Well, I guess you could use a browser detect script that inserts PNG's for supported browsers, and otherwise uses GIF's. You could even use Javascript to write a warning into the statusbar, or the page itself, that says: "PNG Unsupported: Using Low Quality Image Mode" or somesuch. You could even link to MozillaFirebird or Opera... But you'd still probably catch a bunch of crap from your boss.
My hope would be that at this point PNG can stand on its own technical merits, rather then on ideological merits.
It certainly does for me. PNG tends to display colors more accurately than GIF, has cleaner dithering, and has much better transparency than GIF. It also generates smaller files for complex/large images. But, Internet Explorer once again holds us back. IE doesn't do transparency AT ALL for PNG images. It doesn't even use the page color, or white, just a flat 50% gray. Once IE supports PNG properly, a lot more web developers will feel comfortable using it. Curse you and your "standards", Microsoft.
"They're agreeing to let you see the half of the picture that they want you to see", he added.
I wonder if the other half might contain Linux code that's crept into SCO? Mod me down for the consipracy mongering if you want, but there's got to be some reason SCO is behaving this strangely.
My best luck for actual in-class notetaking and library/study group usage came in the form of an old Handheld PC Pro -- Mine was an HP Jornada 820. Yes, it's pretty slow, but it is the best option for taking notes. If you can, find a model with a touchscreen (this was a drawback of the Jornada 820).
The laptop idea was good and all, but if you get an older laptop-like PDA, especially one with Windows CE, you can print via IR to lab laser printers, type on a reasonably comfortable keyboard, and install a WiFi or Ethernet card for instant messaging and (rather limited) web browsing. Oh yeah, this class of PDA's turns on/off instantaneously, and will last anywhere from 8 to 15 hours on a charge -- enough to get you through a day or two without worrying about your battery. Just use ActiveSync when you get back to your desktop, and you're set. They're very expandable, typically having both CF and PC card slots, so you can use flash memory and a NIC together. If you want to browse models and hardware compatibility, check out Chris De Herrera's cewindows.net.
And the best part? You should be able to find one of these 1-kg wonders on eBay for about $200. A pocketable toy it isn't. It won't play MP3's. But it's way sturdier and smaller than a laptop, it will fit in your backpack, and it's a lot better investment for a student than a newer, glitzier, but less functional palm-sized PDA.
Well, because setting up a tracker requires quite a bit of work, and it's not likely to be supported by a lot of ISPs' setups. I haven't set one up myself (ISP doesn't support hosting), but from what I understand, setting up a BitTorrent tracker just isn't something you'd do in a jiffy to prevent a one-time bandwidth overload.
My question is for Slashdot: Since hosting a torrent requires (as Bram states) about 1/1,000th, and in the future as little as 1/10,000th of the total bandwidth for the torrent, why can't/. just make a torrent server available for members to download new ISO's, free software, and large movies (re: Animatrix, etc.)? All it'd take is one monitor page and (maybe) an automated e-Mail script to keep content providers up-to-date on the downloads. And I can tell you for SURE, most of the sites that/. links to would appreciate having their Star Trek parodies, ISO's, and stop-motion LEGO animations mirrored... Be courteous,/.
It's notoriously difficult to read other people's code. It would take more programmers to fix a project than it took to write it in the first place. Shouldn't there be a "Clean Code" peering/mentoring group instead, or a "Clean Code" review body? I'd be much more confident if someone was keeping up with the code as it was written, and going back to the programmers before the program ships, asking "What exactly does this do for the program?", or "You do realize that you should decrement this length counter before you use it, right?". And even that pales in comparison to training all the project managers/project analysts to do this with their own teams' code.
I mean, really. A "Clean Code" group is good and all, but it's not a very efficient or effective way to make new products hassle-free, and it certainly doesn't resolve the problems caused by frequent patching. Plus, knowing the scale of large corporations (read: NOT just MSFT), the "Clean Code" group will probably be in the Canadian wilderness, hundreds of miles from the application developers. Be prepared for bogus patches that break more than they fix. I do suppose, though, since Microsoft will never rewrite code from scratch, this is the only way to get older projects up to speed.
Here's hoping the "Clean Code" group at least includes some of the original developers, to move things along. Windows is so incredibly bloated that I doubt we'll see them finish debugging it inside this decade. I guess that's Open Source's biggest strength -- anybody can be a "Clean Code" reviewer, and you don't need an NDA or a fancy degree to do it. You don't even need to ask for permission!
