, you don't own it, you're just licencing it. In 20 years, will we all be trading the genetic code for houseplants in underground newsgroups? I can see it now... the SPAA (Seed Producers' Association of America) suing startup company Plantster for billions of dollars in lost "lawn licence" fees. :-)
A better solution would be to go to a judge and say, "Do you honestly think a non-profit internet standards organization is trying to rip off some little company? Is allowing domain names to be entered in any language such a brillint and inimaginable innovation that it deserves legal protection? Given the obvious demand for such a system, is there any way we could have done it better?"
Okay, so the U.S. legal system works nothing like that. After all, if they used common sense, we wouldn't need lawyers.
I guess I should have put in a humour disclaimer. :) I was trying to imply that since XP will be a consumer OS as well as a business OS, it might not look 8 times as good for your average consumer. (Yeah, there's the movie maker idea, the media player, and so on... but again, it was supposed to be funny... ah, well.)
At least with OS X you can see why it needs so much processing power to do all the animations and stuff... but what exactly has been added in XP that requires 8 times more memory than 95 did? The interface has barely changed at all since then. If I'm going to have to buy a fancy new computer to run this thing, my windows better schloop into a little icon like they do in OS X!
Another tip if you ever notice Windows swapping: earlier versions of Windows can really sound pretty bad if you're using the default swapfile settings and have less than 5% of your disk space free. I can't say much about swapping performance in 2000, because I like keeping my disk above 10% free -- but I do have 128MB of RAM, and notice that Windows typically uses all 128 MB with the number of programs I typically have running. (Right now, for example, Explorer is taking 5 MB, Internet Explorer is hogging 21 MB, 7 for Winamp, 5 for ad filter software, 4 for ICQ [that's ICQ 98: a "lite" version])
This is a page from any smart corproation's trick book. If I were a shareholder of Microsoft and they just sat around doing nothing to promote their upcoming product (even one that's a few months from release), I wouldn't be happy.
I also suspect that the buying patterns of individuals are a bit different from those of corporations. I'm not sure what the target age group is, but will the younger ones be more likely to use a "wait and see" approach or a "instant gratification" approach?
I don't see many signs of the PS2's sales being impacted (they just hit the 10 million mark ahead of schedule -- and face it, Sony's hype machine was rolling months in advance, too.) Nintendo, whose current console is next to last in market share, doesn't seem to be doing anything to promote their upcoming system. This sounds to me like damage control -- someone just realized a bit late that they're being severely out-marketed. Do you think Nintendo will wait until a week before release to send marketing material to retailers?
I'm sure if they were really trying to deceive us, they would have checked the images more throughly. The anti-aliasing error was pretty obvious. (The lighting looks all wrong, too, as if the character pasted on top was originally under indoor lighting.)