Honestly, I think somebody is paying all these analysts to hype the "next generation" DVD format because for now, at least, BOTH formats are too expensive, require too much investment in new equipment, and offer too little benefit to be worthwhile for at least a few more years.
Perhaps if digital television had taken off a few years earlier, pushing higher-def TVs and better home theater sound into a majority of households, this might be a winning proposition... but for now, most people are quite happy with the DVD experience.
Unlike the transition between video tape and DVD, the improvements moving to HD are far more elusive, and when finally observable, are not really all that great over the "old" DVD format. Early reviews state that a clear difference is only discernable at very high screen sizes; and at the prices those extra-large format, hi-def TVs run, only the most affluent will be able to afford to see what the hype is all about.
In the end, there's no point declaring anybody a winner in "next gen" DVD until the Walmart crowd gets behind it, and "old" DVDs fade into oblivion.....I'll tell you a little secret, though.... the hype isn't about what's best for consumers. It's about pushing new DRM onto the market to supercede the broken DRM (CSS) of DVD; that's it. The big movie companies could care less about the consumer or their experience, but if Sony and their fellow companies can sell you a new pricey $$$$$ kit along the way, why they'll do that too. In that respect, Hi-def DVD formats deserve nothing but scorn.
Come on people, there's got to be somebody out there that can make that happen - take the best of what G4 cast off, and create a true technology channel.
Do the kinds of programs Discover and History don't - Popular Science and Popular Mechanics (especially those "top secret" specials). Concentrate on computers and video games... Leave the sports video game coverage for G4 - they turn every E3 into a giant commercial for EA sports, anyways.
Profile the geeky side of celebrities, whether it's some actor spending endless hours on WoW or a jock who sits up late into the night playing Star Wars Galaxies.
We also need news - not like anything anywhere else, but the happenings on your latest MMORPG or the most recent shuffling of developer houses among publishers. News about betas and bugs, virii and easter eggs. Sure other stations may get around to having a special on the quest for the X-Prize, but we want to know the juicy details AS THEY UNFOLD.
TechTV probably got three times the viewers G4 did, but TV execs are morons. It's an old boys network, and they just don't get the target demographic. Others have mentioned the ruination of Adult Swim, and more obviosuly, the parallel with MTV's descent into vidiocy. We've seen the unfailing ABILITY of these jackasses to turn a good thing into crap, and their complete INABILITY to see the terrible result for what it is.
I never tune into G4 anymore. Even X-Play is unbearable, and everything else is Spike TV rejects. Ugh. It needs to just go off and die.
G4 is dead. The time for SlashDot TV has finally come!!!
Actually, I thought they had confirmed the delay in Japn until Fall of this year. That pushed back the US release until Spring 07.
So far, Sony has done nothing to deny the Merryl Lynch report... well, they initially denied the delay, but now they confirm it. Nothing has been said about the cost of the unit, BOM over $800 - if true, means the unit will definitely NOT be under $500, as that is far too much of a loss to take on each unit (unless the games sell for $80-100 each)
Of course, don't take my word for it...
"I'm going to only say that it'll be expensive. I'm aware that with all these technologies, the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households." - Sony's Ken Kutaragi
So expect units to sell for at least $650-700, and at that price, Sony is taking a huge bath; but also, it would be angering and alienating vendors of BD Players, which expect to sell for even more than that.
Hmmmm....
Honestly, it seems that Sony is doing everything in their power to kill the Playstation line. Fanboyism aside, you should at least understand the basic facts and realities of the situation.
"I'm going to only say that it'll be expensive. I'm aware that with all these technologies, the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households."
- Sony's Ken Kutaragi
There you have it. Sony isn't targeting households with the PS3. I'm not sure **what** he's targeting, but it's not the "masses" so I guess the PS3 is not intended for the mass market or to be produced in any real numbers. It seems to be intended for the same people that drop 50 grand on a home theater system.
I really can't say who will be buying these things, but clearly, Sony is thinking on an entirely different track for the rest of the human race. Maybe there's a market for PS3 on Altaris VI, or in the Alternate Dimension of Lemmu - yeah, that's the ticket, they'll buy these things like hotcakes, and not even know they are being taken.
