We've been waiting for years for a killer video container, and it appears to me that mkv is probably going to be the one. It seems poised to become the mp3 of video. There's finally a container that can be played back in an acceptable number of hardware devices, with acceptable quality, at acceptable filesizes. The lack of file-embedded metadata in the container is still a problem, one that's been holding back online video distribution for years, but external sites such as imdb and thetvdb seem to be working around this well enough.
iPod / iTunes took off like a rocket imho because of a few key factors: -They created hardware that followed the pipe dream of the mp3: A portable player capable of holding many gigs of music in the size of a deck of cards, with headphone out. This wasn't innovation, such solutions were already on the market, but theirs was the most beautiful.; -They smoothed out the rough usability edges in existing portable hdd player solutions by offering great desktop software in iTunes, which took advantage of metadata to create not only a really compelling library system, but also provided very tight integration that was intuitively the same across the iPod & iTunes. -They offered a legal means of acquiring music on demand for their solution. -They made it ridiculously easy to use their device with black market content.
Because Apple were the first with the sack to give people their dream device, with a sensible organized interface, a legal means of acquiring content, and full integration with illegal content, they dominated the marketplace.
Video has been held back, as I said above, by a couple of things. The first was the lack of file-embedded metadata (I can't search for all files in my library directed by James Cameron, for instance), but the ubiquity of always-on wireless connections has solved some of that, and external metadata references are now acceptable. Second, it's been held back by codecs & containers that were way out of date, and don't deliver broadcast-quality (especially HDTV) at acceptable filesizes. The average mp4 vs a highly compressed digital cable channel might be equivalent, but the market wants DVD quality without any sacrifice from downloaded video.
Finally, video has also been held back by the lack of elegant playback solutions. Apple missed the boat with the AppleTV by failing to step up and partner with the black market, which is why the device hasn't been a wild success. Software solutions based on the xbmc core, such as boxee, plex, and uh.... xbmc, are doing much better, but they're still software solutions dependent on having a PC. People want a fully-integrated solution.
Mark my words: The first company with the temerity to market a device that will take a user's existing library and integrate it into an elegant set-top solution is going to CLEAN UP. They will dominate the set-top completely for years to come. It looks like TiVO is going to miss the boat, as is Apple. Are there any dark horses in this race?
Lest anyone think that I'm pipe dreaming, a working solution can be assembled out of off-the-shelf parts right now. Here's what I built in a weekend for about $700:
Software: -Plex -SwitchResX (only necessary for SDTV or older HDTVs) -RipIt -SABNZBD+
Subscriptions: -Usenet service ($11/mo) -Unnamed usenet header indexer ($.75 / week, roughly) -rss feed for TV show subscriptions (free)
With these pieces, I've built a DVR that automatically downloads the shows I like the same day they air. Downloads are FAST, maxing out my internet connection. I can play back 1080p blu-ray rips with full surround sound & 0 dropped frames or stuttering. I can drop any DVD into the reader, and have it copied into the library and spit back out again once it's done. And it's all done with a universal remote in
I do love me some lossless audio, and that just wasn't a common feature on HD-DVD.
Meaning it wasn't capable of it, or most discs didn't do it?
Meaning most studios seemed content to save disk space by only putting on DD+ tracks instead of TrueHD or DTS-MA. I'd rather have a lossless track every time over some fluffy back-patting featurette where everyone talks about how great the movie was, but that doesn't sell disks the way a big bullet list of extras does. Not that the 360 can even output anything over full-bitrate DTS, but had HD-DVD won the 360 wouldn't have remained my player of choice.
As far as technical merits, I'll go with you on pretty much everything you said. I have a HD-DVD drive for my 360 and a PS3, and I'll grant that the early software for HD-DVD was much more polished.
However, I do love me some lossless audio, and that just wasn't a common feature on HD-DVD. I liked using the HD-DVD software better, but it was more or less a wash as far as which was the better format from an end-user standpoint, at least for me.
As to the politics, I done just got told. Thanks for the extra perspective!
DVD licensing fees are STILL quite high, and all the money goes to Toshiba, who own the patents. Toshiba's patent trolling is why blu-ray exists.
Toshiba built HD-DVD on top of their existing patent portfolio, and unilaterally altered the rules of the trade association charged with helming DVD's future, the DVD Forum, in order to push through adoption of their arguably-inferior standard over Sony's more advanced, more open, less expensive competing proposal.
Sony, Panasonic, and several other key players walked rather than spend another hardware generation paying through the nose to Toshiba, and formed their own standards body to back Sony's proposed spec.
Thus the format war was born: Toshiba's standard was named HD-DVD, and Sony's Blu-Ray. For once, Sony was the company that had the widely supported, more open standard. This is why you only saw Toshiba HD-DVD players, while dozens of companies were making blu-ray players.
Mind you, they're both closed formats, but of the two, HD-DVD was way more evil. The lesser evil definitely won in that case.
Nobody's forcing you to pay $40-$50. Games are products which are usually heavily discounted but still readily available 12 months after initial release.
Why not just wait a year, buy for $20, and then play, if you're so concerned about your $/hr value?
This policy has been around longer than that. I was an employee exercising the checkout policy back in the floppy / cartridge days, at several of the stores which would eventualy merge to become Gamestop (c. 1993-1997) This is old news, the lawsuits about it have come and gone. The policy has been disbanded, then re-instated several times. There's no use getting your panties twisted about it now.
Look: If you're reading this article, it's safe to assume you've been in a Gamestop (or EB, or Babbage's, or Software Etc., or Funcoland, or whatever your local store was before being devoured by ConGlomCo). So it is because of your undoubted nightmare customer experience in such places that when I tell you the following, you will know that it is true: working there was a fucking horrorshow. The hours were terrible, the customers obnoxious, the colleagues irritating, the stink from the shrinkwrap machine quite literally poisonous, and management incompetent, malicious, or both. Mind you, I'm talking about how bad it was 15 years ago when the stores were competing with each other. I can only imagine that it's gotten worse for employees since the industry consolidated completely, and you can no longer just walk up to the other side of the mall and get a job with the competition.
These stores pay minimum wage, offer employees almost no discount on the products they sell (and indeed often restrict employees' access to hot items like new-release consoles), and employees are forbidden to hang out mucking about with the in-store demo kiosks during downtime or off-duty hours. Yet at the same time, the customers and management demand that the employees somehow be knowledgable about all the product in the store. These products have consistently sold for $50 - $80 apiece for years. As an employee, you're supposed to have played everything, yet as an employee, you're subject to the same "you broke the shrink, you own it" return policy on $140 a week for the average part-timer. It's an impossible situation for a 19-year-old trying to make rent, groceries, and tuition, much less a sad-sack 30-something manager with kids, pulling in $25k a year on a 70-hour work week if they're lucky.
