Which is rather good news for the citizens of New York, given that it's now standard operating procedure to carpet-bomb the shit out of whatever place terrorists get their funding from.
I'm English too, and I can assure you that of the British filmmakers I've spoken to, Merchant-Ivory is largely regarded as populist claptrap for the US market.
The annoying part is that they started off making rather interesting films examining the sometimes difficult meeting of British and Asian cultures. Then they realised how much the US market slurped up their mainstream rubbish, and went for the money. Their later output is basically Four Weddings in period costumes.
Oh, that _will_ happen. To Blair, Straw, Blunkett, Clarke and Reid for a start. The British Government use the same principle of shouting a lot and "faith" as a substitute for good practice in security matters as much the US one do for science ones.
Amazon, Google and MySpace are all technical systems put together by very clever people trying to create a product that will subsequently make them their fortune by being really, really good.
This will be a Government IT Project put in place by Capita, and as such will be insanely expensive and break down every five minutes in order to keep the servicing payments nice and high. None of their other IT projects work, why would the world's most complex and insanely powerful one be the first.
Don't worry too much. He'll change his mind about the ID database selling next week, probably. The details of what they will and won't be doing flip-flop from one half-arsed idea to the next.
The funniest one was when they were in an 'open Government' mood, and suggested that you would be able to view and correct any false information by logging into the ID Card Website with your ID number and four-digit PIN. Because giving full write access to your central anti-terrorism database is the sort of thing you do with that level of security.
Only those who honestly believe that this Government could organise an IT project in a datacenter need fear. The insane rantings of Blair and his Home Secretary Of The Month would be pretty damn terrifying, if I ever thought they will manage to build it and make it work. But there's very little evidence they will suddenly develop this ability.
Blair likes gigantic IT projects because they sound shiny and tough, and send taxpayers' money to Crapita by the billion. At which point a nice big chunk goes straight into Labour Party coffers. There's no real expectation that they'll need to do any real _work_ to continue being funded, thank God.
Yes, one of the ways that Big Brother Blair hopes to pay for this beaurcratic nightmare is by selling access to the database. Only 'reputable' companies will be allowed, obviously, but 'reputable' seems to equate to 'prepared to hand over lots of money'. They're selling the Electoral Register too, you know.
Phones _shouldn't_ have rubbish interfaces, no. However I've yet to meet a phone interface that isn't actively painful to use from anyone. PC interface software is particularly bad, as both Motorola and Sony seem to think that it's a good excuse to take over your entire PC with buggy drivers and resident programs.
Keeping one device charged shouldn't be a problem, no. But I'm rubbish at keeping my iPod charged, and I'd hate to be unable to make phone calls when that ineviatably happens.
Personally, I just like the facts that (a) I don't run the phone battery down listening to music and then miss a call, and (ii) iPods still have a vastly better interface than any phone I've tried.
Every decent HDTV has at least one input that will take a signal from the standard DVI-I output on the back of the Mac Mini, whether that be DVI itself, HDMI or VGA.
So it really depends on what you want from your 'media' computer. If you want PVR capability then it's pointless without external devices (which are available, but you ruin the sleek look). If you just want something that can play DVDs, Xvids, Quicktime trailers and all the music formats that iTunes can handle then it's fine.
Sure, it's pretty rubbish if you don't have a HDTV, but in that case I'd rather have a standard DVD player anyway.
loading times may make PSP games annoying on the go, but to be fair I find shouting "Objection!" on the train rather embarrassing, and there's no way I'd be able to operate Trauma Center on rickety public transport either.
Microsoft won't sell a mod chip, because it looks really bad then.
Right sir, here are the keys to your new Ford. For a mere $1000 optional extra, we'll sell you the additional key that operates the aircon system we've already installed, but won't let you use.
Why not sue the real estate "fucker" for making a false report?
Because Judges can be reasonable people, too. It sure sounds from the description that the real estate agent could make a reasonable argument for believing the car was indeed undriveable. Getting lawyers involved over a reasonable request would have made the perfectly nice-sounding guy the "fucker", not the estate agent.
