For what it's worth: We would have been happy to pay a reasonable surcharge in months when we rented more DVDs. What your company has chosen to do instead is offensive and insulting.
Bah! Netflix isn't holding your movies for some preset time out of spite, they just have a queue more advanced than a FIFO, which gives less frequent users priority over more frequent users. I've been with netflix years longer than you, and I'm a moderate to heavy user, and this doesn't bother me at all.
This keeps heavy users from locking lite users out. If a lite user only returns a movie per week, then they should get first pick of the Long Wait movies. I may send back 3 a week, so not getting it the first 3 times still equals about the same 1-week wait time to both of us. Plus, it makes the profitable customers happy, which means more money for Netflix, which means my monthly fee is lower too.
If you really don't mind paying more to get more movies, as you've claimed, then just upgrade your service to the 5 per month, or whatever. That's what those options are there for.
They send us emails about everything else...but they can't bother letting us know when the terms of use have changed?
That's just legalese... They don't want to send out certified letters to every user, to make sure they have been made aware of the TOS change. e-mail is not guarateed delivery, so they can't promise you will be contacted. They'd have to send certified letters to every single user to do that.
It's the same reason that Nuclear subs are not limited by how much time they can stay underwater, but how much food they can carry.
Which also seems quite strange, because they are IN THE OCEAN, the place where many of us go to GET FOOD in the first place.
It seems just a step above trivial to install a fully functional fish catcher on a nuclear sub. With that, it would be physically possible to stay underwater and operational until the hull actually corrodes.
The way to see this stuff is with one of those old 3 meter dishes from the 80's.
Why? What important DVB-S signals are available on C-Band? It seems most everything is in Ku-Band now, which means you can get away with a MUCH smaller dish. Either a relatively tiny general-purpose 1.5m or throw-away DishNet/DirecTV dish.
The problem is that it is likely your community has laws against such things being allowed in your yard
Where do you live? I'll guess Eastern USA, or in a major city (LA, SF, etc), because pretty much everywhere else in the US is wide open, and largely free of such nonsense.
They say there was a time when people wanted to see telephone and power wires because it meant progress. Now we have to hide infrastructure underground, lest we offend the eye...
I think the eye is probably the least of it. How many people have been killed by powerlines? I know I hear about deaths regularly. A few months ago it was big news when a couple scout masters putting up a tent at Camp David were electrocuted.
As for everything else, having poles everywhere causes plenty of problems. Lots of single-car accidents from people hitting telephone poles along the road. They certainly get in the way, and need quite a bit of maintenance. Leaving equipment exposed to the elements just isn't a good idea anyhow. It seems like the telephone company was going for the cheapest short-term option, and ends up paying for it in ongoing costs forever.
Forget a stand-alone reciever. They're very inflexible, and a bit expensive for what you get.
Meanwhile, a PCI DVB-S card can be as cheap as $50, and with software decoding, you can play 4:2:2 streams, HDTV streams, free IP access from some satellites, and you don't need to worry about whether or not the reciever manufacturer will fix any bugs in it's firmware, or whether or not one reciever has an difficult to use menu system, etc.
Disclaimer: I don't have either, but I've been looking at info all around the net (user reviews, forums, etc), deciding the same thing myself, over the past few weeks.
Unfortunately, though, it's not really a next generation codec.
Actually, I'd say it's at least on-par with h.264 and could be improved in the future. VP3 had in-loop deblocking many, many years ago. It looks decent on DVD-res material down to about 500k, etc. That's all before any improvements made in the past several years.
The problem with Theora is that Xiph.org has taken YEARS and YEARS, and still doesn't even have a beta release, let alone a stable release. Remember, they started back in 2001, and still haven't accomplished anything more than porting VP3, and sticking it in an Ogg container. That's even a downgrade, since it has painfully large overhead, and Matroska is gaining in popularity because of it.
Theora strikes me as another HURD project that will never get completed.