Gamestop didn't post record profits by paying their line employees well. Everyone's a disposable cog, and they'd just as soon fire you as look at you. Don't think as an employee you aren't constantly reminded by management about the eager stream of salivating 16-year-olds who think working in a game store would be SO COOL, dreaming of replacing you.
Given all this, do you think anyone in their right mind would work at that store if they didn't offer employees what amounts to a free lending library of the newest titles? What other incentive could there possibly be to irritate people with membership clubs, pushy pre-orders and used game pitches, and the soul-crushing pain of listening to the loop of that piped in tv network all day?
If it really bothers you, shop elsewhere. I certainly do, those fucking vultures won't ever get my money again. If you do decide to shop there, use some common sense and check your disks for scratches before you leave the store. It's not that hard.
But seriously, quit the whining about the "used sold as new" crap. The checkout policy is the price you pay for having specialty knowledge behind the register at minimum wage prices.
Initially the E470 toll road was envisioned as a loop around the entire Denver metro area, allowing easy access for people in the suburbs to the airport, the Denver tech center south of town, and the interstate roads toward the ski resorts. By bypassing all that traffic around downtown, they would ease congestion significantly, especially during the winter months.
Unfortunately the residents of Golden, an upscale suburb slightly off the beaten path west of Denver, didn't like the idea of the plebians being able to access their town without having to jump through hoops to get there. They torpedoed the completion of the loop to keep the rabble out of their isolated, upscale community. The result of this is that any skiers coming from the heavily populated areas north of Denver are routed through the center of the city on their way to the slopes, causing congestion and traffic misery for both the tourists and residents.
Meanwhile, not content to make up for massively cutting their operating budget by no longer having any toll collectors, thus slashing their payroll and ongoing operating costs to a bare minimum, the governing body of E470 implemented a toll raise to pay for the new automated technology that will save them millions yearly.
Now that they've put people out of work, hopefully greed for the lost revenue in skier tolls they're missing out on every year will drive the owners of E470 to use that extra money to lobby various legislative bodies that will mandate the completion of the loop.
The residents of Golden delayed the rollout of HDTV in Denver for years by blocking the construction of upgraded antennae, until finally it required a federal mandate to push things through. Let's hope that the E470 governing body's lust for capital is enough to trump the isolationists in Golden.
Sometimes the only way to beat nakedly greedy, corrupt elitists is to sic other nakedly greedy, corrupt elitists on them.
Every streaming media provider so far that has arrived & failed has done so because they try to mimic the rental pricing model. They charge $3 a movie for 24 hours, and then wonder why sales are low. The thing is, people won't pay $3 for access to media they don't physically control.
Netflix is following the HBO OnDemand pricing model. $20 a month for unlimited access to anything in their ondemand streaming library. This is the pricing model people want when it comes to media they don't physically control. Since I didn't pay per-item, I don't mind that there are restrictions on use.
I've been using this service on the XBox 360 for the past few weeks and it's been exceptional. My only technical gripe is that it's limited to 2-channel audio right now, but otherwise there is nothing to complain about. Widescreen movies are displayed fullscreen on an HD set, 4:3 content is pillarboxed, the video quality is approximately on-par with DVD. As soon as they work out 5.1 it'll be perfect. The addition of TV series with new episodes that have just aired but are not yet available on DVD is just another perk. Selection is growing every day.
It's really fantastic if you've got the bandwidth.
I'm seriously thinking about canceling my satellite TV service / DVR and just running with 360 & Netflix. For just under $300 a year, ($50 xblive, $20/mo to Netflix), as opposed to the almost $1000 a year that most cable/satellite companies charge for HD service, it's a great deal.
Pros: +Netflix streaming video works like a charm. +Avatars have potential and are reasonably customizable, very similar to the Mii. +It's great to see the party system extended beyond COD4 / Halo 3. +Playing from HDD instead of from CD will certainly cut down on wear & tear. +In-game dashboard is much nicer.
Cons: -We've gone from 5 tabs to 50+ screens. It's crap. -The menu defaults to the "showcase" channel, which advertises Microsoft's newest games. This means that Microsoft, not content with getting us to pay $300+ for a console and $50 / year for Live, feels the need to advertise to us every time we go to the dashboard. -Old themes port very poorly, stretched across the background in awkward ways. -Many links to premium content have been pushed to the front page. -"Autodownload" feature for the Arcade releases is gone. -Haven't fixed the glaring file management bugs - it's not possible to do something like, say, delete 150 old Oblivion saves to reclaim disk space while keeping 5 of them without pressing 4 buttons for each individual savegame. Not a problem until you realize they're over a megabyte apiece, and on a 20gb hard disk this adds up fast.
On the whole I hate it. The ui is completely cluttered now, but the defaulting to advertisements behavior and the up-front sells for premium content are a dealbreaker. I'm changing my 360's default behavior to "boot what's in the drive" from "default to dashboard" and I'm never looking back.
I recently spent a week driving a rented Ford Fusion equipped with Sync, and while it's definitely 1.0 technology, I think it's one of the most promising things for vehicle use in a long time.
To start, I paired the head unit with my phone as a bluetooth headset. I opted to transfer my address book to the head unit, which took about 5 minutes. From that point on, integration was total.
Then I spent about 5 minutes searching for the USB port so I could plug my ipod in, until I realized that the USB port was hidden inside the armrest. Once the ipod was connected, the screen was covered with an overlay of the Ford logo, and the controls on the ipod itself stopped working. In fact, the device was physically inaccessible to me while driving, because it had to be closed inside the armrest. I appreciated this feature a lot, as there is little more dangerous on the road these days than people futzing with text messages or music players while driving.
Once connected, the head unit began scanning the tags of all 7,000 songs on the ipod. This took about 15 minutes. Once this was complete, the unit was ready to go.
All status updates were spoken in a pleasant female voice.
To use Sync, I pressed a button on the wheel. The system responded by making a 'ding' sound. At this point I could access the phone or the stereo with voice commands:
"Call bob thomas at home." "Play artist Underworld." "Play album Frizzle Fry by Primus" "Play song Ich Bin Ein Auslander by Pop Will Eat Itself" (chosen specifically to try and trip it up, didn't work) "Satellite" to switch to Sirius, which was built in "FM1" etc. "What's playing now" to name the currently playing song.
Received text messages were read aloud by the system to me. Incoming calls rang through the stereo as the music dimmed, and could be answered by pressing the same button on the steering wheel. If I was listening to music on the ipod, it paused during the conversation, then resumed automatically once the conversation was over. The same applied to outbound calls.
The car I used was not equipped with integrated satellite navigation, so I can't speak as to how well that particular piece of the product works, but everything else was flawless. I never had a single false positive or false negative hit with the address book or the music list.
