Weird. I have a 46" 1080p HD-TV that I just bought, and the difference between HD channels and regular channels is STUNNING to me. So dramatic, in fact, that I hate going back to 'standard def' TV for those channels I don't have in HD (which, alas, is most of them).
I am not about to pick a horse in this format war just yet (especially not at these prices), so I just replaced my existing DVD player with a cheap "Up-converting" DVD player-Recorder ($100! AND it plays and copies VHS tapes to DVD!)... and my existing DVD collection looks tons better than it ever did on my old TV with my old player.
Now, I can't see much difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, video quality-wise, but the video quality difference between the HD channels and the standard def channels is dramatic, and I could never go back.
Seriously, I feel exactly the same way. I don't care if the technical specs of Blu-Ray are superior (which is arguable).
Number of Sony products in my house prior to Rootkit: at least a dozen.
Number of Sony products I have in my house right now: exactly one... an old tube TV I rarely use any more, and which will go as soon as it fails. The rest are already gone/replaced/donated/given-away.
I have not purchased anything from them (including CDs... I still buy CDs, just not from Sony, which is annoyingly difficult sometimes) since the rootkit fiasco, and have been trying to talk friends and family out of buying anything Sony related.
I've been rooting for HD-DVD solely becuase it's "Not Sony". Probably not the most nuanced and fair position to take, but seriously, once burned...
Well, numbnut, it's horribly over-priced when you want to purchase it alone. Sorry, but it's a rip-off. I don't expect five different boxes, but come on. This is ridiculous the way they're doing it now. And the "retailers" argument is completely bogus, as it doesn't take "shelf space" on amazon, or at Valve if you buy directly. Nobody is saying toss the current package out the window. You must love strawman arguments.
The current situation is screwing over a lot of people, myself included. You want all the stuff? Good for you. What about all those people that don't, and don't want to get charged a premium to NOT get everything? Or get charged even more to get what they want and then have to toss half of it?
It's seriously stupid. And seriously frustrating. I'd like to play Ep2 six months ago, but instead am going to be forced to wait until the damn thing hits the bargin bins or else just feel ripped off.
We were promised at the time EP1 came out (and was purchased) that a separate, individual EP2 would come out in 6-9 months for the same cost (under $20).
So yes, it is an insult. We were lied to. They failed to keep their promises. And if we had known that our choice would be limited to just this "orange box" back then, I woudln't have bothered buying EP1 at the time.
They're out to screw their loyal customers, pure and simple. There's no other explaination for it. Why the hell did they cancel the "black box"? And why MUST TF2 (which I have zero interest in) be bundled with EP2??
We have been cheated, we have been lied to, and we are being screwed.
No way is Episode 2 worth $30. It's just not. $20 I woudl be willing to part with, but not a 50% premium over that.
So basically the choice for those of us who only want EP2 is: "Buy it by itself and get screwed on the price, or buy the bundler and get screwed even more".
It's really fucking stupid and really fucking annoying, and the more I think about it, the more pissed off I get.
Maybe I'd be willing to pay $30 for EP2 plus Portal, but I have zero interest in TF2 and already have HL2 and EP1.
I'll just wait until it's in the bargin bins I guess. Because I'm not going to play into their BS pricing and stupid bundling games.
Even worse, there's no "Half-Life 2: Episode 2" ONLY packaging, for those of us who don't give a flying fig about Team Fortress 2, will never play it, and don't want to pay for it.
Let's see... I only want Episode 2. I don't want Team Fortress 2, and I already have Half-Life 2 and Episode 1.
"Portal" is a nice bonus, but still, I'm having to buy this huge bundle, half of which is redundant, and a big part of which I don't want and won't play (TF2).
Having to wait 2 years for them to put all this together, and pay more for it, when I could have/should have gotten just Episode 2 a year ago, at a much cheaper cost, is frustrating.