With it's large archive of content, and it's fingers in the DVB pies, the BBC is in an excellent position to push Dirac to the forefront.
Yeah, but who the hell wants it? They're aiming for a replacement of MPEG-2, not a low-bitrate next-gen codec that could compete with MPEG-4, h.264, VC-1, etc.
libavcodec/snow looks much more promising, but work on that has stalled lately, and it really needs some optimizations and bitstream freeze as well.
1) Some companies have more blood than you think they do. 2) I am not (nor was ever) a real stock trader.
Sadly, you have not, but should also have learned:
3) The difference between a bull and a bear
I have to agree with BlackTriangle. It's obvious you don't know anything about stocks, and I hope you're at least smart enough to get out right away, before you lose everything.
People act like the stock market is a money-making machine. But truthfully, it's a lot closer to a horse race or pyramid scheme than people would like to admit.
Clearly you were modded down by a know nothing moron who doesn't have a clue about investments.
No, actually you're the know-nothing moron here, to be honest.
Click on the CID link of any post, and below the comment will be the moderation history. Clicking on yours, I see nothing. Clicking on his, I also see nothing. That means nobody modded his comment up or down, he just posts at -1 due to lots of previous bad behavior. Most trolls, flamers, et al. post at -1.
OTOH, if you click on the CID link for this comment I'm writing, you will see +1 Karma Bonus because I've been here a while, and get modded up more than down, so I post at +2 before any moderation to my posts takes place.
You should know this from reading the FAQ, which you should have gone through before doing much of anything on/. or at least before whining and complaining like a child and calling (non-existant) people morons: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm800
It's a little late to be introducing a 4:3 TV in 3.5 inches.
Agreed. Completely stupid move for the first video iPod, and absolutely insane to do it now.
Now, something where the whole face of an iPod sized box was a 16:9 HDTV display would be neat.
Umm, there's no way you're getting HDTV at that size. Figure, if they're smart, they will squeeze in the full 720x480 D1 resolution at 16/9, but there's no way they're ever getting even 1280x720 in an iPod-sized screen. Besides, with only a 60GB hard drive or so, you don't have enough storage space to hold more than a couple HD movies.
A 16:9 source such as a movie would play at 1024x576, which is no better vertically than PAL DVD.
You could easily pan-and-scan the video (ie. crop off the extreme edges) and be able to use MOST of the resolution.
It's a good thing actual movies are 24fps...
Yes, yes. I wasn't just talking about movies here.
Which will blur everything out to 480p unless you're using HDMI (or, equivalently, DVI with HDCP).
I know they're concerned about that, but I doubt they'll be so strict when push comes to shove. There's really no practical way to capture uncompressed analog 1080 material, and they'll probably work out some macrovision-esque scheme for computer monitors.
Good. Get angry and start name calling. Wonderful approach. It doesn't matter than you're completely wrong, or that you have no facts to back up your claims. Just keep name calling. That will help you out a lot.
True, you can get a bargain basement el-crapola 24" HD-TV with out a Tuner card.
I wouldn't call Samsung/Toshiba/etc "el-crapola".
Jumping up a few inches and adding a tuner will get you into the $600-$700 range.
You don't need a tuner to watch DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-ray discs, etc. 95% (guestimate) of the TV watching public, have cable or satellite service, and will have no use at all for a tuner anyhow.
Also without trying, I found that Best Buy has a 52" RCA HDTV for $1,099, and their website prices are usually higher than in-store prices: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7196 465&type=product&productCategoryId=pcmcat318000500 29&id=1112808997179 Those spending more on ultra-flat LCD/Plasma screens, aren't doing so just so they can watch HD-DVDs/Blu-ray. Counting them is like saying that people need to buy a new $50,000 luxury car to drive to their job at McDonalds...
My DVD has dts 7.1, if it is lossey my ears can't detect it.
It certainly is, and I'm quite sure you haven't done any double-blind tests to see if the uncompressed PCM audio sounds better. So this is just a completely irrational, nonsensical statement.
