Recordable DVD is already a reality, and is slowly on the way to becoming a standard in the home electronics market. It offers all the benefits of VHS recording with the added plus of digital quality.
As near as I can tell, the only real benefit D-VHS offers over DVD is the higher uncompressed quality. But this is overwhelmed by the minuses: the inability to skip from section to section instantly, the incompatability with home computers, and the fragility of the tape media.
There's just not enough advantages offered by D-VHS to make it replace VHS in the consumer market, unless it becomes a LOT cheaper than two grand and fast. Recordable DVD may have three conflicting standards, but it also has about a four-year head start in the market. If D-VHS can't beat DVD-R to the level of affordability, it won't stand a chance.
The JVC D-VHS deck, which should be available around May, will sell for approximately $2,000, while blank media will cost between $10 and $15.
For $2000, no one's going to buy these tapes, regardless of how backwards-compatible they are. DVD players are well-established and can be bought for as little as $100 at the low-end. VCR's are available for even less. Recorded movies in those formats are available for about $20 VHS, $25 DVD. Why in the world would anyone take a chance on digital tapes, except in the professional markets?
The clincher for movies is always going to be what I call the Blockbuster factor. If your local video store thinks you'll have the machine, they'll carry the movies. If you think your local video store will carry the movies, you'll buy the player. But for $2000, nobody's going to start carrying movie titles when VHS and DVD are already practially guaranteed.
Digital VHS may stand a chance in the professional markets. It won't sell anywhere else, period.
We understand that Amazon wishes to provide customers with all manner of services including the ability to buy and sell used books. However, as a leader in the bookselling industry, Amazon's sales practices can have a significantly deleterious effect on new book sales. If your aggressive promotion of used book sales becomes popular among Amazon's customers, this service will cut significantly into sales of new titles, directly harming authors and publishers.
I see. It's okay for people to buy and sell used books, as long as they're not market leaders.
In legal cases involving copyright/trademark infringement, it's generally understood that a company can't credibly raise a fuss over one case of infringement if they've knowingly overlooked it repeatedly in the past. I think the same principle should apply here. They've allowed public libraries to loan out books for decades, and small used book stores to sell titles for almost as long.
Raising a fuss now just because a market leader wants to sell both new *and* used books side-by-side is likely to fall on deaf ears.
What Spanish conquistadors? Perhaps you're thinking of Dreamworks' recent video release, El Dorado, which (despite ignoring the fact that the South American civilizations didn't speak Spanish until after they were conquered) did a rather good job of putting the conquistadors in a bad light and the natives in a good one.
The Emperor's New Groove does do a bad job of accurately depicting ancient Peruvian civilization, to be sure. But it's supposed to be that way. It's funnier that way. Disney hasn't accurately depicted anything since they began producing animated movies fifty years ago, and everyone knows it.
Following up my own post: the official DragonBallZ Web site has a press release dated Nov. 30, 2000 that says Funimation has licensed Infogrames, Inc. to publish games based on their characters. This license would obligate them to issue cease-and-desist to any non-licensed game developers doing the same.
I've noticed that *often* (not always), when "cease-and-desist" orders of this nature come up, it's because the owners of the license want to, or might want to, release a similar product of their own.
Translation: It's very very likely that the owners of the DragonBall Z franchise will want to release their own video game in the near future; even if they don't, the franchise is popular enough that the probability of a video game is high. So while the owners of, say, the Barney the Dinosaur probably won't fight too much over a Quake mod featuring their characters, the owners of DragonBall Z will want to reserve that right to those who legally license the rights.
However, it's always illegal to use someone's legally-owned characters without their permission. Some are just more likely to send lawyers out than others.
Yahoo should do exactly what this says: ban all French IP addresses from all their auction sites, redirecting them to a page saying why they have to do this to ensure full compliance with the French court ruling -- along with an email address or three where people can send their protests to the government.