There were a couple of rough 1.0 edges: -Setting up general shuffle play on the ipod appeared to be damn near impossible, but I also didn't read the manual so this could be user error. At any rate it wasn't intuitive. -There was no integration with the head unit in tuner, CD, or satellite mode. I had to use hard buttons on the stereo itself for these uses. Presumably further integration for these features will come in future model years. -No speech-to-text for responding to text messages.
On the whole I have to say that Microsoft has done a GREAT job with Sync. I never saw a single Windows logo, it never crashed, it worked exactly as expected, and it made using the car with my cell phone & ipod much safer, and much easier. It was rough going back to my late 90's honda knowing I would have to pull over again in order to change tracks and send/receive calls.
based on 500 miles with the product, I think I can recommend Sync with little hesitation.
When drinking one night with a former roller coaster technician who had decided to get into the less stressful job of datacenter ops, I found out something terrifying about a famous (and, it should be said, injury/fatality-free as far as I know) catch & release roller coaster.
The coaster is designed such that the train car is loaded at a station. Then a tractor mechanism pulls it backward, up to the top of a steep incline. Once at the top, the mechanism releases the car, and the train goes rocketing through the station, through a series of tight loops and twists, and then coasts up an identical steep incline on the other end. There another mechanism catches the car, drags it all the way to the top, and then lets go, sending the car back through the series of loops and twists in reverse. The car decelerates up the incline back on the original side, is caught once again, and returned gently to the station for boarding.
All of these catch mechanisms need to know the velocity and weight of the train car in order to properly catch and decelerate it without hurting any of the occupants. Those values will change with every load of passengers, due to people's varying weights and their distribution around the car, so they have to be calculated on the fly.
The software that does this, the engineer swore to me, runs on...
Windows 3.11.
This knowledge made future rides on that particular coaster a hell of a lot more scary.
Shutting down the DVRs for Dish Network would be the stupidest thing that Tivo could do. Dish PR just says "It's Tivo's fault," puts something out on a wire service, someone picks up the story that Tivo made Dish network but not DirecTV or Comcast shut down their DVR's, and bingo, Tivo are the bad guys even though they're the ones protecting their stolen IP from another company. Licensing is just as much in Tivo's favor as it is Dish's at this point. Letting the Dish shutdown happen would be a fiasco.
Also, does this have ramifications for other disk-based DVR's such as those offered by cable companies and DirecTV?
Seven years ago, Napster offered to partner up with the music companies, charge a monthly fee, and go legit. They had a beautiful, efficient 'walled garden' infrastructure, selection surpassing the iTunes store, nearly 15 million active users, and even though there was openNap and Gnutella, these were fringe tools. Napster had no *real* competition, they were a de facto standard. The market was sewn up.
Napster offered multiple times to partner up with the RIAA labels to create a subscription-based model. If they'd have kept just 1/3 of their userbase at $10 a month (highly reasonable) and growth had remained flat (highly unlikely), they'd have pulled in $600mil in the first year, without ever having spent a dime on marketing or distribution. $600mil a year in free money with incredible growth potential, and the RIAA wouldn't have had to lift a finger.
$600mil in revenue in just the first year, for doing nothing. And they said no, shut down Napster, and unleashed the unkillable hydra of gnutella/bittorrent/FastTrack/etc.
NOW the RIAA wants a surcharge? No. You had your chance at the golden egg, and relevancy in the future of music, and you chose instead to cut the goose's throat. We're not going to subsidize you now.
So because someone tried a distro in Fall 2007 that wasn't the "right" distro and gave up, that's the end-user's fault, and not the distro's / linux community at large's fault?
There's no clear signpost as to what's the "right" distro for beginners(UBUNTU UBUNTU UBUNTU, but newbies won't know that, go google "which linux distro should I choose?" and get back to me when the top result isn't a TEN QUESTION QUIZ.
6 months ago was Fall 2007. Windows '98 shipped in 1998, and was deprecated partially in 2000 and fully in 2002. You can't compare a 10-year-old OS to a 6-month-old linux distro. Well, I guess you can, you just did, but you can't do it without looking like a total asshole.
XP was the standard for Windows for 5 or 6 years, and it went through 2 major revisions in that time. OS X revs approximately every 18 months, and is on the fifth version to ship since 2000. You're not treated like you're stupid by the community for getting frustrated with the shortcomings of OS X 10.2.
Look: UI engineering is all about balancing exposing essential functionality vs. overwhelming your end user with choice. Here's an example: Near as I can figure, my TV remote needs about 18 buttons, max (including the 12-digit number pad). Yet it shipped with more than 70, and each of those buttons is there because the engineers at Sony thought I'd want them. I ignore the extra features on my remote, and resent their presence, because they're a constant reminder that I'm not using the television to its fullest abilities. That I don't WANT to use it to those abilities is irrelevant, those 50 buttons there remind me every time that I pick it up that I'm just not smart enough to get the most out of this machine. They have a negative effect on my perception of the value in this television. I dislike it because of the complex user interface (and I plan to get around it by getting another, simpler universal remote, at which time I will credit the remote for simplicity, and not the television for functionality).
Similarly, the barrage of choice that assaults users of linux systems is a detriment to the newbie. Having to pick window managers in 2008 is a disgrace. The decision should be out of the end user's hands until he wants to make the choice, at which time it should be available to him. You don't just ram it down his throat the first time he powers up the system.
You yelling at him for not wanting to make that choice, or necessarily understanding it, is shameful and proof that you're unable to see the forest for the trees. Stop being so damn myopic. Of course you and I want all the functionality we can get out of linux, but we're not typical. Ubuntu understands this, which is why it's been such a phenomenal success, but godDAMN man. Stop driving away the people we need to convert with this shitty attitude of yours.
Cars are routinely released in updated ways that are poorer than the model year that came before, or another line by the same manufacturer. For every Tucker, there's an Edsel. Beyond computerization, the standard sedan has very little to offer by way of innovation. There's little difference between a '98 Camry and an '08 Camry, despite the 10-year difference between their manufacturing dates. Cars are very mature products, while operating systems are decidedly less so (and an order of magnitude more complex beside).
50 years ago computers were using teletypes. Why are you insisting on carrying the automobile metaphor? I ignored it the first time on purpose.
I've been doing this for 30 years too, and I do think that Vista is as underwhelming as MS-DOS 4, but that doesn't make all the/. handwringing any less unbearable. I had to filter out dozens of DR-DOS nerds when that one cratered, but now I have to filter out thousands of linux nerds as Vista craters.
Vista's getting better. Someday it will be as good as or better than XP. In the meantime, we get it. You don't like it. Now shut the fuck up.
Every x.0 operating system ever shipped was immature at launch. Every. Single. One. Singling Vista out for that is like singling out a 3-year-old for not being able to read.