I agree about Windows Explorer. Even worse, the "expand/collapse node" controls are invisible until you mouse over! Ugh.
But I have to say, given everything else, the most annoying thing about Vista that I have to deal with constantly is the response time. Invariably, when I click the 'close window' button, I can count to at least three before the window actually closes. And this is on a 3.5Gb machine with a fast hyperthreading processor and a very decent video card (if it's more than good enough for Half-Life 2...) The machine is no slouch.
There are many things I do like... small changes here and there (like when renaming a file, it auto-selects just the filename, not filename and extension) that I find beneficial. But too many things were just "change, for change's sake" without fitting into an over-arching philosophy that justified the change. And there's too much inconsistency, because they never really finished the redesign. They didn't touch "old" dialogs and applications, and some things are half-changed.
I was hoping Service Pack One would resolve all these fit-and-finish issues, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
And while tons of work was done in the kernal and under the hood to improve performance and scalability and responsiveness... the GUI implementation just craps out all over it. It feels sluggish. Especially when windows don't snap closed the moment you click that button.
They really do need to come out with a "refresh" that basically finishes the job they started, and optimzes the hell out of things. I, like you, am getting sick of my desktop's fan spinning up constantly, and even more so when I'm NOT using the machine, because of all the background stuff going on.
Thankfully, VirtualPC 2007 is a free download, for anything I want to do in other OS's. I do have one application that I need to run that refuses to run under Vista (Microsoft's own SQL Server 2000) -- I run that under Virtual PC in an XP virtual machine. Piece of cake.:-)
I think 4 year election cycles are an even bigger culprit. Just like quarterly reports are for Corporations. The need to show results at every short, fixed increment means that the "costs" for anything that requires long term investment is too "high", and you won't get re-elected, or your stock gets hammered, etc, etc.
There is very little in our society or economy that is set up for long-term thinking.
Have you ever read "A Canticle for Leibowitz "?:-) The plot is basically what you just described. If you haven't, I highly recommend it.
You didn't even factor in the havoc climate change is going to wreck on society and civilization...
I think there's more to it than we're just lazy and stupid (though that's a big part of it). It's that there isn't immediate pay off. It's not just hard, it requires LONG TERM planning and thinking, and our economy and government is just not set up for things that take that kind of vision and investment in the long term, without immediate bottom-line payoffs.
There is simply no way we will see space elevators and permanent moon and mars colonies in the next 50 years.
We might have landed a man on Mars in that time, but that will be about the extent of it (and by "we", I mean Human Kind, as it seems as likely to be a mission from China as from the U.S. at this point).
That whole article reads far more like science fiction, of the kind that is "forever in the future", than of any prescient science fact. It's certainly ridiculous at the 50 year time scale (widespread fusion plants? Riiiight).
I think calling this article "optimisic" is an under-statement. It doesn't seem factually grounded at all, in fact.
Vista has some pretty serious issues with low-memory though... I run a development environment that has SQL Server 2005 and several copies of Visual Studio open, among other things. When memory gets tight, Visual studio, and other applications, just start misbehaving. Right-Click context menus refuse to pop up, or pop up in "incomplete" states (only a few of the selections on them that should be there), and other strange behavior occurs (windows not closing!, dialogs not opening).
I never had this experience under XP. I'd either get out of memory errors, or some other clear notification that something was amiss. In Vista, if you didn't KNOW you were low on memory, you'd wonder what the hell was going on, as there is no indication that any errors are occuring.
I hope this is one of the things they're fixing in Vista SP1.
I was looking forward to SP1 as a way of 'finishing' the obviously unfinished Vista... fixing issues of "old" dialogs mixed with new dialogs, inconsistent graphics, icons, and fonts, updating additional parts of the UI to the new look and feel, incorporation of all the new-look Vista controls into common dialogs and common controls, consistency improvements across the UI, etc.