Is there a way to make the W3C standards work like the GPL, in that any standards that build on them cannot be royalty-based either? I'd love to see things like Amazon's retarded patenting rampage quelled, or at least prevent fees and litigation from such patents. I seem to remember that last year some company tried to assert patent rights to E-Commerce and Web-based credit card transactions...
Cg and the other GPU interface languages seem to be a perfect (or at least well-suited) way to accomplish this today. Image and Movie editing software is specialized enough that, assuming the problem of read latency from the framebuffer is fixed, there shouldn't be a filter you can't apply in real-time or near-realtime.
I wouldn't expect everyday applications to support math on GPU's, but in some places it just makes sense. Now, if we could just have a 'normal' 3D-accelerated desktop, we'd really be in business!
> backwards compatibility with the current standards for DVDs.
What standards? I've been waiting and waiting for the "current standards" to shake out, and they still haven't. Maybe I'll be able to get a DVD burner in another 2-3 years, when they finally do have a standard!
Who says Apple can't remove the iTunes-mandated DRM from their files, or start offering MP3's with their service? Apple is playing a good middle ground. They're trying to make a popular service without opening themselves up for litigation.
As much as we hate it, the DMCA pretty much requires Apple to actively move to protect the labels' interests, or risk lawsuits for 'contributing to piracy'. If we assume that MP3's are right out, I can't imagine that they'd even want to deal with the legal hassle of providing music to Linux or Windows users at all -- the only real DRM formats (WMA, RM) belong to their competition and would require them to basically duplicate their entire library in addition to paying royalties. And let's face it, they're not going to get anyone on board for MP3.
RIAA: "Apple, by providing unencrypted, easily copied MP3 files to Personal Computers, a known bastion of music theft, has materially damaged our business model and violated our agreement." Apple: "But it's what the consumers wanted." RIAA: "So what? You are on the way to destruction. For great justice, All your base are belong to us."
I think I'd rather have my tax dollars going to support some Open-Source geeks working for the gov't than being poured (read: pissed away) into MS's newest licensing scheme whereby they get MORE of the government's money so they can take out even more questionable 'software patents' and lobby for the legislation to allow them to stifle my innovation.
And I don't want to fund Palladium. Not from my pocket, not from my taxes. Write your representatives and tell them that it does matter *how* they spend your money, not just how much they spend.
Customer advocacy groups are concerned that the tags won't be 'divorcable' from the clothing. They aren't telling Benetton not to use the tags for inventory purposes...
So, why can't we all agree on the simplest solution? You already have a clothing label (size, care, etc.) attached to nearly every piece of clothing. Why not stitch the RFID tag into its own little label that says "Inventory Radio ID Device" and "Removal mandates purchase"? That way, it'd be opt-out. If you don't want RFID SPAM or tracking, just pull/cut off the tag after you've bought the clothes! Sure, it's more expensive than embedding the RFID into a hem/stitch, but it's better than being boycotted or villainized in the media, and would still provide massive benefits for tracking inventory.
Heck, I say just embed them in those little plastic shoot-thru thingies (Red or Blue for emphasis) and label them "RFID". Then they'd be useful for inventory, and everyone would remove them after purchase. Why do they have to be part of the clothing?
This is the highest-modded flamebait, so: the point is that I *have* looked around. The post is "Ask Slashdot" to get some anecdotal responses, or actual experiences back. I'm buying a PDA specifically for its complex language support, gray-market imports aren't an option, and I (and conceivably other/. readers) would like to hear about what works for other people.
For example, a few things I've found: J-OS works on old Palms, but not anything with enough memory to be useful as a dictionary/learning tool. CJKOS doesn't support High-Res of any type and won't be updated for OS5. So much for a long-term solution. The things I've tried for Palm, while useful, are largely OLD freeware projects that crash a lot on the newer revisions of the OS.
Windows CE machines, while they do support unicode characters natively, need pagecode translation to display more common encodings (I have no experience to draw on... Is this a problem?), and have an abysmal educational software selection.
Point is: I haven't got the PDA/Smartphone to play with, and would like to hear about peoples' experiences fiddling with the language support of their gadgets before dropping a few hundred bucks on something that may not even work very well at all. I'd also be interested to find out which solutions feel like dirty little hacks, and which are virtually indistinguishable from OS-native support...
