The current status is that there are all manner of ways to get on the database without actually committing a crime. You can be arrested but not charged, you can be charged but subsequently found innocent, you can have your DNA "voluntarily" taken for all sorts of wide-sweeping investigations and so on. You can even have your DNA taken for elimination purposes as the victim of a crime.
The law, and indeed common sense, says that if you're not convicted of a crime, you shouldn't be treated like you've performed one. So what the Judge is really saying here is that the current composition of the database is a legal anomaly that should be cleared up. Either you can chuck away quite a lot of that data as unreasonable on Civil Liberties grounds, or if it's actually as useful as the Police claim, then the 'fair' solution is to put _everyone_ on there, whether they happen to have been attacked by someone or not.
Either one or the other, and it's up to the politicians, not the judges to decide which.
You gave Sony all the personal information they'd want to create your PSN login. Sony wrote the OS that your PS3 is running. While connected to Home or any other PS3 online service it is securely communicating with their servers and verifying that you've not done anything to remove unwanted 'features' from that OS - they have the perfectly good reason that they're stopping cheats.
None of the above is hidden in a "rootkit", because all of it you agreed to when you signed up for a PSN account, and it's the same for 360 owners with XBox Live. If you're the sort of person who doesn't trust Sony with your personal details, you'd be nuts to connect a PS3 to the internet. If you're not nuts anyway.
In terms of the songs on them, Californication is my favorite RHCP record by a long way. But the way all the dynamic range is crushed out of it is infamous, so I'm not going to run round giving Rubin the credit.
If the widget was going to cost £70, that would be great. However, I've read it will be £150-£200, i.e. as much as a standalone PVR.
And yes, after chatting with Sky, Ofcom have refused to give Freeview any more bandwidth than they've already got, unless they go bid for it on the open market.
He can recieve Freeview. That makes it a luckier area than mine; we've pretty much been told that it won't start working until after they've turned off the analogue signal, if at all.
I don't think it will generate a huge amount of interest here in the UK. We don't have any HD channels on Freeview, and won't be getting any, either, if Sky get their way with Ofcom.
If it's only doing standard def, then there are standalone boxes for that price with included hard drives bigger than the one in the PS3.
Don't worry, there is no agreed standard for HD broadcasting over the air in the UK yet, either. Much of the rest of Europe has decided on DVB-T, but over here we can't do that for fear of offending Rupert Murdoch, who is currently raking in as a monopoly supplier of HD broadcasting.
Right now, this is going to be a £200 twin-tuner PVR that only does standard-def. And you can buy those, standalone, with much larger hard-drives for that price without having to stop playing games to use it.
But that's the stupid thing about this. A properly mastered CD has all the audio quality you need to push most stereos. What makes SACD sound great isn't the extra sampling headroom to ensure that noises dogs can hear make it through, but that, as a product aimed squarely at the audiophile, they didn't do this kind of compression crap to it.
They're certainly 'small c' conservative - how many times do Exposition characters have to tell our protagonist that humans' hunger for exploration and new things is what makes us unique?
Anyone wanting to make comments about the political opinions of these people invading a developing planet in order to steal its resources while claiming that they're actually bringing order is on their own, however...
Forget Mexico, when was the last time you saw aliens blow up anything in the flyover states? NYC, Washington, LA, maybe SF or Vegas if they fancy a change. That's about it.
Personally, the news that Michael Bay won't be making a Transformers 2 is the best thing to come out of this whole deal, and I've only got a HD-DVD drive.
I can't speak for the Grandparent, but HD-DVD won me over by a combination of being a format I could afford to purchase, and having films out that I wanted to watch when I decided last Christmas. It did rather help that I already had an XBox 360, so the add-on drive was a shoe-in at 1/8th the price of the only UK-spec Blu-Ray player at the time.
What I don't get is why everyone thinks it's Microsoft handing the money over. Microsoft's media division is a billion in the hole thanks to the reliability problems with the 360, and under pretty heavy pressure to post a profit this financial year. Meanwhile, Toshiba's financials show they made over a billion in PROFIT last year.
Furthermore, they've got a lot more to lose than MS, who I'll agree would like to give Sony a black eye, but nevertheless have their VC-1 codec on both formats and could turn out a BluRay add-on drive for the 360 in short order if they thought it was in their interests to do so. Tosh, however, have a lot of the HD-DVD patents and a big stack of players to sell.