Instead we get what is basically a "roll-up" of existing patches, along with a few "under the cover" performance and stability improvements. As welcome as those are, it isn't really "enough", imho, and this is a real lost opportunity for MS to drive acceptance of Vista, by actually completing it and polishing the UI and Usability of their flagship OS.
But you ALSO have many of those makers (Samsung in particular) making dual-format players now... hedging their bets, so to speak.
Of course, I have yet to see a "dual format" HD-DVD/BluRay player that didn't cost as much or more than buying two stand-alone players, one for each format.
Oh yeah, and the HD-DVD players have been pushing the BluRay player prices down because they came in under-cutting them, and continue to do so, with more aggressive price cuts due for the Xmas season. It seems a pretty straight-forward argument that if HD-DVD didn't exist, that BluRay players wouldn't be matching those price-points.
I seem to recall all this gnashing of teeth about all this wasted "dark fiber" that was laid as 2000 approached and the bubble was growing without bound, that went unused after the dot-com bust. Surely there's already tons of bandwidth lying around out there unused still? Or has that all been used up, quietly, without anyone saying anything about it? I find that difficult to believe.
When will people realize that what is best for the interests of an individual corporation's bottom line is NOT necessarily in the best interest of society as a whole?
Imagine if corporations took over all highways, freeways, and streets, and decided to turn them into toll roads to "manage" them, and further, decided on varying rate structures for different people with different destinations or subscription plans... which of course varied from state to state based on which corporation owned the road.
Imagine if corporations took over all fire departments and police departments, and decided to turn them into profit centers. Imagine calls for emergency services being denied because you hadn't paid your bill or because there wasn't money in it for them (i.e. it was better for their bottom line to let your home burn or be burgled).
Imagine if corporations took over all health care, and decided to turn them into profit centers. Oh, wait, that's happened. And our health care is the slowest most expensive in the world, and among the least effective society-wide (i.e. it's fine if you have tons of money and influence, but otherwise kinda sucks... go see "Sicko" if you don't believe me).
Imagine if corporations took over the news media and decided to turn them into profit centers.... again, that's happened, and our news media sucks.
I think it's clear that what is best for society is to treat the internet as a "common carrier" that must be open and neutral. Period. We've seen the disasters that result in corporate control of the common good. We need to prevent another common good from being destroyed by corporate greed.
Who are these idiots who only buy downloaded tracks? I cannot fathom that.
I want to OWN my music. I want it to be uncompressed, un-DRMed, and I don't want to have to pay for it all again should my MP3 player die, or my hard disk bite the big one. If I change MP3 player brands, I want my music to be compatable, and to not have to rebuy it.
CDs are great. They play everywhere. There's a CD player in my car. My car does not have an MP3 player that I can "sync" with my music library, nor does it have a way to connect my MP3 player to my Car's audio system.
The notion that CDs are becoming obsolete is absurd.
I don't pay a cent for any downloadable music that isn't the free and open and universal MP3, and even then I burn it to a CD so I can play it anywhere I want.
Besides, when you download, you don't get anything PHYSICAL. You don't get liner notes, lyrics, artwork, or even "track order". Music and albums are so much more than just collections of "singles". You lose all that on many MP3 players that you have to go out of your way to get the tracks to play in "album/CD order". And it's ridiculous to pay the same for a 20 second "interlude" track as you do for a 15 minute opus track (whether classic, pop, or rock). And finally, being forced to buy the whole CD to get a single song I liked has opened up my eyes and my tastes to lots of music I never, ever, would have heard on the radio. Generally my favorite tracks are not the singles.
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Weird. I have a 46" 1080p HD-TV that I just bought, and the difference between HD channels and regular channels is STUNNING to me. So dramatic, in fact, that I hate going back to 'standard def' TV for those channels I don't have in HD (which, alas, is most of them).
... and my existing DVD collection looks tons better than it ever did on my old TV with my old player.