They can't fix it. But an impromptu petition like this is the best way to get the fuss into the news and enact some probable change.
I gotta admit, it was annoying enough when my shareware would stop working after a certain number of days. But at least there, it was because I hadn't paid for it. So this was to be expected.
But now Microsoft is rigging things so that, even after I've paid hundreds of dollars for their software, I still have to deal with a "trial period"? What's next, I have to start paying for bug fixes?
...and it's silly to think it is. Mozilla is an open source project to produce an excellent free browser. Netscape is a product, owned by AOL, and it's in AOL's best interest to promote the Netscape portal and the AOL brand -- especially since this sizable piece of software is being given away for free.
You'd think that after web users have been exposed to ad banners on web sites, Eudora, Cute FTP, and any number of other "free" software packages, they'd be used to the notion that good software doesn't come free -- unless you're Microsoft, and you can afford it. Netscape tries to make money from their web site. This is how they get people there.
Besides, the links are all part of the skin. It's only a matter of time before Skinz.org fills up with Netscape skins that lack all the self-promotion. If you're halfway clever, you can even start hacking the code and doing it yourself.
This year, Discover magazine published an article the month before the election about the problems of electing candidates based on simple majority, which begins to fail when more than two candidates have a strong following. With the fuss about Nader voters "taking away" votes from Gore, this is very relevant in this election.
Four years ago, they did a similar article on the electoral college, and how it actually gives more power to the average voter when a very large pool of voters exists.
Both articles should be required reading for all scientifically-minded would-be voting reformers.
What this shows is that the way the patent system works, it limits competition and makes research less interesting. Even if someone can come up woth some better technology, the economic advantage of doing so is partly removed.
That's not how I read it. "Difficult, if not impossible, to develop a competing technology to RDRAM and not infringe on our patents"... That means the challenge is for someone else to develop an equal or better technology independently. The patent system is doing exactly what it's supposed to, providing protection to the company that originated the best ideas. It's up to their competitors to produce a better mousetrap, not cry foul because Rambus isn't sharing.
Of course, whether or not those patents are excessively broad, and thus making it functionally impossible to develop any competing technology, is a discussion for another thread.
I'm getting married in a few days, and acquiring a step-daughter in the process. For her, and for myself, the issue of what sort of media influences enter the home is very, very important to me.
A year ago, I came up with a novel solution, one which I intend to carry over to our new family house. The television will not be hooked up. It will be connected to the VCR and the stereo receiver, so that we can watch movies as we choose them. But that's it. No cable feed, not even an antenna. There's not enough really good television programming to make it worth having that permanent distraction taking up our family room.
So many people think of television as some kind of basic human right that they ignore this possibility. The same goes for internet access. Thousands of Americans don't have any way to access the World Wide Web, and they're not suffering for it. If you don't like what the Internet has to say, don't turn it on. It really is that simple.
Now, what should we do about public libraries? In my opinion, nothing. Hatred and racism like The Bell Curve and Mein Kampf are already available in most sizable public libraries for those who want it; literary pornography is easily accessible to anyone who can find the romance section. And if you don't want to deal with kids browsing porn away from their parents, then just position the monitors so that a librarian at their desk can see what's being downloaded.
This is, as far as I know, the single best example of politicans saying what they think people want them to say instead of thinking through a practical solution to things. Mandatory filtering software has already been tried out extensively, and it never works right: it never filters everything, and usually ends up filtering things it shouldn't because of too-narrow criteria. Gore's proposed solution is poorly thought out, but Bush's is just insipid.
Because, in our culture, we have a moral system in which economics is not the final arbiter of right and wrong.
Ahh, but should we require such a moral system to be built in to our economics? Or should we let morality and capitalism, church and state, operate independent of each other?
I appreciate the tongue-in-cheek commentary on political hype, but correllating an increase in violent games and movies to a decrease in violent statistics is just as bad as what the politicians are claiming. I just fundamentally dislike using bad statistics to back up any argument.
