If you go out and buy their cheap cards twice as often as you'd upgrade to their top of the line cards, you'll spend half as much money and always have a latest generation card capable of playing all the latest games with all the greatest detail levels with a framerate fast enough that you won't know the difference.
Except that's just not true.
Take UT2k3 as an example. Turn up everything on high, set your anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering to max, and go play online... your frame rate is going to suck so badly it doesn't matter how good you are.
And if you're hoping the card will perform better when Doom3 is released, well...
That said, you can back things off very slightly - particularly on the AA and AF fronts - and things will be just fine with a $150 video card. And you can do what you suggest. Which, frankly, is probably fine for most people.
And while by and large I don't stare at the eye candy when playing UT2k3 online, there was a massive improvement in going from a GF2 to a GF4 Ti4200 - upping the visual quality very much improved the experience (and the frame rate boost didn't hurt my play either).
And, yes, you really do want your framerate above 60 fps at all times. Below that you will start seeing stuttering -- video cards don't display motion blur like film or video do, so 24 or 30 fps is not good enough.
Maybe you couldn't get one if you were in Siberia at the long end of a dog run for post, but for the rest of the world you could get one without any issues back in September 2002 - as long as you were willing to pay $400.
Or, of course, you could just assume that this is all made up. Note the 3rd review, written in early September by some teenage fanboy.
Hell, the ATI AIW 9700 Pro has been available since November.
Re:Independent review sites?
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ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
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· Score: 5, Insightful
So, are there any independent review sites out there
What do you mean by independant? They all take ad revenue now, and often that ad revenue is from either hardware companies or retailers. Most of the reputable ones (AnandTech, Tom's, Sharky's, etc) have guidelines on who they will and will not accept ads from - in the case of retailers they usually have to have a good rating.
How do they get their hands on pre-release hardware
The hardware companies aren't freaking stupid. It's called marketing, and the marketing departments make sure that the top reviewers get the hardware ahead of time. Sure, you could send them something the day it's out, but that hurts the marketing push. Especially since it can take a couple weeks to do some reviews. And you want to make sure that if the reviewer has a problem they can get help.
At least it's better than the old print reviews, where they would get the hardware before release and then print a couple months after release -- since print cycles are so freaking long (especially for monthly magazines).
Just how close to payola is the whole thing, anyway?
Most reviewers have to return the hardware afterwards. Of course, there's always swag, and they get tons of it. From everyone. Occasionally they'll get to keep the hardware, and upon occasion the big sites will have charity auctions or giveaways for random stuff (although that's often just another marketing gimick - the site is donated hardware specifically for the purpose of giving it away).
If you want a "truely" independant site that gets no stuff from anyone, then go look for the chintzy sites that review stuff weeks to years after it's out. You know... the sites that you think suck and are horribly outdated.
If you want to know what you should buy then read the reviews from a couple of the top sites, and then go scan some forums. The forums are by average geeks and will give a wonderfully negative review of pretty much any product.
Can you show me where the DVD-R is on that Dell? I couldn't configure it
Yes, I misread that on the Dell site.
Also, you can't really compare the prices when you have XP Home edition selected as the OS
Exactly what features do you need from Pro over Home? In a laptop?
As far as which is preferred (OS X or XP), I said, quite explicitly, that that was a personal preference.
Also, how about iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, where are they on the Dell
Dell does bundle music and photo toys. Movie creation tools are available for an additional $49. I doubt they're on the level of the iTools (which, by all accounts, are exception pieces of software), but it's something. Again, I said software was personal preference. Or do you really, really want to get into the long list of software that simply isn't available on the Mac?
Pricing out the computers, I don't get huge differences. And if you price out the 15" (which compares a little better to the Dell), the Apple ends up being cheaper
No it isn't. First off, the 15" Apple has a meager 1280x854 resolution. The Dell 15.4", even with an SXGA screen, is 1680x1050. The Apple is $300 more expensive once you include 3 years of warranty protection (which I didn't do with the Dell vs 17" Powerbook example). The Apple has a longer battery life, the Dell is more powerful. Pick what you need.
If you like Macs, then get a Powerbook. Otherwise the Dell is a very nice option... either way you're going to spend one helluva lot of money on a system.
The original poster, however, compared a 17" Powerbook to the Dell and wondered why the Dell was (slightly) heavier. I wondered too. I also wondered about cost. If cost wasn't an issue, I'd probably go with the Powerbook, even though it has slightly lower resolution. The longer battery life and larger screen would cinch it. The reduced CPU power isn't a big deal, since I'm not likely to do anything CPU constrained on a laptop, and a 1 GHz G4 isn't a wimpy CPU anyway.