I'm no Microsoft apologist, but I do think the unbridled hate that pervades/.'s reaction to every single Vista article is a bit out of hand. Maybe this will help stem the tide of Vista-bashing. Sure, Vista kinda sucks, but all Windows versions kinda suck. I think most people who are ripping on Vista for being the operating system anti-christ are forgetting how badly XP sucked pre-SP1, and even pre-SP2. 7 years ago, the chorus of "OH MY GOD XP IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN 2000! THERE'S NO NEED TO UPGRADE!" in every XP article's comments were eerily similar to the ones you hear now every time Vista gets a mention.
Vista's maturing, and as it does it'll become a better operating system, and everyone will benefit, even if they don't use Vista. Microsoft still competes largely on the basis of being a de facto standard. Vista's release has caused them to lose this edge somewhat, and the window has opened for their competition, who compete mostly on features, to get a little lazy (Leopard, anyone?). Microsoft competing more vigorously on their stale plank, assuming they don't magically find traction they've been unable to find for years, can't do anything but help the products on the market.
Okay, now it's time to cue the million responses calling me a Microsoft shill. Suggested topics: "There really was no reason to upgrade from 2k to XP, I still use 2k just fine," "Vista is beyond repair because of DRM," and "Vista is way more broken than Leopard, how dare you rip on OS X."
What would you have the cable companies do, hold back technology until everyone finally implements the new technology? That's why we're still stuck with analog cable, since cable companies are forced by the government to continue to support ancient TVs.
No, I would have them publish the specifications for ordering PPV, sending OnDemand requests, and communicating 2-way with the back-end network to anyone interested in making a set-top box. Same with any future cable technologies. Publish API's, publish specifications, and allow other companies to make end-point devices.
And if they can't or won't do that? Then yes, hold them back. Cable companies being forced to continue supporting analog cable is a good thing. They're being held back from technological progress in the name of accessibility, because communication monopolies have been granted to them in exchange for their service to the public good, even if that service comes at the expense of theirp rofit margin. Cableco's want to have their monopolies, and still blatantly serve their own interests above all others.
Sort of like all web browsers are all EXACTLY THE SAME, right? Please. This is almost exactly analogous to a web browser - the set top acts as a browser of the cable's content.
This is nothing like a web browser. To carry your analogy: If my ISP were like a cable company insisting on OCAP, every time I signed on to my ISP, my computer would automatically download a copy of Netscape 4.7. This instance of Netscape would run in a jailed virtual machine, and I would have no configuration control over it. If I wanted to browse the internet or use e-mail, I would have to use this copy of Netscape 4.7, and no other software. The ISP is happy to let me download IE5 for $4.99 a month, or IE7 for $14.99. They do not support IE6, Firefox, Safari, or Opera. The ISP 2 towns over supports Firefox, but due to monopoly rights granted to my ISP by the government, I am unable to purchase service from them.
That's the kind of bullshit environment the cable companies are forcing down our throats.
What customers want is a model exactly like the browser system, content that is retrieved over the wire in a well-documented standard format which can be understood by any end device and interpreted by that device in user- and vendor-configurable ways, regardless of the intent of the original content publisher or the content distributor. We want to rip out their channel guide and use our own, we want to time-shift our content without paying them a monthly DVR fee, we want to disable banner advertisements, and we want to play video back in a window on our PC screens while we type up responses to idiot AC's on Slashdot. These are all things we used to be able to do before cable monopolies leveraged digital cable to take control of the endpoint devices. It's not at all unreasonable as a customer to want that control back.
This is just 2-way cablecard, aka Cablecard 2.0, aka Open Cable, rebranded with yet another name. It's all a marketing gimmick designed to shake off the negative connotations attached to CableCard and its failure in the marketplace at the hands of the cable companies. These still aren't the droids you're looking for.
I think every cable customer who has every had to use a shitty digital cable tuner for any period of time knows that they suck mightily. They're some of the worst consumer electronics products put into wide release in the last decade. They have horrible user interfaces, they're slow to change channels, they're riddled with banner ads slapped on every spare square inch of screen real estate, they feature glacial channel guides, and are plagued by forgetful DVRs. The list of ways in which cable boxes suck goes on and on, but cable customers have put up with it because they didn't have a choice.
Really, the customer wants to be able to do the same things with digital cable that they were able to do with analog cable back in the 90's. Namely:
Use the tuner built into their TV without paying the cable company rental fees for a box or a device
Hook the cable directly into a recording device for time-shifting without noticeable DRM restrictions
See open competition in the set-top box marketplace to drive down prices and create innovative new interfaces & services
Do and have all of the above without sacrificing PPV, On-Demand, other new features, or any channel subscriptions they've paid for.
10 years and an act of Congress later, Cablecard was supposed to do give us all of the above, but the implementations have been so intentionally broken by the cable companies that it's basically useless. Cable companies have intentionally made the experience of using a cablecard-equipped PC with Windows Media Center (a fine device, whatever Slashdot's biases) or a cablecard-equipped Tivo a complete nightmare. Purchasers have to put up with broken installs, untrained technicians, and then once everything is set up, the system is so fragile that without notice the devices just Stop Working for days at a time, and often don't resume function until hours are spent on the phone with Comcast support. Users of WMC or TivoHD also lose access to PPV and On-Demand, even though they still have to pay the cable company for access to those features, and any channels that are deployed on a new back-end technology called SDV are inaccessible as well. Current WMC PC's and cablecard Tivo's are already obsolete, not 2 years into their product lifespan. CableCard is a lousy deal, and the cable companies have gone out of their way to make sure it remains a lousy deal, because the last thing they want to do is open up their network to competition.
CableCard 2.0, or 2-way cablecard, or OpenCable, or (now) True2Way, or whatever they call it, is supposed to be a panacea. These devices will allow 2-way communications with the cable company's network, and let you buy any cable box you want, complete with ppv and on-demand and SDV. But here's the rub: They use a technology called OCAP, with is four-letter-acronym for "Whatever box you buy will download and run the cable company's shitty software in a sandboxed virtual machine, and the box provider can offer no features above and beyond what is deployed by the cable company." There is no real competition under the OCAP model, because when plugged into the cable network and activated, the boxes will all be EXACTLY THE SAME. Maybe they can compete on hard disk space, but that'll be about it. You want a Tivo or WMC interface? If your cable company doesn't offer one (for the low low price of $15 a month, but did I mention that our standard cable box interface is free!) then you're screwed. You want an interface that isn't covered in banner ads? Good luck with that. The cable company remains the keyholder to the gates of the network, and there's no chance in hell they'll open up.
Like all romance languages, English has a masculine, feminine, and a gender-neutral case. It's just that in English, the gender-neutral and the masculine are conjugated identically. So really, when people are in doubt and they're referring to you as him, they're really using a gender-neutral pronoun. "He or she" is totally unnecessary, and wordy besides.