The Xbox 360 is indeed, the most complex console to date, as has almost every console released, ever. More things going wrong with it? The only thing I've heard of it overheating of the PSU, mainly because of the decision to make it external (and poor design, at that) and people's inability to put it somewhere where heat would not build up.
It certainly isn't the "biggest console disaster ever" - as I understand it, the 360 is setting records for "games-per-unit" sales, and since the hardware is completely sold out everywhere, I imagine that means positive revenue for Microsoft. They were able to sell them like gangbusters last Christmas, even bundled with hundreds of dollars of extras (thereby eliminating the loss per unit in one fell swoop).
The PS3, on the other hand, is going to cost 3 times the Xbox 360 to BUILD. Sony can only hope to **match** the games-per-unit record that the 360 is making, and that won't compensate for the loss they'll need to take just to sell the PS3 and keep it competitive.
I spent two days removing thos POS from a friend's machine last week. Symantec publishes the instructions to uninstall manually, because the automatic install DOES NOT WORK.
FIVE PAGES OF INSTRUCTIONS.
Countless services and hooks into the operating system, tied into Microsoft's automatic installation system, forcing itself to re-install if you miss a trace of the uninstall procedure (which is, itself not complete).
Before uninstalling, it would take up to 5 minutes to boot XP, after uninstalling, the bootup was in seconds. Everything ran faster after installing another anti-virus client.... EVERYTHING!! Even though taskk manager showed no CPU usage being stolen by Symantec, it clearly was sucking as much as 90% of the processor bandwidth with it's huge number of processes and hooks.
My own impression was that Symantec laid out Antivirus like a virus itself, trying to restart itself on any attempt to remove it. The reality is that it was just badly designed bloatware.
For me, I have to shut down any MSI apps (the motherboard maker installs things like it's own "Live Update" that sucks 100% of CPU every 3 or 5 seconds and doesn't register a blip on Task Mananger).
On my friend's machine, receently, after uninstalling Symantec Antivirus (what a pain, doesn't uninstall itself , 5 pages of manual instructions, screw something up and it relentlessly tries to re-install itself), which was running 10 or so services, his bootup happens almost instantly (compared to 5 minutes with SAV) and his performance is off the hook now.
In both of these cases, Task Manager was no help.... for whatever reason, the processes simply did not register significant CPU processing usage - yet the difference was night and day!
AS I understand it, if all the ice melted from Antarctica, the net result would be the continent rising. Also, at this "alarming" rate (well, as alarming as Chicken Little's bump on the noggin from an acorn), the rise in sea level is still rather negligible.
Areas endangered by high sea levels are usually those already sinking under their own weight (NOLA, Venice, to name a couple). More water means more water vapor, which means less heating from the sun. The Earth's environment is a buffer, where one effect is often offset by a resulting opposite effect.
As an embedded systems programmer, I've always wanted to write the elevator code to purposely bump down in priority any user who presses the button repeatedly.
Of course, as a backdoor, you'd use two shaves and a haircut and get top priority.
Losing the brand name is stupid. Intel even has pop culture behind it.
Kind of like when my wife's real estate agency went from "Better Homes and Gardens" to "GMAC" Ugh. "GMAC" stands for General Motors Assurance Corporation - how boring is that?
Likewise, other recognizable brands or trade names have been wasted into oblivion by idiots sitting on boards who have no clue what they are doing. Witness "Securitas" - what's that, you say? It used to be known as "The Pinkerton Agency" - ahhh... now you recognize it, right? Recognize it fromt he countless pop culture references in western movies and books.
Movie studios and record companies want to use DRM to lock down their "IP" with an iron fist.
DVDs will be around for a LONG time. Until the Walmart crowd buys into HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, nothing will change - just like VHS hung in until DVD Players hit $30 and less, and became mass-market, almost disposable items. DVD-R will become the common man's VCR, as prices settle into ~$75 for a recorder.
Until Digital TV gets a mass market tuner, it, too, will continue to languish as a toy of those rich enough to enjoy copious amounts of disposable income.