The Dell has a CD-RW/DVD-R standard, just like the Apple does.
Dell, the leader in PC market share can't make a laptop as well designed as Apple's, thats the point
Only if you ignore the real specs. I suggest reading my other post on the thread - the two are very comparable, but the Dell is about 20% less expensive.
About the only significant difference I see is the resolution - the Dell screen, while smaller, has a resolution of 1920x1200. The Apple screen is "only" 1440x900. This is a signficant difference in resolutions, and may partially explain the weight difference. More likely, though, it's simply case materials.
Of course, the Apple PowerBook G4 17" is $3299. Base (which includes a lot). A comparably configured Dell Inspiron 8500 (upgrade HD to 60GB, video to GF4Go, WUXGA video, 2 GHz CPU) is only $2657. And the Dell has a faster CPU (the 1 GHz G4 isn't going to beat a 2 GHz P4M in most tasks), more resolution (albeit a smaller screen), and a much, much longer standard warranty (3 years vs 1 year).
Oh, and yes, the Inspiron 8500 has 802.11b/g, standard. I don't think it has Bluetooth (the Powerbook does), but both have Gigabit ethernet and built-in modems. Both have CD-RW/DVD-R's, and half a gig of memory (upgradable on both). They're really pretty comparable as far as hardware goes. Which software you prefer is obviously up to you.
The Apple is lighter and (mostly) smaller. About the biggest difference is the height - 1" vs 1.5" is pretty major. The Apple is an inch wider, but that's probably not a big deal to most people.
That patch will be issued immediately after the patch that causes asshole sysadmins to stop requiring a new password every 30 days that doesn't match any of the previous 11 passwords, is at least 8 characters long containing mixed case, a number, and a non-alphanumeric character.
I've had to deal with such systems before and my passwords rapidly degraded from secure, non-dictionary crackable "phrases" to stupid crap like "Abcdef1", "aBcdef1", or "FuckYou2".
Of course, I've also known people that did just write their passwords down on a piece of paper, even if you didn't have to change them. The best one was a Unix sysadmin at a place I used to work. He was incompetent, so we would just get stuff done ourselves by going over to his cube and reading the appropriate root password off the bottom of his wrist rest.
I just love the new and inventive was that the govnernment figures out to give away gifts (or exchange them for votes) with our tax dollars!
Yeah. It's like those damn schoolbooks. How dare they buy them for the students instead of having the kids buy their own! Who cares if they can't afford them!
Of course, you blatantly ignore the niggling little detail that these aren't a gift. The students don't own them. They have to turn them back in at the end of 8th grade. Kinda like how you have to turn books back in at the end of the year.
As for your misappropriated quote - first off, the US isn't a democracy. It's a Republic. The founding fathers were rightfully afraid of a democracy and avoided it explicitly. Second, since the governor didn't run with "give free laptops to the kids!" as a platform, you can hardly claim that he was voted in based on this program. Third, and finally, Mr. King is now the former governor of Maine. Obviously he didn't give enough largess based on your statement.
For those who are interested, AAC is the "Advanced Audio Coding" codec, and apparantly a Dolby standard. It's the same format that BMG and Universal are using for their online downloads, and it claims to have better audio quality than MP3 while using 1/3 the space.
It does contain DRM tech to prevent copying. There appear to be a number of portable digital music players that support it, such as the Panasonic SV-SD80 and the Nokia Music Player.
Personally, I'd rather see FLAC or some other lossless encoding available. But that'd give them DRM nightmares (burn it to CD as CD-A and the DRM is gone, but you can recreate the song perfectly - no transcoding issues). Oh well. They'll eventually get there.
At least now that 12 song, $12 CD is filled with 12 songs you actually like and not 2-6 good or decent ones and 6-10 pieces of crap.
But, hey, why am I surprised that people are still finding this too expensive? Hell, if they offered them at $.01/song then people would still bitch.
Excepting that this service doesn't apply to me (since I own neither a Mac nor an iPod), it sounds pretty damn good. I'd be happy to pay $.99/track for songs I like as long as they were high quality and readily available. I'd certainly buy more music than I do now.
CD-R and CD-RW are quite different... the reflectivity from a CD-RW is much lower than CD-R, so while an old player can read CDs and CD-Rs just fine, it needs automatic gain control (AGC) in order to read CD-RWs.