Finally, you'd have an OS/interface that would be the same for most TV's worldwide, and wouldn't need loads of effort and reprogramming to localize for different markets. And that's not mentioning the possiblity of a widely available set-top that could conceivably run a very decent browser (mozilla/phoenix). Maybe it's not what we geeky Americans drool over, but the business/marketing sense in it is obvious.
That's sickening. P2P apps actually are dramatically *decreasing* the profits of organized media pirates, or at least not increasing them.
If downloading a movie is supporting terrorism, how do the terrorists make their profit distributing materials through a P2P net? I mean it. I really want to know. If I can make millions of dollars by sharing files on KazaA...
Well, then again, you don't have to agree to a separate product license to use the graphics card in a PC, or the bumper on your car.
And, in any case, if the separate EULA for a specific component product asserts that you are legally entitled to return the product for a refund, provided that you have not used the product, then they are legally required to provide such a refund. In other words, 99.9% of customers being satisfied with the product doesn't mean that MS can renig on their contractual, legal obligation to provide refunds to the 0.1% of customers who don't want their OS. And they're the ones who wrote the EULA in the first place!
Maybe we'll start seeing computers sold with "Free Microsoft OS"...
Yeah, but the CappucinoPC isn't designed for ubergeeks to build into the dashboards of their cars!!! I think putting one of these in, and covering it with a flip-down 7" widescreen LCD would be the coolest in-car mod ever!
I wonder if they make "Intel Inside" bumperstickers... Maybe I could even find an electroluminescent hood ornament like I've seen on those little Hondas and Toyotas...
802.11 a/b band is allocated for *consumer* use. If this is how consumers want the frequency to be used, so be it. I, for one, can see a large demand for nationwide broadband, especially wireless. At the moment, broadband users can't even dial up to their ISP over the phone from the road, much less get broadband access to their account from a moving vehicle or a foreign city.
It just boils down to the fact that consumers will have to vote with their dollars to say how they want this (their) bandwidth to be used.
And, for all the/. hopefuls out there, maybe this will serve as a good case-in-point to prove to the FCC that companies don't have to *own* frequencies to be able to do business on them. If we can convince them of this, it could still be possible to fix some of the FCC's biggest mistakes:)
It looks like it's time for tougher legislation. As a community of internet-loving zealots, we have been battling the problem of SPAM for far too long with too little result. I first obtained a SPAM-blocking meta-address from pobox.com in 1997, and was down to only one or two pieces of SPAM every two weeks; Until this January, that is, when SPAM volume began to surpass their ability to monitor and protect me.
What have we accomplished? Well, we've made spammers' jobs very difficult. We've sown public discontent and developed an extreme social pressure against these activities. We've developed tools that cause large percentages of spammers' messages to fail, or even discover their activities and shut down their accounts. The job is hard, but it's still not hard to turn a huge profit doing it.
We have laws against disturbing the peace, solicitation, and harassment. Companies that use spammers should be fined heavily, to the point that there's no way they could reasonably profit from something like this. If a spammer is found out, the government should seize property and cash in the amount of their payment for this illegal act.
The problem is that while it's socially unacceptable, there is still an economic incentive. Remove it, and you can remove the problem.
Slashdot search is down, but I managed to find at least a press release for what I'm talking about at GM's website here.
Toyota's plan will add more weight, bulk, and complexity to the car, while simultaneously reducing acceleration, handling, and passenger space. With all the cons above, I don't think many people will consider it a viable alternative to straight combustion engines.
GM's AUTOnomy project not only has the potential for greater acceleration, being a transmissionless electric auto platform, but having motors in each wheel means most vehicles will be able to (literally!) turn on a dime. It's a 100% fuel cell vehicle, and all the workings fit in a 6" high plate at the bottom of the vehicle. It makes the car safer, lighter, easier to handle, and since there is no engine, no battery packs, and basically nothing above ankle-height, passenger safety is vastly improved (no engine to break your legs in a crash) along with comfort.
Which car will Americans choose? Well, I guess it actually all depends on who's marketing their car more agressively.:(
Sorry. I was a little underinformed about formats. CVD (China Video Disc) is 1/2 D1 on a CD, and is supported by many of the standalone recorders on that page. I just need to do some research and find out how the format differs between CVD (which I can make already) and 1/2 D1 DVD's...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I guess you could use a browser detect script that inserts PNG's for supported browsers, and otherwise uses GIF's. You could even use Javascript to write a warning into the statusbar, or the page itself, that says: "PNG Unsupported: Using Low Quality Image Mode" or somesuch. You could even link to MozillaFirebird or Opera... But you'd still probably catch a bunch of crap from your boss.