The move was merely to swallow up a competitor and likely use ULi's current line as a low end chipset.
nVidia has been making a lot of inroads in the chipset market, but not ATI is joining the fray... Eliminating ULi as competition, and acquiring it's current portfolio doesn't really provide a big bang for the buck, but marginally improves market share for nVidia in the chipset market.
It doesn't hurt that ULi came up with it's own configurable PCI-E setup (ala SLI, though not supported by video card makers, yet). That's probably the key piece, and there may be some parts of the IP portfolio nVidia can leverage toreduce their own licensing costs - which means cheaper chipsets.
Additionally, they gain a group of driver and firmware developers, probably more accustomed to rapid technology changes than nVidia's own group (allowing their original people to concentrate on video)
Overall, it's a "Decent" move, probably having more to do with opportunity, rather than as some large-scale strategic move. ULi simply doesn't command the market share nVidia does, and there are plenty of Asian motherboard makers using nForce chipsets already - this move has NOTHING to do with building those relationships.
I liken it more to buying that 300GB SATA drive on Black Friday because it's a decent deal, not because I suddenly need all that extra capacity, or even that I'll need it in the future... however, it does give me more options.
Forget your bias against Microsoft; the Xbox 360 design is far better than the PS3, which WILL BE A NIGHTMARE to debug.
Debugging is not the problem, the rush to market is to blame here, plain and simple.
As the other reply states, most of these initial games won't make use of multiple cores, anyway, but even so, multiple threads and processes are not really an issue, nor are they poorly understood by game developers. Games can make use of the multiple cores without much hassle, as long as the underlying libraries and compiler optimizations are clean... which is probably the major problem here - the 360 XDK is simply not that mature yet. Debugging is straightforward, and better still, done remotely, which, most of the time, results in cleaner steps through code in this sort of environment.
Synchronization isn't even that big of a deal, because even in a developer-optimized game, one thread (i.e. running on it's own core) will handle the rendering, the other will handle the housekeeping (disk I/O, user actions, networking, mesh/object manipulation, etc). Most of the time, the housekeeping will be waiting on the rendering. While the CPU arrangement is symmetrical, this doesn't really refer to running a single process, but rather the generic nature of code and memory access. PS3's Asymmetrical system, on the other hand, means games will have to be optimized to a larger degree by the developer, and MORE care is needed to prevent issues.
I also find it odd that a game would be released that can't make it through the first single player race... simple playtesting should have showed the bug well before launch. This smacks more of a hardware issue, which ANY multi-core system is likely to run into. Blame IBM for that problem, I guess.
I would think that you could claim damages, including recovering whatever extensive costs were required to restore your system, if a bit of malicious software caused damage to your system.
What is my data worth?
I think getting a honey pot set up, with Sony's Rootkit, and some old SQL non-transferable licenses set up on it might do nicely for 5 or 6 thousand in actual damages, to begin with. Add in my own time to restore the system to working order (another couple of thousand) and punitive (Triple damages?).
Multiply that times, let's say, 10% of the slashdotters out there, all filing suits in every state and district of the US... a million individual lawsuits, with recognizable evidence of criminal negligence, damages, and likely a ton of defaults on the order of billions in judgements, might actually sink RIAA, as the other big labels realize how foolhardy all of this DRM crap really is.
All these pronouncements about "who has won" a technology battle get rather stupid and tedious.
It might just be that NIETHER Blu-Ray or HD-DVD survive. Perhaps a third standard comes in and wipes the floor up with them.
The main thing Blu-Ray has going for it, besides the Sony backing, is the fact that it will come in ahead of HD-DVD. Bickering between studios and the committee of technology partners on HD-DVD is what is dragging it down and quickly making it irrelevant. M$ only backed it because it stands against Sony - otherwise, it doesn't make sense for them to support a standard that can't get its act together in time to actually compete.
What I'd really like to know, however, is what Forrester Research had to say about the "winner" of the DVD-R and DVD+R battle. As that battle has dragged on into a droning background buzz, the fact that they would make a pronouncement of any kind would be very telling.