Most DVD players can read CDs but not CD-R(W) because of the difference in the disks. CD-R's organic substrate absorbs shorter wavelengths, which is what DVD uses. CD doesn't.
I could keep paraphrasing, but the info in question is in the CD-R FAQ. The relevant sections are 2-12 and 2-13.
Either way, current DVD players won't be able to play them, and the blue lasers will still be backwards-compatible with the current DVD and CD laser standards
Forgot to reply to this bit -- no they won't. Blue lasers cannot read current DVDs or CDs. If you want a player that can read both blue and red laser formats then you either need two lasers or one with a selectable frequency.
Of course, if you want to read CD-R/RW as well, then add either a 3rd laser or a 3rd frequency.
You may be able to get away with optics (which is how most non-Sony DVD players read CD-R/RW), but I dunno if that'd work for blue lasers. It's a much larger frequency shift.
The "Save to VCR" feature saves it as analog video out -- not digital. So there's no complaint about it. Really no different than saving to tape in the first place.
As far as doing it with a HD stream - dunno if it'll have that feature. As I said, we'll see. But, at least in theory, TiVo could then say that they're doing nothing more or less than what was already possible, just as with VCRs now. There's just a buffer between it. Of course, they'd have to obey the HDTV copy flags (none (which shouldn't be on the TiVo at all), once (no dump), any (dump all you like, we'll make more!)), but that's pretty trivial.
and as long as you handle your DVDs / CDs carefully then they last forever anyway
Don't have kids, do ya?
They have a tendancy to mishandle CDs and DVDs - at best you just wind up with tons of greasy fingerprints that can be cleaned off. At worst I've heard of kids snapping them in two (by accident). You can try to keep them away from the kids, but that's of mixed success for most people.
The rental market (read: Blockbuster) also wants cartridges. Period. Too many dead rental discs from people excercising rentalitis (it's not mine so I don't give a shit).
Cartridges don't solve these problems entirely, but they go a long, long way toward reducing them.
Your point about mechanical parts is a good one, and a valid one. Traditionally there have been issues with cartridges, but I have little doubt that they'd be solved with the weight of the entire CE industry behind them.
I suspect that Blu-ray will win out in the long run anyway, since the majority of the firms are behind it. But Toshiba is a very big fish in the pond, so we'll see. WB is being dismissed rather readily as a non-solution - the CE manufacturers want to sell new boxes at high margins, not retool old designs. And they don't want to pay the MPEG-4 royalties.
If TiVo knows what's good for them they'll offer a machine that has blue DVD-recording capabilities
TiVo does know what's good for them. And it's to stay as far away from anything like this as possible.
Heck, I'm still surprised that they're going to offer show sharing between TiVo's - even though it's an added cost package to do it. Pleased, but surprised. Of course, they've taken some fairly significant steps to try and ensure that show sharing will be limited as intended, but I question how long that'll last.
TiVo knows that doing anything like this is going to open it up to lawsuits. Big ones. Especially with HDTV. So why bother? Just keep recording to HD and giving a mostly blind eye to the video extraction crowd - especially since the extraction software is still hokey and only works with Series1 TiVos (the new S2 TiVos are proving hack resistant, although some progress is being made... if you're willing to take a soldering iron to your BIOS).
TiVo is much better off improving their software, offering value added packages like the HMO, and spending it's legal muscle defending its patents against Motorola and Scientific Atlanta -- not burning capital in courts defending itself from the networks, the studios, and every cable company in the US.
In any case, a disc based TiVo would stick you back in some of the nightmares that plague VCRs - have a disk in? Is it blank? Does it have enough capacity for the shows you want to record before you can change the disc?
Oh, sure, you can stick a HD in there and then just dump to disc when you want to, but then why should TiVo bother? Just continue offering a "Save to VCR" option and stream the data out a digital port where a D-VHS, or Bluray recorder, or whatever can suck it down and save it. Of course, I'm presuming that the HD TiVo will still have this, and that's just a guess at the moment. We'll see. But if it did then it's less likely to cause legal problems than TiVo putting the recorder in the same box.
Go read this. It's from last September, so I suspect the battle lines have changed some, so feel free to Google for more info.
Basically there are three proposals for "HD DVD" - Warner Brothers wants to take current red laser DVD-9's and change the DVD spec to allow the use of MPEG-4. This would, allegedly, give enough recording capacity for HD movies. Toshiba wants to use blue lasers with a disc having the same physical characteristics as a DVD-9, but retain MPEG-2 as the encoding format. Sony, Philips, and the rest are pushing the Blu-ray format - blue laser, MPEG-2, and a disc that is similar to current DVD-9's but are enclosed in a cartridge and only has a single layer.