It's not just that - they've pulled you over because they believe you've done something you shouldn't have. The goal to any reasonable police officer is to persuade you to realise this, and not repeat the error. Acting like an asshole doesn't exactly give them the impression that they've achieved it, and so a nice big kick to the wallet might succeed where reasonable discussion has failed.
Quite apart from the police officer treating you more reasonably if you treat them with respect for the obvious social communication reasons, it makes basic policing sense.
The officer isn't issuing a traffic ticket just because they like getting their quota. It's because they caught you doing something against the traffic laws, and those laws are at least nominally there for a good reason. The ticket is there to act as persuasion not to do it again, not just punishment - if the officer actually believes that you've genuinely understood that you shouldn't do it, and will try not to do it again, they're less concerned with making your wallet do the talking.
50Gb dual-layer BD-Rs are on sale (at pretty high prices), but manufacturing pressed ones with content is currently giving such low yields that it's not financially sensible. As I (amongst others) said elsewhere, 25Gb discs with VC-1 encodes that give a good image will be on shelves well before any 50Gb discs anyway, so it's not a problem in the long term. Today, though, the combination of 25Gb and MPEG 2 does not give an image as good as the one 30Gb and VC-1 is producing on HD-DVD.
If you ask me, the sensible thing for the BluRay group to have done would have been to hold the release of the format until the codec issue had been sorted. I know they were desperate to stop HD-DVD building up too much of a first-mover advantage, but right now the format looks half-baked and unready. Once someone other than Samsung brings a player out, and films are in VC-1 with DD+ audio, then they'll have something to properly compete with HD-DVD.
The third HD-DVD layer is a bit of an uncertainty at the moment, unfortunately. On the one hand Toshiba have been heavily hinting it's just a drive firmware update to support on the A1 and AX1, and as effectively the only players currently out there (the RCA player is a rebadged A1) there's nothing to worry about.
However, the official spec for player standards only mandates support for two layers currently, so there's the possibility it won't get used. On the other hand, some early DVD players threw a hissy fit when presented with the late-addition of the DTS audio track, and that didn't stop loads of them being made.
Personally, I think that both it and 50Gb BluRay discs are going to be like DVD-18s; rarely useful on a practical level, more expensive (due to yield worries) than making multiple lower-capacity discs, and the average consumer sees a "two disc set with tons of bonus features!" as being better value than a single disc with the same features anyway.
Sorry, I should probably have cleared this up in the original post. See my other reply, but _current_ disc sizes are 25 vs. 30. BluRay can and will go to 50Gb in the future, but for the purpose of comparing any discs you'll see in the next 12 months that's what we've got.
25Gb is plenty to fit a normal-length film on in VC-1 anyway, and we'll see those before we see any 50Gb discs.
My reply is kind of directed at MindStalker as well, as it's essentially the same question.
BluRay does indeed go to 50Gb in the specs, but they're currently failing to manufacture dual layer discs on a commercial level, so all currently announced titles are only 25Gb at most. The first couple of batches have been more like 22Gb, because they daren't even go to the edge of that first layer, but they're starting to get braver.
Actually, the HD-DVD group recently announced that they're planning to introduce a third layer next year, around the same time that it's expected we'll be regularly seeing 50Gb BluRay discs, so capacity isn't really a big comparison factor.
Finally, it's all something of a marketing argument anyway. 2 hour movies are looking just gorgeous as 15-20Gb VC-1 files, so other than the ability to get all of the extended Return Of The King on one disc I wouldn't worry about it.
To be fair, there are much better HD-DVD titles out there (I love Serenity and The Bourne Supremacy, for a start, and Sleepy Hollow came out this week too). These three are just the first where they are available on both formats, and we can A/B directly.
You're basing that all on two rather significant assumptions:
1) PS3s get bought in significant numbers, quickly enough to win the marketing war, by people who want to watch HD movies on them, rather than play games. Personally, I expect the vast majority of the first six month's sales to go to people who want their console to be a console.