I listen to NPR just about every morning and evening, and violent gaming seems to have a surprisingly objective review there. Just yesterday was an interview with one family on why Diablo II is so popular, with audio quotes from two young boys maintaining that "It's just a game!", and that they can distinguish cartoon/videogame violence from the real thing.
But then, a couple of months ago, they had another discussion about a pre-teen kid esperienced with first-person shooters, and his first experience with shooting a real handgun. The adult observer commented on how steady his hand was, how careful his eyes, how his hesitation at shooting a target was nonexistent -- and then pointed out that these games are so good at training individuals to use real weapons that the Army now uses the same technology toward the same goal.
Do realistically violent games and movies desensitize kids to the real thing? No doubt. Does it do so to the point where actual violence is much, much easier to commit? Unprovable. There are plenty of things that can cause a decrease in crime statistics, from better policing to bad reporting. But claming that there's no correlation at all between virtual and actual violence, even in sarcasm, is just dodging the issue and irresponsible in the extreme.
Give your old systems (complete, and working) to a local school which needs it. Most schools, both public and private, lack funds to provide sufficient computer technology for kids. Even an old 486 with a decent modem would be enough for a school library to help kids get information off the WWW, or a box with a CD-ROM that can run "Reader Rabbit" or simple math games.
Best of all, if the school gives you a letter stating that they've accepted your gift and what the value of the hardware is, then your donation becomes tax-deductible. Win-win all around.
On one hand, "It is not a punitive step. This will actually benefit very many people seeking insurance. The only people who are likely to have taken a test for Huntington's disease are people with a family history of this disease." But on the other, insurees "would be expected to disclose the results of any genetic test for Huntington's disease they had taken in the past" and "insurance companies would have the right to refuse to offer insurance if a customer refused to reveal details."
Additionally: "a person at 50% risk of developing Huntington's often found their insurance premium loaded by as much as 300%." And this is only if you're at risk, which is different from being certain of it.
Is this fair? Probably. If you, personally, are likely to contract a certain medical condition, then why shouldn't you pay your own rates for that instead of expecting it to be evenly distributed, Medicare style?
On the other hand, this is definitely a slippery slope. I'll be one of the first to cite "Gattaca", and the instance where a day-care center wouldn't take a certain boy who was at risk for assorted genetic "defects", all because "the insurance won't cover it". Will our medical insurance one day have factors for our likelihood of cancer, Alzheimer's, and depression, the same way our homeowner's insurance now factors in our neighborhood and the age of the plumbing?
Re the stability: agreed, this is a HUGE improvement over the past PR's. I'm testing this browser on a newly-installed Win2000 machine at work, and the PR wasn't even identified as compatible with that OS.
Re the memory requirements: all betas tend to do that. Memory requirements are trimmed down for the final release. If it's 30+ MB in the final, THEN I'll take issue.
Re the "Modern" skin: big thumbs up. I just wish Mozilla had at least a couple more skins ready for download when this came out.
Re the speed of displayed pages: it does seem faster than IE5.5, although I haven't tested it side-by-side yet this morning. It's disturbingly slower when I click the "back" arrow to reload a page, though. Rather odd.
Big bug still present: when I modify several preferences at once, it won't "ok" the changes. I have to change just one panel at a time, then "ok" it and go back. But it doesn't crash anymore, at least.
One thing I really want to see with this Mozilla browser, though, is for Yahoo! to pick it up and customize it. Right now this browser is heavily customized for AOL/Netcenter users, and I'm not one of those. If Yahoo! can take Netscape 6 and tweak it their own way, I'll be ecstatic to use it.
As previously reported, the Web redesign is aimed at providing improved ease of use, said Susan Merit, Netscape's vice president for design and production, while better targeting the company's chosen market of professional, at-work users. The Web redesign will also provide more integration with the company's new Netscape 6.0 Web browser, she said....