The Blu-ray format is designed from the outset to be recordable. It also has the most raw capacity (27 GB - Toshiba's has 20 GB in recordable format, and obviously WB's wouldn't change anything from the current 4.7GB). I also like the cartridge idea, since it reduces scratches and other potential damage. In fact, the lack of a cartridge was one of the biggest complaints about DVD.
MPEG-4 doesn't have "more backers". It has a few companies that are intensely interested in it for patent revenue. The majority of the CE industry doesn't want it because of the idiotic royalty payments being demanded by the consortium. Even the players in the consortium are being edgy.
I haven't read any of his pontifications on sender-pays, but when has that stopped anyone from posting on/. ?
It probably is a everyone pays system - although I suspect that ISPs will then say "x messages per y time period included!" - and either eat the cost or raise their rates to compensate.
The real problem will be the same as it is for any microbilling setup - the overhead is a killer. It all looks well and good to stop the spammer that's hitting you with 100,000 emails, but when you realize that you also have to deal with the 10,000 accounts that are sending 10 emails each, the overhead eats you for lunch. Maybe he's proposed a solution for this - if so, then there's a whole lot of VC's that would like to talk to him.
Uh, and what do you base these wild assumptions on?
First off, a DVD is 9.4G/side - most current DVDs are dual-layer. Rewritable DVD's are still only single layer.
Next, you've deeply, vastly, absurdly overestimated the quality of VHS. Record at best quality possible on VHS and it's still less than half the line count of DVD, and we won't even go into chroma and lumiscence loss.
The one estimate I've seen for VHS backups is 2.7GB... certainly not that bad, but it has all the drawbacks of tape storage and requires a rather hokey control system (IR blaster out of the PC).
For what? Attempted tax evasion? Hell, you may as well arrest the entire country then.
About the only thing you can accuse them of is terminal stupidity and/or gullibility.
Fortunately I don't know anyone (personally) that's been taken advantage by this or any other conartist to a significant extent. But I'm sure you'd be the hit of the family if your grandparents lost their life savings to such a con artist and your only suggestions was to throw them in jail.
You're right... I guess I shouldn't rip all 1000 of my CD's to FLAC and make them available for music servers like TiVo, AudioTron, etc.
Yeah, that'd be stupid.
Oh, and who needs to edit video anyway? Let's go back to analog video editing. So much more efficient and far easier! Right.
It's particularly sad that you can't even think of legitimate uses for large amounts of HD space.
Re:Mining Asteroids and other economical tasks in
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Collecting Stardust
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· Score: 1
Well, it's probably be worth a good bit less since in selling it you'd significantly reduce the sale price (even if you petered it out over a century).
The real problem is still economic. It just doesn't have a good enough rate of return. Presume it costs a mere $30B to design, develop, and deploy a system to secure and exploit a nickel-metal NEAR as suggested. If it takes you 20 years to do this, and then you play the asteroid out over another century, what's your rate of return when you sell the goods for $4T?
Well, if you took that $30B of initial investment and let it grow at 5% APR, compounding daily, it would turn into $1,206,780B after 120 years.
So, uh... you just cut your return by over 3000 times. Ouch. Big, big, big ouch.
That's the real big problem with space exploration - it takes so long that it becomes unviable economically. And these numbers don't even take risk into account, and they're probably low on a factor of 10x - it would probably cost closer to $300B to develop that first successful mining strategy, if not more. There's a lot of hard problems to crack first.
Of course, this doesn't touch on other reasons to do this kind of thing, but then you're appealing to other desires. Raw economics is not a good reason to go into space... it's a really lousy one. But I still want to go there.
No, because if the source is leaked by China and MS doesn't ferret out every single leak and erradicate it (unlikely if leaked widely enough) then it's unlikely a judge will decide that MS showed sufficient security measures in keeping the trade secret secret.
Now MS could sue China (or Germany or whoever), for all damages involved... but, well... good luck.
I'd assume that there are magic keys all over the place acting as a canary, plus other methods intended to prevent leaks. Otherwise MS may as well assume the code is going to be out there in short order.
Of course, all of these code peeks exclude the encryption, authentication, and other "secret" libraries, which is why MS is willing to (and able to) do this in the first place. I'd bet that any trade secret level code is unviewable.
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If you go out and buy their cheap cards twice as often as you'd upgrade to their top of the line cards, you'll spend half as much money and always have a latest generation card capable of playing all the latest games with all the greatest detail levels with a framerate fast enough that you won't know the difference.