And what do I want advanced menus for? I want to be able to press play and watch my movie.
DVDs have a lot of extra content, and better menus would make it more interesting, and easier to use. Besides, DVDs aren't just for movies. Think of Blu-ray encylopedias, educational discs with interactive content, games, and many many more possibilites.
Actually, I believe all content on an NTSC DVD is 720x480.
Errr, ummm. Yeah, that's basically true. All DVDs an average person buys will be 720x480. However, the standard also allows for eg. 352x480 video in MPEG-1, PCM audio, etc. Still, you'll never see anything like that from a major studio, which is where most everyone buys DVDs.
If the material is widescreen, you have a higher density of lines vertically than you would if it was 4:3 material, which results in a sharper looking picture.
Not unless you've got a display that is higher-res than a TV. It really amazes me the number of television myths there are. A TV is low enough res that you can actually get close to a reasonably large one, and manually COUNT the pixels.
Also, I believe the standard is to encode the material as interlaced on the disc,
No, no, no. Just completely wrong. I'd say something like 95% of movies are just pure, 100% progressive. Nothing at all interlaced.
which is why you need progressive scan capable players or fancy line-doublers/deinterlacers to get the most out of your EDTV/HDTV.
Line-doublers have nothing to do with interlacing, and only to do with how well your TV upscales, versus how well your expensive progressive-scan DVD player upscales.
Progressive-scan players are needed because:
A) the circuitry in normal DVD players outputs each field seperately, one field after the other, rather than both fields together (even on fully progressive material).
B) things like TV shows on DVD are encoded as interlaced, and need to be deinterlaced for progressive display. You really don't get any benefit to deinterlacing if your display is a CRT or something else that can natively display interlaced video. However, it makes all the difference on things like Plasmas, LCDs, etc (EDTV).
C) some content is either fully or partially hard-telecined. That means while it is fully progressive, it's gone through the 3:2 pulldown process, and been encoded as interlaced fields. There's really no reason at all for studios to do this, but for some reason, they do... Because hard telecine patterns vary, it is very difficult to reverse, and very advanced hardware is needed.
Actually, PROPER (motion adaptive) deinterlacing is harder than "inverse telecine"/"pulldown reversal"/"3:2 pullup", but truth is, proper deinterlacing is uncommon, and simple deinterlacing is quite easy, whereas even the most simple and glitchy inverse telecine process is difficult.
I have an LCD monitor on each of 3 computers, and each one of them is only 1024x768 pixels, you insensitive clod!
I suspect you bought all three of them several years ago. LCDs sold in the past couple years are almost always higher resolution than that (except for the VERY cheap ones), and even very OLD CRTs can do much better. Besides, 1024x768 would be good enough for 720p... Hope your (old/cheap) LCD's response time is fast enough to display @60fps material without too much blur...
Besides, given that the majority of existing monitors do not support HDMI, will BD players even have a VGA output?
No, I'm certain they won't... However, consider HD-DVD/Blu-ray ROM drives for PCs, and (heavily DRMed) software players.
Yes, by far. Generally almost half what the DVD costs.
And the reason I wasn't including them in the comparison is that I've already explained how a DVD provides a significant improvement to the consumer with out a large investment. [...] If you don't have an HD TV (like the majority of consumers) then there is no advantage to HD/BlueRay over DVDs.
That isn't even a single order of magnitude more pixels - just little more than half.
I wouldn't call almost 7X "a little more than half"... That's a lot more than half. In fact, it's more than 2/3rds, and not far from 3/4ths (an order of magnitude).
If we were comparing PAL instead of NTSC the difference with HDTV would be even less.
Yes, but then you have to take into account the 20% higher refresh rate, then it all evens out to about the same ~6X improvement.
Take a look at VHS, here it is, roughly 10 years after DVDs came out, and VHS decks are finally disappearing. And DVD's had a lot of easily definable benefits to the consumer. Better picture quality, no degradation, no eaten tapes, no demagnetizing, added content, etc...