I am not about to pick a horse in this format war just yet (especially not at these prices), so I just replaced my existing DVD player with a cheap "Up-converting" DVD player-Recorder ($100! AND it plays and copies VHS tapes to DVD!)
Now, I can't see much difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, video quality-wise, but the video quality difference between the HD channels and the standard def channels is dramatic, and I could never go back.
Seriously, I feel exactly the same way. I don't care if the technical specs of Blu-Ray are superior (which is arguable).
... an old tube TV I rarely use any more, and which will go as soon as it fails. The rest are already gone/replaced/donated/given-away.
Number of Sony products in my house prior to Rootkit: at least a dozen.
Number of Sony products I have in my house right now: exactly one
I have not purchased anything from them (including CDs... I still buy CDs, just not from Sony, which is annoyingly difficult sometimes) since the rootkit fiasco, and have been trying to talk friends and family out of buying anything Sony related.
I've been rooting for HD-DVD solely becuase it's "Not Sony". Probably not the most nuanced and fair position to take, but seriously, once burned...
You'll need lots of duct tape and sheets of plastic.
Well, numbnut, it's horribly over-priced when you want to purchase it alone. Sorry, but it's a rip-off. I don't expect five different boxes, but come on. This is ridiculous the way they're doing it now. And the "retailers" argument is completely bogus, as it doesn't take "shelf space" on amazon, or at Valve if you buy directly. Nobody is saying toss the current package out the window. You must love strawman arguments.
The current situation is screwing over a lot of people, myself included. You want all the stuff? Good for you. What about all those people that don't, and don't want to get charged a premium to NOT get everything? Or get charged even more to get what they want and then have to toss half of it?
It's seriously stupid. And seriously frustrating. I'd like to play Ep2 six months ago, but instead am going to be forced to wait until the damn thing hits the bargin bins or else just feel ripped off.
We were promised at the time EP1 came out (and was purchased) that a separate, individual EP2 would come out in 6-9 months for the same cost (under $20).
So yes, it is an insult. We were lied to. They failed to keep their promises. And if we had known that our choice would be limited to just this "orange box" back then, I woudln't have bothered buying EP1 at the time.
They're out to screw their loyal customers, pure and simple. There's no other explaination for it. Why the hell did they cancel the "black box"? And why MUST TF2 (which I have zero interest in) be bundled with EP2??
We have been cheated, we have been lied to, and we are being screwed.
No way is Episode 2 worth $30. It's just not. $20 I woudl be willing to part with, but not a 50% premium over that.
So basically the choice for those of us who only want EP2 is: "Buy it by itself and get screwed on the price, or buy the bundler and get screwed even more".
It's really fucking stupid and really fucking annoying, and the more I think about it, the more pissed off I get.
Maybe I'd be willing to pay $30 for EP2 plus Portal, but I have zero interest in TF2 and already have HL2 and EP1.
I'll just wait until it's in the bargin bins I guess. Because I'm not going to play into their BS pricing and stupid bundling games.
Even worse, there's no "Half-Life 2: Episode 2" ONLY packaging, for those of us who don't give a flying fig about Team Fortress 2, will never play it, and don't want to pay for it.
Let's see... I only want Episode 2. I don't want Team Fortress 2, and I already have Half-Life 2 and Episode 1.
"Portal" is a nice bonus, but still, I'm having to buy this huge bundle, half of which is redundant, and a big part of which I don't want and won't play (TF2).
Having to wait 2 years for them to put all this together, and pay more for it, when I could have/should have gotten just Episode 2 a year ago, at a much cheaper cost, is frustrating.
You don't think that's frustrating?
I agree about Windows Explorer. Even worse, the "expand/collapse node" controls are invisible until you mouse over! Ugh.
...) The machine is no slouch.