2) HD-DVD players staying as expensive as a PS3. It's one thing to imagine that a $1000 Blu-Ray player will be replaced by a $600 model, but quite another to imagine that the $500 HD-DVD players won't drop in price before the above market-scarcity of the PS3 wears off.
By Christmas, VC-1-encoded Blu-Ray discs will be out there, and the quality argument _should_ stop (assuming that the PS3's image quality as a Blu-Ray player isn't as bad as the original PS2's was at DVDs). But it's price that killed Beta, and UMD as well.
There are two problems at the moment. Firstly, it seems that the Samsung player just isn't terribly good, despite costing twice as much as the Toshiba. But by far the largest aspect is that the current batch of BluRay discs are mastered with the MPEG-2 codec, rather than the superior VC-1 that HD-DVD discs are using. This is because Sony's initial mastering software did not support the use of the more advanced codecs.
This has just recently been fixed, so discs should start appearing toward the end of the year with exactly the same encode as the HD-DVD, and the only remaining aspects will be the quality of the player, and any necessary culling of extra features or audio formats to make the film fit on a 25Gb BluRay instead of a 30Gb HD-DVD.
Technically, XP MCE is based off Pro, but the Domain and IIS stuff is deliberately broken during the install process. Your matrix is essentially correct in terms of features, rather than architecture - you can't do an in-place upgrade to a version that has Domain networking (rather than just workgroups) to one that doesn't support it, in case it's in use and breaks things; similarly it won't let you upgrade the Media Centre to one without that feature.
That's because Ultimate is the only one that isn't missing features from any of the XP releases - it's got all the Domain networking and IIS stuff from XP Pro, plus all the PVR stuff from Media Centre Edition.
The other Vista versions are all missing one or the other, and so you can only do an 'in-place' upgrade where this doesn't strip features that you might be using.
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Which is rather good news for the citizens of New York, given that it's now standard operating procedure to carpet-bomb the shit out of whatever place terrorists get their funding from.
It's really useful when a news source not only tells me that new pirate software exists, but how to tell the 'good' one from the fake.
I'm English too, and I can assure you that of the British filmmakers I've spoken to, Merchant-Ivory is largely regarded as populist claptrap for the US market.
The annoying part is that they started off making rather interesting films examining the sometimes difficult meeting of British and Asian cultures. Then they realised how much the US market slurped up their mainstream rubbish, and went for the money. Their later output is basically Four Weddings in period costumes.
Oh, that _will_ happen. To Blair, Straw, Blunkett, Clarke and Reid for a start. The British Government use the same principle of shouting a lot and "faith" as a substitute for good practice in security matters as much the US one do for science ones.
Amazon, Google and MySpace are all technical systems put together by very clever people trying to create a product that will subsequently make them their fortune by being really, really good.
This will be a Government IT Project put in place by Capita, and as such will be insanely expensive and break down every five minutes in order to keep the servicing payments nice and high. None of their other IT projects work, why would the world's most complex and insanely powerful one be the first.
Don't worry too much. He'll change his mind about the ID database selling next week, probably. The details of what they will and won't be doing flip-flop from one half-arsed idea to the next.
The funniest one was when they were in an 'open Government' mood, and suggested that you would be able to view and correct any false information by logging into the ID Card Website with your ID number and four-digit PIN. Because giving full write access to your central anti-terrorism database is the sort of thing you do with that level of security.
Actually, I'd put it more cynically.
Only those who honestly believe that this Government could organise an IT project in a datacenter need fear. The insane rantings of Blair and his Home Secretary Of The Month would be pretty damn terrifying, if I ever thought they will manage to build it and make it work. But there's very little evidence they will suddenly develop this ability.
Blair likes gigantic IT projects because they sound shiny and tough, and send taxpayers' money to Crapita by the billion. At which point a nice big chunk goes straight into Labour Party coffers. There's no real expectation that they'll need to do any real _work_ to continue being funded, thank God.