And DVDs had a lot of easily definable drawbacks to the consumer as well. Easily scratched and destroyed, needs more careful handling, extremely expensive to backup/copy (for the first several years), forced FBI warnings/trailers. No easy method to cut-out those FBI warnings/trailers. etc.
HDs and Blue Rays offer improved video quality that the majority of consumers can't currently use.
Guess what, the vast majority of consumers don't need to demand a product. A solid minority can make a product vastly profitable quite well.
So there is very little incentive for a consumer to buy a $24 HD-DVD instead of a $12 DVD if in order to get the sole added benefit of a better picture they are also required to buy a $200 deck and a $1500+ TV.
Bullshit. HDTVs start at about $400 RIGHT NOW, and are getting cheaper all the time. 50"+ HDTVs are only $1,000, so you clearly pulled $1500 out of your ass.
Also, as for features other than picture quality, you'll also have better sound (likely lossless), much more space for extras, far more advanced menu system, unscratchable discs, etc.
Last but not least, it doesn't matter that HDTVs are more expensive. In a year or two, you won't be able to buy a NON-HD TV. Unless standard TVs last forever, the market for HD content will build itself, irrespective of Blu-ray/HD-DVD. Also, don't count the percentage of HDTVs vs standard TVs, count the number of households with HDTVs. Even if the TV in your den, kitchen, bedroom, et al., is standard, you've still got an HDTV in your living room. I'd dare say a large number of people are already capable of watching HD at home, whether one of their TVs in their homes, or on their computer monitor (most can display at least 1920x1080).
I'm not saying HD's will NOT take off, I'm saying it's going to take time. And so long as they are not priced competitively with DVDs and provide an obvious improvement to the consumer, there sales will likely be slow.
Congratulations, you've managed to backpedal enough that you've said absolutely nothing at all. That's what I call +5 Insightful!
your argument would be valid if what was coming out on Blue-Ray was the exact same collection of VOB files that existed on the current DVD.
But it's not;
Then apply the same question to scratched/broken discs. I've contacted companies and tried to get a replacement of an unplayable disc. Basically, they'll *only* charge you the full retail price of the movie for a new copy, if you send them the damaged disc...
So, I have a grand total of about 5 DVDs, and no intention of ever buying more. If it wasn't for Netflix being a good solution, I wouldn't be paying for any movies at all, ever again.
How many women do you know go cliffjumping or start street racing just because of the type of car that pulled up next to her at the stop light?
No, women don't go street-racing, they're too busy talking on their cellphone as they cut-off the fully-loaded semi they didn't see comming...
Seriously, it's absolutely ridiculous to say that men are wreckless and women are not. The fact of the matter is, the two sexes just have very different forms of their own wrecklessness.
On several occasions they had the opportunity to settle for far less money, and they kept escalating and escalating the situation.
Right, what assholes. Who do they think they are, demanding their day in court and all? Believing they are innocent until proven guilty? Refusing to pay the required bribe to the company trying to use a submarine patent on them.
I mean, hey, that's the corrupt system we live under, and they should just have gone along with it.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Companies almost always take "early adopters" for granted, and introduce their products at a much higher price, to milk whatever extra money they can get out of them.
If the price doesn't drop significantly within about 6 months... THEN perhaps it will be time to look at HD-DVD players once again, and compare.
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Bah! Netflix isn't holding your movies for some preset time out of spite, they just have a queue more advanced than a FIFO, which gives less frequent users priority over more frequent users. I've been with netflix years longer than you, and I'm a moderate to heavy user, and this doesn't bother me at all.
This keeps heavy users from locking lite users out. If a lite user only returns a movie per week, then they should get first pick of the Long Wait movies. I may send back 3 a week, so not getting it the first 3 times still equals about the same 1-week wait time to both of us. Plus, it makes the profitable customers happy, which means more money for Netflix, which means my monthly fee is lower too.