Netscape 6.0 preview 3 will have a new look over previous versions, LaGuardia said, based on feedback from preview 2 beta testers, who had the opportunity to try out and design a variety of new interfaces, or "skins." Preview 3 won't offer a broad range of new features, he added, saying this version is primarily aimed at addressing stability and performance issues.
Librarians are paid to help people FIND information, not keep it FROM them.
You deliberately missed the point. The issue is whether kids are using library terminals to browse porn. Porn =/= information, except in the strictest binary sense of the word.
This is why this is such a big deal. The fact that it runs on VirtualPC without modifying that software application (unlike, say, Windows Me) means that a vast majority of x86 processors out there today can run Darwin. And if they can run Darwin, the core of MacOS X, they're much much closer to being able to run MacOS X itself.
So be happy. The open source community has just scored another coup.:-)
This article has two screenshots from The Matrix on the first page, before and after compression. The "Before" picture is sharp, bright, DVD quality. The "After" is darker, drabber and visibly pixelated.
Now, this may just be a result of how his images were screengrabbed. But it sure doesn't look like a suitable replacement for DVD quality to me -- especially if I have to have a computer monitor instead of a 36-inch (or larger) television set to watch the movie.
...making him and Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), the only two actors to appear in all of the Star Wars movies to date.
Isn't that a bit of a misnomer? After all, neither Kenny Baker nor Anthony Daniels actually appeared in either movie. Anthony wasn't even physically in Episode I, either, for that matter, just his voice.
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You can't tape over DVD you stupid.
Recordable DVD is already a reality, and is slowly on the way to becoming a standard in the home electronics market. It offers all the benefits of VHS recording with the added plus of digital quality.
As near as I can tell, the only real benefit D-VHS offers over DVD is the higher uncompressed quality. But this is overwhelmed by the minuses: the inability to skip from section to section instantly, the incompatability with home computers, and the fragility of the tape media.
There's just not enough advantages offered by D-VHS to make it replace VHS in the consumer market, unless it becomes a LOT cheaper than two grand and fast. Recordable DVD may have three conflicting standards, but it also has about a four-year head start in the market. If D-VHS can't beat DVD-R to the level of affordability, it won't stand a chance.
The clincher for movies is always going to be what I call the Blockbuster factor. If your local video store thinks you'll have the machine, they'll carry the movies. If you think your local video store will carry the movies, you'll buy the player. But for $2000, nobody's going to start carrying movie titles when VHS and DVD are already practially guaranteed.
Digital VHS may stand a chance in the professional markets. It won't sell anywhere else, period.
I see. It's okay for people to buy and sell used books, as long as they're not market leaders.
In legal cases involving copyright/trademark infringement, it's generally understood that a company can't credibly raise a fuss over one case of infringement if they've knowingly overlooked it repeatedly in the past. I think the same principle should apply here. They've allowed public libraries to loan out books for decades, and small used book stores to sell titles for almost as long.
Raising a fuss now just because a market leader wants to sell both new *and* used books side-by-side is likely to fall on deaf ears.
...Would our generation prefer to attempt this playing Super Mario Bros. or Contra? (Or The Legend of Zelda, or....)
The Emperor's New Groove does do a bad job of accurately depicting ancient Peruvian civilization, to be sure. But it's supposed to be that way. It's funnier that way. Disney hasn't accurately depicted anything since they began producing animated movies fifty years ago, and everyone knows it.
Relax. There's nothing to be offended by here.
The press release is here.
Translation: It's very very likely that the owners of the DragonBall Z franchise will want to release their own video game in the near future; even if they don't, the franchise is popular enough that the probability of a video game is high. So while the owners of, say, the Barney the Dinosaur probably won't fight too much over a Quake mod featuring their characters, the owners of DragonBall Z will want to reserve that right to those who legally license the rights.
However, it's always illegal to use someone's legally-owned characters without their permission. Some are just more likely to send lawyers out than others.