Yes, one of the ways that Big Brother Blair hopes to pay for this beaurcratic nightmare is by selling access to the database. Only 'reputable' companies will be allowed, obviously, but 'reputable' seems to equate to 'prepared to hand over lots of money'. They're selling the Electoral Register too, you know.
Phones _shouldn't_ have rubbish interfaces, no. However I've yet to meet a phone interface that isn't actively painful to use from anyone. PC interface software is particularly bad, as both Motorola and Sony seem to think that it's a good excuse to take over your entire PC with buggy drivers and resident programs.
Keeping one device charged shouldn't be a problem, no. But I'm rubbish at keeping my iPod charged, and I'd hate to be unable to make phone calls when that ineviatably happens.
Personally, I just like the facts that (a) I don't run the phone battery down listening to music and then miss a call, and (ii) iPods still have a vastly better interface than any phone I've tried.
Every decent HDTV has at least one input that will take a signal from the standard DVI-I output on the back of the Mac Mini, whether that be DVI itself, HDMI or VGA.
So it really depends on what you want from your 'media' computer. If you want PVR capability then it's pointless without external devices (which are available, but you ruin the sleek look). If you just want something that can play DVDs, Xvids, Quicktime trailers and all the music formats that iTunes can handle then it's fine.
Sure, it's pretty rubbish if you don't have a HDTV, but in that case I'd rather have a standard DVD player anyway.
loading times may make PSP games annoying on the go, but to be fair I find shouting "Objection!" on the train rather embarrassing, and there's no way I'd be able to operate Trauma Center on rickety public transport either.
Microsoft won't sell a mod chip, because it looks really bad then.
Right sir, here are the keys to your new Ford. For a mere $1000 optional extra, we'll sell you the additional key that operates the aircon system we've already installed, but won't let you use.
Why not sue the real estate "fucker" for making a false report?
Because Judges can be reasonable people, too. It sure sounds from the description that the real estate agent could make a reasonable argument for believing the car was indeed undriveable. Getting lawyers involved over a reasonable request would have made the perfectly nice-sounding guy the "fucker", not the estate agent.
It's not just that - they've pulled you over because they believe you've done something you shouldn't have. The goal to any reasonable police officer is to persuade you to realise this, and not repeat the error. Acting like an asshole doesn't exactly give them the impression that they've achieved it, and so a nice big kick to the wallet might succeed where reasonable discussion has failed.
Quite apart from the police officer treating you more reasonably if you treat them with respect for the obvious social communication reasons, it makes basic policing sense.
The officer isn't issuing a traffic ticket just because they like getting their quota. It's because they caught you doing something against the traffic laws, and those laws are at least nominally there for a good reason. The ticket is there to act as persuasion not to do it again, not just punishment - if the officer actually believes that you've genuinely understood that you shouldn't do it, and will try not to do it again, they're less concerned with making your wallet do the talking.
50Gb dual-layer BD-Rs are on sale (at pretty high prices), but manufacturing pressed ones with content is currently giving such low yields that it's not financially sensible. As I (amongst others) said elsewhere, 25Gb discs with VC-1 encodes that give a good image will be on shelves well before any 50Gb discs anyway, so it's not a problem in the long term. Today, though, the combination of 25Gb and MPEG 2 does not give an image as good as the one 30Gb and VC-1 is producing on HD-DVD.
If you ask me, the sensible thing for the BluRay group to have done would have been to hold the release of the format until the codec issue had been sorted. I know they were desperate to stop HD-DVD building up too much of a first-mover advantage, but right now the format looks half-baked and unready. Once someone other than Samsung brings a player out, and films are in VC-1 with DD+ audio, then they'll have something to properly compete with HD-DVD.
The third HD-DVD layer is a bit of an uncertainty at the moment, unfortunately. On the one hand Toshiba have been heavily hinting it's just a drive firmware update to support on the A1 and AX1, and as effectively the only players currently out there (the RCA player is a rebadged A1) there's nothing to worry about.