If you really don't mind paying more to get more movies, as you've claimed, then just upgrade your service to the 5 per month, or whatever. That's what those options are there for.
That's just legalese... They don't want to send out certified letters to every user, to make sure they have been made aware of the TOS change. e-mail is not guarateed delivery, so they can't promise you will be contacted. They'd have to send certified letters to every single user to do that.
Which also seems quite strange, because they are IN THE OCEAN, the place where many of us go to GET FOOD in the first place.
It seems just a step above trivial to install a fully functional fish catcher on a nuclear sub. With that, it would be physically possible to stay underwater and operational until the hull actually corrodes.
Why? What important DVB-S signals are available on C-Band? It seems most everything is in Ku-Band now, which means you can get away with a MUCH smaller dish. Either a relatively tiny general-purpose 1.5m or throw-away DishNet/DirecTV dish.
Where do you live? I'll guess Eastern USA, or in a major city (LA, SF, etc), because pretty much everywhere else in the US is wide open, and largely free of such nonsense.
I think the eye is probably the least of it. How many people have been killed by powerlines? I know I hear about deaths regularly. A few months ago it was big news when a couple scout masters putting up a tent at Camp David were electrocuted.
As for everything else, having poles everywhere causes plenty of problems. Lots of single-car accidents from people hitting telephone poles along the road. They certainly get in the way, and need quite a bit of maintenance. Leaving equipment exposed to the elements just isn't a good idea anyhow. It seems like the telephone company was going for the cheapest short-term option, and ends up paying for it in ongoing costs forever.
Forget a stand-alone reciever. They're very inflexible, and a bit expensive for what you get.
Meanwhile, a PCI DVB-S card can be as cheap as $50, and with software decoding, you can play 4:2:2 streams, HDTV streams, free IP access from some satellites, and you don't need to worry about whether or not the reciever manufacturer will fix any bugs in it's firmware, or whether or not one reciever has an difficult to use menu system, etc.
Disclaimer: I don't have either, but I've been looking at info all around the net (user reviews, forums, etc), deciding the same thing myself, over the past few weeks.
Well there's a totally baseless assertion if I've ever heard one.
Actually, I'd say it's at least on-par with h.264 and could be improved in the future. VP3 had in-loop deblocking many, many years ago. It looks decent on DVD-res material down to about 500k, etc. That's all before any improvements made in the past several years.
The problem with Theora is that Xiph.org has taken YEARS and YEARS, and still doesn't even have a beta release, let alone a stable release. Remember, they started back in 2001, and still haven't accomplished anything more than porting VP3, and sticking it in an Ogg container. That's even a downgrade, since it has painfully large overhead, and Matroska is gaining in popularity because of it.
Theora strikes me as another HURD project that will never get completed.
Yeah, but who the hell wants it? They're aiming for a replacement of MPEG-2, not a low-bitrate next-gen codec that could compete with MPEG-4, h.264, VC-1, etc.
libavcodec/snow looks much more promising, but work on that has stalled lately, and it really needs some optimizations and bitstream freeze as well.
Sure are! Take a digital camera when you walk over there and look at the prices.
Sadly, you have not, but should also have learned:
3) The difference between a bull and a bear
I have to agree with BlackTriangle. It's obvious you don't know anything about stocks, and I hope you're at least smart enough to get out right away, before you lose everything.
People act like the stock market is a money-making machine. But truthfully, it's a lot closer to a horse race or pyramid scheme than people would like to admit.
No, actually you're the know-nothing moron here, to be honest.
Click on the CID link of any post, and below the comment will be the moderation history. Clicking on yours, I see nothing. Clicking on his, I also see nothing. That means nobody modded his comment up or down, he just posts at -1 due to lots of previous bad behavior. Most trolls, flamers, et al. post at -1.
OTOH, if you click on the CID link for this comment I'm writing, you will see +1 Karma Bonus because I've been here a while, and get modded up more than down, so I post at +2 before any moderation to my posts takes place.