For starters, the speakers should send out a audio cancellation on the user's voice, and put the "babble" out in a low, quiet volume level. "Babble" parts should probably be soft sounds, so that to an obvserver, it sounds like a low murmur of activity.
The feedback of voice from a cube is nice, because it alerts others not to disturb a phone conversation. Keeping it low, combined with the audio cancellation, should provide ample protection against eavesdroppers, without disturbing the surrounding cubicles.
If the effect is done right, an overt attempt to listen should be met with a profound confusion and maybe even be a little disturbing to the listener trying to understand it. To anyone else int he office, it should just be a little more background noise (Less distracting because of the chosen tones and the fact that the human brain should not pick up the conversation due to unrecognizable "words").
It would be interesting to listen to a recording of the tests.
If Microsoft is kind enough to continue using TEA encryption in the Xbox 360 for the bootstrap initialization, perhaps it will not be so unhackable.
Probably not, but my personal belief is that MS would be dumb to make it unhackable, as mod chips have probably been responsible for a lot of console sales, and in turn, a lot of good word-of-mouth PR in the trenches.
The "hotspot" is from the oceans. Pay attention and you'll see, toward the very end of the clip, that the land mass glides through the edge of the hot spot.
Also, while most cloud formations are not in the light long enough to see real change, one formation does appear to dissipate before hitting the terminator.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I think somebody is paying all these analysts to hype the "next generation" DVD format because for now, at least, BOTH formats are too expensive, require too much investment in new equipment, and offer too little benefit to be worthwhile for at least a few more years.
....I'll tell you a little secret, though.... the hype isn't about what's best for consumers. It's about pushing new DRM onto the market to supercede the broken DRM (CSS) of DVD; that's it. The big movie companies could care less about the consumer or their experience, but if Sony and their fellow companies can sell you a new pricey $$$$$ kit along the way, why they'll do that too. In that respect, Hi-def DVD formats deserve nothing but scorn.
Perhaps if digital television had taken off a few years earlier, pushing higher-def TVs and better home theater sound into a majority of households, this might be a winning proposition... but for now, most people are quite happy with the DVD experience.
Unlike the transition between video tape and DVD, the improvements moving to HD are far more elusive, and when finally observable, are not really all that great over the "old" DVD format. Early reviews state that a clear difference is only discernable at very high screen sizes; and at the prices those extra-large format, hi-def TVs run, only the most affluent will be able to afford to see what the hype is all about.
In the end, there's no point declaring anybody a winner in "next gen" DVD until the Walmart crowd gets behind it, and "old" DVDs fade into oblivion.
Come on people, there's got to be somebody out there that can make that happen - take the best of what G4 cast off, and create a true technology channel.
Do the kinds of programs Discover and History don't - Popular Science and Popular Mechanics (especially those "top secret" specials). Concentrate on computers and video games... Leave the sports video game coverage for G4 - they turn every E3 into a giant commercial for EA sports, anyways.
Profile the geeky side of celebrities, whether it's some actor spending endless hours on WoW or a jock who sits up late into the night playing Star Wars Galaxies.
We also need news - not like anything anywhere else, but the happenings on your latest MMORPG or the most recent shuffling of developer houses among publishers. News about betas and bugs, virii and easter eggs. Sure other stations may get around to having a special on the quest for the X-Prize, but we want to know the juicy details AS THEY UNFOLD.
TechTV probably got three times the viewers G4 did, but TV execs are morons. It's an old boys network, and they just don't get the target demographic. Others have mentioned the ruination of Adult Swim, and more obviosuly, the parallel with MTV's descent into vidiocy. We've seen the unfailing ABILITY of these jackasses to turn a good thing into crap, and their complete INABILITY to see the terrible result for what it is.
I never tune into G4 anymore. Even X-Play is unbearable, and everything else is Spike TV rejects. Ugh. It needs to just go off and die.
G4 is dead. The time for SlashDot TV has finally come!!!
I'm pretty disappointed that they didn't touch the monitor I just bought. NewEgg is selling them like hotcakes ($349 after rebate for a 20.1" LCD)
So far I'm pleased with it, and games seem fine, but I'd like to see how it holds up to other LCDs on a technical basis
Actually, I thought they had confirmed the delay in Japn until Fall of this year. That pushed back the US release until Spring 07.