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We've been waiting for years for a killer video container, and it appears to me that mkv is probably going to be the one. It seems poised to become the mp3 of video. There's finally a container that can be played back in an acceptable number of hardware devices, with acceptable quality, at acceptable filesizes. The lack of file-embedded metadata in the container is still a problem, one that's been holding back online video distribution for years, but external sites such as imdb and thetvdb seem to be working around this well enough.
iPod / iTunes took off like a rocket imho because of a few key factors:
-They created hardware that followed the pipe dream of the mp3: A portable player capable of holding many gigs of music in the size of a deck of cards, with headphone out. This wasn't innovation, such solutions were already on the market, but theirs was the most beautiful.;
-They smoothed out the rough usability edges in existing portable hdd player solutions by offering great desktop software in iTunes, which took advantage of metadata to create not only a really compelling library system, but also provided very tight integration that was intuitively the same across the iPod & iTunes.
-They offered a legal means of acquiring music on demand for their solution.
-They made it ridiculously easy to use their device with black market content.
Because Apple were the first with the sack to give people their dream device, with a sensible organized interface, a legal means of acquiring content, and full integration with illegal content, they dominated the marketplace.
Video has been held back, as I said above, by a couple of things. The first was the lack of file-embedded metadata (I can't search for all files in my library directed by James Cameron, for instance), but the ubiquity of always-on wireless connections has solved some of that, and external metadata references are now acceptable. Second, it's been held back by codecs & containers that were way out of date, and don't deliver broadcast-quality (especially HDTV) at acceptable filesizes. The average mp4 vs a highly compressed digital cable channel might be equivalent, but the market wants DVD quality without any sacrifice from downloaded video.
Finally, video has also been held back by the lack of elegant playback solutions. Apple missed the boat with the AppleTV by failing to step up and partner with the black market, which is why the device hasn't been a wild success. Software solutions based on the xbmc core, such as boxee, plex, and uh.... xbmc, are doing much better, but they're still software solutions dependent on having a PC. People want a fully-integrated solution.
Mark my words: The first company with the temerity to market a device that will take a user's existing library and integrate it into an elegant set-top solution is going to CLEAN UP. They will dominate the set-top completely for years to come. It looks like TiVO is going to miss the boat, as is Apple. Are there any dark horses in this race?
Lest anyone think that I'm pipe dreaming, a working solution can be assembled out of off-the-shelf parts right now. Here's what I built in a weekend for about $700:
Hardware:
-Mac Mini c2d (winter '09)
-Harmony 720 remote
-DisplayPort --> HDMI cable
-Optical Audio cable
-1TB firewire-800 external storage from pricewatch
Software:
-Plex
-SwitchResX (only necessary for SDTV or older HDTVs)
-RipIt
-SABNZBD+
Subscriptions:
-Usenet service ($11/mo)
-Unnamed usenet header indexer ($.75 / week, roughly)
-rss feed for TV show subscriptions (free)
With these pieces, I've built a DVR that automatically downloads the shows I like the same day they air. Downloads are FAST, maxing out my internet connection. I can play back 1080p blu-ray rips with full surround sound & 0 dropped frames or stuttering. I can drop any DVD into the reader, and have it copied into the library and spit back out again once it's done. And it's all done with a universal remote in
I do love me some lossless audio, and that just wasn't a common feature on HD-DVD.
Meaning it wasn't capable of it, or most discs didn't do it?
Meaning most studios seemed content to save disk space by only putting on DD+ tracks instead of TrueHD or DTS-MA. I'd rather have a lossless track every time over some fluffy back-patting featurette where everyone talks about how great the movie was, but that doesn't sell disks the way a big bullet list of extras does. Not that the 360 can even output anything over full-bitrate DTS, but had HD-DVD won the 360 wouldn't have remained my player of choice.
As far as technical merits, I'll go with you on pretty much everything you said. I have a HD-DVD drive for my 360 and a PS3, and I'll grant that the early software for HD-DVD was much more polished.
However, I do love me some lossless audio, and that just wasn't a common feature on HD-DVD. I liked using the HD-DVD software better, but it was more or less a wash as far as which was the better format from an end-user standpoint, at least for me.
As to the politics, I done just got told. Thanks for the extra perspective!
DVD licensing fees are STILL quite high, and all the money goes to Toshiba, who own the patents. Toshiba's patent trolling is why blu-ray exists.
Toshiba built HD-DVD on top of their existing patent portfolio, and unilaterally altered the rules of the trade association charged with helming DVD's future, the DVD Forum, in order to push through adoption of their arguably-inferior standard over Sony's more advanced, more open, less expensive competing proposal.
Sony, Panasonic, and several other key players walked rather than spend another hardware generation paying through the nose to Toshiba, and formed their own standards body to back Sony's proposed spec.
Thus the format war was born: Toshiba's standard was named HD-DVD, and Sony's Blu-Ray. For once, Sony was the company that had the widely supported, more open standard. This is why you only saw Toshiba HD-DVD players, while dozens of companies were making blu-ray players.
Mind you, they're both closed formats, but of the two, HD-DVD was way more evil. The lesser evil definitely won in that case.
Nobody's forcing you to pay $40-$50. Games are products which are usually heavily discounted but still readily available 12 months after initial release.
Why not just wait a year, buy for $20, and then play, if you're so concerned about your $/hr value?
This policy has been around longer than that. I was an employee exercising the checkout policy back in the floppy / cartridge days, at several of the stores which would eventualy merge to become Gamestop (c. 1993-1997) This is old news, the lawsuits about it have come and gone. The policy has been disbanded, then re-instated several times. There's no use getting your panties twisted about it now.
Look: If you're reading this article, it's safe to assume you've been in a Gamestop (or EB, or Babbage's, or Software Etc., or Funcoland, or whatever your local store was before being devoured by ConGlomCo). So it is because of your undoubted nightmare customer experience in such places that when I tell you the following, you will know that it is true: working there was a fucking horrorshow. The hours were terrible, the customers obnoxious, the colleagues irritating, the stink from the shrinkwrap machine quite literally poisonous, and management incompetent, malicious, or both. Mind you, I'm talking about how bad it was 15 years ago when the stores were competing with each other. I can only imagine that it's gotten worse for employees since the industry consolidated completely, and you can no longer just walk up to the other side of the mall and get a job with the competition.
These stores pay minimum wage, offer employees almost no discount on the products they sell (and indeed often restrict employees' access to hot items like new-release consoles), and employees are forbidden to hang out mucking about with the in-store demo kiosks during downtime or off-duty hours. Yet at the same time, the customers and management demand that the employees somehow be knowledgable about all the product in the store. These products have consistently sold for $50 - $80 apiece for years. As an employee, you're supposed to have played everything, yet as an employee, you're subject to the same "you broke the shrink, you own it" return policy on $140 a week for the average part-timer. It's an impossible situation for a 19-year-old trying to make rent, groceries, and tuition, much less a sad-sack 30-something manager with kids, pulling in $25k a year on a 70-hour work week if they're lucky.
