All Hell is going to break loose when it becomes possible to play a CD holding a Divx film on the Xbox.
And here's something I'll bet MS already know: they're going to sell a lot more Xboxes when that happens.
With Divx, you can cram an absolutely fine rip of a DVD onto a single CD-R. That incredibly compact size also means that they only take a few hours to download. The downloadee can then churn out copies for his friend at about 25c a shot, as opposed to $1.50 or whatever for blank DVDs.
The only hurdle to widespread casual distribution channels evolving is that watching films at your workstation is uncomfortable and cabling the signal to your main television is a little too messy, unsightly and expensive for most people.
Find a way for people to play Divx on their Xboxes, however, and the situation reaches the momentum it needs to really take off.
Then the shit will really hit the fan and the studios, the premium channels and Blockbuster all have a HUGE problem.
Which isn't entirely unfunny.
So, is this likely to happen anytime soon? Well, I think this is what they meant on the Xtreme-Xbox site when, while listing this mod chip's features, they stated:
Modified XBE's and custom code can boot (This is a HUGE feature - as you'll all see soon)
I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure that the whole copyright situation is about to explode.
I figure all cars are going to become part of a tracking network anyway, most likely GPS-based, but making concerns about the effect on privacy of car-based wireless networks redundant.
In the same way that car rental companies are starting to use technology to protect their interests (CNet article: Rental-car firm exceeding the privacy limit?), I expect that insurance companies will, at some point in the near future, insist upon something similar.
They won't exactly make it madatory but their fees for unmonitored coverage will be too prohibitive for the average Joe to consider.
Cringely builds his argument for a widespread, car-based wireless network on the premise that the storage required by cars frequently disconnected from a network is an insurmountable problem, given the inability of Hard Disks Drives to survive in the hostile environment of a car. He believes that this problem will not be resolved by HDDs designed to better cope with that environment because the HDD companies can only afford to invest in research that will pay off within a year whereas the car companies plan four years ahead.
IMHO, it's a bit short-sighted to focus exclusively on HDDs; Flash memory makers are currently making great strides in producing chips that, in capacity, compete with miniture HDDs. Their primary financial motivation for this is the perceived huge market for personal MP3 players. I read one article a few months back that predicted a real head-to-head battle between Flash memory and IBM's tiny HDDs.
If we're going to be seeing Flash memory with several GBs capacity, I don't see why they shouldn't be used within cars.
Also, I don't see why the 4 year planning cycle for a new car should be such a problem; that time covers the design process for the car as a whole, no telematics system would be so intrusive as to require being part of that process from Day One. Indeed, it should be something that can be integrated within existing designs.
I'm wary of questioning Cringely's ideas because he does seem to have good sources on this but the direction he's taken that info doesn't seem to have been thought through properly.
Also, it's hard to accept his technical credibility when the software he uses for his site's forum is so damn tacky.
It isn't so much the commercial use of this information that bothers me but, rather, that it's being accumulated in the first place leaves the door open for shady government agencies to have access to it in a harder to fight way than something slightly more attributable and, therefore, possible to fight such as Carnivore.
If you think about it, there was no real reason for the FBI to stick their neck out like that with an actual hardware wire-tap of their own when most ISPs would probably bend over backwards to share the info they've already collected for commercial reasons.
Want to know who's been visiting dangerous, subversive websites? Simply send Agent Crewcut to play a few rounds of golf with CEO Weasel and suggest that there might be some juicy government contracts coming up for grabs.
It's good to see that Comcast haven't, in this case, been able to use general technical ignorance to bamboozle their way out of this one.
It looks as if they actually expected to get away with claiming they needed that info for caching purposes. I hope that they're nicely stunned at being asked to prove why they felt it necessary to tie that info back to individual user identities.
BTW, I presume that most/.ers have always assumed that their ISP was tracking their online activities.
You still think that's nothing? A thousand here, a couple hundred there, it could easily add up, particularly if used to obtain credit cards. Some joke, once you have a few hundred people trying to put their lives back together after someone trashes their credit rating, etc.
Relax, it's only a joke.
And, ask yourself, who is it making fun of?
I'm admonishing these shallow and selfish idiots who think that the ability to use packaged cracking tools makes up for their lack of social skills and, more importantly, social empathy; I'm specifically highlighting the callousness of this sort of thing and the effect it's going to have on the lives of people who, on the whole, work diligently for far too little money and far too little respect in our society. People like your friend who had to go through all that stress because one of these feckers wasn't man enough to work for his money.