So far, Sony has done nothing to deny the Merryl Lynch report... well, they initially denied the delay, but now they confirm it. Nothing has been said about the cost of the unit, BOM over $800 - if true, means the unit will definitely NOT be under $500, as that is far too much of a loss to take on each unit (unless the games sell for $80-100 each)
Of course, don't take my word for it...
"I'm going to only say that it'll be expensive. I'm aware that with all these technologies, the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households." - Sony's Ken Kutaragi
So expect units to sell for at least $650-700, and at that price, Sony is taking a huge bath; but also, it would be angering and alienating vendors of BD Players, which expect to sell for even more than that.
Hmmmm....
Honestly, it seems that Sony is doing everything in their power to kill the Playstation line. Fanboyism aside, you should at least understand the basic facts and realities of the situation."I'm going to only say that it'll be expensive. I'm aware that with all these technologies, the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households." - Sony's Ken Kutaragi
There you have it. Sony isn't targeting households with the PS3. I'm not sure **what** he's targeting, but it's not the "masses" so I guess the PS3 is not intended for the mass market or to be produced in any real numbers. It seems to be intended for the same people that drop 50 grand on a home theater system.
I really can't say who will be buying these things, but clearly, Sony is thinking on an entirely different track for the rest of the human race. Maybe there's a market for PS3 on Altaris VI, or in the Alternate Dimension of Lemmu - yeah, that's the ticket, they'll buy these things like hotcakes, and not even know they are being taken.
Your post is nothing but fanboy flamebait.
The Xbox 360 is indeed, the most complex console to date, as has almost every console released, ever. More things going wrong with it? The only thing I've heard of it overheating of the PSU, mainly because of the decision to make it external (and poor design, at that) and people's inability to put it somewhere where heat would not build up.
It certainly isn't the "biggest console disaster ever" - as I understand it, the 360 is setting records for "games-per-unit" sales, and since the hardware is completely sold out everywhere, I imagine that means positive revenue for Microsoft. They were able to sell them like gangbusters last Christmas, even bundled with hundreds of dollars of extras (thereby eliminating the loss per unit in one fell swoop).
The PS3, on the other hand, is going to cost 3 times the Xbox 360 to BUILD. Sony can only hope to **match** the games-per-unit record that the 360 is making, and that won't compensate for the loss they'll need to take just to sell the PS3 and keep it competitive.
I spent two days removing thos POS from a friend's machine last week. Symantec publishes the instructions to uninstall manually, because the automatic install DOES NOT WORK.
FIVE PAGES OF INSTRUCTIONS.
Countless services and hooks into the operating system, tied into Microsoft's automatic installation system, forcing itself to re-install if you miss a trace of the uninstall procedure (which is, itself not complete).
Before uninstalling, it would take up to 5 minutes to boot XP, after uninstalling, the bootup was in seconds. Everything ran faster after installing another anti-virus client.... EVERYTHING!! Even though taskk manager showed no CPU usage being stolen by Symantec, it clearly was sucking as much as 90% of the processor bandwidth with it's huge number of processes and hooks.
My own impression was that Symantec laid out Antivirus like a virus itself, trying to restart itself on any attempt to remove it. The reality is that it was just badly designed bloatware.
For me, I have to shut down any MSI apps (the motherboard maker installs things like it's own "Live Update" that sucks 100% of CPU every 3 or 5 seconds and doesn't register a blip on Task Mananger).
On my friend's machine, receently, after uninstalling Symantec Antivirus (what a pain, doesn't uninstall itself , 5 pages of manual instructions, screw something up and it relentlessly tries to re-install itself), which was running 10 or so services, his bootup happens almost instantly (compared to 5 minutes with SAV) and his performance is off the hook now.
In both of these cases, Task Manager was no help.... for whatever reason, the processes simply did not register significant CPU processing usage - yet the difference was night and day!
Hate to be the one upper here, but I remember a game that had a wheel, and it was DARK BROWN to defeat photo copiers, too.
Of course, floppy based protection has existed since the days of the C=64. It never stops piracy, and only inconveniences the legitimate users.