Money has changed hands, although I believe it's in the form of the consortium paying their marketing budget for their releases, rather than a straight cheque or two. I don't think it's Microsoft's cash, though.
Oh, absolutely. The PS3 is definitely powerful enough to run 1.1 spec; it's the processing in standalone players that the chip manufacturer has explicitly stated can't do it (because they've since launched a new, more powerful and expensive one where that's the main bullet-point).
It's an interesting quirk of the 1.1 deadline that you're allowed to carry on making models that initially shipped before the cut-off date, which is why Sony and Samsung both have new low-end models coming out a month before.
That, and the original poster seems to think it's strange you can sell twice as many units when you seperate your films into two releases. Wow, go Sony.
By value, the total sales for Matrix and Pirates films that week were near-identical.
It's not fixable in firmware, sorry. The reason the HD-DVD drive is nice and quiet, unlike the internal one, is that it's slower. Too slow to play games that are written for the internal drive from.
So while it's presumably possible to build a new 360 with a fast drive in, we won't be doing it with our current drives. It'd be nice if they let us use it for the various media stuff the 360 will do, though - having to put WMVs and music in the internal drive is annoying.
I know where you're coming from, but right now we have ISPs whining left and right about things like the BBC's iPlayer bringing P2P to the masses at lower bitrates than basic xvid releases that torrents and Usenet carry. If you think your ISP is going to be providing you with 30Gb movies that download in a reasonable timeframe then you've got a long wait.
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The current status is that there are all manner of ways to get on the database without actually committing a crime. You can be arrested but not charged, you can be charged but subsequently found innocent, you can have your DNA "voluntarily" taken for all sorts of wide-sweeping investigations and so on. You can even have your DNA taken for elimination purposes as the victim of a crime.
The law, and indeed common sense, says that if you're not convicted of a crime, you shouldn't be treated like you've performed one. So what the Judge is really saying here is that the current composition of the database is a legal anomaly that should be cleared up. Either you can chuck away quite a lot of that data as unreasonable on Civil Liberties grounds, or if it's actually as useful as the Police claim, then the 'fair' solution is to put _everyone_ on there, whether they happen to have been attacked by someone or not.
Either one or the other, and it's up to the politicians, not the judges to decide which.
Why would Home need to be a "rootkit"?
You gave Sony all the personal information they'd want to create your PSN login. Sony wrote the OS that your PS3 is running. While connected to Home or any other PS3 online service it is securely communicating with their servers and verifying that you've not done anything to remove unwanted 'features' from that OS - they have the perfectly good reason that they're stopping cheats.
None of the above is hidden in a "rootkit", because all of it you agreed to when you signed up for a PSN account, and it's the same for 360 owners with XBox Live. If you're the sort of person who doesn't trust Sony with your personal details, you'd be nuts to connect a PS3 to the internet. If you're not nuts anyway.
In terms of the songs on them, Californication is my favorite RHCP record by a long way. But the way all the dynamic range is crushed out of it is infamous, so I'm not going to run round giving Rubin the credit.
Because they'd rather charge you extra to have that as an option, still.
Do I feel foolish. Sorry...
If the widget was going to cost £70, that would be great. However, I've read it will be £150-£200, i.e. as much as a standalone PVR.
And yes, after chatting with Sky, Ofcom have refused to give Freeview any more bandwidth than they've already got, unless they go bid for it on the open market.
He can recieve Freeview. That makes it a luckier area than mine; we've pretty much been told that it won't start working until after they've turned off the analogue signal, if at all.
I don't think it will generate a huge amount of interest here in the UK. We don't have any HD channels on Freeview, and won't be getting any, either, if Sky get their way with Ofcom.
If it's only doing standard def, then there are standalone boxes for that price with included hard drives bigger than the one in the PS3.
Don't worry, there is no agreed standard for HD broadcasting over the air in the UK yet, either. Much of the rest of Europe has decided on DVB-T, but over here we can't do that for fear of offending Rupert Murdoch, who is currently raking in as a monopoly supplier of HD broadcasting.