They can't fix it. But an impromptu petition like this is the best way to get the fuss into the news and enact some probable change.
But now Microsoft is rigging things so that, even after I've paid hundreds of dollars for their software, I still have to deal with a "trial period"? What's next, I have to start paying for bug fixes?
Oh, wait... they started that with Windows98....
"something to put with Crichton"? I don't know... have you read "Timeline" yet?
You'd think that after web users have been exposed to ad banners on web sites, Eudora, Cute FTP, and any number of other "free" software packages, they'd be used to the notion that good software doesn't come free -- unless you're Microsoft, and you can afford it. Netscape tries to make money from their web site. This is how they get people there.
Besides, the links are all part of the skin. It's only a matter of time before Skinz.org fills up with Netscape skins that lack all the self-promotion. If you're halfway clever, you can even start hacking the code and doing it yourself.
This year, Discover magazine published an article the month before the election about the problems of electing candidates based on simple majority, which begins to fail when more than two candidates have a strong following. With the fuss about Nader voters "taking away" votes from Gore, this is very relevant in this election.
Four years ago, they did a similar article on the electoral college, and how it actually gives more power to the average voter when a very large pool of voters exists.
Both articles should be required reading for all scientifically-minded would-be voting reformers.
That's not how I read it. "Difficult, if not impossible, to develop a competing technology to RDRAM and not infringe on our patents"... That means the challenge is for someone else to develop an equal or better technology independently. The patent system is doing exactly what it's supposed to, providing protection to the company that originated the best ideas. It's up to their competitors to produce a better mousetrap, not cry foul because Rambus isn't sharing.
Of course, whether or not those patents are excessively broad, and thus making it functionally impossible to develop any competing technology, is a discussion for another thread.
A year ago, I came up with a novel solution, one which I intend to carry over to our new family house. The television will not be hooked up. It will be connected to the VCR and the stereo receiver, so that we can watch movies as we choose them. But that's it. No cable feed, not even an antenna. There's not enough really good television programming to make it worth having that permanent distraction taking up our family room.
So many people think of television as some kind of basic human right that they ignore this possibility. The same goes for internet access. Thousands of Americans don't have any way to access the World Wide Web, and they're not suffering for it. If you don't like what the Internet has to say, don't turn it on. It really is that simple.
Now, what should we do about public libraries? In my opinion, nothing. Hatred and racism like The Bell Curve and Mein Kampf are already available in most sizable public libraries for those who want it; literary pornography is easily accessible to anyone who can find the romance section. And if you don't want to deal with kids browsing porn away from their parents, then just position the monitors so that a librarian at their desk can see what's being downloaded.
This is, as far as I know, the single best example of politicans saying what they think people want them to say instead of thinking through a practical solution to things. Mandatory filtering software has already been tried out extensively, and it never works right: it never filters everything, and usually ends up filtering things it shouldn't because of too-narrow criteria. Gore's proposed solution is poorly thought out, but Bush's is just insipid.
Ahh, but should we require such a moral system to be built in to our economics? Or should we let morality and capitalism, church and state, operate independent of each other?
Thus arises the conflict of interest.
I appreciate the tongue-in-cheek commentary on political hype, but correllating an increase in violent games and movies to a decrease in violent statistics is just as bad as what the politicians are claiming. I just fundamentally dislike using bad statistics to back up any argument.
I listen to NPR just about every morning and evening, and violent gaming seems to have a surprisingly objective review there. Just yesterday was an interview with one family on why Diablo II is so popular, with audio quotes from two young boys maintaining that "It's just a game!", and that they can distinguish cartoon/videogame violence from the real thing.
But then, a couple of months ago, they had another discussion about a pre-teen kid esperienced with first-person shooters, and his first experience with shooting a real handgun. The adult observer commented on how steady his hand was, how careful his eyes, how his hesitation at shooting a target was nonexistent -- and then pointed out that these games are so good at training individuals to use real weapons that the Army now uses the same technology toward the same goal.