Gamestop didn't post record profits by paying their line employees well. Everyone's a disposable cog, and they'd just as soon fire you as look at you. Don't think as an employee you aren't constantly reminded by management about the eager stream of salivating 16-year-olds who think working in a game store would be SO COOL, dreaming of replacing you.
Given all this, do you think anyone in their right mind would work at that store if they didn't offer employees what amounts to a free lending library of the newest titles? What other incentive could there possibly be to irritate people with membership clubs, pushy pre-orders and used game pitches, and the soul-crushing pain of listening to the loop of that piped in tv network all day?
If it really bothers you, shop elsewhere. I certainly do, those fucking vultures won't ever get my money again. If you do decide to shop there, use some common sense and check your disks for scratches before you leave the store. It's not that hard.
But seriously, quit the whining about the "used sold as new" crap. The checkout policy is the price you pay for having specialty knowledge behind the register at minimum wage prices.
This has been pretty thoroughly debunked, actually:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein's_alleged_shredder
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/feb/25/iraq.iraqandthemedia
And nobody is fooled except the people who modded up your post.
Initially the E470 toll road was envisioned as a loop around the entire Denver metro area, allowing easy access for people in the suburbs to the airport, the Denver tech center south of town, and the interstate roads toward the ski resorts. By bypassing all that traffic around downtown, they would ease congestion significantly, especially during the winter months.
Unfortunately the residents of Golden, an upscale suburb slightly off the beaten path west of Denver, didn't like the idea of the plebians being able to access their town without having to jump through hoops to get there. They torpedoed the completion of the loop to keep the rabble out of their isolated, upscale community. The result of this is that any skiers coming from the heavily populated areas north of Denver are routed through the center of the city on their way to the slopes, causing congestion and traffic misery for both the tourists and residents.
Meanwhile, not content to make up for massively cutting their operating budget by no longer having any toll collectors, thus slashing their payroll and ongoing operating costs to a bare minimum, the governing body of E470 implemented a toll raise to pay for the new automated technology that will save them millions yearly.
Now that they've put people out of work, hopefully greed for the lost revenue in skier tolls they're missing out on every year will drive the owners of E470 to use that extra money to lobby various legislative bodies that will mandate the completion of the loop.
The residents of Golden delayed the rollout of HDTV in Denver for years by blocking the construction of upgraded antennae, until finally it required a federal mandate to push things through. Let's hope that the E470 governing body's lust for capital is enough to trump the isolationists in Golden.
Sometimes the only way to beat nakedly greedy, corrupt elitists is to sic other nakedly greedy, corrupt elitists on them.
Netflix gets it.
Every streaming media provider so far that has arrived & failed has done so because they try to mimic the rental pricing model. They charge $3 a movie for 24 hours, and then wonder why sales are low. The thing is, people won't pay $3 for access to media they don't physically control.
Netflix is following the HBO OnDemand pricing model. $20 a month for unlimited access to anything in their ondemand streaming library. This is the pricing model people want when it comes to media they don't physically control. Since I didn't pay per-item, I don't mind that there are restrictions on use.
I've been using this service on the XBox 360 for the past few weeks and it's been exceptional. My only technical gripe is that it's limited to 2-channel audio right now, but otherwise there is nothing to complain about. Widescreen movies are displayed fullscreen on an HD set, 4:3 content is pillarboxed, the video quality is approximately on-par with DVD. As soon as they work out 5.1 it'll be perfect. The addition of TV series with new episodes that have just aired but are not yet available on DVD is just another perk. Selection is growing every day.
It's really fantastic if you've got the bandwidth.
I'm seriously thinking about canceling my satellite TV service / DVR and just running with 360 & Netflix. For just under $300 a year, ($50 xblive, $20/mo to Netflix), as opposed to the almost $1000 a year that most cable/satellite companies charge for HD service, it's a great deal.
Pros:
+Netflix streaming video works like a charm.
+Avatars have potential and are reasonably customizable, very similar to the Mii.
+It's great to see the party system extended beyond COD4 / Halo 3.
+Playing from HDD instead of from CD will certainly cut down on wear & tear.
+In-game dashboard is much nicer.
Cons:
-We've gone from 5 tabs to 50+ screens. It's crap.
-The menu defaults to the "showcase" channel, which advertises Microsoft's newest games. This means that Microsoft, not content with getting us to pay $300+ for a console and $50 / year for Live, feels the need to advertise to us every time we go to the dashboard.
-Old themes port very poorly, stretched across the background in awkward ways.
-Many links to premium content have been pushed to the front page.
-"Autodownload" feature for the Arcade releases is gone.
-Haven't fixed the glaring file management bugs - it's not possible to do something like, say, delete 150 old Oblivion saves to reclaim disk space while keeping 5 of them without pressing 4 buttons for each individual savegame. Not a problem until you realize they're over a megabyte apiece, and on a 20gb hard disk this adds up fast.
On the whole I hate it. The ui is completely cluttered now, but the defaulting to advertisements behavior and the up-front sells for premium content are a dealbreaker. I'm changing my 360's default behavior to "boot what's in the drive" from "default to dashboard" and I'm never looking back.
I recently spent a week driving a rented Ford Fusion equipped with Sync, and while it's definitely 1.0 technology, I think it's one of the most promising things for vehicle use in a long time.
To start, I paired the head unit with my phone as a bluetooth headset. I opted to transfer my address book to the head unit, which took about 5 minutes. From that point on, integration was total.
Then I spent about 5 minutes searching for the USB port so I could plug my ipod in, until I realized that the USB port was hidden inside the armrest. Once the ipod was connected, the screen was covered with an overlay of the Ford logo, and the controls on the ipod itself stopped working. In fact, the device was physically inaccessible to me while driving, because it had to be closed inside the armrest. I appreciated this feature a lot, as there is little more dangerous on the road these days than people futzing with text messages or music players while driving.
Once connected, the head unit began scanning the tags of all 7,000 songs on the ipod. This took about 15 minutes. Once this was complete, the unit was ready to go.
All status updates were spoken in a pleasant female voice.
To use Sync, I pressed a button on the wheel. The system responded by making a 'ding' sound. At this point I could access the phone or the stereo with voice commands:
"Call bob thomas at home."
"Play artist Underworld."
"Play album Frizzle Fry by Primus"
"Play song Ich Bin Ein Auslander by Pop Will Eat Itself" (chosen specifically to try and trip it up, didn't work)
"Satellite" to switch to Sirius, which was built in
"FM1" etc.
"What's playing now" to name the currently playing song.