Right now, this is going to be a £200 twin-tuner PVR that only does standard-def. And you can buy those, standalone, with much larger hard-drives for that price without having to stop playing games to use it.
iTunes will normalise volume levels for you, and Audacity will actually renormalise the raw file. You could try one of those.
But that's the stupid thing about this. A properly mastered CD has all the audio quality you need to push most stereos. What makes SACD sound great isn't the extra sampling headroom to ensure that noises dogs can hear make it through, but that, as a product aimed squarely at the audiophile, they didn't do this kind of compression crap to it.
Really? I'm not inconvenienced by it, because I know where my amplifier's 'midnight mode' is. Many DVD players can do it at that end, too.
Compressing the dynamic range for people who aren't in a position to cope with it is a hell of a lot easier than uncompressing it again.
CDs hold the capacity for great sound quality, yes. But not if you crank the master this far, crushing all the dynamic range.
They're certainly 'small c' conservative - how many times do Exposition characters have to tell our protagonist that humans' hunger for exploration and new things is what makes us unique?
Anyone wanting to make comments about the political opinions of these people invading a developing planet in order to steal its resources while claiming that they're actually bringing order is on their own, however...
Forget Mexico, when was the last time you saw aliens blow up anything in the flyover states? NYC, Washington, LA, maybe SF or Vegas if they fancy a change. That's about it.
I swear a lot more when I'm drunk. Which has to be good for at least Alanis Morrisette levels of irony.
Personally, the news that Michael Bay won't be making a Transformers 2 is the best thing to come out of this whole deal, and I've only got a HD-DVD drive.
I can't speak for the Grandparent, but HD-DVD won me over by a combination of being a format I could afford to purchase, and having films out that I wanted to watch when I decided last Christmas. It did rather help that I already had an XBox 360, so the add-on drive was a shoe-in at 1/8th the price of the only UK-spec Blu-Ray player at the time.
What I don't get is why everyone thinks it's Microsoft handing the money over. Microsoft's media division is a billion in the hole thanks to the reliability problems with the 360, and under pretty heavy pressure to post a profit this financial year. Meanwhile, Toshiba's financials show they made over a billion in PROFIT last year.
Furthermore, they've got a lot more to lose than MS, who I'll agree would like to give Sony a black eye, but nevertheless have their VC-1 codec on both formats and could turn out a BluRay add-on drive for the 360 in short order if they thought it was in their interests to do so. Tosh, however, have a lot of the HD-DVD patents and a big stack of players to sell.
Money has changed hands, although I believe it's in the form of the consortium paying their marketing budget for their releases, rather than a straight cheque or two. I don't think it's Microsoft's cash, though.
Oh, absolutely. The PS3 is definitely powerful enough to run 1.1 spec; it's the processing in standalone players that the chip manufacturer has explicitly stated can't do it (because they've since launched a new, more powerful and expensive one where that's the main bullet-point).
It's an interesting quirk of the 1.1 deadline that you're allowed to carry on making models that initially shipped before the cut-off date, which is why Sony and Samsung both have new low-end models coming out a month before.
Because Sony didn't offer financial incentives to Fox and Disney to go BluRay-exclusive at all, no.
Oh, wait. There was that bit where they were mastering, pressing and distributing the titles for free. Oops.
Really? I remember hearing that about Gamecube discs, but not 360 ones. How does the drive cope when asked to play DVDs and CDs for other stuff, then?
That, and the original poster seems to think it's strange you can sell twice as many units when you seperate your films into two releases. Wow, go Sony.
By value, the total sales for Matrix and Pirates films that week were near-identical.
It's not fixable in firmware, sorry. The reason the HD-DVD drive is nice and quiet, unlike the internal one, is that it's slower. Too slow to play games that are written for the internal drive from.
So while it's presumably possible to build a new 360 with a fast drive in, we won't be doing it with our current drives. It'd be nice if they let us use it for the various media stuff the 360 will do, though - having to put WMVs and music in the internal drive is annoying.
I know where you're coming from, but right now we have ISPs whining left and right about things like the BBC's iPlayer bringing P2P to the masses at lower bitrates than basic xvid releases that torrents and Usenet carry. If you think your ISP is going to be providing you with 30Gb movies that download in a reasonable timeframe then you've got a long wait.