BTW, I'm noticing a very weird pattern with regard to humor on/.
Humor is a wonderful tool to highlight inconsistencies and contradications but I've noticed that whenever a funny posting (by anyone) reachs a moderated rating of 5 someone almost always comes along and mods it down as a troll or flamebait, irregardless of it's revelance to the discussion at hand.
Then the posting tends to bob up and down as other mods mark it back up only for it to once again be classed as a troll or flamebait.
What is that, a cultural thing? Or do a frighteningly high percentage of moderators have faulty humor plugins?
Farmers huh? Hmmm.. not a bad idea. A few social security and address switches and I can start getting paid NOT to grow crops like everyone else!
But if you're a Third World farmer you get paid for the crops you DO grow only to have that money used to pay off gigantic debts racked up by decades of corrupt dictators.
i would respectfully disagree. the register article is biased as always.
Well, I guess what I meant by "more interesting" was "more entertaining".
And, somehow, I always find biased entertaining.
CNet is so deadly dull and earnest these days, especially those video reports. That blonde lady they had reporting from E3, she's easy on the eyes but, God, I'd give anything to see her just once looks as if she realizes that 90% of what she's reporting is complete arse.
"...troubling news for people who like high-speed internet access at reasonable prices..."
It's also bads news for freedom of speech
Whereas in a competitive environment ISPs can compete for savvy customers by touting their lack of restrictive practices (such as server-side censorship software that eliminates client-side choice), now they'll be more worried about not offending the big-hitters like the Christian lobbying groups who have the Washington-level power to disrupt their cosy monopolies.
It's horribly offtopic but how is it that with your low UID you've posted only 95 comments total and 24 of those in the past day? Where does this sudden uncontrolable urge to post come from?!?
Wow, well spotted Quantaman!
The low UID is down to the fact that I've been a casual reader of/. for years, but never really felt any reason to comment, partly because I knew that, no matter how funny or interesting anything I had to say might be, someone else would probably get around to saying it anyway.
My "sudden uncontrolable urge to post" (which, btw, is much worse than you think because it's actually probably more like 85 out of my total of 95 that I've posted in just the last 48 hours) is down to a renewed interest in the actual workings of discussion forums. I've recently been asked to set up a community forum for a UK charity/support group and, as such, have been fiddling around with PostNuke.
I felt that, apart from mastering the technical side, it was important to understand the social side, not to mention personally experience the disappointments, elation, frustration and fun of being a poster. I was also very interested in how the slashdot's karma system operated.
I started posting yesterday, making what I hope were worthwhile contributions.
I hit the karma cap of 50 pretty quickly so I'm ending the experiment but I enjoyed getting involving and now plan to keeping posting on a regular if somewhat less intensive basis.
Again, well spotted and I hope that I've managed to explain myself.
Note to moderators: I effectively modded myself -1, Offtopic by checking "No Score +1 Bonus" for this post:)
Unbelievable, I post something questioning a major flaw in a story posted just minutes ago and, because somebody else submitted the same question just seconds before me, my posting gets modded down as redundant?
That doesn't make any sense, some sort of rule such be implemented to prevent the use of Redundant until a decent time has elapsed.
At the very least, the advice given to moderators should be clearer on this and other hiccups in the system.
I may be missing something here but I can't find the IEE article in question. One link goes to the IEE's main page, the other to BT. I've looked around the IEE site and even used their site search facility but found nothing!
Deregulation of the radio business and rampant practices that skirt 40-year-old anti-payola laws stifle competition, drive up music promotional costs and make it harder for new artists to gain attention, the artists and record labels said in a joint statement addressed to the federal regulators and Congress.
Slashdot Mirror
All Hell is going to break loose when it becomes possible to play a CD holding a Divx film on the Xbox.
And here's something I'll bet MS already know: they're going to sell a lot more Xboxes when that happens.
With Divx, you can cram an absolutely fine rip of a DVD onto a single CD-R. That incredibly compact size also means that they only take a few hours to download. The downloadee can then churn out copies for his friend at about 25c a shot, as opposed to $1.50 or whatever for blank DVDs.
The only hurdle to widespread casual distribution channels evolving is that watching films at your workstation is uncomfortable and cabling the signal to your main television is a little too messy, unsightly and expensive for most people.
Find a way for people to play Divx on their Xboxes, however, and the situation reaches the momentum it needs to really take off.
Then the shit will really hit the fan and the studios, the premium channels and Blockbuster all have a HUGE problem.
Which isn't entirely unfunny.