--Jasin Natael
My hope would be that at this point PNG can stand on its own technical merits, rather then on ideological merits.
It certainly does for me. PNG tends to display colors more accurately than GIF, has cleaner dithering, and has much better transparency than GIF. It also generates smaller files for complex/large images. But, Internet Explorer once again holds us back. IE doesn't do transparency AT ALL for PNG images. It doesn't even use the page color, or white, just a flat 50% gray. Once IE supports PNG properly, a lot more web developers will feel comfortable using it. Curse you and your "standards", Microsoft.
Jasin Natael
I wonder if the other half might contain Linux code that's crept into SCO? Mod me down for the consipracy mongering if you want, but there's got to be some reason SCO is behaving this strangely.
--Jasin Natael... and your enemies closer.
I guess this is evidence that you can't keep it up forever.
--Jasin Natael
My best luck for actual in-class notetaking and library/study group usage came in the form of an old Handheld PC Pro -- Mine was an HP Jornada 820. Yes, it's pretty slow, but it is the best option for taking notes. If you can, find a model with a touchscreen (this was a drawback of the Jornada 820).
The laptop idea was good and all, but if you get an older laptop-like PDA, especially one with Windows CE, you can print via IR to lab laser printers, type on a reasonably comfortable keyboard, and install a WiFi or Ethernet card for instant messaging and (rather limited) web browsing. Oh yeah, this class of PDA's turns on/off instantaneously, and will last anywhere from 8 to 15 hours on a charge -- enough to get you through a day or two without worrying about your battery. Just use ActiveSync when you get back to your desktop, and you're set. They're very expandable, typically having both CF and PC card slots, so you can use flash memory and a NIC together. If you want to browse models and hardware compatibility, check out Chris De Herrera's cewindows.net.
And the best part? You should be able to find one of these 1-kg wonders on eBay for about $200. A pocketable toy it isn't. It won't play MP3's. But it's way sturdier and smaller than a laptop, it will fit in your backpack, and it's a lot better investment for a student than a newer, glitzier, but less functional palm-sized PDA.
--Jasin Natael
Well, because setting up a tracker requires quite a bit of work, and it's not likely to be supported by a lot of ISPs' setups. I haven't set one up myself (ISP doesn't support hosting), but from what I understand, setting up a BitTorrent tracker just isn't something you'd do in a jiffy to prevent a one-time bandwidth overload.
--Jasin Natael
My question is for Slashdot: Since hosting a torrent requires (as Bram states) about 1/1,000th, and in the future as little as 1/10,000th of the total bandwidth for the torrent, why can't /. just make a torrent server available for members to download new ISO's, free software, and large movies (re: Animatrix, etc.)? All it'd take is one monitor page and (maybe) an automated e-Mail script to keep content providers up-to-date on the downloads. And I can tell you for SURE, most of the sites that /. links to would appreciate having their Star Trek parodies, ISO's, and stop-motion LEGO animations mirrored... Be courteous, /.
Jasin Natael
It's notoriously difficult to read other people's code. It would take more programmers to fix a project than it took to write it in the first place. Shouldn't there be a "Clean Code" peering/mentoring group instead, or a "Clean Code" review body? I'd be much more confident if someone was keeping up with the code as it was written, and going back to the programmers before the program ships, asking "What exactly does this do for the program?", or "You do realize that you should decrement this length counter before you use it, right?". And even that pales in comparison to training all the project managers/project analysts to do this with their own teams' code.
I mean, really. A "Clean Code" group is good and all, but it's not a very efficient or effective way to make new products hassle-free, and it certainly doesn't resolve the problems caused by frequent patching. Plus, knowing the scale of large corporations (read: NOT just MSFT), the "Clean Code" group will probably be in the Canadian wilderness, hundreds of miles from the application developers. Be prepared for bogus patches that break more than they fix. I do suppose, though, since Microsoft will never rewrite code from scratch, this is the only way to get older projects up to speed.
Here's hoping the "Clean Code" group at least includes some of the original developers, to move things along. Windows is so incredibly bloated that I doubt we'll see them finish debugging it inside this decade. I guess that's Open Source's biggest strength -- anybody can be a "Clean Code" reviewer, and you don't need an NDA or a fancy degree to do it. You don't even need to ask for permission!