You should know this from reading the FAQ, which you should have gone through before doing much of anything on
Agreed. Completely stupid move for the first video iPod, and absolutely insane to do it now.
Umm, there's no way you're getting HDTV at that size. Figure, if they're smart, they will squeeze in the full 720x480 D1 resolution at 16/9, but there's no way they're ever getting even 1280x720 in an iPod-sized screen. Besides, with only a 60GB hard drive or so, you don't have enough storage space to hold more than a couple HD movies.
You could easily pan-and-scan the video (ie. crop off the extreme edges) and be able to use MOST of the resolution.
Yes, yes. I wasn't just talking about movies here.
I know they're concerned about that, but I doubt they'll be so strict when push comes to shove. There's really no practical way to capture uncompressed analog 1080 material, and they'll probably work out some macrovision-esque scheme for computer monitors.
Yeah, your single anecdotal case is wonderful proof.
Amazon is a terrible comparison. You need to actually compare in-store prices, and not just when the movie has just been released.
Good. Get angry and start name calling. Wonderful approach. It doesn't matter than you're completely wrong, or that you have no facts to back up your claims. Just keep name calling. That will help you out a lot.
I wouldn't call Samsung/Toshiba/etc "el-crapola".
You don't need a tuner to watch DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-ray discs, etc. 95% (guestimate) of the TV watching public, have cable or satellite service, and will have no use at all for a tuner anyhow.
That's funny, because I just found a 50" plasma for $2,600, without even trying: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=733
Refresh my memory, 2600 is under 3000, correct?
Also without trying, I found that Best Buy has a 52" RCA HDTV for $1,099, and their website prices are usually higher than in-store prices:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=719
Those spending more on ultra-flat LCD/Plasma screens, aren't doing so just so they can watch HD-DVDs/Blu-ray. Counting them is like saying that people need to buy a new $50,000 luxury car to drive to their job at McDonalds...
It certainly is, and I'm quite sure you haven't done any double-blind tests to see if the uncompressed PCM audio sounds better. So this is just a completely irrational, nonsensical statement.
DVDs have a lot of extra content, and better menus would make it more interesting, and easier to use. Besides, DVDs aren't just for movies. Think of Blu-ray encylopedias, educational discs with interactive content, games, and many many more possibilites.
Errr, ummm. Yeah, that's basically true. All DVDs an average person buys will be 720x480. However, the standard also allows for eg. 352x480 video in MPEG-1, PCM audio, etc. Still, you'll never see anything like that from a major studio, which is where most everyone buys DVDs.
Not unless you've got a display that is higher-res than a TV. It really amazes me the number of television myths there are. A TV is low enough res that you can actually get close to a reasonably large one, and manually COUNT the pixels.
No, no, no. Just completely wrong. I'd say something like 95% of movies are just pure, 100% progressive. Nothing at all interlaced.
Line-doublers have nothing to do with interlacing, and only to do with how well your TV upscales, versus how well your expensive progressive-scan DVD player upscales.
Progressive-scan players are needed because:
A) the circuitry in normal DVD players outputs each field seperately, one field after the other, rather than both fields together (even on fully progressive material).
B) things like TV shows on DVD are encoded as interlaced, and need to be deinterlaced for progressive display. You really don't get any benefit to deinterlacing if your display is a CRT or something else that can natively display interlaced video. However, it makes all the difference on things like Plasmas, LCDs, etc (EDTV).
C) some content is either fully or partially hard-telecined. That means while it is fully progressive, it's gone through the 3:2 pulldown process, and been encoded as interlaced fields. There's really no reason at all for studios to do this, but for some reason, they do... Because hard telecine patterns vary, it is very difficult to reverse, and very advanced hardware is needed.