So, is this likely to happen anytime soon? Well, I think this is what they meant on the Xtreme-Xbox site when, while listing this mod chip's features, they stated:
Modified XBE's and custom code can boot (This is a HUGE feature - as you'll all see soon)
I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure that the whole copyright situation is about to explode.
Has it been confirmed that the exhibition will be visiting Edinburgh?
That would suit me down to the ground as I'm living in Edinburgh at the moment but I searched their website but wasn't able to find any mention of it.
Excellent review.
I wasn't going to visit this exhibition but now I think I will.
Thanks Micheal.
Btw, did they have any take on the future of video gaming or even anything on the current, quite interesting scenario?
I figure all cars are going to become part of a tracking network anyway, most likely GPS-based, but making concerns about the effect on privacy of car-based wireless networks redundant. In the same way that car rental companies are starting to use technology to protect their interests (CNet article: Rental-car firm exceeding the privacy limit?), I expect that insurance companies will, at some point in the near future, insist upon something similar.
They won't exactly make it madatory but their fees for unmonitored coverage will be too prohibitive for the average Joe to consider.
Cringely builds his argument for a widespread, car-based wireless network on the premise that the storage required by cars frequently disconnected from a network is an insurmountable problem, given the inability of Hard Disks Drives to survive in the hostile environment of a car. He believes that this problem will not be resolved by HDDs designed to better cope with that environment because the HDD companies can only afford to invest in research that will pay off within a year whereas the car companies plan four years ahead.
IMHO, it's a bit short-sighted to focus exclusively on HDDs; Flash memory makers are currently making great strides in producing chips that, in capacity, compete with miniture HDDs. Their primary financial motivation for this is the perceived huge market for personal MP3 players. I read one article a few months back that predicted a real head-to-head battle between Flash memory and IBM's tiny HDDs.
If we're going to be seeing Flash memory with several GBs capacity, I don't see why they shouldn't be used within cars.
Also, I don't see why the 4 year planning cycle for a new car should be such a problem; that time covers the design process for the car as a whole, no telematics system would be so intrusive as to require being part of that process from Day One. Indeed, it should be something that can be integrated within existing designs.
I'm wary of questioning Cringely's ideas because he does seem to have good sources on this but the direction he's taken that info doesn't seem to have been thought through properly.
Also, it's hard to accept his technical credibility when the software he uses for his site's forum is so damn tacky.
The Dragon Runner is a miniature camera-equipped wheeled truck about the size of a shoebox which can be sent into dangerous areas as a scout.
What's the betting that the Web will soon be swamped with pop-ups offering to sell us the X10.Com version of these?
It isn't so much the commercial use of this information that bothers me but, rather, that it's being accumulated in the first place leaves the door open for shady government agencies to have access to it in a harder to fight way than something slightly more attributable and, therefore, possible to fight such as Carnivore.
If you think about it, there was no real reason for the FBI to stick their neck out like that with an actual hardware wire-tap of their own when most ISPs would probably bend over backwards to share the info they've already collected for commercial reasons.
Want to know who's been visiting dangerous, subversive websites? Simply send Agent Crewcut to play a few rounds of golf with CEO Weasel and suggest that there might be some juicy government contracts coming up for grabs.
It's good to see that Comcast haven't, in this case, been able to use general technical ignorance to bamboozle their way out of this one.
It looks as if they actually expected to get away with claiming they needed that info for caching purposes. I hope that they're nicely stunned at being asked to prove why they felt it necessary to tie that info back to individual user identities.
BTW, I presume that most /.ers have always assumed that their ISP was tracking their online activities.
You still think that's nothing? A thousand here, a couple hundred there, it could easily add up, particularly if used to obtain credit cards. Some joke, once you have a few hundred people trying to put their lives back together after someone trashes their credit rating, etc.
Relax, it's only a joke.
And, ask yourself, who is it making fun of?
I'm admonishing these shallow and selfish idiots who think that the ability to use packaged cracking tools makes up for their lack of social skills and, more importantly, social empathy; I'm specifically highlighting the callousness of this sort of thing and the effect it's going to have on the lives of people who, on the whole, work diligently for far too little money and far too little respect in our society. People like your friend who had to go through all that stress because one of these feckers wasn't man enough to work for his money.
BTW, I'm noticing a very weird pattern with regard to humor on /.
Humor is a wonderful tool to highlight inconsistencies and contradications but I've noticed that whenever a funny posting (by anyone) reachs a moderated rating of 5 someone almost always comes along and mods it down as a troll or flamebait, irregardless of it's revelance to the discussion at hand.