Received text messages were read aloud by the system to me. Incoming calls rang through the stereo as the music dimmed, and could be answered by pressing the same button on the steering wheel. If I was listening to music on the ipod, it paused during the conversation, then resumed automatically once the conversation was over. The same applied to outbound calls.
The car I used was not equipped with integrated satellite navigation, so I can't speak as to how well that particular piece of the product works, but everything else was flawless. I never had a single false positive or false negative hit with the address book or the music list.
There were a couple of rough 1.0 edges:
-Setting up general shuffle play on the ipod appeared to be damn near impossible, but I also didn't read the manual so this could be user error. At any rate it wasn't intuitive.
-There was no integration with the head unit in tuner, CD, or satellite mode. I had to use hard buttons on the stereo itself for these uses. Presumably further integration for these features will come in future model years.
-No speech-to-text for responding to text messages.
On the whole I have to say that Microsoft has done a GREAT job with Sync. I never saw a single Windows logo, it never crashed, it worked exactly as expected, and it made using the car with my cell phone & ipod much safer, and much easier. It was rough going back to my late 90's honda knowing I would have to pull over again in order to change tracks and send/receive calls.
based on 500 miles with the product, I think I can recommend Sync with little hesitation.
Joystiq has posted an excellent refutation of this tempest in a tea-pot.
When drinking one night with a former roller coaster technician who had decided to get into the less stressful job of datacenter ops, I found out something terrifying about a famous (and, it should be said, injury/fatality-free as far as I know) catch & release roller coaster.
The coaster is designed such that the train car is loaded at a station. Then a tractor mechanism pulls it backward, up to the top of a steep incline. Once at the top, the mechanism releases the car, and the train goes rocketing through the station, through a series of tight loops and twists, and then coasts up an identical steep incline on the other end. There another mechanism catches the car, drags it all the way to the top, and then lets go, sending the car back through the series of loops and twists in reverse. The car decelerates up the incline back on the original side, is caught once again, and returned gently to the station for boarding.
All of these catch mechanisms need to know the velocity and weight of the train car in order to properly catch and decelerate it without hurting any of the occupants. Those values will change with every load of passengers, due to people's varying weights and their distribution around the car, so they have to be calculated on the fly.
The software that does this, the engineer swore to me, runs on...
Windows 3.11.
This knowledge made future rides on that particular coaster a hell of a lot more scary.
A good host name should denote the following:
-location
-department/cost center
-purpose
-prod/stage
-some sort of serial # to make it easy
Depending on how your sites are named (I like using airport codes but it might not scale right for your org), you could wind up with:
sjcmarkfilep01
Which would denote san jose office, marketing, fileserver, production, 01.
Adjust as necessary for your use.
Shutting down the DVRs for Dish Network would be the stupidest thing that Tivo could do. Dish PR just says "It's Tivo's fault," puts something out on a wire service, someone picks up the story that Tivo made Dish network but not DirecTV or Comcast shut down their DVR's, and bingo, Tivo are the bad guys even though they're the ones protecting their stolen IP from another company. Licensing is just as much in Tivo's favor as it is Dish's at this point. Letting the Dish shutdown happen would be a fiasco.
Also, does this have ramifications for other disk-based DVR's such as those offered by cable companies and DirecTV?
Seven years ago, Napster offered to partner up with the music companies, charge a monthly fee, and go legit. They had a beautiful, efficient 'walled garden' infrastructure, selection surpassing the iTunes store, nearly 15 million active users, and even though there was openNap and Gnutella, these were fringe tools. Napster had no *real* competition, they were a de facto standard. The market was sewn up.
Napster offered multiple times to partner up with the RIAA labels to create a subscription-based model. If they'd have kept just 1/3 of their userbase at $10 a month (highly reasonable) and growth had remained flat (highly unlikely), they'd have pulled in $600mil in the first year, without ever having spent a dime on marketing or distribution. $600mil a year in free money with incredible growth potential, and the RIAA wouldn't have had to lift a finger.
$600mil in revenue in just the first year, for doing nothing. And they said no, shut down Napster, and unleashed the unkillable hydra of gnutella/bittorrent/FastTrack/etc.
NOW the RIAA wants a surcharge? No. You had your chance at the golden egg, and relevancy in the future of music, and you chose instead to cut the goose's throat. We're not going to subsidize you now.
Are we using different googles? Mine returns http://polishlinux.org/choose/quiz/ as the top link.
So because someone tried a distro in Fall 2007 that wasn't the "right" distro and gave up, that's the end-user's fault, and not the distro's / linux community at large's fault?
XP was the standard for Windows for 5 or 6 years, and it went through 2 major revisions in that time. OS X revs approximately every 18 months, and is on the fifth version to ship since 2000. You're not treated like you're stupid by the community for getting frustrated with the shortcomings of OS X 10.2.
Look: UI engineering is all about balancing exposing essential functionality vs. overwhelming your end user with choice. Here's an example: Near as I can figure, my TV remote needs about 18 buttons, max (including the 12-digit number pad). Yet it shipped with more than 70, and each of those buttons is there because the engineers at Sony thought I'd want them. I ignore the extra features on my remote, and resent their presence, because they're a constant reminder that I'm not using the television to its fullest abilities. That I don't WANT to use it to those abilities is irrelevant, those 50 buttons there remind me every time that I pick it up that I'm just not smart enough to get the most out of this machine. They have a negative effect on my perception of the value in this television. I dislike it because of the complex user interface (and I plan to get around it by getting another, simpler universal remote, at which time I will credit the remote for simplicity, and not the television for functionality).
Similarly, the barrage of choice that assaults users of linux systems is a detriment to the newbie. Having to pick window managers in 2008 is a disgrace. The decision should be out of the end user's hands until he wants to make the choice, at which time it should be available to him. You don't just ram it down his throat the first time he powers up the system.
You yelling at him for not wanting to make that choice, or necessarily understanding it, is shameful and proof that you're unable to see the forest for the trees. Stop being so damn myopic. Of course you and I want all the functionality we can get out of linux, but we're not typical. Ubuntu understands this, which is why it's been such a phenomenal success, but godDAMN man. Stop driving away the people we need to convert with this shitty attitude of yours.
Cars are routinely released in updated ways that are poorer than the model year that came before, or another line by the same manufacturer. For every Tucker, there's an Edsel. Beyond computerization, the standard sedan has very little to offer by way of innovation. There's little difference between a '98 Camry and an '08 Camry, despite the 10-year difference between their manufacturing dates. Cars are very mature products, while operating systems are decidedly less so (and an order of magnitude more complex beside).
50 years ago computers were using teletypes. Why are you insisting on carrying the automobile metaphor? I ignored it the first time on purpose.