Jasin Natael
Is there a way to make the W3C standards work like the GPL, in that any standards that build on them cannot be royalty-based either? I'd love to see things like Amazon's retarded patenting rampage quelled, or at least prevent fees and litigation from such patents. I seem to remember that last year some company tried to assert patent rights to E-Commerce and Web-based credit card transactions...
Cg and the other GPU interface languages seem to be a perfect (or at least well-suited) way to accomplish this today. Image and Movie editing software is specialized enough that, assuming the problem of read latency from the framebuffer is fixed, there shouldn't be a filter you can't apply in real-time or near-realtime.
I wouldn't expect everyday applications to support math on GPU's, but in some places it just makes sense. Now, if we could just have a 'normal' 3D-accelerated desktop, we'd really be in business!
> backwards compatibility with the current standards for DVDs.
What standards? I've been waiting and waiting for the "current standards" to shake out, and they still haven't. Maybe I'll be able to get a DVD burner in another 2-3 years, when they finally do have a standard!
Who says Apple can't remove the iTunes-mandated DRM from their files, or start offering MP3's with their service? Apple is playing a good middle ground. They're trying to make a popular service without opening themselves up for litigation.
As much as we hate it, the DMCA pretty much requires Apple to actively move to protect the labels' interests, or risk lawsuits for 'contributing to piracy'. If we assume that MP3's are right out, I can't imagine that they'd even want to deal with the legal hassle of providing music to Linux or Windows users at all -- the only real DRM formats (WMA, RM) belong to their competition and would require them to basically duplicate their entire library in addition to paying royalties. And let's face it, they're not going to get anyone on board for MP3.
RIAA: "Apple, by providing unencrypted, easily copied MP3 files to Personal Computers, a known bastion of music theft, has materially damaged our business model and violated our agreement."
Apple: "But it's what the consumers wanted."
RIAA: "So what? You are on the way to destruction. For great justice, All your base are belong to us."
I think I'd rather have my tax dollars going to support some Open-Source geeks working for the gov't than being poured (read: pissed away) into MS's newest licensing scheme whereby they get MORE of the government's money so they can take out even more questionable 'software patents' and lobby for the legislation to allow them to stifle my innovation.
And I don't want to fund Palladium. Not from my pocket, not from my taxes. Write your representatives and tell them that it does matter *how* they spend your money, not just how much they spend.
Heh, I'll never need a car charger again, I'll just throw the phone into the backseat in front of my 15" subwoofer :)
Customer advocacy groups are concerned that the tags won't be 'divorcable' from the clothing. They aren't telling Benetton not to use the tags for inventory purposes...
So, why can't we all agree on the simplest solution? You already have a clothing label (size, care, etc.) attached to nearly every piece of clothing. Why not stitch the RFID tag into its own little label that says "Inventory Radio ID Device" and "Removal mandates purchase"? That way, it'd be opt-out. If you don't want RFID SPAM or tracking, just pull/cut off the tag after you've bought the clothes! Sure, it's more expensive than embedding the RFID into a hem/stitch, but it's better than being boycotted or villainized in the media, and would still provide massive benefits for tracking inventory.
Heck, I say just embed them in those little plastic shoot-thru thingies (Red or Blue for emphasis) and label them "RFID". Then they'd be useful for inventory, and everyone would remove them after purchase. Why do they have to be part of the clothing?
This is the highest-modded flamebait, so: the point is that I *have* looked around. The post is "Ask Slashdot" to get some anecdotal responses, or actual experiences back. I'm buying a PDA specifically for its complex language support, gray-market imports aren't an option, and I (and conceivably other /. readers) would like to hear about what works for other people.
For example, a few things I've found:
J-OS works on old Palms, but not anything with enough memory to be useful as a dictionary/learning tool. CJKOS doesn't support High-Res of any type and won't be updated for OS5. So much for a long-term solution. The things I've tried for Palm, while useful, are largely OLD freeware projects that crash a lot on the newer revisions of the OS.
Windows CE machines, while they do support unicode characters natively, need pagecode translation to display more common encodings (I have no experience to draw on... Is this a problem?), and have an abysmal educational software selection.
Point is: I haven't got the PDA/Smartphone to play with, and would like to hear about peoples' experiences fiddling with the language support of their gadgets before dropping a few hundred bucks on something that may not even work very well at all. I'd also be interested to find out which solutions feel like dirty little hacks, and which are virtually indistinguishable from OS-native support...