AS I understand it, if all the ice melted from Antarctica, the net result would be the continent rising. Also, at this "alarming" rate (well, as alarming as Chicken Little's bump on the noggin from an acorn), the rise in sea level is still rather negligible.
Areas endangered by high sea levels are usually those already sinking under their own weight (NOLA, Venice, to name a couple). More water means more water vapor, which means less heating from the sun. The Earth's environment is a buffer, where one effect is often offset by a resulting opposite effect.
Or a meter every 2500 years?
Wow.... better shore up the levees, Waterworld is coming soon!
As an embedded systems programmer, I've always wanted to write the elevator code to purposely bump down in priority any user who presses the button repeatedly.
Of course, as a backdoor, you'd use two shaves and a haircut and get top priority.
Losing the brand name is stupid. Intel even has pop culture behind it.
Kind of like when my wife's real estate agency went from "Better Homes and Gardens" to "GMAC" Ugh. "GMAC" stands for General Motors Assurance Corporation - how boring is that?
Likewise, other recognizable brands or trade names have been wasted into oblivion by idiots sitting on boards who have no clue what they are doing. Witness "Securitas" - what's that, you say? It used to be known as "The Pinkerton Agency" - ahhh... now you recognize it, right? Recognize it fromt he countless pop culture references in western movies and books.
Modern Marketing sucks bigtime.
Movie studios and record companies want to use DRM to lock down their "IP" with an iron fist.
DVDs will be around for a LONG time. Until the Walmart crowd buys into HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, nothing will change - just like VHS hung in until DVD Players hit $30 and less, and became mass-market, almost disposable items. DVD-R will become the common man's VCR, as prices settle into ~$75 for a recorder.
Until Digital TV gets a mass market tuner, it, too, will continue to languish as a toy of those rich enough to enjoy copious amounts of disposable income.
The move was merely to swallow up a competitor and likely use ULi's current line as a low end chipset.
nVidia has been making a lot of inroads in the chipset market, but not ATI is joining the fray... Eliminating ULi as competition, and acquiring it's current portfolio doesn't really provide a big bang for the buck, but marginally improves market share for nVidia in the chipset market.
It doesn't hurt that ULi came up with it's own configurable PCI-E setup (ala SLI, though not supported by video card makers, yet). That's probably the key piece, and there may be some parts of the IP portfolio nVidia can leverage toreduce their own licensing costs - which means cheaper chipsets.
Additionally, they gain a group of driver and firmware developers, probably more accustomed to rapid technology changes than nVidia's own group (allowing their original people to concentrate on video)
Overall, it's a "Decent" move, probably having more to do with opportunity, rather than as some large-scale strategic move. ULi simply doesn't command the market share nVidia does, and there are plenty of Asian motherboard makers using nForce chipsets already - this move has NOTHING to do with building those relationships.
I liken it more to buying that 300GB SATA drive on Black Friday because it's a decent deal, not because I suddenly need all that extra capacity, or even that I'll need it in the future... however, it does give me more options.
Wrong.
Forget your bias against Microsoft; the Xbox 360 design is far better than the PS3, which WILL BE A NIGHTMARE to debug.
Debugging is not the problem, the rush to market is to blame here, plain and simple.
As the other reply states, most of these initial games won't make use of multiple cores, anyway, but even so, multiple threads and processes are not really an issue, nor are they poorly understood by game developers. Games can make use of the multiple cores without much hassle, as long as the underlying libraries and compiler optimizations are clean... which is probably the major problem here - the 360 XDK is simply not that mature yet. Debugging is straightforward, and better still, done remotely, which, most of the time, results in cleaner steps through code in this sort of environment.
Synchronization isn't even that big of a deal, because even in a developer-optimized game, one thread (i.e. running on it's own core) will handle the rendering, the other will handle the housekeeping (disk I/O, user actions, networking, mesh/object manipulation, etc). Most of the time, the housekeeping will be waiting on the rendering. While the CPU arrangement is symmetrical, this doesn't really refer to running a single process, but rather the generic nature of code and memory access. PS3's Asymmetrical system, on the other hand, means games will have to be optimized to a larger degree by the developer, and MORE care is needed to prevent issues.