Except that's just not true.
Take UT2k3 as an example. Turn up everything on high, set your anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering to max, and go play online... your frame rate is going to suck so badly it doesn't matter how good you are.
And if you're hoping the card will perform better when Doom3 is released, well...
That said, you can back things off very slightly - particularly on the AA and AF fronts - and things will be just fine with a $150 video card. And you can do what you suggest. Which, frankly, is probably fine for most people.
And while by and large I don't stare at the eye candy when playing UT2k3 online, there was a massive improvement in going from a GF2 to a GF4 Ti4200 - upping the visual quality very much improved the experience (and the frame rate boost didn't hurt my play either).
And, yes, you really do want your framerate above 60 fps at all times. Below that you will start seeing stuttering -- video cards don't display motion blur like film or video do, so 24 or 30 fps is not good enough.
Maybe you couldn't get one if you were in Siberia at the long end of a dog run for post, but for the rest of the world you could get one without any issues back in September 2002 - as long as you were willing to pay $400.
Or, of course, you could just assume that this is all made up. Note the 3rd review, written in early September by some teenage fanboy.
Hell, the ATI AIW 9700 Pro has been available since November.
So, are there any independent review sites out there
What do you mean by independant? They all take ad revenue now, and often that ad revenue is from either hardware companies or retailers. Most of the reputable ones (AnandTech, Tom's, Sharky's, etc) have guidelines on who they will and will not accept ads from - in the case of retailers they usually have to have a good rating.
How do they get their hands on pre-release hardware
The hardware companies aren't freaking stupid. It's called marketing, and the marketing departments make sure that the top reviewers get the hardware ahead of time. Sure, you could send them something the day it's out, but that hurts the marketing push. Especially since it can take a couple weeks to do some reviews. And you want to make sure that if the reviewer has a problem they can get help.
At least it's better than the old print reviews, where they would get the hardware before release and then print a couple months after release -- since print cycles are so freaking long (especially for monthly magazines).
Just how close to payola is the whole thing, anyway?
Most reviewers have to return the hardware afterwards. Of course, there's always swag, and they get tons of it. From everyone. Occasionally they'll get to keep the hardware, and upon occasion the big sites will have charity auctions or giveaways for random stuff (although that's often just another marketing gimick - the site is donated hardware specifically for the purpose of giving it away).
If you want a "truely" independant site that gets no stuff from anyone, then go look for the chintzy sites that review stuff weeks to years after it's out. You know... the sites that you think suck and are horribly outdated.
If you want to know what you should buy then read the reviews from a couple of the top sites, and then go scan some forums. The forums are by average geeks and will give a wonderfully negative review of pretty much any product.
Can you show me where the DVD-R is on that Dell? I couldn't configure it
Yes, I misread that on the Dell site.
Also, you can't really compare the prices when you have XP Home edition selected as the OS
Exactly what features do you need from Pro over Home? In a laptop?
As far as which is preferred (OS X or XP), I said, quite explicitly, that that was a personal preference.
Also, how about iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, where are they on the Dell
Dell does bundle music and photo toys. Movie creation tools are available for an additional $49. I doubt they're on the level of the iTools (which, by all accounts, are exception pieces of software), but it's something. Again, I said software was personal preference. Or do you really, really want to get into the long list of software that simply isn't available on the Mac?
Pricing out the computers, I don't get huge differences. And if you price out the 15" (which compares a little better to the Dell), the Apple ends up being cheaper
No it isn't. First off, the 15" Apple has a meager 1280x854 resolution. The Dell 15.4", even with an SXGA screen, is 1680x1050. The Apple is $300 more expensive once you include 3 years of warranty protection (which I didn't do with the Dell vs 17" Powerbook example). The Apple has a longer battery life, the Dell is more powerful. Pick what you need.
If you like Macs, then get a Powerbook. Otherwise the Dell is a very nice option... either way you're going to spend one helluva lot of money on a system.
The original poster, however, compared a 17" Powerbook to the Dell and wondered why the Dell was (slightly) heavier. I wondered too. I also wondered about cost. If cost wasn't an issue, I'd probably go with the Powerbook, even though it has slightly lower resolution. The longer battery life and larger screen would cinch it. The reduced CPU power isn't a big deal, since I'm not likely to do anything CPU constrained on a laptop, and a 1 GHz G4 isn't a wimpy CPU anyway.
The Dell has a CD-RW/DVD-R standard, just like the Apple does.