:-)
But I have to say, given everything else, the most annoying thing about Vista that I have to deal with constantly is the response time. Invariably, when I click the 'close window' button, I can count to at least three before the window actually closes. And this is on a 3.5Gb machine with a fast hyperthreading processor and a very decent video card (if it's more than good enough for Half-Life 2
There are many things I do like... small changes here and there (like when renaming a file, it auto-selects just the filename, not filename and extension) that I find beneficial. But too many things were just "change, for change's sake" without fitting into an over-arching philosophy that justified the change. And there's too much inconsistency, because they never really finished the redesign. They didn't touch "old" dialogs and applications, and some things are half-changed.
I was hoping Service Pack One would resolve all these fit-and-finish issues, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
And while tons of work was done in the kernal and under the hood to improve performance and scalability and responsiveness... the GUI implementation just craps out all over it. It feels sluggish. Especially when windows don't snap closed the moment you click that button.
They really do need to come out with a "refresh" that basically finishes the job they started, and optimzes the hell out of things. I, like you, am getting sick of my desktop's fan spinning up constantly, and even more so when I'm NOT using the machine, because of all the background stuff going on.
Thankfully, VirtualPC 2007 is a free download, for anything I want to do in other OS's. I do have one application that I need to run that refuses to run under Vista (Microsoft's own SQL Server 2000) -- I run that under Virtual PC in an XP virtual machine. Piece of cake.
I'm with you on that. I still only buy physical media (so I 'own' it), and then rip to free and open formats for computer use.
I have never yet purchased music or video on-line that came encumbered with DRM or was in a non-open format. With any luck, I never will.
I think 4 year election cycles are an even bigger culprit. Just like quarterly reports are for Corporations. The need to show results at every short, fixed increment means that the "costs" for anything that requires long term investment is too "high", and you won't get re-elected, or your stock gets hammered, etc, etc.
There is very little in our society or economy that is set up for long-term thinking.
Have you ever read "A Canticle for Leibowitz "? :-) The plot is basically what you just described. If you haven't, I highly recommend it.
You didn't even factor in the havoc climate change is going to wreck on society and civilization...
I think there's more to it than we're just lazy and stupid (though that's a big part of it). It's that there isn't immediate pay off. It's not just hard, it requires LONG TERM planning and thinking, and our economy and government is just not set up for things that take that kind of vision and investment in the long term, without immediate bottom-line payoffs.
I think the article was a complete fantasy.
There is simply no way we will see space elevators and permanent moon and mars colonies in the next 50 years.
We might have landed a man on Mars in that time, but that will be about the extent of it (and by "we", I mean Human Kind, as it seems as likely to be a mission from China as from the U.S. at this point).
That whole article reads far more like science fiction, of the kind that is "forever in the future", than of any prescient science fact. It's certainly ridiculous at the 50 year time scale (widespread fusion plants? Riiiight).
I think calling this article "optimisic" is an under-statement. It doesn't seem factually grounded at all, in fact.
The SP was installed, and I've gotten the same issue just as often as before.
Vista has some pretty serious issues with low-memory though... I run a development environment that has SQL Server 2005 and several copies of Visual Studio open, among other things. When memory gets tight, Visual studio, and other applications, just start misbehaving. Right-Click context menus refuse to pop up, or pop up in "incomplete" states (only a few of the selections on them that should be there), and other strange behavior occurs (windows not closing!, dialogs not opening).
I never had this experience under XP. I'd either get out of memory errors, or some other clear notification that something was amiss. In Vista, if you didn't KNOW you were low on memory, you'd wonder what the hell was going on, as there is no indication that any errors are occuring.
I hope this is one of the things they're fixing in Vista SP1.
I was looking forward to SP1 as a way of 'finishing' the obviously unfinished Vista... fixing issues of "old" dialogs mixed with new dialogs, inconsistent graphics, icons, and fonts, updating additional parts of the UI to the new look and feel, incorporation of all the new-look Vista controls into common dialogs and common controls, consistency improvements across the UI, etc.