However, the official spec for player standards only mandates support for two layers currently, so there's the possibility it won't get used. On the other hand, some early DVD players threw a hissy fit when presented with the late-addition of the DTS audio track, and that didn't stop loads of them being made.
Personally, I think that both it and 50Gb BluRay discs are going to be like DVD-18s; rarely useful on a practical level, more expensive (due to yield worries) than making multiple lower-capacity discs, and the average consumer sees a "two disc set with tons of bonus features!" as being better value than a single disc with the same features anyway.
Sorry, I should probably have cleared this up in the original post. See my other reply, but _current_ disc sizes are 25 vs. 30. BluRay can and will go to 50Gb in the future, but for the purpose of comparing any discs you'll see in the next 12 months that's what we've got.
25Gb is plenty to fit a normal-length film on in VC-1 anyway, and we'll see those before we see any 50Gb discs.
My reply is kind of directed at MindStalker as well, as it's essentially the same question.
BluRay does indeed go to 50Gb in the specs, but they're currently failing to manufacture dual layer discs on a commercial level, so all currently announced titles are only 25Gb at most. The first couple of batches have been more like 22Gb, because they daren't even go to the edge of that first layer, but they're starting to get braver.
Actually, the HD-DVD group recently announced that they're planning to introduce a third layer next year, around the same time that it's expected we'll be regularly seeing 50Gb BluRay discs, so capacity isn't really a big comparison factor.
Finally, it's all something of a marketing argument anyway. 2 hour movies are looking just gorgeous as 15-20Gb VC-1 files, so other than the ability to get all of the extended Return Of The King on one disc I wouldn't worry about it.
To be fair, there are much better HD-DVD titles out there (I love Serenity and The Bourne Supremacy, for a start, and Sleepy Hollow came out this week too). These three are just the first where they are available on both formats, and we can A/B directly.
You're basing that all on two rather significant assumptions:
1) PS3s get bought in significant numbers, quickly enough to win the marketing war, by people who want to watch HD movies on them, rather than play games. Personally, I expect the vast majority of the first six month's sales to go to people who want their console to be a console.
2) HD-DVD players staying as expensive as a PS3. It's one thing to imagine that a $1000 Blu-Ray player will be replaced by a $600 model, but quite another to imagine that the $500 HD-DVD players won't drop in price before the above market-scarcity of the PS3 wears off.
By Christmas, VC-1-encoded Blu-Ray discs will be out there, and the quality argument _should_ stop (assuming that the PS3's image quality as a Blu-Ray player isn't as bad as the original PS2's was at DVDs). But it's price that killed Beta, and UMD as well.
There are two problems at the moment. Firstly, it seems that the Samsung player just isn't terribly good, despite costing twice as much as the Toshiba. But by far the largest aspect is that the current batch of BluRay discs are mastered with the MPEG-2 codec, rather than the superior VC-1 that HD-DVD discs are using. This is because Sony's initial mastering software did not support the use of the more advanced codecs.
This has just recently been fixed, so discs should start appearing toward the end of the year with exactly the same encode as the HD-DVD, and the only remaining aspects will be the quality of the player, and any necessary culling of extra features or audio formats to make the film fit on a 25Gb BluRay instead of a 30Gb HD-DVD.
Technically, XP MCE is based off Pro, but the Domain and IIS stuff is deliberately broken during the install process. Your matrix is essentially correct in terms of features, rather than architecture - you can't do an in-place upgrade to a version that has Domain networking (rather than just workgroups) to one that doesn't support it, in case it's in use and breaks things; similarly it won't let you upgrade the Media Centre to one without that feature.
That's because Ultimate is the only one that isn't missing features from any of the XP releases - it's got all the Domain networking and IIS stuff from XP Pro, plus all the PVR stuff from Media Centre Edition.
The other Vista versions are all missing one or the other, and so you can only do an 'in-place' upgrade where this doesn't strip features that you might be using.