Dell, the leader in PC market share can't make a laptop as well designed as Apple's, thats the point
Only if you ignore the real specs. I suggest reading my other post on the thread - the two are very comparable, but the Dell is about 20% less expensive.
About the only significant difference I see is the resolution - the Dell screen, while smaller, has a resolution of 1920x1200. The Apple screen is "only" 1440x900. This is a signficant difference in resolutions, and may partially explain the weight difference. More likely, though, it's simply case materials.
Of course, the Apple PowerBook G4 17" is $3299. Base (which includes a lot). A comparably configured Dell Inspiron 8500 (upgrade HD to 60GB, video to GF4Go, WUXGA video, 2 GHz CPU) is only $2657. And the Dell has a faster CPU (the 1 GHz G4 isn't going to beat a 2 GHz P4M in most tasks), more resolution (albeit a smaller screen), and a much, much longer standard warranty (3 years vs 1 year).
Oh, and yes, the Inspiron 8500 has 802.11b/g, standard. I don't think it has Bluetooth (the Powerbook does), but both have Gigabit ethernet and built-in modems. Both have CD-RW/DVD-R's, and half a gig of memory (upgradable on both). They're really pretty comparable as far as hardware goes. Which software you prefer is obviously up to you.
The Apple is lighter and (mostly) smaller. About the biggest difference is the height - 1" vs 1.5" is pretty major. The Apple is an inch wider, but that's probably not a big deal to most people.
That patch will be issued immediately after the patch that causes asshole sysadmins to stop requiring a new password every 30 days that doesn't match any of the previous 11 passwords, is at least 8 characters long containing mixed case, a number, and a non-alphanumeric character.
I've had to deal with such systems before and my passwords rapidly degraded from secure, non-dictionary crackable "phrases" to stupid crap like "Abcdef1", "aBcdef1", or "FuckYou2".
Of course, I've also known people that did just write their passwords down on a piece of paper, even if you didn't have to change them. The best one was a Unix sysadmin at a place I used to work. He was incompetent, so we would just get stuff done ourselves by going over to his cube and reading the appropriate root password off the bottom of his wrist rest.
I just love the new and inventive was that the govnernment figures out to give away gifts (or exchange them for votes) with our tax dollars!
Yeah. It's like those damn schoolbooks. How dare they buy them for the students instead of having the kids buy their own! Who cares if they can't afford them!
Of course, you blatantly ignore the niggling little detail that these aren't a gift. The students don't own them. They have to turn them back in at the end of 8th grade. Kinda like how you have to turn books back in at the end of the year.
As for your misappropriated quote - first off, the US isn't a democracy. It's a Republic. The founding fathers were rightfully afraid of a democracy and avoided it explicitly. Second, since the governor didn't run with "give free laptops to the kids!" as a platform, you can hardly claim that he was voted in based on this program. Third, and finally, Mr. King is now the former governor of Maine. Obviously he didn't give enough largess based on your statement.
I do hope you're teaching your children better.
For those who are interested, AAC is the "Advanced Audio Coding" codec, and apparantly a Dolby standard. It's the same format that BMG and Universal are using for their online downloads, and it claims to have better audio quality than MP3 while using 1/3 the space.
It does contain DRM tech to prevent copying. There appear to be a number of portable digital music players that support it, such as the Panasonic SV-SD80 and the Nokia Music Player.
For more info, see the AAC homepage and a Google cache of Dolby's announcement regarding BMG and Universal.
Personally, I'd rather see FLAC or some other lossless encoding available. But that'd give them DRM nightmares (burn it to CD as CD-A and the DRM is gone, but you can recreate the song perfectly - no transcoding issues). Oh well. They'll eventually get there.
At least now that 12 song, $12 CD is filled with 12 songs you actually like and not 2-6 good or decent ones and 6-10 pieces of crap.
But, hey, why am I surprised that people are still finding this too expensive? Hell, if they offered them at $.01/song then people would still bitch.
Excepting that this service doesn't apply to me (since I own neither a Mac nor an iPod), it sounds pretty damn good. I'd be happy to pay $.99/track for songs I like as long as they were high quality and readily available. I'd certainly buy more music than I do now.
CD-R and CD-RW are quite different... the reflectivity from a CD-RW is much lower than CD-R, so while an old player can read CDs and CD-Rs just fine, it needs automatic gain control (AGC) in order to read CD-RWs.
Most DVD players can read CDs but not CD-R(W) because of the difference in the disks. CD-R's organic substrate absorbs shorter wavelengths, which is what DVD uses. CD doesn't.