Do realistically violent games and movies desensitize kids to the real thing? No doubt. Does it do so to the point where actual violence is much, much easier to commit? Unprovable. There are plenty of things that can cause a decrease in crime statistics, from better policing to bad reporting. But claming that there's no correlation at all between virtual and actual violence, even in sarcasm, is just dodging the issue and irresponsible in the extreme.
Give your old systems (complete, and working) to a local school which needs it. Most schools, both public and private, lack funds to provide sufficient computer technology for kids. Even an old 486 with a decent modem would be enough for a school library to help kids get information off the WWW, or a box with a CD-ROM that can run "Reader Rabbit" or simple math games.
Best of all, if the school gives you a letter stating that they've accepted your gift and what the value of the hardware is, then your donation becomes tax-deductible. Win-win all around.
On one hand, "It is not a punitive step. This will actually benefit very many people seeking insurance. The only people who are likely to have taken a test for Huntington's disease are people with a family history of this disease." But on the other, insurees "would be expected to disclose the results of any genetic test for Huntington's disease they had taken in the past" and "insurance companies would have the right to refuse to offer insurance if a customer refused to reveal details."
Additionally: "a person at 50% risk of developing Huntington's often found their insurance premium loaded by as much as 300%." And this is only if you're at risk, which is different from being certain of it.
Is this fair? Probably. If you, personally, are likely to contract a certain medical condition, then why shouldn't you pay your own rates for that instead of expecting it to be evenly distributed, Medicare style?
On the other hand, this is definitely a slippery slope. I'll be one of the first to cite "Gattaca", and the instance where a day-care center wouldn't take a certain boy who was at risk for assorted genetic "defects", all because "the insurance won't cover it". Will our medical insurance one day have factors for our likelihood of cancer, Alzheimer's, and depression, the same way our homeowner's insurance now factors in our neighborhood and the age of the plumbing?
Re the memory requirements: all betas tend to do that. Memory requirements are trimmed down for the final release. If it's 30+ MB in the final, THEN I'll take issue.
Re the "Modern" skin: big thumbs up. I just wish Mozilla had at least a couple more skins ready for download when this came out. Re the speed of displayed pages: it does seem faster than IE5.5, although I haven't tested it side-by-side yet this morning. It's disturbingly slower when I click the "back" arrow to reload a page, though. Rather odd.
Big bug still present: when I modify several preferences at once, it won't "ok" the changes. I have to change just one panel at a time, then "ok" it and go back. But it doesn't crash anymore, at least.
One thing I really want to see with this Mozilla browser, though, is for Yahoo! to pick it up and customize it. Right now this browser is heavily customized for AOL/Netcenter users, and I'm not one of those. If Yahoo! can take Netscape 6 and tweak it their own way, I'll be ecstatic to use it.
You deliberately missed the point. The issue is whether kids are using library terminals to browse porn. Porn =/= information, except in the strictest binary sense of the word.
Darwin is the core of MacOS X.
This is why this is such a big deal. The fact that it runs on VirtualPC without modifying that software application (unlike, say, Windows Me) means that a vast majority of x86 processors out there today can run Darwin. And if they can run Darwin, the core of MacOS X, they're much much closer to being able to run MacOS X itself.
So be happy. The open source community has just scored another coup. :-)
- Turn all computer monitors toward a librarian's desk.
- Keep the desk staffed.
Problem solved, and nobody's spending any additional money at all for the effort.Now, this may just be a result of how his images were screengrabbed. But it sure doesn't look like a suitable replacement for DVD quality to me -- especially if I have to have a computer monitor instead of a 36-inch (or larger) television set to watch the movie.
Isn't that a bit of a misnomer? After all, neither Kenny Baker nor Anthony Daniels actually appeared in either movie. Anthony wasn't even physically in Episode I, either, for that matter, just his voice.