Instead we get what is basically a "roll-up" of existing patches, along with a few "under the cover" performance and stability improvements. As welcome as those are, it isn't really "enough", imho, and this is a real lost opportunity for MS to drive acceptance of Vista, by actually completing it and polishing the UI and Usability of their flagship OS.
Gotta love a Venture Brothers Quote. :-)
HD-DVDs are cheaper to produce than BluRay discs.
Thus higher profit margins.
But you ALSO have many of those makers (Samsung in particular) making dual-format players now ... hedging their bets, so to speak.
Of course, I have yet to see a "dual format" HD-DVD/BluRay player that didn't cost as much or more than buying two stand-alone players, one for each format.
Oh yeah, and the HD-DVD players have been pushing the BluRay player prices down because they came in under-cutting them, and continue to do so, with more aggressive price cuts due for the Xmas season. It seems a pretty straight-forward argument that if HD-DVD didn't exist, that BluRay players wouldn't be matching those price-points.
I seem to recall all this gnashing of teeth about all this wasted "dark fiber" that was laid as 2000 approached and the bubble was growing without bound, that went unused after the dot-com bust. Surely there's already tons of bandwidth lying around out there unused still? Or has that all been used up, quietly, without anyone saying anything about it? I find that difficult to believe.
+1 Brilliant
Thank you.
100% agree - but I don't think that Bush has suspended Habeas Corpus with this order...
Not with this order, no. Habeas Corpus was suspended a while ago.
When will people realize that what is best for the interests of an individual corporation's bottom line is NOT necessarily in the best interest of society as a whole?
Imagine if corporations took over all highways, freeways, and streets, and decided to turn them into toll roads to "manage" them, and further, decided on varying rate structures for different people with different destinations or subscription plans... which of course varied from state to state based on which corporation owned the road.
Imagine if corporations took over all fire departments and police departments, and decided to turn them into profit centers. Imagine calls for emergency services being denied because you hadn't paid your bill or because there wasn't money in it for them (i.e. it was better for their bottom line to let your home burn or be burgled).
Imagine if corporations took over all health care, and decided to turn them into profit centers. Oh, wait, that's happened. And our health care is the slowest most expensive in the world, and among the least effective society-wide (i.e. it's fine if you have tons of money and influence, but otherwise kinda sucks... go see "Sicko" if you don't believe me).
Imagine if corporations took over the news media and decided to turn them into profit centers.... again, that's happened, and our news media sucks.
I think it's clear that what is best for society is to treat the internet as a "common carrier" that must be open and neutral. Period. We've seen the disasters that result in corporate control of the common good. We need to prevent another common good from being destroyed by corporate greed.
That's a fair cop.
Who are these idiots who only buy downloaded tracks? I cannot fathom that.
I want to OWN my music. I want it to be uncompressed, un-DRMed, and I don't want to have to pay for it all again should my MP3 player die, or my hard disk bite the big one. If I change MP3 player brands, I want my music to be compatable, and to not have to rebuy it.
CDs are great. They play everywhere. There's a CD player in my car. My car does not have an MP3 player that I can "sync" with my music library, nor does it have a way to connect my MP3 player to my Car's audio system.
The notion that CDs are becoming obsolete is absurd.
I don't pay a cent for any downloadable music that isn't the free and open and universal MP3, and even then I burn it to a CD so I can play it anywhere I want.
Besides, when you download, you don't get anything PHYSICAL. You don't get liner notes, lyrics, artwork, or even "track order". Music and albums are so much more than just collections of "singles". You lose all that on many MP3 players that you have to go out of your way to get the tracks to play in "album/CD order". And it's ridiculous to pay the same for a 20 second "interlude" track as you do for a 15 minute opus track (whether classic, pop, or rock). And finally, being forced to buy the whole CD to get a single song I liked has opened up my eyes and my tastes to lots of music I never, ever, would have heard on the radio. Generally my favorite tracks are not the singles.
So no, CDs are not obsolete. Not by a long shot.