I could keep paraphrasing, but the info in question is in the CD-R FAQ. The relevant sections are 2-12 and 2-13.
Read this and follow the link to here. For the second article, this is the most informative section.
Either way, current DVD players won't be able to play them, and the blue lasers will still be backwards-compatible with the current DVD and CD laser standards
Forgot to reply to this bit -- no they won't. Blue lasers cannot read current DVDs or CDs. If you want a player that can read both blue and red laser formats then you either need two lasers or one with a selectable frequency.
Of course, if you want to read CD-R/RW as well, then add either a 3rd laser or a 3rd frequency.
You may be able to get away with optics (which is how most non-Sony DVD players read CD-R/RW), but I dunno if that'd work for blue lasers. It's a much larger frequency shift.
The "Save to VCR" feature saves it as analog video out -- not digital. So there's no complaint about it. Really no different than saving to tape in the first place.
As far as doing it with a HD stream - dunno if it'll have that feature. As I said, we'll see. But, at least in theory, TiVo could then say that they're doing nothing more or less than what was already possible, just as with VCRs now. There's just a buffer between it. Of course, they'd have to obey the HDTV copy flags (none (which shouldn't be on the TiVo at all), once (no dump), any (dump all you like, we'll make more!)), but that's pretty trivial.
and as long as you handle your DVDs / CDs carefully then they last forever anyway
Don't have kids, do ya?
They have a tendancy to mishandle CDs and DVDs - at best you just wind up with tons of greasy fingerprints that can be cleaned off. At worst I've heard of kids snapping them in two (by accident). You can try to keep them away from the kids, but that's of mixed success for most people.
The rental market (read: Blockbuster) also wants cartridges. Period. Too many dead rental discs from people excercising rentalitis (it's not mine so I don't give a shit).
Cartridges don't solve these problems entirely, but they go a long, long way toward reducing them.
Your point about mechanical parts is a good one, and a valid one. Traditionally there have been issues with cartridges, but I have little doubt that they'd be solved with the weight of the entire CE industry behind them.
I suspect that Blu-ray will win out in the long run anyway, since the majority of the firms are behind it. But Toshiba is a very big fish in the pond, so we'll see. WB is being dismissed rather readily as a non-solution - the CE manufacturers want to sell new boxes at high margins, not retool old designs. And they don't want to pay the MPEG-4 royalties.
If TiVo knows what's good for them they'll offer a machine that has blue DVD-recording capabilities
TiVo does know what's good for them. And it's to stay as far away from anything like this as possible.
Heck, I'm still surprised that they're going to offer show sharing between TiVo's - even though it's an added cost package to do it. Pleased, but surprised. Of course, they've taken some fairly significant steps to try and ensure that show sharing will be limited as intended, but I question how long that'll last.
TiVo knows that doing anything like this is going to open it up to lawsuits. Big ones. Especially with HDTV. So why bother? Just keep recording to HD and giving a mostly blind eye to the video extraction crowd - especially since the extraction software is still hokey and only works with Series1 TiVos (the new S2 TiVos are proving hack resistant, although some progress is being made... if you're willing to take a soldering iron to your BIOS).
TiVo is much better off improving their software, offering value added packages like the HMO, and spending it's legal muscle defending its patents against Motorola and Scientific Atlanta -- not burning capital in courts defending itself from the networks, the studios, and every cable company in the US.
In any case, a disc based TiVo would stick you back in some of the nightmares that plague VCRs - have a disk in? Is it blank? Does it have enough capacity for the shows you want to record before you can change the disc?
Oh, sure, you can stick a HD in there and then just dump to disc when you want to, but then why should TiVo bother? Just continue offering a "Save to VCR" option and stream the data out a digital port where a D-VHS, or Bluray recorder, or whatever can suck it down and save it. Of course, I'm presuming that the HD TiVo will still have this, and that's just a guess at the moment. We'll see. But if it did then it's less likely to cause legal problems than TiVo putting the recorder in the same box.
Go read this. It's from last September, so I suspect the battle lines have changed some, so feel free to Google for more info.
Basically there are three proposals for "HD DVD" - Warner Brothers wants to take current red laser DVD-9's and change the DVD spec to allow the use of MPEG-4. This would, allegedly, give enough recording capacity for HD movies. Toshiba wants to use blue lasers with a disc having the same physical characteristics as a DVD-9, but retain MPEG-2 as the encoding format. Sony, Philips, and the rest are pushing the Blu-ray format - blue laser, MPEG-2, and a disc that is similar to current DVD-9's but are enclosed in a cartridge and only has a single layer.