Actually, PROPER (motion adaptive) deinterlacing is harder than "inverse telecine"/"pulldown reversal"/"3:2 pullup", but truth is, proper deinterlacing is uncommon, and simple deinterlacing is quite easy, whereas even the most simple and glitchy inverse telecine process is difficult.
I suspect you bought all three of them several years ago. LCDs sold in the past couple years are almost always higher resolution than that (except for the VERY cheap ones), and even very OLD CRTs can do much better. Besides, 1024x768 would be good enough for 720p... Hope your (old/cheap) LCD's response time is fast enough to display @60fps material without too much blur...
No, I'm certain they won't... However, consider HD-DVD/Blu-ray ROM drives for PCs, and (heavily DRMed) software players.
Yes, by far. Generally almost half what the DVD costs.
Yes, and I've already explained how you're just simply completely wrong: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=176819&cid=14
I wouldn't call almost 7X "a little more than half"... That's a lot more than half. In fact, it's more than 2/3rds, and not far from 3/4ths (an order of magnitude).
Yes, but then you have to take into account the 20% higher refresh rate, then it all evens out to about the same ~6X improvement.
And DVDs had a lot of easily definable drawbacks to the consumer as well. Easily scratched and destroyed, needs more careful handling, extremely expensive to backup/copy (for the first several years), forced FBI warnings/trailers. No easy method to cut-out those FBI warnings/trailers. etc.
Guess what, the vast majority of consumers don't need to demand a product. A solid minority can make a product vastly profitable quite well.
Bullshit. HDTVs start at about $400 RIGHT NOW, and are getting cheaper all the time. 50"+ HDTVs are only $1,000, so you clearly pulled $1500 out of your ass.
Also, as for features other than picture quality, you'll also have better sound (likely lossless), much more space for extras, far more advanced menu system, unscratchable discs, etc.
Last but not least, it doesn't matter that HDTVs are more expensive. In a year or two, you won't be able to buy a NON-HD TV. Unless standard TVs last forever, the market for HD content will build itself, irrespective of Blu-ray/HD-DVD. Also, don't count the percentage of HDTVs vs standard TVs, count the number of households with HDTVs. Even if the TV in your den, kitchen, bedroom, et al., is standard, you've still got an HDTV in your living room. I'd dare say a large number of people are already capable of watching HD at home, whether one of their TVs in their homes, or on their computer monitor (most can display at least 1920x1080).
Congratulations, you've managed to backpedal enough that you've said absolutely nothing at all. That's what I call +5 Insightful!
Actually, VHS is far more "economically effecient" (read: cheap), yet people are willing to pay more to get "DVD's" (read: better).
Then apply the same question to scratched/broken discs. I've contacted companies and tried to get a replacement of an unplayable disc. Basically, they'll *only* charge you the full retail price of the movie for a new copy, if you send them the damaged disc...
So, I have a grand total of about 5 DVDs, and no intention of ever buying more. If it wasn't for Netflix being a good solution, I wouldn't be paying for any movies at all, ever again.
No, women don't go street-racing, they're too busy talking on their cellphone as they cut-off the fully-loaded semi they didn't see comming...
Seriously, it's absolutely ridiculous to say that men are wreckless and women are not. The fact of the matter is, the two sexes just have very different forms of their own wrecklessness.
Right, what assholes. Who do they think they are, demanding their day in court and all? Believing they are innocent until proven guilty? Refusing to pay the required bribe to the company trying to use a submarine patent on them.
I mean, hey, that's the corrupt system we live under, and they should just have gone along with it.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Companies almost always take "early adopters" for granted, and introduce their products at a much higher price, to milk whatever extra money they can get out of them.
If the price doesn't drop significantly within about 6 months... THEN perhaps it will be time to look at HD-DVD players once again, and compare.
The Afterstep method of a spiraling window border works just fine, and uses very little CPU time, without needing OpenGL acceleration.
I'd like to see the OpenGL support result in more PERFORMANCE myself. Eye-candy be dammed.
Note to self: NEVER accept an invitation to go to this guy's house...