I also find it odd that a game would be released that can't make it through the first single player race... simple playtesting should have showed the bug well before launch. This smacks more of a hardware issue, which ANY multi-core system is likely to run into. Blame IBM for that problem, I guess.
Hah hah...
I've read an interview of Adam Savage, and both are married, family guys, apparently.
They actually get asked this quite a bit - given the location (Bay area), and their "look", it's an honest question.
I didn't say infect your own PC.
Simply listen to the rootkit'd CD, leave your PC exposed to the wild world wide web. That's the idea of a "honey pot".
You aren't actually infecting your own system.
I will admit, it is akin to taking that hot cup of coffee and moving about in a crowd, I suppose.
I would think that you could claim damages, including recovering whatever extensive costs were required to restore your system, if a bit of malicious software caused damage to your system.
What is my data worth?
I think getting a honey pot set up, with Sony's Rootkit, and some old SQL non-transferable licenses set up on it might do nicely for 5 or 6 thousand in actual damages, to begin with. Add in my own time to restore the system to working order (another couple of thousand) and punitive (Triple damages?).
Multiply that times, let's say, 10% of the slashdotters out there, all filing suits in every state and district of the US... a million individual lawsuits, with recognizable evidence of criminal negligence, damages, and likely a ton of defaults on the order of billions in judgements, might actually sink RIAA, as the other big labels realize how foolhardy all of this DRM crap really is.
That would be interesting as well.
All these pronouncements about "who has won" a technology battle get rather stupid and tedious.
It might just be that NIETHER Blu-Ray or HD-DVD survive. Perhaps a third standard comes in and wipes the floor up with them.
The main thing Blu-Ray has going for it, besides the Sony backing, is the fact that it will come in ahead of HD-DVD. Bickering between studios and the committee of technology partners on HD-DVD is what is dragging it down and quickly making it irrelevant. M$ only backed it because it stands against Sony - otherwise, it doesn't make sense for them to support a standard that can't get its act together in time to actually compete.
What I'd really like to know, however, is what Forrester Research had to say about the "winner" of the DVD-R and DVD+R battle. As that battle has dragged on into a droning background buzz, the fact that they would make a pronouncement of any kind would be very telling.
For starters, the speakers should send out a audio cancellation on the user's voice, and put the "babble" out in a low, quiet volume level. "Babble" parts should probably be soft sounds, so that to an obvserver, it sounds like a low murmur of activity.
The feedback of voice from a cube is nice, because it alerts others not to disturb a phone conversation. Keeping it low, combined with the audio cancellation, should provide ample protection against eavesdroppers, without disturbing the surrounding cubicles.
If the effect is done right, an overt attempt to listen should be met with a profound confusion and maybe even be a little disturbing to the listener trying to understand it. To anyone else int he office, it should just be a little more background noise (Less distracting because of the chosen tones and the fact that the human brain should not pick up the conversation due to unrecognizable "words").
It would be interesting to listen to a recording of the tests.
See, there is the PROOF!
Americans land two mini-SUVs on Mars, tool around the countryside making tracks, and triggers global warming!
Q.E.D.
Heh heh...
If Microsoft is kind enough to continue using TEA encryption in the Xbox 360 for the bootstrap initialization, perhaps it will not be so unhackable.
Probably not, but my personal belief is that MS would be dumb to make it unhackable, as mod chips have probably been responsible for a lot of console sales, and in turn, a lot of good word-of-mouth PR in the trenches.
The "hotspot" is from the oceans. Pay attention and you'll see, toward the very end of the clip, that the land mass glides through the edge of the hot spot.
Also, while most cloud formations are not in the light long enough to see real change, one formation does appear to dissipate before hitting the terminator.
This appears to be quite real.
That would match the title of this article a bit better... anybody care to take a stabe at the number?
Assuming X number of electrons to store a bit, multiplied by the amount of traffic in a given day, multiplied by the weight of an electron.
In Stone, of course, because nothing beats an ancient, obscure weight system used by exactly ONE country on this planet.