I've been doing this for 30 years too, and I do think that Vista is as underwhelming as MS-DOS 4, but that doesn't make all the /. handwringing any less unbearable. I had to filter out dozens of DR-DOS nerds when that one cratered, but now I have to filter out thousands of linux nerds as Vista craters.
Vista's getting better. Someday it will be as good as or better than XP. In the meantime, we get it. You don't like it. Now shut the fuck up.
Every x.0 operating system ever shipped was immature at launch. Every. Single. One. Singling Vista out for that is like singling out a 3-year-old for not being able to read.
I'm no Microsoft apologist, but I do think the unbridled hate that pervades /.'s reaction to every single Vista article is a bit out of hand. Maybe this will help stem the tide of Vista-bashing. Sure, Vista kinda sucks, but all Windows versions kinda suck. I think most people who are ripping on Vista for being the operating system anti-christ are forgetting how badly XP sucked pre-SP1, and even pre-SP2. 7 years ago, the chorus of "OH MY GOD XP IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN 2000! THERE'S NO NEED TO UPGRADE!" in every XP article's comments were eerily similar to the ones you hear now every time Vista gets a mention.
Vista's maturing, and as it does it'll become a better operating system, and everyone will benefit, even if they don't use Vista. Microsoft still competes largely on the basis of being a de facto standard. Vista's release has caused them to lose this edge somewhat, and the window has opened for their competition, who compete mostly on features, to get a little lazy (Leopard, anyone?). Microsoft competing more vigorously on their stale plank, assuming they don't magically find traction they've been unable to find for years, can't do anything but help the products on the market.
Okay, now it's time to cue the million responses calling me a Microsoft shill. Suggested topics: "There really was no reason to upgrade from 2k to XP, I still use 2k just fine," "Vista is beyond repair because of DRM," and "Vista is way more broken than Leopard, how dare you rip on OS X."
No, I would have them publish the specifications for ordering PPV, sending OnDemand requests, and communicating 2-way with the back-end network to anyone interested in making a set-top box. Same with any future cable technologies. Publish API's, publish specifications, and allow other companies to make end-point devices.
And if they can't or won't do that? Then yes, hold them back. Cable companies being forced to continue supporting analog cable is a good thing. They're being held back from technological progress in the name of accessibility, because communication monopolies have been granted to them in exchange for their service to the public good, even if that service comes at the expense of theirp rofit margin. Cableco's want to have their monopolies, and still blatantly serve their own interests above all others.
Sort of like all web browsers are all EXACTLY THE SAME, right? Please. This is almost exactly analogous to a web browser - the set top acts as a browser of the cable's content.This is nothing like a web browser. To carry your analogy: If my ISP were like a cable company insisting on OCAP, every time I signed on to my ISP, my computer would automatically download a copy of Netscape 4.7. This instance of Netscape would run in a jailed virtual machine, and I would have no configuration control over it. If I wanted to browse the internet or use e-mail, I would have to use this copy of Netscape 4.7, and no other software. The ISP is happy to let me download IE5 for $4.99 a month, or IE7 for $14.99. They do not support IE6, Firefox, Safari, or Opera. The ISP 2 towns over supports Firefox, but due to monopoly rights granted to my ISP by the government, I am unable to purchase service from them.
That's the kind of bullshit environment the cable companies are forcing down our throats.
What customers want is a model exactly like the browser system, content that is retrieved over the wire in a well-documented standard format which can be understood by any end device and interpreted by that device in user- and vendor-configurable ways, regardless of the intent of the original content publisher or the content distributor. We want to rip out their channel guide and use our own, we want to time-shift our content without paying them a monthly DVR fee, we want to disable banner advertisements, and we want to play video back in a window on our PC screens while we type up responses to idiot AC's on Slashdot. These are all things we used to be able to do before cable monopolies leveraged digital cable to take control of the endpoint devices. It's not at all unreasonable as a customer to want that control back.
This is just 2-way cablecard, aka Cablecard 2.0, aka Open Cable, rebranded with yet another name. It's all a marketing gimmick designed to shake off the negative connotations attached to CableCard and its failure in the marketplace at the hands of the cable companies. These still aren't the droids you're looking for.
I think every cable customer who has every had to use a shitty digital cable tuner for any period of time knows that they suck mightily. They're some of the worst consumer electronics products put into wide release in the last decade. They have horrible user interfaces, they're slow to change channels, they're riddled with banner ads slapped on every spare square inch of screen real estate, they feature glacial channel guides, and are plagued by forgetful DVRs. The list of ways in which cable boxes suck goes on and on, but cable customers have put up with it because they didn't have a choice.
Really, the customer wants to be able to do the same things with digital cable that they were able to do with analog cable back in the 90's. Namely:
10 years and an act of Congress later, Cablecard was supposed to do give us all of the above, but the implementations have been so intentionally broken by the cable companies that it's basically useless. Cable companies have intentionally made the experience of using a cablecard-equipped PC with Windows Media Center (a fine device, whatever Slashdot's biases) or a cablecard-equipped Tivo a complete nightmare. Purchasers have to put up with broken installs, untrained technicians, and then once everything is set up, the system is so fragile that without notice the devices just Stop Working for days at a time, and often don't resume function until hours are spent on the phone with Comcast support. Users of WMC or TivoHD also lose access to PPV and On-Demand, even though they still have to pay the cable company for access to those features, and any channels that are deployed on a new back-end technology called SDV are inaccessible as well. Current WMC PC's and cablecard Tivo's are already obsolete, not 2 years into their product lifespan. CableCard is a lousy deal, and the cable companies have gone out of their way to make sure it remains a lousy deal, because the last thing they want to do is open up their network to competition.
CableCard 2.0, or 2-way cablecard, or OpenCable, or (now) True2Way, or whatever they call it, is supposed to be a panacea. These devices will allow 2-way communications with the cable company's network, and let you buy any cable box you want, complete with ppv and on-demand and SDV. But here's the rub: They use a technology called OCAP, with is four-letter-acronym for "Whatever box you buy will download and run the cable company's shitty software in a sandboxed virtual machine, and the box provider can offer no features above and beyond what is deployed by the cable company." There is no real competition under the OCAP model, because when plugged into the cable network and activated, the boxes will all be EXACTLY THE SAME. Maybe they can compete on hard disk space, but that'll be about it. You want a Tivo or WMC interface? If your cable company doesn't offer one (for the low low price of $15 a month, but did I mention that our standard cable box interface is free!) then you're screwed. You want an interface that isn't covered in banner ads? Good luck with that. The cable company remains the keyholder to the gates of the network, and there's no chance in hell they'll open up.
All this announcement means is that y
Like all romance languages, English has a masculine, feminine, and a gender-neutral case. It's just that in English, the gender-neutral and the masculine are conjugated identically. So really, when people are in doubt and they're referring to you as him, they're really using a gender-neutral pronoun. "He or she" is totally unnecessary, and wordy besides.