The Blu-ray format is designed from the outset to be recordable. It also has the most raw capacity (27 GB - Toshiba's has 20 GB in recordable format, and obviously WB's wouldn't change anything from the current 4.7GB). I also like the cartridge idea, since it reduces scratches and other potential damage. In fact, the lack of a cartridge was one of the biggest complaints about DVD.
MPEG-4 doesn't have "more backers". It has a few companies that are intensely interested in it for patent revenue. The majority of the CE industry doesn't want it because of the idiotic royalty payments being demanded by the consortium. Even the players in the consortium are being edgy.
I haven't read any of his pontifications on sender-pays, but when has that stopped anyone from posting on /. ?
It probably is a everyone pays system - although I suspect that ISPs will then say "x messages per y time period included!" - and either eat the cost or raise their rates to compensate.
The real problem will be the same as it is for any microbilling setup - the overhead is a killer. It all looks well and good to stop the spammer that's hitting you with 100,000 emails, but when you realize that you also have to deal with the 10,000 accounts that are sending 10 emails each, the overhead eats you for lunch. Maybe he's proposed a solution for this - if so, then there's a whole lot of VC's that would like to talk to him.
Uh, and what do you base these wild assumptions on?
First off, a DVD is 9.4G/side - most current DVDs are dual-layer. Rewritable DVD's are still only single layer.
Next, you've deeply, vastly, absurdly overestimated the quality of VHS. Record at best quality possible on VHS and it's still less than half the line count of DVD, and we won't even go into chroma and lumiscence loss.
The one estimate I've seen for VHS backups is 2.7GB... certainly not that bad, but it has all the drawbacks of tape storage and requires a rather hokey control system (IR blaster out of the PC).
Shouldn't all 150 go to prison?
For what? Attempted tax evasion? Hell, you may as well arrest the entire country then.
About the only thing you can accuse them of is terminal stupidity and/or gullibility.
Fortunately I don't know anyone (personally) that's been taken advantage by this or any other conartist to a significant extent. But I'm sure you'd be the hit of the family if your grandparents lost their life savings to such a con artist and your only suggestions was to throw them in jail.
Very compassionate of you.
You're right... I guess I shouldn't rip all 1000 of my CD's to FLAC and make them available for music servers like TiVo, AudioTron, etc.
Yeah, that'd be stupid.
Oh, and who needs to edit video anyway? Let's go back to analog video editing. So much more efficient and far easier! Right.
It's particularly sad that you can't even think of legitimate uses for large amounts of HD space.
Well, it's probably be worth a good bit less since in selling it you'd significantly reduce the sale price (even if you petered it out over a century).
The real problem is still economic. It just doesn't have a good enough rate of return. Presume it costs a mere $30B to design, develop, and deploy a system to secure and exploit a nickel-metal NEAR as suggested. If it takes you 20 years to do this, and then you play the asteroid out over another century, what's your rate of return when you sell the goods for $4T?
Well, if you took that $30B of initial investment and let it grow at 5% APR, compounding daily, it would turn into $1,206,780B after 120 years.
So, uh... you just cut your return by over 3000 times. Ouch. Big, big, big ouch.
That's the real big problem with space exploration - it takes so long that it becomes unviable economically. And these numbers don't even take risk into account, and they're probably low on a factor of 10x - it would probably cost closer to $300B to develop that first successful mining strategy, if not more. There's a lot of hard problems to crack first.
Of course, this doesn't touch on other reasons to do this kind of thing, but then you're appealing to other desires. Raw economics is not a good reason to go into space... it's a really lousy one. But I still want to go there.
No, because if the source is leaked by China and MS doesn't ferret out every single leak and erradicate it (unlikely if leaked widely enough) then it's unlikely a judge will decide that MS showed sufficient security measures in keeping the trade secret secret.
Now MS could sue China (or Germany or whoever), for all damages involved... but, well... good luck.
I'd assume that there are magic keys all over the place acting as a canary, plus other methods intended to prevent leaks. Otherwise MS may as well assume the code is going to be out there in short order.
Of course, all of these code peeks exclude the encryption, authentication, and other "secret" libraries, which is why MS is willing to (and able to) do this in the first place. I'd bet that any trade secret level code is unviewable.
Innocent until proven guilty is a criminal court concept.
A trade secret infringement case is civil court, and that concept does not apply.
And then the judge would throw you out of court and suggest you take a remedial English class so you, too, can understand the use of commas.