Then the posting tends to bob up and down as other mods mark it back up only for it to once again be classed as a troll or flamebait.
What is that, a cultural thing? Or do a frighteningly high percentage of moderators have faulty humor plugins?
Farmers huh? Hmmm.. not a bad idea. A few social security and address switches and I can start getting paid NOT to grow crops like everyone else!
But if you're a Third World farmer you get paid for the crops you DO grow only to have that money used to pay off gigantic debts racked up by decades of corrupt dictators.
Not quite as juicy a deal.
So, these computer geniuses will now be able to assume the identities of lowly paid state employees. Well done.
For your next feat, why not steal the identities of Third World farmers?
i would respectfully disagree. the register article is biased as always.
Well, I guess what I meant by "more interesting" was "more entertaining".
And, somehow, I always find biased entertaining.
CNet is so deadly dull and earnest these days, especially those video reports. That blonde lady they had reporting from E3, she's easy on the eyes but, God, I'd give anything to see her just once looks as if she realizes that 90% of what she's reporting is complete arse.
"...troubling news for people who like high-speed internet access at reasonable prices..."
It's also bads news for freedom of speech
Whereas in a competitive environment ISPs can compete for savvy customers by touting their lack of restrictive practices (such as server-side censorship software that eliminates client-side choice), now they'll be more worried about not offending the big-hitters like the Christian lobbying groups who have the Washington-level power to disrupt their cosy monopolies.
It's horribly offtopic but how is it that with your low UID you've posted only 95 comments total and 24 of those in the past day? Where does this sudden uncontrolable urge to post come from?!?
Wow, well spotted Quantaman!
The low UID is down to the fact that I've been a casual reader of /. for years, but never really felt any reason to comment, partly because I knew that, no matter how funny or interesting anything I had to say might be, someone else would probably get around to saying it anyway.
My "sudden uncontrolable urge to post" (which, btw, is much worse than you think because it's actually probably more like 85 out of my total of 95 that I've posted in just the last 48 hours) is down to a renewed interest in the actual workings of discussion forums. I've recently been asked to set up a community forum for a UK charity/support group and, as such, have been fiddling around with PostNuke.
I felt that, apart from mastering the technical side, it was important to understand the social side, not to mention personally experience the disappointments, elation, frustration and fun of being a poster. I was also very interested in how the slashdot's karma system operated.
I started posting yesterday, making what I hope were worthwhile contributions.
I hit the karma cap of 50 pretty quickly so I'm ending the experiment but I enjoyed getting involving and now plan to keeping posting on a regular if somewhat less intensive basis.
Again, well spotted and I hope that I've managed to explain myself.
Note to moderators: I effectively modded myself -1, Offtopic by checking "No Score +1 Bonus" for this post
Okay, good point, I'm new to this, I hadn't thought of it that way. Makes sense. Thanks.
And, following your lead ...
(I effectively modded myself -1, Offtopic by checking "No Score +1 Bonus" for this post :)
While you're at it, figure out how to get the popular press aware of this
Easy: explain to journalists that, if space travel really takes off, they stand to bag some of the best press junkets ever.
We already have this in sweden
Yeah, but I find it so inconvenient having to fly to Sweden to check my email.
Unbelievable, I post something questioning a major flaw in a story posted just minutes ago and, because somebody else submitted the same question just seconds before me, my posting gets modded down as redundant?
That doesn't make any sense, some sort of rule such be implemented to prevent the use of Redundant until a decent time has elapsed.
At the very least, the advice given to moderators should be clearer on this and other hiccups in the system.
Ah, okay, the BBC to the rescue once again.
I guess CmdrTaco was thinking wireless but flying brainless.
I may be missing something here but I can't find the IEE article in question. One link goes to the IEE's main page, the other to BT. I've looked around the IEE site and even used their site search facility but found nothing!
What strange madness is this?
Given BT's appalling record on broadband so far, I find it hard to get excited about this.
Pretty crummy website.
You'd think that by now publishers would have ensured they were on top of what must surely be their most important marketing medium.
It's probably worth noting that the Music Industry slime-wads aren't actually worried about the corruption of the play lists that payola causes.
From the article:
Deregulation of the radio business and rampant practices that skirt 40-year-old anti-payola laws stifle competition, drive up music promotional costs and make it harder for new artists to gain attention, the artists and record labels said in a joint statement addressed to the federal regulators and Congress.
That's right, it's all about the mighty $.
Why buy into a game you already own?
So, who was that?
Dell?
Don't know why