Finally, you'd have an OS/interface that would be the same for most TV's worldwide, and wouldn't need loads of effort and reprogramming to localize for different markets. And that's not mentioning the possiblity of a widely available set-top that could conceivably run a very decent browser (mozilla/phoenix). Maybe it's not what we geeky Americans drool over, but the business/marketing sense in it is obvious.
That's sickening. P2P apps actually are dramatically *decreasing* the profits of organized media pirates, or at least not increasing them.
If downloading a movie is supporting terrorism, how do the terrorists make their profit distributing materials through a P2P net? I mean it. I really want to know. If I can make millions of dollars by sharing files on KazaA...
Well, then again, you don't have to agree to a separate product license to use the graphics card in a PC, or the bumper on your car.
And, in any case, if the separate EULA for a specific component product asserts that you are legally entitled to return the product for a refund, provided that you have not used the product, then they are legally required to provide such a refund. In other words, 99.9% of customers being satisfied with the product doesn't mean that MS can renig on their contractual, legal obligation to provide refunds to the 0.1% of customers who don't want their OS. And they're the ones who wrote the EULA in the first place!
Maybe we'll start seeing computers sold with "Free Microsoft OS"...
Yeah, but the CappucinoPC isn't designed for ubergeeks to build into the dashboards of their cars!!! I think putting one of these in, and covering it with a flip-down 7" widescreen LCD would be the coolest in-car mod ever!
I wonder if they make "Intel Inside" bumperstickers... Maybe I could even find an electroluminescent hood ornament like I've seen on those little Hondas and Toyotas...
802.11 a/b band is allocated for *consumer* use. If this is how consumers want the frequency to be used, so be it. I, for one, can see a large demand for nationwide broadband, especially wireless. At the moment, broadband users can't even dial up to their ISP over the phone from the road, much less get broadband access to their account from a moving vehicle or a foreign city.
/. hopefuls out there, maybe this will serve as a good case-in-point to prove to the FCC that companies don't have to *own* frequencies to be able to do business on them. If we can convince them of this, it could still be possible to fix some of the FCC's biggest mistakes :)
It just boils down to the fact that consumers will have to vote with their dollars to say how they want this (their) bandwidth to be used.
And, for all the
Reminds me of an older sig I once used:
"Assembly language: The Haiku of Code Poetry"
One of my friends asserted that it was comparable only to Haiku in Japanese, since Assembly was just as unintelligible to him...
It looks like it's time for tougher legislation. As a community of internet-loving zealots, we have been battling the problem of SPAM for far too long with too little result. I first obtained a SPAM-blocking meta-address from pobox.com in 1997, and was down to only one or two pieces of SPAM every two weeks; Until this January, that is, when SPAM volume began to surpass their ability to monitor and protect me.
What have we accomplished? Well, we've made spammers' jobs very difficult. We've sown public discontent and developed an extreme social pressure against these activities. We've developed tools that cause large percentages of spammers' messages to fail, or even discover their activities and shut down their accounts. The job is hard, but it's still not hard to turn a huge profit doing it.
We have laws against disturbing the peace, solicitation, and harassment. Companies that use spammers should be fined heavily, to the point that there's no way they could reasonably profit from something like this. If a spammer is found out, the government should seize property and cash in the amount of their payment for this illegal act.
The problem is that while it's socially unacceptable, there is still an economic incentive. Remove it, and you can remove the problem.
Slashdot search is down, but I managed to find at least a press release for what I'm talking about at GM's website here.
:(
Toyota's plan will add more weight, bulk, and complexity to the car, while simultaneously reducing acceleration, handling, and passenger space. With all the cons above, I don't think many people will consider it a viable alternative to straight combustion engines.
GM's AUTOnomy project not only has the potential for greater acceleration, being a transmissionless electric auto platform, but having motors in each wheel means most vehicles will be able to (literally!) turn on a dime. It's a 100% fuel cell vehicle, and all the workings fit in a 6" high plate at the bottom of the vehicle. It makes the car safer, lighter, easier to handle, and since there is no engine, no battery packs, and basically nothing above ankle-height, passenger safety is vastly improved (no engine to break your legs in a crash) along with comfort.
Which car will Americans choose? Well, I guess it actually all depends on who's marketing their car more agressively.
Sorry. I was a little underinformed about formats. CVD (China Video Disc) is 1/2 D1 on a CD, and is supported by many of the standalone recorders on that page. I just need to do some research and find out how the format differs between CVD (which I can make already) and 1/2 D1 DVD's...